The Weed Patch
Tammy Wilson
Part II
1943 arrived with farmers stretched to exhaustion, trying in vain to keep up with so few young men available. The extra burden was wearing on Dad. At fifty-six, he should have been slowing down some, but the pressure to keep up with wartime demands had him doing the work of three men. At Agnes’s suggestion, Mama helped the Red Cross when she could while Winnie and I took part in scrap drive competitions.
“How about we dismantle Baldwin’s machine shed?” Winnie suggested. “That would put us over the top.”
“And he’d blow his,” I said.
Shortages didn’t hit us as hard as it did folks in town. Rose, however, remained flamboyant when it came to maintaining normalcy. In August she threw a party for “Mr. Keefe’s” birthday. Despite rationing, she fixed three meats except turkey, a dozen salads—including red, green and yellow Jell-O, potato salad, glorified rice and a spaghetti-tomato salad she’d learned about in New Orleans. She had also baked pies with Bing cherries, gooseberries, peaches and key lime juice from Key West. She had worked for days setting up this feed, placing it all on sawhorse tables. It was quite a feed, and before sunset the grownups—and us fledgling adults—gathered on the porch to sing Scotch rounds and tell jokes while the workers’ children played tag and statues out by the dried cornstalks.
Rose was hostess as usual, the troubled water having long smoothed over on her own accord. Dressed in a bright cotton frock and Carmen Miranda earrings, she was her old self, recruiting the wives of hired hands to help, offering them take-home plates as recompense.
Uncle Baldwin was the center of attention, as usual, lecturing on how Roosevelt was a fool for sending our boys off to be cannon fodder for the British (though he never mentioned Kenny directly), how bankers ought to be hogtied for paying measly interest. They were no better than thistles, adding, “We should uproot all those shysters.”
The men listened politely.
For years, he had kept a thistle hoe in the trunk of his car after his foot got so sore and diabetic, sent Rose on campaigns of search and destroy. It wasn’t something she enjoyed, of course, but she knew how to play the game. She could respect his wishes to follow along, given how much he’d provided.
“Eat up. I don’t want anything leftover for Mr. Keefe to piece on,” she said.
“Hmmpf! If she didn’t want that, she shouldn’t have fixed all this,” Agnes said.
She was failing miserably in keeping him away from temptation. His weight had ballooned to three hundred pounds. He had long outgrown his suits. He took insulin shots every morning and night.
With his traveling days over, he sold the trailer that fall and insisted Rose not leave the house unless she had someone there to take care of him. He’d read enough about blood sugar to know it was life threatening and was convinced that he could lapse into a coma at any moment.
I stopped by Uncle Baldwin’s one day in early June 1944. I had just received my high school diploma when Rose summoned me to help rescue her from the tedious task of canning six rows of English peas all coming on at the same time. There was no one else to ask, she said. I knew that wasn’t true, but I went anyway.
Rose was well into the process. Jars were steaming in a boiler, peas mounded everywhere.
“You need to look in on your uncle,” she said. “He’s not doing too well.”
I stepped out the kitchen door for some fresh air. Uncle Baldwin was sitting on the porch in long johns and a shawl around his shoulders, his bandaged, oozing foot propped on an orange crate. “I’m not worth a plug nickel,” he said. He was eaten up with self-pity, insisting that crutches were for cripples. “I’m about to be pushed around in a wheelchair like that damned Roosevelt. That old hood connived to get us into war and I’ll hand it to him. He got the job done.”
I stared at the porch floor, not knowing what to say.
“What do you hear from Kenneth these days?”
Since Kenny had joined the Navy, Uncle Baldwin had used the formal name as a way of distancing himself from his nephew. I was surprised he asked about him, though war news was hard to ignore. We were in midst of a food shortage. Army bases were running low on chow. To help remedy the situation, President Roosevelt allowed a few soldiers be sent home to help farm. Mama thought that might be a possibility for Kenny’s early discharge, but with Dad able-bodied and Uncle Baldwin having sufficient hired men, there was little use in making the request.
“Kenny’s on a destroyer. Probably cruising off the Turkish coast,” I told him.
Uncle Baldwin nodded. “A lot of New Testament took place in Turkey. Wish I could’ve seen it.”
I paused. It was unlike him to talk about religion, and I couldn’t help but notice how he spoke of himself in the past tense.
“You still can, when the war’s over,” I said.
“Ha! I don’t believe I’ll ever see that day.”
I patted his arm. “Sure you will. We’ll whip old Hitler and Tojo. You’ll see.”
He winced as he readjusted his propped foot. “I sure as hell don’t want to die alone. One of these days, they’ll find me crawled off to die like some sick old dog.”
I nodded. It was pure Baldwin. After all the misery the war had brought, with boys a third of his age being killed every day, he chose to wallow in self pity.
“You aren’t going anyplace,” I said.
“Oh you’re wrong there, missy. I’ve already been to town and got Selwyn Adams to draw up my will. He did an exceptional job, too, but he doesn’t come cheap.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
If anyone knew how to sew up an estate with tough stitching, it was Selwyn Adams. Those rich enough to hire him got their money’s worth. Those who couldn’t prayed that they never had to meet him in court.
“Yes sir, and I’m getting myself baptized.”
I frowned. “Weren’t you christened as a child?”
“I don’t mean that kid stuff. I’m talking the real McCoy, the full country dunk. Rose and me, we’re going to take the plunge together. This time I want to make sure it takes.”
“How do you know your baptism didn’t take the first time?”
He laughed. “Look at this old carcass. Does it look holy?”
I marveled at his spunk. Here he was, arthritic, diabetic and septic at sixty-three, insisting that he prove doubt allegiance to the Lord. And he’d talked Rose into going along with him. They weren’t married so far as we knew. Rose had once whispered to Agnes that they had slipped across the Mexican border at Brownsville and tied the knot during their winter at the Gulf, but Agnes was sure she was lying. “If it were true, she wouldn’t have hesitated one second to call herself Mrs. Keefe.”
I dismissed the baptism business as old man’s folly until the subject came up again after church. Both he and Rose would be immersed in Wampler’s Pond, he said. “I want to make sure I’m right with the Lord. I’ve set everything up with that new preacher and you’re all invited next Sunday.”
We stood clustered in the churchyard, stunned. Dad, who’d been a Baptist back in Kentucky, said he couldn’t fault him for “wanting to get it done up right,” but Mama found the possibility outrageous. “Everyone knows that Presbyterians don’t immerse.”
“Ha! Tell that to Preacher Pollitt.” He eyed her as if he could hear the gears churning in her mind.
“Of course that new preacher has put ideas into his head,” Mama said later. “I’ve said from day one that he sounds like a hard-shell Baptist.”
By this time, none of us were regular churchgoers except for Mama and Agnes, but we knew that if Uncle Baldwin he had wanted to get right with the Lord, he would have married Rose ages ago.
As if on cue, she walked up from having chatted with other churchgoers. Baldwin reiterated what he had just told us about the baptism.
“This’ll be your initiation into real Christianity, won’t it Rosie?” he said.
“I thought she was raised Catholic,” Mama said.
Rose shrugged. “I was never official.”
“A fellow in my shape needs to get his house in order,” Uncle Baldwin said.
It was at that point Winnie squared his jaw. “Then why don’t you get married?”
Uncle Baldwin loosened his shirt collar and stared him down like a blue racer ready to leap.
“It’s just a teen-ager talking,” Mama said.
“I know what he is, sister,” Uncle Baldwin said. “A boy his age ought to be stepping up to the plate to help Uncle Sam.”
Mama looked like she’d been stung by a swarm of yellow jackets. It was one thing to have one son off at war, but it was quite another to suggest that we send a second. “Isn’t Kenny enough?” Mama said.
“Quite,” Baldwin replied.
On the way home, Mama fussed at Winnie about upsetting his uncle. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he writes you out of his will.”
“Let him keep his filthy old money. The rest of you can sit around waiting for a handout from that old windbag. Who does he think he is, saying I need to sign up? He never served a day in his life.”
“We all make mistakes,” Dad said.
“Yeah, well he’s made some big ones.”
“Sounds like he’s trying to make amends, getting himself baptized, and Rose—“ Mama said.
“That’s just to get more attention,” Winnie said. “You’d think they were starving for attention the way they carry on.”
Mama spoke up. “If it weren’t for Baldwin, we wouldn’t have—“
“We wouldn’t have so much heartburn,” Winnie said.
He refused to go with us to see Reverend Pollitt baptize Rose and Uncle Baldwin. The preacher was more used to sprinkling babies, of course, but there were a few like Baldwin who insisted on full immersion. It had been his idea, of course, and Rose wouldn’t argue, which is one area in which she differed from her predecessor. Ernestine would have balked at being plunged into a slimy pond. Since it was ladies first, Rose went ahead, joking “don’t drown me fellows,” and barely made a sputter. When she came up out of the water, her dress clung like a wet girdle accentuating her shapely figure. She wrapped a Turkish towel around her middle and sloshed onto the grass.
When it came Uncle Baldwin’s turn, Dad and Mr. Wampler helped the preacher lead him down to the bank, lay him back in the water, since the reverend wasn’t half Baldwin’s size. He shot up from the water, sputtering and coughing. Then the two led him, eyes closed, up to the grass as if he was “it” in a game of blindman’s bluff. As Baldwin headed up to Wampler’s house to get changed, Rose wrung water from her hem. “Just look at me, will you? A dripping Protestant!”
Uncle Baldwin passed away at about six thirty that Wednesday morning. Dad took the call because Mama was close to hysterics assuming it was bad news about Kenny.
“Mr. Keefe went into a diabetic fit,” Rose said. “He tried to choke me.” He had always despised his sugar shots, and forbade her to waste money on new needles. That particular morning, he had raged through the house despite his gouty, oozing foot. He’d had enough, he said. The Lord should let him die in peace. Then he grabbed her by the wrist and held her down by the neck.
“Mr. Keefe gets awful strong when he put his weight into something,” she said.
She said she’d hidden out by the hen house, unsure what he might do next. She waited until sunup, and found him sprawled on the bedroom floor with his bedclothes touching the space heater, just beginning to smoke.”
“That was lucky, wasn’t it? He could’ve taken the whole house with him,” she said.
I tried to console Mama while Dad called for Winnie to get up. While the rest of us flailed around about what to do next, he stepped outside and lit a cigarette. “I’m not going,” he said. By the time our pickup rumbled up their lane, the hearse had already arrived. None of the hired hands could be found, and Dad and the undertakers had a hard time moving the body down the back steps. Meanwhile, Rose was trying to recuperate with an ice pack at her throat, blubbering something about how she’d have to wear a high-necked blouse to the funeral.
Their front room was turned into a makeshift funeral parlor, the front door from its hinges removed to accommodate the oversized casket. Salmon-colored torchieres and a guest registry were banked by floral tributes of every description. He was such a well-known figure that, like him or not, folks for miles around felt compelled to pay their respects in ways befitting his legend.
Rose, who had purchased the largest spray of red roses we’d ever seen, stood at the coffin to receive mourners. True to her roots, she wore a black-lace veil to help disguise the reason for her turned-up collar. As I passed the mahogany coffin, I took one last look at the stocky, muscular hands. I hoped she had fought back.
The newspapers speculated on the size of Uncle Baldwin’s estate. One said one million and a quarter, another, a million and a half. By any measure, he was the wealthiest man in Lincoln County. His expansive, well-tended farms were the pride of the county. He had employed scores of people over the years, put food on the table of a lot of families during hard times. He had been a remarkable man who loved his Lord so much that he joined the church twice, though this fact was not mentioned.
After the funeral, Rose insisted that all of us return to the house where neighbors and church people had brought food.
When we’d all settled in to dinner, she said, “Now I can get that cursed hoe out of the trunk. First chance I get, I’m going to fling that thing to Colorado.”
She sounded so determined that I half expected her to run out the door and do it. Instead, she burst into wailing sobs. She was inconsolable. Agnes looked at Mama and then at Dad. While the rest of us toyed with what was left of our dinner, the reverend ushered her to the front room.
“Let it out, sister,” he said. The preacher was being exceptionally sympathetic, but he could afford to be. Rumor had it the church was to receive a generous sum from the estate.
Rose proceeded to wail for upwards of thirty minutes as the rest of us worked our way through lunch after which Mama said, “I never cared for trashy displays of dime-store grief.”
I wished she hadn’t spoken those words. I could sympathize with Rose. She’d lived with him longer than any other woman could endure, save Aunt Ernestine, and I told her so.
Mama gave me a narrow look. “Selling out doesn’t pay, Iola.”
“But she lived with him seven years. You said yourself that’s common law.”
“It would be, if this were a common-law state. She’s not a wife. She’s the same tramp he dragged home.”
A few days later, a thick envelope arrived “special delivery” from the law offices of Selwin Adams. Dad spotted carried it up from the mailbox and laid it on the kitchen table where Mama and I were rolling pie dough.
“For you,” he said. “It must be the will.”
Mama let out a gasp and tore open one end of the envelope with her floured hands and clicked her tongue as she slowly read the contents. She would receive the family Bible, Grandmother Keefe’s diamond brooch that, surprisingly, had never passed on to any of Uncle Baldwin’s women, and a thousand dollars to be split between the two sisters.
“That’s only five hundred a piece,” I said.
The Prairie Creek Church was to receive forty acres with proceeds to be used for perpetual care of his grave tucked providentially, next to the church building. Poor Winnie was left one humiliating dollar. Dad, Kenny and I were not mentioned.
“Isn’t this a fine how-do-you-do? Lumping you and Winnie in with Kenny,” Mama sighed. “And Homer…he worked for that man for nearly forty years. Where did that get him?”
“Bernice, I’m no blood relative, but I have no complaint. Baldwin was fair with me. He paid me what he owed.”
I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt. It was a major slight and it stung, but what surprised me was Winnie’s share if you could call it that. Leaving out Kenny I could see, but Winne? I thought Baldwin would have been a bigger person than to insult Winnie with a measly dollar. It was as if Kenny’s transgression had tainted us all.
“He made his money. It was his to give away,” Dad said.
“He has done that,” Winnie said. The two of them lit a smoke.
“Wait a minute. Listen to this,” Mama read further. “’To Miss Rose Trumbull, my devoted companion, I hereby bequeath my implement business and the remaining farmland situated in Lincoln County, being fourteen hundred fifty acres, more or less. This will be hers to have and to hold so long as she remains unmarried. If she does marry, I direct that her bequest will pass to my two beloved sisters, Mrs. Walter (Agnes) McDonald and Mrs. Homer (Bernice) Parsons. Beloved sisters! It’s just like Baldwin to patronize us, and don’t you stick up for him, Homer.”
That evening, Agnes joined Mama at the kitchen table as they pored over every word of Baldwin’s last testament, shaking their heads like the daughters of Job.
“Five hundred dollars will hardly buy a new car, much less a house,” Agnes said. “How could he throw it all away on that hussy? Why I knew that girl was trouble from the moment I laid eyes on her!”
“Maybe you can get Rose married off,” I suggested.
“Married? Do you know anybody who’d marry her? Why even Baldwin knew better than that!” Agnes said.
Mama refolded the document and slid it back into the envelope. I was sure both of them were considering the possibility of Kenny. He could come home from the service, pick up with Rose and redeem us all from Uncle Baldwin’s spite. But the notion was purely ridiculous. Rose wasn’t about to give up her million dollars for some sailor, even if he were Baldwin’s nephew.
Dad shrugged. “Your brother never owed us anything. What’s done is done.”
“Well aren’t you congenial? Since when should we let bygones be bygones?” Mama said.
“Sounds like my Walter. He doesn’t understand why we’re upset. He says a thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but it is compared to a million.”
“You’re not getting a million,” I said.
“No, we’re getting five hundred lousy dollars a piece.” Agnes said. “And thanks to Selwyn Adams, that’s sewed up tighter than a drum.”
“It’s what Baldwin wanted,” I said sadly.
“I’d take five hundred. That’s a fortune to most folks,” Winnie said.
“Homer, we aren’t most folks,” Mama said. “Do you know how it feels to be completely cut off?”
Of course Dad knew plenty about hardship, watching his home, barns and most everything else wash away with a raging river, but his reserve wouldn’t let him say more.
Winnie didn’t say much about the will, but the slight had to have hurt him as much as rest of us. Nobody thought he would have been ignored.. Now he planned to start a farm auction business, he could have used the cash.
Mama said she’d break the news to Kenny in her next letter. “I’ll tell him that Baldwin’s passed on, but I won’t say who got what.”
“He’s going to find out sooner or later,” Dad said.
“Then let’s let it be later.”
Rose took the Meadowlark Express to Chicago for a week of shopping. She picked up a full-length mouton coat from Marshall Field’s, a Rogers silver service for 12 and numerous pieces of etched crystal. She topped off the spree with enough fourteen-karat jewelry to decorate a Christmas tree. “Beyond words,” Mama said.
When it came time for the estate sale, she hired a competing auctioneer to hear the bids. Curious, Winnie went along with the rest of us to preview the goods and spotted a box lot of old photographs on the rack wagon. Curious, the two of us sifted through them and found the original photograph from Biloxi Wharf—the very same photo used for the postcard. Winnie held it up to the light. “I’m going to ask if I can have this.”
Rose was standing off to the side when Winnie approached her. She didn’t appear friendly. She snatched the photo out of his hand, looked it over. “Just take it,” she said.
Winnie sheepishly tucked it in his coat pocket. I couldn’t imagine what he’d want with that reminder, given the heartache she’d caused. I wondered where Kenny’s postcard had wound up, thinking maybe he’d packed it up when he left for the service. Nobody had the nerve to go through his things since Mama had declared both his dresser and closet off limits. It was as if his belongs were part of a shrine. In her mind, as long as we left things undisturbed, he would return home safely.
Whatever didn’t sell at the auction was left for the renters when they moved into Baldwin’s farmhouse. Rose was moving on. As soon as the auto plants were re-tooled from wartime production, she traded the Lincoln (with the hoe in the trunk) for a white Cadillac convertible. When Rose relocated in Florida, her dinner invitations disappeared along with her phone calls, birthday cards and Christmas greetings. We heard she had found a home in Tarpon Springs, one of their winter stopovers along the Gulf, and had started her own business catering parties for rich people. Other than that, we knew nothing.
For some time afterward, Mama would say, “What do you suppose Rose Trumbull’s up to?”
Dad would smile. “Heading down the aisle, you hope.”
In truth, we never knew for certain whether Rose had married or not, but in time, the possibility never left our thoughts.
Kenny returned from the Navy in the fall of 1945. The war had “seasoned” him, Dad said. He was taller, meatier, quieter. He had come into his own.
One Saturday, when he had gone with friends to the movies, Dad said, “I believe the fire’s burned out of that boy.” He was right. Kenny was more reserved with a far-off look in his eyes. It was as if he were preoccupied while we chattered about day-to-day matters, machinery repairs, crop yields, what to fix for supper. He didn’t talk much about his ship or his experiences overseas.
Once I asked him, “How was Turkey?”
He looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign tongue.
Turkey, he said, had been his own code word for wanting to be anywhere from where he was: in the thick of the invasion of Italy. He’d seen what Mussolini’s men had done, old men handed, women and children shot, homes burned.
“You don’t what you’ve got until it’s gone,” he said.
I didn’t know how to respond. He had peered into a world I could never know.
I didn’t bring up Rose and he didn’t either. A handsome, stalwart version of Dad, Kenny dated a few local girls and helped with the farm, but by spring, he decided to go to night school, which meant we saw less and less of him. Soon afterward, he announced he was going to rent a garage apartment near the University of Illinois in Urbana. He wouldn’t have much room, so everything must have a double purpose, he said.
We found him upstairs going through his things, divvying up what to take, what to throw away and what to give Winnie and me. He had accumulated quite a pile of outgrown clothes, battered comics and other boyhood things. It made me sad to see him throw away his past like that, but all things were temporal, he said. He’d learned that in the war.
“You got some good stuff here,” Winnie said, picking up a catcher’s mitt. “You never played with this much, or these.” He pointed to a box of dominoes.
“Grabby,” I said.
“No, just thinking like a businessman,” Winnie assured me. “Most anything can be auctioned.”
Kenny pulled a familiar candy box out of one drawer. I recognized the Marshall Field logo immediately. He lifted the lid.
“You want this?” he dangled the Big Catch postcard over Winnie’s hairline.
“No, I got the real thing at her sale.”
“Sis?”
“Keep it,” I said. “It’ll scare away mice.”
Later that year, Winnie met a nice girl from Shelbyville who recorded buyers’ numbers and kept the cash box. They were happily dating.
As for me, I stayed on with the folks though I’d taken a stenographer’s job. Selwyn Adams had advertised for a Girl Friday and I needed to do something with my life. It was a comfortable fit. Eventually life became a steady rhythm of working, coming home every evening to watch John Cameron Swayze on the Camel News Caravan. Mama had bought the television set with half of her inheritance that she’d placed on time deposit. When the marvel of live moving pictures caught her eye, she decided it was time to sacrifice.
Agnes thought it silly not to buy something like a new wardrobe, but Mama said it was time we stopped being country bumpkins. Spending five hundred dollars on clothes that would go out of style with the next season was the kind of fool-hearty thing Rose Trumbull would do.
Mama’s arthritis was setting in, so evenings after work I became her hands, kneading dough, opening tin cans, unscrewing jars, pulling weeds, doing whatever that took extra muscle power when Dad was busy with other chores.
Rose came up in conversation every once in a while at work when Mr. Adams and his associates needed a textbook example of a selfish, spendthrift legatee. I refused to take offense at the comparison. True, Rose had squandered much of her estate and expressed appreciation for her good fortune. She had neglected to publish a memorial poem in the paper for his birthday or the anniversary of his death like Mama and Agnes did. But when the newspaper published the delinquent tax assessments every year, her name got repeated upwards of a dozen times in the Prairie Creek and Richland township listings, huge tracts of land commanding as much tax as most people brought home in a year. Some of the land went up for auction, though Winnie’s competitor was awarded the contracts.
Dad said he’d seen such fools as a boy. “Folks get money and go hog wild, but when the river rises it doesn’t care if you live, everybody gets ruined. As the Good Book says, it rains on the just and the unjust.”
“Your folks were fools to live along that muddy old river,” Mama said. “The Bible also says Lord helps those who help themselves. And Rose Trumbull sure has done that.”
He looked up from his newspaper. “She still galls you, after all this time.”
“Yes, Mr. Parsons, and for a whole lot more time to come.”
None of us were sorry to see Rose move to Florida, but having her that far away made it difficult to ever know what she was doing. For good measure and out of a sense of family duty, I wrote a letter to the Hillsborough and Pinellas county clerks once a year, asking them to check their marriage license register, but they always wrote back empty-handed.
Winnie thought I was ignorant to think Rose would do something as obvious as get married where she lived.
“She’ll run off to Havana or Freeport. Somewhere you won’t be looking.”
He was beginning to fill out some and looked more and more like Uncle Baldwin. He even sounded like his uncle. “The way she’s spending his money, it’s a wonder he’s not haunting us all.” He bet that Rose had at least a couple of proposals before she left Illinois, but speculated she would just live with the man and not marry.
“She’s not stupid enough to jeopardize all that money. If she stays single, she won’t have to pick up after anybody but herself.”
With the folks up in years, I felt I owed it to them to stay put. After so many years working at Selwyn Adams, I’d met several suitable young men, out of fear or disinterest, I shut out every one, much to Mama’s chagrin. I was an unclaimed blessing, a drudge, but having seen what love and marriage had done for Aunt Ernestine and Agnes and Uncle Baldwin—and Mama—I was content to let things be. I had a steady income and a comfortable, predictable place to live. I couldn’t ask for more than that.
Mama thought it was foolish for me to waste postage stamps writing to Florida and risk stirring up trouble, though she’d be the first in line to read the county clerks’ letters when they arrived, quickly sharing the news with Agnes which invited another replay of their pity party. I figured there was no harm in trying to confirm that Rose was single. After all, it was a million-dollar question, and if there was one thing I had learned working in a law office, it was to look out for your own interests.
“You’re so interested chasing down a husband for Rose, why don’t you find one for yourself?” Winnie asked.
He couldn’t accept that I was an old maid. I was thirty, a full twelve years older than Rose Trumbull had been when she met Uncle Baldwin. I was well past the age of dreaming about bridal veils. Kenny was working at Farm Service, married a professor’s daughter from Urbana, and had two children. Winnie had grown his auction business and lived at home with us until he eloped with Shirley, the cash box girl, a turn of events that Mama found hard to accept.
“After all we did for that boy, he ups and runs off,” she said.
Then one day a St. Petersburg attorney called. He said that he needed to contact Mr. Adams “to help with disposal of a house that belonged to a Miss Trumbull in Prairie Creek Township.”
“You mean Rose Trumbull?”
“That’s right. Unfortunately, she passed away three weeks ago.”
My heart raced. How had we missed this important news? Knowing how Rose craved attention. There had been no funeral or published obituary. It was as if she hadn’t existed at all. It would be so unlike her to expire outside the limelight.
Grasping for words, I referred the lawyer to Winnie’s auction company, then phoned Mama.
“The minute you get off work, we’re riding out to the church to see for ourselves,” she said.
At five thirty, Mama, Winnie and Agnes piled into my Studebaker for the six-mile ride to the Prairie Creek cemetery, grousing all the way about how we had all been kept in the dark. Mama, clutching her oversized handbag, sat next to me in the passenger seat while Agnes and Winnie rode in the back.
“I can’t believe we didn’t know. Why would she do something like that?” Agnes said.
“They said she had cancer. The last thing she would have wanted was being viewed as anything but vivacious,” I said.
“What about her family?” Winnie said.
Mama sniffed. “They were always an odd lot. She never would bring them around us.”
“She knew better,” Agnes said.
“How in the world they pulled this off without any of us knowing is a mystery to me. I’ll say one thing. That new preacher is no Charlie Crotts,” Mama said. “If Charlie were around he’d have clued us in. The very idea! Digging up Baldwin’s plot.”
“That’s against the law, isn’t it?” Agnes said.
“It ought to be,” Winnie said.
I slowed to turn onto the church road. “How did he know we didn’t know?”
“Oh Iola! Any fool could see it was the Keefe lot. He knows we’re Keefes. If he was on top of things like he should be, he would have paid us a bereavement call or at least asked around. Where did they find that fellow anyway, Agnes?”
“Down around Little Egypt, I heard.”
“Figures,” Mama said.
“Isn’t that where Dad grew up?” Winnie asked.
“No son. He was on the Kentucky side,” Mama said.
“If you ask me, we’re paying that fellow too much if he can’t keep no more track of his flock than this.”
“Rose didn’t want anybody to know she was ill,” I said. “It was her right.”
“Don’t you go sticking up for that shrew,” Mama said. “I knew she was conniving the minute I met her. She was no-good trash then and she was no-good trash to the end.”
“Amen to that, Sister,” Agnes called from the back seat.
“The woman is dead, Mama,” I said.
“Well I’m not going to pretend that I liked her or anything about her. She was no good, Iola. All she did was wiggle her way into Baldwin’s favor, and I mean wiggle. You should’ve seen some of the dresses she used to wear.”
“It’s the funeral home I blame,” she said. “Agnes, you know good and well that they sent Baker & Sons gravediggers over here to get her planted.”
“Well this does me up for them. Not tell us, will he? Why I’d rather die than have them handle my funeral services! Winnie, Iola you mark my words. When the time comes, you send me to McMillan’s. And that goes for your Dad, too.”
The church steeple appeared over the ridge. Sure enough, there was a freshly smoothed mound of dirt next to Uncle Baldwin’s monument. Mama and Agnes shook their heads at the sight. Then, as if we were at a funeral ourselves, we silently piled out of the sedan. A metal funeral home stake read, Rosemary T. Keefe, 1918-1952.
“Mrs. Keefe,” Winnie said, joking. “They weren’t married, were they?”
“Heavens no!” Mama gave the flimsy marker a kick. It fell flat in the soft soil. “The liar thought she could move in on us and stay here for eternity. I ought to call Harvey Baker and give him a piece of my mind. I’m so angry at that woman. All these years we put up with her, and now this!” Her voice broke. “This is our family plot, not hers. And here she’s wormed her way in for eternity, laying there with no shame. Baldwin is one thing, but the folks!”
Agnes touched her shoulder. “Bernice, calm down.”
“I’m not about to calm down. She planned this just to spite us.”
“Mama…”
“Don’t Mama me, girl. That woman would stoop at nothing.”
Winnie put his hands in his hip pockets. “Couldn’t we have her dug up?”
“Dug up?” Mama shrieked, her hat in disarray.
“Where would she go?” I asked, for want of something to say.
“Fling her to the moon for all I care. Throw her to the buzzards on her precious farm ground,” Mama said.
I held my breath. They were behaving like childish ghouls. I turned toward the car.
“Who would pay for it?” Winnie asked.
Mama called, “Iola? Where are you going?”
“Home,” I said.
“Home?” I could hear her stepping toward me. “You work in that office. Isn’t her estate liable for this outrage?”
“I’m no lawyer, Mama.”
It was some time before we learned that Rose, in a final desperate move to buy everlasting attention, had willed that her remaining nine hundred fifty acres be turned into a wildlife sanctuary. Field tiles were ripped out, Baldwin’s farmhouse and outbuildings torn down and burned, the fields allowed to flood. In this way, Canada geese could land, wild turkeys nest and mosquitoes breed. Seeds were scattered to re-establish native grasses.
“It’s a good thing Baldwin isn’t around,” Agnes said. “If he knew the weeds were allowed to take over like this, he’d die all over again.”
Mama said. “I’ll bet that witch is looking down at us right now, laughing her fool head off.”
“Looking down?” Agnes said.
A few days later, Mama asked me to drive her out to inspect “Rose’s weed patch.” I wasn’t eager to see it, but I said I’d take her. I helped Mama step across rude planks the state had laid down to get to the newly-flooded acreage. So many fields gone to seed! The cicadas tuned up their early evening buzz as we stood in silent contemplation.
“And here we thought Ernestine was something,” she said.
“It was Uncle Baldwin’s property to do with as he chose.”
She looked at me squarely. “Don’t you think I know that? The point is, she had her clutches on him from day one. She was witchy, that girl. She cast a spell on him and look what that got us. Whoever heard of wasting good farmland like this? No, ma’am. If it hadn’t been for that floozy, he would have had the sense to remember his own flesh and blood.”
The fact was that he had indeed remembered his family—Kenny and all of us. But he hadn’t liked what he saw. Mama and Agnes had become no more than buzzards picking a carcass. Winnie, the favored nephew, had fatefully miss-stepped when he spoke what we’d all wanted to say. Kenny, like Dad and me, was a non-person unworthy of recognition, the lowest cut of all.
Part of me wished that I’d been the one who’s told Uncle Baldwin off, that I had been more honest and told him what each of us wanted to say. But I had chickened out, and in the end, my quiet fence sitting had been for naught. And now it was eating up Mama and everyone around her.
We headed back home as the sun was turning from burnt orange to rosy pink and lavender. Mama sat in the seat beside me, silent as stone as we bumped along the country road. Life would go on. She and Agnes would continue their “if only” game for the rest of their days. Kenny, Winnie and the rest of us would live out our days with eternal questions that couldn’t be answered.
But in the end I had to give the devil her due. Rose had played the game. She had fought the battle and won the fight. And here she had written her own perfect ending, and for that I gave her credit. And as I looked across the sea of prairie grass and Scotch thistles, I could feel her watching from wherever she was, her head tossed back, laughing in wicked delight.
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TAMMY WILSON of Newton, NC has published in such journals as The Potomac, The Healing Muse and Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual and has received grants and fellowships sponsored by the N.C. Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.