Up Jumps the Devil

14

« ^ » …Their behavior at home is consistent with their appearance abroad.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

I’d asked for it, of course, but I didn’t like the implications of Talbert’s question. I hadn’t had to spend much money on campaigning before. If he decided to take a personal interest in my next election, he could channel enough money to an opponent to more than swamp me. Even down here at the bottom of the political food chain, money makes a difference.

Even less did I like the corollary thought to the question I’d asked G. Hooks. Mr. Jap’s death might complicate his plans, but suddenly things were rosier for Daddy and the brothers who still live and farm along Possum Creek.

If we could keep Adam from selling, there would be no access to the Talbert land. No access meant no immediate development, no change to our way of life here on the north side of Possum Creek. For a little while longer, we could fish and hunt or just revel in the sheer luxury of space.

Adam’s right: we may not all live here—I’m a judge in Dobbs, Frank’s retired out in San Diego, Will’s an auctioneer in Cotton Grove, Herman’s an electrician in Dobbs— yet, except for Adam, our roots go down deep in these sandy fields and scruffy woods. Even the grandchildren, who are starting to scatter out across the state, look to this part of Colleton County as a fixed anchor. My brothers aren’t much for putting emotion into words, but Haywood once said it for them: “When you step out on your own back porch and everything is Knott land for as far as you can see, why boys, don’t y’all’s spirit just fill up in a plenteous amplitude?”

I crossed the creek in a bittersweet mood that echoed the falling leaves and I wondered how much longer such plenteous amplitude could endure.

Adam accused me of romanticizing our land. If by that he means I know the spiritual value of what we have and don’t want to see it disappear beneath a gridwork of named streets with manicured grass and biscuit-cutter houses, he’s right. Guilty as charged.

As I came up the slope, Hambone rushed down to meet me, whimpering in his relief at finally seeing someone he could attach himself to. Almost immediately, his confidence was restored enough that he dashed into the edge of the woods and began to bark at something. His little beagle tail wagged happily and he kept running back and forth as if wanting to share something wonderful with me.

“Whatcha found, boy?” I asked.

The leaves and grasses had been smoothed down into a narrow trail that led into the undergrowth, and sure enough, there by the trail sat one of Andrew’s homemade wooden rabbit gums. He and Daddy raise and train rabbit dogs, and rabbits are integral to that training.

Out back of his house, Andrew has fenced in a quarter-acre circle with shoulder-high chicken wire. The yard itself is overgrown with weedy grass and shaggy bushes, and Andrew’s hauled in tree limbs, a few logs, and several lengths of hollow plastic pipes, six to ten inches in diameter. He traps rabbits and releases them into the training yard, then turns the pups in. The rabbits bounce around the yard and the puppies yip and tumble after them till the rabbits get tired and go hide in the hollow pipes.

The object of the exercise isn’t to have the dogs catch the rabbits. It’s to get them familiar with the rabbit’s scent and to learn to break off the hunt when called.

Like Daddy, most of my brothers hardly ever take a gun with them when they go out to the woods to run the dogs. Mainly they just like to be outdoors, listening to the song the dogs sing when they catch the scent.

The trap door had fallen shut on the rabbit gum Hambone had found and when I hefted one end of the thing, I felt the telltale slither as the animal inside scrabbled to maintain its balance. Rabbit, possum or coon? From the lively scratching, it was probably a rabbit, but sometimes other young animals will go in after the fruit bait and trip the door.

Hambone was beside himself with excitement as I set the box down and I couldn’t resist. I grabbed him by the collar and held it tightly with one hand while lifting the trap door with the other.

Instantly, a rabbit tumbled onto the ground, blinked once in the afternoon sunlight, and lit out across the bean field. I gave him about a ten-foot head start, then let go of Hambone’s collar. He lunged after the rabbit, yipping and singing as if he’d been doing it all his life. I knew there was no chance in the world that he’d ever catch up, but he’d have a blissful twenty minutes thinking he might.

Smiling to myself, I carefully returned the box to the same place Andrew had left it, reset the trap door, then took a handful of leafy twigs and brushed away most of our tracks so maybe Andrew wouldn’t notice that we’d freed one of his rabbits.

For just a moment, I had managed to forget the sight of poor Mr. Jap lying there on that cold concrete floor.

By the time Hambone conceded he was never going to catch his first rabbit and we got back to the homeplace, Daddy’s old red Chevy was just pulling into the yard. Blue and Ladybelle jumped out of the back and the three dogs touched noses and smelled bottoms. From the reproachful look the older two gave me, I almost could swear that Hambone had told them of his adventure and what they’d missed.

The wind was blowing steadily from the north now, the temperature had dropped at least five degrees, and Adam was shivering in Zach’s cotton knit shirt. Daddy slammed the truck door and held the fronts of his thin denim jacket together as he headed for the house.

“Time to put a match to the fire,” he said.

Adam and I followed him inside and found the kitchen already warm and cozy. Maidie and Cletus were waiting for us and had lit the old wood heater and put a fresh pot of coffee on. Vegetable soup simmered on the range and an iron skillet waited till it was time to cook cornbread nice and crusty for supper. Daddy never expects Maidie to cook on the weekends, but Adam was spending a couple of nights out here and whenever there’s company, she feels obliged to step in.

Now she took Daddy’s jacket and handed him a thick wool cardigan that Seth and Minnie’s children gave him two Christmases ago. There was a time when he would have scorned wearing an extra layer indoors, and sorrow brushed my heart as I realized that the cold bothered him more than it used to.

“Time was,” whispered the preacher. “Time is.”

And time will BE! I thought defiantly.

The pragmatist nodded. “And time will be,” he said quietly. It was neither promise nor threat, only simple acknowledgment.

The five of us sat with warm mugs of coffee in our hands while Daddy and Adam and I took turns telling Maidie and Cletus what had happened.

Cletus never says much, especially when Maidie’s there to do the talking, but when he does speak, he always goes straight to the point. “Reckon that shiftless Allen Stancil’s gonna be a rich man now.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Depends on whether or not Cherry Lou signed her interest in the farm back over to Mr. Jap this week.”

Adam shrugged. “I don’t see why that makes any real difference. If she didn’t do it yet, he just has to wait till the trial’s over. He is Mr. Jap’s only kin, isn’t he?”

“There’s Miss Elsie’s niece,” said Maidie. “She’s Dallas’s first cousin.”

“But no real blood kin to Mr. Jap,” I said. “The Yadkins and the Stancils both come down from a common Pleasant ancestor—G. Hooks Talbert does too, for that matter—but that’s too far back to count. No, the laws of inheritance are pretty clear. When Dallas died without children or a will, half of his real property—the land—automatically went to his surviving parent and the other half to his wife. Cherry Lou. But since she can’t benefit under the Slayer Statute, and, assuming a jury convicts her, her half of Dallas’s estate would automatically pass to his closest next of kin, which was his father. Now that Mr. Jap’s dead, it goes to his blood kin, and that’s Allen Stancil.”

“But Cherry Lou’s not been tried yet,” Maidie argued, “and if Mr. Jap died ’fore he could get it, seems like to me it’ll have to start all over again back with Dallas, and Miss Merrilee and Allen will share and share alike since they’re both first cousins to Dallas.”

Daddy agreed. “Sounds like the fairest way to me.”

“What’s fair and what’s legal are two different things,” said Adam.

He spoke with such bitterness that Maidie immediately gave him a worried look.

“ ‘Get out of the way of Justice. She’s blind,’” I quoted lightly.

“Then maybe we better get that lady a white walking stick,” Cletus chuckled.

“What happens if Allen’s the one that did it?” asked Maidie.

“It would be up to the Clerk of the Court,” I said. “Ellis Glover might decide Merrilee has a legitimate claim after all. On the other hand, Allen does have a couple of children and they’d be within the five degrees of consanguinity required by North Carolina law, which has to be closer than Merrilee.”

Daddy frowned. “Con-sang-what?”

“Consanguinity—blood kinship. You count the degrees by counting generations up to the common ancestor and then back down to the related person.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One up to Mr. Jap’s father, one down to his brother, another to his brother’s son—Allen, and then down to Allen’s children. That’s four degrees. If somebody related to you dies without a will or any immediate heirs, you can put in a claim if you’re within five degrees of blood kin.”

Another thought occurred to me. “On the other hand, if Allen is involved, Merrilee could argue that the Slayer Statute blocks his kids from inheriting. It’d be a pretty little legal battle.”

Daddy dismissed consanguinity as irrelevant legalistic gobbledegook since he couldn’t see that Allen had any call to hurt Mr. Jap.

“Jap was ready to give him everything he had to get him a real car shop. Y’all know how he always liked messing with cars better’n working the land. Land ain’t never meant nothing to Jap Stancil except a place to stay, something to take money out of, never put none back in. He’s clear-cut his woods twice and never planted a single tree. Why, Billy Wall’s been a better steward of that land than he ever thought to be.”

Proximity since childhood might have made Daddy and Mr. Jap friends and cohorts, but I realized now that Jap Stancil had never shared Daddy’s values.

“Ever since the government closed down his shop, Jap’s been wanting to get another one,” he said. “That’s why he kept all them old cars setting around when they was fools out in Charlotte or down in Wilmington that’d give him three times what they was worth. ‘Money in my pocket, Kezzie,’ he told me. Bad as he hated losing Dallas, he was happy to get Allen. Only this time, he won’t going to fix people’s transmissions and carburetors. Him and Allen was going into pure restoration big-time, he said. Going to take them old heaps and make ’em look like they just rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.”

“Using what to buy their tools and equipment?” I asked, hoping to goad him into telling what he knew about Jap’s plans to sell land. “Billy Wall’s corn money?”

“It was a start,” he said mildly and shifted over to reminiscences of his and Jap’s boyhood days along Possum Creek. He told us again about Mr. Jap’s courtship of Elsie Yadkin, him a braggedy, drinking, cussing roughneck, her a timid little churchgoing lady half engaged to a deacon’s son, and how he’d made the deacon’s son back off and leave the field to him. “And Jap might not’ve quit all his bragging and drinking and cussing out in the shop, but he always remembered that Elsie was a lady and he never brought it indoors nor let Dallas bring it in the house neither. Merrilee’s a lot like her Aunt Elsie, the way she’s settled that Grimes boy.”

“It’s a wonder they never got caught driving drunk, what with all the drinking they did,” Adam said provocatively.

But if he was hoping to get Daddy to talk about the bootlegging days, he didn’t have any more luck than I had with Mr. Jap selling land. Daddy just sat there in front of the wood heater with his hands around his coffee mug and his long legs stretched out to the warmth and a sad smile on his lips as he remembered whatever he remembered.

Eventually, and over their protests, I stood to go back to Dobbs.

“The soup smells wonderful,” I said as Daddy pressed me to stay to supper and Maidie promised there was plenty for everybody, “but Aunt Zell was going to start on her fruitcakes this evening and she’ll be waiting for the pecans.”

Maidie took a gallon bag of shelled nuts from the freezer and put them in a paper bag for me.

“And, Cletus, would you get her a bottle of that—gin, is it?” Daddy asked slyly. “Wouldn’t be Zell’s fruitcake without some gin.”

The bottle Cletus took from beneath the sink had a Gilbey’s label and a broken tax seal, but if I took a sniff, I would not expect to smell juniper berries. A faint aroma of apples or peaches, maybe, but not juniper berries.

Maidie and I rolled our eyes at each other, but Aunt Zell would be disappointed if her fruitcakes had to do without their usual drenching of homemade brandy.

I asked Adam if he wanted to catch a movie somewhere, but he yawned and said all this fresh air was getting to him. “I think I’ll make it an early evening since I promised Herman and Nadine that I’d go to their church with them tomorrow morning.”

“Better you than me,” I said cattily. “Their minister’s a chauvinistic born-again who gets so tangled up in his own rhetoric that it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s proved his point or the devil’s.”

“Deborah Knott, you be ashamed of yourself!” Maidie scolded. A preacher is a preacher is a preacher to her, but Cletus gave me a wink and a grin.

Daddy walked out to my car with me to remind me that North Carolina law requires that open containers of alcoholic beverages be transported in the trunk. (He’s an authority on those laws.)

Once the bottle was properly stowed next to my toolbox, he whistled up the dogs. They came running through the late afternoon sunshine, Hambone trotting along after them. I opened the car door and the pup hopped right up on the front seat. As I stood on tiptoe to kiss Daddy’s leathery, wind-chilled cheek, he gave me a hug.

“You take care of yourself, now.”

“I will,” I promised, sliding in after Hambone. “You, too.”

He gave me an ironic smile that said he knew how we were starting to worry about him. And then, just as he used to say when I was a very little girl, “Don’t you fret yourself, shug. I ain’t gonna die till you’re an old, old lady.”

Now, as then, the words still made me smile. Never mind that when I was very little, thirty-six seemed old, old.

I started to switch on the engine when Daddy rapped at my window.

“Almost forgot to tell you,” he said. “Dwight said for you to call him when you get back to Dobbs.”

There was a sheepish look on his face that I couldn’t quite interpret.