Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 17

TUESDAY MORNING

Tuesday continued fair and sunny, but weather forecasters were predicting a change by the weekend. Normally, I like autumn rains that help the trees unleaf and let winter wheat sprout so that newly disked fields turned bright green. Now I was hoping they’d hold off till after the harvest festival ended Saturday night so that Tally and Arnold wouldn’t have a financial loss to pull them down further after the loss of their son.

I’d forgotten to set the alarm and didn’t wake up till nearly eight. That was so surprising, I reached over and picked up the telephone just to reassure myself I still had a dial tone. I had half expected a call from April or Andrew or Minnie or Dwight. Instead, the phone stayed silent while I showered and then struggled with panty hose. I always forget to check for runs and the first two pairs I tried had them. In the second leg, of course.

The dress I put on was a sleeveless navy with a matching long-sleeved jacket that was cropped at the waist. Instead of my usual pumps, I found a pair of Cuban-heeled navy shoes more suitable for walking around a sandy-soil graveyard. For sentiment, I wore my silver charm bracelet again.

Lipstick, a dash of mascara, a touch of blusher, and I was ready to roll by eight forty-five.

Still no phone calls. I wondered if Dwight had chickened out of telling Miss Emily.

I’d left my car parked by the back door, and when I slid in behind the steering wheel and started to fasten my seat belt, I saw an unfamiliar manila envelope that had slipped down between the two seats. Puzzled, I opened it and found a thick stack of color photographs. They all seemed to be of the same woman in different clinging outfits. When I looked closer, they appeared to be nightgowns in colors that ranged from sexy black satin that shimmered in the camera’s flash to demure white lace and pink ribbons, with all the rainbow in between. But they were such crazy poses that it took me a minute to realize she must have taken the pictures herself, holding the camera out at arm’s length. Nothing could be seen of her face, though, except a chin line here, a brow there, or, in overhead shots, her dark curly hair and dangling earrings above more lace and silk.

I recognized that these must have come from the self-storage locker of negligees that Braz had bought, but how—?

Then I remembered Dwight struggling with my seat belt. The envelope must have slipped out of his jacket pocket. With a mental note to hand it back to him at the funeral, I stuck it up between the sun visor and the roof.

When I got over to the homeplace, most of my sisters-in-law were already there, aprons tied over their Sunday dresses, working as a team as they directed the kids to set up lawn chairs out under the shade trees and on the porch that wrapped around three sides of the house. It was a school day, yet all the children seemed to be here. A long table had been set up on the porch nearest the kitchen door and I found Minnie and Jessica covering it with several snowy white bedsheets that were kept for just that purpose.

Jessie immediately voiced the curiosity the others must be feeling. “Deborah! You’ve met her. What’s she like?”

“Does she have tattoos?” asked Will and Amy’s youngest.

“Didn’t see any,” I said, answering the easiest question first. “She looks like anybody else. Very nice, but very sad right now.”

“Does she look like Ruth or A.K.?” asked Zach’s Emma, who was filling napkin holders from an enormous package.

“Yes,” I said, looking around for Andrew.

Out at the grave site, Duck’s people had set up rows of folding chairs under the tent. The closed casket was already in place with a blanket of red roses covering the polished wood. Duck and several of my brothers, somber in dark suits and white shirts, were down there with more of the children. But no Andrew.

“Which?” said Emma.

“Which what, honey?”

“Which one does she look like?”

“Both of them. Same eyes, only black hair.”

I slipped past before they could bombard me with more questions. Inside the kitchen, Maidie was sugaring a huge vat of hot tea since everybody knows you might as well not bother with sugar at all if you try to add it after the tea is iced. Never tastes the same.

“Stevie? You and Reese can go ahead and set them ice chests out on the porch, too,” she said.

I turned, and there was my nephew back from Chapel Hill in a gray tweed jacket, blue shirt, and tie. As my glance fell on him, he immediately grabbed the ice chest and retreated, which let me know I wasn’t the only one hoping to avoid awkward questions.

Amy and Doris were making coffee in the two big party urns Mother had bought thirty years ago when one of the boys got married here at the homeplace, and Haywood and Isabel arrived with Jane Ann and a box full of plastic cups, plates, forks, and spoons.

Since Haywood immediately demanded more information, I tried to tell them as concisely as I could.

“She’s not Olivia anymore, I guess y’all heard that?”

“Tallahassee,” said Robert’s wife Doris, disapprovingly. “Now you got to say that’s a real peculiar name to call yourself. Like me changing my name to Raleigh or Fuquay-Varina ”

“Actually, wasn’t Varina a woman’s name?” asked Isabel, going off on her own tangent. “Somebody from Civil War days?”

“If you have a problem with that, Doris,” I said, “just call her Tally. That’s what everybody else does.”

“I didn’t say I had a problem with it,” Doris said huffily. “I just said it seemed peculiar. I can say that, can’t I?”

“Doris, honey, you can say anything you want,” said Minnie, who’d stepped inside the kitchen, “but let’s let Deborah tell us what we need to know before they get here, all right?”

Doris thought about flouncing off (Doris does that a lot), but she was too curious, so she subsided and listened as I explained that our niece Tally had been married almost twenty years to someone named Arnold Ames, that they lived in Florida, that they were part owners of the carnival playing the harvest festival, that she owned the old Hatcher place over near Widdington, that she had a second son named Valdosta (Doris frowned at that name), who was about sixteen (the girl cousins perked up their ears), and that they’d probably be accompanied by a lot of their carnival friends.

“I hope you’ll all remember that Sunday’s a workday for them when they’re on the road and they live in trailers too crowded for a lot of clothes they wouldn’t normally need, so some of them might not be dressed up. But Braz was their friend and I’m sure they’ll be mourning for him just as sincerely as if they were in suits and ties and Sunday dresses.”

Several started to scold me for even suggesting that they’d judge a person’s worth by their clothes, but I knew it would undercut the ones like Doris and also help the kids keep an open mind.

Another car arrived with A.K. driving April and Ruth. No Andrew.

“He just flat refuses to come,” April said despairingly. “And there’s nothing I can say that Seth and Mr. Kezzie haven’t already said. We’ll just have to make the best of it.”

Duck Aldcroft had sent a funeral car for Tally and her family, but they weren’t due for another half hour.

I slipped out of the house while the others were exclaiming and tsk-tsking, and a few minutes later I was easing my car’s low-slung chassis across a couple of erosion barriers in the lanes between the homeplace and Andrew’s house.

As I expected, he was out back at the pens with some of his rabbit dogs.

“Don’t you start on me!” he said as soon as he saw me. “I’m not going and that’s that. You can just turn around and march yourself right back over to Daddy’s. You hear?”

“I hear,” I said, and kept coming till I reached the step of the little viewing house he and the boys had built in front of the quarter-acre training pen so that they could watch the dogs in comfort when the weather was rainy or cold.

I didn’t say anything, just sat on the step and waited while he raked the dog dirt out of the gravel yard of each pen, filled their pans with fresh water, and checked their ears for mites and ticks. His hands were gentle with them, if a bit unsteady, and his face still had a pasty look from all the liquor he’d drunk this weekend.

“You had no call to tell April,” he said angrily.

“I didn’t go looking for her, Andrew. She came to me. To find out why you’d crawled in a bottle to hide.”

He glared at me. “I won’t hiding!”

I just sat there and looked back at him.

“I won’t hiding,” he muttered.

“No? What do you call this?”

He turned back to the dogs without answering, but when next he looked at me, he said, “You don’t go on, you’re gonna be late for the burying.”

I shrugged. “She’ll have lots of other aunts and uncles there.” I let a moment go by. “No father, though.”

“I ain’t—” He broke off with a disgusted wave of his hand. “Oh, hell, Deb’rah. She don’t want me there.”

“You won’t know that for sure unless you go.”

I stood up and walked over to the dog pens. “Show me your hands.”

“Huh?”

“Your hands,” I said.

Puzzled, he held them up. I reached across the fence, took his right hand in mine, turned it over, and traced the scar there with my finger. “How’d you get that?”

“Aw, you know how. Guy in a bar had a knife.”

“And you took it away from him.”

“I was liquored up,” he said dryly. “You telling me to go have a couple of stiff ones?”

He started to pull his hand away, but I held on to it and pointed to another ragged scar at the base of his thumb.

“You weren’t liquored up when Jap Stancil’s bulldog went after Jack.”

He did pull his hand away then.

“You’re not a coward, Andrew, so how come you’re so scared of meeting her?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say after all this time,” he said plaintively. “Besides, she’d probably just spit in my face.”

“Yes,” I conceded. “There is that possibility. So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re not afraid of switchblades or bulldogs, but you are afraid of a little spit, right?”

“Shit, Deb’rah.” Against his will, the barest hint of a smile crossed his lips.

“Daddy’s got soap and water,” I told him. “And if she really does want to spit in your face, well, don’t you think you owe her that much?”

His eyes were anguished. “But what’ll I say to her?”

“How about ‘I’m sorry’? How about ‘I was a stupid kid who didn’t have the brains God gave a monkey’? How about ‘I was wrong. You are my daughter and I’m glad to meet you’?”

“Yeah,” he said with a shaky smile. “I guess any of those would do.”

One nice thing about men—they don’t take forever to get dressed.

While Andrew splashed around in the bathroom, I laid out his suit, shirt, and tie, found fresh underwear, dark socks, and his dress shoes, then got out of his way. He was a little damp around the edges but ready to go exactly twelve minutes after he caved.

Even so, Duck Aldcroft’s funeral car had already arrived with Tally, Arnold, and Val, and Daddy must have been out front to welcome her. Tall and dignified, his hair bright silver in the sunlight, he was escorting her to the front row of chairs as we came down the slope. Arnold and Val both wore sports jackets, shirts, and ties as did the other owner, Ralph Ferlanski, and Dennis Koffer, the show’s patch. Tally looked beautiful in a dark green pantsuit and man-tailored white silk shirt. Some twenty-five or thirty other carnival people arrived in a collection of motley cars and trucks. All were neatly, if more casually, dressed, and they followed the Ameses awkwardly, uncertain of the protocol of a family graveyard. There was a little glitch as Duck’s people tried to get them to take seats under the canopy and they held back. They clearly thought they should be the ones standing and that our family should sit.

While Duck was sorting them out, I took Andrew’s hand and led him to the front row where Tally sat between Daddy and Arnold. She looked up as though in relief at seeing my familiar face, and I gave her a quick hug.

“This is Andrew,” I whispered in her ear, “and he’s scared out of his mind that you’re going to spit in his face.”

Her blue eyes were huge in her drawn face as she looked up at him somberly.

Standing there between the coffin of his grandson and the daughter he’d denied for so long, Andrew suddenly looked as if he’d been hit with a poleax. His face crumpled.

“They didn’t tell me you were so pretty,” he said brokenly. “Oh, Livvie, baby, I’m so sorry. About your boy, about you—I was so dumb back then.”

I don’t know what she’d planned to do or say when she finally met him. What she actually did do was look deep in his eyes, then put out her hand to him and say, “You were seventeen back then.”

Daddy got up and gave Andrew his chair. Duck found him another a few rows back, and I went and stood between Seth and Dwight.

Tally had said they didn’t want a religious ceremony and Duck did the best he could, but it’s hard when you’re so used to Bible Belt rituals. He read Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” and talked about youth’s bright promise cut short. He started to call for prayer, caught himself, and instead suggested that everyone close their eyes for a moment of silence in tribute to Brazos Hartley.

I knew from experience that when Duck says a moment of silence, he means the full sixty seconds. Sixty seconds seems forever when you’re trying to think reverential thoughts about someone you’ve never known.

Eventually, he murmured a soft “Amen,” and there was a general rustling and throat-clearing.

“I’ll ask everyone but his immediate family to rise now and join in while Annie Sue Knott leads us in ‘Amazing Grace.’”

We’re all more or less musical, but Herman and Nadine’s Annie Sue has the best voice in the family and it rang out pure and sweet as she set the pitch and timing for the rest of us. The boys and their wives and children were right there with her by the third note—bass, alto, tenor, and soprano, our voices blended in the old familiar harmonies:

‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home.