The Banty House

by Brown, Carolyn

  Sloan took her small hand in his. “I guess we’ve both lived through some rough times.”

  “Yes, we have, and it’s made us tough enough to face whatever lies ahead of us,” she said. “Maybe God or Fate or Destiny put us here in this place at this time so we could help each other make peace with the past.”

  “I like that idea.” He smiled.

  “Me too,” she said. “Now I reckon I should be goin’ on back to the Banty House. The sisters will be gettin’ worried.”

  Thunder sounded like it rolled right over the top of the house.

  “Let me drive you home,” Sloan said. “You’re liable to get wet if you walk.”

  “Thank you.” Her smile lit up the whole room. “I will surely take you up on that.”

  He pulled her up by the hand and kept it in his the whole way outside and across the yard to his truck. She didn’t resist, and that simple little fact, and knowing that she was going to stay in Rooster for a little longer, brought him so much comfort that mere words couldn’t have begun to describe the feeling.

  Chapter Ten

  There was an envelope lying on Ginger’s plate at the breakfast table on Friday morning. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Your paycheck for the past week,” Betsy said. “We all get paid on Friday. Our CPA takes care of the payroll and puts ours directly into our individual bank accounts. If you want, we can have Sloan drive you into town this afternoon, and you can start a bank account with yours. After you do that, we can have Suzanne do a direct deposit for you, too.”

  “Are you serious?” Ginger asked when she peeked inside the envelope. “This is more money than I made in two weeks at the café, and I had to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries.” She had always held her breath and hoped that she could stretch each check from one payday to the next. There had certainly never been enough money to even think about starting a bank account.

  “Well, do you want to start an account?” Connie asked.

  “Yes,” Ginger said, nodding her head the whole time. “Yes, I do. I wouldn’t even know what to do with all this money except to save it up so I can buy what the baby needs.”

  “All right, then. As soon as Sloan gets through taking care of the car, he can drive you into Hondo to our bank and help you get things done. And while you’re in town you can run by the store and pick up a few things that I forgot yesterday,” Betsy said. “I was so excited about seeing the baby like we got to do that I plumb forgot to get some vanilla extract, and I need another twenty pounds of sugar for blackberry jam this week.”

  “Just make a list, and I’ll be glad to get whatever you need.” The thought that went through Ginger’s mind was that she could pack her bag and get all the way to California with the money she already had and there would be enough left to stay in a cheap motel until she could find a job. She thought about it for a split second before she shook the crazy notion from her head. Next week, she’d have a paycheck just like this one, and by the time the baby came, she’d have even more. For the first time in her life, she’d have money in the bank. She couldn’t leave behind a deal like this, not even to dip her toes in the ocean.

  When breakfast was over, the table cleared, and the dishes done, she and Betsy put a turkey in the oven for the noon meal. In this part of Texas, that was dinner and the evening meal was called supper. Ginger had been in one upscale foster home where the meals were called lunch and dinner and some not nearly as fancy where they were dinner and supper. Lucas used the terms “lunch” and “dinner” and looked down his nose on anyone who did differently.

  “What on earth are four people going to do with a whole turkey?” Ginger shook her head to get rid of the vision of Lucas’s face when he made snide remarks about the people he considered beneath him and his family.

  “We eat what we want, and then, when you get back from town, we’ll pick all the meat off the bones, make a couple of turkey potpies for the freezer, and maybe if there’s enough left, we’ll have turkey-salad sandwiches for supper tonight,” Betsy said. “That way if we get a call that someone in Rooster is sick or has died, all we have to do is pop a potpie in the oven and we’re good to go.”

  “To go where?” Ginger started taking the leaves off the ends of strawberries.

  “Honey, if someone dies, we take food to the house where the family is gathering. If someone is sick, then they probably ain’t feelin’ like cookin’ for the family, so we do the same,” Betsy explained.

  “That’s so sweet.” Ginger thought she might never leave this place if all the folks were that kind. She cocked her head to one side. “Who’s whistling?”

  Betsy cupped a hand around her ear and slowly made her way to the door leading out to the garage. “That’s not Kate’s whistling. Hers is higher pitched and not nearly as happy.” She picked up a glass from the counter, put the top of it against the door, and placed her ear against the bottom.

  “What the hell are you doin’?” Kate asked as she opened the basement doors. Alcohol fumes mixed with a faint hint of something minty followed her into the kitchen.

  “Shhh . . .” Betsy put a finger over her lips. “Sloan is whistling.”

  “You’re kiddin’ me.” Kate jerked the glass out of Betsy’s hand and listened for herself. “You are so right. Sloan is whistling. I ain’t seen him happy enough to whistle since before he left to go to the service.” She handed the glass back to Betsy and turned to Ginger. “What’d y’all talk about last night?”

  Ginger raised one shoulder. “Just life in general. How it ain’t fair, or at least that’s the way it seems until we done lived through it and got on down the road a few years. Then we look back and figure out that maybe things worked out the way they were supposed to.”

  “That’s pretty deep for a girl your age,” Betsy said.

  “It’s just the way I see it, I guess.” She went back to washing the berries and getting them ready for Betsy.

  “Well, whatever you did, do some more of it.” Betsy crossed the room and got out the big pot that she used to make jam.

  If Ginger could whistle, she might have been doing the same thing as Sloan, because her heart felt lighter that morning—even before she found her paycheck on her plate—than it had ever been.

  Folks at the bank knew Sloan, and several of the tellers either waved or else spoke to him when he and Ginger came in the front door. Some even raised their eyebrows at him coming in with a pregnant woman, but he was long past the time when he cared what people thought or even what they might say when he was gone. He showed Ginger into the office, where a girl he’d graduated from high school with took care of new accounts, and then he went to one of the teller’s windows to transfer some of his money from checking to savings.

  “Hey, is that the woman I’ve been hearing about?” The teller was a girl who lived in Rooster, named Samantha. She was a few years older than Sloan and was a daughter to the preacher at the Rooster church.

  “What woman and what’s been said?” he asked.

  “That you met her when she came to the cemetery looking for her relatives’ graves and y’all had a fling. Now she’s come back and says she’s pregnant with your baby. The Banty House ladies are letting her stay with them while y’all sort this crap out and you can get a DNA done when the baby is born.” She made out a slip and handed it to him. “All done with your transaction. Need anything else?”

  “Not today.” He knew that gossip was crazy in small towns like Hondo, but holy smokin’ hell. How had the rumormongers ever come up with a story like that?

  “Are you goin’ to tell me if the story goin’ around is anywhere near right?” she asked.

  “Not today,” he said, repeating his previous words, and walked over to the office where Ginger was signing papers.

  She glanced up and saw him standing in the open doorway and held up a finger. “Just a few more minutes. They’re making me a debit card right now.”

  “Take your time.” He stopped just short of say
ing “darling” just to keep the rumors going. What kind of wild stories would folks tell when Ginger left Texas—would he be the son-of-a-bitch, deadbeat father who didn’t even acknowledge his own child?

  That got him to thinking about what it would be like if the rumors were true. Would the news that he was about to have a daughter make him happy? His grandmother would probably shout so loud in heaven that he could hear her right there beside the Cottonwood Cemetery. One of the last things she had told him before she died was that someday she wanted him to find someone who’d make him as happy as his grandpa had made her.

  He was deep in thought when Ginger touched him on the arm. “I’m all done, now.”

  He tucked her arm into his, and they walked out of the bank together into a fierce wind that whipped Ginger’s hair around in her face and sent Sloan’s cap tumbling down the sidewalk right beside a big tumbleweed. He chased after it while Ginger stood on the sidewalk and laughed. Finally, after several tries, he caught the blasted thing and shoved it in the hip pocket of his camouflage pants.

  “Good thing your hair is attached to your head,” he teased when he came back to her.

  “And that I’ve got the extra weight of this little girl in my tummy to anchor me,” she said. “I’ll treat you to an ice cream at that store over there, if you’ll go with me.”

  “I’d love a hot fudge sundae,” he said. “But are you sure you want to be seen with a man like me?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  He told her what the gossips were saying about them, and she threw back her head and laughed. If the wind could have carried the sound of her laughter across the whole eastern half of Texas, it would have put a smile on lots of folks’ faces.

  “I’ve never mattered enough for anyone to spread gossip about me,” she said. “I think that’s pretty funny. Anyone who knows you should know that you are the kindest, most honorable man in the whole state.”

  “Didn’t you hear a word I said the other night about my buddies?” He took her hand in his, and they bent forward against the wind as they crossed the street. No one could ever understand what he was going through, not even a woman with a hard-luck past.

  “Yes, I did, but you need to let that go and move on with your life. You’re not dead for a reason,” she shot back.

  The business of going forward was tough when he carried the guilt of not being there for his team on his shoulders. He couldn’t just throw off the weight like a bag of topsoil or fertilizer. If he was alive for a reason, he damn sure wished he could figure out what it was.

  “I try, but it’s easier said than done.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. After all, it wasn’t Ginger’s fault that he was the cause of his team’s death. “Let’s go get ice cream now, but before we go into the ice cream shop, let me tell you, I can’t let you treat me. My granny would rise up out of her grave and use a pecan-tree switch on me if I let a lady pay when I’m with her. Besides, it’ll show everyone that I do have a little decency left in me.” He opened the door for her and had to fight it to keep the wind from slamming it shut.

  “All right,” she agreed as she crossed the floor and looked at the menu up above the counter. “But if you pay, then you have to stay and play dominoes with us tonight, and you have to come to movie night next Wednesday.”

  “I’ve played dominoes with the ladies a few times, and beware, darlin’, those old gals take their games very serious. But I didn’t know about movie night. They don’t even have a television, do they?”

  “I want a caramel sundae,” she said.

  “I’ll take a hot fudge sundae with chocolate ice cream,” he said.

  “Oh, do we get to pick the ice cream? If so I want butter pecan under my caramel,” she told the young lady behind the counter.

  “Have it right out to you,” the girl said as she made change from the bill that Sloan handed her. “Y’all sit wherever you want.”

  Ginger slid into a booth beside the window. “Their television is behind the wall above the fireplace.” She went on to describe the whole thing to him and then to tell him about the shows they’d watched.

  “What time does it begin?” Sloan asked.

  “Seven on the dot. Betsy makes popcorn and puts it in bags for each of us and brings us each a candy bar and a bottle of root beer. I could ask them if they’d mind if you had a real beer. I don’t think they’d mind since Kate makes moonshine,” she said.

  “I haven’t had a drink . . .” His voice trailed off.

  She laid a hand over his. “Then root beer it is.”

  The girl brought their sundaes, and they both set about eating. To Sloan, even in the midst of a busy ice cream shop, there was no one else but the two of them in the world right at that moment, and he rather liked the feeling.

  So this is what it feels like to have real friends, Ginger thought that evening as they sat around the dining room table and played dominoes. Connie won the first hand of a game called Shoot the Moon, and Betsy won the second. Sloan whipped them all in the third hand, and Kate declared that Connie hadn’t shuffled the pieces well enough when she lost the next round.

  Betsy excused herself to go get the snacks after the fourth round, and Ginger followed her into the kitchen to help.

  “What can I do to help?” Ginger asked.

  “Get out the cheese tray from the refrigerator and fill the center part with black olives,” Betsy said. “I’ll slice up some apples. Didn’t want to do them too early or they turn dark, but Sloan likes them with my special cream-cheese dip.”

  “How often do y’all have a domino night?” Ginger went to work following Betsy’s orders.

  “About once a month,” Betsy answered. “Mama said if you play something too often it’ll get boring, so we vary things. We didn’t play last week because you needed to get settled in a little. It was Kate’s turn to choose our Friday game that time, and she always picks dominoes. Next week it’ll be my turn, and we’re playing Scrabble. That’s good for the mind. Keeps it active. Connie changes her mind and goes back and forth between Monopoly and Yahtzee.”

  “I like playing games with y’all and Sloan.” Ginger finished arranging the olives in the center section of the crystal plate. She didn’t say it out loud, but she also liked helping make pretty food with Betsy in the kitchen.

  “Did you remember to ask him to movie night?” Betsy asked.

  “Yes, I did, and he said he’d come next Wednesday,” Ginger answered.

  They took the food plates to the dining room and set them on the buffet.

  “Whoever isn’t playing at the time can help themselves,” Betsy said. “Plates and napkins are right here. Don’t get anything greasy on Kate’s dominoes or she’ll throw a fit.”

  “You bet I will. There’s no telling how many games have been played with these little ivory darlin’s.” Kate shuffled them well, and then everyone slid their own share over to set them up. “Mama kept really good records about who played dominoes and who got baths.”

  “What do dominoes and baths have to do with each other?” Ginger asked.

  “Honey, this wasn’t a regular old whorehouse where men came and went all night long,” Connie explained as she started out the game by laying down a double six. “This was a special brothel. Only six men, one to each of her girls, were allowed through the doors each evening, and they had to make an appointment. Mama had senators and doctors and lawyers comin’ to the Banty House and we have all her records to prove it.”

  “But what about baths?” Ginger asked.

  “It was like this.” Kate talked as she studied her dominoes. “Each man got special treatment the night he came to the Banty House. To start with, whichever girl he had an appointment with gave him a bath and then a massage.”

  “Why?” Ginger asked.

  “Honey, this is Texas,” Connie whispered. “After a hard week’s work, Mama’s customers smelled pretty bad.”

  Kate giggled and went on. “After tha
t, she served him a good meal of his choosing—fried chicken, roast beef, steak—Mama’s menu usually offered their choice of one of several meats and sides, right along with dessert, coffee, and a cigar if he wanted one afterwards. The meal was served in his girl’s bedroom so the two of them could have conversation and visit.”

  “That must’ve been very expensive,” Ginger said.

  “It was.” Kate laid out a domino with a sharp click. “The clients had to pay up front, and they had to be gone by seven o’clock in the morning. Mama ran a strict house. Straight-up sex if the guys wanted it—no whips or cuffs and nothing demeaning to her girls.”

  “The girls got one-third of what they made, but Mama made them save part of it. The house got one-third, and the other part of the money they collected each evening went into a general fund. When a girl had worked a year, Mama gave them a severance package and put them on the train to wherever they wanted to go so they could get a fresh start in a new place,” Connie said.

  “Why?” Sloan asked.

  “Mama said that it was good marketing to keep fresh faces in the house,” Betsy said. “And she never let her girls look like anything but angels. They wore white dresses every night. That way the menfolk thought they’d made a trip to heaven when they left in the morning.”

  “Did she ever have trouble keeping help?” Sloan played a domino.

  “She had a waiting list of girls who wanted to work when she closed down the place right after I was born,” Connie replied. “And from what she said, she hurt a lot of guys’ feelings when she had to tell them that she wouldn’t be doing business anymore.”

  “I betcha there’s a whole list of folks who would kill to get their hands on those records your mother kept.” Sloan chuckled.

  “They’re in a really good safe at our bank,” Kate said. “Mama didn’t believe in blackmail, but she did believe in protection.”