Billy Bob Walker Got Married (31 page)

The July morning was unexpectedly cool rather than muggy, as yesterday had been before the rain. Along the two-lane highway that led west to Seven Knobs, late black-eyed Susans bloomed.

The pecan grove was the first sign of Walker Farm. It took up the acreage that bordered the road, and just beyond it was the fruit stand itself. Hanging baskets-fuchsia, begonia, ivy, spider plant, fern—dangling from the extended, wide roof of the stand greeted visitors with a blaze of verdant color.

And all around on tables and in crates was produce of the season; north Mississippi grew it in plentitude: ripe, red tomatoes; their yellow counterparts called Golden Boys; fresh, sweet corn still wrapped in its green covers, still dangling its silky white tassels; two kinds of peaches, spread into bountiful heaps of yellows and reds; baskets of bumpy brown cantaloupes and of crisp green fingers of beans and of sticky, fat, bullet-shaped yellow squash; watermelons sprawled on the floor, one round striped one cut open to reveal its wet, ruby-red sweetness.

And presiding over the harvest was Willie Walker himself, sitting in the rocking chair he kept on the corner porch of the place, under the shade of an overhanging pecan tree, right beside the money box that stayed hidden under an old upside-down washtub where he laid his fan when he got busy talking to visitors and customers.

Billy stopped the Cadillac just past his grandfather, pulling off the road into the shade. Then he looked down at Shiloh.

"Come on. Don't be scared," he coaxed, seeing the nervousness in her face. "Grandpa won't bite."

"Aren't you scared?" she asked.

"Nope. Things will be fine, you'll see," he promised, ignoring his own nagging little apprehension.

"Maybe for you, but what do you think you'd feel if this was my family you were going to meet?" she persisted.

"I've already had the honor, and I was shaking in my shoes. But this is my family. They're different. Now come on."

She let him tug her out of the car, then over to where Willie sat, watching without a word.

A woman and two little boys were thumping watermelons. Shiloh didn't know any of them.

"So you finally decided to come home," Willie drawled, without waiting for his grandson to speak. "Your mama's been worried."

"I'm sorry. I figured you'd hear what happened. And I told her from the beginning I'd be all right."

"We've heard a lot. And it appears to me that there's a whole bunch of things you
didn't
tell us." Willie pushed himself up on his cane, looking at the girl whose hand Billy held tightly in his—the girl who stood so close to his grandson. "So this is Pennington's daughter, is she?"

Billy's hand tightened around Shiloh's. "This is my wife," he said pointedly. "Her name is Shiloh."

"Hmphm." Willie squinted at her. "Pretty as a picture, just like Clancy said. I hope she's pretty enough to be worth all the trouble."

"I hope I'm worth her," Billy returned.

Willie looked from her to him, then back to Shiloh. "Why'd you marry him, girl?"

Shiloh answered steadily, "Because I love him."

"How much is this corn, Willie?" the woman called across the fruit stand.

"Price is marked on each bushel basket, Melinda. You just got to look for it."

"Mama, I don't know how else to tell you, so I'll just come out and say it. This is Shiloh. We got married a few weeks ago."

Billy held her in front of him, his hands on her upper arms, her back pressed tightly to his chest. He wanted Ellen to take to Shiloh, to understand that she was different from all the other girls, and not just because she was his wife. But his mother's face was a little frightened, a little shy, a little angry—probably at him.

"It's nice to meet you," Shiloh said hesitantly, her own hands reaching up to curl around his, as if for reassurance.

Her politeness flustered Ellen even more. She nodded at Shiloh and mumbled, "Nice to meet you," her hands twisting the apron she wore.

Billy's mother was a pretty woman, Shiloh thought, shorter and more petite than she herself was, blond and green-eyed. There was little about her even to suggest that she had mothered him.

Certainly none of his laughter. She looked stern and stiff.

They don't like me, she thought in dismay.

"You never gave a sign you were thinkin' about gettin' married," his mother told him quietly. "I got the news long about dark yesterday. The last to know. Ann McIntyre, the biggest gossip in Seven Knobs, she told me on her way home from Sweetwater. I kept waitin' for you to come and tell me. Waited 'til eleven last night before I went to bed."

"I'm sorry, Mama. But we had a pretty rough day yesterday. I wanted to get away" Billy's face darkened as he faced Ellen over Shiloh s head.

"I need to talk to you, Will," she returned, glancing away from the girl in her son's arms.

"That's fair. But I want to show Shiloh the house, okay? We're married, Mama. Really and truly married. We want to live here, unless there's a reason you've got against us doin' that."

His voice challenged Ellen, and Shiloh turned her face toward his chest. This involvement in the personal, intimate relationships of a family that she didn't belong to was intensely embarrassing.

Ellen moved at last, answering flatly. "The house is more yours than anybody's. I'm not disputin' the facts, Billy. You've put ever' red cent in it that's been put in for the last five years. You can do as you please in it."

"It's part mine, that's all." He moved suddenly, pulling away from Shiloh to drop a kiss on his mother's cheek. She caught at his arm convulsively for a second, then released him back to Shiloh.

"Reckon I'll go down to the fruit stand for a while," she said huskily. "I'll be there when you're ready to talk." She looked directly at Shiloh.

Maybe it was hurt, or doubt, or fear, or even reserve that made her seem withdrawn and her green eyes sad, Shiloh thought as Ellen spoke. "We're real glad to have
you
in the family, Miss Penn—"

"Shiloh." She smiled tentatively at her mother-in-law, wondering if there would ever be a meeting ground for the two of them.

"Walker," Billy added insistently. "Her name is Walker, Mama."

He had never realized before just how old and even downright shabby the interior of the farmhouse was. The outside of it he had kept painted, just as he kept the lawn mowed and the shrubs and the hedges trimmed.

But it had been years since much time had been put into the house. All three of them had worked frantically on the expanding orchards and on the business.

There was never enough money to stretch to buy new carpets or curtains, and even if there had been, Ellen had always been an outdoors, practical person, not a woman who liked or understood any more about a house than keeping it squeaky clean.

It never mattered to her if the bedroom suites matched, or if the two worn-out recliners in the living room were gray and the carpet a dusty tan.

Or that three different kinds of chairs sat around the heavy oak table in the kitchen.

But Billy saw it now with new eyes and winced, remembering the luxury of the rooms he'd seen at Shiloh's house. But he showed her everything stubbornly—better that she understood things right up front.

The house looked like an L from the front, with long banistered porches filling in from one gable to the end of the house, both upstairs and downstairs, both front and back.

But in truth, it formed a T. An arm projected backward from the kitchen, as well as forward from it.

The room to the front was an old-fashioned, little-used parlor; the room to the back of the kitchen was a complete surprise, a light, buttery room full of the morning sun. Windows on one side let it flood in; windows along the back revealed a giant hickory tree casting a heavy shadow outside; and a door on the third wall opened onto the back porch.

The room held an old white iron bed with a patchwork quilt, a wooden set of drawers painted blue, and a straight back chair with a cane bottom, painted a horrible brown. There was no carpet, just a squeaky, yellowy, waxed wooden floor.

"Whose room is this?" Shiloh asked, breaking the silence that lay around them as he opened doors and motioned her into rooms.

"Nobody's. I think it was once Grandpa's sister's. The place has been in his family for years." Billy moved away, motioning her after him. "Down this hall is the bathroom. There's only one. Here's the den, and down there"—he pointed to a door at the end of the hall—"that's Grandpa's room."

"Where does your mother sleep?"

"Upstairs . . . here." Billy motioned her to the long narrow stairs that led up between two wall-papered walls. Nothing glamorous about these steps, Shiloh thought, remembering the gentle curve and the deliberately exposed, arched support beams of the stairs in her own home.
Sam's
home. Billy Bob's steps were just to connect one floor to another, that was all.

"Mama's in this room." He showed her the open door at the top right of the steps, but she hung back, reluctant to look in. "She's right above Grandpa. He can't get up and down stairs anymore, but if he needs her, he just taps on the ceiling with his cane."

That only left one important place to visit.

"This is my room," he said quietly, and stood aside to let her enter. It was beside his mother's room. Too close.

A big bed made of red oak stood in the dead center, its headboard against one wall. A table beside it, a lamp, an alarm clock. One tall dresser with a small mirror above it, shelves on one entire wall that ran from the ceiling down to a long desk.

And books.

They surprised her. She glanced at them, then at him as he watched her face.

He didn't seem like a reader.

She moved to the shelves, reached up, and pulled one off.
Introduction to Animal Husbandry.
Another one above that was entitled
Advanced Studies in Horticulture.

"Have you read all these?" she asked in amazement, putting down the heavy tome she'd picked up.

He shrugged, his cheeks a little flushed. "Most of 'em. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to, so I could understand things that I needed to know."

"I . . . see."

That was a lie. She didn't see anything. How could she? Her eyesight was blurred from tears.

What had she done? She had taken as a husband a man she had only known briefly four years ago. She didn't know him now, not the first thing about the way he lived, not how he thought, not even what he read.

This was an unknown house that didn't feel or smell like home.

Nobody wanted her here except Billy Bob, and he himself had done things to her that had made her a stranger even to herself.

For one painful minute, Shiloh wanted to go home to Laura and Sam, until she fought down the wave of homesickness.

"What's the matter?" Billy asked tenderly, coming up behind her to wrap his arms around her, to cuddle her up against him, his chin on top of her head. "Afraid I'm gonna make you read all of these books? Well, don't worry. They'd put a hyperactive to sleep, and I want you wide awake, baby."

His teasing didn't offer much reassurance, but enough for her to say what she wanted.

"The room at the end of the porch downstairs, Billy. Could I—can I have that one?"

He went still behind her, the hands that had been stroking her arms freezing.

"You mean—to sleep there?"

She nodded.

"And just tell me," he said dangerously, pushing away from her, twisting her around to face him, "why you can't sleep here, in my room, with me?"

"It's—it's too close, that's what. To everybody. And it's you. Totally you, Billy. I don't belong in this house. I don't think it even wants me here. All this stuff—she motioned at the books—"I didn't know you read like this. I don't think I have a chance here."

"What you mean is, you're regrettin' everything we've done already," he said in anger, turning loose of her. "This house—
my
home—it's not good enough for you."

"That's not true. But I have to be alone for a little while."

"In a different room, on another floor from me? Tell me something, Shiloh." He caught her chin in his hard fingers, forcing her to look at him. "Where's the girl who told me we were free, the girl who took off her clothes and gave herself to me, the girl who held me last night and called my name when—-"

"You were different, too, last night," she cut in, her face flaming. "You needed me. Today you're a part of your family. Of this house. You don't need comfort."

He turned loose, swallowing, his own face flushed.

"All right." Billy moved away and looked out the window at the shady backyard. "By God, then, you take that room downstairs. You stay there until you're ready to be my wife. I want the Shiloh I held last night, not somebody seared of belonging to me, and my family, and my home."

"It all happened so fast, Billy," she whispered, and the sound of her voice was so forlorn that his shoulders sagged and the temper went out of him.

"Don't you think I know how hard this is for you?" he asked, then let his hand reach out to brush her cheek lightly with his knuckles. "I've gotta go smooth things over with Mama. I'll tell her that you'll be using that room. Get some rest, baby. You didn't get much last night."
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17

"You've been with
this girl four years and we've never heard a peep about it?" Willie demanded dubiously. The cane in his right hand pointed straight at Billy, as unnerving as the staff of Moses indicting an uneasy, but unrepentant, young Pharaoh.

So Billy explained it again, patiently, except for the part about the thirty-five hundred dollars, which he carefully chose to omit.

"... and we met again the night she wrecked her car and they brought her to the jail to wait for her father."

"You sure got married quick as greased lightnin'," Willie continued.

Billy sucked in his breath in exasperation. "I knew what I wanted, Grandpa. I wasn't going to let her get away a second time."

"What you wanted," Ellen said slowly, ignoring her son's face, focusing stubbornly instead on the Bed Delicious apples she was polishing, "belonged to the judge's other son."

"No." Billy's denial was fast and emphatic. "I know what you're thinkin', that I was after Shiloh to get even with the Sewells."