Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind

by Ann B. Ross

  “Soup,” Lillian said, getting to her feet. “I’ll heat some soup and crumble up some body crackers in it. That be good for her. You pour some milk. She’ll need building up.

  “Now, what I want to know,” she went on as she put a pan on the stove, “is what you gon’ tell Deputy Bates? He be here pretty soon.”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell him anything,” I said. Then, at her quick glare, hurried on, “At this time. He’s in a bad position, Lillian. The sheriff, or rather that big lieutenant, wants to question Miss Puckett and that could take all day when we could be looking for Little Lloyd. If I tell Deputy Bates she’s here, he’ll have to report it and no telling what that would lead to. If he doesn’t know it, he can’t report it. So, I’m just thinking of what’s best for him.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She poured soup in a bowl and crumbled in saltines until it was a thick mush. She put the bowl, a spoon, a napkin, and a glass of milk on a tray. I added a bottle of aspirin.

  “You take this on up to her,” Lillian said, “and I’ll fix his breakfast. Go on, now, I think I hear his car turning in. And put yo’ clothes on, too. Sound like we got lots to do soon as Deputy Bates close his eyes.”

  I hurried upstairs with the tray, wanting Deputy Bates to think I was still in bed. Hazel Marie Puckett groaned when I touched her shoulder. Lord, she looked worse in the daylight.

  “Shhh,” I whispered. “Here’s something to eat, but we have to be quiet. There’s a deputy sheriff in the house.”

  Her eyes flew open, as much as the swelling would allow, and I could see the fear in them.

  “Is he here for me?” Her mouth was so misshapen that she could hardly form the words.

  “Should he be?” I asked sharply, realizing again how little I knew about her.

  She shook her head. “You never know.”

  Well, that was the truth, especially after my run-in with Lieutenant Peavey. “Eat,” I told her, “but be quiet about it. Deputy Bates lives here and pretty soon he’ll be sleeping right down the hall.”

  When she’d finished the soup, I helped her across the hall to my bedroom and ran a hot bath for her. Deputy Bates would think it was my morning ablutions. I told her to soak out the soreness while I dressed. I gave her some of my underclothes and then went to the closet to pick out a dress for her. When she came out of the bathroom in my slip, hunched over against the pain in her ribs, I had three for her to choose from. None of them Sunday dresses, just my good, everyday shirtwaists. She looked at them for quite a while.

  Then she said, “Do you have anything else?”

  “What’s wrong with those, I’d like to know?”

  “I’m sorry. I just meant, maybe some jeans or shorts.”

  “There’re some things,” I informed her, “that ladies don’t wear. And jeans and shorts are two of them.”

  “Sorry,” she said, and picked up the first one and put it on. It was maybe a size too big for her, but she was skinny to start with, and it was somewhat longer than she was accustomed to wearing, which wasn’t a bad thing. I started looking for some slippers that would fit.

  We heard a tap on the door, and Lillian stuck her head in. “He gone to bed,” she said, sidling in and closing the door behind her. “I come to fix you up,” she said to Hazel Marie, holding up a roll of Ace bandage.

  So we helped Hazel Marie undress again, and Lillian displayed another of her unsung talents as she wrapped the bandage around the chest of the woman who’d had my husband’s arms around the same places.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  AS SOON AS Lillian finished, Hazel Marie Puckett swallowed hard a few times, then clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Sick!” she gasped, clutching her ribs with one arm and scrambling for the bathroom. She made it to the sink before soup, saltines, milk, and aspirin came spewing out.

  I went to the far corner of the room, as far from the sound of it as I could. I’m sensitive to things like that, don’t you know, and I couldn’t bring myself to go in and help her. I moved the curtains aside and looked down on the street. Cars passing, people going to work, two runners panting and sweating as they pounded by on the sidewalk. Normality everywhere except in my house. Help me, Lord.

  I heard water running in the bathroom, and Lillian comforting Hazel Marie. I turned back as Lillian led her toward the bed. She wiped Hazel Marie’s face with a wet cloth, then pulled down the covers on the bed.

  “Lay back down, now,” Lillian told her. “You too weak to be doin’ anything. You need a doctor.” She glared at me.

  I sat down on the side of the bed, trying not to think about how this woman was now in my bed. Wesley Lloyd’s bed. But I had to put first things first, and that little boy was the first thing.

  “Miss Puckett,” I said, “I know you don’t feel good, but I need some answers and I need them now. We’re both concerned about Little Lloyd, and if you’re out of commission, as it seems you are, I need to know how to proceed in finding him.”

  “Please,” she said, “please find him.”

  “We will. Now, listen to me and give me some straight answers. Who was driving that car when you left Little Lloyd here?”

  “Brother Vern,” she said, her voice weak but determined. “He was going to take me to Raleigh—I didn’t lie to you about that. I had a place in beauty school, and Brother Vern had just come home from preaching somewhere out in California. He was all tore up about Wesley Lloyd’s passing. He didn’t know about it until he got home, and he offered to drive me down so I could get a new start.”

  I nodded. “So why’d you change your plans?”

  “I didn’t change them.” She put a hand over her eyes, but I could see tears leaking down her face and into her hair. “I thought we were on our way, but as soon as we left Junior here with you, he told me he had to see some people on church business and it wouldn’t take long.” She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of my three-hundred-count Egyptian cotton sheet, took a deep breath, and continued on. “He drove way back in the hills, up near the edge of the national forest, I think. I’d never been up there before, but we ended up at a couple of trailers. Single-wides, and the sorriest bunch of people I’d ever seen. Just trailer trash, with outhouses and filth all over the place.”

  I thought to myself that they must have been a motley crew indeed, since her own people were considered pretty sorry. But I didn’t say anything.

  “So what happened then?”

  “Well, he kept making one excuse after another for not leaving, kept having meetings with the people living there and telling me he was on the Lord’s business and I’d have to be patient. And all the while, he was counseling me—that’s what he called it—reading the Bible and praying over me.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said when I heard the word “counseling.”

  “I didn’t know what was going on,” Hazel Marie said, looking first at me and then Lillian. “’Cause he kept asking about Wesley Lloyd, how he died, was he saved, had he been right with the Lord, and had he straightened out his affairs before he faced judgment. I didn’t know, Miz Springer, I swear Wesley Lloyd never talked about anything like that with me. You have to believe me!” She commenced crying again, burying her face in the sheet.

  “Oh, I believe you,” I said. “He never discussed things like that with me, either. But don’t worry about him being saved. He was a Presbyterian and therefore one of the elect, which makes me wonder about the election process. But that’s neither here nor there. What happened then?”

  “Well, Brother Vern kept on at me, saying that Wesley Lloyd had promised to provide for me and Junior. He thought I was holding out on him, told me I was being selfish and ungrateful, and I had to respect the hierarchy of order that the Lord instituted because woman is the weaker vessel. It just got worse and worse, and he’s got a temper, Miz Springer, a temper you wouldn’t believe. I thought he was gonna hit me right there, but the Lord stayed his hand.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, though I’d
heard Pastor Ledbetter expound on that hierarchy more times than I cared to recall. In a family, according to him, children are under the wife, and the wife is under the husband, and the husband alone is answerable to God. But I couldn’t figure where uncles came into it. “Did he think he had a right to whatever you had?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but that’s kinda the way it is in our family. The men take care of the money, if there is any, even if it belongs to the women. And since my daddy’s dead, and I don’t have a…Well, you can see how he figures it’s his place to look after things for me. But I don’t have any things for him to look after.”

  “Thay Lord,” I said, about to roll my eyes until I realized that my situation hadn’t been much different from hers. Except for the violence. But then, I’d never refused Wesley Lloyd anything. “So how’d you get away from him?”

  “I kept asking to go, telling him I had to be in Raleigh, and he’d promised. Finally, after a day or two, I forget now how long it was, I just decided to walk outta there. I didn’t know where we were, but I thought I’d just walk till I come to a road and follow that. Soon as I started out, though, some of those people took hold of me and wouldn’t let me leave.”

  “Well, I never,” Lillian said. “Don’t tell no more till I get back. You need some liquids in yo’ stomick. Jes’ lay right still while I go get you something to drink.”

  She came right back with a glass of chipped ice, a spoon, and a can of ginger ale.

  “Suck on this,” she commanded, shoveling a spoonful of ice into Hazel Marie’s mouth. “An’ soon as yo’ stomick feel settled, we’ll start on this drink.”

  “Go on,” I urged. “What happened then?”

  “Well, Brother Vern was still trying to get me right with the Lord, he said, so things wasn’t too bad. Except I couldn’t leave. He preached at me till I thought I’d go cross-eyed. He just would not believe that Wesley Lloyd hadn’t left me anything. All I had was three hundred dollars for beauty school. I offered him that and he took it, then he went on and on about Wesley Lloyd’s papers. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and still don’t. I swear I don’t.

  “The next thing I knew, he told me to get in the car. That was Friday, I think, Friday evening. He drove me to my house, I mean the one I’d been living in, and, Miz Springer, I got such a shock when we pulled in. Two of my cousins, twice removed, was moving my furniture out, Jerome and Donnie. They just loaded it up in a U-Haul and a pickup. I tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen to me. Said Brother Vern’d told them they could have whatever they could move. They come from the other side of the family, and that whole bunch is not worth a hill of beans.”

  I almost smiled as I thought of the pot and the kettle, but I didn’t. “So they took your furniture?”

  “Yes’m, every stick,” she went on, wiping her eyes and taking a quivering breath. “I tried to get Brother Vern to make them quit, but he told me that your lawyer was going to take possession if the family didn’t get it first. He said he’d looked through everything I had and couldn’t find Wesley Lloyd’s papers, and he’d run out of patience.”

  She turned away and hid her face. Lillian reached over and patted her on the arm. “Now don’t you worry, honey. You safe here with us.”

  I rolled my eyes at that, and asked Hazel Marie, “So what happened then?” I asked.

  “He talked awhile to my cousins. Then he left.”

  “And?”

  “They beat the shit outta me,” she said.

  My mouth tightened as the shock of the word resounded in Wesley Lloyd’s bedroom. I was not accustomed to such language. However. What she said seemed to be pretty much the truth.

  “Brother Vern come back sometime later,” she went on, “but, Miz Springer, I couldn’t give what I didn’t have. And he said if I wasn’t gonna be obedient like I was supposed to be, he’d just have to keep Junior away from me. Said I wasn’t fit to raise a child, being outside of God’s will like I was. Miz Springer, I was alayin’ in that garage, hardly able to get my breath and hurtin’ so bad I thought I was gonna die, and he said he’d just keep Junior till I decided to submit to the Lord’s will. And he left me there, bleedin’ and hurtin’, and I knew he was going after my little boy.”

  She was sobbing by this time.

  To give her a chance to collect herself, I told her how we’d gone to her house and how Deputy Bates had found blood all over the garage, and teeth, too, and how, when we got back to town, we’d found that my house had been broken into.

  “It had to’ve been Jerome and Donnie,” she said. “Maybe Brother Vern thought you had Wesley Lloyd’s papers.”

  “I do,” I said. “Or rather my lawyer does. But there’s nothing concerning you or the child in them. I’d know it if there was.”

  “I bet he tear up the house ’cause Little Lloyd wadn’t here for him to get ahold of,” Lillian said. “That man’s mean as a snake. But, honey, how you get from that place to here in the shape you in?”

  “Walked and crawled,” she said. “I was afraid to try to get a ride, lookin’ like I do. Afraid somebody’d call the law on me. And afraid Donnie and Jerome would be looking for me, too. So I went through fields and woods, hiding out in the daytime and come into town after dark, so afraid he’d get to Junior before me. And he did.” More crying.

  I felt bad about it all. There I’d been so anxious to be rid of the child, and blithely let him go off while his mama was walking miles to get to him. I felt real bad.

  “Drink some of this,” Lillian urged, holding out the glass of ginger ale. “I ’spect you keep it down now.”

  “I still feel sick,” Hazel Marie said, “but I got to get up and look for Junior.”

  “The problem is,” I said, “is where’re you going to look? You think Brother Vern took him to Raleigh, like he told me?”

  She thought for a minute. “No. He just told you that to get Junior away from you. No, he’s still around, ’cause he thinks I’ve got something of Wesley Lloyd’s. Oh, me,” she said, as she began to untangle herself from the sheets. “I feel like I’m gonna throw up again.”

  Lillian helped her to the bathroom, saying, “This girl need some medicine or a doctor or something.”

  “Not a doctor,” Hazel Marie said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Watch after her, Lillian. Get her into one of my gowns while I walk downtown to the drugstore. I ought to be able to find something that’ll make her feel better.”

  I put on my hat, hung my pocketbook on my arm, and commenced walking. Perkins Drugs was only two blocks away on the corner of Polk and Main, so I could walk it quicker than I could find a parking place.

  I marched down the sidewalk, intent on my errand, going over in my mind what purchases to make for the Puckett woman. Miss Myrtie Gossett came walking toward me, that ugly tote bag on her shoulder, and wanted to stop and talk. I waved and passed on by. I had no time for gossip. Besides, I was the hot topic, so she couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

  Troy Beckworth was leaning on the door of his insurance office, hoping for a calamity that would scare up some business for him, and I do mean scare. He’d taken to advertising on the Asheville television, warning people about the dangers of flooding from the sea surge of hurricanes, and us two hundred miles from the coast and three thousand feet above sea level.

  “How do, Miz Springer,” he said.

  “Sea surge,” I replied. “For the Lord’s sake.” And passed on by.

  And when I went into the drugstore, who should I run into but Norma Cantrell in her big hair and a turquoise pantsuit. She was getting a prescription filled instead of taking care of the pastor’s office, which is what she should’ve been doing.

  “Why, Miss Julia,” she said, patting that hair to be sure it was still a foot high. “What you doing in the drugstore?”

  “Minding my own business,” I said, looking at my watch. “Particularly since I’m not supposed to be working in anybody’s office.”

&
nbsp; She huffed a little at that, but her salary and the preacher’s came out of my pledge and I had a right to demand a day’s work for a day’s pay.

  I went about my business of picking out the things on the mental list I’d made. A box of straws, a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, another Ace bandage, and a hot-water bottle for the soreness. I carried it all to the counter by the cash register where Norma was standing. She pretended she wasn’t interested, but she eyed everything I put down, and I saw her trying to get Buck Tatum’s attention by making little sideways jerks of her head at my pile of merchandise. He kept on counting pills, and I went back down the aisle.

  After considering all the places where Hazel Marie had been messed up, I picked up two more hot-water bottles. I don’t like those heating pads with electric cords that plug in the wall. They’re all right if you’re holding them to a sore place while you’re sitting up, but try turning over in bed.

  I took the hot-water bottles to the counter and with a look at Norma dared her to say anything. I stood there tapping my fingers on the counter, trying to think of what else I needed.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, turning on my heel and catching a glimpse of Norma’s avid stare. I paid no mind as I went looking for a tube of Ben-Gay. Good for muscle soreness and stiffness. I added some Q-Tips, Band-Aids, and Mercurochrome. Then, on the Puckett woman’s request, a bottle of foundation to cover her bruises. Cover Girl, which seemed apt.

  When I got back to the counter, I called Buck to come help me. I needed one more thing.

  “I’ll be through here in a minute, Miz Springer,” he said from behind his drug counter. “Just getting a few things together for Miz Cantrell.”

  I didn’t mind waiting a few minutes, but Norma said, “Oh, that’s all right. Go ahead and wait on Miz Springer. I’m in no hurry.” She turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Pastor Ledbetter sent me.” Letting me know she was on the job.

  “All right, then,” Buck said, “what can I do you for, Miz Springer?”