“Sorry. I don’t have an interest anymore in tracking what they do.”
“We’re defaulting on the Wyoming land deal. Earl’s creditors are calling in all his debts. I think it’s what you planned, Billy Bob.”
“Earl stepped in his own shit, Peggy Jean.”
“I want to hire you as our attorney.”
“Nope.”
“I can pay. Earl has a half-million-dollar life insurance policy I can borrow on.”
I shook my head. “Let me give you some advice instead and it won’t cost you a nickel. If you’re poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you’re educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.
“That’s what will happen to Earl. He’ll become more and more desperate, and more and more people will take advantage of his situation. The ducks will nibble him to death and eventually he’ll come to Lourdes. If I were his attorney, I’d tell him to negotiate a plea now and try to avoid a capital conviction.”
She got up from the chair and gazed at my house, the barn and Beau in the lot and the windmill ginning and the fields that had been harvested and were marbled with shadows and the willows by the tank that were blowing in the wind.
She looked up at the red oak plank I had hung from the crossbeam over the driveway.
“Why did you name your place Heartwood?” she asked.
“It comes from a story my father told me when I was baptized. It has to do with the way certain kinds of trees grow outward from the center.”
I sat down in the folding chair and filled a jelly glass with Kool-Aid from a plastic pitcher. My hair was damp with perspiration and in the shade the wind felt cool against my skin.
She stood behind me and her shadow intersected mine on the grass. Then the sun went behind a cloud and our shadows grayed and disappeared. She stroked the hair on the back of my head, upward, as she might a child’s.
“Heartwood is a good name. Goodbye, Billy Bob,” she said.
Then she was gone. I never saw her again.
After Labor Day the weather turned dry and hot, and there were fires in the hills west of the hardpan, flecks of light you could see at night from the highway, like an indistinct red glimmering inside black glass. I tried not to think about the Deitrichs anymore, and instead to concentrate on my own life and the expectation and promise that each sunrise held for those who accepted the day for the gift it was.
Fletcher Grinnel had given up Earl Deitrich in front of a grand jury and Kippy Jo was off the hook for the shooting of the intruder, Bubba Grimes. She and Wilbur had gone to Wyoming to begin drilling on their property, even though she still maintained that Wilbur would bring in a duster.
Lucas was preparing to return to school at Texas A&M and was talking about Esmeralda joining him there. But Ronnie Cross found excuses to visit my house with regularity and to ask about Esmeralda, and she in turn had a way of dropping by when he was there. In those moments I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it’s no one’s fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child’s courage.
Temple Carrol and me?
She still said I lived with ghosts.
But even though I told myself each day I was through with the Deitrichs and the avarice and meretriciousness of the world they represented, I knew better. They were too much a part of us, the town, our history, the innocence and goodness we had perhaps created as a wishful reflection of ourselves in the form of Peggy Jean Murphy.
The Deitrichs came back into my life again with a phone call. In a way that would never allow me to extricate myself from them.
A call at midnight from Jessie Stump.
“I thought you’d left the area,” I said.
“I been sick,” he said.
“Go to a hospital.”
“Don’t need none. My daddy could heal bleeding and blow the fire out of a burn. He cured warts with molasses and a hairball from a cow’s stomach … I’m gonna send money to get Skyler’s casket moved to a church cemetery.”
“I have his personal effects from his rooming house. I’ll mail them to any address you want. Why don’t you honor his memory and start over again somewhere else?”
“I don’t need no personal effects. He give me his watch. The one his ancestor carried at the Alamo. I’m looking at it in the palm of my hand right now.”