Seth heard the urgency in our voices and made a calming motion with his hands. “Everything’s fine. We’ve got a little bonfire going down by the pond. The children want to give you the Christmas present they’ve all chipped in for, but first you’ve got to get out of those fancy dancing clothes, though I have to say, you do look mighty pretty, honey.” He paused a couple of beats and grinned widely. “You look mighty pretty, too, Dwight.”
Both of us would trust Seth with our lives, and since he was clearly enjoying the moment, we didn’t argue, just hurried inside and changed into jeans and sweatshirts.
When we came back out, dressed for anything, Seth led us down the slope behind the house to the long pond and I saw Annie Sue’s truck parked next to Reese’s.
Several of my brothers who live locally had come with their wives, even Barbara and Zach. Herman, Annie Sue’s dad, is pretty much confined to a wheelchair these days, but he sat beside Haywood in the golf cart Isabel uses to run around the farm on.
Cal and several of the cousins were lounging on heavy canvas tarps. They had fetched lawn chairs from the garage and I saw Daddy seated on the far side of the bonfire with Ladybell, his redbone hound, at his feet.
As Dwight, Seth, and I drew near, everyone yelled, “Surprise!” and at that instant, Annie Sue must have thrown a switch because the deck and two nearby willows sprang into colorful light. The kids had run Christmas tree lights on hooks along the base of our long narrow pier, all down the railing, and up into the trees. The lights reflected in the pond so brightly that I clapped my hands in delight.
“Do you like it?” asked Annie Sue. “Are you surprised?”
“Oh yes,” said Dwight, answering for both of us. “So this is what y’all’ve been doing when you were supposed to be installing circuit breakers?”
“She done that too, ol’ son,” Haywood called.
“Come on,” said Reese, grabbing me by the hand, while Jane Ann and A.K. pulled Dwight along, too.
“To get the full effect, you need to go all the way out to the end of the pier and take a look from there.”
We didn’t argue. Once we were at the end and looked back, it really was magical—the colored lights, the bonfire, the happy faces of our family. Cal came running and squeezed in between us to grab our hands.
“Let ’er rip!” Reese called, and suddenly we became aware of light and sound behind us. We turned and there about twenty feet off the end of the pier, a jet of water shot up a good six or seven feet into the air.
“Oh—my—God!” said Dwight, as the bubbling geyser changed from blue to green to red to yellow from submerged floodlights.
“My idea,” Reese said proudly.
CHAPTER 26
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See now, Dwight, what you gotta do next summer,” said Haywood when we were all sitting around the bonfire later, “is get the wood and some shingles and a roll of window screen and we’ll build you and Deborah a pond house here. Waist-high walls, the rest screens.”
“I’ll wire it,” said Annie Sue.
“Make the west wall solid and I’ve got some neon beer signs that would look real good hanging on it,” Reese said.
Getting into the swing of things, Will remembered that he had picked up a few himself at a going-out-of- business sale last month. “I can let you have ’em real cheap.”
Barbara rolled her eyes and Dwight tried to look stern. “I’d appreciate it if y’all would quit encouraging her.”
The whole family knows I’ve been crazy for neon ever since I was a child. There used to be a corner cafe on Dawson Street, on the way out of Raleigh. With windows on two sides and walls that were thickly hung with neon signs, that cafe was as colorful as a Christmas tree, and whoever was behind the wheel would always circle the block for me so I could look my fill. When I was sixteen and newly driving, I stole a blue guitar beer sign from a convenience store in Makely and had to spend the summer working off my crime to Daddy when he found out about it. The store owner let me keep it, though, and it’s still in my old room back at the homeplace—along with a multicolored OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT sign I came home with after a New Year’s party when I was living with Aunt Zell. I still don’t know where or how I acquired that one. I keep thinking they’d look great on the wall of our back porch, but Dwight says they’d look tacky.
“Two are tacky,” I agreed. “Eight or ten would be a collection.”
“A tacky collection,” he told me.
“I think those signs would be cool,” said Cal, who was sitting between us.
I put my arm around him and gave him a quick squeeze. “Two votes for neon over here!”
It was almost midnight, but Cal was on a sugar high from toasted marshmallows, and yes, that was probably why Haywood, Herman, and Robert were still awake, too. Between them, they’d emptied a whole bag.
The kids dumped more fallen limbs on the fire, and Dwight and I listened while they interrupted each other in their eagerness to tell how they had decided to gift us with the fountain: how close they came to being discovered when Dwight came home unexpectedly for lunch yesterday, and how they were sure I’d realize that they were there last night to finish connecting a line they had buried from the new breaker box to the outlets they had installed on the pier.
“Who was brave enough to get into that cold water to set up the floodlights and pump?” I asked.
Stevie raised one hand and pointed to Reese with the other. “A friend of mine lent us some wet suits and skin diving equipment so we could finish setting everything in place today while y’all were at work. And yeah, it was really cold.”
