Free The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] by Jeff Bredenberg Page B

back then South Carolina. The earth was rich enough (although a might sandy), but he farmed only a small patch measuring eight rows by a hundred feet—corn, cabbage, rutabagas, string beans. He had no teeth—had never had any in anyone’s memory—and his leathery face resembled a collapsing jack-o-lantern. Not a trace of paint remained on his shack, which stood among towering oaks hung with Spanish moss in the center of his property. Most neighbors speculated that he owned so much land just so that no one would have any business coming near him.
    Grammy Baker, who had never lived more than a couple of miles from Cross, swore that he had looked precisely the same when she was a little girl 70-odd years before. It was even gossiped that he was 250 years old and had come from Africa himself on a slave boat—a notion that the younger folks poo-pooed, of course.
    Sam Weathers, who delivered dry goods to Cross’s house on the first of each month (unless it fell on a Sunday), had heard Cross say once that he was on his seventh wife—Lydia—and the courthouse records did show four legal marriages under his name, the first one being to Melissa Bailey in 1904.
    Children? Strangely, nobody quite knew, but skeptics reckoned that there had been two Rutherford Crosses, father and son, and that the distinction between the two had blurred—thus accounting for his unnatural life span.
    Cross was held in high esteem when it came to doctoring. He could set a broken bone, cure a fever, and had delivered dozens of babies with Lydia’s help. The Clinic doctors, the kind with framed diplomas on the wall, would get pretty hot about that. But mention such things as “voodoo” or “mojo” or “medicine bag” to Cross and he was as likely as anyone to roll his eyes and spit out a spiteful “Pshaw.”
    The old gentleman also was known to have a substantial root cellar. Grammy Baker had once let on that Rutherford Cross had dug clear through the earth and had spent more time in China than Marco Polo. No one gave much credence to Grammy Baker.
    It was in the year 2013 that Lydia got pregnant. She and Rutherford Cross stood solemnly on their front porch in the bone-chilling damp one night—her big-bellied, him permanently stooped. Their eyes took in the sky. It was turned a broiling red by those magnificent bombs that were slapping the landscape with nuclear fire.
    “Lydia, you go on down ta root cellar an’ don’t come up,” Cross said. He settled into a rocking chair on the porch. “Me, I’m gonna rest these ol’ bones now.”
    Lydia did go to the root cellar. She lived by lantern light and subsisted on smoked hams and shelf after shelf of canned vegetables set up by Cross himself. Above, a year-long wind storm was raging, and in the middle of what should have been a steamy summer Lydia delivered her own child. She named the boy Rutherford Cross but later found herself calling him Pec-Pec, baby talk for the youngster’s favorite food, pickles.
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    16
    The Valve Job
    A car horn honked outside and Seth Graham dropped the roasted chicken breast to his plate—”Damn!”—and went to the window, licking grease from his fingers. There were a jeep and a van below. A young fellow in a Government jumpsuit stood in the gravel waving a small clipboard at him in the rain.
    Deedee Graham swallowed a spoonful of baked potato and said, “They can fend for themselves, can’t they Sethy? Can’t they see we’re shut down for the night?”
    “Ya’d think so, Deedee. Ya’d think so. But if it’s an emergency…” Graham took the keys from a nail on the wall. He slipped his feet into his galoshes, not bothering to buckle them, pulled his slicker from the hanger on the door, and went out. The living quarters were raised on stilts well above the flood level of River 011, and the area below the house had been enclosed to form a garage. Graham wearily thumped down the wet wooden steps.
    The man in the jumpsuit