"I'm all stopped up this week." Joe C opened the conversation, which would not let up until I left the house. He lowered himself into the old red velvet chair in a corner of the large back bedroom.
"Allergies?" I said absently, stripping the bedding off the four-poster and pitching it into the hall, where I'd gather it up and take it to the washer. I shook out the bedspread and draped it over the footboard.
"Naw, I reckon I ate too much cheese. You know, it binds you."
I exhaled slowly, calmly, as I stepped out into the hall to open the linen cupboard.
"Did you get Calla to get you some prunes?"
He cackled. I was one ahead of him. "Yes, missy, I surely did, and ate them all. Today's the day."
I wasn't in the best mood to put up with Joe C this morning. The charm of this particular town character was lost on me; maybe the sightseers the Chamber of Commerce was trying to attract would appreciate hearing colorful stories about Joe C's intestines. I couldn't imagine why any tourist would want to come to Shakespeare, since its only possible attraction would have been antebellum homes—if they hadn't been burned to the ground in the Late Unpleasantness, as Joe C's best friend, China Belle Lipscott, called the Civil War. So all Shakespeare could boast was, "Yes, we're old, but we have nothing to show for it."
Maybe Joe C could be propped on a bench on the square to amuse any soul who happened by. He could give a daily report on the state of his bowels.
"China Belle's daughter is dropping her off in a few minutes," Joe C informed me. "Is my tie crooked?"
I straightened from putting on the fitted sheet. I suspected he'd been eyeing my ass. "You're okay," I said unenthusiastically.
"China Belle's quite a gal," he said, trying to leer.
"You creep," I said. "Mrs. Lipscott is a perfectly nice woman who wouldn't go to bed with you if you owned the last mattress on earth. You stop talking dirty."
"Oooh," he said, in mock fear. "Bully the old man, why dontcha. Come on, darlin‘, make old Joe C feel good again."
That did it.
"Listen to me," I said intently, squatting before him. He put his cane between us, I noticed, so he hadn't completely ruled out the fact that I might retaliate.
Good.
"You will not tell me about your body functions. Unless you're dripping blood, I don't care. You will not make sexual remarks."
"Or what? You're going to hit me, a man in his nineties who walks with a cane?"
"Don't rule it out. Disgusting is disgusting."
He eyed me malevolently. His brown eyes were almost hidden in the folds of skin that drooped all over him. "Calla wouldn't pay you, you go to hit me," he said in defiance.
"It'd be worth losing the pay."
He glared at me, resenting like hell his being old and powerless. I didn't blame him for that. I might feel exactly the same way if I reach his age. But there are some things I just won't put up with.
"Oh, all right," he conceded. He looked into a corner of the room, not at me, and I rose and went back to making up the bed.
"You knew that gal that got killed, that Deedra?"
"Yes."
"She was my great-granddaughter. She as loose as they say?"
"Yes," I said, answering the second part of the question before the first had registered. Then I glared at him, shocked and angry.
"When I was a boy, it was Fannie Dooley," Joe C said reminiscently, one gnarled hand rising to pat what was left of his hair. He was elaborately ignoring my anger. I'd seen a picture of Joe C when he was in his twenties: he'd had thick black hair, parted in the middle, and a straight, athletic body. He'd had a mouthful of healthy, if not straight, teeth. He'd started up a hardware store, and his sons had worked there with him until Joe Jr. had died early in World War II. After that, Joe C and his second son, Christopher, had kept Prader Hardware going for many more years. Joe C Prader had been a hard worker and man of consequence in Shakespeare. It must be his comparative helplessness that had made him so perverse and aggravating.
"Fannie Dooley?" I prompted. I was not going to gratify him by expressing my shock.
"Fannie was the town bad girl," he explained. "There's always one, isn't there? The girl from a good family, the kind that likes to do it, don't get paid?"
"Is there always one?"
"I think every small town's got one or two," Joe C observed. "Course it's bad when it's your own flesh and blood."
"I guess so." At my high school, a million years ago, it'd been Teresa Black. She'd moved to Little Rock and married four times since then. "Deedra was your great-granddaughter?" I asked, surprised I'd never realized the connection.
"Sure was, darlin‘. Every time she came around to see me, she was the picture of sweetness. I don't believe I ever would have guessed."
"You're awful," I said dispassionately. "Someone's going to push you off your porch or beat you over the head."
"They's always going to be bad girls," he said, almost genially. "Else, how's the good girls going to know they're good?"
I couldn't decide if that was really profound or just stupid. I shrugged and turned my back on the awful man, who told my back that he was going to get gussied up for his girlfriend.
By the time I'd worked my way through the ground floor of the old house, whose floors were none too level, Joe C and China Belle Lipscott were ensconced on the front porch in fairly comfortable padded wicker chairs, each with a glass of lemonade close to hand. They were having a round of "What Is This World Coming To?" based on Deedra's murder. There may have been a town bad girl when they were growing up, but there'd also been plenty to eat for everyone, everyone had known their place, prices had been cheap, and almost no one had been murdered. Maybe the occasional black man had been hung without benefit of jury, maybe the occasional unwed mother had died from a botched abortion, and just possibly there'd been a round of lawlessness when oil had been discovered... but Joe C and China Belle chose to remember their childhood as perfect.
I found evidence (a filtered butt) that Joe C had once again been smoking. One of my little jobs was to tell Calla if I found traces of cigarettes, because Joe C had almost set the house afire once or twice by falling asleep with a cigarette in his hands. The second time that had happened, he'd been unconscious and his mattress smoldering when Calla had happened to drop by. Who could be smuggling the old man cigarettes? Someone who wanted him to enjoy one of his last pleasures, or someone who wanted him to die faster? I extricated the coffee mug he'd used as an ashtray from the depths of his closet and took it to the kitchen to wash.
I wondered if the old house was insured for much. Its location alone made it valuable, even if the structure itself was about to fall down around Joe C's ears. There were businesses now in the old homes on either side of the property, though the thick growth around the old place made them largely invisible from the front or back porch. The increased traffic due to the businesses (an antique store in one old home and a ladies' dress shop in the other) gratified Joe C no end, since he still knew everyone in town and related some nasty story about almost every person who drove by.
As I was putting my cleaning items away, Calla came in. She often timed her appearance so she'd arrive just as I was leaving, probably so she could check the job I'd done and vent her misery a little. Perhaps Calla thought that if she didn't keep an eye on me, I'd slack up on the job, since Joe C was certainly no critic of my work (unless he couldn't think of another way to rile me). Calla was a horse of a different color. Overworked (at least according to her) at her office job in the local mattress-manufacturing plant, perpetually harried, Calla was determined no one should cheat her any more than she'd already been cheated. She must have been a teenager once, must have laughed and dated boys, but it was hard to believe this pale, dark-haired woman had ever been anything but middle-aged and worried.