The Wisdom of Hair

by Kim Boykin

  I decided I’d better go check on him because Daddy Heyward never left the house to drink. When I got there, I saw the men dragging the creek for his body, scratching their heads trying to figure out the how and why of Heyward’s death. Somehow I knew the reason was much simpler than they were making it out to be. Heyward just wanted to see what it was like to have his heart’s desire, that’s all. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  I stood on the creek bank and was aware of a tiny flutter in my belly. It was so slight that when I awoke, I lay there in the darkness, wondering if it was just part of the dream, and then I felt it again.

  I got out of bed, put my robe on, and went into the den where Mrs. Farquhar was knitting and Mr. Farquhar was asleep in the recliner.

  “I felt the baby move.”

  She put her knitting down and hugged me for the longest time. As we walked toward the kitchen, she told me how much she loved me, and that she couldn’t wait to be a grandma. We sat down at the table and drank warm milk together, and I listened as she told me about the first time Sara Jane moved inside her.

  “Sometimes it can be scary to have a baby inside you, to be responsible for another life, but it’s also quite a wonder.”

  She let out a little sigh and watched the last bit of milk swirl around in her glass. “You know, it’s funny how I missed that kicking for the longest time,” she said. She didn’t really look up, and the way she said it was the way someone might talk about something sweet that doesn’t last.

  “Sometimes I still miss that feeling. Even now.”

  35

  Being pregnant means sometimes all those extra hormones get together for a pity party over the silliest things, like breaking a nail or not being able to find your shoes. As I stood there in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Mrs. Farquhar making breakfast, the smell of bacon frying and the sight of homemade biscuits just out of the oven made my eyes sting and well up. By the time she touched the top of the bread to see if it was done and set the pan down on a little brass trivet, my face was awash with tears.

  I know she didn’t see me standing there in the doorway of the kitchen, watching her, as she began to fuss over a pie she was making for Sunday dinner, but somehow she knew I was there. “Good morning.” She tasted a dab of the fluffy chocolate filling, then took one look at me and nearly dropped the bowl. “What’s wrong, darling?” She set the bowl down and wiped her hands on the dish towel before she put her hand across my forehead. “You look feverish.”

  “I want to go home.”

  I don’t know why I needed to. I knew I wouldn’t stay. But something inside me said I had to go there.

  “I was wondering if I could borrow Sara Jane’s car,” I said trying to get hold of myself.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, and before I could say another word, she covered the unbaked pie with tinfoil and put it in the refrigerator.

  “You don’t have to go. It takes about six hours to get there, and I’m not going to stay long. I have my first day of work tomorrow.”

  “Well, I sure will worry about you on the road by yourself, but if you have to go alone, I understand.”

  “Do you think Mr. Farquhar can get by without a big Sunday dinner?”

  “Jerry’ll get along just fine. Now you go on and eat some breakfast while I get dressed, and we’ll be on our way.”

  I drove for what seemed like forever and only stopped twice so I could use the bathroom. We passed through Simpsonville and went by my old high school. The town was the same. As we drove by Mrs. Cunningham’s apartment, I noticed she’d left her Christmas lights on. Little twinkly white ones laced around her balcony railing winked at us.

  I stayed on the highway that went straight through the middle of town until we got to the place on the mountain where the road narrowed. A dirt road cut off to the right and straight up to my place. I had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach and I’m sure it wasn’t the baby. Mrs. Farquhar didn’t say much, didn’t ask any questions. I guess she knew how hard the trip was for me. The whole way there, she never did anything more for me than smile from time to time, to remind me how strong she was and how willing she was to share her strength with me. I know if she hadn’t come along that day, I probably would’ve turned around long before the Simpsonville city limits and gone straight back to Davenport.

  I let the car roll slowly over the rough spots in the dirt road. I knew the way so well, I could have closed my eyes and driven us straight to the front door. I could see the old place through the bare trees. It made me feel weak and small. As I drove into the yard, the house looked cold and lonely. I put the car in park and sat there for a minute. Mrs. Farquhar reached out and touched my hand.

  I couldn’t get out immediately and was almost satisfied just to see the old place and head home to Davenport. But then there was a part of me that opened the car door just enough to hear it unlatch, and I felt that cold, damp mountain air seeping into the car. I don’t know what I was waiting for; maybe I half expected Nana or Mama to come out and throw their hands up like they were glad to see me. Maybe I waited, thinking I’d come to my senses and leave, but whatever had drawn me to that place continued to tug at me like the invisible thread that draws all children home.

  Mrs. Farquhar got out to stretch her legs a bit. It was cold, real cold. She hugged herself and walked over to look at the old stone well with her breath trailing behind her. I placed my feet on that rocky ground, inching my way toward the house until I felt the creak of the front porch boards under my feet. I closed my eyes, listening to their strange music, wondering why I never noticed it before.

  I touched the key that dangled on a shoestring from around my neck. When I was little, Nana had put the key on the string for me to play with. I wore it for years but never had to use it. I remember wearing that old string because it reminded me that I had a place where I belonged, and then taking it off when I moved to Davenport because I didn’t think I needed it anymore.

  The door was unlocked. I looked at Mrs. Farquhar, who had joined me on the steps.

  “Honey, it’s unlocked.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe we should go into town and call the sheriff.”

  “It’s okay. Folks up here don’t lock their doors.”

  I pushed the door open and looked around. All the kitchen cabinet doors were open and the food was gone. There was a can of spoiled pork and beans on the kitchen table and some dirty dishes in the sink.

  “My Lord, Zora, who was here?”

  “Hobos, maybe somebody hiking or fishing the creek.”

  I remembered hearing the neighbors talk about coming home and finding hikers on their front porch. We weren’t far off the Blue Ridge Railway Trail, and from time to time those folks would show up, especially in the early spring if there’d been a late snow.

  “Don’t worry, there’s nobody here.”

  We walked into the room that was the kitchen and living room. I threw the pork and beans in the trash can and raked the bread crumbs off the table with an old rag. I could tell raccoons had been there by the droppings everywhere, but even they had passed on the spoiled beans. Whoever had been there hadn’t left much of anything for the animals except a bag of potatoes in the bin that had long spaghetti-like eyes snaking about them. I stood there looking at the mess and shook my head before opening the door just off the living room.

  “This was Mama’s room.” The bed was stripped, and there didn’t seem to be anything left that was hers. I saw a little yellow top sticking out from under the skirt of her dressing table. It was an old bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo that had fallen back there. I picked it up and looked at the label that had faded to a pinkish color. It was sad but kind of funny that all Mama left me was an eighty-nine-cent bottle of baby shampoo.

  Nana’s room was right across the hall from Mama’s. Somebody had taken her bedding. Her old settee was still there, but it looked like the raccoons had messed it up. If we’d brought Jimmy’s truck, I’d have taken it
back to Davenport and made a nice cover for it.

  Her yarn was strewn about over the floor and looked a mess. We rolled some of the thread that wasn’t soiled back onto cards and put it in her sewing basket. It was just a little pink wicker basket she had bought at some store for next to nothing. There was a fuzzy black poodle appliquéd on the lid with three little rhinestones on her collar. I remember fingering those things and pretending they were real while Nana crocheted.

  “Let’s take this home,” Mrs. Farquhar said as she put the top on the basket. I guess she could see how precious it was to me. “I bet there are two or three sacks full of yarn, Zora. You could make some baby things if you want.”

  I smiled to myself and thought about Nana trying to teach me how to crochet and how worthless my fingers were. Whenever she put her arms around me and guided my hands, I could always pull the thread through just right. But as soon as she turned loose of me, I’d mess up. She never fussed at me, just ripped out the row I’d messed up, and showed me how to start over.

  There was a picture facedown on a shelf of Nana and my granddaddy. I put it in one of the paper sacks, along with all of my school pictures she had in little tin frames. The Bible she kept in her bedside table was gone. It was an old King James Version she kept important papers in. I suspected Uncle Heath and Aunt Fannie took it, and that was fine with me.

  The old Planters Peanuts can was still there, the one that Nana kept spare buttons in. I always loved that little can, the way the buttons sounded in it, and I played with it so much over the years, the little peanut man was nearly rubbed off. I looked at the backside of it and saw where I had claimed it for myself a long time ago by etching my name with a stickpin into the navy blue paint. I took a pin out of the can and underlined the letters.

  Nana’s clothes, her shoes, and old flannel robe were gone. I opened her bureau drawers and didn’t see anything but three or four little pink sachet tablets I had given her for Christmas one year that had long since lost their fragrance. My baby stirred inside of me, and I touched my belly.

  Mrs. Farquhar put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry it’s all picked over.”

  I nodded, set the paper bags with the sewing basket in the hallway, and closed Nana’s door, holding on to the doorknob for a brief spell.

  Mrs. Farquhar put her arm around me and we walked by our tiny bathroom with the little blue gingham skirt around the sink. The curtains Mama made out of bath towels were gone. There wasn’t a time that I could remember when the bathtub faucet didn’t leak. With no heat, the stream of water had frozen solid, extending from the spout to the drain like a great icicle. The rug that hid the bare spot on the linoleum floor was gone. I could see where a knothole had given way and wondered how long the floor had been like that.

  “Is this your room?” Mrs. Farquhar opened the door at the end of the hall. I stood there frozen like my breath in the air, like the good and bad of living there was all balanced out and one false move might tip the scales.

  I remembered Nana nursing me when I was sick and soothing me when life had nothing but bad for me. I remembered my daddy kissing me good night with cheap bourbon thick on his breath and giggling with me over things that only we thought were funny. I shook my head, trying to get hold of the present, taking note of real things that I could see and touch. My bed was stripped, too, like the rest of the room. Birthday cards from Daddy and Nana were still taped to the mirror over my dresser, along with a picture Nana took of me the morning of my sixteenth birthday. I looked so much like Mama it made me think of the bad men she brought into our house.

  I struggled to keep my mind on the inventory. The cedar chest was open. My graduation dress was gone. My baby clothes were soiled by animals that didn’t seem to miss an inch of the place. Mrs. Farquhar scooped them up in a plastic bag she found in the kitchen to boil them until they were sanitized.

  My school box was on the floor. All my papers were still in it, along with precious little gifts I made Nana for Christmas and Mother’s Day. A tiny pair of white leather baby shoes was there, too. I wasn’t sure if they were mine, but I took them anyway.

  Mrs. Farquhar put the top on the school box. “Do you want to take this, too?”

  I nodded, and we started packing the car with bits and pieces of my life. It didn’t take long before the trunk was full. I put the little step stool Nana always kept in the kitchen in the backseat. I remembered sitting on that thing when I was little, and I wanted my baby to sit on it, too.

  When we were done packing, I took a walk around the yard. Mrs. Farquhar walked beside me in a quiet way, smiling at a bird that sang every time the sun tried to peek through the clouds. I looked down the old well and remembered it had always scared me so. A little girl had fallen down one and died when I was maybe five or six, so every time I got near that old thing, Daddy would remind me about her and tell me to get away from it. But there is something about a well that makes even scared little children peer into it. I stared at the outline of myself in the stagnant water and remembered how daring and frightening doing that used to feel.

  Behind the barn, I ran my fingers over the rough, weathered wood of the little shed where I dreamt Daddy Heyward had sobered up to share the secret of the universe. How in the world could I ever be a good mother?

  For the past six months I’d clung to the notion that Winston’s looks made me do the things I did. The very idea that I might have the tiniest bit of Mama inside me was terrifying.

  “She never loved me,” I said. “What if I’m just like her?”

  “Zora, you’re going to be a wonderful mother. I don’t know everything that happened between you and your mama. I do know that she was fourteen when she had you, no more than a child herself. I suspect she loved you the only way she knew how.”

  “I still hate her.”

  Mrs. Farquhar put her arms around me and rocked me like her own child. “My sweet girl, all the hate you have for your mother, rolling around inside you, kicking up such a fuss, is fighting to stay alive. It can’t exist alongside that precious baby you’re carrying.”

  She held me at arm’s length and brushed my tears away and then her own. I knew she wanted me to pardon Mama for all her sins, but the hate I carried with me made grace and mercy for Mama like a toy put up on a shelf to punish a bad child. Not that fawning over Winston Sawyer or even getting pregnant was an unforgivable sin, but somehow knowing better and then traipsing around in my mother’s shoes was.

  36

  I’d only been working at Ronnie’s for five months, but Ronnie and Fontaine were good to me from the start. They helped me build my clientele by giving me all the walk-ins I could handle and even rubbed my swollen feet in between appointments. Fontaine never got excited about anything, but I knew both he and Ronnie were as excited about the baby as I was.

  One of my regulars, Charmaine Lyndell, came slinking into the shop on the wrong day. I was tired before I got up that morning and had eaten ham for dinner the night before so that my ankles were so swollen; they looked like they were going to explode. Charmaine loved nothing better than tormenting me, although if Ronnie or Fontaine had known what she was doing on a biweekly basis, they would have thrown her out of the salon on her rhinestone ass.

  Right off, Charmaine and I recognized each other as mountain folk. Sometimes, after I was done fixing her hair, her eyes would narrow and she would look at me in the mirror like I’d better keep my mouth shut about where we came from. I never asked her when she left the mountains, but legend had it that ten years and two kids ago, she was a stripper in Myrtle Beach. She came to Davenport one weekend with a friend for a wet T-shirt contest, won the contest, and married the guy who owned the bar. Because of all that, and the fact she had money, she thought she was better than everybody, especially me.

  When you’re fresh out of beauty school, you’ll put up with almost anything to build a clientele. As bad as Charmaine was to me, I was glad to have a steady patron. So I ignored her digs and her bragging and
her huge store-bought tits her husband got her after she had her tubes tied to get that big tip. For a thirty-dollar haircut, Charmaine would leave a twenty, for a fifty-dollar cut and color, she’d leave two twenties. With the baby coming, I saved every cent I got my hands on, except the money Charmaine slipped into my maternity pants pocket, like I was some kind of stripper, too. I always made a point to buy something nice for the baby or myself.

  Of course, when somebody hates you, truly hates you, there’s a natural tendency to speculate why. I’ll always believe Charmaine hated me because I have good teeth. I don’t know this for a fact, but a lot of mountain folk don’t have good teeth, especially the ones poorer than I was growing up, which, judging from her choppers, included Charmaine. With those big tits, nobody much looked at the one thing that gave her away, but I knew. It was stupid for her to be like that. She always wore a ton of real gold jewelry from her brother-in-law’s pawnshop and could have traded it in on dental work any time she wanted.

  “You’re so pale, Zora,” Charmaine purred. “You need some color.”

  I smiled and nodded at her Scotch-Irish white mountain face she’d fried crispy brown that made her look fifty instead of thirty.

  “It must be hard,” she went on.

  I was determined not to get sucked in by her venom.

  “Yeah, I bet it’s hard, you being so big and just seven months. I never gained more than twenty pounds with my young’uns, but Lord, girl, you’ve got eight more weeks to go. If you keep getting bigger, you won’t be able to get that fat belly anywhere near this chair.”

  Now, there are two ires you never want to raise. One is the anger that spews from a hormonal, swollen mess who’s been pregnant approximately two hundred and ten days and the other is the ire of a highly protective, bitchy gay man.

  Ronnie marched over to my chair and looked in the mirror at Charmaine. “Do we have a problem here?”