Chapter 6 - The Scuppernong VinesSix months later, on a Saturday afternoon in late October, the air on Ridge Road tasted of woodsmoke, dry pine needles, and the wild, muscadine tang of ripe scuppernongs.
The white farmhouse sat three hundred yards back from the blacktop, its metal roof freshly coated with silver aluminum paint that reflected the blue autumn sky like a mirror. In the south garden, the dead tomato vines had been pulled and composted, the cedar stakes bundled neatly under the eaves of the woodhouse for the winter.
A yellow moving van was parked in the circle beside Daniel’s new truck—a plain, white six-year-old Dodge with a magnetic sign on the door: HOLLIS & BAKER: CIVIL SURVEYING & SITE PLANNING.
Daniel was on the roof of the front porch with a hammer in his hand, replacing three cedar shakes that had rotted under the gutter. He was wearing an old canvas shirt with the sleeves cut off, his arms brown from six months of working his own transit crews on county drainage jobs. He had lost fifteen pounds. His jaw was lean again, the soft, anxious puffiness he had carried for seven years at Baker Landworks burned away by eighty-hour weeks of honest, independent labor.
Down on the grass, Mabel was running through the fallen leaves with Theo, both of them chasing an enormous, floppy-eared hound puppy that Daniel had brought home from a farm down in Liberty County.
"Mabel!" Daniel called down from the roof, his hammer poised above a copper nail. "Don't let him into your mother’s herb bed! He’ll dig up the winter rosemary!"
"He won't, Daddy!" she shouted back, her cheeks bright red from the wind. "He’s an Army dog! He follows orders!"
I sat on the top step of the porch, a mug of hot cider steaming between my hands, watching the sunlight strike the line of sweetgum trees along our fence.
The mail had arrived an hour ago.
The blue envelope on the bench beside me was from the United States District Court in Savannah.
Judge Mercer had signed the final order approving the restructuring of Baker Landworks under Chapter 11. Warren had not gone to state prison; the district attorney had accepted a plea to two misdemeanor counts of false swearing after Brenda Clanton’s testimony and Celeste’s corporate ledgers made a trial impossible. But the price had been paid in the ledger where Warren lived.
The fine was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The civil settlement with the state transportation department had stripped the company of all its public grading contracts for seven years. To pay the mezzanine lenders and keep his equipment from the auctioneer’s block, Warren had been forced to sell the house on Abercorn Street, the river lot on Isle of Hope, and forty percent of his non-voting equity to a construction syndicate from Charlotte.
He lived now in a two-bedroom brick condominium off the Harry Truman Parkway, where he spent his mornings on a concrete balcony overlooking an asphalt retention basin, watching other people’s trucks drive out to the highway.
He had not called Daniel since July.
Celeste had called.
She had come out to the farm three weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, her Honda trunk filled with boxes of my mother’s canning jars that Warren had locked in the company storage sheds three years before. She had stayed for supper. She had sat at my mother’s oak table, eaten my chicken and dumplings, and watched Daniel show Theo how to sharpen a drawknife without crying once.
She had her own accounting practice now, operating out of a small, sunny office on Bull Street with two junior associates and six commercial clients who had left Baker Landworks the day Warren entered his plea.
Daniel climbed down the ladder, set his hammer in the wooden tool chest by the door, and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist.
He walked over to the steps, sat down beside me, and took a long sip from my cider mug.
"Roof’s tight," he said, looking up at the tin eaves. "Won't leak a drop this winter. I’ll get the flashing around the chimney done before the frost hits next Tuesday."
"Good," I said.
He leaned back against the porch railing, looking out over the twelve acres of pasture that sloped down toward the creek.
In the far corner, near the old bridge abutment, the green state marker was already up: CHATHAM COUNTY AGRICULTURAL CONSERVATION DISTRICT: PROTECTED UNDER GEORGIA LAW.
"Dad’s lawyer called this morning," Daniel said quietly.
I didn't move. "Frank?"
"No. The new guy from Atlanta. The bankruptcy trustee’s lawyer."
"What did he want?"
"He wanted to know if we were interested in buying the four acres between our south line and the old mill road," Daniel said. "The estate needs cash to clear the secondary liens on the equipment yard before the court closes the file."
"How much?"
Daniel looked at me, a slow, wry smile touching the corners of his mouth—the smile he used to have when we were twenty-four and had sixty dollars between us for a weekend in Charleston.
"Thirty-two thousand," he said. "Cash."
I looked out at the south fence, where the old cedar stakes stood against the blue sky, straight and unbending in the black Lowcountry dirt.
"Tell him we’ll give him twenty-eight," I said, setting the cider mug on the floorboards and leaning my head against my husband’s shoulder. "And tell him we want the deed by Friday. I want to plant winter clover before the rain."
Daniel laughed—a clear, easy sound that carried across the yard, across the pasture, and out into the quiet pines where no one could ever serve us again.
May you like
"Twenty-eight it is, Captain," he said.
He took my hand, his fingers rough with cedar dust and honest work, and together we sat on my mother's porch while the sun went down behind the trees.
