Home Fires by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online Page A

story, some of which only Daddy remembered now.
    Hard as it would be to lose those, losing the pictures and the Bible would be like losing our past. Pictures can’t be retaken. And though Daddy’s not much for churchgoing, the Bible holds his mother’s record of the family’s births and deaths and marriages in her semi-literate handwriting.
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    The lane curved around the oak grove. A dusty old black two-ton truck was parked out in the cotton field near a tall magnolia tree in full bloom. As we approached, I saw that the tree stood inside a low stone wall that enclosed a small plot of ground about twenty-five feet square. The truck was fitted with a hydraulic winch to hoist slabs of marble and granite in and out of the truck’s bed.
    “You ever meet Rudy Peacock before?” Daddy asked as a man rose from his seat on the wall.
    “Not that I remember,” I said.
    “His granddaddy made my daddy’s stone and his daddy and him did Annie Ruth’s and your mama’s stone, too.”
    My grandfather Knott’s “stone” was a ten-foot-tall black marble obelisk, erected shortly after he crashed and drowned in Possum Creek. Revenuers shot out his truck tires when he tried to outrun them with a load of his homemade whiskey. From all accounts, my grandfather was a good-hearted family man who turned to moonshining when boll weevils destroyed the cotton farms around here. It was the only way he knew to feed and clothe his extended family and pay the taxes on his little piece of land.
    Daddy was barely in his teens when he became the man of the house, and defiant pride had reared that costly shaft to his father’s memory long before my birth. Same with his first wife’s marker, too, of course.
    I probably would have met the Peacocks, father and son, when they came out to set Mother’s white marble stone except that I was in full flight by then—mad at Daddy, mad at my brothers, mad at God—so mad that I stayed gone for two years.
    “Rudy’s right shy with women,” Daddy warned as we pulled up to the big truck. “Try not to scare him.”
    Scare him?
    The man now leaning against the truck’s front fender was tall as Daddy, but so broad and muscular you could’ve fit two Kezzie Knotts into one Rudy Peacock’s chinos and black T-shirt. Peacock’s hair was granite gray and his arms were roped with veins that stood out against the muscles. He nodded politely when we were introduced, but he didn’t put out his hand, his eyes didn’t quite meet mine, and he soon moved back so that Daddy was a buffer between us.
    Ordinarily, I’d have asked if he was the father of a Peacock girl who’d been a year or two ahead of me in high school, but he was clearly so uncomfortable that I was ready to fade into the background.
    Not Daddy, though. He’s always had a broad streak of mischief in him.
    “Deb’rah’s gonna need your vote again come election time,” he said. “And won’t some of your girls in school with her? What was their names, shug?”
    “Now you didn’t drag Mr. Peacock out here to get his vote or talk about my high school days,” I said, and opened the wide iron gate set in the stone wall.
    The damage was apparent as soon as I stepped inside and it shamed and angered me that any nephew of mine had a hand in this. I can understand teenage boys buying beer illegally. I can understand why they’d come back here, well off the road and out of casual view, to drink it in the moonlight and strew the cans around. But to then start pushing over headstones? To come armed with a can of spray paint?
    The need to smash and deface I do not understand.
    I hadn’t closely scrutinized the Polaroid pictures of the damage that Cyl DeGraffenried had introduced as evidence that afternoon. Mrs. Avery had picked them up, but under her disapproving eye, I had given them only a cursory, embarrassed glance. Now that I was here and could see all the girls’ names printed in dark green across the stones and wall,