13

Earl Tucker, a man known to nurse a bottle and to disappear for long stretches of time, leaving his daughter, Ruby, to run free, showed up at Ella’s doorstep with a rusted axe and a leather thermos that he claimed held only water.

“Now, Earl, I appreciate you coming out here,” Ella said, swatting away sand gnats. “But I am not in a position to pay. At least not until I get the cypress up to Millville.”

Tossing the axe into the ground blade first, Earl massaged the worn and broken leather on the bottle. His potato-shaped nose was covered with blisters, and the ends of his carrot-red hair hung like strands of hay at his neck. “I ain’t worrying about all that,” he said. “I’m here on account of Ruby. Now I ain’t claiming my girl set that fire—”

“Earl, nobody here is saying such,” Ella said.

Earl raised his hands and tucked his head down. “I’m not saying whether she did or didn’t. I’m just here to right a wrong that’s been done to my neighbor.”

Stunned, Ella talked the rest of the day about how grateful she was to find at least one helpful neighbor. Narsissa reminded her how people had once come together to build barns. Samuel showed Earl how to position the gator tail saw so it could dig deeper into the cypress. “There you go, neighbor,” Samuel said when Earl got it right.

But the neighborly concern didn’t register with Lanier. Whether it was the way Earl nervously rubbed his mole whenever Lanier caught Earl looking at him or the questions Earl would ask three and four times in a row, Lanier wanted to keep away from this man who was only as tall as Keaton.

“Where did you say you was from again?” Earl asked the question two times before Lanier licked the remnants of water from the side of his mouth and tossed the ladle back into the bucket of fresh water.

“Georgia,” he mumbled and returned to work.

“Georgia, where?” Earl took a swig out of a can that had once sat on the store shelf filled with pinto beans.

“I expect we can cut at least four more before lunch break,” Lanier said, walking away from Earl.

During lunch, a crane pranced at the water’s edge. Lanier could see the tail of an alligator as a splash of water called out in the distance. If the visitor gets too nosy, there are options, he thought.

“How come you to wind up here?” Earl said while reaching for the biscuit that Ella offered him.

Lanier sighed, and Ella looked in his direction. He smiled and this time she smiled back.

“He’s family, Earl,” she said. “I thought I’d told you.”

“You might’ve. Who’s to say? When you live with a girl that’s slow like mine, you go half-crazy yourself.” Earl laughed, but no one followed. “Just joshing a little bit,” he said. “How long you reckon you’ll stay in Dead Lakes?”

Keaton stopped wringing the sweat out of his shirt and turned to face Lanier. Narsissa stopped pouring water into a tin cup, and Samuel moved closer from the water’s edge, dropping the wax paper still stained with mustard. Locusts buzzed the air, and no one moved, not even to strike at the mosquitoes.

They all stared until Lanier felt the back of his sunburned neck flame even stronger. When he turned to look back toward the barn, hoping for time to script a believable response, he saw them walking across the skinned field that was dotted with stumps. “Did you bring company with you, Earl?” Lanier asked.

Bonaparte led the group, carrying a rusty saw and a wooden spike as big as a rake. The others who had witnessed the disappearance of the burns on his daughter followed behind him. They fanned out across the field and for an instant looked like trees that were still sturdy and resolute.

When Lanier stood, Ella and the others followed.

“What on earth?” Ella asked.

Bonaparte kept his eyes on Lanier but answered Ella. “Miss Ella, we heard about your predicament. I expect you might not know this, but back when I was a single man, I rode the log rafts, taking the cut wood up and down to Millville.”

Ella nodded the same way she might if she had been receiving Bonaparte and the men on the porch of her home.

“Folks talking about this and that and bills and so forth.” Bonaparte raised his hand and tucked his head. “Now I don’t mean to get in your business, but . . .”

“Six days,” Ella said. “I have six days.”

“Six days. All right now.” Bonaparte took the saw from his shoulder and placed it on the ground. The group of men, eighteen strong, followed suit.

Ella clutched her chest and stepped backward. She stared at the men as if they were tossing out gold coins. “I can’t let you . . . oh no, no, I can’t have you . . .” Ella stammered and then laughed. “How can I pay . . . I mean, I can’t pay right now.”

“For my part, that man right there done paid the bill for you.” Bonaparte pointed straight at Lanier. The men scattered down the water’s edge mumbling greetings to the group. All but Earl and Ella returned to their positions.

Lanier started laughing and shook his head. He felt Earl studying him the way people examined the dolls that he made. Lanier could see the man through the corner of his view, scratching the mole on his face. He imagined words of suspicion forming into questions inside the man’s scraggly head. “Well, now. Six days,” Lanier said. “They tell me the Good Lord made the world in six days.”

“And pray tell He sent reinforcement,” Ella said, but Bonaparte had already begun showing Samuel and Keaton how to strike the ring of the cypress so that it would float properly.

Lanier tossed Ella the work gloves that she had dropped on the ground, and to his surprise she caught them with one hand. He winked at her and said, “Time for lollygagging is over.”

After the sun had cast a blue streak across the horizon and the frogs had begun their steady calls from the swamp, Bonaparte rubbed his hands as if washing them. He promised Ella he would return the next day.

“I’ll pay you, you know that,” she said.

“We ain’t worrying with that right now,” Bonaparte said. His words trailed off as he looked up like there might be a script written on the tree branches.

Ella reached out and took Bonaparte’s thick, gritty palm in hers. His grip grew stronger as she shook his hand. “I’m not looking for charity,” Ella said. “I pay what is owed.” Forcing herself to look into his dark, bloodshot eyes, Ella realized that it was the first time she had ever gotten close enough to the man to touch his skin.

When Narsissa walked up next to her and brushed her arm, Ella stood with her shoulders squared back. “My aunt always told me that people were in the world not just to observe but to impact. Each and every one of you is impacting our lives. I can’t thank you enough.”

As the men walked away, each spoke a pledge to return the next day. But Earl made no such promises. He walked away in a hobbled gait, rubbing the tight muscles in his shoulder. At the fork in the road where lightning had split an oak tree in half, he reached inside the dead trunk and pulled out the bottle of whiskey he had placed there that morning. By the time he had made it to the house that sat on a field where he sharecropped tobacco for Sheriff Bissell, he was certified drunk.

Lightning bugs lit up the yard where tall strands of goldenrod weeds bloomed through the gaps in a stack of cinder blocks stacked haphazardly next to the broken porch step. Ruby ran barefoot, wearing her cherry-sequined turban and carrying a chipped Mason jar. “I got another one,” she said as she snatched an amber-colored bug.

“Keep at it,” Sheriff Bissell said from the side of the house. He had his foot propped on a washer turned sideways on the ground, the metal wringer long broken.

“A promise is a promise,” Clive Gillespie said. He walked from around the corner of the house, where he had just relieved himself. He was still zipping up his pants. “A nickel for every lightning bug caught.”

Earl tucked the whiskey bottle in his back pants pocket and ran his hand through hair that was matted with sweat. His puzzled gaze shifted from Clive to Ruby.

Ruby wrapped her hand around the crumpled wax paper that covered the jar. She threw her hips to the side with each word that she spoke. “That man promised he’d pay me to catch these. He likes the way they light up his bedroom at night.” Three buttons on the side of her skirt were undone, and two red blotches marked the spot on her chest where Clive’s hands had groped her moments earlier.

“She’s a spitfire,” Clive called out. He struck a match against the weathered porch rail and lit a cigar. “I can see she’s a handful.”

“Got another one,” Ruby yelled and jumped in the air.

“I told her to stay put,” Earl said. “I tried to lock that cellar, but I knew she’d most likely pick the lock.”

Sheriff Bissell kicked the piece of rotten wood on the washer and laughed. “That old rusty thing will barely hang on the door, let alone lock.”

Clive blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. Dried sweat made his shirt look as crumpled as the wax paper that Ruby used for a lid on the jar. “When we pulled up here she was running free out in the field.”

“She was swinging that baton like there was no tomorrow. Just a-swinging and a-singing.” The sheriff laughed again.

Earl wove a path to the porch. Ruby ran toward a pile of fungus-stained firewood that was left over from the cold. No one ever cautioned her to stop climbing onto the rotting wood.

A mattress stained with yellow blotches lay on the ground next to the flower box that had last been used when Earl’s wife was still alive. Horsehair from a tear down the side of the mattress invaded the flower box like gray weeds. Earl attempted to push the mattress underneath the porch with the side of his boot. But he soon grunted and gave up.

“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Clive said. “Ruby seems perfectly charming to me.”

“She was just a-swinging that baton and singing and laughing. She was putting on a big show for us,” Sheriff Bissell said.

“She don’t mean no harm,” Earl said.

“Oh no,” the sheriff said and wiped his chin. “I keep telling folks that. I keep telling them but they just don’t want to listen.”

“Speaking of commotions,” Clive said, “earlier today a man who works for me happened by the swamp, you know the piece of lowland I’m talking about, Earl. The one on the other side of the Wallace place? Just at the edge of her property?”

Earl stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked back at Ruby, who was talking to the lightning bugs she had captured. “Yes, sir.”

“It’s hard to see clearly through all that overgrowth, but I could have sworn there were a bunch of nigras bantering about with cross saws. My man could hear their commotion down at the edge of the property, you know, by that spring.” Clive smiled at Earl and then turned his head. “I think he might have mentioned seeing you among the group.”

Earl looked at the sheriff and nodded. “The sheriff probably told you. Folks is saying Ruby burnt up the timber at the Wallace place. Like I told the sheriff last night, I can manage her. I don’t want no trouble. The way I seen it, if I was to go over and help out for a day, it might make things right with the Wallace woman. Maybe she won’t press charges and all.”

Clive squinted, and the acne scars on his forehead bunched together. “Certainly.”

The sheriff used a stick to knock off mud from the corner of his boot. “Yeah, well, I want to be clear, Earl. Now I don’t think I made myself clear when we first talked it over. Just because Ella don’t press charges doesn’t mean Ruby won’t face charges.”

Earl ran his hands down the sides of his pants. “Come again, Sheriff?”

Sheriff Bissell sighed. His jowls tussled about when he shook his head back and forth. “The law is the law. I took an oath to uphold the law.”

“The law doesn’t have cataracts, they tell me.” Clive stumped out his cigarette against the peeling porch rail and tossed it at Earl’s feet.

“I got twelve,” Ruby said. The side of her skirt flapped in the air as she jumped.

“Folks can be so ornery,” the sheriff added. “They have been after me all day to do something with that girl of yours. Everybody is scared to death she’ll burn down their place next.”

“She was with me all night that night.” Earl shuffled his feet and placed his hand on the back pocket that hid the bottle.

“Hmmmm,” the sheriff said. “And where was it again that you happened to be? I don’t think being laid up drunk at the time in question will count much before the judge at the courthouse.”

“Say, Sheriff Bissell,” Clive said, “would it help the cause if Ruby had . . . oh, I don’t know . . . something along the lines of a benefactor? Someone to support her and ensure she wouldn’t do harm to the community? Someone to see after her, so to speak.”

The sheriff rose on his boot heels and looked up at the first stars of night. “I expect that’d help, all right.”

“Well, now,” Clive said and reached inside his pants pocket. He lifted the end of a silver monogrammed money clip and pulled forth a dollar. “Ruby . . . Ruby.”

Ruby ran up to the porch, still clutching the jar of lightning bugs. Greenish light from the insects flickered against the cracked, dirty glass. No words were spoken as the jar and money were exchanged. Ruby ran up the stairs and through the threshold that was missing a front door. Her giggling could be heard from inside the house. Clive held up the jar, examining his purchase. “Sheriff Bissell, if Earl is of a mind to it, then I’d be happy to serve as Ruby’s benefactor.”

“That’s mighty white of you,” the sheriff said. He stuck his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and his jowl expanded. “It sure would be a shame to lock a pretty little thing like her up in jail.”

“Jail?” Earl stepped forward.

“Worst case, naturally,” the sheriff added. “I expect Judge Kimball would take pity on her—her being simpleminded and all. Probably just send her over to Chattahoochee.”

“Crazy hospital?”

Sheriff Bissell shrugged his shoulders. “Out of my control, Earl.”

Earl kicked at a patch of sandspurs. The roots of the thorny weed finally broke free from the ground. “A doctor one time wanted us to put her in there. My wife wouldn’t sign the papers.” He looked Clive square in the eyes. “You hear what they do to girls like her in there?”

“Now, Earl, no need to let your imagination run wild,” Clive said, raising his hand. “I’ll personally see to it that things are smoothed over.”

Earl stared at the patch of uprooted sandspurs. “I promised my wife I’d never . . .”

“Oh, certainly.” Clive walked back and forth in front of the cinder blocks. He snatched the top of one of the weeds, and the bloom ripped. “You know, the sheriff here can attest that I esteem nothing of more importance than loyalty. Except for maybe discretion. Is that a fair statement, Sheriff Bissell?”

The sheriff pursed his lips and nodded.

“So, Earl, here’s what I’m willing to do.” Clive took out the money clip again and began peeling away bills. He folded the edges perfectly. “I’m going to pay you to keep showing up at Ella Wallace’s place. You don’t ask any questions. Fact of the matter, you don’t talk beyond what is simply necessary. You just follow my instructions. You can do that, can’t you, Earl?”

“Now I didn’t go there aiming to work like a pulpwooder. I was just helping for the—”

Clive closed his eyes and held up his hand again. “The only worry you have right now is following instructions. Because it would be a travesty—a mortal sin, you might well say—to let that pretty daughter with the mind of a child and the body of a filly end up in the crazy hospital harnessed to the wall like a mare on breeding day.”

Earl reached for the bottle again but this time didn’t bother to hide it. Pulling the whiskey from his pocket, he swallowed what remained, wiped his chin, and threw the bottle to the ground. It landed against the side of a cinder block, cracking the glass right down the middle.