I stood there listening, nodding when I needed to, and following the dancers with my eyes, but I was so hungry I could hardly see straight. The woodsmoke from out back drifted in, making me slather like a calf. I didn’t know how I was going to make it until they cooked that meat, weak as I was feeling. Ruby was dancing with our daddy and Calvin with Ma. Ma laughed up in his face like she was the one who’d just married him. My poor brother, Jasper, led Calvin’s mother around the floor. That lumbering she-bear knocked dancers down like bowling pins. My sister Crystal was dancing with Martin Jenkins, a farm equipment salesman from Carthage who turned out to be the first in her long string of husbands. Calvin’s oaf of a brother J.D. was making mincemeat out of the feet of Karlene, Ruby’s maid of honor.
A breeze came up and the smoke blew in, but sweat still poured off everybody, who by then were revved up to high gear, swinging and shouting. The musicians played their hearts out, whooping up there on the stage, stomping their feet. Every minute more people streamed through the open doors. They joined the dancers or crowded along the walls, shaking hands with people they knew, waving across the room. By that time word must have gotten out to everyone within fifty miles that a party was in progress, because I starting seeing people I’d never laid eyes on in my life, boys and men mostly—some dressed in coveralls, horse shit still fresh on their shoes, others in what passed as Sunday best—faded-out poplin shirts buttoned up to their scurvy necks.
I couldn’t hardly draw a breath, and the faint feeling came over me again, making the floor tip. The thick smell of smoke and sweat made my stomach heave up and do a flip-flop. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. When I opened them, there was Karlene, standing in front of me with a grin on her face.
“How you doing, Toad? Having a good time?”
Karlene had a pug nose and shiny brown eyes like a teddy bear. Her and Ruby had been thick as thieves since they were five years old. They were a tight little club of just two members, and much as I wanted to be a part of it, they’d never let me in, even for a minute. Karlene tipped her head and smiled at me like that was about to change. Her hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat.
“Listen here, Toad,” she whispered in my ear. “There’s someone here wants to talk to you.”
“Who?” I said, quick as a shot. Edward was so much on my mind, my first thought was that he was there, or that he’d sent word. I got so excited I forgot about feeling faint, or sick, or even hungry.
“A boy. A boy who’s interested in meeting you.”
“Who?” I repeated.
“You sound like a hoot owl, Toad,” Karlene said with a laugh. She’d been taking a nip. I smelled it on her breath. “He’s a Sledge. One of the Sledge boys.”
My heart sunk. Everybody knew the Sledges. They had a reputation in those parts for being rough and dumb, for wild behavior and breeding like rabbits. Sledge men were notorious for running up and down those country roads sticking their peckers in every knothole they could find. There was a slew of them. The oldest ones had kids older than their own brothers and sisters. They all had names from the Bible, which was funny since they showed up at every honky-tonk where they could drink and dance—and they all could dance, which was part of how they got in so much trouble. You could tell one a mile off. All of them had dark coppery hair, kinky as could be, black eyes, broad shoulders, and skinny hips. Wasn’t no surprise that half the folks a hundred miles around looked just like them. Those Sledge men had been going at it for generations.
“What would I want with a Sledge?” I answered.
“Listen here, Toad. Don’t you play high and mighty. He’s a real nice boy. He works with Delbert down at the mine. He wants to know if he can talk to you, if you’ll walk outside with him a minute.”
Delbert was Karlene’s sweetheart, so he must have put her up to it. My nosy cousins were listening in.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s he want?”
“He likes you. Wants to get to know you better.”
I guess word had gone round that Edward had lit out. It stung, but I reminded myself that I wouldn’t be around to suffer much longer, so what difference did it make?
“What’s his name?” I asked. “Where is he?”
Karlene smiled, like she’d won out. “His name’s Abel. He’s right over here.”
She took my arm and led me away, pulling me through the crowd, stepping over and around kids. My cousins twittered and bobbed their heads, trying to see where we were headed. We had to dodge the dancers, who kicked out their feet and twirled each other around. Karlene was more tipsy than I thought. She stumbled, leaned on my arm, and laughed her boozy breath in my face.
“Your daddy know you been drinking?” I asked. He was one of the deacons of our church and would have given her what for if he knew.
“You hush your mouth, Toad, and listen to me. Abel is the sweetest thing. It is not going to hurt you one bit to talk to him. Look, there he is.”
He was standing over on one side of the room with his arms at his sides and his legs together, like a line drawn on the wall. His pants were too short and his jacket too small. A good three inches of his ankles and wrists showed, making his hands and feet—which were already big—look bigger. That kinky hair of his was parted in the middle, standing out on either side like a hayrick. No wonder people said they was part colored. His face was covered with tiny flecks of rusty freckles that made his skin look like fresh-sawed cedar. He’d been waiting for us, you could tell. He was jittery, but he kept a poker face, not showing a trace of a smile as he turned and watched us come toward him. He was so beside himself that he took hold of both Karlene’s hands when we got up next to him and held them like the preacher does when he’s greeting people after service on Sunday.
“Toad, this here’s Abel. Abel, this is Toad,” Karlene said.
She pried his hands loose from hers, swung around, and snapped them onto mine like she was hitching up a carriage. Then she turned tail and tottered away, back into the crowd.
There I stood facing him, his hands locked on my hands, his black eyes fastened on my face. He kneaded and squeezed my hands. His thumb probed my palm. His head bobbed, his mouth opened and closed like a fish, and his Adam’s apple worked up and down, but he couldn’t for the life of him utter a syllable. His face was so earnest, and so scared, I took pity on him. I glanced over at the corner. My cousins’ necks were craned three feet long so they could ogle us. They were chattering like monkeys.
“You want to go outside?” I asked. “Get a little fresh air?”
Boy, did he. He nodded ‘til I thought his head would break off and bounce across the dance floor. He took my elbow and shouldered a swath through the crowd, butting like a billy goat. The fresh air out back was a blessing. There was a big open space behind the banquet hall, with the stables off to one side and the feed store on the other. A clump of sycamores stood in the middle, with two long tables beneath them. Some of the older kids were chasing a dog around them, jumping up on the benches and yelling their heads off. Close to the banquet hall, three of daddy’s younger brothers were getting sides of beef ready to put on the barbecues, where the heat was rising in waves. A few cars had pulled up near the side of the building. A group of men I didn’t recognize squatted down in the dirt alongside them, throwing dice. One of them looked up and jutted his chin at Abel when we walked by.
“You know him?” I asked.
“That my brother.”
“What’s his name?”
“That one?” He looked back like he hadn’t taken note the first time. “Adam.”
His voice was gruff, like talking was a trial for him. Like he’d been yelling all night, or was getting over a cold.
Another boy on the edge of the group looked up at us the same way. Abel gave a little grunt and nodded at him.
“That there’s Esau,” he said.
“He your brother, too?”
> “Yep. Two more inside. Shem and Enoch. They dancing. We all come in the wagon.”
Swooped down on the party like a swarm of locusts, I thought to myself. To him I said, “Goodness me. How many of you are there?”
“Fourteen born, but my ma raising ten.”
He commenced to naming them on his fingers, those boys he already mentioned and a bunch of girls—Naomi, Sarah, Ruth, Dinah, and Rebecca. I looked at his hands while he counted them off. They looked like they were made of leather with big thick fingers and raggedy, scraped-up nails.
“Joe, he got killed down there at the mines. We lost two when the flu came round. And Baby Zillah, she caught the whooping cough. Never made it to her first birthday.”
When we got to the strip of shade near the stables, Abel dragged a metal drum up against the side, pulled his hankie out of his pocket, and spread it on the drum for me to sit on. I looked him over. He wasn’t bad-looking, but he wasn’t no Edward. He looked strong, with a thick neck and ropy arms and legs, and that hair of his wasn’t that ugly orange-red, but darker, a deep rust. There was nothing particularly wrong with him, but nothing really right, either. He wasn’t the kind of boy I’d ever give a second thought to. And the way he talked! I marveled at that. He was a hick with a capital H. I know I ain’t no Shakespeare, but next to him I spoke the queen’s English. When he got the hankie all smoothed out the way he wanted it, he made for me to sit, helping me like I was delicate as a flower.
It felt good to sit, and to be out there in the shade, breathing fresh air. When I was all arranged, he pulled those thin lips of his back in a smile. His teeth were small and yellow, with spaces between each one. Looked like corn kernels. Let’s just say he was more handsome with his mouth closed.
I smelled the hay and horse shit in the stables behind us, heard the horses knocking around in there. “How come you sent Karlene over to get me?” I asked him. “I don’t know you.”
“Well, I know you. I remember you from school.” He grinned at me with those sorry teeth.
“When? I don’t remember you being in school. Not in the least.”
He must have gotten all dolled up for this party, but he was sweating through that too-tight jacket. “I sure remember you,” he said, shifting from foot to foot. “You was the prettiest girl in the whole school. And the smartest.”
Everybody likes a compliment, but I am no fool. When I looked at his face and saw he wasn’t just blowing smoke up my ass, that he really meant what he said, I had to wonder what was wrong with him. Even in my wildest dreams I never imagined I was the prettiest of anything. Smart, maybe, but not the smartest. Nowhere near, unless you were a moron, which seemed to be the case with Abel.
“I stopped school when I was thirteen, but I remember you,” he said, dancing back and forth. A line of skin showed above his socks, which were creeping down into the backs of his shoes. “Went down and worked, you know. Worked there in the mines. Couldn’t keep on there at school. But I always remembered you. Remembered you, then I seen you. In town a couple times. And at that Christmas pageant. At church.”
He looked at me the hungry way you do when you’re aching for someone. I didn’t understand it since he didn’t know the first thing about me. What was there he liked so much? I still couldn’t place him. I thought again that there must be something wrong with him, but then I thought how I felt about Edward, and I took some pity on Abel, because sometimes you just can’t explain these things. When my eyes shifted, he turned to see what I was looking at. His hands floated in front of him like big mitts, ready to pluck whatever I wanted out of the air. He’d talked himself dry. Now he just watched me, that idiot grin on his face.
“I better be going on back, then,” I finally said, hoisting myself off that drum. His black eyes were making me squirm. They were about to bore a hole through me.
“Can I call on you?” he said. “Come out and see you?”
He was so hell-bent, I couldn’t tell him no. I shrugged. “All right. If you want.”
You’d think I gave him a million dollars. He took my hand and nearly squeezed it to death.
“I’ll come on out there, then, Toad. I’ll come see you.”
ABEL CAME TO call the very next day. The day after and the day after that. The days were long that time of year. He came on up to our farm after his work, got out there God knows how, hitching rides, then walking three or four miles up to the house. One thing you can say about Abel is he was determined. Pigheaded as all get out.
Every time he came, he brought me something. A jumping jack he carved out of wood. All the joints—the shoulders and knees and elbows—were attached with little pins. You squeezed the sticks it hung on and it spun around, did tricks. It was real clever. He gave me a hankie with the edges embroidered in red, and hickory nuts he strung together in a necklace. He even brought me a kitten, an orange tom, mean as hell. Tiger, Abel called him. I grew to love that cat. He fetched anything you threw, like a dog. Must have been a Sledge, because within a year a slew of orange kittens was swarming around.
Not two weeks passed before Abel told me he loved me. That just showed how much he knew. He didn’t have the faintest idea how I was still pining for Edward, how I was worried sick about my predicament, and what I felt about him—which was pretty much nothing. I didn’t have no room for that. It was the furthest thing from my mind. You wouldn’t know it, though, the way he fawned and followed and mooned over me every chance he got.
“You got no reason to feel the way you do,” I told him. “You don’t know the first thing about me. You just dreamed up some crazy notion in your own head.”
“I do know,” he answered, kneading my hand like he always did. “It’s all in them dark eyes of yours, Toad. I love everything about you. There’s not one thing I’d change. You are just the kind of woman I want.”
He must have mustered up every ounce of brainpower he had to string that speech together. To this day, more than sixty years after we were married, I still don’t know what made him love me the way he did, come hell or high water. The best answer I got is once he latched on to something, he’d never let go, even if you beat him over the head with a skillet. He was just like a mule that way, dogged as the day is long.
MY MA AND daddy’s house was on a little rise. You could see a distance out toward the west. Us girls’ bedroom was right over the front door. You could sit on the edge of the bed and look out the window, down toward the bottom of the hill where the road was. The drive up to our house was rough, just a rutted double track, grown up with weeds. I sat there of an afternoon during that desperate time and watched the sun drop lower. It got so my heart sank when I spotted Abel at the bottom of the hill, small at first, making his way on up. I didn’t want to see him, face his earnest eyes and big hands opening and closing, him wanting me despite everything, not knowing how miserable I was.
“Go on and leave me alone,” I finally told him. “I’ve had enough of this now. There’s no reason for you to come up here.” There were plenty of girls who’d have been tickled to death to have him. I couldn’t figure out why he was wasting his time with me.
“Just give me a chance, Toad,” he begged. “Please. Get to know me a little before you make up your mind.”
So here he came again right after supper, about seven in the evening. Toiling up that damn hill with his hair fresh parted and slicked down on both sides. I had the heartburn that evening. I kept burping, like I’d drank three or four gallons of sour milk. The last thing I wanted was to see Abel, but I’d given up on everything by then. I didn’t even have the energy to go down to the creek like I’d planned, to tie the rope around that branch and slip the other end over my head. See, it was too much trouble even to kill myself. I threw my life to the wind.
That was the end of September. I was a good two months pregnant. It was harvest time, and dust from the threshers slung a haze in the air, making everything shimmer and glow. The sky turned oran
ge as the sun sank lower, and Abel seemed to be moving slow, taking a long time to get up to the house. Maybe he was tired that night. I watched the dust rising behind him as he traveled along the lane, not really thinking of anything, just mad at how bullheaded he was, how he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I can’t say how the idea came to me. I didn’t piece it together in words, building it up bit by bit like you do with other ideas, with plans. No, this thought just arrived in my mind like something left on your porch that surprises you when you open the door and see it sitting there. The only way I can explain is, every step Abel took up that hill brought me closer to my answer. Just as sure as he was going to keep on walking toward the house, I knew I was going to go through with it. When he passed the pump, I made up my mind. When he got to the tree where we tethered the dogs, I knew it would work. Just as sure as he was going to keep on walking, was going to come on into the yard, step up on the porch, and knock on the door, I knew that things were set, that there was no turning back. By the time I opened the door, it was set in my mind, everything in place.
“Come on inside,” I told him, and that was that.
RASSLING
We had baked fish and boiled potatoes for lunch, with green beans on the side. Boring. Poison Ivy was nattering away about the illegal aliens. You’d think she’s Walter Cronkite the way she talks.
When we were done and everybody was leaving, I flagged Vitus down and said, “Just a minute. I got something else to tell you.” My timing couldn’t have been better because Poison Ivy happened to be walking by at that very minute and her eyes popped out of her head. I gave her a big smile and nestled a little closer to Vitus.
“I talked to my daughter about me and you,” I said close to Vitus’s ear. He isn’t like lots of old men who got bushes sprouting from their earholes and nasty wax built up inside. His is just as fresh and clean as a baby’s, smooth and good smelling. “She’s way against it, Vitus. She objects to us being together.”
Breaking Out of Bedlam Page 17