In great contrast, Luke Swan's house was the kind of shack even Jeffrey had looked down on when he was a kid. As a matter of fact, the house was so bad that somewhere along the way the Swan family had simply abandoned it and moved into a trailer home parked in the driveway. Stacks of newspapers and magazines stood on the porch, just waiting for a stray cigarette or match to bring the whole place down. It stank of poverty and hopelessness, and Jeffrey thought not for the first time that there were still large chunks of the rural South that had not yet fully recovered from Reconstruction.
As Jeffrey parked on the dirt road in front of the house, six or seven dogs ran out to the car – the standard redneck house alarm. A majestic-looking mailbox stood at least four feet high in front of the driveway, fancy script giving the street numbers. Just to be certain, Jeffrey checked the numbers against the page he had ripped out of the phone book he had found dangling from a wire by the pay phones outside Yonders Blossom. The book was at least ten years old, but people in Sylacauga did not tend to move around much. There were only two Swans listed in town, and Jeffrey had taken the wild guess that Luke was not associated with the ones who lived near the country club.
"Git back!" a woman yelled at the dogs as Jeffrey got out of the car. The animals scattered and the old woman stood on the cinder block porch outside the trailer, leaning heavily on a wooden cane. Her cheeks were sunken in, and Jeffrey guessed she had left her teeth in a glass somewhere inside the trailer.
She asked, "You come about the cable?"
"Uh…" He looked back at his mother's car, wondering what she must have been thinking. "No, ma'am. I came to talk to you about Luke."
She clasped her housedress together with a gnarled old hand. He walked closer and he could see her rheumy eyes were having trouble focusing.
As if she knew what he was thinking, she said, "I got the cataracts."
Her accent was so heavy that he had trouble understanding her. "I'm sorry."
"Not your fault, is it?" she asked, no menace in her tone. "Come on in," she said. "Mind that first step. My grandson was gonna fix it for me, but then, well, I guess you know what happened."
"Yes, ma'am," Jeffrey said, testing the bottom step. The cinder block shifted, and he could see where rain runoff from the trailer had eroded the soil underneath. He kicked some dirt and stones under it, making it a bit more level, before following her into the trailer.
"Not much," the old woman said, the understatement of the century. The place was a pigsty, the narrow design making it seem like the walls were closing in. More newspapers and magazines were piled around the room, and Jeffrey wondered what she was doing holding on to all this stuff.
"My late husband was quite the reader." She indicated the piles of magazines. "Couldn't bear to part with his things when he passed." She added, "The emphysema got him. Don't smoke, do you?"
"No, ma'am," he said, trying to follow her into the main room, a combination kitchen/dining room/living room that was little more than ten feet square. The trailer smelled of chicken fat and sweat, with a slightly medicinal undertone that older people got when they stopped taking care of themselves.
"That's good," she said, putting her hands out in front of her to feel her way toward her chair. "Smoking's horrible. Kills you something bad in the end."
Beside him, Jeffrey saw a stack of Guns amp; Ammo along with magazines of a considerably more adult nature. He glanced at the old woman, wondering if she was aware that a copy of the 1978 Christmas edition of Penthouse sat less than three feet from where she stood.
She said, "Go on and sit if you can find a place. Just move that stuff aside. My Luke used to sit there and read to me." She put her hand behind her, feeling for the chair. Jeffrey took her elbow and helped her sit. "I like the National Geographic, but the Reader's Digest is getting a little too liberal for my liking."
He asked, "Do you have someone who comes in to take care of you?"
"It was just Luke," she told him. "His mama done run off with a door-to-door salesman. His daddy, that was my youngest boy, Ernest, well, he never amounted to much. Died in the penitentiary."
"I'm sorry," Jeffrey said, walking across the sticky carpet. He considered the chair, but remained standing.
"You sure do apologize a lot for things that ain't got nothing to do with you," the woman said, feeling around on the table beside her. He saw a plate of crackers, and wondered how she chewed them. She put one in her mouth and he saw that she didn't chew them so much as let them melt on her tongue while she talked.
She told him amidst a spray of crumbs, "Cable's been out for two days now. I liked to had a fit when it went off – right in the middle of my program."
Jeffrey started to say he was sorry again, but he caught himself. "Can you tell me about your grandson?"
"Oh, he was a good boy," she said, her whiskered mouth trembling for a moment. "They got him down at the funeral home still?"
"I don't know. I guess."
"I don't know where I'm gonna get the money to bury him. All I got is my social security and the little bit I get from the mill."
"You worked there?"
"Up until I couldn't see no more," she said, smacking her lips. She paused a beat as she swallowed the soggy cracker in her mouth. "That was four, five years ago, I'd say."
She looked about a hundred, but she could not be that old if she was able to work in the mill that recently.
"Luke wanted me to get that surgery," she told him, indicating her eyes. "I don't trust doctors. I've never been to a hospital. Wasn't even born in one," she said proudly. "I say take the burdens God gives you and go on."
"That's a good attitude," Jeffrey said, though he wondered at choosing blindness for the rest of your life.
"He took care of me, that boy," the old woman said. She reached for another cracker, and Jeffrey looked back at the small strip of a kitchen, wondering if that was all the food she had.
He asked, "Was Luke into anything bad that you know about? maybe hanging out with the wrong kind of people?"
"He made money cleaning people's gutters and washing their windows. Nothing wrong with an honest day's work."
She had said "win-ders" for windows, and Jeffrey smiled, thinking he hadn't heard that word in a while. "No, ma'am."
"He had some trouble with the law, but what boy around here hasn't? Always something he was into, but the sheriff was real good about being fair. Let him make restitution to folks." She put the cracker in her mouth. "I just wished Luke'd found him a good woman to settle down with. That's all he needed was somebody to look after him."
Jeffrey thought that Luke Swan had needed a hell of a lot more than that, but he kept this opinion to himself.
"I hear he was going with that deputy's wife."
"That's what they say."
"He always did have a way with the women." She found this hilarious for some reason. She patted her knee as she laughed, and Jeffrey saw her bare gums as well as bits of cracker in her open mouth.
When she had finished, he asked, "Did he live here with you?"
"Back in the back. I slept here on the couch or in my chair sometimes. Don't take much to get me to sleep. I used to sleep out there in that tree when I was a little girl. My daddy'd come out sometimes and holler, 'Girl, you git down from that tree,' but I'd sleep right through it." She smacked her lips again. "You wanna see his room? That's what the other deputy wanted."