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Chapter 1
I clearly remember the hot summer minute when I decided if the alternative was to forgive Preston Scott Anderson, I'd rather go to hell.
Still, I followed that thought with an anxious glance toward Uncle Stephen's open upstairs window. Was he still typing? He'd been too engrossed in the next day's sermon to stop Preston and me from fighting, but sometimes he seemed to know my very thoughts.
It was a beautiful afternoon, the kind with puffy white clouds, dark blue sky, robins chirping in a tree, and Abby clearly audible through the open bathroom window, telling a story to her rubber turtle in an after-nap bath. Much too lovely a day for the feelings roiling inside me. My stomach ached so bad, I was afraid I'd give Preston the pleasure of watching me throw up all over the soft cool grass.
"Go home!" I commanded, feet apart and a fist on each hip.
Preston still hadn't had that growth spurt he'd been promising all year, so at almost eleven he was still shorter than I at almost twelve. Under the blooming pear tree he was pale and sweating, rusty freckles standing out on his face like dried hen dookey on a very white egg.
Dookey was a new word I'd picked up from Ruth Lamont, and it seemed exactly right for Preston. I could imagine him standing under his Uncle Davy's hen roost while Biddy, the meanest of Miss Hannah's hens, dripped on his face.
Nothing a hen could drip, though, was as nasty as what was coming out of Preston's wet pink mouth. "Just you wait, Carley Marshall! Your Uncle Stephen's a Commie and a nigger lover. He'd have lied like a rug to get Jay off"
Hot blood rushed to my head. "Jay didn't kill anybody, and you know it. And Uncle Stephen would never have lied. But he'll whip you good if he hears you calling Jay that. Now get off our property!"
"Ain't your propity, it's church propity," Preston reminded me with odious superiority, "and you don't know anything, smarty pants. If you knew everything there is to know--what old Stevie boy's really been doin'?--well, all I gotta say is, when we get through with him, he'll be lucky if he don't get tarred, feathered, and run out of town. Just you wait!"
I wasn't smart enough to know he was just quoting his elders.
I rushed him, fists flailing the air. "Don't you call him Stevie!" One punch grazed his round soft jaw. "You call him Mister Whitfield!" A second brushed his right ear. "And if you don't get out of this yard this minute, I'll kill you!" My third punch hit solid, burying my arm almost to the elbow in Preston's pillowy midriff. He reeled and fell with a satisfactory "Oof!"
I straddled him, still punching. Nothing had felt so good in a long time.
"Carley!"
I jerked my head upward. Uncle Stephen stood framed at the screen, cradling his pipe in one hand and shoving back his hair with the other. "Time for your piano practice," he said mildly. "Go on home, Preston, and do your arithmetic exercises. If you need help, come over later. Okay?" He turned and disappeared into the darkness beyond the screen.
I glared at Preston. He glared back, his blue eyes like hard little marbles. "You don't know what I know, Carley," he rasped. "It's big as God! And people're gonna do everything they can to make sure your precious Uncle Stephen gets 'zactly what he deserves." He limped toward the road and his own house next door. His limp was always worse when he knew somebody was watching.
"You're fat and ugly and your mama dresses you funny!" I yelled after him. But I yelled softly. I didn't want Uncle Stephen wasting a perfectly good suppertime talking about turning the other cheek.
That afternoon I abandoned my new sonata, dug out an old book I'd finished years before, and found "The Happy Farmer," which I could bang out fast without thinking. "I'll never forgive him," I vowed again, pounding away at the chords. "Never! If I have to go to hell--okay, I will."
Determination must have poured through my fingertips, for Uncle Stephen called down the stairs, "Sounds like the happy farmer's taking a beating from his angry wife."
How could I know, that hot, still afternoon, that of all the people in Job's Corner, only Preston Anderson--with a face full of freckles and hair like a rusty toilet brush, with eyes so weak he had to hold a paper almost to his nose to read it--only Preston saw clearly what was going on?
That happened in June 1950, but if I'm to tell this story correctly I must begin in July 1949, when I turned eleven. I wanted a weenie roast. Mama gave me a pink party--pink cake, pink ice cream, and eleven little girls in pink dresses bringing presents wrapped in pink. Not by a single flicker did the eleven pink candles on my cake warn me what was coming my way in the next twelve months. If they had, I'd have gone to bed and pulled Big Mama's quilt over my head.
In those days I lived with Mama and her mother, Big Mama, in a little town perched on the North/South Carolina border just under the Blue Ridge mountains. We lived in a big white house with a wide front porch, where I loved to sprawl on the cool gray floorboards to read. Aunt Sukie--brown, gnarled, and so bent with arthritis she wasn't taller than me--came in every day to cook and clean. Even though Pop, Mama's daddy, had been dead two years, his name--Henry Marshall's--in big white letters on a red brick store in Shelby still insured that everybody in our little town knew who we were.
