DeGraffenried of the sophisticated haircut, the elegant understated clothes, the competitive career woman?
There’d be a lot of hard adjusting all around.
I put down paper towels and spread the pictures and cards to dry as I switched on the radio. Bulletins were coming thick and fast on WPTF. Fran was definitely coming ashore around eight o’clock at Bald Head Island at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.
Rain was falling hard in long windblown sheets that almost obscured the pond as it lashed at my windows. I went around making a final check and had just latched the last window when the phone rang.
“Your people are here,” said Daddy. “Why ain’t you?”
“On my way,” I told him and dashed out into the rain with my duffle bag crammed with enough clothes and toiletries to last a week.
CHAPTER | 16
Here are all the terrible phenomena of the West Indian hurricane—the tremendous wind, the thrashing sea, the lightning, the bellowing thunder, and the drowning rain that seems to be dashed from mighty tanks with the force of Titans.
We spent the next hour settling in. Since the quickest way to get people past their initial awkwardness is to give them something to do, Maidie and I soon had Lashanda and Stan racing up and down the stairs, bringing down pillows, quilts and blankets. Here at the homeplace, kitchen and den flow into each other and Daddy and Cletus sat at the kitchen table to keep from getting run over.
There were enough bedrooms in this old house for everyone to have a choice, but who ever heard of going off to separate rooms during a hurricane party?
The den couch opens into a bed that I claimed for Cyl and me, and there were a couple of recliner chairs as well. We made thick pallets for the children right on the area rugs that dot the worn linoleum floor.
Both Blue and Ladybelle had been turned in and Ladybelle immediately went over and started pushing at Lashanda’s hand with her head.
“She wants you to scratch behind her ears,” Daddy told her.
Half-apprehensively—the hound was almost as tall as she was—Lashanda reached out and scratched. Ladybelle gave a sigh of pure pleasure and sank down at the little girl’s feet.
Daddy’s television was tuned to the weather channel and Stan sat on the floor in front of it, entranced by the colored graphics that covered the screen.
“So
“You don’t have cable?” Cyl asked, stuffing pillows into cotton pillowcases that Maidie had ironed to crisp perfection.
“We don’t have television at all,” said Lashanda, abandoning Ladybelle so that she could help Cyl.
Stan looked embarrassed. “Mama doesn’t believe in it. But I can pick up this channel on my shortwave. That’s how I know that guy’s voice.”
I wasn’t as shocked as some people might be. Like a lot of members in her fundamentalist church, my sister- in-law Nadine doesn’t, quote, believe in television either, but Herman’s overruled her on that from the beginning. And as soon as cable came to Dobbs, he signed up for it. Now that the population’s getting dense enough to make it economically feasible, cable’s finally reached our end of the county, too, but Daddy and the boys have had satellite dishes for years.
All the same, even though I could understand where Clara Freeman was coming from—especially after meeting her father—it did make me wonder how much slack she cut her children.
Or her husband.
“They’s crayons in the children’s drawer,” Maidie reminded me on one of her trips through the den, when she realized Stan was trying to copy some of the color graphics of the storm.
The television sat atop an enormous old turn-of-the-century sideboard. Mother had turned the bottom drawer into a catchall for games and toys as soon as the first grandchild was born. And yes, it was now being used for great-grandchildren, so it still held a big Tupperware bowl full of broken crayons of all colors. Some of them had probably been there since Reese was a baby. Stan seized upon them and one of his blank weather maps soon sported an amorphous gray storm with a dark red blotch in the center.
All this time, the house had been filling with delicious aromas. For Maidie, picnics and parties always mean fried chicken and she had the meaty parts of at least four chickens bubbling away in three large black iron frying pans. There was a bowl of potato salad in the refrigerator, a big pot of newly picked butter beans on the spare burner, and Maidie set Cletus to slicing a half-dozen fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes while she got out her bread tray.
“You’ve already cooked enough for an army,” I said as Cyl and Lashanda and I set the table. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make biscuits, too?”
“Well, you know how Reese eats.” She was already mixing shortening into a mound of self-rising flour. “And that Stan looks like he could stand some fattening.”
Lashanda giggled, her little blue barrettes jiggling with each movement. “And you know what? Mama says he eats like he’s got a tapeworm.”
I had to smile, too. You don’t grow up in a houseful of adolescent boys without hearing that phrase a time or twenty.
Following his nose, Reese blew in through the back door a few minutes later, carrying a full ice chest as if it weighed no more than a five-pound bag of sugar. Like his father Herman, Reese is also a twin, but he’s built like all the other Knott men: six feet tall, sandy brown hair, clear blue eyes. No movie stars in the whole lot, but no trouble getting women either.
“Something sure smells fit to eat in this house,” he said, buttering Maidie before he was even through the door
