“No reason anybody would, you got a spotless reputation.”
“Drinkin’ aside.”
“Well. You got a lot of company in that, I’d say. Now, like I said, this is becoming more and more common among your farmers.”
“Folks know I’m a good businessman, always aboveboard.”
“Yes, they do.”
“Anything was to happen, I’d hope nobody’d think anything underhanded gone on here.”
“No reason to think that. Besides, that thing in Scooba—I wouldn’t call a fellow dying of poison spasms exactly an accidental death. They got away with it for so long because that doctor up there was involved in it.”
They were quiet for a long moment.
“Well, Virgil, I reckon this is good business.”
“It is, Sylvester. You don’t have to think twice about that.”
“I generally think three, four times about most everything.”
“Well. That’s why people respect you.”
“I mean to keep it that way.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Want a little snort before you go?”
“I would, but Bea wouldn’t approve.”
“You stay on her good side, don’t you?”
“That’s good business, too.”
“How come you all don’t call this kind of thing ‘death insurance,’ since that’s what it is, wouldn’t you say?”
“That would be bad for business,” Virgil said.
The men chuckled together at that. And then there were no more words at parting. She heard Uncle Virgil descend the porch steps, make his way to his Ford pickup, and the pickup coughed and rattled and creaked on down the drive out to the main road. She heard her father descend the steps, walk across the yard to his little store, and then come back. When she heard him sit in his rocker and pull the stobber from his jug, she stole around and sat on the porch boards beside the chair.
“Want me to roll you a cigarette, Papa?”
“Here you go, girl,” he said, handing her a tin of Prince Albert and his little rolling machine. She rolled up a perfect one for him.
“Can I light it for you?”
He handed her a box of matches. She struck one, held the match to it, and sucked lightly on it.
“Mind you, don’t take it into your young lungs.”
She handed him the lit cigarette, held the warm smoke in her mouth and then puffed it out.
“I won’t,” she said.
“I don’t want you to take up smoking like your sister Grace.”
“I won’t.”
“You do, I’ll tan your little hide.”
They watched a mockingbird come down from his perch and peck at Top’s head as he tried to cross the yard toward them. The dog ducked his head, then leapt up to try to catch the bird in his jaws when it came at him again. They watched this dance until Top made it to the porch and the bird quit and flew off. The way Top looked at them then, the look on his face, like he was both happy and confused at the same time, just made them laugh again. The dog, embarrassed, went underneath the porch instead of coming up onto it with them.
“Oh, come on up, Top,” Jane said. “Come on up here.”
But they heard the dog sigh hard through his nose and flop down in the dirt.
“Sometimes that dog acts like he knows as much about what’s going on as we do.”
“He does, Papa.”
“Dog’s supposed to have it easier than that,” he said.
ON A SPRING AFTERNOON when it was near harrowing time, before planting, Jane walked up on her father having what appeared to be an argument with young Temple down by the shed. She slowed and stayed back, behind the tractor pulled up near the shed for repair.
“Well, then, you do like I did,” she heard her father say to Temple in his quiet, hard voice. He never raised his voice but he had a way of leveling and hardening it that let you know he was angry and meant business.
Temple said something she couldn’t understand, half mumbling. He had his hat off and was nearly crushing the brim in both hands in front of his waist. He kept looking down at the hat, off at the field, and then giving her father brief looks, askance. He caught her peeping from behind the tractor before she could duck down and his face reddened. Now she was caught spying and couldn’t sneak off.
“You do like I did and like anybody would do that wants to make a better life,” her father said. “You save everything you don’t have to spend to live on. You find any way you can to make a little money during the winter, you can’t be too proud about what it is, neither. When you have a good year, you put as much back as you can and don’t just spend it. And when you can, you buy yourself some land of your own.”
Temple mumbled something else. Jane couldn’t see him now, kept her head down behind the tractor wheel fender.
“You can’t resent them that has more than you if you don’t put in the honest effort to make your own way. And you might try and fail by plain bad luck when others make out all right trying no harder, but there’s nothing to be done then, either, but to try again. Let me tell you, son, I’ve known failure, and I could fail tomorrow, any farmer or cattleman could, and you know that. So don’t come to me complaining about a fair, agreed-on trade which is me giving you a chance to make a start. Everybody starts humble. If you didn’t like this agreement, you shouldn’t have signed on to it.”
Temple said nothing. Jane peeked up. He was looking down, but looking angry, too.
“And you can pack up and go now, too, if that’s what you want,” her father said. “I’ll find a way to finish your crop, if that’s what you want to do. But if you walk away from it, it’s not your crop anymore, you understand? You don’t get your rent money back. You’ve had the land while you’ve worked it.”
Temple said something, looked her father in the eye kind of sideways, and seemed like he said he didn’t want that.
“Well, then,” her father said. And both men stood there another minute, her father looking steadily at Temple and Temple trying to meet her father’s eye but unable to for more than a moment at a time.
And then Temple said something, and held out his hand, her father took and shook it once, and Temple went on back walking toward his place. Her father turned and Jane ducked down, then peeked up to see him go into the shed, taking his hat off and running a hand through his graying hair, shaking his head.
Two days after that, a Saturday, Jane was walking in the woods looking for a sweet gum tree that might be leaking some sap she could nibble. Top kept dashing off to chase foraging squirrels. She heard the tractor muttering its way in a field and looked up to see she was on the edge of it, and it was Temple on the machine, having stopped to tinker with something. Her father let him use it when he could. Temple looked up and saw her there, and she ducked back into the shrubs and trees and made her way toward the trail again. In a while she found a tree with a leaking seam, gathered a little of the gum on the end of a twig, and rolled it into a ball she put in her mouth to nibble with her front teeth. She sat there and Top came to lie down beside her. But in a moment he stood up and gave a low growl and she saw the fur on the back of his neck stand up. When she stood up and turned around she saw it was Lon Temple standing among some oak saplings not far away, looking at her.
“I want a word with you, girl,” he called out just loud enough for her to hear, and she froze. Top growled. She could still hear the tractor idling off in the field.
It took a moment to get her voice. She put a hand on Top’s bristling neck. “All right,” she said.
“My wife said you been coming around snooping at our place. Far as I’m concerned, even though we rent from your daddy, my place is private property. You ought to respect that, keep it in mind.”
Jane flushed with embarrassment, afraid he was on to her sometimes spying on them, but then realized he was probably only talking about her seeing Lacey in the yard with her bruise.
“You hear what I’m saying?” Temple said. “I ain’t saying nothing nobody wouldn’t say about their property.”
“I haven’t been snooping,” Jane said. “It was just that once and I was only coming down to be neighborly.”
He stared at her.
“We ain’t neighbors,” he said. “We’re tenants.”
Temple spat, as if to spit that word out of his mouth, then turned and made his way back up the hill through the woods and out of sight.
She was trembling. The man scared her. She stayed there, squatting and holding Top, sound seeming to disappear into the noise in her mind. She stayed until she finally calmed and then she and Top started home, first walking, then running down the trail.
“What in heaven’s name is the matter with you?” her mother said when they burst into the yard. She was taking clothes from the line and had a bunch of them draped over one arm, a basket for pins crooked onto the other.
“Nothing,” Jane said when she could. “Top and me thought maybe there was a bear.”
“A bear!” her mother said. “This close to the house? Did you see it?”
She shook her head. Then her mother shook her head, too.
“Imagining things again, are you?”
And Jane knew she was talking about that quiet evening when she was little and heard some terrifying beast walk growling by the house beneath the open window and burst into tears, but no one else had heard a thing. And now she was old enough to wonder, what if she had only imagined the beast, and if so, where had that come from? Why and even how would a small child carry something like that in her imagination if it were not already there when she was born, and for some reason? And if it were not to make sure the child learned to keep in her heart a certain measure of fearfulness, in order to keep herself safe, what other reason could there be? There was something frightening about Lon Temple that seemed to bring up a similar feeling in her.
But these were not the kinds of things she cared to try to discuss with her mother. It was perhaps something she could bring up with Dr. Thompson. But she couldn’t imagine how she could bring it up without feeling silly, like a little girl with an overly rich and foolish imagination.
IT WAS JUST under a fortnight after her encounter with Temple in the woods when she came home from a long walk down by the fishing pond and saw Dr. Thompson’s car parked in the yard. He was sitting in her father’s rocker on the front porch, smoking his pipe, a glass of water on the little stand beside him. She stopped still in the yard, that same kind of fear she had thought she might discuss with him suddenly there, inside her. After a moment, she walked on up.
“What’s happened?” she said.
He puffed his pipe, but it had gone out.
“Something got to be wrong before I can come by, now?”
“Well, no.”
“But it’s kind of odd, me sitting out here on the porch by myself.”
“Yes.”
He nodded as if to himself, tapped his pipe out against his boot.
“Temple’s wife is in there with your mother and father,” he said. “There was an accident. You might better wait out here with me awhile.”
Her heart did a double bump in her chest.
“Tell me.”
He looked at her, as if trying to figure her state of mind.
“I haven’t even told you and you’re pale as a ghost.”
“I can tell it’s something bad.”
“Well, it is. Young Temple was killed today.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was an accident. He fell off the tractor and was cut up badly by the disc harrow. Died out in the field. Didn’t come in for lunch and his wife went out looking, found him there, tractor run up against a tree at the edge of the field and faltered. He’s down at their cabin, laid out on the floor there. His folks will come to take the body for burial.”
“How did it happen?” she said then. Her mind keening with the memory of their encounter, how she had hated him then as much as she’d feared him.
“Seems he was drinking. He smelled strong of it. I believe he got into your papa’s makings.”
She sat down onto the porch beside Dr. Thompson and they sat there awhile. Soon they heard the breezeway door to the kitchen open and Lacey hurried past them in tears.
“Miss Lacey?” Jane called, but all she could get out was a whisper.
Lacey Temple didn’t hear, her head down, walking slowly now toward the cabin where her husband lay dead.
“Boy wasn’t but twenty-three years old,” Dr. Thompson said. “And she’s not but, what, eighteen or nineteen, maybe.”