Although I’d called them Cousin Beulah and Cousin Sam till I was old enough to drop the courtesy title, strictly speaking, only Sam Johnson was blood kin. But Beulah and my mother had been close friends since childhood, and Beulah’s two children fit into the age spaces around my older brothers, which was why we’d spent so many Sundays at Bethel Baptist.
When Sam died seven or eight years ago, Sammy Junior took over, and J.C. still helped out even though he’d slowed down right much. At least, J.C. called it right much. I could only hope I’d feel like working half days on a tractor when I reached seventy-two.
Five minutes after saying good-bye to Miss Callie, I was turning off the paved road into the sandy lane that ran past the Johnson home place. The doors there were closed and none of their three cars were in the yard, but Helen’s Methodist and I’d heard Beulah mention the long-winded new preacher at her daughter-in-law’s church.
Helen and Sammy Junior had remodeled and painted the shabby old two-story wooden farmhouse after old Mrs. Johnson died, and it was a handsome place these days: gleaming white aluminum siding and dark blue shutters, sitting in a shady grove of hundred-year-old white oaks.
Beulah’s brick house-even after forty years, everyone in the family still calls it the “new house”-was farther down the lane and couldn’t be seen from the road or the home place.
My car topped the low ridge that gave both generations their privacy, then swooped down toward a sluggish creek that had been dredged out into a nice-size irrigation pond beyond the house. As newlyweds, Sam and Beulah had planted pecans on each side of the lane, and mature nut trees now met in a tall arch.
The house itself was rooted in its own grove of pecans and oaks, with underplantings of dogwoods, crepe myrtles, red-buds, and flowering pears. Pink and white azaleas lined the foundation all around. On this warm day in late April, the place was a color illustration out of Southern Living. I pulled up under a chinaball tree by the back porch and tapped my horn, expecting to see Beulah appear at the screen door with her hands full of biscuit dough and an ample print apron protecting her Sunday dress against flour smudges.
A smell of burning paper registered oddly as I stepped from the car. It wasn’t cool enough for a fire, and no one on this farm would break the fourth commandment by burning trash on the Sabbath.
There was no sign of Beulah when I crossed the wide planks of the wooden porch and called through the screen, but the kitchen was redolent of baking ham. J.C.’s old hound dog crawled out from under the back steps and wagged his tail at me hopefully. The screen door was unhooked, and the inner door stood wide.
“Beulah?” I called again, “J.C.?”
No answer. Yet her Buick and J.C.’s Ford pickup were both parked under the barn shelter at the rear of the yard.
The kitchen, dining room, and den ran together in one large L-shaped space, and when a quick glance into the formal, seldom-used living room revealed no one there either, I crossed to the stairs in the center hall. Through an open door at the far end of the hall, I could see into Donna Sue’s old bedroom, now the guest room.
The covers on the guest bed had been straightened, but the spread was folded down neatly and pillows were piled on top of the rumpled quilt as if J.C. had rested there after Beulah made the bed. He wouldn’t be able to use the stairs until his leg mended, so he’d probably moved in here for the duration. A stack of Field and Stream magazines and an open pack of his menthol cigarettes on the nightstand supported my hypothesis.
The house remained silent as I mounted the stairs.
“Anybody home?”
Beulah’s bedroom was deserted and as immaculate as downstairs except for the desk. She and Sam had devoted a corner of their bedroom to the paper work connected with the farm, Although Sammy Junior did most of the farm records now on a computer over at his house, Beulah had kept the oak desk. One of my own document binders lay on its otherwise bare top. I’d drawn up her new will less than a month ago and had brought it out to her myself in this very same binder, I lifted the cover. The holographic distribution of small personal keepsakes she had insisted on was still there, but the will itself was missing.
For the first time since I’d entered this quiet house, I felt a small chill of foreboding,
Sammy Junior’s old bedroom had been turned into a sewing room, and it was as empty as the bathroom. Ditto J.C.’s. As a child I’d had the run of every room in the house except this one, so I’d never entered it alone.
From the doorway, it looked like a rerun of the others: everything vacuumed and polished and tidy; but when I stepped inside, I saw the bottom drawer of the wide mahogany dresser open. Inside were various folders secured by brown cords, bundles of tax returns, account ledgers, bank statements, and two large flat candy boxes, which I knew held old family snapshots. More papers and folders were loosely stacked on the floor beside a low footstool, as if someone had sat there to sort through the drawer and had then been interrupted before the task was finished. Beulah would never leave a clutter like that.
Thoroughly puzzled, I went back down to the kitchen. The ham had been in the oven at least a half hour too long, so I turned it off and left the door cracked. The top burners were off, but each held a pot of cooked vegetables, still quite hot. Wherever Beulah was, she hadn’t been gone very long.
Year round, she and J.C. and Sam, too, when he was alive, loved to walk the land, and if they weren’t expecting company, it wasn’t unusual to find them out at the pond or down in the woods. But with me invited for Sunday dinner along with Sammy Junior and Helen and their three teenagers? And with J.C.’s broken leg?
Not hardly likely, as my daddy would say.
Nevertheless, I went out to my car and blew the horn long and loud.
Buster, the old hound, nuzzled my hand as I stood beside the car indecisively. And that was another thing. If J.C. were out stumping across the farm on crutches, Buster wouldn’t be hanging around the back door. He’d be right out there with J.C.
It didn’t make sense, yet if there’s one thing the law has taught me, it’s that it doesn’t pay to formulate a theory without all the facts. I headed back inside to phone and see if Helen and Sammy Junior were home yet, and as I lifted the receiver from the kitchen wall, I saw something I’d missed before.
At the far end of the den, beyond the high-backed couch, the fireplace screen had been moved to one side of the hearth, and there were scraps of charred paper in the grate.
I remembered the smell of burning paper that had hung in the air when I first arrived, I started toward the fireplace, and now I could see the coffee table strewn with the Sunday edition of the Raleigh News and Observer.
As I rounded the high couch, I nearly tripped on a pair of crutches, but they barely registered, so startled was I by seeing J.C. lying there motionless, his eyes closed.
“Glory, J.C.!” I exclaimed. “You asleep? That must be some painkiller the doctor-”
I suddenly realized that the brightly colored sheet of Sunday comics over his chest was drenched in his own bright blood.
I knelt beside the old man and clutched his callused, work-worn hand. It was still warm. His faded blue eyes opened, rolled back in his head, then focused on me.
“Deb’rah?” His voice was faint and came from far, far away. “I swear I plumb forgot…”