A Gentle Rain (22 page)

"Mac was good with livestock and Lily had a heart of gold, so I hired `em, yeah. I swore to Glen I'd do right by `em."

"He's a despicable hypocrite."

"Yeah, well."

She scrubbed her hands over her eyes. Took a deep breath. "And the others-Cheech, Bigfoot, Possum, Roy and Dale-how did you come to hire them?"

"People heard I hired the handicapped. People came to me. Family, social workers, friends. Sayin' `Can you help this one or that one?' It just grew from there. I never meant it to be this way. I didn't set out to do anything noble. I can't take credit for something that just happened."

"Yes, you can. To quote Cervantes, `Dios que da la llaga, da la medicina,' meaning-"

"God gives you the hurt, but also the fix for it."

She stared at me. "Yes." She looked away. "As Cervantes was saying ... God handed you a challenge here, but also the solution for it. You've done something marvelous, here. Something few people would have attempted. It's a huge responsibility, to give a home and a livelihood to people whom others often consider unfit and marginal."

"I don't give a damn how other people see `em. They earn their way. They got their problems, yeah, but-"

She laid a hand on my arm. "I'm complimenting you, Ben."

I sat back a little, and sighed. "I get tired, and then I feel guilty for wishing I didn't have to play mama and daddy to `em."

"I'm sorry I made things harder, today. But I despise Glen Tolbert."

"Look, Glen Tolbert ain't Mr. Congeniality, awright? He's rich, and rich people tend to think they should always get their own way-"

"Not everyone who's rich is a selfish and greedy soul."

"I agree. But ... look, how'd we get off the subject of Glen Tolbert? You got to be nice to him. Hear me?"

She got to her earth-sandaled feet. "I have tofu marinating. I need to get back." She went to Estrela and nimbly climbed up. The mare wouldn't tolerate a heavy western saddle; Possum, with his feel for things that made animals feel nervous and cramped, had helped Karen pick a light saddle from the tack room, something we used on young stock just getting accustomed to gear.

Karen had wisely anchored the saddle to a wide cotton breast band across the mare's thick chest. When you strap yourself atop a rocket, you want to make sure you don't slide backwards when the rocket takes off

She took up the loop of rein she'd woven from some cotton rope. Utility reins on a western split-ear bridle with a sissy English snaffle bit. Huh.

"Meanwhile, back at the ranch," she said.

Then she nudged the mare with her heels, and the mare flew.

Flew. Like a bolt of lightning. Like a ball out of a cannon. Splaying sand and palmetto fronds over me and my gelding like we were standing too close to a lawn mower.

What most people don't know is that there are fast horses, and then there are horses that start fast. Your Thoroughbreds-the breed that runs in the Kentucky Derby and such-they're long-legged distance runners. Nothing can beat `em at a mile or more. But your Quarter Horses-the breed of big-assed, bulldog-jawed cattle horses that came out of Texas in the eighteen hundreds-they can out-sprint any horse on four legs. They're unbeatable in the first quarter mile, which is how they got their name. Estrela had a quarter horse's zero-to-sixty-in-five-seconds start. And then some.

I wiped sand off my face, swung aboard my gelding, then him and me tried to catch Karen and the mare.

We couldn't.

Some men feel belittled if they can't best a woman in a horse race.

Me? I thought, She's one fine, fast Cracker.

And the mare, too.

Kara

That night, in the small, daisy-enhanced dining nook of her and Mac's trailer, Lily and I shared a pitcher of peach-flavored iced tea and my homemade cookies. Mac dozed on the living room's flowery couch in front of a baseball game. Mr. Darcy dozed on his shoulder.

I touched Lily's freckled arm. "I apologize for ruining your visit with Mac's brother."

She shook her head. "Because of you, Mac told him No. That's the first time, ever."

"What would happen if you and Mac told him `No,' more often?"

Her face crumpled. "He'd take Mac away."

"Ssssh, don't cry, I'm sorry." I stroked her arm. "That won't happen. It simply won't."

She wiped her eyes, reached down to the floor beside her knees and retrieved a rumpled, brown-paper grocery bag. From it she extracted a childlike scrapbook, its cover plastered with daisies. Lily smoothed a hand over the aging decoupage. "It's not as pretty as Miriam and Lula's scrapbooks."

"You mean the ones they've made with pictures of Ben and Joey's mother in her mermaid costumes?"

"Yes."

Joey adored those scrapbooks. He looked at them at least once a week. "Well, those are nice scrapbooks, indeed, but I'm sure yours is lovely, too. May I see it? What's the theme of it?"

"I don't know. What's a 'theme?"'

I opened the cover and slowly looked through the pages. Pasted on them were clippings from bride magazines. The fashions and advertising styles began with a yellowing vignette of a 1970s bride and groom smiling beneath a disco ball and ended with a crisp clipping of a twenty-first century bride and groom smiling as they listened to their dual iPods.

"Someday," Lily said wistfully, "Mac and I will get married."

I shut the book slowly, then cupped her hand in mine. "Yes, you will. I promise you."

"You're so sweet. But you can't make Glen change his mind."

"We'll see about that. Lily, please don't be upset by this question, but. . when you and Mac were younger, did you ever want to have children?"

Her eyes froze. She searched my face. I tried desperately to read her mind. Was I seeing her fear at the idea of confessing they'd given a baby away, or her horror at the thought of giving birth? She pulled her hand from mine and looked away, frowning. "No. We couldn't have babies. That would have been wrong, for people like us to have babies. Wrong."

"Lily, does Glen tell you to say that?"

Her eyes went wide. "No! It's the truth. I don't talk about babies! I don't want to!" She gathered her scrapbook quickly, put it in the grocery bag, then, crying, grabbed my hand and lifted it to her cheek. "But if we ever did have a baby, I'd wish it was just like you."

She hurried, limping and crying, to the bedroom, and shut the door behind her.

"Sedge, I'm sorry, I know it's after midnight here, but I had to call."

"My dear, Malcolm and I are in Cairo. Having lunch. Don't fret. What's the problem?"

"I've met my biological uncle, and I'd like to have him assassinated."

"All right. Do you prefer poison, knives, guns or a nice car bomb?"

"Hmmm, so many delicious choices. Oh, all right. I just wanted to hear you list the possibilities."

"Even I, flinty old Svengali that I am, would not advise murder. Tell me, what has the uncle done?"

I described the day. "Sedge, he has legal guardianship over Mac. He threatened to take him away from the ranch, and from Lily. He's an intimidating bully. I have to do something to protect my ... Mac. And Lily."

"Haven't you said that Ben Thocco is quite capable of standing up for their interests?"

"Yes, but a court won't side with him against Mac's own brother."

"My dear, there's no solution for that circumstance."

"Yes, there is. No court will side with Glen Tolbert against Mac's daughter."

"Now, now. We have an agreement."

"Yes, but it includes discreetly taking care of Mac and Lily."

"The key word is `discreetly."'

"Then advise me. What can I do to control Glen Tolbert?"

"Think of this as a duel."

"Sedge, I was horrible at dueling. I had no patience for it. The instructor at boarding school gave up on me. She said I was all thrust and no parry."

"Then here is an opportunity for you to mature. To refine your skills. Learn patience. Just see what Mr. Tolbert does next, and then you will make a move to counter him."

I agreed reluctantly, said my goodnights, and lay on my daisy bed in the dark, steaming. If Uncle Glen parried, I would thrust.

I wondered how he'd look as a human shish kabob.

Chapter 11

Ben

I shoulda known Glen would get his pound of flesh.

Usually, I liked driving over to Fountain Springs. Always nice to go to town for awhile, stroll some coquina-stone sidewalks, and tip my hat to the admirin' ladies, old and young. But not when I got a call from the loan officer to come in for a meeting at Sun Farm Bank and Trust.

Bank meetings were bad news. I'd been late on the loan payment for the new cattle barn more than once, including this month's installment, but my loan lady knew I always made good. So it worried me when she said, `Come in. We gotta talk, Ben.' I tried not to think about it on the way over that June morning.

I was sweatil'. And not just from the weather. Weather, I'm used to. Bank foreclosures, I'm not.

I drove slow.

Inland Florida is muggy, even in springtime, semi-tropical and steamy despite leftover Christmas poinsettias blooming in pots on patios and lawns. In the summertime we get a hundred degrees and hundred percent humidity every day from June to October. Before air conditioning, Florida wasn't lazy from the heat. It was in a coma.

Yankees don't understand that the slow southern way of life grew out of surviving the sun; old timers spent afternoons sippin' iced tea and sleeping in the shade of trees just to stay alive. You look anywhere in the world where the heat still runs the show. People living in those places move like turtles, and success is valued in sweat. I grew up swinging Joey in a front porch hammock every hot summer afternoon. Without a breeze, he couldn't breathe good.

You try keeping a loved one alive with the wind off a hammock. It gives you a grim kinda respect for Mother Nature.

Yeah, my thoughts were morbid. I felt put-upon even before I got to the bank. I drove slower, trying to enjoy the view. State Route 108 leads to Fountain Springs through handsome forest and broad pastures, over pretty creeks and past marshes rimmed in stubby palmetto shrubs and cabbage palms. The sides are lined by flowers between the saw palmetto. Florida blooms even where it hurts to try.

At night the road to Fountain Springs was like a trip back in time. Frogs sang loud enough to drown out a hellfire preacher yelling about salvation on the radio and the occasional low grunt of an alligator sounding from the woods. This was the wild, quiet backbone of old Florida. The land of black-eyed peas, corn fritters, fried trout, and Jesus Saves.

I once found a tent-revival preacher who'd lay his palm on Joey's head and pronounce him heeee-aled.

It didn't work.

I passed a few little orange groves. Leftovers from orchards that froze to their roots during a cold snap in the late 1800s. Mama Nature was patient in northern Florida. She'd lull fruit trees with decades of mild winters, then kill a generation of citrus harvests in a single frosty night. Still, a few orange trees hung on. They sprang from the forgotten roots; they sprouted from the ruined stumps.

Citrus, like us Crackers, just plain refuses to give up.

I pressed the brake as the road to town narrowed to a rattling, onelane wooden bridge. The old macadam was flecked with crushed oyster shells. The heat off the road mixed with the burnt-tar scent of creosote from telephone poles. To me the smell of creosote was a comforting memory.

When Joey and me were kids we helped Mama and Pa creosote many a barn and fence post. He cussed the stink and she moaned over the oily stain, but it was fun, anyhow. Joey would sit on the ground dabbing creosote on the low spots, I'd do the middle, and Mama and Pa painted the tall places. We made a team.

The two-lane narrowed and got curvier, following the route of the first wagon path into the blue shade of live oaks planted a hundred years earlier by the Fountain Springs Garden Club.

PONCE DE LEON'S TRAIL, bragged a curlicued historical marker. The road's surface took on more age. Glimpses of smooth-worn red brick peeked out here and there, evidence of a turn-of-the-century roadbed. Sidewalks sprouted. This was where the Cracker road ended and Main Street started.

Houses bellied up to the street. Victorian gingerbreads, mostly. They sat on prettily fenced lots big enough for shade trees and sunny backyards, for storage sheds and narrow garages and flower gardens in manure-fed beds in the sandy soil. Big and fancy and fine.

I slowed for the crosswalk at the elementary school, again at a crosswalk for the library, then drove into a shady town square lined with old buildings with awnings and benches, including the general hardware and feed and the drug store, where I could stall for awhile over a handmade milkshake at the soda fountain's marble counter.

Sun Farm Bank was right next door. I parked between the milkshake and the loan officer and sat in my truck for a good five minutes, debating. Now I know what the waitin' room in hell feels like.

Finally I got out, but I took the long way around. Like I just had to pay my respects to the Saginaw County Courthouse. The courthouse sits in the center of the square, under a canopy of oaks. In all of northern Florida there's nothing else like it for sheer, small-town splendor. The walls are gray coquina stone. The arched windows and doors are rimmed in colorful tiles. The roof is red Spanish tile, and on top is a bell tower.