by L. S. Young
“How many times do I have to tell that woman I don’t like sweet taters?” yowled Granny, cutting her ham into tiny pieces to aid her few teeth. “Et ‘em ever day all the time I was growin’ up, and I had my fill of ‘em. I got a garden of my own, and I’ll grow whatever I like.”
“We’ll take them back with us if you don’t want them,” said Lily.
“Leave ‘em. I can put ‘em in a stew with carrots and onions.”
“Very well,” said Lily, smiling at me.
Granny chewed her food as we busied ourselves putting things away in the sideboard adjacent to the stove. Without all of her teeth, eating took time. When we had finished putting everything away, Lily settled herself on the rag rug in front of the hearth with some needlework she had brought, and I grabbed a broom and began to sweep the floor.
“Don’t do that,” scolded Granny. “You’ll raise a cloud of dust! I swept yestiddy, but it don’t make a lick of difference in this old hovel.”
I sighed and put the broom back on its nail. When Granny had finished her dinner, she washed and dried the plate, and I packed it back into the basket.
“Whar’s Edith?” she asked, as if realizing for the first time that she had not accompanied us.
“It’s Friday,” said Lily with a hint of impatience. “She’s in school.”
“Well hoity toity! Can’t a body ask a question?”
“No,” I teased. “And before you ask why Lily’s not in school, it’s because she isn’t going back.”
Granny sank into her armchair and took up her mending again. “That so? You gonna teach chillun, Lily?”
“Not if I can help it. I hate school.”
“Never liked it much m’self,” said Granny. “Now that’s what you oughta do, Landry. You like book-learnin’.” She had never paid any mind to the fact that my name was a feminization of her dead husband’s. It was enough for her that I’d been named after him.
“I did teach,” I said. “Remember? I had the Clarabelle School eight months when Ezra was three, but Colleen wanted my help around the house, so I left.” I shrugged. Teaching was not a form of employment I had relished.
“That’s right. I plumb forgot. What did I mean to ask ya? Oh yes, I wanted Edith to comb my hair. Well, if she ain’t here, one of y’all can do it.”
Seeing that Lily was already impatient with her, I pushed the curtain aside and took up the silver-handled brush that lay on the nightstand beside her bed, next to her worn Bible and a beeswax candle in a pewter chamberstick.
Granny wore her white hair in a long braid that fell past her waist, and when Edith came to visit, she would take it down, brush and plait it, then wind it into a bun secured through the middle by a long hairpin. I remembered when this task had been one of my chief joys as a child. I carefully untied the ribbon that held her hair in place and untangled the three strands that made the column of the braid then began to run the brush through her snowy white tresses, careful not to pull the tangles. Granny and I shared the same flyaway Irish hair, and I secretly looked forward to the day when I traded my auburn snarls for her pure white waves, so much cleaner and prettier.
Lily put her needlework away and stretched out on the rug.
“Granny, tell us about how you met Grandpa Landry,” she said sweetly.
“Haven’t you heard that’n enough?”
“No, tell us,” I agreed. It was a favorite story of mine.
“Well, all right,” she drawled. She put a few more stitches in the sock she was darning and took a deep breath, settling the wad of tobacco in her cheek.
“I lived in Virginny. I had nine brothers and sisters, and we was poor. Daddy worked in the coalmines, and Mama did washin’ and mendin’ for folks when she could. I was the eldest, and she thought I oughta have a chance to get away, make a better life. So’s she saved up her nickels, and the summer I was fifteen, sent me to visit her cousin who had married well. She tole me, ‘Muriel, this here’s your chance to marry. He can be a humble man, a travelin’ preacher, a cobbler, or a crofter for all I care, but you best not come back to this god-forsaken place.’ Daddy had the black lung from workin’ in the mines, and she knew he wasn’t gonna live long.
“I remember we warshed and starched my only good dress, a blue gingham, and I took a bath, and Mama braided my hair. I saw all the black coal dust in the warsh water and thought, I won’t never have to wash that off agin, for I won’t never live in a mining town agin.
“It was a long trip to git there. The cousin’s husband owned a plantation in Charlotte, North Carolinny. They had a daughter my age, Vi’let was her name. It was in the summer, and they had all these balls and barbecues on, like the rich folk did back then. They had over a hunnert slaves on that plantation. All kinda folk from all over the county would come to their parties, and there I was, didn’t have but one dress, and it homemade. Cousin Annabelle said thet wouldn’t do. Very next day, she took me to a seamstress and had one made up, a day dress, pale green, with eyelet lace. Simple as could be, but the purtiest thing I’d ever owned.
“Well, one day there was a barbecue thet was to be follered by a ball, and I seen a gentleman there. He didn’t look like all them fine and fancy slave owners in their ridin’ boots and ruffled shirts. He was dressed simple, decent, and had a rugged look to him. I seen him and thought, Now there’s a man who knows how to work for a livin’. I asked Vi’let about him, and she says, ‘Oh him, don’t bother ‘bout him, he owns a mercantile in some little town or other.’
“I said for her to introduce us. She introduced him as Landry Andrews, and she says, ‘Here’s my cousin Miss Law (that was my maiden name) visitin’ from Virginny,’ but I promised myself, by the end of that month my last name would be Andrews. That night I went to my cousin Vi’let.
“Now Vi’let and I, we didn’t get on too well. She thought I was trash, and I thought she was high and mighty. But I says, ‘Cousin, eff you lemme borry your dress for the ball tomorrow night, I’ll do your needlework for a month a Sundays.’
“Well, Vi’let says, ‘You musta lost your mind, Muriel Law! That’s my best dress! Mama’d skin my hide! You can borry one a’ my other dresses.’ She says to her maid, ‘Mona, show her my closet!’ Her maid goes and opens her closet, and there was more dresses’n I’d ever seen in my life. Poplins, lawns, calicoes, taffetas, and muslins, in all colors, and I had my pick of ‘em.”
“Which one did you choose?” asked Lily, although she knew very well.
“Young girls in my day almost allus wore white to a ball, but I chose a coral silk cuz it stood out. It had a high waist, what was pop’lar back then, big puffed sleeves, and a gold sash. It had a low neck to show off the shoulders and bosom, and boy was I glad my mama allus made me wear long sleeves and a bonnet when I went in the sun. Down around the hem was gold embroidery, flowers and such. She let me borry a pair of satin slippers to wear with it. They was too small, but I wore ‘em anyway. I wore a scrap of lace round m’throat, and one of the house slaves curled my hair fashionable and did it up with white feathers and ribbons. Why, I didn’t even recognize m’self in the glass, but I thought, ‘I’m gonna get me that merchant man,’ and I did.”
“How?” I asked, prodding her to finish the tale.
“It weren’t polite for a girl to approach a man, so all night I kept catchin’ his eye, and I’d just look sideways at him, meaningful like. Finally, he comes up and says, ‘If a fox was to look at me thet way, I’d turn tail and run,’ and I says, ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir.’
“‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘fer you ain’t a fox.’
“I couldn’t dance a step, so I told him, ‘Sir, my folks ain’t like these. We’re humble folks. I never had any dancing lessons, and I fear I’d mortify you.’ He says, ‘Honest truth, miss, I wasn’t raised among folks like this myself, but we can have a gla
ss of punch.’
“Well, we sat a bit apart from the dancing and drank punch. I made as best I could to seem well-bred. Even if I was poor as dirt, Mama had taught me manners. I kept tellin’ myself, He don’t know you went around in a ragged dress with no shoes. All that coal dust is warshed off, and he ain’t never gonna see it. Truth is, I think he liked me as I was, common as an ole shoe, just like him.”
“Two weeks later you were married!” said Lily.
“We went down to Savannah for a short honeymoon.”
“How’d you end up in Willowbend?”
“Well, I missed the country. Town life was all right, but the women there was never kind to me seein’ as how I was so backwoods. And Landry, he’d grown up on a farm. He’d always wanted to try his hand as a farmer and cattle rancher. Land was goin’ for cheap in Florida, so we saved, and after our first two boys was born, we sold the mercantile and moved down. Did well for ourselves till the war came . . .”
Lily and I did not press Granny beyond this. Once her thoughts turned to the war, which had stolen her husband and four of her sons, she tended to weep and ramble. It was not so stark a difference for her as it had been for many Southern women. She did not know finery or indolence, but she had grown used to comfort and stability as the result of hard work, and the war took that from her.
It was because of this difference that she and my mother had not gotten along. To her, my mother was just another version of her cousin Violet: a spoiled china doll brought up by a European governess and a French-creole nanny, with too many dancing lessons and a finishing school education. She was happy to stay in her little cabin in the woods if it meant she could avoid sharing her home with such a woman.
After Mama died, she came back to the big house to live with us for a time, but when Colleen came to replace her, she retreated once more. At least Elizabeth had been a Southerner. Colleen, with her northern accent and strange cooking, was entirely too foreign.
Chapter 6
An Old Neighbor and a New
In those days, our closest neighbor was Harold Buckley, who lived across our south field. Mr. Buckley was a tenant farmer who sharecropped a portion of our land, and a visit from him generally necessitated a meeting with Daddy. His land was separated from ours by a thin copse of trees, and on occasion he came calling, riding his ancient nag. This was not an event of any particular consequence, but on one morning that March, he appeared as I was shelling peas on the front porch and brought tidings that proved to be of interest to our solitude.
“Morning!” I called, waving my hand in greeting.
He leaped nimbly out of the saddle, considering he was well into his sixties and wearing coveralls to boot, and threw the reins over a hitching post before removing his battered hat and nodding to me. In his dark face were etched the deep grooves of hard work and years in the sun. Ezra had been playing with his wooden blocks on the porch floor, but at the sight of Mr. Buckley’s dour countenance, he ran and hid his head in my apron.
“Don’t be such a scared little rabbit,” I whispered to him.
“How ah you this aftuhnoon, Miss Andrews?” Mr Buckley spoke with a slow, elegant drawl, absent of r’s. His speech was regional to coastal Georgia and the Carolinas, rather than backwoods Florida. I once overheard Daddy say that he was born in a big city in one of those states, Charleston maybe, or Savannah, but had been sold further south as a young child.
Whatever his history, he had lived in Willowbend longer than Daddy had been alive. My details were fuzzy on the matter, but I far preferred the sound of his lulling speech to the local “Cracker accent” as Colleen called it, which seemed askew somehow, with emphasis on r’s, crisp consonants, and long, distorted vowels.
“Just fine, sir, and you?”
“Your Pah arown?”
“No sir. He’s in town, at the cotton gin.”
“Your stepmothuh then?”
“Colleen is . . . feeling poorly. Might I help?”
His eyes had fixed on Ezra, who was cowering against my skirt, and he did not reply.
“Not a very frenly mite, is he?” he asked.
“Might I help?” I repeated.
“Well, the thang is, I saw that scamp brothuh of yours . . . Eh-frame?”
“Eee-frumm,” I enunciated.
“Yessum. Anyhow, ah caught ‘im in mah corn patch yestiddy, makin’ off with mah plants, and he run fore I could get mah hands on ‘im to bring up to ya Pah.”
I set down my basin of peas and stood up, brushing Ezra gently to the side. He cowered behind me. “I’ll see to this immediately,” I said with gravity. I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted, “EPHRAIM! EPHRAIM ANDREWS!”
Some minutes later, Ephraim’s towhead and freckles appeared around the corner of the house. His squinty blue eyes, so like Daddy’s, glinted with mischief, but he blanched when he saw the old man in coveralls.
“Get you right here!” I demanded. He walked toward me slowly. “Mr. Buckley says he caught you trespassing and stealing in his cornfield yesterday, and you ran off. What were you doing there?”
“Not stealin’, no ma’am. I was pickin’ dandelion clocks.”
“You weren’t stealing ears of corn to eat on the sly?”
Ezra glanced between me and Mr. Buckley, then back again, weighing his chances.
“No’m. I was pickin’ dandelion clocks.”
“I see. Don’t we have dandelions for you to pick?”
“Yes, but not like his among the furrows of the picked field. He has ever so many!”
I sighed, wondering if Mr. Buckley had truly ridden down to our house over such a matter. He must be unseasonably bored, but here he was, expecting me to punish my brother, when that was my father’s business.
“Going on another person’s land without permission is trespassing,” I explained.
“Mr. Buckley’s land ain’t his, it’s ours.”
“He rents the land from us and . . .” I sighed, struggling with how to explain the matter of sharecropping to a six-year-old. “He had every right to give you a backside full of buckshot,” I said finally.
Mr. Buckley mmphed at this. I couldn’t decipher if the sound were one of discomfort or approval.
“It won’t happen again,” I continued. “Understood?”
Ephraim seemed to be fighting some inner demon; his small mouth tightened into a grimace, and he squirmed.
“Yes’m,” he said finally.
“Now apologize.”
“No! I ain’t apologizing to that . . .” I clapped my hand over Ephraim’s mouth to prevent him going further and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Buckley. Won’t happen again.”
Harold Buckley did not look at all satisfied with this agreement, but he settled for discussing the weather with me.
“Seems ah’m to have no end of unrest,” he drawled.
“How is that?” I asked politely.
“I now have a naybuh buhind me as well as bufoh. The ole Macready place been let, let or bought.”
I looked up, genuinely engaged. “Let? The Macready estate? It’s been vacant since I was a child.”
The Macready estate was in possession of a grand old manse that had not been updated since before the war. The outbuildings had fallen down, and its fields had gone to seed. As children, my brother and Henry Miller had often scared me with stories that it was haunted by a woman in a white shift, a woman who was murdered and buried in the middle of the cotton field. The story had terrified me as a child, but I thought it was a beautiful place.
“That’s whut ah said, let or bought. Some fellah from Alabama.”
“Have you met him? What sort of person is he?”
“Ah couldn’t tell ya, Miss Andrews. Ah know he’s unmarried with no chillun, so that’s a boon. And now ah best be goi
n’. See yah keep yon scamp outta mah field.”
Shooting Ephraim one last look of dislike, he doffed his hat and mounted his mule, swinging lazily back onto the drive. Ephraim wheeled on me like a stung cat.
“You’re not my mama!” he shouted, aiming a kick which was lost in the folds of my voluminous skirt. I took hold of his sleeve and steered him toward the porch. “I just saved you a licking from Daddy you wouldn’t forget. Go wash for dinner, or I’ll call your mama out here!”
He took off running but not before throwing me a dark look over his shoulder and slamming the screen door.
“Goblin spawn,” I muttered, spinning around in alarm as Colleen spoke from just inside the house.
“Is the old man gone?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.”
She stepped out onto the porch. She wore a faded red calico wrapper over her nightgown, and half of her fair hair was caught up in a messy bun, the rest hanging in tendrils around her shoulders. There were purple half-moons beneath her eyes.
“I don’t see what the trouble is with a little boy taking a few dandelions. I would not wish to spank him over so small a thing. If a man can’t spare a few weeds for a child, then so much for Southern hospitality.”
As usual, where local matters were concerned, I took the opposing side.
“I think Mr. Buckley implied Ephraim took corn.”
“And what if he did?”
“If it were dandelions, maybe he uses them for medicine. Mama used to when times were hard. She even put them in stew sometimes. They’re quite good, rather like collards.”
Colleen made a mouth that signified she did not relish serving dandelions, even in the worst of circumstances. I ignored her.
“It’s all about boundaries,” I tried to explain. “If a child with sticky fingers goes into his corn crop when it’s ripe, well, that’s Mr Buckley’s loss. His fields are smaller than ours, and he owes us the percentage on everything grown as it is. In his mind, it’s criminal to steal from him, especially when we make profit off his yields.”