Saturday. Six A.M. I struggled out of bed and into my work clothes: baggy shorts, baggy shirt, sneakers. Swallowed four aspirin and washed them down with a Coke. My head was pounding from all the gin, wine, champagne, and self-pity I’d swallowed the night before.
It was just barely dawn, but a jaybird was already putting up a fuss at the bird feeder I’d set out on my side of the courtyard. As I was getting in the truck I flipped my own version of a bird in the general direction of the townhouse. “Die yuppie scum,” I muttered.
I’d circled only five ads in the Pennysaver. It was August and Africa-hot in Savannah. Nobody wanted to fool around with a yard sale unless it was absolutely necessary. The first three sales were in and around Ardsley Park, downtown, and the historic district. My first stop of the day, at a cottage on St. Julian Street, yielded a couple good finds: a heart-pine kitchen table for sixty dollars, and a box of old brass wall sconces for five dollars. I saw two or three dealers I knew there, including Early Bird, who dropped what she was holding and scuttled away when I walked into the parlor where the cash-out had been set up. Everybody agreed it was too hot to work and prices were insane. Then we all paid up and headed out for the next sale.
I rode past the sale on Victory Drive that was supposed to open at seven o’clock, but the people were just starting to set up tables in their carport.
“Amateurs,” I sneered, driving past to the next sale, on Forty-fourth, where half a dozen people milled around several tables heaped with stuff. I leaned out the window to take a look. Lots of racks of clothes, laundry baskets full of pots and pans, Tupperware, bad lamps. I drove on.
I almost didn’t stop at the last sale I’d circled, a plain-Jane 1940s concrete block cottage on the 500 block of East Fifty-eighth street. The tables set up in the yard had piles of kids’ toys, paperback books, and of course, the obligatory piece of exercise equipment—this time a NordicTrack exerciser.
I was about to give up and head over to Mr. B’s on Waters for some grits and eggs when something caught my eye. I pulled the truck over to the curb to get a better look. There, in the shade of a crape myrtle, stood two lonely peely paint metal tulip chairs, in my favorite shade of turquoise.
The chairs hadn’t been priced. I walked over to the knot of people pawing through the children’s clothes and spotted the woman running the sale. You can always tell—they wear a fanny pack. She was in her mid-thirties, her face red and glistening from perspiration, and she was trying to coax a little girl into removing her bare tushy from a wooden potty chair.
The child had white-blond hair, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and her shorts down around her ankles.
“But Krystal, you’re a big girl now,” the woman was saying. “You make tee-tee in the big potty in the house. Let Mommy sell the potty chair, and we’ll go to the store and buy you a new toy.”
“No!” the child, who looked to be about four, screamed. “My potty.”
“Excuse me,” I said, tapping the woman on the shoulder. “How much for the yard chairs over there?”
“Krystal!” the woman snapped. “Give Mommy the potty. Right now.”
“Noooo!” the child screamed.
“The chairs?” I repeated, a little louder.
“What?” the woman said. She was tugging at the child’s hand. “Come on, Krystal. Somebody wants to buy the potty chair. Be a good girl and get up.”
This was getting tiresome. I dug in the pocket of my shorts. Took out a dollar bill, and found half a bag of M&M’s too.
“Hey, Krystal,” I said, dangling the money and the candy in front of her tear-streaked eyes, “do you like M&M’s?”
She sniffed. “Yes.”
“Do you want some M&M’s? And some money?”
Another sniff. “OK.”
“Give Mommy the potty chair and I’ll give you the candy and the money,” I said, holding them about a foot away.
She stood, pulled up her pants. I gave her the money and the candy.
“Thank you,” the mother said, grabbing up the potty chair.
“Eew,” said the prospective buyer.
I turned around. Krystal had left one last souvenir in the potty.
“About the yard chairs,” I repeated.
The woman glanced over at them. “Oh those. I guess you can have ’em for five dollars for the pair. But you’ll have to load them yourself. My rat-fink husband took off to go get change an hour ago and he hasn’t been heard from since.”
Five bucks was a steal. I have a dealer in Atlanta who specializes in shabby chic “garden furnishings,” and who pays me thirty dollars for anything with original paint.
“I’ll load them myself,” I promised, handing her five ones. I walked around the tables, just to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything. I wasn’t.
But I went back to the woman, who was now hosing out the potty chair. “Do you have anything else old, like those chairs?”
“It’s all out here in the yard,” she said, straightening up. “Unless…”
“Yes?”
“There’s a whole shed full of old crap in the carport,” she said. “We put my husband’s grandmother in a nursing home two years ago, and it’s all just sitting there rotting, taking up room. The chairs wouldn’t fit in there, so they’ve been out in the rain all these months. What an eyesore.”
I peered over at the carport, which had one of those prefab aluminum toolsheds attached to it.
“Would you be interested in selling some of that old crap?”
“I’d be interested in pouring gasoline over the whole mess and taking a match to it,” she grumbled. “But my husband might object.”
“Well. If you’re not interested.” I picked up one of the chairs and started toward the truck.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. You take everything out of that shed, get it off my property before my husband gets back, and you can have it for, say, a hundred bucks.”
She was walking toward the shed, standing in front of the door.
“Can I see what’s in there first?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “All or nothing.”
Hmm. This was good. It reminded me of Let’s Make a Deal. Let’s see what’s behind that door, Monty. Could be tripe. Could be treasure. I already had at least a hundred bucks of profit from the morning. I decided to go with door number one.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
She threw open the door. “Screw him,” she said triumphantly.
I waded in headfirst. The shed was maybe ten by six feet. It smelled of mildew and cat piss. Not a bad sign when you’re looking for old stuff.
“One more thing,” the woman said, poking her head in the doorway. “If he comes back and you’re still here, I’ll tell him you’re a looter.”
Excellent. Now I was on Mission Impossible.
It was eight o’clock. I pulled the truck into the carport and started loading boxes. I didn’t want to take the time to go through the loot right there, but there were encouraging signs, a pair of little 1940s mahogany end tables, a boxful of old pictures, some with decent carved gilt frames, a pair of matching crocodile-leather suitcases, with a matching crocodile train case, and a box whose open flaps revealed what looked like several sets of blue-and-white toile drapes with silk fringe. My mouth was watering. On the other hand, I also loaded an aluminum walker, an oxygen tank, and at least a case each of adult diapers and liquid nutritional supplement.
After forty-five minutes of intense lifting and lugging, I was done. I slammed the shed door, peeled five twenties off, and leaned out the window of the truck and handed it to the woman as I backed out of the driveway.
“You better go.” She jerked her head toward a black Jeep pulling up at the curb. “That’s my husband.”
I gave the Jeep guy a friendly wave and boogied on down the road.
My first stop was at the St. Francis of Assisi thrift shop, where my mother helps out on Saturday mornings, pricing donations for resale.
I pulled the truck around back and rang the bell. Mama answered. She was wearing her flowered pink apron and a pin that said “May I Help You?”
“What’s all this?” she asked, instantly suspicious.
“A donation,” I said, handing her the walker. “Just a minute while I get the other stuff. It’s a bunch of sickroom supplies. How about getting me a tax receipt while I unload?”
She disappeared inside the thrift shop. I unloaded some boxes of paperbacks, old clothes, the diapers, nutritional supplement, and, as an act of charity, a wooden rocker which I actually could have sold for cash money.
She handed me the tax receipt. “I’ve been calling you for three days.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been really busy.”
“Your cousin Lucy died Wednesday. Didn’t you see it in Thursday’s paper?”
The only part of the paper I read on Thursdays is the classified ads. “No,” I said. “Do I really have a cousin Lucy?”
“You remember Lucy,” Mama insisted. “Eighty-six years old. She’s on the McKuen side. You missed the wake. It was very nice.”
“Sorry again,” I said.
“Cousin Lucy had a house at Thunderbolt. The family wants to know if you’d like to buy her things. I’m in charge of cleaning it out so the house can be sold. Lucy was quite a collector, you know.”
The only Cousin Lucy I remembered was a shrunken old gnome who chain-smoked Virginia Slims and terrorized everybody in the family so they’d buy Avon products from her. I’d never seen her house.
“I’ll let you know,” I promised, giving her a quick kiss. “I’ll call.”
After I’d dumped the excess cargo, I decided to run by Lester Dobie’s shop. The heart pine table and brass sconces were right up his alley, and besides, I wanted to pick his brains a little.
Lester was at the front counter, rewiring a chandelier. Wires and bolts and pieces of crystal were strewn all over the counter. A pole fan was pointed at him, but it did little to stir up the hot, still air.
He looked up when I set the box of light fixtures on the counter.
“Hey, shug,” he said. “What you got there?”
“Four pairs of brass wall sconces,” I said.
He peered down into the box and frowned. “Dime a dozen,” he grunted.
“Fifteen a pair, sixty bucks even,” I said. It was a game we played. He ran down my merchandise, I ran up the prices.
“Give you fifty and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for taking advantage of a blind old man.”
“Got a heart-pine kitchen table out in the truck,” I said.
He pushed his sweat-soaked captain’s hat to the back of his head.
“Let’s take a look.”
“Not too bad,” he admitted, running his hand over the smooth burnt-orange surface of the wood. He ran his hand on the underside of the table and down the legs. “Hand-pegged. What’d you give for it?”
“I’ll take a hundred fifty,” I said, ignoring his question.
“Hundred twenty. What else you got in there?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said. I told him the story of how I’d cleaned out the storage shed on Fifty-eighth Street.
“Hand me that box of frames and stuff,” Lester said. “Let’s get inside out of this heat and take a look.”
We took the box of pictures into his office and went through them one by one. Several were yellowed old religious prints: the Sermon on the Mount, the Last Supper, Jesus and the lost lamb.
“Junk,” he said, setting them aside.
There was a pair of decent watercolor floral still lifes, probably the work of a talented amateur, a framed black-and-white photograph of what looked like a high school class reunion, and an oil painting of slaves picking cotton.
“Hey,” I said, lifting it up for a better look. The frame, heavily carved gilt, was by itself worth the hundred bucks I’d given for all the contents. But the painting was intriguing.
Roughly eight-by-eleven, it portrayed a group of workers, white and black, stooped over, picking cotton in a field framed by moss-draped live oaks. The brushwork was skillful, with richly textured nuances, giving it a somehow wistful, somber look.
“Let’s take it out of the frame, get a look at the signature,” Lester said.
With a pair of needle-nose pliers he deftly removed the brads holding the painting in the frame. He handed me the frame and picked up a lighted magnifying glass.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, motioning for me to look.
“T. Eugene White” was the signature, in carefully looped letters.
“You’ve heard of him?” I asked.
“Just a minute,” Lester said. He turned around in his swivel chair and plucked a book from the shelf behind his desk. He looked in the index, found what he wanted, turned to a page near the end of the book.
“T. Eugene White,” the book said. “Edgefield County, S.C. 1872–1949. Exhibited at Southern Beaux Arts Society, Member American Society of Painters and Illustrators.”
I picked up the book and looked at the title. Twentieth-Century American Painters.
“T. Eugene White is a listed painter,” I said, a silly grin plastered on my face. “What else do you know?”
“Southern vernacular subject matter, very popular right now,” Lester said. “I got the catalog for an exhibit they did at the Valentine Museum in Richmond; there’s a T. Eugene White listed in it, and I think the Telfair, right here in town, has a White in its collection.”
“Bottom line,” I urged. “What’s it worth?”
He scratched his chin. “Hard to say. Oil on board, very good condition, popular size, very popular subject matter. He’s a low-country painter, and he’s been dead for fifty years. You could probably sell it to any interior designer here in town for, say, two thousand.”
“Which makes it worth at least three thousand, and that’s just based on aesthetics,” I said. “Could I do better? A lot better?”
“Sure,” he said. “Take time, though. Might have to call around to some art dealers, see what’s happening on the market right now. It could use a good cleaning. That’d up the value right away. I was you, I’d list it with a dealer in Atlanta or Charlotte, get ’em to take it on contingency.”
“Oh jeez,” I said, hugging the painting to my chest. “Oh jeez.”
“You done good, Weezie,” he said, patting me on the back. “Old T. Eugene White ought to bring you a nice little nest egg.”
“Better than that,” I said dreamily. “Maybe he’ll bring me the Moses Weed cupboard.”
“Moses Weed? You still scheming over that thing?”
“I am,” I said, leaning closer. “Lester, have you heard anything about furniture from Beaulieu being sold around town? Anything about Lewis Hargreaves? I was at a dinner party last night and a woman there said she overheard somebody talking about Lewis selling a sideboard out of Beaulieu. But they haven’t announced another sale yet.”
“Haven’t heard anything,” Lester said. “But I can check in a hurry.”
He picked up the phone.
“Lewis? Lester Dobie here. How you doin’? Look here, I got a client, a lady out at the Landings, got it in her head she needs some real Southern plantation furniture. I know you handle that sort of thing, and I was wondering if you had anything she might be interested in.”
He listened and nodded. “Yeah, I know it’s hard to come by. Damn shame about that sale out at Beaulieu being canceled. You hear anything about when they’re gonna reschedule?”
Lester smiled. “Well that’s good to hear. Take care, hear?”
He hung up the phone. “Lewis says he don’t have any plantation stock right now. But he did say the sale’s been rescheduled. For next Saturday.”
I jumped up and down and hugged him. “Perfect. Now all I have to do is sell the painting before next Saturday. And hope Lewis hasn’t already gotten his grimy mitts on my cupboard.”