Annie recognizes Ellis from pictures she’s seen over the years. The Baine brothers are almost as much a legend as Aunt Juna. Ellis Baine especially, because he was the first one chased away by his own mama. Every five years since the year Joseph Carl Baine was hanged, newspaper people show up in town and start asking questions. While they couldn’t have known it in 1936, they know it now: Joseph Carl Baine was the last man publicly hanged in all of the United States of America, and history will always make that a fact worth revisiting. Those reporters want to meet a Baine brother, and a few have even knocked on the Baines’ door. In the early days, before the last brother was gone, those reporters who braved such a knock found themselves staring into the end of a shotgun.
In addition to tracking down Baines and visiting the crossroad where Joseph Carl is buried, those reporters come knocking on the Hollerans’ door too. Whenever a year rolls around that ends in a one or a six, Daddy will ready himself. For some reason, newspapers mark time in blocks of five years and ten years. The reporters ask after Juna Crowley, and is this the right house? Has she ever returned? Does she ever write? And is this the child? Usually Daddy has chased them off before they get a glimpse of Annie and can ask that last question.
Even now, every five years, those newspapers come, once from as far away as New York City. They write about the female sheriff and the appetite of a small town to witness a man hang. Some say the stories those reporters write are filled with lies. Folks were there. They know the truth. Doesn’t much matter what folks here might know when the folks reading those made-up stories are all the way up in New York City or Dayton, Ohio, or Washington, DC.
Those reporters still come even though the last Baine brother left years ago. The folks in town do their best to make life unpleasant for those reporters. Not a single room will be for rent in all the county. The café will close its empty tables when one of them walks through the door. And not one person will have one thing to say about the Crowleys or the Baines.
“Afternoon, John,” Ellis Baine says to Daddy.
Trailing everyone else by a full minute, the sheriff finally makes his way inside, wiping his face with that same limp kerchief as he steps into the kitchen. Jacob holds open the door for him and takes the sheriff’s hat and Daddy’s too, which the sheriff must have picked up on his way toward the house. Sweat stains have grown out from under the sheriff’s arms, and a button on his shirt has popped open or maybe popped off entirely, exposing his white undershirt.
“Didn’t waste no time, did you, Ellis?” the sheriff says, pulling out a chair and dropping down on it. “Marrying a cook as fine as my Bethany is a blessing and a curse,” he says, patting his large stomach. “Annie, you here?” He turns in his seat, his stomach sagging to his lap.
“Yes, sir,” Annie says, sliding a step to the right so the sheriff can see her standing behind Daddy.
The sheriff begins at the top of his shirt, and one by one, struggling with his thick fingers, unhooks each button. “Come on over here, girl,” he says.
Annie steps up to his chair, places both hands on the sheriff’s collar, all the while keeping her eyes on Ellis Baine, though she isn’t certain why. Grandma would say the know-how is the thing that causes Annie’s breath to quicken, her mouth to go dry, her fingertips to turn numb.
As she stands behind the sheriff, helping him off with his shirt, Ellis Baine studies her. The man’s eyes don’t settle on one piece of Annie. Instead they scan all parts of her, settling here and there as if looking for something special. He’s looking at the size of her hands, the thickness of her hair, the curve of her shoulders. Once the sheriff has managed to pull his arms free, he reaches in one pocket and hands a small white button to Annie.
“Think you can take a needle to this for me?” he says, his stomach stretching the white undershirt he is left wearing. Then he gives Daddy a wave to have a seat. When Daddy makes no move to join him, the sheriff scoots the chair out from under the table with the tip of his boot. “Go on and have a seat. We’ve quite a bit to catch up on after all these years.”
Daddy sits, but not in the chair next to the sheriff. Instead he pulls out the one Mama usually sits in and positions himself directly across from Ellis Baine.
“How is it you see fit to find yourself in my house?” Daddy says.
“Not here to cause no trouble.”
In every picture Annie has ever seen that showed the Baine family, Ellis and Joseph Carl were always the easiest to pick out. Joseph Carl was fair-haired with pale eyes. He was narrow through the shoulders and the shortest of the bunch. The other brothers wore long beards, wide and bushy clumps of hair that drew down to a scrawny point at their end. All of them except Ellis. He was always clean-shaven, or somewhere close to it. The legend goes that Ellis was the brother the ladies liked best, and so he kept himself fine and clean for them. Others, mostly the older men in town, said any decent man would wear a beard, and if he didn’t, it was only proof he wasn’t man enough to grow one.
“Didn’t ask if you was here to cause trouble. Asked why you think you’d be welcome?”
“Never said I figured on being welcome.” Ellis doesn’t look at Daddy as he speaks but instead stares into his coffee cup.
From her spot at the sink, Grandma lets out a grunt. It’s the same grunt she lets out when Abraham Pace says his fiancée doesn’t like him having so much salt or more than one dessert or a third sip of whiskey.
“You been up to the house?” Sheriff Fulkerson asks, shooing Annie away to get busy stitching that button.
“Sure have.”
“You just get in today?” the sheriff asks.
Ellis Baine nods. He’s come home again, and so maybe he’s the one the rocker foretold. But as he nods his head yet again to tell the sheriff he only just today arrived, Annie knows he wasn’t the one who left those cigarettes.
“And you thought to come here next?” Daddy says, even though the sheriff keeps holding up a hand to quiet him.
“You want I should see him back home?”
Everyone turns toward Jacob when he says this. He takes a step forward and asks again.
“Want I should see Mr. Baine home?”
“No, thank you, Jacob. Why don’t you go on outside and make sure we don’t have no more Baine brothers paying a visit.”
“Ain’t no one else coming,” Ellis says.
The sheriff jabs a thumb toward the back door. Jacob pulls on his hat and, without another word, walks outside.
“So you know about your mama?” the sheriff says once Jacob’s footsteps have crossed the porch and the kitchen is quiet again.
Ellis nods. “Not why I’m here though.”
“Then why are you here?” Daddy pushes away from the table, the chair’s legs squealing across Grandma’s freshly mopped and waxed floor.
The sheriff gives Annie the same thumb jab he gave Jacob, but Ellis Baine is staring at her again and she can’t make her legs move.
“Here to see her,” Ellis says, tipping his head in Annie’s direction. “Here to see the girl.”
11
DALE WAS SWEET. That’s the first thing Juna says when Daddy and I and Sheriff Irlene sit with her at the kitchen table. Daddy sucks on a cigar, little more than a stub. He blows his smoke in our faces. Simply put, Dale was sweet. Though he looked just like Daddy, even given the baby fat that hadn’t yet burned away, he had none of Daddy’s meanness. Juna says these things like Sheriff Irlene never met the boy. She says these things like Dale is already gone. Gone for good.