The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

  “What do you mean, it’s for boys?”

  Tuck piped up, “We mean it’s for boys, not for girls.”

  And then I couldn’t help it. I kicked him in the leg. He grabbed on to the rail, or he would have fallen.

  And the next day was when Nelle made Tuck and me start selling snow cones together. We had to stand together at the end of the rink where the snow cone machine was and pour different flavors over the shaved ice. For hours and hours at a time Tuck and me had to stand there and take kids’ and big teenagers’ money, make change, go back and forth between the shaved ice, the little paper cones, different flavors, and that whole time, not kick each other.

  After a while, we couldn’t help it, in order to bear it, we started cracking jokes till finally I was laughing so hard at something Tuck said, I accidentally dropped some shaved ice on my bare feet, which felt very good. So, I threw some ice on Tuck’s feet and we stood there with our hot feet all cooled off, looking out at the other kids skating, something we could not do. He looked at me and said, “Ponder? You’re not a bad snow cone maker.”

  “Neither are you,” I said, and smiled.

  “Maybe we could ask Nelle if we could borrow this machine and set it up and travel all over the state of Louisiana with it.”

  I laughed. “You are crazy!”

  He looked at me and winked. “Yeah, I know.”

  After that, I did not want to kick him in the leg anymore.

  Wouldn’t you just know that it was Sukey who came up with the idea of playing Spin the Bottle?

  Me, Tuck, and Renée were at Sukey’s house, and then Eddie joined us. If you could have seen the look on Eddie’s face, you would of just gotten sick. All he cares about is being a boyfriend. What is the big idea?

  So we all sat down in the garage and Sukey got an empty Coke bottle. She was just about to do the first spin when I remembered that Renée had never played Spin the Bottle before. I hadn’t either, but I heard about it from my brothers.

  “Wait a minute, Sukey,” I said. “Let’s explain to Renée how you play.”

  And everybody started to kind of laugh.

  “C’mon, y’all,” I said. “Not everybody has played every game in the universe. So, here’s how it goes. You take an empty Coke bottle, okay? You put it down on a flat surface, like here on the garage floor, and you twirl it with your hands—right there in the middle of the bottle. And you just spin it around. Now, the person who spins it has to go and kiss the person who the bottle lands on. And it’s just up to Fate, as to where the bottle will land. So, no faking it. Some people have been known to fake it, so the bottle will land on a certain person.”

  “Right,” said Sukey.

  Renée said, “Thank you, Calla. I appreciate you for telling me the rules.”

  “It wasn’t just for you, Renée. I wanted to sort of, well, clean up the rules for all of us.”

  Everybody started to laugh. I told them, “Oh, hush up, y’all!”

  Renée sometimes doesn’t hear if people are laughing at her, or else she doesn’t care, which is the same thing.

  Tuck spun the bottle next and it pointed right at me! Oh, God! I got up and started to walk right off.

  “Calla!” Sukey grabbed me by the shorts and pulled me down. “If the Coke bottle points at you, you don’t walk off, you stay and get kissed. People don’t just walk away. That’s the rule, and you can’t break it.”

  “Oh, I’m going to get you one of these days, Sukey!”

  “Just try!” she said.

  So I sat back down, and Tuck was just standing there. “Now I’ve sat down,” I said. “Do I have to stand up again to get this stupid thing over with?”

  Then Tuck knelt down and looked at me, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was. Cooties, that’s what he was thinking, cooties. But he gave me a kiss, then he jerked back, and I jerked back too. I was dying to tell him, “Get out of here! Don’t you ever try that again.”

  But I got a sense, for that second, that maybe he liked it. And maybe I wanted him to.

  The next day after school, Sukey taught me how to kiss—really kiss, and not jerk back like I did with Tuck.

  “You have to practice kissing,” she told me. “When you start kissing, you don’t want to be a dumbo.”

  So we went to Sukey’s house because her mama was at work. Her mama had to go to work. She’d get all dressed up every day, and always wore her hair, which was black like Sukey’s, teased up into a beehive. I couldn’t believe that could be good for her hair, so I asked M’Dear about it.

  “Well, the beehive’s hard on the hair shaft,” she told me. “But a lot of women think it’s a sophisticated style these days.”

  Sukey’s mama always left food for us, peanut butter sandwiches wrapped up in wax paper in the refrigerator. We each ate a sandwich and then went to Sukey’s room to practice. Sukey said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go put on some of my mama’s lipstick.”

  So we got into her mama’s lipstick. She had probably sixteen different colors, all lined up in a plastic divider in her drawer. We pulled out different colors, and Sukey went, “Here, Calla, you take Mocha.”

  I said, “Mmm—I like that! That’s good.”

  Then she said, “I’m going to take Dreamgirl.”

  We each put lipstick on our lips and started practice-kissing on the inside of our arms.

  Sukey said, “I don’t think that’s good enough, Calla; I think you need to press harder.”

  So I kissed my arm harder till Sukey said, “Maybe that’s good enough. But we need more lipstick.”

  We put on more lipstick and went into the bathroom to do the mirror kiss. “Mmmmm,” Sukey said, as her lips touched the mirror.

  “Nooo, Sukey! That’s not a kiss! That looks more like a smear. Try it again. Look, watch me. Mmmmwah!”

  “Mmmmwah!” Sukey said. “Better. That is a little better.” I was faking it, but I was tired of Sukey bossing me around. I couldn’t really tell if her kiss was better than mine, but Sukey knew a lot of things that I didn’t know. We kissed the mirror a few more times till Sukey went, “Okay. Now, put on some more lipstick.”

  We both did, and then Sukey told me, “Now we’re going to practice on each other.”

  “What?”

  And she said, “Yes, that’s the next step. There is no other way.”

  Then Sukey leaned over and gave me a big kiss. She didn’t even give me a moment to prepare. She just upped and kissed me!

  “There,” she said. “How does that feel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, well, I’m going to do it again. Sit down!”

  “All right. But let’s put on more lipstick and blot a whole lot.” I sat down on the bathroom stool, and then Sukey gave me another kiss on the lips and just stayed there for a while.

  “Now, how does that feel?” she asked.

  “That was pretty good, Sukey.”

  “Good. Now you try kissing me.”

  I gave her a kiss on the lips. Sukey said, “Calla, I don’t think you will ever, ever become a good kisser. That was a ‘mmm’ kiss, not a ‘mmmwah!’”

  Oh, God, what if I can’t become a good kisser?

  “Put on more lipstick,” Sukey said, “and give me a real kiss. Give me a ‘mmmwah.’”

  So I kissed Sukey hard on the lips. Then I thought, What the heck Calla! I kissed so hard that I just bent her backwards over the sink. We kissed like you see in the movies. We kissed until it kind of felt good. Then we cracked up laughing.

  Sukey looked at me, and I looked at Sukey.

  “I think we kiss boys now,” I said.

  “I think we can kiss all the boys!” Sukey said.

  “Yes, dahlink,” I said, imitating the old movies, “once you have graduated from the ‘Calla & Sukey Kissing Academy,’ your lips are the only badge you need!”

  Chapter 7

  1967

  In summertime, I had to wake up early. In Louisiana, if you’re not u
p by 6:30 or so, you miss the whole day, because it gets so hot that you have to do indoors stuff, trying to stay cool until evening, when you can go out again. Of course, it’s not so awfully bad to go out in the evening, because La Luna doesn’t have many mosquitoes that suck you to death and leave you itching and scratching for weeks. We’re blessed. It’s like some kind of huge mosquito net hangs over our little town, protecting us not only from the insects themselves but also from the DDT truck that comes and sprays in Claiborne across the river. M’Dear says that truck is full of poison, spraying ugly chemicals onto little children who ride their bikes behind it, trying to get covered by the spray so they can play outdoors without getting bit.

  One summer morning I woke up, smelling coffee brewing and bacon frying. Pulling on a T-shirt and jeans, I ran down the stairs to the sight of M’Dear and Papa in the breakfast nook.

  I sat down with them and ate quickly because I was meeting Tuck for a ride before the heat got too heavy for us and our horses. I gave M’Dear and Papa each a hug before I headed out, lingering with my M’Dear, breathing in her scent.

  I love horses. They are not “essential to the very essence of my soul,” like Renée said about her horse, but I do dream about them sometimes. I dream about being on a horse and flying. I remember the magical day when I was old enough to stop riding Ricko, the Tuckers’ Shetland pony, and get on a real horse. It was my tenth birthday, and I woke to find a large red bow tied to the end of my bed. Next thing I knew, M’Dear, Papa, the boys, and I were tramping over to the Tuckers’ barn. There stood a palomino with red ribbons strung from her bridle! Her flax mane and tail were so beautiful that tears came to my eyes. “Happy Birthday, Calla Lily,” my family said.

  I stepped forward and pressed my nose into her soft neck. “Golden Princess,” I whispered, as she and I met.

  Since I was little I’ve been tantalized by the smell of horses and wet bridle leather. Once, before Golden Princess came into my life, I found a piece of broken rein in a pasture and brought it home to keep in my room so I could smell it at night. I kept it up on a shelf in my closet, along with special rocks and feathers that I collected from around our yard. Then, of course, I fell in love with Ricko. But I’d never loved anything—except for my family, of course—as much as I loved Golden Princess.

  The morning had already begun to steam as I headed from our house to the barn. The sun was a couple of hours above the horizon when I got to the pasture gate, with carrots in my pocket. Golden Princess greeted me by nickering as she trotted over to take the treats from my hand. I was petting her and talking to her when Tuck came into the barn. Tuck’s horse, Sable Star, was following him across the clover, eager for a ride.

  Tuck was wearing a worn white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was growing up—we both were. I noticed the muscles of his chest under his shirt, and the muscles of his upper arms pushing out, making the shirt a little tight. The shirt was tucked loosely into an old pair of jeans that looked like he’d grown out of them a bit, so the muscles of his thighs—Stop looking at him like that. I didn’t even know exactly what I was feeling about the boy who was practically a part of our household. I only knew that it was territory I hadn’t walked, ridden in, or swam in.

  “Mornin’,” Tuck said, looking at me, then turning away, like he had been doing lately—like he was afraid of me or something.

  “Hey,” I said, giving him a little smile.

  “Hey, you.” He gave me a little smile back, then looked down at his boots. His right foot was tapping, the way it did when he was nervous, the way it had since I met him when we were kids.

  “Gonna be ninety-six degrees,” I told him.

  “That’s a little high for early June.”

  “Papa had on the Farm Report at breakfast,” I said. “And it’s going to be humid, 91 percent. Chance of rain, but not till this afternoon.”

  “Whew,” Tuck said.

  Temperature and precipitation didn’t just mean inconvenience or a hot ride. Every change in the weather affected the crops, as we all knew. My parents were dancers and musicians, but we lived in a farming community. When harvest time came, Papa, Sonny Boy, and Will helped Uncle Tucker in any way needed. Tuck helped out in the fields every day after school. The land and her gifts were close to us, just like the river was close.

  “Well, we’re standing around here talking,” I said, “and we’ve got two horses here who want some attention.”

  “Yeah, look who knows he’s so handsome,” Tuck said, stroking Sable Star’s forelock. The gleam of the brown gelding’s coat, all flashy with white socks and a star, was a beautiful contrast to my horse.

  “Well, look who knows she’s the most beautiful horse in La Luna,” I told him, rubbing Golden Princess along her neck, making the cooing sounds she loves to hear from me, telling her that I am just loving up on her.

  Tuck came over and gently chucked Golden Princess under her chin. “Sometimes,” he said, “when Sable Star breaks into a full gallop, I feel like I’m riding a wave.”

  I extended my hand and fed some of the leftover carrots to Sable Star, admiring the dark brown beauty of his coat.

  “You know something, Calla Lily? One of the things I like about you is that you’re beautiful, but you don’t go around acting like it. You’re beautiful like our horses are beautiful. They don’t know it, they just are.”

  I loved hearing him say that, but I didn’t know how to answer.

  “Sable Star’s a pretty good contrast to my palomino, don’t you think?” I said. It was getting hot, and I lifted my hair up off my shoulders.

  “That’s for sure,” Tuck said. “That is one good thing for sure.”

  I could feel his eyes on me as I reached in the rear pocket of my jeans and pulled out an elastic band. I pulled my hair back and slipped the elastic over it.

  “Let’s go,” Tuck said. “But it’s too hot to saddle up our horses.” So we bridled and mounted and headed out bareback along the grassy strip next to the cotton field behind the Tuckers’ barn. A light morning breeze riffled the rows of cotton plants, tender, green, and young. I looked at them in their newness and somehow felt a kinship. Right then, the cotton plants were so fresh, so different from how they’d look in that late-summer push to blossoms and, eventually, at the harvest that came with the bonfires and gumbo and dancing.

  I could feel Golden Princess’s muscles, strong and rippling under my thighs as we walked and trotted along for a half hour. Even at that pace, we were already sweating, and the horses were in a lather. My T-shirt and jeans were sticky and clinging to my body. Having been born in Louisiana, I loved that feeling—at least I did in June. And I could see patches of sweat forming under Tuck’s arms and at the back of his shirt.

  When we reached the other side of the cotton field, a wide dirt road skirted a big pecan orchard before reaching the horse trail along the raised bayou levee. The levee was like a flat-topped hill, high enough to contain the waters of Bayou Semer, even during the spring flood season—at least in most years. Papa told me that the bayou connected our pastures and pecan orchards to the La Luna River, where steamboats had traveled from the 1800s up to when he was a boy, carrying loads of cotton down to the Mississippi River and into New Orleans for export. Eventually the river traffic stopped when the La Luna silted up. Now the river gave us the gift of rich, black soil that it dropped along its banks, making our farmland rich and fertile.

  I’d always loved riding along the levee, fourteen feet above the riverbanks. There was so much wildlife to see. Sometimes I’d spot a king-fisher cruising for breakfast, a bunny in the brush, or mourning doves feeding on seeds in the grass. And it was cooler on the levee, so when we got there, Tuck and I broke into a trot and then into an easy canter. It felt like our horses were relieved to get the chance to cut loose.

  So Tuck and I raced, just letting Sable Star and Golden Princess run as fast as they wanted. I looked back and saw that, behind us, the sky was getting dark, the sign of a Louisiana thun
derstorm moving our way. My T-shirt and jeans were soaked now, from my own sweat and Golden Princess’s, but she just kept running. I think she could smell the coming storm before I could.

  “Tuck, look,” I called out. “Look at the sky!”

  “Whoa,” he said. “I smell the rain now.”

  Sweat was soaking his hair, and I could see the darkening at his thighs and the crotch of his jeans, where he’d picked up Sable Star’s sweat.

  Sable Star whinnied, smelling the storm too. He broke out ahead, with hooves pounding, and before I knew it, we were barreling at full speed along the levee back toward Uncle Tucker’s barn.

  “Easy, Golden Princess,” I said, knowing it was better to hold a horse back than to let her run at will. But she and Sable Star had no plan to stop. They wanted to beat the thunder and lightning.

  Then the rain started. Heavy drops hit me in the face as we galloped, stinging my eyes, sopping my hair. I looked down and saw that my white T-shirt was completely soaked, and that the nipples of my new breasts, which I wasn’t yet used to, were sticking out. I tucked my chin down to my chest to keep the rain from pounding my eyes and face.

  Finally, we reached the pecan orchard. The pecan branches were swaying in the wind. Only the mighty live oaks at the edge of the pasture seemed solid and unshakable.

  We raced toward them, those ancient trees with their huge limbs dipping down to the ground. I screamed out, “Yahoo!” as we rounded the stand of them and pushed hard around the edge of the cotton field.

  “Yahoo!” Tuck called back.

  Golden Princess and I were like one animal, racing and bucking together. I could feel her energy was mine, firing me up as I bent down over her neck. “Here we come!” I shouted.

  Just as we made it to the barn, lightning cracked through the sky. I was afraid of the storm that would follow. Luckily, Tuck and I pulled into the shelter before it struck.

  I slid off Golden Princess and began to dry her off with a towel. Tuck was toweling down Sable Star, and he came over to me. The smell of wet horses and the smell of us hung in the air.