Weekends in Carolina
Their plates each made different clinks when they touched her small table and Trey noticed they were mismatched. So were the mugs. Max got back up to get them some water and returned with mason jars, rather than regular water glasses. He took another look around the barn. There was not a doodad or tchotchke in sight. Judging by her residence, Max had no patience for pretense and no interest in owning things that didn’t have a use. Everything was well cared for, but nothing was fussy. Even the dog, who had been fixin’ to get up from his bed before a look from Max settled him back down, probably had a job.
“Thank you for the reassurance about the house,” Max said before taking a bite of her sandwich. “Clearly, I had expected to live in the barn this summer, but having it to offer for housing will make finding seasonal help easier.”
“I have no interest in ever living back on the farm and I’m sure Kelly doesn’t, either. And the house does us no good standing empty. Kelly and I will take a week to pack up and store anything personal, then you can move in.”
He took a bite of his sandwich. The egg salad was rich with mayonnaise and the yolks were the bright orange of the eggs he remembered eating as a child, when his mother had raised hens. “Do you have chickens?” he asked, a little embarrassed that he didn’t know what Max grew, other than vegetables.
“They were Hank’s. After we finished renovating the barn, he had some leftover wood. There’s a little chicken coop on the other side of the house, built to look like a tobacco barn.” Her smile must be at the thought of the chickens; it couldn’t be at the memory of his father. “It’s cute.”
Trey tried to imagine his father designing a cute chicken coop and got a headache. He also couldn’t imagine his father wanting chickens. Trey, Kelly and his mother had built the original chicken coop after his father’s response to his mother wanting hens had been, “You want ’em, you gotta work for ’em.” Kelly and Trey had gone with their mother to pick up the chicks from a nearby farm, and though Trey had pretended to be too old and too manly at thirteen for anything cute, he still remembered having to repress a giggle at the sight of the cheeping biddies. His father, however, had never once referred to the chickens without the adjectives “smelly” or “dirty.” He’d also never once turned down fried eggs or a slice from one of his mother’s delicious sour-cream pound cakes.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Max said. Her tone held the same sharp honesty of her stare and Trey wondered if she meant it or was the best liar on the planet. He decided to give her credit for honesty.
“I’m only sorry he didn’t sell you the land before he killed himself. Seems like that’s the only thing you should be sorry about, too.”
It was eerie, watching those short, pale lashes lower over her light eyes. Trey almost felt like he’d said something he shouldn’t have. Almost.
They finished the rest of their meal in silence.
* * *
MAX APPRECIATED BOTH Trey’s help carrying the dishes to the sink and his quick exit. She didn’t know how to respond to the anger simmering under the surface of his skin. Hank hadn’t been a paragon of anything, but he at least deserved for his children to be sad at his death.
She scrubbed the plates and stacked them in the small dish drainer. The winter season was slow on the farm, but she had to finish plotting out her fields before the spring vegetables went into the ground. And she must make sure she had enough wax boxes in stock for when the Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, began. And arrange for the intern candidates to visit. She’d been about to send those email invitations when Hank had died, then she’d wanted to wait until she’d met Trey.
Of course, she thought as she folded the kitchen towel and hung it off the oven, she could still lose the farm for the summer. She didn’t think Trey’s promises could to be trusted. She would have to go on with her work as though everything was normal and be prepared to stand tall when everything came crashing down about her feet.
But starting the broccoli in the greenhouse would have to wait until tomorrow, since she’d wasted the morning in useless, irritated shooting and would need to spend some of the precious daylight picking up shell casings. Her irritation with herself for wasted hours would last until she turned the week in her calendar and didn’t have to look at “shot Pepsi cans” as her record for daily farm duties. Maybe if she added “made lunch for new landlord” to it, the day wouldn’t look so wasted on paper.
When she’d asked Hank what happened to the will and he’d said, “I’ve taken care of it, sugar,” she should’ve pressed him for more details. Her morning spent in target practice had been as much a reaction to her own stupidity as to not knowing what Hank had meant by taken care of it.
She whistled and Ashes eased his old bones out of his bed, stretched, then finally wagged his tail. The old dog wasn’t ready to retire from farmwork yet, but this might be his last season. The geese were starting to get the best of the old dog. She wished he could live out the rest of his days in a farmhouse with central heat rather than the often too-cold barn. She opened the door and together they set out for their respective jobs in the fields.
* * *
“SO YOU MET MAX, huh?” Kelly had let himself into the house without bothering to knock. Which was fair, Trey supposed, since their father should have left the house and all the land to both of them, though Trey would bet the farm that the old man hadn’t. The old man’s prejudices coming in strong, even in the end.
Kelly set bags of Bullock’s barbecue on the counter and the smell of vinegar, smoke and pork filled the kitchen. Trey was happy to see the food, even though he had no idea what they were going to do with all the leftover barbecue, especially with whatever food would be brought by the house tomorrow. “She’s pretty neat.”
When Trey opened the containers, it was the first moment since arriving that he was happy to be in North Carolina. Kelly had brought over barbecue, slaw, Brunswick stew, collards, butterbeans and a greasy bag of hush puppies. As Trey loaded his plate until his wrist nearly collapsed from the weight, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten so well.
“She—” Trey put the emphasis on the pronoun “—is not what I expected. I mean, Dad couldn’t find a man to lease the land to?”
“What, you leave the big city and all of a sudden women have their proper place and it ain’t anywhere outside the kitchen?”
“No, but Dad...”
“Calm down, Trey. I’m mostly just funnin’ you. Everyone but Dad was surprised when Max the farmer turned out to be Maxine the farmer. Max was Mom’s choice.”
That Mom would pick a woman to lease the farm to made sense. However... “I didn’t know they had been planning this since before Mom died.”
“What you don’t know about the farm could fill the Dean Dome. Mom has always been on Dad’s case to do something useful with the land. He finally said he’d agree to whatever her plan was if she did the legwork.” He’d probably capitulated so his wife would shut up and just bring him another beer—much the same way he’d agreed to the first chicken coop. “When she was diagnosed, she sped up her plans a little. The lease with Max was signed two weeks before Mom died.
“That’s gross, you know.”
“What?” Trey asked as Kelly pointed to his plate, where he’d mixed his slaw and barbecue into one sloppy, hot-sauce–topped mess. “I’ve been eating my barbecue this way since we were kids.”
“It was gross then and it’s gross now.” There might as well be force fields separating the food on Kelly’s plate. Even the pot likker from the collards didn’t dare seep across the expanse of white into the slaw.
“I guess I’m surprised Max is still here.” Even though Kelly was in the room, Trey said the words more to himself than to anyone else.
“You mean that Dad kept his promise to Mom or that he didn’t drive Max away by calling her his ‘lady farmer’?”
Trey winced. How had their father been able to withstand Max’s frank, cutting gaze and still say the words lady farmer aloud? “Both, I guess.”
Kelly’s look was somewhere between pity and disgust. “I’m sorry it took Dad’s passing to get you to come back to the farm.”
CHAPTER THREE
TREY WAS ASLEEP when the first knock came on the front door. He pulled on some pants and a sweater then stumbled down the stairs to see who was there. Whoever it was hadn’t stopped knocking for even a second. His aunt Lois stood on the front porch, a dish balanced on her left arm as she knocked with her right fist. He didn’t even have a chance to wish her a good morning before she sailed past him into the house and wove her way to the kitchen.
He thought about stopping her, but no man had stopped Lois Harris since the day she was born a Mangum over fifty years ago, and he was unlikely to be the first. When he caught up to her, she was standing in front of the open fridge, shuffling take-out containers of barbecue around.
“I expected it of you,” she said into the fridge, “though your brother should’ve known better. Noreen raised y’all both to know better.”
Trey wasn’t entirely certain what he and Kelly had done—or failed to do.
The brine-only pickle jars Aunt Lois pulled out of the fridge clinked on the metal edge of the old, laminate counter. “Honestly, did Hank think he would break a nail throwin’ out empty bottles?” She pulled other empty jars and bottles out of the fridge, shuffled more stuff around before declaring the fridge as good as it was gonna get and slamming the door. She must have left the beer cans in the fridge because all that was on the counter were empty mustard bottles with a heavy layer of crust around the lip.
“Aunt Lois, what are you doing?”
The counter was now covered in trash from the fridge and his aunt was opening random drawers and pawing around.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” She didn’t even look up when she said it.
Digging through Dad’s stuff, he thought, though he had the smarts not to say that. When she found a trash bag and the jars crashed into the bag with one big sweep of her arm, Trey had a partial answer. His aunt Lois was going to clean the farmhouse. But why?
“Go out to my car and get the tea I’ve ready-made. People will be coming by for visitation in four hours. If you and Kelly had the sense God gave a mule, you would’ve cleaned this house yesterday.”
No wonder his brother had smirked when he’d said it was Trey’s responsibility to get ready for the visitation, that he had a project to work on and couldn’t take the entire day off.
“Lord in Heaven! Henry William Harris the Third, don’t just stand there. Get!” She made a shooing motion with her entire body. “And get my cleaning supplies while you’re at it.”
Taking a detour up the stairs to put on shoes felt devious after Aunt Lois’s clear instructions, but he needed to take a piss and get something on his feet before going outside. When he returned to the kitchen with a box full of jugs of tea and buckets of cleaning supplies, the hands on his aunt’s hips made it clear he’d dawdled.
“I found your daddy’s supplies, though Lord only knows how old some of this stuff is. Take a bucket and broom and start with the upstairs bedrooms. I’ll work down here.”
“Aunt Lois, I doubt we will have many people show up.” If Trey had been looking for excuses not to come to his father’s funeral, surely everyone else in the county was, too. “And even if we do, no one is going to see the upstairs.”
“We may not have time to give this house the scrubbing it needs, but we can dust shelves, sweep floors and make beds before everyone gets here.” As far as his aunt was concerned, if she didn’t want to hear the words, they hadn’t been said. When he didn’t move, she shoved a broom into his one hand and a bucket into the other. “I’m not your mama or your wife and I won’t do this alone. You either respect Noreen’s memory by making her house tidy for company, or I go home.”
Still feeling as if he were putting lipstick on a pig for a fair no one would come to, Trey plodded upstairs and began cleaning. Out the window of Kelly’s room—which was dusty and full of crap his brother should have thrown away or taken to his own home years ago—he saw Max load something into her truck and drive off into the fields. Dark clouds bullied away the nice weather of yesterday, but that didn’t seem to be stopping the farmer. He wondered what she was doing and why? More important, he wished he could watch her work and admire the swift, purposeful movements he had seen yesterday translated from shooting Pepsi cans to growing food.
“Trey, hon, are you dawdlin’?” his aunt shouted up a few minutes later. “I’m not cleaning Hank’s bathroom on my own. Get down here.”
He couldn’t blame her. His father’s bathroom had offended his bachelor sensibilities—skirting mighty close to the memories of the bathrooms in his frat house. Knowing what was in store for him didn’t speed up his steps down the stairs.
Aunt Lois obviously had more practice cleaning a house before a funeral than Trey did, a fact evident in the way the wood of the banisters sparkled. He peeked into his dad’s bedroom. Photos of his father and mother with different relatives were nicely displayed on the dressers. His mother’s sick room across the hall looked like any other guest bedroom in an old Piedmont farmhouse. As soon as his mother had gotten too sick to sleep through the night, she’d moved across the hall rather than disturb her husband’s sleep, a gesture Trey would have found touching if there was a possibility his father had ever said, “Don’t worry about me.”
Aunt Lois was attacking the stove when he walked into the kitchen. “Bathroom.” She didn’t even look up.
“Aunt Lois, nobody liked my father and there’s no wife to console. I seriously doubt anyone besides you will be dropping by with casseroles.”
“Trey—” she still didn’t look up from her scrubbing “—I don’t care if you’re five or thirty-five, if you don’t get in that bathroom and start cleaning in thirty seconds, I will take a switch to your behind.”
His aunt had always made good on her threats.
Bathroom.
* * *
THE FIRST RELATIVE knocked on the door thirty minutes before Aunt Lois had predicted. “That Gwen Harris,” his aunt muttered, “has had no respect for keeping decent time since she moved to the city.”
Durham, a city of two hundred and fifty thousand souls, was the city Aunt Lois referred to, and downtown Durham was a bare thirteen miles from “downtown” Bahama, despite Aunt Lois’s sniff implying the other side of the world. But Aunt Lois and Uncle Garner had taken their share of Harris farmland and withstood mechanization, buyouts and the bald fact that tobacco causes cancer to keep and expand on a successful tobacco farm. She had no patience with the farmers who gave up their land for pennies to the dollar—even though she and Uncle Garner had profited from their sales—to move into the city. And she also had no respect for a man like Trey’s father, who had clung to his farmland like a virgin to her panties, but had been unwilling or unable to make the land useful.
But, as Cousin Gwen dropping off her rolls being the first of many in a parade of relatives evidenced, blood is thicker than respect. And Aunt Lois had made the house presentable because Hank Harris had been a Harris, even if he’d been a distasteful one.
Kelly slipped in through the kitchen door just after Gwen had said her condolences and left. “I saw her on Roxboro Road driving up here and took my time, just so I’d miss her,” his brother whispered to him. “I’ll see her at the viewing and that will be plenty enough of Cousin Gwen for me.”
Unlike his aunt, Trey didn’t care that Cousin Gwen and her husband had left their farmhouse for a split-level in the city. Hell, having escaped to D.C. as soon as the ink on his college diploma had dried, he wasn’t one to judge. However, Gwen had been a crushing cheek pincher all of his childhood, and hadn’t even stopped when he’d hit puberty. Her kids had been just as awful, though in different ways. The eldest always made sure to include the mention of major life purchases in his Christmas letters. Every year between his accomplishments at work and the achievements of his kids was a description of the new boat/car/RV/lawn mower that the family had just purchased. It had bothered Trey a lot more when he’d been a poor country cousin. Now Trey just thought it was in poor taste and felt for all the pinched country cousins getting that letter every Christmas.
During her short visit, Cousin Gwen had apologized for her children, who had to work and couldn’t make it over. Lucky for him and Kelly, they would be at the viewing. And the funeral. And back here after the funeral to eat all this food.
His whining buzzed about in his head, but he couldn’t seem to swat it away. With each relative, family friend, acquaintance and Southern busybody who walked through the front door of his father’s home bearing casseroles and condolences, the house got smaller and smaller until it pressed in on his temples and made his eyes bulge. Out of respect for his mother, Trey smiled and said thank-you to each salad that had been “Hank’s favorite,” but by the time all the people left, the farmhouse felt small enough he could call it skinny jeans and hang out with the hipsters at the new downtown bars.
“I owe you,” he said to Kelly before walking out the door and leaving him with all the food to put away. “I’ll be back in time to leave for the viewing.” The scolding Aunt Lois would subject him to for leaving was nothing compared to his need to escape the confines of the farmhouse.
Storm clouds that had been threatening all day broke the moment Trey left the cover of the porch. Their punishment for the beautiful weather of yesterday was an icy January rain, but he popped up his collar to protect his neck and trudged on, desperate to be anywhere else. As soon as he reached one of the fields, he knew this was his destination.
It looked like Max had spent the day repairing fences. At the edge of the fields was an eight-foot metal and chicken-wire fence with metal wires running along the top, tied with pink flags. Like Trey, the pink flags were hanging their heads to avoid the pounding rain. He could see where she had been making repairs. Some of the flags were brighter and less downtrodden than their brethren. Some of the wires were more taut, still eager to impress with their ability to stand sentry, and some of the wood less worn. It was a deer fence. He wondered if she ever electrified the top wire. Probably, he decided. Max and her electric-green gaze had a definite look-but-don’t-touch luminescence.
Like some Irish sprite who knew she was on his mind, Max suddenly appeared in the distance with Ashes fast on her heels. While he was soaked through, she had on a complete set of rain gear and was probably dry and cozy underneath it all. It was impossible to tell the drips pouring off Ashes from the raindrops, but Trey was fairly certain he saw a big, sloppy grin on the dog’s face, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
“How was the visitation?” she asked.
“Is the fence electrified?”
She slowly lowered her pale lashes over her eyes, but didn’t comment on his change of subject. “I had hoped to avoid it, but deer have already tested the fence and I don’t want them to think they can do it again.” When she moved, rain slid off her head in sheets, though she seemed not to notice. His father’s lady farmer was tough. “Would you like a tour while you’re out here?”
He looked out over the field that in just a few months would be awash in green. “No, but maybe you could email me a picture.”
“Sure.” Her slicker rustled with her shrug and more water poured off. “But there are also pictures on my website.” The farmer had a website. Of course. Every business had a website, and Max’s Vegetable Patch was as much a business as any other. She probably even had a Twitter account.
“You could come down and see it in the summer, if you’d like. You could stay with Kelly, or at the farmhouse—it has plenty of bedrooms.” She paused and he let his silence continue through the tattoo of the rain. He didn’t really want a conversation, hadn’t even wanted company until she’d come upon him. He didn’t want her to leave, but he didn’t want to talk, either.
“I’ll send you pictures throughout the growing season,” she finally said, filling the vast, dead emptiness of the fields. “Your father loved how the land changed during the growing season.”
“I probably won’t come down and visit.”
“Well, I won’t take it personally.” Her voice carried a smile he couldn’t see in her face. “The land might, though. After all these years, she’s finally producing and you won’t even come and admire her beauty.”
“She—” he rolled the female pronoun Max used around in his mouth, enjoying the feel “—shouldn’t take it personally, either.”
Even though his father was dead, Trey still didn’t want to be near anything the old man had touched. Henry William Harris Jr.’s touch was poisonous and the toxins lingered on the farm like gases too heavy for the wind to blow away. The miasma would outlast the stinky grime of cigarette smoke on the walls and the farmhouse would never really be clean. Not to him.
Max was talking again and Trey only caught the tail end of what she was saying, but he got the gist; Max would tell the land not to take it personally, either. “I have to clean up before the viewing,” she continued. “And you probably have to change clothes now.”
She didn’t wait for a response, just left him in the fields and the rain, without even granting him the protection of Ashes to bark at his bad memories and keep them at bay.
* * *
THIS WASN’T MAX’S first Southern funeral—she’d been to the funeral of her maternal grandfather over in High Point—so she knew the viewing meant Hank would be cleaned up from his heart attack and subsequent car accident and on display. As much as funerals played a role in the North Carolina gossip chain and anyone with a claim of kin or friendship on the deceased or the survivors’ side was expected to go, this couldn’t be Trey’s first funeral, either. But every time he looked over at the open casket, his eyes closed in a barely concealed grimace. No one should look so attractive while looking for an escape hatch.
Each person who expressed their condolences to Trey and Kelly probably didn’t notice Trey’s discomfort. But they probably weren’t pretending to talk farming with neighbors while really watching the grieving family like Max was.
“Maxine!” The voice of Lois Harris jolted Max out of her thoughts. “Did that mechanic Garner recommended work out for you?”
Max had given up asking Miss Lois to stop calling her Maxine. It wasn’t worth the wasted breath, plus Lois and Garner had been invaluable in providing local farming contacts. So Miss Lois could call Max whatever she wanted and Max would call her by the not-quite-formal-but-still-respectful name of Miss Lois, and they would both be happy.
“Yes, he’s been quite helpful.” The used tractor had seemed like such a deal when she’d bought it, but it turned out to be a piece of junk. Luckily, the Harris’s mechanic got it working at the end of last season and it appeared to be making it through the winter. Still, saving for a new tractor seemed smarter than trusting in the magic of the Harris’s mechanic, even if she now had three pots of savings money and keeping track of them strained her Excel spreadsheet. Asking to borrow a tractor last summer had been professionally embarrassing—and she had no desire to repeat the exercise.
“Now, don’t let him...”
Max stopped listening to Miss Lois warn her about the mechanic’s propensity to predict doom. Not only had she heard it before, but she was curious about the attractive brunette grabbing on to Trey’s hand with both hands and pressing it to her heart.
“That’s my second cousin.” Miss Lois leaned in to whisper to Max. “Never been to a funeral or wedding she didn’t cry at, bless her heart.” Sure enough, the young woman had both moved on to Kelly and been moved to tears. “The Roxboro Mangums always have a pool going on when she’ll burst into tears. She’s no blood relation to Trey, but she’s not your real competition.”
