The next Sunday, we flew into Hickory Regional Airport, the closest airport to Byerly. The plane was running a few minutes late, so I wasn’t surprised to see Aunt Nora anxiously scanning the passengers getting off the plane as if afraid Richard and I had gotten lost in mid-flight. Then she saw us, and her whole face lit up. As soon as we got within reach, she pulled both of us toward her and hugged us to within an inch of our lives.
“It’s so good to see you two,” she said, her eyes misting. One of Aunt Nora’s charms is the way she cries when she’s happy. “I didn’t expect y’all to be back this way before summer at the earliest.”
“It was kind of a last-minute thing,” I said. “I finished a huge project right when Richard’s spring break started, and since we couldn’t think of anyplace we’d rather go, here we are. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Mind?” She hugged me again, harder than before.
Though I really had just finished a big project, and it really was spring break, I still felt guilty about not telling her the real reason we’d come.
Thaddeous, a taller version of his mother, was waiting his turn for hugs, and we cheerfully obliged him. Then I handed him the thick letter that his girlfriend, Michelle, had asked me to deliver, and he was so intent on reading it as we went to claim our luggage, that he nearly ran into the wall.
April in Boston is hit-or-miss as far as the weather is concerned—you’re as likely to get snow as sunshine. North Carolina’s April is rarely so wishy-washy, and this year, it was glorious. Flowers were blooming, birds were singing, and the sky was the bright color University of North Carolina alumni call Carolina blue.
“I better drive,” Aunt Nora said. “There’s no way I’m going to let Thaddeous behind the wheel, not with his nose in that letter.”
Thaddeous grinned, but once our luggage was loaded into the trunk, he eagerly climbed into the backseat of the Buick and pulled out the envelope again. I couldn’t blame him. He and Michelle had been involved long-distance for over a year now, and though she’d done her darnedest to find a job in Byerly, she just wasn’t having any luck. If she hadn’t been such a good secretary, she would have settled for one of the less interesting jobs my relatives could have arranged for her, but she didn’t want to take a step down. So they were stuck with letters and phone calls.
I pushed Richard toward the front seat with Aunt Nora, saying, “You need the leg room more than I do.” My husband is considerably taller than my own five-foot-two, but that wasn’t the only reason. The fact was, I was pretty sure I knew what Aunt Nora was going to talk about, and I didn’t want her to see my face while she spoke. Richard did some acting in college, so I knew he could be counted on to keep his thoughts to himself. It went without saying that Thaddeous wasn’t going to notice anything that Michelle hadn’t written. So nobody would be able to tell that Richard and I already knew about Aunt Nora’s big announcement.
Sure enough, before we got out of the parking lot she said, “You two will not believe what’s been happening in the past few days. It was supposed to be a secret, but Hank Parker at the Gazette found out and he put it in Wednesday’s paper.”
I could see the side of Richard’s face, so knew he was showing her his interested-but-concerned expression, but Aunt Nora let the suspense build as she pulled out onto the highway toward Byerly. Then she said, “The Walters are selling the mill!”
Richard’s drama coach would have been proud of him as he made all the right sounds of surprise. I tried to echo him, but knew I wasn’t very convincing. Fortunately Aunt Nora was too caught up in her story to notice.
“Would you believe that they’re selling the place to Yankees?” Then, remembering she was talking to my Massachusetts-bred husband, she reached out and patted his leg. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s just such a surprise that they’d even think of selling, let alone to— To people from out of town.”
Byerly hasn’t got much in the way of industry, just the mill, so of course the ramifications of the buyout were endless, but since most of them had already occurred to me, I quit listening. Instead I stared out the car window, waiting for us to pass the piece of the highway that offers a quick glimpse of Walters Mill.
It wasn’t hard to spot. It’s the biggest building in town, and made of mud brown bricks that make it the ugliest, too. The Walters don’t waste money on landscaping, so it’s surrounded by asphalt parking lots and fences. Generations of my family have worked at the mill, and since the other businesses in town would dry up and blow away without the mill workers, even the relatives who don’t work there depend on it indirectly. Folks tend either to love the mill for taking care of them, or despise it for controlling their lives.
I’d always been on the despising side. It isn’t just the brown lung that claimed so many mill workers—the Burnettes missed the worst of that. It isn’t just that Burt Walters is a petty tyrant—I’ve seen and heard of worse bosses. It’s the inevitability of the place, knowing that if nothing else works out, you can always work at the mill. Some people find that a comfort, but I’ve always considered it a threat.
I’ve sometimes wondered if I would have stayed in Byerly if it hadn’t been for the prospect of working there. I decided early on that I wanted to run a computer, not a loom, and when I went up North for college, I knew I didn’t want to come back. I had other reasons for staying in Boston after graduation, first and foremost Richard, but avoiding the mill was a big part of it. That made my coming back home to help decide the mill’s fate more than a little ironic.
Aunt Nora finished telling us what she’d heard about the buyout just as we pulled up in front of the Burnette home place, currently owned by my great-aunt Maggie. The house is never going to make it onto a list of stately homes of North Carolina. The original structure was a simple white clapboard farmhouse, but as the family got bigger, so did the house. The problem was that some of the Burnettes were better builders than others, which made it a perfect example of a house built by a committee. I’d spent countless hours there before my parents died, and afterward, moved in with Paw so he could take care of me. Maybe it isn’t beautiful, but to me it was home.
“I thought you two might want to change before the cookout,” Aunt Nora said.
“Cookout?” I said.
“The one the Walters and the Saunders are throwing to try to smooth over some of the objections to the buyout,” Richard explained.
“Oh, right,” I said, thinking that I should have paid more attention to what Aunt Nora was saying.
Thaddeous helped Richard and me unload our luggage and carry it to the door, but then started back toward the car, and I realized that Aunt Nora was still sitting behind the wheel.
“Aren’t y’all coming in?” I asked.
“We’d better not,” Thaddeous said. “Aunt Maggie is none too happy with us right now.”
Richard nodded as if he knew what Thaddeous was talking about, which made me wonder what else I’d missed on that ride.
I rang the bell, and a minute later, Aunt Maggie opened the door. My late grandfather may have been the last to know exactly how old his sister was, because she hadn’t bothered to enlighten the rest of us after he died. Though her hair had gone gray early, she was still a vigorous woman, but she may have given that impression by personality rather than by actual appearance. The T-shirts she usually wore left no doubt as to her opinions, and today’s was no exception. In bold red, white, and blue letters, it said, “Look for the union label.” Even Aunt Maggie’s dog, Bobbin—a mix of German shepherd, chow, and golden retriever—was wearing a collar with a union label.
I started to give Aunt Maggie a hug, but she glared beyond me at Aunt Nora’s car, and said, “What are they doing here?” while Bobbin kept watch suspiciously.
“They picked us up at the airport,” I explained, “but they thought it would be better if they stayed put while Richard and I change for the cookout.”
“There’s no need for them to hang around out there. I’ll take y’all to the cookout myself.”
I was about to suggest that we all ride together, but decided that until I could get Richard alone and find out what I’d missed, I’d better be careful to avoid stirring things up worse than they already were. So while Richard carried in our bags, I scooted back out to the car to thank Aunt Nora for picking us up and tell her that we’d see her later.
As usual, Aunt Maggie was putting me and Richard in my old bedroom. The maple bed, dresser, chest, and nightstand were the same as ever, with the maps I used to dream over still stuck on the wall with thumbtacks marking both the places I wanted to visit and those I had been to. Even the bedspread was the same as I’d used, but it was looking a bit threadbare, and the maps were yellowed and curling.
Richard was changing from his good pants to a pair of blue jeans, and I stopped just for a second to enjoy the view. Though my husband’s dark hair rarely looks combed, he always has a terrific rear end.
I was already wearing jeans, but I exchanged my sweater for a short-sleeved blouse, ran a brush through my light brown hair, and put on makeup to disguise the fact that Boston hadn’t had enough warm weather that year for me to get any sun. Then I said, “Okay, what did Aunt Nora say in the car?”
“I should just let you catch up on your own,” he said loftily. “If you’d paid attention—”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “So tell me, why a cookout?”
“With the buyout cat out of the bag, so to speak, Big Bill has invited everybody in town to a cookout to officially introduce Marshall and Grace Saunders.”
“Okay, now why didn’t Aunt Nora and Thaddeous want to come inside? And why didn’t Aunt Maggie want them to?”
“They’re not on speaking terms.”
“Because of the buyout?”
He nodded. “Apparently, the entire family is split down the middle. Aunt Nora and Thaddeous are for it, but Aunt Maggie is enthusiastically against it.” I was going to ask for more details, but he said, “We’d better go. I think I hear Aunt Maggie’s subtle signal.”
I heard the pointed jingling of her car keys, too, so I grabbed my pocketbook and followed Richard down the stairs even though I wasn’t much in the mood for a cookout. The situation was worse than I’d expected. I’d realized that the buyout was likely to set folks against each other, but I hadn’t thought about how much the Burnettes would be affected. I should have known better. If the mill buyout had set Burt Walters against his own father, why should the Burnettes be immune?
I hoped Richard and I were doing the right thing. What right did we have to interfere? Whether or not selling the mill was best, shouldn’t it be the people involved who decided? Finally, we’d decided that it could only help for Walters to know what kind of people he was dealing with. If the Saunders were on the up and up, then we’d tell Burt, and if not, then the sale should be stopped. Richard and I wouldn’t be making any actual decisions ourselves, and Byerly and the Burnettes could only benefit from knowing whatever there was to know.
Still, I felt ill at ease as we climbed into Aunt Maggie’s Dodge Caravan. Worse than that, I felt like a spy for Burt Walters, which was the last thing a member of the Burnette family should be.