If I found Geraldine’s suit without merit—and except for a freehand diagram drawn by an old man, she had shown me no overwhelming proof to support her accusation—the graveyard would probably be kept in immaculate condition from here on out. Not, however, because Annice gave a true goddamn about the place. She reminded me of Adam, only instead of a business in California, her goal was a driveway wide enough to accommodate a Cadillac. One thing about it, though: from now on, Annice would be forced to prove to a watching world (i.e., her neighbors and the rest of the family) that she had more respect for her ancestors than anyone could ever ask.
“The law is the law,” the preacher said sternly. “You can’t overlook the desecration of two graves just because a half-abandoned site is now prettied up.”
I thought of our own family graveyard, bordered in old-fashioned roses and kept in loving repair. My mother is there. So is Daddy’s first wife. They lie amid my grandparents and great-grandparents and children that died of diphtheria and croup a hundred years ago. Daddy and some of the older boys want to be buried there, but will any of the grandchildren?
“The law is the law,” the preacher repeated inexorably.
“The letter of the law is not always the spirit of the law,” the pragmatist pointed out.
I remembered Roots and the Bicentennial and how they inspired amateur genealogists to go out and inventory all the little graveyards in the state, and I knew that this law had been expressly written to keep them from quietly disappearing beneath a farmer’s plow or a developer’s bulldozer.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Frazier,” I said, “but your client has failed to provide meaningful proof of her claim that this graveyard has been desecrated. I find her suit without merit. Case dismissed.”
Allen Stancil caught up with me as I was pushing open the rear door to head for my chamber.
“Just what I’d of done, darlin’. If you’re finished now, could you give me a lift home?”
21
« ^ » I would therefore offer them a caution, and recommend temperance and abstemiousness to them for the first season, till by degrees, they are inured to the place…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
One of Dwight’s deputies had picked Allen up and one of them could have taken him home, but there was such a hangdog look on his face that I felt sorry for him. Besides, I was still curious about where he’d been all weekend and why he’d been evasive with Dwight about it.
But we had driven out from Dobbs with less than a half-dozen sentences between us. Every conversational remark went nowhere, so I quit trying and concentrated on the road west from Dobbs.
Night was coming on clear and cold. The sun slid below the chilled horizon and bare-twigged trees were silhouetted against the vivid red-orange sky like gothic stone tracery against a stained-glass window. Venus hung like a solitary jewel at the precise point where the vermilion of sunset met the deep blue of night.
Allen seemed so sunk in thought that we were almost to the Old Forty-Eight cutoff before he finally roused himself enough to say, “I could sure go for a piece of catfish. How ’bout we swing past Jerry’s for some takeout? I’m buying.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Aw, come on, Deb’rah,” he wheedled. “For old time’s sake? I pure hate to eat by myself and the thought of going back to Uncle Jap’s house with him not there no more—”
For once, there was no double meaning, no suggestive randiness in his voice. It was just starting to sink in that the old man was really dead, and it seemed to be hitting him hard.
Reluctantly, I turned off Forty-Eight onto the two-lane hardtop that leads to Jerry’s.
Jerry’s Steak & Catfish is a head-shaking phenomenon to the old-timers around here, our first homegrown example of “If you build it, they will come.”
When Jerry Upchurch’s father died a few years back, Jerry was determined to keep the land in the family, so even though he had a secure job managing a restaurant in Raleigh, he bought out his two sisters and set about looking for a way to make the place pay. He knew he didn’t want to farm tobacco—he’d had his fill of that growing up—but he had a son who thought catfish might flourish in the irrigation pond, both his sisters and his wife knew a thing or two about cooking, and there were teenagers in the family who could wait and bus tables. There were also several displaced farmworkers in the neighborhood who were willing to skin and fillet catfish or wash dishes for good steady wages.
Before anybody could turn around three times, a rough-hewn restaurant rose up in the pasture overlooking the pond.
Cracker-barrel sages laughed at the Upchurches behind their backs. A catfish place out in the middle of nowhere? Half a mile off the main road? When we already had a barbecue house that served lunch and supper, not to mention service stations at every main crossroads with their soft-drink boxes and snack-food racks? How was Jerry going to find enough customers in a county where housewives still make biscuits from scratch every night?
Cracker-barrel sages hadn’t noticed that full-time, biscuit-making housewives were getting sort of scarce on the ground, or that most of those new houses held outlanders with different eating habits. They hadn’t paid attention to how many of their own sons and daughters, never mind all the new people, were driving home every evening from jobs in Raleigh instead of walking in from the fields. Nor did they realize how happy it made working wives not to have to cook and wash up a pile of dishes every single night.
The Upchurches have since trebled their dining room and dug two more catfish ponds.
“They got ’em a license to print money,” those cracker-barrel sages tell each other now, as if they knew it all along.
Jerry admits that the money’s nice, but he’s just happy he got to stay on Upchurch land and build something for the next generation.
While Allen went inside, I waited in the car overlooking the fishponds and watched aerators jet water ten feet up into the night sky. Each jet spray is illuminated by a different-colored spotlight as if they were ornamental fountains instead of a simple way to oxygenate the crowded waters. We were early enough that only a few people had arrived ahead of us, and Allen soon returned with a big brown paper sack that filled my car with the smell of hot fish and cornbread.
Jap Stancil’s house was less than five minutes away, and a cold cheerless place it was to walk into. Allen set our food on the kitchen table and lit all four bricks of the wall-hung gas heater while I rummaged in cupboards and drawers for glasses and silverware.
The kitchen was clean and tidy, not a spoon or mug out of place; but like most rooms inhabited by old widowed men, it held the spare and faded grayness of a house long without a woman: no curtains or tablecloths, no African violets blooming on the windowsill over the sink, no colorful potholders hanging by the stove, no cheerful rag rugs. No bright grace notes of any description. No softness. All was well-worn spartan utility.
I transferred our food from the compartmentalized foam trays onto chipped stoneware plates and Allen took two beers from the refrigerator.
“Here’s to Uncle Jap, then,” he said, lifting his can with a smile that tried to be sardonic and failed miserably.