Watermelon Summer (10 page)

    Depending on where you grew up, you might think I was
being purposefully incendiary...or perhaps you'll think (like I did)
that it's absurd that an elementary-school kid should be handling
firearms.  I'd never touched a gun in my life and had always gotten
a little frisson of fear when I'd seen law-enforcement personnel with
their holstered handguns.  Rifles like the one pictured in Davey's
hands made me think of school shootings, or of kids who stumble across
Daddy's gun in the attic and accidentally wound their playmates.

 

    I'd been lulled by Mrs. Walker into feeling like I
was home, but now Mom's words came back to me in a rush.  "Mountain
men," she warned, "love guns and dogs more than anything else. 
They can't be peaceful when bullets and teeth are in the picture."

 

    And yet, when I glanced over at Jacob, he not only
seemed peaceful, he seemed stung by my hasty words.  When in Rome, I
reminded myself....

 

    "I'm sorry," I said, when the silence seemed to be
lengthening past the point of no return.  "I was just
shocked.  You don't see guns much in Seattle, and you don't think
of them in the hands of kids.  Can we start this conversation
over?"

 

    Jacob nodded, and seemed to be gathering his
composure.  "Around here, it's pretty normal to put a picture of a
kid's first deer in the paper," he explained.  "Davey was extra proud
he'd got a four-point buck, much more exciting than my first doe.  He knows to
never aim a gun at a person, and he's a pretty good shot.  Plus,
his uncle takes him hunting, which helps make up for the fact that his
no-good father's in prison and can't be in his life."

 

    This didn't seem to be the right time to ask why
Davey's father was locked up and for how long.  (And whether Jacob
and Davey were half brothers since Jacob had said "his" instead of
"our.")  I simply nodded, and Jacob seemed to unwind a bit, almost
as if he cared what I thought of his family.  I filed that thought
away for future reference and just listened while Jacob explained that
deer season was a time to spend with men in your family, plus it
provided a cheap source of meat.  "I've been giving Mamaw most of
the money I make, but it's still hard to raise two kids on a nurse's
salary," he went on.  "Davey's deer gave us about thirty pounds of
really good meat—probably over a hundred bucks worth of food for
the cost of a bullet."

 

    I didn't admit to Jacob that I'd never thought about
meat being expensive and that the idea of eating a deer seemed nearly
as unpalatable as the concept of a kid holding a gun.  "That makes sense," I murmured
instead.

 

    "So, would you like to try your hand at some target
practice?" Jacob asked with a straight face, and I blinked at him in
horror for a couple of seconds before realizing he was making a
joke.  If my laugh was louder than the statement really deserved,
the extra vigor probably came from relief.  For a minute, I'd
thought I'd irrevocably broken something precious before I'd really had
time to hold it in my hands, but Jacob's levity proved everything was
still all right.

 

 

 

    I didn't know what to say to apologize for my faux pas,
but I knew I owed Jacob some kind of gift to make up for my
blunder.  So I gave him Greensun.

 

    Well, not literally, of course, since the property
wasn't mine
to give, but I did open up and tell Jacob about the farm and about
Glen's letter.  And I wasn't just trying to build bridges by
sharing my dilemma either.  Davey's recitation of his brother's
entrepreneurial
efforts had set a little wheel spinning in my head.  Sure, I could
wait and see what solutions other people came up with at the Greensun
meeting
in a few weeks, but who's to say I couldn't get the ball rolling on my
own?  And maybe Jacob was just the business partner I needed.

 

    Jacob's eyes lit up as I tentatively explained Glen's
challenge, and before I knew it, he was brainstorming potential
business ideas.  Over dinner, my host had been quiet and a bit shy,
and his explanation of the hunting photo had felt stilted, as if he was
trying hard to speak in a dialect he didn't entirely understand. 
This
, though, was his language.

 

    "What do you think of me borrowing my uncle's tractor
and coming down to plow up a plot tomorrow?" he asked.  "I've
heard you can make quite a bit of money selling pumpkins around
Halloween, but I don't have the land to give it a try.  I can hunt
down some seeds too."

 

    I have to admit that I'd been paying more attention
to the sparkle in Jacob's eye than to his words, so when he paused, it
took me longer than it should have to answer.  Jacob's face closed
in a bit as he backpedaled.  "Assuming you want to try something
like that, of course," he said.  "I didn't mean to invite myself
along or anything...."

 

    "You're not inviting yourself along," I
answered.  I wasn't entirely sure Glen's Greensun challenge was
something I wanted to sink my teeth into, but I
was
sure that having Jacob around was a plus.  "You're 100%
invited."  I stopped myself just in time before adding in the
usually innocuous, but now-loaded, words: "It's a date."

 

 

 

    Of course, nothing ever goes entirely as
planned.  There was a familiar car in the parking area when Jacob
dropped me off at Greensun, and when I reached the bottom of the
hill, I discovered that Kat was back...to stay.

 

    "I got Dad's letter, and I figured we'd better get
started if we're going to save the farm," my sister informed me as I
walked in the door.  She was struggling to haul a mattress down the
stairs by herself, and I pitched in immediately to help tug the mass out the door even though I had no
clue what she was up to.  We dragged the hulking weight out onto the
front porch, where my sister proceeded to beat it with a broom until dust rose
all around us in a cloud.

 

    "You don't mind, do you?" she asked me at last, out
of breath from her cleaning frenzy, dust coating her lashes.  I
shook my head, even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to—
being around Kat was like that.  "Good," my sister continued. 
"It'll be fun camping out here together."

 

    And it was.  I got to listen to Kat's stories
about the cob-building workshop rather than reading seed catalogs over
dinner, and we hung out so late that evening that I eventually had to
walk back to my tent by flashlight.  I learned that Kat had pretty
much been on her own since she was twelve, when her mother lapsed back
into alcoholism and stopped even bringing home basic groceries of the
non-drinkable sort.  My half-sister rose even further in my
estimation as she explained what it had been like to hop from friend's
house to friend's house in high school so she didn't have to go
home.  Kat was definitely just as stout now as she had been in
Mom's stories.

 

    "So, tell me about this guy who's coming down to plow
the field tomorrow," she asked me at last.  We were playing cards
on the rough wood of the kitchen table, and I had just about gotten a
grasp on the excessively complicated rules.  Trying to explain
Jacob set me back to square one, though, and I quickly lost the
hand.  I won't repeat my words because they were embarrassing
enough the first time around, but there were may "um"s and "er"s, and I
think I descended so low as to tell Kat, at one point, that looking into
Jacob's eyes was like peering into starlight.

 

    "You like him, huh?" replied my big sister.  At
my nod, she continued.  "Well, locals can be enticing but a lot of
them are trouble.  I'll be curious to see if this Jacob passes
muster."

 

 

 

    I discovered the next morning that—at least in
Kat's eyes—Jacob didn't.  When I strolled down the holler from my tent for
breakfast, Kat was already hard at work picking over blackberries she'd
harvested in the small window of time between dawn and my appearance on
the scene, and she'd also discovered a plum tree I didn't know about up
behind the farm house.  I didn't even mind Kat's bossiness when she
suggested I go pick a basketful—Greensun was looking sunnier and
more cheerful by the minute.

 

    Unfortunately, trouble came on a tractor a couple of
hours later.  I'd been looking forward to Jacob's arrival all morning, but when I heard the rumble of the engine and came
hurrying around the bend from the plum tree, a standoff was already in
progress.  Kat was standing in front of the tractor, her hands on
her hips, yelling as loudly as she could to be heard over the roar, and
Jacob's face was stuck halfway between confusion and anger.  They
were so engrossed in their argument that neither noticed me until I was
standing right next to the tall wheel of the machine.

 

    "What's going on?" I called up to Jacob.  He saw
me at last, and his face shifted over to pure pleasure.  Turning
off the tractor, he swung down out of the seat, but let Kat do the explaining.

 

    "He says he's going to plow up this area, but this is
completely the wrong spot for pumpkins!  Dad grows corn here every
year.  If he wants to grow pumpkins, he's going to have to go down
and across the creek to that area beside the barn," she
proclaimed.  Kat's adamant belief in the validity of her own opinions
suddenly seemed less helpful now that I wasn't the only one being
affected, and I could tell Jacob wasn't impressed.

 

    But he didn't raise his voice, as most people
would have when faced with such a heated tone.  "I don't see any
corn," Jacob said simply, once he was sure Kat was done.  "And it's
getting late to plant any.  Plus, the tractor would get stuck if we
tried to take it across the creek."

 

    Two pairs of eyes turned to me.  The brown set
was still shooting angry sparks (metaphorically, of course), while the
blue set squinted up into a smile.  "I guess you're the tie
breaker," Jacob added.

 

    Just the position I didn't want to be in!  But
Jacob was clearly right.  The tractor he'd borrowed was huge, with
wheels that came up to my shoulder, and I couldn't see any way the vehicle was
going to cross over the creek (not if it wanted to come back out anytime
soon).  "I think this is a good spot," I said tentatively, ready
for Kat to turn her anger on me.

 

    But my sister just laughed, murmured something about "So
that's
how it is, huh?" and turned sweet in an instant.  "Sorry to
confuse matters," she said, now to Jacob, taking a step closer so she
was just barely inside his personal space, her face tilted up to
his.  I'd watched girls at school wrap guys around their little
fingers in just this way, and I felt a knot form in my stomach.  If
it came to a contest between myself and Kat, there was no
comparison—even after a morning picking blackberries, my sister looked
lush and kissable, and my clothes had never hugged my curves like hers
did.  Plus, I
was pretty sure I had twigs in my hair from the plum tree.