I love Miss Emily. Whenever she’s putting Dwight in his place, she always looks like a militant Chihuahua up against a Saint Bernard. I’m told that Dwight and his sister Nancy Faye take after their dad, a big slow-moving deliberate man who was killed in a farming accident when his four children were quite young. The other two look like Miss Emily, who is small and wiry and has bright orange hair.
She’s the enormously popular principal of Zachary Taylor High School and drives an elderly TR that she turns over to the vocational kids for a new paint job every spring. They think she’s pretty cool because no matter how outrageous the color or detailing, as long as it isn’t pornographic, she drives the results for a year. Currently, the car’s a midnight blue with a ferocious cougar splayed across the hood. Last year it was turquoise with flamingoes and palm trees and the year before that, a neon purple with red and yellow racing stripes.
I took a serving of her pear salad. With so many newcomers from all over the whole country, Colleton County church picnics are no longer just home-fried chicken and ham biscuits. These days the chicken’s likely to come out of a fast-food bucket that’ll be plonked down alongside a bowl of guacamole or eggplant parmigiana. But Miss Emily’s pear salad is unpretentious comfort food from my childhood: canned pear halves on buttercrunch lettuce with a blob of mayonnaise in the center and a healthy sprinkle of shredded American cheese. Even though I wind up scraping off most of the cheese and mayonnaise, I still put it on my plate every time it’s offered.
Miss Emily was pleased and took me around and introduced me to all the new people who’ve moved in since I last visited. In between, we paused to hug and reminisce with old-timers who remembered my mother and still knew Aunt Zell. If everybody was speaking gospel truth that Sunday, I could count on a hundred votes right here.
I was surprised Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash hadn’t come, but Minnie said they were spending the weekend with cousins down on Harkers Island. “I think she was hoping they might could have a hurricane party.”
People were talking about beach erosion from the storm surges Edouard had kicked up as it passed by our coast, but a hundred and fifty miles inland, the weather here was downright pleasant—low 80s, low humidity, nice breeze. In fact, the day was much too beautiful to stay inside and after all the preaching and handshaking (
“Anybody for a swim off my new pier?” I asked when I’d worked my way back around to Seth and Minnie.
“You know, that sounds like fun,” said Minnie with a pleased smile. “I haven’t been in the water this whole summer.”
Miss Emily begged off, but Dwight thought he’d swing by for a while if he could find an old bathing suit at her house.
“Come on anyhow,” said Seth. “I got an extra, don’t I, hon?”
“If you don’t, Robert or Andrew will,” said Minnie.
I packed up the remains of my chicken pie and lemon bars and stopped at a store on the way home for a bag of ice, some soft drinks, salsa and several bags of tortilla chips in case this turned into another picnic.
* * *
The long pond that my house overlooks is actually more like a small lake that covers about five acres. Years ago, Daddy scooped out a marshy bottom when the little twins thought they wanted to raise catfish as a 4-H project. When they got over that enthusiasm, the original pond was drained, bulldozers and backhoes enlarged it to its present size and it was restocked with bass, bream and crappies.
The land Daddy deeded me takes in only the eastern third of the pond. The rest is part Haywood’s and part Seth’s, but of course, the whole family use it as freely as if all the land still had Daddy’s name on the deed.
When I drove into the yard, I saw two fishermen in our old rowboat at the far end of the water. One was definitely Daddy—I could see his truck parked under a willow tree down there. I assumed the other was one of my brothers or nephews. At a distance, they tend to look a lot alike. I waved before taking my bags into the kitchen and putting the ice in a cooler.
By the time I got the food stowed and then called around to the rest of my brothers who still live out this way, cars and trucks were pulling into my yard—Minnie and Seth, Andrew and April, Andrew’s A.K. and Herman’s Reese. Haywood and Isabel were in Atlantic City this weekend, Robert and Doris weren’t home, and Zach’s wife and daughter Emma were visiting Barbara’s sick grandmother in Wilson, but Zach said he’d come as soon as he could find out what she’d done with his swimsuit. (Half of my brothers still act like they’re guests in their own homes and don’t have a clue as to where anything’s kept even though their wives have been putting stuff back in the exact same places since the day they were carried across the thresholds.)
Long as I had the phone in my hand, I called Will and Amy over in Dobbs and they said they’d try to make it before dark.
That’s when I finally noticed the message light blinking on my answering machine. Two messages actually. The first was from Kidd and came about five minutes after I left for church this morning: “I know I said I couldn’t come, but this is dumb when we both have Labor Day off tomorrow. Call me back and say if it’s okay if I scoot on up there this afternoon. I really miss you, Ms. Judge.”
All
A moment later, my emotions took a plunge into ice water as I listened to Kidd’s second message.
“I guess you must be at church or something. Oh, God, Deb’rah, I sure do hate to have to say this. Some asshole hunter took a potshot at Griggs this morning. Got him in the shoulder. He’s going to be okay and the shooter’s in jail, but they just called me out to cover for him. Damn, damn,
My sentiments exactly as I angrily reset the message tape.
“Except that he lifted me up and then let me drop again,” I sulked out loud.
