Wild Orchids Read online

  Toodles gave a big sniff, so Jackie got up to get him a tissue. After he’d blown his nose so loud that Tessa started to giggle, he winked at her, picked up his spoon, and said, “Tell me a story.”

  I obliged.

  It was after dinner that I told Noble I wanted to talk to him. I wanted the truth about what was going on. I’d known him too long and too well not to suspect he was up to something. We took a six-pack and went up to my office where we could talk man to man.

  “Okay, so why are you here and what do you want?” I asked. “And think about who you’re talking to before you make up any lies.”

  “I’ll leave the lies to you,” he said, his voice humble so he wouldn’t offend me.

  I wasn’t fooled. Noble was a grown man and able-bodied. Even if he had been in prison a few times, he could find work, so why was he here? Why to me? Noble was well named. He had a great deal of pride, so I knew it would take some doing to find out what was in his mind.

  It took me a while to get him to talk, but when he started, I thought he might never shut up.

  He got off the couch and stood over me, glaring.

  “I’m here because you ruined my life so I figure you owe me.”

  “And how did I do that?” I asked calmly, keeping my own anger under control. What ingratitude! I’d never added up the amount of money I’d spent in giving free education to all the nieces and nephews, Noble’s kids, legitimate and otherwise, included, but it was a lot.

  He was still glaring at me. “I used to be happy. I loved bein’ a kid near all my uncles, and I was crazy about my father. And you know something? When I look back at you and me, I thought we had a good time. Yeah, I know we all gave you a hard time, but you were such a snob you deserved it. You always looked down on us.”

  Pausing, he waited for me to say something, but what could I say? To deny that I’d looked down on them? To feel that I was superior was the only defense I had.

  “When you left for college, I was glad to see the last of you—but you know what? I missed you. You always made us laugh. The rest of us, we could do things with trucks and a pocketknife, but you could do things with words.”

  Pausing for a moment, he took a drink of his beer and smiled in memory. “I was pretty mad when you left for college. You remember how I ran over your suitcase with the tractor? You were goin’ off to see the world, while I had a pregnant girlfriend and her dad was threatenin’ to shoot me if I didn’t marry her. Did you know that by the time I was twenty-one I’d been married and divorced two times and I had three kids to support? And all this happened while you were off at college meetin’ town girls.”

  Noble drank some more beer, then sat down on the other end of the couch. His anger was gone now. We were just two men heading toward middle age, reminiscing. “Then you got a book published and all the aunts read it and said it was all about us. Only they said you’d made us look like we ate roadkill for dinner. Uncle Clyde’s wife said, ‘I don’t know who he’s talkin’ about but it ain’t us.’ So after that, we all pretty much decided that you didn’t remember any of us and you’d made up people to write about.”

  Noble gave a little smile. “I can’t tell you how many times I was asked if I was kin to that ‘writer feller’ and you know what I said?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer, but I don’t think he wanted one. I think he’d waited a long time to tell me what he was saying now. In fact, maybe he’d driven all this way just to tell me what he thought of me.

  “No. I told ’em no. Ever’ time somebody asked if I was kin to Ford Newcombe, I told ’em no.”

  I tried to be philosophical about what he was saying, but I felt some hurt. Everyone wanted his relatives to be proud of him, didn’t he?

  “You humiliated us to the world, but you know what was the worst thing you did to us? You changed the kids. My daughter, Vanessa, the one that was born right after you left for college, is just like you. She even looked like you, too, until she had her nose fixed. She read your book when she was just a kid, and after that she didn’t want nothin’ to do with us Newcombes.”

  Noble opened another beer. “You can’t imagine all the ribbin’I got over that kid. People said she was yours, not mine.” He looked at me over the top of his beer. “You remember her mother? That little Sue Ann Hawkins? You didn’t…?”

  Of course I remembered Sue Ann Hawkins. Every young man and a few old ones within twenty miles of her house had been to bed with her. Of course no one dared tell Noble that. Not then and not now. Back then, we kept our mouths shut and wished them luck on their wedding day. Later, half the county breathed a sigh of relief when the little girl was born with the Newcombe nose. Whether the nose had come from Noble, me or one of our other relatives had never been discussed even in private for fear of Noble’s legendary right hook.

  Noble put up his hand. “No, don’t answer that one. That girl swore she’d only been to bed with me in her whole life, and if I hadn’t believed her, I wouldn’t have married her, her daddy’s shotgun or not. But if she was so damned pure, then why did she later take up with every—”

  He stopped himself. “Naw, I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that her mother was so bad that Vanessa ended up livin’ with me from the time she was four. But after she read your book, she was livin’ with you in her mind. It was always, ‘My uncle Ford this’ and ‘my uncle Ford that’ until I wished I’d never saved you that time you fell into the creek and hit your head. You remember that? You remember how I carried you a mile and a half to get you home? I wasn’t an ounce bigger than you, but I carried you. Then Uncle Simon drove his old pickup across the fields and through the fences to get you to the hospital as fast as he could. When you didn’t wake up for two whole days, we thought you were a goner. You remember that?”

  I did remember it. But, oddly, I hadn’t remembered it when I was writing my books.

  “You know what?” Noble said, looking at me. “My daughter didn’t believe me when I told her about savin’ you. She said that if it’d really happened, you would have put it in your book, ’cause you put everything in there. And since it wasn’t in there, it didn’t happen. How come you didn’t put that story in there?”

  I had to look away because I had no answer to that question.

  “Well, anyway, you sent all four of my kids to college. Hell, you even sent my third wife money so she could go back to school and become a grade school teacher. She divorced me after her first year teachin’. Said I wasn’t educated enough for her. And now my college-educated kids don’t want anything to do with me. They want to see you, who they’ve laid eyes on maybe twice in their lives, but they don’t want to see their own dad. But you don’t have anything to do with any of us, do you? Except to write about us.”

  While he took a deep drink from his beer, I waited in silence for him to continue. I must admit that I was fascinated at this look at how I’d “ruined” his life. I was also busy speculating if smart little Vanessa could be my daughter.

  “So, anyway, when we got word that they was gonna let Toodles out, I thought it was time for you to pay up for what you’d done to us, and to me, especially. ‘King’? Did you have to name me ‘King’ in your books? Ain’t ‘Noble’ bad enough?”

  “What do you want from me?” I asked. “You didn’t come here to cry in your beer, so what do you want?”

  Noble took a while to answer. “I got into trouble at home. I don’t mean the jail time. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the inside of a jail, as you well know. But this time I got into trouble with the family.”

  I wasn’t about to tell him that Vanessa had already told me her version of the “family trouble.”

  “After I got out of jail this last time, I had nothin’. My three ex-wives had cleaned me out, and nobody wants to give an ex-con a job, so all I could do was go back home. Uncle Zeb offered me a place at his house, said I could stay in the back room that he turns the heat off in—you know what an old skinflint he is. So I’m out there,