Margaret Maron - Bootlegger’s Daughter

The summer that one of the little twins decided to get married at the farm, Mother brought home a stack of etiquette books from the library. I remember that when Daddy started to fuss about the size of the guest list at breakfast one morning, Mother opened one of the books and said, “Now, Kezzie, listen to this: ‘Whether or not you have included a request to RSVP, once invitations are extended beyond the bride and groom’s immediate family, you may safely assume that at least twenty-five percent of your guest list will not attend.’ ”

Daddy shook his head at that. “That stuffs written for New York City, not down here,” he said pessimistically. “Everybody’ll come and bring along their friends.”

In the end, formal invitations were mailed to 220 people, Mother rented 250 folding chairs just to be on the safe side, but Daddy was right: at least twenty-five people had to stand through the ceremony.

The year before she got sick, Mother threw a Saturday birthday party for Daddy that had people coming in from seven states up and down the eastern seaboard. The first guests arrived on a Tuesday, the last didn’t depart till the following Wednesday week. At one point, the old farmhouse slept eight extra adults and two babies, and Daddy threatened to have the boys dig a three-holer in the backyard so he wouldn’t have to stand in line for a bathroom.

She would have loved the pig picking Daddy put on for me: three pigs, an iron wash pot full of real Brunswick stew (“It ain’t real Brunswick stew if it ain’t got at least one squirrel in it”), wooden tubs of lemonade and iced tea for children and teetotalers, and kegs of beer discreetly off to one side for those who liked their liquids a little wetter.

The pigs weren’t due to come off the cookers till six-thirty, but by the time I got there a little after two, cars were already lining the lane and one of my nephews had begun directing guests into the near pasture. “But I saved you a place right at the front door, Aunt Deb’rah,” grinned his snaggle-toothed eight-year-old sister who was helping out.

A volleyball game was in sweaty progress in the side yard and the clank of iron against iron drew me past the cookers and on down to a stretch of open space beside the potato house, where horseshoes were flying back and forth. I got there just in time to see Minnie win her game with a ringer. “Come and take my place,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the kitchen and see if they’ve got enough cabbage chopped up.”

Ostensibly she and Seth and three of my other brothers and their wives were hosting this party. Even though it was Daddy’s idea, Minnie had done most of the planning and she was the one who coordinated all the details. If Minnie had organized the flight out of Egypt, it wouldn’t have taken forty years to reach the Promised Land.

My brother Will and I paired up against an agricultural extension agent and her boyfriend, the principal of a Widdington high school. We’d have taken them, too, if my leaner at the end hadn’t been knocked flying by the principal’s second shot. They easily fended off Dwight Bryant and his sister-in-law Kate, a couple of tobacco lobbyists from over in Widdington, and two attorneys from Makely, only to be done in finally by Terry Wilson’s son Stanton and Linsey Thomas.

“Y’all hear ’bout Perry Byrd?” Linsey boomed from behind his bushy moustache as he and Stanton waited to see who their challengers would be.

“Hear what?”

“He had a stroke this morning.”

“What?”

“Yep. Went out after breakfast this morning to cut his grass, leaned over to crank his lawnmower, and never came back up.”

The two attorneys from Makely chimed in with more details about the rescue squad’s arrival, its resuscitation attempts, and the rush to Dobbs Memorial.

“Is he going to be okay?”

They shrugged. In that near-shout that was his normal speaking voice, Linsey said, “I called over to the hospital right before I came out here and they said he’s critical but stable, whatever that means.”

“Wonder who Hardison’ll appoint if Byrd has to resign?” asked one of the attorneys.

“Oh Lord,” I grinned. “You don’t suppose this is where Hector Woodlief finally gets a public office?”

They reminded me that the governor would have to pick another Democrat, since Perry Byrd was one.

“Maybe I’ll have to rethink my editorial policy,” said Linsey as Haywood and Seth banged their horseshoes together and wanted to know if he was there to talk or play.

Linsey may have endorsed Luther Parker, but after running a brief story about how it’d been Denn McCloy who’d written those flyers, he’d quietly decided that the Ledger would have no further comment on the race for judge.

He also had enough of his grandmother in him that he’d refrained from sensationalizing Denn’s allegations against Michael Vickery, and the N amp;O was so surprisingly restrained in its coverage that I wondered if maybe some behind-the-scenes personal plea hadn’t persuaded the publisher to back off. Terry’s speculation that the two men had been involved in drug trafficking had not found its way into print; even so, a lot of people around the county had come up with a similar explanation for their violent deaths.

By now, it was two weeks since I’d discovered Michael’s body, and talk had begun to die down as life returned to normal for almost everyone involved.

Since the Vickerys were such faithful Democrats, kind-hearted Minnie told me that an invitation had been sent to them-out of courtesy for their position in Cotton Grove, not because she actually expected them to attend. “Of course, you can’t predict what Dr. Vickery’ll do,” she’d said.

Indeed, Dr. Vickery had played golf the Sunday before, causing some raised eyebrows; but Mrs. Vickery hadn’t yet been seen in public, not even in church. Their daughter Faith had stayed on after the funeral and was said to be concerned about her mother’s health.

By six o’clock, the luscious aroma of hickory-cooked pork well seasoned with Daddy’s “secret sauce” had a lot of people circling the cookers like buzzards. Over two hundred people had been invited and while I tried to act nonchalant about it, I was gratified by the number of dignitaries who had accepted Minnie’s low-keyed invitation to attend a pig picking “in honor of Deborah Knott, candidate for district judge,” even though I knew that several of them had also accepted invitations to a fish fry for Luther Parker the previous weekend.

Among the state’s movers and shakers were Thad Eure, former secretary of state and self-proclaimed “oldest rat in the Democratic barn,” there in his trademark red bow tie, and Bill Friday, former president of the state’s university system, who everyone regarded as a shoo-in for senator or governor if he could only be persuaded to run.

I had a cryptic conversation with a black female judge from the third division, who gave me some good advice and told me to feel free to call if I won and ever needed somebody to unload on about the way the system worked. She was nearing the end of her first term, and sounded cynical about certain aspects. “I thought my big problem was going to be race. Honey, race is nothing compared to being a woman in a good ol’ boy system.”

As the afternoon wore on and the sun began to set, Gray Talbert came driving through the back lanes in his black Porsche and parked at the edge of the orchard. I went over to welcome him and to thank him for his earlier letter to the Ledger.

“You didn’t change parties, did you?” I asked.

“Nope,” he grinned.

“So?”

“So why not?” he drawled with a supercilious smile that sort of got my back up. “Was I wrong? Aren’t you the best candidate? That’s what your daddy told me.”