Most of my brothers’ children don’t want to live like that. Nor do their neighbors’ children. The next generation will be easier pickings for the Dick Sutterlys.
Not that there aren’t a lot of the current holders with the same attitude. No sooner did Jap Stancil have the prospect of regaining his land but that he was ready to sell so that he could finance a state-of-the-art garage for Allen.
For Allen, the land would be a cash windfall; if Merrilee had inherited, it would have been validation of her worth. With no children to provide for, the land would have quickly converted to the clothes and jewelry Pete loved to buy for her. Maybe they’d have taken annual Caribbean cruises instead of every other winter.
And there’s poor Billy Wall, hungry to farm and seeing no way he’ll ever be able to buy land. Is that why he gambled so recklessly with Curtis Thornton, hoping to win enough to make a down payment on a farm?
Dick Sutterly’s never lived on a farm and never wanted to, so far as I could see. Land is merely a commodity, something to buy and sell and turn a profit.
And as for G. Hooks Talbert, this particular bit of land might mean a chance to exact a little revenge on Daddy for being made to eat humble pie with a governor he disdained.
And what about Daddy?
Adam thinks I’m romantically obsessed, but I’m only a pale shadow of Daddy’s fierce attachment to the land he and the boys have acquired over the years. It goes to the core of his being and I’ve seen how he reacts when things of lesser importance have been threatened.
There was no way to judge the situation that was building, especially when no one would give me facts.
I don’t know how long we’d been sitting still in front of the cabin before I realized that we were back. I looked up into Kidd’s eyes.
“Oh, good,” he said. “You did come home with me. I was beginning to wonder.”
As he kissed me, I gladly quit thinking and gave myself up wholly to feeling.
27
« ^ » At this season, the country is very agreeable to sportsmen, having plenty of all sorts of game in the greatest perfection; such as deer, which are as numerous as sheep in Scotland…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Airport workers were stringing lights on a tall fir tree in the main lobby of the airport next day and Haywood and Isabel were laughing like Christmas morning when they came through the gate. Their friends seemed equally jovial and there were cries of “Don’t spend it all in one place, now” and “Let me know when you buy that yacht.”
“Did you get lucky?” I asked.
“You might say so,” they beamed.
We got their overnight bags stowed and I tried to hand Haywood the keys to their car, but he waved them aside.
“You better drive, if you don’t mind, shug. Everybody on the plane kept giving me and Isabel champagne. If I tried to drive, I reckon I’d just float on off the road.”
Isabel giggled and crawled into the backseat. She pulled off her shoes and stretched her legs out along the seat. “Lordy, but my head’s light as a feather.”
“What’d you do, break the bank?” I asked as we buckled up.
“Near ’bout. And here’s what you won.”
Two fifty-dollar bills landed in my lap.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “My twenty dollars won?”
“On the very last quarter, won’t it, Bel?” asked Haywood.
“Next to the last, so I still owe you a quarter, Deborah. Don’t let me forget. Anyhow, I was talking with Joan Hadley about colleges—her last son’s a senior in high school this year so I wasn’t really watching and the next thing I know, the bells and lights went off and it was a hundred dollars. You didn’t say whether or not to keep playing if you won, so I didn’t.”
“That’s fine,” I laughed, thinking of a certain pair of black suede shoes on sale at Crabtree.
“Then, after I won your hundred, I switched to the machine on the other side of Joan so I could talk better, and I hadn’t been sitting there ten minutes when I won eight hundred dollars more.”
“She really had the St. Midas touch Wednesday night,” Haywood said proudly.
“Nine hundred in one night? Hey, that’s great!”
“That’s not all,” said Isabel. “I thought I’d run up to our room and lay down a few minutes till my heart quit beating so fast. But that night, after the buffet—they have the best lobster salad, to be sure—”
“I got the roast beef,” said Haywood.
“—when we got off the elevator, there was a quarter laying on the floor. I picked it up and stuck it in the Quarter-Rama right there by the elevator and blessed if it didn’t win me another twenty-five!”
“Nine hundred and twenty-five? What are you—”
“That’s still not all,” said Isabel. “By the time we went to bed, I’d won twenty-three hundred dollars, not counting that hundred for you.”
Bemused, I said, “I’m guessing that’s still not all?”
“No, wait’ll you hear what Hay wood did.” She started giggling again. “Tell her, honey.”
“Well,” said Haywood, “I didn’t have any luck at all Wednesday night. And it won’t much better yesterday. I’d drop twenty and maybe win back five, then drop sixty and win back three. It was getting on for suppertime and like Bel says, they have them really good buffets. You don’t want to be too late for ’em, if you get my whim. I was a little over my limit, but with what Bel won, we were still more’n two thousand to the good and Bel said we might as well play till six o’clock. Guess how much I won, shug?”
“I can’t imagine,” I told him truthfully.
“Twenty-five big ones.”
“Big ones? You mean hundreds?”
“Thousands!” crowed Isabel from the back seat.
“ ’Course now, the government’s gonna take a good part of it,” Haywood warned me.
“Twenty-eight percent right off the top,” said Isabel. “Remind me to tell Seth we got to file this tax form they gave us.”
(Since Seth and Minnie keep all the communal farm records on their computer, he usually does everybody’s taxes, too.)
“Still and all,” said Isabel, “that leaves us almost twenty thousand to the good.”
Haywood sighed contentedly. “Yeah, we had us a real nice Thanksgiving. How ’bout you, shug?”
I allowed as how I’d had a right nice one myself.
By the time we hit Goldsboro, Haywood and Isabel were both sound asleep. She was curled up on the backseat, he had his head propped between the window and the headrest with his hat down over his eyes to shade them from the midday sun.
Life in the fast lane can be exhausting.
Haywood and Isabel live a little less than a mile past the homeplace. I retrieved my car from Stevie (no dings and he’d even waxed it for me) and started back to Dobbs. As I drove along the heavily wooded road that runs past Jimmy White’s garage and serves as a shortcut over to Forty-Eight, I saw the blue lights of a patrol car up ahead parked on the left shoulder behind a gleaming white truck with lots of chrome.
Reese’s truck.
It had straddled the ditch at a cockeyed angle that made my heart stand still. I swung my car in nose to nose with it and hit the shoulder running, almost tripping over one of those yellow road signs that was broken off at the ground. Reese’s fancy chrome front bumper was crumpled and the right headlight was shattered. Despite the big wheels, the truck was far enough down in the ditch that the cab was almost level with the roadbed and both doors were open.