Dirty South

30

Maggie lived a few miles outside Taylor – about an hour from JoJo’s – in a small white farmhouse surrounded by rosebushes and rows of tomatoes and corn just planted. The hickory tree leaves made brushing sounds as we walked toward her front porch, the sky overhead the color of water in the Florida Keys. I held her hand and she gripped me hard as she told me about a new photo exhibit she was working on for a gallery on Oxford Square.

“It’s more than just headstones,” she said, pulling her sticky white T-shirt away from her chest. “I mean, we’ve seen that about a hundred times. I’ve done pictures of graves of woodworkers. They had some kind of fund that kicked in when they died and some of the monuments are incredible. There’s this man who died down in Paris and his headstone looks like a log stump.”

“Want to show me?”

She stepped back and closed one eye, trying to read my mind.

Maggie was tall and thin with muscular arms from working horses and she had these bright green eyes that made you just want to look at her all day. Her smooth skin was tanned from working outdoors and her hair was the color of black ink.

We took a drive down a backcountry highway, past the freshly planted cotton and small clapboard buildings and around an old gas station that sold hot boiled peanuts and warmer beer. We drove through the Yocona River basin forever flat and brown, waiting for the cotton to twist up out of the earth, and up into the Mississippi hills around Paris. We drove on a highway cut through a long forest of oaks and pines and poplar and hickory and pecan. Green leaves still in the early-summer heat. Dogs trotted loose in gullies and tractors drove slow, headed to turn over some more soil. The air smelled of rich dirt and green leaves.

We turned off the main highway and passed some loose storefronts, all sun-bleached and bare of paint, that had once been a town. Around a small curve and down an unpaved road, we found it.

We parked under an old oak bare of leaves, slammed the Bronco’s doors with a thud, and walked out onto the dirt hill of a cemetery. Children and old people and some lost in accidents and others from yellow fever or world war or Civil War. Marble crosses and lambs made of mortar and sculptures of open Bibles. The rocky earth was filled with them.

“What happened to the town?” I asked.

“This is the town.”

“Oh.”

“This was where Theora Hamblett lived,” she said. “You know? The folk artist.” Maggie brushed her hair from her eyes and squatted down near a grave covered in mud. She wiped away the dirt so she could read the headstone better. “You ever think about dyin’?” she asked.

“Not when I can help it.”

“I think it’s good,” Maggie said. “Makes you remember life.”

I liked the way she said “life,” really strung out that I, and told her.

She raised up off her haunches and stood up in front of me, nose to nose. So close I could smell the mint on her breath. “Can you stay?”

“Just tonight,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to New Orleans.”

“Because of that kid?” she asked. “ALIAS.”

I nodded and kissed her on the forehead.

“Didn’t that man who stole his money kill himself?”

“No,” I said.

She squinted into the sun behind my back. “When will you be back?”

“Soon.”

“What did you do for your birthday?” she asked.

“Slept and watched Hud. It was on TV.”

“I love that movie,” she said.

“I knew you would,” I said. “Why do you think I hang out with you?”

“I hired a sitter tonight,” she said.

“We can take Dylan.”

“He’d like that,” she said. “Then what?”

Long after dinner and two Disney movies later, Dylan fell asleep and I watched Maggie hoist him into her arms and take him back to his bedroom. Saturday Night Live was on her old TV that flickered when the volume got too high and we drank some Abitas and kissed for a long time on her old plaid sofa.

In her bedroom, windows cracked so we could hear the early summer of crickets and hot wind in the tall skinny pines, I watched her strip out of her gray T-shirt and kick out of her boots and jeans. The numbers on her AM radio said it was almost 1 A.M.

Moonlight scattered across her body. I watched her as I tripped out of my boots and clothes. She hooked her thumbs into her cotton panties and rolled them down her long legs.

We met in the middle of her old iron bed and I wrapped my right arm around her waist, feeling her small breasts against my chest and her long legs hooked around mine. She kissed my ears and my cheeks and mouth. I felt the heat and softness between her legs.

In the small room, I only heard her breathing. A bright bit of sweat on our bodies. In the end, she gripped the back of my neck and bit into my shoulder, only the slightest scream escaping her lips.

“Do you love me?” she asked. As she broke away, I heard her breathing hard.

I wanted to say yes but the answer seemed too easy, so I just kept kissing her, hoping she’d forget the question.