“Ain’t no tears in Heaven, Mama told me,” she said.
I put my hands over my ears. I slipped around her and run into the house. I don’t know if she followed me or not, but I heard her say, “She didn’t want none of us no more. She told me.”
* * *
Laying there in Mama’s bed that night, I had a vision of holding Daddy’s pistol in my right hand. I reached over with my left hand, cocked it—it took both thumbs—raised the pistol up to the right side of my head, and pulled the trigger. Then I cocked it again, swiveled my head right, lifted the pistol to the left side of my head, and fired again. Then I shot myself in my forehead, and then I held it over the top of my head and pointed straight down into my skull and fired again. Then I pointed it in one eye, bang, and then the other, bang. My thought was, more or less, There. That oughta do it.
I just laid there and watched myself. It was peculiar, of course—almost comical—to think a person could shoot theirself over and over. But as it played itself out, why, as I shot myself everthing flowed away from me, all my troubles. My eyes was open, but I wasn’t seeing nothing.
My thoughts swirled around and around. What Dacia’d said about Mama, it was the worst lie she’d ever told, the worst I’d ever heard. Didn’t make no sense—why would Dacia lie like that, something she had to know I wouldn’t believe for a minute?
After a little bit I thought about my brothers’ idea for me and the girls. I tried to picture how things would be if we took us a room in some lady’s house. I couldn’t get no picture in my mind, only a smell. There’s a certain smell in a house with only old people in it. When the weather’s hot, or in the winter when the fire is high, that smell pushes itself inside your skin. My mind roused up and asked me, where did I know that smell from, whose house had I ever knowed that only had old people in it, but I smacked back that thought. Didn’t matter. I knowed that smell.
Then out of nowhere, seemed like, a thought come to me—I could get married. I could find me a husband. Mama and the aunts, they was all married by the time they was sixteen or seventeen. Why not me?
My heart started thumping. I could get married, and me and the girls, we could move into his place. I could make us a home, do the cooking and clean house, dress chickens and take in ironing, have me a little garden maybe. Sundays, we could pack up a picnic and go visit William and his wife and the twins. Opal, in my mind’s eye she would make some muslin curtains to hang at the kitchen window. I pictured them curtains, how crisp they would be, how sweet they would smell.
These pictures come easy to me, though where the husband should be, of course, there was a blank. I’d had a few little sweethearts in school—held hands walking across the schoolyard, passed a few notes—but I knowed that wasn’t the same thing as a husband. And I didn’t know of no man looking for a wife, and I didn’t know how to find me one or, if I found one, how to get him to marry me except like harlots done, and I didn’t know exactly what that was.
After while, laying there, my heart slowed back down. I knowed the what, though I didn’t know the how. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I seen Alta Bea in my mind. Seemed like if anybody I knowed could figure this out, it was her.
I never pictured shooting myself again, at least not that night.
Chapter 9
The next morning there was a cold, thick fog around me as I walked over to Alta Bea’s house. The fog had a grassy smell to it, and it made my face feel tacky in a good way.
Alta Bea led me into the room with the bookshelves, and we set at the same table where we’d played paper dolls years ago. The gloom outside give the room a gray-blue tinge through the bay window.
She asked me where was the children, and I told her I’d left them with Dacia. “She’s nine already, it’s about time.”
Her mama come in carrying a silver tray with a pot of coffee and a cake. She said hello, how was the children, and I said fine. I’m glad, she said, and she left, closing the door behind her.
Alta Bea poured us some coffee, and I doped mine with cream and sugar and took a big swallow. Then she cut us each a piece of the cake. “Have you read the new book?”
“Ain’t had time, tell the truth.”
We visited for a while, I forget about what. Pretty soon she reached into her pocket and, cool and smooth, pulled out a little silver flask about the size of your hand. I watched as she poured the liquor into her coffee and took a couple sips. You could tell it wasn’t the first time she done it.
I was shocked. I’d never saw no girl drink liquor—or woman, come to that—and Alta Bea’s mother just in the other room. It seemed unnatural, like a tree growing upside down. I couldn’t think of what to say.
Alta Bea, she didn’t look in my direction, only stared down at her hands.
After a silence I said, “That pork butt your mama sent, that was a blessing, sure enough. I cooked it with apples. You never seen nobody eat like the twins done. That was real nice, that pork butt.” I felt like I was babbling, and I drunk some coffee to shut myself up.
We picked up the conversation, and after a while I took a deep breath and told her I was looking to get married if I could find me a decent man.
“Oh, please,” she said. “You’re what, sixteen?”
I was fifteen yet, but I never said so.
“Next thing you know you’d be having a baby,” she said.
I blushed.
“And what about your brothers and sisters?”
I picked up my fork and started rubbing the crumbs off of it. “Well, looks like we’ve got to break up the family.”
She lifted up her eyebrows. “What?”
I told her William’s plan to take in the twins, him and his new wife. I was looking down at my hands, but I kept her in the corner of my eye. I was trying not to cry in front of her. I had my pride.
“The twins?” she said, blinking. “How do you feel about that?”
“Ain’t about how I feel. About what needs done.” Now I was rubbing the mouth grease off of my fork. Pressing in between the tines. “Buck, he’s wanting to take up the barbering trade. Got him a place in town where Daddy could go live, if Buck can talk him into it.”
“But what about you and the girls?” she said. “Surely you can’t manage the farm by yourself?”
I didn’t say nothing. I don’t imagine Alta Bea’d ever knowed nobody that had to figure out how they was going to make out in the world. Now I seen it dawn on her, and she finished her coffee and poured another cup. “Oh, I see.” Out come the flask again.
“I can’t picture no other way.”
She opened her mouth to speak, seemed like, but closed it back. She took a sip directly out of the flask.
“I don’t want to marry no farmer, truth be told,” I said. “Too hard of a life for children. Opal, she . . .” I got lost in the picture in my mind.
“You have to think of yourself, too, Bertie,” Alta Bea said. “Nobody else is.” There was the slightest little slur on else, so it come out elsh.
I took my chance, though I didn’t hardly know what to say. “Could you—do you—I hoped—”
She give me a puzzled look.
I swallowed. “I thought maybe, with your folks—with your mama, she’s friends with so many people—”
“Oh,” she said, drawing it out. “You want me to help you find someone.”
My face was burning.
“Lordy,” she said. That was a new one on me. She didn’t say it like a curse word, though.
She stood up and put the flask in her pocket, and then she walked over to the bay window and looked out at the fog. “A decent man, like you say. A widower maybe. But not too old.” There was steam gathering in the glass in front of her face. “With a steady income. Stable. Good-looking—that would be nice.” She laughed softly. “And no farmers.”
“Somebody that’d take in the three of us,” I said.
She frowned. “Yes, that.” She turned and come back to the table and set down.
&nb
sp; “I keep a good house,” I said. “And Opal, she’s awful sweet-natured.”
“Wait.” Now Alta Bea stood up again. “I know someone. Benjamin? What’s his name? Raymond? Marion? No, it starts with a B.” She begun pacing. “I saw him once, though we didn’t actually meet, but everybody knows him. He’s from Millard—he’s a schoolteacher. A friend of Mother’s knows his uncle, I think, or his cousin.”
“Oh.” A man teacher would be nice, but what man teacher would have me, ignorant like I was?
“He’s a catch, actually. Everybody says so. No one can figure out why he’s not married already.” She was flushed now.
“Don’t sound like the kind would be interested in me, though.”
She leaned over and reached out her hand and touched my cheek. I smelled the whiskey on her breath. “Why not? You’re a pretty girl.”
I’d heard that a few times as I’d got older, but I never thought about my looks much. The only mirror we had was in Mama and Daddy’s room, high up. I don’t reckon I saw my reflection more than a dozen times living in that house. I done my hair by feel.
“Lordy,” she said again, shaking her head. “Lordy Lord.” I wondered, did the drink make it easier for her to talk to people? And was I just “people” to her, after all this time? After we washed Mama together? I wondered, was I as peculiar to Alta Bea as she was to me? Truth to tell, I wondered would we even have became friends if there was any other females near our age inside of five miles, which there wasn’t. I recalled Mama always said, “Beggars can’t be choosers,” and for a moment I was lost in thought, back home where everbody’s your cousin and you never wonder if somebody’s looking down on you, and even my flat-headed cousin Frank was treated the same as everbody else. Seemed like me and Alta Bea could never be the same like that, and I felt in my heart how it must have tore Mama up when we moved away from everthing she knowed. She didn’t have a friend in the world. No wonder her and Dacia had growed so close.
“Bernard!” Alta Bea cried. “That’s his name, Bernard. Bertie and Bernie!” She smacked her hand on the table and got to laughing, and after a minute I started in laughing, too. Didn’t seem like I could help it.
* * *
The day I went to meet Bernard at the Triangle Cafe, I knowed who he was directly I walked in. He was setting there in a black suit with a high white collar and a thin black tie. His hair was like a preacher’s but more greasy than oily, and there was a sharp part on his right side of his head. He wasn’t a bad-looking man—he had a long nose and curly lips. Alta Bea’s mama’s cousin, or whoever it was Alta Bea talked to, they’d said he was about thirty.
He seen me and stood up. I liked it that he walked over without waiting for me to come to the table. I smelled sweet pomade on his hair. “You must be Miss Winslow,” he said, friendly. He shook my hand with a light grip. “Bernard Whitson.”
I smiled back at him, and we walked over to the table. He already had a cup of coffee going. I noticed the sugar bowl was open. I started to sit down, and he like to pulled the chair out from under me. I laughed a little bit, and he smiled.
I tried to not think about what was at stake for me and the girls. I tried to keep my mind on him, what he was like, what kind of a man he was. It wasn’t easy.
He asked me did I want coffee or what, and I said I did. He asked me did I want a piece of pie, but I thought it would be better not to obligate myself that much. The girl brought me coffee and a little pitcher of cream, and I poured ever drop in. I seen him looking at me, and I said, “I’ve always been partial to cream—that, and clabber milk. I thought I wouldn’t like it, but I did the first time Mama had me to try it.”
“I don’t believe I’ve had clabber milk.”
“You must not have been raised in the country.”
“No, I grew up in Kansas City,” he said.
“Clabber milk, it’s easy to make. You just set it out on the table for three-four hours, or maybe an hour if it’s hot in the house. Gets lumpy and has a nice sharp taste.”
He nodded. “Is that right. I’ll have to give that a try.”
“Best thing there is for the stomach. Just don’t leave it out all day long.” I felt like I was talking too much, but I got the feeling he liked to talk and hear you talk, too, not like no man I ever met before. Except Daddy, who liked to talk but not listen.
Me and Bernard got to visiting about what kind of food did we each like, and then we got on the subject of things going on around town. Seemed like besides Obsidian and Millard, he knowed everbody in Harris, Trenton, all over the county. He told me he liked traveling, particularly in the summer when school was out. He liked meeting new people.
He was easy to talk to, and he looked me in the eye. I liked it, but at the same time it made my scalp prickle. The way I was raised, if somebody looked you in the eye it meant you better be ready for something—maybe good, maybe bad, or maybe they just wanted something. After while, though, it seemed like Bernard didn’t mean nothing by it except being friendly.
Directly he said, “I surely was sorry to hear about your mother.”
I looked at his chin. “She went awful young.”
“I lost my own mother three years ago,” he said, and there was tears in his voice.
“It’s a trial, sure enough.”
“I miss her every minute of every day,” he said.
I nodded.
He clenched his teeth and then cleared his throat. “Do you find it difficult to care for your brothers and sisters?”
Seemed like this question had a hidden thorn in it, though I wasn’t sure. “Has to be done.”
“I expect it takes all your time.” Again he cleared his throat and swallowed two or three times.
I took a drink of my coffee. I felt like I needed to tread lightly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring up a sad subject.”
“It’s only natural.”
“How much schooling have you had, Birdy?”
“Bertie,” I said. “Short for Albertina.”
He smiled. “Pretty name. May I call you Albertina?”
I felt my shoulders relax. “Up to you.”
“Do you like school, Albertina?”
“Like it all right.”
“Are you in high school now?”
Him being a schoolteacher, I knowed he would ask me that. Well, nothing to be done but tell the truth. “Ain’t been to school much since eighth grade. Mama was sick a long while, and I had to mind the children.”
He nodded. “Would you like me to teach you proper grammar?”
For a moment I couldn’t breathe. We all of us Winslows talked improper, sure enough. Timmy had, and Mama, and seemed like what I missed the most about them was just talking to them. I didn’t give a diddly darn about proper grammar. Now I seen myself like a monkey on a string, dancing for this man teacher, and my face turned red. If I married him, would I have to do like his ways? But if I didn’t marry him, what would happen to me and the girls?
“I wouldn’t mind it,” I said finally, “though the people I come up with, they was decent even if they wasn’t proper.”
To my relief, he smiled. “I know what you mean. I’m the first one in my family to finish high school.” Saying this, he looked at his hands, and I followed his eyes. He had man hands, naturally, with coarse black hairs on the back and in between the knuckles, but his nails, besides being real clean and pink, was curved on the ends like a fine lady’s or a harlot’s. I never seen the like. I must have stared at them—he pulled them under the table.
“After I left home, someone taught me how to speak well,” he said. “A very dear friend.” It seemed like there was tears on his eyelashes again. I opened my mouth but didn’t know what to say.
He give me a kindly look. “Speaking well opens up your life to more opportunities. You can meet anyone at all and feel confident in talking to him.”
This felt like he was trying not to insult me, but it did. Then it come to me wh
at to say. “I can see how it would be good for the children to know them things.”
He nodded. “You’re right about that. The world is getting smaller all the time.”
“What?” I said. “I never heard that.”
He smiled. “I don’t mean it literally.”
I probably had a look on my face.
“It’s not actually getting smaller. It just seems as if . . . Well, think about magazines, for one thing. There are thousands of them, and dozens that are read in every part of the country. The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Weekly, Ladies’ Home Journal.” He sounded like a teacher, sure enough.
“Uh-huh.” I seen them magazines, but we didn’t take them.
“So for the first time, we have a truly national culture being created.” He was sweating and looking close into my eyes. “Not just the wealthy and the educated, but everyone. For five cents you can read the ideas of the most brilliant people we have. And the idiots, too, of course.”
“We get the Sears catalog,” I said.
He laughed. “That too! So pretty little Albertina, in Obsidian, Missouri, can buy the very same bedroom suit as citified Albertina in Chicago.”
Now I laughed. “Hairpins and Mason jars, more like.” I noticed he called me pretty.
He looked sheepish. “I get carried away, I know. All I’m saying is, the more that people get to know the whole country, the more we will all be expected to talk—well, you see what I mean.”
“I expect you’re right. But I’m stubborn, tell the truth.” I held my breath.
He started off giggling. “Oh, I like you, Albertina. If you could see some of the ladies I—” Now he opened his mouth wide and laughed.
I felt people looking at us, but I couldn’t help but smile. I started to say I liked him, too, when he pulled out his watch and said, “Look at the time.”
I drunk the last of my coffee. “This is awful good. Course, anything goes in my mouth is awful good if I don’t have to make it myself.”
“Really? I like cooking,” he said.
“I never heard of no man liked to cook,” I blurted out. It sounded hurtful, so I added, “Must be aplenty, though.”
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