Wild Midnight (33 page)

“You’d better believe it. Take enough months out of the school year and Clinie Lloyd won’t catch up. And won’t make college either.” He looked around with his habitual wry smile. “You and my wife the Dragon Lady have dragged me into this, haven’t you? Here I was, grooving in my middleclass bag in this backwater dreamland, and you come along wanting high school volunteers, propagandizing my wife about uplifting my people and stop taking conscience money from ... certain corrupt sources I could name.” He flashed her a wicked look. “So that my boy will look up to me and all that. Okay, do
you
think I ought to run for public office?”
 

Rachel blinked. “Here?”
 

“A good question, but I doubt here, Miz Rachel. Black voters in the low country are still pretty unradicalized. And, although I’m not an ordained minister like Jesse Jackson, I do have my moments.” He grinned at her. “I was a pretty good stand-up comic in ward meetings in southside Chicago, enough to make state committeeman. What do you think?”
 

“I ... I can’t,” Rachel murmured. “Think, that is. But have you ... have you talked it over with Loretha?”
 

“Sure have. She thinks I need another big city. Like Atlanta. Are you going to do the tally book?” he asked abruptly. “I’ve got to get some kids to load this truck now that I got Lloyd’s muffler all wired up and ready to go.”
 

By ten o’clock the sun had turned the air to steam and Rachel could see that the remaining trucks would take care of what had been picked. They would have to stop in another hour or so. It was two hours to Savannah, and there was no need to try to sell their corn after noontime, since most of the truckers and buyers would be gone.
 

The same thought, apparently, was on Jim Claxton’s mind when he arrived. The county agent’s tall, rangy figure loped over the rows and toward her in a hurry. He pushed back the brim of his western hat with his thumb and smiled at her.
 

“Looks like you people have done a good job,” he said.
 

Rachel was genuinely glad to see him, although the warm look in his eyes made her turn away. She closed the ring binder of the tally book and smiled reluctantly.
 

“You’re such a pretty thing,” he murmured, stepping closer to her. “How do you always manage to get so dirty?” He reached up to flick a dollop of mud from her cheek.
 

She backed away from him. The gesture was fond and intimate, but she was not in love with Jim Claxton and she was sure he wasn’t in love with her. She looked up at the tall blond man uneasily.
 

His blue eyes were suddenly fixed at a spot over her shoulder, and his expression froze.
 

Before she could turn around to see what he was staring at the county agent muttered, “Excuse me a minute, will you?” and charged past her.
 

She’d never seen him move that fast. She stared at him as he started for the far rows of corn. There was no one in sight except the last group of high school students picking up their baskets and stereo radios as they prepared to leave, and the forlorn figure of D’Arcy Butler still working midway down the field.
 

It was D’Arcy’s row that Jim Claxton charged into, pushing the waving green arms of the stalks aside like an oncoming freight train. D’Arcy looked up, startled, and then drew back, her lovely face gone paper white as the big man seized one of her fine-boned hands and lifted it palm up to glower at it.
 

They were close enough for Rachel to hear him say in a tight, angry voice, “Woman, what’s got into you? You’re going to ruin your hands doing this!”
 

D’Arcy’s wide eyes lifted in an expression of pure hunger.
 

“You don’t think I can do anything, do you?” Her lips moved slowly, almost dreamily. “I keep telling you I can do things, I’m not a totally useless piece of china—I can pick corn and keep house and wash diapers and cook—and mah God, all you can think of to say is that I’m going to ruin my damned
hands!
”
 

“D’Arcy,” Jim said, his voice a low rumble. “Please, honey—I don’t want to see you doing work like a common field hand.”
 

“I could just kiss you, you damned fool.” In spite of her words D’Arcy seemed to be advancing on him almost menacingly. “I could just tear your clothes off right here and make you kiss me and hug me and make love to me, Jim Claxton, but you won’t do it. You never would, and you’re not going to do it now, because you think I can’t do anything except paint my toenails and spend my time buying fancy clothes!”
 

“D’Arcy,” he said desperately, “don’t put words in my mouth. I’ve never said things like that about your clothes. I can’t ask you ruin yourself, you know that. My mother and sisters, they had to work like slaves picking corn and chopping cotton. I couldn’t ask you—”
 

“Ask me to what?” she shouted.
 

“D’Arcy, Godalmighty!” Jim took off his hat and looked as though he were about to throw it on the ground. “You know my wife was a thousand times more used to the way I live than you are, and she hated it. And you—”
 

“Your
ex-wife
,” she yelled. “And what’s she got to do with it? And what have your mother and sister got to do with it anyway? I’m just tired,
tired
, Jim Claxton, of throwing myself at you and making a fool of myself in front of the whole of damned DeRenne County year after year! And having you tell me the same old trash about your ex-wife and how she hated having kids and doing housework, and how hard your mama worked chopping cotton! Well, to hell with it! I’m picking corn, and I could probably chop cotton, too, if somebody’d give me a damned hoe!”
 

Til Coffee had come up to stand by Rachel. “They’re at it again.
 

Rachel couldn’t speak; she was dumbfounded. D’Arcy and Jim Claxton? Was that why D’Arcy had looked so unhappy these past few weeks, when Jim was being so attentive to her?
 

Rachel felt strangely irked. Obviously she was the paragon Jim was looking for; she fit the mold of wife and stepmother to his children, and not tall, lovely D’Arcy with her indulged Charleston society background.
 

“But she’s got more going for her right now than I’ve seen before,” Til observed philosophically. “I understand she used to follow him around even when they were kids.”
 

“D’Arcy, I’m just a sharecropper’s son,” Jim was saying. “Lord, we’ve been all over this before. I can’t offer you anything, hard times have been my whole life. I’ve got a houseful of kids—”
 

“You’re blind as a bat, you hardheaded fool—can’t you see what I’m doing?” D’Arcy’s slim, silk-clad arm moved over the basket. She reached in, then slammed an ear of corn into the middle of Jim’s chest. “Here! Take it! I picked it myself. I picked a whole truckload this morning, ask anybody! Here, take another one,” she yelled, throwing another ear of green corn at him.
 

His big hands grabbed futilely at it but it bounced away.
 

“D’Arcy, love,” he told her, “don’t hurt yourself.”
 

“Oh,
hell!
” D’Arcy screamed. She struggled to pick up the bushel basket of corn. Before he could move to help her she had it shoulder high and emptied the contents over him. “I’m strong as a damned
horse
, you fool!”
 

Jim fended off the shower of corn ears as best he could. His hat dropped to the ground, leaving a shock of unruly blond hair to fall over into his eyes. “D’Arcy,” he said in his low, gentle voice. “Don’t be mad.”
 

“I am mad!” She stood glaring, her fists jammed at the waist of her expensively tailored slacks, her slender body quivering. “I’m thirty years old, Jim Claxton, and I’m running out of time, chasing you! If I’m going to give you a couple of more babies you’re going to have to do something about it, and quick! I’m turning into a damned
old maid!
”
 

“Babies?” the big man said hoarsely.
 

D’Arcy flung herself at his broad chest and wound her hands around his neck, bringing his head down to her. He gripped her gingerly with both hands, but a shudder ran through him and his big fingers contracted against the silk of her shirt. “Honey,” he said and groaned, “you’re making an awful mistake. I keep telling you—”
 

But the woman in his arms covered his mouth with hers. She twined around him as his arms tightened, her long fingers at the back of his sun-browned neck holding him to her firmly. With a strangled sound Jim yanked her to him quickly, the floodgates of his hunger finally giving way.
 

“D’Arcy, I’ve never loved anybody else,” he choked. “I’ve loved you since we were kids. Oh, God—I married another woman because I thought I could never have you!”
 

D’Arcy’s eyes closed ecstatically and her fingers twined in his thick wheat-colored hair. “You’ve got to marry me right away, do you hear? If you think you’re going to back down, you’re crazy!”
 

“Yes,” he agreed fervently, his arms crushing her to him.
 

Billy Yonge had come up to stand behind Rachel, still carrying a full basket of corn balanced on his shoulder. “Time to quit,” he said, his tight, bony face impassive. But his pale eyes glinted as he watched the county agent move his lips softly against D’Arcy’s fine-spun gold hair and her upturned face with a look of almost drugged happiness.
 

“Did you know about this?” Rachel asked him, still dazed.
 

He lifted his wiry shoulders in a shrug. “Callie should have never married Claxton,” he said tersely. “There were other men around who wanted her bad enough. But she never could see it for wanting him.”
 

As Rachel stared at him, Billy Yonge shifted the bushel basket slightly and started for the waiting trucks.
 

By noon it was numbingly hot. The spring seemed to have ended precipitously, with summer on the way. Rachel, looking around the cluttered cornfield, found that the urge was strong to walk away and leave the stacks of bushel baskets, the mounds of picked corn that couldn’t be shipped dumped wastefully on the ground, and the tags of newspaper wrapping and other litter for another day. But the picking up had begun, mostly by the co-op farmer members and their families, who had been there since before dawn.
 

Til Coffee came over with a weary-looking Loretha to help Rachel finish stacking the last of the bushel baskets so that they could be returned to the wholesaler.
 

“It’s been a good day.” Til grinned and stretched his powerful frame. “And the group’s taking shape, Miz Rachel.” He inclined his head in the direction of the group of white and black farmers standing nearby discussing the prospects of a farm machinery pool. “I think you just might be on a long roll with the co-op.”
 

Rachel was almost too tired to care. What she really needed was Jim’s estimate on how much marketable corn was still standing and whether they ought to try to harvest it tomorrow. But Jim and D’Arcy had left hours ago.
 

“True love sort of got in our way,” Rachel muttered. “At least Jim could have stayed around to give us an idea of whether it would be profitable to get all the trucks back again tomorrow.”
 

Rachel couldn’t begrudge D’Arcy and Jim their happiness; she told herself that she was just tired as she turned back to help with the wooden baskets. As she lifted her head she was the first to see the jeep coming in a cloud of dust into the field at the far end. In spite of herself, her heart lurched painfully.
 

“Uh-oh,” Til said. He’d seen it too. “I meant it
was
a good day.
 

The jeep rolled to a stop at the end of the field. The slumped figure of a man in a battered black Stetson and dusty shirt and jeans sat there for a moment, then lithely vaulted over the side of the jeep and started toward them.
 

“Til, you stay here,” Loretha said sharply as Beau approached them.
 

But the big black man’s body was tensed. “Miz Rachel, take your mother and get in your car. I’ll handle this.”
 

“In my car?” Rachel cried. “But Til, I can’t.” She started after Til, hurrying to keep up with him.
 

“You haven’t seen him?” he asked quickly. “Met him or anything like that lately?”
 

“Seen who?”
 

“Beau. Have you two still got something going on?”
 

The figure coming toward them lurched slightly, unsteady on his booted feet in the corn rows. The group of farmers had gone quiet.
 

“I haven’t seen him in ... some weeks,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, Til, what’s the matter?”
 

“You don’t know him when he’s been drinking.” His voice was taut and angry. “Why didn’t you do like I told you—take your mama and get in the car?”
 

The figure coming toward them looked mean and disreputable, as though he had slept in his clothes not one night, but many. There was a set look to his hard features, and the tawny jaguar eyes were bloodshot. He stopped a few feet away from them, his burning look focusing on Rachel.