Family Linen

by Lee Smith

  I bet he thought he’d died and gone to heaven, Jewell Rife. Think for a minute if you was him, and imagine what-all you saw. Imagine that cold gray afternoon. And here’s the house way up on the hill at the end of the long, long walk all lined with the boxwoods, all that land lying around it empty and cold and smeared white with the leftover snow, and inside the house is Elizabeth, to answer the door. It must of been like stepping into a magazine, to answer that door. Because who knows where-all he’d been, or what he came from? In those days men were desperate. It must of been like stepping into a movie, those pretty things of Mama’s, and how Elizabeth kept them all just so. But the rooms were big, and cold and drafty, the heater was broke. Elizabeth stood in her long plaid coat with Fay behind her, wrapped up in a blanket. Jewell stood there holding his hat, looking like something wild, looking like all outdoors. But one thing about Jewell was that he always did have the prettiest manners. You’d have to call him a lively man, too, when he wanted to be. “You go ahead and start in on the heater,” he told Mr. Bascom, after they’d been introduced. “You go right ahead on, sir, but I believe I’ll just take the liberty of building these pretty ladies a fire in the fireplace to warm them up a bit, they look half-froze to me. Ladies, where’s your wood?”

  “Out back there in the shed,” Elizabeth said, her voice shaking. “But that won’t be necessary, I’m sure, Mister—”

  “Rife,” said Jewell. “And I won’t take no for an answer.”

  Mr. Bascom went in the kitchen to look at the heater, and Jewell went back outside and around the house and up to the barn for the wood. He was checking things out, I imagine, and I imagine he liked what he saw. He came back carrying a great load of it like it was nothing, like it was matchsticks, and dumped it all down in the parlor, and moved the Chinese screen to the side and started right in building a fire, getting wood chips all over the carpet. I don’t think anybody had made a fire in that fireplace for years and years, not since I could remember. Probably not since Daddy died, in fact, or if they had, I couldn’t remember it. Of course I’d been gone two years or more by then.

  “Get me some paper,” Jewell said, and Fay went scurrying, and then he sent her off to the kitchen for matches. Mr. Bascom came in and out, to see what was going on. And Elizabeth stood by the window holding her coat collar tight at her neck, her eyes as wide and as blue as Mama’s Wedgwood plate in the dining-room breakfront. Then he lit it, but he had forgot to open the flue, and smoke came all out in the room and everybody set in to coughing. Jewell reached up in the chimney then and found the cord, and finally pulled it. Mr. Bascom said everybody was coughing, and smoke filled up the parlor. Then Fay got to laughing, and Jewell did too. He threw back his head and just hollered with laughter. Finally Elizabeth joined in, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Her eyes streamed tears, and Mr. Bascom had to pound her on the back and she had to put her arms up over her head. This was what did it, I think. Jewell could make her laugh. Because there had been precious little laughter in that house for years and years. And making a woman laugh can mean a sight more than other things that ought by all rights to be more important. So everybody was laughing, and then Elizabeth and Fay got up by the fire, and after a while Elizabeth took off her coat and Fay took off her blanket, and the parlor started warming up. I bet it was a mess, too. Jewell Rife went in the kitchen and helped Mr. Bascom blow out the Ruud heater, and then they got it started. They made a big loud noise, those heaters, but they worked good. Elizabeth went in the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee, and then they sat down around the kitchen table to drink it, her and Mr. Bascom and Jewell Rife. Mr. Bascom said later that he knew what was going to happen, right then. He said that often since that time, he’s rued the day he ever took Jewell Rife up there with him.

  Because Elizabeth was like an apple hanging on a tree, waiting for somebody to come along and pick it, and Jewell was the man for the job. He was one of those men that can do just about anything, and can get whatever they want. So Elizabeth was easy for him, easy pickings. Besides, Jewell could of charmed a snake. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, but if things come too easy for you, and everything came easy for Jewell, I reckon—he was just down on his luck temporarily, like so many others—why then you don’t develop no restraint. You can’t say no to yourself when you ought to. But he did have a way about him. Mr. Bascom said he told a funny story there at the table about one of the drifters down at the hotel that mumbled all the time, and wrote things down on little scraps of paper and put them in his pockets and his shoes. He said this fellow thought he had a dog, too, but he didn’t. Anyway, I guess it had been a long time since Elizabeth had heard such foolishness. I can see it now, can hear her laughing. She had kind of a silvery laugh. She was always a handsome girl, big and fair like Fay, with the whitest, smoothest skin. Fay came and stood at the door, hanging back and watching. Elizabeth was smiling and Mr. Bascom said it had been years since he’d thought how pretty she was. He looked over at Jewell, and Jewell was taking note, he said. The Ruud heater was roaring away. Mr. Bascom stood up and put on his hat and his coat and his gloves, and Jewell Rife did the same.

  “Well, I sure do thank you.” Elizabeth was blushing.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” Jewell said. “It’s not every day a man gets to help out a lady in distress.” He winked at Mr. Bascom, who winked back before he thought better of it. Jewell was like that. You’d find yourself going along with him. Jewell was looking around. “I don’t mean to speak out of turn now,” he said, “but it looks to me like you’ve got a lot around here that needs fixing, and I’d be proud to come up here sometime and do a few little no-account things for you, since I’ve got some time on my hands. Wouldn’t take a minute to shore up those back steps,” he said. Jewell Rife noticed everything.

  “Well—” said Elizabeth. “Well—I can’t pay you much,” she warned him. She was twisting her hands in her skirt.

  “I’m not worth much,” Jewell said, and then he winked at her. “But I can sure fix them steps.”

  Elizabeth hemmed and hawed a little, she was flustered, and then Jewell said, “That settles it. I’ll see you again directly.” He nodded to Elizabeth, and nodded to Fay over by the door, and put on his hat, and they took their leave. Mr. Bascom said that Jewell Rife asked him question after question about Elizabeth, all the way down that long cold hill, and that when he ran out of questions, he started whistling. Mr. Bascom said he answered him, and saw no harm in it, even though he saw real clear what was liable to happen. But he thought it would be just fine. He liked Jewell Rife, thought he was smart and handy, and I guess he thought Elizabeth could do a lot worse. Like everybody else, he thought she needed a man to take care of her. He said he thought Daddy would of wanted it too, and that he did it in Daddy’s memory.

  This is hogwash. Daddy would of wanted Elizabeth to marry anybody but Jewell Rife, I believe he could of seen right through Jewell Rife in a New York second. He would have wanted me to keep on running the mill, too, which I could of done, or anyway kept it and then leased the land for coal, which has happened since. It’s all water under the bridge, now. But we had had a serious falling-out at that time, Elizabeth and me who were as different as night and day anyway, and I had married Marvin Sizemore, a man who was twenty years older than me, because I couldn’t think what else to do next.

  I got the whole thing up. I was eighteen, Daddy was dead, and Elizabeth had gone and sold the mill and she planned to live right there in that house, it looked like, and polish the silver until the day she died. We had already sold off my horses. Well, I stood it as long as I could, living there with them, and her not wanting me to take any job because whatever I took it in mind to do, she said it was beneath me, and would violate our parents’ memory, and then she’d cry, and then Fay used to get all upset and cry too. I stood it for about two months, and then one day I went out in the country with Lucius Knight to look at a horse out at Marvin Sizemore’s, that Marvi
n was boarding for some people, it was a horse that Lucius Knight was thinking of buying. Lucius and I were old friends. This was a pretty little mare, but weak in the hindquarters. We stood out in the field looking at her, it was spring, and then Lucius asked would I mind riding her around once or twice and see what I thought, so Marvin saddled her, and I did. Redbud was blooming everywhere, and dogwood, but the leaves on the trees weren’t out yet. Nothing was green but the meadow. The horse kept shying to the left. When I got off I bit my lip and looked down, indicating to Lucius what I thought. The Knights were one of the few families in the county who still had anything at that time, although they were land-poor. “Well I’ll think about it,” Lucius said to Marvin Sizemore, and we all knew that meant he wasn’t interested. I handed Marvin Sizemore the reins and looked at him good for the first time, and that did it.

  I don’t know to this day exactly what got into me. Marvin’s wife had died two years before, leaving him all alone with that little hardscrabble farm. She had died of her lungs. They’d never had any children. Anyway, that little farm was the prettiest place, smack in the middle of Long Valley, with Blue Creek running through it. Marvin had a little white house with a tin roof and a white fence, it sat in the middle of the meadow with no trees at all around it. Marvin’s farm looked like a farm that a child might draw. It looked real simple and sweet to me that day, all straight lines. “How have you been getting on now, Nettie?” Marvin said. He talked slow, like all the Valley men. Marvin was spare and faded, light eyes, graying hair, overalls washed so much they were nearly white. Nobody had ironed them for him. “I’ve been all right, I guess,” I said. I looked at Marvin and I looked at the farm. Why not? I thought. I thought, I’m like this, this is how I am, I might just as well do this. I looked at him awhile, until he started smiling at me.

  So I was married, living out there, when Elizabeth took up with Jewell Rife. I don’t think I could of done a thing to stop it, if I’d been still there. It was like she was drunk on him. She acted crazy, different from any way she’d ever acted before. She’d hum, and giggle, and blush, and say things that didn’t follow whatever she’d said before. Jewell Rife went up there every night for dinner, and every Sunday he took her to church and then they went for a ride in Mr. Bascom’s car. Mr. Bascom had asked Jewell to go in with him, and work there, but Jewell said no, that he had some other irons in the fire. He thought he’d just live on Elizabeth’s income, was what he thought I reckon, and it’s what he did. It made me mad as fire when I found out about it later, because that was my money too, or it could been, if I hadn’t been so bullheaded. Anyway, Elizabeth was in love with Jewell Rife, and everybody in town was talking about it, she was such a spectacle. Everybody knew Elizabeth, was the thing of it, because she went to church every time they cracked the door, and went to all those little clubs, and because they had known Daddy, and also you just couldn’t miss her, she was a big woman, all dressed up. Some people thought she was a fool, and others said it was a good thing. Everybody had something to say about it. Elva Pope said, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful?” when I ran into her on the street, and started crying. Everybody watched and waited, to see what kind of a business Jewell Rife might go into, but he confounded them, and didn’t go into a thing.

  And they did get married, by and by, in the Episcopal church, and Marvin and I went to it, sat in the back. I was pregnant. Everybody in town went to that wedding, it seemed like, and I felt I didn’t have any relation to any of them. We led a quiet life, just me and Marvin, out there in Long Valley.

  Elizabeth looked so full of life and joy, she looked like three people, like somebody actually about to bust right out of their skin. She wore a white satin suit and a hat with a veil, and he wore a striped navy suit, grinning from ear to ear, like the cat that swallowed the canary. They ran down the aisle like they were running straight into paradise instead of the Hotel Roanoke, where they went for the weekend in Mr. Bascom’s car. I looked over at Marvin. He smiled that little smile of his, where the corners of his mouth turned down, and put his hand on my stomach. “We’d best go on now, Nettie,” he said, so we did.

  It had almost come my time when she came out to the farm to see me. She had a boy drive her out there in the new Packard which Jewell had just bought. I got the idea she hadn’t told him she was coming, and that maybe she didn’t want him to know. Jewell and I had not spoke above ten words at that time, nor he to Marvin. We didn’t know him at all—I never knew him, really. Anyway it’s not clear in my mind, to this day, exactly what it was that Elizabeth wanted that day she came out to the farm. I think she was asking for some kind of help, and I would of helped her if I could of, she was my sister, but then she turned on me there at the end. She always turned on me.

  Anyway she came right in the house looking everywhere, poking all around to see how we lived—or I thought that, and maybe I was too quick to take offense, maybe she was just trying to be friendly. It was hot, Marvin out in the field, she wore a seersucker suit and high-heel shoes. She looked everywhere. There wasn’t that much to see, I didn’t take a thing from Mama’s when I got married, and Marvin never had much to begin with. I was in the kitchen putting soup beans on to cook, my stomach was out to here. She came in the kitchen. “I’d love a glass of iced tea,” she said, but I didn’t have any made up, and gave her some water. We had two chairs. She sat in one of them and I sat in the other, with my feet splayed out.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  But Elizabeth wouldn’t say. She smiled that kind of a big loony smile she’d been smiling ever since she ran into Jewell Rife, and ran her tongue around over her lipstick.

  “I just thought I’d come see you,” she said.

  A fly buzzed around and around the kitchen. It was dead noon on the kitchen clock.

  I hate to beat around the bush. I said, “Now, Elizabeth, I’ve been out here going on three years, and you never came out here before. So something is the matter, I reckon, and you’d best just go ahead and tell me what it is.”

  She kept looking all around the kitchen at first one thing and then another, darting her eyes every minute or so over at my stomach which was sticking way up under my calico dress. She swallowed hard, and licked her lips, and shut her mouth.

  “Things are not—” she started. “It’s just not—”

  “Not what?” I asked. But she wouldn’t say. I got up and turned the fire down under the soup beans and put the lid on. “You’re not happy, are you?” I said. “Not like you were at first.”

  “Of course I am!” Elizabeth stood up and brushed down her skirt and reached for her purse. “I certainly am! That’s just like you, Nettie,” she said. “All of this is just exactly like you.”

  I let that go, and watched her. She was all agitated. She went out of the front door and called the boy, who came in bringing a stack of diaper cloths, and told him to put them down. I was mighty glad to have them, which I said. She said goodbye, and the boy drove her off home, raising a cloud of dust which hung in the air for the longest time after they left. I sat on the front steps and looked at it. It came to me that she thought she was some fine princess, visiting poor relations. I got so mad. I stomped all around and went back in and cleaned the whole house I was so mad. There is a streak of pride in the two of us, I see this now, that has run in between us like lightning, and burned up what should have been. So I didn’t know what was the matter then, but I know for a fact that the trouble between her and Jewell started that early on.

  I had my baby, Lou, and she was the prettiest thing. I remember how in August one time we were laying in the bed, Marvin and me, with Lou in between us, and it was thunder storming outside, rain drumming on the tin roof, which was how come Marvin couldn’t work that day, and the light all pale and watery in our room. We had us a white iron bed. Lou was cooing away. I was so taken up with my baby then that I guess I kind of forgot, for a while, about Elizabeth and her visit. I don’t believe I ever did tel
l Marvin, who was not much of a talking man anyway, about it. If I’d had to guess at the trouble between Elizabeth and Jewell, though, I’d have said it probably had something to do with their personal relations, and with what he might have wanted, or expected, of her—she was not a young woman, Elizabeth, nor used to men.

  But then by and by she got pregnant too, and had Sybill, and then she had Arthur. I plumb lost track of it here. Because it was at this time that my own baby Lou took sick, and stopped growing any, and Marvin and me carried her to the doctor in town, and then we carried her all the way down to North Carolina to Duke Hospital in the truck, I recall it like it was yesterday, it was raining then too, and Marvin driving his new truck, and the windshield wipers beating back and forth like crazy and Marvin and me spent the night at the Bull Durham Hotel, they wouldn’t let us stay in the hospital with her. We stayed down there three days, and talked to every doctor in the place, and at the end of that time we took her home. She was cooing and giggling on my lap the whole way home. But she had leukemia, and died just seven months later. Her coffin was not as big as a footlocker.

  After that, it’s hard for me to tell what happened, for a while. Marvin gathered up all Lou’s baby things, after about a week, and took them over to his sister’s. I sat in a kitchen chair, in the day, and couldn’t do anything. At night, Marvin and me would lay in that white iron bed right next to each other flat on our backs but not touching, and not talking either, Marvin not being then or ever, as I said, a talking man, and we’d just lay there. You could hear the crickets outside, and the tree frogs, and the train sometimes away off down Long Valley in the night, sounding real lonesome. It was the worst I ever felt, and the most lonesome I ever was, laying right next to Marvin Sizemore in that bed. It was like we couldn’t stand to talk, or touch each other.