“I have no idea who or what they are.”
“Six boys, graduated from high school in 1953. They are Calburn’s only claim to fame. But then some jealous little nobody decided to make up stories about them, and everything fell apart.” There was bitterness in Violet’s voice.
Bailey knew that Jimmie hadn’t been born until 1959, so he couldn’t have been one of the so-called Golden Six. “I’m interested in later than that.” She put a black-bottomed aluminum pan full of water on to boil so she could dip the tomatoes in it to peel them.
“In ’sixty-eight, one of the six boys shot his wife, then himself. That about the right date for you?”
There was 1968 again, she thought. But Jimmie was too young then to have been involved in something like that. “I’m really more interested in the people connected to my farm.”
“Truthfully, I don’t know anything about your place, but I know a girl that used to live in Calburn. Hand me that phone, and I’ll see if she’s home. Except that it’s a long-distance call.” She looked at Bailey expectantly.
“I’ll pay for it,” Bailey said as she wiped her hands on a towel and went to get the telephone. It was a black rotary dial telephone that Bailey was tempted to say should be in a museum.
Violet dialed, listened, then said, “Hey, babe! It’s Honeycutt. I got a new resident of wild and woolly Calburn here, and she wants to know the history of the old Hanley place. Didn’t somethin’ happen there? I seem to remember somebody sayin’ somethin’ one time. Give me a call. We’ll be here awhile, as she’s puttin’ up my tomatoes for me.”
She put down the receiver. “She’ll call me back when she gets in, and if there’s anything to know, she’ll know it.”
After that statement, Violet didn’t say anything for so long that Bailey realized that she was planning to sit there and do nothing but smoke her joint while Bailey put up what looked to be about twenty quarts of tomatoes. And if the woman hadn’t called back by the time she’d finished, Bailey was willing to bet that there were green beans and strawberries to be canned as well.
“All right,” Bailey said with a sigh, “tell me about the Golden Six.” She’d grown up in a small town, so she well knew that each and every town had some great tragedy attached to it, and the residents loved to tell the story over and over. Maybe she should be glad that Jimmie hadn’t left her a farm in Fall River, Massachusetts. If he had, she’d never find anyone who could get past Lizzie Borden.
Violet took a long, deep drag on her joint and let it out as slowly as she could. Since she’d obviously had a lot of experience in this, Bailey had time to peel six tomatoes while she was waiting. “It’s hard to believe this now, but years ago, Calburn was a thriving little town. It had a couple of industries, lots of shops, and it even had its own high school. But in 1952 the high school caught on fire, and the top floor burned out. The fire department said the bottom three floors were safe, but the top couldn’t be used. Since the top floor was where the seniors had their classes, the whole class had to be bused off to somewhere else.”
Behind her, Bailey looked at the woman. From the rote, practiced way she was telling this story, Bailey was sure she’d told it hundreds of times.
Violet paused to take another long, slow drag. “This was all way before my time, of course, but I’ve been told that there was a lot a hoopla over where the seniors would be sent. No school within fifty miles wanted all of them, so the kids were divided up and sent to four different schools in the area. But whoever did the dividing did a poor job of it, because of the twenty kids sent to Wells Creek High School, only six of them were boys and the rest girls.”
“The Golden Six,” Bailey said as she walked to the stove and began to remove hot, sterile jars.
“Yeah, the Golden Six.”
Bailey didn’t know if it was memory or the marijuana, but Violet’s eyes had a dreamy, faraway look to them. “They were golden, all right. They were magnificent boys. Less than a month after they got to the high school, they saved the whole student body from being blown up by a bomb.”
“In this area? In the fifties?”
“Honey, don’t let the accents fool you. People here in Virginia love and hate just like the rest of the world—and they always have. Now we just hear about what goes on in the world more. That summer someone had blown up two warehouses near Calburn, so everyone was a bit nervous. Then, one Monday morning, black smoke started pouring through the high school, and the kids and teachers all panicked. It was chaos! Who knows what would have happened if the six boys from Calburn hadn’t stepped in and quietly and calmly ushered everyone to safety? That the bomb turned out to be a dud doesn’t have anything to do with it. Those boys didn’t know that, and neither did anybody else!” There was anger in her voice, as well as defiance, as though she were having to defend what she was saying.
When Violet looked up and saw Bailey staring at her, she said defensively, “You can read any newspaper in Virginia from the next day, and you’ll see the story of those boys. They were heroes. For a while there was talk of their bein’ given a medal by the president, but nothin’ came of it.”
“So why was Opal at the beauty salon so angry?”
“Parlor,” Violet said, smiling. “It’s a beauty parlor. You already look like a foreigner, but you don’t have to sound like one.”
Bailey started packing tomatoes into the sterile jars. Since modern tomatoes have a low acid content, they had to be handled carefully, so she’d have to leave them in the water bath a long time to remove all danger of botulism.
“Opal’s just like the rest of us. She’s mad about T. L. Spangler. Ever hear of her?”
“I don’t think so. Should I have?”
“Unless you’ve been livin’ out of the country for the last five years, yes, you should know her name.”
Bailey didn’t comment on that statement. As a matter of fact, she’d been living all over the world for the last sixteen years.
“Does Congresswoman Theresa Spangler ring any bells?”
“Actually, no.”
“Where have you—” Violet cut herself off. “Okay, no questions about you. But I warn you that the people of Calburn will find out everything, so you might as well confess now.” She left a bit of time for Bailey to speak, but when she was silent, Violet gave a sigh, then continued.