The Mulberry Tree

“So where’d you learn to make all that—” He waved his hand in the general direction of the house.

“As a kid. My grandmother canned out of necessity, and I do it because I like to.”

He waited for her to say more, but when she didn’t, he sat there and watched her. He didn’t know her very well, but she seemed to be thinking hard about something. “Did Violet tell you something that upset you?”

Bailey sat back on her heels and wiped mud off her hands. “I guess I’ll have to get used to small-town ways again. So everyone knows that I went to see Violet Honeycutt?”

“I’m sure they do. But I take it you weren’t there to buy grass, although her stuff is good. The best I’ve ever—I mean, I’ve heard—” He gave her a crooked smile and filled his mouth with the last bite of the pudding.

Smiling, Bailey moved to another place, bent forward, and began planting again. “Did you know that a man hanged himself in my barn?”

“Yes,” Matt said softly. “It’s not going to spook you, is it?” And make you move away, he wanted to add but didn’t.

“No,” she said, “but I keep thinking about that poor, unhappy man. I know how he feels. He loved the soil and what it produces. But then to have it taken away from him . . . ” She paused. “Poor man.”

“Yeah, there’s been lots of tragedy in Calburn.”

“Oh, yes, I got an earful of your Calburn Six.”

“Golden Six,” Matt corrected automatically.

“There!” Bailey said, turning quickly to look at him. “There it is again.”

“What?” he asked. “There what is again?”

“That tone of voice. Have those boys been canonized? At the hairdresser’s—no, it’s the beauty parlor, I’ve been told—I thought Opal was going to accuse me of heresy for not knowing about the Golden Six. Were those boys that important?”

Matt almost said, To me they were, but he didn’t. “People in Calburn have become suspicious. They’re afraid of what outsiders will say about the town. That book, The Golden Six, hurt Calburn. It didn’t sell well, but it got some attention from the critics when it came out, and for a while Calburn had some tourists here asking questions.”

“It seems sad that anyone would write about such tragedy.”

“Yes and no,” he said. “I guess it depends on how you look at all of it. In Calburn, people tend to think that they were six magnificent young men, but their luck changed.”

“And the other side of it is?”

“That it was all a hoax made up by some imaginative boys. Whatever the truth, for a while, everything they touched seemed to turn to gold, but after graduation, it seems that their luck ran out. Or maybe their luck was attached to Calburn.”

“But I thought they all lived here.”

“Some did; some went away. But they were all in Calburn in the summer of 1968 when Frank killed his wife and then himself.”

“Do people know why he did such a thing?”

“More or less. He’d been in a car wreck four years before and lost the use of his right arm. For about three years afterward, he was out of work, but finally he got a job as a night security guard and seemed to be doing all right, but . . . ”

“Violet said his wife was pregnant.”

“Yes. The autopsy showed that she was. Everyone guessed from that that maybe it wasn’t Frank’s child. He was a proud man, so maybe he didn’t want the humiliation.”

“So he shot her, then himself.”

He didn’t answer her redundant question. Instead, he looked at her. “Why are you so interested?”

“I’m not. I mean, that sounds callous, but I wasn’t interested in them at all. Actually, I was asking Violet about this farm, about who owned it, that sort of thing. Opal sent me to Violet, and I was told about the Golden Six.”

“Opal hates Violet. She wouldn’t have sent you to her,” he said.

“Right. Sorry. Her daughter Carla told me. Or rather wrote me a note. Why does Opal hate Violet?”