In and around cries for more nails. "Head's up!" and "Nail it 'fore it grows," Carver Bannerman's death was the big topic of conversation. Of equal interest were the doses of arsenic he and Herman had ingested. Had it only been Herman, human nature being what it is, Annie Sue and I might have worked all morning surrounded by a cocoon of speculative silence. Enough Tar Heel wives have laced their husband's food that you couldn't blame even good friends for wondering if Nadine had suddenly decided to exchange wedded bliss for widowhood. Luckily for Nadine, young Carver Bannerman's quasi-victimship kept Herman's firmly in the realm of accidental.
Yes, poison was a woman's weapon of choice; yes, most women—most convicted women—seldom stopped with one victim; but since there seemed to be no connection between Herman and Bannerman, people felt free to exclaim and question.
"Good riddance to bad rubbish," said everyone who'd heard of Bannerman's attack on Annie Sue.
He was being buried over in Goldsboro that morning, so his wife's friend, Opal Grimes, wasn't around to crimp the lively discussion. If asked, most of the women wouldn't have recognized either Carver or Rochelle, but that didn't stop the cheerfully catty gossip as we hammered and sawed in the cool morning sunlight. Lazy but shrewd was the general assessment of Rochelle. Assuming he was a prize worth having—a man for whom every woman was a potential sexual conquest—she had skillfully played the cards she'd been dealt and had won the gold ring.
A car had been seen arriving and then leaving again in the rainy twilight just minutes before I got there. A woman down the street thought for sure the driver was a young woman, and her description of the car was enough like Rochelle Bannerman's that I figured Dwight was looking very carefully into her account of how she'd spent the evening. Not that he was sharing that information with me.
"He sure was handsome," conceded the woman who had approved a bank mortgage on his trailer, "but can you imagine going to bed with him?" She pounded a final nail into her end of the siding. "One of my clerks heard he'd lay anything with a vagina. Wouldn't you be terrified of waking up with some nasty infection? To say nothing of AIDS?"
"Well, I heard—"
"My brother-in-law said—"
"—and her husband was right there in the room!"
None of the volunteers acted as if they knew of Cindy McGee's involvement with the dead man because the dirt was dished too freely as she moved back and forth from one task to another. Except for Paige and Annie Sue, I seemed to be the only one who noticed her drawn face and her lack of chatter.
Attention was showered on Annie Sue. She got praise for her bravery and commiseration both for the attack and for Herman's illness. Her self-esteem had lots of bolstering that day.
Poor Cindy had nothing; and every time another comment about Bannerman's womanizing went round, Paige Byrd flushed crimson and looked equally miserable. Sympathetic mortification for her friend, no doubt. Yet she, too, had to hold her tongue.
Somehow they got through the morning and at lunchtime, one of the women from Paige's church called upon the three girls for a song. They were scheduled to sing at services the next morning, "but I've got to go to Greensboro tonight, so I won't get to hear you," she said.
"Yes, do sing for us!" others urged.
Cindy and Paige both looked like they'd just as soon go eat worms, but when Annie Sue stepped up onto the porch, they didn't have much choice.
I'd never heard the girls sing together and their close harmony was a pleasant surprise. No accompaniment, just an a cappella rendering of some old hymns. Annie Sue had always enjoyed the spotlight, and I was glad to see an easing of tension in Cindy's face. Even Paige seemed to lose herself in the melody. Their fresh young voices twined in and out, point and counterpoint, until they infected the rest of us.
A black woman beside me began to croon along. Another joined in with a more solid gospel swing. I've always adored sing-alongs—never do I feel so connected to other people around me as when my voice lifts with theirs—and soon we were all so much into it that BeeBee Powell's new front yard sounded like the Benson Singing Grove over in Johnston County.
Lu Bingham had served a Peace Corps stint, and she taught us a women's work song from West Africa. We went back to our tools more refreshed than if we'd spent the whole lunch hour resting. Throughout the afternoon, occasional bursts of song spurred us on. Everything from Michael, Row the Boat Ashore to There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly. Lu had to cut us off after one chorus of We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder, though, because our hammers went from a brisk 78 rpm to a lugubrious 33 ⅓. * * *
After a quick shower that evening, I drove over to Chapel Hill while it was still light, taking back roads that wound past stands of lush green corn and fields of half-cropped tobacco. Almost every yard was lined with watermelon red crepe myrtles or yellow daylilies. Knee-deep in summer! Whoever wrote that knew about ditch banks tumbled with yellow sneezeweeds and wild pink roses, about powerlines and bridge abutments draped in camouflage curtains of kudzu vines, about jack oaks heavy with broad dark leaves.
Near Holly Springs, I got stuck behind a farm truck piled high with huge burlap bundles of cured tobacco, but I was in no hurry and didn't really mind. Occasionally, a beautiful yellow leaf would work its way out of a bundle and drift back past my windshield like an exotic golden butterfly.
Daddy always shakes his head when he sends tobacco off to market like that—"like bundles of dirty clothes," he says—because he was a grown man with sons working alongside him before farmers quit marketing tobacco in the old way.
First the cured leaves went from stick barns to the packhouse where they were gently stripped from the four-foot-six sticks, each leaf sorted according to grade, then hand-gathered into bundles thick as a woman's wrist and the stem ends hidden by wrapping them in a smooth "tie leaf." Next, each bundle was hung back over the stick and packed onto the truck's flatbed for the drive to market. At the warehouse, the sticks were unloaded and carefully piled in a neat stack on the market floor. "And any young'un who carelessly stepped on a bundle of prime-grade leaf was lucky not to get a switching," my brother Andrew tells me.
By the time I came along and started helping by driving tractor, Daddy and my brothers had switched over to gas-fired bulk barns that look like the box trailers of an eighteen-wheeler. No more tying the leaves onto sticks, no more hand-grading. Just dump the cured leaves out onto big burlap squares, knot the four corners and toss them onto a truck headed for Fuquay or Wilson. * * *
Herman was cranked up in bed when I got to the hospital and he looked more alert than I'd yet seen him. His feet and legs had sustained the most neurological damage. They had started physical therapy, but it was still too soon to know what the final outcome might be.
"I'll be clomping up and down the hall with one of them metal walkers like an old crippled person," Herman said ruefully.
"Better than a wheelchair," said Nadine.
But it might be a wheelchair.
It was his first stay ever in a hospital; and, since Nadine was probably the only woman who'd touched his body since he was married, he was finding the experience almost as embarrassing as it was interesting. Certainly it was a novelty to have a pretty young physical therapist manipulate his legs and massage his hands and feet.