by Lamb, Wally
After they left, Belinda told me she remembered the little girl from when her mother used to bring her into the library in a stroller. It’s a crying shame Belinda probably won’t ever get married and have children of her own now that she’s let herself go to lard and become so housebound. She always loved children and was good with them. When she used to work at the library, doing the story hour for the young ones was her favorite thing to do. For a while there after she graduated high school, I used to urge her to go on to normal school and become a teacher, but that suggestion fell on deaf ears. I believed she could do it, but she didn’t. And her father was always suspicious of education, so that might have been part of it, too, I guess. . . .
That little girl, Annie, was wearing a blue gingham dress with a lace collar and a petticoat underneath, and patent leather Mary Jane shoes and white anklets. They had her dressed up the way I used to dress Belinda Jean for church when she was little. If someone doesn’t step in and mother that child, it’ll be a crying shame. . . . Belinda Jean took it hard when her mother died, and poor Claude was at a loss as far as how to raise a motherless child. Well, I didn’t know anything about being a parent either, especially to an eleven-year-old girl who was pulling out her eyebrow hair and picking her nose so hard and so much that she’d give herself nosebleeds. First time I met her, all I could think about was one of those sad songs my daddy used to sing whenever he took out his guitar: Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That was back when we lived in Alabama. I don’t recall Daddy ever playing his guitar after our farm failed and we moved up here to Connecticut so he could work in the mills, instead, like his brother Emil had already done. Emil was my cousin Wanda’s father. Wanda and I become friends as well as cousins after we both became northerners. I stood up for her when she married Clifford, and she stood up for me when I married Claude. . . . The first thing I did after I told Claude yes, I would marry him, was go down to Cranston’s and buy two books on how to care for a child. One book was saying things like, “Never, ever kiss your child and never hold it on your lap.” As if children were “its” instead of girls and boys. The other book, by that Dr. Spock fellow, said, right off the bat on page one, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” It was a comfort to read that. I threw out the first book and read the Dr. Spock one so much that the pages come loose and had to be held together with a rubber band. But anyway, I stopped those scabby eyebrows and bloody noses of Belinda Jean’s in short order once I come into the picture. I only had to whip her twice with the strap before she quit that foolishness.
Reverend Frickee put on a nice service for Claude today. Earle Potter played the organ and Martha McCoy sang some of the songs I’d asked for, “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Rock of Ages,” “How Great Thou Art.” I made a list of what I wanted. The only one they didn’t do was “On the Wings of a Dove,” that Ferlin Husky song I always like when it comes on the radio. On the wings of a snow white dove, He sends His pure, sweet love. . . . Pastor Frickee said that song was too modern and for funerals they like to keep things traditional, which I understood, of course. The pastor spoke some nice words about Claude: how he was a good man who had his faults like all of us but was a hard worker and a good provider. Both the newspaper obituary and Pastor Frickee mentioned how Claude won our house the Three Rivers Christmas decorating contest back in 1956 for all that stuff he put out in our yard. I have the electric bill to prove it. I’m a saver, or as Claude used to call me, a “pack rat,” which I never much appreciated because of all God’s creatures, rats are the ones I like the least. Well, rats and weasels and snakes—the one because they’re filthy and carry diseases and the others because they’re mean and treacherous. Once when I was a little girl, I saw a weasel kill a cat—hold it in its jaws and whip it from side to side and then, after the cat went limp, eat it. Some of it, anyway. The turkey vultures swooped down and finished the job. It still riles me whenever I remember seeing that. It was our neighbor’s cat, Winky. It always used to come over to our backyard because I’d put a saucer of milk on the back step. It was early morning when that weasel attacked Winky. No one else was up yet. I got out of bed and looked out the window to see what those ungodly screams and howls were all about, and to this day, I wish I’d of just stayed in bed and not seen what I seen because I can still see it. And hear it, too—those screams coming out of poor Winky, whose only crime was that he’d come over to lap up a little bit of milk, poor thing. . . .
Claude wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but Reverend Frickee was kind enough not to mention that. It brought me to tears when, at the cemetery, he looked at Belinda Jean and me and told us we had to be strong for each other in the coming months, and that we would see Claude again someday in the Sweet Bye-and-Bye. I wasn’t crying from comfort at the pastor’s words; I was crying because I guess by now Claude has met His Maker, and I doubt he’s been let into heaven. Claude took his secret to the grave and I intend to take that same secret to mine. But he died unrepentant with blood on his hands. I suspect that right now and for all eternity he’ll be suffering Hell’s tongues of fire for what he done. And maybe, because of my silence, I’ll join him there when my time comes.
I worry about Belinda Jean—about the guilt I suspect she’s feeling. Since her father passed, she hasn’t shed a single tear, not even when Mr. McPadden and his son came out to the house and carried Claude’s body down the stairs and out the door. And Belinda’s a crier. She bawls at sad movies and TV shows. Why, when Elvis Presley had to go into the army, seems like she cried for days. But for her natural-born father: nothing. It’s not normal. And neither was the two of them, father and daughter, living under the same roof and not speaking to each other for almost three years because of what happened with one of those Jones brothers. The artist is the one I’m talking about, if you could even call that crazy stuff he painted “art.” Not the brother who was married to that white tramp. (Common law, I suspect; from what I know of the coloreds, they’re likely to skip the church service and head right for the bedroom.)
It drove me crazy, that uneasy silence between Belinda Jean and Claude, on account of that colored brother’s painting and what happened because of it. Of course, for Claude the trouble with those Jones brothers started way before that. To begin with, he wasn’t thrilled when the Skloots bought the land next door to ours and built that big, fancy house of theirs; Claude thought it stuck out like a sore thumb and made the rest of our homes on Jailhouse Hill look puny. But then when Mr. Skloot hired the Joneses as masons for the buildings he was building around town and let them move into that little place in back of his big house, well, Claude was fit to be tied. And that was before he realized they had a white girl living back there with them besides. Swapping her back and forth between them is what Claude figured. The funny thing was, when they were first settling Jailhouse Hill back in the eighteen hundreds, the coloreds was who lived there, kind of like it was just the coloreds who lived on Goat Island back in Alabama. They were poor, but it was educated Negroes, a lot of them, that lived here on Jailhouse Hill back then. That’s what Belinda Jean told me. When it was quiet down there at the library, she liked to read up on the history of the town. She said the colored community settled here on this hill because none of the white folks wanted to buy property so close to where the criminals were. There was no trouble, though, because the blacks kept to themselves and didn’t try to mix in with whites—even had their own store where they food-shopped and their own grammar school, but not their own high school. Belinda Jean said there was a colored boy in the first graduating class at the Three Rivers Free Academy, back in eighteen eighty-something. “Good lord, don’t mention that to your father or it’ll set him off and there’ll be hell to pay,” I told her and she didn’t. . . .
They planted a garden that first summer they moved in—those Jones brothers, I mean, not the Skloots. One August day Rufus and his white wife come by and knocked on the door to give us some of their tomatoes. They were just being
neighborly, and I didn’t see any harm in taking them. But when Claude got home from work and I told him where those tomatoes had come from, he took the bowl of them outside and fired each and every one at the trunk of our big oak tree. Took satisfaction, I guess, in seeing those tomatoes explode against the tree. “She’s got an accent,” I told him. “Maybe it’s different where she comes from. Maybe whites and colored mix over there in Europe.”
“Well, they ain’t living in Europe, are they? They’re living here.” He was shouting it more than saying it, like I approved of race-mixing, when all I was saying was live and let live. That tomatoes are just tomatoes. Well, he fumed a while, and I’m pretty sure he was mixed up in that window-busting out at that little house of theirs, though he never said as much and I never asked him.
But for Claude things come to a boil in the summer of 1959. That was when Three Rivers was having their three-hundred-year celebration and Joe Jones won that art contest. Lord, what hoopla there was that summer! The outdoor history pageant, the big parade, the fireworks, the beauty queen contest. Belinda Jean shocked me when she put herself in the running for Tercentenary Queen. It was out of character, on account of her shy ways. I’m still not sure what possessed her to do it; she was sweet as sugar back then but wasn’t what you’d ever call the beauty queen type. I knew she wouldn’t make the final five—the ones who got their pictures in the paper so that everyone in town could vote for who they wanted. But it was a rude awakening for poor Belinda Jean, particularly when she overheard one of the judges say how easy it was to separate the beauties from the “bow-wows.” After she heard that? Good Lord, she cried a whole weekend from hurt feelings! But then she got picked to be a trumpeteer in the history pageant, and that smoothed her feathers some. Her father give her some guff about her costume: tuxedo with tails and matching short shorts. But when Claude found out that one or two of his Ku Klux brothers were letting their daughters be trumpeteers, too, and that they didn’t seem to mind their girls showing their legs up on a stage, he gave in and said she could participate after all. In the dark from the other side of our bed, he said he still didn’t like his daughter “parading her wares for all of Three Rivers to see,” but that he was sick and tired of trying to go to sleep at night to the sound of her sobbing her fool head off down the hall. He was wheezing to beat the band that night, I remember; I guess that was maybe when all those Lucky Strikes started gaining on him. His breathing always got worse when he got worked up over something.
Claude had some involvement in the town’s Tercentenary, even though he told me every night when I put his supper in front of him that he thought the whole thing was stupid. There was a contest sponsored by the Evening Record, the Three Rivers Savings Bank, and Hendel’s Appliance Store because they sold Frigidaires. That contest involved ice, and Claude’s foreman put Claude in charge of it. What he had to do was drive a two-ton cake of ice downtown and park it in the traffic island on Franklin Square, right in front of the five-and-ten. There was a five-hundred-dollar prize for the person who could guess how long it would take for that block of ice to melt in the summer sun and trickle down finally to just water. Mathematics students from as far away as Yale University entered the contest with their fancy arithmetic about time and temperature, but the surprise winner was Rufus Jones. He got his picture in the paper, accepting the check for the five hundred. A few days later, he was driving around town in that big white convertible with the red leather seats—him and his white wife. Throwing it in people’s faces is the way Claude felt. He was fit to be tied.
The history pageant was held on a Saturday night, I remember. It was me who brung Belinda Jean to the dress rehearsal the night before and Claude who brung her to the pageant the next night. The cast members had to get there an hour early and assemble behind the big outdoor stage while the bleachers filled up. Claude was halfway home when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw that Belinda Jean, who was nervous as a bushy-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs as my daddy used to say, had forgot her trumpet in the backseat. (They weren’t real trumpets, of course. They were just cardboard fakes painted gold and covered with glitter that the trumpeteers were supposed to put to their lips whenever they played the trumpet music through the loudspeakers.) Well, Claude figured that if Belinda Jean was a trumpeteer without a trumpet, they wouldn’t let her get up on stage and he didn’t want her bawling for the next week. So he drove back there with her trumpet and went behind the stage looking for her. And what does he see back there but his daughter and two or three of the other trumpeteers talking and laughing with Joe Jones. Jones was dressed up like a Wequonnoc Indian in buckskin pants and no shirt. Claude went a little crazy is what happened next. He reminded Jones that he was a Negro, not an Indian, and told him if he ever caught him talking to his daughter again, he was going to be “one sorry coon.” He made an awful scene, I guess—humiliating poor Belinda Jean in front of all the other cast members. Grabbed her by the arm and drug her back to the car and wouldn’t let her be in the show after all. I felt so sorry for the girl. She’d told me just the night before that she’d made friends with a couple of the other trumpeteers, and one of them was having a party at her house after the show was over and that Belinda Jean was invited. I was a nervous wreck the next morning when I had to drive over to the festival headquarters and turn her costume back in, because I don’t like to drive downtown where it’s trafficky. I’m always afraid I’m going to sideswipe some parked car or hit someone who’s just jumped into the crosswalk without waiting for the “walk” light.
After the pageant, Belinda Jean and her father gave each other the silent treatment for over a month. I finally went to Reverend Frickee and asked him for help. He come out to the house and talked to Belinda and me first, and then when Claude got home from work, he talked to him in private and then had the three of us pray with him as a family. Claude kept looking over at me all the time Pastor Frickee was there, and if looks could kill . . . Before he left, Mr. Frickee read some little poem about the world coming to an end either from fire or ice, and he give us a little sermon about how ice between family members caused more harm than fire. Which I interpreted as him saying that it was better to have a fight and get things out than to give people the silent treatment and let things keep festering. I could have been wrong, though; poetry’s hard for me to understand because it never says things plain and simple. Well, Claude did not appreciate that I’d involved Pastor Frickee in our family business, and after he left, I was told in no uncertain terms that what went on in our house stayed in our house, did I understand? But the funny thing was, by the next day, the ice began to thaw between Claude and Belinda Jean, so the pastor’s visit had done some good. The only problem was: Claude gave me the silent treatment for the next week or more. My forty-seventh birthday come up in the middle of that week, I remember. No money for carnations that year!
I knew Belinda Jean and Joe Jones had become friendly in spite of Claude’s warning, or maybe even because of it. I kept my mouth shut, though. I didn’t want Claude finding out and starting World War Three. Truth be told, I was afraid to tell him—afraid for Belinda Jean and for Claude, too. I was scared Claude might fly off the handle and do something he’d get arrested for. March over to the Joneses’ place next door and do more than just break some windows. So I decided I’d keep my mouth shut and deal with the situation in my own way.
This was how I knew she and him had become friends. After they laid me off from the school cafeteria, I got another, better job through the classified advertisements in the Evening Record. What I did was spy for this California company that distributes movies to the Loew’s Poli on East Main Street. (The movie theater’s just a one-mile walk down Jailhouse Hill and over the Sachem River bridge, so I didn’t have to drive downtown to get to work. I could hoof it.) What I had to do was go to the movies and count the number of people in the audience. It’s what’s called “spot checking.” They wanted to see if the number of tickets the theater reported bein
g sold matched up to the number of people I counted. They were checking to see if those theater managers were on the up-and-up, or if they were underreporting ticket sales and pocketing the difference. For every show I went to and reported back on, they give me nine dollars, so I’d do four or five spot checks a week and make, most weeks, almost fifty dollars. Which was about ten dollars more than I’d made at the school cafeteria, plus I’d get to watch all those movies. I liked that I was my own boss with no one breathing down my neck and me not having to stand on my feet all day long. Claude knew what my job was, but Belinda Jean didn’t because her friend Peggy Konicki’s mother sold the tickets at the Loew’s Poli. (Peggy’d run for Tercentenary Queen, too, but she didn’t make the cut either. It was the big shots’ daughters who did: Anita Graves whose father was a doctor, and Sally McWilliams whose mother was a big chunk of cheese on the city council. It was rigged, I figured, because Sally got voted queen, and she could have used a diet and some pimple cream. She wasn’t any more of a beauty than Belinda Jean or Peggy.) When I was on the job, what I usually did was scoot upstairs to the balcony, where no one else went in the middle of the week except maybe an amorous young couple or two. If that was the case, I’d do this nervy thing that was very out of character for me. I’d say, like I was an employee at the theater, “Excuse me, but the balcony is closed. You have to go downstairs.” And they’d get up and go. After the previews were over, and the cartoon if there was one, I’d look below and count the heads and write the number in my little notepad. Of course, the balcony hung over the rear seats downstairs, so I’d have to lean over the railing and count the people in the back rows, too. Then I’d just sit back and, if it was a hot summer day, enjoy the refrigerated air and watch whatever was showing that week: Rio Bravo or Lover Come Back or I Want to Live! (Susan Hayward played a good part in that one.) Instead of buying the refreshments they sold at the concession stand, I’d bring my own: some Peek Frean or Hydrox cookies, or some peanut butter and Saltine crackers I’d put in a wax paper bag before I left home, plus the pint of Old Grand-Dad I would buy at Patsy’s Package Store on the way downtown and slip into my purse. I admit it: I liked a little nip while I was watching those movies up there in that empty balcony. It was very relaxing and helped me to get lost in the stories. Of course, after I’d done my count (counting myself, too, but they always added the cost of my admission onto my pay, long as I included my ticket stub), I would have to keep my eye out for stragglers and add them to the number I’d already recorded. To my way of thinking, if you have to come late to a movie, then don’t come at all. Those latecomers were a nuisance.