Wild Midnight (23 page)

“It has been for me too,” Rachel agreed quickly. She slid her hand to one side at the last moment to keep him from capturing it with his big one. The magic of the evening was only that of two people enjoying themselves, she reminded herself, and nothing more. She studied the tall blond man a little guiltily from under her lashes. Cutting her hair had taken him by surprise, but he’d seemed fascinated with the difference it made; her high-spirited mood entranced him even more. Had she been flirting with him? she wondered idly. If she had, it was the first time she’d ever done something like that in her life.
 

They had been discussing the Ashepoo River Farmers Cooperative on and off all evening, using it to keep conversation flowing. Her excuse for being in Hazel Gardens was to visit the banks and ask Jim Claxton for his professional advice. As they lingered over their second cup of coffee Rachel said, “What do you think of soybeans?”
 

“Oh, I like them,” he said mischievously. “Why, what’s wrong with them?”
 

She smiled. “I mean for a cash crop now, instead of trying to replant tomatoes. It would really be getting away from the whole concept of the co-op,” she said quickly, “which was to set up truck crops the small farmers could market themselves. If we grew soybeans, wouldn’t we have to sell them to a grain wholesaler somewhere? Most of us don’t know much about that sort of thing.”
 

He stirred his coffee for a long moment, giving it his full attention. Jim Claxton was wearing a tan sharkskin business suit, and his short, wheat-colored hair was carefully combed and smelled of a citrusy men’s cologne. He looked very neat, very consciously dressed-up for dinner with Rachel, and very attractive. There was something ruggedly appealing about him, Rachel thought, but the naked admiration in his eyes made her uncomfortable.
 

“Soybeans are a good cash crop,” he said, weighing it, “and a lot of the farmers up-country are big on it. It might solve some of your problems, although I can see where’d you want to stick to your original project. Who told you about soybeans?”
 

Rachel sidestepped the question and said, “We’d have to borrow money for it. But then we’re going to have to borrow money no matter what we do.” She sighed. “I didn’t make much headway with the banks here in Hazel Gardens this afternoon. They don’t think much of tenant farmers’ cooperatives either.”
 

He looked at her keenly. “What are you going to do?”
 

“It’s the board of directors’ decision, actually. The grant, this whole project, is set up so the members can learn to help themselves. I’ll be the one to make the recommendation to look for funding to plant another crop. We may have to get a co-signer for our loan, if nothing else.”
 

Jim finished his coffee and looked at his watch. “Have anybody in mind?”
 

“No, do you?” She couldn’t help smiling.
 

He smiled back, his pleasant face breaking into little weathered lines at the corners of his eyes. “Miz Rachel, if I knew the answer to that—how to find money for farmers—I’d be the most popular man in DeRenne County. Look,” he interjected, “I hate to cut short the evening, but I’ve got to pick up my kids. Why don’t you come along and help me put them to bed, and I’ll offer you a cup of coffee.” When he saw her hesitate, he said, “A two-year-old and a four-year-old make darned good chaperones.”
 

Rachel met his bright blue eyes. “I’d like to see them,” she said softly.
 

Jim Claxton’s house was a fairly large red-brick ranch style on a tree-shaded lot on the Draytonville highway. Rachel parked her car in the driveway behind his Department of Agriculture pickup and helped carry the sleepy two-year-old—an adorable little girl with a headful of blond curls, who smelled wetly of milk and soggy diapers—from the baby-sitter’s house next door.
 

“What a lovely house,” she murmured as Jim opened the front door, balancing the half-awake six-year-old on his shoulder, and turned on the lights in the living room.
 

The pleasant house was decorated in inexpensive Early American furnishings: a flowered sofa, a cobbler’s bench for a coffee table, and a large braided rug in the living room. A screened terrace that led off the dining room overlooked a floodlit backyard with lush green grass and an assortment of children’s toys, tricycles, and a small plastic swimming pool. The big man carried the little boy, now staring owlishly at Rachel over his father’s shoulder, down the hall to the bedrooms, and she followed with the younger child.
 

“I bought the house for Callie,” he told her as he set the little boy down gently. “Son,” he murmured, “you better go to the bathroom while I look for your pajamas.” As the four-year-old wavered sleepily out into the hallway Jim said, “It didn’t do any good. Callie couldn’t stand it here, she didn’t like Hazel Gardens, she didn’t like being a county agent’s wife, and most of all she didn’t like being a mother. At least that’s what she said when she left.” He took the sleeping child out of Rachel’s arms and laid the little girl on her back in her crib with deft, experienced hands. She hardly stirred as he changed her diaper and replaced it with a new one, then covered her with a pink fluffy blanket. “Funny thing is, Callie got the divorce, went off to work in Atlanta, met some guy in her office, married him, and now they tell me she’s pregnant again. There are some things I guess you never figure out.”
 

From the doorway the little boy, naked after having apparently shed his clothes in the bathroom, stared at Rachel with the same blue eyes as his father’s. “Are you my mother?” he wanted to know.
 

Jim looked embarrassed. “You can see I don’t date much,” he muttered. “Scat, young’un,” he told the boy. Over his shoulder he said to Rachel, “Can you fix us some coffee? Just plug in the pot, it’s all ready. I was hoping we’d do this, that I could talk to you before you went back to Draytonville.”
 

“I’ve never known any Quakers,” he said when he came out onto the porch to take the coffee Rachel handed him. “Except the one on the Quaker Oats box, and you sure don’t look like him.”
 

She had heard this too many times, but she smiled. “We don’t wear plain dress anymore, no little gray bonnets or big black hats. In most ways we’re just like any other religious group. We are pacifists,” she added, “and we are dedicated to good works.”
 

“I don’t miss the gray bonnet.” His eyes openly approved the pink dress which molded her breasts and clung to her slim waist. “I like what you’re wearing just fine.”
 

Rachel didn’t resent the look; Jim’s admiration, his eagerness to reassure her about her new short hair, couldn’t possibly offend. She couldn’t help thinking that his wife was a terrible fool. How could any woman not have wanted him, and two such beautiful children?
 

“Sometimes I think it would have been better,” she murmured, “if we’d kept some of the outward signs, plain dress, for instance, like the Mennonites. There’s some criticism that we’ve become too worldly.” She found she couldn’t meet his eyes. “But the way of Friends is still kindness and service to others. You wouldn’t be out of place,” she added impulsively, “in a Quaker meeting for worship.”
 

He turned his steady bright blue gaze on her. The look said,
And you wouldn’t be out of place here, either, in my house.
 

“Rachel,” he said. He put his cup down on the table.
 

“No,” she said too quickly. She was suddenly oppressed by this homey house that needed a woman so badly. “It’s late. I’ve got to get back.”
 

He looked away. “You haven’t touched your coffee.” His patience was more appealing than any move he could have made to hold her hand or take her in his arms. “I’ll walk you out to your car.”
 

The night outside was soft as velvet, the hot southern spring full upon them and loud with the shrill voices of tree frogs and crickets. Jim Claxton leaned his hand against the top of her small station wagon, his big body surrounding her, keeping her for a few more minutes. The feeling was strong that he wanted to kiss her. Rachel, with a very female sense of curiosity, wondered what it would be like to have this big, attractive man take her in his arms. The next moment she was irritated with herself for even thinking such a thing. She saw him bend his head to her in the darkness.
 

“Rachel, I don’t know how you feel about me at this moment,” he began.
 

In another second their lips would meet. She flattened herself against the side of the station wagon and tried to turn her head away casually.
 

“If there’s someone else, you’ll have to tell me,” he said in a low voice. “I know it hasn’t been such a long time since you lost your husband, but it wouldn’t, I mean, I wouldn’t want—”
 

“It’s too soon,” she heard herself saying. She was appalled at her own dishonesty.
 

But he accepted it. “I’m sorry.” She could tell that he was. “It’s just that you’re so lovely, Rachel, so fine and sweet. I don’t want to rush you. I know how much you must miss your husband.”
 

She made a little choking sound. She had come so far in deceit, she couldn’t believe it herself. “I have to get back,” she managed. “I have a lot of work to do, first thing in the morning.” She kept on talking, desperate to find a safe subject. “Now that the banks have turned us down I have to think of something to keep us in business. What do you know about Til Coffee?” she said, getting out her car keys. “He’s the high school teacher in Draytonville who—”
 

“I know who Til Coffee is,” he interrupted her. “But I can’t tell you a whole lot about him.” He bent to open the door on the driver’s side of the car for her. “He came back here last year to teach, that’s what he said. He’s not giving you people any trouble, is he?”
 

“Oh, no,” she said hastily. “Somebody said—someone told me that Til Coffee might get us financing to replant. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about him.
 

She saw the big man raise his hand to the back of his neck. He didn’t conceal his disappointment. His face said that up to the last few minutes the evening had been wonderful. “All I know about him is what everybody in Draytonville knows, that he’s Beau Tillson’s half brother. That’s where he gets his name—Tillson Coffee. From the old man.”
 

It was only ten o’clock when Rachel reached Draytonville. She drove aimlessly along the state highway, not wanting to go home, where Beau Tillson might be waiting for her.
 

She turned her car down the main street, deserted even at that early hour. The heavy perfume of blooming plants—mock orange and cape jessamine—that haunted the damp low-country air was strong; thick shadows from the live oak trees and their trailing gray moss made a dark tunnel of the streets with their few streetlights. The town was familiar, even reassuring now, but Rachel was feeling disillusioned. This beautiful damp, dreamlike part of the world was like no other; she was just beginning to realize the truth of that. Reality didn’t exist beyond an invisible, point; here one could believe anything. And if one didn’t know that, one was a fool.
 

She was a fool.
 

She’d come here a naive and inexperienced young woman, an outsider with an idealistic project for tenant farmers, thinking she could change things. But the only thing that had changed was herself. Without her even being aware of it, Draytonville had claimed her, dragged her into its tangled, thwarted past and present-day mysteries and made her a part of them. Now, in this theater of the absurd, Rachel told herself bitterly, she was onstage with the rest of the permanent cast of players, in that select company that had known each other for most of their lives, acting out a strange melodrama that had no beginning, as far as she could see, and no ending, sustained only by the willingness of the performers to go on. Right now she was a character known as “Beau Tillson’s Woman,” replacing the renowned Darla Jean. Taking her place alongside unhappy D’Arcy Butler, who longed, one supposed, to have her leading role. And beside unhappy Jim Claxton—if ever a good, kind, solid man deserved better, it was he. Center stage was, of course, Beaumont Tillson playing his famous characterization—Beau Devil, the recklessly satanic product of war, a bizarre childhood, and everything else that made him what he was. Then there was Til Coffee, as unlucky as Rachel to be caught up in all this, and at his side the beautiful Loretha Bulloch and their child. And in the wings—the ghosts of Clarissa and Lee Tillson, one apparently as bad as the other.
 

Before she’d left him, Jim Claxton had told her as much as he knew about their stories. Jim, the sharecropper’s son, reminding her that after all, he knew only a part of it, and that the Beaumonts were just one family and the county had many.
 

Begin with Jessie Coffee, a beautiful woman and a Bulloch; all the Bulloch women were fine looking, proud, and smart.
 

“They always claimed they were descended from some tribe on the gold coast,” Jim had told her. “The Bullochs held themselves a cut above the Gullah people hereabouts. And since nobody knew for sure, their story about where they came from originally was as good as anybody’s. Jessie was a county nurse-midwife, went up to Atlanta University and got her diploma and then came back here. They say Tillson wooed her with his money, bought her a new car, gave her anything she wanted. I guess the two of them made up for things they weren’t getting out of life.”