Rain was falling hard in long windblown sheets that almost obscured the pond as it lashed at my windows. I went around making a final check and had just latched the last window when the phone rang.
“Your people are here,” said Daddy. “Why ain’t you?”
“On my way,” I told him and dashed out into the rain with my duffle bag crammed with enough clothes and toiletries to last a week.
CHAPTER | 16
Here are all the terrible phenomena of the West Indian hurricane—the tremendous wind, the thrashing sea, the lightning, the bellowing thunder, and the drowning rain that seems to be dashed from mighty tanks with the force of Titans.
We spent the next hour settling in. Since the quickest way to get people past their initial awkwardness is to give them something to do, Maidie and I soon had Lashanda and Stan racing up and down the stairs, bringing down pillows, quilts and blankets. Here at the homeplace, kitchen and den flow into each other and Daddy and Cletus sat at the kitchen table to keep from getting run over.
There were enough bedrooms in this old house for everyone to have a choice, but who ever heard of going off to separate rooms during a hurricane party?
The den couch opens into a bed that I claimed for Cyl and me, and there were a couple of recliner chairs as well. We made thick pallets for the children right on the area rugs that dot the worn linoleum floor.
Both Blue and Ladybelle had been turned in and Ladybelle immediately went over and started pushing at Lashanda’s hand with her head.
“She wants you to scratch behind her ears,” Daddy told her.
Half-apprehensively—the hound was almost as tall as she was—Lashanda reached out and scratched. Ladybelle gave a sigh of pure pleasure and sank down at the little girl’s feet.
Daddy’s television was tuned to the weather channel and Stan sat on the floor in front of it, entranced by the colored graphics that covered the screen.
“So that’s what he looks like,” he murmured when a black forecaster started explaining for the umpteenth time how the Saffir-Simpson scale rated hurricanes. “I wondered.”
“You don’t have cable?” Cyl asked, stuffing pillows into cotton pillowcases that Maidie had ironed to crisp perfection.
“We don’t have television at all,” said Lashanda, abandoning Ladybelle so that she could help Cyl.
Stan looked embarrassed. “Mama doesn’t believe in it. But I can pick up this channel on my shortwave. That’s how I know that guy’s voice.”
I wasn’t as shocked as some people might be. Like a lot of members in her fundamentalist church, my sister-in-law Nadine doesn’t, quote, believe in television either, but Herman’s overruled her on that from the beginning. And as soon as cable came to Dobbs, he signed up for it. Now that the population’s getting dense enough to make it economically feasible, cable’s finally reached our end of the county, too, but Daddy and the boys have had satellite dishes for years.
All the same, even though I could understand where Clara Freeman was coming from—especially after meeting her father—it did make me wonder how much slack she cut her children.
Or her husband.
“They’s crayons in the children’s drawer,” Maidie reminded me on one of her trips through the den, when she realized Stan was trying to copy some of the color graphics of the storm.
The television sat atop an enormous old turn-of-the-century sideboard. Mother had turned the bottom drawer into a catchall for games and toys as soon as the first grandchild was born. And yes, it was now being used for great-grandchildren, so it still held a big Tupperware bowl full of broken crayons of all colors. Some of them had probably been there since Reese was a baby. Stan seized upon them and one of his blank weather maps soon sported an amorphous gray storm with a dark red blotch in the center.
All this time, the house had been filling with delicious aromas. For Maidie, picnics and parties always mean fried chicken and she had the meaty parts of at least four chickens bubbling away in three large black iron frying pans. There was a bowl of potato salad in the refrigerator, a big pot of newly picked butter beans on the spare burner, and Maidie set Cletus to slicing a half-dozen fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes while she got out her bread tray.
“You’ve already cooked enough for an army,” I said as Cyl and Lashanda and I set the table. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make biscuits, too?”
“Well, you know how Reese eats.” She was already mixing shortening into a mound of self-rising flour. “And that Stan looks like he could stand some fattening.”
Lashanda giggled, her little blue barrettes jiggling with each movement. “And you know what? Mama says he eats like he’s got a tapeworm.”
I had to smile, too. You don’t grow up in a houseful of adolescent boys without hearing that phrase a time or twenty.
Following his nose, Reese blew in through the back door a few minutes later, carrying a full ice chest as if it weighed no more than a five-pound bag of sugar. Like his father Herman, Reese is also a twin, but he’s built like all the other Knott men: six feet tall, sandy brown hair, clear blue eyes. No movie stars in the whole lot, but no trouble getting women either.
“Something sure smells fit to eat in this house,” he said, buttering Maidie before he was even through the door good.
He spotted Cyl and Lashanda, did a double take and then squatted down so he’d be level with the child. “Well, well, well! Who’s this pretty little thing we got here?”
His words were for Lashanda, but his eyes were all over Cyl, who had changed into the jeans and T-shirt I’d brought her. Both were a trifle snug on me, but she had room to spare in all the right places.
“Behave yourself, Reese,” I scolded and introduced him to our guests.
“Oh, yeah, Uncle Robert told me about Miz Freeman. I’m real sorry.” He straightened up and looked at Cyl and me. “If y’all’ll give me your keys, I’ll go move your cars.”
“Why?” I asked. “We’re not blocking you, are we?”
“No, but they’re right under those big oaks and the way this wind’s blowing, you might be better off out in the open.”
We immediately handed them over. By the time he came back, soaked to the skin, we were putting the food on the table. He quickly changed into some of Daddy’s clothes and put his own in the dryer.
Daddy likes to pray about as much as he likes talking on the telephone, but with Maidie and the children sitting there with bowed heads, the rest of us followed their example and he offered up his usual, “For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make us truly thankful. Amen.”
“Amen,” we said and passed the bowls and platters.
The biscuits were hot and flaky. The chicken was crisp on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside—ambrosia from the southern part of heaven.
Stan was a little more polite about it than Reese, but both ate as if it was their first meal in three days.
“Did you know that Edwards woman that got killed in Cotton Grove last night?” Reese asked Maidie as he spooned a third helping of potato salad onto his plate.
I was sitting next to him and I gave his thigh a sharp nudge.
“Let’s don’t talk about that right now,” I said warningly.
Luckily, Lashanda had been distracted by Ladybelle, who knows better than to beg food from any of us, but couldn’t be prevented from sitting near any newcomer in the hope that she might not know the rules. Stan had heard though, and his eyes widened. He turned to Cyl, who sat on the other side of him, and she nodded gravely.
Suddenly he didn’t seem to be hungry any more and when he asked to be excused so he could go check on what Fran was doing, Cyl went with him.
Reese and Maidie picked up that something was going on and they kept Lashanda laughing and talking and plied with honey for her biscuit till Cyl came back to the table.