Long Upon the Land (6 page)

“There,” says Frank and his lower lip quivers again as he points to a spot beneath the window, just under the edge of the counter.

Sue can see the outline of where the round pan must have been pressed into the dirt before it was dragged from its resting place. Multiple footprints of all sizes crisscross the dirt floor but that spot under the counter is wiped smooth.

“It was Mama’s footprints,” he says, his voice quavering again. “Last time she did the wash, right ’fore she went to the house to have Jack.” His blue eyes bore into hers, searching for understanding. “I come in here after the burying and there was her footprints and I put the dishpan over them so I’d always have them and then Andrew went and— I hate him! I
hate
him! And I’ll hate him forever!”

“Oh, Frank,” she whispers and hugs him to her as grief overcomes him again.

“Now she’s really all gone,” he moans and her heart breaks for him.

When he has cried himself out, she says, “Listen, Frank. Her footprints may not be there exactly as she left them, but they aren’t really gone.”

“But they is, Miss Sue. See?” He points to the smooth dirt that the pan had once covered.

“The shape, maybe, but not the substance.”

“What’s substance?”

“What things are made of, honey. Your mama’s footprints were made in the dirt and that dirt’s still there. See where the pan piled up a little ridge of dirt before Andrew lifted it off?”

He gives a doubtful nod.

“That’s where your mama’s footprints still are. Not in the same shape maybe, but still the substance that she stood on. Wait right here and don’t touch it yet, okay?”

He looks at her in mute hope and nods.

She darts out to the yard and is back a moment later with the now-empty Christmas canister. “If we put that little pile of dirt in here, you can keep it safe for as long as you want.”

Wanting to be persuaded, he watches as she pulls the lid off and kneels down beside that smooth spot.

“I’ll do it,” Frank says, so she sits back on her heels and holds the canister while he gently scoops up the dry dirt as solemnly as if something of his dead mother really is being poured into the tin.

When he is satisfied that he has saved all the dirt her feet had touched, Sue snaps the lid back on and hands the canister to him.

“And if Andrew touches it, I’ll kill him,” he says fiercely.

The hired woman invites Sue and Zell into the big, shabby, and blessedly warm kitchen. She wants to hear about Robert and Frank’s near drowning in more detail. While the children are distracted by the Christmas candy and the pretty lithographed scene on Frank’s can, she thanks Sue in a low voice for comforting him. “That baby took Miss Annie Ruth’s passing the hardest.”

The two older boys seem to regard Sue as their own personal property, but she soon charms the others. While the younger boys chatter and tussle, Essie puts together a big pot of beef stew and gets started on fried apple pies for the midday meal.

“Come see our tree, Miss Sue,” Robert says and leads the way into the unheated front parlor. Somehow Sue hasn’t expected such a big tree nor one so festive with tinsel and lights.

Or that eight small socks would be hanging along the mantelpiece. The older boys point out theirs.

“Santa Claus don’t come for grown-ups and Jack’s too little for candy,” says Robert, “so can we give his to Daddy?”

The kitchen fills with smells of cinnamon and apples and the hearty aroma of beef stew. Four-year-old Benjamin volunteers to sing “Jingle Bells,” and Sue teaches them how to click-click-click their fingers for the chorus of “Up on the Housetop.”

By the time they drive away, Sue knows all eight boys by name and can even distinguish between the two twins.

“I didn’t know you were so good with children,” Zell says as they turn back toward Dobbs. “If you don’t want to go to law school, maybe you could be a teacher or something.”

“Or something,” Sue says thoughtfully.

N
ext morning, I was up before the noisy wrens who are raising a second or third brood under our bedroom window, and by six-thirty, I was on the road with a cup of coffee and a cold sausage biscuit left over from yesterday’s breakfast. The weather report had mentioned the possibility of rain, which we badly needed, but the sky seemed indecisive about it. For the first hour, I drove east under gray clouds, listening to the morning news. Shortly before Goldsboro, though, the bright morning sun broke through and made me reach for sunglasses.

A couple of jet fighter planes suddenly appeared off to my left, coming in at such a steep angle that I gave an involuntary tap on my brakes even though reason immediately reassured me that they did not intend to crash. I’d almost forgotten that Seymour Johnson Airfield was here in Goldsboro and it set me thinking about Mother again. This was where she met that man who gave her his lighter and somehow changed her life.

Or so she’d said.

By Kinston, the NPR station from Chapel Hill had faded out and I’d had enough of the grim Middle East news and reports of a congress that only wants to block the president and further the stranglehold of the rich instead of focusing on what could help the country. I slid a new Red Clay Ramblers CD into the player and tried not to match the speed of Bland Simpson’s fingers on the keyboard. Highway 70 between Kinston and New Bern is almost a straight four-lane shoot along the border between Jones County and Craven. The speed limit is 70, but without cruise control, I’d have been ticketed many times over in the years I’ve driven this road to Harkers Island.

Harkers Island?

Combined with thoughts of Mother and anticipation of New Bern, a flashbulb went off in my head.

I had stayed on the island a few years back while holding court in Beaufort and someone invited me to a large noisy cocktail party with skeet shooting down by the water. I had spotted an old boyfriend I hadn’t seen since the winter I lived in New York, so I didn’t pay much attention to the people I was meeting for the first time. But an elderly white-haired man had given me a warm smile when we were introduced.

“Judge Knott? Colleton County? You any kin to Kezzie Knott?”

I always get that sly grin when people mention him. He’d once run a network of whiskey stills all through eastern North Carolina.

“My father,” I’d said and that had gotten me an even warmer smile.

“Married Sue Stephenson, didn’t he?”

“You knew her.”

He picked up on that past tense and a fleeting shadow crossed his still-handsome face. “We both worked at the airfield in Goldsboro during World War Two.”

I should have nailed him to the ground right then, but as I say, it was noisy and there was this guy I had unfinished business with, so I said, “Do you live here? Could I come and talk to you some time?”

“I’m just up the road in New Bern. But don’t leave it too long or I may not still be around,” he’d said.

What the devil was his name?

Adams? Ashworth? Austin?

It’s a trick a fellow judge taught me. When he can’t remember a name, he starts at A and works his way down the alphabet.

Baker? Bowman? Bradley?

I was to the L’s before I finally remembered Livingston, as in Doctor, I presume? One of the guests had even made a joke of it and he had given the pained smile of someone who’d heard that joke a million times because he was indeed a physician.

Surely I could find him if he was still alive. How many Dr. Livingstons could there be in New Bern?

The westbound lanes on 70 were thick with campers and boat trailers and people heading home after a weekend at the beach, but traffic was light in my direction. I reached New Bern and the old red brick courthouse on Broad Street in time to have another cup of coffee with Cindy Dickerson, who met me at the door. She introduced me to a Gina Cruz, who would be my clerk for the day, and Gina in turn guided me through the maze of halls and locked doors of this much-remodeled courthouse. Back of Courtroom 5 was a small office and lavatory where I put on my robe and freshened up, then Gina told the bailiff to notify the attorneys that we were ready to start.

The courtroom was a smallish nondescript chamber similar to so many others across the state. The case, a civil suit between two elderly cousins, wasn’t.

Wade Mitchell and Caleb Mitchell. Both quite wealthy. Both prominent, civic-minded businessmen who wielded enough power and enough political connections to make it easy for the local judges to recuse themselves and let someone outside the district hear the case and make what was bound to be an unpopular decision on one side or the other.

At stake were two plots in Cedar Grove Cemetery. Their Mitchell grandfather had bought a ten-grave plot a hundred years or so earlier, close to an eight-grave plot where his own grandparents, parents, and siblings rested. Edward Mitchell was buried there alongside his wife, as were his two sons and their wives, parents of Wade and Caleb. That left two empty grave sites and each grandson wanted them for himself and his own wife.

There were other newer cemeteries around the edges of New Bern, but except for an older one at Christ Church, I soon learned from the opening arguments that Cedar Grove was the oldest and most prestigious. It became the town’s principal burying place during a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1798 that took close to a thousand lives, a tenth of the population back then. The last family-size plot was sold several years ago for more than a thousand dollars.

A friend of mine from Brooklyn tells me that in New York, the coffins can be stacked one on top of the other, three or four deep, and that each stack can be considered empty twenty years after the space was last opened. “But you don’t want to look too closely at that pile of dirt under the blanket when they dig a new grave,” he says. “That may be your great-grandmother’s thighbone. It’s the only way you can bury seventy-five relatives in a ten-by-twelve plot.” He once showed me a picture of his great-grandfather’s marble funeral marker, a weeping angel atop two graduated blocks of marble. So many names and dates have been engraved on those stones over the last hundred years that they look like pages from a telephone directory.

Unfortunately, nothing like that could happen in New Bern.

As the only child of the oldest Mitchell son, Wade Mitchell claimed both spaces by right of primogeniture. Caleb Mitchell’s attorney snorted derisively at that.

“Their grandfather’s will specifically left his entire estate to be divided equally between his two sons and that estate included the deed to this cemetery plot.”

I was shown a copy of the will and of the original deed, which remained in their grandfather’s name.

“You never asked your fathers to change the deed to reflect their dual ownership?”

“When you’re young, you don’t think about where your body’s going to go,” said Caleb.

“I just took it for granted,” his cousin said.

“What’s the current value of these two remaining plots?” I asked.

“That’s hard to say for something this historic,” said one of the attorneys and the other chimed in. “Assuming a willing seller and a willing buyer, it might be in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars.”

“Each?”

They nodded.

Two thousand dollars for a piece of dirt that probably measured no more than six-by-eight feet?

I addressed the two cousins directly. “Would either of you gentlemen consider selling to the other?”

“Absolutely not!” exclaimed Wade.

“Never!” said Caleb. “The first Mitchell was buried there in 1801. There’s not enough money in New Bern for me to sell my birthright.”

Wade bristled at that. “It’s my birthright, too.”

“What about cremation?” I asked.

They frowned at me.

“If you and your wives were to be cremated, each grave could hold two urns.”

I should have known that solution wasn’t going to fly either.

They wrangled on and on, dredging up family history to back their reasons, and airing old and irrelevant grievances. Sometimes it’s best to let the combatants get it all out of their systems, but I was beginning to feel like Solomon with that baby claimed by two different women, only I didn’t have a sword. Looking at it as a problem in logic, I did have fair and equitable options. I could award each of them a plot. I could give one cousin both plots and order him to pay his cousin the full value of the other, or I could order them to sell both plots and split the money.

From the passion they had displayed, though, I knew that none of those options would satisfy both. It reminded me of a case I’d had over in Asheboro a few years back where two divorcing attorneys both wanted to keep possession of the office they shared. I might have to go the same route with these two.

I thought of our family graveyard out at the homeplace. Right now the fence surrounds enough space for all of Daddy’s twelve children and their spouses, but what if there weren’t? How would I feel to know that I’d be cut off from my family for all eternity? With the cheerful innocence of a ten-year-old, Cal had already picked out a corner for the three of us, but there’s no way his whole generation of cousins could fit in as well. If the land stays in the family, the fence could be moved to take in another quarter acre or two. But if the farm’s been sold and divided and developed by the time death comes for them? Would some of them be sitting in a future courtroom passionately arguing for the right to join their forebears?

By the clock over the rear doors, it was now 11:30.

“We’ll recess for lunch,” I told them, “and I’ll give my ruling at one.”

The bailiff gave me directions to the cemetery and recommended that I stop by a café called The Country Biscuit for the best shrimp salad sandwiches in town. They added a go-cup of strong iced tea to the bag and I drove over to Cedar Grove Cemetery, where I parked in front of the main entrance. Heavy black iron gates were supported by columns of marlstone thick with petrified seashells. Just inside the gates was an informational plaque that gave a bit of the history and marked the resting places of New Bern’s more important citizens. Caleb Bradham, the pharmacist who invented Pepsi, was pictured, but no Mitchells. Using the map one of the cousins had brought to court, I did locate the disputed plot just east of the central square.

Crushed oyster shells lined the drives and huge ancient cedars draped in curtains of Spanish moss offered welcome shade as I walked past grave markers that ranged from simple clean stones to weeping angels and somber saints. Disintegrating granite tablets were engraved with lines of overly sentimental poetry and after two hundred years, many were illegible.

On a stone that dated back to the yellow fever days:
Weep for an infant too young to weep much / When death removed this mother
.

Except for slightly newer headstones and an angel that looked rather amused, the Mitchell plot was much like the others, bounded by a low brick wall and shaded by one of those ubiquitous cedars. The whole cemetery seemed deserted except for a caretaker mowing grass at the far end, and I enjoyed the peace as I sat on the wall to eat my sandwich.

After reading all the names on the stones inside this enclosure, my eyes drifted over to surrounding plots. To my surprise—although it shouldn’t have surprised me, given that it had been mentioned in court—I noticed the Mitchell name on an older monument two plots away. Still munching on my sandwich, I walked over to read the names and dates. The earliest was 1803. Theodore Mitchell and his beloved wife Amelia. The latest was a plain flat stone for an Edward Guthrie, who died in 1967. The black iron fence seemed to mark off the same amount of space as the disputed plot, yet it held only seven graves if I could trust the tombstones.

I was walking back to my car, considering possibilities, when a stone near the path jumped out at me:
Raynesford
.
That
was the name Aunt Zell and I had tried to remember! The name of the man who’d given Mother that cigarette lighter. The stone was behind a fence too high for me to step over and I had to go around to the gate. I found a Walter Raynesford buried amid several others of his clan, but no Walter Raynesford McIntyre.

The two elderly Mitchell cousins seemed a bit weary when I took my seat and faced them. Indeed, they both looked as if they could use a nap.

“I went out to the cemetery during my lunch break,” I told them. “It’s a beautiful spot and I can understand how both of you would want it. I guess it would be a comfort to know that would be your final resting place.”

Both men nodded and started to speak, but I held up my hand. “Who was Edward Guthrie?”

Blank looks.

“He died in 1967 and is buried in a Mitchell plot close to your family’s.”

“Uncle Ned?” asked Wade Mitchell.

Caleb Mitchell nodded. “He was the son of Grandfather’s sister.”

“So y’all are kin to Theodore Mitchell?”

Two more nods. “He was our grandfather’s grandfather.”

“Who owns that plot where he’s buried?” I asked.

Shrugs and more blank looks.

“It seems to me that there are at least two unused spaces in that plot,” I said.

The cousins looked at each other in dawning comprehension of where I was going.

“Uncle Ned’s widow remarried and she was buried with her second husband in Cove City,” Caleb Mitchell said slowly. “But didn’t he have a sister?”

“They moved to Morehead City years ago,” said Wade Mitchell.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that if this is in your family line and no one’s used it since 1967, whoever owns it might be willing to sell.”

One of their attorneys said, “If you’ll continue this case, Your Honor, we’ll search the records and find out who the current owner is.”