Long Upon the Land

I almost forgot,” my brother Will said. It was only the first week of August, more than two weeks till my birthday, but he pulled a small, brightly wrapped box from his pocket. “Got another present for you.”

“Aw, you didn’t need to do that,” I said. “The trellis was more than enough.”

Will’s an auctioneer and does estate appraisals, too. Somewhere or other, in his ramblings around the state, he had found a beautiful wrought-iron trellis that someone had scrapped. All it needed was a good sandblasting to get rid of the rust and Dwight had gladly taken it to a body shop in Dobbs. He and Will said it was a birthday present for me and yes, I would enjoy its beauty once it was in place, but we both knew who was the more enthusiastic gardener. This trellis was seven feet tall with graceful leaves and bunches of iron grapes and once it was set in holes filled with concrete, it would support the scuppernong vine that Dwight had already begun to root from one over at the homeplace.

When he’s not digging trees out of the woods or transplanting flowering bushes to turn what once was a tobacco field into our own Garden of Eden, Dwight is Sheriff Bo Poole’s second in command. I’m a district court judge and I should have been prepping for the heavy workweek coming up. Our benighted state assembly keeps slashing the court’s budget, so in addition to my usual workload, I’d been asked to take a day out of my rotation and hear a case down in New Bern next week. Since the trellis was ostensibly for me, though, it was only fair that I help set it in place. Besides, helping Dwight erect a trellis was a lot more fun than reading depositions. But first Will and I had to wait while Dwight and another brother ran down the farm’s posthole diggers. Seth thought Andrew might have been the last to use them when he expanded his dog run a few weeks ago.

Our son Cal and his Bryant cousins never miss a chance to ride in the truck bed, so they’d gone along, too.

We had wrestled the massive weight from the back of Will’s van and while we waited for the posthole diggers, I took the little package Will had handed me and tore off the paper. Inside was a flip-top Marlboro box and inside that was something small and hard, wrapped in white tissue paper that fell away as my fingers fumbled with it.

A brass Zippo lighter.

I stared at it in surprise and my eyes filled with involuntary tears.

“Will?”

He gave a self-conscious shrug and his own eyes seemed to glisten for a moment. “Adam and Zach never smoked. You quit almost before you started and I quit last year. I thought you might want to keep it.”

I could almost see our mother’s strong slender fingers closed around it, cupping it in her hands to light a cigarette. She was never a chain-smoker—four or five a day was her limit, but I never saw her use a match. This lighter was always in her pocket, the brass smooth and golden. The engraved initials were almost worn off from the constant turning in her fingers whenever she was in deep thought. We should have hated it. After all, she died of lung cancer when I was eighteen. But it was so much a part of her that all the boys wanted it after her death. Not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Indeed Andrew was almost ready to fight the others until Seth stepped in and decreed that Will, as her oldest son, should be the one to have it.

It might have amused me had I been around at the time, because I was the only one who knew whose initials—W.R.M.—were engraved on the case inside a frame of Greek keys. By then, though, I was in such deep denial, so angry at the world, at my whole family, and at Mother for dying that I eloped with a sweet-talking car jockey, a man I almost killed with a rusty butcher knife, and didn’t come home for a few years.

The first time I saw the lighter in Will’s hands, I almost lost it, but for once I’d kept my mouth shut.

Now I opened the lid and flicked the little wheel with my thumb. It sparked, but the wick didn’t catch fire.

“Must be out of fluid,” Will said and reached to take it back. “Who was Leslie?”

“Who?”

He pulled the lighter apart to show three lines of engraving on the inner casing: 11/11/1934—Happy 25th. Below that was the name Leslie followed by four notes on a bar of music: C, G, E, A, a mixture of half notes and quarter notes.

“I never saw this,” I said. “Mother told me that the man who gave it to her was a flight instructor at the airbase over in Goldsboro. I think the W stood for Walter, but I forget what the R was—a family name—Raynor, or something like that. His last name was McIntyre, though, and she called him Mac.”

“Was he her boyfriend?”

I shook my head. “She said she could have liked him, but he was carrying a torch for someone who committed suicide.”

“This Leslie?”

“Maybe. Mother never mentioned the woman’s name.”

“It would go with that scrap of music.” Will hummed the notes and I recognized one of the old songs she used to play on the piano she had brought out to the farm with her when she and Daddy married. “Let’s Fall in Love.” When she was feeling sentimental or flirting with him or making up with him after one of their infrequent spats, this was the song she always played. What he used to play, too. I suddenly realized that he hadn’t played it since she died. Not that I ever heard anyhow.

I looked at the date again. “He would’ve been in his early thirties when Mother met him.”

“So why’d he give her a lighter his girlfriend had given him?” asked Will.

“I think she was supposed to hold it for him as a sort of guarantee that he’d come home safely from the war. Only he didn’t.”

“So she did like him.”

“Not the way you mean. But she did say he changed her life.”

“How?”

I shrugged. “It was one of those things she started to tell me, but then Aunt Zell or somebody came to sit with her for a while and we never got back to it.”

There had been a terrible urgency about Mother’s last summer. She had been too busy living to keep a diary and it was as if she felt that her life would be completely lost if there was no one who knew her stories. So between bouts of nausea and diarrhea, she told those stories to me.

Most of them anyhow.

Only later did I realize how much she had left unsaid. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said I remembered all the details and nuances of the things that she did tell me.

“Would Daddy know?”

“We could ask him, but…” I didn’t have to finish the sentence.

Will nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

Daddy’s never been one to talk about his feelings, but we know how deep the hurt goes. He’ll smile with the rest of us when we talk about her—the house parties that lasted for days, the way she could play any song she’d ever heard, the time she lured his best looper away from the barn with better wages than he’d been paying, the way she teased that she fell in love with his eight little boys before she fell in love with him. But we knew not to probe deeper than those lighthearted family legends and anecdotes. Mother probably would have told me about their courtship had I been mature enough to ask, but I was as self-centered as any teenager back then. More interested in whether to go to a ball game with the team captain or with the coach’s son.

The boys were all off starting their own lives that summer. College. New jobs. Marriage. Having babies. And all of them were unnerved by her losing battle with death. Daddy was in such fierce denial that he drove himself to exhaustion with farm work from first light to last dark. Even though Mother was dying, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for myself. It seemed monstrously wrong that her day-to-day care fell squarely on me. I was supposed to be looking forward to college, not mired in bedpans and soiled bed linens and torn between grief and guilt.

I know now that those last two months were a gift and more than once I’ve wished that I’d listened closer or asked more questions, but she and Daddy were so right together that it never occurred to me to wonder how she could have married a roughneck bootlegger who barely finished grade school and who had eight little boys to boot.

She was a privileged town girl. Had it not been for the war, she would have made her debut in Raleigh wearing long white gloves and a virginal white ball gown.

He grew up in rural poverty, the son of a small-time moonshiner.

Her father was a prominent attorney whose associates tried to get him to run for governor.

His father had died in a car crash while running from a bunch of revenuers.

She had studied Latin in high school.

He spoke the Queen’s English—Queen Anne’s English, as filtered through three hundred years of informal usage.

She was forever correcting our grammar. Although she never completely broke the older ones from using double negatives, none of us could get away with saying ain’t in her hearing.

“It’s not fair,” Adam once grumbled. “Daddy says ain’t all the time and you never correct him.”

“When you’re the man your daddy is, you can say whatever you like,” she told him. “Till then, you’re fixing to go to bed without your supper if you keep arguing about it.”

At the sound of a motor, we looked up toward the house, but when the truck came into sight, it was Daddy’s, not Dwight’s.

“Speak of the devil and up he jumps,” Will said with a grin.

I slid the lighter into a pocket of my jeans and went forward to greet him.

Without cutting his motor, he yelled, “Call the rescue truck! Somebody’s been hurt bad and I’m scared to try and move him.”

I patted my pockets, but of course I didn’t have my phone on me.

Will already had his out, though, punching in 911. “Where is he, Daddy?”

“Down in the bottom, where Black Gum Branch cuts back from the creek. Somebody’s smashed his head like a rotten melon. Where’s Dwight?” He threw the truck in reverse and I scrambled to catch up with him.

“Wait! I’ll come with you. Is he bleeding? Should we bring some ice?”

“Might help,” he agreed and slowed to a stop by my back door.

I darted inside, scooped up some clean dishtowels by the refrigerator, emptied the whole bin of ice into a large plastic bag, grabbed my phone from the kitchen counter, and was back out to the truck in only seconds.

Will roared up in his van. “The ambulance is on its way. I’ll go get Dwight,” he said and dug off toward Andrew’s house.

“Who is it?” I asked as we fishtailed through the sandy lanes that led down to Possum Creek.

“He was throwed down with his face in the dirt,” he said grimly. “I won’t sure if I should move his head, but I turned him so he could breathe. Leastways, I think he was breathing.”

Our family farm is crisscrossed by lanes, some of which lead out to a couple of nearby roads that also cross the farm or serve as boundary lines.

“I was on my way to the food store,” Daddy said by way of explanation, but I knew it was only a partial explanation.

A lane might be a shorter drive from point A (his back door) to point B (his destination) than the road, but the lanes also let him check up on parts of the farm he might not have visited recently. Most farmers still walk or ride their boundaries regularly, keeping an eye on crops, on fences, on drainage ditches that might need cleaning, or for a dozen other reasons. As a boy, he could have walked the family’s hundred acres in an hour, but over the years, he and I and my brothers have added so much land to the original holding that wheels were a necessity. He’s never cared much for what he calls “stuff,” but let an acre of land come up for sale anywhere near the farm and he’s right there with an offer, cash in hand. Last time my brother Seth totted up all the non-contiguous bits and pieces, too, we were surprised to realize that together we own close to twenty-five hundred acres.

We had been driving along the northern edge of Possum Creek. Now, as we neared the turn by the branch, Daddy put the truck in four-wheel drive and edged off the lane into the field.

“I probably already messed up any good tracks for how he got here,” he said as he stopped and cut off the motor, “but you never know.”

Mindful of his words, I was careful to step only on unmarked sand when I hopped out with my ice and hurried over to the body lying on the far side of the lane. Another two feet closer to the branch and he would have been hidden by a thick tangle of weeds and vines.