Annie, a scant one year older than Caroline, is fair with the oddest black eyes, and every time she starts to soften up, to fill out here and there, she grows another two inches and turns hard and lean again. Juna had those black eyes and same slender frame. Cut close to the bone, Grandma may well have said. Like mother, like daughter. Grandma is all the time saying things she ought not say. Mama would have shushed her the way she’s always shushing Annie. But Annie wasn’t too young, and somewhere along the way, sometime during her fifteen and a half years, Annie soaked it up. Aunt Juna isn’t an aunt at all.
Out in the kitchen, the screen door swings open and slaps closed. Two sets of heavy footsteps cross the floor. It’ll be Daddy and Abraham Pace, and they’ll be taking off their boots before setting foot on Grandma’s kitchen floor. Nothing rankles Grandma quicker than someone leaving footprints on her kitchen floor.
“It was Cora Baine,” Daddy says.
Standing next to Abraham, Daddy doesn’t look so tall. His dark hair is matted on top from the hat he would have been wearing. If Daddy is wearing boots on his feet, he’s wearing a hat on his head. His hair has a way of bunching up on him, particularly when the air is heavy and damp, and Mama is all the time smoothing it down for him. His jaw, where his beard has filled in since yesterday morning, is a darker shade than the rest of his face, and the whites of his eyes shine against his brown skin.
“Sheriff loaded her up,” Daddy says.
Except for the creaking and whining of the rocking chair, the living room is quiet. The last Baine is gone. Twenty years ago, there was a litter of them living up at that house. Cora and her seven sons. All those brothers were big men, or so folks say, tall stock with ragged beards and ragged clothes. Each of them, except Joseph Carl, was chased out of Hayden County by his own mama. How bad must a son be to get himself chased off by his own mama? Folks also figure most of those boys are dead by now. They all had a taste for whiskey, and whiskey lovers are dealt less years than the rest of us. That’s what Mama says to Daddy over toast and coffee on those mornings he wakes suffering the aftermath of too much whiskey. The only Baine left in the county is Joseph Carl, and he’s six feet under, sent there by Aunt Juna, and the both of them are legends for her having done it.
Aunt Juna isn’t the good kind of legend, but the kind that has wrapped itself around the Holleran family and hung there for almost twenty years. Annie has never met a single one of those Baine brothers or Aunt Juna, knows them only through pictures. They never smiled, not Aunt Juna and not those boys. Grandma says folks didn’t have much to smile about in those days.
“What happened to her, Daddy?” Annie says, taking another step toward that rocker and wishing Grandma would stop, for the love of the good Lord above, rocking that rocker. “How did she die?”
Abraham Pace will tell anyone he meets that he is the largest man in Hayden County. Not that he is fat, but he is tall and thick and broad. His fingers are so wide, his knuckles so big, he can barely wrap them around another man’s hand to shake it. His chin is as square as the end of a table leg, and he has a wide-set jawbone. But the thing about Abraham Pace that makes him hardest to look at is the bulging brow that hangs over his brown eyes. When he was younger, he would tell people, he had the reddest hair too, though it isn’t so red anymore.
“Not certain,” Abraham says, resting a hand on Daddy’s shoulder. “Sad damn sight, that’s for sure. Sheriff calling in someone from the state. Let them have a look at her.”
“What does this mean?” Caroline says, still sitting with a straight back, her hands resting in her lap.
Like every other girl after she has looked down into the well and seen the face of her intended, Caroline is all the sudden acting like she’s a grown woman. It’s in the tone of her voice and her posture. Both of them so altogether proper. But in truth, Caroline’s been proper for most of her life, so maybe it has nothing to do with intendeds and wells and first kisses. Annie’s voice is the same as it was yesterday. She has no desire to tie on an apron or brush her hair, and because Mama is frowning at Annie and poking her thumb toward the ceiling, Annie is certain her posture is no better either.
“Are they all gone?” Caroline says. “Will someone new move into the house? What does it mean?”
“It means nothing,” Mama says. “Means nothing to us. The town will see to it she’s buried. She was an old woman, and it’s a sad day. That’s all that needs said.”
“But it does mean something, Mama,” Annie says, straining to hold her shoulders back and studying that rocker.
“The child is right,” Grandma says, tapping the side of her head with one finger. “Should have been listening to her all along.”
“There’s no more Baines,” Annie says before Mama can scold Grandma again. “No more anywhere. We won’t never meet up with one of them in town, and Mrs. Baine won’t come here ever again. No more Baines, ever.”
ONCE A YEAR or so it happens. Usually on a Friday or Saturday night. That’s the night folks partake, Daddy would say when trying to explain. Don’t try to make sense of a person partaking. Mrs. Baine would usually walk because her truck never ran so well. She would holler from the drive for Mama to come on out. Mama would send Annie and Caroline to their bedroom and tell them to close the door and stay put until called to come out again.
When they were young, the girls would do as told. They would close the door and then the windows and sit side by side on the edge of Annie’s bed. Caroline would cry because even though they couldn’t make out who was saying what through the closed windows, they could make out the hollering and screaming and most certainly they could make out Daddy’s voice. He didn’t start out yelling, but by the end, by the time Sheriff Fulkerson pulled up the drive, loaded up Mrs. Baine, and drove her home, Daddy would be yelling. As they sat on the bed, Annie and Caroline would hold hands, their feet dangling, not quite touching the floor, and they’d not move until Mama tapped on the door and invited them to come on out again.
As the girls grew older, they still did as they were told, but Annie stopped closing the front window and if it was already closed, she would open it. Even when Caroline begged her not to, Annie would unhitch the latch and slide the window up at least a few inches because just as she had soaked up Aunt Juna being her real mother somewhere along the way, she had also soaked up that Mrs. Baine came to the house yelling and crying and carrying on because she wanted to see Annie. Not only was Aunt Juna Annie’s mama, Joseph Carl Baine was her daddy, and that’s largely the reason he took his last breath while hanging from the end of a rope.
“No more Baines in Hayden County, Mama,” Annie says. She is almost close enough to Grandma’s rocker to reach out and touch it. “No more. No more crossing the road or skipping church. Mrs. Baine won’t come no more and yell at you, Mama. No more Baines.”