Like a nervous hostess smoothing over an awkward social lapse, I found myself chattering about the accident, about Jason’s part in helping to rescue Clara Freeman and how lucky she was to have been found before drowning.
“You live around here?” Jason Bullock asked bluntly.
Now that he mentioned it, what
“Just down in Makely,” he answered easily. “But my brother lives over in Fuquay, so I’m up and down this road a lot. You say she went in this afternoon sometime? I sure didn’t notice when I came through around eight. ’Course, it was still raining then.”
“Oh look!” I said. “There’s Lashanda’s baby doll.”
I went over and pulled a soggy brown rubber doll from the car. As I did, I saw something lumpy on the floor beneath the steering wheel. Clara Freeman’s pocketbook. I gathered it up, too, thinking that I’d carry it to the hospital with me tomorrow morning.
The two men circled the car.
“It’s amazing,” said King. “The car doesn’t seem to have a scratch on it.”
“Dry it out and it should be good as new,” agreed Bullock.
My brother Robert came over, put the car in neutral and closed the doors. “What you planning to do with the car, Dwight? Want me to tow it over to Jimmy White’s garage?”
“Would you mind?”
“Naw, but he ain’t gonna be up this time of night.”
“That’s okay. I’ll call him first thing tomorrow.”
As I climbed up to the glassed-in cab of the big tractor with Robert, I saw King and Bullock walk to their separate cars. I guess they didn’t have much to say to each other.
Not tonight anyhow.
* * *
Jimmy’s garage was only a couple of miles away and the car pulled easily, so we were there in ten minutes. Not surprisingly, the building was dark and silent, as was Jimmy’s house out back, behind a thick row of Leland cypresses.
I helped Robert unhitch the car. We left the key in the ignition switch, although I did detach it from Clara’s keyring. When we climbed back into the tractor cab, I stuck the keyring in Clara’s soggy handbag and tucked it back under the tractor seat so I could hold on.
Now that we weren’t towing the car, Robert put it in gear and soon we were jouncing briskly across rutted dirt lanes. The tractor is air-conditioned and has an AM/FM radio, but Robert keeps the tape deck loaded with Patsy, Hank and George.
“Ain’t no country music on the radio no more,” he said. “Hell of a note when country stations don’t play nothing but Garth Brooks and Dixie Chicks and think that’s country.”
We rode through the night harmonizing along with Ernest Tubbs and Loretta Lynn on “Sweet Thang,” a song that used to really crack me up when I was six.
CHAPTER | 14
“Prepare for the worst, which is yet to come,” were the only consoling words of the weather bureau officials.
The calls started at daybreak.
“You got you plenty of batteries laid in?” asked Robert.
“Batteries?” I asked groggily.
“They’re saying we’re definitely gonna get us some of that hurricane. You want to make sure your flashlight works when the lights go off.”
“We got an extra kerosene lantern,” said his wife Doris, who was on their extension phone. “How ’bout I send Robert over with it?”
Less than ninety seconds after they rang off, it was Haywood and Isabel.
“Don’t forget to bring in all your porch chairs,” said Haywood.
“And fill some milk jugs with clean water,” said Isabel.
“Water?” I yawned.
“If the power goes, so does your water pump.”
Seth and Minnie were also solicitous of my water supply.
“I’ve already got both bathtubs filled,” Minnie said. “This hot weather, you want to be able to flush if the electricity goes out.”
I hadn’t lost power since I moved into my new house the end of July, but it wasn’t unusual when I was growing up out here in the country. It seldom stayed off more than a couple of days and since we heated with woodstoves that could double as cookstoves, no electricity wasn’t much of a hardship in the winter. More like going camping in your house. Especially since it was usually caused by an ice storm that had closed school anyhow, so that you got to stay home and go sliding during the day, then come in to hot chocolate and a warm and cozy candlelit evening of talking or making music around the stove.
