“No’m,” I lied—at least I hadn’t read his letters until in the last few minutes and they hadn’t said much of anything. And the only person in the whole world who ever called my grandmother Nanny Maulden was my own mother and father when they were talking to me about her.
“Well, he’s just been traveling a lot, so maybe that explains it,” she said.
There was this minute of silence. She was smoking a cigarette; I could tell. I was dying to tell her about the tumor in my chest. I knew that it would scare the peedoodle out of her. She’d probably cancel her rehearsals and even call my dad. I’d be the center of attention; and then I’d start feeling guilty over that, even though I’d probably get a real bang out of it. At least if I was the center of attention again, it wouldn’t be because I was in the middle of a fight. In fact, when somebody was dying didn’t everybody get real quiet and sweet? I stared at the pictures over the phone table in the hall. “You ever thought about going to Disneyland?”
She laughed. I’d made her laugh. But I hadn’t meant to. “Lord, honey,” she said, “a trip like that would cost a million dollars. And I’m in the middle of rehearsing for a record. I couldn’t go even if I wanted to.”
“But isn’t it out near Hollywood?” I picked my thumbnail. “We could kill two birds with one stone—you know what I mean?”
She laughed again. I’d turned into a goddamn comedian.
We shot the bull a little bit longer. I even said that I was probably going to fail P.E. She told me all about the songs she was going to sing on the album. (She really was going to make a record!) She even hummed a few bars on a couple of them, and then we both hung up.
But they weren’t dying. My mother and father weren’t dying. I might be. And I was bad and mean, and I thought mean thoughts. But at least it wasn’t going to be a triple funeral. Anyway, ever since I’d fallen in the Mill Pond everybody had been treating me like I had a bad disease—and it had nothing to do with the knot inside my chest, which nobody but me knew about. I’d waked up with Louella leaning over my bed. “Sugar, your grandmother says you jumped off a railroad track and nearly got bit by a snake.” Louella was Ezekiel’s niece. She was skinnier than I was and still a head taller. She’d been married once but she said it wasn’t sweet for her, and she sure didn’t plan to do it again.
“But I thought a train was coming,” I said. “Only it turned out to be just one of those little fix-it carts.”
Louella handed me my robe. “Well, shoot, I’d have jumped too.”
“And I wasn’t jumping off the bridge to kill myself like my grandmother thought.”
Louella studied me. She wore a white uniform, with plum juice stains on it, and tennis shoes that had cut-out holes for corns that she always put my grandfather’s medicine on.
Getting thrown out of a family can make a person look suspect. My grandmother sure didn’t want me to look crazy. And I wasn’t crazy. I told my grandmother I wouldn’t have been up on any railroad trestle for any other good reason than to get away from a cow.
Louella walked out talking about French toast and bacon, squeezed juice and fresh plum jelly. Then she stopped and looked back at me. “I so glad that train didn’t run over you or you get gored by no bull.”
Louella was the only person in my family who still might love me, I thought. For according to my grandmother, Louella was blood kin since the whole Negro race was descended from Noah’s son Ham. My grandmother had told me many times that story about when Noah came off the ark and he had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japeth; and since everybody else was dead from the flood, from these three the whole earth was peopled.
She would read me Genesis 9, 18–27—all that stuff about Noah running a vineyard and one day getting drunk and falling asleep naked. She would tell me how Ham saw his father and told his brother. If Ham was giggling, neither my grandmother nor the Bible said. But anyway, the story goes that Shem and Japeth politely took a blanket, laid it on both their shoulders and walked backward to cover their naked father with it. All the time, they were turning their faces away so they wouldn’t see Noah in his embarrassing position.
So when Noah woke up and found out what his youngest son Ham had done (and the Bible doesn’t say either if Shem and Japeth told on Ham) he was furious. He put a curse on Ham’s son, Canaan, saying all the children of Canaan and his children’s children would be slaves forever. And supposedly this was Louella’s distant relative, which also meant that she was related to me—and also to my grandmother, which my grandmother totally overlooked.
But I found out that Noah didn’t have Ham until he was five hundred years old. No doubt he was burned out from childraising and his sons had driven him to drink on the day he woke up cursing. My grandmother should have been sympathetic to that. And the verses say nothing about Ham or his son Canaan being black, yellow, or any other thing. I decided that was the part that was magic. It seemed that words could be found written down somewhere to support anything. You could lift them off the page, and by themselves they could mean whatever you wanted them to.
So, according to my grandmother, everybody descended from Ham was supposed to be a servant. She said they enjoyed it—proof of this was just listening to them sing. But plenty of times I’d heard Louella in the bathroom cussing out the rings on the tub. She was embarrassed when once I’d come in on her. She cut down on her cussing after that. It just seemed to me that my grandmother could never see Louella as someone like herself. To her the Negro race was something like negative prints to God’s original design.
My grandmother also had told me that anybody who was not Protestant and white liked sex better than almost anything. So Protestants had to work doubly hard to keep Jews, colored people, and Catholics from outnumbering them. Of course Jesus himself was a Jew, but for that my grandmother forgave him. Besides, he wasn’t just any Jew, he was the King. In addition he had blue eyes, which made his heritage suspect. She knew about this because on her grandfather’s plantation there had been some blue-eyed slaves. It proved they weren’t all one thing or another; something had gotten mixed in. Anyway, it didn’t matter if Jesus wasn’t a blueblood, because the fact that he had risen to be King (and even above) was in the best of the American tradition.
I could remember her looking at me and asking me point-blank just how could any Christian like Jews for what they had done to Jesus? I’d always stare quietly back and switch my gum from one side of my mouth to the other. I didn’t have an opinion on that, but I didn’t want to just take hers. I’d already decided that somebody had to die to make the story of going to Heaven so good and lasting. If Heaven were supposed to be true, somebody had to test it, and in that case Jesus was the first guinea pig. It also made sense to choose somebody who was always pushing you to be better than you were. Socrates did and he got it. Indians scalped missionaries for teaching them about sin and making them feel so darned awful. And thinking about how she pushed me, always seeming to be dissatisfied with who I was, I began to wonder if maybe my grandmother might have to be sacrificed.
I heard her voice in the kitchen: “Now what in tarnation does he have?”
I went in and stood watching Louella flip French toast in a black skillet. My grandfather was coming down the alley from the direction of the post office. As he passed in front of the outhouse we saw he was carrying a wide, shallow box with holes in it. The cardboard was the same color as his hat and his pants, and he was smiling.
He came in the sun porch door and lay the box on the kitchen table. We heard high pinging sounds coming from it, like corn popping. “Well, girl,” he said to me. “Maybe not as good as a poodle, but just about as cute.” He grinned, took off his hat and wiped his head.
I looked into one of the holes on the side of the box. Inside must have been fifty baby chickens peeping like crazy and falling all over each other.
Louella looked through another hole. “Lord, they’re cute,” she said. “Can’t be but a few days old.”
“Closer to six.” M
y grandfather stuck his finger in one of the holes. “And there’s seventy-five of ‘em.”
When I took the lid off, my grandmother swallowed the air that ordinarily she would have breathed in.
My grandfather was talking fast. “Got ’em for nothing. Somebody ordered ’em and forgot to pick ’em up.” He grinned. “The post office gave ’em to me just to get rid of ‘em. One more day in the P.O. and they’d have died.”
“Oh for Pete’s sake.” My grandmother closed her eyes. She smelled like coffee and her hair was loose.
My grandfather was looking at her. “If the girl can’t have a dog she ought to have something.”
My grandmother opened her eyes and said we’d have to take the chickens back.
“Can’t.” My grandfather looked at her. “If they go back to the P.O. they’ll die. We have a chicken house; we can keep them till they grow up and sell off the ones we don’t especially like.”
“I don’t like any of them,” she said.
Louella and I put our hands into the yellow peeping mass, and Louella set one of the chicks in her palm and lifted it out of the box. “Ain’t nothing cuter ‘n a biddy,” she said. They were the color of pale lemons and softer than cotton. I held one and rubbed it against my face.
“They must be hungry,” I said.
My grandfather picked up the box. “They’ve got a little water and corn mash in the box.” He started to the backyard and I followed him. “You don’t have to be bothered,” he called back to my grandmother. “Sally can join the 4-H now if she wants to.”
My grandmother walked out the door and down the steps after us. She stopped in the alley near the outhouse. “I’ve already signed her up for the Daughters of the American Revolution and Children of the Confederacy. She’s eligible for those through my family.”
My grandfather stopped beside the garage and looked back at her. “4-H can’t hurt.”
My grandmother pshawed.
By late morning my grandfather and I had gotten all seventy-five of my chickens settled in the vacant chicken house. I’d gone uptown and bought a big sack of mash to feed them. Now my grandmother was calling us in to lunch. It seemed as if everybody was wanting to give me something to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. My grandmother had told Louella to do up a big ham and make a chocolate cake, just for me.
When I went into the bathroom to wash up, the phone rang. It kept ringing and I guessed that my grandmother and Louella were busy setting the table, and my grandfather was still outside with my chickens, so I picked up the phone in the back hall. Just as I did, my grandmother answered the phone in the kitchen and I heard Miss Pankhurst talking breathlessly. She was shooting out words faster than I could think, and every one of them was about somebody named Foster Collins, who turned out to be the bus driver who’d driven us from Memphis.
I couldn’t hang up; the click would tell them I’d been listening. So I just put my hand on the mouthpiece and listened some more. Foster Collins had turned up on Miss Pankhurst’s front doorstep with the latest best-seller and they’d started trading books. He had told her that one reason he’d become a bus driver was so he could spend all those hours in hotels between trips indulging in what he called his habit. He read everything from Western fluff to The Ugly American. And then, on the bathroom phone, I heard Miss Pankhurst giggle.
In what she thought was only my grandmother’s ear, she whispered that Mr. Foster Collins was not a handsome man, but he had a certain animal magnetism. She’d even invited him in for a cup of coffee. Then in a normal-sounding voice, she informed my grandmother that Foster Collins was on the way to our house with my hat with the streamers that had been left in the bus.
Before my grandmother had time to hang up, the magnetic bus driver was standing on our front screen porch. My grandfather had just come in from the backyard and he answered the door. Mr. Collins handed me my hat and my grandfather invited him to see my chickens while my grandmother invited him to stay for ham.
“Lord, they’re cute,” Foster Collins said as he knelt down and picked up one of my chicks. “What kind are they?”
“Don’t know.” My grandfather told him there was no information on the box. When the P.O. tried to reach the man who’d ordered them, the closest people with a phone said he’d moved.
Foster Collins squinted and turned the chicken over. All those chickens were supposedly mine, and I felt a little maternal. “I don’t know much about chickens,” Foster Collins said. “But I was raised on a farm. Separating sexes is an art. Not much to go on at this age. But right now, I’d say you have a good chance of owning about seventy-five White Leghorn roosters.”
My grandfather leaned over and picked up a chick. He turned it over and rubbed his finger across its belly. “I don’t see how you can tell.”
Foster Collins laughed. I was a little embarrassed with the way he and my grandfather picked up one chick after another to examine their undersides. “They look like hens to me,” my grandfather said. “But of course when I went to medical school, I didn’t take chicken anatomy.” He laughed and set down the last furry body, and Foster Collins stood up and said to me: “Well, a month from now you’ll know.”
My grandfather and I walked Mr. Foster Collins to the front yard. As he rounded the corner, I thought that Miss Pankhurst was uglier than I was, and if somebody could fall in love with her, it could probably happen to anybody. But then that cranked up another whole new mystery, because for the life of me I just couldn’t imagine Miss Pankhurst as an object of desire.
After supper I went into my room and got that tube of Purple Midnight lipstick and gave it to Louella. It’d look better on her, and giving it away might even out my chances of staying out of Hell.
The fist in my chest wouldn’t loosen its hold and let me go to sleep. It was probably close to midnight. Outside my window it was so dark that I could see only my own face, reflected on the glass from the nightlight my grandmother left on in the hall. The fist had worked its fingers all the way around to my back. I could barely breathe.
I went into the bathroom, feeling my way through the dark. I used towels to cushion the sound of my opening the medicine chest. Just as I hoped, there was a big bottle of my grandfather’s Inside Medicine on the bottom shelf. I took two big swigs, forcing the swallows down, reminding myself of Mat Dillon in Kitty’s saloon. I wasn’t sure if I should put much faith in the stuff. But it was worth a try. I sat down on the closed toilet seat, waiting to see if my windpipe would open up and for the medicine to hit bottom. I could hear my chickens outside the window, their peeps soft and sweet-sounding. I thought about them sitting in the P.O., starving and not belonging to anybody. And now they did. All those seventy-five biddies belonged to me. Knowing what a sucker I was for anything small, soft, and pitiful, I’d probably even end up loving them. Damn stupid lucky chickens.
I can’t say for sure if it was my grandfather’s medicine or the sound of those chickens, but soon after I got back in the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, the fist loosened its hold in my chest and let me go to sleep.
8.
Going to Rathwell
In the morning the sun was a ball of fire I would have gladly shot out of the sky with a bazooka. I was sick of people thinking I might be crazy. And I didn’t want to die. But if I didn’t, how else would my parents get back together?
I fed my chickens and hit my hand against the hen house. So what if my parents did? What good would it be if I did die and my mother came to the funeral in a new black dress looking sexy and sorry? And my father came in a dark pin-striped suit, rumpled, half-shaven, looking loose with grief and feeling rotten and loving me and seeing my mother on the other side of the coffin looking sorry and sexy, and he falls in love with her all over again? I wouldn’t be there.
My chickens had eaten up all the mash. And now about all seventy-five of them were trying to climb on top of my shoes, peeping and carrying on. I put the empty water bucket over my head and yelled, “Shitass!” so loud that the echo
made my ears deaf.
What in hell are families good for anyway?
In my bedroom, I put on a ruffly blouse so the ruffles would fill in my chest when I pulled my shoulders forward to ease the pain of the fist. As I walked in to breakfast, my grandmother reminded me to not slouch over.
Right before I left for school I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and pounded on my chest. I drank half the bottle of my grandfather’s Inside Medicine and refilled the bottle with water tinted with Listerine.
Suddenly I felt dizzy. I felt so funny and light-headed I got worried that maybe I’d drunk something out of the medicine cabinet that wasn’t my grandfather’s medicine. Maybe I’d poisoned myself, and I was about to die even sooner than I thought. I checked the label on the bottle I’d drunk out of. It said Maulden’s Medicine on the front of it along with four big words as part of the ingredients and 14% alcohol. I walked to school. And, strangely, everything that happened there that day seemed fun. I tap-danced in my head through World History and took a trip to Japan during Study Hall. And then the rest of the day started off as being as ordinary as me.
I was walking home after school was over when I looked down the street to where my grandparents’ house was and saw a Land Rover was parked out front. Sam Best and my grandmother came down the front porch steps. They looked toward Main at me, and then they both raised their arms and pointed in my direction. In another few minutes, the Land Rover came on down to the end of the street and met me.
Sam Best leaned out the back window: “Wanna go for a ride?” Gill Williams was driving, and he looked at me too. They both had on straw hats, the kind that almost all the men in Coldwater wore when they were out in the sun for a long time. Mr. Best held the door open for me. “I got to go out to Rathwell on a little business. We’ll be back before supper. And your grandmother said yes.”
Anything was better than an afternoon spent with my grandmother—especially since she’d already started polishing silver for the November Missionary Society meeting and made me help. I climbed in the Land Rover and settled myself on the leather seat beside Mr. Best. The cushions had papers and files stuck between them, and paper clips and pens were in the ashtrays.
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