“She’s real pretty, but I don’t know who she is.”
“She’s my daughter, Claudia.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I said again, “She’s real pretty.”
“No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s a spoiled brat. She thinks she’s the most beautiful female creature that ever trod the earth. But she’s useless, vain, and unlovable. And it’s all my fault.”
I didn’t know why he was telling me all this, but it was making me fidgety and anyway I had to get home to get supper for the boys. They’d be pretty upset that I was so late. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll be getting along.”
“Don’t go.” He grabbed my arm and hauled me over to where there was a mirror hanging on the wall and made me stand in front of it. “Look there,” he said. “Who do you see?”
“Well, that’s just me.” I tried to pull away from him, but he held on tight.
“That’s a pretty young woman,” he said. “That’s what a young woman is supposed to be, decent and clean and modest. I wish you were my daughter, Jenny Taggert, instead of that hellion who won’t stay home where she belongs and behaves so no man in his right mind would marry her. How would you like that? Would you like to live here and be my girl?”
Well, I felt my neck getting hot, ’cause Ace had told me that when a man starts paying compliments there’s only one thing he’s after, and I’d sure heard enough of Deucy speaking sugar words to his ladies on the porch swing.
“Excuse me, Mr. Carpenter,” I said, “but I got to be gettin’ home and would you please pay me my five dollars so I can carry home some supper to those boys?” I know that was bold, but he was making me nervous and it just came out that way.
He let go of me and pulled out his wallet again. “Is that what Clemmie’s paying you? Five dollars? Well, it’s not enough. Here and here and here.”
The bills came leaping out of his wallet and he stuffed them into my hands. When I looked, I saw I had three ten-dollar bills. Not only that, he started hauling out the leftover chicken that I had put away and shoving it into a paper sack.
“Take the peach cobbler, too,” he said, “and anything else you’d like. Take it all.”
“Now I can’t do that. What would Miz Carpenter say?”
“I’ll tell her I ate it for a midnight snack.” He laughed then, but it wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh. It sounded like something was breaking inside him.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, and skedaddled out the back door before he could think up some new craziness that would get me into trouble.
His voice came after me. “You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you?”
“Sure thing,” I called back. But I wasn’t so sure I would.
All the way home I pondered on Mr. Carpenter and his strange ways. But I just plain couldn’t figure it out. All I could think was that having so much money had addled his mind and I
thanked God that we was poor and couldn’t afford to be crazy.
I put it all out of my mind, though, when I reached the dirt road that led up to our place. The moon was just clearing the top of the big old lilac bush at the edge of the property, and its kindly light smoothened away some of the ugliness you could see in daylight. The house looked welcoming with lights shining from its windows, and there in the dooryard was Pembrook’s dinky little car. I ran up the porch and busted into the house, shouting his name.
They was all gathered in the kitchen and I could see from their dark Taggert faces that I had interrupted an argument. But I didn’t care. I set the Carpenter food down on the table and said, “Here’s supper, boys. Dig in.” Deucy and Earl and Wesley did just that, not even bothering with plates but snatching up that chicken in their fingers.
Then I sat down and took off my left sneaker and pulled out the money. “There and there and there,” I said, as I counted the bills out on the table. Deucy’s eyes bugged out, and Earl and Wesley shouted, “Whoopee!” as best they could with their mouths full of drumstick meat.
Pembrook looked miserable.
“Where’d you get all that, Jenny?” he asked.
“I went as a maid,” I told him.
“Where did you go as a maid?”
“To Miz Carpenter.”
“And she gave you all that?”
I was about to lie and say she did, but I was never very good at lying. It makes my nose run. “No. He did.”
“You’re not to go there any more,” said Pembrook.
Well, I’d just about decided that for myself, but I wasn’t about to have Pembrook, much as I dearly love him, telling me what not to do. “I will if I want to,” I said. “And when did you get home, and how long you staying for?”
“Forever, if I have to, to keep you out of trouble.”
“That’s pretty nice trouble,” piped up Deucy. “Thirty dollars for a day’s work and all this food. You ought to have some, Pem.”
“Shut up, you idiot!”
I had never seen Pembrook so angry. Taggert blood boils easy, but until this minute Pembrook had always managed to keep his temper under control. He turned back to me, his eyes glittering and mean, like a chicken hawk about to pounce.
“You are not to go back to the Carpenter house, not ever again. You are to put it right out of your mind. And tomorrow I am going to mail that money back. And that’s the end of it.”
I only said one thing. “Why?”
“Never mind why.”
Well, that did it. I had worked hard for that money. Whether it was five dollars or thirty dollars, it was mine. The first money I had ever earned. And Pembrook had no right to take it away from me. I had done nothing wrong, as far as I could see, and it wasn’t fair for him to punish me. I reared back in my chair, looked him square in the eye, and opened my mouth.
“Pembrook Taggert, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am no longer Sweet Baby Jenny. I am a woman growed and able to make up my own mind about things. You can’t stand there and give me orders and tell me to never mind why. I took it from Pop and I took it from Ace and I been taking it from these three, while you’ve been off at your college learning your way out of this mess. I ain’t gonna take it no more.”
The hard bitterness faded from his eyes and he took my two hands in his.
“You’re right, Jenny,” he said. “There are things you ought to know. Come out to the porch swing and I’ll tell you.”
“Don’t make it a long story,” Deucy called after us. “Ardith Potter’s comin’ over tonight and we got things to discuss.”
But it was a long story that Pembrook told me. One that went back through the years to the time before I was born. All the boys knew it, but Pop had sworn them on the Bible never to tell me. It accounted for all the things I’d wondered about and never had the gumption to ask. If I had asked, they wouldn’t have told
me, although Pembrook said he was mighty tempted from time to time because it was my life and I had a right to know.
He told me that Pop wasn’t my true father, that Mr. Carpenter was. He told me that about a month after I was born, our mother had told Pop the truth and packed her bag and said she was running off with Mr. Carpenter to have a better life than scratching around on a poor old dirt farm. He told me that Pop had choked the life out of her right there in the bedroom with me looking on with my blind baby eyes from the cradle beside the bed. And then Pop had gone to Mr. Carpenter and told him the whole thing and got him to hush it up because the scandal wouldn’t have done anybody any good. They gave out that our mother had died of childbirth fever.
The tears were rolling down my face, but I managed to ask, “How could you keep on living here, after he did that?”
“Well,” said Pembrook, “Ace was the oldest and he wasn’t but twelve. We had nowhere else to go. And he was our father.”
“What happened then?” I asked. “Why did Pop run off?”
“He didn’t,” said Pembrook. “He lies buried under Mr. Carpenter’s rose garden.”
He went on to tell
me how the years went by and Pop took up drinking and the farm went even further downhill until it was just a wasteland. Then one day Pop got it into his head that Mr. Carpenter ought to be paying money to take care of his child, meaning me. He went up to the Carpenter house, full of liquor and hate, and demanded a thousand dollars. Pembrook and Ace tagged along behind and listened outside the window of a room that was full of books and a big desk and a hunting rifle on the wall over the fireplace.
“I seen that room,” I told him. “Miz Carpenter calls it his study.”
Pembrook nodded. “That’s where Pop got it.”
He said how he and Ace heard them arguing in the room, and Mr. Carpenter shouted that it was blackmail and he wouldn’t stand for it, and then there was a lot of scuffling around, with Pop shouting that he would kill Mr. Carpenter for ruining his
life. And finally there was a shot. Just the one shot, but it was enough. They peeked over the window sill and saw Pop lying on the rug bleeding his life out, and Mr. Carpenter standing there like a statue with the rifle in his hands.
They were about to run away home, but Mr. Carpenter saw them and made them come into the house and help him carry Pop out to the rose garden. The three of them dug up the roses and put Pop in the ground and planted the roses back on top of him. Then Mr. Carpenter told them to get on home and keep their mouths shut or he’d have the marshal come and chuck us all off the farm and into reform school.
And they did, until this minute.
“I guess,” said Pembrook, “I guess that’s why Ace is so wild, but that’s not the way to fix it up. That’s why I’m studying to be a lawyer. One of these days I’ll know how to take care of Mr. Carpenter legally and make it stick. So that’s why I don’t want you going back there, Jenny. You’re likely to spoil my plan, and I it isn’t good for him to be reminded that you exist. I need to get him off guard when I’m ready.”
I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and said, “Thank you, Pembrook, for telling me. Now I understand.”
“And you won’t go back.”
“I’m going to bed.”
And I did. But I didn’t sleep. I lay there pondering over the things that Pembrook had told me, trying to find the right and the wrong of it. Our mother was maybe wrong for pleasuring herself with Mr. Carpenter, but if she hadn’t I wouldn’t be here. Pop was wrong for taking life away from our mother, but she gave him cause in his eyes. Mr. Carpenter was wrong for shooting Pop, but the Taggert blood was up and Pop probably attacked him first. Hardest of all to think about was me being Mr. Carpenter’s daughter. If it was true and he knew it, how could he have let me live all these hard years as Sweet Baby Jenny Taggert while that other girl, that Claudia, had everything her heart desired and then some?
Just before dawn I decided what to do. The boys, even Pembrook, were all sound asleep. I got up quiet as a mouse and dressed in our mother’s green-and-white polkadot dress and my high-top sneakers and snuck out to the barn. The barn used to be a busy place, but it was still and empty that morning. No more cows to bellow for me to come and milk them, no horses to gaze sad-eyed after an apple or a carrot. Way in the back, behind the piles of rotten harness, in a dark corner draped over with cobwebs, I found what I was looking for.
It was a can of stuff that Pop used to put down to kill the rats that infested the barn and ate their way through the winter fodder. There wasn’t much left in the can, and what there was looked dry and caked. Maybe it was so old it wouldn’t even work any more. But I scooped some out with a teaspoon and put it into one of Deucy’s Bull Durham pouches and set off down the road.
I kept up a good pace because I wanted to get there before Mr. Carpenter went off to the bank, and before the boys woke up and came after me in Pembrook’s car. The morning was fresh and cool, and I didn’t sweat one bit.
When I got to the Carpenter house, the milkman was just driving away. I went around to the back, picked up the two quarts of milk, and knocked at the back door. Mrs. Carpenter opened up. She looked sleepy-eyed but pleased to see me.
“Why, Jenny,” she said, “you’re here bright and early. Come in. Come in.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I came to make breakfast.”
“Well, that’s wonderful. Mr. Carpenter is shaving. He’ll be down in a few minutes. He likes two four-minute eggs, I never can get them right, two slices of toast, and lots of strong black coffee. And now that you’re here, I think I’ll go back to bed and get a little more beauty sleep.” She giggled like a silly girl, waved at me, and pranced out.
I put the milk away and started in making the coffee. There was an electric coffee pot, but my coffee is good because I make it the old-fashioned way. I boiled up some water and when it was
bubbling away, I threw in the ground coffee, lots of it, to make it nice and strong. Then I turned the fire down to keep it hot while it brewed, and I cracked an egg so I could have an eggshell to throw in to make it clear. And I emptied out the stuff that was in the tobacco pouch right into the pot.
When I heard his footsteps on the stairs I put on another pot to boil up water for his eggs. He came into the kitchen smiling and smelling sweet.
“Well, Jenny,” he said. “You came back. I’m glad, because you and I are going to get along just fine. You’ll be happy here. I’ll see to that.”
I got out a cup and saucer.
“I been hearing things, Mr. Carpenter,” I said. “Things I never dreamed of.”
He frowned. “What things have you been hearing, Jenny?”
I poured coffee into the cup.
“I hear that you’re my daddy.”
He sank down into a kitchen chair. “Yes,” he said, “that’s true enough.”
I put the cup and saucer on the counter to let it cool off a bit so it wouldn’t be too hot for him to take a nice big swallow.
“I hear that you shot our Pop and buried him in your rose garden. They’re mighty pretty roses you got out there.”
He held his head in his two hands. “They swore never to tell you. Those boys swore.”
“Pembrook told me because he’s afraid I’ll come to some harm in your house.” I set the cup and saucer on the table in front of him.
“Oh, Jenny, sweet baby Jenny, I would never harm you. If anything, I’d like to make up for all those years I tried to put you out of my mind. I’d like you to come and live here and be my daughter and let me give you all the things you should have had.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not a baby any more.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a fine lovely woman, just like your mother was. God, how I loved that woman! She was the only wonderful thing that ever happened in my whole life. I wanted to take her away with me. We were all set to go. We could have gone to some other town or to a big city where no one knew us. We’d have taken you along. And we’d have been happy. Instead, she died.”
“Pop killed her. Because of you.”
“You know that, too.” He sighed. “Yes. He killed her and I killed him, and I’ve been living out my days in an agony of remorse. There’s no one I can talk to. Clemmie doesn’t know any of this. Sometimes I wish I were dead.”
“Drink your coffee.”
The water for his eggs was boiling. Gently I rolled the two eggs into the pot and stuck two slices of bread into the toaster. He left the table and came to where I was working.
“Jenny.” He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around to face him. “What can I do to make it up to you? I’ll do anything in my power, and believe me that’s a lot. You name it. It’s yours.”
I thought a minute. Would it be right or wrong to take from this man? I was having my usual trouble figuring out the difference between the two. Would it be right or wrong to let him drink the coffee?
Then I said, “Could you put Pembrook through law school?”
“Consider it done.”
“And Earl and Wesley, can you find jobs for them? They’re good workers, only down on their luck.”
“Te
ll them to come to the bank.”
“And what about Deucy? Would you get him a new guitar and a ticket to Nashville? He sings real fine.”
“Not only that. I know Johnny Cash personally. We’ll work something out.”
“Now this one’s hard. Can you get Ace out of jail and set him on a straight path?”
“The warden is Clemmie’s cousin. And I own a ranch in Wyoming. He can go there and work off his wildness. But what about you, Jenny. What can I do for you?”
I shrugged. “Oh, I guess I’ll just live here for a while. I can help Mrs. Carpenter and sort of keep an eye on things.”
He hugged me and planted a big kiss on my cheek. “That’s my girl,” he said. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say. You’ll never regret it. Mmm, that coffee smells good.”
He was heading back to the table and his coffee cup. But I got there first and swiped it out from under his nose.
“That’s coffee’s cold,” I said. “Come to think of it, the whole batch is bitter. I tasted it before you came down. I’ll make some fresh.”
I poured all the coffee down the drain and dished him up his eggs and toast. We drank the fresh coffee together, and he went off to his bank.
And that’s the way it is now. Pembrook’s way is better, and he’s studying real hard. He’ll graduate sooner now that he doesn’t have to work his way through. Earl and Wesley really like being bank tellers, and Deucy has his leopardskin Cadillac and all the girls he can handle, although he says he misses the porch swing. Ace sent a photograph of himself on a horse wearing a big old cowboy hat. He looks funny but he says he’s doing fine.
And me? Every day while the roses are blooming I cut some and put them in the house. Mrs. Carpenter just loves them. I’m waiting. Someday us Taggerts are gonna dig up that rose garden.
Wild Mustard
MARCIA MULLER
Marcia Muller (b. 1944) is one of the most celebrated and versatile writers of crime fiction to debut in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Born in Detroit and educated at the University of Michigan, she lives in Northern California, the setting for most of her fiction. Though it caused barely a ripple at the time of its publication, Muller’s Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977) is now accorded primacy in one of the major trends of recent decades: the female private-eye novel. All previous efforts in this line demand an asterisk: characters like Carter Brown’s Mavis Seidlitz, Henry Kane’s Maria Trent, and
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