Fireworks Over Toccoa (9 page)

Lily pulled the Packard over to the side of Owl Swamp Road, turned off the engine, and hopped out, shutting the door behind her. Still low over the flatland east, the sun threw long aureate light across the field. Lily walked out into it, the high grass around her arched and wet and swaying in the breeze.

Jake was already hard at work, digging long trenches to bury mortars, when Lily approached. For a moment, she had a flash of what Jake must have looked like in the battlefields of Europe.

He stopped, rested an arm on the shovel, and took in the sight of her coming toward him. Freshly scrubbed face, hair neatly pulled back, walking into the sun in a pretty, tailored summer dress, Lily was a stunning vision. An angel gilded in the haze. Jake felt his pulse quicken involuntarily as he just stared, fixedly, at her.

“I saw your firework this morning,” Lily said.

“I wasn’t ready to sleep last night after you left. So I worked on it.”

“It was incredible.”

He continued to stare. Once again, she let him. He’d certainly been attracted to women before, but he couldn’t remember ever feeling this unsteady. As beautiful as she had been over the candlelight during dinner, as lovely as she had been in his memory of her throughout the night, to see her like this, fresh and clean and radiant in the silken daylight, she literally took his breath away.
Get a grip, buddy
, he told himself. He willed himself to inhale deeply, slowing his heart rate. He wiped the sweat from his brow. “Would you like some breakfast?” he said slowly, controlling the cadence of his words. “I’ve already had mine, but I could find something for you.”

“No, thank you. I can’t stay long. And actually, I was thinking perhaps I could offer you a meal.”

“No pie?” he said with a disarming grin.

“I’ll leave the pecan pies to the Auxiliary,” she said, returning the smile. “I was thinking, maybe, lunch. Are you free for it today?”

“Maybe a late lunch. I have to get these twenty-fours in the ground.” He pointed to a stack of big two-foot-across steel mortars.

“How about two-ish?”

“Sure. But it gets pretty hot out here ’bout then.”

“I know a place nearby where it’s cooler. I think you’d really like it. We can eat there.”

“Sounds great.”

“Good. See you this afternoon.”

Lily headed back to her car. Jake watched her for a long moment, and then he returned to his labor, digging with increased tempo.

A shopping basket in hand, Lily made her way through the aisles at the market. She found some corn, picked it up, and smelled it. The husks were slightly browned from the heat, and while the corn was fine, Lily knew it would taste nothing like the fresh summer corn she loved so much that grew out at Holly Hills. That was what she somehow got stuck in her mind today, that sweet Georgia Indian corn, and simply nothing else would do today. She put the browned corn back and continued her shopping, realizing that Mrs. Keener was observing her.

“Good morning, Lily.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Keener.”

“You look pretty today.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you see the fireworks this morning?”

“Yes. I did.” Lily put a loaf of fresh wheat bread in her basket.

“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t believe I have.”

“Evelyn Tabor hired the pyrotechnics man for the Auxiliary. Says he’s a quiet fellow. Keeps to himself.”

“Huh.”

“Italian.”

Lily raised her eyebrows as best she could.

“Mrs. Brown said she saw him camping out there in Bartam’s Field, not far from your parents’.”

“Do you have any roasting chicken today?”

Mrs. Keener removed a just-plucked chicken from a refrigerator behind the counter and wrapped it in brown wax paper. “Are you and Paul going to watch the show from Holly Hills on the Fourth?”

“Haven’t decided yet, Mrs. Keener.”

“What am I saying? You probably won’t leave your house for a week when that boy comes home.” Mrs. Keener winked at Lily as she handed her the chicken. Lily produced a smile.

While Mrs. Keener rang up her items, Lily looked out the big glass windows at the front of the store. There was great excitement on the streets of Toccoa right now. Men in uniform poured into town and it seemed as though the entire world was celebrating.

Looking over her shoulder, down an aisle stacked high with cornflake boxes, Lily saw a young man in a Navy uniform and a young woman, her hair a mess, holding each other and kissing. The woman playfully tried to break away, swatting at him and trying to tuck her hair in place, but the sailor held her tight and kept kissing her. They laughed, looking around to make sure no one was watching, unable to keep their hands off each other.

Without them noticing, Lily continued looking, smiling whimsically to herself, surprised by the mixture of joy and restlessness she felt.

After a short drive just north of town, Lily pulled off 123 and onto the paved driveway of Holly Hills. She told herself she was going there to get the rest of her clothes as her mother had told her to do, but mainly she was thinking about that corn.

Mixed among the pines and hardwoods of her family’s fifty-five-acre estate were scores of fully mature southern magnolias. They lined the drive leading up the hill to the house. During the early summer, the massive hundred-foot trees were covered with huge white flowers that filled all of Holly Hills with the ethereal scent of citronella. By July, though, the flowers and leaves burned and curled in the heat. And by August, vast piles of brown droppings lay dead and decomposing under and all around the trees.

When Lily was in grammar school, a UGA English professor who bought a house in town wrote an article that was published in
The Toccoa Record
calling the southern magnolias “Toccoa’s sacred cows.” Likening the town’s grand trees to the bovines that wandered the streets of Hindu countries rubbed many people the wrong way, though it was the professor’s practice of yoga in public parks that ultimately got her run out of town.

Lily parked her car in front of the stately house, a white-columned antebellum structure that “crowned the hills,” as people liked to say. She stepped out of the car and took in the big, heady fragrance of the magnolias. She closed her eyes, committing the scent to memory, knowing the late summer burn-off and drop were coming very soon.

To the side of the house, a massive mound of Cherokee roses grew over and around the old caretaker’s cabin, now a toolshed. Lily loved the wild roses and insisted they be left to their own designs. Honey reluctantly acquiesced and steered the gardeners clear. Lily had even wanted to use the rambling white roses at her wedding, but they weren’t in bloom yet, to her mother’s relief. Hothouse orchids, exotic but decidedly controlled, were flown in.

Lily entered the house, walking through the spacious foyer. There was a scent to her childhood home, coffee and vanilla and her father’s sweet pipe tobacco, but it was more than that, and she couldn’t quite articulate it, but it was distinct and strong and always triggered unexpected flashes of moments from her life. Riding a tricycle her father gave her all around the foyer on some wonderful early birthday. Thousands of jasmine gardenias decorating the entire downstairs for her friend Jenna’s trousseau party. Lily’s brother, in his officer’s uniform, walking out the door for the last time. The Army chaplain coming through that same door with the news.

After, Honey never spoke of Lily’s brother, at least not openly. It was Honey’s way and it was not questioned, and Lily understood that this was not a subject to be brought up, so she didn’t. There were very few pictures or items of his around the house, but Honey did keep one framed photo of him on a lovely jade-topped table against the staircase in the foyer. Lily loved that picture. He was so handsome and hopeful and determined. Looking at the picture sometimes she would recall the way he would smile at her and call her “kiddo.” As a girl, she remembered always liking that. “Hiya, kiddo,” he would say, and then run off with his older friends.

Lily walked up the big staircase, down the upstairs hallway, and into the bedroom that was hers from birth.

She turned on the light, went to the closet, and removed the remaining clothing that still hung there. Most everything she felt she wanted close had already been moved to her new home. This was the last of it. She slung the clothes over her arm and took a final look around to see if she’d missed anything: ribbons from horse back riding, a handmade birthday card her friend Jenna had given her, a silly old necklace Lily had made from tiny glass beads one summer. These things were all important to her. But they were from a different time, a different place, different from where she was and where she was going.

In a stack of schoolbooks lying on a desk, a large yearbook from Toccoa High caught Lily’s eye. She picked it up, smiling as she thumbed through it. Tucked away in the pages was a lovely charcoal drawing on paper torn from a sketch pad: a girl with wet hair in a slip, leaning back on her arms, face to the sky, eyes closed. Lily smiled as the drawing brought a new flash of memory to her mind, of that day four years ago, so long ago now, when she went swimming with Mark Morgan and he drew her in the sun. Everyone always said he was so wild, the lanky carefree boy whose father worked in the back of the Feed & Seed store, but Lily remembered thinking that Mark was also sweet and smart and filled with dreams of such interesting things that were just too fanciful and strange for the tastes of most folks in town. After she met Paul, Lily never thought much about Mark Morgan, never saw him again, except in the reception line at his wedding, when he married Jenna. Odd, even funny, the paths life offers, and the path one chooses.

Lily secured the drawing back in the yearbook and closed it, and fighting a swirl of emotions, she looked around her childhood room one more time, taking in her frilly childhood bed where she so many times dreamed about the shape and substance of the days she was now living. The feelings wept into her heart like a pad of butter on warm grits.

Then she turned off the light and, carrying her clothes, walked out of her room.

After dumping the clothes in the back of the Packard, Lily walked from the car around to the side of the house, past the old shed overgrown with the Cherokee roses—evidence that a gardener once lived there, she always thought—continuing past a low rusted iron fence that surrounded a small gathering of mossy tombstones, Civil War era mostly, until she reached a large vegetable plot that had been cut into a far corner of the back lawn. This was the Davis family’s garden. GiGi, who worked for the family and lived in a room inside the main house, often hired local boys to help tend the garden, which provided a variety of fresh herbs and vegetables for the family. Despite her efforts, the garden was not in the best of shape, having been regularly picked over by the deer.

As a girl, Lily loved working out here, and sometimes her father would join her if he was in town. Using their bare hands they would spread compost in the fall, sow tomatoes and okra and green peppers in the spring, and sit out in the dirt and picnic with their fresh vegetables in the summer. Honey enjoyed seeing them together, but as Lily grew older, Honey grew less tolerant of her daughter’s gardening. Even calling the plot a Victory Garden did little to assuage Honey’s belief that the dirt was no place for a young lady.

Taking in the wonderful smell of the warm earth, Lily went straight to the rows of Indian corn, an extra-sweet variety that flourished throughout the area until the Cherokee were removed from the land, forced west by settlers.

Lily pulled the green stalks down with her hands, shaking off the dirt and plucking off ears of corn. The smell of the husks and corn silk brought a rush of memories to mind and it seemed like only a few days ago that she and her father would sit out here and talk about the silliest things, which would always make her laugh. She smiled, remembering. He used to say that he wanted to take a pot of boiling water out here and drop the corn right in it, that’s how fresh he liked it, and they’d laugh till they were rolling in the dirt thinking about what Honey would say and do if she found them out here with one of her good pots boiling up produce.

Lily brought the freshly picked corn to her face and felt the husks on her skin and breathed in its sweetness, and a sigh escaped from her.

Back at her home, listening to the radio, lost in thought, Lily sat on the back porch shucking corn under heavens flaxy and creamed as raw butter from cows on summer pasture. She loved doing this, especially on these kinds of warm afternoons. It was as close to cooking as Lily got.

When she finished removing all the husks from the Indian corn, Lily cut the kernels off the cob with a chef ’s knife, letting them drop into a large casserole pot. Using the back of the knife, she scraped the milk from the cobs, which she also let drip off into the pot.

Taking the pot into the house, Lily added some sugar, salt, flour, and butter and put it in the preheated oven. She smiled, quite satisfied with her improvised work, which was not entirely unlike a brownie dish she had learned from Honey years ago. But rather than follow a recipe, Lily trusted her instinct.
After all
, she thought,
with sugar and butter and corn this good, how can you go wrong?

She checked on the chicken that was boiling on top of the stove in an oversized hammered-copper stockpot that she’d dug out of a Rich’s gift box, a lavish house warming present from one of her father’s business associates whose name she could not recall. She remembered several lengthy conversations with the mid-level manager who seemed to feel that paying attention to Mr. Davis’s child at holiday parties would be beneficial to his career. The booty of a childhood spent smiling through such proceedings surrounded her now. Silver tongs from Tiffany’s. Fine china from Wedgwood. Everyday dishware from Davison’s. Cutlery from J. B. White. Utensils from Kirven’s. All manner of bowls and bakeware from Belk-Gallant downtown. There were also a few pieces of heirloom crystal and silver, harbingers of the riches her mother had in store for her. Lily felt a twinge of guilt presently using these items, many that came with cards referencing meals to be made for Paul, but she put this out of her mind.