Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “What’s wrong?” Rhoda said. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Because you are going to put out that goddamn cigarette this very minute and you’re going to give me the package and you’re not going to smoke another cigarette around me as long as you live,” he said.

  “I will not do any such thing,” Rhoda said. “It’s a free country.”

  “Give me the cigarette, Rhoda,” he said. “Hand it here.”

  “Give me one good reason why I should,” she said. But her voice let her down. She knew there wasn’t any use in arguing. This was not her soft little mother she was dealing with. This was Dudley Manning, who had been a famous baseball player until he quit when she was born. Who before that had gone to the Olympics on a relay team. There were scrapbooks full of his clippings in Rhoda’s house. No matter where the Mannings went those scrapbooks sat on a table in the den. Manning Hits One Over The Fence, the headlines read. Manning Saves The Day. Manning Does It Again. And he was not the only one. His cousin Philip Manning, down in Jackson, Mississippi, was famous too. Who was the father of the famous Crystal Manning, Rhoda’s cousin who had a fur coat when she was ten. And Leland Manning, who was her cousin Lele’s daddy. Leland had been the captain of the Tulane football team before he drank himself to death in the Delta.

  Rhoda sighed, thinking of all that, and gave in for the moment. “Give me one good reason and I might,” she repeated.

  “I don’t have to give you a reason for a goddamn thing,” he said. “Give the cigarette here, Rhoda. Right this minute.” He reached out and took it and she didn’t resist. “Goddamn, these things smell awful,” he said, crushing it in the ashtray. He reached in her pocketbook and got the package and threw it out the window.

  “Only white trash throw things out on the road,” Rhoda said. “You’d kill me if I did that.”

  “Well, let’s just be quiet and get to where we’re going.” He started the motor and drove back out onto the highway. Rhoda crunched down lower in the seat, pretending to read her book. Who cares, she thought. I’ll get some as soon as we stop for gas.

  Getting cigarettes at filling stations was not as easy as Rhoda thought it was going to be. This was God’s country they were driving into now, the hills rising up higher and higher, strange, silent little houses back off the road. Rhoda could feel the eyes looking out at her from behind the silent windows. Poor white trash, Rhoda’s mother would have called them. The salt of the earth, her father would have said.

  This was God’s country and these people took things like children smoking cigarettes seriously. At both places where they stopped there was a sign by the cash register, No Cigarettes Sold To Minors.

  Rhoda had moved to the back seat of the Cadillac and was stretched out on the seat reading her book. She had found another poem she liked and she was memorizing it.

  Four be the things I’d be better without,

  Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

  Three be the things I shall never attain,

  Envy, content and sufficient champagne.

  Oh, God, I love this book, she thought. This Dorothy Parker is just like me. Rhoda was remembering a night when she got drunk in Clarkesville, Mississippi, with her cousin Baby Gwen Barksdale. They got drunk on tequila LaGrande Conroy brought back from Mexico, and Rhoda had slept all night in the bathtub so she would be near the toilet when she vomited.

  She put her head down on her arm and giggled, thinking about waking up in the bathtub. Then a plan occurred to her.

  “Stop and let me go to the bathroom,” she said to her father. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said. “I knew you shouldn’t have gotten in the back seat. Well, hold on. I’ll stop the first place I see.” He pushed his hat back off his forehead and began looking for a place to stop, glancing back over his shoulder every now and then to see if she was all right. Rhoda had a long history of throwing up on car trips so he was taking this seriously. Finally he saw a combination store and filling station at a bend in the road and pulled up beside the front door.

  “I’ll be all right.” Rhoda said, jumping out of the car. “You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  She walked dramatically up the wooden steps and pushed open the screen door. It was so quiet and dark inside she thought for a moment the store was closed. She looked around. She was in a rough, high-ceilinged room with saddles and pieces of farm equipment hanging from the rafters and a sparse array of canned goods on wooden shelves behind a counter. On the counter were five or six large glass jars filled with different kinds of Nabisco cookies. Rhoda stared at the cookie jars, wanting to stick her hand down inside and take out great fistfuls of Lorna Doones and Oreos. She fought off her hunger and raised her eyes to the display of chewing tobacco and cigarettes.

  The smells of the store rose up to meet her, fecund and rich, moist and cool, as if the store was an extension of the earth outside. Rhoda looked down at the board floors. She felt she could have dropped a sunflower seed on the floor and it would instantly sprout and take bloom, growing quick, moving down into the earth and upwards toward the rafters.

  “Is anybody here?” she said softly, then louder. “Is anybody here?”

  A woman in a cotton dress appeared in a door, staring at Rhoda out of very intense, very blue eyes.

  “Can I buy a pack of cigarettes from you?” Rhoda said. “My dad’s in the car. He sent me to get them.”

  “What kind of cigarettes you looking for?” the woman said, moving to the space between the cash register and the cookie jars.

  “Some Luckies if you have them,” Rhoda said. “He said to just get anything you had if you didn’t have that.”

  “They’re a quarter,” the woman said, reaching behind herself to take the package down and lay it on the counter, not smiling, but not being unkind either.

  “Thank you,” Rhoda said, laying the quarter down on the counter. “Do you have any matches?”

  “Sure,” the woman said, holding out a box of kitchen matches. Rhoda took a few, letting her eyes leave the woman’s face and come to rest on the jars of Oreos. They looked wonderful and light, as though they had been there a long time and grown soft around the edges.

  The woman was smiling now. “You want one of those cookies?” she said. “You want one, you go on and have one. It’s free.”

  “Oh, no thank you,” Rhoda said. “I’m on a diet. Look, do you have a ladies’ room I can use?”

  “It’s out back,” the woman said. “You can have one of them cookies if you want it. Like I said, it won’t cost you nothing.”

  “I guess I’d better get going,” Rhoda said. “My dad’s in a hurry. But thank you anyway. And thanks for the matches.” Rhoda hurried down the aisle, slipped out the back door and leaned up against the back of the store, tearing the paper off the cigarettes. She pulled one out, lit it, and inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke out in front of her, watching it rise up into the air, casting a veil over the hills that rose up behind and to the left of her. She had never been in such a strange country. It looked as though no one ever did anything to their yards or roads or fences. It looked as though there might not be a clock for miles.

  She inhaled again, feeling dizzy and full. She had just taken the cigarette out of her mouth when her father came bursting out of the door and grabbed both of her wrists in his hands.

  “Let go of me,” she said. “Let go of me this minute.” She struggled to free herself, ready to kick or claw or bite, ready for a real fight, but he held her off. “Drop the cigarette, Rhoda,” he said. “Drop it on the ground.”

  “I’ll kill you,” she said. “As soon as I get away I’m running away to Florida. Let go of me, Daddy. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” he said. The veins were standing out on his forehead. His face was so close Rhoda could see his freckles and the line where his false front tooth was joined to what was left of the real one. He had lost the tooth in a baseball game the day Rhoda was born. That was how
he told the story. “I lost that tooth the day Rhoda was born,” he would say. “I was playing left field against Memphis in the old Crump Stadium. I slid into second and the second baseman got me with his shoe.”

  “You can smoke all you want to when you get down to Florida,” he was saying now. “But you’re not smoking on this trip. So you might as well calm down before I drive off and leave you here.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Go on and leave. I’ll just call up Mother and she’ll come and get me.” She was struggling to free her wrists but she could not move them inside his hands. “Let go of me, you big bully,” she added.

  “Will you calm down and give me the cigarettes?”

  “All right,” she said, but the minute he let go of her hands she turned and began to hit him on the shoulders, pounding her fists up and down on his back, not daring to put any real force behind the blows. He pretended to cower under the assault. She caught his eye and saw that he was laughing at her and she had to fight the desire to laugh with him.

  “I’m getting in the car,” she said. “I’m sick of this place.” She walked grandly around to the front of the store, got into the car, tore open the lunch and began to devour it, tearing the chicken off the bones with her teeth, swallowing great hunks without even bothering to chew them. “I’m never speaking to you again as long as I live,” she said, her mouth full of chicken breast. “You are not my father.”

  “Suits me, Miss Smart-alecky Movie Star,” he said, putting his hat back on his head. “Soon as we get home you can head on out for Florida. You just let me know when you’re leaving so I can give you some money for the bus.”

  “I hate you,” Rhoda mumbled to herself, starting in on the homemade raisin cookies. I hate your guts. I hope you go to hell forever, she thought, breaking a cookie into pieces so she could pick out the raisins.

  It was late afternoon when the Cadillac picked its way up a rocky red clay driveway to a housetrailer nestled in the curve of a hill beside a stand of pine trees.

  “Where are we going?” Rhoda said. “Would you just tell me that?”

  “We’re going to see Maud and Joe Samples,” he said. “Joe’s an old hand around here. He’s my right-hand man in Clay County. Now you just be polite and try to learn something, Sister. These are real folks you’re about to meet.”

  “Why are we going here first?” Rhoda said. “Aren’t we going to a hotel?”

  “There isn’t any hotel,” her father said. “Does this look like someplace they’d have hotels? Maud and Joe are going to put you up for me while I’m off working.”

  “I’m going to stay here?” Rhoda said. “In this trailer?”

  “Just wait until you see the inside,” her father said. “It’s like the inside of a boat, everything all planned out and just the right amount of space for things. I wish your mother’d let me live in a trailer.”

  They were almost to the door now. A plump smiling woman came out onto the wooden platform and waited for them with her hands on her hips, smiling wider and wider as they got nearer.

  “There’s Maud,” Dudley said. “She’s the sweetest woman in the world and the best cook in Kentucky. Hey there, Miss Maud,” he called out.

  “Mr. D,” she said, opening the car door for them. “Joe Samples’ been waiting on you all day and here you show up bringing this beautiful girl just like you promised. I’ve made you some blackberry pies. Come on inside this trailer.” Maud smiled deep into Rhoda’s face. Her eyes were as blue as the ones on the woman in the store. Rhoda’s mother had blue eyes, but not this brilliant and not this blue. These eyes were from another world, another century.

  “Come on in and see Joe,” Maud said. “He’s been having a fit for you to get here.”

  They went inside and Dudley showed Rhoda all around the trailer, praising the design of trailers. Maud turned on the tiny oven and they had blackberry pie and bread and butter sandwiches and Rhoda abandoned her diet and ate two pieces of the pie, covering it with thick whipped cream.

  The men went off to talk business and Maud took Rhoda to a small room at the back of the trailer decorated to match a handmade quilt of the sunrise.

  There were yellow ruffled curtains at the windows and a tiny dressing table with a yellow ruffled skirt around the edges. Rhoda was enchanted by the smallness of everything and the way the windows looked out onto layers of green trees and bushes.

  Lying on the dresser was a white leather Bible and a display of small white pamphlets, Alcohol And You, When Jesus Reaches For A Drink, You Are Not Alone, Sorry Isn’t Enough, Taking No For An Answer.

  It embarrassed Rhoda even to read the titles of anything as tacky as the pamphlets, but she didn’t let on she thought it was tacky, not with Maud sitting on the bed telling her how pretty she was every other second and asking her questions about herself and saying how wonderful her father was.

  “We love Mr. D to death,” she said. “It’s like he was one of our own.”

  He appeared in the door. “Rhoda, if you’re settled in I’ll be leaving now,” he said. “I’ve got to drive to Knoxville to do some business but I’ll be back here Tuesday morning to take you to the mines.” He handed her three twenty-dollar bills. “Here,” he said. “In case you need anything.”

  He left then and hurried out to the car, trying to figure out how long it would take him to get to Knoxville, to where Valerie sat alone in a hotel room waiting for this night they had planned for so long. He felt the sweet hot guilt rise up in his face and the sweet hot longing in his legs and hands.

  I’m sorry, Jesus, he thought, pulling out onto the highway. I know it’s wrong and I know we’re doing wrong. So go on and punish me if you have to but just let me make it there and back before you start in on me.

  He set the cruising speed at exactly fifty-five miles an hour and began to sing to himself as he drove.

  “Oh, sure as the vine grows around the stump

  You’re my darling sugar lump,” he sang, and;

  “Froggy went a-courting and he did ride,

  Huhhrummp, Huhhrummp,

  Froggy went a-courting and he did ride, Huhhrummp,

  What you gonna have for the wedding supper?

  Black-eyed peas and bread and butter, Huhhrummp huhhrummp . . .”

  Rhoda was up and dressed when her father came to get her on Tuesday morning. It was still dark outside but a rooster had begun to crow in the distance. Maud bustled all about the little kitchen making much of them, filling their plates with biscuits and fried eggs and ham and gravy.

  Then they got into the Cadillac and began to drive toward the mine. Dudley was driving slowly, pointing out everything to her as they rode along.

  “Up on that knoll,” he said, “that’s where the Traylors live. Rooster Traylor’s a man about my age. Last year his mother shot one of the Galtney women for breaking up Rooster’s marriage and now the Galtneys have got to shoot someone in the Traylor family.”

  “That’s terrible,” Rhoda said.

  “No it isn’t, Sister,” he said, warming into the argument. “These people take care of their own problems.”

  “They actually shoot each other?” she said. “And you think that’s okay? You think that’s funny?”

  “I think it’s just as good as waiting around for some judge and jury to do it for you.”

  “Then you’re just crazy,” Rhoda said. “You’re as crazy as you can be.”

  “Well, let’s don’t argue about it this morning. Come on. I’ve got something to show you.” He pulled the car off the road and they walked into the woods, following a set of bulldozer tracks that made a crude path into the trees. It was quiet in the woods and smelled of pine and sassafras. Rhoda watched her father’s strong body moving in front of her, striding along, inspecting everything, noticing everything, commenting on everything.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Look at all this beauty, honey. Look at how beautiful all this is. This is the real world. Not those goddamn movies and beauty parl
ors and magazines. This is the world that God made. This is where people are really happy.”

  “There isn’t any God,” she said. “Nobody that knows anything believes in God, Daddy. That’s just a lot of old stuff . . .”

  “I’m telling you, Rhoda,” he said. “It breaks my heart to see the way you’re growing up.” He stopped underneath a tree, took a seat on a log and turned his face to hers. Tears were forming in his eyes. He was famous in the family for being able to cry on cue. “You’ve just got to learn to listen to someone. You’ve got to get some common sense in your head. I swear to God, I worry about you all the time.” The tears were falling now. “I just can’t stand to see the way you’re growing up. I don’t know where you get all those crazy ideas you come up with.”

  Rhoda looked down, caught off guard by the tears. No matter how many times he pulled that with the tears she fell for it for a moment. The summer forest was all around them, soft deep earth beneath their feet, morning light falling through the leaves, and the things that passed between them were too hard to understand. Their brown eyes met and locked and after that they were bound to start an argument for no one can bear to be that happy or that close to another human being.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Rhoda said. “It’s a free country and I can smoke if I want to and you can’t keep me from doing it by locking me up in a trailer with some poor white trash.”

  “What did you say?” he said, getting a look on his face that would have scared a grown man to death. “What did you just say, Rhoda?”

  “I said I’m sick and tired of being locked up in that damned old trailer with those corny people and nothing to read but religious magazines. I want to get some cigarettes and I want you to take me home so I can see my friends and get my column written for next week.”

  “Oh, God, Sister,” he said. “Haven’t I taught you anything? Maud Samples is the salt of the earth. That woman raised seven children. She knows things you and I will never know as long as we live.”