Long Upon the Land (4 page)

O
h, for heaven’s sake, Zell,” Sue says impatiently. Despite boots, wool slacks, and heavy jacket, she’s starting to shiver and her words leave little puffs of steam on the frigid air. “What’s the big deal? Go. I’ll be fine.”

Zell looks from her sister to her fiancé. The icy wind has reddened her cheeks and ruffled the wisps of fair hair that escaped from beneath her blue scarf hat. Her pretty face is torn with indecision. “You sure?”

With manful chivalry, Ash Smith says, “If you’ll wait till after lunch, we can all go and I’ll cut the tree for you.”

Sue shakes her head. “I’m perfectly able to cut a Christmas tree by myself.” She glances up at the dark sky. “Besides, they’re predicting sleet this afternoon.”

“I could maybe change our appointment,” says Ash.

Zell gives him an anxious look. “But didn’t Mr. Clark say we have to decide this morning?”

With one gloved hand on the door handle, Sue gives an exasperated shake of her head. “Make up your mind, Zell. It’s too cold to stand here in the middle of town arguing about it. I’m going.”

“Well…if you’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“Ash, will you please put my sister in your car and go buy her dream house before I turn into an icicle?”

The big white brick house has come on the market only that morning. As soon as he finished dealing with the owners, the real estate agent immediately called Ash. Jim Clark is an old friend of the Stephenson family and over the years, he has heard Zell speak wistfully of the Hancock house. When Ash visits Clark’s office to check out possibilities for their first home, Clark says, “Too bad the Hancock heirs can’t agree on a selling price.”

On the off chance that those quarrelsome siblings are finally ready to deal, he phones the oldest Hancock son after Ash leaves and bluntly tells him that the longer the house sits empty, the greater the chances of vandalism or deterioration.

It’s a timely push. The very next day, they agree on an asking price.

“I’ve been working on them two years, and now they want the money yesterday,” Clark says when he calls Ash and sets up an appointment to view the place. “I hear the Hancock daughter’s already ordered a brand-new 1946 Cadillac. It’s a fair price, though, and I’ll have to list it in tomorrow’s
Ledger
, so if you want it, you’d better get your offer in today.”

It’s really more than Ash can afford, but Zell reminds him of the rent money from her half of the farm and she’s sure their fathers will help them.

Only two blocks from First Baptist Church of Dobbs and the shops on Main Street, the location is so desirable that it will not stay on the market long. While less imposing than the Stephenson residence a few blocks farther from Main Street, the house has a warm and welcoming charm that their more formal childhood home lacks and Zell has fantasized about living there ever since she was a little girl.

It’s too big for them now—“Four bedrooms,” Zell says, happily visualizing the children who will fill those rooms. “We’ll grow into it, though.”

Sue knows it will break her sister’s heart if the house slips away when it is almost in their grasp, so to end the argument, she slides into the car, firmly slams the door, and heads toward Cotton Grove and the farm they inherited from their grandmother. The car is ten years old, the tires are worn, and the heater no longer works, but it lasted the girls through the war and Sue suspects that they will find the keys of a new one under the Christmas tree she plans to bring home today.

In truth, she’s glad to be going alone. As much as she loves Zell, she is tired of hearing about bridesmaid dresses, whether the word
obey
should be left in the vows, the reception menu, and endless dithering over the honeymoon. New York and Broadway shows or a picturesque mountain inn?

Now with a house to furnish, it will be carpets and curtains and whether to paint or paper those four bedrooms.

If she were honest, Sue tells herself, she would admit that there’s a touch of jealousy in her impatience with Zell’s wedding chatter. Zell knows what she wants out of life and is diving into it headfirst, while she has nothing. Nothing she can put into words anyhow.

When her parents ask about her plans after she and Zell come home from Goldsboro, all she can say is, “I want to
live
! I want to make a difference. To
matter
!”

“You’re not planning to become a missionary, are you?” asks an alarmed Mrs. Stephenson. Not that she thinks missionary work isn’t noble. After all, they
are
Missionary Baptists. But
Baptists
, not—God forbid!—Catholics. (At thirteen, Sue briefly toyed with becoming a nun and going to Africa to work in a leper colony.)

“Why not try the law?” suggests her father. He will never admit that he favors one daughter over the other, but he worries that her restlessness might take her away from Dobbs. Even though Goldsboro is only fifty miles away, gas rationing has not allowed frequent visits and the big house felt lonely without their lively debates over the dinner table. “Women can do almost anything these days and the way you like to argue, you could do very well in a courtroom.”

Mrs. Stephenson frowns. “Please, Richard. It’s bad enough that you keep defending every piece of trash in the county. Don’t encourage our daughter to join you.”

“Now, Catherine,” he teases. “We’d give her nothing but respectable civil cases.”

Sue laughs at that. “Oh no, you wouldn’t. It’s murderers and rapists or nothing.”

“Really, Sue!” In a perfect world, no child of hers would even know that word, much less utter it over dinner.

Sue smiles as she remembers that conversation. Tempting as it is, annoying her mother is not worth the price. Go back to school? Sit in airless classrooms for another three or four years? Even a leper colony would be preferable to that. At least she’d be outdoors and there would be zebras and elephants and maybe a lion or two.

Dad is right, though. More and more opportunities are opening up for women, but she cannot think of a single nine-to-five job that appeals to her. She isn’t lazy and she doesn’t mind hard work but it’s silly to think of New York, Paris, or Rome if it means she’d still be in an office doing the same boring thing over and over. For the first time in her life, she wishes she were more creative. Dad says she has good common sense, but what’s the good of common sense if she can’t find a sensible use for it? She can’t go on drifting like this.

“Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal.”

For more than six years, those words have echoed in her head, yet here she is, six years closer to the grave and still no goal in sight.

“You only get one life,” Mac had said. “Don’t waste it.”

Maybe Zell has the right idea. Marry someone nice, raise a family, and do good works. Zell has joined a book club that plans to raise enough money for a library truck that will give farmers and their families easy access to books, which could change a child’s life, broaden his horizons.

She turns off the highway onto a rough dirt road that curves through pines and tall bare-branched oaks, then into a narrow lane surrounded by fields planted in winter rye. Under a gray and leaden sky, the rye has a dull, pinched look, as if hunkering down to wait out the cold before turning bright green again. Sue realizes that she doesn’t know who currently rents the farm nor even what these fields will grow come springtime. Tobacco, yes, but what else? Corn? Soybeans? Sweet potatoes?

The lane ends up at the ruins of the abandoned tenant house surrounded by pecan trees. Half the roof has fallen in and all that’s left are some foundation stones that still support the wooden floor and a fire-blackened stone chimney. Shortly after she learned to drive, she and Zell came out with hot dogs and camping gear. They built a fire in the old hearth and planned to spend the night until a puff adder slithered out from behind one of the stones in the fireplace. Normally she could talk her sister into anything, but Zell drew the line at snakes. She went back to the car and refused to get out again until they were safely back in Dobbs.

Patches of bright yellow daffodils once grew on either side of the door and huge gardenia bushes still flower there in the summer with fragrant white blossoms. The girls and their grandmother used to come pick flowers for the church and Grandmother would tell them of driving out from town in a horse and buggy with her father to check on the crops and speak to the family that worked the land back then.

“Every fall, the farmer would give us a big bag of pecans,” she tells the girls, “and in the summer, his wife always sent us home with sweet corn, tomatoes, and the best piccalilli you ever tasted. Not too vinegary. Mama never could get her to give the proportions. I guess everybody needs something special of their very own.”

Sue is ten years old and the idea of making memorable piccalilli so seizes her imagination that she asks their housekeeper to teach her how.

“Why you want to do that?” Mary asks, but for once Mrs. Stephenson encourages her daughter’s fanciful notion.

“In fact, it’s time both you girls learned how to cook a little so that you can manage if your housekeeper suddenly gets sick or quits,” she says, and she asks Mary to let them help her in the kitchen.

Zell takes to it enthusiastically and begins to collect cookbooks and recipes, but Sue loses interest once she learns the basics.

Now, she switches off the engine and lets momentum carry the car further down the slope, past two dilapidated tobacco barns, to a stand of cedars amid tall longleaf pines that stretch up toward the low-lying gray clouds. Beyond the barns, hidden by a tangle of wax myrtle, grapevines, and briars, lies the creek. She gets out of the car and lets the silence wash over her. A crow caws in the distance and somewhere a dog barks, but the only other noise is the wind in the pines, a gentle swishing that sounds like waves softly breaking on a sandy shore. She has not realized how tense her muscles were until she feels them begin to relax.

With a saw in one hand and a rope in the other for dragging the tree back to the car, she wanders down among the cedars looking for a perfectly shaped tree, rejecting this one as too short and that one as too scraggly. Eventually, she finds one that will do. It’s full and bushy on the front and the flatter side can go next to the wall in their living room. As she stoops to clear away the weeds from the base so she can saw through the trunk, she hears voices coming from the creek bank.

She moves quietly through the bushes and two little towheaded boys come into view. Both wear overalls and jackets, but no hats or gloves. The creek is frozen over and they are out sliding on the ice. It looks like fun and half thinking she might join them, Sue steps out of the bushes.

“Hey!” she calls.

Like deer startled by a hunter’s gun, they immediately bolt for the opposite bank and, to Sue’s horror, crash through the ice into the cold, muddy water.

Both boys sink below the surface, but just as quickly, they bobble up again, clutching for the edge of the ice nearest her. Each time one of those half-frozen little hands reaches for safety, though, the ice breaks off and leaves them floundering in the water.

Sue drops the saw and steps onto the ice. An ominous crack warns her of the danger and she quickly lies down on her stomach to spread out her weight. Still clutching the rope, she crawls toward the frantic boys, but halfway there, she knows the ice will not support her.

With one end of the rope looped around her wrist she slides the other toward the children. It stops just out of their reach. She pulls it back to her, fashions a hasty coil, and heaves again with all her strength.

This time the older boy is able to grab it. Treading water, he gives the end to the younger one and both hold on tightly.

Gingerly, Sue backs toward the creek bank and when she can stand, she hauls the rope hand over hand till they, too, reach the bank. Both are white with cold and shock.

“Come on!” she says. “I’ll drive you home.”

One boy starts to turn away, but he still clutches the rope blindly and Sue herds them up the slope and through the trees to the car, where she wraps them in one of the blankets she and Zell keep for cold winter drives.

“Where do you live?” she asks as she scrambles in and slams the door.

They stare at her mutely, their teeth chattering as they huddle together, too cold or too scared to answer.

Running on adrenaline herself, Sue turns the key, stomps on the accelerator, and promptly floods the engine. She tries the starter again and again. It’s hopeless. The car is going nowhere for at least twenty minutes and those little boys are chilled to the bone and shivering uncontrollably.

She jumps out of the car and uses her gloved fingers as a rake to pile up some pine straw several yards away. Mac’s Zippo is in her pocket and she soon has a blaze going. Pine cones and dead twigs join the straw, followed by dead limbs.

“Now then,” she tells the boys. “Let’s get you out of those wet clothes.”

They try to resist, but she will have none of that. “You can keep your underwear on, but you’re going to catch your death if you don’t get next to the fire and dry out so don’t be silly.”

She leads them over to the fire and wraps the second blanket around them once they have shed their drenched outer garments, then forages for more wood until the flames leap up. A large oak branch serves as a drying rack for their wet clothes and as the warmth begins to thaw those little faces, the younger one stops crying.

“My name’s Sue,” she says. “What’s yours?”

“Frank,” the smaller boy whispers.

“You’re brothers?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s his name?”

“I’m Robert,” the other boy says shyly.

“Well, Robert, is your house very far away?”

He shakes his head and gestures toward the creek. “Just over yonder. Daddy’ll come looking us if we ain’t home for dinner.”

As it isn’t quite eleven, Sue knows that could be at least an hour away.

“You think he’d hear if I blew the horn?”

“Maybe.”