peppers. But all he knows are tomatoes and watermelons.”
That winter, a storm shredded the plastic walls and Haywood lost interest in his greenhouse. Yet there it still stands—overgrown with weeds, rusting away, tattered banners of plastic fluttering like fallen flags in every breeze, a blight on the landscape at the end of the pond, right smack-dab in the middle of my view.
“I could string it with Christmas tree lights,” Annie Sue offered. “Turn it into found art?”
“I think that only works for urban areas,” I said.
As we contemplated Haywood’s eyesore, A.K. drove down the lane and pulled up at the edge of the pond. The kids fell silent as he got out and walked towards them and I could tell from their body language that they felt awkward.
From beside me, Annie Sue murmured, “Ruth’s been crying all afternoon. Emma tried to get her to come over and help with the pier, but she wouldn’t. God! A.K.’s such a jerk!”
But the worry in her voice betrayed her.
He must have been working on the pier either last night or early this morning because he scooped up a tool belt and one of the hammers that were piled on the bank.
“They say it might rain tomorrow,” he said, tossing them into the cab.
The cousins came up to him then while their friends hung back, exchanging uneasy glances.
Suddenly, from Reese’s truck came the raucous tones of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Stricken, Emma raced over to snap it off, turned the wrong knob and the music blared louder than ever. “Everybody in the old cellblock —”
Abrupt silence.
A.K. shrugged and gave a wry grin. “Good timing.”
“Hey, man, we practiced,” said Reese, trying to turn it into a joke, knowing he’d done a couple of things just as bad, knowing that there but for the grace of God...
“Yeah, well, see you guys.”
As A.K. turned back to his truck, Annie Sue raced down and gave him a hug. I followed and when I put my arms around him, he clung to me for an instant as if he were seven again instead of seventeen.
“You’ll be all right,” I whispered. “The jailer knows who you are. Just go with the flow and you’ll be fine, okay?”
“Okay,” he said shakily.
12
That evening, after the work crew had departed and the kids had scattered to their Friday night diversions, after I’d quit raking up pieces of shingles, scrap ends of two-by-fours and bits of plastic pipes, I drove over to visit with Daddy a few minutes and maybe get a bite to eat.
But he and Cletus had eaten an early supper and gone cat-fishing somewhere along Possum Creek, said Maidie. She was there on the screened back porch, rocking in the late afternoon shade and shelling butter beans for the freezer. I pulled another rocking chair closer to the hull bucket, fetched a pan from the kitchen and sat down to help her.
“How come you never told me you know Cyl DeGraffenried?” I asked.
“Don’t remember you ever asking,” she said mildly as her fingers rhythmically twisted the flat green pods and nudged the beans loose with her thumb. “Besides, I can’t say as I know her. Except for Miz Mitchiner, she keeps herself to herself. Far as that goes, Miz Mitchiner, she ain’t all that outgoing neither.”
I ate a podful of tender raw beans. “Who’s Mrs. Mitchiner?”
“Her granny. Lives out from Cotton Grove. Goes to Mount Olive.”
“Any kin to that Horace Mitchiner that’s a jailer at the courthouse?”
Maidie frowned in concentration and I could almost see pages of genealogical data scrolling past her eyes. She finally shook her head. “He might be a far cousin of her husband, but I believe he’s from that bunch of Mitchiners on the other side of Dobbs and Mr. Robert Mitchiner was from right around here. ’Course, he’s been dead almost forty years.”
She poured her hulled beans into a large pot on the table, refilled her pan with more pods from the bucket that Cletus or Daddy had brought in from the garden, then settled back in her cane-bottomed rocking chair to shell and reminisce in earnest.
“Miz Mitchiner, she’s had a hard life. Her brother’s wife ran off and she had to raise his young’uns, too, ’cause he was right sickly and couldn’t work much. And Mr. Robert, he got killed in a car wreck when their baby boy won’t but two. Her onliest daughter Rachel was Cylvia’s mother and Rachel—Lord, she was a sweet-tempered girl! Had the prettiest singing voice, to be sure. Used to sing lead in the choir. Anyhow, Rachel died of pneumonia when that little girl was just starting to school. All them children turned out good, though. Cylvia, too. But Miz Mitchiner’s son Isaac, he got in some kind of trouble and he run off to Boston before he was fullgrowed and she ain’t never heard another word from him in over twenty years. It has to grieve her.”
“What sort of trouble?”
She shook her head. “Oh, honey. With all your brothers? And A.K.? And as long as you been a judge? You know what hotheaded young men are like.”
“I mean, was it civil or criminal? Did he rob a place, maybe kill somebody?”
