Southern Discomfort, the second in my
Judge Deborah Knott series, has just become an eBook and may be found at the
Kindle store on Amazon or as a Nook on the Barnes and Noble site. Campaign promises made in the spring have a way of coming due in the heat of summer as Deborah discovers when she realizes that she's volunteered to help build a Habitat-type house for a needy single mother. Among other disquieting events, one of her eleven older brothers has been poisoned and a favorite niece attacked.
In the
excerpt that follows, Deborah has gone back to the farm for solace where she winds up
taking a moonlit walk with her father and his two house dogs.
The caged dogs whined in excitement
as we approached, hoping this meant they were going to get to run with us through
a night world sensuous with the smell of coons and darting rabbits and
slow-trundling possums. They gave soft pleading yaps as we passed.
“Hush!” Daddy said sternly, and
they hushed.
Blue and Ladybelle, aristocrats of
the farm, strode past without turning their heads.
We walked on down past his
vegetable garden, through a cut, past Maidie’s little house perched on the last
bit of level ground before it sloped down to the creek. No light in her windows
either. She and Cletus were early to bed, early to rise and they slept soundly.
The dogs never woke them unless they kept it up so long that even the soundest
sleeper must come awake, knowing there were trespassers on the land.
It seldom happened.
Cletus’s pickup was parked beside
the porch. From atop the cab, Maidie’s big black tomcat was an inky pool of
watchfulness as we passed.
On the other side of the lane lay a
small field of melons. Honeydews and swollen cantaloupes gleamed among dark
vines, and watermelons were starting to stretch themselves.
The lane wound through another
stand of trees and then we were out into a twenty-acre field of tobacco. The
waning moon, almost a week past full now, sailed high in the sky, flooding the
countryside with silver-blue light. A winelike aroma arose from the very earth
itself, compounded of cool dirt, green tobacco, and a light breeze blowing up
from the creek.
Of one accord, we stood as still
and unmoving as the tall pines behind us and breathed it in. Long moments
passed, then an owl swooped down into the middle of a truck row. There was a
sudden frantic squeal, followed by a silence all the deeper as the owl gained
altitude on noiseless wings. A small dark shape dangled limply from its talons.
The spell broken, Daddy lit a
cigarette, and we walked on in the general direction the owl had taken. Another
quarter mile brought us out along the edge of a deep irrigation pond. Three
people had drowned in it over the years. Tonight, the still water was a sheet
of shiny black glass. White moths fluttered toward the moon reflected there and
were snapped up by the waiting fish.
Beyond the pond was the beginning
of the farm he’d given Seth and Minnie as a wedding present years ago. On tonight’s
clear air, faint music mingled with distant laughter and raucous
speech-Saturday night winding down at the migrant camp that straddled the line
between Seth’s land and Andrew’s.
Thus far, we had walked the two
perpendicular sides of a right triangle, now we struck across a fallow field to
make a rough hypotenuse back toward the house, less than a mile away. The dogs
raced out ahead of us and began casting back and forth through the weeds. Once
I would have nearly had to trot to keep up with Daddy’s long legs. Tonight,
even though my feet had been too long on concrete, the pace was slower. Still,
he didn’t seem winded, and his pauses were contemplative, not for rest.
Mostly we had walked in silence. Now as we started up the gentle rise, I
remembered a warm May night back when this field was planted in corn. He and I
and Mother and the little twins had been out walking in the moonlight, much
like this. It had rained all night the night before, a long, much-needed
soaking rain, and the sun had shone all afternoon. As we stood at the edge of
the field, Daddy suddenly hushed us. “Listen,” he’d said.
Crickets and cicadas stridulated
all around us and a soft breeze rustled the green plants, but that wasn’t what
he meant. We strained our ears and there beneath the crickets came faint creaks
like the opening and closing of a thousand tiny rusty hinges.
“What is it?” we whispered.
“Corn’s growing,” Daddy said. “Hear
it? Drinking up water with its roots and stretching up its stalks. It’ll be six
inches taller tomorrow.”
“Do you remember a night?” I asked
him now.
“What night was that, shug?”
“The night we heard corn growing?”
He smiled but kept walking. “That
was a purty sound, won’t it?”
❧ ❧ ❧
