“But we always swam together in the creek,” I protest. “With colored kids we knew,” he says doggedly. “Kids from around here.”
“Colored kids who knew their place?” I ask from my smug perch on the sunny side of Brown vs. Board of Education. “What was wrong with those strangers? They too uppity?”
Seth shakes his head. “Actually, it was Ben and Jack didn’t know their place. They’d never seen whites dating blacks before and they weren’t bashful with their words when they walked up behind some at the hotdog stand. Ever notice that little scar under Jack’s chin? He got a cut before Daddy could break up the fight. He gave ’em both a licking when we got home and that was the last time he carried us anyplace but the beach to go swimming.”
Even though Daddy was a New Deal Democrat who admired Mrs. Roosevelt’s “spunk” I’ve never been totally sure of his rock-bottom feelings on race, but I was willing to bet that Ben and Jack were punished not so much because they’d made a racist slur but because they’d picked a fight over something that was none of their business.
If he has a credo that he’s tried to pass on to us, it’s Live And Let Live And Don’t Go Sticking Your Nose In Stuff That Ain’t None Of Your Business.
Some of us still keep getting our noses thumped.
Like his house, Daddy’s old pickup doesn’t have air-conditioning. I rested my arm on the open window and the warm June air ballooned the sleeve of my T-shirt and whipped my hair about my face. One sneakered foot was propped on the dash, the other was on the hump between my floorboards and Daddy’s.
He wore his usual scuffed brogans. His khaki work pants and blue work shirt had been washed to faded softness, but his hand was strong on the wheel and there was nothing faded about the cornflower blue of his eyes. His eyes narrowed now as he shook his head again over A.K.’s stupidity.
“I don’t understand how come he’s growed up so wild,” he muttered as we crossed Possum Creek and drove along Old Forty-eight. “Less’n it’s ’cause April’s always made Andrew spare the rod.”
“Probably genetic,” I said, enjoying the rush of heavy humid air against my skin. Long as I don’t have to do stoop labor in it, I don’t really mind our summer weather.
“How you mean?”
“From all I hear, A.K.’s pretty much like Andrew was and he says you came near killing that peach tree down at the barn stripping off switches.”
“Back then, he’d rather get a whipping than do right, that’s for sure,” Daddy admitted.
“And April’s the one got him on the straight and narrow,” I reminded him.
“Well, she ain’t keeping A.K. on it.”
“Can’t fight the genes,” I grinned.
“You throwing off on me again, girl?”
“If the shoe fits.”
“I never tore up things just for the hell of it,” he said mildly. “And for certain I never tore up nothing belonging to somebody else.”
The sliding rear window was open and Ladybelle stuck her head in and gave my ear a lick. Blue had his head over the side, his nose to the wind. In his youth, they say, Daddy collected enough speeding tickets to paper the outhouse before they got indoor plumbing. These days he rattles around ten miles under the limit, and the dogs ambled from one side of the rusty truck bed to the other with no fear of losing their balance.
We turned onto the blacktop that led past Jimmy White’s garage, crossed Forty-eight, then did a dogleg onto another blacktop, and finally wound up on the clay and gravel road that runs along Crocker land.
A narrow dirt lane leads across a field of healthy green cotton plants to where a stand of massive oaks shades a fire-blackened stone chimney. The chimney and a scattering of wild phlox among the weeds at the edge of the field are all that remain of the original Crocker homeplace.
“How’d it burn?” I asked as we bumped our way towards it.
“Chimney fire,” said Daddy. (In his Colleton County accent, it came out “chimbly far,” but I had no trouble understanding him.)
“Forty year ago, it were. Martha’s mama was cooking dinner when it catched and she had to be dragged out. Kept trying to get back in till Dwight’s daddy, Cal Bryant—he was the one got here first—he promised he’d go back in for her milk pitcher if she’d promise to stay in the yard. Funny what folks take a notion to save at a time like that. Whole houseful of nice stuff and the only thing she was worried over was a milk pitcher that maybe cost fifty cent at Woolworth’s.”
“What would you save?” I asked.
“Your mama’s picture,” he said promptly. “The picture albums with you young’uns. Maybe my mama’s Bible if they was time. Everything else, I could replace.”
I knew what he meant even though the house was full of irreplaceable reminders of people long gone: a hand-pegged wardrobe that his grandfather built out of heart pine, his mother’s punched-tin pie safe that stood by the back door, the stack of intricate hand-pieced quilts that had warmed us through childhood’s long winter nights, a zillion bits of glass and china and tatted pillow slips and rush-bottomed chairs and pocket knives that had been sharpened so many times that their blades were worn down to slender steel crescents—each object with a story, some of which only Daddy remembered now.
Hard as it would be to lose those, losing the pictures and the Bible would be like losing our past. Pictures can’t be retaken. And though Daddy’s not much for churchgoing, the Bible holds his mother’s record of the family’s births and deaths and marriages in her semi-literate handwriting.
✡ ✡ ✡
The lane curved around the oak grove. A dusty old black two-ton truck was parked out in the cotton field near a tall magnolia tree in full bloom. As we approached, I saw that the tree stood inside a low stone wall that enclosed a small plot of ground about twenty-five feet square. The truck was fitted with a hydraulic winch to hoist slabs of marble and granite in and out of the truck’s bed.
“You ever meet Rudy Peacock before?” Daddy asked as a man rose from his seat on the wall.
“Not that I remember,” I said.
“His granddaddy made my daddy’s stone and his daddy and him did Annie Ruth’s and your mama’s stone, too.”
My grandfather Knott’s “stone” was a ten-foot-tall black marble obelisk, erected shortly after he crashed and drowned in Possum Creek. Revenuers shot out his truck tires when he tried to outrun them with a load of his homemade whiskey. From all accounts, my grandfather was a good-hearted family man who turned to moonshining when boll weevils destroyed the cotton farms around here. It was the only way he knew to feed and clothe his extended family and pay the taxes on his little piece of land.
Daddy was barely in his teens when he became the man of the house, and defiant pride had reared that costly shaft to his father’s memory long before my birth. Same with his first wife’s marker, too, of course.
I probably would have met the Peacocks, father and son, when they came out to set Mother’s white marble stone except that I was in full flight by then—mad at Daddy, mad at my brothers, mad at God—so mad that I stayed gone for two years.
“Rudy’s right shy with women,” Daddy warned as we pulled up to the big truck. “Try not to scare him.”
Scare him?
The man now leaning against the truck’s front fender was tall as Daddy, but so broad and muscular you could’ve fit two Kezzie Knotts into one Rudy Peacock’s chinos and black T-shirt. Peacock’s hair was granite gray and his arms were roped with veins that stood out against the muscles. He nodded politely when we were introduced, but he didn’t put out his hand, his eyes didn’t quite meet mine, and he soon moved back so that Daddy was a buffer between us.
Ordinarily, I’d have asked if he was the father of a Peacock girl who’d been a year or two ahead of me in high school, but he was clearly so uncomfortable that I was ready to fade into the background.