starts preaching. She’s in her seventies now and vows she’ll keep the church going as long as two or three be gathered together there in His name.
We wandered back up to the house and I was framing a graceful goodbye when Mrs. Avery said, “Well, I’m sorry to rush you, Deborah, but you see how busy I am. Do thank Zell for me. It was so kind of her to send the irises. Now, Raymond, before you leave, if you could just—”
Dismissed, I got in my car and eased back down the winding driveway, wondering if Raymond’s parents were as worried about the upcoming weekend as Andrew and April were.
On the other hand, jail might just be the rest he needed after working for Mrs. Avery all week.
As I neared the farm, it occurred to me for the first time that I was going to have to give some serious thought to a new driveway. The long pond’s on the back side of the farm and can be reached by several different tractor lanes which crisscross the land. My favorite runs across the Stancil farm, soon to be an upscale housing development complete with streetlights, sidewalks and golf course. Others are extensions of driveways belonging to Daddy and my brothers. If my family could monitor every time I came or went, to say nothing of every visitor’s coming and going, I might as well stay at Aunt Zell’s for all the privacy I’d be gaining.
Certainly there was no privacy today. As I cleared the woods and came up to the building site that looked out over the pond, I saw six pickups, a bright red sports Jeep, a white Toyota and two horses parked (or tied) out by the deck. I recognized three of the pickups as belonging to the work crew who hammered away on the inside. The rest had brought nieces and nephews and several of their friends who were diving off the end of my brand-new pier.
Farm ponds usually have such messy bottoms that wading out to swimming depth is enough to blight the fun of swimming because you know you’re going to have to wade back in through all the muck. Two weeks earlier, a pile driver from Fuquay came and sank a double row of ten-inch creosoted poles out to where the water’s ten feet deep. Then I had a lumber company deliver a stack of two-by-fours and pressure-treated boards and told A.K., Stevie, and the rest of the kids who still lived on the place that they could use the pier if they’d build it. I figured I might as well get a little work out of them since there was no way I’d be able to keep them off my half of the pond once the pier was built anyhow.
Before I could switch off the engine, Zach’s daughter Emma was tugging at the door.
“Wait’ll you try it!” she cried. Her hair was wet and so were her brown T-shirt and red shorts. “We just put the last nail in about an hour ago. You should’ve got here sooner. You could’ve been first off. This is so cool!”
Yeah!
Her excited voice took me back to when one of the promoters for a community pool tried to sign Seth and Minnie up for membership half my lifetime ago.
“It’s going to be Olympic size with a wading pool for the little ones and water slides and high boards for the teenagers,” the neighbor said. Being a brand-new teenager myself then, I was ready to run right home and beg Mother and Daddy to sign up as charter members, too.
No more yucky pond bottoms? No more skinned knees on those sharp creek rocks? No beating the banks and water first in case there were water moccasins around? No more squatting behind chigger-laden bushes if nature called?
Hot damn! Civilization was coming to Cotton Grove for sure.
Seth had looked around at the eager faces of his children and even though cash money was tight in those days, he was ready to pledge his financial support when the neighbor lowered his voice and added, “ ’Course it’ll be—
I’m told it’s still restricted, but I don’t have firsthand knowledge since none of us ever joined and no Knott ever swam there.
Uncle Ash and Aunt Zell have an in-ground lap pool for his heart and Robert and Doris have one of those big blue plastic prefab things out back of their house for their grandchildren, but unless we’re at the coast, the rest of us have pretty much made do with Possum Creek.
This was going to be a lot more convenient and I wondered why some of my brothers hadn’t done it a long time ago. Was it because the spring-fed ponds had been dredged for utilitarian reasons? For irrigation and fishing, not for swimming?
I walked out on the solid planking and admired everything the kids had done. As I stood on the very end, Herman’s son Reese came up dripping from the water at my feet and grabbed my ankle. My ball cap flew off and I felt myself falling through the sunlit air to land with a huge splash in deep cool water.
Even with all my clothes on, it felt wonderful, although when I got my hands on Reese, I tried to sit on his head for catching me off guard like that.
Stevie, home on summer vacation from Carolina, was standing on the pier laughing his head off when Seth’s Jessica gave him a mighty shove from behind.
Soon the water was swarming with fully clothed whooping and hollering kids, all from here in the neighborhood. Oh well, I thought. Kids—even farm kids—have so many sophisticated distractions these days. Maybe the pier’s homespun novelty would wear off before my house was finished and this privacy thing became an issue. I missed A.K. and his sister, though. Normally they would be here with the rest.
When I was thoroughly cool, I climbed out and sat on the pier to squeeze water from my shirt and shorts.
“Hey, you know what?” said Emma, treading water in front of me. “For Deborah’s housewarming gift, we ought to take up a collection and buy her a beach.”
“A beach?” asked Stevie, who was floating nearby.
“Yeah. A dump truck full of sand. How much could it cost?”
“Do you know how many truckloads it’d take to make even a ten-foot-wide beach?” said her brother Lee. “It’d cost a pure fortune.”
“And your only paternal aunt’s not worth a fortune?” I cooed sweetly.
They all hooted and I had to scuttle down the planked pier toward land to keep from getting splashed again.
