Gone to Green (14 page)

Iris Jo rummaged around on the top of her desk and pulled out the obituary, which was dated less than a year ago.

“He was a good boy,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “They said he was driving too fast, swerved, overcorrected, and hit a tree coming home from Katy's house. He went to church, was one of those boys you think is going to amount to something. Katy quit coming to church for quite a while after that, and I notice her hanging around downtown smoking. That's a hard thing for a girl her age … and so soon after her Daddy.”

Iris Jo looked up at me as though sizing me up somehow.

“He was my son.”

Stunned, I did not know what to say, but I felt tears in my eyes and dabbed at them. I leaned over and hugged her. “Oh, Iris Jo, I am so, so sorry.”

“I don’t know why the Lord took him,” she said, the tears falling more steadily now, “but I know he's in a better place, and one of these days I’ll see him again.”

Frozen, I stood by her desk.

“You remember when you asked me one time why I wasn’t more bothered about the sale of the family paper?” she asked. “What I didn’t say is that I’ve learned that most of the stuff that bothers us just isn’t worth the energy.”

Right then the phone rang, and I had never been as happy to be interrupted in my life.

As I went into my office, I thought back over how Iris Jo was cheerful, but in a gentle, kind way. She was not an exuberant woman, and I saw now she was still trying to thaw from her unspeakable grief. How could I be near someone for hours on end and not realize how much hurt she held inside? I thought of Katy, too, and wondered if she hung around the paper because Iris Jo was there.

Going to Route 2 that night, my heart felt heavy. I cried when I drove by Iris's house.

Settling into the house in the country was tougher than I expected, harder than settling into the newspaper. I slowly unpacked my belongings and tried unsuccessfully to make it feel like home. Nearly two full weeks passed before I spent a night there, always coming up with excuses to stay at the Lakeside.

“I don’t have my phone yet,” I said to Iris Jo, “and you know how lousy the cell service is.” “Oh, I just like visiting with your mother at the motel,” I told Kevin. “It's convenient, and everything at home is such a mess,” I said to Tammy.

During my first week of staying at the house, members of the church began showing up—almost like they had been on a stakeout, waiting to see my car overnight in the driveway. The casserole brigade brought supper two or three nights that week, delicious homemade food delivered in Pyrex dishes with names written on masking tape on the bottom. An older man came over, volunteering to help break down the boxes piled on the screened front porch. Someone had cleaned up my yard, and Iris Jo told me it was Chris Craig.

“That name doesn’t ring a bell,” I said, puzzled over who would do something so nice.

“He's that good-looking catfish farmer down the road, a coach at the school,” she said. “He's a regular volunteer at Grace Community. His wife died of breast cancer three years ago. He took up catfish farming as a hobby of sorts—really super person.”

“Oh … I remember meeting him. The guy you were hugging at church. Do you two date?” I clearly knew little about Iris Jo's personal life.

“Good heavens, no!” she said, almost snorting. “He's more like a son or a brother to me. I wish he could find a good woman.”

Touched by everyone's help, I didn’t let on that I was afraid to stay way out in the country by myself. It was so alien from my city life, which I found myself yearning for on a regular basis. I longed for my condo. I missed the crazy busy newsroom and my comfort zone. I began to think of relocating when my year was up, to New York or Chicago, a big city with lots going on and fewer people nosing into my business.

Other than spending nights there, in the first few months I spent as little time as possible at the house, almost moving into my office, with a supply of microwavable food and some of my favorite pieces of art.

“Good grief, Miss Lois,” Tammy said. “How are Iris Jo and I supposed to look good with the new boss if we always get here after you do and leave before you?” She even devised a contest to see who could get me out of the building earlier, but after a few weeks gave up.

Long evening phone calls with Marti became my habit, helping me put off going home. One Friday night she finally challenged me on it.

“I’ve got a date with that new guy in marketing and have got to get off this phone,” she said. “You have to get a life.”

I pretended to be indignant, but I knew what she meant. That night I rolled up my sleeves and began to transform the country house into my home. I emptied boxes and placed books neatly on shelves, with the hope the Grace cardboard ministry guy would come back by to help me. I hung pictures and pulled out knick-knacks and lined up my antique pottery collection.

The next morning I cleaned and polished, appreciating how the light gave everything a kind of soft glow.

Coffee cup in hand, I walked around the yard and noticed how a few things were already beginning to bud. My mother and grandmother had taught me a lot about flowers, some of it by osmosis. A flowering quince was in bloom, as was a large, healthy forsythia. Several patches of what we called daffodils but local people were calling jonquils were in bloom.

My neighbor and his three mutts drove by in his beat-up pickup truck. He gave a short beep of the horn and waved.

For a moment, I felt settled.

“Please keep my aunt Johnnie Pruitt in your prayers
as she recovers from a four-wheeler accident last weekend.
Although I won’t publicize how old she is, Aunt Johnnie
admits she was born the year Huey Long was first elected
governor. She has never had a driver's license and
said it was high time she learned. ‘I wanted to take my
son's toy for a spin,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of sitting out here
in the country by myself”

—The Green News-Item

I
am not sure what surprised me more about spring in North Louisiana—that it was so incredibly beautiful or that it passed so quickly. Over a period of just a couple of weeks, everything exploded in beauty and color, from dogwood trees that dotted the woods on my way to work to huge, heirloom azaleas that made old streets downtown look like tourist attractions.

For weeks now I had described Green to out of town friends and relatives as shabby without the chic. Suddenly the town looked groomed, planned—special. Even the forlorn Lakeside Annex neighborhood looked better, with big old bushes bursting out in bloom.

After my years of one plant on the patio, I discovered something new in my yard every time I turned around. The sturdy little tree in the front yard was a pink dogwood. The woods on the edge of my back yard were dotted with pinkish purplish trees called redbuds. It was like living in some sort of home and garden show.

As quickly as it came, it went.

Two days after we ran a photo layout of beautiful yards, complete with our first reader-submitted photos, we got a heavy rain and most of the blooms were knocked off the azaleas. The yellow pollen that had covered everything was washed away.

“That I do not miss,” I told Marti. “It freaked me out at first—my nose started itching, my eyes watering, and suddenly everything around town was covered with yellow dust. The car wash on the edge of town even gave pollen checks, instead of rain checks. Can you believe that?”

“Sounds like local color to me,” she said with a laugh. “Not your average boring town.”

“There could certainly be worse places to spend a year,” I said. “There's something about my house where I can relax and be myself. I’ve met so many nice people in the past few months, too. None of them are you, of course, but they’re good people.”

The spring weather had a softening effect on lots of people, as though they were coming out of hibernation. The winter had not been bad at all, certainly not by Midwest standards, but the days had often been gray and chilly. Downtown, always a bit frayed around the edges, perked up with springtime.

More people were “stirring around,” as local residents liked to say. The library, where I had become a regular customer, was busier, ranging from older people learning to use the Internet to school kids working on term papers. The drug store put up a fascinating spring display of photographs of graduating seniors.

The Holey Moley Antique Mall even gained several new vendors. Over my first few months in Green, the owners, Rose Parker and Linda Murphy, the Linder who worked for Major, became two of my closest acquaintances. They pieced the business together around their busy lives and seemed pleased when they made a ten-dollar sale. I wondered sometimes how they paid the rent.

“God always provides,” Rose said on a regular basis. She was one of those people who believe things will turn out right, offsetting Linda's perpetual glumness. “I know the good Lord is looking out for us today. It's amazing how things come together.”

Rose had grown up in Green, was married to a farmer twenty years her senior, and was the hardest-working woman I had ever met. She was also the mail carrier out on Route 2. “I know who you’re getting love letters from and who you owe,” she said, with a smile.

“No love letters,” I said. “Only bills.”

Linda had joined the Holey Moley partnership with caution. She was a woman who did not expect things to turn out well, probably with good reason. She was miserable working at Major's office but needed the benefits. How she stuck with the job, I could not figure out, slowly learning how badly he behaved, barking orders, snapping at her and treating her like dirt.

“He's just mean as a snake,” Rose said. “Mean as a snake.”

Linda had been single for years, after marrying a “sloppy drunk” when she was just out of high school. The men she dated were invariably losers who hurt her in some way. Her latest boyfriend had broken a date with her on a Saturday, right after I first met her, and remarried his ex-wife the next Wednesday.

“I’m not white trash,” she told me once, “but I act like white trash.”

Linda's parents were in terrible physical health, and her mother had dementia. “Half the time she doesn’t know me any more,” Linda said. “And she's doing things like putting her bra on over her church dress and calling to ask if I’ve seen Boots. That cat died twenty years ago.”

Once more I realized the terrible burdens most people carry around everyday.

Rose and Linda admitted during one of our first conversations that they knew little about marketing. They used a couple of my ideas to build the Holey Moley's business, but struggled to get people from the interstate to downtown.

Sitting in my office one day, I stared out at a line of snowy white Bradford pear trees along the edge of the newspaper's property, and it hit me. Why couldn’t
The News-Item
lead an effort to bring back downtown, to get people to clean up their property and to shop in their hometown? What would it take to make downtown vibrant again? Maybe this was a way I could make a difference in this little community.

The pretty spring and the short burst of increased interest in the area had given me a glimpse of something new in Green, an indefinable characteristic that almost felt like hope. Even though
The News-Item
only had a dozen employees, we were one of the biggest businesses downtown, plus we had a small measure of clout in town, mostly from the social standing of the McCullers.

“We can use the power of the newspaper to try to rally residents,” I said to Tom. He seemed delighted, ready to tackle an editorial crusade.

“We can tie that into profiles of downtown businesses,” Alex said. “We can also examine how the area got into such rotten shape and how it might get out.” He paused. “Maybe you could even splurge and let me visit a similar place or two that have turned their downtowns around.”

Visiting with Rose one Saturday, I broached the idea of forming a Downtown Green Association. She was initially excited about the possibility but deflated fairly quickly after talking to Linda.

“We tried something like that once, and it didn’t work,” Linda said. This was another of those sentences I’d learned to despise. The number of things Green had tried before with bad results confounded me. To hear local people talk, nothing had gone right since about 1959.