The sheriff begins at the top of his shirt, and one by one, struggling with his thick fingers, unhooks each button. “Come on over here, girl,” he says.
Annie steps up to his chair, places both hands on the sheriff’s collar, all the while keeping her eyes on Ellis Baine, though she isn’t certain why. Grandma would say the know-how is the thing that causes Annie’s breath to quicken, her mouth to go dry, her fingertips to turn numb.
As she stands behind the sheriff, helping him off with his shirt, Ellis Baine studies her. The man’s eyes don’t settle on one piece of Annie. Instead they scan all parts of her, settling here and there as if looking for something special. He’s looking at the size of her hands, the thickness of her hair, the curve of her shoulders. Once the sheriff has managed to pull his arms free, he reaches in one pocket and hands a small white button to Annie.
“Think you can take a needle to this for me?” he says, his stomach stretching the white undershirt he is left wearing. Then he gives Daddy a wave to have a seat. When Daddy makes no move to join him, the sheriff scoots the chair out from under the table with the tip of his boot. “Go on and have a seat. We’ve quite a bit to catch up on after all these years.”
Daddy sits, but not in the chair next to the sheriff. Instead he pulls out the one Mama usually sits in and positions himself directly across from Ellis Baine.
“How is it you see fit to find yourself in my house?” Daddy says.
“Not here to cause no trouble.”
In every picture Annie has ever seen that showed the Baine family, Ellis and Joseph Carl were always the easiest to pick out. Joseph Carl was fair-haired with pale eyes. He was narrow through the shoulders and the shortest of the bunch. The other brothers wore long beards, wide and bushy clumps of hair that drew down to a scrawny point at their end. All of them except Ellis. He was always clean-shaven, or somewhere close to it. The legend goes that Ellis was the brother the ladies liked best, and so he kept himself fine and clean for them. Others, mostly the older men in town, said any decent man would wear a beard, and if he didn’t, it was only proof he wasn’t man enough to grow one.
“Didn’t ask if you was here to cause trouble. Asked why you think you’d be welcome?”
“Never said I figured on being welcome.” Ellis doesn’t look at Daddy as he speaks but instead stares into his coffee cup.
From her spot at the sink, Grandma lets out a grunt. It’s the same grunt she lets out when Abraham Pace says his fiancée doesn’t like him having so much salt or more than one dessert or a third sip of whiskey.
“You been up to the house?” Sheriff Fulkerson asks, shooing Annie away to get busy stitching that button.
“Sure have.”
“You just get in today?” the sheriff asks.
Ellis Baine nods. He’s come home again, and so maybe he’s the one the rocker foretold. But as he nods his head yet again to tell the sheriff he only just today arrived, Annie knows he wasn’t the one who left those cigarettes.
“And you thought to come here next?” Daddy says, even though the sheriff keeps holding up a hand to quiet him.
“You want I should see him back home?”
Everyone turns toward Jacob when he says this. He takes a step forward and asks again.
“Want I should see Mr. Baine home?”
“No, thank you, Jacob. Why don’t you go on outside and make sure we don’t have no more Baine brothers paying a visit.”
“Ain’t no one else coming,” Ellis says.
The sheriff jabs a thumb toward the back door. Jacob pulls on his hat and, without another word, walks outside.
“So you know about your mama?” the sheriff says once Jacob’s footsteps have crossed the porch and the kitchen is quiet again.
Ellis nods. “Not why I’m here though.”
“Then why are you here?” Daddy pushes away from the table, the chair’s legs squealing across Grandma’s freshly mopped and waxed floor.
The sheriff gives Annie the same thumb jab he gave Jacob, but Ellis Baine is staring at her again and she can’t make her legs move.
“Here to see her,” Ellis says, tipping his head in Annie’s direction. “Here to see the girl.”
11
1936—SARAH AND JUNA
DALE WAS SWEET. That’s the first thing Juna says when Daddy and I and Sheriff Irlene sit with her at the kitchen table. Daddy sucks on a cigar, little more than a stub. He blows his smoke in our faces. Simply put, Dale was sweet. Though he looked just like Daddy, even given the baby fat that hadn’t yet burned away, he had none of Daddy’s meanness. Juna says these things like Sheriff Irlene never met the boy. She says these things like Dale is already gone. Gone for good.
Juna is smiling as she talks even though Daddy is sitting right there to hear her every word. He starts to push away from the table, but Sheriff Irlene points a finger at him and he settles back in.