by Nat Burns
Myria shook Kinsie into a more comfortable position before snuggling her as only a grandmother can. “Ain’t you just the prettiest little baby? Sophie, you see this beautiful baby girl I got?”
Kinsie laughed and Sophie shook her head. “You do spoil them babies, Myria.”
Sophie moved into the bedroom of the small four-room cabin. A thin mattress rested atop the wire supports on a rickety double bed against the east wall. It was probably the bed where Myria had been born. A faded quilt, frayed on one corner, no doubt by a puppy long gone, covered the mattress and extended a good six inches all the way around. The room held little more, only a scarred bureau and a darkly stained chest at the foot of the bed. Clothes on wire hangers hung from pegs fixed along two walls and a pile of dirty clothes spilled from a basket near the head of the bed. The air smelled of old cooking oil.
Raleigh sat on the chest pulling on battered sneakers. He saw Sophie and favored her with his grandmother’s smile. “You takin’ me to school?”
“Yep. Thought I would. You need help with that shoe?” She knelt to tie his sneakers.
“What if I don’t want to go?”
She let her eyes roam across his face as she tied. “I’d say what’s the reason? I thought you liked school, bucko.”
“It’s all right. Cousin Tam’s boy don’t go to school, though.”
“Well, he should, but he’s a lot older than you are.”
“He says he don’t need no school ’cause he can make more money selling for Cheetah Race. Maybe I can do that when I get older.”
Sophie tried to keep anger from racing a billiard ball path through her body. She wanted to snatch up Raleigh and shake sense into him. She’d seen so many kids like him, stepping off the cliff of innocence into the chasm of dead eyes and departed spirit. She snared herself into a corset of iron and willed herself to speak calmly and rationally.
“That’s exactly what you don’t want to do, Raleigh. Cheetah is a gangster, pure and simple, and Tam’s boy is going to be dead within three years. He took that path of his own choosing. If you make that same choice you’ll end up there too. It all looks fine and mighty now, big bucks and better times, but you mark my words and pay attention. You’re six now. By the time you hit nine—no, Tam’s boy is smart—let’s say by the time you’re twelve, he’ll be gone. I want you to come to me on that day and tell me that you understand what I’m telling you now. Will you do that one favor for me?”
Raleigh eyed her with some fear but still defiance. “That ain’t so. What if you’re wrong?”
She cupped both his knees between her palms, skinny, bone-sharp knees, and looked him square in the eyes. “Then you come to me and I’ll tell you I’m wrong. In the meantime, you do what I say, you go to school and stay on that other path that your grandma and me believe in. Will you do that? Have we got a deal?”
His gaze was skeptical, but he nodded, sealing the deal.
“Let’s get you to class then.” She stroked his head, the coarse, densely curled hair rough against her palm. He left the room, and Sophie heard him slip out the kitchen door.
Back in the kitchen, Myria and Kinsie hadn’t moved; it looked as though both were dozing in a warm shaft of sunlight. Reluctantly Sophie spoke, her voice soft so as not to disturb the sleeping child.
“Myria, watch that leg now. Cuts that low on the leg need more care. Walk it every day, but not more than a quarter mile and take it real slow. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow to check on it and change the bandage. Keep it dry till then too, okay?”
Myria nodded. “Thank you for taking the boy. There’s two jars of green beans on the counter there. You take them on. I know how Miss Beulah loves my green beans.”
Sophie didn’t argue but only took one of the jars off the counter as she followed Raleigh into the growing early summer sun.
Chapter Twelve
After showering, Delora pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, ran a brush through her wet hair and headed her car west along Bentley Walk Road toward Spinner’s Fen, the greenhouse where she worked three mornings each week. It was a pleasant drive. Trees, still bearing their translucent spring greenery, interlaced branches across the smoothly paved highway as she rounded a bend. Front Street was mostly residential, like the area where she, Louie and Rosalie lived, but these houses were old, maintained by descendants striving desperately to keep antebellum glory alive and kicking. They were doing a good job too. These houses were dressed in their Sunday finery every day of the week with hanging plants placed perfectly above crisp white gingerbread railings. Serene colors of house paint—pale yellows, blues, peaches—butted against lawns verdant and weed free. Expensive boxwoods, harmoniously trimmed, bordered most yards.
Spinners Fen fell at the end of Front Street where it intersected State Route 116. There the houses were less numerous. Turning left onto Carelton, she passed the little high-dollar strip mall on her left. The centerpiece, Mannings Grocery, carried mysterious items such as almond paste, lemon curd and canned shark meat. Spinner’s Fen sprawled just behind the mall area with a large graveled parking area and two greenhouses that hid the fallow storage field behind.
Annie Meeks was there already. Morning dew still lay heavily upon all the Spinner Fen greenery, yet she was there plucking yellowed leaves off the new stock of small marigolds that had been delivered by a wholesaler late the day before.
“I heard you drive up,” she said, more to the marigold than to Delora. “Muffler’s still leaking. Didn’t you take it to Jerry like I told you?”
Delora moved to hook the chain that would hold the lightweight greenhouse doors open during the business day. “Couldn’t take me,” she answered. “He doesn’t have any free time until Wednesday.”
“Hmmm.” Annie nodded her understanding. “He has been busy.”
They worked in silence for some time, Delora opening the doors for business and Annie arranging the new, spruced-up plants on the showroom displays. When the shop was ready to greet the public, Delora moved outside and started watering the larger stock. This was the part of the work she enjoyed most. Although she’d probably helped a thousand customers in the year she’d worked at Spinner’s Fen, she much preferred the time alone with the plants. They were old friends and she treated them as such. They might have been her children the way she nurtured them, tending their torn leaves, nourishing them daily, even speaking to them as if she expected an answer.
Plants, kids and animals. She’d always had a way with them. She certainly preferred them to the adult humans she dealt with each day. It had to be a character flaw, she was sure, but she decided long ago that it had to do with her own lack of self-esteem. She felt less capable than others and presumed everyone knew. Plants, kids and animals never judged and plain didn’t care.
The greenhouse remained quiet; that was unusual for a Tuesday morning this time of year. Typically, the customers were out early because gardeners, as a rule, rose with the dawn and had most of their outside labor done before the sun rose too high. Southern Alabama’s climate could be brutal, but most natives knew how to work around it.
Delora liked the solitude. Annie was on the other side of the property, checking on the special-order boxwood imports that had come in last week, so Delora was able to let her mind wander freely as she tended the coleus. The little pinkish leaves were perky and danced for her; she felt honored by their display.
Delora was thinking about her parents again today. She did this one or two days a month. She called them “Storm Days” in her mind and expected a rough twenty-four hours. The 1982 hurricane that had taken half the town had stolen her life as well. The damage had been severe, but Delora, safe at her Aunt Freda’s house in Jackson, Mississippi, had endured the storm secondhand, although she had been deeply frightened by the keening and wailing of her aunt when the storm’s potent aftermath became known.
Her parents, Sherman and Rita Clark, had been active in the small community of Redstar and were well-respected by the people there
. Her father, a political figure serving on the administrative board, had supported beautification and cleanup programs during his terms. Her mother promoted school programs and had been an ever-present figure in the schools Delora had attended. Until her fourth grade year...when suddenly she was no longer there.
Sometimes Delora thought the people of the town missed Sherman and Rita more than she did. Numbness was the emotion most encountered when she thought of them. She remembered their beauty.
Her mother had been petite and energetic, always impeccably groomed from hair to clothing to toenails. There was never a hair out of place or a collar upturned. To this day, this fact amazed Delora and gave her mother something of a supernatural aura.
Her father had been a true politician, hardly ever seen without his dark blue business suit and tie. Even in the evenings, he dressed for dinner in chinos and a polo shirt. Nights found him fully clothed in broadcloth pajamas, usually a dark blue, although holidays often brought out green or red versions of the same style.
An image persisted in Delora’s mind, so perfect that it seemed to be something she’d seen on television...or in an old movie. She saw her parents together at the foot of her bed. One sat on each side of the bed, bookending her feet. Her father was on the left, wearing his dark blue pajamas, his closely cropped hair mussed in the back. Her mother sat to her right, in a boat neck gown of pale beige. Her long blond hair was still, even this late in the day, styled in a sleek twist along the back of her head, but wispy escaping bangs framed her face along the top. Her eyes had been beautiful, large and blue in color. Delora had inherited these eyes along with her father’s strong brow and chin. Her mother’s face had been a perfect oval with a small nose and sweetly arced lips. The two of them had been laughing at their only daughter, at something witty she had said. Delora didn’t remember what had caused the laughter—that had faded over time—but she did remember the feelings of warmth and camaraderie she had felt, cocooned in her bed with a loving parent on either side.
Delora, picking slugs off the variegated coleus, smiled just a little. She’d been a happy child. She was spoiled, the only grandchild on her father’s side, as he was an only child, his mother having died from typhus when he was young. His father had never remarried after her death, preferring to live quietly in his polished townhouse attended by his secretary, Claude. Although Grandpa Cecil had been reserved and very polite, Claude was a silly man who delighted in surprising Delora with balloons and music boxes. During Grandpa Cecil’s funeral, Claude held her hand and cried. He also cried at her parents’ funeral two months later. Then he had disappeared, leaving behind for her a snow globe containing a tiny replica of the Swiss Alps.
Her mother’s father, Langston Marrs, died in a farming accident when Freda and Rita were still very young. After the settlement of the generous life insurance policy, Nettie Marrs had lived in seclusion, her girls attending the best private boarding schools money could buy. The visits Delora and her family made to Grandmother Marrs’s farmhouse had been tense and unsatisfying. Yet they went dutifully twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, until, at the age of fifty-four, Grandmother Marrs had endured a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. She now lived in a nursing home outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. Delora did not visit.
Delora sighed and rubbed at her back as she stretched. Hunching over while picking at the plants made her back ache if she did it too long.
She thought of Aunt Freda, plagued by every minor illness known to man. Her back ached; she had migraines, painful teeth and sweaty palms. It was always something new. Her weekly phone calls to Delora were endless litanies of new complaints. She had never had children due to mysterious, unspecified “female trouble” and Delora knew this was a good thing. The poor child would have been neurotic as hell.
Freda’s long-suffering husband, Chute Myers, had to be the kindest, most sympathetic man Delora had ever met. He commiserated with his wife as if he meant it. Delora, as she got older, began to note extended absences and finally figured out that Chute had a little drinking problem and was a skilled closet nipper.
Delora pictured his thin beatific face and smiled at the memory. Everyone has his own way of coping, and Uncle Chute found his by passing through life in a vodka-induced fog. Delora didn’t blame him. Dealing with Aunt Freda on a daily basis would be tough for anyone.
It saddened her that Aunt Freda hadn’t wanted her. Freda put it differently, saying to the judge in Goshen that her poor health just wouldn’t allow her to take on a young, spirited girl. The judge, grandfather to her friend Nita May, had seen Freda’s state of mind and given Delora to the state. He realized, no doubt, that Delora wouldn’t do so well in Freda’s care. Unfortunately, he hadn’t known that the state child services roulette wheel had come back around to Rosalie James.
Freda, of course, cried guiltily that day and looked at Delora with sad, pleading eyes. Delora, still numb and not sure how she should feel, had watched Freda and Chute hurry from the courtroom.
Later, when she realized what Freda’s denial was going to mean in her life, she’d felt great bitterness. Living with Rosalie had never been easy but, as one embattled day followed the next, Delora forgot the days of fragrant, busy mothers and tall, smiling fathers. Her life structured itself into caring for the other foster children in Rosalie’s home, attending church and excelling in all her classes at school. She liked school. It challenged her and her powerful mind grew to engulf knowledge and claim it as her own.
Delora met Louie November during her third year of high school. Louie came in late in the year, his family fresh from the Washington, D.C., area. His father was a long-haul truck driver who had been lured to Redstar by the call of the gulf waters. Louie’s mother worked at the dime store in Redstar until she was killed in a botched robbery. The sudden loss of both of their mothers was a point of commonality they shared, pulling the two of them together.
Louie. He found in her a willing victim to accompany him on his journey to mediocrity. Delora, who excelled in schoolwork, did not always excel in people, so she was drawn easily into his codependent games.
Urged on by school counselors in her senior year, Delora decided to go to a four-year college. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to major in, but she liked the idea of continuing her school days. Rosalie was appalled by the idea, however, saying good girls had no need of college. They married. They settled down and tried to make their husbands and children happy. Colleges were places of sin and debauchery. Girls who attended did so to find a wild lifestyle, too far from church and other things of the Lord. Rosalie would not have one of her girls throwing her life away in such a manner.
Rosalie’s friend, Geraldine Pacer, operated the Grant Business School, and Rosalie arranged for Delora to enroll in the secretarial program there after graduation. The secretarial classes bored Delora into a state of further numbness. During this time, she and Louie became more of an item and she became involved in his partying lifestyle. Together they learned to drink well, falling into careless sex and a heavy marijuana habit.
The wedding was inevitable, the road all downhill. It was a small church ceremony and Delora’s life was sealed.
Her parents’ death, when that tree bisected their home during the hurricane, had left a hole in Delora, and in the family, that could never be filled. Freda mentioned the loss each time she called, and Delora remained empty year after year. Being taken in by Rosalie hadn’t done much to fill that void; she was not a loving person and Delora had never been able to form any real connection with her. If she could have, maybe some of the numbness would have eased.
Delora tried again, by creating a family of sorts with Louie, but it too was a black hole that never seemed to get smaller. Louie November made her feel something once, although the feelings had soured quickly into tolerance and now a type of cloudy hatred. Delora wished she could hate him outright, with a clean sparkling knife-edge of hatred. She couldn’t. The feelings she had for him went beyond that. Hate is
the antithesis of love, and she didn’t love him enough to gain that other side. She felt indifferent toward him, only wishing he could be removed from her life, surgically detached and flushed away.
Thinking of Louie disturbed the peace of her morning, and she pushed thoughts of him away as her hands expertly ferreted slugs out from leaf bottoms and stem crevices. She had opened the Mason jar of alcohol she habitually carried with her while at work and was dropping the pests into the jar as she removed them. Annie had a real problem with slugs, and Delora spent a lot of time manually removing them. They especially liked the coleus, so Delora made sure she checked them daily. Her effort was paying off; the young populations had diminished noticeably.
Rosalie did all right. Delora couldn’t fault her. She was as self-obsessed and greedy as a person could be, but she had provided Delora with three hot meals and a room of her own. The mothering, the involved guidance, had been scarce, replaced by an admonition of responsibility—to the household and to God.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, Delora thought just as the toe of her sneaker caught on a supple branch that was held taut and unyielding by two oversized pots of shrubbery. She went down like an unexpected sneeze. She managed to salvage the three small coleus pots that fell with her but nicked the soft skin of her abdomen on the vertical side of one of the large pots, right through the thin shorts she wore. A damp, alarming warmth spread immediately.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered as she righted the coleus pots. The harsh scent of alcohol and slug corpses stung her nostrils as a stinging pain spread across her lower belly.
Chapter Thirteen
Eleven thirty and here they were just getting started. Sophie sighed as she surreptitiously checked her wristwatch. Damn. She was going to be tired in the morning.
“Look, Al,” she said, her voice cajoling, “we’ve got to sew that up or you’re going to bleed all over the place.”