Let Me Die in His Footsteps

10

ANNIE WATCHES UNTIL Ryce disappears over the rise and she can no longer hear the squeal of his bike. Sheriff Fulkerson is watching too, and when he turns to greet Daddy, the sheriff is shaking his head like he doesn’t know what gets into that boy. Mama sometimes shakes her head the same way at Annie.

“Why don’t you come on with us,” the sheriff says to Annie when she starts up the stairs to go inside and help Grandma in the kitchen.

Daddy gives a nod, which means he thinks there’s no harm in it, so Annie calls out to Grandma that she’ll be back shortly and follows Daddy and the sheriff.

“You keep a sharp eye, John,” Grandma shouts from the porch. Since breakfast, she has repinned her hair, and her apron hangs straight now. “Keep a sharp eye on Annie.”

Partway up the hill that’ll lead them to Grandpa’s tobacco barn, Annie stops because Daddy and the sheriff stop. She knew they would. Visitors always do. Especially this time of year. This is the spot-halfway between the house and the tobacco barn-where folks take a break, usually saying they need to rest even though it’s not such an uphill climb. They brace themselves, feet planted wide apart, hands on hips, and look across the land that rolls down toward the house and lifts up again and stretches to the horizon. As far as a person can see in most any direction, rows of lavender, swelled to their full size, run side by side. They’re evenly placed, four feet on center, precisely, exactly, every one of them, as only Daddy would have it. It’s a trick of the eye and the work of distance that draw the rows closer and closer as they travel toward the horizon until eventually they meld into a single field of lavender covering the hills. There aren’t many prideful moments in growing lavender, so says Daddy, but this is one of the few.

Standing next to the sheriff, who can only shake his head at the splendor of it, which makes Annie wonder if he was shaking his head at the splendor of Ryce, though she doubts it, Daddy takes off his hat, slaps it against his thigh, and nods along. It’s about the proudest a person will see Daddy. He never walks folks around to the other side of the house and to the top of the rise that looks off in the other direction. There, the lavender has already been harvested. It’ll be distilled into oil and so is always taken before it breaks into bloom. It’s not such a pretty sight once the slender lavender-tipped stems have been hacked off, leaving behind only a jagged mound of greenery.

Like folks always do, the sheriff lays his head back and inhales. Usually, Annie doesn’t notice the sweet smell because she, and the rest of the family too, lives with it every day. It builds slowly over the season, little by little, and so is never fresh or new, but when a visitor comes along, like the sheriff, Annie is reminded of it by the look on his face.

Just this last week, she’s felt like a visitor might. The smell has been stronger, sweeter, thicker, like new again. She should have known it was a sign her life was about to change-same as she should have known the one warped board on the porch, and the star she saw falling from the sky last Tuesday night, and the shiver that woke her this past Saturday all meant death was closing in.

“Beats the hell out of growing tobacco,” the sheriff says as he takes one deep breath. His large belly lifts up and out, his eyes close, the lines around his mouth soften, and he exhales long and slow. Then he slaps his hands together, gives Daddy a wave, and they continue on toward the barn.

By the time they reach the top of the hill, Sheriff Fulkerson is red-faced and can’t talk for breathing so hard. He mops his forehead with a limp white kerchief and rests a hand on his belly, which swells up until his shirt gaps between his buttons. Ryce is already taller than his daddy but is a good bit smaller around the middle.

“This where you crossed over?” the sheriff says without looking at Annie. His voice has changed. It’s slipped lower, and he’s likely not smiling anymore. Grandma says Sheriff Fulkerson spends too much time politicking. This is the voice he saves for discussing serious matters with serious men. He’s not politicking just now. Waiting for an answer, he leans over at the waist and looks down the length of the rock fence. Maybe he’s looking for rocks knocked loose or oversize footprints, or maybe he’s admiring what Grandma calls fine Irish fence building.

“Yes, sir,” Annie says, looking for some sign that Ryce hadn’t been entirely truthful and that his daddy does think Annie killed Mrs. Baine. So far, the sheriff is being friendly enough. “Best I can tell,” she says, glancing at Daddy. He gives her a nod that means keep on. “It was dark. Crossed over right about here.”

“Just jumped on over?” Now the sheriff gives her a smile and his voice lifts a bit higher. He’s politicking again, and that’s Annie’s first warning that the sheriff isn’t altogether trusting of what she’s telling him. “You can do that? Girl small as you?”

“Sure can,” Annie says.

It’s not often someone calls Annie small these days. She outgrew Caroline and Mama a year ago. Daddy has started saying he worries she’ll outgrow him next. She’s about to show the sheriff how easily she can manage that fence, but Daddy is shaking his head at her. If she were still thirteen, or maybe even fourteen, Daddy wouldn’t have minded. But she’s halfway to sixteen and that’s altogether different from being thirteen or fourteen.

“Caroline done it too,” Annie says, wondering straightaway if that was something she should have not told. “Both of us, we climbed right on over. It’s not so high.”

“You all get up here often?”

Daddy points his thumb toward the barn’s open doors. “Lavender drying in there this time of year. Otherwise, no. Have a look.”

The sheriff steps up to the barn’s open doors and leans inside. Three-inch bundles of lavender hang from the wooden crossbeams, their bluish-gray buds dripping toward the ground.

“Doors always open?” the sheriff asks, leaning inside.

“Circulation,” Daddy says.

The sheriff nods, doesn’t have to ask. He knows all about circulation. It’s the same for tobacco. Fresh air moving across the plants means less chance of mold.

The sheriff steps farther into the barn and runs one hand across the tips of the lavender. Tiny petals pop free and flutter to the ground.

“Today is your day, then?” he says without looking at Annie. “Fifteen and a half?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ryce was right. That’s the thing that has folks worried. For girls like Annie, those with the know-how, turning of age is something special. Or maybe something worrisome.

“Fifteen and a half,” Annie says, repeating the sheriff.

“But you and your sister, the both of you, come up here to look in that well over at the Baines’ place?”

Annie nods, which makes Daddy poke her in the back. “Yes, sir,” she says. “Me and Caroline, both.”

The sheriff can’t see a nod because he’s still studying that lavender, which shouldn’t be all so interesting, even to a visitor. He’s studying it like Annie had been studying it when she thought, hoped, Daddy was in there watching over her as she made her way to the Baines’ well.

“No well of your own?”

If she wasn’t certain before, she’s certain now. The sheriff is circling around her, closing in ever tighter with each question.

“Dried up,” Daddy says, and he says it easy and casual like he isn’t at all worried about what the sheriff’s thinking.

“Didn’t figure to see nothing in a dried-up well,” Annie says, and then so the sheriff won’t think that’s something only people like Annie know about, she says, “Everyone knows that. Just ask. Just ask anyone.”

The sheriff jostles a handful of lavender petals in one hand and walks from the barn.

“And what did you see when you got over there?” he says, squinting into the sunlight and dumping the petals. “You have a light of any kind?”

“Caroline did,” Annie says. “Daddy’s flashlight. Didn’t see much except for Mrs. Baine. She was on the ground there by the well. Didn’t know it was her at the time. Just seen an arm, what I thought was an arm. It was real dark.”

Mrs. Baine was old, just about the oldest person Annie has ever seen, and that’s why she died. She had slender lips that rolled in on themselves because she didn’t have teeth where she should have had them. Her fingernails were thick, yellow, and squared off like she whittled them down with a gutting knife, and dark patches-age spots, Grandma called them-covered the backs of Mrs. Baine’s hands and the sides of her face. Deep lines ran from her forehead to her chin, and her hair was like pulled gray cotton hanging down her back. A person can only grow so old. Grandma is always saying it’ll get us all eventually, God willing. But as Sheriff Fulkerson asks yet another question, and as he settles his eyes on Annie and keeps them there, it’s certain he is of a different mind. He’s of a mind that something other than old age got its claws into Mrs. Baine.

“There were the cigarettes,” Annie says, kicking at the ground near the barn doors. “They were around here somewhere.” She keeps digging at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “A pile of them.”

“Yours?” the sheriff says to Daddy.

Daddy shakes his head. “Never smoke up here. Too dry.” Daddy glances at his watch. He should be out to the fields, helping Abraham set his tobacco. “Never smoke most anywhere. Sarah, you know. She don’t like it. Smell don’t agree with her.”

The smell reminds Mama too much of her daddy, she once said. The sheriff gives Daddy a pat on the back as if he knows all about wives and the things they don’t much like, and the three of them keep on studying the ground and searching for those cigarettes.

“Went looking for them last night when Annie first mentioned it,” Daddy says. “Didn’t want a fire springing up on top of everything else.”

“Right around here,” Annie says, pointing at a patch of ground just outside the open doors. Those cigarettes had to belong to someone, so maybe the sheriff was right. Maybe something else, or someone else, did get its claws into Mrs. Baine. Those cigarettes will mean that the someone else was not Annie.

Daddy steps up behind Annie and squats. He groans on the way down. With one hand, he pats the ground and riffles through the dirt. “You sure it was cigarettes?”

“Positive,” Annie says, and all those good feelings Daddy stirred up when he hauled off that rocker are gone as quick as they came because Daddy doesn’t believe her and he’s saying so right in front of Sheriff Fulkerson. “One was still lit even. At first, I thought they was yours. I thought they meant you was out here too, that Mama sent you. I looked for you in the barn.”

Annie says these things even though she knows they’ll hurt Daddy. Mama did send him, but he and Abraham had been drinking their whiskey. They’d been doing it more and more lately because Abraham would be getting married soon. Fun’s over once you say I do, Daddy was all the time saying and then he’d wrap Mama up in a hug and rub his stubble against the underside of her chin. Mama would swat Daddy away, but he’d keep at it until she closed her eyes and leaned into him instead of pulling away. Daddy sleeping when he should have been watching over Annie was probably why Mama burned the toast this morning. Grandma is always saying a cook who burns the biscuits is an angry cook, indeed. The same must be true for a cook who burns the toast.

“Yep,” Daddy says. “I should have been here. But wasn’t me. Wasn’t my cigarettes. Maybe you was mistaken.”

Sheriff Fulkerson joins them but doesn’t try to squat. “Probably mistaken,” he says, repeating Daddy.

“But one was orange-tipped,” Annie says, digging two hands into the dirt, gathering it in her palms and letting it filter through her fingers. She stares up at both men, looking them in the eyes so they’ll know she’s telling the truth. “It was still burning. I’m certain. Certain as can be. I snubbed it out. Daddy’s always saying we have to be careful. But I thought they was Daddy’s. I was sure.”

“There anything else, Annie?” the sheriff asks, planting the sole of his black boot right where Annie had been rummaging in the dirt. “Anything you ought tell me?”

Annie can’t tell him about the spark that’s been in the air or the trouble that’s been lurking. Folks, regular folks, don’t like to hear about things like that. But for a week, Annie’s known it was coming, and here it is, and now folks think she killed Mrs. Baine.

“No, sir,” she says. “Nothing more to tell. But I seen those cigarettes, and if they ain’t here, that means someone took them.” Annie was wrong. Aunt Juna isn’t coming home. She’s already here. “I think they were Juna’s cigarettes. My Aunt Juna’s.”

Sheriff Fulkerson starts shaking his head again, and it’s surely disappointment making him do that and not the splendor of Annie.

“Think we’ve seen all we need to,” he says and looks off toward the house. “I see my deputy’s here.”

On the drive below, a dark-blue sedan has parked behind Daddy’s truck.

“Thought he could stay close to you folks,” the sheriff says, “for the next few days.”

“Why do we need someone staying close?” Annie asks, shielding her eyes and looking down on the parked car.

When no one answers, she drops her hand and turns to the sheriff. He’s looking at Daddy as if wondering what should and should not be said.

“You think Aunt Juna’s come home, don’t you? You think it too.”

Daddy lets out a long breath. He’s not so good at politicking. The sheriff, however, opens up a big smile and wraps an arm around Annie’s shoulders. It almost makes Annie forget he most certainly thinks she had something to do with Mrs. Baine dying. Grandma is right. He is awful good at politicking.

“Come on down and meet him,” the sheriff says. “You’ll probably remember him. Jacob. He’s a year or so older than Ryce.”

“Jacob Riddle?” Annie says a little too quickly.

“You do recall, huh?” The sheriff gives her a wink and squeezes her so tight she feels his damp underarms on the side of her face. “Been helping me out since he got back in town. Maybe he’s the fellow you seen down in that well? I’ll be sure to tell Ryce he’s got himself some competition. What do you think of that, John? Think you’d have Jacob Riddle for a son-in-law?”

Stretching one hand overhead, the sheriff waves it side to side so Jacob will see them. The driver’s side door of the sedan swings open, and Jacob Riddle steps out. No mistaking it. That’s Jacob Riddle all right. He waves back in the sheriff’s direction, but it isn’t a wave to say hello. It’s a wave to say hurry on up. There’s something bad going on down here.

IT’S BEEN A year since Jacob left town. Folks say he went to stay with his aunt in Louisville where he could see a decent doctor. Just last summer, he was Jacob Riddle who had an arm like a cannon. The men in town said Jacob could throw a baseball harder than anyone who’d ever crossed the Hayden County line, probably harder than anyone who’d ever crossed into the state of Kentucky. And the taller he grew, the harder he threw. Folks still talk about the day last June when something snapped in his arm. They knew it before the ball hit the catcher’s mitt. The arm that dangled like it had come unhinged would never throw another pitch.

The closer Annie, Daddy, and the sheriff get to the bottom of the hill, the stronger the smell of Grandma’s spice cake becomes. Jacob’s going to smell the cake a person should only be smelling at Christmastime, and worse yet, he’s going to know it’s her day of ascension and that she’d been looking in a well in hopes of seeing her intended.

Jacob must be nineteen now, maybe twenty. Annie first started watching him play ball when she was nine years old and they had just moved in with Grandma. She’d walk all the way into town to watch whenever his team was playing. It wasn’t that she was a fan of baseball, or even so much a fan of Jacob’s, but going to a game meant she was going somewhere where lavender didn’t grow.

Usually the games weren’t all so interesting because Jacob threw one pitch, two pitches, three pitches, and the batter was out. If a player did manage a hit off Jacob Riddle, he damn well knew he’d earned it because Jacob never threw with pity. The few times a fellow put his bat to one of Jacob’s pitches, Jacob covered his mouth over with his glove, but not before Annie saw the smile on his face. He was smiling because that hit meant he got to stay on the mound a bit longer.

There were a few games during Jacob’s last season when Annie wondered if her liking to watch him throw the way she did-if her getting to know his motion so well she knew if the ball sailing toward the catcher would skim the outside of the plate, float with no spin, or dip just before reaching the batter-meant she was falling in love. But then something in that arm snapped, he left town, and she didn’t much think about him again, which probably meant it hadn’t been love.

Annie stops worrying about spice cake and wells and what the sheriff might tell Ryce over the supper table tonight when Daddy starts walking faster, so fast he passes Annie up. The sheriff passes her up too, and he’s red-faced again and can’t speak for breathing so hard.

“Someone’s in there,” Jacob says, pointing toward the house.

He jogs toward the sheriff as he says it again and yet again, shouting just loud enough to be heard but not so loud that whoever is inside the house will hear. Even in a uniform, his shirt tucked, his belt buckle shining, both laces on his boots tied up tight, those arms and legs of Jacob’s don’t quite fit as well as they did when he stood up on that mound.

“What do you mean?” Daddy starts drifting toward the house. “Who’s in there?”

“You hold up, John,” the sheriff says, and when he reaches Jacob, he bends at the waist, hands on his hips, and draws in one deep breath after another. “You wait for me, John.” And then, to Jacob, he says, “Who do you say is in there?”

“Not altogether certain.” Jacob gives a single nod in Annie’s direction as if to say hello. “Only know the family likeness.”

Annie was right. It’s Aunt Juna. She’s come home.

“Spit it out, son,” Sheriff Fulkerson says. “Who is it?”

“Sir,” Jacob says, “I believe it’s Ellis Baine, sir.”

Even though the sheriff hollers at him to stop, Daddy starts to jog and then gets to running so fast his hat flies off. He jumps the three stairs leading onto the porch, yanks open the door, and disappears inside. Sheriff Fulkerson straightens, blows out one deep breath that makes his lips flutter, and tells Jacob to hurry on after Daddy.

“See to it John doesn’t get himself in any trouble,” he shouts as Jacob follows Daddy up the stairs and into the house.

IN ADDITION TO smelling of cinnamon and cloves and ground ginger, the kitchen still smells of the lavender Grandma simmered during the night, or maybe it smells like lavender because the sun is full in the sky now, the air has warmed and everything will smell of lavender for the rest of the day. And right there, sitting in the center of the table and reminding everyone it’s Annie’s day, is the spice cake. The powdered-sugar drizzle still glistens, has not yet hardened to a chalky white. Grandma must have forgotten Annie was supposed to do the icing.

The moment Annie sees the cake, she wants to snatch it and hide it in a cupboard or on the back porch so Jacob Riddle won’t see it. It’s a reminder Annie is halfway between fifteen and sixteen, and even though fifteen and a half is altogether different than being thirteen or fourteen, it still isn’t being grown up. Not so grown up as Jacob Riddle.

Two decks of cards also sit on the table, right next to the cake, yet another sign today is a special day. Cards on the table mean company is coming for supper. Annie glances around the room, trying to decide if she can take the cake without anyone noticing, but Grandma is leaning against the counter as if she’s washing dishes in the sink except there aren’t any dishes to wash, and she’ll know, because she always knows. If Annie tries to take that cake, Grandma will turn and ask what Annie’s up to, and then everyone will see the cake for certain and Annie will turn red in the face again.

Sliding deep into the corner, where she hopes no one will pay her any mind, Annie lets her glance drift from the spice cake to the rest of the room. Daddy stands near her, just inside the door, chest still rising and falling with each heavy breath, boots still on both feet because he didn’t bother to take them off. His arms are crossed, and he’s taken on a wide stance as if he’s setting himself against the northern wind. With both thumbs hooked inside his belt, Jacob Riddle stands on the other side of Daddy. Jacob is a good head and a half taller than Daddy, probably had to duck when he walked through the door, but as tall as he is, he doesn’t look so big standing in the kitchen, not sure where to look or what to say. And sitting quietly, both hands wrapped around a coffee cup, hat hanging from the back of his chair, is Ellis Baine.

Annie recognizes Ellis from pictures she’s seen over the years. The Baine brothers are almost as much a legend as Aunt Juna. Ellis Baine especially, because he was the first one chased away by his own mama. Every five years since the year Joseph Carl Baine was hanged, newspaper people show up in town and start asking questions. While they couldn’t have known it in 1936, they know it now: Joseph Carl Baine was the last man publicly hanged in all of the United States of America, and history will always make that a fact worth revisiting. Those reporters want to meet a Baine brother, and a few have even knocked on the Baines’ door. In the early days, before the last brother was gone, those reporters who braved such a knock found themselves staring into the end of a shotgun.

In addition to tracking down Baines and visiting the crossroad where Joseph Carl is buried, those reporters come knocking on the Hollerans’ door too. Whenever a year rolls around that ends in a one or a six, Daddy will ready himself. For some reason, newspapers mark time in blocks of five years and ten years. The reporters ask after Juna Crowley, and is this the right house? Has she ever returned? Does she ever write? And is this the child? Usually Daddy has chased them off before they get a glimpse of Annie and can ask that last question.

Even now, every five years, those newspapers come, once from as far away as New York City. They write about the female sheriff and the appetite of a small town to witness a man hang. Some say the stories those reporters write are filled with lies. Folks were there. They know the truth. Doesn’t much matter what folks here might know when the folks reading those made-up stories are all the way up in New York City or Dayton, Ohio, or Washington, DC.

Those reporters still come even though the last Baine brother left years ago. The folks in town do their best to make life unpleasant for those reporters. Not a single room will be for rent in all the county. The café will close its empty tables when one of them walks through the door. And not one person will have one thing to say about the Crowleys or the Baines.

“Afternoon, John,” Ellis Baine says to Daddy.

Trailing everyone else by a full minute, the sheriff finally makes his way inside, wiping his face with that same limp kerchief as he steps into the kitchen. Jacob holds open the door for him and takes the sheriff’s hat and Daddy’s too, which the sheriff must have picked up on his way toward the house. Sweat stains have grown out from under the sheriff’s arms, and a button on his shirt has popped open or maybe popped off entirely, exposing his white undershirt.

“Didn’t waste no time, did you, Ellis?” the sheriff says, pulling out a chair and dropping down on it. “Marrying a cook as fine as my Bethany is a blessing and a curse,” he says, patting his large stomach. “Annie, you here?” He turns in his seat, his stomach sagging to his lap.

“Yes, sir,” Annie says, sliding a step to the right so the sheriff can see her standing behind Daddy.

The sheriff begins at the top of his shirt, and one by one, struggling with his thick fingers, unhooks each button. “Come on over here, girl,” he says.

Annie steps up to his chair, places both hands on the sheriff’s collar, all the while keeping her eyes on Ellis Baine, though she isn’t certain why. Grandma would say the know-how is the thing that causes Annie’s breath to quicken, her mouth to go dry, her fingertips to turn numb.

As she stands behind the sheriff, helping him off with his shirt, Ellis Baine studies her. The man’s eyes don’t settle on one piece of Annie. Instead they scan all parts of her, settling here and there as if looking for something special. He’s looking at the size of her hands, the thickness of her hair, the curve of her shoulders. Once the sheriff has managed to pull his arms free, he reaches in one pocket and hands a small white button to Annie.

“Think you can take a needle to this for me?” he says, his stomach stretching the white undershirt he is left wearing. Then he gives Daddy a wave to have a seat. When Daddy makes no move to join him, the sheriff scoots the chair out from under the table with the tip of his boot. “Go on and have a seat. We’ve quite a bit to catch up on after all these years.”

Daddy sits, but not in the chair next to the sheriff. Instead he pulls out the one Mama usually sits in and positions himself directly across from Ellis Baine.

“How is it you see fit to find yourself in my house?” Daddy says.

“Not here to cause no trouble.”

In every picture Annie has ever seen that showed the Baine family, Ellis and Joseph Carl were always the easiest to pick out. Joseph Carl was fair-haired with pale eyes. He was narrow through the shoulders and the shortest of the bunch. The other brothers wore long beards, wide and bushy clumps of hair that drew down to a scrawny point at their end. All of them except Ellis. He was always clean-shaven, or somewhere close to it. The legend goes that Ellis was the brother the ladies liked best, and so he kept himself fine and clean for them. Others, mostly the older men in town, said any decent man would wear a beard, and if he didn’t, it was only proof he wasn’t man enough to grow one.

“Didn’t ask if you was here to cause trouble. Asked why you think you’d be welcome?”

“Never said I figured on being welcome.” Ellis doesn’t look at Daddy as he speaks but instead stares into his coffee cup.

From her spot at the sink, Grandma lets out a grunt. It’s the same grunt she lets out when Abraham Pace says his fiancée doesn’t like him having so much salt or more than one dessert or a third sip of whiskey.

“You been up to the house?” Sheriff Fulkerson asks, shooing Annie away to get busy stitching that button.

“Sure have.”

“You just get in today?” the sheriff asks.

Ellis Baine nods. He’s come home again, and so maybe he’s the one the rocker foretold. But as he nods his head yet again to tell the sheriff he only just today arrived, Annie knows he wasn’t the one who left those cigarettes.

“And you thought to come here next?” Daddy says, even though the sheriff keeps holding up a hand to quiet him.

“You want I should see him back home?”

Everyone turns toward Jacob when he says this. He takes a step forward and asks again.

“Want I should see Mr. Baine home?”

“No, thank you, Jacob. Why don’t you go on outside and make sure we don’t have no more Baine brothers paying a visit.”

“Ain’t no one else coming,” Ellis says.

The sheriff jabs a thumb toward the back door. Jacob pulls on his hat and, without another word, walks outside.

“So you know about your mama?” the sheriff says once Jacob’s footsteps have crossed the porch and the kitchen is quiet again.

Ellis nods. “Not why I’m here though.”

“Then why are you here?” Daddy pushes away from the table, the chair’s legs squealing across Grandma’s freshly mopped and waxed floor.

The sheriff gives Annie the same thumb jab he gave Jacob, but Ellis Baine is staring at her again and she can’t make her legs move.

“Here to see her,” Ellis says, tipping his head in Annie’s direction. “Here to see the girl.”