can. The stream played in the metal bottom until the waterline came up a few inches. The rest of the way it filled with a sound like a kind voice.
He heard Orlynne’s Jeep grind up from the base of the cove long before she swung around the curve at the bottom of the mountain and chugged up the rest of the way. She drove on around to the side next to the toolshed and killed the engine. He saw that she wore her heavy coat though it was only a cool forty degrees that morning. Permanently cold-blooded, she’d once told him. As a timber rattler, he’d said once, and she’d laughed and it had been their unspoken joke since then.
“Hey, kid,” she called, held up a paper bag with damp swatches of grease. “I took care of biscuits for us. I’ll only charge you a ten percent delivery fee.”
“Take it on up to the house. I’ll water this row and see you up there in a minute.”
Though Kyle gave her a good five minutes to make it up from the greenhouses, he overtook her short of the front porch. She’d had to rest at the top of the wooden steps embedded in the hillside. Hip going bad. Eighty-five at the end of the month, and still she insisted on coming out to work with him, just as she had his mother and father since they’d bought the property fifty-two years before. All his life Orlynne had been out here, nursing the greenery that would supply other people’s gardens. He had thought of telling her to sell the camper she kept on the Doe River, to come up and stay in the spare bedroom of the main house, but he knew she would have refused. She wanted no charity, only the promise of work and to help things grow.
“You go on up. I’ll be there in a minute,” she told him. “I’m just testing gravity. Making sure the earth is still willing to grab hold of me.”
“All right. You want a coffee, don’t you?”
“Does the Pope crap in the woods?”
“I don’t know. If I see a Catholic grizzly bear I’ll ask.”
He went up and ground some fresh beans, poured some well water into the back of the Mr. Coffee, and watched it wheeze and spit into the carafe. By the time it had filled Orlynne had made it to the front door, put her rear in the big Queen Anne chair in the front room next to the wood-burning stove. She didn’t bother unbuttoning her parka, though her forehead was already slick with sweat. He handed over her coffee.
It wasn’t difficult to see that some mornings were harder on her than others. Clear to him that the only thing worse than dragging herself out of bed to a full day working amid the rows was the prospect of doing nothing at all. She was about as tough as anyone he’d ever known. So he wouldn’t ever tell her what she couldn’t do, that she needed to stay back. He couldn’t ever imagine himself being that cruel.
After they’d kicked around the house eating breakfast and letting it settle, they went back down to the greenhouse and began loading the truck with what they would take to the midweek farmers market. The sun was well up from behind the top ridge, so the mild day would grow warmer, likely draw a decent crowd. They needed it. The winter had always been leaner than he would have liked, but for the last couple of years he had noticed several brown patches where people had kept winter gardens in the past. Many of the older people in the Warlick community were aging into assisted-living facilities and their inherited land was going untenanted or else being taken over by younger kin with more of a mind for selling than making their own lives here. He guessed that his forty years made him one of the youngest still holding on, though that didn’t bother him particularly. He had enough to keep him busy.
He cranked the Tacoma and fed the gas until the engine skipped past its cold chatter and achieved full throat.
“Let’s get while the getting’s good,” Orlynne said, slapped the dash like a hind end.
The parking brake popped and they rolled downhill.
Once they were off the mountain, the road followed the Doe River for close to a mile, the steep bank pitched like the edge of the world. Kyle always took the bends slow, knowing many Carter County drunks had met an abrupt end in those narrow turns. But once he made the asphalt he opened things up, pushed down through the quick switchbacks that carried them over the southern shoulders of Towheaded Mountain until they could turn for the highway headed toward Elizabethton.
They stopped at a Valero gas station before they got out of Warlick to buy some bottled water and to break a large bill for the sake of change to keep in the cash box. The clerk tried to sell them some lottery tickets but Kyle said he’d had enough experience throwing money away and he saw no reason to make the government rich in the process. The clerk, a man no younger than Cain, said that was a hell of a way for a county commissioner to talk, and Kyle said, “Ain’t it though,” and smiled as he let the front door swat shut behind him.
It was only another five minutes up the road before they reached the dusty side lot where the other members of the market had arrived and thrown up their tents. He and Orlynne waved and said hello to the few others sticking it out through the winter months, mostly retirees and their underemployed relations, though there were a couple of hippie girls down from a Watauga County co-op with their organic wares. Honey and jams mostly. Kyle liked to watch them work, especially when it was warm enough for shorts and tank tops. Orlynne had noticed his particular attention to these girls who were indecently young and had done her best to ruin it for him when she’d decided they were lesbians, called them “the Sapphic sweethearts” in a whisper so loud that they could hear her from across the parking lot, which caused them to giggle.
Orlynne braced up the tent poles while Kyle ran the guylines and hammered the stakes into the ground with a rubber mallet. Once it was set and held well in the crosswind, he brought out a pair of long tables with folding legs and leveled them with wood chips he kept in the truck bed for that purpose. Ten minutes later they had all the potted plants down on the ground and the lettuce and flowers spread out on the tables. What little remained they placed on the dropped tailgate of the Tacoma, then sat in their camp chairs and drank their waters and waited.
A good flurry of tourists began to stop by after the first hour. They wanted the flowers mostly, talked about how they desired something natural to carry home as a genuine part of their Appalachian driving tour. He smiled and listened to them, gave directions, advised the best spots for snapping scenic overlook pictures, took their money. Orylnne stepped in and told stories to those who looked like they were after a little bit of local color. It was a good and established rhythm and by midday a substantial portion of what they’d hauled off the side of the mountain was gone. Kyle told Orlynne to watch things while he walked across the road to buy them a barbeque lunch.
When he came back holding a handful of hot paper sacks, he saw a county sheriff’s deputy standing there talking with Orylnne. The big SUV’s engine was still running. What had been hunger in his stomach turned to something else.
“Hey, deputy. What can we do for you all?”
“You ever heard of a cell phone? We’ve been trying to get ahold of you half the morning,” the deputy said. His broad face was mottled pink and he had a look in his eyes like he’d suffered an unfair accusation. Given what Kyle knew about the man the deputy worked for, there was a good chance of that having been the case.
“I must have come off and forgot it. You’ve turned over the right rock and found me.”
“Come on, dang it. I’ve got orders to pick you up. Sheriff said.”
“I hope I don’t need a lawyer.”
“No, you don’t need a dang lawyer. It’s Old Man Pickens. Sheriff needs you to talk the old son of a gun down. And I mean quick, too.”
Kyle told Orlynne to pack up what was left, to get the girls to help her take the tent down and drive everything back home, that he’d have the deputy bring him back when he was done.
“You sure about that, kid? I’m not too trusting of the po-lease,” she asked, grinned wide when she saw that the deputy heard her and didn’t appear pleased.
“Yeah, you go on. This one’s a good old boy. Ain’t you?”
“Can