I probably would have called Hambone to heel and headed straight back to Dobbs right then if Ladybelle and Blue hadn’t suddenly perked up their ears and started racing for the cut.
Adam and I had been so riled up that neither of us had heard Daddy’s truck coming hell-for-leather through the field on the other side of the creek. He rattled across the log-and-board bridge and roared up the rise and the dogs had to scatter to keep from being hit.
The dogs? Hell, Adam and me, too.
At the very last instant, Daddy saw us and skidded to a stop that threw up an arc of dirt. He leaned across the seat and flung open the door and yelled, “Get in! We got to go call Dwight. Somebody’s done and killed Jap!”
11
« ^ » The simple truth shall be told, and let facts be judged of as they really are.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Since I knew Dwight’s number by heart, I was the one who actually called the Sheriff’s Department over in Dobbs. Dwight wasn’t there, of course, but the dispatcher promised to get a team underway while she ran him down.
I gave her the directions to Jasper Stancil’s garage and told her we’d meet the officers there. Then we headed back in Daddy’s truck, this time by way of the hardtop public road, which was marginally quicker.
“I was coming home from getting my hair cut,” Daddy said, “and thought I’d stop by and speak with him a minute.”
The community barber shop was a little one-room, one-chair affair at Pleasant’s Crossroads about four miles from home. Beneath the brim of his white straw planter’s hat, a narrow ring of pale skin divided Daddy’s white hair from the back of his sunburned neck.
“Got my ears lowered,” he used to joke after each fresh haircut.
There was no joking today as we crossed the bridge and sped toward Jap Stancil’s place.
“Jap’s truck was out at the garage, so I pulled up beside it and honked my horn. Them double doors was closed, and when he didn’t step out, I went in at the side door to see if he was there. And that’s when I seen him—laying there in his own blood and a tire iron right beside him.”
In Daddy’s Colleton County accent, words like “tire iron” come out “tar arn,” but neither Adam nor I needed to think twice about his meaning.
Nor did it occur to us that Jap Stancil might not be dead or that his death was accidental. Daddy’s seen a lot of violence over the years. He’d know.
He wasn’t real happy that I’d insisted on coming back with him and Adam. Even though he brought me up on a working farm that routinely slaughters hogs and cows and chickens for the freezer, even though he helped me get a job that routinely brings the dregs of the county before me, even though he hasn’t seen me in ruffles and Mary Janes since I was old enough to routinely reach for jeans and sneakers, in my daddy’s heart I’ll probably always be his dainty little baby girl who needs protection and shielding from the harsh realities of life.
And death.
Squashed in between the two men, my knee in danger of getting banged every time Daddy shifted gears, I couldn’t keep the images of what we were soon going to see at that garage from being colored by Adam’s earlier jibes.
As a child, I was never terrorized on the school bus like so many other kids. The bullies soon learned that messing with me meant they were messing with Adam and Zach. And if the little twins couldn’t handle it, there was always Will, who kept an eye out for all three of us. My biggest battle was making them let me take care of my own problems and I seldom won it till after all the boys were grown and out of the house.
Now I had to wonder if protecting me was something the boys had wanted to do, out of family solidarity, or because they knew what Daddy would say if they didn’t.
If I ever fell out of a tree, got stung by yellow jackets, was chased by a dog or ran into a barbed wire fence, sooner or later, when Mother was patching me up, Daddy would ask her who was supposed to be watching me? Where was [Zach] [Adam] [Will] [Jack] [Seth]? Pick one, any one. Hell, pick two or three if I were seriously hurt.
“Oh, Kezzie, hush,” Mother would say. “They’re not responsible for her and anyhow, hardheaded as this one is, you’re never going to keep her wrapped in cotton.”
Nevertheless, he would pick me up and pet me till I’d stopped crying. Being wrapped in cotton didn’t sound like much fun the way Mother said it, but sitting on his lap, leaning against his strong chest, diverted by the inner workings of his big gold pocket watch while Mother applied bright orange Mercurochrome to my scrapes or cuts, made me feel cherished and safe.
“How much petting you reckon he gave the boys?” asked the preacher. “Or Adam?”
By the time I was old enough to notice, Zach and Adam were almost too big for lap-sitting, but I seem to remember all three of us squooshed in together like a lapful of puppies to watch television or listen to Mother read, with Will and Jack and Seth and even Ben sprawled on the rug or couch next to us. And the way my brothers still hug each other, going and coming?
“And didn’t your daddy go right off and find some burn salve for Adam’s blistered hand while you were talking to the dispatcher?” asked the pragmatist.
If Adam feels shortchanged, maybe it’s his fault, not mine or Daddy’s.
As we approached Mr. Jap’s place, I said, “You might want to put your tires exactly where you had them before, if you can.”
But Daddy’d already had the same thoughts. “I’m not gonna mess up Dwight’s trail,” he assured me, and carefully drove off into the weeds where it was clear no other tires had passed since the rain stopped last night.
“Mind where you put your feet,” he warned Adam and me as he stepped across the overlapping tire tracks.
Dwight’s tracking skills were going to be put to the test if he tried to sort them all out. It was clear that at least three or four different vehicles had been past today.
The dirt drive that enters beside the old garage continues across an expanse of fallow ground too weedy and unkempt to be called a lawn, circles on around behind Jap’s house, then exits onto the road on the other side of the house. But the drive forks in a couple of places along the way. One fork leads over to Dallas’s house and storage barn. Another joins the lane Kidd and I had used a few weeks earlier. It was the one Dick Sutterly took after he finished talking to Adam, the same one that Daddy had used just now to cross the creek when he met Adam and me.
Mr. Jap was never territorial about Daddy and the boys or their tenants crossing his land. We’ve all used it as a shortcut to the stores at Pleasant’s Crossroads. Nor has Gray Talbert ever complained, not even when he had good reason to keep strangers from poking around his place. Not that actual strangers would know much about the back lanes since the woods on both sides of the creek are posted with those phony Possum Creek Hunt Club signs. A lane can look well traveled and still dead-end at an irrigation pond.
Seeing poor Mr. Jap was as bad as I expected, but by no means as bad as it could have been. Sprawled face-down on the damp cement floor halfway across the shop, he looked a little larger in death than he had in life. Adam seemed uneasy with this close view of violent death and murmured, “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
Along with the Bible, Dickens and One Hundred and One Famous Poems, Mother had read Shakespeare aloud to us of a winter’s evening, and we three younger ones can glibly quote from her favorite plays.
Daddy gave me an odd look. I shrugged and we both turned our attention to the condition of the shop. At the far rear corner stood a massive iron safe so old that its original green paint and gold lettering were nearly undiscernible beneath the layers of dirt and grease. According to Daddy, this was where Mr. Jap had kept the few papers he considered valuable: his farm deed before he signed it over to Dallas, his marriage certificate, Dallas’s birth certificate, Miss Elsie’s death certificate, Social Security papers, promissory notes, insurance policies and the like.