I carry myself off to bed around three thirty that night, having spent hours researching Davey’s LaserCon. His costumes are all over the home page. Basically, he’s a legend. If we’re going to win a thousand dollars, Beauty and the Beast will have to be spectacular.
I am so groggy when I get to the elementary school the next morning, I nearly walk right in front of Fifty’s mower.
When Janie Lee scoots up next to me and says, “Hey, we’re doing our after-school service project together today,” I actually groan. I catnap through school, not for the first time, and join Janie Lee in her mother’s Acura.
101 Needmore Road, home of Victor Nix, is a white farmhouse half-lost in some untended soybeans. We arrive windblown and delighted by the freedom of a country road. There’s an oak tree in the front yard that must be three hundred years old. It has the remnants of a tree house high in its branches and a dilapidated ladder that doesn’t even look safe for squirrels. She parks in its shade and I prop my sunglasses on my head.
“If I fall asleep, punch me,” I say.
And then we walk purposefully toward the door and knock. A gentleman, who must have been poised to go out as we were coming in—his trilby hat under his arm, wearing a camel-colored coat with a line of fur that’s far too heavy for September—opens the door. “Well, hello there,” he says cheerily.
“Mr. Nix?” I greet.
“I am.” He raises his neck and shoulders from their slouch, thrilled for company. “And you?”
“I am Billie McCaffrey, and this is Janie Lee Miller. We’re out doing some service projects for Community Church, and wanted to see if you needed anything done.”
“Well, I was about to run to the mill for seeds, but I guess . . .” He places his key on a hook by the door labeled Front Door. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything fancy to wet your whistle, but I have water from the tap.”
Sure that he will give us something to do soon, we accept water in juice glasses and the three of us sit in yellow Naugahyde chairs around a white Formica kitchen table. The clock on the wall chirps like a bird, and a cat emerges from beneath the table and lands on my lap. His tag says Otis. He’s ogling the selection of Little Debbie cakes in a bowl. Janie Lee is too. There’s a sign on the bowl that reads Take One. One is underlined.
Mr. Nix lifts a chocolate cake. Midair, he passes the cake to Janie Lee. “Did you know my nurse counts these things?”
She eats the cake, which loses me Otis as a friend.
“Mr. Nix, can you think of anything we might help you do?” Janie Lee asks, wadding the paper from the cake and placing it in her pocket.
“Maybe I should check Gloria’s list,” he says.
Mr. Nix’s late wife, Gloria, is the youngest Corn Dolly recipient to date. When she was the fresh age of twenty-three, she won the 1968 Corn Dolly. Though many have tried, no one has replicated the win. Other Corn Dolly winners are all forty and up. When paired with the fact that Mrs. Nix wasn’t even mildly attractive, or from a well-reputed family, she’s a curiosity among the aging Corn Dolly queens. (This is discussed and debated freely over coffee and cakes because Gloria Nix died and isn’t around to defend herself. She clearly went on living in the heart of Mr. Victor Nix.)
“What did you younguns say you were selling?” Mr. Nix asks, taking a Little Debbie cake from the bowl.
Thinking this man probably needs more company than service, I answer, “We weren’t selling anything, sir, but we’d love to hear more about your lovely wife.”
“God rest her,” Mr. Nix says. “She’s over in Fairfield Memorial. I need to get some flowers for her grave. Maybe I’ll go to the mill later.”
Janie Lee sags a little lower in her chair, but says, “We could help you with that.”
“Oh, that’s so nice,” Mr. Nix tells us. “I’m eighty-three. Did you know I don’t even have to have a picture on my driver’s license anymore?”
From my spot at the table, I have a full view of the front yard. There’s no vehicle parked there. No hook labeled Car Keys by the door.
“Mr. Nix, would you like us to drive you to the mill?” I suggest.
Mr. Nix pats the part in his hair, and then points a withered finger toward a large shed. “Oh, I must have plenty of seeds in the barn. But I’m not supposed to go out there with my hip.” He rubs his left hip, and then his right.
“Mr. Nix, we’ll slip out and check. Then we’ll help you do some planting for your Gloria.”
“Gloria was the most beautiful woman in Otters Holt other than our Hannah,” he tells us. And in his old voice, there’s a kernel of a much younger voice. I see a woman on tiptoe kissing a smooth-skinned man in the same trilby hat under an oak tree in the front yard.
“Key’s around here somewhere.” Mr. Nix pats his pockets.
I lift the key off an equally well-labeled hook by the door, and promise we’ll be right back with seeds. The door closes behind us. We walk slowly on the path to the shed.
“That man—” Janie Lee says.
“Is painfully wonderful,” I finish.
Key to lock, I swing the door wide on its hinges, revealing the shed. There isn’t a packet of seeds to retrieve; there are thousands and thousands. Daisies, sunflowers, marigolds. Bins of seeds. Buckets of seeds. Bunches of bulbs. This man has been going to the mill and forgetting he went to the mill for years.
“What do we do?” she asks.
I sink my arms deep in a barrel, let hundreds of prickly bits cling and fall through my fingers. What a wonder. I can’t tell whether I am insanely happy at the way he has loved this woman or insanely sad that he hasn’t been loved by this woman in so long.
“I think we ask him if we can borrow some seeds for the elementary school,” I say.
“Yes,” Janie Lee agrees.
First, we load our arms with supplies for Gloria. Flowerpots, soil, Miracle-Gro, and seeds. Inside, we pot the seeds while Mr. Nix searches for Gloria’s Corn Dolly. He’s intent on showing us, as if we’ve never seen a Corn Dolly before.
“Mr. Nix, it’s okay if you can’t find it,” I call upstairs.
He is gone long enough that I want to make sure he hasn’t fallen, but he returns holding a crumpled Corn Dolly wrapped in a green string of white lights. “With the Christmas stuff,” he announces, holding it high above his head, the cord from the lights falling like an unwanted tail. “Gloria liked to use it as an angel.”
I take a plate from the cupboard and make peanut butter sandwiches. “Tell us about the year she won?”
“Oh, yes.” He strokes the corn husk carefully and eases his bones into the chair next to mine. They pop audibly. He rubs a hip. “We were astonished she made the ballot. All Tyson Vilmer’s doing. Always been a magician. I need to go visit him soon and ask to buy a goat.”
Janie Lee flinches and I bite my lip. He continues, “Tyson and Gloria grew up together. Sort of like siblings. It was probably Tyson’s influence that made her so strong.”
“Is that why she won the Corn Dolly?” I ask.
“Oh, no. It was the flowers.”
“The flowers?”
“People were in a rage over Vietnam. Myself as well.” He taps the side of his head as if he’s wearing a helmet. “And I guess, they just needed happiness instead of war. Gloria wasn’t one of those hippie people, but she loved flowers better than anything. Planted them all over town. Mostly without permission. Said to me once, ‘Vic’—she always called me Vic instead of Victor—‘I can’t help myself. I need more color than this.’”
I often feel this way. I like Gloria more and more.
“How many flowers do you think she planted, Mr. Nix?” Janie Lee asks.
“I reckon she did every yard in the county.”
Marshall County isn’t huge. But the notion of Gloria Nix planting seeds in every yard is huge.
“She was such a pretty soul.” His eyes water with love and memories. He says to Janie Lee, “You are too, dear. What’s your name again?”
“Janie Lee,” she whispers.
“Mark my words, eyes like that, and you’ll be winning your own Corn Dolly one day.”
“Thank you, sir. My friend Billie here is on the ballot this year.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. I didn’t understand this dolly hubbub at first. I says to Gloria, ‘There’s nothing outright special about a corn husk made into a dolly.’ And she says to me, ‘Oh, Vic, it’s so much more than a doll. It’s about being seen.’ I must have turned my head halfway around like an owl when she said that. She’d always been something to see, dolly or not, if you asked me.”
Grandy’s Corn Dolly—Maybel is what she named her—sits beside my Grampy’s urn in the pie safe. If there were a fire, Grandy would grab Maybel on the first trip, Grampy on the second. That used to bother me, placing so much value on a thing. But after hearing Mr. Nix, I realize again that the Corn Dolly is not a thing . . . it’s a metaphor.
I have been seen in my town, but I’ve never been seen as Mr. Nix is suggesting. I am not sure I want to be.
The time is seven p.m. And according to the chart beside the Corn Dolly calendar, Mr. Nix is due to shower in thirty minutes.
“You kids are so kind to visit. Let me give you something for your trouble,” he says, patting his breast pocket.
I mount a full, but kind, protest. “We won’t hear of it. Your company is our payment.” This is a line Woods might use at the Liars Table; it is not a lie.
Victor Nix is robotically removing items from the pockets of his coat: Kleenex, money clip, a peppermint, which he offers to Janie Lee and which Janie Lee accepts. Pockets empty, he lifts the camel-colored coat into the air, the way my mom did to me when I was a little girl who wanted to trek into the snow. He coaxes me. “Try it on. Make an old man happy.”
“Sir, I can’t.”
Mr. Nix makes the coat dance. The soft under-skin of his biceps flaps. “Please.”
Forced into polite obedience, I try on the man’s coat.
Mr. Nix is part tailor, part pixie. He pets the fur collar into submission, makes it lie correctly around my neck. Satisfied, he tugs the lapels and says, “A coat like this might win someone’s affection, young man.” He nods in Janie Lee’s direction, and I wish I hadn’t been too tired to attend to myself this morning. Bombshell one day. Man the next.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
I leave Mr. Nix’s house with my soul in a twist. We don’t speak at all on the way to my house and then we speak at the same time.
Janie Lee, who has recovered herself, says, “He knows you’re a girl.”
And I say, “I think we can transplant all those daylilies to the school.”