Bootlegger’s Daughter

2 i just came home to count the memories

The County Democratic Coalition was holding a candidates’ forum at West Colleton Senior High, a sprawling two-story “educational plant” built by integration back in 1969.

It took fifteen years and the threat of cutting off federal funds to make the county finally admit that separate wasn’t equal. All those shabby old black schools had to be closed because no white tax-paying parents would stand for sending their children there. I shake my head sometimes to hear people fume about the evils of bussing and the benefits of neighborhood schools. You didn’t hear any of that kind of talk back when I was in seventh grade and it was black kids being bussed miles past white schools.

We arrived a little before six, and the early May sun was still high in the clear blue sky. It streamed in through floor-to-ceiling cafeteria windows and further brightened tables already cheerful with red-checked biodegradable paper tablecloths. Clusters of red, white, and blue balloons were tethered at each table, and red-white-and-blue crepe-paper bunting draped the head table. Very colorful. Very patriotic.

Lest anyone forget why we were there though, a partisan mural hung on the wall behind the head table. An art teacher here at West Colleton had painted a lifesize donkey kicking the butt of an elephant whose eyeglasses looked suspiciously like those worn by North Carolina ’s senior senator.

Supper was the usual pork barbecue, cole slaw, hush puppies, and sweet iced tea. I’d graduated from West Colleton, and Knotts had farmed around here since the late 1700s, so the crowd was friendly. Lots of hugs and howdies. For moral support, I sat at a table with John Claude Lee and Reid Stephenson, my two partners; Sherry Cobb, our legal secretary; and their significant others, which in Reid’s case seemed to change with the moon. A couple of my brothers and their families were there, too.

Not Daddy though.

He wasn’t real thrilled when I went to law school and he’s sat on his hands ever since I announced for judge. Being the only daughter after a string of sons, I was supposed to wear frilly dresses and patent leather Mary Janes till I grew up and married somebody who’d worship at the foot of my pedestal the rest of my natural life. He swears he isn’t chauvinistic; but truth is, he doesn’t approve of ladies messing with politics. (Daddy’s like Jesse Helms that way. Neither one of them’s ever met a woman. All females are ladies unless they’re trashy and immoral, in which case they’ve got other labels.)

I try to take into account that he’s an old man now, someone from another era. He says that’s disrespectful. People say I’m natured more like him than Mother, another reason I stayed in town with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash after Mother died. Keeps us from snarling at each other. This way I can stay polite and respectful.

Most of the time.

The evening followed predictable lines once they got rid of the feedback squeal in the sound system: a welcome by the president of the Democratic Women, an invocation by the minister of Cotton Grove Presbyterian, then some brief remarks by our U.S. House incumbent. It’s a safe seat. Down at the grass roots level, there’re still a lot of farmers, and ninety percent of Colleton County farmers are yellow dog Democrats when it comes to local politics.

We faced the flag for the pledge of allegiance, then sang “God Bless America,” which usually evokes muddled memories. Grade school assemblies get mixed in with cozy feelings from when “thru the night with the light from above” was the blissful security of the hall light that shone through a crack over my bedroom door until I fell asleep.

All incumbents stood to be applauded, including Perry Byrd and Harrison Hobart, then the chairman of the Colleton County Democratic Party gave a seven-minute pitch for Harvey Gantt, who was running against Jesse Helms for U.S. Senate and who sent regrets that he couldn’t be with us that night. After that came the parade of candidates to the microphone at the front of the cafeteria. State hopefuls got five minutes, county three.

Sheriff Bowman Poole only took two minutes. He gazed out over the two hundred or so party faithful with that genial expression that never quite masks the watchful alertness of a shepherd collie and said he sure did appreciate their continuing support, he’d try not to let ’ em down. Bo plays the role of laid-back good ol’ boy as well as anybody, but he runs a modern department. His officers have to keep themselves updated with regular classes at the community college, and he takes advantage of all the special techniques seminars that the SBI runs in Raleigh. Long as he wants to stay sheriff, Bo Poole’ll keep getting elected, and people gave him a good hand when he stepped away from the mike.

District judges come down near the end of the slate of candidates even though our judicial district comprises a three-county area. (On the ballot, we come after the sheriff but before clerk of the court, register of deeds, coroner, and county surveyor.) We can’t make campaign promises or take stands on particular issues. All we can do is state our background and expertise and promise to uphold the laws of this great land.

Running against me in the primary were three males. One, Luther Parker, was a tall gangling attorney from the next county who looked vaguely like a black Abe Lincoln without the beard. The other two were white, a fat attorney from Widdington and an earnest young assistant DA from Black Creek with a wonderful bass speaking voice that almost made you forget it had nothing to say. Harrison Hobart had let it be known-unofficially, of course-that he favored the ADA, “a man who thinks like me ’bout where the law ought to be going.”

It was unlikely that any of us would win a clear majority in the primary. I figured the two whites would probably cancel each other out, and then if all my relatives voted for me and if Parker pulled a big percentage of black votes, it’d probably come down to a runoff between him and me. At that point it’d turn into a real horse race. Far as I know, the only Colleton County woman ever elected to county-wide office has been Miss Callie Yelverton, our register of deeds, and she sort of inherited the job from her daddy, who first got himself elected about 1932.

Just because Democrats don’t pay as much attention to color and gender as Republicans doesn’t mean they don’t take both into account when they step inside the voting booth.

I’m white, but I’m female.

He’s male, but he’s black.

I’m single with some dirty linen I’d hate to have washed in public.

He’s a family man with a spotless reputation.

Actual qualifications would count for damn little, but then they never do in any other election, so why should judgeships be any different?

After five verses of “Democrats Are on the Move,” a unity song set to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” the evening broke up in a burst of enthusiastic optimism. November was a long way off.

My two white opponents tried to work the room, but most of the blacks were clustered around Luther Parker or Gantt’s representative; and, as I said before, I had graduated from West Colleton High so I was on home ground among folks who acted tickled to see me running for judge.

I was passed from one familiar bear hug to another, scolded for not coming home more often, told I was getting prettier every day and asked when I was going to quit breaking hearts and settle down.

Some things will never change. Not in eighteen million years.

I gave a mental shrug, said the things they wanted to hear, and hugged everyone back till I suddenly fetched up in the arms of a tall, good-looking man with silver flecks in his thick black hair.

Jed Whitehead.

“Little Debbie,” he grinned, the laugh lines falling into easy crinkles around his eyes and lips. He never lets me forget when I was a chubby teenager who used to pig out on those cream-filled cupcakes Dinah Jean kept in their refrigerator for when I baby-sat for them. “I wanted to tell you how much I liked your talk yesterday, but you got away too quick.”

Yesterday I’d given a speech to the Civitans and it’d gone well. Especially the question and answer session.

“I had to get back to court,” I said.

True.

I disentangled myself and smiled politely as someone else claimed my attention. “Sorry I missed you.”

Lie.

I’d seen Jed in the audience and I’d also seen him purposefully working his way over to me, which was why I cut out a little more abruptly than was strictly necessary.

Here in the cafeteria, the party was winding down. There was barely enough fading daylight to see by as people began to wander out to their cars. I did the courtesies with the organizers and party officials and moved toward the doorway myself, where my brother Seth stood talking with some neighbors. He put out his arm and gave my shoulder a squeeze as he drew me to his side. “You did good, honey,” he said.

Suddenly feeling tired, I leaned against his comfortable bulk. Seth’s five brothers up from me, but we’ve always been close.

“Hey, congratulations, Jed,” he said.

I hadn’t realized that Jed was right behind me.

“Know you’re real proud of her,” said Seth’s wife, Minnie, beaming at him.

“Oh, I am, I am,” Jed agreed.

I finally remembered what they were talking about. “Hard to believe Gayle’s old enough to be winning college scholarships,” I said.

“Tempus sure keeps on fugiting,” someone observed. “Seems like it was just Christmas and now I’ve already cut my grass three times.”

“We’ve got bluebirds nesting in three boxes,” Minnie offered, but the men were off on crops, allotments, and the prospects of rain before the weekend, so she and I spent a few minutes talking strategy. Minnie’s always been active in the Colleton County Democratic Women and was my closest thing to a campaign manager.

Sherry and her boyfriend passed by in the deepening twilight. “We’ll be at the car when you’re ready to go,” she told me.

I promised to visit Seth and Minnie real soon and started to follow Sherry across the crowded parking lot when Jed fell into step with me.

“Let me drive you back to Dobbs,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

I frowned.

“About Gayle,” he said. “She’s got a crazy bee in her bonnet and you’re just the person to smash it for me.”

For Gayle was a different story. I told Sherry that I had a ride home and to go on without me. Seeing Jed waiting over by his car, she winked at me. Probably thinking Jed and I ought to get back together.

Not that we ever really were together.

I couldn’t say what it was that kept it from happening. God knows I’d had a heavy enough crush on him when I was a kid and he’d been one of that gang of teenage boys that dropped by the farm every weekend to tussle with my brothers over whatever ball was in season.

I was a teenager myself, though still much too young for him, when his first wife was killed; but the gap had narrowed by the time he and Dinah Jean were divorced a year or so ago. We’d had a mild flurry of dates-dinners, movies, a couple of dances at the American Legion Hut-but I’d let them dwindle out to nothing.

“There is a tide…” said Shakespeare. If so, it must have crested years earlier because being with Jed never quite loosed the floodgates of adult passion. He certainly made all the right moves. There’d even been some heavy breathing after one of Reid’s parties, but that turned out to be the full moon and three of Reid’s Orange Blossom Specials. Sunlight and black coffee soon lowered my pulse rate. I told myself it’d been a case of forbidden fruit, and to test my hypothesis, I let a week pass, then met him for a movie; two weeks, then a concert to show there were no hard feelings. After that, I told Aunt Zell and Sherry to make excuses if he called. He only called once more.

Nobody ever had to draw Jed a diagram.

But I kept a soft spot for Gayle. I was the first sitter Janie had trusted outside her own family, and I’d continued to sit for Gayle after Dinah Jean and Jed were married. There hadn’t been much real contact in the last few years though until Jed and I began seeing each other. I think Gayle wanted me to be stepmother number two, but when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, she gradually stopped finding excuses to phone.

Actually, I still felt a little guilty about that.

“So what kind of bee’s bugging Gayle?” I asked, when we were in the car and buckling up.

Jed clicked my seat belt into place and switched on the ignition. It was finally full dark and headlights from other cars swept the school parking lot as he pulled out onto the highway and turned the car toward Dobbs.

“She wants to hire a private detective to find out who killed Janie,” he said.

“What?”

“Right.” His handsome face was illuminated by the pale green lights of the dashboard and a worried frown crumpled his eyebrows.

Eighteen years ago, when Gayle was less than three months old, she and Janie had disappeared one rainy gray afternoon in May. It was three days before some field hands heard a baby crying in the loft of an old abandoned gristmill. Gayle was dehydrated and raw bottomed from going all that time with no milk or water and no change of diapers, but an overnight stay in the hospital for observation showed no lasting injuries. Janie’s body was lying on the cold stone floor, her limbs straightened, her hands by her side. She’d been hit over the head and there was a bullet hole behind her right ear.

Jed’s hands clenched the steering wheel. “She says she has to know once and for all who killed her mother, so she can finally put it behind her.”

“But what exactly is there to put behind her?” I asked as cars flashed past us in the opposite lane. “She wasn’t even crawling, for God’s sake. There’s no way she could remember Janie or a thing that happened then.”

“Tell me about it.” He flicked the high beams impatiently as an oncoming car with badly set high beams nearly blinded us. Half the time, these back roads drivers never dim their lights unless you remind them three or four times.

“When she turned sixteen, she said she didn’t want a new car; she wanted me to pay a psychiatrist to hypnotize her and try to regress her back to when it happened.”

“You didn’t do it, did you?” I knew Gayle had a little red Toyota that couldn’t be more than two years old.

“Eight hundred dollars it cost me,” he answered wryly as two more headlights flashed by in the darkness. “On top of her car.”

Well, he’d always been foolish over Gayle from the minute she was born.

“What happened?”

“He got her back to that time she was so sick with a strep throat. You remember?”

I was impressed. “She couldn’t have been much more than what? Eighteen months?”

“Sixteen months and still in her crib,” he confirmed. “But that was as far as he could get her.”

“You going to let her hire the detective?”

“It’s not a matter of letting,” he said. “Now that she’s turned eighteen, she has the trust fund Janie’s dad set up when she was born.”

“But that’s for college-” I started to protest, and then I remembered. “Oh. The scholarship.”

“Yeah.”

We rode in silence for several minutes through the mild spring evening. Stars were bright pinpoints that faded as we approached the outer limits of Dobbs, and soon we were passing tobacco warehouses, the cinder block factory, and several fast-food places illuminated by neon and streetlights.

Like many small towns across eastern North Carolina, Dobbs is having its troubles keeping downtown vital. Strip malls dot the four lanes leading in and out of town and there’s a huge outlets mall nearby on I-95. Everybody’s just holding their breath, hoping that the last major department store on Main Street won’t move out. So far we’ve kept ahead of store closings by bulldozing the abandoned buildings and turning the sites into convenient little parking lots made almost parklike with benches set under shady crepe myrtles. But most people think that if it weren’t for its being the county seat of government, downtown would be one vast parking lot around the churches and the courthouse.

“Would you talk to her?” Jed asked as he turned off Main Street. “You’ve always been Gayle’s role model. She’ll listen to you.”

The storefronts gave way to large brick, stone, and wooden houses set among masses of flowering azaleas. Like all the residential streets of Dobbs, ours was lined with huge mature oaks and maples that nearly met overhead. At the end of the street was Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash’s whitewashed brick.

Role model?

Did he know how old that made me feel?

Jed drove through the opening in the white brick wall and pulled up at the far end of the long low veranda, in front of the door that led directly to my rooms.

“I think I have a clear hour tomorrow afternoon,” I sighed. “Tell her to call Sherry and set it up.”