started a pot of coffee and I made sausage patties to go with waffles. Isabel has asked us all not to feed him, but Haywood always assumes we’ve fixed enough for him, and as soon as he got a whiff of that sausage, heavily seasoned with sage, he climbed down off the tractor, washed up at the kitchen sink, and sat right down at the table in happy anticipation.
I doubled the waffle batter and added extra patties to my black iron skillet.
“Bel only set out cereal and fruit this morning,” Haywood said, beaming when the waffles began coming off the iron. He slathered on the butter and added a pool of maple syrup. “A man cain’t go all morning on just cereal and fruit.”
Cal finished his waffle in record time and went outside to clamber up on Haywood’s tractor. While we ate, Mayleen Richards called. She had spoken to Jeremy Harper’s doctor minutes before.
“No change in his condition,” Dwight told me when he’d hung up, “but it looks as if whoever did it caught him off guard. The doctor says he was probably hit twice, just like Rebecca Jowett. No defense marks on his hands or arms. He told her that if the second blow had landed on the same spot, he’d be dead now. All the same, it’s still too soon to know how much permanent damage there’ll be. The good sign is that neither his hands or feet are drawn up like they’d be if he was paralyzed.”
I topped off his coffee and he cut into a second waffle as Haywood was finishing off his third.
Minutes later, another deputy called to report that Jeremy Harper’s blue Toyota had been found in the NutriGood parking lot only a few miles away.
I half expected Dwight to go running over, but he told the officer to question all the clerks there once the stores opened and to keep him informed. When he saw my look of surprise, he grinned and said, “Well, you’re always telling me I have good people and that I need to trust ’em to run with the ball.”
“And besides,” said Haywood, “you got them peas to plant.”
Three more cups of coffee later (and another round of waffles for Haywood), our brother Robert pulled up on a smaller tractor rigged with plows to run rows.
“You was supposed to be done disking by now,” he scolded Haywood, “but here you set, feeding your face. Bel’s right. You’re just digging your grave with your teeth.”
Since Robert’s not exactly a beanpole either, Haywood didn’t pay him any mind. He climbed back up on the John Deere and headed out to the garden site. I handed Robert up a mug of coffee with a spoonful of the honey he likes and he told me that his wife Doris planned to take their grandson to see The Lion King that afternoon. “She says she’ll take Cal and Mary Pat and little Jake, too, if y’all pay for their tickets and popcorn.”
“What do you think?” I asked Cal when we were in the car to pick up the other two for the day to give Kate a break.
He gave me a big thumbs-up. Despite computer games and DVDs, all three children are entranced by the big screen.
Or maybe it’s the popcorn.
We got back to the house in time to wave goodbye to Robert, who had finished running precise, ruler-straight rows where Haywood had disked. I love the smell of new-turned dirt, and soon I had a hoe in my hands, too. Dwight and I each took a row and sent the children ahead of us to drop two peas into the furrows at a time, three or four inches apart, then he and I used our hoes to cover them and firm the soil.
Despite the cool air, it felt good to be out working in the sunshine. Dwight pruned dead branches from the azaleas and other flowering shrubs, and the children and I piled them for a bonfire. Then the kids washed up and finished working on their valentines for Monday while I made lunch.
Doris picked up Cal and his cousins in time for the two o’clock matinee. After a morning out in the fresh air, Dwight turned on a ball game and stretched out on the couch. I sat down in a nearby lounge chair with a basket of clean laundry and we watched Carolina run up and down the court while I folded T-shirts and underwear.