Bahamas and other islands to my father. Take the train down to Miami and sail from there. “The Bahamas?” my father asked. “The Bahamas? Now?”
“What is wrong with the idea? Winter is the best time to go.”
In our camp, we had our own concerns. Sweetie grew and grew, so much the tiny pink-and-white hat I’d crocheted under Aunt C’s eye didn’t fit anymore, and her old booties no longer could be stretched around on her feet. Her wrists had creases like bracelets. Her hands had doubled in size, and her caramel skin filled in. Her eyes had morphed into great marbles. She was so soft she was shocking.
Before Thanksgiving, on a Monday afternoon, I walked home from school to discover Daniel’s spattered, ancient car under the porte cochere. The front of the thing was mean-looking to me with its hooked chrome beak—a hawk’s. It was two colors, the top part orange and the bottom brown, with a silver strip between. The back door was open: Sidney, Daniel, Aunt C, Sweetie, and Cleo were inside already, waiting for me. “Get in,” Aunt C said, pointing to the backseat. “Come on, darling.”
The interior was completely unknown to me at that point. I poked my head in and saw pieces of burgundy carpet on the seats and, below that, through the big rusted holes in the floor, the gleaming, bleached pea gravel of our driveway. At that, I stopped.
Aunt C turned, laughing, color in her cheeks, “Claire, Mr. La Fever doesn’t have all day.” She was the only one who called Daniel “Mr. La Fever.” “What’s the matter? You can’t fall through.”
Sweetie was already on the bench seat in her basket. Cleo was in Aunt C’s lap, with her paws hooked over the edge of the open window. Before I could change my mind, Daniel said, “Let’s go.” Reaching back, he pulled my door shut, locked it.
Suddenly, we were rolling, Cleo sipping air at the crack in the open window, pebbles in the asphalt of the road becoming zooming streaks beneath my feet. I could not look down—but it was an adventure.
“Left your mother a note, dear,” C said in a monotone. “Nothing to worry about.”
In the front, they started listing recipes: sandies, pralines, rumballs, nougat logs, brittle, sherried nuts, dream bars, ordinary pecan pie, coconut pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, Waldorf salad, cranberry orange pecan relish, spiced cocktail pecans, pecan fudge, stuffed dates, divinity.
The dash of the car was of bird’s-eye wood, shiny and smooth with large chrome-ringed pools for the dials. The odometer showed all zeroes—I asked why. Daniel said that was because he’d broken it by driving so far. He had bought this thing years before, when he got out of the service in California, drove it all the way back across the country. It had survived several engines, he said.
After a while, Cleo got tired of hanging out the front window and turned around to see Sweetie and me. She came down close with her hot breath that smelled like beans, so I shielded my sister. But she laughed at the dog.
The conversation in the front moved on. Daniel said, “One hundred sixty-one pounds.”
“Not me, not me,” Sidney chimed in, her voice high-pitched, silly.
“Well, you can try,” Aunt C said to Daniel. “You get half.”
“We will see about that,” he said.
We drove slowly past the old parts of town and then, leaving Fayton’s limits, turned onto Mt. Ararat Road, which led to the house we called Mam’s. It was the original McKenzie place, where my ancestors had a farm a long time ago.
Aunt C mentioned she had lived there early in her marriage, something I had never known. When I said so, she told me more: In the 1930s, her father, my grandfather, fell right over the counter at his store, McKenzie Seed and Feed. Everyone found the fact that he’d had a heart attack ironic since his wife, my grandmother, had angina: she’d spent half her time in bed since she was forty. Not long after my grandfather died, the business folded. It was the Depression—within a year, they lost the house in town. My father was a teenager then, thirteen years younger than his sister, C. He was the closest to Mam of any of the children. When he was finishing high school, Aunt C left her job to come down to look after her mother. For a while, her husband joined her, but then he had to leave because of the war. Aunt C said, “Somebody had to rescue your daddy.”
“Rescue him?” I asked.
“I don’t mean he was in danger. But he could go to college on the money from the Veterans when Daddy died. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stay with Mam. I had to talk him into it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Your father has a loyal soul.”
She started to say something else then she stopped and started again: “It’s a good trait. A very good trait. Really. Really.” She clicked her tongue, looked out the window. I saw her eyes reflected in the mirror. Downcast.
All of the siblings—my father, Aunt C, the two older brothers—owned the country house in common, so it was Aunt C’s as much as my father’s, though it was his responsibility. He still lived in Fayton while the rest had left for lives in the North. “We had to go,” she explained. “Nobody had anything back then. Not a decent job in Fayton County in those days. I can testify to it. I looked and looked, took all the Civil Service tests. People along this road used to get a mule to haul their Model T into town.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Nobody could afford gas.”
“Gas is twenty-seven cents a gallon,” I said. I had just seen a sign for it.
“That’s what she’s saying,” Daniel chimed in, nodding.
Mam’s few fields had always been in tobacco, except for the pecan grove. My father rented the land to other farmers. We had an allotment, that was why he could, she said. There was a ramshackle house with many doors to the outside. Once white, it was now a mink gray, hardly enough paint left to tell it was peeling.
“Anybody living there?” Daniel asked as we approached.
“Not now, Connor told me. Vacant.” Aunt C said.
“Sure?” he asked. “People out here have a shotgun.”
“I’m sure,” Aunt C said.
We turned from the highway onto the road that led to the house—really now just two tracks where grass was barely peeping up from the sandy soil. Aunt C was talking about how she’d tried to renovate the place a bit when she moved in with Mam. “I see it’s falling apart again,” she said, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
We rolled past the complicated house, snoozing on its old plot of ground, a fancy overgrown flower garden on one side with tall boxwoods and camellias surrounding it.
Our nuts were special, not the common ones, papershells or Stuarts. The McKenzie trees produced a bronze, lightly speckled pecan, and the meats were skinny and golden, not brown. They were also sweet and very oily as if buttered inside their shells, as well. Like the nuts, most of the trees were narrow, elongated. This was true of all but the queen of the grove, which unwound in every direction, a majestic spiral in the midst of a bare circular section of shade where little would grow. A thicket of slick-leaved, low trees and a stand of bushes that defined the end of the garden rimmed this great tree on the side near the house. The fields and the rest of the grove were beyond the queen, spreading out all the way down to the creek. We parked far from the house. The sky was cold powder blue. There was one of those day moons that came in late fall and early winter.
For half an hour we picked up the nuts on the ground, and then Aunt C started eyeing the trees. “You ready?” she asked Daniel.
He