Designated Daughters (8 page)

A
s soon as we stepped out of the car after church, Cal and I smelled the succulent aroma of roasting meat. We followed our noses around to the screened back porch, where Dwight had fired up the gas grill. He finished swabbing some ribs with barbecue sauce and lowered the lid before Cal or I could snitch a sliver of crisp pork.

“Another twenty minutes, and no lifting this lid,” he said sternly. “Peas are in the kitchen and I’m gonna go scratch a few potatoes.”

“Wait for me!” Cal cried and hurried off to change out of his Sunday pants and hard shoes.

Digging for new potatoes in our soft sandy soil means g
entl
y feeling around under the roots to find those gumball-size spuds without hurting the sturdy green plants. It’s like an Easter egg hunt for farm kids and Cal never seems to tire of it. A trail of hastily discarded garments led down the hall to his room and he was out the back door before Dwight reached the garden.

I hung up his pants, tossed his shirt in the laundry, and left his shoes where they were for him to stumble over and maybe think to put them away.

I changed, too, shucking my two-piece blue linen dress and open-toed heels for cutoffs and sandals. Out in the kitchen, a pan of tender young sugar snaps waited for someone to string them.

When Dwight and Cal returned with a double handful of baby potatoes, I washed the dirt off and steamed them in their thin red jackets.

Ribs are like fried chicken, best eaten with the fingers, and we didn’t stand on ceremony when they came off the grill, smoky and tender. These were from one of Robert’s pigs, so most of our meal had been grown right here on the farm.

“Can’t get more locavore than this,” Dwight said, spearing a potato no bigger than a marble.

I couldn’t help smiling.

“What?” he said, smiling back.

“Nothing,” I lied, but I’d suddenly remembered the reasons he’d given me for wanting to get married. “I’m tired of living in a bachelor apartment,” he’d said plaintively. “I want to plant trees, cut the grass, buy family-size packs of meat at the grocery store.”

And here we sat, less than two years later, surrounded by trees he’d planted and grass that he’d be cutting this week if he could get the mower’s carburetor adjusted, and a family-size platter of meat on the table.

While we ate, Dwight told me that he had fast-forwarded through Mayleen’s DVD and taken a few notes. “When Mr. Kezzie’s brother drowned, was there ever any talk that it might not have been an accident?”

Cal’s eyes grew wide. “Granddaddy had a brother that drowned?”

This was the first time the subject had come up in front of him and I kept my voice matter-of-fact in telling him about Daddy’s younger twin brothers and how Jacob had drowned in Possum Creek, while Jed died at Fort Bragg.

Cal listened, then turned back to Dwight. “Why’d you say it might not’ve been an accident, Dad? You think somebody killed him? The same guy that killed Aunt Rachel?”

He knows what Dwight’s job entails, but we try not to talk about it too much in front of him, and Dwight seemed a little taken aback that Cal had leaped from one possibility to another so quickly.

“I don’t know, son, but if someone did do both, he’d have to be pushing eighty now, wouldn’t he, Deb’rah?”

I nodded. “At least. Their friends would’ve been teenagers back then, too.”

“Weird,” said Cal. In his video games, all the bad guys were brawny and muscular and young, not octogenarians.

“On the other hand,” I said, when Cal had gone outside to give Bandit some rib bones and to check for new animal tracks on the concrete slab, “there were a lot of elderly people in and out of Aunt Rachel’s room. People who knew her and know our family from years back. It wouldn’t take much strength to smother an unconscious old woman.”

“Was she talking coherently the whole time? Making sense?”

“Coherent, yes, and probably making sense, too. You’d have to ask the others about that, though. I didn’t know half the names she mentioned, but that’s why she was killed, isn’t it? To keep her from going on and on about Jacob’s death? That it wasn’t an accident and someone was afraid she was going to name who she suspected?”

“Looks that way to me,” he said. “Why else kill a woman likely to die in the next few hours?”

The family started coming in around two. Daddy and Aunt Sister arrived first, followed in short order by Seth and Minnie, Sally and Jay-Jay, Aunt Sister and her daughter, several of the nieces and nephews who had contributed pictures, and lastly by Haywood and Isabel, Herman and Nadine, and even Robert and his wife Doris. Except for Herman, none of those last six had been there on Wednesday, but they didn’t want to be left out—or at least their wives didn’t—because they were sure they could help identify any that the others couldn’t.

“Robert’ll probably know everybody Miss Rachel talked about,” said Doris. “If y’all remember, he used to take some of his extra vegetables and watermelons down to her vegetable stand and sit and talk with her for hours, didn’t you, hon?”

Robert allowed that this was true. “She liked my mother and told me a lot of good things about her I didn’t remember.”

Aunt Sister sniffed at that, but held her tongue.

I was surprised by Robert’s words. He and my older brothers almost never mention Annie Ruth, Daddy’s first wife. My impression of her is that she was short-tempered, grim, and worked in her house and garden from first light to full dark. Ironing, mending, canning, and preserving, even though she must have been pregnant most of the time. Eight babies, two of them twins, in eleven years. Nine babies, if you count the stillborn first son. Poor as Daddy was, she came from even more abysmal rural poverty and, according to Aunt Sister, never had a new dress or pair of new shoes till after they were married. She encouraged Daddy’s illegal activities because it put food on the table, clothes on her expanding brood, and a stash of paper money under the kitchen floorboards.

“But he could’ve made a million dollars and it won’t never going to be enough,” said Aunt Sister. “I reckon when you’ve been that poor you don’t never feel easy in your mind. She sure was proud of pumping out them boys, though. Thought she was raising up a real work crew.”

Daddy seldom spoke of Annie Ruth and only once was it halfway negative. “We had it rough, too,” he had said, “but there was always time for fiddling or story-telling. ‘What’s the good of it?’ she used to ask me. She never stopped to smell the roses and she won’t one to walk out in the fields with me of a moonlight night or catch lightning bugs with the little ’uns.”

To be fair, though, my mother had it easier. She was town bred, the daughter of a prosperous attorney with a bit of money of her own, and she used that money to hire help instead of trying to do it all by herself. She always had time for a ramble with Daddy and any of the boys who wanted to tag along, and she loved having friends and family come visit for days at a time. Between her piano and his fiddle, our old farmhouse rang with music and laughter.

But there must have been some tenderness in Annie Ruth to make her firstborn find comfort in Aunt Rachel’s memories and want to hear whatever stories she could tell him.

Dwight and Cal and I pulled extra chairs into our living room/den and we rounded up a bunch of cushions so that the younger ones could sit on the floor.

I could see the television screen from my seat at the dining table where I had my laptop ready to go when Dwight cued up the DVD. Mayleen had sent him an alphabetized list compiled from the notes that people had turned in, so it would be easy to insert any new names. Most of the still photos were focused on Aunt Rachel and those immediately around her bed. These had no sound to them, of course, and some were out of focus. Dwight paused the pictures whenever they showed other parts of the hospice room, and everyone called out the names of those they recognized. After five minutes, I’d only added one name to my master list—a Furman Snaveley. He was stooped with enormous age and turned out to be the former minister of Aunt Rachel’s church.

“Well, I’ll be blessed,” said Jay-Jay. “I didn’t see him there Wednesday. He’s the one baptized you and me, Sally.”

“Really? Oh wow! Look how he’s shrunk. When he laid me backwards under the water, I thought he was six feet tall. Of course, I was only eleven, but still—!”

“Probably eat up with arthritis,” said Doris, who had a touch of it in her thumbs.

Using his laser pointer, Dwight put a red dot on the profile of another white-haired man who stood between Seth and Dr. Howell near Aunt Rachel’s bed. His head was turned away, so we couldn’t see his face. “Who’s that, Seth?”

“Never saw him before. Daddy?”

Daddy leaned forward. “I’m not rightly sure. You know him, Sister?”

She shook her head and Dwight moved on to the next picture. At that point, a three-minute burst of video flashed on the screen, and each time the camera strayed from Aunt Rachel’s face, he would pause it so that everyone had a chance to comment.

“Oh, I know who that must’ve been before,” said Jay-Jay. “That’s his wife over there talking to you, Sally.”

“Kitty Byrd? He’s Sam Byrd?”

“We met her Friday after the funeral,” I reminded Dwight, adding an asterisk to both names to denote someone over seventy-five. “She gave you a list of names, remember?”

“They live just up the road from Mama’s and she used to let us come pick blackberries in their back pasture. Lord, the chigger bites we used to endure for Mama’s blackberry cobblers. Remember, Jay-Jay?”

“Did you know them when y’all were young?” I asked Daddy.

“Naw, never met them till atter Rachel and Brack set up housekeeping,” he said, giving me a speculative look.

It’s always hard to slide anything past him. If he knew we were concentrating on the over seventy-fives today, he’d realize where Dwight was going with this.

“Who’s that?” someone asked as Mrs. Byrd’s “bald man, big red nose, blue shirt” passed in front of the camera.

Dwight immediately reversed the film and paused it there.

“I know him,” Robert said unexpectedly.

“Jim Collins,” said Sally before I could chime in. “He owns a big company down in Fayetteville. Something to do with medical equipment for the military, I think. He used to love to stop by Mama’s vegetable stand on his way home and listen to her talk. Said she reminded him of his own mother.”

“That’s right,” said Robert, “and there’s his daughter right behind him. Real pretty, ain’t she? I forget her name.”

“Amanda,” Sally said. “Mr. Collins says she goes to Meredith College now. Majoring in business so she can go to work with him.”

I recognized that this was the girl whose pearls had broken when we both used the bathroom across the hall from Aunt Rachel’s room. Slender and blonde, she was short like her father, with a narrow nose set in a very pretty face.

“She must take after her mother,” I said.

Sally took a peppermint from the bowl on the coffee table. “No, Mrs. Collins was just as dumpy.”

Jay-Jay leaned forward with a smile. “She’s—”

Dwight immediately paused the picture again. “Something, Jay-Jay?”

“Naw,” my cousin said. “Just thinking how lucky she was not to get his nose.”

Dwight had moved on and we all focused again on the screen. Some of the videos were fuzzy and shot at an odd angle and none of them were very long.

I get it that videos taken with a cell phone can eat up a lot of valuable battery power that could better be used for texting and talking, but I also get it that teenagers have a short attention span and a hard time not talking while they’re filming. Emma was the only one who managed to keep her mouth shut and her camera focused on Aunt Rachel for a full ten minutes.

We listened as she rambled on from Jacob to Jed to the house fire that had killed Richard Howell’s sister and her two young daughters to bathing suits and recurring references to Letha, whoever she was. With so much background noise, it was difficult to hear everything.

“Mayleen’s sent a copy of this DVD over to the SBI lab,” Dwight said. “They say they can maybe clean up the sound and get more of what Miss Rachel was saying.” He paused the action as Aunt Sister registered that mention of soup being ruined.

“Lordy, lordy!” she said. “I plumb forgot about that! It was hot as the dickens that day Jacob died, but the vegetables were ready and Mammy and Rachel were canning soup mixture. You young’uns don’t know what hot is till you try to can vegetables in a water bath on top of a wood-burning range in the middle of summer. No air conditioning. No ’lectric stove. We’d shelled and shucked the night before and Mammy got started first light peeling tomatoes and slicing corn, but it was atter dinner and her and Rachel was still working on ’em when I went to the field. Hot as it was out there in the midday sun, me and Jed at least got a breeze. Not like the kitchen. When they hollered that Jacob was dead, Mammy just ran out of the house and—”

Her voice broke as the vivid memories of that day flooded over her.

“By the time we walked back in the kitchen, all the water had boiled out of the pot, the soup was burned, and three of them half-gallon jars had busted,” she finished quietly. “That’s what Rachel meant.”

We all sat silent for a minute, and Dwight looked over at me.

“Let’s take a break,” I said. “Cal, would you get Aunt Sister a Pepsi, please? Anybody else want one? How about a glass of tea?”

“I could use a glass of that last beer you made,” Seth told Dwight, and some of the others joined them at the tap Daddy had given him as a wedding present. Doris allowed as how she wouldn’t mind a little glass if Robert was having one, but the rest of us opted for tea or soft drinks.

Emma helped me set out bowls of chips and nuts while some took turns in the bathrooms. As we waited for everyone to settle again, I said, “Who was that Letha she kept mentioning? Was she Jacob’s girlfriend or something?”