Southern Discomfort (17 page)

"Some folks faulted me for marrying your mama so quick," Daddy said at last. "Annie Ruth was a good wife for a poor man—a hard worker, careful about getting and saving, whether it was a penny or a mess of peas. She was always laying by. They had it rough back yonder in the marshes. We had it rough too; but even after they killed my daddy, there was still time for fiddling or story-telling. 'What's the good of it?' she used to ask me."

Again his fingers brushed the stone letters of her name. "No, she won't one to stand out in a field of a night and listen to corn grow. Your mama and me, we come down here the night we got married. I told her I guessed Annie Ruth must've known she wouldn't never have enough time to smell the roses, and maybe that's why she worked so hard every minute from first light to last dark. Next day, Sue carried the boys to town and let 'em each pick out a rosebush for their mama. Jack was too little to choose, so she bought this one special from him for Annie Ruth. Marshall Niel. Smells real sweet, don't it?"

"Yes," I said, wondering if he'd answered one of my questions.

"Brick walls are poor absorbers of sound originating within the walls and reflect much of it back into the structure. Sounds caused by impact, as when a wall is struck with a hammer, will travel a great distance along the wall."

I slept in my old bed that night and next morning, I was up early to put on the coffee so I could meet Maidie at the screen door with a mugful, sugared just the way she likes it and so milky it was pale beige. I'd also begun the grits and sausage and had the bread tray and pastry cloth laid out on the counter for her. I know how to make biscuits and nobody's ever choked on them, but it's like I can play the piano good enough for a sing-along, yet wouldn't touch a key if Van Cliburn walked in the room.

Maidie makes biscuits the way Van Cliburn plays the piano.

She's only about fifteen years older than me. I remember the summer she came to my mother's kitchen as a lanky teenager, a temporary fill-in for Aunt Essie, who had gone up north to attend the birth of her daughter's first child. Aunt Essie met a widowed Philadelphia policeman, Maidie met Cletus, and both just stuck where they'd lit.

After Mother died, Maidie continued to keep house for Daddy. Once in a while she'll start nagging me: if I'm not going to get married again and set up a real house this time, how come I don't just come on back home where I belong?

Sunday mornings are relatively peaceful, though. She only gets on my case when she has plenty of time for new arguments on the old themes. On Sundays, she's usually running behind. She has to get Daddy's breakfast, clean up the kitchen, go put on a dress and hat and be sitting in the pew at Mt. Olive A.M.E. Zion church ready to open her hymnbook at ten o'clock sharp. Doesn't give her a whole lot of time to fuss at me.

Besides, today she wanted to hear all about how Paige Byrd was the one who'd killed Carver Bannerman. When I told Daddy the night before while we were sitting on the porch swing after our walk, his first response was, "You reckon her mama'll need help with Zack's fees?"

As far as he was concerned, Paige had just saved the Knotts from having to pay a defense attorney themselves. Sooner or later, one of his sons or grandsons would have found Bannerman and beat him senseless. She simply got there first, so it was only fitting to offer to pay for Zack's services.

"I never heard nothing good about Judge Byrd," said Maidie as we finished eating, "but I reckon he raised his daughter to do right."

"Probably was her mama did the raising," said Daddy, reaching for a final hot biscuit.

"Whoever." Maidie put the last piece of sausage on my plate and carried the dish over to the sink.

I was too full to eat another crumb, so I slipped the sausage inside a biscuit and wrapped them in a piece of plastic wrap. One of my nephews would probably be rummaging in this refrigerator before the sun went down. Teenage boys always seem hungry.

As I put away the blackberry jam, the phone rang and Maidie answered. Her lips curved in an easy smile. "Doing just fine, Miss Zell. How 'bout you? . . . Yes, ma’ma she's here all right... You, too, now."

She handed the phone to me and I heard Aunt Zell say, "Deborah? I told her I bet that's where you were."

"Her who?"

"Gladys McGee. I told her I'd track you down and get you to call her. She wants you to sign an exhumation order."

"A
what?
"

"You heard right. She wants to dig up Ralph and have him autopsied. She's convinced he was poisoned, too."

"Checking and cracking describe breaks in the paint film which are formed as the paint becomes hard and brittle... Both are the result of stresses in the paint film which exceed the strength of the coating."

I had never been in Gladys McGee's living room before, but I could have described it beforehand: everything beige and rose and
pretty
. Every blonde oak tabletop polished, every piece of glass shining. Beige wall-to-wall, a beige couch in front of a fireplace that had never burned a single log, a rose-flowered wing chair on either side of the couch, a blonde oak coffee table in the middle, and a pink glass ashtray in the middle of the table. Polished brass candlesticks on the sidetable. Pink candles.

A pink-faced Cindy saying, "Mom,
please
don't do this!"

Cindy's recently married, less-recently pregnant sister saying, "I can't believe you're going to do this to us. What is the
point?
"

"The point is that your father may have been deliberately poisoned."

Gladys sat in one of the floral-upholstered wing chairs and looked with bewilderment from one daughter to the next. "Don't you girls care?"

"
Mo-ther
." Ginger sighed with exaggerated patience. "Dad had a heart attack. Two doctors said so."

"Not two American doctors," Gladys said stubbornly. "Dr. Bhagat was born in New Jersey, for God's sake!" said Cindy.

"Cindy Elaine McGee, I will not have you use the Lord's name in that manner!"

"But, Mom—"

"But me no buts, young lady."

I was seated in the other wing chair and she turned to me with stubborn determination. "You remember, Deborah? Just week before last, at your reception—you yourself remarked what a shock it was to everybody when Ralph just dropped dead, remember? And I told you he'd had the summer flu?"

"Yes, but—"

"It was just like what happened with Herman. Nadine says that's what he thought he had at first—summer flu. And here they've found him full of arsenic! If he'd gone on and died, I bet they'd be thinking it was a heart attack, too. Am I wrong?"

"No," I admitted. Ginger gave me a disgusted look and Cindy appeared on the verge of tears.

Gladys leaned forward with a confidential air. "I never did trust that Tink Dupree. He swore it was an honest mistake, but three years in a row? He was just lucky Ralph kept him out of jail. Am I wrong?"

I didn't know what Gladys was talking about, but she was happy to explain.

Ralph had prepared the Coffee Pot's taxes ever since the Duprees bought the place. Last year, he discovered that Tink and Retha Dupree were running an unlicensed sandwich stand at a flea market every weekend and sequestering their profits. It wasn't a regulated market, just a crossroads out in the country where people gathered on pretty Saturday mornings and sold stuff out of the back of their cars. Since it was so informal and since vendors didn't pay sales taxes on their wares, the Duprees assumed they were somehow exempt, as well. Or so they claimed.

They had been doing this for three years before a horrified Ralph realized they'd been charging expenses to the Coffee Pot, which he'd dutifully listed, which in turn lowered their apparent taxable profits, thereby making him an unwitting accomplice.

"Ralph said if ever one of those hotshot state auditors took a good look at their books, they could say that Ralph was cooking the figures and maybe pull
his
license. Ralph was really mad about it because never in a million years would he've done anything to risk that.

"He told Tink and Retha that if they didn't make voluntary restitution, he was going to turn them in. I forget how much money it took before they were straight with the state."

"Get real, Mother," said Ginger. "Even if the Duprees were mad at Dad, there's no way Tink Dupree would wait almost a year to put arsenic in Dad's iced tea."

"Well, who else would have a reason to?" Gladys asked.

"
Nobody!
" Cindy howled. "He wasn't poisoned. He had a heart attack."

Gladys leaned over and patted her younger daughter's knee. "I know it's hard for you to understand how somebody could deliberately hurt Dad, but you have to be brave, sweetie."

She turned back to me. "And another thing, Deborah. Ava Dupree
says
she ran Bass off and that he's gone back to Georgia, but how do we
know
that's what happened to him? Has anybody heard pea-turkey from him since Ava says he left?"

"I don't believe this," Ginger kept muttering. "I do
not
believe this. Tommy's parents are going to have a cow. This is the tackiest thing anybody's mother ever did."

"Dad would just hate it," Cindy moaned.

"Seems to me certain people have forgotten what else their father would have hated," Gladys said with a significant look at Ginger's bulging tummy and an equally accusing look at Cindy. "Am I wrong?"

"This is totally different," Ginger said huffily. "What Cindy and I did or did not do isn't going to be in the newspaper or on television. This will."

Gladys pursed her lips. "He'd hate it even more if Tink Dupree got away with killing him."

Nothing the girls said was going to dissuade Gladys, and, in a cockeyed way, I didn't blame her. Herman had ingested poison, so had Bannerman; and both, like Ralph, had eaten frequently at the Coffee Pot. If my husband had died as unexpectedly as Ralph had, maybe I'd be putting two and two together same as she was.

"The thing is," I told her, "I can't give you an exhumation order. You'll have to talk to one of the superior court judges."

As I left, she was dialing Ned O'Donnell's home phone. I suggested she inform Dwight or Bo Poole and I gave her Gordon O'Connor's name and number as well. As happy as he'd been to hear about Bannerman's arsenic, he'd probably do handstands if Ralph got added to the list.

Cindy followed me out to my car disconsolately. She'd been on the phone all morning with Annie Sue.

"Paige called her late last night." There was an unconscious tinge of jealousy in her voice that Annie Sue had been called and not her. "I've tried and tried to call Paige, but nobody's answering the phone. What's going to happen to her?"

I explained the elements of self-defense and how unlikely it was that Paige would be convicted under the circumstances.

"I
hate
the way everything's turning out," Cindy said petulantly. "I wish Annie Sue'd never mentioned that old WomenAid house to us."

I was getting a little tired of Cindy's attitude. "Neither Annie Sue nor that house is to blame for Carver Bannerman getting the wrong idea," I said coldly. "And if half the things we heard about that man is true, I personally would be over at the hospital asking for an HIV test."

She drew back as if I'd slapped her, glared at me, then suddenly burst into tears and fled back inside the house.

"Why don't you just go on home and pull wings off flies for a while?" sighed the preacher.

"Sounds like a good idea to me," said the pragmatist.

Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash were gone when I got there. The puppy was wide awake in his box and let me know he wouldn't mind some company. He still didn't have a name.

After a day or two of comedians (Cosby, Seinfeld, Groucho), Aunt Zell had been trying out imperial Roman names lately (Augustus, Caesar, Pompey), but so far, nothing really struck her as appropriate.

I held the squirming little butterball to my face and said, "So how's it going, Julius?"

He licked my nose.

"Visiting Herman," said a note held to the refrigerator door by a tobacco leaf magnet. "Stevie brought over your tape."

I tucked Marcus Aurelius under one arm and took the video cassette up to my room, stuck it into my VCR, pushed PLAY; then Nero and I settled into my lounge chair to watch. Piled on the low table nearby was a sheaf of rulings that the chief district judge had sent over for all district judges to read. Claudius gnawed on the manila folder while I watched my swearing-in ceremony with only half an eye; especially the part where Ellis Glover was introducing half the county.

Every time I see myself on tape, I vow to quit eating for a week. Much as I love that splashy red print dress, it certainly does emphasize every extra ounce. But I was right, it did make a nice symbolic contrast when I zipped up that black robe over it. I loved the way Stevie had zoomed in on Daddy's face at that moment. He honestly does look like an Old Testament patriarch at times.

I pressed the remote's REWIND and rolled it back a couple of minutes so I could watch his face and Aunt Zell's. She really is very dear. Mother without the wild streak.

Then FAST FORWARD to the reception in the courthouse rotunda. Stevie had gotten there before me and panned over the lace-covered serving table with the silver platters of finger foods, the cutglass punch bowl, the Martha Circle and their helpers—all in readiness before the first guest walked down the row and destroyed the pretty symmetry.

And now, there I am with Frances Tripp, talking, talking every minute. The hugs, the handshakes. Lu Bingham stuffing pecan puffs with one hand and twisting my arm with the other. I found myself smiling all over again.

And there among the dignitaries, guests, and Marthas were Annie Sue, Cindy and Paige, scurrying around to fetch fresh cups of punch and take away the empty ones. How strange to think of all that had happened to those girls in only two weeks!

And look at Herman posing with them, a glass punch cup in one big hand, a plate piled high with cucumber sandwiches in the other. I couldn't bear to think that he might never walk alone again.

Was it possible that his poisoning
had
been deliberate? The Coffee Pot? Had Bass's leaving—"
IF he's left," said the pragmatist
—made Ava or Retha flip out?

I sighed, flicked off the VCR and picked up Judge Longmire's assigned readings.

Heliogabalus fell asleep sucking on my finger.