Up Jumps the Devil

10

« ^ » The cause, then, that could induce a people of this cast, to forsake their native lands… and make them seek for habitations in countries far distant and unknown, must, doubtless, be very cogent and powerful.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

By the time I finished running errands around Dobbs, it was after lunch before I got out to the farm.

Adam’s rental car was parked out back, but Daddy’s ancient red Chevy pickup was nowhere in sight. Neither of them was in the house either, so Hambone and I walked on down the lane to Maidie and Cletus’s little house.

“Adam’s out somewhere with the dogs and Mr. Kezzie went off this morning to get a haircut,” said Maidie, who was gathering dried marigold seeds from her dooryard flower garden. “I expect he’ll be back any time now.”

She tried to get me to sit on her porch swing and wait for Daddy, but Hambone was going crazy with all the smells and sights, and I decided to see if we could find Adam.

“Well, he might be burning some brush over by the creek,” said Maidie. “Seems like I smelled smoke coming from that way. Don’t know who else it’d be less’n that Gray Talbert’s burning off his weeds again.”

She chuckled at her own joke and her gold tooth flashed in the weak sunshine that was trying to break through the gray clouds.

Maidie came to the farm as a teenager to help Mother when I was just a child. It was supposed to be a temporary thing till the woman we called Aunt Essie came back from attending the birth of her first grandchild up in Philadelphia. But a loving-natured Aunt Essie met a widowed Philadelphia policeman with two motherless teenage girls and Maidie met Cletus Holt, one of Daddy’s best tenants, and both of them decided they’d landed in greener pastures.

Even though IRS irregularities were what had sent Daddy to prison before I was born, his farm workers preferred cash under the table and no Social Security deductions. Mother wouldn’t play those games with the people she hired, and she was always meticulous about paying into Social Security and a pension plan, too, for Maidie and Cletus. Maidie made him keep it up after Mother died.

I suppose if I were more politically correct, I’d bemoan this surviving remnant of old-time mutual dependence— white landowner, black domestic. Instead, I was grateful for the continuity.

“Where’s that good-looking man of yours?” Maidie asked me now. “Not run off with some pretty young thing, has he?”

“As a matter of fact, he has,” I said ruefully.

Instantly, her teasing smile faded into concern, but before she could offer me sympathy and start heaping scorn on Kidd, I quickly explained that the pretty young thing in question was his daughter. Maidie wasn’t completely mollified.

“She’s living right there in New Bern, ain’t she? How come they can’t see enough of each other through the week?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s her birthday or something.”

Maidie gave me a shrewd look. “Onliest child your boyfriend’s got and you don’t know when her birthday is? ’Pears to me you don’t like her much, do you, honey?”

“She’s the one doesn’t like me,” I protested.

“Which one of you’s the grown-up?” Maidie said, as she went back to gathering flower seeds.

I may have a law degree and I may be a judge, but seems like I never win an argument with her.

It was a good half-mile to where Maidie thought Adam was and when I got there, I saw a smoldering bed of embers, all that remained of a pile of brush. There were dog tracks and the imprints of a boot that could be Adam’s, but no other immediate sign of him.

I whistled and Blue and Ladybelle came loping up the cut that leads down to the homemade bridge across Possum Creek. Hambone gave one sharp excited bark when he saw them, then hurried over to me for protection, knowing he was the interloper in their territory.

The two older dogs approached in measured dignity. I assured Hambone that they were friendly and he took me at my word, frisking around the taller dogs, inviting them to romp. Ladybelle was too polite to raise her eyebrows at Blue, and both of them patiently endured the youngster’s enthusiasm, but their manner clearly questioned my judgment in requiring them to put up with such an unruly visitor without a nip to teach him some manners.

The four of us walked to the head of the cut. Across the bridge, at the opening into the far field, I saw Adam and another man standing beside a white pickup. At first I thought it was Reese, but as the dogs and I started across the bridge, the second man got into the truck. When he slammed the door and drove away, I saw a familiar logo on the door: Sutterly Homes.

“Was that Dick Sutterly?” I asked curiously as Adam met us halfway across the bridge. “Why’d he take off like that?”

“We were finished talking for now,” Adam said.

We got to the end of the bridge and Adam squatted down by the water’s edge to dip his left hand in the creek. I saw that his handkerchief was tied around it like a bandage.

“You hurt?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Burned myself,” he grunted. “Nothing serious.”

Nevertheless, he held his hand in the water another minute or two before pulling it out with the handkerchief dripping wet. I could see red around the edges on the palm of his hand, but he wouldn’t untie it to let me see just how bad it was.

“I told you. It only stings a little, okay?”

“Fine. So what were you and Sutterly talking about?” I asked, still suspicious of Sutterly’s motives and Adam’s meeting with him.

“Hey, back up there,” he said sharply. “This isn’t one of your courtrooms.”

The boots he wore were probably his, but the jeans were probably Zach’s. Certainly the maroon-and-green rugby shirt was Zach’s because I’d given it to him two Christmases ago. Makes cross-country packing easy if, at the other end, you can borrow from your twin’s wardrobe.

My brothers from Daddy’s first marriage tend to be big-boned and solid, and they top out between five ten and six one. Like Will and Zach, Adam stands about six three with the hard lean build of the men on Mother’s Stephenson side of the family. Unfortunately, I got the worst of the genetic blend: Daddy’s bones but the same volatile Stephenson temper as Mother and my three youngest brothers. We’re quick to anger, quick to tears, quick to forgive.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that Dick Sutterly makes me nervous the way he wants to slap a house on every square inch at this end of the county.”

But Adam wouldn’t let me off that easily. “What difference does it make to you? You live over in Dobbs. Not out here.”

“And because I don’t live here, I’m not supposed to care? Because you live in California, it doesn’t matter if you help wreck it for the others?”

“Get off my case,” he said angrily, striding away so abruptly that the dogs were torn between staying with me and trailing after him.

I almost had to run to keep up with his long legs. “What’s going on here, Adam? You’re the richest one of us all. How much money do you need, for God’s sake, that you’d sell Daddy out to Dick Sutterly and G. Hooks Talbert for a measly forty-five thousand?”

“Rich?” He turned on me with a snarl. “You people are sitting over here on seven million dollars’ worth of property in one of the most economically sound areas in the country and you call me rich?”

“Seven million?” I was stunned. “Who’s got seven million?”

“Doesn’t anybody ever do the simple arithmetic?” He shook his head in exasperation. “How many acres do you and Daddy and the boys own all together?”

“I don’t know. Two thousand? Maybe twenty-five hundred?”

“Be conservative. Say two thousand. And what’s it going for these days? Rock-bottom prices?”

“Thirty-five hundred an acre,” I hazarded.

I broke off a twig, stooped down, and did the multiplication in the dirt. The zeroes that lined up behind the seven astounded me. Adam was right. It had never occurred to me to do the math.

Daddy and most of the boys are farmers.

If you’re a farmer, you may cycle a lot of cash from one growing season to another. You go into debt to buy heavy equipment and you pay for expensive repairs. You buy fertilizer, pesticides, and disease-resistant seeds. Then you have to hire extra labor to plant and harvest. Money comes in, money goes out, but it’s hard to ever feel rich because so little of that money seems to cycle into your own pocket to stay. No sooner is the crop sold and your debt paid off than it’s time to borrow more and start all over again.

But if you’re a Knott and there’s a little extra cash lying around at the end of the year, you buy land. You don’t sell it. Except to each other, as Adam had sold to Zach and me what he’d inherited from Mother years ago before the prices started to soar.

I stood up and erased the numbers with my sneaker. It unsettled me just to think about it. Seven million dollars?

“Minimum,” said Adam. “So if you want to cough up that measly forty-five thousand, I’ll deed you my measly three acres and you can keep on being dewy-eyed and romantic about The Land as if it were a mystical entity and not negotiable property.”

“But why?” I asked again. “You and Karen aren’t having problems, are you?”

“Ever hear of downsizing?” he asked grimly.

I looked at him blankly. “You lost your job?”

Adam wouldn’t meet my eyes and suddenly I realized what had seemed different about him when he arrived Wednesday night. The surface sheen was still there, but underneath he was no longer the cocksure golden boy.

“What happened?”

“Same old same old. Crystal Micronics got bought out by Global V.I. last winter and since my seniority entitled me to a bigger benefits package than my G.V.I, counterpart, I was the one the bottom-liners cut loose in February.”

“You’ve been out of work since February? But with your skills and your experience—”

“Silicon Valley’s full of forty-year-old men with my skills and my experience. We’ve sold the boat and the Jags, let the maid and gardener go, and put the kids in public school this year. If it weren’t for Karen’s job, we’d have had to dump the house instead of selling it last week for a break-even price.”

“You sold your house?” Now I was distressed. I knew how much Karen loved that house. “Adam, why didn’t you tell us? Let us help?”

“And listen to Haywood and Robert and Andrew brag about bailing their uppity little brother out of his troubles? No, thanks. And don’t you go blabbing to them either, you hear?”

“They wouldn’t brag,” I said defensively.

“You know what I mean.”

We had reached the burned spot and I helped him kick wet sand onto the last smoldering coals.

“Hey, don’t look so gloomy. It’s going to be all right. Eventually. With what the house brought and with what I have left from my severance package, I’ve got almost enough to form a partnership with two other guys in my position. All three of us had been wanting to go out on our own for years, but the corporations made it too comfortable to leave. Now we’re going to start our own company. Dick Sutterly’s so hot for that three acres that I’m betting he’ll go sixty thousand. That would put me just over what I need for my third. Hell, if it works out, I could be back in a few years to buy you all out.”

The return of his arrogance infuriated me. “And in the meantime, Dick Sutterly sticks one of his cheap housing developments right there across the creek, but you don’t give a damn because you’ll be out in California while Daddy’s back here with his heart breaking. Street lamps lighting up his night sky, horns blowing, kids trashing his creek. The boys are right. You did get uppity and big-headed and you’ve turned your back on your own family.”

We were back to glaring at each other over the dogs’ heads.

“You ever give two thoughts about what this family’s like from where I stood?” said Adam. “Number ten son in a gang of eleven boys? But at least Zach and I were special because we were twins and we were the babies, right? And then seven years later, along came the darlin’ baby girl the family’d been praying for, for all those years, so suddenly Zach and I were just two more little interchangeable Knott boys.”

Quick tears flooded my eyes. “I didn’t realize you hated me.”

Ladybelle came to me instinctively and nuzzled my fingers.

“Oh hell, Deborah, I didn’t hate you. I’m just trying to make you understand why I had to get away, find some individuality. And now that I’ve got this chance for real independence, I’m not going to lose it. I don’t care what you or Karen or any of the boys think. One way or another, I’m going back to California next Wednesday with sixty thousand dollars in my pocket, okay?”

I probably would have called Hambone to heel and headed straight back to Dobbs right then if Ladybelle and Blue hadn’t suddenly perked up their ears and started racing for the cut.

Adam and I had been so riled up that neither of us had heard Daddy’s truck coming hell-for-leather through the field on the other side of the creek. He rattled across the log-and-board bridge and roared up the rise and the dogs had to scatter to keep from being hit.

The dogs? Hell, Adam and me, too.

At the very last instant, Daddy saw us and skidded to a stop that threw up an arc of dirt. He leaned across the seat and flung open the door and yelled, “Get in! We got to go call Dwight. Somebody’s done and killed Jap!”