Long Upon the Land (3 page)

S
ue Stephenson! Thank the Lord!” says the bald-headed man selling tickets at the door of the American Legion Hall. “I hear you and DeEtta really tore up the piano at her party last week. If you’ll play till our fiddler gets here, I’ll let y’all in for free.”

Ash Smith puts his wallet back in his pocket as if it is a done deal that his future sister-in-law will save him the cost of their tickets. “Don’t tell me Simon’s drunk again.”

“Not this time. Naw, he went and broke his arm. Fell off a chair while he was trying to stick a star on top of their tree. His wife says he’s got somebody good to come take his place, but folks are here and wanting to dance right now.”

Beyond the ticket table, the hall is crowded with merrymakers. All white, of course, except for the bartender and the dishwasher behind the bar.

Fun-loving middle-class couples mingle with junior members of the country-club set, the women in their brightest colors since before the war, the men in jackets and ties. Several are still in uniform because their discharge papers have not come through yet, but rationing has finally ended and people are more than ready to put the war years behind them and get on with their lives—
the lives they lived before the war
, thinks Sue. The same comfortable lives their parents and grandparents live. Working at the same jobs, going to the same parties, shopping at the same stores, worshiping in the same churches with the same people they’ve known all their lives. Mac said it would be different, that things would change—
had
to change—yet here they are. Except that everyone seems to have more money, it could be 1935 not 1945.

On this raw December evening, the windows are draped in garlands of pine and cedar tied with big red bows, and a tall Christmas tree casts a festive glow over the shabby room. A double row of chairs and small round tables line the side walls of what is basically a wide empty hall with hardwood floors and a low wooden platform at the far end. To the left of the platform, doors lead out back to a kitchen and restrooms; to the right is a bar.

Although Colleton County is technically dry, private clubs like this are exempt even though “trial” memberships can be bought at the bar for a small fee. Real members bring their own bottles of liquor that are labeled and kept on shelves locked behind wire doors to which only the bartender has keys. Men tell him their names, point to their bottles, and pay him for setups—the ice and mixers.

“Just ginger ale,” Sue says when Ash asks what she wants to drink. She has developed a taste for bourbon on the rocks while working at the airfield, but here in the Bible Belt, few “nice” women drink more than a single shot spaced over the evening and well cut with a soft drink. If she asks for a real drink, her mother will surely hear about it and she herself will never hear the end. Instead, she hands her red wool coat to her sister Zell and heads for the upright piano that stands on the dais. In truth Sue is glad for the diversion. She hadn’t wanted to come, but their mother disapproves of either daughter going out alone in cars with men, even a man as honorable and trustworthy as Ash Smith.

Never mind that Sue and Zell spent the last two years of the war living in a boarding house in Goldsboro so they could work at the Seymour Johnson Airfield. The war is over now and men need their jobs, so here they are back in Dobbs, ready to marry and settle down.

Or so Mrs. Stephenson thinks.

Zell is halfway there. Ash slipped a diamond ring onto her third finger two days after he came home in November and a May wedding is planned. Her whole life seems laid out before her, a life like her mother’s and grandmother’s. There will be book clubs, teas, meetings of the Daughters of the Confederacy or the DAR, Bible study groups, and occasional trips to New York and Washington until the babies start coming. (They are hoping for at least three.)

After that, it will be PTA, Cub Scouts or Brownies, and dinner parties for Ash’s bosses and fellow buyers at one of the large tobacco companies.

Not me, though
, thinks Sue as she sets her drink on the scarred piano and speaks to the drummer, who is older by a good ten years. The guy on bass was three or four grades ahead of her in school. They are not part of her crowd, but they know who she is, just as she has a clear sense of their social standing as well. Not that she cares, but her mother’s judgmental voice is always in her head: “
Not quite our kind of people, are they, dear?
”

They hand her a playlist that consists mostly of swing band standards for the older dancers mixed with boogie-woogie tunes for the young and agile. Only one is unfamiliar. She can read sheet music, but mostly plays by ear. “If your fiddler doesn’t get here by the time you’re ready for this one, one of y’all will have to hum it for me.”

She runs exploratory fingers over the keyboard. B-flat wants to stick and the G feels spongy, otherwise it is in surprisingly good shape. The drummer hits his high hat to get the crowd’s attention, the bass player gives her the key, and they launch into a lively version of “In the Mood.” Toes tapping and fingers snapping, a dozen or more couples immediately spill onto the dance floor. After some slower tunes—“Begin the Beguine,” “Who Am I?” and “Once in a While”—they clear the floor of gray-hairs with “Jukebox Saturday Night.” Among the younger set, Zell and Ash are almost as good as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire as they jitterbug down the length of the hall and back. His legs are a blur when he spins her in and out, and the skirt of her swingy new dress swirls so high that Mrs. Stephenson’s lips would be clenched in a tight line, embarrassed that a daughter of hers would show that much thigh in public.

Near the middle of that first long set, Sue hears the sound of a fiddle behind her and glances over her shoulder to see a tall skinny man in a cheap blue suit and a string tie. He looks like someone who would be more at home on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry than playing pop songs for this crowd. A worn fiddle is tucked beneath his chin and his fingers fly up and down the strings as he works his way into the song they are playing. At first he follows their lead, but by the second chorus, they are following his.

The set ends with Ash swinging Zell over his head, giving nearby dancers a flash of white lingerie. Sue closes the piano, smiles at the other players, and stands to join her sister and their friends.

“Hey,” says the drummer. “You’re not quitting on us, are you?”

“I was only filling in,” she says. “You don’t need me now.”

“Sure we do,” says the bass player. He props his tall instrument against the back wall and they move off the platform where he pulls out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, then slaps his pockets in a fruitless search for matches. Sue hands him her lighter. He immediately reads the initials engraved on the front of it. “Your boyfriend?”

“No.” How to explain that complicated relationship? “No, just a friend who didn’t make it back from Germany.”

“Sorry,” he says and offers her one of his cigarettes.

She starts to refuse. Movies are making it more acceptable that women smoke, but her mother still thinks it “common” for women to do so in public. What the hell, though? “Thank you,” she says, and bends her head to accept a light from him before he lights his own and passes the Zippo back to her.

The drummer and the fiddler are lighting cigarettes of their own and they sit on the edge of the platform. With her skirt tucked around her knees, she perches on the step beside the bass player, chatting with friends who come and go with song requests and, in Sue’s case, asking for a dance before the evening was over. No one seems to be saying much to the fiddler, so she turns toward him and says, “I’m Sue Stephenson. I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“Kezzie Knott,” the man says.

His name is vaguely familiar, but she can’t think in what context. “Here in Dobbs?”

“Over near Cotton Grove,” he say brusquely and walks away toward the bar.

“Don’t mind him,” says the drummer. “He’s had it pretty hard.”

The bass nods. “First time I’ve seen him play since Annie Ruth died.”

“His wife?” Sue asks.

“Yeah,” says the bass. “Childbirth fever. Weird when you think about it. To die like that after kicking out such a bunch of babies.” He shakes his head at the irony. “They let him out of prison six months early so he could come home and take care of them.”

“Prison?”

“Surprised you don’t know,” says the bass. “I believe your daddy was the one got him that early release.”

“Really? What was he in for?”

A sly grin appears on the drummer’s lips. “Income tax evasion, won’t it?”

That means a federal prison
, thinks Sue.

Puzzling.

This Knott man doesn’t look as if he has enough income to make evading taxes an issue.

They finish their cigarettes and start to return to their instruments when her sister Zell hurries up. “C’mon, Sue. Brix Junior wants to dance with you.”

Sue rather doubts that. Brix Junior is their father’s much younger half brother who’s due to join Stephenson and Lee when he finishes law school. As usual, he is surrounded by a mix of college girls and Junior Leaguers and seems slightly surprised when Zell pulls on his arm.

“Here she is, Brix. I told her you wanted the next dance.”

“Thank you, darlin’,” he drawls and hands one of the girls his glass as the fiddler launches into “Easy to Love.”

“Why did Zell say you wanted to dance with me?” she asks as he sweeps her expertly across the floor.

“I always want to dance with you,” he says. “You know how to keep your feet out from under mine.”

“Be serious, Brix.”

“I guess we didn’t think you ought to be up there playing with those guys.”

Sue frowns. Brix might be a bit of a snob, but Zell isn’t. She hadn’t said a word against her playing when it was just the drummer and the bass. Which must mean—?

“Who’s Kezzie Knott, Brix? Why was he sent to prison? And don’t say income tax evasion.”

“But that’s what it was. What the government said it was anyhow. Said he was selling something he didn’t pay taxes on.”

“White lightning? He’s a bootlegger?”

“And a pretty successful one on the whole. Prison was a bit of a setback, but they say he’s back supplying shine to distributors all up and down the East Coast. Father says he sends a lot of business to the firm. Anybody that works for him, if they get caught, he pays their legal fees and takes care of their families if they get jail time, which isn’t as often as you might think. Any money left over, he puts it in land. He’s getting quite a spread out from Cotton Grove. Wanted to buy that farm your grandmother left you and Zell. His land touches it now.”

“Really? I never heard about that.”

“Catherine was sure y’all wouldn’t be interested.”

For once her mother is right, thinks Sue, but she and Zell should have heard the offer and made that decision themselves. The tenant house that once sheltered sharecroppers back when her mother was a girl has long since fallen to ruin. A hurricane took half the roof before she and Zell were born and no one thought it worth replacing. For years now, the land has been rented out to a neighboring farmer and the rent money put into a savings account for the girls. It suddenly occurs to Sue that they might have a tidy little nest egg. Maybe even enough to travel. To see the world now that the war is over. To find the life she is meant to have, the life she promised Mac she
would
have.

“Have to say I was surprised to see him here tonight. It’s not like he needs the money. But I’ve heard he loves to play the fiddle and he’s pretty good, isn’t he?”

“Hmm?”

“Knott,” says Brix, bringing her back from sudden dreams of New York. Paris. Rome.

She matches her steps to his and realizes that Brix is right. The fiddle player really is good. He weaves the melody in and out between the bass and drums, never straying so far that the dancers lose the rhythm, but never completely predictable either. When the song is over, she lets Brix go back to the girls clustered at his table and she spends the rest of the evening dancing with several young bachelors in their set.

All are perfectly nice young men, men her mother approves of.

All eligible.

All boring.

A
s we were leaving Aunt Zell’s, Dwight’s phone rang.

“We’ve got a hit on the victim’s prints,” he said, so I dropped him at his office and Cal and I drove on home alone.

When we neared the farm, Cal said, “Can we go by Uncle Robert’s?”

He and Robert, my oldest brother, have forged a bond over the farm’s old Cub tractor. I learned to drive on it when I was Cal’s age and now Robert is teaching Cal. They’ve been talking about disking in our spring garden to get ready for a fall crop of leafy greens. Dwight had already bought some cabbage and collard plants and was keeping them in a cool shady spot till time to set them out.

“I don’t know, honey. It’s Sunday,” I reminded him, “and you know how Aunt Doris feels about working on Sunday.”

“We won’t be working, Mom. He’s just going to show me how to hitch up the discs. That’s not work.”

When it comes to males and machinery, the line between work and play is so narrow not even an angel could dance on it. Or so it seems to be in my family.

“First, we’ll go home and change clothes,” I said, “then you can call him and see what he thinks.”

As I expected, Robert said for Cal to come on over. When we got there, we found him out under the shelter with the Cub. “You can stay, too, Deb’rah, but Doris has gone shopping with her sister.”

It doesn’t bother Doris that Sunday play for her means Sunday work for others.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got some stuff I need to do.”

Cindy Dickerson, the trial court coordinator down in New Bern, had emailed me the pleadings for tomorrow’s court and when I finished with those, I spent another hour reading up on family law.

Our chief district court judge has proposed that we subdivide our court into specialty areas: civil, criminal, and family. He’s asked if I’d like to hear the family cases—the divorces, custody disputes, contested child support, etcetera. With its monotonous round of DWIs, assaults, rubber checks, and petty crimes, criminal court has begun to bore me. Yes, domestic situations can be heartbreakers, but those situations interested me more and more these days and I think I’ve done some good work there. And let’s not overlook a side benefit: Dwight and I wouldn’t have to be so careful about discussing his work in case it proved to be something I’d have to rule on.

Decision made, I called Judge Longmire and told him yes.

By late afternoon, the sun had moved around to the other side of the house and a light breeze tempted me out to our shady screened-in porch to finish reading the Sunday paper. I had gone back inside to pour myself a glass of tea when I heard a car door slam and glanced out in time to see the taillights of a gray patrol car leave the yard.

Dwight looked hot and tired, but he smiled when I opened the door. “Is that for me?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

He had drained my tea in three deep gulps. “Thanks, shug. That really hit the spot.”

He followed me back into the kitchen for more and while I poured a second glass for myself, he loosened his tie and hung his jacket on a doorknob. “The guy’s name was Vick Earp. Ring a bell for you?”

“The only Earp I know is our dentist. Any kin?”

He shook his head. “You issued a domestic violence restraining order on him last year.”

“I did?”

We took our tea out to the porch and settled into lounge chairs while Dwight tried to refresh my memory. “He lives on the far side of Cotton Grove. Drives an oil truck for Dexter Oil and Gas. Wife Rosalee, two daughters, both grown and both living out of state.”

“Because they were tired of watching him beat up on their mother,” I said. “I didn’t recognize him yesterday and I can’t quite put a face to her but I do remember her saying that about her daughters. Yet she never divorced him, did she?”

“No.”

“Have you talked to her?”

He nodded and swirled the ice cubes in his glass with a deep sigh. Telling the relatives is the hardest part of his job. “Even with a black eye, a cut on her chin, and a big purple bruise on her arm, she still says he was a good man till he wrecked their first car and one leg wound up shorter than the other.”

“Always somebody else’s fault,” I said. “Never his own sorry doing. As I recall, he’d been drinking when he crashed. Did she kill him?”

“Who knows? We caught up with her at her cousin’s house. She claims she’s been there since around six Friday evening and her cousin backs her up. Says she doctored the cut on Mrs. Earp’s chin and then put her to bed with a sleeping pill.”

“Is that when his head got bashed in? Friday night?”

“Hard to say. Singh puts the actual time of death about a half hour before Mr. Kezzie found him yesterday. That would make it around ten o’clock. No way to tell when Earp got hit or when he was dumped, though. He was hit at least three times and he had bruises on his knees like he’d fallen. What did him in was probably the blow to the back of his head with something straight and narrow. Like a thin but heavy four-inch-wide board. Ray and Tub and I went over to the house. There’s blood on the back steps. Looks fresh. No sign of whatever was used to hit him with, though.”

“A man that violent must have enemies,” I said.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Mrs. Earp said no when I asked her, that he was pretty much a loner. Her cousin did say he was on the outs with his brother. She also said somebody took a shot at him last weekend through the windshield of his truck. I’ll go back and talk to them tomorrow.”

“If he lived on the other side of Cotton Grove and if that blood’s where he was struck down, why do you reckon he was brought out here?”

“Well, Mr. Kezzie did say that kids have been known to park there on a Saturday night. Maybe someone remembered it as a fairly isolated spot.” He suddenly grinned. “You ever park there with anybody?”

I laughed. “You have to be kidding.”

“You telling me you never made out with anybody in the backseat of a car?”

“No. I’m just saying I never did it within five miles of the farm. Daddy seemed to have eyes everywhere in those days. Still does, for that matter.”

“You gonna name names?”

“Right after you do,” I said. “Seems like I remember hearing that you and Will got bogged down in that branch one night on your way home from a ball game. Not that the branch is on the way to your house from the school gym. I believe one of you had to sneak past our house without Daddy knowing so you could wake up Seth to pull you out with a tractor.”

He laughed. “Those girls never went out with us again.”

Before I could tease him for their names, the sound of a motor made us look around to see that little red Cub putt-putting down the lane in second gear. Cal was in the driver’s seat, a big grin on his face. Robert stood behind him on the tow bar and he was beaming, too.

“Show us where you want it cut in,” Robert called to Dwight, “and we’ll get ’er done tomorrow.”

We walked out to the garden, which seems to have grown exponentially this season. You can give a country boy a town job, but he’s never going to buy all his food in town. Not if he has a square foot of dirt to play with.

Dwight pointed to the rows where garden peas, zucchini, and potatoes had grown and been harvested. Field peas, tomatoes, and okra would bear until frost, but the rest could be cut in and rows run for the fall planting.

Robert came back to the porch with us and allowed as how a glass of tea would taste real good and did I still have some of those sugar cookies I’d baked last week?

I did.

I brought out the cookie jar and he took a handful. Dwight and Cal helped themselves, too.

“I always think of Mama Sue when I eat one of these,” Robert said. “She’d wait till it was almost time for us to get home to start making them. Us boys would get off the school bus of a cold winter day and we could smell them all the way out to the road. Ain’t nothing like a warm sugar cookie and a cold glass of milk.” He munched reflectively. “Unless it’s warm chocolate cake. She said when she was a girl, their cook would make one on a Saturday morning and it’d smelled so good she couldn’t stand it, but her mama wouldn’t let it be cut till Sunday dinner. After her and Daddy got married and she came to live with us, she always sliced us off a piece of chocolate cake while it was still warm. These days I heat mine up before I put on my ice cream, but that was before microwaves.”

Cal’s only been in our family two years so he hasn’t heard all the familiar stories, but because he’d been fascinated when Aunt Zell described how my parents met, I asked Robert to tell him about his own first meeting with Mother. It’s one of our more dramatic family legends and I never get tired of hearing it. Too bad Frank wasn’t here or I’d make him tell his Mama Sue story, too.

“How old were you then, Robert? Nine? Ten?”

“Something like that,” he agreed. “She saved our lives,” he told Cal. “Me and Frank’s. Won’t for her we’d’ve been long dead by now.”

He took a swallow of his iced tea and leaned back in the chair with Cal sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him. “I forget why she come out to the farm.”

“To cut a Christmas tree,” I reminded him.

“That’s right. It was getting on toward Christmas, ’cause her and Aunt Zell come out next day and brought us some Christmas candy. We’d had a real cold snap and Possum Creek had near ’bout froze solid, something we hadn’t never seen before…”