The Spy on the Tennessee Walker (6 page)

CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10

MAGGIE
MAGGIE

OXFORD

While “meat and two sides” might be standard Southern parlance, no self-respecting member of my family would be satisfied with anything less than three, four, or maybe five sides.

I surveyed Aunt Phoebe's company table. It had looked like a magazine cover when we began our supper — golden, fragrant fried chicken, a little fried catfish just in case someone wanted that plus the chicken. And the sides: potato salad, coleslaw with peanuts, okra, black-eyed peas, a dish of homemade pickles. Iced sweet tea for Phoebe and me, and a couple of Louisiana-brewed Abitas for the gentlemen.

Gradually, the table grew quiet, as three of the four of us were reduced to near stupor. Aunt Phoebe was still jumping up every five minutes to bring just one more thing: corn sticks, accompanied by honey from Uncle Beau's hive, and of course, a big bowl of the twenty-four-hour fruit salad my mother makes — hand-pitted bing cherries, almonds, marshmallows. How exactly is it that any Southerners live past forty? But there was Phoebe, maybe 110 pounds, in her spotless, pressed linen dress, just nibbling and hopping up
and down to ferry still more food to the table.

“Now, for dessert,” she began, “I've made pecan pie for Maggie and banana cream for Michael, and oh, my neighbor sent over some homemade pralines.”

Michael put both hands up in the air. Phoebe stopped in her tracks, “Michael, honey, what's wrong? Are you choking?”

“Phoebe,” he said, “I am surrendering. I beg you, can we have a timeout before dessert?”

“The Henhouse Museum!” I said. “Let's take a little walkabout and get the highlights tour.”

“That is a fine idea,” said Beau. “And since we are putting you two lovebirds in the henhouse guest suite, we can get you all moved in.”

At three in the morning, I startled myself — and Michael — out of a dead sleep. Michael rolled over and looked at me. “
Cara
, what's wrong? What are you talking about? It's the middle of the night.”

I shook my head. “I was talking? What was I saying?”

He pulled me close. “Beats me. I'm just a guy trying to sleep. Whatever it was, you can tell me in the morning.” He pulled me close, tugged the covers up over my shoulders, and was snoring rhythmically in under a minute. I stared at the wall. Just above the dresser hung the twin to the daguerreotype Phoebe had sent me. My doppelganger looked back at me.

“Hello,” I whispered. “I think I was talking to you, Victoria. And maybe you were talking back.” The room was silent. The window shade moved in the dark, and a familiar fragrance blew through the room. It couldn't be lilac; spring was long gone. I wiggled out from under Michael's arm and crept over to the window. I lifted
the shade and leaned onto the window sill. Right outside the window, the top branches of witch hazel shrubs brushed against the sill. I reached out, broke off a small piece, heavy with yellow flowers, and brought it close to my face. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed…” I whispered. But I must have been half dreaming, because it was far too late for lilacs. I tiptoed back to bed. Victoria and I exchanged glances, or at least that's how it felt. She looked brave, confident, strong on that sixteen-hand-high horse. “Tell me your secrets,” I said. And then I fell back asleep.

CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 11

MAGGIE
MAGGIE

OXFORD

Over breakfast — mercifully we got away with yogurt and fruit — Aunt Phoebe outlined the day. “Now, you children can just take it easy this morning. Beau's already headed out on his rounds, but he left early so he should be back in plenty of time for the Egg Bowl. I'll just finish up in my office.”

Phoebe's office was, of course, the kitchen, a picture-perfect homage to the 1950s, with an elderly but pristine Wedgwood stove, a dishwasher that was so noisy when it was turned on it sounded as if a family of beavers were inside gnawing specks off the dinnerware, and a long, sunny window hung with starched dotted swiss café curtains. Phoebe's “office” was a long-running joke her children had started when they were small and their mama would tell them to play nice so she could “finish up.” Since Phoebe was always cooking or baking or canning or preserving, there was no finishing up, as far as I could tell. There was just cleaning up from one project to get ready for the next. Beau used to say, “You children leave your mama alone — she's got work to do in her office.”

Michael and I exchanged looks and tossed a coin to
see who would pursue the futile effort to help Phoebe with her myriad chores. I lost, so I strolled purposefully into the kitchen and plucked an ironed apron off Phoebe's antique coat rack. I tied the apron strings around twice and said, “Phoebe, I'm wearing an apron, so you've got to give me a job to do.”

She glanced at her watch and back at me. I could tell she was considering a big move. “You know what, darlin'? If we're going to get an early start for the picnic tables, you could do a little job or two for me.”

“Hallelujah!” I said. “Bring 'em on.”

In a few minutes, and with just about twice as many detailed instructions as any idiot would receive, but especially a Yankee idiot would need, Phoebe had briefed me on my two assignments: stuffing the hard-boiled eggs she'd probably prepared in the dead of night while we mere mortals slept, and garnishing each one with a sliver of Kalamata olive — or as Phoebe called them, “calamity” olives. I stood at the world's most ancient cutting board and meticulously slivered each calamity.

“You know, Phoebe,” I ventured. “You can buy Kalamata olives already slivered.”

“Oh, I know. I've seen them in the fancy shelves at the Piggly Wiggly. For you working gals, timesavers like that are just more precious than rubies. But I think about all those slivers sitting in that olive juice with all the flavor leaching out — because once you slice them, they're just not the same.” I pondered as I slivered. I wasn't too sure about the science behind Phoebe's theory, but she could be right. And no one's deviled eggs tasted as good as hers. Besides, what higher calling did I have than standing in an operating room/clean
kitchen and slivering away?

“Phoebe, we loved staying in the henhouse last night. You know, the only time Michael ever experiences ironed sheets is at your house. He asked me this morning if you'd be willing to fly out to California once a week and iron ours?”

She was quiet for a moment. “You know, Maggie, you could wash a few sets and send them to me and I'd iron them and send them back? We could get a little backlog in your linen closet so Michael would always have pressed sheets. People sleep better on ironed sheets, that's what I believe.”

I put my knife down. “Phoebe, you know I'm teasing you, right?”

She frowned over some unseen flaw in her coconut cake, wielding the icing spatula like a perfectionist neurosurgeon. She looked up. “Oh, honey, you are always joking. I can't always tell when you're serious — but anyway, you know that one of your cousin Betty's boys is working at FedEx. I bet he could get us a discount on sending those sheets.”

“Phoebe, you missed your calling. You ought to run logistics for the military.”

“You just watch yourself, Missy. You keep an eye on that knife and those calamities — we don't have time for a stop at the ER on our way to the game.”

“Plus,” I offered, “we'd have to rinse all the blood off the olives, and that would really throw us off schedule.” Phoebe tsk-tsked at me.

We fell back into a companionable silence.

“I have so many questions about all those things in the henhouse,” I finally said. “I hardly know where to
start. Does Beau know the names of all the people in those photos?”

“Lots of them. Not all, but you know he's a very persistent fellow, so if you turn up something you want to know, he'll figure it out.”

I thought about all the things I'd seen in our first stroll through the henhouse: photos (loose, framed, and enclosed in albums), paintings, sketches, boxes of carefully filed newspaper clippings, and family Bibles, including two inscribed to my grandmother, Alma. The first was a white leather book with gold-edged pages, a classic St. James version containing the Old and New Testaments. On the flyleaf it read:

On the occasion of your marriage to Morris Stern, September 18, 1947. God has kept you safe, now Morris will keep you happy.

Your loving Mother and Father

The second was a soft, cloth-bound Torah
,
with Papa Morris's quick strokes on the first page:

You, my darling Alma, are a price above rubies. When we are together, I fear no serpent in our garden.

With all my heart and soul, your Morris

“What Great-Grandmother Jessamyn wrote to Alma, what Morris wrote to Alma — those were such elegant, heartfelt thoughts,” I said. “‘I fear no serpent in our garden' — can you imagine emailing something like that?”

“I can,” said Phoebe. “You have written me beautiful emails. And when they are very special, I print them
out and I put them in one of your grandmother Alma's hatboxes.”

I shook my head. “Really? I think my emails are all about trolling for family gossip — which you, of course, being so kind-hearted, refuse to divulge — or asking you to re-send me one of your recipes I've lost yet again.”

“You quoted some poem to me that just filled my heart when my friend Sarah died.” Phoebe wiped her hands on the dishtowel. “I learned it by heart.” Standing straight, with her hands folded in front of her like a schoolgirl, she recited:

“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
”

Phoebe dabbed at her eyes with the corner of the dishtowel.

“You know, that's not exactly a poem,” I said. “It's from a sermon that Canon Henry Scott Holland preached at St. Paul's in London. He gave that sermon in 1910, and he died in 1918, six months before the armistice.”

“The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” said Phoebe. “My father taught us that. It was such a horrific war.”

“They're all horrific. But I've always wondered about Canon Holland — his happy-talk beliefs about death must have been tested before he died.”

Phoebe looked at me sharply. “I didn't think that was happy talk, Maggie. It broke my heart when my friend Sarah died. We used to talk every Sunday afternoon on the phone, three o'clock in the afternoon on the dot, her time in Connecticut, two o'clock my time. And after you wrote to me, I realized I could still talk to her. So I take myself for a walk on Sunday afternoons and I tell Sarah what's been going on, and if I'm bothered about something, I just yak, yak, yak, and I can almost hear her answers.” Phoebe began stacking her trademark tower o' Tupperware to pack into the picnic baskets. “Just so you know, Maggie, your Mr. Holland's comments comforted me greatly, so I'll thank you not to disrespect them as ‘happy talk.'”

Good work, Maggie
, I thought. Being snarky to the nicest person on the planet. I put my slivering instrument down and wrapped my arms around Phoebe's shoulders. “I am an awful smart-mouth, Aunt Phoebe. I am so sorry.”

She patted my cheek. “Honey, you always had a bit of a sassy mouth. I wouldn't know you otherwise.”

“Last night —” I said, stopping.

“Pardon?”

“Last night, I woke up at three in the morning, and I must have awakened Michael, because he asked me who I'd been talking to. I had the oddest feeling I'd fallen asleep looking at the old photo of Victoria, and I was talking to her.”

“In the same room, darlin'.”

The eggs were done, each one stuffed and bedecked with one infinitesimal olive sliver, packed carefully in — what else — a deviled egg platter, which she lowered like a priceless piece of art into a sturdy Tupperware container. While I had labored over those eggs, Phoebe had efficiently packed two picnic baskets with chicken salad, roasted zucchini, peppers, and sweet onions from her garden, spoonbread, and a cherry pie. Uncle Beau was rattling around with two wagons, Radio Flyers that had belonged to their kids (aka my cousins) and now repurposed for tailgating afternoons. A cooler with ice, wine, and beer perched on one wagon. Uncle Beau hoisted the picnic baskets, batting away offers of help. “Now, honey, you know we don't want our ladies to get all smudged and perspire-y from heavy lifting.”

I gave up, though I had seen Phoebe out in the garden since I was a little girl, attacking a non-performing plant with a hoe and a shovel, relentless until she had upended some strong-rooted plant, either to consign it to the compost heap or to replant it in a more favorable location. Phoebe caught my eye and placed her finger on her lips. “They have to believe what they have to believe,” she whispered.

Owing to my not-yet-advanced age, Uncle Beau did permit me to pull the lighter of the wagons, heading across the square and off into Hollingsworth Field.

Football day in Oxford always looks like a wedding reception to me. Ladies in pearls, gentlemen in khaki slacks and blue blazers. In recent years, the ties had been dwindling, but a stalwart few still dressed like gentlemen. Uncle Beau, of course, was turned out in a crisp white shirt and a striped rep tie.

Our little procession's ranks swelled as we moved across the square: cousins — actual and honorary — families, pretty college girls in linens and pearls, a marching band playing (of course) “Dixie,” and the usual conglomerate of kids too young to embrace the culture and old stiff-legged guys who'd raise a glass to toast the “Speed Limit 18” sign on campus, the insiders' homage to number eighteen, the one, the only Archie Manning.

We turned the corner into the Grove, and every single childhood memory about Saturday afternoons and Ole Miss football came back to me. The air was already alive with

       
Hotty Toddy, Hotty Toddy, Gosh Almighty!

       
Who the Hell Are We? Hey!

       
Flim Flam, Bim Bam

       
Ole Miss by Damn!

“Tailgate time,” called Beau, leading the way through the sea of popup tents to find the one he'd reserved for us.

The sophomore who was officially saving our place waved an Ole Miss pennant. “Over here, Mr. Beau!”

Phoebe waved back, greeted the young man with a hug, and said, “Marcus, say hello to our niece, Maggie Fiori, and her husband, Michael. This is Marcus, and he is in pre-med and is going to go into the business of saving lives. And I can't wait till he's out of school and will be my doctor so I can let poor Doc Harry retire!”

We shook hands. “That is some endorsement,” I said.

Marcus grinned and leaned in close. “I think she's
just encouraging me. Doc Harry treats her like the Queen of Sheba. She'll never let him retire.”

Meanwhile, Beau had shucked his seersucker blazer and, with Michael and Marcus's help, began setting up the ancient folding picnic table. In an instant it was covered with a good white cloth, red-checked napkins, and an ocean of Tupperware containers. Phoebe presented Marcus with his own container. “I wish you'd stay and eat with us,” she said, “but I know you want to go visit with your friends. So here's a little collection of nibbles for you and that pretty girl I hear you're seeing.”

Marcus looked startled. Beau laughed, “Marcus, my boy, if you don't know Oxford is a small town by now, you're never gonna learn. You could learn some diagnostic skills from Phoebe — she can spot a man with a fatal condition, otherwise known as love, at one hundred paces.” Marcus blushed, shook hands all around, and gratefully escaped, Tupperware in hand.

“Let's sit down,” said Phoebe, “before the hot stuff gets cold and the cold stuff gets warm.”

“To feast and friends,” said Uncle Beau. “And may the best Rebs win.”

“Doesn't matter,” said Phoebe. “You know what we say around here — Ole Miss may not win the game, but we will always win the party.”