She shook her head. “Thank you kindly. I’m just going right up the road a piece.” And she walked on.
After a while the same truck came back, going in the opposite direction. The driver slowed and stopped and he said, “That must’ve been a fur piece. You sure I caint take you somewheres?”
The direction he was heading was the direction she had come from. “I’m not going that way,” she say. “I’m going this way.”
“Hon, I can take you wherever you want to go,” he declared.
“Can you take me to Stay More, Arkansas?” she asked.
“Now that is a mighty fur piece,” he said. “Naw, but I could take you halfway to Memphis. Get in.”
She was tempted, but there was something about the man that held her back. She looked around. She was out in the country now. There were no houses in sight. If she turned him down, would he try to do something to her anyway? “Thank you kindly,” she said. “But I’ve come this far on my own, and I can go the rest of the way.” He scowled at her, drove on a way, made a U-turn, and came roaring back in his original direction. As he passed her, he raised his middle finger and thrust it upwards several times.
She walked on. She was tired, and she was getting thirsty again, and there were no more filling stations. She passed a few houses. Probably she could have stopped at one and asked for a drink of water, but she did not. She had a long way to go, and wanted to see how far she could get before sundown.
But the sun was still well up in the sky when she began to tire beyond endurance. Her bare soles tried to cling to the earth, but kept misstepping. She staggered. There were mountains in the distance, and she thought of the expression, “get over the mountain,” and tried to remember when was the last time she had done that. She could not remember. She knew that for some strange reason whenever she got over the mountain she blacked out.
Maybe the glorious excitement of the moment was just too much for her. Maybe she fainted because she simply couldn’t stand the wonderful thrill of it all. Thinking of all this, she wondered if somehow an orgasm was coming on her, because she reached the mountaintop and began to go over. Then everything was black.
Chapter twenty-five
When she came back out of the blackness, an elderly lady in a fancy dress was kneeling beside her, mopping her brow with the hem of her dress. Behind the lady was a man in some kind of uniform, with a black billed cap and double-breasted tunic. Latha’s first thought was he might be a policeman. They were in a ditch beside the road. Latha’s arms and knees were bruised and dirty, and she had dirt all over her dress. On the road was parked a very large automobile of a type Latha had never seen before.
“What has happened to you, child?” the woman asked her.
“I must’ve fainted or got heat stroke,” Latha said.
“Help her up, Rodney, and let’s take her to the house,” the woman said, and the uniformed man lifted her to her feet and pulled her up out of the ditch and put her in the rear seat of the big automobile. The woman sat beside her. The man sat in front and drove the car.
They drove on for some distance, the auto purring like a cat.
“Do you feel all right?” the woman asked her.
“Just tired,” she said. “I guess I must’ve passed out from trying to walk so far.”
“Where were you walking from?” the woman asked.
“Nashville,” she said.
“What was your destination?”
“Stay More, Arkansas,” she said.
“Good heavens,” the woman said. “Is that anywhere near Little Rock?”
“No, ma’am. It’s up in the Ozark mountains a long ways from Little Rock.”
“And you were just planning to walk there?”
Latha realized that it would be foolish to admit that was her intention. But she didn’t know how else to get there. It was dark, and Latha realized the woman could not see her nodding her head. So she spoke and said, “I reckon so, ma’am.”
They turned off the highway and drove for quite a spell along a road flanked by tall, columnar trees, evenly spaced. They came to the house. It was a mansion like Latha had never seen, except possibly the Albert Pike house in Little Rock, only much larger. There were Greek columns all along the front and sides, supporting the roof and a verandah for the second floor. The car stopped at the front door and the driver jumped out and opened the door for Latha and the woman, who led her up the steps and into the grand hall, where there was a huge chandelier and fancy furniture everywhere. In a tall mirror surrounded by an elaborate gold frame Latha caught sight of herself: her dirty face and arms and legs and her short messy hair. She looked like an escapee from the crazy house.
“You have no shoes,” the woman observed. “Nor any handbag, nor luggage of any sort, nor a hat. What is your name?”
She had not spoken her name in a good long while, but she remembered it. “Latha Bourne,” she said.
The woman eyed her carefully and then said, “Well, I am Mildred Cardwell, and I welcome you to the Cardwell’s Lombardy Alley. It was built by a Cardwell before the War Between the States, but there are no Cardwells left. Hope!”
“Ma’am?” Latha said, wondering just what she was supposed to hope for.
The woman put a finger to her lips. “I’m calling that stupid maid,” she said. Soon another woman, younger than Latha, showed up, in a starched dress and a little bonnet. “Hope, this is Miss Latha Bourne. Get her bathed and properly dressed and then give her some supper.”
“Yes’m,” said Hope, and led Latha up a long staircase to the second floor, and to a bathroom which contained a bathtub made of marble. She began filling it with water. “Where’d you get in a cat-fight?” she asked Latha.
“I fell in a ditch,” Latha said.
Latha soaked for as long as she dared in the bath, enjoying it. She washed her hair. Hope gave her a hairbrush and some lipstick and rouge. Hope said, “I don’t reckon you know beans about housework but the Ma’am likes your looks and that’s why I’m out of a job.” She gave Latha a starched dress like her own to put on.
“I’m not looking for a job,” Latha said.
“Well, you’ve got one,” Hope said. “And I don’t. But she’s been threatening to get rid of me for months. I can go into town and make more money as a waitress.”
When Latha was dressed in her maid’s uniform and her hair was dried and brushed, they went back downstairs to the kitchen, where another woman had set out a plate for Latha, and was getting ready to serve up a fine supper of roast pork, greens and some kind of soufflé. Hope said “Sadie, this here is my replacement, Latha Bourne. Aint she an adornment?”
“Oh, my, yes,” said Sadie. Then asked, “What would you like to drink with that?”
“Water’s fine,” Latha said.
After she had finished the supper, and a nice dessert of fresh strawberry shortcake, Latha was escorted back to the “sitting room” by Hope, where Mrs. Cardwell was sitting. The woman studied Latha and said, “There now. You look much better.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t want Hope’s job,” Latha said.
“Let me make that decision,” Mrs. Cardwell said. “Now let me show you around the house.” She took Latha into the dining room, which would seat two dozen people. She showed Latha the library, where there were books from floor to ceiling on four walls. She showed Latha the sunroom, the parlor, the billiard room, and the various closets and storerooms. Then she pointed toward the second floor and said, “I don’t like to climb those stairs. You run up there and look around. Your room is the last one at the end of the hall.” Latha went up and began opening doors. There must have been half a dozen bedrooms, the largest one obviously Mrs. Cardwell’s. The room at the end of the hall was much smaller, and had some of Hope’s things and clothes in it. But it had a nice chest of drawers and a pretty dresser, and a washstand. Latha caught a mental image of her room at home in Stay More and her room at Mandy’s, and both of those rooms were bare and squalid compa
red with this. She might never again have a chance to live in a room like this or a mansion like this. The precariousness of her position in life rose up and intimidated her. She had no money, no clothes, nothing. Maybe she could just live here and work long enough to earn enough money to buy a bus ticket home.
So when she returned downstairs and Mrs. Cardwell said, “So? What do you think?” Latha told her that it was a beautiful house and she greatly admired it. “I can offer you only twenty dollars a month, plus your meals,” Mrs. Cardwell said. Latha nodded. “I’m a very exacting person,” Mrs. Cardwell went on. “Everything must be constantly neat, dustless, spotless, and tidy. Since Mr. Cardwell died, I no longer entertain regularly, but I do have occasional visitors and I want them to be awed by my fastidiousness. Hope is lazy, and does only the bare minimum of what is expected of her. And sometimes she is impolite. Do you think I should take a chance on you?”
“I would if I were you, ma’am,” Latha said.
The woman laughed. “Very good,” she said. “I should caution you that you will find much time on your hands. I want you to be always available to me, but I won’t be needing you around the clock. Do you have any hobbies? Hope just collects movie magazines and spends most of her salary on them. Or else she plays solitaire all day and night. Do you want a deck of cards?”
“No, ma’am. I’m not one for games.”
“What do you do with your spare time?”
“I used to go fishing,” Latha said.
“Well, there’s a splendid creek out back of the property, but the problem with that is that I couldn’t call you there, so you’d have to find something in the house or close to it. Do you like to read books?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Latha said, trying to remember the last time she’d opened a book.
“Then help yourself to the library. But I insist that you return each volume to the exact spot on the shelf from whence you took it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Latha said, and turned toward the library.
“Wait!” Mrs. Cardwell said. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Will that be all, ma’am?’”
“Will that be all, ma’am?” Latha said.
“At bedtime, I like to have a toddy. Sadie will show you how to make it, and you bring it up to my room. Hope could do it, but I’d just as soon never lay eyes on that girl again.”
Latha said “Yes, ma’am,” and then went into the library. She didn’t know where to start. Most of the books looked as if they’d never been touched, except to be dusted. They came in sets, leather-bound, gold edged, twenty-five volumes of Sir Walter Scott, twelve volumes of William Makepeace Thackeray, ten volumes of Alexander Pope, ten volumes of William Harrison Ainsworth. She had never heard of any of these, nor had she heard of Southey, Kipling, Gibbon, or Melville. She noticed that some of the sets were not bound in leather but just plain cloth, and these seemed to be more recent and more interesting. She had heard of Zane Grey and Thomas Hardy and Booth Tarkington. She might even have heard of Harold Bell Wright, Gene Stratton Porter, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and John Gals-worthy. She had definitely heard of David Grayson, but couldn’t recall when and where. She lifted out of his set a book called Adventures in Contentment, and flipped through it, and maybe Thomas Fogarty’s illustrations brought it all back to her: she had read this book in the library at the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum. Her eye fell upon a favorite sentence, “We are all of us calling and calling across the incalculable gulfs which separate us even from our nearest friends.” There were several other books by Grayson, and she chose one called Adventures in Understanding and chose a comfortable stuffed chair and began reading it. She was still reading when she thought she heard her name called and a little later the cook Sadie brought her a round silver tray with a drink on it.
“What’s this?” Latha asked.
“Madame’s toddy,” Sadie said. “You’d better rush it up to her. You’re late.”
Latha didn’t have a bookmark for the book so she left it open face down on her seat, and took the toddy up to Mrs. Cardwell.
“If you’re going to read, you’d better read in your room with the door open so you’ll hear me calling,” Mrs. Cardwell said.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Latha said. “Will that be all, ma’am?”
“For now. Leave your door open.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Latha said, and ran downstairs to get her book and take it up to her room.
It took Latha over a week to learn all the things that she was expected to do and not do. In time she learned that all of the other servants in other fine houses around this part of Tennessee were black people, but Mrs. Cardwell did not hire Negroes. Latha never learned if this was because she didn’t like them or because she sympathized with them so much she wouldn’t turn them into servants. The maid named Hope had taken with her a pair of silver candlesticks, and Mrs. Cardwell was furious. She tongue-lashed Rodney, her chauffeur, who had given Hope a ride into town without knowing that she had the candlesticks in her luggage. “Was she putting out for you?” Latha overheard the woman shouting at him. “Do you know how much those candlesticks were worth?” Latha heard the chauffeur trying to argue that he had no idea Hope had taken anything with her.
Rodney was an efficient but sullen chauffeur. He lived in his own room over the garage, and only came into the house when Mrs. Cardwell needed him to perform a handyman’s task, like hanging a picture or fixing the plumbing. He was young and fairly good-looking, although his eyes were rather demonic, as if he were constantly on the look-out for something evil to do. When he wasn’t driving or polishing the limousine, he did all of the yard work, keeping the lawns mowed and the flowers watered and the shrubs trimmed. When it was hot, he would take off his shirt. He had finely developed muscles.
On the rare occasions when Latha found herself alone with him—he took his meals in the kitchen at the same table she did but Sadie the cook was usually present—if Sadie stepped out of the kitchen, he would start flirting with Latha in a very coarse way, saying things like, “Babe, when d’ye aim to sneak up to my room in the middle of the night?” or he would grab his crotch and say, “I got a nice big present fer ye!” Whenever Mrs. Cardwell took Latha with her when they rode into town to do grocery shopping, Rodney would turn those creepy eyes of his on her in the rear-view window, and if he caught her looking back at him he’d pucker up his mouth and smack his lips at her. Once when he had her alone for a moment he said, “You ort to’ve asked Hope what a real loverboy I am.”
On one of the trips into town, Mrs. Cardwell took Latha to a department store and bought her some new clothes and shoes, as well as some cosmetics and cologne. It was much more than she had ever dreamed of buying for herself. This finery was for use only on the trips into town. At work and around the house she always had to wear her maid’s uniform. But whenever she was dressed in her new things to wear into town, Rodney would ogle her and make gestures and, if he caught her away from Mrs. Cardwell, he would say “Gimme a kiss, babe,” or even “We got time for a blow-job in the backseat.”
Once Latha overheard Mrs. Cardwell saying to Rodney, “All you want is to work your will on that poor girl. Do it if you must, but the moment I catch wind of it, you are unemployed. Out of work. Jobless. And unpaid. Is that clear?” Latha heard him grumble, “Yes’m,” but within hours or even minutes he would be after her again.
Latha reflected that if he’d possessed even an ounce of chivalry or just plain old good manners, she might have yielded to his flirtations, because she often felt desirous, but he was so straightforward and tactless and lecherous that he repelled her. She was convinced he never thought of her as a person but just as a starched maid’s dress with a serviceable mannequin inside it. Whenever he got a chance to speak to her out of earshot of Mrs. Cardwell, he would say, “You aint nothing but a cunt.”
Once when he said that, she replied, “You aint nothing but a prick.”
He was shocked for only a moment, and then he said, “Wal, honeybunch, pricks and cunts are m
eant for only one thing together, and it’s the best thing on earth.” His face was so close to hers that she could smell the tobacco on his breath. Mrs. Cardwell was very strict about allowing no smoking anywhere on her property or in her limousine, but each afternoon when Mrs. Cardwell took her regular nap of one hour, Rodney would sneak out to the woods behind the garage and try to see how many cigarettes he could smoke in one hour. To Latha he claimed that he had smoked fifteen and was on his way to twenty. His thumbs and forefingers were stained yellow.
Latha was on call at all hours seven days a week, but Mrs. Cardwell permitted Rodney to have Saturday evenings off, and to take the limousine into town, provided he did not smoke in it.
Mrs. Cardwell told Latha, “I can only assume he frequents brothels.”
“Ma’am?” said Latha. “I don’t know who they are.”
“Whores,” Mrs. Cardwell said. “There are several establishments in town which provide sensual relief for men who can afford them. My scoundrelly late husband Richard was not above making use of their services. But I am not ashamed to say it, and I did not fault him for it, because it provided me with some relief. And you might consider that if Rodney did not have his whores in town, he would be all the more bothersome toward you.”
There were times, not often, when Latha did not know whether this was a blessing or a damnation. She reflected upon the fact that there were actual houses where such prostitutes received men, but she had never heard of the equivalent for women. Weren’t there any men for hire anywhere? She considered asking Mrs. Caldwell, but she had the impression the woman would prefer not to give thought to the matter of carnal desires. One day she did ask Sadie the cook. Sadie was just a plump, plain country woman, a good cook. She slept in a small room behind the kitchen. When Rodney wasn’t around, Latha came right out and asked her, “Sadie, what does a girl who wants some loving do to get it hereabouts?”
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