Chapter Seven - Lisa
We left the gazebo, and instead of going back the way we’d come, Cody took me farther down the lake shore. He let us through a gate in a barbed-wire fence, and on the other side the pecan trees switched over to white oak and pine, dense and impossible to see through.
Finally we came to a clearing on a broad-shouldered hill above the lake, and a long, rambling white house with a wide porch. It reminded me of the big house in some ways, I think mostly in the way the eaves and windows were made. Probably built to match.
“This place has been here ever since I can remember. It’s been used for everything from a guesthouse to a junk barn over the years, sometimes as a place for some of the ranch hands to live. We’ve got three more of them over there on the other side of the lake, but this is the one I always liked the best because it’s got the most privacy. Me and Marcus shared it for a little while, till he moved into one of the other ones. So it’s all mine now,” he murmured, unlocking the door to let us in.
The second we stepped inside, I felt like I’d entered a scene straight out of True Grit. Cody had covered the couch with a whole skin from a Holstein dairy cow, with all the black-and-white-splotched hair still attached. It looked like he’d built most of the tables and furniture himself from rough plank lumber that matched the paneled walls of rough-cut white oak wood. He’d scrounged a few street signs to put on the walls, and there was a Texas flag in the window and a real bear-skin rug in the middle of the floor that still had the claws and teeth on it. It still had the eyes, too, and I almost felt like it was staring at me.
I glanced at Cody, and saw that he was watching me with a proud smile on his face, like he thought he’d done something really special. I laughed a little.
“Did you kill that?” I asked, nodding at the bear, which was still staring at me.
“Yeah, sure did. Way back in a holler up in the Ozarks a couple years ago,” he said proudly, and I laughed again.
He gave me the quick tour, such as it was, ending at his bedroom. It didn’t take long since the whole place was set up on a fairly simple plan; living room and kitchen combo in the middle, with four bedrooms surrounding it; two on each side. It was pretty obvious he didn’t use the extra bedrooms very much, so there wasn’t a lot to show me. One of them was full of cardboard boxes and bunk beds taken out of the other rooms and shoved in there for lack of anywhere else to put them. Another one had nothing in it but a forgotten scrap of sheet music on the floor, and the third one was empty. I paid attention to everything as we went along, but of course it was Cody’s room itself that I most wanted to see.
It fit the same young-single-redneck-cowboy style as everything else, only more so. He had a big double bed built of rough-cut cedar logs, with a handmade red and blue quilt in a starburst pattern, neatly made. There was a matching dresser with a big mirror on top, and a silver bolo tie in the shape of a bull’s head hanging from the corner of it. Another white straw hat was hung from the other corner. On the wall were a few pictures in wooden frames, and a Texas Rangers pennant.
There was a desk with a computer on it, and a handful of reference books about farm business management and soil conservation and veterinary medicine and so forth. The books looked like he used them pretty often.
Besides that, there wasn’t much else in there except a little shelf of knickknacks nailed to the wall beside his closet door. A high school rodeo trophy buckle. A horse carved from cedar wood with a pocketknife. A glass ball from Zion National Park. A toy monster truck like somebody might build from a model kit, of all things.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“If I hadn’t known you lived here, I think I could have guessed it after seeing this room,” I said humorously.
“Yeah, it’s me, huh?” he asked, obviously pleased with my reaction.
I walked over to the knickknack shelf to meddle with his things, and saw that he’d won the rodeo buckle his senior year for calf roping. Then I looked at the picture of his parents. Miss Josie didn’t seem to have aged much in all those years, and they both seemed very much in love. Sometimes you can tell, even in a picture. It gave me a wistful feeling, to see them like that. Cody didn’t really look much like either one of them, but then I guess sometimes kids don’t.
“You like to whittle?” I asked, picking up the horse. It was a stallion reared up on its hind legs, eyes wide and nostrils flared. It was exquisitely carved, with amazing attention to detail. I could even see the hair.
“No, but Marcus does. He gave me that for Christmas a couple years ago. It’s supposed to be Buck, but I think he flattered the old boy a little bit. He’s real good, though, huh?” he said, and I had to agree.
The glass ball was about the size of an orange and solid all the way through, with some desert wildflowers preserved inside. I don’t know what kind they were, but they reminded me of the little blue lupines that bloom in early spring. At the bottom was a caption that read In Beauty be it finished. A pretty thought, even though I wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to mean.
Then I picked up the monster truck and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, that’s somethin’ I built a long time ago. I used to like to go to truck rallies and stuff like that,” he said sheepishly, like he was afraid I might think the truck was a stupid thing to have on his shelf. I didn’t, really, and besides that I was much more interested in what he said about truck rallies.
“How come you don’t go anymore?” I asked.
“No particular reason. Just busy, I guess, and Marcus doesn’t really like that kind of stuff much. It’s no fun to go by yourself,” he said.
“I’d like to try one,” I said.
“Would you, now?” he asked, curious.
“Sure. If I had anybody to go with,” I added.
“Well, then, I might have to take you sometime, whenever one pops up anywhere close,” he said.
“I might have to take you up on that,” I agreed.
After that we went back to the gazebo for a while, but that was all we said about serious things for the rest of the day. He told me some funny stories about places where the Mustangs had played now and then; brawls he’d been in and things like that. He told me about a sweetheart gig when they got to play at the Four States Fair in Texarkana two years ago, which they only got because Cyrus’s brother was going out with one of the board members’ nieces at the time. The power of networking, I guess you could call it.
Anyway, he said the last song they played that night was Dixie, and half the crowd was half drunk by then, and all those rednecks and hillbillies got all teary-eyed and Southern-patriotic and sang half the song with them and gave them a standing ovation at the end and they collected almost nine hundred bucks in tips. We both laughed at that and I kind of wished I could’ve been there to see it.
He cracked open some of last year’s pecans for us with his bare hands while we sat there and swung back and forth, which reminded me of something Daddy used to do when I was little. We always had a butter churn full of pecans and we’d sit around the fire to eat them on winter evenings while we watched TV. He always crunched them in his fists like that. Eating pecans all night is a surefire way to get fat, no doubt, but I was too young to know or care about such things back then.
But I certainly knew now, so I mostly just nibbled even though I enjoyed the memories it brought back. We were careful to throw the broken shells over the railing into the lake; pecan shells hurt when you step on them bare-footed.
When we finally got back to the house, Miss Josie was right in the middle of transferring a warm, steaming brisket from the grill to a serving platter, and it smelled wonderful. Cody hurried to open the back door for her, and together we all went back into the kitchen. She deftly put the brisket down on the dining room table, and I saw that she’d already set out the plates and silverware and everything.
“Miss Josie, you should have co
me and got us sooner; I would have been glad to help you with all this!” I said, feeling bad that she’d been slaving away in the hot kitchen all evening while me and Cody had been drinking iced tea in the gazebo.
“Aw, now, it was no trouble at all. Now, y’all come eat before it gets cold,” she said.
We did, joining hands while Cody blessed the meal, and then Miss Josie served the food. She’d whipped up mashed potatoes and corn on the cob to go with it, and a key lime pie for later.
“Now, Cody, make sure you don’t run off anywhere tomorrow till that fence is done, and then Mr. Jackson’ll be here sometime in the morning, too. He said he’ll need to talk to both of us,” she said.
“Okay, Mama,” he said, when he swallowed his food. It sounded like he didn’t really want to talk about the subject, whatever it might be.
I wondered fleetingly who Mr. Jackson was; the only one I could think of offhand was Sheila’s daddy, Howie, the president of Piney State Bank. But I kept my curiosity to myself.
I wanted to help clear the table after supper, but Miss Josie wouldn’t hear of that, either. She sent Cody and me back outside to wait for her on the verandah while she finished up in the kitchen. Finally she came out with her camera, fiddling with the buttons.
“Now, y’all go stand against that pecan tree over yonder and let me get some pictures,” she said, and Cody laughed.
“Aw, come on, Mama; you want to take pictures now?” he asked.
“Yes, I sure do. Now y’all get over there,” she told him, and so we did, standing in between the tree and Cody’s truck. He put his arm around my shoulders and we shot as many poses as it took to satisfy Miss Josie. Then we sat on the verandah for a while and drank some more tea and talked about nothing in particular until it got dark and the lightning bugs started to come out.