“Bingo!” said “Wilma.”
“Fred and Wilma Greene?” I rolled my eyes at the two black SBI agents, who tried to look innocent. “Why didn’t you use Flintstone and be done with it?”
“Sh-sh!” said Dwight as he concentrated on the bickering voices their bug was beaming over from Dallas’s house.
Terry Wilson tried to give me a hug. “Sure do ’preciate you going in there and asking all those questions for us. We didn’t get doodly with ol’ Fred and Wilma here.”
“Go to hell!” I flared. “What’s my Aunt Zell going to say when I tell her one of her best chicken casseroles is sitting down there in a murderer’s refrigerator?”
2
« ^ » … nor will it be easy to explain how they should all conspire in the same tale, and, without varying, stumble upon the same favorable accounts.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
It was almost Halloween before the worst of the kidding died down.
Cherry Lou Stancil and her son-in-law Tig Wentworth were sitting in jail waiting to be formally arraigned on first-degree murder charges. Both were going to be under such high cash bonds that neither would be able to raise it. Cherry Lou’s main collateral was the farm, but Mr. Jap had retained John Claude Lee, my cousin and former law partner, to roadblock her putting any liens on the land till after the trial. Under North Carolina’s Slayer Statute, she’d forfeit any claims to Dallas’s estate if convicted as a principal or accessory, and since Dallas had no children from his first two marriages either, John Claude was pretty sure he could get the farm reverted to Mr. Jap as Dallas’s closest blood kin.
Turns out that the land may have triggered the shooting. A local speculator offered Dallas a hundred thousand for his place. Soon as Cherry Lou heard that, she got visions of returning to Florida in glory.
Maybe they’d even buy a house right next door to Disney World.
“In your dreams,” Dallas told her.
From that day forward, according to Mr. Jap, she was at him like a hound dog after biscuits—just wouldn’t let it alone—till one day Dallas looked around and realized he was supporting a wife, a stepson, a stepdaughter, a stepson-in-law and a step-granddaughter. And he didn’t really like a single one of them anymore except for maybe the little girl. Mr. Jap said Dallas told Cherry Lou he was going to see a lawyer about a divorce when he got home from his next run to Galveston. In the meantime, he wanted Ashley and Tig’s trailer off his land. Ashley, Tig, and Bradley, too, for that matter.
Three days later he was dead.
Cherry Lou’s two children had been charged with conspiracy, but at their probable cause hearing, the DA cut them a deal when they agreed to testify for the prosecution. They were out on relatively small bonds, secured by Bradley’s truck and Ashley’s trailer.
Tig swore he’d kill them both if he ever got turned loose and he kept badgering his court-appointed attorney to forget about murder charges for a minute and start filing divorce papers on Ashley. “And put in there that I want sole custody of my little girl. Ain’t no fit momma that’d tell on her baby’s daddy.”
Cherry Lou had disowned the whole bunch. She admitted buying the shotgun the day Dallas told Mr. Jap he was going to divorce her—how could she not with her signature on Kmart’s credit card receipt?—but it was supposed to be a Christmas present for Dallas, she said. Along with a box of shells, she said. She didn’t know why Tig decided to try it out on Dallas two months early.
“Trick or treat maybe?” Dwight suggested.
They buried Dallas at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church, next to his mother, who’d been the only churchgoing person in the Stancil household. She was a Yadkin though and her niece, Merrilee Yadkin Grimes, Dallas’s first cousin, made all the funeral arrangements for Mr. Jap, right down to picking out the music, “This Little Wheel’s Gonna Turn in Glory,” and the text, Ezekiel 1:21—“And when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up beside them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”
The preacher was good with metaphors, but even he seemed to have a right hard time stretching that particular text to fit the occasion. Merrilee was pleased with the sermon though. “Dallas loved trucking and I thought Ezekiel was real appropriate for a truck driver.”
The words of the Old Testament prophet must have touched Mr. Jap more than Merrilee could’ve hoped for. Or maybe it was losing his only child like that.
Anyhow, the next thing I heard was that Mr. Jap had got religion and painted a purple cross on his front door right above the words “Holyness Prayr Room.”
Daddy said he had about twenty pictures of Jesus tacked up on the walls and he’d made a simple cross out of two tobacco sticks and some baling wire. “Other’n that, the living room looks just like it did when Elsie was living, ’cept now Jap sits in there and reads the Bible to a couple of Mexicans that show up every Sunday morning.”
“You, too?” I asked, knowing Daddy seldom stepped inside any kind of a church except for weddings and funerals.
“Be different if he’d just read,” Daddy said regretfully. “Jap and me, we been knowing each other our whole lives, but I never much cared for being preached at.”
3
« ^ » … but, in the month of October, there cannot be a more temperate air, and finer climate, than here, the weather being mild and dry for the space of forty or fifty days.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
By the middle of October, I get pretty tired of any leftover summer dregs—the midday heat, the dust, the grasshoppers, the dogflies from hell. I’m usually ready for some serious rain and a killing frost. Especially one that’ll kill dogflies.
(Takes a sleet storm to kill grasshoppers. They just hunker down in the broom sedge and wait for sunshine. I’ve flushed grasshoppers five inches long on a sunny January day.)
So far, the nights had been cool enough to start coloring leaves and brown off most of the weeds, but one last dogfly had somehow managed to survive and it had been circling my head for several minutes, eluding my flailing hands and waiting for me to lower my guard long enough so it could land on bare skin and dig in.
Exasperated, I started to duck into a thicket of hollies to get away from it, then recoiled in automatic reflex.
Hanging upside down between two young holly trees was a spider that looked like a tiny yellow-and-white hard-shell crab, and I had almost put my face through its large delicate web. One minute the dogfly was following my head. The next minute it was entangled in the sticky strands. The more it struggled, the tighter it was held and already the spider was hurrying over, playing out more sticky threads of silk to tether those kicking legs and buzzing wings before they could break loose.
“Hey, cute trick!” said Kidd. “I never saw anybody do that before.”
If a man thinks you’ve deliberately maneuvered a pesky winged bloodsucker into a spiderweb, why tell him it was a pure accident? Can it hurt to have him think you’re uncommonly clever in the ways of the wild? Especially when he’s so crazy about the outdoors himself?
Picture six feet three inches of male lankiness. Long skinny legs. Flat belly. A face more homely than handsome. Crinkly hazel eyes that disappear when he laughs.
Kidd Chapin.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation.
You know how you’ll see pretty shells lying on the sandy beach, cast up wet and lustrous from the ocean floor, so colorful you can’t resist picking them up? You know how, months later, you find them dry and dull in a jacket pocket or stuck down in a desk drawer, and you wonder what on earth made you bring them inland?