Signs in the Blood (6 page)

“So you two really planted all of this?” Hawkins asked as Elizabeth led the way off the porch down to her gardens.

“Yes, this had all been a hillside tobacco field. We had a bulldozer make a flat place for the house and two smaller flat places below for a yard. It was really just so the girls would have a place to play, but over the years we got into planting more and more flowers and shrubs. At first everything came from friends who'd give me cuttings or divisions from the plants they had in their yards, like the iris and forsythia, the mock orange and the daylilies. But now . . .” She shrugged. “Now I really like to find unusual plants and probably spend more than I should on new flowers and shrubs.”

They were standing by a waist-high rock wall bordering the driveway. Soft gray thymes and golden yellow sedums cascaded over its flat top, while above it spiky clumps of purple irises and cushions of deep pink dianthus bloomed. Elizabeth absently pulled out a few encroaching weeds while Hawkins moved forward.

“What about this wall?” he asked. “It looks like it's been here forever.”

“It does, doesn't it? Actually, Ben just finished it last year. It's made from rocks picked out of the pastures. Ben started work on it back when he just spent summers with us. As a matter of fact, it was Cletus who taught him how to build walls, and they worked on it together.” She rested one hand on a huge capstone, remembering the gentle ways of Cletus. He had never been able to learn to read, but he could construct a dry-laid stone wall that was as solid as if he'd used mortar. Miss Birdie's son had possessed an intuitive genius for finding just the right rock from a heap of miscellaneous fieldstone to fit any given space. He and Ben had spent many weekends constructing the long wall, working side by side with very little conversation. But when they were finished, Ben had told her that he had learned more from Cletus than from many of his college professors.

She brushed the sun-warmed rock with her fingertips, thinking of this lost friend.
Another loss . . . like Sam. And just as senseless.
Suddenly she knew that she was out of small talk. She realized that she felt uneasy around Hawkins, and began to wish she hadn't invited him to the farm.
You hardly know this person, Elizabeth,
she thought.
Just because he was a friend of Sam's doesn't mean—

But Hawkins was bounding up the set of rock steps that led to a lush planting of pink peonies and deep red rhododendrons. She followed reluctantly as he made his way along the uneven stepping-stones to the blue bench under the apple tree. Here he stopped and flung out his arms as if to encompass the whole mountainside. “This is incredible, Ms. Good—Elizabeth. Just beautiful!”

Hawkins dropped onto the long blue bench and gazed appreciatively at his surroundings. With an inward sigh, Elizabeth resigned herself to being sociable a little longer and sat down on the other end of the bench. Hawkins said nothing but continued to look around in obvious admiration. And, as often happened, Elizabeth found herself seeing her house and her garden as if through the eyes of her visitor, delighting anew in the beauty that she
—and Sam—and Ben and Cletus—
had created.

It is beautiful,
she agreed silently. Below the driveway the tiered vegetable garden lay in orderly rows. Pea vines covered their trellises like lacy green shawls stretched out to dry. In the raised beds, dark green parsley, golden oregano, and purple-leafed sage crowded one another, while the bright chartreuse and deep burgundy of loose-leaf lettuces scrolled in bold patterns. Elizabeth had discovered long ago that dividing each rectangular bed into three triangles and then planting contrasting colors and textures within each division would produce a kind of cut-rate formal garden—at least till all the lettuce was harvested.

Behind the blue bench her most recently acquired rhododendron—a “Gomer Waterer”—was thick with blooms. The creamy blossoms were tinged with gold and pink
—just like a sunrise—and just like the catalogue promised.

“So, we must be facing due east.” Hawkins broke into her reverie. “You've got the ideal location—east-facing, southern exposure”—He motioned toward the vista before them—“and then there's the view. . . .”

The ranks of gently rounded mountains marched into a smoky blue distance. Their slopes were covered with the bright greens of the new-leafed poplars and oaks and maples, punctuated with dark evergreens. Here and there the trees gave way to an emerald swath of pasture or the raw dark red of a fresh-turned tobacco field. The sun glinted from a bright metal roof in a newly cleared area, and Elizabeth remembered that only two roofs had been visible twenty-some years ago. Now there were seven, counting this one.
At least they're so far away we can just barely see them. Our nearer neighbors we don't see at all from here.

Hawkins was saying something more about the house's perfect location and her thoughts turned unwillingly to Sam—Sam who had insisted on the due east alignment and southern exposure for the greenhouse—Sam, who had
husbanded,
in the excellent old agricultural sense, the land.
So now we're both widows—
she thought with a rush of bitterness
—me and the land.
She dug her thumbnail hard into the soft flesh at her wrist in an attempt to escape her thoughts.
Goddammit, Sam. Goddammit.

At last the early afternoon heat drove them back to the shade of the porch. Elizabeth brought tall glasses of iced tea and once again Hawkins stood at the railing, silent and gazing off into space. She sat in a rocking chair and sipped her tea, waiting for him to signal that he was ready to leave. Finally he drained his glass and, without turning, said, “I'd like it if you'd come into Asheville and have dinner with me sometime, Elizabeth. Maybe go to a movie. Or when I get a place rented I could fix dinner for you—”

“Would you like some more tea?” Elizabeth interrupted, standing up so hastily that her rocker banged against the porch wall, startling the three dogs out of their sleep. James, as was his wont, began to bark mindlessly, while Molly and Ursa stalked down the steps to the yard with offended backward looks.

“No thanks, no more,” Hawkins replied quietly as she collected his empty glass and headed for the kitchen. “I'd better get going—you've probably got things to do.”

“Oh, no, not today,” Elizabeth called back from the kitchen where she was furiously rinsing the glasses and coffee mugs. “But if you need to get back, I'll take you down to your car.”

Ben, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a second cup of coffee and a gardening magazine, lifted a quizzical eyebrow and silently mouthed,
What's your problem?

Ignoring her nephew, Elizabeth set the mugs and glasses in the dish drainer and returned to the porch. Hawkins put out his hand and said, “Thank you for everything, Ms. Goodweather. Lunch was delicious and I really enjoyed seeing this place. Sam told me so much about it and about you that almost all of it seemed familiar.” The handclasp was polite and brief. His thoughtful brown eyes rested on her momentarily and he said evenly, “You don't need to drive me down; I'd enjoy the walk.”

You were unforgivably rude,
Elizabeth told herself as she watched Hawkins's stocky form moving purposefully down the road.
No wonder he didn't want a ride.
As Hawkins rounded the barn and disappeared, the familiar sense of loss that was her heart's constant core seemed to swell, constricting her throat and forcing tears into her eyes.

CHAPTER 5

M
ISS
B
IRDIE
I
NSISTS
 (
S
UNDAY AND
M
ONDAY)

E
LIZABETH WAS STILL WATCHING THE EMPTY ROAD
when the screen door banged and Ben came out onto the porch. “What the hell got into you, Aunt E? A nice guy asks you for a date and you act like he's a serial killer or something. It sounded like you two had a lot to talk about—you know you like it when people want to look at your flowers—but all of a sudden, boom, you're in doing the dishes. He just asked you out to dinner, for God's sake. Even if you're not interested in him as a date, he might have helped you out some with this Cletus thing.”

“Oh, I know, Ben. It was just . . . I guess I wasn't expecting . . . I don't think that I . . .” She sank down heavily in the nearest rocker. “He was nice, Ben,” she explained carefully, “but I don't feel like getting involved with anyone. I just—”

“Involved? Since when is going to dinner and a movie with someone ‘getting involved'? You know what, Aunt E?” Ben hitched himself up to sit on the wide porch railing and she realized that she was in for a lecture.
At what point,
she wondered,
did the roles reverse? Just about when I really began to try very hard not to interfere in the lives of my children, then they, and Ben as well, decided to fill the gap by taking an interest in
mine.
The girls tell me what I should or rather, shouldn't wear, and now Ben . . .

“. . . do you good to have some social life,” he was saying. “Sam's been gone almost five years now and you've hunkered down like Queen Victoria mourning Prince Albert.” Elizabeth's eyebrows shot up in surprise and he went on. “You know, like in that movie you got from the library
—Mrs. Brown
or whatever it was.”

He continued hurriedly; having once broached the topic he appeared determined to have his say. “I mean, everyone knows how you carried on with the farm and the business and no one ever even saw you cry. You were really brave and all. But, my god, since last fall it seems like you've been in a blue funk; instead of getting back to some sort of a normal life, it was like Sam had just died and you were sadder than ever.”

Ben stopped in some confusion, but when Elizabeth said nothing, he renewed the attack. “Aunt E, don't you see . . . the girls and I have been really worried, but you're so . . . what do they call it? . . . such a private person that no one wanted to say anything.” He shook his head. “You know, when Rosemary was home for Christmas, she told me that, in her opinion, you might be clinically depressed. She thought that maybe we should try to get you to talk to a doctor about medication. Laurel's even been thinking that maybe she should move back, but I told them I thought you'd snap out of it before long. I was really hopeful today, seeing you enjoying this guy Hawkins's company. It's time you had some social life.”

Elizabeth stiffened in her chair. Now she felt indignant to think that while she had believed that no one had noticed her sorrow, Ben and her girls had been discussing her and, even worse, pitying her. “I appreciate your concern,” she said formally as she got to her feet, “but I'm fine and I don't really want a social life.”

The screen door slammed behind her and she headed upstairs to her workroom in search of something useful to do, something to erase the memory of Hawkins's cool manner as he said good-bye and started down the road. Behind her she could hear Ben saying dryly, “Sorry, Aunt E. I guess it's none of my business.”
At least you got that right, Benjamin,
she thought, as she climbed the steps to the airy room that served as her sewing room, junk repository, and general sanctuary.

A stack of patchwork squares waited by the sewing machine, an unfinished piece of embroidery lay in its hoop by her ratty but supremely comfortable chair, and a small pile of shirts reproached her from the ironing board. She ignored them all and scrabbled through a closet filled with the odds and ends of her life. At last she found it—a topographical map of Marshall County. Spreading it out on the desk beneath the window, she began to make notes on a yellow legal pad. At the top she wrote, in bold letters,
WHERE WAS CLETUS???

An hour later she had a plan. She would get in touch with the sheriff tomorrow and find out if the autopsy had been done. If it had, and if it was clear that Cletus had drowned, maybe Miss Birdie would accept the findings and agree with the sheriff that Cletus had fallen accidentally from the trestle while foolishly trying to cross it in the dark. But just in case Birdie still wanted to search the nearby hollows for any evidence of where Cletus had been before he died . . . Birdie had said that Cletus started out up Pinnacle Mountain, the three-thousand-foot peak that rose above Elizabeth's house.
He would probably have gone up the old logging road that runs along our southern line,
mused Elizabeth, tracing the road along the ridgeline on the map.
Once at the top, would he have gone down the other side immediately? or along Pinnacle Ridge? And which way?

The ridge ran roughly north and south and was furrowed with numerous coves and hollows. A century ago, much of this land had been open pasture and fields, and every hollow had supported one or more large families. The ridgelines had served as highways for travel by foot or horse, and a young man would think nothing of working in the fields all day and then walking miles over the mountain to attend a “singin',” to play baseball, or to go courting.
Like Little Sylvie's lover,
Elizabeth realized, tracing with her finger the short distance between her cove and the cove just on the other side of the mountain.
Birdie said his name was Johnson, and there are Johnsons still living over there.

The ridge runners had traveled these high trails till after the Second World War, when improved roads and affordable cars had made horse and foot travel obsolete. Now most of the fields and pastures were covered with second-growth timber and the insidious multiflora rose. Subsistence farming had given way to jobs in the city, and many old mountain farms had been abandoned. The sturdy log tobacco barns still stood, though, their rusting metal roofs incongruous amid the encroaching trees.

Elizabeth noted down the nearest hollows on the other side of the mountain; many were named on the map by the branch or creek that ran through them—Little Branch, Devil's Branch, Sweet Water Creek—but others had names taken from some long-forgotten event—Lonesome, Turkey Feather, Hog Run, Buckscrape. She could imagine the early settlers naming these places: “You mind that ole holler where them big bucks clean the velvet offen their antlers—we call it the Buckscrape?” She had been in a few of these “hollers” years before when she and Sam had tracked some of their cows that had gotten out through the old barbed-wire fence at the top of the mountain. But most of the hollers, though only a few miles away, were totally unknown to her. To get to them by car she would have to go down Ridley Branch to the bridge and then up the road that ran by Bear Tree Creek for four or five miles.
I'll talk to Birdie about it tomorrow, after I find out about the autopsy. If we have to go hunting, Birdie can suggest the likely places to start.

Early Monday morning, Elizabeth fed her chickens and walked through her vegetable garden, trying to decide which chores should take precedence. The tomato plants that she had started in a cold frame were too small to set out yet. The potatoes were pushing up through their thick blanket of hay and needed no attention. She could hoe around the young broccoli and collards, or she could do some weed-eating.
But first you call the sheriff,
she reminded herself.

The deputy who took her call was vague as to the sheriff's whereabouts but reasonably sure that Cletus Gentry's autopsy had not yet taken place. He suggested that she call back toward the end of the week. No, there was still no reason to regard this as anything other than an accident.

“Well, hell,” said Elizabeth, hanging up the phone. It startled her by ringing immediately.
It's going to be Birdie, and you can probably forget about getting that weed-eating done,
she told herself as she picked it back up.

“I'm ready, Lizzie Beth.” The old woman's voice was quavering but steely with determination. “I done packed us some sausage biscuits and some applesauce biscuits and a jar of buttermilk and I'm just a-settin' here waiting for you. Reckon we could start by goin' up Lonesome Holler.”

As they drove the narrow road that wound its way up Bear Tree Creek, Elizabeth glanced over at Miss Birdie, who was clearly enjoying herself. She had something to say about each farm or house they passed. “They must of got their baccer set right before that last big rain; hit looks real purty
. . . That
old place was like to fall down, then some Florida people bought it and fixed it up good as new. . . . Look-a there, they done set their mailbox up on an old bull-tongue plow.”

Elizabeth had been somewhat surprised at Birdie's calm acceptance of the fact of Cletus's death. Birdie had not shed a tear, to Elizabeth's knowledge; instead, she had resolutely concentrated her emotion on the question of how Cletus had met his end. The old woman was just commenting on a cow in a pasture by the road—“. . . puts me in mind of that old Jersey we used to have, old Polly. She poured the milk but was awful bad to kick. Cletus, he wouldn't have nothin' to do with her, though he was usual a right good hand to milk”—when she broke off abruptly and looked at Elizabeth, as if she'd read the latter's mind.

“Reckon I don't sound like a natural mother, just a-goin' on like that and my boy dead and not even in the ground yet. But, Lizzie Beth, I tell you how it is. Cletus has gone to be with Jesus and I know he's safe now. . . . These last few years, I been studyin' what would happen to him when I was gone. I'll be eighty-two in October and him just forty-one.” Miss Birdie's eyes were misty now. “He was the onliest one of our babies what lived. We had five afore him and they was all born dead or died afore they could walk. I thought I wouldn't have no more, then he come along and me thinkin' I was havin' the change. Me and Luther was so happy, and even when we knowed he was simple, why hit didn't hardly matter; he was a good help on the farm and as sweet as the day is long. He couldn't never learn to read, but . . .”

She wiped her eyes and blurted out, “When Luther died ten years ago, some lady from the county come out and talked to me about Cletus, said maybe he would do better in one of them special homes. I run her off right quick, but I knowed that if something was to happen to me, they'd take and put him in one of those places and, Lizzie Beth, he couldn't of stood it. So I guess maybe the Lord knowed that, too, and that's why He called my boy afore me.”

Elizabeth started to speak but Birdie went on, her voice stern now, “But that don't mean I don't want to find whoever it was knocked my boy on the head and throwed him in the river like a bag of garbage.”

Lonesome Holler was aptly named. A narrow dirt and gravel road ran between two freshly plowed and harrowed tobacco fields and up a densely wooded mountainside. Next to the road a swift-moving stream hurtled down over huge mossy boulders. Ancient dark green rhododendrons loomed above the road, bathing it in deep shadows.

“I thought we'd best start here 'cause it's the clostest place he mighta gone,” Miss Birdie explained, holding on with both hands as the jeep crawled over the rutted road. “This here's where Walter and Ollie Johnson live; do you know them? It was Walter brought them beans over to Dessie's that last day.”

“I know who they are. . . . Sam and I were over here years ago, looking for some of our cows that had gotten out. I think I remember . . . there was a beautiful little pool at one place in the woods, under a big oak tree in a clearing. . . .” With a sharp pang she remembered the day: hot and sweaty from the long hike up and then partway down Pinnacle, they had come upon this perfect bathing spot hidden away in the woods. They had quickly stripped and immersed themselves in its four-foot depth, delighted at this rare find so high up a mountain. They had emerged and dressed just as quickly, huddling their clothes onto still-wet bodies, when they heard voices and realized that there must be a house nearby. “Do they live in a pretty little log house—two rooms with a dogtrot down the middle—almost to the top of Pinnacle?”

“Used to they did,” Birdie said. “That is, till their childern got the notion Mommy and Daddy was too old to live up there so far from the hard road and without no phone nor 'lectricity.”

They had reached a clearing where a small barn and a newish white single-wide mobile home sat on a bulldozed cut in the side of the slope. A shed-roofed porch attached to the front of the trailer was lined with plastic lawn chairs. As Elizabeth pulled the jeep to a stop beside a rusted Ford truck, the door of the trailer opened and Walter and Ollie Johnson came out and sat down, ready to receive company. Ollie, a large, comfortable-looking woman with fluffy white hair, urged them, “Get you uns a chair,” and flapped her apron to shoo a yellow cat off the porch.

Once they were all seated, Miss Birdie began. “You uns know Lizzie Beth. She lives right down the other side of the mountain from you—the old Baker place.”

Walter, a wisp of a man in faded overalls, leaned slowly forward to peer at Elizabeth. He was about to speak when his wife said, “Why, yes, we know who she is. You remember, Walter, her and her man come huntin' their cows, back when we was livin' up on the mountain, must have been ten, twelve years ago. I believe hit was in June and they was just soaked with sweat. They found them cows, too, in the pasture with old Pet.”

She smiled widely at Elizabeth. “Hit's good to see you again, Miz Goodweather.” Then she lowered her voice and leaned toward Birdie. “Birdie, honey, Burlen done told us about your Cletus. I hate it for you but I know he's singin' with the angel band right now.” She touched Birdie's arm consolingly.

“I thank you, Ollie. I was just tellin' Lizzie Beth that my Cletus is safe with Jesus. But I still want to know how come him to end up in the river when I seen him goin' the other way, headin' up Pinnacle. I was wonderin' if he'd come this way—hit would have been about three weeks back of this.”