Mama Stalks the Past (9 page)

“Nat is fine,” Mama assured them. She sat down and motioned me to pour her a cup of tea. “You know,” she said, after she was satisfied that her brew had plenty of sugar and lemon in it, “Hannah Mixon was my neighbor. I saw her as much as anybody in the area. Still, I didn’t know much about her.”

Carrie Smalls made a throaty sound. “That’s ’cause Hannah was a selfish woman. She could live in this world alone, except for her boy, Nat.”

“I never saw visitors. I wondered about her family,” Mama continued serenely.

“Hannah didn’t have family,” Carrie Smalls stated. “Her people died before she was full grown. Course, being married so many times,
she had a lot of in-laws.” She said this grimly, as if in-laws were germs. I tried to remember if Carrie Smalls had ever married.

Mama cleared her throat. “Did either of you ladies know Hannah’s husbands?” she asked, an innocence in her voice.

“Of course we knew them!” Annie Mae Gregory roared. “I courted her first husband, Curtis Joyner, myself. That was before Curtis ever knew Hannah. Should have married him, could have if I had wanted to. Curtis died six months after Hannah got him. Had that Spanish flu that was going around right after the war.”

I cleared my throat.

“World War One,” Mama explained to me, keeping her eyes on Annie Mae.

Carrie Smalls continued. “It was years later when Hannah married her second husband, Charles Warren. He wasn’t half the man Curtis was. Charles was Nat’s father. The boy was only a baby when Charles got himself killed in a gambling fight.” Carrie Smalls shook her head. “Nat’s got bad blood in him. I reckon Hannah knew it, too. That’s why she didn’t try to make much out of the boy.”

“And her third husband?” Mama asked.

This time Annie Mae Gregory answered. “His name was Richard Wescot. Richard was from
Darien. He was a fine-looking man, a red bone, high yellow with a deep singing voice.”

“He used to sing quartet,” Carrie Smalls added.

“Richard had people follow him all the way to Melbourne just to hear him sing,” Annie Mae Gregory agreed.

“I’ve seen him turn out more than one church service,” Sarah Jenkins added. “Poor Richard wasn’t married to Hannah for more than three years before he died.”

“Miss Hannah may not have had the best personality,” I declared, “but she certainly had the knack of getting married.”

“Hannah got husbands but she seemed to lose them as fast,” Mama pointed out.

Sarah Jenkins coughed. “Ill tell you one thing, nobody in this town was surprised when Hannah snagged her fourth husband, Leroy Mixon.”

Mama looked puzzled.

Sarah Jenkins tried to laugh, but started coughing, instead. Nobody said anything until it was certain that she was going to live.

“That’s because Leroy Mixon was just like Hannah,” Carrie Smalls said firmly. “Together they were the meanest two people in these parts!”

That night, Nat was sitting up in his hospital bed, his long legs stretched out under the white sheet, his head wrapped neatly in bandages. Mama sat at his bedside. Daddy stood leaning at the door.

Mama urged Nat to tell me his story. Nat tilted his head to one side and gave me one of his most dejected looks. “I walked into the house—” he began.

I was impatient. “What time was that?” I interrupted.

“Five, six—”

“It had to be before six,” I said. “Everybody in the world was up at six
A.M
., right, Mama?”

Mama cut her eyes. “Go on, Nat,” she said, “tell Simone what happened next.”

Nat yawned. “Somebody hit me in the back of my head,” he said.

“We know that!” I said, exasperated.

Nat looked up, his head cocked. “Felt like it was with a hammer!”

Daddy interjected, “Big boy like you should watch out for falling hammers!”

“He must have hid behind something, ’cause if I’d seen him, he’d never got the best of me!” Nat declared.

Daddy laughed.

“Do you have any idea who it could have been?” I asked Nat.

“No,” Nat said. “But he was big.”

Mama’s voice sounded relaxed, at ease. “Bigger than you?” she asked.

Nat took a deep, shuddering breath. “He was
big!”
he repeated.

We weren’t getting very far. “Anything else?” I asked.

Nat hesitated. Then he wrinkled his nose. “He smelled funny,” he told us.

Mama’s eyes opened wide. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“
Funny
?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Nat answered. He rubbed his eyes and yawned again.

“Funny like what?” Mama demanded.

‘”I don’t know. If I smell it again, I’ll tell you,” Nat answered, making me long to smack him over his head myself.

“Maybe he smelled like alcohol,” Daddy told Nat. “Like your favorite brew!”

It’s amazing, I thought, how easily my father could see Nat’s drinking as a problem but couldn’t see his own.

Nat shook his head. “It was something else,” he insisted. “Something I never smelled before.”

“It may be a good idea for you to stay with us for a while,” Mama said. Daddy frowned.

This seemed to terrify Nat. “Oh, no!” he cried, his mouth slack with panic.

“Suppose whoever hit you comes back?” Mama asked.

Nat made a gesture. “Don’t worry, I’m listening to you, I’m gonna make sure that all the doors and windows are locked from now on.”

“Always look behind you,” Daddy joked.

“Most big fellers hit from behind!”

We had left the hospital, and were back in our snug kitchen when I turned again to the window with its view of Miss Hannah’s shabby little house. “Have you wondered how Miss Hannah got to own two hundred and fifty acres of prime land?” I asked Mama. “The way she and Nat lived, you’d never thought she had anything valuable.”

Mama began cutting slices from a fresh loaf of wheat bread. “I don’t reckon nobody knew Hannah owned that land. Except maybe the tax collector.”

“I was thinking the same thing. I plan to check the county tax records tomorrow, see when she got the land.”

“That’s a good idea, Simone,” Mama said.

Daddy sneezed loudly, pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his nose. “Around here, land is more valuable than gold.”

“It’s so valuable,” I said, “that your Uncle
Chester refuses to die so that he can continue to control the acres of land owned by your family.”

Mama started to say something, but Daddy broke in. “Uncle Chester can’t live too much longer—nobody lives forever. I’ve told Agatha to wait a few more months, a year at the most, and then she can do whatever she needs to do with that land.”

Mama shook her head. “James, you don’t understand. It’s prudent to take care of the land
before
Uncle Chester dies. That way, there won’t be a nasty fight among the cousins, the heirs. If Uncle Chester would only give Agatha the power of attorney, she can go ahead and set up the Covington Land Company and incorporate it. Agatha has already started the process; Calvin Stokes has drawn up the papers. The corporation would be set up for one hundred years. That way the land will stay in the family.”

Daddy sneezed again. But he didn’t say a word.

“Agatha has been satisfied with getting the timber cut and paying the taxes,” Mama continued, “but she knows that she ain’t going to be able to take care of the land forever.”

“I never thought of that,” I said.

“James, you and your cousins are the second generation. Agatha knows that none of the Covington children of the third generation is going
to take responsibility for that land. Agatha is afraid that when she dies, the Covington property will get sold, or worse, lost for taxes.”

“I wouldn’t want the responsibility of handling the Covington property, of seeing that it stays in the family,” I said.

Daddy scowled. “I agree with Agatha that our parents worked hard for that land. They did without a lot of things to buy it and to keep it. It’ll be a shame to lose it from neglect.”

Mama nodded. “Agatha is doing the right thing,” she said firmly. “And somehow we’ve got to make Uncle Chester understand that!”

C
liff and I talked around ten-thirty that night. He was still tied up in New York. The Zwigs were going at it tooth and nail. Needless to say, I was depressed. The thought of going back to work again in Atlanta without so much as looking into his face was sickening. And the next morning the black cloud still seemed to hang over my head. I called Sidney and begged for the balance of the week off. He quickly agreed.

Mama seemed a little preoccupied. She hadn’t gotten any closer to finding either Miss Hannah’s Bible or the mysterious envelope.

Around ten
A.M
., I set off to find the source of Miss Hannah’s large property holding. I headed
for the Otis County Courthouse, a large, very ugly brick building built in 1878 that sits at the head of Main Street.

It took me an hour to find the source of Hannah Mixon’s large property holdings. That’s because when I couldn’t find a record of Miss Hannah’s purchase in the Clerk of Court Deed Books, I went to Probate Court on the assumption that Miss Hannah could have inherited the land from one of her husbands. Sure enough, I found Leroy Mixon’s will stating that the property would belong to Hannah Mixon and, upon her death, it would pass on to her son, Nat.

“Not anymore,” I murmured, reading the fine print in the will. “Upon her death, it passed on to my Mama, Candi Covington.”

Before going back to our house, I stopped into the drugstore to pick up a few candy bars. I was looking though the selection, trying to convince myself that I didn’t need to buy as many as I wanted to, when I saw Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls drive up outside in the large blue Buick owned and solely driven by Carrie Smalls.

I started to slip toward the back of the store, because I didn’t want another encounter without Mama’s presence. Fortunately, the three women didn’t see me. They were too busy talking. They
stopped in front of the pharmacy, their backs to me.

“Well, if you ask me,” Annie Mae Gregory was saying, “Candi knows more than she’s letting on.” Her large body seemed to tremble with excitement.

“Hannah hated Candi, I know that for a fact,” Sarah Jenkins said.

The sound of these women talking about Mama twisted something inside me.

Carrie Smalls interjected. “It’s mighty suspicious that Candi was the one to take Nat to the hospital.”

“Seems pretty clear to me,” Annie Mae continued. “Candi might not have been doing that boy any favor dragging him to the hospital if she was the one that tried to kill him.”

“Candi tries to make people think she ain’t changed since she’s come back home to live, but I don’t buy it,” Carrie Smalls said.

I was shocked, to say the least. My first impulse was to give the women a piece of my mind, to set them straight about talking about Mama. Then it occurred to me that Mama would want to know what they were saying, so I controlled my inclination and eased around on the other side of the aisle so that I could better hear then talk without them knowing I was listening.

Annie Mae Gregory spoke. “You can’t travel
all over the world and mingle with different people and come back home the same way as you left.”

“I dare say, Candi could have learned how to hide poison in Hannah’s food when she was overseas,” Sarah Jenkins said.

Annie Mae Gregory’s huge body stiffened. “If Candi had something to do with Hannah’s dying and somebody hitting poor Nat, she had a reason.”

“Talk is that Hannah didn’t like her neighbors,” Sarah contributed.

“What is it she didn’t like about Candi?” Carrie asked.

“Don’t know exactly,” Sarah Jenkins said, “but Hannah told my first cousin’s wife that Candi tried to bring her something to eat once. Hannah said she knew better than to eat anything from Candi Covington’s house.”

“Hannah might have known something about Candi that we don’t,” Carrie Smalls said.

“If you ask me, Hannah suspected Candi of trying to poison her then,” Annie Mae Gregory said.

That was enough. My appetite for candy was gone. I fought an impulse to slap each of the women and instead, eased toward the front door. Once in my Honda, I headed home.