A Death On The Wolf (2 page)

Aunt Charity was taller than I remember Mama being. She had brown hair. Mama’s was blond like mine and my sister’s. Our aunt lived next door to us in a big brick house that her husband had built in 1959. Jack Jackson, my Uncle Jack, had been a captain in the Marines, a decorated veteran of the Korean Conflict. Daddy eschewed college, enlisted in the Marines right at the end of World War II, and was discharged in 1950 with the rank of Sergeant. He got out before things really got going in Korea, so he never saw action. But he was in the Military Police, so he may not have been sent overseas anyway. He and Mama got married in ’51 and I came along in ’53. Mama had had two miscarriages before I was born.

Aunt Charity and Uncle Jack didn’t have any children. Uncle Jack was a career Marine officer who took a commission when he graduated from Ole Miss in ’52, the same year he and Aunt Charity got married. He was killed back in ’66, in “Lyndon Johnson’s infernal war” (to quote my father). Daddy had supported Barry Goldwater in ’64 and he said the war in Vietnam would have long been over by ’66 if Goldwater had been in the White House. Aunt Charity agreed with him. She said we all would have been dead by 1966 if Goldwater had been President. Listening to Daddy and Aunt Charity talk politics was entertaining, to say the least.

Before Mama died, Aunt Charity had been a school teacher, and she taught me and all my friends in the first grade. But she also “had money,” which was a quaint way in Mississippi of describing someone you were fairly sure was financially well off, but unsure just how well off they were. There were people who were “rich,” and those that “had money.” Aunt Charity was of the latter: She didn’t have to work. She lived in a nice house. She always drove a new Cadillac. And she had a white housekeeper. Aunt Charity paid me $20 each week during the summer to mow her lawn and keep the pine needles raked up. During the winter she always found something for me to do around her house so she could pay me $20 a week. Years later, I learned that Aunt Charity was very well off indeed from Uncle Jack’s oil and gas leases from his family’s land over in Louisiana—land and leases he’d left to her. Land and leases she subsequently bequeathed to my sister and me.

I heard the squeak of the screen door on the back porch, then: “You all home?” It was Parker Reeves, the colored man Daddy had hired back in January to help out on our small farm—a decision I was still trying to figure out since we didn’t need any help, especially back in the dead of winter.

“
We’re in here,” I hollered out the open kitchen door.

Parker appeared in the doorway, hat in hand. “Mr. Nels, them goats done got out again and are all over in Miss Charity’s yard. I tried to get ’em up but they’s too quick.” I don’t know why Parker insisted on calling me “
Mister
Nels.” I suppose it was the remnants of the etiquette of the Old South, but it made me uncomfortable. I was fifteen-going-on-sixteen and he was old enough to be my great-grandfather. But to him I was “Mr. Nels” or “Mr. Nelson.” Even Sachet, at five years old, was “Miss Sash.”

I looked at Sachet. “When you finish, I want you to go wash your hands and face, brush your teeth, and put your pajamas on. You can watch some TV until I get back.
I Dream of Jeannie
comes on tonight. I’m going to help Parker get those goats up before Aunt Charity gets back and has a fit.”

Sachet nodded and then gave me a little smile. She knew there would be hell to pay if Aunt Charity came home from her Eastern Star meeting and saw those goats in her yard, especially if they had been eating any of her flowers. “What about a bath?” she asked.

“
No bath tonight,” I said, getting up from the table. “You had one last night.”

Chapter 2

Daddy’s Way

It was after nine o’clock and Daddy had not gotten home. I had taken a bath and was in my pajamas, sitting in Daddy’s recliner watching
The Carol Burnett Show
on the TV. Sachet was in bed asleep. I had finally gotten her down at 8:30, which was a half-hour past her bed time. She did not like to go to bed without seeing Daddy, but I knew if he was not home by eight, something was wrong at the plant and it was no telling what time he might get in. I had heard Bear, our collie, barking a few minutes ago when Aunt Charity got home from her meeting. The goats were back inside the fence behind the barn, and they hadn’t done too much damage in her yard. With darkness fast approaching, I was hoping she would not notice.

I heard Bear bark again along with the sound of Daddy’s pickup, with its tell-tale exhaust leak, pulling in behind the house. I got up and went to the kitchen.

As Daddy stepped through the kitchen door, the phone rang. Since the phone was on the wall right inside the door from the back porch, he caught it on the second ring. “Hello?”

I stood there watching him listen to whoever was on the other end of the line. It was unusual for us to get any phone calls this late at night.

“
I don’t know,” Daddy said. “I just got home.” He put his hand over the receiver and looked at me. “Did the goats get out again?” he asked.

“
Yes,” I said, and rolled my eyes to heaven. It was Aunt Charity on the phone.

Daddy smiled and I could tell he was trying not to laugh. “Yes, Charity…I’m sorry. It won’t happen again…I know…I know. Yes…yes…soon as I get the lumber. Right. I promise. Yes…goodnight.” He hung up the phone.

I walked over and took Daddy’s lunch box from him as he hung his hardhat on the coat rack beside the door. He smelled of sweat and creosote and grease, a cocktail of scents I had grown up with and did not find objectionable at all. I took the thermos from the lunch box and went over to the sink to wash it and get it ready for tomorrow.

“
Thank you, son,” I heard Daddy say behind me as he sat down at the table.

“
You had to work over tonight?” I asked rhetorically. I flicked the switch for the fluorescent light over the sink and poured out the bit of cold coffee still in the thermos while I waited for the running water to get hot.

“
The number two boiler went down at three this afternoon and we spent five hours working on it,” Daddy said.

The water was hot now and I started washing out the thermos. I looked in the dark glass of the window over the sink and I could see Daddy’s reflection. He was watching me. “Do you want me to fix you something to eat?” I asked.

“
I stopped down at the Colonel Dixie and got me a burger when I got off work. I ate it on the way home.”

“
Don’t let Aunt Charity find out,” I said, looking at Daddy’s reflection in the window glass. He chuckled to himself.

“
Nelson, we’re going to have to rebuild the fence behind the barn this weekend,” Daddy said. “Your Aunt Charity has reached her limit with the goats, and mending the fence every other day isn’t working anymore. And Parker is too old to be chasing after the goats every time they get out.”

“
I know,” I offered as I rinsed out the thermos and started drying it. “He and I had a time getting them back in. I’m glad Aunt Charity was at her meeting.”

“
Eastern Star tonight?” Daddy asked.

“
Yes,” I said, and popped the dish towel, then folded and hung it on the peg sticking out of the side of the cabinet over the sink. Daddy was a Mason, and he and Mama had belonged to the Eastern Star, too, but Daddy had not gone to any of the meetings since Mama died. He did try to make the Blue Lodge meetings on the second Thursday of each month, but work often prevented it. Looking back, and from what I know now of Freemasonry, I can honestly say my father took the central tenets of that ancient fraternity to heart and embodied them in everything he did. I was about to get a lesson in that fact as I went over and sat down at the table, looked at my father, and asked, “Why did you hire Parker? We don’t need him and most of the time when he’s here he’s just sitting around out there at the barn.”

Daddy leaned back in the chair and ran his hands through his hair. He was studying me. People said I looked like my father, but I couldn’t see it. He had dark brown hair; mine was sandy blond. He had blue eyes; mine were green. Daddy was forty-two, tall and lean (that trait we did share), and his skin was tanned and weather-worn from twenty years of working in the Mississippi sun. “I know we don’t need him, son,” he finally said. “But he needs us.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
The only family Parker had left around here was his grandson, Haywood. He worked down at the plant with me until back in January. He lived with Parker, paid the bills, bought groceries. He got in a bar fight on New Year’s eve and stabbed a man and he’s been in jail ever since. When he got arrested, Haywood asked me to go check on his granddaddy, and I did for a couple of weeks. The last time I went to check on him there was no food in the house, so I tried to give him some money, but he wouldn’t take it.”

“
How come?” I asked.

“
Parker’s a proud old gentleman. He didn’t want a handout.”

“
But isn’t that what his grandson was doing if he was paying the bills and all?”

“
No. Haywood was paying the bills, but he wasn’t paying any rent to live there.”

“
Oh,” I said. “I still don’t see why you hired him.”

“
Because he wouldn’t take my money but he would take a job, Nelson. Like I said, we didn’t need him, he needed us. The twenty dollars a week I give him isn’t going to break us, and I know he eats good when he’s here. Charity sees to that. And he has helped out around here a lot, especially since you started working down at Dick’s.”

“
I guess so,” I said.

“
Speaking of you working down at Dick’s, you going to have enough money by the fifth?”

“
I think I’ll have enough,” I answered, sounding more sure than I really was.

We were now talking about the car I wanted to buy. I would turn sixteen on August 5th, and Daddy had promised to take off work that day and take me to get my license. And he knew I wanted to do the driving test in my own car; my first car, which I’d been saving for since April. Daddy had told me numerous times that I could drive our family car any time I wanted to. His old Dodge pickup was the primary vehicle for us, and the car was really only driven to church on Sunday and the few times we ventured out of the Bells Ferry area to go to the beach or shopping down at Biloxi or Gulfport, or if Daddy was feeling especially adventurous, the hour or so drive down to New Orleans. But our car was about the most un-cool vehicle around. Daddy loved it, but I thought it was hideous. It was a 1960 Chrysler Saratoga 2-door hardtop; a black behemoth with a red interior that had tail fins that were nearly chest high on me. I called it the Batmobile. Daddy bought it from a dentist down in Bay St. Louis the year before Sachet was born, the year before Mama died. The Batmobile had two redeeming qualities: it had air conditioning that would freeze your nuts off on the hottest day in August, and it had nifty swivel-out bucket seats that made getting in and out an adventure in itself.

As for the drivers license, it would be, quite frankly, a formality. I had been driving the back roads around here in the pickup since I was fourteen, as well as riding the Honda 350 Scrambler Daddy bought last summer. He was a motorcycle aficionado of sorts, and had bought and sold numerous old Harleys and Indians over the years. In fact, there was a ’52 FLH Panhead in the barn now that he was rebuilding. The Honda was the first new bike he ever bought, and it had quickly become my main form of transportation; consequently, my old Schwinn had been gathering dust in the barn for nearly a year now. I think Daddy was secretly longing for me to get a car so he could have his motorcycle back.

The car I had been saving up to buy belonged to the estate of the late Mrs. Wendell Borcher, which had just come out of probate. Mrs. Borcher had left the car to a niece who lived over in Bogalusa and she didn’t want it, so she asked the attorney handling the estate to sell it. As it happens, J. Preston Marks, Esq. and my father were high school classmates and fellow Masons, so through some “wink and nod” negotiations the sale was being delayed until I could save up enough money to close the deal. My sources of income were my $5 weekly allowance for doing chores and watching Sachet, the $20 a week I could count on from Aunt Charity for cutting her grass or whatever she needed doing, and my job at Dick’s. The car was a pale blue ’64 Impala 4-door hardtop with a 283 in it. What made it desirable, besides having that small block V8, was that Mrs. Borcher rarely drove it, which meant even though it was five years old, it spent most of its life in the garage, had less than four-thousand miles on it, and looked like brand new. And it would be mine for $500.

“
How much have you got?” Daddy asked.

“
About two-hundred.”

“
And what are you making a week pumping gas down at Dick’s?”

“
About twenty…maybe a little more when I get some good tips.”

“
I don’t think you’re going to have enough come your birthday, sport.”

I knew he was right, but I was trying to remain optimistic. I think Daddy could see the fiscal worry in my face. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, leaning forward and placing his elbows on the table. “You help me rebuild the fence on Saturday and however much you’re short come your birthday, I’ll make up the difference. Deal?”