The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

  I stopped trimming and asked, “Do you have any special hair concerns?”

  “My natural blond hair,” she said, “which, of course, has absolutely nothing natural about it. It’s so thin that I’m scared people can see my scalp.”

  “But what wonderful hair you have, so soft,” I told her. “And your complexion, oh girl, peaches and cream, peaches and cream! You’re so lucky.”

  “Really? Tell me, is Calla Lily your real name?”

  “Yes, ma’am. My mother and father loved calla lilies, and they named me for them.”

  “Well, it suits you beautifully.”

  I pulled her hair up to weigh it, and then I snipped some more.

  When I was finished, I spun her around to face the mirror and said, “What do you think?”

  “Ooh, you make me feel like I ‘clean up good,’” she said, beaming. “I love it, especially the bangs being a tad bit uneven.”

  Oh, I do feel good! I realized, as Beth left, that she had never explained why she burst into tears. But I knew she had left here feeling a little bit healed anyway.

  Every Friday since I opened, Miz Lizbeth and Aunt Helen came to the Crowning Glory to get their hair done. They’d show up together around eleven.

  First I’d give Aunt Helen her massage and wash, set her hair with brush rollers on the top and on the sides around her face, then blow it dry.

  Miz Lizbeth preferred an old-style bubble dryer I kept in the salon for my older clients. The older clients also loved their Aqua Net. No self-respecting Louisiana woman of a certain age felt that her hair was truly “done” without a good shellacking of Aqua Net.

  Then Aunt Helen would insist on helping to clean the shop, and Miz Lizbeth and I would go out on the patio. Since she had the best garden in La Luna, Miz Lizbeth would go around checking on all the flowers in the beautiful wooden planters that Sonny Boy made me. She’d tell me, “These coleus should get less sun,” or “I’m going to pull those little weed shoots out of your planter of pink calla lilies.”

  When we were done reviewing the garden, we’d wash our hands and set the table for lunch, which Miz Lizbeth always brought. Some days it would be cold fried chicken with cornbread and tomato salad. Other times it might be ham sandwiches on Miz Lizbeth’s homemade bread. But whatever she brought—even her tuna fish salad, which had some of her homemade sweet pickle relish mixed in with just enough Miracle Whip—it was delicious. And, of course, Miz Lizbeth was never one to skimp on dessert, so there was always a special treat—like her pecan tarts or her pineapple cake or her fudgy peanut butter brownies—to end the meal.

  Those Fridays with Miz Lizbeth and Aunt Helen were just so loving and warm. I was glad to have the chance to give something back to these two women who, along with Olivia and Nelle, had been second mothers to me. Of course, M’Dear had given me a good foundation for learning how to become a woman, but all of them had shown me how to grow up and become myself.

  Chapter 40

  1984

  How I love October in Louisiana! It is, hands down, the most beautiful time of year. Even though we know that another week or so of heat can still sneak in and blast us, in October, a happiness breezes in. The cotton is being harvested—you can see the combines in the fields—and the big cotton trucks leave a scattering of bolls that looks like white snow along the roadside. Some people get angry as all get-out when they get stuck behind a cotton truck, but I don’t. If a fluff of cotton falls onto my Mustang, I consider it a sign of good luck. When M’Dear was still alive, we’d gather up bolls of cotton, glue them to thin pieces of rope, and hang them around the dance studio, strung with Christmas lights. M’Dear said, “Bébé, you got to celebrate every season, not just Christmas and Easter. There’s beauty in every day of the year.”

  People who think that Mardi Gras is Louisiana’s only celebration—well, little do they know! Almost every small town in Louisiana sponsors an annual festival dedicated to its best product or favorite pastime or dish. Louisianans love to party and look for any excuse to sing and dance, invite friends to spend the weekend, and celebrate with good food and drink.

  Of course, the best festival themes are snatched up by the towns that are the most publicity-minded. Sometimes I can’t believe that there are actually two crawfish festivals, one on each side of the Atchafalaya Spillway. There are celebrations of jambalaya, frogs, swine, rice, gumbo, strawberries, and more. I guess you’d have to say that the annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City is in a category all by itself.

  In La Luna, naturally, we have our moon festival. During the festival parade the queen gets to sit on a little bench carved into a crescent moon painted violet blue with tiny silver stars. The queen and the moon get carried through the streets on the back of a flatbed truck decorated with pastel-color Kleenex flowers.

  But my favorite festival is held in the little town of Opelousas, which celebrates the harvest of its big local crop with the Yambilee on the last weekend of October. I love it because the ugly heat of summer is pretty much over. And because Tuck brought me here.

  Events are held at the Yamatorium, and the festival’s royalty are named King Will-Yam and Queen Sweet Potato. In addition to the usual cooking and eating contests and a parade, there is a fun street festival and an auction of sweet potato products. Children get to do a Yamimals contest in which they create characters, in Mister Potato Head style, out of construction paper, toothpicks—and of course, yams.

  I hadn’t been to Yambilee since Tuck took me in high school, so when Sukey and I saw it advertised in the paper, we decided to go. We asked Ricky and Steve to come up and make a weekend of the festival. We packed up a big cooler with sandwiches, chips, cookies, and Cokes and then put four lawn chairs in the trunk of my Mustang. When we got to Opelousas and were looking for a spot to sit and view the parade, I was shocked. The town had changed!

  “Wow!” I said to Ricky and Steve. “I was planning to play tour guide for you, but I can’t believe that there’s a chain motel here now, and even a Burger King.”

  It turned out that the motel was where the festival queen and her royal court were staying. “Let’s set up our lawn chairs near the motel,” Sukey said. “That way, we can get a look at them when they’re fresh at the start of the parade.”

  We didn’t have to sit there long before the queen and her attendants came out, all decked out in ball gowns with skirts inflated by crinolines and hoops. “Oh, my God,” Ricky said. “Will you look at those dresses?! I think I’m having a flashback to the 1950s!”

  “Oh, Ricky,” I scolded, “don’t suck all the beauty out of those girls! You have no idea of what they have to suffer.”

  “Yeah, like those hairdos!”

  I had to admit that they all had hair that was teased and shellacked within an inch of its life. “That’s the style I call ‘Cajun Girl Stir-Fry!’” I told him. “But think about it. All of us want to be kings and queens of something.”

  The parade was an interesting combination of white Cajun and local black culture, and worked a few indignities on its royalty. Opelousas is a town of fewer than 10,000 people, so convertibles are in short supply.

  “Looks like only the queen herself is getting to perch above the back seat of a top-down car,” Steve said.

  “Yeah,” Ricky raved, “her twelve less-lucky attendants look like they’ve had to settle for any transportation they could get. Look at them precariously seated on sunroofs, their legs inside the car and their skirts pouffed out around them. It makes them look like doilies with heads!”

  Others had to contend with actual car hoods.

  “My goodness, y’all,” I said, “those girls risk slipping off, in slick taffeta gowns, and being crushed under the wheels!”

  “I bet those hoods are hot!” Sukey said, then took a big sip of Diet Coke.

  “Oh, my God!” Ricky said, “look at them! Those poor girls are having to rock from side to side, trying to cool off the right cheek while they lean to the left. That is just
butt torture.”

  “That takes skill, y’all,” Sukey said.

  “No kidding,” I added. “I’ve heard one year an attendant’s pantyhose melted—actually fused to the hood of the car. Think of what that did to her behind.”

  We all started laughing hysterically, holding on to the arms of our lawn chairs. “There’s a lawsuit somewhere in there,” Steve said, barely able to talk.

  As the festival royalty passed, the folks who were lined up on the sidewalk flung candy at them. A man walking in Earth Shoes picked up some of the candy and pretended to feed it to the statue of the Infant of Prague that he was carrying in a basket.

  “Uh-oh, I hope the baby Jesus doesn’t get a case of the chewdalooskas,” Sukey said. That’s what her mama used to tell us we’d get if we ate too much candy.

  Of course, that set the four of us off into more fits of laughter. Then we watched the parade for another hour, and headed to the Yamatorium.

  As we walked down the residential streets off the main parade route, there was a nip in the air. Sweater weather. Enough to make you feel alive with a new season.

  All of a sudden, I ached to have Tuck next to me, holding my hand as we walked. I remembered when he’d taken me to this festival all those years ago. It had been the day after he’d made two touchdowns for La Luna High. I can still remember the crowd yelling, “Go Snake Boy! Bite ’em, Snake Boy!”

  The memory of that made me giggle a bit. My friends turned to me. “Do you know a secret that we don’t?” Ricky asked.

  “No,” I said. “Still thinking of the parade. Why don’t the three of y’all head on over to the Yamatorium, and I’ll meet you there.”

  “But Calla,” Steve said, “you’ll never find us. Not with this massive crowd of yam fans.”

  “Oh, leave her alone,” Sukey said and looked at me. “Meet us back at the car, Calla. It’s easy enough to find.”

  Then I walked along the streets by myself, with the memory of Tuck’s hand in mine. The smell of his leather letter jacket, the way we’d stop and kiss every ten or twelve steps. All that we’d already been through at such a young age made something like a yam festival silly, fun, and precious.

  I stopped abruptly for a moment at the sound of a distant car horn. It pulled me out of my reverie, and I felt such a complex weave of grief, guilt, love, and longing that I could barely stand. I found the nearest place where I could sit on a curb.

  I’m sorry, Sweet. I miss you, I want you, I would give anything if you were still alive. Forgive me for this longing that I still carry like a stone in a beautiful basket. I still want him. I still want Tuck. How does that feel to you, now that you are on the other side?

  I stood up and resumed my walking. It felt good to move my body, to feel its muscles and bones work together. I felt myself moving into a dance. Du plus profond de mon coeur, from the bottom of my heart. I was in my own world when I heard a little boy say, “What is she doing?” I opened my eyes to see a towheaded five-year-old wearing very small cowboy boots. His hair was blond and curly. A combination, I thought, of what Tuck’s and Sweet’s hair might be if they were combined. And that longing for a baby rose back up in me so strongly I had to wrap my arms around my waist as I forced a smile toward his mother.

  Had I lost my chance to have a child? Would I ever love someone in that way again? I watched as the mother and her little boy walked off, the sight of his small cowboy boots staying in my mind.

  I’m sorry, Sweet, but I know now that I’m still alive and I still want. And the one I want I may never ever see again. But at least now I have admitted it to myself, and to you.

  Chapter 41

  NOVEMBER 1984

  Olivia was the one who found him. Though she was in her seventies, she still came over to prepare meals for Miz Lizbeth and him. She told me later that the chickens were flapping around him on the ground, like they were trying to wake him up. The doctor said that Uncle Tucker had died of a heart attack.

  Tuck never got a chance to see his grandfather one last time before he died.

  Within an hour, the news of Bernard Tucker’s death was all over La Luna. Businesses closed, and people came in from the fields to be together and mourn. That’s how beloved Uncle Tucker was. When I called the fishing camp to tell Papa, he broke down in tears.

  “Calla,” he said, “I have lost my friend. You don’t get another one like Tucker. Only one in your life. And now he’s gone.”

  Papa asked me to come and pick him up, since he didn’t trust himself to drive. On the way, I thought about how Papa and I had lost M’Dear, how I had lost Sweet, how Papa had lost his closest buddy, and how Miz Lizbeth had lost Uncle Tucker .

  I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice that the most segregated hours of the week are Sunday mornings, when black and white worshippers head off to different churches. It was true in La Luna as well, where the pews at Our Lady of the River usually held a sea of white faces. But on the day of Uncle Tucker’s funeral, at least a third of those faces were dark—all sitting at the back of the church, like they always did when they came to a white church. Many of them worked at the La Luna cotton gin that Uncle Tucker owned. They’d picked cotton, starting probably when they were six or seven years old, and as they grew up, they worked on the tractors, then in the combines—running the gin, alongside Uncle Tucker.

  My papa was invited to sit up front to bid his old friend good-bye. Aunt Helen was sitting next to Uncle Richard, who came out for the occasion. Sonny Boy and Will and their families were sitting all in one row, near the confession booths with Eddie and Renée and their kids. Sukey and her mama sat across the aisle.

  I deliberately chose to sit next to Olivia and Pana. The two of them had loved Uncle Tucker so much, and taken care of him for so many years, and yet no one had thought to ask them to sit up front. M’Dear did not like the custom of black people sitting in the back, and neither did I.

  In addition to grieving for the old man they loved, the church was buzzing over the fact that Tuck had returned to La Luna for the funeral. Tuck the big-time lawyer, pride of La Luna, now coming home for the first time in years. I’d heard from Eddie that Tuck had flown into Claiborne, rented a car, and driven to La Luna. Eddie also told me that Tuck was recently divorced. I was truly sorry to hear that.

  And then, there he was. Marching right past me down the center aisle, staring straight ahead. He took his place in the front pew with Uncle Tucker’s other surviving relatives. We all noted that Tuck’s mother, Charlotte, was not there. Nobody knew what had become of her.

  I must have flushed bright red when I saw Tuck, because Olivia reached over and placed her hand on my arm. Sukey and Renée kept turning around to look at me. Renée shot me her famous one-eyed stare. This could mean anything from “Watch yourself,” when she turned it on Eddie or the kids, to warm encouragement, which is what I was getting. Sukey kept making faces at me, but subtly, so as not to disrespect Uncle Tucker.

  Throughout the Mass, Tuck faced his grandfather’s coffin. Now and then, he bowed his head to bury his face in his hands. Then, after the sermon, Father Gerard asked Tuck to come to the podium to deliver the eulogy. When he stood up to talk, I gasped and covered my face with my handkerchief.

  I’d dearly loved Uncle Tucker. He was like a grandfather to me and like a second father to Papa. I don’t know what would have happened to my father after M’Dear’s death if Uncle Tucker hadn’t been around. I’d cried long and hard for Uncle Tucker, but now I also had to hide my emotions at seeing Tuck for the first time in a decade. His face hadn’t changed much at all. It was more angular, with cheekbones more pronounced than when he was in his teens. His thick blond hair was shorter and more carefully shaped than when I knew him. Definitely an urban professional cut.

  His tailored suit hung well on his tall, lanky body. But the language of his body contradicted his sophisticated image. My body immediately responded to his, a deep animal identification with what he must have been going through. He held his
arms behind his back. I feel the shaking of your hands. He dropped his head and took a deep breath. I can feel the tightness in your shoulders. A hush fell over the church as Tuck paused to compose himself, with the discipline of a well-trained lawyer. Then he looked up and took in the different faces around the church.

  “Thank you all for coming here today to say good-bye to my grandfather, Bernard Tucker,” he began. “He was ‘Uncle Tucker’ to many of you, and he was a true papa to me. I know you all might think I broke his heart by not coming back to La Luna. I can tell you that it was done out of love, between Papa Tucker and me, a love which maybe only one or two other people might understand. Finishing college and law school was a dream for me, for my mother, Charlotte Tucker LeBlanc, and for all my family. All I can say is that I’m speaking for Papa Tucker at his own request, delivered through Father Gerard. My mother isn’t here today. But I’d like to think that I’m representing her as well.

  “Papa would appreciate y’all being here because he loved La Luna. And he earned your love in return. As you know, he was a man who gave a lot and didn’t keep score.”

  Tuck closed his eyes for a split second. I feel the tears being held back. I know.

  “Papa was born and raised here. He met and fell in love with my grandmother, Miz Lizbeth. The two of them were always the greatest of companions. My mother, Charlotte, was their only child. She left La Luna when she was eighteen. I left La Luna when I was eighteen. Both of us went looking for something better, but a lot of what we found was simply harder.”

  Tuck seemed so vulnerable and wounded that I could sense my body leaning toward his, willing him to go on. I could feel a ripple pass through Olivia beside me, acknowledging Tuck’s frailty. It was as if the two of us had become a silent chorus for him.