I rubbed my eyes and steadied my head between my hands. The world was spinning again, and the ants at my feet weren’t helping my perspective any.
“Is there somebody else around here I can talk to?” My voice was pretty much gone, and all I could muster was a smoker’s whisper. “Amos, have you had your coffee this morning? Because I’m tired and I don’t quite remember how I got here, but I think you’re riding me. And if you’re riding me, that’s a pretty good sign that you have not had your coffee.”
Amos was really animated now. “I’ve been traipsing around this piece of dirt you two call home all morning. Thanks to you and your disappearing stunt, I ain’t had the pleasure of my morning cup of coffee. What is it with you Styleses and this piece of dirt? If you’re gonna choose someplace to catch up on a week with no sleep, you could have picked a better place than the middle of a cornfield. In the last hour I have ruined my pants, scuffed my boots, torn my shirt, and there is no telling how much pig crap I’ve got smeared on me right now. Why do you keep that old pig?”
“Who? Pinky?”
“Well, of course, Pinky. Who else makes all this stuff?” Amos pointed at his boots. “In all my life, I have never seen a pig crap the way she can. You ought to enter her in a contest. It’s everywhere. What do you feed that thing?”
“Amos . . . A-Amos.” I stuttered and shivered. “It’s got to be close to ninety, and I feel like crap. I’m itching everywhere, and I’ve got a headache. All I want to do is see my wife. Please, just help get me back to my house.”
Amos knew when to quit.
“Come on, D.S. Inside.” He picked me up and hooked his shoulder under mine. “Ivory, did I already tell you that you need a shower?”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time.”
We crashed through the corn and limped toward the house.
Pulling me along, Amos asked, “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Well,” I said, aiming my toes toward the porch, “I was sitting with Maggs when this suit from the hospital poked his pointy head through the door and asked me how I intend to pay my bills. He started to say something about how expensive it was to keep Maggie there. So I did what any husband would have done. I turned around and clocked the pointy-headed son of a—”
Amos held up his hands. “I get the picture.”
“I dragged him out in the hall, and Maggie’s nurses started looking him over. But to be honest, they didn’t seem real eager to start tending to him.” I glanced at the cut on the knuckle of my right hand. It was still puffy and stiff, so I guessed I had hit him pretty hard. “I don’t remember too much after that.”
Amos carried me a few more steps to the house. Without looking at me, he said, “An executive from the hospital named Jason Thentwhistle, with two loose teeth, a broken nose, new pair of glasses, and one very black and swollen eye, came to the station to file a complaint against one Dylan Styles. Said he wanted to press charges.”
Amos kept his eyes aimed on the back door, but a smile cracked his face. “I told him that I was really sorry to hear about his altercation, but without a witness we really couldn’t do anything.” He turned and held me up by my shoulders. “D.S., you can’t go around hitting the very people who are taking care of your wife.”
“But Amos, he wasn’t taking care of my wife. He was being an—”
Amos held up his hand again. “You gonna let me finish?”
“I should have hit him harder. I was trying to break his jaw.”
“I didn’t hear that.” Amos wrapped his arm tight about my waist, and we took a few more steps.
I stopped Amos and tried to look him in the eyes. “Amos, is Maggs okay?”
Amos shook his head side to side. “No real change. Physically, she seems to be healing. No more bleeding.”
“I’d drive myself, but I might have to push my truck to the station, so can you please just take me there without a bunch of conversation?” I asked again.
Amos dug his shoulder further under mine, dragged me closer to the back porch, and said, “After your interview.” He grunted and hoisted me up onto the steps.
“Interview?” I sat down on the back steps and scratched my head. “What interview?”
Catching his breath, Amos wiped his brow, straightened his shirt, gave his gun belt another two-handed law enforcement lift, and said, “Mr. Winter. Digger Junior College. If you can survive the interview, you’ll be teaching English 202: Research and Writing.”
It took a minute, but the word teaching finally registered. “Amos, what are you talking about? Speak English.”
“I am speaking English, Dr. Styles. And in about two hours, you’ll be speaking it with Mr. Winter about the class you’re going to teach.” He smiled and took off his sunglasses.
Amos only calls me doctor on rare occasions. I finished my doctorate a few years back, but because I quit teaching after graduate school, few knew it, and fewer still called me by the title. Although I was proud of my accomplishment, I had little reason to make sure everybody knew about it. My corn didn’t care what kind of education I’d had. It sure didn’t help me drive that tractor any straighter.
“One thing at a time,” I said, shaking my head. “Will you or will you not take me to see my wife?”
“D.S., have you been listening to me?” Amos raised his eyebrows and looked at me. “Dr. Dylan Styles Jr. is soon to be an adjunct professor at Digger Junior College, teaching English 202: Research and Writing. And”—Amos looked at his watch—“Mr. Winter is expecting you in his office in an hour and fifty-seven minutes.”
He unfolded a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Don’t fight me on this. They need a teacher, and for a lot of reasons, you need this.”
“Name one,” I said.
Amos wiped the sweat off his brow with a white handkerchief. “Taxes, to begin with. Followed by your loan payment. Both of which are coming due at the end of the month, and the chances of you actually producing anything but a loss on this piece of dirt are slim to none. Teaching is your insurance policy, and right now you need one.”
“Amos, I’ve got a job.” I waved my arms out in front of me. “Right here. Right out there. All of this is my job.” I pointed to the fields surrounding the house. “And how do you know when my taxes and loan payments are due?”
Amos dropped his head and pointed to the soil. “D.S., you and I grew up right here, playing ball on this field. You busted my lip right over there, and”—he pointed to his house—“two hundred yards across that field and over that dirt road is my house and my dirt. So I know about dirt. I don’t want to see you and Maggie lose it.” He spat. “Heck, I don’t want to lose it. So don’t fight me. Put your education to work, listen to what I’m saying, and get in the shower while you can still afford to pay for hot water.”
“How’s Maggie?” I asked again.
“She’ll live. She’s stable. At least physically. Mentally . . . I don’t know. That’s His call.” Amos’s eyes shot skyward.
“Amos,” I said, as the world came slowly into focus, “tell me about this whole teaching thing.”
During graduate school in Virginia, I had taught seven classes as an adjunct at two different universities to help us pay the bills, and, I hoped, secure myself a job when I got out. But after I defended my dissertation and graduated, nobody would hire me. I got a feeling it wasn’t my credentials as much as it was my background. A farm-boy-turned-teacher, at least this one anyway, was not something they wanted on their faculties.
Unable to get a job in the field that I had chosen, I hunkered down in the field that I owned. I was not my grandfather, Papa Styles, and nobody was knocking on my door, asking for advice, but for three years Maggie and I had been making ends meet out here in this dirt. Amos knew this. He also knew that having been snubbed once, I wasn’t too eager to go crawling back in there—especially at a community college as an adjunct. I had moved on.
“Digs, room one, English 202. You’ve tau
ght it before.”
“But Amos, why? Between what’s in the ground, what will be, the pine straw lease, and the two leased pastures, we’ll make it. My place is with Maggie, not nurse-maiding a bunch of dropouts who couldn’t get into a real school.”
“D.S., don’t make me look foolish. Not after I went to bat for you. And don’t thumb your nose at those kids. They’re not the only ones who couldn’t get into a ‘real school.’” Amos had a brutal way of being honest. He also had a real gentle way of making me eat my pride. “And this isn’t my doing. It’s Maggie’s.”
“Maggie’s?”
“She saw an ad in the paper that Digs was hiring adjuncts. So she called Mr. Winter a month or so ago and inquired about it. She was going to talk with you after the baby was born.”
“Yeah, well . . . ” I felt numb. “She didn’t get a chance.”
“And as for your tax records and loan payment, Shireen at the station pulled your file and ran a credit check for me. Which, by the way, is real good. I’m just trying to help you keep it that way.”
I shook my head and suppressed a wave of nausea. “Amos, if I could throw you in general quarters with all your law-abiding buddies . . . ”
“D.S, how long are you going to fight me on this? You know good and well that every one of my jailbird buddies deserves to be there. They know it too.”
Amos was right. He pegged it pretty square on the head. Everybody knew he was fair, even the folks he arrested. Amos was who you wanted to catch you if you ever broke the law. You’d get what you deserved, but he’d be fair about it. Amos enforced the law. He didn’t rub it in your face.
“Besides,” he whispered, “it’s Maggie’s wish.”
Somewhere in the last three days I had rolled in pig excrement. Now it was smeared on Amos’s hands and shirt. He brushed himself off, making it worse, paused, and then looked right at me.
“D.S., here I am. My uniform is now covered in pig crap, and I’ve got a radio, loaded gun, big stick, and this badge. If I could trade places with you, I would. But since I can’t, I’m here to ask you, please go inside, shower twice, shave, and get dressed. Because deep down, you know it’s best for you.” He scanned the cornfield. “It’s best for your wife, and it’s best for this place.”
Sometimes I wished Amos weren’t so honest.
“Who’s staying with her?” I asked.
“I was until a little bit ago. The nurse is now. She’s a sweet girl. Pastor’s daughter. She’ll take good care of her. D.S., there’s nothing you can do for Maggie. That’s God’s deal. I don’t understand it and I don’t like it, but there is nothing you or I can do for her. Right now what we need to worry about is you and making sure that the mailbox out front goes right on saying ‘Styles.’
“And for that to happen, you got to teach. This is what it comes down to. And don’t give me any of that stuff about not teaching again.” Amos pointed his finger at me and poked me in the chest. “You are a teacher. Why do you think God gave you Nanny to begin with? You think that was just some big cosmic mistake?” He spat again. “You think she just shared all that with you so you could keep it bottled up and to your lonesome?”
Amos put one foot up on the steps and rested his elbow on his knee. “Not likely. You may like farming, but you’re no Papa, at least not yet. You can hide out here if you want to, but it’d be a sorry shame. Now are you gonna get cleaned up, or do I have to hose you down myself?”
I opened the screen door and stumbled into the house, mumbling, “Dang you, Amos . . . ”
“Hey, I’m just honoring my promise to your wife. You married her. Not me. If you want to complain”—Amos pointed toward the hospital—“complain to her.”
“I would if I could get there.”
“After your little chat with Mr. Winter.” Amos smiled, grumbled something else to himself, and then walked to the kitchen and began washing out the percolator.
chapter four
I SUPPOSE YOU COULD CALL ME A LATE-LIFE MIRACLE. At least I’m told my parents thought so, because my dad was forty-two and my mom forty when she gave birth to me. I have sweet memories, but not many because Dad died in a car accident pretty close to my fifth birthday and Mom suffered a stroke strolling down the cereal aisle of the grocery store six months later.
My grandparents took me in after their daughter’s funeral and raised me until I turned eighteen and headed off to college. Despite the absence of my parents, love lived in our house. Papa and Nanny saw to that. They poured their love into three things: each other, me, and this house.
When my grandfather built our two-bedroom brick farmhouse more than sixty years ago, he pieced the floors out of twelve-inch-wide magnolia planks and dovetailed them together without using nails. They were strong, creaky, marred with an occasional deep groove, and in the den where my grandparents danced in their socks to the big band music of Lawrence Welk, polished to a mirror shine.
Papa covered the walls in eight-inch cypress plank, the ceilings in four-inch tongue-and-groove oak, and the roof in corrugated tin. I have no memory of the house ever being any other color but white with green trim and shutters. Why? Because that’s the way Nanny liked it, and Papa never objected.
One summer, standing on a ladder and painting the underside of a soffit for the umpteenth time, he looked down and said with a smile, “Never argue with a woman about her house. Remember that. It’s hers, not yours.” He waved his paintbrush toward the kitchen and whispered, “I may have built it, but in truth, we’re just lucky she lets us sleep here.”
Whenever I think of Nanny’s home, I remember it glistening white and green under a fresh coat of springtime paint, landscaped with whatever was blooming, and cool from the whispering breeze ushering through the front and back doors, which she propped open with two retired irons.
Papa had several eccentricities. The top three were overalls, pocketknives, and Rice Krispies. The first two fit most farmers, but the third did not. He’d pull a saucepan from the cupboard, fill it to the brim with cereal, cover it in peaches, douse it with half a pint of cream, and polish off an entire box in one sitting. Not surprisingly, the first few words I learned to read were snap, crackle, and pop.
Born poor country folk, Nanny and Papa didn’t make it too far in school. Born before the Depression and raised when a dollar was worth one, they were too busy working to pursue higher education. But please don’t think they were uneducated. Both were studious, just in a nonacademic way. Papa studied farming, and he was good at it. For the sixty years that he turned this earth, it stayed green more often than not. His reputation spread, and people drove for miles just to rub shoulders at the hardware store and ask his opinion in between the feed and seed.
While Papa plowed, Nanny cooked and sewed. And late at night, after she had untied her apron and hung it over the back screen door, she read. We owned a TV, but if given my choice, I preferred Nanny’s voice. After Walter Cronkite told us everything was all right with the world, Papa clicked the television off and Nanny opened her book.
After school, I’d spot Papa on the tractor, run across the back pasture, climb into his lap, and listen to him talk about the need for terraced drainage, the sight of early-morning sunshine, the smell of an afternoon rain, the taste of sweet corn, and Nanny. When our necks were caked in dust and burnt red from a low-hanging sun, Papa and I would lift our noses and follow the smell of Nanny’s cooking back to the house like two hounds on a scent.
One morning when I was about twelve, I was standing in the bathroom, getting ready for school, listening to a loud rock ‘n’ roll station hosted by an obnoxious DJ that all my friends listened to.
Papa walked in with a raised brow, turned down the volume, and said, “Son, I rarely tell you what to do, but today I am. You can listen to this”—he pointed to the radio, which, thanks to his tuning, was now spewing country music—“or this.” He turned the dial, and hymns from the local gospel station filled the air.
It was one of the best things m
y grandfather ever did for me. Listen to Willie singing “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” and you’ll understand what I mean. About the same time I was flipping through the three channels we received on our dusty Zenith and came across a show called The Dukes of Hazzard. I heard the same voices from the radio singing their theme song and put two and two together.
Before long, I planned my week by what I was doing at eight o’clock on Friday nights. Nanny and Papa watched with me because Dallas followed, and they had to know who had shot J.R. But from eight to nine, the TV was mine. I fell in love with Bo and Luke Duke and amused myself by mimicking everything they did. With Papa’s help I bought a guitar, learned to play “Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” and began wearing boots. All the time.
Papa worked hard six days a week, but like most Bible-Belters, never on Sundays. Sundays were reserved solely for the Lord, Nanny, and me. We’d spend the morning in church, then gorge ourselves on Nanny’s fried chicken or pork chops. After a lazy afternoon nap we would walk down to the river, where we would feed hooked earthworms to the bream or listen to the wood ducks sing through the air just after dark.
Papa was never real vocal about his faith, but for some reason, he loved putting up church steeples. In the fifteen years I lived with Nanny and Papa, I saw him organize twelve steeple-raising parties for nearby churches. Pastors from all around would call and ask his help, and as far as I know he never told one no. The denomination of the church mattered little, but the height of the steeple did. The taller, the better. The closest stands a mile from our house, atop Pastor John Lovett’s church—a rowdy AME where the sign out front reads, “Pentecost was not a onetime event.”
After attending my fourth or fifth raising, I asked him, “Papa, why steeples?”
He smiled, pulled out his pocketknife, began scraping it under each fingernail, and looked out over the pasture. “Some people need pointing in the right direction,” he said. “Myself included.”