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BY 1930, LIBERTY had been living in Lafayette County without Sweets for five years. Five years without someone to sass her and tell her to quit on that every time she wanted to kiss her baby girl under the chin. Five years without back talk, insults, and smirks. Without someone saying, “Who sings night-night songs to a baby that can carry her own tune?” After her husband’s departure Liberty fell headlong in love. Suddenly everything about her daughter was charmed and precious. Who more than Liberty treasured the sound of Queen Ester’s footsteps as she ran down the hall? Or the way her little baby girl chewed her lunch with her mouth open? Just beautiful.
It had begun simply enough. One night it occurred to Liberty that she didn’t have to wait until morning to see Queen Ester. Nothing stood in her way, certainly not Sweets, she thought, as she got up from her bed and tiptoed to Queen Ester’s room. As she opened her daughter’s door, she called out softly in the dark, “Baby, you come get in bed with me if you like. I’ll sing you one more song fore bed.” Liberty was enchanted with the look of wonder and pleasure that stole across her daughter’s face when she woke up. She don’t want to wait till morning either, Liberty thought, watching her girl fling off her covers. If what make her that happy make me happy, what’s the harm? She waited a month to do it again, thrilled with Queen Ester’s delight and surprise.
Slowly, once in a while became night after night. After tucking Queen Ester into bed, Liberty would appear again in her daughter’s doorway to ask breathlessly, as if the thought had just crossed her mind, “You can come sleep with me, Queenie. I sing you one more song fore bed.” And Queen Ester, who hadn’t fallen asleep at all, put aside her pretending to stumble into her mother’s arms. She had been waiting on her mother’s arrival, listening for Liberty’s pacing, since her excitement sprang not from the suspense of whether her mother would come but when. Sometimes Liberty would hold back for just minutes; other nights she would wait for as long as two hours to suddenly step out of the dark. Queen Ester cherished the moment when her mother walked into her room, wearing a mischievous smile, ready to feed her songs that felt like secrets.
Bye-bye blues, bells ring, birds sing,
sun is shining, no more pining.
Just we two, smiling through,
don’t sigh, don’t cry, bye-bye blues.
Bye-bye to all your blues and sorrows,
bye-bye cause they’ll be gone tomorrow.
The song alone was worth spending an hour and sometimes two, clawing the sleep away, struggling against her body’s warmth. Liberty would sing the lead and Queen Ester would sing its counterpoint:
Bye-bye blues, bells will ring and birds all sing.
Stop your moping, keep on hoping.
The two of us together, just me and you,
will keep smiling, smiling through.
So don’t you sigh and don’t you cry.
Bye-bye blues.
Liberty knew very few songs from beginning to end. So what if the song Queen Ester loved best contained the words “just we two”?
They would live three more years alone, eight years altogether without husband, friend, or neighbor, and all the while Liberty treated their love like something covert, though there was no one watching. She knew Sweets had left, but to admit he was gone for good meant they were now two, a breakable number. So she treated Queen Ester as if someone lurked around the corner to snatch her. Strangely enough, it felt like the best way to be with her daughter—at once playful and imperiled. Whether they were two or three, love didn’t mean a thing until someone threatened to pull it away.
By the time Sweets walked out, Liberty had skimmed five thousand three hundred sixty-eight dollars. Sweets had to sleep, and Liberty had taken as much as twenty dollars from his money clip at any one time. Sweets hadn’t noticed. And if he had, so what? She was the wife. Now church shoes were worn all through the week. Liberty dressed Queen Ester in the same outfit, ordered in three different colors. At forty-two cents a pound, Liberty fed them round steak every third month. Like her love, the money seemed endless. They lived high for almost eight years: ice cream on Sundays, rose-scented soap for washing up, hour-long baths till Queen Ester stepped out from the tub gleaming. Liberty had no friend to shove reality down her throat, no one to say, “Sweets been gone for how long? Girl, he ain’t coming back. You better hold on to that money you took off him.” Liberty treated her husband’s disappearance like an extended vacation. Man get that mad, got to walk it off. And that takes a spell. No need to cut corners; Sweets would be back to fill her pockets any day now. Never mind that any day stretched into eight years.
But in 1933, the five thousand three hundred sixty-eight dollars Liberty had thought would last as long as Sweets was gone had dwindled down to two. And without Sweets’s ever-full money clip, things fell down at Liberty’s house. Lemon cakes and rhubarb pies made just because became a habit of the past. The generator in the backyard broke and Liberty didn’t have the money to fix it. Now she and Queen Ester had dinners lit by kerosene lamps and candles. Queen Ester turned ragged. Quickly she outgrew the dresses specially ordered, and Liberty’s night songs turned to clever explanations. “I was gone buy you a new dress, baby. But you look so sweet in them old ones. Like the little bit you was when everything was just right. And they ain’t too tight, is they?”
“No, ma’am.” Queen Ester snuggled deeper into her arms.
“You ain’t just saying that, is you?” Liberty pulled back slightly to get a better look at her child’s face. Winter air rushed between them and bit hard into Queen Ester’s bare stomach.
“No, ma’am, I ain’t just saying that,” Queen Ester said, hoping that Liberty would pull her close again.
“All right. All right then. You know, when I was your age, I was damn near six feet.”
“You wasn’t.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, I was.” Liberty could feel beneath her chin her daughter’s lips jut out with pouting. “Naw, I was just teasing. I was a little bit just like you. But then I grow right on up.” The cold had vanished, and creeping warmth now made it impossible to fight sleep. Queen Ester yawned. “Like I’m gone grow on up, Mama?”
“Not while I’m watching. You can be a little bit for as long as we want. You ain’t got to make a way. That’s for me to do.”
But those two dollars wouldn’t go very far and she knew it. Worse, Sweets’s money had spoiled Liberty, made her proud. Despite having lived in Lafayette County for eleven years, Liberty and Queen Ester were almost strangers. Ignorant of her neighbors’ intricate trading system, Liberty didn’t know she could get two baskets of tomatoes from Carol Lee for a bolt of fabric. Poo-Poo fixed generators and anything else slightly electrical if you agreed to take in his laundry for a month. She could have gotten her roof retarred by Minyas and his boys if she gave them rhubarb pies anytime they asked.
Liberty was just as ignorant of Lafayette’s history. A hundred years had passed before the people of Lafayette County realized they had forgotten to lay down sidewalks. The calm stitching of cement and stone that meant a place had really decided to settle never came to Lafayette, and the county’s lapse gave it the air of being an accident. There were things in its favor. It had the wanting. Any man who could walk ten miles without falling down wanted enough to get a car. (Disgusted with himself for loving the Model T—by 1933, the unbreakable metal owned by every farmer and sawmill boss was on its way out—a man would also dream of a Chadwick, which was rumored to run at 110 miles per hour.) But he still couldn’t figure out—or, rather, no one told him—how to get electricity or a toilet into his house.
The county also had the strength. Hacking and hacking away under the yoke of the sawmills (which took seventy-three years to get to Lafayette and then the companies just upped and went, taking the money and all that went with it), the people prayed for post offices and courthouses, doorknobs and curtains, all of which never came. Still, they chopped at the oaks and the pines and watched the trains leave with l
ogs and broken men.
Liberty didn’t know that in 1901 there had been more folks congregating at the sawmill quarters than at the churches. Years later, when the goldenseals refused to grow anywhere but the cemeteries and the violets sprang stupefied between the railroad tracks, the newly arrived, looking creased in their store-bought khakis, asked themselves if this was all there was: the ripe smell of dying dogtooth violets and the sawmills that at a distance had the awful air of a plantation that ran on wood instead of cotton. But no one was there to answer, because by then the old had vanished, fleeing to Texas or returning whence they came.
Had Liberty known all this, Lafayette’s history and thus its wounded pride, perhaps she wouldn’t have carried herself the way she did: head up so high people wondered how she managed to get where she was going, and constantly picking at that child of hers. Plucking away imaginary lint, smoothing Queen Ester’s eyebrows, and the like. To the town she seemed haughty. No “How you?” or concern that Carol Lee’s baby had just died of tuberculosis. “Lady too big for her britches,” they said. Collectively they turned their backs on her, keeping secret the way they got by on grim kindness. And Liberty failed to notice their upturned noses because she was so busy creating explanations for Queen Ester that all came to the same thing: “We can’t afford it.” And just as she overlooked Lafayette County’s history and its trade-and-barter system, she never registered that there was no line when she went to the general store for supplies and that the manager had begun to wait on her as if she were a white woman. She could spend thirty minutes wandering the aisles if she liked, not realizing that she paid for the “Yes, ma’ams” and “Thank yous” along with the cans of sardines and steak. Mr. Jameson, the owner, was the only adult she traded more than three words with, the only adult to ask her how her day was going. If she said she was tired or mad, he’d cluck out his commiseration. He’d help her find work, now that she had run out of Sweets’s money. Liberty was sure of it.
She arrived at the general store just as it opened. “Morning, Miss Liberty,” Mr. Jameson said, when she walked through the door. He stood behind the counter, tall, slim, with a full head of black hair, putting on his work apron.
“Morning.”
“What you in the mood for today?” Mr. Jameson asked. Liberty heard herself respond to the familiar exchange, but wished it would hurry and end.
She spoke abruptly. “You got work?”
He paused, taking in his steady customer as she stated the obvious.
“I’m big and strong. Know how to sew and cook. I keep a clean house. Ain’t got no bad habits. And I ain’t one for talking bout other folks’ business. And I don’t need much either. Just enough to see bout me and mine.”
“How many mine?” His voice was suddenly brisk. Not mean, just hurried, as if something had wildly burnt behind the door and needed his attention quickly.
“Just one. I got a little girl.”
“Well, now—” Mr. Jameson began.
“It don’t look like it, but I can keep out of folks’ ways till they need me and lend a hand real quick.”
“Miss Liberty—”
“I know how to can fruit and such…”
“Miss Liberty—”
“I can launder…”
“Miss Liberty—”
“Excuse me for cutting you, but I know how to—”
“Miss Liberty, I ain’t got enough work around here to keep me busy most the day. Depression done snatched away most of my customers. Fact of the matter is, you was the only one left that come by regular.” He pursed his lips together in thought and moved his hands over the length of the register table. “Maybe Mr. Carthers got work for you out at his place.”
She snorted. “My place damn near big as his.”
“Sure it is. But then, he ain’t come in here asking me for work.” She pushed back from the counter and Mr. Jameson saw her sudden repugnance.
“I ain’t never coming back in here.”
Liberty raced toward the door, her face still showing her disgust. She wasn’t angry, just appalled, and not at Mr. Jameson but at herself for being so unsuspecting. Old doubts resurfaced. Thought I ran past being this innocent. Told Queen Ester so year ago. But he was being so nice and I made nice with him. Just when I think I know what’s around the corner, he push his lips out at me, like I just threw something dead on the counter. Maybe I ain’t innocent no more, just stupid.
Her arm flew out ready to yank the doorknob, but the door slid open of its own accord. She stumbled, tripping over the door saddle into a tiny woman who caught Liberty around the waist. For a moment she held Liberty’s entire weight in her arms, belying her own short stature. “You all right there?” She set Liberty on her feet.
“Almost had a real spill,” Liberty panted out, straightening her clothes back into place. She looked at the woman for the first time. Dark chocolate, without a scar in sight, she was better than pretty, to Liberty she was beautiful. “Thank you for catching me up like that.”
“Any time.” The woman smiled, revealing dimples.
“Well. Morning,” Liberty said, moving away, but the woman grabbed her wrist.
“You looking for work?”
Liberty stiffened at the question. “Who told you that?”
“Heard you asking in the store.” She still held Liberty’s wrist, though she felt her grow rigid.
“You listening in?”
“Well, you wasn’t talking like it was some kind of secret.” Then she let go before Liberty could decide whether or not to wrench her wrist free. “I’m Mable. Mable Pickett.”
“Liberty Strickland.” She couldn’t think what else to say. Despite her anger, Liberty laughed, suddenly charmed by Mable’s boldness, strength, and dimples. Her laughter rose for a moment more and then subsided into a soft chuckle. Now she was giggling at her own stupidity. “And yeah, I need work.”
* * *
They became friends. During the next few weeks, while she tried to think of work Liberty could do, Mable told the story of her entire life. About Curlene, her best girlfriend, who was also from Virginia, who knew Mable had to leave her house because her daddy thought she was too pretty, and when her mama finally found out she told Mable to “gone on.” Curlene, who Mable had convinced to buy the same Sears catalog number 782 blue dress; Curlene, who Mable cried all the way onto the train with her. Once in Lafayette, Curlene took a husband for nine years until he was knifed up north in a dance hall near Little Rock, while Mable played house with her John-John till he decided to quit the sawmill and Mable all in one go. Then Curlene couldn’t take it anymore and, before Mable could get to her, to remind her friend of the dress they shared, her friend was gone.
So then Mable had no Curlene and no John-John. Though it hurt that Curlene had left, the thought of John-John made Mable sick at the stomach. Not only did he quit her right after pulling her skirt over her head, but in two weeks every bill collector south of Stamps and north of Walker Creek was knocking at her door, and after the third visit the car, a Model T, the only promise John-John had ever kept, was gone too. Six months later with even the curtains taken, Mable decided she had learned her lesson with men. But then she met Downtown, and sooner than she could have imagined there she was behind Bo Web’s café, her stockings tangled around her ankles.
She told Liberty about the whole naming business. How after he had his way with her, he wanted to know her name and she wouldn’t hand it over, because she wasn’t sure, despite sharing a basket of chicken in Bo Web’s backyard, if she wanted to get that personal. What else was a person besides what they called themselves? she said. She laughed, telling Liberty all the stunts he had pulled and the carrying on he did for two months. Coming from the store where he worked to catch her washing dishes, doing a seam or hem, or hanging clothes on the line. He’d take her in his arms and breathe his one question into her collar. “You ready yet?” He waited on her to say what was simple, what most people said almost in passing: “My name is…�
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He tried. Casually walking behind her with his hands in his pockets, he followed her when she left the store where she did errands. On her rounds of folks making small talk, he’d turn to the people she’d spoken with and say, “That lady, yeah, the one in the yellow dress”—or green shirt or pink scarf—“what’s her name?” But they all knew who he was. They had seen him walking out of Mable’s house buckling his belt; they had heard about the chicken basket and the grass—Bo Web’s wife didn’t hang around the back of the house for nothing—so they thought his question was some lover’s game. Loving a game or two themselves, they made fun with him when they had the time.
“That gal?”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t say I rightly know.” Or, worse yet, they gave him names that weren’t Mable’s.
“That gal?”
“Yeah.”
“She sho got a leaning toward them smart colors.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, sometimes she answer to Sweet Girl, then Pretty Girl, and I even seen a time or two when she turn around at Baby Girl. I suppose any one of them can get you somewhere.”
After six months, he stopped asking, tired of hearing his question hover in the air and then drop, still loving the way she murmured “Downtown” after Bo Web’s and fried chicken. Mable liked that he always said thank you when she put toast or coffee down in front of him, and how he listened to all the gossip and stories she brought to his house, something John-John never did—when Mable tried to talk John-John would just spit in the sink and walk out the door. She didn’t understand that about John-John, because Mable could tell a story or piece of gossip like nobody’s business.
Knee-Deep in Wonder Page 8