“I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
Four minutes in the bathroom, one minute to straighten the covers, another two minutes to throw on jeans and my favorite Carolina sweatshirt, and I was down the stairs with three minutes to spare, ready for coffee and juice and for standing in the kitchen with Kidd’s arms around me.
Like the dogs, I need the physical contact of hands and face. I want to nuzzle and be petted, to hug and be hugged back. Next to life itself, having someone to love, having someone who loves you, is the luckiest thing in the whole world. Love doesn’t have to be sexual, but it does have to be physical—touching, kissing, feeling warm skin against my skin. Or like now, standing with my head against his blue flannel shirt, feeling the beat of his heart beneath my fingers.
We seldom plan anything when I come down and we spent the morning lazing on the porch, enjoying the sun when it finally burned away the fog, and talking of this and that.
“How is Amber?” I asked dutifully when he mentioned his daughter in passing.
“Fine. Growing up too fast, though. I’ve got her new school pictures.”
He went inside and brought back a handful of color prints.
The face that looked back at me was truly beautifuclass="underline" masses of dark curly hair, flawless fair skin that showed no adolescent pimples or eruptions, intensely green eyes that crinkled a little like Kidd’s in the one picture where she was smiling. Otherwise, I gathered that she generally favored her mother, a woman I hadn’t met.
“She’s lovely,” I said truthfully, “but she looks more like eighteen than fourteen.”
“Tell me about it,” Kidd said, shaking his head as much in pride as in rue. “The phone never stopped the whole time she was here last weekend. I told her I didn’t know why she wanted to come out when we couldn’t talk ten minutes without one of her friends or some boy calling.”
I knew exactly why Amber had wanted to keep him from spending the weekend with me, but not by the slightest frown or raised eyebrow would I let him know what she was up to.
So I cooed over her pictures and as Kidd talked of his daughter, I smiled and made appropriately interested noises until the conversation moved on to other topics.
After lunch, we took the dogs for a long walk along the river.
“When I was a boy,” said Kidd, “the Neuse was full of fish up this way. And the brackish water a few miles down used to be so thick with crabs we could catch two or three at a time on a single chicken head.”
Sunlight sparkled on the water, but instead of a fresh woodsy smell, the humid air around us held something vaguely fetid today.
Kidd tossed a pebble and the dogs perked up their ears as it plinked and sent ripples across the surface. “This used to be such a beautiful river, but now it’s dying and it’s killing the estuaries as well.”
The troubled coastal waters were at the root of that murder down at Harkers Island where we first met.
“I see where the state’s just authorized another study on the Neuse,” I said. “Be simpler if we could just bus the whole legislature down here and make them swim for an hour.”
“Won’t happen,” he said. “Too many politicians up there in Raleigh, not enough statesmen. Greed and ignorance. They send us all their mess downriver—raw sewage, hog lagoon spills, runoffs from agri-industries— everything but the laws and the money it’ll take to clean it up. We get another commission to do another study while the state spends millions to shore up the millionaires’ beaches on Bald Head Island.”
He plinked another pebble. We found a low spot almost level with the river and our mood lightened as we began skipping stones. I got six skips, but Kidd’s a show-off and routinely got eight or ten skips out of his pebbles before they sank.
“Some of us have real jobs,” I said, when he teased my lack of proficiency. “You, on the other hand, have clearly wasted too much time working on your rock-skipping skills.”
The day had turned out blue-sky beautiful. As we walked through the trees, we saw several hawks kiting on thermal currents overhead. Down on the ground, the wind was such that we walked right up on a small herd of deer. Unfortunately, the dogs saw them at the same time we did and their sharp barks sent the deer dashing for the underbrush, white tails flying.
“My nephew Reese is dying to bag a nice buck,” I said.
“So what’s stopping him? The deer population’s so swollen he shouldn’t have any trouble. Or is he a bad shot?”
“No time to hunt. Now that his dad’s stuck in a wheelchair, more of the work falls on him.”
“Reese. He’s the one with the fancy truck, right?”
I laughed. “Right. And you don’t even have your scorecard.”
When I first started introducing Kidd to my family, he had such a hard time keeping everybody straight that I made him a chart. He has most of my brothers and a lot of their wives down pat, especially those that live around the homeplace, but my nieces and nephews still blur together.
“You sure you don’t want to come meet them all on Saturday? We’re having our Thanksgiving get-together out at Daddy’s.”
“You sure you don’t want to come backpacking around Mattamuskeet?” he countered.
“Swamp water and mud in my boots? Mice stealing my food at night? A million ducks and geese squawking in my ear?”
“No worse than a million Knotts.”
I grabbed up some pine cones and pelted him, then turned and fled when he lunged at me. His legs are longer, though, and we went down in a tangle of dead grasses and fallen leaves. The dogs thought it was a game and joined in, tails wagging, to lick our faces and jump on our backs.
That evening, we drove down to Cherry Point for a Thanksgiving steak at one of the lounges with a bluesy piano. Not only does Kidd kiss good, he listens good, too. All through dinner, he listened to the developments in Mr. Jap’s death since we had last talked; and on the drive back to his cabin, I curled up next to him on the van seat and told him my fears that some of my family might be involved.
“Reese must have seen something he’s not telling me.”
“Or somebody.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you and your family do use those back lanes like turnpikes, don’t you?”
“They started out as real shortcuts, but these days my brothers shuttle equipment back and forth that way every time they can—combines and tractor rigs—even when it might be quicker to go by the public road. They get a little tired of honking cars, and getting the finger from impatient commuters. Urban people move to the country and it’s like, ‘Gee, you mean farmers live in the country? And they’re going to be cluttering up my road with hay balers or gang disks? Who the hell do these rednecks think they are?’ Pooling equipment’s the main reason Daddy and the boys are still able to make farming turn a decent living.”
I sighed and Kidd put his arm around me.
Maybe it was Dallas getting killed because he wouldn’t sell and move Cherry Lou back to Florida or maybe it was because of Adam’s mercenary assessment, but since Mr. Jap died, I’d given a lot of thought to the varying attitudes about land.
Robert, Andrew, Haywood, Seth, and Zach will continue to farm as long as they can sit a tractor or spread manure, and each has at least one child who shares that love of farming. But Frank is in San Diego and none of his children will ever come east to live. Even if Herman weren’t wheelchair-bound, he’s already cast his lot in town. His older son has a white-collar job out in Charlotte. Reese enjoys hunting and fishing, he may even put a trailer out there on Herman’s part, but he’ll never work the land himself. Haywood’s Stevie is studying liberal arts and thinking about journalism.
It’s that way right on down the line with Ben, Jack and Will and their children. They rent their land to the ones that still farm, but they themselves will never be true stewards. Adam was a generation ahead of his time when he told Haywood he wanted a job where he didn’t freeze in winter and broil in summer. Maybe he really was the smartest one of us, to take the money and run. Designing computers has got to be a lot less stressful than praying for rain before the crops burn up or praying the rain will stop before the crops drown and rot in the field.