Designated Daughters Page 7

  Because a lot of his work is with major crimes that would go directly to superior court, it hasn’t been much of a problem.

  We got home in plenty of time for Cal’s game, and even though his team lost, he scored one run on a grounder past the shortstop and caught a pop-up foul, so he and Dwight high-fived each other and we parents treated the team (and Reese) to pizzas afterwards. Dwight’s brother Rob and his kids came, too. Jake’s T-ball league doesn’t keep score. They’re focused on just teaching the kids which way to run to first base, but Mary Pat’s softball league does and they had won, so she was ragging on Cal in the car.

  Her mom Kate wasn’t with us. R.W. still takes naps, and Kate had elected to stay home today.

  “To be perfectly honest,” she confided to me as Dwight and Rob loaded the car with bats and gloves, “baseball bores me to tears. If I’m forced to watch grown men chase around after small round objects, I much prefer hockey.”

  “You New Yorker,” I teased.

  She laughed. “Go, Rangers!”

  The sun had dipped below the tall pines when we got back to the house. We walked down to the pond to see how the concrete was drying and discovered that Bandit had run across the smooth surface while we were gone.

  “Sorry,” Cal said, abashed. “I tried to call him back but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Look there. Aren’t those squirrel tracks? That’s probably why he didn’t listen to you.”

  “And those look like crow feet,” Dwight said, pointing to a set of large avian prints in the middle of the slab.

  “Maybe a possum or a coon or a fox will go across it tonight,” said Cal. “Then we’d have a whole zoo.”

  “Not as fast as it’s drying.” Dwight pressed down lightly with his fingers and they left no mark. “In fact, with all this sunshine today, it’s drying too fast. C’mon, buddy, grab one of those buckets and let’s get some water on it before it cracks.”

  I left them to it and headed back to the house to see what I had in the way of drinks and munchies for tomorrow.

  Above the pines, wispy clouds blazed orange and red. Sailors would be happy with tomorrow’s weather if red skies really did mean anything.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Spring typifies youth, and shows the fruit that will be.

  — Cicero

  Even though there were no sailors in our vicinity, Sunday morning did indeed dawn bright and clear. Dwight wanted to adjust the carburetor on our riding mower and then start looking at the DVD Mayleen had put together, so Cal and I drove back into Dobbs to go to church with Aunt Zell, something I try to do at least once a month, in addition to dropping by the house for lunch every week or so.

  Aunt Zell is my mother with some of the strong-minded edges smoothed down, not that she’s anybody’s pushover. But she never challenged the status quo the way Mother did, and when she married, it was to a respectable and educated buyer for one of the large tobacco companies, not a fiddle-playing bootlegger with a houseful of half-wild little boys.

  She was the dutiful one who joined all the expected small-town social groups: Junior League, the DAR, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Democratic Women. She helped organize the town’s first Friends of the Library and she continues to raise money for the community college, the hospital, and the shelter for victims of domestic violence.

  Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash had no children, so she sublimated with Mother’s brood. When I ran off to dance with the devil after Mother died, she never gave up on me, and when I was ready to come back to Colleton County, she let me use the apartment on the second floor of their house, where Uncle Ash’s mother had lived until her death.

  Cal and I got there in time to sit down in the kitchen and share a cup of coffee while Uncle Ash went up to put on a tie. She poured chocolate milk for Cal, and their little dog Hambone jumped up in his lap as soon as he patted his knee.

  “Well, young fellow,” Uncle Ash said when he came back down. “I hear you drove a tractor yesterday.”

  Cal beamed and was soon describing how he’d had to stand up on the pedals to change gears and how balky the blade had been when he tried to raise it, but he’d managed to do okay.

  I put our cups and Cal’s glass in the dishwasher, Aunt Zell picked up her Bible and her purse, and we went out the back door. It was only three blocks to the church and too pretty a day not to walk. Cal held still long enough to let me get rid of his milky mustache and slip him a dollar for the collection plate, then hurried to catch up with Uncle Ash’s long strides. Aunt Zell and I followed at a more leisurely pace because she wanted to hear my take on Aunt Rachel’s death and funeral.

  She hadn’t known Aunt Rachel all that well, but she had visited a time or two after Sally brought her to live at nearby Crenshaw’s Lake.

  I described the low-cut red dress Sally had worn to the funeral and how scandalized Bel and Doris were by her collection of wigs. “Why didn’t you ever mention them?”

  She smiled. “Didn’t realize I hadn’t. They’re just so Sally, I guess I assumed you’d seen her.”

  “Not since her hair came back in funny,” I admitted, feeling vaguely guilty that I hadn’t visited more often.

  As if reading my mind, Aunt Zell linked her arm in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You’ve had a busy spring, honey, and Bel and Doris don’t have enough to do if they’ve got time to keep finding new ways to fault Sally. Maybe she never got over being a teenager, but she’s been through a lot and she was good to Rachel.”

  “Do you know her support group?”

  “The Designated Daughters? Oh yes. I was one myself once.”

  “You?”

  “When Ash’s mother was dying. She was a dear woman and a wonderful mother-in-law, but those last few months were bad. Congestive heart failure. Uncomfortable for her and so hard to watch. The Daughters were such a comfort. Ash was still having to travel in his work. South America. Mexico. I couldn’t talk about it with my regular friends—it would have sounded self-pitying and very disloyal to her. But the group understood and didn’t judge. And they had such practical suggestions for coping.”

  “You must have missed Mother terribly then,” I said, remembering how close they had been. “And I wasn’t here for you either.”

  She squeezed my arm again. “You’d already had your bad time, honey, nursing her. And you didn’t have much of a support group yourself, did you?”

  I was eighteen that summer, newly graduated from high school, the only child still at home, and yes, my mother’s only daughter. My last summer at home. I should have been looking forward to college. Parties. New clothes. Instead, it was sickness and grief. Aunt Zell came as often as she could get away from her caretaking duties with her mother-in-law, but it was Maidie Holt, our longtime housekeeper who was dealing with her own grief, who helped me through it on a day-to-day basis. She was my rock. I was her broken reed.

  Looking back, I don’t fault my brothers anymore. The boys were building their own lives, getting married, starting families, preoccupied with earning a living and totally unnerved by her dying. Even Daddy. He was so heavy into denial that he couldn’t—wouldn’t—talk about it to her, to me, to anyone, so he hid behind farm work. Tobacco. Corn. Beans. He was out on a tractor twelve and fourteen hours a day.

  I forced back the lump in my throat that always rises if I let myself remember too clearly and cast about for another subject. “Do you know a Frances Jones? Lives over on West Elm?”

  “Jones? Would that be Olive Jones’s daughter?”

  I shrugged. “All I know is that she lived on West Elm and her mother used to belong to the UDC.”

  “Must be Olive Jones, then. She was president of our UDC before me. Why?”

  “Sally’s trying to help her and her niece save the house,” I said, and told her what I knew about the situation.

  Aunt Zell was surprised that they were in such financial straits and dismayed to hear they had been che
ated by a dishonest auctioneer. “Her Georgian tea set? Oh dear. Olive was so proud of it. Not proud in a ‘Look what I can afford’ way, but more like ‘I’m so lucky to have such a thing of beauty.’ It would break her heart to know her daughter couldn’t keep it.”

  Before I could ask if she ever saw the woman’s Tiffany jewelry, we reached the side entrance to the church, where Cal held the door for us.

  “Such nice manners,” Aunt Zell said, and I felt a wave of maternal pride that still catches me by surprise even though Cal’s lived with us for over a year now.

  With so many nieces and nephews to cuddle, babysit, yell at, or ignore, I’ve never felt any yearning for a child of my own body, especially now that I’ve adopted Cal. When Doris or Bel or Nadine started asking pointed questions about when were Dwight and I going to have a baby together—“You ain’t getting no younger,” they told me—I quickly let them know that Cal was all the child we needed or wanted.

  “If you want another one, sure,” Dwight said amiably when the subject came up last summer, “but don’t do it on my account. I’m fine with Cal.”

  “Good,” I’d told him, “because I’m fine with my ready-made son, too.”

  That didn’t stop my sisters-in-law from sniping or warning me that I might feel differently when it was too late.

  Not a chance, I thought, as Cal and I shared a hymnal and he stumbled along earnestly with the words of “Safely Through Another Week.”

  Amen.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Nor, while lust bears sway, can self-restraint find place.

  — Cicero

  As soon as we stepped out of the car after church, Cal and I smelled the succulent aroma of roasting meat. We followed our noses around to the screened back porch, where Dwight had fired up the gas grill. He finished swabbing some ribs with barbecue sauce and lowered the lid before Cal or I could snitch a sliver of crisp pork.

  “Another twenty minutes, and no lifting this lid,” he said sternly. “Peas are in the kitchen and I’m gonna go scratch a few potatoes.”

  “Wait for me!” Cal cried and hurried off to change out of his Sunday pants and hard shoes.

  Digging for new potatoes in our soft sandy soil means gently feeling around under the roots to find those gumball-size spuds without hurting the sturdy green plants. It’s like an Easter egg hunt for farm kids and Cal never seems to tire of it. A trail of hastily discarded garments led down the hall to his room and he was out the back door before Dwight reached the garden.

  I hung up his pants, tossed his shirt in the laundry, and left his shoes where they were for him to stumble over and maybe think to put them away.

  I changed, too, shucking my two-piece blue linen dress and open-toed heels for cutoffs and sandals. Out in the kitchen, a pan of tender young sugar snaps waited for someone to string them.

  When Dwight and Cal returned with a double handful of baby potatoes, I washed the dirt off and steamed them in their thin red jackets.

  Ribs are like fried chicken, best eaten with the fingers, and we didn’t stand on ceremony when they came off the grill, smoky and tender. These were from one of Robert’s pigs, so most of our meal had been grown right here on the farm.

  “Can’t get more locavore than this,” Dwight said, spearing a potato no bigger than a marble.

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  “What?” he said, smiling back.

  “Nothing,” I lied, but I’d suddenly remembered the reasons he’d given me for wanting to get married. “I’m tired of living in a bachelor apartment,” he’d said plaintively. “I want to plant trees, cut the grass, buy family-size packs of meat at the grocery store.”

  And here we sat, less than two years later, surrounded by trees he’d planted and grass that he’d be cutting this week if he could get the mower’s carburetor adjusted, and a family-size platter of meat on the table.

  While we ate, Dwight told me that he had fast-forwarded through Mayleen’s DVD and taken a few notes. “When Mr. Kezzie’s brother drowned, was there ever any talk that it might not have been an accident?”

  Cal’s eyes grew wide. “Granddaddy had a brother that drowned?”

  This was the first time the subject had come up in front of him and I kept my voice matter-of-fact in telling him about Daddy’s younger twin brothers and how Jacob had drowned in Possum Creek, while Jed died at Fort Bragg.

  Cal listened, then turned back to Dwight. “Why’d you say it might not’ve been an accident, Dad? You think somebody killed him? The same guy that killed Aunt Rachel?”

  He knows what Dwight’s job entails, but we try not to talk about it too much in front of him, and Dwight seemed a little taken aback that Cal had leaped from one possibility to another so quickly.

  “I don’t know, son, but if someone did do both, he’d have to be pushing eighty now, wouldn’t he, Deb’rah?”

  I nodded. “At least. Their friends would’ve been teenagers back then, too.”

  “Weird,” said Cal. In his video games, all the bad guys were brawny and muscular and young, not octogenarians.

  “On the other hand,” I said, when Cal had gone outside to give Bandit some rib bones and to check for new animal tracks on the concrete slab, “there were a lot of elderly people in and out of Aunt Rachel’s room. People who knew her and know our family from years back. It wouldn’t take much strength to smother an unconscious old woman.”

  “Was she talking coherently the whole time? Making sense?”

  “Coherent, yes, and probably making sense, too. You’d have to ask the others about that, though. I didn’t know half the names she mentioned, but that’s why she was killed, isn’t it? To keep her from going on and on about Jacob’s death? That it wasn’t an accident and someone was afraid she was going to name who she suspected?”

  “Looks that way to me,” he said. “Why else kill a woman likely to die in the next few hours?”

  The family started coming in around two. Daddy and Aunt Sister arrived first, followed in short order by Seth and Minnie, Sally and Jay-Jay, Aunt Sister and her daughter, several of the nieces and nephews who had contributed pictures, and lastly by Haywood and Isabel, Herman and Nadine, and even Robert and his wife Doris. Except for Herman, none of those last six had been there on Wednesday, but they didn’t want to be left out—or at least their wives didn’t—because they were sure they could help identify any that the others couldn’t.

  “Robert’ll probably know everybody Miss Rachel talked about,” said Doris. “If y’all remember, he used to take some of his extra vegetables and watermelons down to her vegetable stand and sit and talk with her for hours, didn’t you, hon?”

  Robert allowed that this was true. “She liked my mother and told me a lot of good things about her I didn’t remember.”

  Aunt Sister sniffed at that, but held her tongue.

  I was surprised by Robert’s words. He and my older brothers almost never mention Annie Ruth, Daddy’s first wife. My impression of her is that she was short-tempered, grim, and worked in her house and garden from first light to full dark. Ironing, mending, canning, and preserving, even though she must have been pregnant most of the time. Eight babies, two of them twins, in eleven years. Nine babies, if you count the stillborn first son. Poor as Daddy was, she came from even more abysmal rural poverty and, according to Aunt Sister, never had a new dress or pair of new shoes till after they were married. She encouraged Daddy’s illegal activities because it put food on the table, clothes on her expanding brood, and a stash of paper money under the kitchen floorboards.

  “But he could’ve made a million dollars and it won’t never going to be enough,” said Aunt Sister. “I reckon when you’ve been that poor you don’t never feel easy in your mind. She sure was proud of pumping out them boys, though. Thought she was raising up a real work crew.”

  Daddy seldom spoke of Annie Ruth and only once was it halfway negative. “We had it rough, too,” he had said, “but there was always time for fiddling o
r story-telling. ‘What’s the good of it?’ she used to ask me. She never stopped to smell the roses and she won’t one to walk out in the fields with me of a moonlight night or catch lightning bugs with the little ’uns.”

  To be fair, though, my mother had it easier. She was town bred, the daughter of a prosperous attorney with a bit of money of her own, and she used that money to hire help instead of trying to do it all by herself. She always had time for a ramble with Daddy and any of the boys who wanted to tag along, and she loved having friends and family come visit for days at a time. Between her piano and his fiddle, our old farmhouse rang with music and laughter.

  But there must have been some tenderness in Annie Ruth to make her firstborn find comfort in Aunt Rachel’s memories and want to hear whatever stories she could tell him.

  Dwight and Cal and I pulled extra chairs into our living room/den and we rounded up a bunch of cushions so that the younger ones could sit on the floor.

  I could see the television screen from my seat at the dining table where I had my laptop ready to go when Dwight cued up the DVD. Mayleen had sent him an alphabetized list compiled from the notes that people had turned in, so it would be easy to insert any new names. Most of the still photos were focused on Aunt Rachel and those immediately around her bed. These had no sound to them, of course, and some were out of focus. Dwight paused the pictures whenever they showed other parts of the hospice room, and everyone called out the names of those they recognized. After five minutes, I’d only added one name to my master list—a Furman Snaveley. He was stooped with enormous age and turned out to be the former minister of Aunt Rachel’s church.

  “Well, I’ll be blessed,” said Jay-Jay. “I didn’t see him there Wednesday. He’s the one baptized you and me, Sally.”

  “Really? Oh wow! Look how he’s shrunk. When he laid me backwards under the water, I thought he was six feet tall. Of course, I was only eleven, but still—!”