Wild Midnight (4 page)

Rachel turned away to look over the field, where green rows of tomato plants rose from the rich, damp earth. The river-bottom lands they hoped to harvest in a few months were surrounded by the old earthen dikes once used to flood the fields for rice cultivation. It was so full of peace and promise, it was impossible to think they would lose all they’d worked for in an argument over access by a dirt road.
 

Til looked from Rachel to the county agent. “I’ve still got plenty of trash to pick up,” he said abruptly. “Miz Rachel, you just let me know if you need any more help.” He started back down the last row of seedlings.
 

Rachel watched the tall man’s retreating figure. She must talk to Til later, she thought, and give him her heartfelt thanks. She turned back to Jim. “Are we the last ones?”
 

“Billy Yonge and his daddy J. T. are still down the other end of the field,” he told her. “But I quit, Miz Rachel, ‘cause I’m a government bureaucrat and I turn into a pumpkin after dark.” He gave her a slow, admiring smile as she stretched her arms, her breasts thrusting under the muddy shirt. “Haven’t you had enough?”
 

Rachel lifted the straw hat from her head and gingerly fingered her sweaty hair. She sighed. “You and Til Coffee make me feel like I’m ninety years old, calling me Miz all the time.” She thought his slow, gentle smile curled his mouth agreeably.
 

“Why, Miz Rachel, it’s a term of respect. It’s the way we address a lady here in the South. Age’s got nothing to do with it. You’re not aiming to stamp out southern chivalry, are you?” His blue-eyed gaze traveled from the top of her head to the soles of her muddy running shoes. “I think you got a little sun. Didn’t your mama tell you redheads had to be careful about that?”
 

“All the time.” She jumped off the wagon abruptly and jammed the hat back on her head. Nice as Jim Claxton was, she knew what those blue eyes were saying, and she was not ready for their open admiration. “Do you think our tomato plants are going to live? They look sort of wilted. The trucker we bought them from at the farmers’ market this morning swore they were grade A plants, in good condition.”
 

“They’ll do just fine.” The county agent bent and touched a sprig in the next row, his fingers carefully parting the wilted leaves. “See, the stem is thick and green, they’ll straighten up and put out new growth.” He turned to her, smiling again. “One thing about tomatoes, they belong to the jimson weed family, and you can hardly kill anything that’s part weed. These are Clemson Thirty-one, a new disease-resistant strain, and top producers. You made a good buy.”
 

“Yes, for someone who didn’t know what she was doing,” Rachel said ruefully. Her eyes traveled over the field. Billy Yonge, the co-op’s chairman of the board, and his father were still working, solitary figures against the brown earth.
 

“They’ll quit when they get ready,” Jim told her, following her gaze. “They run a bachelor house, so nobody’s waiting supper for them. Are we just about finished here?”
 

Jim took her arm carefully as Rachel’s tired feet stumbled in a furrow. He led the way to his truck, parked at the edge of the field.
 

“You ought to be pleased the way it turned out,” he told her. “I didn’t think the high school kids would come, if you want to know the truth, and once here I didn’t think they’d work as hard as they did. I don’t think you could have gotten it done without them.”
 

“And Til Coffee,” she reminded him.
 

“And Til Coffee,” he repeated without much enthusiasm. “Our big shot from Chicago.” He changed the subject quickly. “Just don’t tell anybody I’m available for field work, will you? I don’t plan to branch out of the ag office with custom row cropping right at this time. And to tell you the truth, I haven’t driven a big John Deere in years.” He swung his arms and groaned. “Lord, I’ve had a workout.”
 

Rachel climbed into the front seat of Jim Claxton’s pickup truck with the big seal on the doors that said south carolina state department of agriculture and settled back into the hot plastic cushions with a weary sigh.
 

“I hope we’re not going out by the field road,” she murmured. Beaumont Tillson probably wasn’t at the gate, not at this late hour, but the thought of meeting him again made her close her eyes tiredly.
 

“Why?” Under the brim of his western hat Jim’s face tightened. “I’m not afraid of Tillson. But I can turn the truck around and go out that way, if you want to.”
 

Rachel opened her eyes quickly to stare at the man beside her. Did just the mention of Beau Tillson’s name set people on edge?
 

“There doesn’t have to be any trouble, you know.” He jammed the truck into gear and let out the clutch slowly as they navigated the edge of the planted furrows. “That is, if you don’t let Tillson walk all over you just because he’s a Beaumont, like most people around here. The real problem is that no one stands up to him. In my books he’s a—” He left the sentence unfinished as the truck wallowed into a gully and then came up on the paved road.
 

“A what?” Rachel wanted to know.
 

“Can’t use the words in the presence of a lady.” He wasn’t smiling. “Tillson hasn’t got a leg to stand on, closing that road. It’s some more of his damn-fool nonsense, that’s all.”
 

The pickup turned into a narrow road that skirted the broad green-brown Ashepoo River, now reflecting the dying sun in sheets of glimmering orange and yellow. The highway followed the original plantation road that kept to the winding waterway. Here the Ashepoo was brackish with the tides from St. Helena Sound, the moss-hung forest a dense black thicket at its edges. A flight of white marsh herons crossed the evening sky, ragged as flying white banners.
 

“This country’s so lovely,” Rachel breathed, sticking her head out the window to enjoy it. The breeze riffled her hair, unraveling mahogany-hued tendrils from her long single braid. “And so dreamlike. Does that sound silly?” She glanced shyly at him. “It was the first thing I felt when I came her—that the coast here was so soft, so melancholy and dreaming. I suppose that’s because so much of it’s been abandoned for so long.”
 

“Mmm,” he responded. The pickup groaned up an incline and onto the narrow paved road that ran alongside the river. “Well, I guess so, but it was never exactly what you’d call crowded. Back in the last century travelers had to ride through miles of wilderness to get from one plantation to another. Mostly they relied on people putting them up at private houses because there were so few inns to be had. That was probably the start of what we call southern hospitality.” He turned to her, his face once again wearing its familiar easy smile. “‘Course, if you were one of the big plantation owners, you usually had a big house along the river with more rooms than you could count, anyway, and it didn’t matter. And a couple of barges or so that slaves could row you around in to visit your neighbors. Mighty fancy boats too—some of the planters outfitted their slaves in fancy uniforms, a dozen or more slaves to a barge, and when they didn’t have anything better to do they raced them, one plantation crew rowing against another. And from what the old histories say, house parties went on all the time. Most of the towns had racetracks as well.” He looked at Rachel out of the corner of his eye, to see if she were really interested. “It was a high old life when they made money. Big planters could afford pretty near anything they wanted—owned their own banks, sent their sons to London or Paris to school, their daughters to private academies in Charleston and Savannah, kept racehorses, used to gamble—there was some dueling, but not like it was around New Orleans.”
 

“But not everyone was a planter,” she prompted.
 

“No, of course not. Slave-owning aristocrats were a tiny part of the population, probably not more than six or eight percent at the most. That’s one of those myths about the South that’s hard to get rid of—that everybody lived in big plantation houses and owned gangs of slaves. This area here, the low country, was plantation country though—black families on the Carolina coast in some spots outnumbered white families ten to one. But there were still small farmers, shopkeepers, people like that. Like my folks—they came over as bondsmen, indentured servants, signing up to work for somebody for fifteen or twenty years, until they could buy back their freedom. You don’t hear much about it, but a lot of them broke their indentures and took off for Indian territory, what’s now Kentucky and Tennessee and Alabama, and hid out.”
 

“And those that didn’t?” she asked.
 

“Stayed here in the low country.” He grinned. “Went to the university, got a degree, and became your local county agent. Look.” He rolled the truck to a stop at the side of the road. “I want to show you something.”
 

The view of the river was blocked by a woods of tall pine and wild sabal palms. Right in front of the truck the rich black earth was marred by huge, gouges and great yellow-painted earth-moving machinery set in the mud. Coffinlike forms of white plastic portable toilets sat in a row, and there was an office trailer with power and telephone lines strung to it.
 

“This is called Harborside Development.” He rested his arms on the steering wheel and stared through the windshield thoughtfully. “It’s going to be a million-dollar complex of condominiums and shopping plazas. Down at the water’s edge there’ll be a restaurant and a marina for several hundred boats. What they’re doing right now is putting in underground pipes to drain off the surface water into ornamental ponds, because when you bulldoze down the trees, you’ve got to put the runoff somewhere.” He lifted a big hand to point. “Along the river they’ll put up concrete retaining walls. It’ll look mighty pretty. You ever been down to Hilton Head? That’s what it’ll look like—everything wrapped in concrete borders. The wildlife will have to go, and it will alter the river some, pumping sewage into it—there’s no county sewage lines out here.”
 

Rachel stared at the violated earth. “I didn’t even know all this was here.”
 

“It’s a West German company with headquarters in Savannah.” He looked grim. “The county gave them everything they asked for when their executives came down here two years ago talking development, payrolls, and tax money. We had a group of environmentalists up at the state capitol who tried to fight against it, but the legislature went right ahead and granted them all sorts of waivers of pollution restrictions up and down the river. Now the state’s talking about building a feeder road, four lane from the interstate, to let tourists in.”
 

They sat for a long moment in silence.
 

“In a way,” he went on, “you’ve got to give Beau Tillson credit. He fought to keep Harborside out, and all the thanks he got for it was people writing him off as some kind of nut. But he was right—the silt from this construction site is already coming downriver to spoil his bottomland. Muck could come right in the next high water and ruin him if he didn’t have those old rice dikes to keep it out.”
 

“Surely someone can do something,” Rachel protested. “Isn’t there some sort of zoning that could be passed?”
 

“It’s money,” he said tersely. “Big money. Sometimes I think this whole country of ours has gone crazy just to make a profit. And it’s not only Harborside—a whole bunch of developers are waiting to come in all up and down the Ashepoo. Zoning’s a joke around here—you can’t talk to people, they’ve been poor too long.”
 

Rachel turned to look at him. “But it’s the developers who will make all the money!”
 

“You can’t tell people here that.” He released the brake and started the truck’s engine. “Tillson thinks the only way to keep the developers out is to run beef cattle, fence in and hold on to every scrap of land available, and enforce farmland zoning. There’s a big cattlemens’ lobby at the capitol that tries to balance out against the developers who want to concrete over the best grazing land.”
 

Rachel said slowly, “Does that mean that the only way to solve the problem is a fight between two big interests—the cattle lobby and the developers?”
 

He shrugged. “That’s what Tillson thinks. The problem is, there’s not that many cattle operations in DeRenne County. He’s the only one around here.”
 

A few minutes later, approaching Draytonville, they came to the intersection of the state highway and two other paved roads, and a clutter of shabby service stations, convenience stores, and a beer tavern, The popular Polar Bear Drive-In ice cream and burger stand was filled with the automobiles and pickup trucks of Draytonville’s teenagers gathering early for Saturday night. Rachel thought she recognized some of the co-op’s high school volunteers, who apparently had not yet returned home.
 

“I’m thinking about what you’ve told me,” she said quietly, “and it makes me more convinced that the co-op is really needed here. You know, that’s our aim, to help the small farmers keep their land.”
 

Jim kept his eyes on the road. “I didn’t aim to discourage you, Miz Rachel. I just wanted to show you that Tillson’s got a reason, as he sees it, to be touchy about a public right-of-way, especially as Harborside borders his place. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to be nasty to deal with, because he is.” He tried to give her a reassuring grin. “The farmers’ co-op is doing better than anybody expected, don’t look so down in the mouth. Especially when you consider this part of the South doesn’t take easily to that sort of thing—what some people called a socialist idea when you first came to town. You made it work the way you’ve gone about it, sort of persuading people to work together. But you know the project’s just that—an idea. I mean,” he went on, clearing his throat, “the people that sent you down from Philadelphia might be happy enough just to know that you got this far. Nobody expects you to reconvert the whole agricultural economy of the low country overnight.”