Up Jumps the Devil

26

« ^ » … The earth is rendered rich and delightful by the fine rivers and streams which glide through them.... It is incredible to think what plenty of fish is taken both in their salt and fresh water rivers…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

New Bern, at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse rivers, is the second-oldest town in North Carolina. As the name implies, it was founded by Swiss, English, and German colonists under the leadership of Baron Christoph von Graffenried in 1710. There were actually more English in the party than Swiss, but since the Baron was Swiss and since it was his money bankrolling the settlers, he got to name it. As a result, every gift shop in town sells souvenirs embellished by the black bear, symbol of the original Bern, and the town hall’s red brick clock tower is thought to duplicate Swiss clock towers.

Despite the attempt to underline its Swiss connection, New Bern draws more tourists for its eighteenth-century English connection. Tryon Palace, the seat of royal colonial government, was built in 1770, burned in 1798, and has now been restored—overly restored some purists say—well past its original glory. Even so, this river town is an appealing mixture of old and new. Evergreen live oaks, spring-blooming dogwoods, and August-blooming crepe myrtles line the quaint streets. Expensive sailboats and sleek cruisers line the modern marinas along the badly polluted rivers. Resort hotels and restaurants fill in around the edges of the historic district to serve tourists and sailors alike. Summer can be pretty bad here, hot and humid and mosquito-laden unless the wind is blowing, but the other three seasons are pleasantly temperate.

New Bern itself is only thirty miles further east than Kinston, but since I always get lost when I try to take Kidd’s back-road shortcuts, I had to go into town, cross over the Neuse River and then backtrack west a little ways until I found the dirt road that winds through the trees to Kidd’s cabin on the north bank of the river.

It really is a log cabin. Kidd built it himself with the help of some friends from a kit that used passive solar design. It’s warm and sunny in the winter and cool and shady in the summer. The front door is on the same level as the gravel drive, but the land drops off sharply in back where a wide plank porch runs the entire length of the cabin. Viewed from this height, the Neuse is broad and deceptively beautiful.

Kidd was laughing as he came out to meet me. “I thought you were a lost insurance salesman,” he said. “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile, is it?”

That first kiss after long days and longer nights alone is always sweet. He’s the best kisser I’ve ever known anyhow, a man who takes his time and gives it serious attention.

Eventually we did get around to taking my garment bag and overnight case out of the car.

He had left the sliding glass doors to the porch open on either side of the stone fireplace; otherwise the night would have been almost too warm for the fire crackling on the hearth. The damp river air made it welcome.

The cabin’s decor is very definitely masculine, but without the spare bleakness of Mr. Jap’s house. Kidd likes stone and wood and glass, but he also likes comfort and color. The sectional couch that wraps around the fireplace is a deep wine red and tossed across one corner is a bright patchwork quilt his mother pieced together when he was a little boy. Framed posters advertising various coastal attractions are clustered on one wall, another holds enlarged photographs of local birds. A musket that his great-great-grandfather carried in the Civil War hangs over the fireplace. (And carried is the operative word. According to Kidd, he spent three years in uniform and only shot birds, squirrels and rabbits for the regimental cookpot.)

In front of the couch, a low table held champagne flutes and an ice bucket.

“Are we celebrating something?”

He grinned. “Whatever you happen to feel thankful for.”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

We drank champagne and ate grilled sea bass in front of the fire, and later we made love there, too.

Later still, wrapped together in his quilt, we drank the last of the champagne and watched the fire die down to coals while the running lights of boats drifted past, far down on the river.

“Yes,” I murmured sleepily.

“Yes, what?” His lips brushed my brow.

“Yes, I am thankful.”

Thanksgiving Day dawned mild and foggy again with a brightness that promised sunshine by noon. Kidd’s a morning person and when I slid a foot over to his side around nine-thirty, he’d been up so long that my toes found no residual warmth from his body.

But the low murmur of his voice floated up through the open window and I saw him sitting on the porch steps, talking to the dogs as he gave them a good brushing. Occasionally he’d pause to scratch their heads and gaze out over the river where the fog hung in hazy layers.

“Don’t look all the pretty off the morning,” I said. “Save some of it for me.”

“Better hurry up then.”

“I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

Four minutes in the bathroom, one minute to straighten the covers, another two minutes to throw on jeans and my favorite Carolina sweatshirt, and I was down the stairs with three minutes to spare, ready for coffee and juice and for standing in the kitchen with Kidd’s arms around me.

Like the dogs, I need the physical contact of hands and face. I want to nuzzle and be petted, to hug and be hugged back. Next to life itself, having someone to love, having someone who loves you, is the luckiest thing in the whole world. Love doesn’t have to be sexual, but it does have to be physical—touching, kissing, feeling warm skin against my skin. Or like now, standing with my head against his blue flannel shirt, feeling the beat of his heart beneath my fingers.

We seldom plan anything when I come down and we spent the morning lazing on the porch, enjoying the sun when it finally burned away the fog, and talking of this and that.

“How is Amber?” I asked dutifully when he mentioned his daughter in passing.

“Fine. Growing up too fast, though. I’ve got her new school pictures.”

He went inside and brought back a handful of color prints.

The face that looked back at me was truly beautiful: masses of dark curly hair, flawless fair skin that showed no adolescent pimples or eruptions, intensely green eyes that crinkled a little like Kidd’s in the one picture where she was smiling. Otherwise, I gathered that she generally favored her mother, a woman I hadn’t met.

“She’s lovely,” I said truthfully, “but she looks more like eighteen than fourteen.”

“Tell me about it,” Kidd said, shaking his head as much in pride as in rue. “The phone never stopped the whole time she was here last weekend. I told her I didn’t know why she wanted to come out when we couldn’t talk ten minutes without one of her friends or some boy calling.”

I knew exactly why Amber had wanted to keep him from spending the weekend with me, but not by the slightest frown or raised eyebrow would I let him know what she was up to.

So I cooed over her pictures and as Kidd talked of his daughter, I smiled and made appropriately interested noises until the conversation moved on to other topics.

After lunch, we took the dogs for a long walk along the river.

“When I was a boy,” said Kidd, “the Neuse was full of fish up this way. And the brackish water a few miles down used to be so thick with crabs we could catch two or three at a time on a single chicken head.”

Sunlight sparkled on the water, but instead of a fresh woodsy smell, the humid air around us held something vaguely fetid today.

Kidd tossed a pebble and the dogs perked up their ears as it plinked and sent ripples across the surface. “This used to be such a beautiful river, but now it’s dying and it’s killing the estuaries as well.”

The troubled coastal waters were at the root of that murder down at Harkers Island where we first met.

“I see where the state’s just authorized another study on the Neuse,” I said. “Be simpler if we could just bus the whole legislature down here and make them swim for an hour.”

“Won’t happen,” he said. “Too many politicians up there in Raleigh, not enough statesmen. Greed and ignorance. They send us all their mess downriver—raw sewage, hog lagoon spills, runoffs from agri-industries— everything but the laws and the money it’ll take to clean it up. We get another commission to do another study while the state spends millions to shore up the millionaires’ beaches on Bald Head Island.”

He plinked another pebble. We found a low spot almost level with the river and our mood lightened as we began skipping stones. I got six skips, but Kidd’s a show-off and routinely got eight or ten skips out of his pebbles before they sank.

“Some of us have real jobs,” I said, when he teased my lack of proficiency. “You, on the other hand, have clearly wasted too much time working on your rock-skipping skills.”

The day had turned out blue-sky beautiful. As we walked through the trees, we saw several hawks kiting on thermal currents overhead. Down on the ground, the wind was such that we walked right up on a small herd of deer. Unfortunately, the dogs saw them at the same time we did and their sharp barks sent the deer dashing for the underbrush, white tails flying.

“My nephew Reese is dying to bag a nice buck,” I said.

“So what’s stopping him? The deer population’s so swollen he shouldn’t have any trouble. Or is he a bad shot?”

“No time to hunt. Now that his dad’s stuck in a wheelchair, more of the work falls on him.”

“Reese. He’s the one with the fancy truck, right?”

I laughed. “Right. And you don’t even have your scorecard.”

When I first started introducing Kidd to my family, he had such a hard time keeping everybody straight that I made him a chart. He has most of my brothers and a lot of their wives down pat, especially those that live around the homeplace, but my nieces and nephews still blur together.

“You sure you don’t want to come meet them all on Saturday? We’re having our Thanksgiving get-together out at Daddy’s.”

“You sure you don’t want to come backpacking around Mattamuskeet?” he countered.

“Swamp water and mud in my boots? Mice stealing my food at night? A million ducks and geese squawking in my ear?”

“No worse than a million Knotts.”

I grabbed up some pine cones and pelted him, then turned and fled when he lunged at me. His legs are longer, though, and we went down in a tangle of dead grasses and fallen leaves. The dogs thought it was a game and joined in, tails wagging, to lick our faces and jump on our backs.

That evening, we drove down to Cherry Point for a Thanksgiving steak at one of the lounges with a bluesy piano. Not only does Kidd kiss good, he listens good, too. All through dinner, he listened to the developments in Mr. Jap’s death since we had last talked; and on the drive back to his cabin, I curled up next to him on the van seat and told him my fears that some of my family might be involved.

“Reese must have seen something he’s not telling me.”

“Or somebody.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you and your family do use those back lanes like turnpikes, don’t you?”

“They started out as real shortcuts, but these days my brothers shuttle equipment back and forth that way every time they can—combines and tractor rigs—even when it might be quicker to go by the public road. They get a little tired of honking cars, and getting the finger from impatient commuters. Urban people move to the country and it’s like, ‘Gee, you mean farmers live in the country? And they’re going to be cluttering up my road with hay balers or gang disks? Who the hell do these rednecks think they are?’ Pooling equipment’s the main reason Daddy and the boys are still able to make farming turn a decent living.”

I sighed and Kidd put his arm around me.

Maybe it was Dallas getting killed because he wouldn’t sell and move Cherry Lou back to Florida or maybe it was because of Adam’s mercenary assessment, but since Mr. Jap died, I’d given a lot of thought to the varying attitudes about land.

Robert, Andrew, Haywood, Seth, and Zach will continue to farm as long as they can sit a tractor or spread manure, and each has at least one child who shares that love of farming. But Frank is in San Diego and none of his children will ever come east to live. Even if Herman weren’t wheelchair-bound, he’s already cast his lot in town. His older son has a white-collar job out in Charlotte. Reese enjoys hunting and fishing, he may even put a trailer out there on Herman’s part, but he’ll never work the land himself. Haywood’s Stevie is studying liberal arts and thinking about journalism.

It’s that way right on down the line with Ben, Jack and Will and their children. They rent their land to the ones that still farm, but they themselves will never be true stewards. Adam was a generation ahead of his time when he told Haywood he wanted a job where he didn’t freeze in winter and broil in summer. Maybe he really was the smartest one of us, to take the money and run. Designing computers has got to be a lot less stressful than praying for rain before the crops burn up or praying the rain will stop before the crops drown and rot in the field.

Most of my brothers’ children don’t want to live like that. Nor do their neighbors’ children. The next generation will be easier pickings for the Dick Sutterlys.

Not that there aren’t a lot of the current holders with the same attitude. No sooner did Jap Stancil have the prospect of regaining his land but that he was ready to sell so that he could finance a state-of-the-art garage for Allen.

For Allen, the land would be a cash windfall; if Merrilee had inherited, it would have been validation of her worth. With no children to provide for, the land would have quickly converted to the clothes and jewelry Pete loved to buy for her. Maybe they’d have taken annual Caribbean cruises instead of every other winter.

And there’s poor Billy Wall, hungry to farm and seeing no way he’ll ever be able to buy land. Is that why he gambled so recklessly with Curtis Thornton, hoping to win enough to make a down payment on a farm?

Dick Sutterly’s never lived on a farm and never wanted to, so far as I could see. Land is merely a commodity, something to buy and sell and turn a profit.

And as for G. Hooks Talbert, this particular bit of land might mean a chance to exact a little revenge on Daddy for being made to eat humble pie with a governor he disdained.

And what about Daddy?

Adam thinks I’m romantically obsessed, but I’m only a pale shadow of Daddy’s fierce attachment to the land he and the boys have acquired over the years. It goes to the core of his being and I’ve seen how he reacts when things of lesser importance have been threatened.

There was no way to judge the situation that was building, especially when no one would give me facts.

I don’t know how long we’d been sitting still in front of the cabin before I realized that we were back. I looked up into Kidd’s eyes.

“Oh, good,” he said. “You did come home with me. I was beginning to wonder.”

As he kissed me, I gladly quit thinking and gave myself up wholly to feeling.