Home Fires by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

Daddy’s old pickup doesn’t have air-conditioning. I rested my arm on the open window and the warm June air ballooned the sleeve of my T-shirt and whipped my hair about my face. One sneakered foot was propped on the dash, the other was on the hump between my floorboards and Daddy’s.
    He wore his usual scuffed brogans. His khaki work pants and blue work shirt had been washed to faded softness, but his hand was strong on the wheel and there was nothing faded about the cornflower blue of his eyes. His eyes narrowed now as he shook his head again over A.K.’s stupidity.
    “I don’t understand how come he’s growed up so wild,” he muttered as we crossed Possum Creek and drove along Old Forty-eight. “Less’n it’s ’cause April’s always made Andrew spare the rod.”
    “Probably genetic,” I said, enjoying the rush of heavy humid air against my skin. Long as I don’t have to do stoop labor in it, I don’t really mind our summer weather.
    “How you mean?”
    “From all I hear, A.K.’s pretty much like Andrew was and he says you came near killing that peach tree down at the barn stripping off switches.”
    “Back then, he’d rather get a whipping than do right, that’s for sure,” Daddy admitted.
    “And April’s the one got him on the straight and narrow,” I reminded him.
    “Well, she ain’t keeping A.K. on it.”
    “Can’t fight the genes,” I grinned.
    “You throwing off on me again, girl?”
    “If the shoe fits.”
    “I never tore up things just for the hell of it,” he said mildly. “And for certain I never tore up nothing belonging to somebody else.”
    The sliding rear window was open and Ladybelle stuck her head in and gave my ear a lick. Blue had his head over the side, his nose to the wind. In his youth, they say, Daddy collected enough speeding tickets to paper the outhouse before they got indoor plumbing. These days he rattles around ten miles under the limit, and the dogs ambled from one side of the rusty truck bed to the other with no fear of losing their balance.
    We turned onto the blacktop that led past Jimmy White’s garage, crossed Forty-eight, then did a dogleg onto another blacktop, and finally wound up on the clay and gravel road that runs along Crocker land.
    A narrow dirt lane leads across a field of healthy green cotton plants to where a stand of massive oaks shades a fire-blackened stone chimney. The chimney and a scattering of wild phlox among the weeds at the edge of the field are all that remain of the original Crocker homeplace.
    “How’d it burn?” I asked as we bumped our way towards it.
    “Chimney fire,” said Daddy. (In his Colleton County accent, it came out “chimbly far,” but I had no trouble understanding him.)
    “Forty year ago, it were. Martha’s mama was cooking dinner when it catched and she had to be dragged out. Kept trying to get back in till Dwight’s daddy, Cal Bryant—he was the one got here first—he promised he’d go back in for her milk pitcher if she’d promise to stay in the yard. Funny what folks take a notion to save at a time like that. Whole houseful of nice stuff and the only thing she was worried over was a milk pitcher that maybe cost fifty cent at Woolworth’s.”
    “What would you save?” I asked.
    “Your mama’s picture,” he said promptly. “The picture albums with you young’uns. Maybe my mama’s Bible if they was time. Everything else, I could replace.”
    I knew what he meant even though the house was full of irreplaceable reminders of people long gone: a hand-pegged wardrobe that his grandfather built out of heart pine, his mother’s punched-tin pie safe that stood by the back door, the stack of intricate hand-pieced quilts that had warmed us through childhood’s long winter nights, a zillion bits of glass and china and tatted pillow slips and rush-bottomed chairs and pocket knives that had been sharpened so many times that their blades were worn down to slender steel crescents—each object with a