she was especially keyed up this morning as they waited for Raff. She fidgeted around in the kitchen and living room, lining up objects that seemed even slightly out of place, glancing at herself in the hall mirror, adjusting her hair.
After the church service, which seemed agonizingly long to all three of them, the Codys dodged through the crowd of lingering parishioners and hurried home. They scarfed a light lunch sitting at the kitchen table. There was no Sunday dinner this day; they would all be dining sumptuously at her parents' home in the evening. Without changing from their best clothes, they hurried out to the pickup and headed south on the hour-long drive to Mobile.
They did not, however, go directly to the Semmes family home on the Azalea Trail.
"We're going first to drop by and see your Aunt Jessica," Marcia said to Raff.
"Oh, dear God!" murmured Ainesley. No way I'm going in there, he thought. I'm going to sit in the shade somewhere and smoke, and kill a soldier or two. He'd thoughtfully iced some bottles of beer--soldiers--and stored them under the truck tarpaulin the night before, just in case.
On Marcia's command, they pulled off at Satsuma, an exurban settlement just north of Mobile. After several turns they came on to Savannah Street, in the old section. Halfway down the first block, in a neighborhood adorned exquisitely with mature live oaks and magnolias, Ainesley brought the pickup to a halt in front of a run-down little house set well back from the line of other properties. The structure had a single floor, a slightly sagging front porch with a swing and two rocking chairs, and a roof in critical condition. Weeds fought crabgrass for possession of the spacious lawn. Lovely unpruned azaleas and crepe myrtles added to the overall aura of decaying gentility.
"This place must have looked great a hundred years ago," quipped Ainesley.
Then he announced his escape strategy: "I'll stay here in the truck until I see you go in. Then I'll be back to pick you up in two hours. Tell her I've got business." He looked straight ahead to avoid back talk, and waited for them to get out.
Almost as soon as Marcia knocked on the front door it was opened--and there stood Aunt Jessica, snow-haired, gap-toothed, and encased in an ankle-length flowered smock. She must have seen them through the front window as they approached. Of course she would be there and waiting for anyone who cared to come by. She was known never to leave the house.
"Good Lord have mercy on my soul, look who's here! Y'all come right on in!"
Aunt Jessica was a few years north of ninety. Born just before the turn of the century, she had lived all her life in the Savannah Street house, and even when young had never traveled farther away than the Mobile watering holes of Fairhope to the east and Biloxi to the west. Her grandmother had been a young woman living in Navy Cove at the time of the War Between the States, close enough to Fort Morgan to hear the thunder of artillery and watch Farragut's fleet break through into Mobile Bay. An enemy cannonball overshot the fort and landed in the family's backyard.
After the war, her grandfather had bought a little farm on what was then called the Old Savannah Road. In recalling the occupation, her grandmother allowed to Jessica, "The Yankees never did any harm to us." On one occasion, a trooper was reprimanded for stealing a chicken from the backyard, and his immediate superior apologized to the family. "They were mostly nice boys," she said. "They just wanted to get home themselves." The war had nevertheless devastated the economy, and land was cheap. Sections could be bought along the beach of the Fort Morgan Peninsula, over across the mouth of Mobile Bay, for ten dollars an acre.
Aunt Jessica herself had met and talked to many Confederate veterans when she was a teenager. They were old men by then, and it was customary to address them all as "Cap'n" in the Gulf seacoast manner of respect. She lived through the Great Depression, when much of rural Alabama was still an impoverished developing country, and Mobile little more than a backwater town compared to Savannah and New Orleans. She had witnessed the great immigration during World War II of tenant farmers, black and white, who poured into the city to help build the shipyard and Brookley Field.
Jessica and her family believed that "our