Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 7

SATURDAY AFTERNOON (CONTINUED)

As soon as I got back to my car, I took out my cell phone and called Daddy’s number. Not surprisingly, Maidie answered. Technically, she doesn’t work on the weekends, but nobody ever put up a time clock for her to punch at the kitchen door, and since she and Cletus live just down the lane from Daddy’s shabby old farmhouse, she’s in and out whenever it suits her. If she happens to be in when the phone rings, she answers it automatically because my father doesn’t like talking on the phone and won’t pick up if he knows she’s around.

“Is Daddy there?” I asked.

“Him and Cletus just got back from the long pond with a mess of brim for supper,” she said. “Don’t you want to come eat some? They’s plenty.”

“Sure,” I said promptly, knowing that pond fish meant Maidie’s crispy cornbread and a medley of late summer vegetables, including the best fried okra in North Carolina. “And while I have you, are Eric and his parents still coming out for dinner after church with y’all tomorrow?”

“Far as I know they are. Why?”

“I just thought that maybe you’d tell him to bring his swimsuit and he and Stevie can go swimming off my pier.”

“I bet he’d like that,” she said. “I’ll call him right now before I forget it.”

“Be sure and tell him I’m particularly looking forward to seeing him. I haven’t had a chance to talk to either of them in a long time.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said. “You want to speak to your daddy a minute?”

“Has it ever been more than a minute?” I asked.

She laughed. “Hang on, honey.”

A moment later, I heard Daddy say, “Yeah?”

No How you doing? How’ve you been? Everything all right? He expects us to state our business and get off the phone.

And much as it pains him to take a local call, long distance makes him crazy, even when he’s not paying for it. My brother Adam, one of the little twins, will deliberately call from California and see how long he can keep Daddy on the line before he says, “Well, less’n you got something to say worth ten cents a minute to say it, I’m gonna get off ‘fore you go broke.”

Adam hasn’t yet made it to five minutes.

“You going to be there for the next hour?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. I’m just Ieaving, the festival here in Dobbs. I’ll run past my house and change clothes and then I’ll be over,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s—” I hesitated. No point in just blurting it out. Better to wait till I could soften the news with words and judge his reaction as to how much to tell.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“Fine,” he said, and hung up.

Next I called Haywood’s house. I didn’t really expect Stevie to answer, so I wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t. I left a message on the machine that I hoped would sound innocuous to Haywood or Isabel but would let my nephew know I meant it when I said I really wanted to catch up with everything that’s been happening to him lately.

Dwight should know by now that I won’t leave trouble alone when it involves my family.

As a teenager, I used to make the drive from the farm to Dobbs in just under twenty minutes. With all the new housing developments and population growth, the speed limit’s dropped to forty-five miles an hour and it now takes me closer to thirty, which means that there was plenty of time for Daddy to drive down the lane past Maidie’s house, through the cut, and around the fields to my house.

His truck was parked at my back door when I pulled into my yard, and he was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette.

Ladybelle came over and nuzzled my hand in greeting as I got out of the car, but Blue continued to sprawl with his head on Daddy’s workboot and merely thumped his tail in welcome.

“He’s getting lazy,” I said.

“Naw, just getting old,” said Daddy. “He’ll be twelve, come Thanksgiving.”

He’s partial to those two hounds, but like most farm people, he’s realistic. Over a long lifetime, he’s watched a lot of puppies turn into good dogs, then grow old and die.

He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up so I could hug him. “You look mighty pretty in that blue dress, shug. Real ladylike.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said lightly, not looking to pick a fight. “Come on up on the porch and let me get you some tea.”

I opened the screen door and stepped inside to switch on the ceiling fan above the circular glass-and-metal table. I don’t like air-conditioning any more than he does. Long as the air’s stirring and I don’t have to do stoop labor out under a hot sun, the heat doesn’t really bother me. Oh, I’ll complain about it right along with my friends, but that’s only pro forma. In actuality, I love our hot, muggy summer days unless they drag on and on through early fall without a break. Makes our winters more special.

Daddy pulled out a chair, took off the white straw planter’s hat he wears from April till October, and hung it on a nearby peg. His hair has been snow white since before I was born and was still thick across the crown.

“Better bring another glass,” he said off-handedly. “Andrew’ll be along directly.”

I about dropped the pitcher.

“Andrew?”

“That is what you wanted to talk about, won’t it?” he asked. “Andrew’s girl being back and her boy getting hisself killed?”

“You know who she is? How? Who told you?”

He gave a half smile. “Well, now, shug, you ain’t the only one knows people at the courthouse. I been keeping an eye on the Hatcher farm ever since old Rod Hatcher died. Watched the farm go to his sister, then to her boy, then back to the boy’s cousin three years ago, and he didn’t have but two cousins. Carol and Olivia. Tallahassee Ames won’t old enough to be Carol, so I figured she had to be Olivia. Had somebody backtrack on her and sure enough.”

“Somebody?” I asked suspiciously. “Dwight?”

“Naw, not Dwight.”

“Terry White, then?”

“I ain’t saying.”

He didn’t have to. Terry’s an SBI agent and would do anything for Daddy, long as it was halfway legal. I was the one introduced them when he and I were hanging out together a hundred years ago. They bonded over a bass right out there on that pond, long before I built a house in this pasture, and they stayed tight even after Terry and I moved on to other relationships. Veteran lawmen and old reprobates are just two sides to the same coin, which is probably why Terry and Dwight are so crazy about my daddy and why he’s right fond of them, too.

“She tell you how come her to change her name to Tallahassee?”

“That’s where she joined the carnival,” I said.

“Real sorry to hear about her boy. Just wish you won’t the one had to find him. You okay? He was messed up pretty bad in the face, I heared.”

But I was still reeling. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“What for?” he asked. “She knowed who we were and where we were. When she didn’t try to sell the farm, I figured she’d come looking us someday when she was ready to know us. We hadn’t done nothing for her growing up, so we didn’t have no claims on her now. Figured it was her choice.”

My brother drove into the yard about then, parked his truck beside Daddy’s old Chevy, and got out. There was a puzzled look on his face.

“Does he know?” I asked.

Daddy shook his head. “You want to be the one to tell him?”

“Tell me what?” said Andrew as he came up on the porch and joined us at the table.

Of my eleven older brothers, Andrew’s third in the birth order after Robert and Frank. He’s the one that looks the most like Daddy. His thick brown hair is fast going gray and will probably be all white in another year. He’s also the one that seemed to have the hardest time of it as a child. Didn’t get a chance to be a baby long before the big twins came along and pushed him out of his mother’s lap.

“Andrew was wild as a ditch cat,” Aunt Zell says whenever she talks about the houseful of boys Annie Ruth left behind, which explains why she always had a soft spot in her heart for him.

Although he eventually came to love my mother, it was hard for him to show it, especially since he was the one who initially resented her the most after Annie Ruth died and Daddy remarried. Took him a long time to find his way in life, to find April, who gentled him and brought him back to the farm and a settled life.

“Tell me what?” he asked again, beginning to get an apprehensive look on his face. “What’s wrong? A.K.? Ruth?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “I saw both of them when I was leaving the carnival and they were fine. Enjoying the rides.”

He didn’t relax. “What then?”

There was no easy way to say it, but I couldn’t help trying.

“Andrew, I heard today that Carol’s dead. She’s been dead for years.”

He looked at me blankly, trying to think who I was talking about.

“Carol Hatcher,” said Daddy.

Carol was more than half a lifetime behind him, and nothing I’d ever heard made me think there’d been anything other than sexual attraction between them.

“Olivia too?” he asked.

“No. She’s alive and she’s here.”

He swiveled in his chair abruptly as if he expected her to come walking from my kitchen onto the porch.

“Not here in the house. Here in the county,” I said. “She’s with the carnival over at Dobbs.”

“Yeah?”

“You heard about the young man that was killed over there last night?”

Andrew nodded.

“That was your grandson, Andrew.”

“The hell you say, Deb’rah!”

“Watch your tongue,” Daddy said mildly. He never likes it when the boys use language around me.

“Well, tell her to watch hers.” His jaws were tight with anger. “Olivia ain’t mine! How many times I got to tell y’all that Carol gave it out to every guy in three counties?”

“You can tell it till you’re blue in the face,” I said, “but it won’t change the fact that you’re the one got tagged fair and square. She’s yours, kid.”

“And how would you know? You won’t even born then.”

“Because Mother said so, remember? She was so sure that she took you over to the Hatcher farm right after you and Lois were married, but Carol had gone off with Olivia again.”

“You were just a baby,” he said. “How could you know that?”

“I told you. Mother said so. Just before she died, she told me all about it. Besides, I’ve seen her, Andrew. I’ve talked to her. She looks more like you than A.K. or Ruth.”

“What’s she doing back here?”

“Right now, she’s part owner of the carnival, but she did wind up getting the old Hatcher place and she and her husband have been fixing up the house.”

“So what does she want?”

He was radiating so much resentment and suspicion that I wanted to slap him for his self-centeredness.

“From you? Not a d—” I caught myself just in time. Much as Daddy doesn’t like anybody cussing in front of me, he likes it even less when I cuss. “Not a blessed thing, Andrew. Just put her out of your head and don’t give another thought to what kind of a life you let your daughter have and what she’s going through right now.”

I turned back to Daddy. “Her boy’s dead and she wants to bury him at the homeplace.”

He looked at Andrew and his voice was courteous. “That all right with you, son?”

Andrew stood up, jammed his John Deere ball cap back on his head, and pushed open the screen door. “Do what you think you need to, Daddy. You and Deb’rah both, since it looks like y’all’ve adopted her. Just keep me and my family out of it, okay? Them carnival tramps is nothing to do with me or mine and that’s how I aim to keep it.”

“She’s no tramp,” I called to his retreating back. “And you tell April or I’ll do it for you.”

He never looked around, just got into his truck and drove off with a great spray of dirt.

I guess I must have given an involuntary sigh because Daddy reached out and patted my hand.

“Don’t let him get under your skin, shug. He’s got to huff and blow about it awhile, but he’ll come ‘round. Don’t forget, he did try’n do the right thing back then.” He cut his eyes at me. “Just the way you did with Allen Stancil.”

Like Carol for Andrew, Allen Stancil was a part of my past I’d just as soon not talk about and certainly not with Daddy, so we sat silently for a few minutes, sipping our iced tea and watching a pair of wood ducks dabbling out on the pond. It’s still pretty peaceful here. Without the occasional beep-beep-beep that drifts in on the wind during the workweek as dump trucks back and haul, one could almost forget the pile of houses that are being built across the creek a half mile away. On this quiet Saturday afternoon, all we could hear at the moment were birdsongs and the hum of insects.

“I reckon Sue told you a lot of things there towards the end,” Daddy said finally.

I nodded.

“Things you still ain’t talked about?”

“A few.”

“I won’t much use to her there for a while, was I? To you, neither, the way I put it all on you like that.”

No denying that it had been hard. I was the only child still at home that summer. The boys were all busy building careers or getting their crops in, getting married, getting divorced, getting babies. And Daddy was gone half the time, too. All of them were unnerved by her dying and the intensity of her need to talk. Daddy was hurting so bad and in such deep denial that he couldn’t—wouldn’t—listen until it was almost too late.

“She understood,” I said, taking his big, work-roughened farmer’s hand between my own. “You were there when she needed you the most. And she knew that you would be. She told me so.”

He squeezed my hand tight, then pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Durn ragweed,” he muttered, as if I didn’t know that he’s never been allergic to any plant. “I believe I could drink another glass of that tea if you’re offering it.”

As I refilled his glass, he said, “Tell me about Olivia. Or Tallahassee, I reckon I ought to say.”

So I told him as much as I knew, omitting the circumstances of Braz’s conception and the fact that Tally’s first marriage had been in name only. And yes, I sort of glossed over Braz’s record so that it didn’t sound too much worse than Reese’s and A.K.’s. Or Andrew’s and Will’s.

Or his, either, for that matter.

“A lot of people look down on carnival people, think they aren’t much good,” I said, “but—”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Like that Cher song.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t you remember? Your mama used to like it. I learned how to play it for her to sing. ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.’ That was the name of it.”

He hummed the chorus, his fingers tapping out the rhythm on the glass tabletop, and for a moment, I could hear Mother’s throaty voice as she sang the line about the hypocritical men who hurled insults at the carnival folks and then came around every night eager to buy tickets for the kootch show.

“I don’t know if Tally ever did any dirty dancing,” I said, “and I’m sure there’s a lot she’s not telling me, but for somebody who had to bring herself up, looks to me like she’s done a pretty decent job of it.”

“What’s her other boy like?”

“Val? He’s about fifteen or sixteen, same build, same coloring as all your other grandsons. Prideful,” I said, remembering his outburst to me last night. “Mindful of his parents, I think. But I only spoke to him briefly.”

He listened to the silence behind my words and nodded. “When does she want to do it?”

“She doesn’t know. When I left, Chapel Hill still hadn’t called her. And that reminds me. I need to call Duck Aldcroft. He’s going to handle things for her.”

“Good.” He stood and reached for his hat. “I’ll go along then. Maidie says you’re coming for supper?”

“If you’ll have me.”

“Always room for another pair of legs under my table, shug. You know that.”