The best mud in Corliss County, it turned out, belonged to us.
Hadley & Marsh had the listing for Brannock Meadows, a new subdivision on the edge of town. Phase One was finished and sold. Phase Two was forty acres of churned-up clay, a single paved cul-de-sac and a sign promising LUXURY LIVING FROM THE LOW 400s. After six weeks of rain, it was less a construction site than a soup.
I called the builder’s foreman on Thursday night. His name was Arturo. He had sold houses with Vivian before, and he did not ask any questions. He only said, “We’ve lost a concrete truck out there,” in the voice of a man reading the weather.
“For how long?”
“It’s still there,” said Arturo.
We arrived at seven on Friday morning. Vivian brought coffee for Arturo, coffee for me and a stopwatch.
She was wearing her six-inch navy pair. Not the flats. I asked about it.
“If I train in fours,” she said, “I’ll walk in fours. If I train in sixes, I’ll walk in anything.”
“Is that a real principle?”
“It is now.”
She marked a course with three orange cones from the trunk. Cone to cone was about a hundred yards across the open clay of Lot 31. She handed me the stopwatch, stepped off the pavement and started walking.
I want to describe this accurately, because it matters for what came later.
She did not wobble, and she did not flail. She leaned slightly forward, kept her steps short and quick, and never once stopped.
Her heels went into the clay with a sound like a cork leaving a bottle, again and again. It was not graceful. It was something better than graceful. It was relentless.
At the first cone, she called back, “Time?”
“Two minutes and forty seconds.”
“Again.”
By nine, a small crowd had gathered on the cul-de-sac. Arturo and two of his framers. A woman walking a golden retriever. A man from the gas company who had come to read a meter and stayed.
“What is she doing?” the gas man asked me.
“Training,” I said.
“For what?”
I thought about how to explain Fenwick Farm, the north line, Ida, the goose and the forty-one slips in the jar.
“A farm,” I said.
He nodded as if that cleared it up. Then he took out a five-dollar bill. “Is there a pool?”
There was always a pool.
Vivian’s rules for mud, as I wrote them down that morning:
One. Short steps. Long steps are for people who own boots.
Two. Weight forward. If you lean back, the mud thinks it has won.
Three. Never stop moving.
“Mud only wins if you stop,” she said, on her ninth lap. “It’s like a negotiation. Pause too long, and the other side sets the terms.”
Her ninth lap was a minute fifty-one. Arturo’s framers applauded, and the golden retriever barked. Vivian did not acknowledge any of them. She came back across the clay and went straight to the starting cone.
“Again,” she said.
At ten-thirty, my phone rang. It was Nell.
“Where are you?” she said. “The second floor says you’re at Brannock Meadows. Somebody’s cousin drove past.”
“Somebody’s cousin should mind their own business.”
“Nobody in this county minds their own business. That’s why we have a real estate market.” She lowered her voice. “Caleb, the jar is at twenty-three hundred.”
“Dollars?”
“The title company bought in, and so did the appraiser. One of Boone’s own agents at Ridgeline drove over here to buy a slip.” I heard paper rustling. “And a reporter from the Corliss County Courier called and asked for a comment.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘No comment,’ and then I laminated it, so I could keep saying it.”
I watched Vivian finish lap eleven. She did not look like a woman who would be caught in flats on Saturday. She looked like a woman who would be caught in flats on the day of the Second Coming, and even then would negotiate.
“Nell,” I said. “What are the rules, exactly?”
“There are seven.”
“Is there one about what counts as a flat?”
“Rule Four.” She did not need to look it up. She had written it. “A flat is any shoe with a heel under one inch, measured at the back of the heel by the pool administrator.”
“Who is the pool administrator?”
“Me,” said Nell. “I have a tape measure. I’ve had it in my desk drawer for eleven years.”
“Have you ever used it?”
“Not once,” said Nell. “Saturday, I’m bringing it.”
We stopped at noon. Vivian’s best lap was a minute forty-four. Her navy heels were brown to an unknown height. She sat on the tailgate of Arturo’s truck and cleaned them with a staging towel, carefully, the way some people tune an instrument.
I sat beside her with the stopwatch, which I had been holding for five hours. I had questions.
Normally I wouldn’t have asked any of them. But it is hard to stay professional after five hours of watching your boss walk through soup.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask.”
“Why six inches? The real reason.”
She kept wiping the heel. For a while, I thought that was my answer.
“My first open house,” she said finally. “I was twenty-two. I had a navy suit from a department store and flat shoes, because the training manual said so. Sensible shoes.”
She put a little edge on sensible. “The seller came home early. He walked in, looked down at me, and asked me to go and get the agent.”
“Oh no.”
“I said, ‘I’m the agent.’ He laughed. Then he called the office to check.”
She folded the towel. “I sold the house. Above asking. And that afternoon I went to the mall and put a pair of six-inch heels on a credit card I couldn’t afford.”
“And nobody’s asked you to get the agent since.”
“Not once in twenty-two years.” She looked across Lot 31 at her own footprints. There were a lot of them. They were very straight.
That should have been the whole story. It was a good story, and it explained the rule and the jar and the ladders.
But I had been in the barn on Thursday. I had heard her name a tractor’s year from across the room.
“How do you know about bank barns?” I asked.
Vivian was quiet for a long time. Arturo’s framers had gone back to work. Somewhere, a nail gun went off three times in a row.
“I grew up on a dairy farm,” she said. “Tillman County, two hours north. Ninety cows, one bathroom and a mudroom bigger than the kitchen.”
She almost smiled. “I mucked out barns every morning until I was eighteen. I wore boots for eighteen years. Rubber ones, green, two sizes too big because they were my brother’s.”
I didn’t say anything. I was a band teacher once. I know when to hold a rest.
“The day I left for college, I gave them to the neighbor’s kid,” she said. “And I promised myself I’d never be stuck in the mud again. Literally or otherwise.”
She stood up and brushed off her skirt. “It’s not complicated, Caleb. People look at boots and see a farm kid. They look at these and see an agent.”
“Ida Fenwick doesn’t care about shoes,” I said. “She said so.”
“Everybody cares about shoes,” said Vivian. “Some people just care about them in the other direction.”
On the drive back, my phone buzzed twice.
The first was a text from a number I didn’t know.
Boone here, got your number from Nell, hope that’s OK. Bringing spare boots Saturday, women’s size six. No pressure, just in case. Ground doesn’t lie!
I didn’t show it to Vivian. I didn’t have to. She read it upside down from the passenger seat, the way she read everything.
“Size six,” she said. “How does he know my size?”
“Nell?”
“Nell knows everyone’s size.” She looked out the window. “That’s why Nell is dangerous.”
The second text was from Ida Fenwick, who typed entirely in capitals, like a telegram.
ROYCE DANFORTH COMING SATURDAY. SAYS HE WANTS TO WATCH. BRINGING HIS ATV. DONT BE LATE.
Saturday arrived gray and dripping. The forecast said a forty percent chance of rain. The sky said a hundred.
Vivian came out of her front door at seven-fifteen in black six-inch heels. She was carrying her clipboard, a thermos and the folding step stool with her initials on it. I didn’t ask about the stool. She got into the car and said, “Drive.”
We turned off Route 9 at the grain elevator at five to nine. We came over the last rise of the gravel road. I saw the gate of Fenwick Farm, and the barn beyond it, and the long brown fields shining wet under the clouds.
And I saw the gate wasn’t empty.
Parked along the fence were nine cars. In front of them, in a neat row, sat most of the Hadley & Marsh office.
They had brought lawn chairs.
Up next: The Fence Line
Continue to Part 4 →