Del said, “I sure didn’t care none for him, but what a helluva way to go.”
They sat quiet for a while until Del pulled out his harmonica. He played several slow, melancholy tunes, and everyone, the children included, sat quietly, reflecting on the lonesome notes. He finally stopped and stared around the table at the faces of the people he cared about most in this world, and knew if he were to die in his sleep this very night, he would go a contented man.
Chapter 36
Rae Lynn
Rae Lynn drove her old truck down the dirt road and pulled it under a large pecan tree by the farmhouse to keep it in the shade. The men had taken the boys to Rockfish to unload barrels of gum into the warehouse, and Rae Lynn expected them back anytime, hungry as a pack of wolves.
She hurried into the house, calling out to Sudie May, “Yoo-hoo!”
She dropped her purse and keys on the table by the door, kicked off her shoes, and walked barefoot across the worn floorboards and into the kitchen.
Baby Belinda, who everyone had taken to calling Beebee, was in the high chair, and Norma was attempting to help her teach herself to eat. Beebee had chicken-n-dumplings on her face and on the floor. She waved a chicken leg happily at her mother and gave her a newly sprouted toothy grin.
Norma said, “I tried to help her get it in her, not on her.”
Rae Lynn smiled.
She said, “You should’ve seen her when I tried to feed her beets,” and to Beebee, “Look at you! I need to put you in the bath.”
Sudie May came in from the pantry off the kitchen and said, “Despite what’s on the floor and in her hair, she still ate a lot. I saw what was in the bowl before she started.”
“She takes after her daddy. Well, me too, ’cause I feel like I could eat that whole pot of dumplings right about now. I can’t seem to eat enough lately.”
Sudie May set the jars she’d retrieved on the table, and said, “Huh. Sounds a lot like last time you were pregnant.”
Rae Lynn gave her a sage look, a hand on her belly. “That’s because I am.”
Sudie May’s eyes flew open, and she rushed over to Rae Lynn and hugged her.
“Oh my. I’m so happy for you.”
Rae Lynn said, “Funny, Del only mentioned the other day he was going to start building the extension onto the house. We’re gonna need it. It seems a peculiar thing to say. When we first come here, there was so many rooms I’d get lost.”
Beebee hiccupped, and the women turned to her as she hurled the chicken leg on the floor.
Rae Lynn said, “I reckon you’re done.”
She wiped off the baby’s face and carried her outside. The men and boys were back from town, and she watched from the porch as Delwood and Jeremiah jumped out of the back of the truck, along with Joey and Darren. Del blew her a kiss, before going to help Amos unload the new barrels they’d picked up. Rae Lynn’s heart trembled at the sight of them. Her husband, and sons. Del showed the boys different ways to roll the barrels so they’d be easier to maneuver while standing behind them, helping guide small hands. He was an excellent father, patient and loving. She squeezed Beebee to her, sniffed at the soft hair on the top of her head, her baby smell coming through despite the fact she’d practically bathed in her dinner. She and Del had agreed they wanted a big family, and they were well on their way, though Del had his doubts in the beginning.
Right before they married, he said, “I need to tell you something.” He acted in a way he never had. Nervous, preoccupied.
He sat her down, took hold of her hands, and said, “There’s things about me you need to know.”
He told her about his past, how he’d been, what he’d done. He told her what happened to him in the grain bin, and how it had affected him.
He said, “I tried to be with anything in a skirt. All kinds a women. Other men’s wives. I didn’t care. That is, until this farmer I worked for, named Moe Sutton, caught me with his. Had me work in his grain bin, and I think . . .”
He stopped talking.
She said, “You think what?”
He went through the events of what he saw, and what happened after.
Rae Lynn had taken his hand and said, “You think you might’ve died?”
He raised his shoulders, then expanded a little more on his inability to, as he put it, aim high for the sky.
She said, “You can’t . . . ?”
He gave her such a forlorn look right then and said, “I ain’t sure.”
Rae Lynn emitted a soft, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
She said, “We’ll just take it one day at a time. I was married seven years and never got pregnant. I don’t know what to think about that. Warren had Eugene and all. I got something I need to tell you too, speaking of Warren.”
He said, “You ain’t got to if you don’t want to.”
She said, “No, I need to.”
And so she did, observing his face, his eyes mostly, looking for his reaction to what happened. There was none, only quiet listening, and a nod here and there as she poured out all of the pain and distress of what it had entailed. What it had taken out of her. When she was finished, his grip tightened on her hand.
He said, “It’s terrible, but what you done was merciful at that point, not murder.” And the most important thing he could say was what he said next. “I’d have done the same thing. It’s a hurt near about impossible to get over, but I’m hoping when I tell you you’re the first woman I’ve ever truly loved, Rae Lynn, it’ll help, if only a little.”
Her heart soared from out of the darkness that day, and here they were now. Three children later, another one on the way, a small but flush turpentine farm, and most important of all, each other. Rae Lynn couldn’t get enough of looking at their children, watching them when they didn’t know it. She found herself thinking on how her and Del’s blood ran in their veins. They were an indelible symbol of what they’d accomplished; like the catfaces on the trunks of the longleaf pines, they were the imprint of their love, their existence proof of what they’d been, who they were, even long after they’d left this Earth. For now, all she needed was to hold them close, and so she went to them and did just that.
Chapter 37
Delwood and Jeremiah
Bladen County, 1942
Dark haired like their mother, they had their father’s startling blue eyes. Eight-year-old Delwood, born in May of ’34, was quiet and thoughtful, while almost six-year-old Jeremiah (as he liked to remind everyone), born in August of ’36, chattered endlessly and couldn’t sit still. On this early summer day, they followed their older cousins, Joey and Darren, as they ran through the woods to where their parents waited. With the Reese boys ran their coonhound, Rabbit, named so because of his long, floppy ears and twitchy nose. Delwood and Jeremiah were excited. Today, their father was going to show them how to make the funny catfaces on the special pine trees he called the longleaf. The Reese boys each carried a small tool made by their father. He told them it was a bark hack.
Since they were old enough to walk, they’d spent a good deal of time in the woods with their parents, and like their older cousins, the Reese boys already knew the names of all the different pines, the hardwoods, plus many other plants and flowers. They knew about scrape, pine gum, pitch, tar, and that smelly stuff called turpentine, which their mother used for most anything that ailed them. They knew about crops of trees, the small sections the work hands called drifts, but most of all, they knew the work their family did was hard, but meaningful. The special trees, the longleaf, their father said, used to be all over, but now, most were gone.
The boys spotted their mother and their little sister, Beebee, walking around smacking her hands and singing. Their mother was by their father, and both were talking with Aunt Sudie May, Uncle Amos, and their adopted relative, Uncle Peewee, along with several work hands near a drift of trees. Cousin Norma held their baby brother, Joshua.