Annie stares at the empty space where Caroline had been standing. She’s playing it over in her mind, wondering if she heard Caroline correctly and yet knowing she did. As evil as everyone says you are.
A half block away, he’s still there, working a shovel into a mound of dirt at the side of the road. Ellis Baine. He’s the reason Mama didn’t return Annie’s wave and the reason she didn’t hear what Caroline said. Because of all the rain, the dirt he is working in has turned to mud. Even big as he is, he’s still slow with each shovelful he dumps as he refills the hole that’s been dug over his brother’s grave. Annie walks around the end of the car and starts down the street toward Ellis Baine.
TWICE IN THE past few weeks, as Daddy’s been sleeping on the sofa and not kissing Mama in the mornings or rubbing his stubble on the underside of her chin, Annie has seen Ellis Baine working up at his place. One of those days, she stood in the barn door, watching as he yanked out the wooden stakes meant to prop up his mama’s tomatoes and tossed them in a wheelbarrow. The thing Ellis Baine didn’t know as he yanked out those stakes was that Daddy hammered most of them into the ground. Even though Mrs. Baine showed up all too often, yelling for Mama to come out, which led Grandma to insist on fetching the sheriff, Daddy’s been the one seeing to Mrs. Baine all these years. When Ellis took a break that day after uprooting all those old plants, he stood and pulled the hat from his head. Annie waved, and he waved back.
Annie’s halfway to that hole and to Ellis Baine before the car door opens and Mama calls out to her.
“Annie,” Mama says. “Where you going? We have to get home.”
There’s the whine the handle makes on the passenger window, Caroline rolling down her window to see what Annie’s up to.
“You need help?” Annie says, stopping a dozen steps away.
Ellis Baine straightens and jams his shovel in the pile of mud. “The Holleran girl, yes?”
Annie nods, takes another few steps.
When Annie was younger-and truth be told, she does it still-she would lie awake listening to the distant thunder that started up after sunset. She’d imagined that thunder rolling in over the hills, dipping and rising as it hugged the ground, creeping ever closer. And then the rain would start and she would flex her toes and pull her blankets up around her shoulders and imagine those boys crawling out their windows and dragging their shovels to town. One day there would be enough of those boys. The ground would be soft enough, and they would dig deep enough, and Joseph Carl would claw his way out.
“Annie, honey.” It’s Mama again. “We need to get going.”
She’s climbed out of the car and is standing on the far side, both hands resting on the roof. She’ll be getting the front of her blouse and skirt dirty. Daddy will wonder what happened, and what will she tell him?
“You got a shovel?” Ellis says.
“No, sir.”
“Sir?” he says, yanking off his hat, pulling a kerchief from his back pocket, and wiping it over his head. His dark hair, streaked with gray at his temples, is slicked back and smooth. His jaw is nearly black for having not seen a razor in a few days, and his shirt hangs open, showing a yellow undershirt beneath. “Long damn time since anyone called me sir.”
Annie imagines him ducking as he emerges from one of the mines farther back in the hills. His throat must be gravel on the inside, and with his shirt hanging open, she can see the dark patches along his neck and up his forearms where he never can scrub himself clean.
“Thought I should help,” Annie says, another step closer. Everyone and everything is pushing her this way, toward giving in to and accepting what’s behind supper on the table. It’s something not so pleasing but true just the same. Maybe she’s not as evil as Aunt Juna, not yet, but she’s something altogether different from girls like Caroline and Lizzy Morris.
“And why is it that you think you should be helping?” Ellis Baine’s eyes look past Annie to Mama still standing at the car.
“I know he’s my daddy,” she says, nodding off toward the hole in the ground. “My real daddy.”
Ellis grabs hold of the shovel’s handle, pumps it back and forth to loosen it from the mud. “Sure are your mother’s daughter,” he says.
“I am not,” Annie says. “I ain’t nothing like Juna Crowley.”
Ellis jams the shovel in the mud, lifts it, and dumps another load in the hole.
“Ain’t talking about Juna,” he says. “Talking about your mama.” And he looks off down the road where Mama is standing, watching. “Kindness. You get it from your mama.”
“Can I help then?”
He continues to work his shovel into the mud and fill the hole. Annie glances behind to see Mama has moved to the back of the car.
“Can I?” she says again.
Ellis stops, leans on the shovel. “This man ain’t your father.”
“He is.”
“No, darling, he ain’t. Sorry to say I don’t know who is. Thought it might have even been me, but there’s no Baine in you. Too pretty to be a Baine. Sorry, but that ain’t your daddy down there.”
“Annie,” Mama calls out. “Your father will be wondering.”
Annie backs away as Ellis Baine starts digging and tossing again. He said it so easily: He’s not her daddy, and neither is Joseph Carl. Ever since seeing Ellis Baine there on her porch, and him looking into her black eyes with such ease, she’d almost been hoping it would be him. Ellis Baine isn’t better than many, but he’s better than Joseph Carl. He’s a good enough fellow to say Annie isn’t the daughter of the man lying under that hole. She’d have thought there would be some peace in knowing the truth, but it only makes her sorry for asking, like she’s being ungrateful for the daddy she has.
“You kill my Aunt Juna?”
The words come spilling out before she can think about rudeness and presumption and all the other rules of fine manners Mama has tried to impart.
This makes Ellis Baine laugh out loud. “Done a few things with your Aunt Juna, but killing her ain’t one of them.”
“Some other Baine do it?”
He shakes his head.
“You were up there that night,” Annie says. “It was you.”
“Was me.”
“Looking for Aunt Juna?”
He twists up his mouth in that way a person does when they don’t know the answer to something. “I suppose if you’re asking me did I kill her,” he says, kicking the mud off his shovel, “that means you ain’t seen her lately.”
“Never seen her.”
His eyes widen, and he nods. “That so?”
“That’s so,” Annie says.
“But you think she’s back?” He jams the clean shovel in the ground and leans on it. He’s heard the rumors like everyone else. “Why is that?”
“Don’t matter,” Annie says, too embarrassed to tell him about the know-how and the rocker and the sizzle in the air. She also doesn’t want to tell him she found Juna’s cigarettes the same time she found his dead mama.
“Good enough,” he says, lifting a hand to Mama and giving her a friendly nod. “Guess you’d better get on. But tell me something first.” He reaches in his front pocket and pulls out a deck of cards tied off with a red rubber band. He tosses them to Annie. “These belong to you?”
Using both hands, Annie snatches them from the air. It’s the faded red deck with sailboats drawn on the back of each card. “No, sir, but you took them from our kitchen.”
“Yep,” he says. “You know where they come from?”
Annie stares down on them. “The store?”
He shakes his head. “You find out where those come from, will you? Maybe tell me next time we run into each other.”
“When’ll that be?”
“Not sure,” he says, giving Annie another wave to get on. “But I’m supposing it’ll be soon enough.”