Home Fires

11

Burden Drop-Off Center (Matthew 11:28)

—New Testament Baptist Church

Next day, Friday, things were a little quieter. Ed and his people had nothing to say on record, the television cameras and reporters drifted back to Raleigh, the county commissioners were talking about appointing an interracial task force, and Wallace Adderly had been invited (invited himself?) to speak at the interchurch fellowship meeting that was still scheduled for Sunday at Mount Olive.

My calendar was so light that I was finished by two, which suited me just fine. I didn’t want to be anywhere around when A.K. checked into jail at six. Andrew, who actually spent a night or three in the old jail back when he was doggedly climbing Fool’s Hill himself, had sounded stoical when I called last night, but April’s seen too many prison movies. She was terrified that A.K. was going to be raped or beaten up and nothing I said could convince her that things like that didn’t happen in our new jailhouse.

For all I knew, she was probably planning to come along and camp out in Gwen Utley’s office for the whole forty-eight hours. Gwen’s one of our magistrates and her door’s on the same basement hallway as the jail. Gwen’s pretty no-nonsense though, so maybe she could reassure April.

On the way out of town, I stopped past Aunt Zell’s where I’ve lived for the last few years and changed into sneakers, a faded red cotton T-shirt and my favorite pair of cutoffs. A baseball cap and work gloves and I was ready to head out to the farm to see what the builders had done since I last had a chance to look.

My brother Adam out in California had sent me a book with several passive solar house plans and the modest one I’d picked had a concrete slab floor, steel framing, a tiny sunroom and a couple of strategically placed masonry walls to store heat in cold weather. South-facing windows would catch the low winter sun, while the eaves were angled to block most of the higher summer sun. A trellis of wisteria would help shade the south side until the trees got taller, and extra thick insulation would cut down on both heating and cooling costs without adding too much to the overall building cost.

The two solar collectors on the roof and the hot water tank were a bigger investment, but I liked the idea of letting the sun heat my water from March till November.

“And if you’d ante up another ten or fifteen thou, you could go totally off-grid,” Adam says, e-mailing me diagrams and figures about storage batteries, photovoltaics, and Swedish refrigerators. This from a man who enjoys the Silicon Valley lifestyle in a seven-thousand-square-foot house.

“Hey, I use solar energy to heat the pool,” he says indignantly.

It was another hot and sticky day here in eastern North Carolina, but I kept my car windows down and the air conditioner off. If I hoped to do any work on the house, it would seem even hotter to step out of a cool car into ninety-two degrees.

A church sign on the way out of town read

God’s fire in your heart

Will keep you from burning.

Okay.

Churches have always had signs, of course. Usually they’re dignified brick boxes neatly lettered on either side with the name of the pastor and the hours of service. In the last few years though, the brick boxes started having a little glass door on either side and a signboard inside that spells out exhortational messages with changeable letters.

Or else the pastors use one of those portable signs on wheels, the kind that usually have a big red arrow pointing to a used car sale: “All prices slashed!!”

Not all the church messages make good sense—especially when some of the letters fall off and you have to guess at the original wording.

Portland Brewer and I recently saw one where the letters were so scrambled that it looked as if the sign was speaking in tongues.

In front of a Pentecostal church.

True story.

When I got to the King homeplace, I turned in at the long sweeping driveway that led up to the house past newly planted baby azalea bushes that would someday grow into head-high masses of pink and white.

Aunt Zell’s irises had been spectacular at Easter—like stalks of white orchids, six or seven blossoms to the stalk—but they needed dividing again and she’d already given some to every gardener she could think of. Then she remembered that Mrs. Avery’s mother used to have white irises growing in her dooryard, “so I called Grace King Avery and she was thrilled because her brother didn’t care anything about the gardens. Just let them go. I said I’d send her some divisions at first passing and as long as you’re going right by her door…”

As I drove around to the back (no matter how splendid the front door on a country dwelling, few people use it), I was glad that I’d opted for a new house instead of going Grace King Avery’s route. There’s nothing more beautiful than a gracious old farmhouse lovingly restored, but they’re black holes when it comes to time and money. I hate to think how many gallons of paint it took to cover all the turned railings and gingerbread on the front and side porches alone.

Raymond Bagwell was hard at it with a shovel when I rolled to a stop. Stripped to his skinny waist, he was digging up a four-by-twenty length of sunbaked dirt that was probably going to be Mrs. Avery’s restored perennial border.

“Raymond, right?” I asked as I got out of the car.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said warily.

“I’m A.K.’s aunt.”

“The judge?” He paused in his digging and gave my ball cap a skeptical look.

“That’s me. Mrs. Avery here?”

He nodded toward the screen door and got on with his shovel.

A medium-sized white dog came over to greet me. Halfway between a spitz and a sheepdog, with a thumbprint of black hairs on the top of his head, he sniffed at my legs as I unlocked the trunk and lifted out the cardboard carton of iris tubers. Before I could slam the trunk lid, Grace King Avery was there, welcoming me, scolding Raymond for not helping me with the bulky box—“Just set it over there in the shade. And if you could just give them a sprinkle with the hose so they don’t get too dried out? Zell did just dig them today, didn’t she, Deborah? Not too much there, Raymond! I said sprinkle, not soak. Come in, Deborah, I was just thinking about you.”

Useless to say that I was in a hurry. She and the dog were already leading me through the kitchen—“You wouldn’t believe the way my brother let this place go. I had to buy all new appliances”—and into a large and airy room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases between the tall casement windows. All the woodwork sported a fresh coat of white enamel.

“This is where my father and my grandfather, too, did their accounts,” she said. “That desk has sat in that very spot for over a hundred years.”

The desk was solid and pleasingly crafted but probably built right here in the neighborhood by some nineteenth-century cabinetmaker who was good with his hands. It was not a piece to drive an antique dealer wild with envy unless he could see it with Mrs. Avery’s ancestor-addled eyes, but it did look at home here. The dog curled up in the kneewell and went to sleep.

“My grandmother had her sewing machine over there in the corner,” she said, nodding toward the spot where a large television now sat, “but I’m going to use this room as my den cum library.”

(Mrs. Avery’s probably the only person in Colleton County who could use the word cum and not sound pretentious.)

I’d never been inside this house before and I was surprised by its charm. There was an ease to the proportions that made you feel as if you could take a deep breath in comfort here, so I praised the desk and the room even though it was still cluttered with boxes of books and papers waiting to be arranged on the newly painted shelves as soon as they were completely dry.

Looking more than ever like a little gray-feathered guinea hen, Mrs. Avery picked her way through the maze of cardboard boxes and plucked a paper from one of them. “I came across this last night while I was looking for something else. Do you remember it?”

It was a creased sheet of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded into a tight little packet. On one side, Pass to Portland. On the other side, Ask Howard if he wants to take me to K.’s party, okay? D.

The pencilled handwriting was my affected teenage loops and swirls right down to the little smiley face over the i. I felt my cheeks flame with the same embarrassment as when she’d confiscated that note in her classroom a hundred years ago.

Mrs. Avery shook her head at me. “Oh, you were a one all right. Always thinking about the boys. And now here you are a judge and still unmarried. I thought surely—”

“Time has a way of playing tricks,” I said hastily. I crumpled the note, stuck it in my pocket and fished a high school yearbook from the nearest carton. It was from a few years back when one of my brother Robert’s daughters was a freshman. It would be hard to open any one of these yearbooks and not see a Knott face somewhere in its pages.

“Blessed if I know why I haven’t thrown out all these old test papers and record books,” Mrs. Avery said. “Really, the yearbooks should be souvenirs enough, don’t you think? Thirty-five years.”

I was appalled. Thirty-five years of pounding sophomore English into the thick skulls of hormonal teenagers?

“No wonder you’re enjoying this change of pace,” I said.

“I’ve never worked so hard, but it’s such pleasure,” she agreed. “The front parlor and bedrooms are still to do over, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve finished up outside. After all those years in town, it’s so wonderful to be out here on King land where everything I see is beautiful and orderly. Come and let me show you what I’ve done with my mother’s roses. They’re the only thing my brother cared about. Isn’t it funny how men are with roses?”

I would soon have to be thinking about landscaping the grounds around my own house, so I was actually interested as she pointed out rhododendrons and camellias and how the gardenias needed good air circulation so they wouldn’t mildew and if I wanted some of the baby magnolias that had volunteered around the mother tree, I should say now before she had Raymond root them out.

She had planted more azaleas on the slope down to the narrow creek branch that ran between her property and the little dilapidated church just on the other side. Here in the heat of summer, the branch was barely a trickle of clear water.

“A water garden with papyrus and blue flags would be so pretty down there, but—Come back here, Smudge!” she called sharply before her dog could cross the branch and muddy his paws. “My grandfather, Langston King, gave the land for that church, you know, so I can’t help feeling an interest in it. I’ve offered to have Raymond mow their grass and neaten up a little, maybe haul off those old cars, but I’m afraid Mrs. Williams took my offer wrong.”

She would, I thought, suppressing a grin. Women like Grace King Avery could get me to agree to anything just to get rid of them, but Sister Williams was an implacable will that bent to no force.

Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle, pastored by the hot-tempered Reverend Byantha Williams, hasn’t had a fresh lick of paint in all the years I’ve known it and the tin roof sags precariously. The only thing that seems to hold up the branch side of the church is the ancient rusty house trailer backed up against that wall where Sister Williams lives with her four malevolent cats.

Out back, behind the tiny graveyard, two wrecked cars and what looked like an old washing machine or refrigerator were half covered by kudzu vines. Even junk can look picturesque when smothered in vines. Too bad that kudzu hadn’t reached the church yet.

Maidie shakes her head over the condition of this church because the congregation is too poor and too small to do more than patch and mend. It’s a dying church. Sister Williams’s standards are too rigidly puritanical and most of the young people deserted to other churches years ago. The average age is something like sixty-five. But what the members lack in youth and money they make up in fervor, and the rickety walls really rock when Sister Williams starts preaching. She’s in her seventies now and vows she’ll keep the church going as long as two or three be gathered together there in His name.

We wandered back up to the house and I was framing a graceful goodbye when Mrs. Avery said, “Well, I’m sorry to rush you, Deborah, but you see how busy I am. Do thank Zell for me. It was so kind of her to send the irises. Now, Raymond, before you leave, if you could just—”

Dismissed, I got in my car and eased back down the winding driveway, wondering if Raymond’s parents were as worried about the upcoming weekend as Andrew and April were.

On the other hand, jail might just be the rest he needed after working for Mrs. Avery all week.

As I neared the farm, it occurred to me for the first time that I was going to have to give some serious thought to a new driveway. The long pond’s on the back side of the farm and can be reached by several different tractor lanes which crisscross the land. My favorite runs across the Stancil farm, soon to be an upscale housing development complete with streetlights, sidewalks and golf course. Others are extensions of driveways belonging to Daddy and my brothers. If my family could monitor every time I came or went, to say nothing of every visitor’s coming and going, I might as well stay at Aunt Zell’s for all the privacy I’d be gaining.

Certainly there was no privacy today. As I cleared the woods and came up to the building site that looked out over the pond, I saw six pickups, a bright red sports Jeep, a white Toyota and two horses parked (or tied) out by the deck. I recognized three of the pickups as belonging to the work crew who hammered away on the inside. The rest had brought nieces and nephews and several of their friends who were diving off the end of my brand-new pier.

Farm ponds usually have such messy bottoms that wading out to swimming depth is enough to blight the fun of swimming because you know you’re going to have to wade back in through all the muck. Two weeks earlier, a pile driver from Fuquay came and sank a double row of ten-inch creosoted poles out to where the water’s ten feet deep. Then I had a lumber company deliver a stack of two-by-fours and pressure-treated boards and told A.K., Stevie, and the rest of the kids who still lived on the place that they could use the pier if they’d build it. I figured I might as well get a little work out of them since there was no way I’d be able to keep them off my half of the pond once the pier was built anyhow.

Before I could switch off the engine, Zach’s daughter Emma was tugging at the door.

“Wait’ll you try it!” she cried. Her hair was wet and so were her brown T-shirt and red shorts. “We just put the last nail in about an hour ago. You should’ve got here sooner. You could’ve been first off. This is so cool!”

Yeah!

Her excited voice took me back to when one of the promoters for a community pool tried to sign Seth and Minnie up for membership half my lifetime ago.

“It’s going to be Olympic size with a wading pool for the little ones and water slides and high boards for the teenagers,” the neighbor said. Being a brand-new teenager myself then, I was ready to run right home and beg Mother and Daddy to sign up as charter members, too.

No more yucky pond bottoms? No more skinned knees on those sharp creek rocks? No beating the banks and water first in case there were water moccasins around? No more squatting behind chigger-laden bushes if nature called?

Hot damn! Civilization was coming to Cotton Grove for sure.

Seth had looked around at the eager faces of his children and even though cash money was tight in those days, he was ready to pledge his financial support when the neighbor lowered his voice and added, “ ’Course it’ll be—you know—restricted?”

I’m told it’s still restricted, but I don’t have firsthand knowledge since none of us ever joined and no Knott ever swam there.

Uncle Ash and Aunt Zell have an in-ground lap pool for his heart and Robert and Doris have one of those big blue plastic prefab things out back of their house for their grandchildren, but unless we’re at the coast, the rest of us have pretty much made do with Possum Creek.

This was going to be a lot more convenient and I wondered why some of my brothers hadn’t done it a long time ago. Was it because the spring-fed ponds had been dredged for utilitarian reasons? For irrigation and fishing, not for swimming?

I walked out on the solid planking and admired everything the kids had done. As I stood on the very end, Herman’s son Reese came up dripping from the water at my feet and grabbed my ankle. My ball cap flew off and I felt myself falling through the sunlit air to land with a huge splash in deep cool water.

Even with all my clothes on, it felt wonderful, although when I got my hands on Reese, I tried to sit on his head for catching me off guard like that.

Stevie, home on summer vacation from Carolina, was standing on the pier laughing his head off when Seth’s Jessica gave him a mighty shove from behind.

Soon the water was swarming with fully clothed whooping and hollering kids, all from here in the neighborhood. Oh well, I thought. Kids—even farm kids—have so many sophisticated distractions these days. Maybe the pier’s homespun novelty would wear off before my house was finished and this privacy thing became an issue. I missed A.K. and his sister, though. Normally they would be here with the rest.

When I was thoroughly cool, I climbed out and sat on the pier to squeeze water from my shirt and shorts.

“Hey, you know what?” said Emma, treading water in front of me. “For Deborah’s housewarming gift, we ought to take up a collection and buy her a beach.”

“A beach?” asked Stevie, who was floating nearby.

“Yeah. A dump truck full of sand. How much could it cost?”

“Do you know how many truckloads it’d take to make even a ten-foot-wide beach?” said her brother Lee. “It’d cost a pure fortune.”

“And your only paternal aunt’s not worth a fortune?” I cooed sweetly.

They all hooted and I had to scuttle down the planked pier toward land to keep from getting splashed again.

✡ ✡ ✡

My sneakers squished with every step as I walked up to the house still dripping water. My ball cap was the only thing that had escaped a soaking.

Delight welled up in me as I viewed my new house. Pride of ownership, too. From the outside, it was starting to look like a proper dwelling now that the roof was on and most of the siding was up. The south windows had been set since I was last out, which meant that Sheetrocking couldn’t be too far behind.

I had stopped at a store on the way out and filled a cooler with soft drinks and as I pulled it out of the trunk of my car, Will appeared at my elbow.

“Let me help you with that, little sister,” he said, grabbing the other end.

Seth had offered to oversee the construction and Haywood was all set to get his feelings hurt if I didn’t choose him even though both brothers were knee-deep in tobacco when the bank finished approving my loan and I was ready to break ground. Fortunately, summer is the slowest season in Will’s auctioneering business and for some reason, he really wanted to do this for me. Since Will actually worked in construction for a couple of years after he left the farm, I agreed.

Will’s my mother’s oldest child, good-looking and a bit of a rounder. You can’t always count on him to finish what he starts, but when he does work, he works smart. Sometimes the other boys feel a little jealous and say I’m more partial to Seth, so it helps when I can favor one of them over Seth.

We carried the cooler onto what would be a screened porch overlooking the pond and the others inside took a break and came out to join us for a cold drink and something from the snack bag I’d also brought.

They were a pickup crew from here in the neighborhood—two white men, a Mexican, and a black man who was the only one who’d actually worked with steel framing before. According to Will, they’d each grumbled about it though. He hadn’t been all that thrilled at working with the stuff himself. Yeah, yeah, he knew it was the wave of the future, termite proof, cheaper, more energy efficient, et cetera, et cetera.

“All the same, wood’s more forgiving,” he said every time the metal frames popped their bolts or threatened to wobble out from under the men.

Now that everything was braced six ways to Sunday, the house felt as sturdy to him as Adam’s literature had promised.

“It might actually stand up in an earthquake,” he teased me.

Earthquakes aren’t a real big problem in North Carolina. I was more interested in hearing that the house could withstand the wind force of a hurricane and the jaws of industrial-strength termites.

As the men finished their break, Herman’s Annie Sue came out on the porch. She wore a sleeveless yellow tee, cutoffs, and heavy leather work shoes with bright yellow socks. Her chestnut hair was tied back in a ponytail.

“I’m all caught up with you, Uncle Will,” she said, unbuckling the tool belt from her sturdy waist. “Nothing more I can do till the Sheetrock’s up. Hey, Deborah. One of those drinks got my name on it?”

“And a Nab,” I said, holding out the bag.

She broke open the cellophane wrapper and bit into the cheddar crackers smeared with peanut butter. Orange crumbs showered down the front of her shirt.

Herman started teaching Reese about electricity before Annie Sue was born, but she’s a better electrician than he’ll ever be.

Will went back inside and the two of us sat there on the porch steps sipping our Diet Pepsis as we looked out over the long pond where her cousins and older brother still frolicked in the water at the end of the pier.

“Come on in,” they cried, but we both shook our heads even though I was still damp from the water and Annie Sue was equally damp from her hot sweaty work.

Reese’s truck radio was set on a golden oldies country station and scraps of tinny banjo and guitar music floated up to us. The sun baked us dry as it started its long slow slide down the western sky. A male bluebird swooped down on a grasshopper and flew off toward the woods. A field of shoulder-high corn rippled greenly at the edge of my new boundaries. Music, laughter and splashing on one side, the sound of hammers on the other, yet I could feel peacefulness sinking into my bones.

“You picked you one of the prettiest places on the whole farm,” Annie Sue said, unconsciously echoing my own thoughts. “Least it would be one of the prettiest if you could get Uncle Haywood to take away that old greenhouse.”

“He says he’s going to refurbish it,” I said.

“And you believe him?” she asked cynically.

Haywood gets enthusiasms but he and Will are a lot alike about sticking to things. The difference is that Will works smart while Haywood can only work hard.

About five years ago, Haywood decided he was going to get into truck farming in a big way. Cut back on tobacco, go heavy on produce.

“The man who gets the first tomatoes to market gets to the bank first, too,” he said. “First truckload of watermelons you’n get five dollars apiece. Last load, you can’t give ’em away for fifty cents.”

So he bought some big metal hoops, covered them in heavy plastic sheets and built himself a greenhouse sixty feet long and twelve feet wide down at the far end of the pond where his and Andrew’s land comes together. And he diligently sowed flats of tomatoes and watermelons. And when they were the right size, he transplanted them out into the fields where they promptly drowned in one of the wettest springs we’d had in years.

Undaunted, he tried again the second year and did indeed get the first truckload of local tomatoes to the market where they had to compete against the tomatoes and watermelons being trucked up from Georgia and South Carolina.

According to Seth, who keeps all the boys’ farm records on his computer, Haywood netted about eighty-five cents on the dollar that year.

“I tried to tell him to grow yuppie things for the Chapel Hill crowd,” Seth said. “Leeks, snow peas, or fancy peppers. But all he knows are tomatoes and watermelons.”

That winter, a storm shredded the plastic walls and Haywood lost interest in his greenhouse. Yet there it still stands—overgrown with weeds, rusting away, tattered banners of plastic fluttering like fallen flags in every breeze, a blight on the landscape at the end of the pond, right smack-dab in the middle of my view.

“I could string it with Christmas tree lights,” Annie Sue offered. “Turn it into found art?”

“I think that only works for urban areas,” I said.

As we contemplated Haywood’s eyesore, A.K. drove down the lane and pulled up at the edge of the pond. The kids fell silent as he got out and walked towards them and I could tell from their body language that they felt awkward.

From beside me, Annie Sue murmured, “Ruth’s been crying all afternoon. Emma tried to get her to come over and help with the pier, but she wouldn’t. God! A.K.’s such a jerk!”

But the worry in her voice betrayed her.

He must have been working on the pier either last night or early this morning because he scooped up a tool belt and one of the hammers that were piled on the bank.

“They say it might rain tomorrow,” he said, tossing them into the cab.

The cousins came up to him then while their friends hung back, exchanging uneasy glances.

Suddenly, from Reese’s truck came the raucous tones of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Stricken, Emma raced over to snap it off, turned the wrong knob and the music blared louder than ever. “Everybody in the old cellblock—”

Abrupt silence.

A.K. shrugged and gave a wry grin. “Good timing.”

“Hey, man, we practiced,” said Reese, trying to turn it into a joke, knowing he’d done a couple of things just as bad, knowing that there but for the grace of God...

“Yeah, well, see you guys.”

As A.K. turned back to his truck, Annie Sue raced down and gave him a hug. I followed and when I put my arms around him, he clung to me for an instant as if he were seven again instead of seventeen.

“You’ll be all right,” I whispered. “The jailer knows who you are. Just go with the flow and you’ll be fine, okay?”

“Okay,” he said shakily.