Kidd Chapin’s a wildlife officer. I found him down at the beach back in the spring.
So far, I haven’t once wondered why I brought him home with me.
Not that I have, actually. Not in the literal hang-your-jeans-in-my-closet sense. For starters, he has his own house on the banks of the Neuse River above New Bern, and he’s assigned to cover an area down east.
“Inland” is complicated by the fact that I live in the middle of a small town with an aunt and uncle. My own quarters are relatively separate, with a private entrance which I seldom use, and no, I don’t think Aunt Zell would get out her scarlet thread and start embroidering my shirts if I chose to let Kidd use that entrance. I don’t know if it’s manners, my abiding awareness that it is their house, or an active neighborhood watch system (made up of active voters, be it stipulated) that keeps me from giving him a key.
If I were eighteen years old again, maybe I would. Maybe I’d even stand on the front porch and make a speech about hypocrisy and honesty, about personal freedom and modern morality.
But I’m a district court judge. I know the value of hypocrisy. I’ve also learned a little bit about discretion as I’ve passed thirty and race toward forty: don’t do it in the road and scare the mules. I don’t want to watch Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash struggling to be broadminded and tolerant, and I certainly don’t want judgmental neighbors putting my morals on the ballot come the next election.
If Kidd’s still around after Christmas, I may finally think about getting my own place. In the meantime, instead of taking him into my bed like a mature woman whenever he drives over, we sneak around Colleton County like a couple of horny teenagers. His new minivan has four-wheel drive, tinted windows and seats that let down flat, and it’s been up and down just about every secluded lane and byway along Possum Creek.
Kidd and I were out on the back side of my daddy’s farm that warm Sunday afternoon. We’d been to church that morning with Nadine and Herman, the brother who worries most about my soul. We’d eaten dinner with Minnie and Seth, the brother who cuts me the most slack. (Being the closest thing I had to a campaign manager, Minnie’s also the sister-in-law who’s least interested in seeing me married. She’d rather see me in the state legislature.) Now we were out running a pair of young rabbit dogs Kidd had just bought. They were barely past puppyhood and eager to please, but they didn’t have a clue and if you didn’t watch them every minute—
Well, let’s just say we both got distracted for maybe a bit more than a minute. By the time we came up for air, the dogs had got into the woods and across the creek and sounded as if they were heading for Georgia.
Kidd whooped and hollered, but they were too excited to mind and there was nothing for it but to jump back in the van and go chase them down. We both had our heads out the windows, listening for the dogs, when we rounded a corner of the field and surprised a huge flock of blackbirds. As one, they rose from the earth in a great rush of wings to settle raucously in the trees around us.
All through spring and summer, grackles and starlings are little-noticed birds. In the fall, though, they band together by the thousands in flocks so large that it can take a full two minutes for them to cross the sky. Their chatter was so noisy that the dogs could have been just beyond the trees and we wouldn’t have heard them.
When we got to the homemade bridge across the creek, Kidd wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his van on something built out of hickory logs and some scrap two-by-fours.
“It’s strong enough to hold a tank,” I assured him. “Shorty and Leonard and B.R. drive over it twice a day.”
“Who’re they?” Kidd asked as we crept across, going maybe half a mile a minute.
“Some of Daddy’s old tenants from when he was still suckering tobacco by hand. He lets them live rent-free on our side of the creek, but they work for part-time wages at Gray Talbert’s nursery and this is their shortcut.”
Kidd breathed easier when his back wheels were on firm dirt again. Not me. I’m never comfortable on Talbert land.
G. Hooks Talbert is head of Talbert International and a power player in the reactionary right wing of North Carolina’s Republican party. He has a hundred-acre country estate near Durham with a private airstrip and a couple of Lear jets. He also has two sons: one’s a grasshopper with the morals of a cowbird; the other’s a conscientious ant whose morals are probably whatever G. Hooks tells him they are.
When G. Hooks needed to stand the grasshopper in a corner, this little piece of land he’d inherited through his mother’s side was the corner he chose. Gray Talbert raised a lot of hell at first, then, to everybody’s surprise, he seemed to settle right down. Repaired the greenhouses. Started a profitable nursery.
According to Daddy, who twisted a knot in G. Hooks’s tail over that nursery, it’s totally legitimate these days, if maybe not quite as profitable as back when Gray was running it unsupervised.
Nevertheless, I was glad when Kidd stuck his head out the window again, heard the dogs, and said they’d veered off to the east. We doubled back along a lane that followed the creek bank and soon passed the iron stake that marked the corner between our land, G. Hooks’s, and Mr. Jap’s. One of those ubiquitous orange plastic ribbons was tied around the stake and the loose ends fluttered in the breeze.
Kidd slowed down to a crawl when he saw me twist around to stare out the back window. “Something wrong?”
“Just wondering who’s surveying what,” I said.
Sighting back along the Talbert line, I could see more orange ribbons tied to a distant tree at the edge of the creek bank.
“My daddy has a standing offer to buy this piece of land, but G. Hooks would dig up the whole forty-six acres and ship it to China before he’d let Daddy have a square inch. If he’s getting ready to sell, you can take it to the bank that he’s found a buyer he thinks’ll give Daddy grief.”
“Why should your dad care who Talbert sells to?” asked Kidd. “He’s already got a mile-wide buffer around his house.”
An exaggeration, but not by much.
Daddy’s always happiest when he can put a little more land between himself and the outside world and he’s been adding to it ever since he was a boy of fifteen. He and my brothers own at least twenty-five hundred acres between them. A hundred or so of those acres are mine.
Some people spend money on fancy cars and lavish houses or expensive toys. We Knotts like to put our spare change in land. As Daddy always reminds us, it’s not like God’s making any more of it.
We cleared the trees and there, blocking the lane, was a shabby black two-ton farm truck with bald tires and homemade wooden sides to the flatbed. A wiry young white man in blue jeans, a faded red T-shirt, and a green John Deere cap leaned against one of the fenders as he talked with Mr. Jap. Beside the lane was a nice patch of bright orange pumpkins that looked big enough to harvest even though the vines were still green.
I hadn’t seen Mr. Jap since the funeral, so I motioned for Kidd to stop and got out to say hey.
He looked old and frail standing there with the sun beating down, as if Dallas’s death had drained off ten years of energy, and he didn’t seem to place me till I mentioned Daddy, introduced Kidd, and explained why we were there.
Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yeah. A pair of hounds went streaking past here about two minutes ago. I wouldn’t be surprised but what that rabbit’s holed up down yonder at the sheds. You just go ahead, but try not to run over no pumpkins if you can help it.”
“I’m glad you reminded me,” I told him, “because Aunt Zell asked me to bring her a dozen ears of your corn if I was out here before Halloween.”
Mr. Jap was never much of a farmer, not even in tobacco’s glory days. He so preferred working on cars that he rented out his acreage and even let some of his fallow fields go back to nature. A few years ago, though, when the influx of new people started and those newcomers couldn’t seem to get enough of the ornamental corn he brought to the crossroads flea market, Mr. Jap planted a couple of acres so he could pay for his winter heating oil. Now, to my surprise, he seemed to be in farming with both feet. Except for that small pumpkin patch, the whole back side of his farm was covered with broken stalks and culled ears.