“Merrilee wasn’t one real drop of kin to him before.” I was getting a little tired of explaining how the laws of inheritance work. “All you people keep thinking it goes back to Dallas and starts again with Dallas’s heirs. It doesn’t. We’re still looking at Mr. Jap’s heirs—Allen or Allen’s children.”
“Yeah?” There was a mulish look of disbelief on Dwight’s big homely face.
“I’m a judge,” I told him. “I know the law.”
“Then maybe I ought to list Allen’s children, too.”
“Makes as much sense as having Merrilee there.”
“And to be strictly fair, I’ve got to list Adam.” Before I could protest again, he said, “Good as Adam’s doing in California, I grant you he’s the most unlikely one of the bunch, but he was out there alone during the relevant time.”
No way could Adam kill somebody, I thought, but that still didn’t mean I was going to tell Dwight about my brother’s current financial problems.
“Who else could we make a motive for?” Dwight mused.
I hesitated. Daddy had asked Adam and me not to mention Mr. Jap’s plans to sell, and even though he seemed to think it was okay to confide my secrets to Dwight, I couldn’t bring myself to go against him completely.
“Well, Dick Sutterly’s been trying to get Adam or Mr. Jap to sell. Maybe he thought he’d have better luck picking up the Stancil farm from Mr. Jap’s heirs than from Mr. Jap?”
Dwight looked dubious, but he added Sutterly’s name to the list all the same. At the very bottom, he wrote down Billy Wall’s name. “He says Jap Stancil was alive when he left, but unless someone else saw Stancil alive later, I’ll have to keep him in mind.”
There didn’t seem to be anyone else with an immediate motive. He stuck the list in the case jacket and stood up to go with a mischievous look on his face. “So if killing Mr. Jap would be the second dumbest thing Allen Stancil ever did, what was the first dumbest?”
For once, I did not rise to Dwight’s bait.
Daddy always says a catfish would never get caught if it’d just learn to keep its mouth shut.
17
« ^ » All modes of Christian worship, not detrimental to society, are here tolerated...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Sunday morning dawned clear and sunny. There was a decided nip in the air as I left the house at 10:54. Dwight and I had wound up talking about my problems with Kidd’s daughter and his problems with his ex-wife before we put the video on, so it was nearly one before I got home and close to two before I fell into bed.
Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash had left in plenty of time for Sunday school at ten, but I’m doing good to make eleven o’clock preaching services. I’ll always consider Sweetwater my home church, but I moved my membership when I joined my cousins’ law practice because I hate to get up early on the weekends. And proximity really was my original motivator for choosing First Baptist Church of Dobbs.
Honest.
“That’s still an admission of sloth,” the preacher had said, disdainful that I couldn’t spring out of bed on Sunday mornings and drive twenty miles to Sweetwater.
“Never hurts a newly qualified attorney to share hymn books and amens with some of the most prominent citizens of the county,” the pragmatist had reminded him.
“Opportunism in church is worse than sloth and furthermore—”
It was such an old argument that I pushed them both to the back of my head and hurried into the sanctuary just as the first hymn was announced. Portland and Avery Brewer moved down to make room for me at the end of a pew near the door and my voice joined with theirs as we sang hymn number one-ninety, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”
Because it was the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the young and earnest minister exhorted us to count our many blessings and give thanks to the Lord. Obediently, I fixed my eyes upon my favorite stained-glass window, a pastoral scene where sheep grazed calmly while an improbable lion lay down amongst them with sleepily benevolent eyes. Instead of the upcoming national holiday, I thought back to the earliest November I could remember.
Now that I considered it, that was probably about the time our simple little country church was changing over from its old-fashioned Harvest Day.
Harvest Day at Sweetwater Baptist was usually a Saturday in late October or early November. There would be a morning praise service in gratitude for bountiful crops, then lunch on the grounds with hot dogs stuck on straightened-out coat hangers and roasted over an open fire, followed by marshmallows toasted on the same wire hangers. When I pulled mine out of the fire, they were always black on the outside and melted ambrosia inside.
After the weenie roast, there would be an auction to raise money for the church. Men donated cords of wood, bales of cotton, carved cedar walking sticks, fresh apple cider, and ten-pound bags of pecans, walnuts or peanuts. Women gave crocheted tablecloths, embroidered aprons, colorful patchwork quilts, fancy cakes, or quart jars of canned fruits, the peaches and cherries glowing like jewels in that crisp autumn sunlight.
Will got his start as an auctioneer at one of the Sweetwater Harvest sales.
Daddy wasn’t a churchgoer, but he always came to the sale and donated a hundred-weight of cured tobacco and bid on a quilt or some cakes. Growing boys always needed covering or feeding.
Relatively speaking, Southerners—especially those out in the country—have only recently taken to Thanksgiving. Certainly it was never a major holiday when I was very young. Oh, we colored pumpkins and turkeys in kindergarten and put on assembly plays in Pilgrim costumes of buckled shoes and hats and gray clothes with wide white collars. And we’d get Thursday and Friday off and the mail wouldn’t run on that Thursday, but otherwise, it was just an ordinary day of the week. Like as not, Daddy and the boys would harvest beans or cut stalks that day while Mother and Maidie and I went about our usual chores.
It wasn’t till I was in middle school and after some of the boys had married town-bred girls who celebrated Thanksgiving like the rest of the country that Mother started cooking a turkey and making a special holiday meal.
Daddy still thought it was a made-up holiday imposed on us by the North. As a boy, he could remember when Thanksgiving depended on annual presidential proclamations and was vaguely mistrusted as a remnant of Yankee puritanism. “They tried to outlaw our Christmas, so we never much bothered with their Thanksgiving,” he says, harkening back to lore handed down from before the Civil War.
Mother was a girl but old enough to remember when President Roosevelt stabilized Thanksgiving in 1939 and made it the fourth Thursday in November instead of the last Thursday, a distinction with a difference. “And not for the glory of God,” she would say dryly, “but for Mammon. November had five Thursdays that year and Mr. Roosevelt thought it would help stores get out of the Depression quicker if the country had an extra week of Christmas shopping days.”
Which is why Haywood and Isabel would feel no qualms about flying off to Atlantic City next Thursday instead of staying home to eat a big meal. As long as we get together sometime toward the end of the week, our family still has no fixation on any particular day.
My Thanksgiving reverie was suddenly interrupted by a sharp nudge in the ribs by Portland Brewer. Everyone else had their heads bowed for the prayer that closed the minister’s sermon. Once again, I’d missed it entirely.
Oh, well.
We stood for the singing of a final hymn—“Bringing in the Sheaves”—a last benediction, then we left the shadowy sanctuary and passed into the bright sunshine where red, gold and brown leaves lay thickly on the sidewalk and swirled along the gutters. Last night’s chilly wind had finished stripping the crepe myrtles and maples. The oaks alone still held their brown leaves.