“The eighteenth. Two weeks tomorrow.”
Maud left Mr. Singer’s company wanting to talk to Lizzie again. But the cook was in the summer kitchen and it was directly across from the porch. Her only excuse to go in there was to return the buttermilk glasses. She’d offered to do that, but Mr. Singer had told her not to bother. So she headed back toward the bottoms by the river way again, both to avoid the men on the machines and to take a long look down the planks of the bridge that headed toward Muskogee. She wondered if Booker was just over there. It was too far to walk to and get back from in a day. But it was easy on a horse; and she began plotting how to get a ride over there. She wasn’t very far into that plot when she realized that Billy would be back that evening. She wasn’t ready to see him with Booker spinning in her head. She detoured to her grandpa’s and took supper there.
She was washing dishes and Viola was drying when Lucy stood up from the table and said, “I think this baby’s coming early.”
Maud handed Viola a plate and smiled. Being with family had raised her spirits and she’d convinced herself there was a good chance Booker was just over in Muskogee. She said, “What makes you think that?” and turned and looked at her pregnant aunt. There was a puddle at Lucy’s feet. Maud’s eyebrows went almost into her hair. “You mean right now?”
Lucy nodded.
Maud’s instinct was to flee out the back door, go to Nan’s and get her, go home, milk the cow and put the chickens up, then go to Gourd’s house and hide under his bed. “I’ll get Aunt Nan,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron.
Viola said, “We need to get them men outta here.” She left the room, speaking loudly enough to be heard in the kitchen: “Baby’s on its way. Y’all get on over to Nan’s. Blue, Maud’s cow and chickens need tending. Bert, send Nan this way. Cole, you go, too, and take Lee. Early, scat.” Viola came back to the kitchen and said, “Maud, pump a lot of water and set it to boiling. Lucy, come with me.”
Maud opened her mouth to protest. But by the time a sentence had formed on her tongue, Viola was leading Lucy by the hand through the door. Maud was left standing by the sink, dishwater dripping off her rag. Early came in and grabbed what was left of a pie. He said, “I hear tell it’s worse than calving.” He escaped out the back door.
Maud had cleaned up the puddle on the floor but was still in the kitchen when Nan arrived. She was scrubbing the counters like they hadn’t been cleaned in years when Viola barked from the next room, “Got the water hot?”
Maud’s mental time had been spent plotting and discarding escapes. She’d forgotten about the water. She knocked the dipper to the floor in her hurry out the door to the pump. But by the time Viola came back in, she had three pots of water roiling and was soaked with the heat of the fire.
Viola said, “This is gonna be quick. You come help Nan hold Lucy in position.”
Maud didn’t budge. “I’ll just get in the way.”
“No, you won’t. Come on.”
“No, really. I’ll tend the water.”
“You need to see this. It’ll be practice fer you’un.” Viola used her elbow to point to Maud’s stomach.
Maud had once seen her daddy stick his hand up a cow’s rear to get a calf out. But she’d never seen a human being in the misery her aunt Lucy was in, and she knew Lucy was no complainer. There was nothing about childbirth that looked appealing to Maud, and a lot that seemed downright appalling. The blood was as bad as hog killing, and she thought that if Lucy screamed one more time she was going to have to slap her. Even when the baby was held up, tapped on the rear, and started wailing, Maud didn’t feel the miracle of birth. She thought the little girl looked as slimy as a catfish. And she had a black head of straight hair that, upside down, looked like a boot brush.
Viola cackled. “We got us a little Indian.”
Maud sat down on a windowsill. She clutched the edges. Lucy looked like a dying horse. The baby looked like a critter that needed drowning. And it wouldn’t stop screaming. Maud thought she was going to be sick. She jumped up from the sill, ran through the kitchen and out the back door. She threw up her dinner beside the steps. She was sitting on the back stoop with her head in her hands when Poker started licking her throw up.
The baby, Nancy they called it, upset everybody’s living arrangements. That was the only good thing Maud saw about it. Her grandpa, Uncle Ame, and Uncle Blue moved into her house. Early and Cole moved into Gourd’s. Lee came home to his mother, and Maud was put in charge of him. Viola took charge of Lucy and the baby. Things stayed that way for more than a week, and then the men started straggling in.
Cole came back first. The next day, Ame and Blue returned. On the next, her grandfather took dinner with them rather than at Nan’s. After dinner, Maud found him alone in the side yard at his usual seat on the ground against a stump. He was shining a dried gourd with a flour sack, making a rattle for the baby. She sat down on a block of wood. “While you were down at the house, did Billy Walkingstick happen by?”
“Shore did.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“He mentioned you.”
“Say anything in particular?”
Her grandfather had several sticks and a little bowl of dried seeds and beans at his side. He picked up some seeds and dropped them one by one into the gourd. After several were in, he shook the rattle close to his ear. “I told him where you was. I don’t think he wanted to dip into the baby business.”
Maud had been banking on that. “Anything else?”
“Well, he come down ever’ night. That was saying enough.”
Maud was glad for the information, but she felt like her whole family knew her business. And that irritated her. She was out of sorts with the whole lot and out of sorts with herself, Booker, and Billy, too. She had been, every day, walking the path around the river bend and into the potato fields far enough to see if Booker’s wagon had returned. It hadn’t. Each day brought her closer to the eighteenth and put her in a blacker mood. And being in a family way didn’t help. She’d started trying to decide if she was going to marry Billy and pass the baby off as his or try to abort it. Every day she awoke with those thoughts. As the days went on, she seesawed from one choice to the other. Billy loved her. And she was attracted to him. But he was no wild Indian with movement in his veins; he was a Cherokee, and a fairly full-blooded one. As forward thinking as he seemed, he would eventually, she thought, want to squat on a piece of land, hug it like a blanket, and not give it up. She would spend a life with him out in the country. Buying a new tractor would be big news. There wouldn’t be pretty clothes, parties to speak of, shiny cars, or dancing on tables in nightclubs. There wouldn’t even be indoor plumbing or electricity. And, Maud knew, there wouldn’t be many books or any discussion of ideas beyond current events that took place so far away that they seemed in a dream.
But Booker wasn’t coming back. He would’ve already returned if he was. And he had been run off by the very type of thing she wanted away from. Or maybe he’d been run off by her not confiding in him sooner. She occasionally admitted that into her calculations. But telling the man you love that you helped cover up murder wasn’t the type of confiding that led to marriage. She’d felt that. And it had proven to be true. She resolved that no matter what she did in the future, telling the truth to men was a bad proposition. She was so lost in thought that her grandfather’s voice came as a surprise. She asked him to repeat himself.
“Lovely. Don’t rightly know what’ta do ’bout him. A man has a right to go where he wants. If Ame and me hadn’t took that right, we would’ve spent our lives among strangers.”
Maud had never heard her grandfather speak of his past. And now she wasn’t interested in it. Out of politeness, she said, “Your parents died?”
“Yep. Daddy were kilt by a fellow in a uniform. Funny thing, I comb my mind like I’m picking fleas and I ain’t never been able to call up if it were gray or blue. Daddy warn’t no soldier. He were a miller. The soldiers jist ca
me through.”
“Was your daddy a white man?”
He dropped some beans into the gourd. “I think he were. Mama were a Choctaw on her mama’s side. Cherokee on her daddy’s.”
“A Choctaw?”
He snorted. “Odd, ain’t it?”
“You came over here, why?”
“Looking fer Mama’s family. Got confused. Thought they was the Singers. Took a while to figure out they wasn’t. Meantime, Check Singer took me and Ame in. Gave us work. Paid the fee on us.”
Maud wasn’t interested in talking about the arrangements for non-Cherokees to work before statehood. Indian Territory had dissolved into Oklahoma before she was born. Others might jaw about the injustice of that, but she thought that was like whipping a dead mule. Being an Indian was a misfortune more than anything else. The only thing she felt glad to have confirmed was that her grandfather’s father had been white. She turned the talk back to Lovely. No one had heard any reports on him.
Her grandfather said, “I was thinking maybe you could write yer pa. He’s at his sister’s, ain’t he?”
“Sheriff Talley says not. But Daddy can hide out easy.”
“Why don’t ya think about writing yer aunt? Tell her Lovely’s run off. To keep an eye out fer him.”
“Lovely won’t go to Daddy.”
Her grandfather held the rattle up. “Do you think you could paint a face on this? Sompthing pretty?”
“Probably.”
“Good. Put red on it somewheres. I’ll glue the handle after it’s painted.” He put his hand on the stump and got up. Looking down at Maud, he said, “Mustard and Lovely was always crossways. But in my experience, blood goes to blood. It’s worth a try. We don’t want to lose the boy.”
Shortly afterward, Maud started walking home. She was wearing one of her aunt Lucy’s dresses and carrying a feed sack that held her dress and the gourd. She swung the sack like she was carefree, but her thoughts were about squaw root. She’d heard it whispered among girls at school that the plant could expel babies down outhouse holes. She was glad she’d picked up enough to roughly know what the plant looked like. And some had grown in Blue’s woods in years past. She decided to find it and ask Viola about how to prepare it once she had it in hand.
She scanned the sides of the road for snakes as she thought and walked, but when she finally looked up, she saw Billy and Early on Gourd’s front porch. Billy smiled. She felt a little jump in the triangle between her legs. She shook her head, tossed her hair, and ran her free hand through it. Billy’s smile got wider. By the time she got to the lane in front of the house, Early had gone inside. Billy said, “Baby okay?”
That startled Maud. Then she remembered Lucy’s newborn. “Baby’s fine. What have you been up to?”
“Jist chawing the cud with yer menfolk. Won a quarter offin Early pitching pennies.”
“He’ll make it up. Don’t play cards with him.”
Early appeared at the screen door. “Whose side are you on, Maud?” He grinned.
Early told Maud he’d secured Gourd’s place to live in for as long as Gourd was piled up in his current woman’s bed. He asked about the baby and paid Billy his quarter. After that, Billy said he probably should help Maud settle back in. Early arched an eyebrow and remarked, “Yer as helpful as a crutch, Walkingstick.”
Maud and Billy hadn’t been in her house longer than a minute when he grabbed her around the waist from behind. He turned her around, pressed her to him with his hands on the cheeks of her rear, and kissed her hard. The kiss went through her whole body. She felt like she was melting into a puddle, like her legs were giving way. She wasn’t aware of how they made it all the way over to the bed. And they didn’t bother with getting her aunt Lucy’s dress all the way off; they just pushed it up and Billy went inside her. Once he was in, they began a rocking that moved the bed both up and down and against the wall so hard that the iron piece of furniture made noises like a hammer. Soon those noises were joined by Maud’s and by a low hum of Billy’s that sounded like the rush of a river. Maud came first with a high moan that could’ve been heard on the porch. Billy came with more thumping of the bed and more humming. Then they lay back, faces turned up toward the crack in the ceiling. They did the same thing twice again until they both finally fell into such a deep sleep that the cock crowed several times the next morning before Maud fully awoke and looked over at Billy. He was still asleep, his mouth open, his lips thick. She touched his thigh. He groaned. Then she touched his balls. His eyes opened. He pursed his lips. His eyelids dropped down again. He cupped Maud’s hand with his own and moved it up to his penis. It hardened. Maud said, “I need to see to the chickens. Fox could have got them.”
Billy said, “Too late now.” Then he let go of Maud’s hand, rolled over onto her, and started rocking again. They rocked with a smoother rhythm than the night before, and when Billy finished, he said he thought that would last him all day. Maud finished with the beginnings of feeling sore. She pushed Billy’s shoulder and said, “We’ve ruined the bed.”
“Okay. Tonight, we’ll use the floor,” he said.
Billy left after breakfast, and Maud started in on chores that the men folk who had been tending the animals hadn’t noticed needing doing. That entailed a lot of washing and dusting, and it wasn’t until midafternoon that she got to thinking again about the squaw root. She pictured the plant in her mind as a single stalk with bluish-green leaves and a flower that looked almost like a starfish. She thought a patch grew around some trees she’d been through when Blue had taken Lovely and her hunting for wild mushrooms. She wished she had a clock or a watch. She walked out to the pump to see what board its shadow was cast on as, in certain seasons, the shadow could be used to measure the time. She bit her under lip, tilted her head, and decided she didn’t have enough space left in the afternoon to get to Blue’s allotment and back before Billy was likely to return. She went into the house, got a pencil and pad, and walked over to the live oak tree. She brushed aside its branches and settled on a little stool that had, in her absence, found its way under there. She wrote the letter to her aunt that her grandfather had asked her to write. She thought about the dirt dobbers. She decided to mail the letter in Nan’s box.
She closed the cover of the pad and set it and the pencil on the ground. She leaned against the trunk of the tree and looked out between its branches. She felt settled by her lovemaking with Billy. She’d felt settled all day. In fact, the day had been the best she’d had in a while, and the first time since Booker left that she hadn’t felt bereft. She thought that if Billy and she kept it up she’d be able to forget Booker entirely. And that was what he deserved for leaving her alone without a word. She was tired of men moving around when they took a mind to, tired of them laying out. They didn’t lay out in books, not routinely anyhow. And she thought in cities men didn’t come and go as they pleased. City men settled down, went to work in the morning, came home in the evening, played with the children, and read the paper. She recalled the men in her family also did that sometimes. But other times, they just up and ran away. Booker was clearly in that mold. And if he was, well, it was good to be rid of him. She should’ve known he was a traveling man by the fact that he’d taken up peddling when his wife and child died. She’d been blinded by his looks and his books. Well, she could get over that. She had the remedy for it. Billy Walkingstick. Billy Walker. He would do. He would do just fine. She hoped Booker would come back and find them piled up in bed. She imagined that scene. He would walk in and there Billy would be on top of her, humming like rushing water. She’d be groaning, and she’d look over at Booker and say, “Why don’t you have a seat on the porch? We’re busy here.” Maud giggled at that scene and then she thought of another.
In that one, she was sitting astride Billy, riding him like a horse. He was bucking and the bed was thumping so loud that she didn’t hear Booker come in. He grabbed her arm and tried to get her off of Billy, but she jerked away from him, threw her head back, and sh
ook her hair. In another, she and Billy were in the barn, up in the hayloft on a quilt. They hadn’t heard Booker climbing the ladder until he was up there with them. She looked up. He was standing over them. His hand went into his pants. He started stroking himself.
That image shocked Maud. She jumped up from the stool, parted the branches of the live oak tree, and walked out into the yard. Chickens were pecking in the dirt. Clothes were flapping on the line. Off toward the river, a flock of birds looked like ants crawling across a blue cloth. Maud straightened her dress. She didn’t need to be thinking such thoughts. She put her hand on her tummy. She needed to get rid of that thing before Billy noticed it. She resolved to walk to Blue’s allotment the next day.
She and Billy spent that evening like the one before, only Maud got on top one time, just like she’d imagined under the tree. Billy let out a little laugh, but then he settled right into a rhythm, and she hung on to the iron rods of the bed over his head. They got up afterward and ate their supper, and then they went out on the porch to enjoy the breeze off the river. They took a quilt with them so they wouldn’t get splinters.
The next morning, Maud gave Billy her aunt’s letter to mail. She told him to put it in Nan’s box, the second in the line, to avoid getting stung. As soon as he rode off, she grabbed her rifle and bullets, a flour sack, and three biscuits. She took an old cow path west toward Blue’s allotment. The air was abuzz with insects and the sun was warming her back. Fairly soon, she was sweating, and she looked forward to the shade of the trees where she thought she remembered squaw root growing. She worked on keeping images of sex away by thinking about Sherlock Holmes. She was doing a fairly good job of that until the barrel of her rifle reminded her of a penis and she got to carrying it with a rhythm that recalled the one she and Billy used in bed. She got a funny feeling in her arm that made her want to thrust her gun in a jabbing sort of way. She shook her head. She was thinking unnatural thoughts. She cradled her gun in both arms and tucked her flour sack in her armpit, careful to keep the biscuits away from her sweat.
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