Taft

by Ann Patchett

  If all my good behavior had no effect on Marion, it did plenty to bring her parents around. They saw how much I loved my boy. They started to like my regular job and the money I was making. They were proud of me, taking care of Franklin and sending Marion through school. When we went over to their house, Marion's mother would ask her politely to come into the kitchen and help her with supper. After they'd been in there for a while, she'd start to holler at her. "You've made your point," Mrs. Woodmoore would say, loud enough to make the neighbors lean towards their windows. "Now you're just being contrary. The man wants to marry you."

  Marion would start to argue back, telling her to keep her voice down, that the baby was asleep. About that time Mr. Woodmoore would put a finger up to his lips and point to the basement door. The two of us would slip downstairs to smoke.

  "Boy ought to have his father's name," Mr. Woodmoore would say to me. "It's criminal what she's doing to that child." Then he'd take a deep pull on his cigarette and shake his head.

  Marion never liked me any better after those visits. In truth, I think they helped her decide to go to Miami, which was the last thing in the world her parents wanted.

  It was raining like crazy when I got to their house and I held the flowers upside down to keep their heads from getting knocked off.

  "You're going to drown out there," Mrs. Woodmoore said to me. "Come on, get inside."

  I shook off my coat best I could on the porch so I wouldn't flood their house. I gave her the flowers and kissed her.

  "Ruth, look at this," she said. "Now why don't you bring home boys who give me flowers?"

  "Nobody brought him home," she said.

  I was surprised to see Ruth there. The last I'd heard she had some job up in Detroit. I'd always liked Ruth and she liked me, mainly because she didn't like her sister. "What are you doing in town?"

  "Ruth's moved home," Mrs. Woodmoore said. "She had some hard times so she came back. All my children are always welcome at home."

  Ruth looked anxious to get out of the room. "I'll get you a beer," she said. It would be hard on Ruth to come home. She was the wild one. Everybody thought Marion was wild, getting pregnant and then staying single, moving in and out of everyplace all the time. But Marion was staid at heart. She would have liked to get married and settle down if things had gone differently. It was just that her luck was bad. I wondered if some of that bad luck had come to Ruth.

  "Business good?" Mr. Woodmoore said. He was always under the impression that I owned the bar no matter how many times I told him otherwise.

  "Good enough," I said. "Yourself?"

  "Boat's still running. I picked myself an industry that's never going to fold." Mr. Woodmoore ran a tugboat that brought the freighters into dock. "I figure when they retire me I'm going to get myself a job on one of those gambling boats. Then I'll be just like you, spending all day in a bar." He laughed at his joke and Ruth gave me a beer in a bottle.

  "What're you doing now?" I asked Ruth.

  "This and that," she said, meaning that it wasn't the time to talk about it. Ruth looked like Marion. She wore her hair different and she didn't have the same sort of style, but there was no mistaking the similarity. Being in that house always made me feel like I had gone back to another part of my life. Pictures of Franklin sat on every tabletop. There were her parents. Ruth was Marion. I drank my beer.

  "Let's go ahead and eat," Mrs. Woodmoore said. "I know you have to get back to work. That's why we didn't ask you over for Saturday. I know how busy things get for you then."

  Ruth stood up in a tired way, stretched a little and headed out to the kitchen to help her mother put out the food.

  "Buddy okay?" I asked Mr. Woodmoore.

  "Fine," he said. "Fine except he stays away too much. I don't see why they have to station him in Germany. Too hard to come home. Crazy how they keep those boys over there. Hell, fifty years later. It's too far away."

  Mrs. Woodmoore stopped frying things when the doctor told her she was killing Mr. Woodmoore with kindness. "Feeding him to death," Marion used to say. She still put bacon in the green beans though and there was chicken gravy for the potatoes. "Take more," she said to me. "You probably never get any food at all. You didn't used to be thin like that."

  I put another biscuit on my plate. Whatever people might say about me, it wasn't that I was thin.

  "You hear from Marion much?"

  "I talk to Franklin once a week. Sometimes I talk to Marion then."

  "So you heard about him getting the stitches." Mrs. Woodmoore asked cautiously, like she wasn't sure I had heard.

  "Marion called me right after it happened."

  Mrs. Woodmoore smiled and nodded.

  "It's dangerous for a boy down there," Mr. Woodmoore said, salting his corn. "He shouldn't be running loose that way."

  There was nothing for me to say.

  "You playing at all?" Ruth asked me. I looked up at her, surprised.

  "We don't think Marion is happy," Mrs. Woodmoore said. "Last couple of months, every time I talk to her she starts crying about one thing or another. She says the hospital's not as good as the one here. She said the job she left was better than the one she has. They'd take her back, too. Baptist was always crazy about her."

  Ruth put down her napkin and got up from the table. "I'm going to get another beer. You'll have another one, won't you?" She went to get it before I answered, though I would have said yes.

  "I don't think Franklin is happy there either."

  "He keeps telling me about his friends," I said. I'd be the first to list off all that Marion's done wrong in her life, but no good came from talking this way about a woman to her parents.

  "I don't think he likes the school as much. Marion's said that. I think they both want to come back. She just doesn't know how to do it. You know how Marion is, prideful. She'd just as soon choke on her own pride than ask for help."

  Ruth came back from the kitchen holding two bottles of beer. She was smiling at me, walking in a slow way. Her sweater had ridden up and was showing an inch of her stomach above her jeans. "Mama thinks that if you ask Marion to come back to you, she'd do it now." She set a beer down on the tip of my knife.

  Mrs. Woodmoore looked at her younger daughter, not unlike the way she looked at me when she tried to pull my throat out.

  "Marion wouldn't come back to me," I said. "We've tried that. Every way two people can try, Marion and I tried that."

  Mrs. Woodmoore took a sip off her tea. Nobody at the table was eating any more except for Ruth. "But if it was true, if she was willing to come back, would you...?"

  I waited for her to finish her thought. Would I what? Have her? Marry her? Help her? I was at their dinner table. These people were good to me. I wasn't about to say I wanted no business with their daughter. "I want what's best for Franklin," I said. "I'd be a lot happier if he was home."

  The Woodmoores seemed to take this as the right answer, in so much as they both started eating again.

  After dinner there was coffee and chess pie. Mrs. Woodmoore never did forget what I liked. She brought out about a half a dozen photos and handed them to me. "These just came this morning," she said. "I thought maybe you hadn't seen them."

  Franklin at the beach, wearing his electric blue shorts. It was hard to tell how much bigger he'd gotten until the one where he was standing with Marion. He came up to her shoulder nearly. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and big sunglasses. In the picture he was standing in front of her and she had her arms wrapped around him. They were both laughing. For a minute I hated her all over again.

  "He's getting so tall," Mrs. Woodmoore said.

  I nodded. "Looks good," I said, and handed them back to her. They must have been taken right before he fell. There was no scar. It wouldn't be any time soon that Marion would send us pictures showing that scar.

  Mr. Woodmoore said he was working on something down in the basement that he wanted to show me. "I'm putting a ship in a bottle," he said. "Harder on my bl
ood pressure than anything I'm eating."

  I got the cigarettes out of my coat pocket and followed him downstairs.

  "I can always count on you," he said, peeling back the foil.

  "Sure you can."

  He handed me the bottle. I could see the little wooden hull of a boat sitting in the bottom. "It's the damndest thing," he said. "You put it all together inside with needles and tweezers. Buddy sent it to me from Germany for my birthday."

  "More than my nerves could take," I said, and put it back in its stand.

  "Everybody needs a little something to keep them occupied." He lit a cigarette and then handed one to me. "What about you? You seeing anybody?"

  As soon as he said it I got a picture of Fay standing in front of my car at Shiloh. I didn't think Mr. Woodmoore would count a white girl whose head I'd held against my chest. I wasn't sure I counted it either. "Nothing to speak of."

  He smiled at me and nodded. "But you're keeping busy. That's good, you should be. All I want from you is a little favor," he said, flicking off his ash into a coffee can. "It's nothing serious now. I just want you to call Marion. Tonight, tomorrow night, doesn't matter. You don't have to say anything in particular, just call and let her know you're thinking of her. The girl's having a hard time. No one would be more in their right than you to say no thanks, but it's like you said, you've got to think about the boy."

  "Sure," I said. "I can do that." Maybe I was wrong to go along with him, but I figured if there was anything to be cleared up that was Marion's job to handle. I'd just as soon make the old man happy.

  "Good," he said, and patted my arm. "That's good." Then we put out our cigarettes and headed upstairs.

  All three of them walked me to the door.

  "You still at Muddy's all the time?" Ruth asked me.

  I felt sorry for her, a grown woman standing there with her mother and father on either side of her. I thought of her being up long after they went to sleep, sitting in the dark living room, watching television. I told her she should come by.

  When Ruth was a kid she kissed me once. It was right before Marion got pregnant. It was August, and at five o'clock it was still 104 degrees. Marion called and asked if I'd take her to the public pool to cool off. The pool closed when it got dark and it didn't get dark in August until past nine. When I pulled up I could hear screaming coming from inside the house. The door flew open and out ran Ruth wearing a swimsuit top and a pair of cut-off shorts. She was skinny and wild looking, like a hot, hungry dog. Marion was right on her heels.

  "Don't," Ruth screamed, and she ran and stood behind me. Marion stopped short.

  "I can go with you, can't I?" Ruth said.

  I always thought it was best to let Ruth come along when there wasn't any chance for me and Marion to be alone together. A public pool when it was 104 didn't hold out a lot of promise of privacy. "You going to be good?" I said.

  "Perfect," Ruth said.

  Marion rolled her eyes and raked her toes across the gravel on the driveway, but she wasn't going to make a scene about it. Marion had a habit of going along with anything I said back then. "I've got to go get my towel," she said, glaring at her sister.

  Ruth hopped in the front seat, giving a little squeal when the hot vinyl hit the backs of her thighs. That's what you get for wearing shorts like that. She leaned out the window. "Get me one too!" she called.

  I got in the car and turned the ignition on to listen to the radio.

  "Too hot," Ruth said.

  "That's August."

  "Well, I don't like it."

  I looked at her. She had her bare feet up on the dashboard and was trying to fan herself with her hand. When she saw me looking she leaned over and kissed me straight on the mouth, pressing her whole self up against me. It was the kiss of somebody who knew a couple of things about kissing.

  "She's going to chop your head off," I said, pushing away from her.

  "There wasn't a whole lot of time," she said, readjusting her swimsuit top, "or I would have done it better."

  "Jesus," I said. "What are you thinking about?"

  Marion opened the front door of the car and stood there holding a bunch of towels under her arm. "Get in the back," she said.

  Ruth crawled over the top of the seat rather than go to the trouble of getting out and then in again. She made a real point of dragging one of her legs across my face as she slid over, but that was that.

  I said my good-nights and Mrs. Woodmoore tried twice to give me her umbrella. "You should just stay in Buddy's room," she said to me. "Nobody should be going out in weather like this." When I finally got away I ran across the street for my car. From where they were standing, they would have thought I was running from the rain.

  A bar can be a nice place to wind up on a night like that. Business was good. Wallace was pouring me a drink as I was walking in the door, and even though I'd been meaning to tell him about my policy against drinking where you work, I took it anyway.

  Things always ran smoothly when Wallace was behind the bar. That's because people liked him and were afraid of him at the same time. It occurred to me all of the sudden that he would be the man to hand the money over to. Nobody was going to bother Wallace at the night deposit box, unless they were planning on shooting him, in which case we all stood an equal chance.

  "How'd you do in math?" I asked him.

  "Better than I did at some other things," he said. "Is there going to be a test?"

  "I was wondering how you'd like to learn to close the place. I can't keep doing it every night myself."

  Wallace was a solid character. Football had made him tough. I'd seen him play when he was a star at Memphis State. If it hadn't been for those bad knees, I think he would have gone pro. "I could do that," he said.

  "Good." I took a sip of my drink. "We'll get started on that then."

  "Tonight?" He said it in such a way that made it clear that it wouldn't be the best time for him.

  "Not tonight," I said. "There's no hurry."

  This would work out better than Cyndi. She was smart, but she was a moody girl. There was always the chance she wouldn't do what you told her to.

  When I went through the kitchen to go up to my office I found Fay and Rose staring in a pot. Fay was stirring.

  "Hey," she said. "Look at this. Rose is teaching me how to cook."

  "You're teaching her to cook?"

  "She asked me," Rose said.

  "I'm only coming in for short lessons, just on my breaks," Fay said. "You were so late, we'd about given up on you coming in altogether."

  I didn't like the way she was looking at me, so clearly happy to see me when Rose was standing right there.

  "Don't stay back here too long," I said. "I'm going up to the office."

  I wasn't three steps past them when Fay told Rose she'd be right back and followed me. When we got upstairs she closed the door.

  "Something wrong with you?" she said.

  "I just don't think it's such a good idea, you coming up here with me when Rose is standing right there."

  "She doesn't care."

  That much was true. The rest of it I didn't feel like explaining. "Okay," I said. "Never mind."

  "Where'd you go tonight?" she said, not like she was prying, more like she was shooting the breeze.

  "I had dinner with some friends."

  "Did you have a good time?" She was stalling, wanting to stay in the office with the door closed.

  "Good enough."

  "Carl told me last night that you have a kid."

  Carl must have liked that. "I have a son."

  "You never told me about him."

  "Never came up."

  "Do you have a wife to go with this son?"

  "Awful lot of questions," I said.

  "Are you married?"

  "No."

  She nodded her head and then sat down on the edge of my desk. Her legs were pale and bare and she had on white socks and black tennis shoes. I watched her leg swing back and forth. "I
know you think there's nothing going on here, and probably you're right. But I'm glad you don't have a wife."

  "Me too," I said.

  "How old's this son?"

  "Nine."

  "What's his name?"

  "Franklin."

  "Franklin," she said. "I like that. I could see naming a boy Franklin. If I had a son, I'd name him Levon."

  I never knew what it was about women that made them pick out names for children they didn't have.

  "I should get back out on the floor," Fay said. "You don't mind Rose teaching me to cook, do you?"

  "It's okay as long as she doesn't mind."

  "My mother was always going to teach me," she said. Fay had a way of talking that made it seem like her mother was the one who was dead.

  She hopped off the desk and stood in front of me. Neither one of us had any idea what was going on or what we were supposed to do about it. "I had a good time yesterday," she said. I nodded at her. She waited for me to say something, but I didn't. It was better that I didn't get started. "I guess I'll see you downstairs, then," she said.

  There's no getting overtime in the factory where Taft works. He's lucky to still be full-time. Plenty of people with just a year or two less have been cut down to part-time and lost their benefits. There's been talk of getting a union in there for years. Back in the beginning, Taft was all for it, but he doesn't see that there's much point in it now. You can't get blood from a turnip, and Royal Hill Carpet didn't have enough orders to keep everybody on. It isn't like it used to be. Taft is lucky to have gotten the job as night watchman down at the lumberyard two nights a week. Sometimes he thinks it's wrong, him having two jobs when other people can't find one, but he needs the money. Friday and Saturday nights he's down there ten until five in the morning. Five dollars an hour to wear a uniform and walk around. Sometimes he sits in the office and watches part of "The Tonight Show," but he always winds up shutting it off. He thinks he hears things.