Wedding Bell Blues

by Ruth Moose

  After she got the two freezers (in catering you had to do as much as you could ahead of any event) she froze vegetables. Except green beans, which seemed to grow better and more prolifically than anything else in Littleboro, hence our lovely Mayor Moss with her idea for the Green Bean Festival, bless her little not-from-around-here heart. Homegrown green beans were, for some universally recognized reason, not as good frozen, so every self-respecting Littleboro family canned theirs. At the end of a summer a lot of Littleborian women recited, “I put up a hundred and thirteen jars of beans this summer.” Or “I did a dozen canners of green beans.”

  I couldn’t help thinking about how different basements were from root cellars. I had a bad memory of root cellars: dark, musty smelling, dirt floors. Mama Alice’s basement had a cement floor that was painted a clean-looking gray and the walls, too, were painted. A hardworking commercial washer and oversized drier we used in bad weather stood along one wall and along another was the water heater and furnace. And sure, it had shelves of canned goods, its own whole wall of them.

  I picked a jar from the shelf and wiped dust off it. Probably not safe to eat. Home canned vegetables do not have expiration or “best used by” dates on them. There was always the danger of botulism if they were not properly canned.

  I’d heard Mama Alice lecture on this deadly stuff as she put jars in the pressure canner, set it on the stove and set the timer. I’d listened to the pressure relief valve “jiggle” in that hot-as-hell summer kitchen many afternoons and vowed I’d never touch another green bean. A vow I didn’t have any trouble keeping when I lived “up north.” Evidently Maine soil is better suited to potatoes. I love potatoes. Mama Alice sometimes cooked scraped new potatoes atop green beans. I ate the potatoes, left the green beans alone.

  As I stood there holding that jar of green beans I remembered all those jars in the booth at the Green Bean Festival and Mrs. Butch Rigsbee presiding over smoothies and brownies and God knows what-all green stuff. Who had tasted it? If there was botulism there, there was enough to do in the whole town, or half of it at least.

  But where was the infamous Mrs. Rigsbee now? I didn’t realize I’d said this out loud when I came into the kitchen still holding the jar of Mama Alice’s canned green beans until Scott said, “Didn’t anybody tell you about Ossie’s latest civic irritation?”

  Scott had come in for a couple more “cold ones” for him and Randy, then stood holding them as he closed the refrigerator with his backside. “Some woman shot up the fairgrounds. Started with the green tin man, then all the balloons one by one. That got Ossie running down there. He must have thought the whole town was under siege.” Scott laughed.

  This woman had to be Mrs. Butch Rigsbee. None other.

  “That’s awful,” I said, pretending I knew nothing. Sometimes I have found that way gets more information dropped in your lap. “What’s with that woman anyway? I mean, she checks in here for an hour, then shows up working for Mayor Moss and drops a hot corn stick in Debbie Booth’s lap, then has this booth at the festival.”

  “Ossie said she said she hated the town of Littleboro and everybody in it.”

  “Why?” I asked hoping he didn’t see my tongue in my cheek. “What did Littleboro ever do to her? This crazy woman.”

  “She said her husband was cheating with some woman who lived in Littleboro who had all the money from his business dealings and she was target practicing so she’d be ready when she found the right woman. But what she wanted more than her husband was her share of his business.”

  I thought, Oh, Reba, what have you gotten yourself into now? And me right along with you. I must have had a strange expression on my face because Ida Plum stopped what she was doing and asked, “What? What’s all this business about somebody shooting at the fairgrounds who sounds really crazy? Is this the same woman who checked in here and only stayed an hour, then asked for her money back?”

  “One and the same,” I said, and went back to my faithful KitchenAid and the topic about which Ida Plum and I had been in deep discussion before Scott came in: Verna’s plea to come home. Ida Plum had stopped by to see Verna this morning and said Verna was threatening to fly the coop from that “henhouse.” Said Verna told her all those women recited their alphabet all day long. Arthritis, Bursitis, Constipation, Dyspepsia, Gout, Hemorrhoids, the whole list. They were making her sick.

  Ida Plum scraped a mixer bowl and handed the beaters to Scott, who nodded his thanks and pulled out a chair. “Cake batter and beer,” he said. “Yum. The rest of the world doesn’t know what it’s missing.”

  “There is no way any self-respecting human can live in that house,” I said. “It’s not even fit for … rabbits.” I looked down at Robert Redford helping himself to Sherman’s cat chow. Was he even supposed to be eating that instead of his own rabbit kibble? What if he got sick and it was my fault for letting him eat something he was not supposed to?

  “How bad is it?” Scott handed me the licked-clean beaters.

  “Snake den,” Ida Plum said. “Rat’s nest.” She scrunched her shoulders. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Think I should take a look at her house after I take Randy his refreshment.” Scott held up Randy’s beer. “Maybe I should take another beer, since he worked while I caught up with my two best girlfriends.” He got another from the refrigerator, asked, “Do you know why Southern girls don’t sleep around?”

  I groaned.

  He went on to the punch line. “They’d have to write too many thank-you notes.”

  I laughed. Ida Plum laughed in spite of herself.

  Scott grabbed her by her apron strings, twirled her around and headed toward the door. “Stay as sweet as you are.” He blew her a kiss.

  “Smart aleck,” she said, and laughed.

  Later, when Scott and Randy knocked off for the day, I saw Scott pull his truck into Verna’s driveway. The house was unlocked and I knew Scott would know if anything in there was worth anything … if he could see it. It wasn’t long before I heard him leave. Well, I thought, he probably said to himself the same thing I had said to myself: bring in the bulldozers, bring on the dumpster bins, let the unhoarding begin. With Verna’s permission of course. But I dreaded even approaching the subject with her. Would it be “kill the messenger” and she’d never speak to me again? I could live with that. Forgive me, Mama Alice, for causing a rift between neighbors.

  Chapter Forty-two

  I knew I had to be the one to take this on, so after supper I put Robert Redford in Sherman’s crate and drove us to The Oaks, where Verna was doing “rehab” from her fall. I hadn’t been to The Oaks since Mama Alice died. Ida Plum liked to say if she broke something—leg, hip, whatever—we were not to take her there. “Just shoot me,” she’d say. “That’s what they do to horses, only don’t throw me in a ditch. Give me a royal send-off and serve moonshine and MoonPies.”

  When I got to Verna’s room and she saw me with Robert Redford, she let out a little scream of pure joy. Robert Redford jumped from my arms straight into her lap and she started hugging him for all he was worth, laughing and crying, “My sweet boy. My own sweet boy.”

  I was sorry it had taken me so long to think of doing this, how much it would mean to her. After she calmed down and Robert Redford curled up in her lap, I brought up the dreaded subject of her hoard house.

  “And Scott says he can handle it. Take whatever you want to sell to the consignment shop.”

  To my surprise, Verna laughed and said, “Why honey, I been watching that TV show and I’m not one of them people. I know I got a mess. It’s just that I got so confused about what you could recycle and what you couldn’t, I just let it pile up. Accumulate. And accumulate ’til it got the best of me.”

  I said again that Scott was willing to haul off some of the stuff and take recycling to the recycling center.

  She said, “Tell him to haul off anything he wants. I’d like to start over, do to that house what all you’ve done to the Dixie Dew. I’ve pu
t it off too long.”

  “What about all those shoes?” I asked. Curiosity had gotten the best of me. I had to ask.

  “Oh, those,” Verna said. “My sister Ella bought out the old Good Morton’s store when it went out of business years and years ago, had them all dumped in that bedroom. There’s a bed still in there somewhere. Ella.” Verna looked pensive for a minute. “Named for Cinderella. And I guess she always had a weakness for shoes.”

  I had never known Verna had a sister. A much older sister? I’d lived next door all my growing-up years and as far as I knew Verna was the only person who lived in that house. Was Verna making this up or was the body of Ella still on that bed after years and years under all those shoes? Like Miss Emily in Faulkner’s spooky story I’d read in my high school English class. I didn’t like Faulkner’s picture of the South then or now, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I’d do it tomorrow.

  I took the rabbit, hugged Verna, and left. What I had dreaded had actually been a piece of cake, which made me think of Reba and wonder if she’d been bunking over at Verna’s and that maybe I should warn her that revitalization was about to begin. On second thought, I couldn’t imagine Reba under a roof very long. It was just that I hadn’t seen her around lately.

  “Actually,” Scott said the next morning when he came in for coffee, “I stopped by to see Verna yesterday right after I looked around her house and suggested that before she went home I could go in and do some organizing for her. You should have seen her. She clapped her hands together, said she’d love that. That she knew it must look like she was hoarding stuff, but the truth was, she just hadn’t had the energy to keep up with things. She said stuff piles on top of stuff and there was nothing in that house worth anything but her and Robert Redford, and they weren’t worth much these days.”

  So Scott had been by before me and had already primed Verna. So much for all my persuasive powers. Scott seemed really distant at times. He knew stuff he didn’t tell me. Stuff I should have known. How much did he know about Bruce and Ossie and “police business”?

  “There’s some really good old furniture behind all that accumulation, and once the junky stuff is out of there, after some paint-up, fix-up, it will be a grand old house.”

  “Did you go upstairs?” I asked, remembering Crazy Reba sitting upright in that canopy bed eating her wedding cake.

  “Upstairs is clean and clear.” Scott sipped his coffee. “Evidently stuff didn’t make it upstairs, just puddled at the bottom. Collected. Piled up. Accumulated in avalanche proportions. Nothing bad, just stuff.”

  “So you clean it out enough to make it livable and Verna comes home? Then what?”

  “Next step is to get down to details with her about doing what I did, and am doing, to the Dixie Dew to her house.” He picked up Robert Redford. “And you can go home, buddy.” Sherman rubbed his ankles. “Not you, cat. This is where you live.” Robert Redford nibbled Scott’s ear.

  I was going to miss him. The rabbit, I meant. Maybe Scott, too. Where exactly were we in our relationship? Sunnye Deye was singing her heart out on a million commercials and maybe her way back into his heart. She was glamorous and I was Miss Plain Proprietor of the Dixie Dew Bed-and-Breakfast, a poor proprietor at that. I bet she, like Lesley Lynn Leaford, was worth a fortune. I only had debts and some sweet memories between the sheets. We rarely talked beyond tomorrow. We hardly talked at all. Could I settle with being a little bit of Scott’s life? He could go out of my life as quickly and easily as he’d come into it. I knew I had to find time to go to The Mess office and do some microfilm reading. I just didn’t know when I would.

  I looked out the kitchen window. The gazebo was half-finished, and at least it had a roof. The copper roof gleamed in the sunlight. Juanita was going to love it. Her garden wedding. In my mind I could see Ossie in his white hat and snakeskin boots, Juanita on his arm, marching down my flagstone path and up the steps to the gazebo. It was a warm picture and I didn’t have many of those “warm pictures” starring Ossie in my mind. Mama Alice would be proud of me for thinking “good thoughts.” I was actually thinking more along the lines that with a couple more weddings I could afford to hire Scott and company to take on the Dixie Dew living-room walls, ceiling, moldings, wainscoting and floors. So far I’d only redone the most necessary of Dixie Dew rooms like the entrance hall, dining room and bedrooms, and we’d made some cosmetic touches to the bathrooms and created an office space in the pantry off the kitchen. I’d planned the office for later, but Scott had done that as a surprise, and I loved it. Computers and cookbooks. My life. And it wasn’t a bad life if I could just keep people from coming to the Dixie Dew and dying or making threats on my life.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Ida Plum left early, mysteriously early. In fact she often left later, never early, usually saying—like she had when she first came to work at the Dixie Dew—that she had nothing and nobody waiting on her at home. Not even a cat or dog to be fed. But today I got the feeling she had learned more at Juanita’s than she wanted to tell me. More about the weird woman shooting up the fairgrounds. I bet Ida Plum went by Juanita’s to tell everyone there how that same woman had come to the Dixie Dew and checked in for an hour, washed her face and left. Putting in her two cents’ worth to make a good story. And everybody would have loved it. A funny bit to add to Littleboro folklore.

  I could just imagine the woman in the next chair getting a haircut or perm saying out of the corner of her mouth, “Well, at least this one left alive.” I knew those kinds of remarks went around Littleboro all the time, just not to my face.

  “Friday, thank goodness it’s Friday,” Ida Plum had said before she left. “If I ever live through another week like this one, I’ll move to California, dried okra or not.”

  “Thanks tons,” I said. “You’d desert me and leave Littleboro in its finest moment? Or should I say moments? Its days of glory?” Were Littleboro’s “moments” or “days of glory” when its courthouse caught fire and burned? Was that the first thing anyone would think of when you said you lived in Littleboro or were from the town of Littleboro? Up north, my hometown had been a joke and I had laughed with everybody. Now I felt ashamed. I should have defended Littleboro, the South, my heritage. I had to come crawling back home to see its worth.

  Ida Plum hadn’t answered, just kept going, out the door, up the walk. From the droop of her shoulders I could tell she was as tired as I felt, and the week wasn’t over yet. We still had Miss Green Bean to crown.

  Earlier Scott had picked up Ossie’s groom’s cake to drop off in Southern Pines at the fancy smancy hoity-toity restaurant chosen for the rehearsal dinner. Scott was staying for the dinner. After all, he had been invited. He was part of the wedding party, Ossie’s best man. I was simply a working girl, but better working than not. I wouldn’t have known what to do with my life if I hadn’t been working. I’d even taught summer school and kiddie camps when I lived in Maine. One must support oneself and I felt blessed to be able to do so. That was also the first time I’d heard Scott mention he was to be Ossie’s best man.

  “Why you?” I’d asked him when he told me. “Why not Bruce? That’s his sidekick.”

  “Why not me?” Scott shot back. “I know my way around nuptials. Played music for a few in my life.”

  I wanted to ask if he’d also been in one, but didn’t think this was the time. He brushed my shoulder as he walked by, winked and left.

  So he and Ossie had gotten to be buddies behind my back. Where did Scott’s loyalties lie? I thought he felt the same way about Ossie DelGardo as I did: a transplanted Yankee know-it-all. Did I have a backstabber and traitor in my life? Not to mention occasionally in my bed? Not a happy thought.

  Google. That’s what would tell me Scott Smith’s marital status. So I Googled. What I got was a web page and list of professional appearances with a group called When Cousins Marry.

  Wow. They’d played all over the place: Tokyo, lots of London gigs, Nashville many, many tim
es of course, played from Scotland to Switzerland, Canada. I had a celebrity in my life. Hmmm. Wonder if Sunnye Deye had been on those tours? I looked over the photos and didn’t see a girl singer. Just a younger Scott with longer hair either cuddling a bass guitar or behind the keyboard. I thought bass players must know just how to hold a woman. Nowhere did it say anything personal. No information on marital status. No information on day jobs, what Scott did when the group wasn’t on tour. Did they play clubs? Did he do construction work so he could be out of doors in California and hear the music of hammers and saws? And why, most of all, was he back in Littleboro?

  I cleaned the kitchen, watched out the window as the gazebo began to take shape.

  I thought about how much I loved the long days of summer, the mild evenings that seemed to go on forever, blending into night. I remembered catching lightning bugs, letting them go, watching stars sprinkle the sky, trying to figure out the constellations. I remembered sitting on the front porch with Mama Alice and Verna while they broke the tops and bottoms from the green beans to pull out the tough strings and how the beans plink, plinked when tossed into gray enamel pans at their feet. How they canned them. Some of those damn green beans were still in the jars in Verna’s cellar and Mama Alice’s basement gathering dust. They had outlived my grandmother. Maybe green beans were eternal.

  Chapter Forty-four

  After I’d showered and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, at seven o’clock I started to walk over to Littleboro High where the crowning of Miss Green Bean would take place. I walked over as I had done when I had classes there: Mrs. Mott Saunders for English, Miss Owana Odie for algebra, Miss Jessie Schell for physical ed. I could almost hear Miss Schell’s whistle in my ear as I walked. She was tough and blew an earsplitting whistle on a lanyard around her neck.