Margaret Maron - Bootlegger’s Daughter

“Of course, when we’re appointed to represent indigent defendants, we don’t have the option of turning them down if they refuse.” I smiled apologetically at the Republican. “I’m afraid that goes back to their Sixth Amendment rights again-the right to counsel, whether or not they take the counsel’s advice.”

The luncheon concluded in time for me to put in a quick appearance at the end of a noontime fish fry to benefit the hospital in Hilltop. I got to pull a raffle ticket out of a gallon jar, and the white-haired gentleman who won the VCR donated by the Hilltop Radio Shack fancied himself a roguish charmer. “I claim the right to kiss the prettiest candidate in the whole damn election!” he said as he came up to collect his prize.

I smiled-God, how candidates have to smile!-proffered my cheek and mentally put a big red asterisk beside his name. He’d be grinning out the other side of his mouth if he ever showed up in my court.

Midafternoon was Joplin ’s Crossroads. The volunteer fire department there was sponsoring an auction of surplus farm equipment, and my brother Will was auctioneer. Will is three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four, and a bit of a rounder. Everybody likes Will as long as they don’t have to pick up behind him and clean up his messes. He’s a fine auctioneer though and makes good money on the circuit. The crowds get to laughing at his fast-talking patter and hardly notice how high the bid’s gotten. He’d phoned me the week before. “Long as you’re going to be in the neighborhood, you ought to come on by and say hey to everybody. That firehouse is a polling place, and a lot of those men’ll vote for you if you smile at ’em pretty.”

So I climbed up onto the flatbed of a two-ton truck that he was using as a platform, flashed as genuine a smile as I could muster, and used his microphone to make a dignified appeal for their votes. Then, while some announcements were made and another consignment of machinery was rolled into place, Will took a break and I asked him if he remembered Howard Grimes.

“That old busybody? Oh, hell, yeah. Why?”

We were sitting on the far side of the flatbed away from the crowd with out legs dangling over the edge. I popped the top on a can of Diet Pepsi someone had brought us and took a sip. “I was remembering how he said he looked hard at the man in Janie Whitehead’s car that afternoon she disappeared because he thought at first she was Trish and he wanted to see who she was cheating on you with, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” he said sourly. His and Trish’s divorce had not been amicable. They fought over every single thing they’d acquired together-furniture, appliances, and the dogs; but the major sticking point, and one that almost unglued the settlement, was who was going to keep the album of wedding pictures. Even though she understood the psychological significance of the impasse, Mother wound up paying their photographer to duplicate the whole damn thing right down to the album’s white taffeta cover just so she wouldn’t have to keep listening to Will mouth about it.

“You dated Janie before she married Jed, didn’t you?”

He set his Pepsi down between us, pushed his gray poplin hat on the back on his head, and fumbled in the pocket of his windbreaker for a cigarette. “So?”

“So was Janie cheating, too? Is that why she and Trish quit being friends?”

Will put the cigarette between his lips and cupped his big hands around a Zippo so old and battered that its square corners were rounded off. It was Mother’s originally, a souvenir she’d brought home from the Seymour Johnson Airfield after World War II.

The lighter is burly and masculine-looking, made of stainless steel and engraved with the insignia of the Army Air Forces Technical Training School where she’d worked. It always looked so incongruous in her lovely smooth hands with those long pink fingernails, yet she was never without it. When she died and her things were divided, there were the usual two- and three-way battles, and some of those battles went all the way to skinned knuckles and bloody noses; but that beat-up Zippo was the only item all the boys fought over-not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Even the ones that didn’t smoke. Yet I was the only one who knew who’d given her the lighter and why she kept it. None of them had ever thought to ask.

Or maybe they had and she just hadn’t answered them.

Like Will wasn’t answering?

I waited till his cigarette was going good. “Was she?”

He narrowed his eyes at me as a mild spring breeze blew the cigarette smoke back in his face. “How come you asking something like that after all these years?”

“Gayle wants me to help her find out why Janie was killed,” I said.

“Should you ought to be doing that while you’re running for judge?” he asked.

Before I could answer, we were interrupted by calls for the auction to resume. He poured the rest of his Pepsi on the ground, crushed the can in his hands, then swung himself back upright on the flatbed and picked up the mike again.

Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to take him longer than usual to work back into his patter and get that first laugh. I smiled my way back to my car, shaking hands as I went, but faces and hands were blurred by the sudden memory I had of Will kissing Janie.

For the life of me I couldn’t remember whether it was before she married Jed or after.

Back in Dobbs, I showered, changed clothes, and collected Aunt Zell for a Democratic rally down in Black Creek.

Aunt Zell’s my mother without the wild streak-one of those good people that help hold the world together. They pick up the pieces, clean up the messes, and try to make sure nobody goes to bed hungry. If that makes her sound trivial, try running the world without women like her in it.

All her babies died before they walked, but that doesn’t mean she took me to raise when I moved in on her and Uncle Ash during college. Still, I think I’m a comfort to her. Anyhow, I try to remember to be.

Not a large turnout in Black Creek, but when you’re running for a local office, wherever one or two be gathered in your name, that’s where you go. The Women’s Missionary Union from Harrison Hobart’s church was well represented and gave me a warm welcome. I’d like to think it was because they approved of me personally, but I had a feeling it was because Aunt Zell was with me. She’s been active in the WMU all her adult life, even holding district office. Everybody respects her, and some of that respect rubs off on me, a distinct asset for a single woman in a society that still gets a bit uneasy when a halfway attractive woman doesn’t marry and settle into monogamy by the time she’s twenty-five; thirty if she was ever divorced.

I’m thirty-four and no man’s ring is on my finger at the moment.

On Sunday, Aunt Zell and I visited all three of the churches I’d grown up in. The morning began with Sunday school at Fresh Hope, then a quick fifteen-mile drive to Bethel Baptist for morning preaching by Barry Blackman, an old high school boyfriend long married now and the father of three. For dinner afterwards, Aunt Zell and I had been invited to the Bryant-Avery family reunion there in the neighborhood.

The spring day was gloriously warm and sunny. Azaleas and dogwoods were almost finished, just scattered blossoms here and there; but wisteria still draped soft purple ribbons up and down the tall trunks of longleaf pines, and wild cherries had already made me re-memorize Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.”

Aunt Zell and I drove through a lush green landscape perfumed with wild crabapples and Carolina jasmine. Pears were fully leafed, but I could still see some of the limb structure of the huge oaks when we turned into the yard at Kate and Rob Bryant’s house.