Southern Discomfort

CHAPTER 17

CHALK LINES

"Long straight lines between distant points on surfaces are marked by snapping a chalk line... For an accurate snap, never snap the chalk line over a twenty-foot distance."

Perry Byrd's attorney was a man who'd run against me in the primary, Edward "Big Ed" Whitbread, from Widdington over in the next county. They were old pat-fanny teammates from way back, but when it came to defending her daughter, Mrs. Byrd showed that she'd been paying attention over the years and ignored any cronyistic instructions Perry might be trying to send from the grave. As soon as Paige finished telling her what she'd told me, Eleanor Byrd pulled herself together and called Zack Young, the best criminal lawyer in Colleton County and the man who'd tied a knot in her husband's tail more than once over the years.

At Paige's urging, I went with them to the courthouse. Gwen Utley was the magistrate on duty that night. She arraigned Paige on a charge of voluntary manslaughter, then set such a low bail that she might as well have not bothered, just gone on and released her into Eleanor's custody.

Zack emerged from his first conference with Paige and immediately announced his young client would not be pleading guilty.

"This is justifiable homicide, pure and simple," he told me as we walked through the dim echoing halls afterwards. "As clear a case of self-defense as you'll find in any textbook."

He cut his eyes at me. "Conflict with anything she told you earlier?"

I set his mind at rest. "No. When she tried to pull him off Annie Sue, she said he came up toward her with a roar. She may well have thought he'd knock her out and rape her, too."

"You'd testify to that?"

"Certainly."

We came out onto the side street next to the parking lot and he slouched off toward his car. "See you in court, Judge honey."

Zack or Dwight. Bound to be one of 'em picked up on it. * * *

I'd been up since six. A long physical day. Emotionally draining as well. Yet I was too wired to go home.

But I had more than one home, didn't I?

And a lopsided moon was halfway up a star-studded sky, wasn't it?

Without hardly thinking twice, I turned the car toward Cotton Grove; and once I was on Old Forty-Eight south of town, I just let it find its own way back to the farm.

Unless you're from the area and grew up knowing, there's nothing much to indicate that a house might be somewhere up the rutted lane, only a battered tin mailbox with a faded number and no name. The hogwire fence is overgrown with cow-itch vine and Virginia creeper. The posts that once held it are rotted away and the fence is now supported by jack oaks and pines that have grown up and through the rusty hog wire.

The lane curves abruptly through such a thick stand of unkempt trees that even in wintertime, you won't see house lights from the road unless you look back over your shoulder just as Old Forty-Eight crosses Possum Creek. In summer, you won't see that glimmer unless there's a party going on with the whole house lit up like a Christmas tree. Even then you'd have to look hard.

All my car windows were down, and as soon as I turned off the paved road, I killed my radio and doused my lights. Moonlight was enough to pick out the sandy lane. I drove slowly, quietly, slipping into the old game, but the air was too cool and clear for me to win.

Only Saturday night traffic back out on New Forty-Eight between Cotton Grove and Makely let me get as close as I did before the dogs let loose in their pens on the far side of the house, yipping and howling as they heard me approach.

I topped a low ridge and there was the homeplace spread out before me.

White rail fences gleamed in the moonlight. Beyond a broad expanse of grass—new-mown by the smell of it—swept across the level ground and disappeared in thick dark shadows cast by a grove of huge old oaks and fifty-year old pecans. The house itself was just a plain old two-story white wooden box, nondescript and ordinary except that it was surrounded on all sides by deep porches upstairs and down.

Despite the racket the dogs were making, there were no lights in any of the windows. Only the tin roof shone like worn silver in the moonlight.

I switched off the motor and coasted to a stop on the circular dirt drive beneath a magnolia tree my grandmother had planted in 1900 to mark the new century. Its sweet fragrance welcomed me back as gladly as the two dogs that waited silently for me to open my car door. A few more querulous yaps, then the hounds and rabbit dogs out by the barns subsided. Those penned dogs get sold or traded every few months, but the night that Blue and Ladybelle bark at me will be the night I know I've stayed away too long.

They were too well mannered to jump up on my linen skirt or rip my stockings, but they appreciated a hello scratch behind their silky ears.

Five wide wooden steps led up to the shadowy porch and I sat down on the second one to whisper baby talk to the dogs. The smell of cigarette smoke reached me just as I heard the creak of the porch swing from the deepest shadows.

"Didn't wake you, did I?" I asked quietly.

"Nah," said Daddy. "I was just setting here enjoying the night. And thinking about taking a ramble. You want to come?"

"If you'll wait for me to change."

"Take your time. I ain't in no hurry" * * *

Without turning on a light, I went through the house and up the central staircase. None of the curtains were drawn, but the moon was unneeded. I could have walked blindfolded to my old room on the southeast corner.

Maidie keeps fresh linens on my bed, and I leave several changes of clothes in the closet and extra toiletries in the dresser drawers. Like a snake shedding its skin, I peeled off my town clothes in the dark and slipped into jeans and an old cotton sweatshirt. Knowing Daddy's rambles, I felt around on the closet floor for a pair of worn leather boots and tucked my pantlegs down inside their tops against ticks and chiggers. * * *

The caged dogs whined in excitement as we approached, hoping this meant they were going to get to run with us through a night world sensuous with the smell of coons and darting rabbits and slow-trundling possums. They gave soft pleading yaps as we passed.

"Hush!" Daddy said sternly, and they hushed.

Blue and Ladybelle, aristocrats of the farm, strode past without turning their heads.

We walked on down past his vegetable garden, through a cut, past Maidie's little house perched on the last bit of level ground before it sloped down to the creek. No light in her windows either. She and Cletus were early to bed, early to rise and they slept soundly. The dogs never woke them unless they kept it up so long that even the soundest sleeper must come awake, knowing there were trespassers on the land.

It seldom happened.

Cletus's pickup was parked beside the porch. From atop the cab, Maidie's big black tomcat was an inky pool of watchfulness as we passed.

On the other side of the lane lay a small field of melons. Honeydews and swollen cantaloupes gleamed among dark vines, and watermelons were starting to stretch themselves.

The lane wound through another stand of trees and then we were out into a twenty-acre field of tobacco. The waning moon, almost a week past full now, sailed high in the sky, flooding the countryside with silver-blue light. A winelike aroma arose from the very earth itself, compounded of cool dirt, green tobacco, and a light breeze blowing up from the creek.

Of one accord, we stood as still and unmoving as the tall pines behind us and breathed it in. Long moments passed, then an owl swooped down into the middle of a truck row. There was a sudden frantic squeak, followed by a silence all the deeper as the owl gained altitude on noiseless wings. A small dark shape dangled limply from its talons.

The spell broken, Daddy lit a cigarette, and we walked on in the general direction the owl had taken. Another quarter mile brought us out along the edge of a deep irrigation pond. Three people had drowned in it over the years. Tonight, the still water was a sheet of shiny black glass. White moths fluttered toward the moon reflected there and were snapped up by the waiting fish.

Beyond the pond was the beginning of the farm he'd given Seth and Minnie as a wedding present years ago. On tonight's clear air, faint music mingled with distant laughter and raucous speech—Saturday night winding down at the migrant camp that straddled the line between Seth's land and Andrew's.

Thus far, we had walked the two perpendicular sides of a right triangle, now we struck across a fallow field to make a rough hypotenuse back toward the house, less than a mile away. The dogs raced out ahead of us and began casting back and forth through the weeds. Once I would have nearly had to trot to keep up with Daddy's long legs. Tonight, even though my feet had been too long on concrete, the pace was slower. Still, he didn't seem winded, and his pauses were contemplative, not for rest.

Mostly we had walked in silence, enjoying a communion that needed few words. Now as we started up the gentle rise, I remembered a warm May night back when this field was planted in corn. He and I and Mother and the little twins had been out walking in the moonlight, much like this. It had rained all night the night before, a long, much-needed soaking rain, and the sun had shone all afternoon. As we stood at the edge of the field, Daddy suddenly hushed us. "Listen," he'd said.

Crickets and cicadas stridulated all around us and a soft breeze rustled the green plants, but that wasn't what he meant. We strained our ears and there beneath the crickets came faint creaks like the opening and closing of a thousand tiny rusty hinges.

"What is it?" we whispered.

"Corn's growing," Daddy said. "Hear it? Drinking up water with its roots and stretching up its stalks. It'll be six inches taller tomorrow."

"Do you remember a night?" I asked him now

"What night was that, shug?"

"The night we heard the corn growing?"

He smiled but kept walking. "That was a purty sound, won't it?"

Down the slope from the house, on the same side as the porch swing, lay our family graveyard; and I suddenly realized this had been his destination all along.

Under a blazing sun, the bouquet of all the old roses planted here would have met us downwind. The cool moon silvered the heavy old-fashioned blossoms. It washed away their delicate pinks and flaming yellows, and it paled their heady aroma into a ghostly fragrance.

Inside the low stone wall, we passed the black marble obelisk he'd erected to his father's memory, the act of a boy's defiant pride after revenuers shot out the tires of the older man's truck and left a young family fatherless. The inscription was in deep shadow, but I knew it by heart:

ROBERT ANDREW KNOTT

1879 - 1923

WELL DONE, THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT

Ten feet away was a white marble stone washed in moonlight. Its block letters were so deeply carved that they were as easy to read against the smooth surface as newsprint on a page.

ANNIE RUTH KNOTT

1915 - 1944

HER SONS WILL REMEMBER AND BLESS HER NAME

Growing up, I hadn't given those dates a second thought. Yet here I stood—now past my thirtieth birthday, but still young, still in a state of becoming—and I experienced an almost visceral shock as I realized for the very first time what it meant that she had ended while only in her twenties.

Daddy's words seemed to come from far away. "They say Herman may be in a wheelchair the rest of his life."

I slipped my hand in his. Less for his comfort than for mine.

"I been thinking on his mama all day. She named him after her daddy. You know that?"

"Yes, sir."

"She didn't have much of a life. Nothing but hard work and babies."

"And you," I said loyally.

"Won't much of a prize." He reached out with gnarled fingers and lightly touched the letters of her name. "She was such a little thing. Not much more than a baby when she come to me. Not as old as Annie Sue is right now when she lost our first son."

A newborn lamb knelt atop the miniature stone beside Annie Ruth's. After all these years, its features had weathered smooth, but as a child, I had been enchanted by the lamb and whenever I played here, I brought it flowers or ferns or colored leaves depending on the season.

Mother hadn't known Daddy's first wife; but she was the one who planted the yellow Marshall Niel rose by Annie Ruth's grave, and she was the one who sang lullabies to Annie Ruth's babies and tried to mother her boys.

The summer Mother was dying, she walked me down the slope to show me where she wanted to lie—opposite Annie Ruth with a space left between them for Daddy some day. Her stone was over there now:

SUSAN STEPHENSON KNOTT

I WILL NOT LET THEE GO, EXCEPT THOU BLESS ME

"Were you ever jealous of her?" I asked back then.

Mother's face was serene as she looked over at the white marble marker of the woman who had preceded her in all things on this farm. "Oh, Annie Ruth and I made up our differences years ago."

"Then you were jealous."

"Use your head, Deborah!" she answered sharply. "I had her man, I had her sons, I had her place. I was alive! What cause did I have for jealousy? No, it was Annie Ruth who was jealous of me at first. But we made it up."

"How?"

My mother had answered my every question that summer, even some I didn't ask. It was as if she wanted to tell me all her secrets before she died. But not this one.

"Annie Ruth knows," she said finally, "and that's enough." * * *

"Did you love her an awful lot?" I asked Daddy now.

He didn't answer and I wasn't bold enough to ask a second time.

Suddenly a mockingbird's throat-clearing trill fell like a pebble into the pool of stillness around us. Halfway up the gradual slope between the graveyard and house stood a utility pole where generations of mockingbirds had perched to sing in the moonlight an hour or more at the time. This one seemed prepared to carry on the tradition in long liquid bursts of warbled themes. He would repeat a snatch of notes five or six times, catch his breath, and then move on to a new set of sounds. A virtuoso. In his song I heard the squeaky porch swing, a blue jay's querulous complaint, a meadowlark's clear descending whistle, the guttural cry of a cat in heat.

"Some folks faulted me for marrying your mama so quick," Daddy said at last. "Annie Ruth was a good wife for a poor man—a hard worker, careful about getting and saving, whether it was a penny or a mess of peas. She was always laying by. They had it rough back yonder in the marshes. We had it rough too; but even after they killed my daddy, there was still time for fiddling or story-telling. 'What's the good of it?' she used to ask me."

Again his fingers brushed the stone letters of her name. "No, she won't one to stand out in a field of a night and listen to corn grow. Your mama and me, we come down here the night we got married. I told her I guessed Annie Ruth must've known she wouldn't never have enough time to smell the roses, and maybe that's why she worked so hard every minute from first light to last dark. Next day, Sue carried the boys to town and let 'em each pick out a rosebush for their mama. Jack was too little to choose, so she bought this one special from him for Annie Ruth. Marshall Niel. Smells real sweet, don't it?"

"Yes," I said, wondering if he'd answered one of my questions.