by Jim Grimsley
“You ain’t got but one clean shirt and it ain’t ironed.”
“Then Ellen can iron it and I can go,” Carl Jr. said, and I was already reaching for the flatirons to warm them on the stove.
“Look at her move now,” said Nora with a sneer.
I was transfixed by her expression for a moment, the meanness of that look, and at the same time I grew aware that her body had become different than it was, more curved. The cotton dress clung to her breasts and thighs. I studied Nora in her meanness, a memory as vivid as the scent of the drooping arm of this rosebush covered with blossom, so thick with smell I am almost drunk.
I have buried my sister Nora, in the present. She died of kidney disease some months ago. All her children came to her funeral and cried, and in spite of the fact that my sister lay dead, I thought it was a fine sight. I thought my sister had done well for herself, to have so many children willing to cry at her funeral. Since then I have visited her grave and I know she waits in it, her body anticipating resurrection in her dry vault.
But the Nora I cannot escape is the one who rises out of me, the one who turns to me when I am setting the pot of beans on the stove. “You let them beans alone now, you’ll ruin them if you put in the salt. You let me season them beans.”
I IRONED CARL JR.’S shirt and Mama refused to say a word, though she glared at me now and again. I checked the biscuits in the oven and told Nora when the tops toasted brown. I boiled the grits and kept them stirred, in between resting the flatirons on the hot stove, and ironing the shirt, and carrying Carl Jr. his coffee with three spoons of sugar. I moved from one task to another like a good girl without complaining. I thought about my blue skirt and white blouse that were nearly new given to me by Mama’s sister Lucy Baker as hand-me-down from her daughter my age. I had only worn this outfit to church twice before and now I could space it with the green check dress Mama had bought me out of my money from working in cotton and tobacco over the summer. I had begun to think of that money as my money now, even though she still collected it, kept it and spent it as she pleased. I could wear one outfit one week and one outfit the next. This made church easier to deal with than school, where two outfits did not last so long.
When Daddy shuffled into the kitchen scratching his behind through his overalls, I brought him a hot biscuit and he tossed it from one hand to the other while I rinsed out his coffee cup and wiped it dry.
“You make me sick.” Nora glared at me as I moved back and forth.
“She twists that little ass around here like she’s going somewhere. I ain’t said she could go nowhere.” When I approached the stove, Mama cuffed me again to warn me, not much harder than before, but I still backed out of range. “That goddamn church will fill your head with a bunch of mess. I know all about Jesus. Jesus can wipe my goddamn ass, that’s what Jesus can do.”
Nora pouted over the kettle of hot water, the plate of sausage dripping with grease, the pot of grits. I fed Madson and the baby, then I ate, but by then the grits were mostly cold.
When I had eaten the last mouthful of grits, Carl Jr. said, “Get your dress on. It’s a long walk to that church and I don’t want to bust in on them people when they’re ringing that bell.”
No one else said anything, except Daddy, who muttered, “That girl is crazy for a church, ain’t she?” I slipped quickly away from the table and hurried to the bedroom where I splashed water on my face and searched for a clean slip.
I had no Bible to carry but I pretended, as we walked, that I had a black leather Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red letters, as well as a hat and white gloves, wrist-length, as fine as any rich man’s daughter. We took a cut through the woods back of a couple of shacks where the colored people lived, a teeny naked boychild creeping through the yard in a tee shirt but no pants, carrying the slop bucket toward the johnny house, his miniscule wee wee jiggling at every step. His round black bottom glistened with dew. I was embarrassed to look, but Carl Jr. hooted at him to make sure he knew he had been seen.
Miss Ruby Jarman was out walking in the tiny yard at the back of the store, where it butts up against a clay bank, but when she saw us out so early headed for church, she ducked back behind the building, curlers clutched at her stringy gray hair. Spread over her bare white calves like spiderweb lay nets and vines of blue vein, like something that had ruptured.
We could hear the welcoming music flood down the hill from the church while cars turned into the driveway and people climbed the steep bank.
“We’re going into the house of God,” I reminded Carl Jr. as we began to trudge up the driveway.
“You betcha,” he agreed, and we walked right in.
For the introductory service before the Sunday School session we sat at the back of the sanctuary, farther than which Carl Jr. refused to go. Usually he would stretch out on the back pew to sleep during the Sunday School class. Carl Jr. was a thoughtful sleeper and never snored.
As for me, I sat politely and anxiously among the other Sunday School children, keeping my back straight and sitting with my hands in my lap in such a picture-perfect way that I could continue to imagine myself as having gloves on my hands and a Bible in them.
Today I managed to get a seat next to June Frances Taylor in the Sunday School class, and she smiled at me and passed me a note. It was a real note; I had half expected it, tangibly white and crispy, and I could hardly wait to sneak to open it at my side, where I read, with a thrill down my spine, “My Ma says you can have Sunday dinner with us today. Say yes or no, your friend, June Frances Taylor.” She had even made narrow “yes or no” blanks so I could check one or the other, though I had brought no pencil.
I blushed and raised my eyes shyly.
June Frances watched me cautiously out of the corner of her eyes, and I blushed more and nodded.
Behind her head, Alma Laura appeared and sat demurely with her hands in her lap.
The window hung open, and with every passing breeze the room washed with waves of honeysuckle, a huge old vine that ran along the fence at the back of the church.
IT IS AS if she is with me now, here, in the present. As if I will find her somewhere working the soil of my yard. I have lived with the dead so long, it’s hard to tell who’s who sometimes.
I am smelling the roses in my own yard to block out the scent of the honeysuckle from long ago.
I am lost in that Sunday in the past, and I have no idea whether Mama will allow me to go to the Taylors’ for dinner. We work for the Taylors in their fields. I have chopped many a row of Mr. Albert Taylor’s cotton since I grew old enough to wield a hoe. I have handed many a truck of green tobacco to the loopers, and I have picked my share of cotton. Mr. Taylor is a placid man who never raises his voice, who always shaves clean and behaves circumspectly. June Taylor stands like him, with her shoulders slightly slumped, and she stares at the ground when she walks, as if checking for potholes and such.
June Taylor is in my grade at school, but I have never visited her at home. Maybe that explains why this memory clings to me vividly. Sometimes she brings two cheese sandwiches for lunch, and when she does, I can have one; I can still taste it. She sits next to me and speaks to me in a quiet voice as if we have always been friends, and offers me the cheese sandwich without a word, without even asking, so that I do not have to say, yes, I want the sandwich. The weight of it rests in my lap. I unwrap the wax paper, inhaling the fresh bread, the scent of yeast. Smooth and white, the mayonnaise. My stomach is gurgling, and I already wish for something to drink with my sandwich.
I wish I could see her now. I heard years ago she ran a diner down the highway from here, maybe in Smithfield or Luma, I can hardly remember. I wonder whether she still owns it; I hope she is still alive. She would have aged straight and tall, I think. Hair pulled back neatly off her face and no bangs. The skin of her forehead always shone very clear and white.
She was never very much for the outdoors. I can picture her standing with me, inhaling the scent of these tea
roses and these evening damasks; she would be wearing a hat and scarf, maybe even sunglasses, and she would be squinting behind the sunglasses, and sniffing delicately at the roses, as if too much of the scent would make her drunk.
We had known each other all our lives, or at least for most of our lives, but when I was ten years old and going to church we became friends. At first she watched me in the Sunday School class with a special suspicion; I would catch her at it and she would look away. Then she started to stand beside me during recess on the school playground. We simply stood together and glanced at each other. I noticed her clothes had worn thin, though not as thin as mine, her shoes were scuffed, her socks were darned. For some reason this realization relaxed me and suddenly the idea of being close to her became easy.
Then one day at lunch she said, “I brought two sandwiches.”
In the classroom everyone was opening the tops of desks, unfolding lunchpails or unwrapping cloth-covered bundles. My empty stomach growled.
June spoke in a whisper. “I can’t eat but one.”
When I unwrapped the sandwich, June refused even to glance at me or to acknowledge my actions in any way, until I had finally stuffed the corner of it into my mouth and took out a bite. That first day June Frances brought two sandwiches, she looked at me, dark-eyed and sad. We chewed our lunches together. I avoided disturbing June’s somber mood, but for myself, I was almost delirious. I had never eaten lunch at school before, and my belly was turning flip-flops to have so much in it so early in the day.
At the end of the meal June broke her pickle in half and gave me one end. I chewed, savoring the fine quality of the pickle brine that streaked my chin, all but smacking. June chewed her pickle in small bites, holding it delicately with the tips of her fingers. The white skin of her face and neck nearly glowed in the light from the window, and a smattering of tiny moles mottled her throat to behind one ear. The tracery of moles fascinated me, some no larger than pinheads, some the size of peppercorns.
Depending on the dress she wore, some days you could see more of the moles and some days you could see less. I wondered, in a formless way, how far the dark spots reached along the slender part of her back. I wondered if all her skin were as pasty and white as the mild flesh under her chin and along her throat.
“I want you to come to my house,” she said one day, and my heart stopped, and the whole universe wrapped itself in this one moment. I had waited for her to look at me with exactly this serious expression, to make exactly this request. She had the troubled blinking gaze of the gospel soloist from Goldsboro who sang at church some Sunday mornings. June Taylor carried an air as if she saw all in the faces of the people around her, every imperfection in every soul. I myself did not see so much but I was willing to learn.
“I have to ask my mama,” I answered.
“You can come Sunday after church.”
“I have to ask.” I sighed, trying for an effect of melancholy like hers. “But I guess it will be all right.”
BUT I HAD never asked, and now it was Sunday.
All during the church service I sat with the folded note in my hand, the heat and sweat of my hand softening the paper, till by the end of the service it was moulded to the shape of my palm. June Frances sat with her parents and Piggy, her older brother, swollen to the size of a black bear in his suit. I sat by myself a few rows behind them, studying the backs of their heads, Mrs. Taylor’s tattered hat, Mr. Taylor’s cowlick and sprinkle of peppery hair.
No other earthly human being distracted me, except Johnny Holland with his slick hair and square, thick shoulders, passing the collection plate and flirting silently with all the women of the congregation.
When the sermon was over and the preacher had prayed his last prayer, I filed out of the church with all the rest, stopping to find Carl Jr. who sat up and rubbed his eyes on the back pew. He had put so much hair grease on his head the hair was all stuck together smooth in the back. But he still thought he was cute, and so did Jeanie Foy and Carol Askew at the end of the pew, giggling with their hands over their mouths.
While Carl Jr. and I walked down the aisle I said, like it was nothing, “June Taylor says her mama wants me to come to Sunday dinner at her house.”
Carl Jr. blinked slowly, but made no reply.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.” He paused. “I never heard you say anything to Mama about going to the Taylors for dinner.”
“I didn’t say nothing to her because I didn’t know.”
Carl Jr. eyed me sideways, then began to smile. The smile was telling me something about freedom, but years would pass before I understood.
“I don’t know why you’re grinning at me all stupid like that.”
“Mama will tear your tail up when you get home.”
Mrs. Frog Taylor walked up just then, clutching that hat to the top of her head, with June Frances trailing her like a pale moon. “Tell Mama I’ll be home after a while,” I said, in something of a hush, and ran to the Taylors’ wood-paneled station wagon with the chrome stripe dangling off the side. June stood in the shadow of the car and waited for me, one moon-colored arm thrust forward into the sunlight, pale skin alive with white light. She was so happy I was coming, she clamped her lips tight together and stared straight ahead as her father, Mr. Albert Taylor, slid his broad shoulders behind the steering wheel and started the car. He rolled down the window and hollered to his wife, “Come on, Frog.”
“I told you, don’t call me Frog at church.” She walked tottering on her spike heels, turning to wave to Mrs. Rilla Spokes, the midwife, “I can’t stand you using that name in the churchyard.”
“Whatever you say, darling.” He swung open the door for her, she shoved her wide butt through the door and onto the seat, and beyond her head stood Carl Jr. at the edge of the churchyard, grinning and waving.
I waved feebly to Carl Jr.
“This here is Ellen Tote,” Frog Taylor said, by way of introduction, while arranging her faded skirt on the car seat. “We are taking her home to Sunday dinner with us.”
“I know who it is,” said Mr. Albert, chewing the wide edge of a blade of grass. “She’s been picking in my fields since she was knee high to nothing.”
The daring of what I had chosen came to me fully when Mr. Albert slipped the car into gear, pumped the clutch, and coaxed us forward. Carl Jr.’s figure dwindled in the rear window. Side by side, squeezed against each other by the bulk of Piggy Taylor, June and I waited for the car trip to end. We sat circumspectly, our eyes fixed straight ahead, neither daring to look at the other. I could smell the trace of molasses on her breath.
I AM FEELING the constriction happiness brings to the chest; I stand beside the fence at the back where I have trained the honeysuckle to climb and knot. The memory continues rippling through me. I saw the Taylors’ farmhouse in a whole new light, now that I could expect to walk inside it. The house sat prim and quiet in its Sunday repose, and the clouds lowered over it, the tops of the pin and water oaks moving. Beyond the fields, against a backdrop of pines, stood a lone sycamore, the outer bark stripped away to reveal chalky whiteness. Beneath the tree a cemetery stood, in the middle of the field. I noted details I had never before considered about the Taylor house and its surrounding fields and farm buildings. I could smell the hogs in the pens, out of sight. I stepped out of the car onto a dry mud rut where the tractor had crossed the yard.
The house, up close, had a dilapidated look. My heart flooded with sympathy when I comprehended the look of it. A rusted-out washtub sat indistinctly in high brown weeds. An old washboard lay flat in the grass, June showed me the corrugated tin washplate but refused to lift it out of the grass, because of snakes. An old rusted pump and well stood at the side of the house, but the well must have dried because spiderwebs filled the spout. The wooden lid that covered the well had rotten boards and we were not supposed to climb there, according to June Frances. A colored boy drowned in that well once, June informed me, before her daddy
rented the farm and moved the family into the house. But you could hear the boy whimpering, sometimes, of an evening.
When she spoke like this, the strange spirit of her drifted very far away. We stood over the dangerous well and stared down into the dark spaces. June stared at the well with longing, as if she might ease into the mouth of it herself.
The new pump stood inside Mrs. Taylor’s kitchen, and before we changed clothes I primed it and pumped a bucket of water for the cornmeal Mrs. Taylor was mixing, and some to heat to wash the early dishes, the ones that were already stacked at the sink under the window. A pot of cactus sat in the windowsill, furry and prickly, and I studied it because I had never seen cactus, while I waited for the water to heat.
Because she was busy, I had time to look around. The kitchen was very plain, its walls dingy with soot, as if the chimney flues needed repair, or as if there had been a fire. I had always thought the Taylors rich because we worked for them, and I pictured Mrs. Taylor as having every convenience, like the women in the radio dramas that Carl Jr. played for me in the evenings. But the kitchen table was battered wood that had been painted over many times, the washbasin nicked and scarred, the water dipper bent and beaten back into shape. Mrs. Taylor changed from her Sunday dress into a cotton dress with a stained collar and mended pockets at the waist. She had patched June Frances’s jeans. Mr. Taylor’s overalls showed wear at the knee and his boots needed new soles. Everywhere I turned I found more evidence.
Yet there was some difference I could not yet define. Something having to do with the neatness of things, the clean quiet of the house.
Piggy, gross and white, walked through the living room with no shirt, the bib of his overalls hanging in front of him, hollering at his mama to find him a shirt, and he just stood there like that, a round, bulbous, slick white thing with a head stuck on one end of it, and small dark nipples marking off the upper part of him, and a navel drooping and smiling across his lower gut.
“You giving them hogs some feed?” Mr. Taylor asked, peering over the top of his Farmer’s Almanac.