by Donis Casey
Alafair patted Phoebe’s arm. “Calm down, now,” she soothed. “I never said we were going to forbid you to see him. You just ask him over first chance you get.”
Phoebe said, “Yes, ma’am,” but she looked troubled, and Alafair thought that Phoebe was afraid that John Lee’s father would be the real impediment to their relationship. It hurt Alafair to admit to herself that this was probably the case.
***
It was a relief to finally get into the dark warmth of the house. They walked together into the large parlor, which was brightened by tall windows that covered two walls. Two doors in the back of the room led to the bedrooms, and to the left was the entrance to the enormous kitchen. The parlor was furnished with a settee and two horsehair-stuffed armchairs, plus several slat-backed chairs, a rocker and a few side tables. A fine old upright piano graced one corner, and two narrow iron cots were discreetly tucked head to head into another. A large quilt frame was appended to the ceiling by a rope and pulley at each corner, to keep it out of the way when not in use. The pot-belly stove in the center of the parlor was fired up enough to take the chill out of the air, but the real heat came from the giant wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen, where all six of Alafair’s other daughters were in a frenzy of meal preparation.
Dark-haired Martha, twenty and the eldest, was the general of this evening’s repast, and directing her troop with a skill that was beginning to approach Alafair’s own. Almost-nineteen-year-old Mary, the best if sloppiest cook in the house, was spooning fried potatoes into a ceramic dish. Alice was in charge of dessert, since she had a particular talent for pies, and tonight’s offerings were already cooling on wire racks on the cabinet. The youngest girls, Ruth, Blanche, and Sophronia, ages twelve, seven, and six respectively, were setting the table with much rattling and clanking of dishes.
“You girls done with your lessons?” Alafair asked the young ones, as she hung Phoebe’s coat on the rack next to the back door.
The two little girls shrieked and skipped and both spoke at once, somehow conveying the message that they had no homework tonight. Blanche dropped a serving spoon on the floor and gazed at it in befuddlement before Ruth scooped it up and handed it back to her. “Now you got to go wash it off,” Ruth informed her disdainfully.
“Ma,” Blanche implored, indignant, “I just swept the floor this afternoon.”
“Go wash the spoon, Blanche,” Alafair told her, ignoring the faces that the girls made at each other as Blanche flounced off toward the wash basin with the spoon.
“I see Phoebe has deigned to grace us with her presence,” Mary interjected.
“Phoebe was occupied with her new beau,” Alice explained.
Mary looked up from her spooning, interested. Mary was blond and blue-eyed, like Alice, but not so tall. She wore her light hair in a careless braid as thick as a rope down her back, and had a habit of flicking the tail of it against her cheek when she was contemplating devilment. Now, she fingered the blue-ribboned tail dangerously. “Phoebe has a beau?” she asked. “I thought she had made a vow to die a maiden because there’s no man in the world good enough for her.”
“No, you’re thinking of Martha,” Alice told her gleefully. “Phoebe’s the one who would just dry up and blow away with embarrassment if a boy looked in her direction.”
“Has Phoebe got a beau, Mama?” Sophronia asked. “What’s a beau?”
“You all just mind your business and leave Phoebe alone,” Alafair scolded. “Phoebe, go out to the porch and draw up a pitcher of buttermilk. And be quick about it. I hear Daddy and the boys coming up to the house already.”
Phoebe gave her a grateful sidelong glance and left out the back door with a haste that was just short of unseemly.
“Now, you girls leave Phoebe alone,” Alafair warned, giving Alice an especially stern glower. “She’s just trying to be friendly to that poor Day boy, and I think he could use all the friends he could get.”
“John Lee Day,” Martha said, intrigued.
“Is Phoebe going to marry John Lee Day?” Blanche asked.
“No,” Alafair assured her. “Go get some more big spoons for these dishes here.”
The front door slammed open and Shaw Tucker and his sons and their dog, Charlie-dog, spilled into the parlor, ripping off coats and hats and scarves and piling them haphazardly on the coat tree. The two black, white and tan ’coon hounds, Buttercup and Crook, who followed Shaw almost everywhere, stayed outside. “We’re home, Ma,” Shaw boomed, like he did every evening of the world. “It’s drizzling rain. We’re froze!” The girls poured into the parlor to greet their father, and Alafair followed behind. She stood in the kitchen door and watched fondly as Shaw indulged in his favorite ritual of kissing his seven beloved daughters hello.
Alafair’s dark brown eyes softened. After twenty-one years of marriage, the sight of Shaw Tucker still made Alafair’s heart warm up. He was on the tall side, close to six feet, and slim as a rail still, hard from the physical work of a large farm upon which he raised horses and mules, a few cows, a few crops. Not one gray hair streaked his head full of dark brown hair, and his amber and green eyes shone with humor and intelligence. A toothy white smile flashed at his girls from beneath his big bush of a mustache. Alafair was always amused at how the girls clung to him like vines when he came in from work in the evening, as though he had been gone for weeks, and how he always gave each of them a showy smooch in order of age.
As Shaw and his daughters played out their evening ritual, the boys, finally skinned out of their winterwear, made their way over to their mother for their own quieter greeting. There were only two of them, sorely outnumbered in this house of females, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in presence. The elder, Gee Dub, was dark-eyed and curly-haired, but otherwise the image of his father, even down to his never-fail good nature. He was amazingly grown-up for a fifteen-year-old boy, and always had been old for his years. He had never given his parents any trouble to speak of, and Alafair could hardly credit her luck with him. Somehow, she just knew deep inside it couldn’t last—no child was such an unmitigated joy. Charlie-boy, on the other hand, had kept his parents on their toes for all of his ten years. His big blue eyes were deceptively innocent. He wasn’t a particularly noisy boy, or naughtier than most, but he was the hardest-headed child to ever draw breath. Once he made up his mind to do something, he did it in the face of punishment, or the wrath of God.
Gee Dub leaned over to give his mother a casual kiss. She was continually amazed at how easy he was about affection, for a boy. “Daddy’s in rare form, tonight,” he observed.
“Daddy always paints everything large,” Alafair conceded. She grabbed Charlie and squeezed him to her with a noisy smack on the cheek, just to tease him.
“Oh, Ma, quit now,” he managed, squirming, and Alafair laughed. The big yellow shepherd, who was Charlie’s particular friend, nudged at her skirt, and she rubbed his head. “You’ve just got to have some loving, too, don’t you, Charlie-dog?” She straightened. “You fellows are freezing! There’s hot water for you on the stove. Go wash up.”
The boys and the dog ran for the back porch as Shaw headed toward her with his arms full of daughters and Blanche and Sophronia dragging on his knees. “Y’all sit down, now,” he ordered the girls, “while I kiss your mama and wash my hands.”
“You couldn’t wash your hands and then kiss their mama?” Alafair teased.
“First things first,” he told her, giving her an authoritative kiss on the mouth. “Where’s Phoebe?” he asked, when he drew back. “I’m missing a girl.”
“Out on the back porch getting some buttermilk,” Alafair told him. “She had a little adventure today and the girls were teasing her. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it at the table.”
***
When they were all seated properly in their places, including Phoebe, Shaw folded his hands on the table and silence fell. “Charlie, would you say the blessing tonight?”
Heads bowed
and Charlie drew himself up. “Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies. In Jesus’ name, amen,” he intoned.
“Amen,” all said, in chorus, and the clatter of self-service began.
Supper in the evening was a lighter meal than midday’s dinner, and consisted mainly of leftovers from the main meal of the day, along with fresh cornbread and couple of newly opened home-canned vegetables from Alafair’s store to round out the meal. Wednesdays’ fare, according to custom, was a huge pot of soupy brown beans and fatback, and home fries with onions on the side. The butter, white at this time of year, and its resultant buttermilk, were fresh that morning. The sweetened carrots and cooked tomatoes had been canned in the summer. Shaw and Alafair both liked to float raw onion in their beans, so Martha had chopped a bowlful. Each member of the family had his or her opinion on the proper way to eat cornbread in conjunction with beans. Some liked to open a square of cornbread on the bottom of the bowl and spoon beans over it. Some considered cornbread wasted if it was not slathered with butter and eaten along with the beans. Others preferred to crumble their cornbread into their buttermilk. Some preferred a combination.
Shaw was a butter man himself, dolloping it into his beans and onto his carrots and potatoes as well as his cornbread. “Who has something interesting to tell me?” he asked in the midst of his buttering.
“I seen Mr. Leonard cutting across the back field over by the creek again today,” Charlie told him. “He was riding a mule and toting some big old saddlebags.”
“Which Mr. Leonard was that?” Shaw wondered.
Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. All them Leonards look alike to me.”
“I swear, Shaw,” Alafair interjected. “That path to the creek is getting to be a regular highway for the neighbors. Maybe you ought to post some signs.”
“Oh, it ain’t that big a problem, is it?” Shaw said. “The path only cuts across our property for about twenty yards, and it’s a mighty long way from the house, more than a mile.”
“Phoebe is going to marry John Lee Day,” Blanche piped in, before Shaw could consider the path problem any more.
“Is that so?” he said offhandedly. A man with nubile daughters grew accustomed to unfounded rumors of marriage. “When did you decide this, Phoebe?”
“Oh, Daddy, you know that ain’t true,” she replied, dripping with scorn at her little sister. “I met John Lee on the road and he walked me up to the house and now nobody can talk of nothing else.”
“It’s true, Daddy,” Alice admitted, her eyes bright with mischief. “We’re just starved for entertainment.”
Shaw laughed at that, for his children were masters of creating their own entertainment. “I see that boy out in the fields every once in a while,” he said. “He sure is a worker, and always respectful when we’ve had occasion to speak. Truly, I think he’s the only one who does a lick of work on that scraggly farm of theirs. I swear he’s the only one over there I ever speak to, though.”
“I barely know Miz Day to see her,” Alafair confessed. “It’s shameful not to know your neighbors any better, but it seems like they prefer to keep to themselves and shun company.”
Shaw nodded. “It’s strange,” he agreed. “Do you remember Harley’s old dad?” he asked Alafair. “He was a fine man. He had a share in the brick plant, I believe.”
“I know Jeb Stuart Day,” Charlie said in. “He’s just my age, and we play sometimes. His daddy don’t let him come over here, but I see him at school when he comes.”
“Me and Fronie play with Mattie and Frances,” Blanche contributed. “They’re nice, but they don’t come to school all the time, either.”
“I talk at John Lee some,” Gee Dub told them. “Sometimes our cattle get in together over by the pond, so every once in a while we meet when I go to bring in the stock. He’s nice. He really admires the horses, Daddy. Said he wishes they could afford to raise horses. I used to be friends with that oldest girl, Maggie Ellen, but I haven’t seen her in ages. I heard she got married and is living in Checotah now.”
“They’re poor, ain’t they, Mama?” Ruth asked.
“There’s no shame in being poor,” Alafair told her.
“There’s poor and then there’s poor, Ma,” Alice noted.
“That’s hardly the kids’ fault,” Martha pointed out.
“No, it ain’t,” Shaw agreed, “and I’m pleased that you all have made friends with them sad ragamuffins. But the sadder truth is that Mr. Day is not a man I want you kids consorting with. So it’s all right if they want to come over here and play or visit, as long as they come up to the house and say hello first. But I don’t want you kids going over there onto the Day property.” He looked at Phoebe. “Especially you girls,” he said. “Y’all understand?” There was nothing stern about his tone, but all the children took serious note of what he was saying. There was a straggle of “yes, Daddy”s. Shaw’s eyes crinkled over the cornbread he had raised to his mouth as he looked across the table at Alafair. A wordless parental agreement to discuss this topic later.
“Now, what have the rest of you been up to all day?” he wondered.
***
That night it snowed; fat, wet flakes that fell thick and drifted deep. In her dream, Alafair was running toward town, toward the doctor, as fast as she could go, her dying baby in her arms. Her lungs were bursting, but the faster she ran, the farther away the town became. Alafair awoke with a start, her heart pounding and her cheeks wet with tears. The snow sat deep and heavy wherever it fell, and as dawn approached, Alafair could hear cracks like pistol fire as tree limbs succumbed to the weight of the snow that blanketed them.
Chapter Three
The snow lay on the ground for three days, deep and white under a gray sky, ribbed with the black of bare tree limbs and half-covered buildings, a black and white world. On Saturday evening, the clouds began to break up and the wind shifted, and the thaw started. By nightfall, the roof edges had cleared and black ruts stood in the roads and footpaths. The thaw continued in earnest all day Sunday, and by Monday morning only patches remained under the trees and in the shady spots, and anomalous drifts on the north sides of buildings.
It was young Frances Day who spotted her father’s ear protruding from the melting snow that drifted against the house. She sat for several hours next to the wall in the sun, playing with her corn cob doll and watching fascinated as the rest of the man emerged from the snow. He was lying on his right side with his hands pillowing his head, as though he had lain down against the house for a little nap. When he was pretty much uncovered, Frances notified her mother that she had found Daddy.
Not that they had been looking for him. Harley made a habit of going off on a drunk for a week at a time, which was always a nice respite for Mrs. Day and the children. He had been missing for five days this time, ever since the evening of the big snow. Now a general atmosphere of relief prevailed among the surviving Days once it had become clear they no longer had to anticipate his return.
***
Monday was washday in Alafair’s scheme of things, as it had been with the women in her family since time out of mind. The clothes were gathered and the beds stripped while breakfast was being made. After breakfast and before her help was called away by the demands of work and school, Alafair and the girls separated the clothes while Shaw and the boys toted her iron cauldron and wash tubs and hand-cranked wringer into the yard for her. Alafair started the fire as the girls formed a loose bucket brigade between the pump and the kettle.
After Shaw and the kids had left, Alafair was joined by the wife of one of their tenants, a Negro woman by the name of Georgie Welch, whom Alafair paid to assist her in doing the laundry for eleven people. Georgie was a pleasant, talkative, competent young woman with an infant of her own. Alafair enjoyed her company and loved playing with the baby, a boy named Doll, whom Georgie kept in a large, willow-lath basket while they worked.
While the water was coming to a boil, Alafair dumped a measure of soap and t
he whites into the cauldron, which she agitated with a broom handle for a while, then left to soak in the soapy water while Georgie prepared the smaller tubs for scrubbing, rinsing, starching, and bluing.
While the whites were being boiled and stirred to Alafair’s satisfaction, she and Georgie scrubbed and rinsed the clothing, and starched selected Sunday pieces as stiff as wood. As she finished each piece, she rolled it up and placed it into a wicker basket. When the basket was full, the women stirred the sheets for awhile before pouring the bluing water into the cauldron. It took a lot of stirring and bluing and boiling before the whites were eye-piercingly white enough to suit Alafair. When that moment came, Alafair threw a bucket of soapy water on the fire, and the women carried their baskets to the clothes line to hang clothes while the sheets cooled enough to rinse and wring.
Alafair was thankful that the freeze was over and the wind was moving, though the air was moist and it would take the clothes longer to dry than usual. She rather enjoyed hanging clothes, since it gave her time to socialize, or when she was on her own, to think. As she hung the clothes, she took inventory of all the new holes and stains and rips that she had missed while sorting, planning her mending and deciding who needed a new shirt or skirt and what items were almost ready for the rag bag.
After the clothes were hung, Alafair and Georgie returned to the cooling kettle and lifted out the sodden whites with the broom handle. Wringing and rinsing and wringing and rinsing the unwieldy pieces of cotton big as sails was the most tiresome part of the job. When they finally got the things draped over the remaining clothesline and a couple of spare bare bushes, they were tired, and allowed themselves a couple of gusty sighs before they dumped the used water in bucketsful at the bases of the shrubs and trees around the yard. Alafair raked out the fire and Georgie rinsed and cleaned the smaller tubs, and returned them to their places on the work benches on the back porch, but they left the big iron kettle for Shaw to move back into the shed. Alafair paid Georgie a quarter and two quarts of canned apples, played with the baby in the kitchen for a few minutes while she caught up on Georgie’s family, then both women retired to their respective domains to start dinner for their families.