“That’s me. Mrs. Avery here?”
He nodded toward the screen door and got on with his shovel.
A medium-sized white dog came over to greet me. Halfway between a spitz and a sheepdog, with a thumbprint of black hairs on the top of his head, he sniffed at my legs as I unlocked the trunk and lifted out the cardboard carton of iris tubers. Before I could slam the trunk lid, Grace King Avery was there, welcoming me, scolding Raymond for not helping me with the bulky box—“Just set it over there in the shade. And if you could just give them a sprinkle with the hose so they don’t get too dried out? Zell did just dig them today, didn’t she, Deborah? Not too much there, Raymond! I said sprinkle, not soak. Come in, Deborah, I was just thinking about you.”
Useless to say that I was in a hurry. She and the dog were already leading me through the kitchen—“You wouldn’t believe the way my brother let this place go. I had to buy all new appliances”—and into a large and airy room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases between the tall casement windows. All the woodwork sported a fresh coat of white enamel.
“This is where my father and my grandfather, too, did their accounts,” she said. “That desk has sat in that very spot for over a hundred years.”
The desk was solid and pleasingly crafted but probably built right here in the neighborhood by some nineteenth-century cabinetmaker who was good with his hands. It was not a piece to drive an antique dealer wild with envy unless he could see it with Mrs. Avery’s ancestor-addled eyes, but it did look at home here. The dog curled up in the kneewell and went to sleep.
“My grandmother had her sewing machine over there in the corner,” she said, nodding toward the spot where a large television now sat, “but I’m going to use this room as my den cum library.”
(Mrs. Avery’s probably the only person in Colleton County who could use the word
I’d never been inside this house before and I was surprised by its charm. There was an ease to the proportions that made you feel as if you could take a deep breath in comfort here, so I praised the desk and the room even though it was still cluttered with boxes of books and papers waiting to be arranged on the newly painted shelves as soon as they were completely dry.
Looking more than ever like a little gray-feathered guinea hen, Mrs. Avery picked her way through the maze of cardboard boxes and plucked a paper from one of them. “I came across this last night while I was looking for something else. Do you remember it?”
It was a creased sheet of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded into a tight little packet. On one side,
The pencilled handwriting was my affected teenage loops and swirls right down to the little smiley face over the i. I felt my cheeks flame with the same embarrassment as when she’d confiscated that note in her classroom a hundred years ago.
Mrs. Avery shook her head at me. “Oh, you were a one all right. Always thinking about the boys. And now here you are a judge and still unmarried. I thought surely—”
“Time has a way of playing tricks,” I said hastily. I crumpled the note, stuck it in my pocket and fished a high school yearbook from the nearest carton. It was from a few years back when one of my brother Robert’s daughters was a freshman. It would be hard to open any one of these yearbooks and not see a Knott face somewhere in its pages.
“Blessed if I know why I haven’t thrown out all these old test papers and record books,” Mrs. Avery said. “Really, the yearbooks should be souvenirs enough, don’t you think? Thirty-five years.”
I was appalled. Thirty-five years of pounding sophomore English into the thick skulls of hormonal teenagers?
“No wonder you’re enjoying this change of pace,” I said.
“I’ve never worked so hard, but it’s such pleasure,” she agreed. “The front parlor and bedrooms are still to do over, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve finished up outside. After all those years in town, it’s so wonderful to be out here on King land where everything I see is beautiful and orderly. Come and let me show you what I’ve done with my mother’s roses. They’re the only thing my brother cared about. Isn’t it funny how men are with roses?”
I would soon have to be thinking about landscaping the grounds around my own house, so I was actually interested as she pointed out rhododendrons and camellias and how the gardenias needed good air circulation so they wouldn’t mildew and if I wanted some of the baby magnolias that had volunteered around the mother tree, I should say now before she had Raymond root them out.
She had planted more azaleas on the slope down to the narrow creek branch that ran between her property and the little dilapidated church just on the other side. Here in the heat of summer, the branch was barely a trickle of clear water.
“A water garden with papyrus and blue flags would be so pretty down there, but—Come back here, Smudge!” she called sharply before her dog could cross the branch and muddy his paws. “My grandfather, Langston King, gave the land for that church, you know, so I can’t help feeling an interest in it. I’ve offered to have Raymond mow their grass and neaten up a little, maybe haul off those old cars, but I’m afraid Mrs. Williams took my offer wrong.”
She would, I thought, suppressing a grin. Women like Grace King Avery could get me to agree to anything just to get rid of them, but Sister Williams was an implacable will that bent to no force.
Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle, pastored by the hot-tempered Reverend Byantha Williams, hasn’t had a fresh lick of paint in all the years I’ve known it and the tin roof sags precariously. The only thing that seems to hold up the branch side of the church is the ancient rusty house trailer backed up against that wall where Sister Williams lives with her four malevolent cats.
Out back, behind the tiny graveyard, two wrecked cars and what looked like an old washing machine or refrigerator were half covered by kudzu vines. Even junk can look picturesque when smothered in vines. Too bad that kudzu hadn’t reached the church yet.
Maidie shakes her head over the condition of this church because the congregation is too poor and too small to do more than patch and mend. It’s a dying church. Sister Williams’s standards are too rigidly puritanical and most of the young people deserted to other churches years ago. The average age is something like sixty-five. But what the members lack in youth and money they make up in fervor, and the rickety walls really rock when Sister Williams
