Margaret Maron: Bootlegger’s Daughter

I wanted to stay in bed with my head under the covers and the air conditioner turned down to sixty. I wanted to fly to New York City and stand in the middle of Times Square surrounded by twelve million people who’d never heard of Colleton County or anybody in it. I wanted to buy a pound of chocolate truffles and go sit through three screenings of Random Harvest where nobody would notice if I bawled my head off, because everybody cries for Greer Garson and Ronald Colman.

Instead, I drove out to the country, parked my car up a deserted lane, and walked out into a twenty-acre field that bordered the western edge of Possum Creek. The tobacco was waist high, and scattered here and there were plants that had already begun to top out too early with pink tuberoses-the end of the plant’s dedication to leaf growth and the beginning of its desire to make seeds.

I found a sturdy stick at the edge of the field, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes I walked up and down the rows slashing tops off every flowering hill like Lash LaRue flicking guns out of outlaws’ hands. Whack! for those lying letters Denn sent. This for Linsey Thomas’s endorsement of Luther Parker. Luther Parker? Whack! Fifty-nine percent? Whack! Every Vickery that ever walked the face of the earth? Whack-whack-whack!

Eventually my fury and humiliation abated and instead of slashing at tobacco tops, I found myself using the stick to poke at stone flakes and flip bits of quartz out of the dirt as I walked along.

The woodland Indians that lived here before Columbus arrived usually built their villages and camps on the west side of rivers, and my brothers and I had picked up hundreds of their projectile points when we were children.

As had my aunts and uncles.

As do my nieces and nephews.

As will their children and their children’s children if the land abides with us.

Yet no matter how many we carry away, each spring plowing turns up more. The oldest go back more than eight thousand years, the newest are less than two hundred, each point shaped by a human hand.

There’s something innately soothing about walking slowly up and down rows of growing plants, your mind drifting across consciousness like a cloud across the blue sky overhead, only your eyes alert to leaf green flint or white quartz.

A front had passed through during the night and the air was cool and dry. The tobacco was just high enough that whenever I lifted my eyes from the dirt, I was an island in the middle of a fresh green lake that rippled in the soft June breeze.

Yet I was not alone. A hundred eyes watched my passage up and down the long rows. Grasshoppers fled before me, lizards skittered, a toad sat passive and immobile. In the next furrow over, a young snake with rusty blotches gave me a turn until the shape of the head and patterns along its length let me see that it was a harmless corn snake and not a poisonous copperhead. I’m not afraid of any snake once I know it’s there, yet, like Emily Dickinson, I never come across one unexpectedly without that involuntary “tighter breathing and Zero at the bone.” Desmond Morris says that’s because we’re descended from apes, and snakes were the only natural predator that could follow us up into the trees. The Bible says it’s because we’re descended from Eve and lost Eden through the serpent’s guile.

Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. And 1 will put enmity between thee and the woman.

Poor snakes.

I found chips and flakes and broken points with missing bases and then a piece of pottery half as big as my hand, the outside textured in an even pattern, the inside smoothed by clever fingers gone to dust two thousand years ago. Was it enough for the maker, this simple grace of common work done well? If she’d known that she would live and die and all that would survive to mark her passage would be these few square inches of sand-colored bowl, would it have troubled her?

Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

I could see her sitting before campfires on cold autumn nights. Did she watch the red and gold sparks fly upward and merge with the stars until her mind stretched into the vastness of the cosmos? To know and believe absolutely and without doubt that God-whatever god-created the universe and all that is in it is to stand with a shield against the outer darkness; and yet always comes a still, small, the-emperor-has-no-clothes voice that asks, “But then who created God?”

And what is the universe that it is mindful of-wait, wait, wait! There on the ground lay the tip of a beautifully flaked point, its base hidden by the dirt. Holding my breath, I stooped and picked it up. Lovely! No missing base, no broken corner. It was a Kirk Corner Notched point, as whole and perfectly formed as the day it came from its maker’s hand, two thousand years before the first pyramid.

As I smoothed away the last few grains that clung to this gift from the past, I suddenly realized that I’d begun whistling a syncopated version of It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

Okay, so Luther Parker won this time. No matter who finished out Perry Byrd’s term, that seat was up for election in two years. I’d learned a lot this go-round and next time… a cluster of small chips drew me forward.

I saw the cloud of dust kicked up by the wheels before I heard the pickup. I had wondered how long it would take him. Though I hadn’t noticed anyone, I wasn’t fool enough to believe no human eyes had seen me down here in this back field.

By the time Daddy’s battered red Chevrolet made its circuitous way around the edge of the fields, I was waiting at the end of the rows where cultivated land gave way to creek brush. He pulled up beside me and spoke through the open window.

“If you don’t want no company, I can get on back to the house, but Maidie thought you might like some dinner.”

A tip of his head indicated a soft blue cloth tucked into a cardboard box on the seat beside him.

“She send enough for you?” I asked, knowing well and good who thought I might be ready to eat lunch.

“I reckon.”

He cut off the engine and handed over a jug of sweet and strong iced tea, and we walked down a path to a big flat rock beside the water. Trees overhung this stretch, but sunlight still dappled the brown water. We spread the blue cloth on the rock and I set out a platter of crispy fried chicken, warm spinach salad, and deviled eggs. The biscuits were still hot from Maidie’s oven.

As we ate from paper plates, perched on the rocks, I showed him the arrowhead and the piece of pottery and we talked about bonfires and Indians, about family and tenants, until finally he said, “You’re doing okay then?”

I reached for my father’s gnarled and workworn hand. “Yes, I really am.”

“Them crows sure put a pecking on you, didn’t they, shug? You still sorry you didn’t win?”

“Yes,” I said honestly. “I can live with it, but yes.”

“You know something, daughter? You never once told me how come you wanted to make a run for it.”

I picked up some nearby pebbles and began plunking them into the creek. “You never asked.”

“I’m asking now.”

So I told him about how it’d all come to a head that rainy January day when a black plumber was charged with drunk driving and Perry Byrd had mean-mindedly piled the whole weight of the law onto his shoulders.

“You’d’ve turned him loose?”

“No, sir. He did go out on the highway after drinking; he did, for whatever reason, refuse to take the Breathalyzer. Those two things are against the law and the law does save lives. But justice could’ve been tempered with mercy. Maybe one night in jail to think it over, but on the weekend, when it wouldn’t interfere with his livelihood. Instead of taking away his license altogether for a year, I’d’ve kept him off the road when he wasn’t working. How can a plumber keep his business going if he can’t make house calls? Punishment’s supposed to deter a person from doing it again, not crush his spirit. And it shouldn’t depend on what color his skin is, what sex he happens to be, or what social class he’s from.