Long Upon the Land (2 page)

I
almost forgot,” my brother Will said. It was only the first week of August, more than two weeks till my birthday, but he pulled a small, brightly wrapped box from his pocket. “Got another present for you.”

“Aw, you didn’t need to do that,” I said. “The trellis was more than enough.”

Will’s an auctioneer and does estate appraisals, too. Somewhere or other, in his ramblings around the state, he had found a beautiful wrought-iron trellis that someone had scrapped. All it needed was a good sandblasting to get rid of the rust and Dwight had gladly taken it to a body shop in Dobbs. He and Will said it was a birthday present for me and yes, I would enjoy its beauty once it was in place, but we both knew who was the more enthusiastic gardener. This trellis was seven feet tall with graceful leaves and bunches of iron grapes and once it was set in holes filled with concrete, it would support the scuppernong vine that Dwight had already begun to root from one over at the homeplace.

When he’s not digging trees out of the woods or transplanting flowering bushes to turn what once was a tobacco field into our own Garden of Eden, Dwight is Sheriff Bo Poole’s second in command. I’m a district court judge and I should have been prepping for the heavy workweek coming up. Our benighted state assembly keeps slashing the court’s budget, so in addition to my usual workload, I’d been asked to take a day out of my rotation and hear a case down in New Bern next week. Since the trellis was ostensibly for me, though, it was only fair that I help set it in place. Besides, helping Dwight erect a trellis was a lot more fun than reading depositions. But first Will and I had to wait while Dwight and another brother ran down the farm’s posthole diggers. Seth thought Andrew might have been the last to use them when he expanded his dog run a few weeks ago.

Our son Cal and his Bryant cousins never miss a chance to ride in the truck bed, so they’d gone along, too.

We had wrestled the massive weight from the back of Will’s van and while we waited for the posthole diggers, I took the little package Will had handed me and tore off the paper. Inside was a flip-top Marlboro box and inside that was something small and hard, wrapped in white tissue paper that fell away as my fingers fumbled with it.

A brass Zippo lighter.

I stared at it in surprise and my eyes filled with involuntary tears.

“Will?”

He gave a self-conscious shrug and his own eyes seemed to glisten for a moment. “Adam and Zach never smoked. You quit almost before you started and I quit last year. I thought you might want to keep it.”

I could almost see our mother’s strong slender fingers closed around it, cupping it in her hands to light a cigarette. She was never a chain-smoker—four or five a day was her limit, but I never saw her use a match. This lighter was always in her pocket, the brass smooth and golden. The engraved initials were almost worn off from the constant turning in her fingers whenever she was in deep thought. We should have hated it. After all, she died of lung cancer when I was eighteen. But it was so much a part of her that all the boys wanted it after her death. Not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Indeed Andrew was almost ready to fight the others until Seth stepped in and decreed that Will, as her oldest son, should be the one to have it.

It might have amused me had I been around at the time, because I was the only one who knew whose initials—W.R.M.—were engraved on the case inside a frame of Greek keys. By then, though, I was in such deep denial, so angry at the world, at my whole family, and at Mother for dying that I eloped with a sweet-talking car jockey, a man I almost killed with a rusty butcher knife, and didn’t come home for a few years.

The first time I saw the lighter in Will’s hands, I almost lost it, but for once I’d kept my mouth shut.

Now I opened the lid and flicked the little wheel with my thumb. It sparked, but the wick didn’t catch fire.

“Must be out of fluid,” Will said and reached to take it back. “Who was Leslie?”

“Who?”

He pulled the lighter apart to show three lines of engraving on the inner casing:
11/11/1934—Happy 25th
. Below that was the name
Leslie
followed by four notes on a bar of music:
C
,
G
,
E
,
A
, a mixture of half notes and quarter notes.

“I never saw this,” I said. “Mother told me that the man who gave it to her was a flight instructor at the airbase over in Goldsboro. I think the W stood for Walter, but I forget what the R was—a family name—Raynor, or something like that. His last name was McIntyre, though, and she called him Mac.”

“Was he her boyfriend?”

I shook my head. “She said she could have liked him, but he was carrying a torch for someone who committed suicide.”

“This Leslie?”

“Maybe. Mother never mentioned the woman’s name.”

“It would go with that scrap of music.” Will hummed the notes and I recognized one of the old songs she used to play on the piano she had brought out to the farm with her when she and Daddy married. “Let’s Fall in Love.” When she was feeling sentimental or flirting with him or making up with him after one of their infrequent spats, this was the song she always played. What he used to play, too. I suddenly realized that he hadn’t played it since she died. Not that I ever heard anyhow.

I looked at the date again. “He would’ve been in his early thirties when Mother met him.”

“So why’d he give her a lighter his girlfriend had given him?” asked Will.

“I think she was supposed to hold it for him as a sort of guarantee that he’d come home safely from the war. Only he didn’t.”

“So she
did
like him.”

“Not the way you mean. But she did say he changed her life.”

“How?”

I shrugged. “It was one of those things she started to tell me, but then Aunt Zell or somebody came to sit with her for a while and we never got back to it.”

There had been a terrible urgency about Mother’s last summer. She had been too busy living to keep a diary and it was as if she felt that her life would be completely lost if there was no one who knew her stories. So between bouts of nausea and diarrhea, she told those stories to me.

Most of them anyhow.

Only later did I realize how much she had left unsaid. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said I remembered all the details and nuances of the things that she
did
tell me.

“Would Daddy know?”

“We could ask him, but…” I didn’t have to finish the sentence.

Will nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

Daddy’s never been one to talk about his feelings, but we know how deep the hurt goes. He’ll smile with the rest of us when we talk about her—the house parties that lasted for days, the way she could play any song she’d ever heard, the time she lured his best looper away from the barn with better wages than he’d been paying, the way she teased that she fell in love with his eight little boys before she fell in love with him. But we knew not to probe deeper than those lighthearted family legends and anecdotes. Mother probably would have told me about their courtship had I been mature enough to ask, but I was as self-centered as any teenager back then. More interested in whether to go to a ball game with the team captain or with the coach’s son.

The boys were all off starting their own lives that summer. College. New jobs. Marriage. Having babies. And all of them were unnerved by her losing battle with death. Daddy was in such fierce denial that he drove himself to exhaustion with farm work from first light to last dark. Even though Mother was dying, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for myself. It seemed monstrously wrong that her day-to-day care fell squarely on me. I was supposed to be looking forward to college, not mired in bedpans and soiled bed linens and torn between grief and guilt.

I know now that those last two months were a gift and more than once I’ve wished that I’d listened closer or asked more questions, but she and Daddy were so right together that it never occurred to me to wonder how she could have married a roughneck bootlegger who barely finished grade school and who had eight little boys to boot.

She was a privileged town girl. Had it not been for the war, she would have made her debut in Raleigh wearing long white gloves and a virginal white ball gown.

He grew up in rural poverty, the son of a small-time moonshiner.

Her father was a prominent attorney whose associates tried to get him to run for governor.

His father had died in a car crash while running from a bunch of revenuers.

She had studied Latin in high school.

He spoke the Queen’s English—Queen Anne’s English, as filtered through three hundred years of informal usage.

She was forever correcting our grammar. Although she never completely broke the older ones from using double negatives, none of us could get away with saying
ain’t
in her hearing.

“It’s not fair,” Adam once grumbled. “Daddy says
ain’t
all the time and you never correct him.”

“When you’re the man your daddy is, you can say whatever you like,” she told him. “Till then, you’re fixing to go to bed without your supper if you keep arguing about it.”

At the sound of a motor, we looked up toward the house, but when the truck came into sight, it was Daddy’s, not Dwight’s.

“Speak of the devil and up he jumps,” Will said with a grin.

I slid the lighter into a pocket of my jeans and went forward to greet him.

Without cutting his motor, he yelled, “Call the rescue truck! Somebody’s been hurt bad and I’m scared to try and move him.”

I patted my pockets, but of course I didn’t have my phone on me.

Will already had his out, though, punching in 911. “Where is he, Daddy?”

“Down in the bottom, where Black Gum Branch cuts back from the creek. Somebody’s smashed his head like a rotten melon. Where’s Dwight?” He threw the truck in reverse and I scrambled to catch up with him.

“Wait! I’ll come with you. Is he bleeding? Should we bring some ice?”

“Might help,” he agreed and slowed to a stop by my back door.

I darted inside, scooped up some clean dishtowels by the refrigerator, emptied the whole bin of ice into a large plastic bag, grabbed my phone from the kitchen counter, and was back out to the truck in only seconds.

Will roared up in his van. “The ambulance is on its way. I’ll go get Dwight,” he said and dug off toward Andrew’s house.

“Who is it?” I asked as we fishtailed through the sandy lanes that led down to Possum Creek.

“He was throwed down with his face in the dirt,” he said grimly. “I won’t sure if I should move his head, but I turned him so he could breathe. Leastways, I think he was breathing.”

Our family farm is crisscrossed by lanes, some of which lead out to a couple of nearby roads that also cross the farm or serve as boundary lines.

“I was on my way to the food store,” Daddy said by way of explanation, but I knew it was only a partial explanation.

A lane might be a shorter drive from point A (his back door) to point B (his destination) than the road, but the lanes also let him check up on parts of the farm he might not have visited recently. Most farmers still walk or ride their boundaries regularly, keeping an eye on crops, on fences, on drainage ditches that might need cleaning, or for a dozen other reasons. As a boy, he could have walked the family’s hundred acres in an hour, but over the years, he and I and my brothers have added so much land to the original holding that wheels were a necessity. He’s never cared much for what he calls “stuff,” but let an acre of land come up for sale anywhere near the farm and he’s right there with an offer, cash in hand. Last time my brother Seth totted up all the non-contiguous bits and pieces, too, we were surprised to realize that together we own close to twenty-five hundred acres.

We had been driving along the northern edge of Possum Creek. Now, as we neared the turn by the branch, Daddy put the truck in four-wheel drive and edged off the lane into the field.

“I probably already messed up any good tracks for how he got here,” he said as he stopped and cut off the motor, “but you never know.”

Mindful of his words, I was careful to step only on unmarked sand when I hopped out with my ice and hurried over to the body lying on the far side of the lane. Another two feet closer to the branch and he would have been hidden by a thick tangle of weeds and vines.

Blood had matted his hair and drawn flies and yellow jackets. I flapped them away with my dishtowel and gently laid the bag of ice on the wound, which was still oozing blood. Oozing meant his heart was still beating, didn’t it? Or was it only gravity because Daddy had turned his head minutes ago? When I pressed my fingers against the side of his neck, I didn’t feel a pulse and I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. It’s been years since I’d taken a CPR course, but Daddy helped me move him onto his back and I started compressing his chest.

When Daddy relieved me, I used my phone to take pictures of the ground around the man where some tire tracks lay. No footprints and it looked like someone had used a dead branch to sweep the sand smooth. I walked a few more paces down the lane past where Daddy had stopped the first time and took more pictures.

Before I could kneel to take over again, Daddy sat back on his heels. “He’s gone, shug. Ain’t nothing more we can do.”

We heard the sirens then and Dwight’s truck barreled through the lane, a blue light clamped to the roof of the cab. One of our local rescue trucks followed and Will was close behind.

Three EMTs hurried over to the man who lay motionless on his back, his eyes closed and bluebottle flies circling his head.

A
ny excitement on the farm can usually turn out several of my brothers who live here. Seth and Dwight had been at Andrew’s when Will found them. Haywood was there, too, helping Andrew work on a malfunctioning burner at one of the bulk barns. Tobacco was ripening too fast to let a barn sit idle, so even a dead body wasn’t enough to draw Andrew, but Haywood was too curious to stay behind and offered Seth a lift. Several nieces and nephews trickled in, alerted by the sirens. I looked around for the children, but Dwight had left them with Andrew.

By now, the ground around the dead man was so thoroughly trampled that there was no point in leaving him until more deputies arrived. Especially after Dwight sent pictures to the county’s ME and said the EMTs could detect no sign of life. “Looks like he was killed somewhere else and dumped here.”

“Nothing to be gained by my coming out then,” said Dr. Singh. “Just bag his hands and send him along to me.”

All of us had taken a long hard look at the stranger’s dirty, blood-streaked face. Ruggedly attractive, thin lips, and a nose that had probably been broken several years ago. He appeared to be between fifty-five and sixty, with thick brown hair that was beginning to go gray and a stocky build that would come in just under six feet. His jeans were well worn but his short-sleeved blue shirt looked fairly new. There was nothing in his pockets except a few loose coins. No wallet, no ID, but as they were loading him onto the gurney, one of the EMTs did notice that the sole of his left boot was about half an inch thicker than the right one.

“That should help us with an ID if no one comes forward,” Dwight said. “Boots like that are usually custom-made.”

As we waited for his backups, Dwight asked us to describe the scene when he first got there.

Daddy sat on the tailgate of his truck and fanned himself with the brim of his straw Panama. His white hair was damp with sweat and held the imprint of his hatband. “It was about ten-thirty, Dwight, and like I told Deb’rah, I was on my way to the grocery store. Didn’t see nobody till I got to the curve here and seen his shirt in the weeds. I thought somebody’d throwed out some trash, so I pulled up and got out to see what it was. Sometimes kids park here and dump beer cans and stuff.”

Teenagers often take advantage of isolated farm lanes and
stuff
was as close as Daddy could come to saying
condoms
in mixed company. (I know of at least one child that was conceived here back when I was in high school.)

“You recognize him?” Dwight asked.

“He was laying facedown in the dirt when I got here,” Daddy said. “I seen how his head was all smashed in, so I turned it so he could breathe—
if
he could breathe. Couldn’t really tell and then I went to fetch you. Got to say I didn’t see no shoe tracks, but I might could’ve messed them up getting to him.”

“What about you?” Dwight asked me.

“I was careful not to step where I saw any footprints or tread marks,” I said, “but Daddy’s were the only ones I saw. We turned him over on his back so we could try CPR, but it was too late.”

“How was he lying?”

“Like Daddy said. On his face and all crumpled up, like somebody’d dumped some trash. We had to straighten him out to try CPR. I took pictures, though.”

“Yeah?”

I couldn’t blame him for looking surprised. I don’t like being tethered to a phone and half the time I either forget to carry mine or to switch it on, a source of perpetual exasperation for him. This time I not only had it on, but had quickly taken pictures of the man’s position and the ground around him before we moved him.

“I’ll send them to Mayleen,” I said.

Mayleen Richards—Mayleen Diaz in private life—is one of Dwight’s best detectives and the department’s computer whiz. He’s already grumbling about how hard it’s going to be to replace her when she goes on maternity leave.

Two deputies had arrived to make an inch-by-inch examination of the site, but they came up empty-handed. Not even a cigarette butt or gum wrapper. The body and a six-foot stretch of blurry tire tracks were all they would have for a starting point.

We’d had no rain in well over a week and the dry sandy soil barely held the tread.

Dwight was pessimistic about identifying the tire brand, but he sent one of the deputies to lift the man’s fingerprints and put them online along with a physical description. “Ask Dr. Singh if he has any distinguishing marks or tattoos and don’t forget to say that one leg’s shorter than the other.”

Until they got the ME’s report or the body was identified, there wasn’t much else Dwight could do, so I rode back to the house with him while the rest of the family dispersed. At least he and Seth had located the posthole diggers and they finished mixing the concrete and got the trellis set in place before Will headed back to town.

Haywood fetched the children home for us. Normally, he would have pushed his porkpie hat back on his head and stayed to offer unneeded advice or to speculate about the dead man. Today, he didn’t even turn off his engine, just gave us a wave of his hand before driving off. Probably to go tell Robert, who had missed the excitement.

As I was undressing that night, Mother’s lighter fell out of my jeans and landed on our bedroom floor with a
thunk
.

“What’s that?” Dwight asked.

“Will gave it to me.” I handed it to him. “Do you remember it?”

“Of course I remember it,” he said. “I never once saw Miss Sue light a cigarette with a match.”

“Do we have any lighter fluid around?”

“You’re not going to start smoking again, are you?”

“Of course not, but I might as well get it working. Did you ever hear Mother say anything about it?”

He shook his head and, like Will, asked about the initials and the hidden inscription when he pulled the lighter apart. As we got into bed and turned out the lights, I told Dwight the little bit that I knew. A last-quarter moon shone through the windows, casting dark shadows in the room.

Lying close to him, I said, “Did I ever tell you what Mother said about you?”

“About me?”

“Well, she didn’t know it was you. We were talking about marriage and she told me to try to marry someone I could laugh with the way she and Daddy could. She wondered if I’d met my future husband yet. I wish she could have known it was going to be you.”

His arms tightened around me. “Me, too, honey.”

“That lighter’s got me wondering about them, though. Mother and Daddy were good together but they started off life so differently. How do you think they ever got together?”

I felt him shrug. “I don’t even know how my own parents did.”

“I do,” I said. “Miss Emily said that their school bus routes got changed when he was a senior and she was a sophomore.”

“Yeah?”

“They already knew who each other was. He played basketball and she was a cheerleader.”

“I did know that.”

“Well, when the bus routes changed, they wound up on the same bus and got to see each other twice a day. He asked her out and they were married in the spring before she graduated. She always wanted to be a teacher, but you and Rob and your sisters came along so fast, she didn’t go back to school until after your dad died.”

“That was a rough few years,” he murmured.

“Weird that I know more about your parents than my own.”

“So just ask Mr. Kezzie,” Dwight said. “Or ask Miss Zell. It can’t be much of a secret.”

He yawned and kissed me good night. A few minutes later, his breathing deepened and I knew he was already asleep.

He was right, though. There was no real reason not to ask.

Next morning—Sunday—after Dwight checked with his office and was told there was still no ID on the murdered man, we drove over to Dobbs, to the big white brick house where I’d lived after law school until I made peace with Daddy and built a small house out on the farm, the house that Dwight and I enlarged when we married and Cal came to live with us. Aunt Zell had invited us for lunch, so despite the heat, we left the car parked in the driveway and walked with her and Uncle Ash the few short blocks to the First Baptist Church. They never had children and they’ve always sublimated with Mother’s brood.

Aunt Zell is only a year or two younger than Mother and it’s bittersweet to think that she should still be with us. She would be white-haired now and perhaps look a little frail, but married more than fifty years and still as clearly in love with Daddy as Aunt Zell is with Uncle Ash. Dwight and I probably married too late to have fifty years but the two we’ve already had make me sure we could last that long if given the chance.

Mother’s cigarette lighter had raised so many questions in my head that on the walk home, while Dwight and Cal talked fishing with Uncle Ash, who was too aware of Cal’s young ears to ask about the body, I said, “Aunt Zell, what was Walter McIntyre like?”

“Who?”

“Walter Raynor McIntyre. I think that was his name. Mother met him while y’all were working over in Goldsboro. She made a point about his middle name when she told me about him. Like Raynor was a joke or something.”

Aunt Zell’s brow furrowed. “Walter Raynor McIntyre?”

“He gave her his cigarette lighter to keep for him when he was sent overseas.”

“Oh. Mac. I don’t think his name was Raynor, though.” I could see her searching her memory. “Raymond? Rainier?”

“I’m not sure. She just called him Mac when she was telling me about him. So what was he like?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t really know him. He was a flight instructor who used to come to the USO club. Real good-looking, as I recall. Sue went out with him a few times before he was reassigned. He was too old for her, but she said it wasn’t really dating. What on earth made you think of him?”

“Will gave me that lighter for my birthday,” I said, and back at the house, I pulled it apart to show her the inscription inside.

“I saw that lighter a million times,” Aunt Zell said, “but I never knew anything about that engraving. Who was Leslie?”

“His girlfriend, I assume.”

Aunt Zell hummed those four notes and frowned. “‘Let’s Fall in Love’?”

I nodded and she looked puzzled. “How odd. That was her and Kezzie’s song.”

“Looks like it was Mac and Leslie’s song, too. Mother did say he changed her life.”

“Really? How?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I’m sorry, honey. She didn’t talk about him much after he left Goldsboro and I’m afraid I was too busy writing Ash every night to ever ask. Changed her life, she said? I wonder how? Did you ask your dad?”

“Not yet. He gets touchy when we ask too many questions about her.”

While she brought the gravy back to a boil, I dished up the vegetables and took the biscuits out of the oven. Once we were seated, though, and Uncle Ash began to carve the roast chicken, I said, “Did Mother ever tell you exactly how she and Daddy met?”

Aunt Zell shook her head. “She didn’t have to, honey. I was there. Ash, too. Remember, Ash?”

“I remember.” Tall, with thin silver hair and hands knotted with veins, he carefully cut the wishbone away from the rest of the breast, put it on a plate, added some crispy skin, and passed the plate to Cal, who grinned in anticipation of pulling that bone with him. “I also remember how you didn’t approve.”

“I didn’t disapprove,” she protested. “That was Brix Junior. And I knew he’d tell Mother.”