Death's Half Acre

CHAPTER 2

All the big apple orchards are gone.

. . . peach trees, old horse apples

that came from Civil War days.

I remember the Indian and Clear-seed peach . . .

All that, gone.

—Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

TUESDAY NIGHT

You ain’t never gonna get a man to vote against his pocketbook, Deb’rah,” Daddy said, waving a hard roll at me to make his point. “And right now, every one of them commissioners ’cepting maybe Abe Jacobson’s granddaughter is either in the building trade or got real close ties to somebody that’s making a bunch of money offen the new folks. So lessen you plan to quit being a judge and run for commissioner yourself, you can just suck it up.”

“I don’t want to suck it up,” I said petulantly as I dipped a piece of my own roll into the dish of olive oil on the table between us. “I just want them to start thinking about the people of Colleton County. All the people, not just the ones that pay for their political posters and campaign ads.”

“Oh, I reckon them people’s paying for a lot more than that,” he said cynically as he waited for our server to bring him some butter.

After finishing up a court session that ran late, I had stayed on in Dobbs to catch up on my paperwork until it was time to meet some of the family for supper. It had surprised me to get to the restaurant and find Daddy there. He doesn’t drive at night much any more and I hadn’t realized he was coming.

Ferguson’s is a little pricy, but their steaks are dry-aged and supposedly hormone-free. Here on a Tuesday night, it wasn’t very busy and the waiter had already been around once to refill our tea glasses.

“Anyhow,” said Daddy, “when did you start thinking county commissioners oughta be different from any other politicians?”

“Ever since I heard they’re letting NutriGood build a store at Pleasant’s Crossroads.”

I have nothing against the NutriGood grocery chain, per se. I may not preach the gospel of whole grains and free-range chickens like a born-again health nut, but I do like them; and whenever I’m in Raleigh, I swing past the NutriGood to pick up store-baked bread and organic vegetables that aren’t yet ripe in our garden. Hell, I even bring my own reusable cloth tote bags so I won’t have to decide whether it’s paper or plastic that’s going to wind up in our county landfill.

A chain store in Raleigh’s one thing, and I can grit my teeth and live with the sprawling commercial mess around the interstate exits several miles to the east of me. But an upscale town store to anchor a strip mall at Pleasant’s Crossroads? Only three short miles from my own house? That’s a whole ’nother can of something, and no, I’m not talking organic worms.

Pleasant’s Crossroads is the intersection of two backcountry roads that used to go nowhere. Nothing was there except scrubby woods, tobacco fields, and a couple of dilapidated clapboard buildings on diagonal corners facing each other across the two-lane hardtop. One building was a little general store and single-pump service station that old Max Pleasant owned back when my daddy was running white lightning all up and down the coast and needed a safe source of sugar. It’s been closed for years. Daddy’s name was never on the deed to that store, but everyone knew who bankrolled it and who paid the bills. The other was a barbershop run by one of Max’s Yadkin cousins. That’s where Daddy and those of my eleven brothers who live out this way used to get their hair cut every four or five weeks until Baldy Yadkin abruptly hung up his scissors, sold out to a commercial builder, and bought himself a place on the Pamlico Sound, where he can fish and crab three hundred days a year.

Bulldozers had already torn out and removed Max’s old gas and kerosene tanks and thrown up a berm around that corner so as to provide privacy for a secluded high-end “village” developed and owned by G. Hooks Talbert, one of the movers and shakers in the state’s Republican party and a descendant of the original Pleasant who held a land grant from the Lords Proprietor. Talbert’s older son used to run a wholesale nursery out there on the other side of Possum Creek from us. In fact, that nursery was responsible for my becoming a district court judge five years ago.

It’s a long story, but all you need to know is that it gave Daddy the opportunity to pressure G. Hooks—

“Pressure?” asked the preacher who lurks at the edge of my consciousness and tries to keep me honest.

“I believe the word you’re looking for is blackmail,” said the pragmatist who usually approves of euphemisms.

Okay, okay. Technically speaking, that nursery gave Daddy the ammunition to blackmail G. Hooks Talbert into asking the governor to appoint me after I lost my first race. Until then, Talbert was famous in our family for saying he didn’t care to deal with any ignorant bootlegger. Nobody’s heard him say that recently and now it’s gotten personal.

To even the score, and knowing how it would gall Daddy to have any kind of a development—even an upscale one—so close to his borders, G. Hooks quietly bought up all the land on the south side of Possum Creek and, even more quietly, got the county commissioners to rubber-stamp his plans to build creekside houses and a tiny village centered around a café and a gift shop that stocked designer jewelry and local pottery. The first thing he did was dredge out a lake on a bend of the creek and put up a picturesque country inn with a gourmet restaurant suitable for formal weddings.

Unfortunately for him, he underestimated the Kezzie Knott grapevine. Someone at the register of deeds office had given Daddy a heads-up before the ink was dry on the first property transfers. Daddy waited until the inn was finished and the lake was already stocked with bass and perch before it was brought to G. Hooks’s attention that our line ran along the south bank of the creek and not down the middle of the creek itself as was usual. Daddy could have made G. Hooks tear down his new million-dollar inn and fill the lake back in.

We’ve heard that several of G. Hooks’s attorneys were fired after he was sent a copy of our deeds with the relevant parts highlighted in yellow.

The agreement that our family hammered out with the Talbert Corporation provided that the rest of the creek and the new lake would become a managed greenway. No houses on the creek itself. Instead, there would be hiking trails and bicycle paths on both sides. We don’t have to look at the McMansions that are still going up, and in return, we allow hikers and picnickers on our side of the creek, which, according to Talbert’s site manager, is proving to be a big plus in the eyes of potential buyers who have moved to the country because they want to see a little country.

Except for the extra cars that the new village has added to our roads, it’s been a good enough compromise, although I suspect G. Hooks is still smarting from being one-upped by an ex-bootlegger. Sequestered behind berms and fast-growing evergreen firs and hollies, there were no visual eyesores to blight the landscape.

Until now. Now a big gaudy sign proudly announces the imminent arrival of our very own NutriGood grocery store. Soon that little homemade barbershop will be swept away as if it never existed.

As if four generations of Colleton County farmers hadn’t swapped tall tales and bragged about how many pounds of tobacco or how many bales of cotton their land was going to produce that year.

As if little boys who are now grandfathers hadn’t scrunched down on the wooden bench beneath the dangling bare lightbulb to listen while their elders waxed eloquent about the love and loss of a good woman or a good car or a good hound that treed his last possum more than fifty years ago.

It’s not that I didn’t know how financial magazines regularly rate us as one of the best places to live. But it wasn’t till I saw the bulldozers scraping that corner clean that it finally hit home for me that our whole way of life is under attack. Let an ant find one tasty crumb and soon your whole kitchen counter is aswarm with them. People who live in the county’s small towns or inside Raleigh’s Beltline don’t have a clue about the changes out here in the country, of the things we’re losing.

Two years ago, tobacco and corn grew behind that little shop. Pine trees have encroached along the back edges where dogwoods and redbuds bloom. The new strip of brick buildings will include a bath and beauty store, a Thai restaurant, a dry cleaner, and God knows what else. The parking lot will hold three hundred cars. Nothing’s been said about limiting the light pollution that will wash the rest of the Milky Way out of our night skies. Nothing about requiring trees to shade that much asphalt and help with the runoff that will surely work its way into the creek that meanders through my family’s land.

Even though it’s downstream from us, we still care. Years ago, my brothers quit farming right up to the edge of the creek and built dikes across the fields so as to prevent fertilizers and pesticides from washing into it. They don’t go around hugging trees, but they try to be good stewards of the land and they know that we’re all interconnected—not that any of them would put it that way. But Possum Creek flows into the Neuse and the Neuse flows into Core Sound, which used to have the best scallops and oysters my brothers ever tasted. They can remember standing waist-deep in the gentle waters off Harkers Island, feeling for scallops with their bare feet. The big twins can get downright lyrical remembering their salty sweetness.

“We’d scoop one up and wait for it to peep open,” says Haywood. “Soon as we saw that ring of shiny blue eyes, we’d slide in a clamshell, twist it open, and eat it raw right there.”

“That was good eating, won’t it?” Herman always says.

“Real good,” Haywood says with a sigh for what’s been lost. “Real good.”

The Neuse was recently declared one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Seth smiling down at me. He’s five brothers up from me, but there’s always been a special bond between us.

“Y’all order yet?” his wife, Minnie, asked. “I’m hungry enough to eat a cow. Or at least the flank of one that’s walked past the fire.”

She leaned over to kiss Daddy’s leathery cheek and took the chair next to mine.

“Any of the others coming to the meeting?” I asked Minnie, meaning those of my brothers and sisters-in-law who still live out on the farm.

“All of ’em.” She put on her glasses and reached for a menu. “Plus some of those new people from Talbert’s place. They’re not exactly clear on what a stump dump is, but they’re pretty sure they didn’t pay close to a million dollars to live near one.”

Seth grinned as he looked up from his menu. “Not after Minnie finished talking to them anyhow.”

Minnie used to be president of the county’s Democratic Women and she’s shepherded me through both of my campaigns. Comfortably plump and fast going gray, she keeps an eye on the larger community for the family and rallies us to the cause when she thinks we’re needed.

“Times like this, I really miss Linsey Thomas,” she sighed.

The owner and editor of The Dobbs Ledger died in a hit-and-run almost a year ago, a case that remains unsolved despite the large reward posted by his loyal readers. I was still messing around with a game warden from down east then, with no thought of marrying anybody, much less Dwight Bryant, Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief deputy; but I remember how long and how hard Bo’s whole force worked to find the driver, only to come up dry.

Linsey Thomas was a straight-shooting liberal from a long line of liberals. His grandfather was labeled a commie during the McCarthy era. His father had advocated integration during the civil rights movement, back when the KKK was still active in the county. They burned a cross on the Thomas lawn and shot out all the windows at the Ledger. When Linsey took over the paper, he continued their tradition. Didn’t matter if the miscreants were Republican or Democrat, the Ledger named names and kicked butt whenever county officials favored special interests or began to think no one cared if they bent the rules for themselves or their friends. Linsey cared and he made his readers care.

Regrettably for us, he had been a childless only child and ownership of the paper had passed to a distant cousin down in Florida, who promptly sold it to a conservative conglomerate that looks upon a community newspaper as something to wrap around advertising and two-for-one or ten-cents-off coupons.

The waiter returned with Daddy’s butter and took our orders—steak for Minnie and Seth, broiled shrimp for Daddy, grilled chicken salad for me.

“Linsey would have explained exactly what a stump dump was and illustrated it with photographs from the one that caught on fire over in Johnston County,” said Minnie, handing her menu to the waiter.

“He’d’ve printed who was asking for the permit and whether or not an impact study had been done,” Seth agreed.

Daddy frowned. “Don’t believe I’ve seen a single mention of it in the paper.”

“No, and you won’t,” Minnie said. She broke a roll in half and shared it with Seth, who grumbled that he was with Daddy when it came to dunking your bread in olive oil instead of buttering it like God intended. “Ruby’s not going to rock any boats. Long as the advertising keeps coming in, her bosses in Florida don’t care that she can’t put together a decent paper.”

Ruby Dixon is a tall, horse-faced woman who had been a good reporter till gin got the best of her. Even falling-down drunk, she could write like an angel. Linsey had inherited her from his dad and didn’t have the heart to fire her. Before his death, she’d managed to stay sober till late afternoon. After he died, she was handed the editorship and now we hear that she starts her days with a glass of liberally laced orange juice sitting on her desk. The best reporters have drifted away and the Ledger doesn’t print much substantive news any more.

What saves her is the county’s explosive growth. The paper’s advertising department sells so many ads that the inserts weigh at least three times more than the eight or ten sheets of newsprint. As long as deaths, weddings, and high school ball scores are reported, and which churches are having revivals or guest gospel singers, which kids have made the honor roll, and what the school cafeterias are serving this week, most people don’t seem to care that the Ledger no longer takes unpopular stands or tries to educate and inform. There will never be any crosses burned or windows shot out while Ruby’s the editor.

“Any word around the courthouse as to how Candace Bradshaw feels about stump dumps?” Minnie asked me.

“However Danny Creedmore’s told her to feel,” I said cynically. “You know well as I do who pulls her strings.”

Daniel Creedmore is the owner of Creedmore Concrete Corporation. He began twenty-five years ago with a single cement truck and made concrete blocks for cheap houses and migrant camps. Now he owns a fleet of trucks and Triple C probably pours at least a third of the foundations for new construction in the county.

Oh, and did I mention that he runs the Republican party in Colleton County?

As for Candace Bradshaw, who now chairs the board of commissioners, maybe if I’d been born poor and raggedy with a slut for a mother, I might have a warped view of powerful men and money, too. At fifteen she quit school, moved in with her grandmother here in Dobbs, and went to work for Bradshaw Management and Janitorial. She cleaned apartments and scrubbed toilets for a couple of years and eventually took night classes at Colleton Community College till she earned her GED. Two months later, she married her boss and seven months after that, they were blessed with a beautiful baby girl. A real Horatio Alger story, right? With everybody living happily ever after?

Unfortunately, she couldn’t help bragging to her best friend about how clever she’d been to notice that Cameron Bradshaw kept books of poetry in his office. She batted her green eyes at him, tucked a strand of her sexy long hair behind her ear, and asked his advice about a paper she had to write. One thing soon led to another, as it usually does with cute young women and naive older men. Even before the baby was born, her best friend had confided in her best friend and it was soon all over Dobbs that Candace deliberately got pregnant so that Cameron Bradshaw, a well-regarded businessman more than twenty years her senior, would do the honorable thing and marry her.

Bradshaw Management provides janitorial services for half the businesses in Dobbs, including my old law firm. It also manages a couple of apartment complexes and two rest homes. It took Candace a few years to learn all the ropes, but once she felt competent enough, she pushed her husband aside and took over the business after their separation. Gossip says her goal in life is to be rich and powerful and that she compensates for her lack of smarts by working hard. Gossip also says that she landed some of her biggest contracts by working hard between the sheets.

She ran for the county board of commissioners the first time I ran for judge, which is when I finally became aware of her and heard all the gossip. She won her primary. I lost mine.

Of course, her party bosses had quietly agreed on a single slate of local candidates before the primary so that she could run unopposed, while my primary was the usual free-for-all with four of us slugging it out for the same slot.

It would be hypocritical for me to sling mud at how she got her seat. It’s what she does with it that tightens my jaws. Yes, Daddy blackmailed a crook to get me appointed, but neither he nor any of my friends or family have ever gotten a cent out of it, unlike the men who put Candace Bradshaw on the board, where she happily does their bidding with girlish giggles and much tossing of her long brown hair.

Our food came and, as we ate, talk turned to the familiar—the children, neighbors, our gardens, and whether or not Dwight and I were ever going to take a real honeymoon. I married him a few days before Christmas and his eight-year-old son had stayed on to spend the holidays with us before returning to his mother in Virginia. Three weeks later, she was murdered and Cal’s been with us since January.

“Maybe when school’s out,” I murmured, spearing one of Daddy’s shrimp.

“You’re going to take Cal with you on your honeymoon?” Minnie shook her head as the waiter refilled our tea glasses. “You and Dwight need time alone, honey. Any of us would be glad to keep him for you.”

“I know,” I said, “and we will. Only not just yet.”

Seth looked at Daddy. “Did you and Mama Sue have a honeymoon?”

He gave a crooked smile. “With all of you young’uns? We couldn’t farm y’all out to one family and Sue didn’t want to split you up.”

Every time I get to thinking how hard it is to be a stepmother before I was used to being a wife, I think of those eight little motherless boys: some too young to know what was going on, some shyly wanting to love their daddy’s new wife, two or three of them resenting the hell out of her, and all of them as wary as ditch cats waiting to see which way to jump. How on earth did she do it?

“Did you ever tell Mother she wasn’t your mother and you didn’t have to mind her?” I asked Seth.

He paused with a final forkful of steak and shook his head. “I was too little to remember my own mother. She was the only mother I ever knew.”

“ ’Sides,” growled Daddy. “Anybody sassed her would’ve had to answer to me. That boy of Dwight’s sassing you, Deb’rah?”

“No,” I said, reaching across to squeeze his calloused hand in reassurance. “Dwight wouldn’t let that happen either. It’s just that Cal’s so quiet sometimes. I’m never sure if it’s because he’s missing Jonna or because he wishes I weren’t in the picture.”

“He probably doesn’t know himself,” Minnie said briskly. She waved off our waiter’s offer of a third round of tea and gathered up her purse and glasses. “We’d better get going if we want to get a seat.”

“No problem,” I said. “Jamie Jacobson told me yesterday that they’d be meeting in the old courtroom. So many people turn out to speak for or against any of the items on their agenda these days that they haven’t met in their own room since Christmas.”

Daddy and Seth had their usual squabble over who was going to pay the check. I didn’t bother to get into it, because Daddy always wins. I just put down the tip and waited for Seth to give it up.