“This is where my father and my grandfather, too, did their accounts,” she said. “That desk has sat in that very spot for over a hundred years.”
The desk was solid and pleasingly crafted but probably built right here in the neighborhood by some nineteenth-century cabinetmaker who was good with his hands. It was not a piece to drive an antique dealer wild with envy unless he could see it with Mrs. Avery’s ancestor-addled eyes, but it did look at home here. The dog curled up in the kneewell and went to sleep.
“My grandmother had her sewing machine over there in the corner,” she said, nodding toward the spot where a large television now sat, “but I’m going to use this room as my den cum library.”
(Mrs. Avery’s probably the only person in Colleton County who could use the word cum and not sound pretentious.)
I’d never been inside this house before and I was surprised by its charm. There was an ease to the proportions that made you feel as if you could take a deep breath in comfort here, so I praised the desk and the room even though it was still cluttered with boxes of books and papers waiting to be arranged on the newly painted shelves as soon as they were completely dry.
Looking more than ever like a little gray-feathered guinea hen, Mrs. Avery picked her way through the maze of cardboard boxes and plucked a paper from one of them. “I came across this last night while I was looking for something else. Do you remember it?”
It was a creased sheet of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded into a tight little packet. On one side, Pass to Portland. On the other side, Ask Howard if he wants to take me to K.’s party, okay? D.
The pencilled handwriting was my affected teenage loops and swirls right down to the little smiley face over the i. I felt my cheeks flame with the same embarrassment as when she’d confiscated that note in her classroom a hundred years ago.
Mrs. Avery shook her head at me. “Oh, you were a one all right. Always thinking about the boys. And now here you are a judge and still unmarried. I thought surely—”
“Time has a way of playing tricks,” I said hastily. I crumpled the note, stuck it in my pocket and fished a high school yearbook from the nearest carton. It was from a few years back when one of my brother Robert’s daughters was a freshman. It would be hard to open any one of these yearbooks and not see a Knott face somewhere in its pages.
“Blessed if I know why I haven’t thrown out all these old test papers and record books,” Mrs. Avery said. “Really, the yearbooks should be souvenirs enough, don’t you think? Thirty-five years.”
I was appalled. Thirty-five years of pounding sophomore English into the thick skulls of hormonal teenagers?
“No wonder you’re enjoying this change of pace,” I said.
“I’ve never worked so hard, but it’s such pleasure,” she agreed. “The front parlor and bedrooms are still to do over, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve finished up outside. After all those years in town, it’s so wonderful to be out here on King land where everything I see is beautiful and orderly. Come and let me show you what I’ve done with my mother’s roses. They’re the only thing my brother cared about. Isn’t it funny how men are with roses?”
I would soon have to be thinking about landscaping the grounds around my own house, so I was actually interested as she pointed out rhododendrons and camellias and how the gardenias needed good air circulation so they wouldn’t mildew and if I wanted some of the baby magnolias that had volunteered around the mother tree, I should say now before she had Raymond root them out.
She had planted more azaleas on the slope down to the narrow creek branch that ran between her property and the little dilapidated church just on the other side. Here in the heat of summer, the branch was barely a trickle of clear water.
“A water garden with papyrus and blue flags would be so pretty down there, but—Come back here, Smudge!” she called sharply before her dog could cross the branch and muddy his paws. “My grandfather, Langston King, gave the land for that church, you know, so I can’t help feeling an interest in it. I’ve offered to have Raymond mow their grass and neaten up a little, maybe haul off those old cars, but I’m afraid Mrs. Williams took my offer wrong.”
She would, I thought, suppressing a grin. Women like Grace King Avery could get me to agree to anything just to get rid of them, but Sister Williams was an implacable will that bent to no force.
Burning Heart of God Holiness Tabernacle, pastored by the hot-tempered Reverend Byantha Williams, hasn’t had a fresh lick of paint in all the years I’ve known it and the tin roof sags precariously. The only thing that seems to hold up the branch side of the church is the ancient rusty house trailer backed up against that wall where Sister Williams lives with her four malevolent cats.
Out back, behind the tiny graveyard, two wrecked cars and what looked like an old washing machine or refrigerator were half covered by kudzu vines. Even junk can look picturesque when smothered in vines. Too bad that kudzu hadn’t reached the church yet.
Maidie shakes her head over the condition of this church because the congregation is too poor and too small to do more than patch and mend. It’s a dying church. Sister Williams’s standards are too rigidly puritanical and most of the young people deserted to other churches years ago. The average age is something like sixty-five. But what the members lack in youth and money they make up in fervor, and the rickety walls really rock when Sister Williams starts preaching. She’s in her seventies now and vows she’ll keep the church going as long as two or three be gathered together there in His name.
We wandered back up to the house and I was framing a graceful goodbye when Mrs. Avery said, “Well, I’m sorry to rush you, Deborah, but you see how busy I am. Do thank Zell for me. It was so kind of her to send the irises. Now, Raymond, before you leave, if you could just—”
Dismissed, I got in my car and eased back down the winding driveway, wondering if Raymond’s parents were as worried about the upcoming weekend as Andrew and April were.
On the other hand, jail might just be the rest he needed after working for Mrs. Avery all week.
As I neared the farm, it occurred to me for the first time that I was going to have to give some serious thought to a new driveway. The long pond’s on the back side of the farm and can be reached by several different tractor lanes which crisscross the land. My favorite runs across the Stancil farm, soon to be an upscale housing development complete with streetlights, sidewalks and golf course. Others are extensions of driveways belonging to Daddy and my brothers. If my family could monitor every time I came or went, to say nothing of every visitor’s coming and going, I might as well stay at Aunt Zell’s for all the privacy I’d be gaining.
Certainly there was no privacy today. As I cleared the woods and came up to the building site that looked out over the pond, I saw six pickups, a bright red sports Jeep, a white Toyota and two horses parked (or tied) out by the deck. I recognized three of the pickups as belonging to the work crew who hammered away on the inside. The rest had brought nieces and nephews and several of their friends who were diving off the end of my brand-new pier.
Farm ponds usually have such messy bottoms that wading out to swimming depth is enough to blight the fun of swimming because you know you’re going to have to wade back in through all the muck. Two weeks earlier, a pile driver from Fuquay came and sank a double row of ten-inch creosoted poles out to where the water’s ten feet deep. Then I had a lumber company deliver a stack of two-by-fours and pressure-treated boards and told A.K., Stevie, and the rest of the kids who still lived on the place that they could use the pier if they’d build it. I figured I might as well get a little work out of them since there was no way I’d be able to keep them off my half of the pond once the pier was built anyhow.