Homeplace (31 page)

“So what I’ve done so far is simply refuse any offer they make on the house, and refuse to name a firm price. I can’t string it out forever, but I figure I can delay it a while yet. Sooner or later, though, they’re going to get tired of it all and move on it.”

“And then what?”

“Then they’ll file condemnation proceedings and get it condemned, file a declaration of taking, get a court decree and take title, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

“You mean …”

“I mean they’ll let out bids to subcontractors and the dozers will come on in. They surveyed and took test
borings and drove the stakes back in the winter. It’s all in place.”

“My God, Sam! This what-you-macallit … this declaration of taking … they can just do it whenever they want to, whether or not you’re even satisfied with their price? That’s
wrong
, that’s
criminal …”

“No, that’s legal. And they sure can do it, and they do, and will, in this case. Up until World War II they couldn’t take title or take a hoe to dirt or anything until there was a final property settlement, which of course could take years. But in wartime you just can’t wait, sometimes, for roads and munitions plants and such. You can sort of see their side, Mike … without a tool like the declaration of taking, there probably wouldn’t be any freeway system, for instance. But now that they can do it anytime and anyplace they want to, of course it’s often misused, like every other law. I frankly don’t know why they’ve let me drag this on as long as I have, except that I’ve pleaded illness and family distress, which, God knows, is true enough. But it rarely stops the DOT.”

“Maybe Bay has been able to influence them,” Mike said. “I know he’s trying.”

“Oh, yes,” Sam Canaday said. “I’m sure he’s had considerable influence. Well, that’s it, essentially and in a nutshell. I wanted you to know what you were getting into. I wanted to be sure you understand that we’re not going to win it. Only delay it.”

“Does he … does Daddy understand that? He doesn’t seem to; that painting he’s having done, and the way he talks about it …”

“The Colonel understands it,” Sam said. “He’s a lawyer, after all. Whether or not he acknowledges it is another matter. But I’m sure he understands it.”

“Sam … is it right, after all? This delay; it can only put off something that will hurt him badly in the
end. And he’s not going to get stronger, you know, only weaker …”

“It’s right,” Sam Canaday said, taking off the glasses and rubbing his eyes. There were dark smears of fatigue under them, and the strong tan of his face had faded until, in the dawn-lit kitchen, he looked almost as mustardy as J.W. “You know why I’m delaying; we talked about it. It’s keeping him going. And it’s buying him time to try and get you back.”

“He’s got me now; I’m in the fire right along with the rest of you,” Mike said. “I told him we’d start with the letters this morning. I’m going over and get Priss’s typewriter …”

“No,” Sam Canaday said. “He’s got your participation. He hasn’t got your love.”

“Ah,
God
…” Mike cried, pushing back her chair and whirling around to stare sightlessly out the windows over the sink at the brightening day. “You ask too much! Both of you, all of you … you just plain ask too damned much!”

“You’re right,” he said, gathering up the papers and stuffing them back into his shabby old briefcase. “We ask everything.”

Mike was not prepared for the reaction her participation in John Winship’s media-blitzing campaign engendered in her sister and Bayard Sewell. She had not expected DeeDee to be pleased, since she was more or less forsworn to try and discourge her father in his fight against the Department of Transportation. But she had not expected rage and fear.

She and John Winship were just finishing the last of the morning’s letters—these to the editors of the small dailies and weeklies in the surrounding communities—and Mike was stamping them while Lavinia Lester prepared lunch and her father settled into his chair to watch
Tic-Tac-Dough
when DeeDee came into the kitchen of the Pomeroy Street house. She was hot and
flushed in a pink-striped cotton tent of astounding proportions, and she carried a foil-covered pie pan in one hand.

“Peach pie from the first of our peaches,” she said, kissing her father and peering around the cool, bright kitchen. “What on earth are you all doing? Planning a party?”

“I’m helping Daddy with his correspondence,” Mike said brightly, hoping to divert her sister. But DeeDee would not be distracted.

“What kind of correspondence?” she said. “Who on earth does Daddy know that he has to send so many letters …” She picked up a couple of envelopes from the pile Mike had stamped and stacked neatly at the edge of the kitchen table, and actually turned pale under her habitual high flush.

“You’re helping him with these crazy, awful, horrible letters,” she squealed. “Mike, you
promised
, you said you thought this DOT stuff was as crazy as we did …” Her breath gave out and she stood glaring at Mike, great shelf of chest heaving, breath bubbling in her small pink piglet’s nose.

“Well, I changed my mind,” Mike said equably. What was that strange, shrill note in DeeDee’s voice? Why on earth was she so agitated? If DeeDee considered the letters foolish and futile, what did it matter to her who typed them and sent them out?

“What’s your problem, Daisy?” John Winship said, his voice strong and sharp as DeeDee’s own. He had been animated and almost ebullient all morning, dictating clearly and decisively, cackling appreciatively at his own prose occasionally, seeming almost to shimmer with a faint, strange light of his own that Mike had seen only once or twice in her life and barely remembered. She had caught the mood herself, and had found her fingers flying over the keys of Priss’s old manual typewriter and her veins humming with more energy than
she had felt since the first slumberous coupling with Bayard Sewell. She turned now to her father, and saw that his cheeks were so flushed they were almost vermilion, and his eyes had sunk back into the flesh around them and acquired a feverish glitter.

Apparently DeeDee saw, too, because she wrenched her little pink mouth into a smile and said, “No problem, Daddy. I just don’t want you to get overtired. Mike means well, but she hasn’t been here since the beginning, and I’m afraid she doesn’t know yet what’s good for you and what isn’t.”

“Micah knows what’s good for me better than anybody else in this house except Sam Canaday,” her father rasped. Mike saw his frail chest beginning to labor, and so she said, “Daddy, you promised you’d take a nap before lunch when we finished,” and the old man looked from one of his daughters to the other, flashed them his swift, grotesque half-grin, and said, “So I did.” DeeDee did not speak again until Lavinia Lester had wheeled him into his room, and then she turned on Mike.

“You’re going to kill him. Do you know that? What you’re doing is going to kill my daddy, and I hope you’re happy when he’s lying dead! It’s cruel, what you’re doing, and it’s dangerous, and it’s awful …”

“DeeDee, I am
not
hurting him!” Mike said. “Look at him! His color is good, and he’s lively, and he’s eating well and sleeping, and he hasn’t had one of those attacks of pain in several days … he’s come out of that awful lethargy he was in; you just haven’t seen it, you haven’t been around lately. He’s
much
better, much stronger …”

“It’s the last of his strength! He’ll have another stroke; he’ll collapse …” DeeDee’s eyes were unfocused with what could only be terror, and tears tracked her cheeks and chins.

Mike’s heart turned over. Her sister was obviously in anguish. No matter how nattering and unfounded her concern, it was still causing her pain. She did not look well, either; the thin, stretched skin around her blue eyes was violet and crosshatched with tiny fatigue lines, and her blue-black hair straggled, lusterless, on her neck and down her back. It looked heavy and flat and rusty, like the wings of a dead and rain-soaked crow, and Mike saw for the first time that DeeDee had been dyeing it. She thought of the terrible little ersatz bunkhouse on the edge of the mobile home park, and the cawing, slavering old woman so irrevocably and eternally there in it, and of Duck Wingo.

She put her hand on DeeDee’s shoulder. “I won’t let anything happen to him,” she said gently. “We’ll stop the minute he looks the slightest bit tired. I guess I did get a little carried away this morning, and let things go on too long. We won’t do that again.”

“But Mike,
why?”
Dee’s voice actually trembled. “You thought it was all as silly and unnecessary as we did …”

“What can it hurt?” Mike said. She wasn’t about to go into the evening at the homeplace that still burned in her mind. In DeeDee’s present mood, she would probably think Mike was trying to secure the farm for herself and nothing could have been further from the truth. Mike did not want the old house. She simply wanted it, and her father, to be left alone.

“I’m only doing it to keep him company and to keep an eye on him,” she said. “He was doing it anyway, you know, on that old tape recorder of Sam’s, and half the time he couldn’t make it work, and he’d lose his temper and wind up twice as tired and upset as he is now. At least this way I can monitor him. Really, Dee. It isn’t going to change anything, but if it makes him happier, why not?”

Her sister peered at her out of tear-sheened eyes, and
then let her massive shoulders slump. “I guess you’re right. It’s just that I love him, Mikie, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

“Oh, Dee …” Mike’s own eyes prickled, and she covered DeeDee’s fat, ringed little hand with her own. “Something is going to happen to him, and we can’t change that. But not because of this.”

Seeing the tears start again in the beautiful, myopic blue eyes, she said hastily, “Tell you what. Next week, let’s take off and do something together, just the two of us. Something silly and fun. I’ll send Lavinia over to stay with Duck’s mother and J.W. can sit with Daddy, and we’ll make a day of it. What would you like to do? Go to Atlanta and have lunch and go shopping, or see a movie? My treat.”

“You know what I’d really like to do?” DeeDee said, her voice rising. “Bay’s a member of the country club, of course, and he says that anytime we want to go and swim or sun or just have lunch and lounge around the pool, he’ll leave a guest pass for us. We haven’t been yet, and I … well, I’d like it if you’d go with me. I think that would be fun. We might even join, Duck and me, if we like it …”

Mike’s heart sank, but she said, “Of course. You name the day and we’ll do it.” Could she really bear it, DeeDee in a swim suit, sipping fruit-laden drinks around the Lytton, Georgia country club, clothed in her maddening, heartbreaking airs? She supposed she could. What difference did it make, after all?

“We can go any time at all,” DeeDee said, her face brighter. “Bay’s already left instructions with the staff. He was president for several years before Sally got so bad.” She paused, and then said, “Do you have something that isn’t … well, you know, Mikie … so bare?”

“I won’t embarrass you, DeeDee,” Mike said, suppressing the impulse to smack her sister. Just when you
were feeling better about DeeDee, kinder, she would invariably put her elephantine foot into your goodwill.

“I didn’t mean that,” DeeDee said, turning to leave, impervious to her effect on Mike. “It’s just that you’re so thin. You’ll be meeting a lot of the new people, and you’ll want to put your best foot forward.”

“Oh, well, of course,” Mike said sarcastically. She could think of nothing about which she cared so little as impressing the new people of Lytton. Did DeeDee think, then, that she had changed her mind and would be staying on indefinitely? And if it came to that, would she? She did not know, had not thought about it after assuring everyone that she would be here only temporarily, until something could be decided about her father. But that was before Bayard Sewell …

He called that afternoon, scarcely an hour before she was to have met him in her bedroom upstairs.

“Worse luck, Mike. I’ve got to go out of town. I’m at the airport now, and I’ve only got a minute.”

“Oh, Bay …
why?
It’s been almost a week …” Her heart contracted physically and painfully in her chest. She was hollow and electric with wanting him, and had already bathed and shaved her legs and smoothed her body with bath lotion.

“I know, love. I know. It just can’t be helped. Partly it’s Sally; she’s getting sicker and sicker, and Dr. Gaddis says there’s liver involvement now, and she’ll have to be sent somewhere they can give her specialized attention. So I’m going up and check out Silver Hill, in Connecticut. It’s supposed to be tops. If they’ll take her, I’ll have Shep Watson, our lawyer, put her on a plane and I’ll meet her and admit her. Tough for poor Sal, darling, but better for us. And then, there are some people in Boston I need to see about some business. It can’t wait.”

“How long? I don’t think I can do without you very long, Bay …”

“Me either, or I’ll end up with one of those inflatable ladies from Japan in my hotel room. I’m sorry, Mike. A few days. No more than a week. Can you find something to do with yourself?”

“Well, it just so happens that I have something to do with myself,” she said. She told him about the letter campaign, and about helping her father. “I know you probably think it’s silly, darling, but it keeps his mind occupied and it keeps me off the streets. Without it, I’d probably be hanging around the Red Rose Motel lounge with the good old boys, yowling around the piano bar and trying to get this itch scratched that you leave me with.”

She expected his deep, easy laughter, but it did not come. Instead there was silence, and then he said, “I don’t like it at all that you’re egging him on, Mike. As I’ve told you, I don’t think he’s got a prayer, and this is just going to make it harder on him when he loses.”

There was ice in his voice, and small whips.

“You’re always telling him you’re doing the best you can to head it off in the legislature,” she said defensively. His voice cut her badly.

“I’ve also told him that I don’t think I can do much. I really don’t have much influence in committee, and he realizes that. I’m pretty junior. I just want him to know I’m on his side, mainly. I don’t actually encourage him, and I don’t like it that you’re doing it. You’re stringing him along. It’s worse than cruel. It could be dangerous for him.”