Slow Dollar (23 page)

I told her about Daddy and as much of his first wife as I could, about my brothers and their children, and about A.K. and Ruth, her half siblings; but that seemed to make her uncomfortable so I remembered something I’d read about on the Internet and I asked, “Did you ever do a hey rube?”

“Me personally? Nope.”

“Not even when those guys were ripping up your Pot O’Gold?”

“For three drunks?” Her voice held amused scorn as she shook her head. “You only do one when you need a lot of backup quick, okay? First one I ever saw was at the Brandywine Racetrack, about a month after I was with it. One of the towners had some problem with a guy on one of the rides so he got about thirty of his buds together about eleven o’clock one night and they all climbed up and over the back of the ride to attack the eight guys who were crewing the ride. Well, the guy on the mike at the ride booth saw what was happening and he hey rubed over the mike, which brought about fifty carnies running. It was a real short spat.”

She smiled in memory. “If you yell ‘Hey Rube,’ everyone drops everything to assist. I mean, games are empty, rides stop in midturn, food’s left to burn on the grill, so it’s a serious thing. I’ve only seen about five in all my years.”

As she spoke, her husband and son rounded the corner of the women’s bunkhouse.

The boy gave me a curt nod and went on into their trailer, but Arnold Ames sank down into one of the webbed chairs.

“Judge,” he said.

“Please. Call me Deborah.”

“She’s no judge here, Arnie, okay?” Tally said.

He shrugged.

“Get you a beer, hon?”

“That’d taste good.”

“Deborah, you ready yet?”

Again I passed and she stepped inside the trailer.

“I probably ought to be going,” I told her husband. “But it’s been good getting to know Tally.”

“Don’t leave on my account,” said Ames.

I listened for the sarcasm beneath his words, but there didn’t seem to be any. He had a nice face. Not handsome, but pleasant. I guessed him to be midforties. A receding hairline. Shrewd green eyes. The hard wiry build of a man who does physical work outside.

Tally struck me as a complete pragmatist, a woman who’d seen too much crap to put up with anything she didn’t like for very long. If she’d stayed married to Arnold Ames for going on twenty years, it had to be because he was good to her. That was enough for me to cut him all the slack he needed tonight.

Tally came back with an opened bottle of beer, and he thirstily chugalugged several swallows.

“TV people were all over the front end,” he said. “They get back here?”

Tally shook her head. “What’s happening with Polly?”

“They’ve taken her to Chapel Hill. They think she killed herself.”

“
Why?
”

He reached out to touch her hand. “They’re not saying, but from the questions they asked, and the way they were being extra careful to bag up her shoes...”

“What?” Tally prodded.

“They may be thinking she’s the one killed Braz.”

It was a little past nine when I left Tally and Arnie. People were gathering around the two trailers, bringing lawn chairs and coolers, ready to spend the rest of the evening talking about Polly and Braz and offering what comfort they could. Even though Tally seemed to accept me now, I knew my presence would make the others uncomfortable, so I drew a map to show Arnie how to get to the farm, then I hugged Tally goodnight and repeated April’s invitation to bring as many of their friends tomorrow as wanted to be there.

Windy Raines, with rough courtesy, offered to walk me to my car, but I told him I’d be fine.

As indeed I was. Officers still milled around the Plate Pitch, but the reporters with their cameras seemed to have moved on and there was no sign of Dwight, either, till I got to my car and found a prowl car parked along side. The window was down, and he seemed to be catching a cat nap behind the steering wheel.

“Hey,” I said softly. “You asleep?”

He opened one eye. “Nope. Just wondering if I ought to come looking for you. See if you’re all right.”

“I was talking to Tally.”

“I figured.”

He yawned, got out, and stretched. “She okay?”

“I think so. It’ll probably be better after tomorrow’s over. Do you want to come to the funeral?”

“Yeah, I probably ought to be there.”

“Arnold Ames thinks you think Polly Viscardi killed Braz.”

“Does he?”

“
Dwight!
”

“C’mon, Deb’rah. Be fair. You know it’s too soon to say about things like that.”

I subsided, knowing he was right.

He looked at his watch. “Still early. Not even nine thirty yet. You reckon Mr. Kezzie’s still up?”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly, knowing where he was going with this and knowing I couldn’t put it off any longer. “What about Miss Emily?”

“She’s a night owl,” he said. “Want to follow me out?”

“Slow as you drive? I could tell my whole family and be home in bed before you get to your mother’s.”

He smiled down at me. “Don’t count on it. I got me a blue light here. You break the speed limit and I’m pulling you over.”

Despite his threat, when we drove back through town, he turned off at the courthouse and I knew he was going to pick up his truck rather than drive the prowl car out to Miss Emily’s. All the same, I kept it under the speed limit all the way out to the homeplace as I tried to decide how I was going to tell Daddy.

The moon was high in the sky, shinier than a newly minted quarter. I turned in at the rusty old mailbox that bore only a number on the side, crested the ridge, and eased down the long driveway. There was a light on at the back of the house, but the dogs came off the front porch to greet me. As I looked more closely, I saw Daddy sitting there on the swing in the deep shadows cast by the tall magnolia trees that grew along the path.

“Was wondering if I was gonna see you tonight,” he said, when I got out of the car.

I turned and looked down the slope to the edge of the yard and our family graveyard. With the moon nearly full, I could see Duck Aldcroft’s funeral tent and a dark mound beyond.

Daddy got up and joined me in the yard. I slipped my arm through his and together we walked down to the newly dug grave. That dark mound was the dirt that had been dug up, covered now with carpeting that I knew to be navy blue, though it would have been hard to tell in the moonlight even when it was this bright.

“Never could understand why grave diggers feel they got to hide the dirt,” Daddy said. “You reckon they think people don’t know that’s what’s gonna be covering them?”

“Have you talked to Andrew today?” I asked.

“No, but the last I heared, he’s sober now. Seen a lot of April and the girls, though,” he added dryly. “They and Maidie’s got enough to feed the five thousand. Eating table’s full of cakes and pies.”

The old rosebushes that grew around the graves of both his wives were already starting to drop their leaves, and that reminded me. I looked at Daddy, stricken. “I forgot to order flowers!”

“Don’t you worry, shug,” he said, patting my hand. “You know April won’t gonna forget something like that. And I told Duck to make sure Tallahassee has what she wants for the coffin. They’s gonna be plenty of flowers.”

The grave had been dug next to the little stone carved in the shape of a kneeling lamb that marked the grave of Daddy and Annie Ruth’s first baby boy, a stillbirth. It was as if the gods had required a sacrifice for all the strong, healthy boys to come.

And now another boy was joining him that none of us had ever met, either.

With my arm still linked in Daddy’s, we walked over to Mother’s grave and I put my hand on her stone: SUSAN STEPHENSON KNOTT. It’s not that I think dead spirits inhabit the graves of their bodies, but this was as close as I could physically get to both my parents.

I took a deep breath. “Dwight’s asked me to marry him,” I said, speaking as much to my mother as to my father.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I found myself too choked up to continue.

At last, Daddy asked quietly, “How did you answer him, Daughter?”

“I told him yes.”

He pulled his arm free of mine, stepped back, and tilted my chin up till the moonlight fell full on my face. His own face was stern and, in this light, looked as if it, too, were carved from marble.

“Except for when you decided to run for judge, I ain’t never said a word to you about the way you lived your life, the things you done, the men you been with. Have I?”

“No, sir.”

“I figured you won’t hurting nobody but yourself and what you done was your own business. But if you marry Dwight and mess up—well, now, that’s gonna hurt a lot of people.”

“Daddy—”

He held up his hand. “Hear me out, Deb’rah. I’m right partial to Dwight. He’s a good man and he deserves a good wife. You gonna forsake all others and cleave only to him so long as you both shall live?”

“Yes, sir.” Tears streamed down my face and my hand still lay on Mother’s stone as if it were on a Bible.

“All right, then.” He opened his arms to me and held me against his chest till I quit crying.

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?”