Not Daddy, though. He’s always had a broad streak of mischief in him.
“Deb’rah’s gonna need your vote again come election time,” he said. “And won’t some of your girls in school with her? What was their names, shug?”
“Now you didn’t drag Mr. Peacock out here to get his vote or talk about my high school days,” I said, and opened the wide iron gate set in the stone wall.
The damage was apparent as soon as I stepped inside and it shamed and angered me that any nephew of mine had a hand in this. I can understand teenage boys buying beer illegally. I can understand why they’d come back here, well off the road and out of casual view, to drink it in the moonlight and strew the cans around. But to then start pushing over headstones? To come armed with a can of spray paint?
The need to smash and deface I do not understand.
I hadn’t closely scrutinized the Polaroid pictures of the damage that Cyl DeGraffenried had introduced as evidence that afternoon. Mrs. Avery had picked them up, but under her disapproving eye, I had given them only a cursory, embarrassed glance. Now that I was here and could see all the girls’ names printed in dark green across the stones and wall, I realized that A.K. had probably been telling the truth when he swore he hadn’t used the spray can.
One hand had printed every S and every N backwards. A different hand had mixed his capitals with lowercase, then dotted each capital I. And while Andrew’s son might have written his letters that way, April’s son had been taught to print his alphabet perfectly long before he started kindergarten.
I’ve heard SBI handwriting experts say it’s almost as hard for an educated person to mimic a crude writing style as it is for an uneducated person to mimic a correct style. Both groups almost always revert to true form somewhere in the document. I was pretty sure A.K. couldn’t have written those backward letters that consistently. Especially not after three or four beers.
But he’d certainly had a hand in tipping over half a dozen headstones and pulling over the angel.
“No real damage to the markers,” said Mr. Peacock after he’d walked around the little graveyard. “I can stand ’em back up, reseat them with a little mortar and they’ll be fine as new once that latex paint’s scrubbed off. Good thing they won’t using oil-base.”
“What about that there angel?” asked Daddy.
She was granite, not marble, about five feet tall, and she had fallen back at an angle. One wing was half-buried in the soft sandy loam, but the right wing had struck the stone wall and shattered into several chunks.
“Now that’s gonna take some work,” said Mr. Peacock, stroking his broad chin. “I gotta be honest with you, Mr. Kezzie. It’s gonna cost. First I’ve got to see if what’s left of that wing can take drilling.”
“Drilling?” I asked.
He was so absorbed in the mechanics he forgot to be shy and actually met my eyes for a brief instant. “I’ll have to put in at least two steel pins to hold the new wing tip on. Then if it’s sound enough to accept the pins, I’ve got to see if I can match the color. Every stone’s a little different, you know.”
He bent down for a chunk of the broken wing that must have weighed at least fifteen pounds and hefted it in one huge hand as if it were a two-pound sack of flour. The sun had already set and daylight was fading, but we could still see the color difference between the granite’s weathered surface and its freshly split interior.
His hands looked like boot leather but his touch was delicate as his fingers gently traced the feathers chiseled on the broken stone he held, as if he were smoothing real feathers instead of granite.
“And after I match the stone, I’ve got to carve the feathers so they match, too.”
“And if the pins won’t hold or you can’t match it?” asked Daddy.
“Then we’ll have to make a whole new pair of wings and pin ’em on back behind the shoulder blades. By the time I give her a good buffing all over and bring her back and stand her up, they ought to look all right, but it’s gonna cost you.”
“Durn them boys,” said Daddy, shaking his head.
“Could’ve been a lot worse,” Peacock said. “If she’d fallen on her face, we’d have to make a whole new head. You can’t never get a new nose to look exactly right.”
As they continued to talk, I wandered around in the twilight to read the names of Crockers long gone. Old Mr. Ham Crocker had been eighty-eight. His sister Florence, laid to rest here around the turn of the century, “died a maid of 14 yrs., 3 mos., 24 days.” And there was Daddy’s great-uncle Yancy Knott “and also his beloved wife Lulalia Crocker Knott,” both dead of typhoid in 1902.
Gardenia bushes had been planted on either side of the gate and they were in full bloom. Their heavy sweet fragrance filled the air and hummingbird moths were busily working the fleshy white blossoms.
Lightning bugs drifted on the still June air. Mosquitoes, too, I realized, and slapped at one that was biting my arm.
Suddenly the quiet evening was interrupted by a pager on Rudy Peacock’s belt. He squinted at the tiny screen in the failing light, then strode across the cemetery to his truck, pulled out a cell phone and punched in some numbers.
“Where?” we heard him ask urgently. The next minute he was stepping up into the cab.
“Sorry, Mr. Kezzie, Miss Deb’rah, but I got to go. I’m on the volunteer fire department and we just got a call-out. Sounds pretty bad.”
“Where?” asked Daddy, his long legs covering the ground between them.
Already we could hear sirens on the other side of the woods.
“Starling’s Crossroads,” said Rudy Peacock as he swung himself into the seat and switched on the flashing red light suctioned to his dashboard. “The church yonder.”
6
Storm Alert! Isaiah 29:6
—Pleasant Grove Freewill Baptist
“It must be Balm of Gilead,” I said as we sped through the lane behind Rudy Peacock. “Where that Mr. Freeman preaches.”
“Yep,” said Daddy.
Despite the warm evening, we had the pickup windows rolled tight to keep from breathing in the clouds of dust Peacock’s truck was kicking up. It was like driving through fog and Daddy kept his beams on low so he could see the way.
When we reached the blacktop, our windows came down and we heard sirens converging from all directions. We followed as Mr. Peacock made another quick turn onto a clay road with deep, sunbaked ruts that hadn’t been scraped since the last heavy rain. A car was ahead of him and another turned in behind us. The red clay made it even dustier than the lane we’d just come from, and at that speed we were jounced around so hard that we had to shout to hear each other. Between rising dust and falling darkness, it was hard to make out the old converted gas station until we were right on it and could see the front lit up in kaleidoscopic flashes from the red lights in a couple of volunteers’ pickup trucks.
Flames were already jetting through the back left corner of the roof and Daddy pulled in behind Peacock just as the West Colleton volunteer fire truck swung in next to the building itself.
Ignoring Daddy’s command to stay in the truck, I jumped out to see if I could help salvage anything from inside.
Like hundreds of small two-pump gas stations built in the 1940s, this one had the usual low-pitched A-line roof that extended out over a narrow pull-through to cover the gas pumps plus a smaller pump for kerosene, none of which was still here.
A fireman called out, “Reckon they’s still any gas in them old tanks?” and I hoped Daddy had heard and that he’d stand well back in case something set off the tanks that were probably still there beneath the ground.
Two barred windows flanked the center door, and I followed a burly volunteer in protective gear into the large open space once lined with shelves of canned goods, sugar, flour and cereal, with room for a counter to one side, a drink box at the front and a potbellied stove in the middle. A narrow door at the rear would have provided cross-ventilation in summer.