“I have some pictures here somewhere that I wanted to show you before you leave.” Azalee’s voice was muffled inside the closet.
“They were in an album, but your daddy pulled them all out and put them in a box when his mind started going. That man was crazy about boxes. Saved nearly every box that came through. Then we never could find anything because he hid the boxes. He drove me crazy doing that.” Azalee backed out of the bonus room closet pulling a green tub. She loved these green plastic tubs as much as her husband had loved cardboard boxes.
“Come over here and let’s go through some.” She patted the seat next to her on the small sofa. “Get you a pen and write names on the back of these. What if I die before I get a chance to tell you who these people are?”
Mary Anne smiled and shook her head. “Mother, you’re not going to die.”
“I’m going to sometime. I’m eighty years old.”
“Both your parents lived past ninety.”
“I know, but I could drop dead tomorrow, then you’d be left with a tub full of dead people you don’t know the names of. Get a pen.”
“Yes, ma’am. How about we just write a number on the back, and I’ll make an index. That way we won’t damage the photo.”
“Whatever works.” Azalee dug through the tub, pulling out boxes of news clippings, old check registers and cardboard-covered journals. “At least your daddy put these things in a plastic tub. Everything looks exactly like it did when I brought it home from the farm. I just love these tubs.”
“I have thirty-six of them in my garage.” Mary Anne sifted through the yellowed newspaper pieces.
Azalee stopped what she was doing to look up at Mary Anne over the top of her clear-lensed glasses. “Thirty-six? That’s a little excessive, isn’t it? You sound like your daddy.”
“What? I bought them when we moved to California. Now they have all the kids’ childhood stuff and Christmas and my fabric in them.”
Azalee rooted down to the bottom and pulled out a box with Belk written across a Christmas scene on the lid. “Speaking of Christmas... we took some of these photos the last time we were there after Daddy died. I’d already sold the farm, but Charlie wanted to take photographs everywhere. He said we’d never go back, and I guess he was right. Are you ready?”
Mary Anne braced a coffee table book across her knees and readied her yellow pad. “I’m ready. Have at it.”
Azalee pulled out a photograph of a blue house with white shutters and and black asphalt tile roof.
“Number one. This is Aunt Cleo’s house. You remember her. Lived next door to Mother and Daddy? That was a little house they had. I don’t know how they raised all those boys there; but they did, and their store was right next door. It was a big barn, really.” She angled the picture to see it better. “I remember when Uncle Ellis built it, I thought it was a castle. Well, I would’ve if I’d ever heard of a castle, but I was only five, and I’d never heard a fairy tale. There aren’t any castles in the Bible, and that was all we heard growing up, but it was the finest building I’d ever seen. The wood was clear, yellow pine stacked up two stories high. I loved to go in there when he first built it. He let me run around in circles, all the way to the back and round up to the front and back again as many times as I wanted. But I nearly always got splinters.” She handed the photograph off to Mary Anne.
“He never did sand down that floor, and I didn’t have any shoes until I was, I don’t know, six maybe? eight?” She pecked through the box. “Why did they think children didn’t need shoes? They told me it was because I’d grow out of them, but I think they just couldn’t afford them. Seems like Ellis would have given me some. Anyhow, I loved that store. It smelled so clean and fresh when it was new. I’ve always like clean smells. You know, that fresh pine is what Pine Sol wants you to think it smells like, but it doesn’t. I don’t guess you remember it.” Azalee looked up at her daughter.
“No, I remember. I got to go in it a couple of times, but it was dark and dirty by then. He’d already built that concrete block store down by the main road.”
“I didn’t remember you ever knowing him. I thought he died before you came along.”
Mary Anne handed the photo back to her.“No, I went to his funeral with you when I was fourteen. Remember?”
“Oh, Lord. That was awful. I remember now. Do you remember how he died? Had that stroke working on the roof? Bless her heart, when Cleo found him, she fainted. Then somebody had to come in and find her. I can’t imagine seeing his purple face hanging over that beam. His eyes were all bugged out.” Azalee made goggles with her fingers around her eyes. “They did a decent job cleaning him up for the wake, but I don’t know why she had an open casket. He’d already been hanging up there in that hot sun, cooking, but she insisted. Charles said he thought they had to cut his eyeballs out to get his eyelids closed. And there we all sat, right around that stinking casket with plates of food in our laps. I am so glad we don’t do that anymore.”
“I remember standing there at the end of the casket in all those sprays of flowers.” Mary Anne closed her eyes and tilted her head back as though she could still smell them “I’ve always loved carnations”
“People don’t send flowers like that anymore. They give donations to charities. At least they say they do. I always wonder if they really do. Maybe they just lie to save money.”
“Mother, you’re awful!” Mary Anne elbowed her mother. “I think the flowers were to try to hide the smell. They had Ellis’s body in that front room at least two days--”
“That’s right because a lot of people sat up all night with him.”
“Do you think they thought he’d wake up?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be there. He’d a been screaming, my eyes, my eyes!”
“And they’d a been screaming, you’re dead, you’re dead!” Mary Anne and her mother laughed like young sisters while they passed the photographs back and forth like playing cards. “Here’s one. Whose house is that?
“Let’s see, that is Mary Nell’s house shoved up next to the store. It was right large. She had three boys, and I don’t think but two had to share a room. They had a long front porch. Oh really, it was a back porch because it was on the second story facing the woods. Mary Nell had them turn the house around when they built it because she wanted to be able to sit on the porch and look into the woods; but when they turned the house around, the ground sloped so that the first floor became the second floor.” Azalee rolled her eyes.” That was stupid. They should have built a different house. It messed everything up. But they didn’t care about the way things looked. They just wanted it the way they wanted it.”
“I wonder how you knew about things like design and decorating. You’re mother didn’t teach you.”
“Lord, no, she didn’t know anything about that. I read. When I started working, I bought Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal. And home ec. I learned a lot in home ec. I had the best teacher. She taught me for four years. Everything I know about housekeeping and cooking, I learned from her.”
Azalee had been shuffling through the photographs, some black and white, some sticky Polaroids, some fading from the seventies and the more recent darker prints. She pulled out a bent black and white square with ruffled edges.
“Now, you wanted me to tell you where Mother Harris’ house was. Your daddy didn’t get a picture of that, it was long gone before you got here; but if you remember standing in the road there in front of Grandmother and Granddaddy’s house, and you looked up over your left shoulder, it would be right about there. There. “She tapped the picture with her finger. “You can just about see the house in between the trees in this photograph. I guess if you went there today, you could still find the corner rocks that it sat on. It was tiny. It wasn’t much more than a cabin, but it was clapboard. They painted it the most awful green, not dark pine green. Crayon kelly green. I guess they thought it would blend in.”
“Maybe it was the only paint they could get.”
“I doubt it.” She stared at the small photograph, her mind carrying her back in time to that place. Her words paused for a minute. “That might have been it, I guess. But I think they didn’t know what would look good. They never cared. They threw their trash out the back door and hung plastic curtains over their windows.” Her lips had tightened into a grimace.
“Is that the house you’d run through the holler to?”
“Yeah, I’d sneak over there and watch Mother Harris. I don’t know why she fascinated me. She was a tiny woman all humped over, and she always wore a bonnet and long sleeves even when it was terribly hot. And quiet. Never had much to say, but I loved her. I think I loved the idea of her. She certainly didn’t try to love me back." Azalee held up another photo. "Look, here’s pictures of her funeral.”
“Look at those flowers. They cover the grave twice over.” Mary Anne lifted the faded photograph closer to her eyes. “Wonder how much those cost?”
“More than anybody could afford, I bet. I always said the best job to have was mortician and the second best was florist. People always die.”
“I told all the boys they should own mortuaries for that very reason.”
“Oh, Adam couldn’t have handled the dead bodies.”
“No, but he could hire a mortician. He’s got a soothing personality.”
“That’s true.” Azalee nodded her head thoughtfully. “I think he’d still have nightmares, though. And he doesn’t need anything else to have nightmares about.”
Mary Anne sorted through some more pictures, trying to find one that would lighten her mother’s mood. “How about this one?’
“Which one is that?”
“This dog trot cabin. I don’t remember it.”
“Oh, wow. I didn’t even know Charles took this photo.” She held the photo by the right-hand corner. “It was still there after all those years..”
“Whose was it?”
“It was some awful man’s house. You couldn’t see it except the leaves are off the trees. It was across the holler over there near Granny’s. See, look, look to the left there. That’s about where her property started. Whoo. I hated that man and his dark, little house. Makes my skin crawl thinking about it.”
“Why?”
“He was evil.” She shuddered. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Why?”
Azalee stopped shuffling.
“Don’t you listen?” She turned her head to stare at her daughter. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Was he related to us? I mean, he lived in the holler with everybody else, was he a Campbell?”
Azalee grabbed the box of photographs and flopped it onto the table in front of them as though she was going to stand up, but Mary Anne slid her arm around her mother and hugged her into staying put. “You said you were going to tell me the stories, Mom.”
Azalee picked up the photograph again, her lips pulled into graceless pout. She adjusted her glasses and sighed.
“No, he wasn’t a Campbell. He took over that house in 1930 after someone in the family died and left it. Nobody could afford to buy it, so he got it.” She held the photo up and away from her face as though she were standing in the road below it and looking across the pasture to see it. Her eye squinted against the glare of the overhead light on the shiny surface. “It had the purest lake up behind it. Everybody hated to see him get that. He posted signs to keep off his property, but he’d walk all over everybody else’s however it suited him.”
“So, he was just mean, then?”
“No. He was evil. He’d shoved his hands up little girls’ skirts, then sit in church on Sunday and sing the loudest of anybody. And I had to sit there playing the piano with him grinning at me. I hated him.”
Mary Anne looked at her mother. The laughter was gone, and a sense of darkness seemed to settle 2around her.
“Mother.”
Azalee lowered the photograph and dropped it in the box, then looked at her daughter, her face tight.
“Did he hurt you?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it. I tried to forget it seventy years ago. I don’t want to drag it up now.” All her life Azalee had been running from her childhood, running from anything that reminded her of the farm in Georgia. These pictures had been in a box for fifteen years for a reason.
“Did you tell anyone?” Mary Anne’s voice was soft and gentle.
“I tried to tell Mother once, but she slapped me for telling lies about a grown-up. After that, I didn’t even try to tell Daddy. I probably should have started with him, he was always loving with me. I learned to stay away from that house, though. When I’d go through the holler, I cut down to the far right trying to keep him from seeing me. He must have sat on his porch watching for me because he seemed to show up every time I went there. And then once, he caught me playing in the stream at the bottom of the holler. I almost got it that time. I had to jump in the creek to get away. I got the worst whipping of my life that day, and I was only six. You’d a thought my mama would have been worried, but no, all she wanted to do was stripe me with that hickory. She was so mean sometimes. I didn’t tell her anything after that.”