Southern Discomfort

CHAPTER 20

PLUGGING THE HOLES

"A nail set is used to set (meaning to countersink slightly below the surface) the heads of nails in finish carpentry. The purpose of setting is to improve the appearance of the work by concealing the nail heads.... The small surface hole above the head is usually plugged with putty"

It was one of the fastest exhumations I ever heard of. I don't know if it was a combination of Dwight, Terry, and Gordon O'Connor all pushing, but by midmorning on Monday, Ralph McGee had been dug up, relevant tissue samples had been collected, and his body was back under six feet of dirt again out at Centenary Cemetery where most of the best people in Dobbs were buried.

Results of the tests would take a while. As I understand it, proving arsenic's in a body is a fairly simple reactive test; proving it isn't there is a bit more complicated. Still, we were hoping to hear by Wednesday at the latest.

Rumors were flying all over Dobbs, especially since Bo Poole's office had queried Bass Langley's brother in Georgia and the brother said no, he hadn't heard a thing about Bass supposed to be coming home. "He hain't showed up here. Y'all ask Ava where he mought be?"

"Something 'bout that boy makes me think Bass got all the brains in his family," said Dwight as he went off to query the Duprees again.

Wasn't like he had to fight his way through hordes of lunchtime customers, he told me later. The only ones sitting at the Coffee Pot's counter were two out-of-town salesmen, our in-town drunk, and Gordon O'Connor, who was eating the same thing Ralph McGee usually ordered: a rare hamburger all the way and a glass of sweet iced tea.

In most small places, there's always a cousin or a neighbor's elderly sister who'll tell you—for your own good, of course—what folks are whispering behind your back and Dobbs was no different. Retha was red-eyed, Tink seemed bewildered, and Ava acted belligerent when Dwight came in to ask them where else Bass might be, since he wasn't in Georgia, far as they could tell.

"What's the matter, Deputy?" said Ava. "You think we poisoned him, too? You want to look out back in the dumpster?"

"Now, Ava—"

"Mrs. Langley to you, Deputy Bryant," she snapped.

"Now, Ava," said Tink. "No need to get huffy with the customers. What'll you have, Dwight?"

Up until that minute, Dwight says he hadn't really given it much thought as to whether the Coffee Pot actually was the source of the arsenic. He hesitated and saw Gordon O'Connor watching him through those shiny glasses. The epidemiologist picked up the succulent hamburger Retha had made him and bit into it with exaggerated relish.

("Well, he could, couldn't he?" Dwight asked me defensively. "They certainly weren't going to poison somebody from the Health Department.")

"I could sure use some iced tea, thank you, Tink."

"You like it sweet, don't you?"

But that far, Dwight was not prepared to go. He has a flat belly but he patted it anyhow and said he thought he'd better start cutting back on sugar.

"Humph!" said Ava and went outside to wash the windows, the better to glare at the townspeople who hadn't stopped in for their usual morning snacks. * * *

While everyone might've been walking around the Duprees, Paige Byrd was suffering from too much attention. She and her mother had unplugged all the phones and fled to her Aunt Faith's house the night before. Friends and relatives quickly figured it out though, and by noon on Monday, they had crowded into Faith Taylor's house to lend aid and comfort and hear all the titillating details firsthand.

The consensus seemed to be that Paige had done what she had to when she defended her honor and Annie Sue's; and while it was too bad that she'd panicked and run, well, shoot! She was only sixteen, not even over her daddy's death good, and had never said boo to a goose. Who knew if they'd've done any smarter?

Paige stood it as long as she could, then called Annie Sue, who swung by on her way to run a line of 220 wire for a customer's new air-conditioning unit. The customer was an elderly farm woman who, after her husband's early demise, had managed eight acres of tobacco, thirty acres of sweet potatoes, plus the usual corn and soybeans till her sons were old enough to take over the farm.

No big deal, right?

But she thought it was just wonderful the way young women today could do so many things. Imagine being electricians! She was so impressed. And couldn't she just fix them a plate of cookies and a Pepsi? * * *

On Tuesday morning, I awoke to the sound of Mr. Ou's lawn mower. The deep back gardens are overlooked by screened verandas that run the width of the house upstairs and down, and I pushed open my bedroom doors and stepped outside. A lacy screen of clematis shaded my part of the veranda and I looked down onto beds of splashy summer flowers at the height of their colors and riotous beauty.

Aunt Zell has never gone in for exotic plantings. She prefers sturdy common annuals and old-fashioned perennials: zinnias of every color and height from multicolored miniatures to four-foot red giants, clear yellow marigolds, white and pink cosmos, blue salvia, more blue in the speedwell, clumps of old-time daylilies, and stiff purple phlox.

In the middle of the yard, in a long diagonal from the house, is Uncle Ash's lap pool, forty feet long by six feet wide and only four feet deep. A narrow footbridge arches over the center to a weathered gazebo almost hidden in its tangle of purple clematis.

Along the side wall, rhododendrons had finished blooming, but hydrangeas sported deep blue blossom heads bigger than honeydew melons.

Except for a wide swath that meanders through the flowerbeds and strips each side of the lap pool, there isn't much grass here in the back; and one of Mr. Ou's adolescent sons guided the power mower along the path while he and another child weeded and a third boy used an electric edger to trim where the mower couldn't reach. A much younger child gravely lopped off dead flower heads with a pair of hand clippers.

All wore khaki shorts and shirts, brown leather sandals, and cloth hats against the July sun. Mr. Ou himself was so young that I found myself suddenly taking another look at the three older boys. They were quite close in height and build. Too close, in fact, to be brothers unless they were triplets. Perhaps cousins?

In the mad scramble to get out of the refugee camps, Mr. Ou, hardly more than a boy himself, might well have wound up claiming younger brothers or nephews as his own sons. Difficult to imagine all the hardships they must have endured before fetching up here in Colleton County—exiled to a strange land, their future entrusted to strangers.

(By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.)

I wondered what his work had been in his homeland and wished his English or my French were better so that we could speak about something other than the weather and how he was feeling.

Aunt Zell had started putting the puppy out on the grass inside a portable fence after his morning feed so he could start his training, and the youngest Ou child had discovered him. He scooped up Brinkley/Donaldson/ MacNeil/Lehrer (Aunt Zell thought he'd cocked his head with interest when the news came on last night) and spoke to the others in lilting phrases that I took to be a Cambodian dialect.

There were broad grins and smiling replies as he hefted the puppy in an oddly familiar gesture I couldn't quite place. A stray breeze rippled my gown and one of the boys spotted the motion. He hissed a quick warning to the young one, who even more quickly returned Cronkite to his pen. The others paused and gave me half-bows of formal greeting.

"Bon jour," I called down. "C'est un bel matin, non?"

"Good morning," replied Mr. Ou. "Is beauty day, yes. Very hot soon."

Another round of smiles and nods and I went inside to shower and dress. I admired the courage and tenacity that had allowed Mr. Ou to survive and now, even begin to flourish in a modest way. Lu told me that she'd signed up enough home owners for his services that by next spring he would probably be able to afford a riding mower for bigger yards. Dobbs can be suspicious of strangers and foreigners and I was proud they'd let the Ou family settle in without any friction. Cultural clashes can sometimes—

"Oh, dear Lordy!" exclaimed the pragmatist, who often puts two and two together a step ahead of my conscious mind.

"Now don't go jumping to conclusions," the preacher warned nervously.

"Who's jumping? And why are you wringing your hands if you haven't already jumped, too?"

I found Lu Bingham's private number in my address book and when she answered sleepily on the fourth ring, I said, "I have to be in court in exactly one hour and twenty-two minutes. If you want to keep Mr. Ou from having a cross burned on his front doorstep, you better get here in fifteen."

I skipped my shower, threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs.

"Is something wrong?" asked Aunt Zell when I came barreling through the kitchen.

"No, no. Lu Bingham's coming over to help me talk to Mr. Ou. There's a question about wages," I lied, knowing the mention of money would keep her inside.

Aunt Zell would never ask how much I was paying for her anniversary gift, but she did say, "Whatever you're giving him, dear, he's worth every penny. He and those boys do such a good job." * * *

One thing about working in a crisis center, it does seem to give quick reflexes. Lu was still in bed when I called, yet she made it in ten minutes. I guess she was expecting, from the tone of my voice, to find an angry mob storming Aunt Zell's backyard. Instead, there was only Mr. Ou and his boys, toiling peacefully in the early morning sun.

"I ran two red lights," she began indignantly. "What's the big emergency?"

"I need you to translate, okay?"

"If you'd paid more attention in Mrs. Jefferson's French class instead of flirting with Howard Med—"

"You gonna lecture or listen?" I interrupted.

We walked across the narrow arched bridge to the vine-shaded gazebo and Lu asked Mr. Ou to join us.

He came, but he looked apprehensive; and when I gestured for him to sit, he did so gingerly.

"Tell him my aunt has been very pleased with his work," I said.

I waited till she had translated and he had warily acknowledged the compliment, then said, "Ask if he understands that I'm a judge, an officer of the court and bound by the laws of this state?"

She started to protest, took one look at my face and asked him.

Mr. Ou nodded and looked even more apprehensive, if that were possible.

"I've read that dogs are considered great delicacies in your country. Even cats."

Lu gave me an outraged glare. "Of all the stereotyped, xenophobic, racist—"

I glared right back. "Why does a recognition of basic cultural differences always get labeled racism? If I were a racist, I'd have someone from the sheriff's department over going through the bones in his compost heap. I called you, not a reporter from the Ledger, didn't I? So quit hanging insulting labels on me and ask him, okay?"

"Oh, God!" said Lu and hastily translated.

Mr. Ou listened, but said nothing. He didn't have to. Not after I'd seen that youngest boy heft Brokaw the way I've seen Aunt Zell heft a supermarket chicken or pork roast a thousand times.

"In this country, cats and dogs are pets. People here would be horrified and outraged if they knew you had cooked one." I tried not to let myself think of Aunt Zell's Goldie. Of Miss Sallie's Queenie. Or, heaven forbid, Alice Castleberry's registered bull terrier.

"There is no law in North Carolina that actually forbids the eating of these animals," I continued, "but a person who took another's pet could certainly be prosecuted for theft, perhaps even for cruelty to animals."

As Lu translated, Mr. Ou suddenly began to speak and even with my limited French, I understood a protest when I heard one.

Lu confirmed it. "He swears there was no cruelty. Death was painless and swift."

"Then he admits it."

"Not exactly. It's all couched in the conditional voice."

"Well, put this in the imperative: it must stop. No more. If I hear of another single dog or cat disappearing, he and his family will be charged. Even if there's no evidence, just the accusation will make his neighbors shun them, get his children taunted in school, certainly make people quit hiring him. Some Americans get more upset over abused cats than abused children. His very life might even be threatened if certain men were to hear of it.

"These the same men who eat squirrels and possums and shoot a Bambi for their freezer every fall?" Lu asked sardonically.

"Don't try to justify or rationalize, just tell him what I said, and put in as many cultural taboos as you can."

There was a long silence when she finished, then Mr. Ou spoke quietly for several minutes.

"He's very sorry if he's done broken our laws and offended you. It's been very difficult feeding his sons. Boys need meat to grow strong, he says, and there was not enough money to buy it. Now, thanks to his lawn service business, he no longer has to forage for meat, but can buy it at a grocery store. He promises it will not happen again. He's very grateful to you for not bringing him to court, and to show his gratitude, he'd like to do this yard for free from now on."

"That sounds suspiciously like a bribe," I said. "Tell him, thanks but no thanks. If he wants to atone, let him put in a yard at the WomenAid house." * * *

As we walked back to the house, Aunt Zell came out to ask Lu to tell Mr. Ou how really pleased she was with his work and to express her hope that he was finding America a good place to live. She had a small box of cookies for the youngest child. "Animal crackers," she beamed.

I thought of the child's sharp little teeth biting off the head of a tiger and decided to skip breakfast and go directly to court.