When she awoke, she expected to feel ailing. She lay on her back looking up at the ceiling, waiting for the nausea to hit. She tracked the crack, pretending it was a road on a map that led to Tulsa and on to Oklahoma City. She did that for several minutes, her mind wandering to the previous evening until she determined she might not get sick. She got up slowly, went to the door, and looked out on the porch. Lovely’s face was covered with his arm. Early was asleep with his hat over his eyes. She decided that if she was going to throw up, she best to do it before they woke up. So after her morning business, she pulled some side meat out of the ice chest and sniffed it. The sniff didn’t turn her stomach or even make it uneasy. She wondered if she wasn’t really pregnant, or if wine was the ticket to feeling good. She slapped the meat into a skillet and started making biscuits, figuring on how to get a private word with Lucy later in the day.
Maud didn’t know much about pregnancy beyond what she’d observed watching animals and a little she’d heard from her aunts. Her mama had lost a baby. But she hadn’t realized her mother was pregnant until she had going-down pains, and when that happened, her grandfather had taken her, Lovely, and her sisters out of the house all the way to Ft. Gibson. He’d bought them ice cream. Maud got to thinking about how good that ice cream had tasted, and she was half finished preparing breakfast before she realized she still didn’t feel sick at all. She went out on the porch and shook the men awake.
While they were taking their time getting up and going about their business, Maud ate her breakfast without any queasiness. But she found she’d lost her taste for coffee. She finished quickly and made trips to the garden and cellar to get the fixings for the dinner. After she fed the men, she asked Early to build a fire under the kettle outside, and she sat Lovely down on a little stool next to it and made him stir the pot with a long-handled wooden spoon. Early squatted with Lovely to remind him to stir. Maud walked to Gourd’s to raid his dishes.
The first person to arrive was Blue, and he sat out by the pot with Early and Lovely. Maud could see them talking and hoped they were gossiping about Saturday night in town. She feared they might be gossiping about Billy and her or Booker and her. But she didn’t have time to do anything about that, and she sure didn’t want to get into a conversation with them or get any ribbing. She shied away from the pot until the entire family arrived and naturally split into groups of men, women, and children. The women commanded the kitchen and porch, the men the pot of stew, and the children the yard and the live oak tree.
The men ate first, the children next, and then, after washing two rounds of dishes, the women ate. While they did, the men set cigarette butts on the tops of the fence posts against the wild and took turns shooting them off. The sound of gunshots and children laughing felt so reassuring to Maud that she, for most of the afternoon, forgot about wanting to go anywhere else and was perfectly content with her family around her, as country and as dark as they were. She only wished that her mother was sitting at the table with them, that her father was taking his turn with the gun, that her sisters, Rebecca and Peggy, lived closer by. Her mind didn’t return to her troubles until Lucy said, “I wish this baby would hurry itself up.”
Nan snorted. “It’ll be a pile more trouble when it comes.”
“I’m tired of peeing ever’ fifteen minutes,” Lucy replied.
Maud thought about her own peeing. It seemed normal. “Remind me when it’s due?”
“Gonna be a Virgo.”
“You’ll have an easy time. Mark my words. Easy delivery, easy tempered,” Viola said.
“Renee’s a Virgo,” Nan said. “She’s gitting as high tempered as Ryde.” She rolled her eyes.
“Well, the daddy figures into it, that’s fer shore,” Viola said.
Nan put a golly rag to her lips. She cut her eyes at Maud. They twinkled.
Maud knew Nan was hiding a grin. She felt a blush down to her toes. There wasn’t such a thing as privacy in the bottoms. As gossipy as her family was, the likelihood that Viola hadn’t spread that she’d had the morning sickness was as remote as a breakfast without biscuits. They might not say they knew it, but that was just so they could giggle and make fun behind her back. Maud felt her temper rise. “Can’t anybody have anything to themselves around here?”
Nan drew her chin into her neck. Viola looked down at the table. But Lucy, bolder than either of the other two when her husband wasn’t around, cackled and said, “Well, if ya parade up and down the section line, ya could be seen.”
“I can’t get to my house without going down the line!”
“Yeah, that’s unfortunate,” Lucy replied. “I’m shore glad Daddy moved us up closer to the highway.”
Nan said, “I sorta like Booker.” She looked out the door.
Maud felt her heart pounding. She hadn’t begun to sort her feelings, and they were being laid out on the kitchen table and fingered like knives and forks. “I like him, too, but he’s taken a powder.”
“He’ll be back, I ’spect,” Lucy said. “Men do that all the time.”
“Uncle Cole doesn’t,” Maud replied.
“No, Cole, he stays as close as a tick on a dog. But he’s an exception.”
Nan said, “Where you think Booker went to?”
Once Maud gave into the conversation, she did so with relief. “I don’t know. He left me a letter, but it melted in the rain.” She told them the full story of the letter and what Mr. Singer had said. When she was finished, Lucy shook her head. “I don’t know how you put off reading it. I couldn’t’ve stood the suspense.”
“I won’t again,” said Maud.
Outside, one of the children yelled. That drew only the slightest turn of heads, as it was a scream of playing wild, not of distress. But the yell focused Maud’s attention on the rest of her circumstance, and she blurted out, “How do you tell for sure if you’re in a family way?”
All three women pulled their eyes away onto spots somewhere in the distance. Maud waited them out, letting them pretend they didn’t already know. Lucy finally answered, “Different fer different babies. This one, I got to feeling like a stuffed hen the next morning. The first one, I didn’t even know he was in me until I noticed I wasn’t on the rag.”
Maud’s thoughts went to her calendar. She could go in the main room, get it, and figure the days again with her aunts. But that would be a public reckoning she wasn’t quite ready to make. She looked out the screen door. Three of Nan’s children were playing tag in the dirt. Lucy’s baby was waddling after a chicken. It suddenly occurred to Maud that she didn’t really care for children. That realization hit her in the face so hard, she gulped. As she did, Lucy said, “When’d yer visitor last call?”
Maud brought her mind back to the table. “I’m not sure.” She looked at each of her aunts in turn. Viola had a dip in her lip; so did Lucy. Nan was picking a bit of pie crust out of a pan. None of them seemed anything but calm. While Maud was struggling for a way out of the conversation without having to get the calendar, Viola said, “A lot can happen to a baby this early on.”
After that, Nan and Viola got up from the table and started in on the dishes again, and Lucy told Maud about a snake she’d recently found in a hen’s nest. Maud felt thankful for that particular snake, and the talk dribbled away from what was on her mind to the daily hazards of living, the hope for a break in the heat, and the antics of people they all knew and mostly were related to. After the dishes were done, the women went to the front porch, and the men left off shooting and got to looking under the hood of Ame’s car. The older children climbed in the tree. The younger ones napped on a cot on the porch. The day melted into evening before they all went home.
Maud was tired and went to bed early. But she was as far from sleep as she was from the Mississippi River. She lay on her back, listening to Lovely’s chair creak on the porch. Her mind rushed ahead like water rolling to the sea. If Booker didn’t return, a baby would tie her to the bottoms, the heat, the dirt, and the hardship, for the re
st of her life. Even if she told Billy it was his and married him, it would tie them both down. And the baby, if there was one, could turn out to be light rather than dark. Billy would be able to see every day that it wasn’t his.
Maud woke to the cock’s crow and looked at the crack in the ceiling. The curl at the closest end seemed to be a snake dipping its head, trying to hold her with its eye. Maud ran her hand down her belly. It was flat. She was circling her stomach with her palm when she realized she didn’t hear any sign of Lovely. She glanced to his cot. He hadn’t been on it. She swung her feet to the floor and rose. He wasn’t on the cot on the porch. She went to the outhouse and to the pump. There were no signs anyone had washed up. While she was brushing her teeth, she realized for the second day in a row that the only pang in her stomach was hunger.
Maud studied the calendar through her meal. By her calculations, she’d missed one visitor entirely and was due for another one. She felt her breasts. They were tender and a little larger than usual. She went about her chores wondering where Lovely had gone off to and trying to settle into the idea of being a mother. While she was doing that, she visited a red hen she had setting in a little brooder house next to the chicken coop. Trying to hold the hen’s attention by clucking, she stuck her hand under her feathers. The hen flashed a peck at her arm. It drew blood. Maud said, “Hussy!” But she knew she didn’t have any business bothering the hen; she’d done it on an impulse to see how the chicken would react. And the hen’s temper wasn’t too far off from what she had expected. Or from what she felt herself. She didn’t want to be sitting on an egg if Booker had up and left her for good. The irritation she might have otherwise felt at being pecked she directed toward the whole male race.
Lovely didn’t come in for dinner. Maud thought about walking up to the swale to see if he was working, but decided he couldn’t be without either breakfast or a noon meal. So she spent her afternoon reading, perched on a little stool in the shade under the limbs of the live oak tree. She’d read the Sherlock Holmes and the Henry VIII, and her attention was on the second section of Mooney’s book, The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Formulas existed for all sorts of things, many for curing, some for hunting, a few for love. Maud was studying the love formulas when she caught the beat of hooves in the distance. She looked out from the cave of branches. She saw Billy riding her way.
She hadn’t thought of him all day. She looked to the trunk of the tree. Boards were nailed there. They’d held Morgan and Renee only yesterday. Maud laid her book on the ground and grabbed a board. She pulled herself up, squirmed onto the largest low branch of the tree, and stuffed her skirt under her legs. She made her breathing shallow and looked out from between the leaves.
Billy went up to the porch and peered in the screen door. He went inside. He came back out and sat in a rocker. There he stayed. Maud settled into the limb. She thanked her elders for teaching her stillness with hunting and fishing. She didn’t even feel particularly unsettled. Eventually, Billy walked to the pump, splashed some water out, drank, and rubbed some on the back of his neck. After that, he walked his horse to the first guard, which he’d left open in the lane, secured it again, and did the same with the far one. Maud waited on the limb until the sound of hooves died away.
She spent the rest of the evening reading and fanning herself. Occasionally, she lifted her eyes and wondered where Lovely had disappeared to, wondered if she really was carrying, wondered what she could do if she was. In all that mulling, she decided her top tick-off was to find where Booker was and get to him. She thought that if she could make her way to Fayetteville, she might find him there, or find people who would know where he was. She went to bed with that plan planted in her mind.
The next day, she copied out on a little lined pad the formulas Mooney had recorded in both Cherokee and English for making children jump down and for destroying life. The formulas for destroying life relied on the wild parsnip, a plant she’d never seen. But she routinely substituted ingredients while cooking and she thought a parsnip was a cousin to a carrot. She had some of those left in the garden. She spent most of her spare time during the day pulling from the book other secrets she thought might come in handy. Then she ate an early supper and walked to her uncle Gourd’s, carrying his bowls, Mooney’s book, and her notepad.
The house was hot from being closed up, but there was enough light inside to read. She sat at Gourd’s table, poured over the book, and made notes until she heard the beat of hooves. She slipped to the floor below the window. She kept reading until the light was too dim and the hooves beat away up the line.
Maud was too busy with her worries about Booker and the little bean that might be lodged in her belly to give much mind to Billy. She appreciated his attentions when she wanted them, and she’d always found him handsome, even exciting. He could be worked like dough, which had both its good points and bad. But her mind and her heart were given over to Booker. And with that in mind, the next day, she walked the line toward Mr. Singer’s with his books and handkerchief in a flour sack. She looked toward the swale and didn’t see Lovely there. At the section lines’ cross, she opened her mailbox flap, hoping her sister Rebecca had finally answered her letter. A dirt dobber flew out into her face. Maud ducked and said, “Dammit, get out of here!” Then she took a step back and peered into the hole. There were three mud nests in there, but no more dobbers and no letters. She looked under the box for a hole the wasps could be using to get in. She didn’t find one and decided she’d left the flap a little open the last time she’d checked the mail. She pushed it closed and then pushed it harder with the butt of her gun. She walked on, feeling irritated with Rebecca until she recalled that her sister had three children under the age of five.
On up the line, two big machines for moving dirt were across from the burnt school. As she got closer, she saw several men. She decided to avoid the men even though she had her rifle. She cut west across the potato fields on paths that had been laid before she was born and then took the river path. When she got to Mr. Singer’s, she went to the front door. It was open except for the screen. The same Negro woman came to it. She said, “Mr. Singer ain’t in.”
Maud felt irritated with herself for not checking to see if the Packard was in the garage before she knocked on the door. If she’d come by her usual route, she would’ve seen that. “Is he expected back soon?”
“Can’t say.” The woman had on glasses. She lowered her chin and looked at Maud over the top of them.
Maud didn’t like that look. But she didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the woman guarding the door. So she smiled and said, “I don’t believe I know your name.”
“Miz Lizzie.”
“Well, Miz Lizzie, Mr. Singer loaned me these books.” Maud held up the sack. “He generally likes to quiz me on what I’ve read. So if you’ll tell me when I can catch him, I’ll come back.”
“Gone into town. Don’t tell me his intentions.”
“Well, then.” Maud pulled the sack to her breast. “Tell him Maud Nail dropped by and will come again.”
“I’ll tell him. Youse Jenny’s granddaughter?”
Maud stepped back. She hadn’t heard her grandmother’s given name in a long time. “Yes, I am. You knew her?”
“Knew her well.”
Maud took a deep look at the woman on the other side of the screen. She was short and wide. She was well fed, which wasn’t usually true of Negros, and she had on those glasses, which was unusual in the same way. Maud couldn’t tell how old she was by looking at her. If she’d known her grandmother well, it would’ve been as children. Adult Negroes and other people didn’t mingle. Maud was trying to calculate how old her grandmother would’ve been had she been living when Lizzie said, “Sit there in that chair. I’ll bring ya some lemonade.” She turned from the door.
Maud was surprised by the hospitality and thankful to sit a spell. She was hot, and the books and gun had weighed her down. She didn’t feel the energy she usually had, and her ti
red blood confirmed her suspicions. She was brooding on those when the screen door opened and Lizzie brought lemonade out on a little tray. Maud gulped it without stopping, put the glass back on the tray, and wiped her mouth with her fingers. “That was delicious.”
“I ’spect yer looking fer yer man.”
Maud leaned sideways, her eyes up at Lizzie, wide as saucers. “Yes, yes, I am. Do you know where he is?”
Lizzie looked toward the incline that held the road. “Can’t say. But he went thaterway.” She pointed to the bridge.
Maud was astonished. She’d gotten more information out of this stranger than she’d gotten from anyone. She asked if she knew any more. Lizzie didn’t, but she asked Maud about Lovely. She said he’d done her a favor a few weeks back and she knew he’d been poorly. Maud said he hadn’t entirely recovered from his shots, and both to change the subject and to satisfy her curiosity, she blurted out, “What kind of favor?” As soon as she said it, she realized she shouldn’t have, and she feared she’d given offense to someone whose help she needed. But Lizzie seemed unfazed. “Moved a rock fer me. From the swale where he’s working up here to the house. I’d taken a shine to that rock as a girl. It waz gonna get lost in the plowing.”
Maud left shortly after that, taking the flour sack of books with her as an excuse to come back. But she walked away feeling like she’d made an unexpected ally. She climbed the rise and sat for a while beneath the same tree by the highway close to the bridge that she’d sat under before. Then she walked the old path by the river to avoid the men and machines, and because she could just as easily go that way to get to her grandpa’s.
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