Let Me Die in His Footsteps (11 page)

1952—ANNIE

ANNIE WATCHES UNTIL
Ryce disappears over the rise and she can no longer hear the squeal of his bike. Sheriff Fulkerson is watching too, and when he turns to greet Daddy, the sheriff is shaking his head like he doesn’t know what gets into that boy. Mama sometimes shakes her head the same way at Annie.

“Why don’t you come on with us,” the sheriff says to Annie when she starts up the stairs to go inside and help Grandma in the kitchen.

Daddy gives a nod, which means he thinks there’s no harm in it, so Annie calls out to Grandma that she’ll be back shortly and follows Daddy and the sheriff.

“You keep a sharp eye, John,” Grandma shouts from the porch. Since breakfast, she has repinned her hair, and her apron hangs straight now. “Keep a sharp eye on Annie.”

Partway up the hill that’ll lead them to Grandpa’s tobacco barn, Annie stops because Daddy and the sheriff stop. She knew they would. Visitors always do. Especially this time of year. This is the spot—halfway between the house and the tobacco barn—where folks take a break, usually saying they need to rest even though it’s not such an uphill climb. They brace themselves, feet planted wide apart, hands on hips, and look across the land that rolls down toward the house and lifts up again and stretches to the horizon. As far as a person can see in most any direction, rows of lavender, swelled to their full size, run side by side. They’re evenly placed, four feet on center, precisely, exactly, every one of them, as only Daddy would have it. It’s a trick of the eye and the work of distance that draw the rows closer and closer as they travel toward the horizon until eventually they meld into a single field of lavender covering the hills. There aren’t many prideful moments in growing lavender, so says Daddy, but this is one of the few.

Standing next to the sheriff, who can only shake his head at the splendor of it, which makes Annie wonder if he was shaking his head at the splendor of Ryce, though she doubts it, Daddy takes off his hat, slaps it against his thigh, and nods along. It’s about the proudest a person will see Daddy. He never walks folks around to the other side of the house and to the top of the rise that looks off in the other direction. There, the lavender has already been harvested. It’ll be distilled into oil and so is always taken before it breaks into bloom. It’s not such a pretty sight once the slender lavender-tipped stems have been hacked off, leaving behind only a jagged mound of greenery.

Like folks always do, the sheriff lays his head back and inhales. Usually, Annie doesn’t notice the sweet smell because she, and the rest of the family too, lives with it every day. It builds slowly over the season, little by little, and so is never fresh or new, but when a visitor comes along, like the sheriff, Annie is reminded of it by the look on his face.

Just this last week, she’s felt like a visitor might. The smell has been stronger, sweeter, thicker, like new again. She should have known it was a sign her life was about to change—same as she should have known the one warped board on the porch, and the star she saw falling from the sky last Tuesday night, and the shiver that woke her this past Saturday all meant death was closing in.

“Beats the hell out of growing tobacco,” the sheriff says as he takes one deep breath. His large belly lifts up and out, his eyes close, the lines around his mouth soften, and he exhales long and slow. Then he slaps his hands together, gives Daddy a wave, and they continue on toward the barn.

By the time they reach the top of the hill, Sheriff Fulkerson is red-faced and can’t talk for breathing so hard. He mops his forehead with a limp white kerchief and rests a hand on his belly, which swells up until his shirt gaps between his buttons. Ryce is already taller than his daddy but is a good bit smaller around the middle.

“This where you crossed over?” the sheriff says without looking at Annie. His voice has changed. It’s slipped lower, and he’s likely not smiling anymore. Grandma says Sheriff Fulkerson spends too much time politicking. This is the voice he saves for discussing serious matters with serious men. He’s not politicking just now. Waiting for an answer, he leans over at the waist and looks down the length of the rock fence. Maybe he’s looking for rocks knocked loose or oversize footprints, or maybe he’s admiring what Grandma calls fine Irish fence building.

“Yes, sir,” Annie says, looking for some sign that Ryce hadn’t been entirely truthful and that his daddy does think Annie killed Mrs. Baine. So far, the sheriff is being friendly enough. “Best I can tell,” she says, glancing at Daddy. He gives her a nod that means keep on. “It was dark. Crossed over right about here.”

“Just jumped on over?” Now the sheriff gives her a smile and his voice lifts a bit higher. He’s politicking again, and that’s Annie’s first warning that the sheriff isn’t altogether trusting of what she’s telling him. “You can do that? Girl small as you?”

“Sure can,” Annie says.

It’s not often someone calls Annie small these days. She outgrew Caroline and Mama a year ago. Daddy has started saying he worries she’ll outgrow him next. She’s about to show the sheriff how easily she can manage that fence, but Daddy is shaking his head at her. If she were still thirteen, or maybe even fourteen, Daddy wouldn’t have minded. But she’s halfway to sixteen and that’s altogether different from being thirteen or fourteen.

“Caroline done it too,” Annie says, wondering straightaway if that was something she should have not told. “Both of us, we climbed right on over. It’s not so high.”

“You all get up here often?”

Daddy points his thumb toward the barn’s open doors. “Lavender drying in there this time of year. Otherwise, no. Have a look.”

The sheriff steps up to the barn’s open doors and leans inside. Three-inch bundles of lavender hang from the wooden crossbeams, their bluish-gray buds dripping toward the ground.

“Doors always open?” the sheriff asks, leaning inside.

“Circulation,” Daddy says.

The sheriff nods, doesn’t have to ask. He knows all about circulation. It’s the same for tobacco. Fresh air moving across the plants means less chance of mold.

The sheriff steps farther into the barn and runs one hand across the tips of the lavender. Tiny petals pop free and flutter to the ground.

“Today is your day, then?” he says without looking at Annie. “Fifteen and a half?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ryce was right. That’s the thing that has folks worried. For girls like Annie, those with the know-how, turning of age is something special. Or maybe something worrisome.

“Fifteen and a half,” Annie says, repeating the sheriff.

“But you and your sister, the both of you, come up here to look in that well over at the Baines’ place?”

Annie nods, which makes Daddy poke her in the back. “Yes, sir,” she says. “Me and Caroline, both.”

The sheriff can’t see a nod because he’s still studying that lavender, which shouldn’t be all so interesting, even to a visitor. He’s studying it like Annie had been studying it when she thought, hoped, Daddy was in there watching over her as she made her way to the Baines’ well.

“No well of your own?”

If she wasn’t certain before, she’s certain now. The sheriff is circling around her, closing in ever tighter with each question.

“Dried up,” Daddy says, and he says it easy and casual like he isn’t at all worried about what the sheriff’s thinking.

“Didn’t figure to see nothing in a dried-up well,” Annie says, and then so the sheriff won’t think that’s something only people like Annie know about, she says, “Everyone knows that. Just ask. Just ask anyone.”

The sheriff jostles a handful of lavender petals in one hand and walks from the barn.

“And what did you see when you got over there?” he says, squinting into the sunlight and dumping the petals. “You have a light of any kind?”

“Caroline did,” Annie says. “Daddy’s flashlight. Didn’t see much except for Mrs. Baine. She was on the ground there by the well. Didn’t know it was her at the time. Just seen an arm, what I thought was an arm. It was real dark.”

Mrs. Baine was old, just about the oldest person Annie has ever seen, and that’s why she died. She had slender lips that rolled in on themselves because she didn’t have teeth where she should have had them. Her fingernails were thick, yellow, and squared off like she whittled them down with a gutting knife, and dark patches—age spots, Grandma called them—covered the backs of Mrs. Baine’s hands and the sides of her face. Deep lines ran from her forehead to her chin, and her hair was like pulled gray cotton hanging down her back. A person can only grow so old. Grandma is always saying it’ll get us all eventually, God willing. But as Sheriff Fulkerson asks yet another question, and as he settles his eyes on Annie and keeps them there, it’s certain he is of a different mind. He’s of a mind that something other than old age got its claws into Mrs. Baine.

“There were the cigarettes,” Annie says, kicking at the ground near the barn doors. “They were around here somewhere.” She keeps digging at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “A pile of them.”

“Yours?” the sheriff says to Daddy.

Daddy shakes his head. “Never smoke up here. Too dry.” Daddy glances at his watch. He should be out to the fields, helping Abraham set his tobacco. “Never smoke most anywhere. Sarah, you know. She don’t like it. Smell don’t agree with her.”

The smell reminds Mama too much of her daddy, she once said. The sheriff gives Daddy a pat on the back as if he knows all about wives and the things they don’t much like, and the three of them keep on studying the ground and searching for those cigarettes.

“Went looking for them last night when Annie first mentioned it,” Daddy says. “Didn’t want a fire springing up on top of everything else.”

“Right around here,” Annie says, pointing at a patch of ground just outside the open doors. Those cigarettes had to belong to someone, so maybe the sheriff was right. Maybe something else, or someone else, did get its claws into Mrs. Baine. Those cigarettes will mean that the someone else was not Annie.

Daddy steps up behind Annie and squats. He groans on the way down. With one hand, he pats the ground and riffles through the dirt. “You sure it was cigarettes?”

“Positive,” Annie says, and all those good feelings Daddy stirred up when he hauled off that rocker are gone as quick as they came because Daddy doesn’t believe her and he’s saying so right in front of Sheriff Fulkerson. “One was still lit even. At first, I thought they was yours. I thought they meant you was out here too, that Mama sent you. I looked for you in the barn.”

Annie says these things even though she knows they’ll hurt Daddy. Mama did send him, but he and Abraham had been drinking their whiskey. They’d been doing it more and more lately because Abraham would be getting married soon. Fun’s over once you say I do, Daddy was all the time saying and then he’d wrap Mama up in a hug and rub his stubble against the underside of her chin. Mama would swat Daddy away, but he’d keep at it until she closed her eyes and leaned into him instead of pulling away. Daddy sleeping when he should have been watching over Annie was probably why Mama burned the toast this morning. Grandma is always saying a cook who burns the biscuits is an angry cook, indeed. The same must be true for a cook who burns the toast.

“Yep,” Daddy says. “I should have been here. But wasn’t me. Wasn’t my cigarettes. Maybe you was mistaken.”

Sheriff Fulkerson joins them but doesn’t try to squat. “Probably mistaken,” he says, repeating Daddy.

“But one was orange-tipped,” Annie says, digging two hands into the dirt, gathering it in her palms and letting it filter through her fingers. She stares up at both men, looking them in the eyes so they’ll know she’s telling the truth. “It was still burning. I’m certain. Certain as can be. I snubbed it out. Daddy’s always saying we have to be careful. But I thought they was Daddy’s. I was sure.”

“There anything else, Annie?” the sheriff asks, planting the sole of his black boot right where Annie had been rummaging in the dirt. “Anything you ought tell me?”

Annie can’t tell him about the spark that’s been in the air or the trouble that’s been lurking. Folks, regular folks, don’t like to hear about things like that. But for a week, Annie’s known it was coming, and here it is, and now folks think she killed Mrs. Baine.

“No, sir,” she says. “Nothing more to tell. But I seen those cigarettes, and if they ain’t here, that means someone took them.” Annie was wrong. Aunt Juna isn’t coming home. She’s already here. “I think they were Juna’s cigarettes. My Aunt Juna’s.”

Sheriff Fulkerson starts shaking his head again, and it’s surely disappointment making him do that and not the splendor of Annie.

“Think we’ve seen all we need to,” he says and looks off toward the house. “I see my deputy’s here.”

On the drive below, a dark-blue sedan has parked behind Daddy’s truck.

“Thought he could stay close to you folks,” the sheriff says, “for the next few days.”

“Why do we need someone staying close?” Annie asks, shielding her eyes and looking down on the parked car.

When no one answers, she drops her hand and turns to the sheriff. He’s looking at Daddy as if wondering what should and should not be said.

“You think Aunt Juna’s come home, don’t you? You think it too.”

Daddy lets out a long breath. He’s not so good at politicking. The sheriff, however, opens up a big smile and wraps an arm around Annie’s shoulders. It almost makes Annie forget he most certainly thinks she had something to do with Mrs. Baine dying. Grandma is right. He is awful good at politicking.

“Come on down and meet him,” the sheriff says. “You’ll probably remember him. Jacob. He’s a year or so older than Ryce.”

“Jacob Riddle?” Annie says a little too quickly.

“You do recall, huh?” The sheriff gives her a wink and squeezes her so tight she feels his damp underarms on the side of her face. “Been helping me out since he got back in town. Maybe he’s the fellow you seen down in that well? I’ll be sure to tell Ryce he’s got himself some competition. What do you think of that, John? Think you’d have Jacob Riddle for a son-in-law?”

Stretching one hand overhead, the sheriff waves it side to side so Jacob will see them. The driver’s side door of the sedan swings open, and Jacob Riddle steps out. No mistaking it. That’s Jacob Riddle all right. He waves back in the sheriff’s direction, but it isn’t a wave to say hello. It’s a wave to say hurry on up. There’s something bad going on down here.