a Rockwell painting.
Silas figured out a way to race Enoch, with me as judge, but it was hard to tell who’d won.
“Mom,” Silas called, maybe for the second or third time, “you’re absentminded again, aren’t you?” He’s patient.
I admitted that I had been distracted and hadn’t heard whatever he’d said. The work needing to be done, especially that beyond the farm, the needs of community and region, had besieged my head. On every side, I saw a landscape resembling ruin.
“Who won that time?” Silas said.
“You did.”
Thus days passed at the farm, and the form of a life became evident.
I’d been home about a month the afternoon I met my cousin Sue. Daddy and I were unclogging the septic tank drain. The commode had stopped flushing—one more malfunction in the declining house. I’d had to use the woods the past week; Silas, refusing the woods, waited until he got to school. The drain needed fixing badly.
We had the concrete tank lid levered up with Uncle Percy’s heavy-duty Handyman jack, and then we propped it with cement blocks, hoping it wouldn’t fall and kill us. I reached down into that smelly richness and tore loose the massive root systems of grass that clung there, then I uncoiled a long metal snake up the six-inch PVC pipe that ran underneath the house. Within ten feet I hit something that felt like rock. Whatever it was had blocked the toilet drain.
Ten feet back from the septic tank, under the eaves of the house, a lantana had grown for thirty years. Friend of sulphur butterflies, it bloomed miniature bouquets of orange, yellow, and pink, which I’d loved to pick when I was a child. I was digging beside the lantana, worrying that its roots were clogging the drain, when a dated white truck turned into the yard.
“Hey,” Mama called to a woman getting out. “You don’t have to unholster for us.”
The woman was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots. She had long red hair and tattoos stenciled up and down her arms, intricate designs that started at her wrists and disappeared into her T-shirt.
“Time to take it off,” she said, unstrapping a pistol from her belt. “I’ve been squirrel hunting with Daddy down in Shug’s pecan trees.”
I had found, as I suspected, that the lantana’s roots were woven around the pipe and entering it at a loose joint, and I was attacking the roots with fury. Only a few hours of daylight were left. Between shovel blows, I watched the woman approach, Mama and Daddy smiling wide.
“You know your cousin Sue?” Daddy asked.
“Not officially.” I stopped slicing at dirt and roots for a few minutes, long enough to apologize for the circumstances. My overalls, a gift from Uncle Percy (his old ones), were muddy and dirty; my hair went every which way. An embarrassing stench filled the air, relieved only somewhat by the odor of fallen and dried pecan leaves crushed against the ground.
“I’d shake your hand if I could,” I said.
“Don’t worry about a thing.”
“We’re kin somehow, I know,” I said.
Sue smiled. “Your grandmother was my daddy’s aunt,” she said, slowly. Sue’s daddy being Grandmama’s nephew made us second cousins.
“Close enough for me,” I said, leaning on the mattock.
“Keep working,” Sue said. “I’ve been wanting to stop and say hello. I saw you all out in the yard.”
“Glad you stopped.” In between chopping and digging and pulling, I listened. Daddy was asking after Uncle Mike and what they would do with the squirrels. The lantana was too deeply rooted for a shovel, the pipe embedded in its tan roots. Excusing myself, I went for an axe. With a few blows, I twisted the pipe out of the root-grip and it broke open under the house, spilling raw sewage across the dry dirt. A Cracker house is built two or three feet off the ground for ventilation, so I climbed under and started shoveling fast, dumping the sludge into a five-gallon bucket. It was sure stinking under there, and I was embarrassed. It was an awkward time to have company, since I couldn’t very well quit. At least fixing the pipe was easy now—simply fit it back together. But Lord, the stench.
I’d heard Sue raised rabbits, that she knew how to fish and how to tan hides. I’d heard she liked to get out in the woods, that she liked heart-pine houses and worn knives and good stories. She knew things I wanted to learn. I finished under the house and crawled out, filthy, hair chaotic, and not exactly smelling like a rose.
“You gotta come to the syrup-boiling,” she said. “The day after Thanksgiving. It’s at Tommy Davis’s place.”
“Where’s that?”
“Not far. On the other side of the church.”
“I hope you mean it. I might show up.”
“You’d be welcome.”
Houses Mourn, Too
The family farm is seventy acres that Great-grandfather Walt deeded to Grandfather Arthur, in a settlement in upper Appling County peopled by the descendants of pioneers. My ancestors have lived here since white settlers forced their way into south Georgia, in 1818, displacing the Creeks from their prime hunting grounds. I own none of the farm. When my grandmother died, she divided it among her seven children. They have children and grandchildren of their own, who live in cities not so far away. My mother has a section of field and a strip of the branch past the water hole. The piece with the farmhouse, built by my grandparents in the 1920s out of heart pine, belongs to the eldest boy, my uncle Percy.
We call the place a farm because it still grows soybeans, corn, rye, and cattle for Uncle Bill Branch, really my mother’s first cousin. Southerners often use the word “uncle” as a term of respect for elder kin. Uncle Bill leases land from my aunts and uncles, although many parts of the farm are long forsaken.
The town of Baxley is located at the crossroads of two recently four-laned highways, U.S. 1, which runs from Maine to Miami, and U.S. 341, the principal artery from inland Georgia to the coast. Baxley is a place people pass through going somewhere else. At the center of town, on Main Street, is a courthouse built of marble in 1907. Four clocks, one facing each of the directions, are inset in its cupola; the four clocks do not keep the same time, and sometimes they stop altogether. The courthouse is painted every decade or so, and is now yellow and gray. On its lawn a conifer gets decorated at Christmas with blinking lights. Here on Saturday afternoons, when I was a girl, street-corner preachers would park their old trucks, equipped atop with powerful loudspeakers, and blast passionate sermons—warning against sin and predicting Armageddon—at passersby.
One block south of the courthouse, parallel to Highway 341, are railroad tracks, upon which trains run too fast to the coast with loads of pine chips, and too fast back with loads of shiny new cars. The town has a few beautiful old churches downtown, but most of the historical buildings were bulldozed in a 1970s flurry to be “progressive,” or to raze the past; during that era, both 341 and Main Street were four-laned, destroying the small-town feel, the angle parking, even the front lawns of some townspeople. A department store at the main stoplight has a mural of the town’s history
