Up Jumps the Devil

21

« ^ » I would therefore offer them a caution, and recommend temperance and abstemiousness to them for the first season, till by degrees, they are inured to the place…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

One of Dwight’s deputies had picked Allen up and one of them could have taken him home, but there was such a hangdog look on his face that I felt sorry for him. Besides, I was still curious about where he’d been all weekend and why he’d been evasive with Dwight about it.

But we had driven out from Dobbs with less than a half-dozen sentences between us. Every conversational remark went nowhere, so I quit trying and concentrated on the road west from Dobbs.

Night was coming on clear and cold. The sun slid below the chilled horizon and bare-twigged trees were silhouetted against the vivid red-orange sky like gothic stone tracery against a stained-glass window. Venus hung like a solitary jewel at the precise point where the vermilion of sunset met the deep blue of night.

Allen seemed so sunk in thought that we were almost to the Old Forty-Eight cutoff before he finally roused himself enough to say, “I could sure go for a piece of catfish. How ’bout we swing past Jerry’s for some takeout? I’m buying.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Aw, come on, Deb’rah,” he wheedled. “For old time’s sake? I pure hate to eat by myself and the thought of going back to Uncle Jap’s house with him not there no more—”

For once, there was no double meaning, no suggestive randiness in his voice. It was just starting to sink in that the old man was really dead, and it seemed to be hitting him hard.

Reluctantly, I turned off Forty-Eight onto the two-lane hardtop that leads to Jerry’s.

Jerry’s Steak & Catfish is a head-shaking phenomenon to the old-timers around here, our first homegrown example of “If you build it, they will come.”

When Jerry Upchurch’s father died a few years back, Jerry was determined to keep the land in the family, so even though he had a secure job managing a restaurant in Raleigh, he bought out his two sisters and set about looking for a way to make the place pay. He knew he didn’t want to farm tobacco—he’d had his fill of that growing up—but he had a son who thought catfish might flourish in the irrigation pond, both his sisters and his wife knew a thing or two about cooking, and there were teenagers in the family who could wait and bus tables. There were also several displaced farmworkers in the neighborhood who were willing to skin and fillet catfish or wash dishes for good steady wages.

Before anybody could turn around three times, a rough-hewn restaurant rose up in the pasture overlooking the pond.

Cracker-barrel sages laughed at the Upchurches behind their backs. A catfish place out in the middle of nowhere? Half a mile off the main road? When we already had a barbecue house that served lunch and supper, not to mention service stations at every main crossroads with their soft-drink boxes and snack-food racks? How was Jerry going to find enough customers in a county where housewives still make biscuits from scratch every night?

Cracker-barrel sages hadn’t noticed that full-time, biscuit-making housewives were getting sort of scarce on the ground, or that most of those new houses held outlanders with different eating habits. They hadn’t paid attention to how many of their own sons and daughters, never mind all the new people, were driving home every evening from jobs in Raleigh instead of walking in from the fields. Nor did they realize how happy it made working wives not to have to cook and wash up a pile of dishes every single night.

The Upchurches have since trebled their dining room and dug two more catfish ponds.

“They got ’em a license to print money,” those cracker-barrel sages tell each other now, as if they knew it all along.

Jerry admits that the money’s nice, but he’s just happy he got to stay on Upchurch land and build something for the next generation.

While Allen went inside, I waited in the car overlooking the fishponds and watched aerators jet water ten feet up into the night sky. Each jet spray is illuminated by a different-colored spotlight as if they were ornamental fountains instead of a simple way to oxygenate the crowded waters. We were early enough that only a few people had arrived ahead of us, and Allen soon returned with a big brown paper sack that filled my car with the smell of hot fish and cornbread.

Jap Stancil’s house was less than five minutes away, and a cold cheerless place it was to walk into. Allen set our food on the kitchen table and lit all four bricks of the wall-hung gas heater while I rummaged in cupboards and drawers for glasses and silverware.

The kitchen was clean and tidy, not a spoon or mug out of place; but like most rooms inhabited by old widowed men, it held the spare and faded grayness of a house long without a woman: no curtains or tablecloths, no African violets blooming on the windowsill over the sink, no colorful potholders hanging by the stove, no cheerful rag rugs. No bright grace notes of any description. No softness. All was well-worn spartan utility.

I transferred our food from the compartmentalized foam trays onto chipped stoneware plates and Allen took two beers from the refrigerator.

“Here’s to Uncle Jap, then,” he said, lifting his can with a smile that tried to be sardonic and failed miserably.

“To Mr. Jap.”

I touched my glass to his can and we began to eat.

Maybe it was the friendly clink of knife and fork against our plates, the hot hushpuppies, or the rapidly warming air. Or maybe it was only the beer that unlocked Allen’s tongue and set him talking about Mr. Jap and Miss Elsie and Dallas.

I knew that Allen had been born in Charlotte and that his father was killed in a stock car pileup before he was eight, but I didn’t know that his mother had been the neighborhood punchboard, good-hearted and lazy and never too particular about who supported her. I didn’t know that he used to run away to down here whenever his latest “uncle” got too free with belt or strap.

“Mama always made them send me back, but sometimes I got to stay for three or four weeks till she could get the money together for my bus ticket. Aunt Elsie was real good to me. That woman made the best lard biscuits in the world, big as bear claws, and she never grudged me a bite. She’d give me clothes that Dallas had outgrowed and take me to town for new tennis shoes ’cause mine always had holes in ’em. And Uncle Jap treated me like I was his.” Allen gave me a crooked smile. “I used to really wish I was, you know?”

Clean hand-me-downs, new sneakers, all the hot biscuits and molasses a growing boy could eat, plus a male relative who wasn’t a mean drunk. Who would think that this old clapboard farmhouse had once been Eden?

Allen took another big swallow of his beer.

“Even after I was grown and Aunt Elsie was dead, Uncle Jap never turned me away from his door.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” I said softly.

“Yeah,” said Allen, who might not know the poem but had lived its meaning. “This is the only real home I ever had after my daddy died.”

I could have needled him about making—or not making—homes with any of the women he’d married or fathered children with over the years, but that seemed like pettiness tonight.

“Uncle Jap and Dallas taught me how to drive before I was big enough to see over the steering wheel. Had to look through it to tell where I was going. I’ll never forget the first load of ’shine I ran with Dallas. He was seventeen, I was twelve. That old Hudson out yonder under the shed? They hollowed out the back seat so we could hide the jars. Four cases of ’em. It wasn’t much of a run, just from the crossroads over to a shot house on the other side of Holly Springs, forty, forty-five miles roundtrip. I was a little nervous going, but everything was cool till coming back through Varina, this town cop pulled up beside us and motioned for Dallas to pull over. Which he did. Only he waited till the cop got out of his patrol car and started walking toward us and then he gunned it. We must’ve been doing sixty-five by the time we got to the railroad crossing there at Forty-Two ’cause I know for sure all four wheels left the ground.

“That ol’ cop was pretty good though. He hung right with us all the way down to Harnett County. Dallas finally lost him on them dirt roads around Panther Lake. When we got home and told Uncle Jap about it, the onliest thing he asked us was did we remember to muddy up the license plate? We said yes and he laughed and told Dallas not to get too cocky ’cause next time he might not be so lucky.”

Allen crushed the flimsy aluminum can in his big fist and went back to the refrigerator. “Another one for you?”

I shook my head. “You ever bring your kids down here?”

“Yep. Keith and Wendy Nicole, both.” He popped the top on a fresh beer. The foam bubbled up and wet his mustache. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Hell, I even brought Tiffany and her mama by one day and Tiffany’s not even my young’un. But none of ’em ever really took to Uncle Jap. Guess he was too old then.”

“Or they were too young?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you see them this weekend?”

“See who?” he asked, suddenly wary.

“Wendy Nicole or Tiffany.”

“I told you. I went to Greensboro.”

‘To see about a car, yeah, I know. But you also went to Charlotte.”

“Dwight tell you everything he hears?”

“Enough,” I lied.

“I swear to God my ass is a blue banana if they hear about it.”

“If who hear about it?”

“Sally and Katie, of course.”

I took a final bite of my flaky catfish fillet while I worked it out. If he’d spent last night with ex-wife Sally in Charlotte and didn’t want her to know he’d been in Greensboro on Saturday, that must mean that Katie—?

“That man you went to see about a car. Hollyfield?”

“Raiford? What about him?”

“Is Katie Morgan his sister? The one whose name you couldn’t remember this morning?”

“I thought you said Dwight told you all that.”

“No, you said he did.”

“Shit.”

“And you’re in it up to your neck, aren’t you?”

“No more’n usual, darlin’,” he sighed. “No more’n usual.”

Once again I wondered how on earth I could have been so young, so recklessly naive to run off with such a shiftless womanizer. In the harsh overhead light, he looked every year of the knockabout life he’d led, like a car that had just rolled 200,000 on its odometer.

“Dwight ask you where you got the money to give your harem?”

He preened a little at the term, then gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Won’t none of his business long as I could prove I won’t here when Uncle Jap’s got stolen.”

Shaking my head, I got up and stacked our dishes in the sink and put on my jacket.

He followed me outside to the car. His voice was husky and a little embarrassed as he asked if I’d walk over to the garage with him and show him where it’d happened.

“I just pulled into the driveway good this morning and that deputy was setting here waiting for me. Dwight says Mr. Kezzie found him?”

“Yes.”

We made our way down the sandy drive by the dim glow of a bare bulb on the back porch to the garage two hundred feet away. Yellow crime scene ribbons lay around on the ground, but I knew Dwight had finished with the building. Mr. Jap’s rattletrap truck loomed up before us, still parked where he’d left it Saturday morning. Allen touched the fender as we passed, almost like someone comforting an old horse that had lost its master.

He fumbled with the garage lock in the darkness, then opened the side door and flicked on the lights.

“He was lying there,” I said.

In the fluorescent light, Mr. Jap’s dried blood looked like only another grease spot on the stained concrete.

The old-fashioned iron safe still stood agape and the door lay on the floor in front of it. Gray fingerprint powder covered the acetylene torch which had been used to burn off the hinges. Someone—Dwight or one of his detectives, probably—had gathered up the strewn papers and piled them neatly inside the safe since I was here.

Allen began to look through them. “Dwight said they took Uncle Jap’s corn money. You reckon that was all?”

“Did he have anything else?”

Allen shrugged. “Not that I know of. Just his marker chits where people owed him money. Far as I know, Billy Wall’s the only one he was holding paper on these days.”

His lips quirked in a rueful smile beneath his bushy mustache. “He always wanted to be a big shot, like your daddy. ‘Kezzie Knott holds paper on half the county,’ he’d say. If he didn’t have but two dimes to rub together, he’d try and lend you one of ’em just so you’d owe him. Before Merrilee settled him down, Petey Grimes and me, we’d get Uncle Jap to bankroll us to cars and stuff just to make him feel good. Soon as we’d pay him back, he’d be wanting to lend us some more. Hey, here’s his bankbook.”

He opened the small green passbook and riffled the pages. “Look at this. Not but three hundred dollars in it. Pitiful. Eighty-one years old and he barely got enough Social Security to live on.”

“Hard to get a lot from something you never paid into,” I said tartly. “He always worked for cash, didn’t he? Tried his best not to let himself show up on anybody’s books was what I always heard.”

Allen had to smile at that. “No, he was a catbird, all right.”

He lifted a yellowed envelope that had the logo of Duck Aldcroft’s funeral home as a return address. “Here’s his burial insurance. All paid up so nobody’d be burdened when his time came.”

“I think Merrilee’s handling arrangements,” I said. “Since you weren’t here.”

It didn’t seem to occur to him that he should take offense at Merrilee’s preempting his next-of-kin duties.

“Then she might ought to have this.”

As he pulled the policy from the envelope, another paper fell to the floor.

He picked it up and gave it a puzzled scan before handing it over to me. “Is this a deed?”

It appeared to be a photocopy of a one-page notarized document signed by both Mr. Jap and Dick Sutterly. Hedged in therefores and whereases and dated just last week, it said that in consideration for a cash sum of one thousand dollars, Jasper Stancil promised to sell Richard Sutterly all but ten acres of his farm within ninety days of acquiring clear title to it, at a price guaranteed to be five percent above the high bid of any other would-be purchaser.

“You didn’t know about this?”

“He never said a word. What’s it mean? Does it give this Sutterly guy a lien on the land?”

“Don’t worry about it. This paper would never hold up in court,” I said. “Even if Mr. Jap were still alive, almost any lawyer could get it set aside if he changed his mind and wanted to back out.”

He took it from me and ran his rough fingers over the photocopied notary seal. “Sure looks legal.”

To a shade-tree mechanic like Jap Stancil, it had probably felt pretty legal, too.

“Dwight ought to see this,” I said. “It could mean that the killer got this thousand, too.”

“If Sutterly paid him right then.” Allen turned this new development over in his mind. “Well, I can’t keep you from telling Dwight, but I believe I’ll hang on to this paper for right now.”

“I’m telling you, Allen, it’s not worth the ink it’s written in. Especially with Mr. Jap gone. Dick Sutterly couldn’t use it to force a sale.”

“But couldn’t I use it to make him buy? Five percent above the highest bid. Isn’t that what it says?”

“Lot of if’s standing between you and this place. Cherry Lou’s not come to trial yet and Merrilee could probably fight you for half if she wanted to.”

“Naw, she couldn’t. Uncle Jap won’t really her uncle.”

“But Dallas owned it last and she’s as much his cousin as you were.”

After spending most of the weekend educating my family and Merrilee about consanguinity, it amused me to play devil’s advocate and argue the opposing viewpoint. “Ellis Glover might see it your way—”

“Who?”

“Clerk of the Court. That’s who’d make the first disposition. But if Merrilee wanted to contest his decision, I bet any jury in the county would split it between you, given how much she’s done for Mr. Jap over the last few years.”

But Allen had stopped listening. He was standing with his back to me, his big, grease-stained hands on the slat-backed, cane-bottomed chair that Mr. Jap always sat in. When he turned, his eyes glistened with unshed tears.

“He was just a pigheaded, big-talking old man that never did no real harm to nobody. How could anybody hurt him, Deb’rah? He couldn’t have stopped a flea from taking that money. Why’d they have to kill him, too?”

“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “I don’t know.”

We both sighed for the wasteful sadness of it and as we went outside, he switched off the light and snapped the hasp on the lock.

The night was cold and still. Even with a jacket, I was chilly. No moon, but stars blazed overhead and the air was so crystalline that the Milky Way was a gauzy cloud that twined through the autumn constellations. I could see every star of the normally fuzzy Pleiades.

“Makes a man feel mighty small, don’t it?” Allen said softly.

He put his arm around my shoulder in a friendly gesture and I found myself leaning into it for warmth as we gazed up into the glittering sky.

“You forget how big it is,” he said. “Over in Charlotte, there’s too many lights on the ground to let you see any but the biggest stars. But, my sweet Lord! Just look at them all up there.”

I settled myself more comfortably on his shoulder and looked up, up, up into the celestial depths, bedazzled as always, and mesmerized by the eternal, unending splendor of worlds without end. By the time it fully registered that his fingers had begun—almost imperceptibly—to caress my ear in gentle stroking exploration, I was dizzied by both the visual and sensual input and breathing more heavily than I realized.

He gently turned my face to his and his mustache brushed my cheek. Our lips met sweetly, sweetly, with a growing intensity. The stars swirled overhead and I was falling into them, drowning in milky nebulae and—oh my God!

I wrenched myself away. “You bastard! Here I was feeling sorry for you, and you—all you want—!”

I stumbled across the rutted drive toward the porch light and my car.

From the darkness behind me, Allen called, “You want it, too, darlin’.”

My internal preacher yammered at me all the way back to Dobbs, but as I lay wide awake in bed that night, the pragmatist said, “You were wondering what you ever saw in him? Well, now you remember, don’t you?”