The Night the Lights Went Out

by Karen White

  “Is that what it was like during the olden days?” Lily asked, concentrating on getting the exact amount of sugar in the measuring cup.

  This time Merilee was sure she saw a smile. “Living on a farm meant there wasn’t a lot of time for schooling, especially for girls and mostly for everyone during the fall harvest and spring planting seasons.” Sugar looked out the window above the sink, her smile fading as her gaze seemed to focus on the woods. “So much has changed. I sometimes wonder . . .”

  Instead of finishing her sentence, Sugar began filling a small saucepan with water, then placed it on the stove and lit the burner.

  “What do you sometimes wonder, Miss Sugar?” Lily’s sweet, high voice seemed unusually loud in the quiet kitchen.

  Sugar moved away from the stove and looked out the window again. “I sometimes wonder if people today understand what sacrifice means.”

  “I know what it means,” Lily said with excitement. “It’s one of our vocabulary words this week. It means to do without or give up something, usually to help someone else.”

  The old woman had gone very still, her gaze focused outside the window. “Yes, that’s right.” Addressing Merilee, she said, “When the water in the saucepan starts to boil, turn off the heat and put a half stick of butter in a bowl on top of it—just until it’s soft; don’t let it melt. And move fast, because I can’t be here all night. My shows start at eight o’clock.”

  “Don’t you have a DVR?” Lily piped up as her mother retrieved the butter from the fridge. “Then you can watch your shows when you want to and fast-forward through the commercials.”

  Sugar blinked slowly behind her glasses. “I like commercials. They give me time to get up and walk around the living room so I can get my steps in.”

  Lily shared a glance with her mother before Merilee quickly did as Sugar had instructed. “What else can I do?” she asked.

  “Watch, and memorize, because I don’t like repeating myself.” She handed her a mixing bowl filled with flour. “Please cut the okra into half-inch pieces and then coat them in here. When you’re done with that, shake off the excess flour in a strainer, and then we’ll move on to the egg and cornmeal part.”

  “You know, they sell batter mix now, so you don’t have to go through all the trouble of . . .”

  She stopped when she saw Sugar’s expression and took the bowl. They measured, mixed, and battered in silence punctuated only by Sugar’s directions. Lily slowly migrated back to her laptop while Merilee played the dutiful soldier, grateful yet irritated all at the same time. She was irritated at Sugar for being the way she was, and at herself for letting her get away with it. And at her mother, who hadn’t thought it necessary to share her kitchen secrets with her daughter, and then, after David died, had stopped pretending to care or make plans to do it later. As if his death weren’t punishment enough.

  Her back was aching by the time they took the last batch of cookies from the oven and emptied the fryer of the final pieces of okra. She was about to suggest that Sugar recite the recipe again so she could write it down when she was interrupted by Lily.

  “Mom! Do you know what a blog is?”

  Merilee used the back of her wrist to scratch her nose since her hands were covered with oven mitts. “I don’t have time to follow any, but I know what they are. Why?”

  “Because Bailey Blackford says there’s a new blog that’s all about Sweet Apple and that I might recognize some of the people mentioned in it.”

  “Really? What’s it called?”

  “The Playing Fields. Bailey’s mom thinks it’s because it’s all about the families with kids here in Sweet Apple, and all the time we spend playing sports. But I think it’s bigger than that, you know?”

  Merilee frowned, unsure of what Lily was talking about, but amazed at her daughter’s insight just the same. “Who writes it?”

  “No one knows because it’s just signed ‘Your Neighbor,’ but Mrs. Blackford thinks it’s probably a mom at Windwood since the blogger seems to know a lot about it. That’s called a-non-y-mous, when you don’t know who the person is.” She frowned. “Bailey says that I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “About the blog? Why? Is it bad?” Lily understood that the word “bad” meant foul language, nudity, drugs, and pretty much everything she’d been exposed to in the brief snippet she’d seen of The Godfather.

  “I don’t know; I haven’t read it yet. Bailey said she’d send me a link. Do you want to see it?” The frown lines that had disappeared during their cooking lesson reappeared.

  “Yes, please. I’ll read it first, okay? Just to make sure it’s appropriate for a ten-year-old.” She leaned down and kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “And, Lily? Thanks for telling me.”

  Lily beamed, making Merilee’s heart squeeze. Lily’s need for approval, while always a part of her personality, had gone into overdrive since the divorce. Yet another reason to silently curse Michael in Merilee’s nighttime rants when she’d wake up and couldn’t go back to sleep.

  Sugar stood at the sink, filling it with hot water, her back stiff and unyielding, without any sign of a dowager’s hump. “Please,” Merilee said. “You’ve done enough—I’ll clean up. Can I send you home with some cookies and fried okra?”

  The older woman appeared not to have heard her. She leaned toward the window, her gaze on Colin in the tree swing facing the woods. “What will you do if he finds that dog and it doesn’t have a home?”

  The question surprised her. “I have no idea. I try just to think about things as they come up. Otherwise I get too overwhelmed.” Merilee tried to smile but quit when she realized it wasn’t funny at all.

  Sugar turned off the water and her hands gripped the edge of the sink. “Dogs don’t live nearly long enough. It’s too hard on a child.”

  “Did you never have a dog?” Lily asked.

  A sad smile crossed her face before disappearing into a grimace. “I grew up with dogs. My brothers always had outside dogs, but my daddy let me keep a small one inside just for me—as long as I kept it away from Mama, since she didn’t like them. Her name was Dixie. She—” Sugar stopped abruptly. Folding the dish towel into a crisp rectangle, she said, “My shows will be starting soon and I need to see to my supper.”

  Merilee felt somehow bereft, as if she’d just missed an opportunity for something she wasn’t even aware of. As if this glimpse into Sugar’s life had been the opening for not exactly a friendship but some sort of relationship that until today Merilee hadn’t really considered. Maybe it had to do with Sugar’s being on her own for so long, so that Merilee could imagine they had something in common. Could understand what it was like living alone. Could understand the loneliness, the emptiness and barrenness that haunted not just her bed but every waking moment of her day. The crushing weight of all life’s decisions, joys, and burdens that she’d once imagined sharing. The sheer hatefulness of it all because the decision hadn’t been hers. Sugar’s husband had been killed in the war, but the desertion of the heart would have felt the same.

  Merilee pulled out a chair. “You’ve been on your feet all afternoon. Why don’t you sit down and let me pour you a glass of sweet tea. That’s one thing I do know how to make—my grandfather taught me, and he was born and raised in south Georgia.”

  Sugar frowned. “It probably won’t be sweet enough for my liking.”

  “Colin likes it, and he only likes really sweet things,” Lily said over the laptop.

  “Well, then,” Sugar said grudgingly, “I suppose I could have a glass. Just one, though.”

  Merilee smiled to herself as she poured four glasses from the pitcher she always kept in the fridge. Placing two in front of Lily, she said, “Your computer time has expired. Why don’t you take one of these outside to your brother and enjoy some fresh air?”

  Sugar sent Lily a stern look. “Don’t forget to stay away from the w
oods. I don’t have time to drive anybody to the emergency room tonight, and I doubt your mama would be able to drive a car with you or Colin in the backseat with a water moccasin hanging off your leg.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Lily sent Merilee a worried look. She closed the laptop without argument before heading toward the back door, walking slowly so she wouldn’t spill. She was always so careful about making mistakes that Merilee wanted to call after her and tell her to run with the glasses, that spilling tea was one mistake in life that was easily cleaned up. But she figured Lily would probably learn that all on her own. That was the one sure thing Merilee knew about life: You’d make your own mistakes no matter how many times you’d been taught better.

  Merilee put the remaining two glasses on the table and sat down. “Sorry I don’t have any lemons. I forgot to stop at the grocery store on the way home.”

  Sugar took a sip from her glass and let it sit in her mouth a moment before swallowing. “I’ve had worse.”

  “Thank you,” Merilee said, hoping the older woman could hear the sarcasm that she didn’t bother to hide in her voice. She watched as Sugar placed her left hand flat on the wide-plank pinewood surface of the table, a single gold band on her third finger her only jewelry.

  “My daddy made this table—from the tall Georgia pines behind this house. It used to be in the big house, but my father gave it to me when I got married. Said that with my brothers going off to fight and me getting married, they didn’t need such a big table anymore. I think it made him sad to see it so empty each night.” A short, bare fingernail picked at a small nick on the edge. “This table could tell so many stories.”

  She glanced up as if waiting for encouragement, and Merilee noticed how blue Sugar’s eyes were, and how her face was a perfect heart shape. She’d once been a very beautiful woman, Merilee decided. Whose husband had been dead for more than seventy long years. Merilee felt that bond again, the loneliness that stretched between them like sticky strands of a web, connecting them whether they wanted it or not.

  “Tell me one,” she said, leaning back in her chair.

  For a moment, she thought Sugar would refuse. Would stand up and leave and resent Merilee for interrupting her solitude. Instead, Sugar took a long sip of her sweet tea, then placed both hands on the table. “When I was eleven years old, I watched a man bleed to death on this table. And I can’t say either it or I has been the same since.”

  Five

  SUGAR

  Sweet Apple, Georgia

  1934

  I squatted by my brother Jimmy at the edge of the lake, my hands on my kneecaps slipping in sweat as I watched him drag his small net as deep as he could, hoping to find the tadpoles that were hiding from him. Grandpa’s binoculars—the ones he’d used when he fought in France during the war—hung around Jimmy’s scrawny neck, and I held my breath as they dipped close to the water.

  Even though Jimmy was a year older than me, we were the same size, and one of his arms was shorter than mine altogether, and near useless. He walked funny, too, one foot turned the wrong way and nobody knowing how to straighten it. All this was on account of him getting stuck when he was getting around to being born. I didn’t know exactly what that meant other than my brother Jimmy and I looked like we were the same age.

  “Quick,” he said. “Give me that jar.”

  I handed him the chipped Mason jar that Willa Faye’s mama had given us to play with. We’d stuck lake muck and grass in the bottom of the jar along with some lake water so the tadpoles could be comfortable in their new home. Jimmy told me that once they grew legs we’d have to let them go because they couldn’t stay underwater all the time anymore. That’s what I loved about Jimmy—how smart he was. He knew everything about birds, too—like if they were from Georgia or just stopping by for a visit, what they liked to eat, and what they sounded like—which was why Grandpa had given him the binoculars. Harry and Will—our oldest brothers—always teased him something fearful, calling him stupid and other bad names, but Jimmy never seemed to mind it at all. It was our little joke, pretending he was just as dumb as our brothers thought he was. And that’s why Jimmy was my favorite even though Mama had told me it was wrong to pick favorites. I made the mistake once of pointing out that it couldn’t be so wrong since she did it, and I got my hide tanned by Daddy when he came in from the fields. I was never sure what was worse—the spanking or the waiting for the sound of his boots on the front porch.

  With Jimmy’s tongue squeezing out between his teeth in concentration, he carefully picked up each tadpole in the net and put him in the jar, and we smiled at each other like we’d just done something wonderful.

  “Where you going to keep it?” I asked.

  He wrinkled his nose at me, his odd-colored eyes squinting. They were so pale that in the sun the blue blended into the white, one of the reasons why other people thought he was half-baked. But I knew it meant he could see things most people couldn’t.

  “I reckon I could hide the jar under the back porch steps, keep ’em out of the sun. I’ll feed them some grass and leaves from the lake every day.”

  “How come you know what tadpoles eat?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I’ve been sitting on the edge of that lake nearly all day, hardly moving, just staring at them frogs and tadpoles. You learn a lot about something when you just watch.” He squinted at me again. “Like when Mama says she’s tired she really means she’s just not interested.”

  I wanted to say something good about Mama, about how she’d never been this tired before the last three babies—all of them buried in the tiny cemetery in the woods, and all three come and gone in less than two years. She got real tired after that. Stopped cooking and cleaning and tending her vegetable garden, and sewing and mending, and asking us kids how we were feeling. Pretty much stopped doing everything except singing sad and listening to our brother Bobby reading to her from her books she’d brought from Savannah.

  Willa Faye’s mama helped as much as she could until Mama got better, but I didn’t see how that was gonna happen with her spending most of her time taking a lie-down or rocking on the front porch without even mending to keep her busy.

  A shadow fell on us, and Jimmy and me looked up to see Lamar Jenkins. His daddy, Rufus, had come to us from a ranch in Texas when Lamar was small and he’d wanted to get out of Texas on account of his wife and little baby girl dying from the influenza. Rufus knew lots about cows, which was why Daddy hired him.

  Rufus had skin as black as coal and was as tall as he was wide, which was why nobody messed with him. And he knew cows better than my daddy. The big secret about Rufus was that he was the gentlest person you could ever want to meet. I once saw him jump into the lake to save a baby bird that had tumbled into it while looking for worms. He scowled at me and Jimmy and made us swear we wouldn’t tell a soul what we’d seen.

  Lamar was only ten but already as tall as Harry, who was almost seventeen. He was going to be as big as Rufus, according to my daddy, and I was glad since that meant people wouldn’t mess with him, neither. His skin was so black that Will swore he could hide at night if he was stark naked and kept his eyes closed. I think he might have been right.

  “Hey, Lamar,” Jimmy said as we both got to our feet. “Look what we got.”

  Lamar studied it real close. “Looks like a bunch of tadpoles. You gonna watch ’em turn into frogs?”

  I smiled at Lamar. He was smart like Jimmy, but I could tell people didn’t give his brains any account because of how black he was. And how big. It was like another secret Jimmy and I shared, and I was fine with that. Because then I wouldn’t have to share Lamar and Jimmy with anybody.

  “Yep,” said Jimmy. “We’re gonna put the jar underneath the back steps.”

  Lamar nodded. “Just make sure those brothers of yours don’ see you. They never seed somethin’ they don’ want to destroy.”

  As if they knew we were talki
ng about them, we heard a big hollering and whooping out by the barn. We all turned and watched Harry riding Grace, the steady old mare who pulled the hay wagon. He was supposed to be checking the property fences, but it didn’t look like he was inclined too much to be working.

  He began digging his heels into Grace’s sides as if he wanted her to go faster, and I shouted for him to stop because she was old and, really, a slow walk was about as fast as she could go. We were too far for him to hear, so we began to run toward the barn, Jimmy’s hand flat over the top of the Mason jar so it wouldn’t slosh over, Grandpa’s binoculars bouncing on his skinny chest. He was fast, even if his foot was facing the wrong way. He wouldn’t win any beauty pageants with his running, but he sure could beat anyone in a footrace.

  As we got closer we saw Will up in the haymow, peering through the double doors and looking like he was getting ready to jump. Which was crazy, because everybody knew it was too far off the ground. It was where we parked the wagon and shoved out the hay with a pitchfork, but I didn’t see any wagon or hay in sight, just a pitchfork leaning against the side of the barn like it was watching those foolish boys.

  We heard a shout from the other side of the barn and spotted Rufus running toward the barn, too, waving his straw hat to get their attention. “You boys quit it, ya hear? You gonna break your sorry necks, is what you gonna do.” He ran so fast that later Jimmy said it was like you couldn’t see his feet.

  “Hey, Rufus!” Will hung out of the haymow, one hand clutching the opening. It took me a minute to recognize the jug of moonshine he waved with his other hand. I figured it was from the still we had in the woods even though it wasn’t against the law to drink anymore. Daddy said it was just cheaper to make our own, so we did. Us kids weren’t supposed to be drinking it, though, so after I stopped shouting at Harry to stop kicking the horse—not that he listened—I started shouting at Will because he was going to get in a lick of trouble if Daddy found out about the moonshine.