CHAPTER TEN

November 14

Georgia is sure she slept no more than three hours. The monkey had a good night.

Now, lying on her back in the stillness of Sunday morning, with the storm passed and a weak sun illuminating the curtains beside her bed, she wishes she could skip church.

Why the hell not? She’s 51 years old, and she’s skipped church on a regular basis for much of the past 15 years. When Justin turned 12, she and Jeff told him it was up to him whether he wanted to continue going. No more nagging. They hadn’t wanted him to reach adulthood completely ignorant of the possibility of a Higher Being, unaware of the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. Georgia thought there was even a literary aspect to it. Like most children growing up when and where she did, she received most of her spotty classical education from the Bible.

Justin went more than they did, to Grace Presbyterian three blocks away, but he quit entirely after their marriage broke up, as if that failure was brought about by some structural flaw in the church, some fallibility by the Infallible.

Still, Georgia thinks joining the Peace Corps after college and grad school was a kind of church for him, a way of meeting God halfway.

These days, she thinks that Justin, with his ready-to-pop-any-minute girlfriend, his dope she’s sure they’ll be smoking again as soon as the baby is born (please, God, not before), and his lack of reverence for the church of his fathers, is more godly than she.

Which, she knows, is damning him with nearly inaudible praise.

She has been in a sulk equal to the one that led to Justin abandoning organized religion. After years of sleeping late on Sundays, she had become an important part of the little Methodist church Phil and his family attended, singing hymns amid a congregation so elderly that she and Phil were part of “the young folks.” But, after March, she felt she had a right to be pissed off at Whoever is in charge. After the funeral, she never went inside his old church again.

Why, then, not roll over and give sleep a chance in broad daylight?

The answer, she supposes, is Forsythia Crumpler.

The real answer, she worries, is that she is still, after 51 damn years, too eager to please, still a slave to praise. If she worships a graven image, if she has broken that commandment, too, on her golden calf is chiseled the word “Approval.”

On Wednesday, in the process of them making their peace, her old teacher had asked her if she was coming to church on Sunday. Happy to be back in the good graces of her oldest living mentor, she had said yes.

Truth be known, she does enjoy some aspects of the services.

The Reverend Weeks is the kind of pastor that a church like Geddie Presbyterian—older even than Phil’s was, and much more needy—tends to get. He seems a good enough man. He is in his mid-40s, five years into the ministry after abandoning a career in hospital administration. The kind of light he must have seen, grumped one of the deacons after a sermon during which two elders began snoring at separate times and had to be elbowed awake by their wives, was not exactly the wattage of the one that blinded Paul on the road to Damascus. “It seems more like a night light,” the deacon muttered to his wife on the way home.

In addition to being an uninspiring speaker, he does not have the natural gift for remembering names. Even after two years at Geddie, he struggles when greeting his small, ancient flock after services.

But there are other elements of Georgia’s few Sundays at the church that almost salvage it for her. She does find a peace that passes at least her understanding in going through the routines, not changed much since she was a girl here, fidgeting and flirting. The church had been larger then, with many more young people, and there was a social aspect to it.

She falls into the rhythm of the call to worship, the Gloria Patri, the reciting of the Apostles’ Creed, the tithes and offerings, the small choir’s thin, enervated musical interludes and all the other stops on the way to a 10-minute sermon that always seems longer. (An asterisk beside each hymn asks, “Those that can, please stand.” Georgia wonders if it is meant to be puckish. Considering Reverend Weeks and his wife, who produce the program, she thinks not. Most but not all in the congregation are still able to rise.)

The service reminds her of t’ai chi, which she found gave her an inexplicable rush of well-being when she embraced it after her first divorce and her father’s death. There was no logical reason why it helped her. But it did.

She also wonders if it isn’t just nostalgia.

The three of them have established a routine in which everyone gets his or her own breakfast and lunch, with dinner their only truly communal meal, even on Sundays. (The older people here still call it “supper;” dinner is the large meal they used to eat in the middle of the day, sometimes starting before noon, when they were all farmers or farmers’ wives.)

Getting everyone to the table at the same time was difficult before nightfall, and it led to unnecessary friction. Georgia would rise late for Leeza’s eggs. Leeza and Justin would oversleep Georgia’s French toast.

Today, Georgia finds the house empty when she comes into the dining-living room at 8:45, looking for cereal and orange juice. Dirty dishes, glasses, and silverware sit in the sink, and Justin’s Toyota is gone. She is still a little shaky from last night, and she considers calling Kenny. He left soon after Pooh did, probably in the service of one of the young women who seem to occupy his time. He said to call him on his cell phone if there was trouble, quick to add that he was sure there wouldn’t be. The rest of them ate a dispirited meal, then watched TV for a while, stricken mostly mute by the attack they could neither predict nor defuse, wondering if Pooh was coming back.

Justin, she feels sure, was and is upset that he could not protect his mother adequately, that even with his hard-earned Guatemalan calluses, he still needed Kenny and his carpet knife. And Leeza has tended, as her first child’s birth looms, to expect smoothness and treat the bumps as personal affronts.

Georgia regrets getting Kenny into the middle of something so idiotic, yet so threatening. She fears that this is one of those situations she remembers from her youth here, in which logic and patience always seemed to get drowned out by some bloodlust, the dimensions and protocol of which she has never really understood. Part of what she found appealing about the leafy, corduroy-jacketed world of academia was the absence of such explosions. Her colleagues might harbor grudges and turn pettiness into an art form, but there was never the necessity to carry a carpet knife.

She played it over in her mind endlessly after Pooh’s departure, and she continues to do so this morning. What did she do wrong? How had this gotten so out of her control? Should she go see Pooh, or William? Should she—and she can’t believe she’s even considering this—get a gun?

She realizes that she needs a local guide, the same one who rescued her last night.

She decides, finally, that she should wait. Kenny might be a late riser, especially on a Sunday morning. He might not even be alone. She’ll call him after lunch.

She does feel better after her two hours at the old church. Even Sunday School, taught by a sweet-natured young woman who stumbles so hopelessly over the lesson plan that Georgia wants to snatch the book from her and do it herself, is at least bearable.

Several people ask her how the yard sale went, and they seem impressed that so much of the house’s furnishings sold.

“I hope you didn’t let that Jimmy Cole come up at the end and get everything for nothing,” Murphy Lee Roslin says loudly. He says everything loudly because he is mostly deaf. Georgia wonders why he doesn’t make this much noise when he sings.

“Well, Mr. Roslin,” Georgia says, forcing herself to speak up, “he did get a few things, but you know, it isn’t like we were going to take them up to Sotheby’s and get a million dollars for them.”

She gets puzzled looks from Mr. Roslin and others within earshot, but nobody asks her what she’s talking about.

Sotheby’s, she thinks. Jesus. She wonders if she will ever relearn the language down here, if she ever knew it at all. Even as a teenager, and certainly as a college student, she found so much of what she said was, to the ears of Geddie Presbyterian’s faithful, a string of non sequiturs.

And then, there’s the cursing. She’s always had what her mother would have called a trash-mouth. She’s never really considered four-letter words to be the devil’s instruments. When she uses the F-word in public, she thinks of herself as colorful, sassy, irreverent, uninhibited—traits that do not seem to command respect in East Geddie.

When she came out of Sunday services three weeks earlier and saw that one of her tires had gone flat, she exclaimed “Shit!” before she even thought about it. There was an uneasy silence behind her before two of the deacons came over and helped her put the spare on.

She hasn’t mentioned last night’s confrontation. She is so uneasy with it that she doesn’t even feel comfortable talking about it among these quiet, peaceful people.

She does talk with Forsythia Crumpler, though, as they are both going to their cars.

Forsythia asks if she has found out anything else about Jenny’s ring. She asks it in a low voice after the others are out of earshot.

Georgia tells her that all she knows is that Wade Hairr didn’t remember seeing a ring, and neither did anyone else between the pond and the morgue.

“Well,” the older woman says, “like I told you, she was so crippled with that arthritis. She might have just not worn it that day.”

“Wade Hairr said he would ask about it, ask the Blackwell boy.”

“And has he?”

So Georgia does what she didn’t really plan to do. She tells her old teacher about Pooh’s visit. When she is through, she finds that she is shaking. Forsythia leans against her car, looks up at her and frowns.

“I probably ought not to say this, but that one scares me. He gets an idea in his head, and it seems as if he can’t get it out.

“I remember, must have been four or five years ago, he thought one of the Gibbs boys had cheated him in some kind of business deal, the kind of thing the Blackwells are usually involved in. You know, two cats for a dog, or some such. I don’t even know all the details, but he beat that boy so bad he had to go to the hospital. I think he moved away from here not long after he got out. I knew that boy. There wasn’t a bit of meanness or dishonesty in him. It was all in Pooh’s head.”

“Well, I wish I could get this particular idea out of his head. The last thing in the world I want to do is make enemies around here.”

Forsythia rises up from the car.

“You know, I guess I’ve taught just about everybody between Pooh’s age and 65 who grew up around here. You teach elementary school, you see them for seven years. It wasn’t that big a school. And you can’t help but have impressions. After a while, you can get a good idea, just from remembering their older brothers and sisters and observing their parents, and from seeing them grow up, how they’re going to turn out.

“Some of them, it just seems like they were born a certain way, and they are bound for a certain fate, and about all you can do is try to alter their course a little. You don’t give up on them, but you know pretty much how it’s all going to turn out. It can be a terrible thing, teaching at one school that long.”

Georgia smiles a little.

“So, how did you think I was going to turn out?”

The older woman gives her an inscrutable look.

“Well, I guess you turned out about the way I figured. Thought you’d move away and not come back, thought you might have become a writer. Didn’t think you’d get married three times, but who can predict that?”

Who indeed, Georgia thinks.

The older woman opens her car door, then turns stiffly around to face Georgia again.

“We’re glad you came back, though,” she says, dispensing a small smile. “And we’re glad to have some young people here, too. Bring them with you next time.”

“Yeah,” Georgia says, shaking her head. “Maybe they’ll even get married here. Maybe they’ll get married somewhere, I hope.”

“Don’t worry about that, now. They’ll either get married or they won’t. You can’t bully them into it.”

“It’s just that I never imagined that my first grandchild would be born out of wedlock.”

Forsythia frowns as she turns to go.

“It’ll work out,” she says. “It’ll work out. And the baby will be loved, I can tell that. That’s what counts.”

Georgia phones Kenny, but no one answers. When she walks over, his car is gone.

Justin and Leeza don’t return until after 3. They’ve been visiting the Geddies, they tell Georgia, who is getting ready to skewer them for leaving her at home alone.

“We told you that,” he reminds her. “We told you last week that I’d finally gone to see Blue, and how we were going to their church today. Remember? We left a little early to run by that 24-hour drugstore in Port Campbell and get some things for Leeza.”

Georgia pretends not to recall. She knows she probably would have declined if they’d asked her to join them. The AME Zion services, everyone knew, were interminable. Spirited, but interminable.

“Their church was so neat,” Leeza says, as enthusiastic as Georgia has seen her lately, her belly so obscenely large that Georgia can’t believe she’s been up and about all morning and half the afternoon. “They sang, and got excited and clapped their hands. It wasn’t like any church I’ve ever been to.”

I’ll bet not, Georgia thinks but does not say. She wishes she could infuse the good people of Geddie Presbyterian with some of the black church’s spirit.

“Well,” she says, looking for something to complain about, “why didn’t you wake me up? I might have come with you.”

“You looked like you could use the sleep,” Justin said, “after last night and all.”

“So,” Georgia asks, “how is Blue? And his mother—Annabelle?”

Blue is married; he and Sherita have a boy and a girl. They and his mother live on opposite sides of Littlejohn McCain Road, in matching double-wides.

“And what was the other one’s name—Godfrey?”

“Winfrey. Ah, he’s in prison. Drugs, I think. He’s supposed to get out next summer, Blue said.”

“That’s too bad. About him being in prison, I mean. Not the getting-out part.”

She remembers learning about the wreck when she got to East Geddie to pick up Justin and take him back to Montclair that summer. She just assumed, her primitive brain overriding 22 years of sensitivity training, that the two black kids with her son had been the cause of it. Looking at her son’s broken nose and scars, she was raving about pressing charges, but her father talked her out of it. On the way back home, Justin told her about the marijuana he’d provided and the damage he had done, and Georgia then understood the part of Littlejohn McCain’s will that left 150 acres of prime farmland to an African-American family she barely knew.

She asks Justin if Blue walks with a limp. She is embarrassed that she hasn’t been to see them herself, but she salves her conscience by remembering that they haven’t visited her, either.

“Just a little,” Justin says. “I wasn’t even going to say anything about it, but he brought it up. It’s funny. He said he thought that wreck was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him. He said it made him grow up, forget about playing basketball and focus on something.”

Winfrey, he tells her, did become a big high school basketball star, just as both of them dreamed they’d be, and he even played a year or two at Pembroke, but then he just drifted, never graduated.

“But you know,” Justin says, “there’s still hard feelings about the land, between Kenny and the Geddies. It’s too bad. I mean, they live right beside each other and all, and they barely speak.”

Georgia knows the basics, as told to her by Kenny and various other old acquaintances who talk of it obliquely, deftly dodging direct inquiries.

It seems obvious to her that her father meant to give some of the very best land to Blue and his mother. The land reaching over toward the Blue Sandhills was where he himself had made much of what money he made farming. It had never been planted in tobacco, and the berries and melons and cantaloupes they raised down in the bottomland flourished.

The interstate was foreseen before Littlejohn died, but the final route had not been determined. Those plans were announced within a year of his passing.

The road they finally built took away a few acres of the best land and more or less ruined a dozen more, cut off now from the rest of the farm by the raised highway.

In the meanwhile, Kenny had traded three acres of his land south of the still-rut road to the Geddies in exchange for three acres on the north side that included the Rock of Ages, where he would build his home.

It hadn’t seemed important at the time. Nobody had any problems with it. They didn’t even call in a lawyer, just wrote it out on a piece of paper and got it notarized. They sealed the deal with a handshake.

But then, after they became aware that they would soon be losing almost 20 acres of prime berry land—the money they received for it didn’t come close to equaling its long-term value—Blue and his mother came to Kenny Locklear one day and told him they had changed their minds, that they were going to need that good land where Kenny had already laid the footings for his new brick rancher.

It was a mess, everyone agreed. Kenny’s dream was to build within eyesight of the old Indian rock, to actually own the land on which it sat. Blue and Annabelle suspected Kenny had known all along that they were going to be losing a valuable little triangle of their land to the new highway.

What really tore it was when, on the occasion of their second meeting, Kenny said he didn’t think they should renege on the deal they’d already made.

Neither Blue nor Annabelle were familiar with that verb, but they sure as hell knew what it sounded like.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Blue had said, and the two of them walked out on a startled Kenny, who became aware later and second-hand of the faux pas he had committed.

He came to them and tried to explain, but then, when it seemed as if they weren’t in the mood to listen, he became exasperated and angry, and he wound up storming out of their tarpaper home that the double-wides soon would replace.

The lawyer Blue threatened to bring in never materialized, and so the feud just festered, fed by crowds of Lumbees who sometimes parked on Annabelle and Blue’s land when they came to see the rock, and by friends of Blue’s who were prone to throw their empty beer cans into Kenny’s yard as they drove by.

In general, though, it has been a quiet grudge, gradually receding. They don’t actively hate or even harass each other. Kenny admonishes his visitors to respect the Geddies’ property, and Blue tells his friends not to be throwing their trash in his neighbor’s yard.

The old scar, though, has not completely healed.

Kenny says the Geddies have made a pretty good living off what’s left of their inheritance, and he can’t be blamed if they pissed away the right-of-way money, mostly on things they bought for their worthless relatives.

“But we’re going to try to get them together,” Leeza says.

“Well, we hope maybe we can,” Justin says, looking more doubtful. “We had this idea.”

“What?” Georgia asks.

But her son doesn’t want to say.

“It’s kind of half-baked, and I’d rather wait and see if we can do it or not.”

Georgia is determined not to press him, not to be overbearing. She even understands her son’s reluctance. She knows she is prone to throw cold water on youthful dreams.

She is sure he will tell her eventually. He’s never been able to keep a secret for long.

“Oh,” Leeza says, “and Annabelle—that’s what she wants me to call her—is going to teach me how to make biscuits, from scratch.”

Well, Georgia thinks, that shouldn’t be much harder than beef Wellington. She herself never really gained the knack for making biscuits. Her mother, an orphan reared by an older couple, had barely known how to do it. Her father actually was the family biscuit-maker.

It was not something the future collegian and world-traveler dreamed of doing—making the perfect buttermilk biscuit. It was one of those skills that was highly treasured around East Geddie but did not travel well.

She had tried, though, attempting in vain to turn self-rising flour, shortening, a pinch of baking soda and buttermilk into something light as air and capable of absorbing twice its weight in molasses. Hers usually bear a depressing resemblance, in shape and heft, to hockey pucks.

“Well,” Georgia says, “that ought to be interesting. That’s no easy feat, making them from scratch. I’m looking forward to you learning that trick. I haven’t had a good scratch biscuit since homecoming at the church.”

“She spent about an hour showing me how,” Leeza says, and Georgia notices the smudges of flour around the parts of her an apron would not have covered. “She’s a nice lady.”

As opposed, Georgia is sure she is thinking, to the mean asshole who keeps busting my chops every time I do something wrong around here.

Just then, Georgia detects a flash of movement and turns to the window to see Kenny’s car coming down the road.

“Oh, good,” she says, glad for the excuse. “Kenny’s home. I wanted to go over and talk to him about last night.”

They haven’t mentioned it until now. Georgia finds that it embarrasses her, makes her blame herself for somehow letting such ugliness burst into their lives. Justin, she’s sure, feels the same helplessness she does in the face of such black and unassailable rage.

She goes to get her coat, telling them she will be back in a few minutes.

“Want us to come with you?” Justin asks.

“No, that’s OK. You all can just, ah, practice making biscuits or something.”

She doesn’t know why she said that, and she leaves before anyone can accuse her of meanness or sarcasm.

Kenny is getting ready to wash his car, an old Nissan that seems not to fit what Georgia imagines as his mid-life single-male lifestyle.

“Hi,” she says, coming up behind him as he is bending to turn the hose on. “I called earlier, but you weren’t here.”

He turns and nods, squinting into the afternoon sun. He shuts the water off again and wipes his hands on the sides of his jeans. He is still a handsome man, Georgia thinks, really seeing him now. Her image of him, imprinted long ago, seems to need updating. There is more substance there, or maybe it was there all along and she didn’t notice. It helps that he talks occasionally now and seems more comfortable in her presence. She used to think that she scared him, and he certainly disconcerted her.

She is relatively certain that Kenny is her never-known half-brother’s son, issue of Littlejohn McCain and the dark and beautiful Rose Lockamy Locklear. Despite this, she wonders if she hasn’t consigned him, all this time, to the general subset of “Lumbee,” as if he were of a different species altogether.

He is tan and fit from making his living at least partially with his muscles, but he isn’t worn out the way Georgia remembers the old-time farmers, who worked like the mules with which they ploughed and were heavy on sweat, light on knowledge. Any of the latter that had come from books instead of being passed on, right or wrong, from father to son was viewed with scepticism.

He offers no explanation for his absence today.

“I figured maybe you just had a hot date last night and didn’t make it home,” she says, trying to make it into a joke.

He shakes his head.

“I had a hot date all right,” he says. “Tommy.”

She knew that he had custody of the boy one day a week, plus two weeks in the summer, when they go on vacation together. She’s never seen Tommy, though, and tends to forget that Kenny has a son. All she knows about him is that he is supposed to have some kind of developmental problem.

Kenny usually likes to make his day with his son either Saturday or Sunday. The boy is inside now, watching television.

“Why don’t you ever bring him over to see us?” she asks. “I’d love to meet him.”

“Maybe I will sometime,” Kenny says. “Maybe I will.”

Georgia thanks him again for saving her, thinking as she says it what an old-fashioned, non-feminist notion that is. Nevertheless, he did. So there.

“I’ve got something I want you to have,” he tells her, a hesitant tone in his voice. “I hope you won’t just dismiss it out of hand.”

He goes to the trunk and brings it out, so small it might be a child’s toy, ready to squirt water on her. He hands it to Georgia, who has never held a gun before. She stares at it and wants to hand it back but is afraid of offending Kenny.

“I know it’s not your style,” he says, holding his hands up to ward off the argument, “and everything will probably just smooth over, water over the dam. But it’s never a bad idea just to have one around.”

He tells her it’s called a Ladysmith, chauvinistically small, tiny enough to fit into a purse. It only weighs about a pound and a half empty, he tells her, but it feels heavier, as if its serious intent adds to its bulk.

“I … I can’t,” she says, thinking what a betrayal this would be of every word she’s ever uttered or written against an out-of-control gun culture. “I’d probably wind up shooting myself.”

“Bull,” he says, and, taking the gun from her, motions her to come with him.

Across the collard patch behind the barn is a lone pine tree, and on the tree is a target. Georgia has heard what she thought were gunshots occasionally across the field, and she guesses, from the Swiss-cheese condition of the paper, that this is where they came from.

He gives her the gun. His hands are rough but warm.

“Now, just aim it. Take in a breath, then let it halfway out, and pull.”

She does it, with him helping steady her arms from behind. She closes her eyes in anticipation of the sound, which is not as loud as she had feared. She is surprised that there is not more kick. She has actually, Kenny tells her, hit the edge of the target 30 feet away.

“You’d be using this a lot closer than that if—God forbid—you ever had to,” he tells her. “Here. Try again.”

She shoots at the target 20 times and is ashamed at how good, how empowered she feels. When she has used up what ammunition Kenny brought with him, she tries to give it back again.

“Nope. It’s yours.”

She doesn’t argue, for now.

“Well, what do I owe you?”

“You don’t owe me anything. A man owed me something, and I had him pay me back.”

He shows her how to load it.

“Eight rounds, no safety. Just keep pulling the trigger. And don’t worry. It won’t go off if you drop it or something.”

She can imagine the small, serious piece of metal falling to the floor and discharging as she reaches for her offering money at church.

“I’m never going to use this,” she tells him.

“You already have. Just remember how easy it is, for better or worse. Bad things don’t always happen, Georgia, but they can happen, and it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“Like a Boy Scout.”

“Yeah. Right.”

She asks him if she can talk to him about Pooh, and about Jenny McLaurin’s ring.

He frowns but says sure, tell me about Jenny McLaurin’s ring.

She puts the little gun, no heavier than a small flashlight, in her purse, and feels changed by its weight.