Malice and Magnolias
1. As Always, Good Morning
If the glares of neighbors were lasers they would have burned holes in him long ago. Rumors of his character and motives swirled and grew around the small southern town like tornados of speculation, accusing him of things like being a communist, a deviant, a hippy, a junky, or just plain mad. Lamentations for the memory and imagined responses of his dear late grandparents served as the catalyst to a revisionist history of a couple whose legend swelled from being merely conservative fixtures to one presenting them as pillars of the community and ardent supporters of traditional values. The haze of time and the desire for confirmation of beliefs and biases allowed such fictions to be accepted as facts.
The truth in this town, as in many small towns, and even within large cities though there it is confined to communities specific, is that the collective want of conformity, of familiarity, fueled the innate resistance to any noticeable difference, as differences are so easily perceived as threats. Not many would claim to hate the stranger, that is stranger as in one who is strange and not as in one who is unknown, though the border between hate and fear is often crossed without out notice. It could even be argued that a hate of fear is reasonable and so the hate of fear may be applied to the fear itself or likewise to the object of the fear. In other words, to fear is to hate, perhaps the distinction is that fearful hate is applied preemptively without definite cause for grievance.
Bobby Flynn spotted this wayward son of the town through the café’s front window during the breakfast rush, but the sighting elicited no distinguishable emotion. Bobby felt no animosity for the young man or his collective of eccentrics. For years, as the senior sheriff’s deputy, he had been reassuring the county’s residents that all was well and the threats they imagined were neither monsters nor evil spirits bearing down upon them. He couldn’t remember how many times he had shared the wisdom that sometimes, often even, a bump in the night is simply a bump in the night, with no malicious intent attached. Bobby saw the young man walk into the post office across the street, but he observed it without thought or care.
Earl Driggs, recently retired from the livestock feed and fertilizer business, was not as unmoved by the sight as his breakfast companion. He hastily set his coffee mug on the table and nodded towards the post office.
“There goes that commie hippy queer kid. I think he’s out there growing drugs or something on his granddaddy’s land. You ought to lock him up, Bobby. Why haven’t y’all done it yet?”
Bobby raised his eyebrows slightly as an acknowledgment that he heard the comment, and as a request for a moment to respond as he took a sip of the scalding cheap coffee. He set his cup down and eased into the groove where he kept his overused and ever ready default response.
“For what? He ain’t done nothing illegal. He ain’t growing no drugs up on his farm neither. The boy may be different but he ain’t bad. He’s just different. Harmless as far as I’m concerned. Sheriff thinks so too.”
Earl scoffed. “Just look at him. He’s a menace. Hell, look at that truck of his. The damn thing is so vulgar and it’s parked out on a city street. It looks like something a druggy would drive. All those flowers and splotches of color painted all over it. And why is PK painted all over it? What do you suppose that means? Is it some kind of Russian commie sign?” He paused thoughtfully and continued, “It may stand for police killer. Have you thought about that, Bobby? You’re the police. Maybe it’s a threat against you.”
Bobby looked at Earl quizzically. “It’s the boy’s initials, Earl. Paul Kingsley. PK. Get it?”
“Oh, yeah. Maybe. But still that truck is a spectacle and it shouldn’t be allowed on these streets. It’s profane. It’s obscene. I bet it’s full of drugs too.”
“Calm down, Earl. There ain’t nothing obscene about flowers. I admit the truck is mighty ugly. It sure ain’t my taste, but ugly ain’t illegal. You ain’t got no cause to think the boy has drugs in there neither. I don’t think he painted the truck anyway. It’s more likely that one of them artists that live on his farm painted it. They paint on practically everything up there. I seen that even his tractor is painted like that. As far as I know, the boy ain’t no artist. He’s a farmer just like his granddaddy was.”
“Now you’re dead wrong there. The boy ain’t nothing like his granddaddy was. His granddaddy was a good man and a fine Christian. He’s probably turning round and round in his grave because of all this boy is doing. If he weren’t already dead he’d die of shame cause of that boy.
“And you talk about them so called artists that live up there on his granddaddy’s farm. They’re the real menace. They’re always making all kinds of racket and putting those travesties they call art beside the road to scare everybody who drives by. I’ve seen them doing devil worshipping dances and acting possessed too up there at that roadside produce stand they have. I don’t know why anyone stops there and buys their produce. It’s probably laced with who-knows-what. I bet they send their money to terrorists or the cartels in Mexico or something like that. The whole thing is a disgrace to this town, this county, and this state. They should be locked up.”
“They ain’t devil worshippers. They’re odd, but they ain’t devil worshippers. They ain’t terrorists neither. Didn’t you sell seed and whatnot to the boy? You know what he plants.”
“He always ordered heirloom seeds and he never bought fertilizer or pesticides or herbicides either. He’s a member of the co-op too, but he ain’t like the other farmers. He’d come to the meetings, but he always sat in the back and never said nothing. It’s like he was spying or something. Maybe he’s selling our farming secrets to the communists.”
“We ain’t got no farming secrets. Wasn’t he pleasant enough in those meetings?”
“He was always hiding behind that goofy smile of his, but he’s got shifty eyes. It’s like he’s always plotting something. I never trusted him there or in the store either. He always paid in cash too. Said he don’t trust banks or something. That’s how criminals act. Always hiding their money from the government because they’re doing something wrong.”
“Just yesterday you was telling me how you don’t trust banks and how you think the government’s gotten too high and mighty for its own good. Sounds to me like you and that boy got a lot in common.”
“Don’t you curse me like that, deputy. Hell, I think the banks are rotten sometimes, but it ain’t like what that boy thinks. I always made sure my taxes were paid, even if I don’t like what they are used for. I’m a patriot. I love what this nation stands for.”
“Like freedom?”
“Of course for freedom. That’s what makes this country so great.”
The deputy chuckled. “But ain’t you wanting to lock that boy and his friends up for being different? What kind of freedom is that?”
Earl shifted uneasily in his seat and glared at the deputy. “What in the Sam Hill has gotten into you today? You are being just as cantankerous as I’ve ever seen. Now you know me and you know what I’m trying to say here. Why are you trying to twist my words and make it seem like me and that boy is the same?”
The deputy raised his empty cup to get Claire’s attention as his usual method of requesting a refill and then he returned nonchalantly to the discussion.
“Because you ain’t thinking about what you’re saying, Earl. Not really. You don’t like the boy because he’s a little different than you. He ain’t hurt you. He ain’t done nothing wrong. He just chose to live on his own terms, which to me shows that he’s got a lot more of his granddaddy in him than you want to give him credit for. That boy’s granddaddy was the mind-your-own-business sort. He fought in the war, and they said he was a tough son-of-a-bitch when it came to killing Nazis, and when he come back to the states he took up farming right where he left off. He was nice enough as I remember, but he sure as hell kept to himself. And he didn’t bother nobody else neither. Just like that boy there.”
Almost nothing in the town’s small post office had changed in several decades, signifying the virtue of consistency and the comfort, sometimes read as complacency, of it that serves as the lifeblood of the community. In this corner of the world progressive candidates run on platforms that promise to resist change, with the only changes being how resistance is mounted. In a region where tradition is sacred, proposing change is an insult to identity.
The trusty old bell on the front door clanged, and Inez looked up to greet the morning visitor. He was a regular, so she recognized him instantly, and though she knew others in town were apprehensive about him, she had long since warmed to his congenial ways.
“Morning, Paul. I just noticed you got a stack of mail waiting on you. Too much to fit into your box, so we got it stacked over here.”
“Good morning, Inez. Thank you.”
“You can come around the counter here. Use that flat cart right there to take it to your truck. Careful though, some of those boxes are heavy. What you got in them?”
As he walked around the counter, Inez reflected briefly on his appearance. For the most part he looked indistinguishable from virtually every other farmer in the county, not so much in feature but in presence. He was muscular, as all who toil in physicality are, and his clothes were clean but showed permanent staining from the task of subduing the earth. His ears were pierced and vibrant tattoos peaked out from beneath his sleeves, but that wasn’t altogether uncommon amongst the young farmers and farm laborers. She noted also the darkened skin and lightened hair that comes from a constant envelopment of the probing rays of the sun.
“What’s in all those boxes? You know, we deliver, so you wouldn’t have to come pick up your mail if you had it sent to your address.”
He smiled politely. “I don’t know what all this is. It may be art supplies, or books, or maybe exotic spices and herbs. It’s always a surprise to me.”
Little effort was exerted as he stacked the packages of different sizes easily on the cart, with spatial acuteness unrivaled by any master of Tetris. He continued speaking, “I used to have the mail delivered, but I had a hard time keeping an intact mailbox. The first two or three times it was destroyed I thought maybe it was because of the way it was painted, so I asked the artists to just leave it as a blank canvas, but it got bashed in then as well. So, no mailbox for me. I don’t mind coming to pick it up anyway.”
After several decades of working at the post office, Inez was familiar with the scourge of the rural youth and their blood feud and constant attacks on the mailboxes sporadically planted along the sides of small country roads.