by Amy Conner
Five minutes later, my mother banged back through the front door, down the long center hall, and into the kitchen, a Fury in a pillbox hat. The hem of her skirt was covered in grass stains.
“The little hooligan got away,” she snapped. “Methyl Ivory! What were you doing all day? How could you let Annie play with that, that little . . . weasel?”
Methyl Ivory was imperturbable before my mother’s wrath, but I felt her stiffen. Her voice composed, she said, “Annie s’posed to stay in the backyard, where’s I can keep an eye on her, ma’am. I plenty busy cleaning this house, cooking dinner, doin’ the laundery.”
Sensing things were not going my way, I commenced a noisy demonstration of sniveling victimhood. Methyl Ivory gave me a discreet push, and I slid off her lap into disgrace, my bare feet coming to rest on the cool linoleum. A tear plopped wetly on my big toe.
“That’s it,” my mother announced in disgust. She yanked off her gloves. Rummaging in her purse, she fished out her cigarettes and fired one up with a snap of her lighter. “If it’s not one thing, Mercy Anne Banks, it’s another,” she said, expelling smoke in a furious stream. “Before you lose an eye or end up in the back of a police car, I’m sending you to stay with Aunt Too-Tai in the country. You’ve got to learn to be more responsible.”
“But I don’t want to go to Aunt Too-Tai’s,” I squalled. “It’s boring. And she, she . . . doesn’t have air-conditioning!” Rattling window units had been installed late last summer when my father had finally saved enough money to get the house—a big old Greek Revival relic—air-conditioned. This summer, we would no longer be too embarrassed about the box-fans on the floor to invite people over for cocktails. The air-conditioning seemed like an excellent reason not to be banished.
“Too bad, missy,” my mother announced, looking grim. She stabbed her cigarette out in the sink. “I’ll go write her a letter right this minute.” Aunt Too-Tai lived so far out in the country, she didn’t have a telephone either.
My summer vacation was going to be ruined.
Awaiting Aunt Too-Tai’s reply, my mother made sure that I was practically chained to the rusted swing set in the backyard for the duration. Joel and the other Bad Kids leaned over the fence, daring me to climb out and join them on expeditions of thievery and random vandalism.
“We’re going down to the creek,” Joel taunted. The creek was an enormously attractive drainage ditch across Fortification Street, past the old garage above the railroad tracks. It was full of interesting household debris and deformed frogs: just this past spring we’d found half a dozen wriggling tadpoles with two heads. “Too bad you can’t come.” Joel sniggered. Then he lobbed a brown paper bag over the fence. “Here’s something to play with, crybaby.” I glared at him from my perch on the top of the slide.
“Joel Donahoe, I hate you,” I shouted.
After the Bad Kids left, though, I slid down the scalding metal chute and ambled over to investigate the bag. It was full of dog shit, probably the product of King, Dr. Thigpen next door’s German shepherd. I dropped it in the grass in my rush to report this latest infamy to Methyl Ivory. She was in the living room, watching As the World Turns on the black-and-white TV while she ironed my daddy’s shirts.
“Methyl Ivory, Joel Donahoe threw dog shit in our backyard,” I complained. “Can’t I go beat him up?” I held up my fists like Cassius Clay. “I’ll teach him not to be so mean.”
“Don’t you say shit.” Methyl Ivory tested the iron with a finger-flick of water from the tall, condensation-beaded glass on the ironing board beside her. The iron hissed.
“You said it,” I pointed out.
“Talk like that why you going to the country. You best stay inside till you mama get home from the bridge party.” I was speechless at her indifference. How could she not understand that this salvo couldn’t be ignored? If I was going to be gone for weeks this summer, who was going to defend our home and our honor? I had a vision of stinking brown bags in heaps all over the backyard. “Go on now, read one of your books,” Methyl Ivory advised me.
“But Joel Donahoe—”
“That boy gone end up in the ’formatory ’stead of the work farm, he keep at it.” Serenely sure of her predictions as ever, she added, “You gone have a good time with your old auntie this summer ’fore you come home and go to third grade. All kinds of chirren’d love it out there. Didn’t I hear your mama say Miss Too-Tai got a horse for you to ride?”
I folded my arms and sniffed, refusing to be mollified. It wasn’t a horse; it was a mule, and Aunt Too-Tai’s mule, Bob, was even more ancient than she was. Besides, the whole barn area had been off-limits to me whenever the family had made the pilgrimage to Chunky to visit: my mother wanted me to keep my company clothes clean, and Daddy worried about hookworms.
At any rate, the lingering hope of appealing to my father for relief was utterly extinguished that evening when he went outside to light the barbeque and stepped on the paper bag.
Late in the day the next Saturday afternoon, I was spying from behind Dr. Thigpen’s oak tree as a dusty black Chevrolet rolled into the driveway. My great-aunt Theodosia Imogene sat in the front seat. Long before my time, my grandmother Isabelle had nicknamed her Tootie. When their mother told her to stop it, she called her little sister Too-Tai instead. Great-Grandmother Gooch had wisely let that particular dog sleep in peace, probably knowing from experience with the awful Isabelle that things could only get worse.
Aunt Too-Tai got out of the passenger side in her bib overalls and men’s work shoes. She adjusted the wide-brimmed straw hat on her head and walked up the steps to the front door. Her farm man, George, stayed with the car.
I’d seen George before, of course, but I’d never heard him say anything. He was the oddest man, taller than my daddy, with long, skinny flamingo legs that seemed like they should bend backward at the knee. Unlike a flamingo, though, George was black, a black that was almost blue. His hair was a curling, steel-wool silver, but most fascinating of all was the white-veined scar twisting his full upper lip, winding in a mysterious serpentine to his left nostril. I’d imagined he’d caught it in one of the savage-looking machines piled up in my aunt’s barnyard. Sidling closer to the car in shameless voyeurism, I stared at the scar while George pretended I wasn’t gawking at him. Daddy lugged my little cardboard suitcase and box of books down the steps. George unfolded like a stepladder from the front seat and arranged my worldly goods in the cavernous trunk while my parents and Aunt Too-Tai discussed the terms of my exile.
“Make her wear shoes,” Daddy stated. “The hog pen is awfully close to the house.”
“And keep an eye on her,” my mother broke in. Her eyes met mine with a fearsome promise. “You’ve got to be more responsible, Annie.”
But I was already planning on making a run for it. I eyed the Chevrolet. I could steal the car. I already knew how to drive, although after I’d run the Buick into the garage last summer I hadn’t been able to practice since. I was certain I could join the French Foreign Legion once I got to Africa, but ten minutes later I was fuming in the back of the Chevrolet while George drove and Aunt Too-Tai smoked all the way to Chunky, some forty miles of two-lane road from home.
After my dreadful behavior since Starr left, responsibility was a big theme that summer. Undaunted, though, on my first day of vacation I’d conducted a scientific inquiry: I put dead houseflies in the freezer ice cube trays and filled them with water so I’d have my own personal Ice Age specimens, timing the experiment with my late grandfather’s gold pocket watch. When my daddy came home and went to make old-fashioneds, he discovered the watch atop a container of ice cream. Dr. Thigpen discovered the flies when he finished his old-fashioned and rattled the ice cubes to signal my dad for another round.
The summer was young, so over the course of the next week I’d gone on to set a fire in the barbeque pit with sticks from the backyard, using my mother’s silver sandwich scissors to make s’mores with pilfered marshmallows; dye the Poseys’ whit
e poodle pink in a tin-tub bath infused with scarlet crepe paper; steal the entire block’s mail from the boxes to play postman and, after it began to rain, leave every scrap of it—wedding invitations, bills, letters from the government, etc.—under the ligustrums. When in desperation my mother enrolled me in an unsuspecting playgroup in another, far-off neighborhood so as to keep me out of trouble, I told all the little girls it wasn’t true, babies being born under piles of cabbage leaves in a gestational truck garden. Now everybody’s command of the facts of life was clinically accurate thanks to my father’s commitment never to lie to his child.
And concluding with the incident involving the off-limits scissors in the garage, this was all accomplished in seven days, a span of time nothing short of biblical considering the damage I’d done. Since these were the days before time-outs, I’d received seven spankings followed by seven lectures on responsibility. I should think before I acted. I should respect my parents’ wish to live a peaceful life on Fairmont Street. Did I want to grow up to be a lady, or was I going to jail? Methyl Ivory’s being inconvenienced wasn’t mentioned at all, but she let me know about it just the same.
“Why you want to cut up, child? Don’t you know I got the heart-flops?”
Summer in the country was the price of irresponsibility. I should have been reflecting on my behavior that long afternoon in the back of the Chevrolet, but the combination of Aunt Too-Tai’s Pall Malls, the road, and strenuous unrepen-tance put me to sleep.
George must have carried me inside the house when we arrived because I woke early the next morning on a pallet beside Aunt Too-Tai’s bed. I yawned and scratched, feeling grumpy as a damp cat, unwilling to get up and explore my new surroundings. The ceiling fan creaked overhead, pushing a tepid wash of air to ruffling the lace curtains, fluttering the hem of my aunt’s nightdress hanging from a hook on the bedroom door. She was already risen and gone, as evidenced by her voice coming from through the open window from outside.
“Hand me that crescent wrench.” A clanging racket commenced. “Dammit, hold her steady.” Some large piece of machinery struggled to life with a series of barking coughs. I wandered to the window and stuck my head out into the day through the moon vine overtaking the side of the house. Aunt Too-Tai and George were beside a coffin-like, wheeled contraption containing a mess of gears, belts, and toothed cogs. The dew-covered tractor hitched to this mystery chugged blue exhaust into the brilliant eastern sky. The engine’s growl covered my aunt’s voice, but she was deep in a conversation with George. His hands were planted on his thin hips, George’s scarred face dubious. He shook his head, and his mouth moved. My aunt leaned in to hear his reply, putting her hand on his shoulder. So George could talk, I thought, if he wanted to.
By the time I went to the bathroom, put on my shorts, shirt, and shoes, and scraped my thick blond hair into a messy ponytail, Aunt Too-Tai was in the kitchen. It was a long, narrow room with an old-fashioned iron stove at one end, a deep porcelain sink, a table, three chairs, and a new refrigerator.
“I’m hungry,” I declared. My stomach was rumbling.
“Here,” she said. Aunt Too-Tai handed me a spoon and a bowl with some dry cornflakes in it. “Milk’s in the icebox.”
“Where’s the sugar?”
“Rots your teeth,” my aunt threw over her shoulder. She was at the sink, washing her big-knuckled hands with a cake of yellow soap. “We don’t keep sugar here,” Aunt Too-Tai added.
Glaring at her back, straight and tall as a white-haired telephone pole, I didn’t dare argue, for it had dawned on me that my aunt was no Methyl Ivory, making sugar-butter sandwiches whenever I wanted. Instead, I ate my cereal without sweetening while Aunt Too-Tai drank black coffee. She lit a cigarette, popping the match head into a bloom of light. The sharp, sweet scent of cigarette smoke reminded me of my mother, and in that moment I missed her desperately. It would be months before I’d be allowed to go home.
“We’re not going to church this morning,” my aunt announced without preamble. That was good. A more useless waste of time hadn’t been invented, in my experience: even school was preferable to the eternity I spent squirming on St. Andrew’s varnished oak pews in my Sunday dress with its scratchy petticoats.
“We’re going to the garden,” Aunt Too-Tai said, “before it gets too hot. The tomatoes are covered with cutworms.”
The sun was well up when we stood at the edge of the garden’s long rows of growing things. Our shadows, one tall and one much smaller, stretched before us in the morning. A haze of moisture lifted off the plants, soon to evaporate in the day’s coming heat.
“Take off your shoes,” Aunt Too-Tai said. I piled my Keds and ankle socks beside a coiled garden hose. “Here.” She handed me a large glass pickle jar. “I’ll pay you a nickel for every five worms you put in this jar,” my aunt said, pulling on a pair of work gloves.
“A nickel?” Even in 1964, it wasn’t much.
Nodding, Aunt Too-Tai parted the towering rows of tasseled sweet corn and at once vanished from view. Her voice faded as she called, “If you’re thirsty, get a drink from the hose. I’ll be back in about an hour.” Corn stalks rustled, and I was alone except for the conversational grunts of the hogs in the nearby pen.
The dirt was cool and damp between my toes. I eyed the tomato plants with misgiving but didn’t mean to ignore my instructions—not yet, anyway. Squatting beside the row, I wondered if there would be enough worms to be worthwhile. Tomatoes hung in green-striped balloons from their staked vines, and I soon discovered that hidden underneath their leaves were armies of cutworms. I held one up for a better look: the front end and the back end both had faces. The worm writhed as I dropped it in the pickle jar, coiling into a fat bud of destruction.
“That’s one.” I was determined to keep count. Surely by the time I’d captured a jarful of worms, I’d have enough money to support myself when I took the Chevrolet and drove off to join the Foreign Legion. The garden was still in the hot morning, and sweat ran down the back of my checked shirt. A mockingbird called, another answered, and the verdant aroma of the tomato plants, rich and sharp as gasoline, filled my nose while a smiling breeze tickled the back of my neck. Engrossed in cutworm removal, I was fully into plans for getting to Africa and concentrating on the best way to stow away on a freighter when two big work boots appeared beside me in the dirt.
“I got fifty-nine, Aunt Too-Tai,” I said. “You owe me a bunch of nickels.” I looked up, squinting in the sun. The boots belonged to George. His ruined face was serious, arms in his faded denim shirt folded across his thin chest.
“Hey, Mr. George,” I mumbled. I couldn’t take my eyes off that scar. Maybe he would finally say something. But no, his eyes were patient as he sighed just once and glanced in the direction my aunt had taken.
“Oh—you want Aunt Too-Tai?” I asked.
He nodded.
“She went thataway.” I pointed a dirty finger at the corn where a thin plume of cigarette smoke wafted. With a nod that might have been a thank-you, George disappeared between the tall, green spears.
“Did you get the spreader going?” Several rows over, my aunt’s voice was faint but clear. “Just leave it behind the barn, then. We’ll fill it with that moldy hay, spread the bad stuff over the south pasture after you’re done with the gear box.” Shrugging, I went back to work. Sixty-one, sixty-two . . . A sibilant whisper of corn shocks meant Aunt Too-Tai’s return, and I clapped the lid on the pickle jar just as I finished the row.
“You done with the worms? Good.” She took the glass jar from my hands. “Looks like about, oh—sixty to me.”
“I got eighty.” Well, it was almost that.
“Eighty, you say? That’s sixteen nickels, then. Put your shoes back on and come along.” My thighs aching, I stood up, but as we walked across the backyard toward the barn, a dark, sinuous shadow slung itself in rapid S-curves across the mown grass.
I jumped backward in instinctive fright at the snake. I was mortally afraid of s
nakes. In a panic, I froze, my mouth wide open and ready to holler like I’d seen Frankenstein’s green-skinned monster lurching around the yard, but Aunt Too-Tai put her hand over my lips.
Almost too low to hear, she said in my ear, “Stay put now, Annie. Don’t move a muscle.” The shadow had coiled under the shade of a sweet gum tree, near hidden in the tall grass around the roots. My aunt slipped away from my side and let herself into the darkened doorway of the barn.
“Aunt Too-Tai!” It was a tin-whistle whisper of a scream. “Don’t leave me!”
An age ticked by. Positive I would have no choice but to stand there and burn up in a fever of terror, I practically melted in relief when Aunt Too-Tai came through the barn doorway with a garden hoe. Raising a finger to her lips, she glided across the grass to the sweet gum tree, and fast as a snake herself, she raised the hoe and struck. Divots of earth flew. A meaty hunk of snake shot skyward as she reduced the snake to its component parts in unimpassioned efficiency until it was done. I was openmouthed with admiration. The snake’s dispatch was the most thrilling thing I’d ever seen that wasn’t on television.
“Come on to the house, Annie,” Aunt Too-Tai said. She leaned the hoe against the tree trunk. “I’ll get George to bury that cottonmouth.”
Back inside at the kitchen table, she lit a cigarette and poured us each a glass of ice water. “Here.” She handed me a twist of paper. “Put this BC Powder on the back of your tongue.” I rolled my eyes like a balky horse since I was skittish of even baby aspirin and dreaded pill taking to the point of hysteria, but Aunt Too-Tai was too forceful a presence to deny. Look at what had happened to the snake.