Good Ground

by Tracy Winegar

  Though Ellis hadn’t gotten the wife of his dreams, he did get a wonderful cook and farmhand out of the arrangement. Clairey was more than proficient at fried okra, with the breading thick and crisp, sweet potatoes generously slathered in butter and a bit of molasses, green beans with a hint of bacon grease for flavoring, thick slices of ham cooked to perfection and served with mashed potatoes, and batter bread that was moist and steaming hot when he broke a piece off. On rare occasions, she would bake up a batch of gingerbread dolloped with fresh whipped cream and sugar chilled outside in a mound of snow next to the front steps.

  There was nothing to rival her biscuits with fried potatoes and milk gravy in the morning. She would cook the bacon up in the skillet then remove it to a dish, leaving the drippings behind. To that, she sprinkled in the flour and mixed it in with a fork until it bubbled and grew thick and pasty. Then she added fresh milk and stirred continuously, waiting for it to begin to boil till it was like pudding. She’d finish it off with salt and pepper to season it. It was the finest white gravy, with not a single lump in the whole batch.

  Ellis would carefully break open a biscuit, laying the steaming halves side by side on his plate and generously bathing them with the gravy. Each bite was to be savored. Some nights, she would take an ear of corn, de-silked but still wrapped in its husk, and lay it in the coals on the hearth. When dinner came around, the corn was good and roasted, piping hot and full of flavor. She used this same trick for baking apples until their supply ran out about mid-winter.

  Now and then, Ellis got the notion to put a chicken’s neck to the block, and there was fresh poultry. Clairey could work her magic on that too, roasting it slow and long all the day, serving it up with potatoes and carrots from the root cellar. With what was left, she made chicken and noodles, where the noodles were cut from scratch, plump and slightly chewy. For lunch, Ellis liked nothing better than to break up a biscuit into rough, loose chunks, put the pieces in a bowl, and drown them in milk. It was simple fare but fast, easy, and so delicious.

  Near the end of winter, he went hunting with his .22 and brought back two lean rabbits that he cleaned in the backyard. Clairey used the meat for a stew that she let simmer all day long. When he came in near dark from working, the aroma met him at the door. His mouth watered and his stomach growled. She dished it up for him, and what should have been gamey meat was so tender, so full of flavor, that it nearly dissolved in his mouth. There was no limit to her culinary abilities. But it was her dumplings that left him wanting more. Just the memory of them made his mouth water.

  With the arrival of warmer weather, Clairey discovered a wild blackberry patch growing down close to the spring, and she picked the berries from it, carrying them back in the well of her upturned skirt. She made blackberry dumplings and served them along with dinner. From then on, Ellis couldn’t wait until she served it up again.

  His belly had never fared so well. He began to notice changes in Clairey as well—the benefits of a consistent diet. Her thin, undernourished frame began to fill out. This was not something someone might spot right off, what with the same stretched out, worn long underwear and sack-like dress she wore on a daily basis. When she needed to wash them in the large galvanized tubs, she would borrow a shirt and pair of overalls of his to wear around until she could put her dress back on after it had dried. But Ellis was a man, and his interest in her—how she moved, her habits and preferences—did not escape the scope of his awareness. He hated himself for it at times, but he couldn’t deny to himself that he was intrigued by her and her femininity. When she took the dress off at night, he glimpsed a hint of her hips and bottom filling out the long underwear. The flesh of her cheeks grew rounded, and she was altogether curvier up top too. The bones that lay beneath her skin that had jutted out at unflattering angles had disappeared, and she was suddenly a woman.

  However, Clairey’s cooking and the second set of hands she lent were the only real benefits of their match. They may have shared the same bed, but that was where it ended. She was a constant presence by Ellis’s side for the work, there to spread his table for meals, and that was the extent of it. Apart from that first night when she seemed to be offering herself to him, Clairey never made any movement toward intimacy, and Ellis was too backward with women to initiate anything on his own. As unlikely as it seemed, they lived as though they were brother and sister.

  One reason was that Ellis was ashamed of how he had come to have Clairey. She wasn’t someone he had desired and courted. She had instead been thrust onto him by her angry father like an unwanted dog. Again, he thought of her slinking after him that first day. A stray, that’s what she was. It was an arrangement of convenience. Nothing more. She really had no place to go, and he would not be the man to turn her out.

  Ellis was too vain to admit to himself that he was somewhat ashamed of Clairey. He felt aggravated with himself for it too, ashamed that he wasn’t a better man, that he was so weak in his character. Clairey was a plain woman. If only she’d do something with herself. She didn’t seem to want to be attractive. But then, maybe she just didn’t know how. She had likely never been taught how to care for her hair or dress in a feminine way. And perhaps he was partly to blame for it too. He hadn’t made any attempts at purchasing any clothing for her. She had no means of her own in acquiring a dress or fabric with which to make one. She relied solely upon him. Her wardrobe up to that point was limited to that single shabby dress, and Ellis would have been embarrassed for any of his friends to see her, let alone to introduce her as his wife.

  Those were not the only complications surrounding their relationship. To Ellis, Clairey seemed skittish, afraid of men and what they were capable of. He knew her experience with her father had probably given her certain notions, that she most likely saw a woman as nothing more than a man’s victim. Maybe that was something she did not want to be. She made no attempts to flirt with him, did not seem to show an interest in a romance. Perhaps she simply didn’t want the inevitable hurt. So, both were held in check by the other.

  There was also the issue of Dulcie Mae. Ellis would have liked to think he was over her. But whenever he allowed himself to do so, he would think back to that picnic they had shared, the feelings she had stirred in him, and the assumption he had made that they would marry. He had thought she shared the same feelings for him, and that was why it had been so painful when he’d learned she’d married Homer Pond. He could see now that it wasn’t entirely her parents’ opposition that had caused her to spurn him. She’d had a chance to make a better life for herself and had simply taken the opportunity when it was presented to her. Ellis could never have given her the kind of life Homer was capable of giving her. He would forever be nothing more than a simple farmer. When he thought about what might have been, he wondered if she ever regretted her decision.

  Then, too, being raised without a mother, living in relative isolation with only his father, he’d never seen how a marriage worked. Oh, he knew plenty of the birds and the bees. He, after all, was raised on a farm and was not ignorant on that account, but understanding a complex woman was much more of a challenge than understanding how a male and a female came together to do more than mate.

  In spite of the passage of time, he never got over a feeling that Clairey was a stranger to him, almost a hired hand merely to be tolerated and hidden away. The reclusion of winter and their inability to travel about freely did much to contribute to their confinement on the farm. Ellis thought it best. It gave him the time he needed to grow used to the idea of Clairey being his wife.

  It took the snow thaw before he brought her to see his kin. On a pleasantly sunny day, winter on the verge of disappearing completely, the skies clear and the roads too, he drove her up to see his daddy’s aunt. Clairey seemed pleased to be away from the farm as they drove along through the greening countryside. Even in the winter months, there was beauty to be seen in this land. The world around them looked like a subdued watercolor, all hazy with romantically indistinct line
s and supple depth to its shades. Mornings, the frost was still thick on the grass, but they saw glimmers of spring peeking through during the day. Clairey had been put away all winter, and while she was apparently used to such a lot as this, she seemed to relish a change when one presented itself. And this was certainly a change for her.

  “This here’s my daddy’s aunt, so’s she’s gettin’ long in years,” he explained. “Her man died nigh on six years ago, and she gets awful lonesome out here on her own.”

  He glanced over and observed Clairey absently twisting at the hem of her dress again. He had seen her do that often. It was a nervous habit of hers, the only thing that really gave away her true state of mind. Everything else about her was calm and still—her face, her voice—but he could see she was anxious.

  “Don’t go on and look at her too long when you first lay eyes on her. A dog got at her when she’s just a child, and she got marks on her face still from it.”

  “That’s awful sad,” she murmured.

  “She don’t care none, I reckon. Had a time to get used to it. But she be terrible afraid of dogs. She won’t have nothin’ to do with ’em. Won’t have one even to keep watch.”

  “Will she like me, you think?” Clairey asked.

  “Don’t know that Aunt Sissy ever met nobody she didn’t like.”

  From the second Sissy opened the door, Ellis wanted out of there. He had warned Clairey about his aunt’s face, had warned her not to be taken off guard. Sissy enthusiastically ushered them in, and instantly Clairey glued her eyes on the poor woman. She seated them in her small front room, where she had a large wood burning heater. The orange flames of the fire were glowing brightly through the slits in the small hinged door through which the wood was fed. The room seemed insufferably hot and stuffy, and Ellis immediately began to sweat.

  Although distracted the entire time by Clairey’s outright gawking, he was able to carry on a conversation. Sissy was a plump little lady with bowed legs and a round face. Her old skin sagged around the harsh white of the jagged lines. When she talked, only half her lower lip moved. The other half, unwilling to cooperate, drooped, paralyzed. She wore a threadbare black wig—far too dark for her coloring—that seemed to be on upside down, the weave that held the hair in place visible in some spots where it had worn through completely.

  Clairey spoke hardly at all during the entire visit, just sat there staring. Sometimes she would try to look down at her hands in her lap, but then her eyes would slowly wander back to Aunt Sissy. Confusion would play out in Clairey’s features; her brow would wrinkle as if she were working something out in her head. Ellis tried several times to get her attention, to motion to her to stop staring, but she never did look at him, only Sissy with her lopsided smile. It was like observing a small child who was unfamiliar with proper etiquette. No matter how discreetly one attempted to stop them, there was just no dignified way of doing it.

  Sissy had them stay on for supper. In true Southern fashion, she fed them a midday meal, covering it with a cloth when they were finished, then pulled the cloth away at dinnertime so that they could eat at it again. Ellis left the two women alone briefly, reluctantly, to chop some wood for Aunt Sissy’s pile. She was too old now to care for animals all on her own, so she had sold them all off after her husband died, living solely off of her garden. Ellis would bring her milk and eggs on a regular basis when the weather permitted, and he would make sure that she had enough to get her through the hard months.

  Chapter 14

  ONCE ELLIS WAS GONE, Aunt Sissy moved in closer to Clairey as if they were conspiring. “He’s a dandy, that a-one,” she said with a strange girlish giggle.

  Clairey nodded absently, uncomfortable with being left alone with the old woman. She glanced several times to the door, as if she might bolt for it at any moment.

  Aunt Sissy didn’t seem to notice. “That boy is a blessing to me. Always was.”

  Clairey occupied herself by concentrating heavily at picking the hem of her dress to try to avoid looking at Aunt Sissy’s ruined face. “Uh huh.”

  “I bore two of my own,” Aunt Sissy confided. “One was a boy and the other ’un a girl.”

  “They close by to you?” Clairey asked politely.

  “Just out yonder.”

  “That’s real nice. Must be a comfort to you.”

  “They’s buried up on the hill there.”

  It registered in Clairey’s brain what Aunt Sissy was saying, and her face fell. She was ashamed that she had said something so thoughtless. “How sad,” she whispered.

  “My girl, Elsie, was born of ’em first. Oh, she come out cryin’ and never did stop. Poor child. There was nothin’ that could hep it. She wouldn’t eat nothin’, and she just cried and cried. Couldn’t tell what was the matter with her.” Aunt Sissy told her story in a casual manner, with the lack of emotion that distance of time allowed. “She died just a short piece after she’s born.

  “And then there was my Thermal. He cried an awful lot too. Pitiful little thing. He lasted longer. I had him for six months afore he died. He’s layin’ on the bed back yonder in the room, and he just rolled over, and there’s blood coming from his mouth. And he’s gone, jus’ like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Jus’ like that.”

  Clairey could see a look of sadness, of pain, flash in the old woman’s eyes. Strangely, it reminded her of a wounded animal. It was a brief moment of suffering, and then it was gone.

  Aunt Sissy said matter-of-factly, “There wasn’t no more after that. But Ellis, he come round and let me love on him, and I helt him on my lap and treated him like he’s one of mine. And he don’t mind that I fussed over him.”

  She smiled brightly, her eyes wandering over to the window, where the two of them could see Ellis as he chopped wood. “He come to the house and done things to make me laugh. Silly little things a child does, you know. Sometimes, he’s a-bringin’ flowers, other times a-bringin’ a purty little somethin’ he found here and there. And he’s so bright. Looked like the sun had lit on his face. Took the hurt away some to have him round.”

  Clairey had been raised to be distrustful. All things were to be considered a threat. And anything said should be deciphered for its double meaning, for there could always be a hidden agenda of suffering and humiliation behind a person’s seemingly innocent remarks. So, naturally she wondered if Aunt Sissy was trying to bond with her, or if she was giving warning that Ellis was hers and Clairey should keep her distance from him. But the old woman seemed guileless. Clairey suspected there were no ill motives. Whether malice or friendship was intended was not clear, but Clairey felt an empathy for the woman that left her feeling gloomy.

  When Ellis came back to the house, Aunt Sissy was prattling away, and Clairey still had her big, deep-brown eyes glued directly on the disfigured woman. Ellis cursed her in his head, angry that she hadn’t followed his directive not to stare.

  Clairey just didn’t seem all that smart to him. Why wouldn’t she look away?

  “Well, we ortta be gettin’ back on home now, Aunt Sissy. We got them animals out yonder to tend to,” he told her.

  “Now, you-uns come round again soon, you hear? I do relish good company such as you.”

  “Sure we will,” he promised. He motioned for Clairey to follow him.

  She came out of the spell with a slight smile. “I thank you for havin’ us,” she said politely.

  “An ole woman gets awful lonesome,” Sissy replied, patting her hand softly. “It’s good of you to come on by. Now you take care of that boy. He’s a good ’un.”

  On the ride back, neither of them spoke. Ellis was afraid that if he said anything, he would just lay right into her with a whole string of scathing remarks over her ignoring his instructions not to stare at Sissy’s deformity. Clairey didn’t seem to have anything to say, either. She just sat there, dumbly picking at the hem of her dress again.

  After a while, he finally found words. “What’d you mean a-lookin’ at her that a-way?
I done tole you afore we even come not to look on her face.”

  She seemed surprised. “I didn’t look on her face.”

  “Why, ’course you did. I done watched you do it. Whole time we was there, you was a-lookin’ and a-lookin’.”

  “I weren’t lookin’ at her face.”

  “What was you lookin’ at then? ’Cause I sure thought you was. I mean, it seemed like you was to me. Seemed like you wouldn’t take your eyes offen her.”

  As Ellis chastised her, Clairey was cringing, shrinking away from him. Like an animal that feared a ruthless master, she feared him.

  “Go on and tell me,” he prodded. “What was you a-lookin’ at?”

  Clairey watched him with her brown eyes full of fear, not daring to say anything.

  “Well?” he pressed.

  Her voice was small, timid, and strained. “I’s lookin’ at the hair of her head,” she finally admitted.

  Ellis thought about it briefly and then burst out laughing. “Her hair?” he repeated.

  “It weren’t right,” Clairey replied.

  Ellis saw her hesitate, as if she were wondering if she should laugh too or if he was on the verge of giving her an earful and this was the calm before the storm. It was something he could picture her father doing, laughing before he laid into her.

  “Somethin’ was off with it,” she continued.

  “That there was a wig,” he explained.

  “Do what?”

  “A wig. A hair piece.” He could see she was still lost. “Aunt Sissy went and sent away for it all the way to Atlanta.”

  “She done sent away for her hair?” Clairey asked.

  “She says it’s genuine real hair. But she had it for a long time now, and I s’pose it’s seen better days.”

  “Now I’m awful sorry if I done made her feel bad. You think she thought I’s lookin’ on her face?” Clairey seemed genuinely horrified that she might have offended the old woman.