She got a little shifty. "Not ... precisely. It's of no consequence at the moment. I have history I'd rather not discuss. But I'm not a car thief or any other kind of criminal, pervert, miscreant or n'er do well."
"What are you running from?"
"Nothing that need concern you. I ... I'm not running f 'rove anything. I prefer to think of it as `trying to find myself"'
"That's fine, as long as nobody but you is looking for yourself. I can handle trouble, long as it doesn't ambush me. Somebody gonna show up here after you? A mean boyfriend, a crazy husband?"
"No. I'm not married, and I'm not the type to endure an abusive boyfriend."
"I bet you've left a few with knife marks."
"You're veering from the subject, Mr. Thocco."
"You got enough money to buy another car?"
"I can take care of myself."
"I'm guessing that means `No."' I scrubbed a hand over my hair and blew out a long breath. "Awright, look. A mare from my ranch caused you to run off the road. The fact that your car was stolen's not my problem, except that your bad luck wouldn't a-caught up with you except for running off the road on account of my mare. So you got a right to expect me to make it up to you."
"I don't intend to sue you for damages."
"Here's my deal. I'll give you a thousand dollars, cash, towards a car. And I'll give you free room and board here for as long as it takes you to save up the rest. And I'll give you a job. Cook. Housekeeper. And anything else that needs doing that you can help with. That's not a perfect deal, but ..."
"I'll take it. And I don't want your thousand dollars, or a salary. Room and board will be good enough, thanks."
"Well, uh ...
"I'd like to get unpacked and see how else I can be useful."
I was flabbergasted. "Look, let me just lay down the rules, here. You get paid. Period."
"Well, if you insist."
"How else you gonna buy a new car?"
"Well I ... all right. I'll take a salary. Thank you."
"And I can probably only afford you through the summer."
"Perfect! I've always wanted a summer job! Thank you."
"You never had a summer job, before?"
"I . . . " Her voice got pinker. "I, uh, of course."
"Look, uh ... if you've been living on food stamps, unemployment checks, that kinda thing ... it's nothing to be ashamed of."
Her eyes got soft as she studied my face. "Thank you. But I'm able to ... to get by."
"Good, then. Here's the rules: Treat my people like you would anybody else-with respect. Don't play down to `em and don't play on their sympathy."
"I understand your point and accept your terms."
"I don't know what to think about you. But I'll give you a chance to prove yourself and I'll try to do right by ya, to make up for what happened to your car. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough."
"Awright, then. If you need answers to questions, talk to Miriam. Her and her sister, Lula, are crusty but not mean. You'll have no problem with them. And as for Lily, she's peculiar, but don't get annoyed at her. She thinks you're the best thing since sweet milk-"
"She seems very maternal. I assume she and Mac have children?"
"Nope. None."
"How ... strange. Not to pry, but I'd appreciate any information you can give me. Since they've been so kind, and it appears I'm going to be staying in their guest room for the summer, I don't want to say anything awkward or painful."
Smart gal. I nodded. "Awright. Just between you and me, Lily don't like to talk about babies, and neither does Mac. Lily's been `fixed.' Tubes tied. Been fixed since she was a teenager. From what I've heard, her and Mac's family talked her into it as a condition of her and Mac livin' together. I don't like what was done to her and him, but that was long before I met `em, and that's just how it was done for their kind, back then. I think that's why she's always sayin', `Poor baby this and poor baby that.' `Cause she never got a chance to have a baby of her own."
Karen went real pale. "Never? She says she's never had a child?"
"Nope. Not a one."
Karen started to sink. I caught her by the arm. She landed hard on the bench. I dropped to my boot heels beside her. Godawmighty, was she so sensitive she couldn't hear about other folks' sad stories without gettin' the vapors? "Need some water?" I asked. I tried to joke. Waved a hand. "I got a creek right here."
She dabbed her face. "Sorry. I'm still a little wobbly from yesterday's trauma."
You sure didn't look wobbly when you were threatening to carve the Pollos, I thought. But I let her be. Her color improved and she took a deep breath, then looked at me with a nod. "There. I'm fine. No need to toss me in the creek."
"I wasn't gonna toss you. Just hold you by the feet while you dunked."
She made a sputtering sound, then gave up and smiled, though it was a kinda sad smile. "Mr. Thocco, you have a way with words."
"That's what comes from read n' comic books and westerns."
She folded her hands in her lap. "Indeed."
Indeed? I swear, she was like somebody out of an old movie, yeah, let's see, one of those characters in Little Women. Lily, Miriam, Dale and Lula made us all watch girl movies some nights, so I'd seen that one not long back.
She was Jo. Yeah, Jo, except dressed in earth sandals, hiking shorts, and a save-the-world t-shirt made of cotton so coarse it looked it was spun by free-range spiders on a tequila bender.
I patted a hand at her like she was a nervous calf. "Look, I don't know what you're doing roaming these parts with a bird and a harp and a lute about being some kind of traveling artist, but that's your business. You're safe here, and you're welcome to stay."
Her face softened, again, and she blushed. "Thank. you," she said. "You are truly a rare breed of man."
"More like `medium done.' And crispy around the edges."
She smiled some more. I smiled.
It got awkward. She fromied and stood up. I shot to my feet, too. I won't say I was blushing, but I will say I felt hot. "That's that, then," I said. "If you need to catch your breath another minute, just stay here and enjoy the view. I'm the prince, so, I ... decree you can hang out in my. . . office." I was making a fool of myself.
She smiled wealdy. "I appreciate that, your highness."
I headed back across the footbridge, then stopped on a thought and looked back at her. "I don't suppose you'll tell me how you came to own that fancy gaucho facon you carved the Pollos with, uh?"
She stared at me. A strange little gleam came into her eyes. "I've spent some time in South America. Have you?"
"Here and there. Mexico and thereabouts. A long time ago."
I let it go at that.
The less said about El Diablo, the better.
She looked disappointed.
Part Two
"We are four miles west of the small village of Island Grove, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon."
-Marjorie Finnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
Chapter 7
Ben
It didn't take long for Karen to turn everything ass backwards and upside down.
I mean that in a good way.
She ran the kitchen. Not just ran it, but emptied it, scrubbed it, and de-toxed it. Karen frowned every time she looked at the storeroom full of canned spaghetti and just-add-water mixes. She freaked the first time she saw what I kept in the freezer. "I've never seen so many industrial-sized bags of frozen buffalo wings, French fries and corn dogs," she told Miriam. "Are we feeding human beings or creating mutations in lab animals?"
Miriam thought that was pretty funny. "Karen wants to know if she can take over the grocery shopping for me and Lula," Miriam told me one night. I told her, `Sure, as long as you can feed ten people for two weeks on Ben's budget.' And you know what she said to that? She said she learned to cook where peop
le roast bugs and eat fried worms. So she `spects she can handle most anything. What do you think of this girl, Ben?"
"I think we better watch out if she serves something that looks like macaroni with legs."
Miriam went off chortling.
Hmmm. So Karen had a South American cowboy knife, plus jungle cooking skills. Okay. A couple of pieces of Karen's puzzle were in place. That only left about a thousand more.
Kara
I needed a focus that took all my energy, and feeding ten adults three hearty meals a day-made from scratch as much as possible, despite the supply of processed foods I had to disperse before Miriam could justify a shopping trip-kept me busy. Ben's kitchen was the heart of the house, and I adored it.
It was big, drafty, old and happy-shabby, with rust-stains on the faucet, fine cracks in the headboard ceiling, one linoleum counter that sagged a little, and a pine-plank floor that let me see through to the crawl space through a knot-hole in one corner.
The main furniture was a weathered picnic table big enough to hold at least ten people, with mismatched chairs, and the only decoration on that table was a stack of paper napkins with Lily's hand-painted daisy rock on them.
"You paint very well," I said to her. "Have you ever painted on canvas?"
She blushed, shook her head, and hurried from the room. Miriam nudged me. "Mac's brother says her flowers are silly. So she don't even paint rocks, much, anymore."
Mac's brother. Glen. I made lots of mental notes about my unsuspecting uncle. None of them good.
Lily was the ranch's laundry maven. Despite a few misadventures with bleach, she had mastered the art of the washing machine and dryer that lived in a nook just off the kitchen. This was no small task, since she not only took care of personal clothing-much of it stained with sweat, dirt and animal manure-but also washed loads of work rags from the barns and the occasional horse blanket.
We spent every day together, her laundering and me cooking, with Joey and Miriam and Lula, who took turns doing other chores. Miriam and Lula's flamboyant personalities, their jangling mermaid jewelry, and their droll pragmatism appealed to me. They were human parrots.
They drove the hands to doctor's appointments and kept track of their medications from the Fountain Springs Pharmacy. Only Lily and Mac seemed perfectly hale and hearty. I was glad for that fact. Physically, my birth parents were normal. I dreaded the word "normal," and I knew I shouldn't apply it as a standard, but I did. Political correctness was hypocritical comfort.
I mulled such thoughts while sweeping vast porches inhabited by lizards, spring spiders, small snakes, mice, squirrels, and nesting sparrows. Mr. Darcy perched on the whitewashed rails, whistling, shrieking, and occasionally yelling, "There it goes!" when something moved.
The ranch hens began to hang out in the yard nearby, tilting their pretty heads and looking at him. He liked chickens; he was sometimes lonely for other large birds. Though he'd been paired with female macaws a few times, he quickly grew bored with their company.
Malcolm had once laughingly said, "I do believe he's gay," and I wondered, myself.
At any rate, his presence brought out the territorial malice in the large rooster of the Thocco flock, who strutted toward Mr. Darcy with fluffed menace before herding the hens elsewhere. "Chicken," Mr. Darcy sometimes chortled. The way he said it, it was clearly a taunt. Joey found this the most entertaining thing in the world and spent a lot of time on the porch, watching Mr. Darcy and the rooster, while I swept.
Typical of apre-air-conditioning Florida home, the porches were larger than the house, surrounding it on all four sides; some parts were screened but most, open. During spring showers the rain pinged lovingly on the tin roof and dripped in un-guttered freedom on azaleas taller than I.
The interior rooms consisted of a small living room, the large kitchen, two bedrooms and two small bathrooms. The furniture was sturdy but second-hand, and the decor consisted mostly of bookcases lined with texts on livestock and ranch management. An aged stone fireplace in the living room had long ago been fitted with a modern wood stove on the shallow hearth.
Floor fans sufficed in every room except Joey's, which sported a large window air conditioner that could cool the entire house on the hottest days of summer. "The rest of this house may be two degrees away from a wreckin' ball," Miriam said, "but Joey's room is the Taj Mahal."
Indeed. Ben had expanded the walls of his brother's bedroom, put in large picture windows that looked out on the creek and pastures, and installed a wide door to the back porch, where rails and a ramp allowed Joey to roam in his wheelchair.
No television set existed elsewhere in the house, but Joey had the latest technology-a large, flat-screen unit mounted on the wall across from his bed, with a satellite system that provided hundreds of channels. I quickly learned that Joey's favorites were ESPN in all its incarnations, the Cartoon Network, Animal Planet, and any other channel catering to cowboys, dogs, old westerns and funny home videos. A large computer screen occupied a table at the foot of Joey's bed, and on a swing table within reach of his pillow were his video-game remotes.
"Last Christmas Ben drove four hundred miles to camp out at a store in Atlanta when the latest thing hit the shelves," Miriam said. "People in Fountain Springs brought their kids over to visit, `cause Joey got the first X-Box in this part of the state."
I looked at the aging recliner near the bed. "Ben sleeps there every night?"
"Every single night. If he has to go out to the barns at night we got calves being born, foals being born, sick stock, you name it, Joey has a intercom button to push-" She pointed to a unit on the headboard-"and it's wired to buzz in every building on this place. Ben doesn't ever want his baby bubba to be scared or do without."
Ben's bedroom should have been the least of my priorities, but the fact that he kept its door shut and locked intrigued me far more than I wanted to admit. "You don't clean, you don't change the linens, not ever?" I asked innocently. "Is he hiding a collection of suspiciously human-looking bones in there?"
Miriam just shrugged. "He doesn't sleep there. It's his office. He says he likes it private."
Lily gasped. "Ben wouldn't keep people's bones indoors! He'd take `em to Sheriff Arnold."
I had to tell her I was teasing.
A 1950s photograph Lily showed me one night was infinitely depressing. A very young, shy Lily, dressed in dungarees and wearing a brace on her bad leg, sported red hair cut so short it appeared shaved. She clung to the hand of a leathery old woman in a shapeless print dress.
That woman, Granny Maypop, Lily called her-there was a tradition of flower names in the family-looked both grim and nervous. It was as if she knew that being the center of attention rarely brings good fortune to the poor and powerless.
Granny Maypop had worked as a maid for the wealthy Tolberts, and they had let her bring Lily, her sweet, simple-minded granddaughter, to work with her. And there, she had met a sweetly simple, stuttering soul mate. Mac. Thus Lily and Mac had grown up in the grandeur of the Tolbert's antebellum home, River Bluff
Lily showed me a picture from Mac's family album. River Bluff was not a Greek Revival stereotype but a large and ornate house nonetheless, with columned balconies and a white-washed turret, a grand house by historical standards, filled with fine things, paintings and pianos, staffed by slaves and later by sharecroppers, white and black alike, servants in a comfortable and elegant Tolbert world among the live oaks and marshes of north-central Florida.
I researched the Tolberts on the Internet. They maintained an elaborate genealogy site linked to related sites for the town of Tolbert and its history. They had founded Tolbert, Florida in the 1830s, building a pioneer-era trading post into a prosperous and historic burg on the broad St. John's River.
The St. John's is an enormous waterway, meandering more than three hundred miles north from the marshes of central Florida to empty into the Atlantic Ocean near Jacksonville. In the vicinity of Tolbert the river is more than two miles wide. br />
Tolbert, like its famous larger cousin, Palatka, was a key supply port for the Confederate army during the Civil War and a major steamboat stop. In the 1800s every Mark Twain and Showboat fantasy of the paddle-wheel era existed on the river's palm-Puled vistas.
Mac's people had owned steamboats and turpentine mills, timber mills and farms. A prosperous legacy, then and now. Glen Tolbert-my uncle, should I choose to think of him that way-owned several large commercial farms, fast-food franchises, car dealerships, and a real estate firm. He had been married several times and had grown children and ex-wives scattered across the South.
The modern Tolberts were a powerful lot. Couldn't they have tolerated my birth? Couldn't they have absorbed the mild scandal of Mac and Lily's love child? Couldn't they have convinced Mac and Lily to keep me?
To at least acknowledge that I had been born?
To no surprise, days at a working cattle ranch were long and exhausting. Hundreds of spring calves had to be rounded up, castrated and vaccinated, weaned from their mothers and readied for shipment, via large tractor-trailers, to stockyards and huge ranches out west.
Florida's cattle industry ranked highly nationwide, but was k nownn as a "cow-calf" business, meaning the primary function was to raise beef calves to weanililg age, then sell them to others who grew them to adulthood, for slaughter.
As a semi-vegetarian I didn't eat beef, and I considered the beef cattle industry a major source of pollution, both in terms of human health and environmental resources. Thank goodness, I was wise enough to keep that thought to myself.
For a little while.
Several nights of the week-usually in conjunction with some televised sports game du jour-everyone gathered at the ranch's version of a fraternity house rec room.
Ben had walled and insulated a section of the hay loft in the cattle barn, installing a pool table, several rump-sprung old couches, a refrigerator stocked with cheap beer and snacks, a microwave for making popcorn, a basic bathroom, a variety of neon beer signs and sports posters, and a sixty-inch television set.