by Mary Monroe
“I got one foot and a big toe in the grave. The rest of me is still kicking,” she told me, wheezing like a sick mule. “I ain’t seen you in public but a few times since you got married. How come Odell ain’t with you? He done run off already?”
Chapter 29
Joyce
“O DELL DIDN’T RUN OFF. HE WOULD NEVER LEAVE ME!” I WAS talking so fast, I almost bit my lip. I couldn’t believe the nerve of this old woman. “Why would he and why are you asking me something like that?”
Aunt Mattie looked at me with contempt—like I was the one who’d insulted her—and hunched her shoulders. “Well, you here and he ain’t. And, he is a man.”
“So? He’s also my husband. He told me he married me for life.”
“Pffft!” Aunt Mattie waved her hairy, gnarled hand, which could have passed for a monkey’s paw. “Gal, let me tell you something, and I hope you believe every word I’m fixing to say. So what if Odell is your husband and claims he’ll be with you for life. Ha! You wouldn’t believe how many times I done heard them famous last words from other women. If that’s what you believe, you got a lot to learn. It’ll take more than him being married to you for him to stay! People do fall out of love and split up. I see it all the time in my business.”
It took a great deal of effort and a silent prayer for me not to get too mad. But I still wanted to slap the smug look off Aunt Mattie’s face. I had never hit another person in my life and wasn’t about to start now. Besides, I had to consider her age because another thing I’d never done was sass an elder. I would give her the benefit of the doubt, because I had heard from a lot of folks that she was just naturally rude. I had also heard that she had a good heart and was always willing to help people in need—as long as you didn’t disrespect her or make her mad. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to holler at you and get you upset,” I apologized.
“Honey child, it’d take more than you hollering to get me upset. I done been through things most people ain’t even had to deal with in their worst nightmares. Getting hollered at don’t even faze me.” Aunt Mattie gave me a thoughtful look and kept talking. “Being nosy and meddlesome is part of being old.”
“Well, I can tell you myself that Odell is crazy about Joyce, and he ain’t going no place. He treats her like a queen,” Yvonne piped in, sitting down on the other side of me. “I wish I could train Milton to be more like Odell.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Yvonne,” Aunt Mattie advised. Then she got a glazed look in her eyes. “Sometimes you better off with what you already have. I got everything I ever wished for and look where I’m at.”
“You got a good business and you still kicking. For somebody that used to be a slave, you lucky,” Yvonne said, crossing her legs. “I bet most of the use-to-be slaves done already died.”
Slavery was another painful subject to me. My parents had experienced it and every time they brought it up, I left the room. I didn’t want to keep hearing about how the white folks had mistreated our people back in the old days. It was hard enough to listen to how they were mistreating us now. As much as it bothered me, I decided to encourage a conversation on this subject so I wouldn’t have to listen to more of Aunt Mattie’s comments about my marriage. “Daddy was eleven and Mama was seven when Lincoln freed the slaves. She can’t remember anything about being a slave, but he remembers it all like it happened yesterday,” I reported in a sad tone. “Aunt Mattie, can you still remember what it was like?” I knew this was an unnecessary question because she was several years older than my daddy and if he could remember slavery, she could.
“I hope I never forget. It was my hell on earth. I was a teenager when it ended,” Aunt Mattie said with her voice cracking. Two women I hadn’t been introduced to yet stood nearby. They stopped talking and moved closer so they could hear what Aunt Mattie had to say. “Um . . . I ain’t talked about what I went through in more than sixty years. But for some reason, I got a few things I’d like to get off my chest and share with somebody tonight.” Aunt Mattie sat up straighter and cleared her throat. There was an extremely sad look on her face. It was hard to believe that a few minutes ago she’d been laughing and whooping and hollering like a wild woman. “When I was eleven, they took me out of the fields and put me to work in the main house. I slept on a pallet in the room Master Buffington shared with his wife. I had to get up two or three times a night and go all the way out to the end of the backyard to empty the slop jar them two boogers used. They had the nerve to call it a “night glass” but it was just as much a shit pot as the ones in the slave quarters. And every other night one of them peckerwoods had the runs. I hated being around Master Buffington. When that horny motherfucker didn’t feel like pestering his wife—with his nub of a dick—he got down on that pallet and crawled on top of me. By the time I was fifteen, I’d had four baby girls by him and he sold them all before I could even wean them.”
“Did you ever see them again?” I asked, feeling sorry for a woman I barely knew.
Aunt Mattie shook her head. “Naw. To this day, I don’t know where they at. But a few years after the war, a woman on the next plantation over told me that he had sold them to other men who had sons so they’d have somebody to pester when they got old enough. By now I must have grandkids, great-grandkids, and great-great-grandkids all over the place that I’ll never meet.”
The mood around me got dark. It didn’t seem like I was still in the same room with the rest of the rowdy guests. They were just a few feet away whooping and hollering, dancing, drinking, and talking all kinds of bullshit, and I wished I was doing the same thing. I didn’t want to be rude and get up and move, so I decided to stay put until Aunt Mattie finished telling her story.
“Did you have any other babies?” Yvonne asked.
Aunt Mattie shook her head again. “Just one. Ten years after we got our freedom, I got pregnant by a man I’d been in love with for years. He got kicked in the head by a mule and died a week before my son was born. I named him Aaron, after his daddy. He was a smart little rascal, but colored folks and smarts didn’t go together back then, not that they do much now either. When he got old enough, he spoke up about the way we was being treated and how we needed to get some education. He even taught hisself how to read and write and had just started teaching other colored kids to do the same thing. Well, the white folks told him to behave and act like a nigger. They beat him up a few times, but even that didn’t stop him. One night he didn’t come home after visiting the girl he was planning to marry. The next day, we cut his body down from the tree where somebody had lynched him.”
“Did they ever find out who done it?” Yvonne asked.
“Pffft! What’s wrong with you, girl? Everybody knowed who done it! It was them same peckerwoods that was so pissed off about losing the war and was taking it out on used-to-be slaves. They put the entire blame for the war between the North and the South on us!”
Yvonne blinked hard and sniffed a few times. I blinked and sniffed even harder. Aunt Mattie wiped a few tears off her face. The other two women who had been listening stayed quiet. I didn’t know what was going through their minds, but I had never felt so sad in my life. I motioned for Milton to replenish my drink, which he did immediately. Aunt Mattie sniffled a few times, but she perked up again right away. “Enough of that!” she said, clapping her hands. “So Joyce, where is Odell tonight? Do you know?”
“He’s gone out to check on his daddy,” I replied. “Lonnie’s been having all kinds of problems with his health lately.”
“Well, if Ellamae ain’t taking care of him, he ought to get rid of her,” Aunt Mattie snarled.
“She takes care of him, but she needs a break now and then. Taking care of that old man is a big responsibility. Ellamae depends on Odell to come out and help a few times a week. And when he needs a break, he goes fishing.”
“Hmmm. Fishing for what?”
“For fish!” I snapped harder than I meant to. Aunt Mattie flinched, but she stayed on the same subject anywa
y.
“That’s nice. You ought to go with him.”
“I don’t like to fish.”
“So what? I didn’t like to fish when my man was still with me. But every time he went, I was right behind him. Sometimes it pays off for a woman to stay close to her husband.”
“Well, I don’t think that. Odell doesn’t smother me, and I’m not going to smother him. Especially as close as we already are. Sometimes he knows what I’m thinking before I say it and I’m the same way with him. Now, if he likes to go fishing a few times a week by himself, I want him to do just that. But I don’t need to go.”
Aunt Mattie sucked on her teeth and gave me a dry look. “Maybe you should. For all you know, he could be doing something he don’t want you to see. . . .”
Yvonne and the other two women stayed as quiet as mutes. I was exasperated, but I had to keep standing my ground. I was not about to let this signifying monkey get under my skin without speaking up for myself. “He used to ask me to go fishing with him every time he went and I went a few times. I never enjoyed it so I stopped going. I told Odell that if he’s happy standing on a creek bank for hours at a time and don’t catch but one or two fish, if any, more power to him. I think he’d rather go by himself anyway. He works hard taking care of my folks’ business, so he needs to be alone when he wants to.” The way Aunt Mattie pressed her thin liver-colored lips together, I thought she’d decided to shut up. I was wrong.
“Humph. He sure is a busy man. And a right handsome one, too, you know. If he was my man, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight as much as you do. I don’t like to get too personal, but I’m just being nosy on account of I really like you and Odell, and I’d hate to see something bad happen between y’all.”
I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “If you mean him latching on to another woman, that’s the least of my worries,” I shot back. “Yvonne, can I use your toilet and if you don’t mind, could you pour me a stronger drink?” I stood up and started walking toward the back of the room as fast as I could.
Chapter 30
Odell
“DADDY, HOW COME YOU DON’T LIVE WITH US ALL THE TIME?” my son Daniel wanted to know. I loved all my children, but he was the most special. He’d been born in the month of May in ’35 at home in the same bed where me and Betty Jean had created him during one of the worst tornadoes we’d had since I was a little boy. In nearby Midland City, the wind had picked up and hurled a family of three a hundred and fifty yards from their farmhouse, killing the five-year-old son and seriously injuring the husband and wife. Some of the people who lived on the same block as Betty Jean had lost everything. Because of that storm, I’d had to spend a few extra hours in Hartville and so I’d been in the house for Daniel’s birth. I’d also been present for the births of our other two, but things had gone a lot smoother. As big a fool as I was for women, I’d choose my children over them in a heartbeat. There was something about having another person in my life that I had helped create. Love was the strongest connection between a man and a woman. But with his children, it was love and blood. I would rather die than not be able to spend time with my precious sons. I had to blink hard to hold back the tear that threatened to roll out of my eye.
“Boy, you know your daddy got to travel for his work,” Betty Jean answered before I could. We sat on the front porch steps of the house that I paid the rent for every month. My two younger boys was visiting with their aunt Alline.
Daniel gave me a curious look and hunched his shoulders. “How come you can’t work around here, Daddy?”
“I wish I could. But we still going through the Depression and finding jobs is hard, so I need to hold on to the one I got.”
The country was still in a slump. Millions of people was still out of work and scrambling like crazy just to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. I don’t know what I would have done if Aunt Mattie hadn’t let me work for her for almost five years and then for Mac and Millie to hire me. Without the job I had now, I couldn’t take care of my family, and I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like if I lost them. With things being so easy for me, at least for now, I didn’t spend much time worrying about losing either one. Instead of wasting time dwelling on situations that sent shock waves throughout my body, I spent my time counting my blessings every day.
“Did that answer your question?” I asked, tapping the side of my son’s head. The older he got, the more he resembled me.
He nodded. “I got another one.”
“Oh? And what is it?”
“Do we have a grandmother and a grandfather? And what about aunts and uncles and cousins and stuff?”
A lump got stuck in my throat. I was relieved when Betty Jean jumped and answered that question for me, too.
“You know my mama and daddy both dead. But you got plenty of other kinfolks on my side. Your auntie Alline and her husband, and our cousin Roy and his wife and your three cousins come see us all the time.” Betty Jean paused and gave me a sympathetic look. “Your poor daddy. He lost his whole family years ago. He ain’t got nobody except us.”
“Oh. Well, can we have a puppy, too?” Daniel asked.
Betty Jean and I laughed at the same time, but I felt really sad. Daddy loved children and he missed not having relationships with my siblings and their families. That made me feel worse than I already felt. I hadn’t communicated with my sister and brother since before I got with Joyce, so they’d never met her. I had toyed around with the notion that one day I would load up Betty Jean and the kids and drive to Birmingham so they could get acquainted with my siblings and their families. But if I ever did, I could never let my siblings know about Joyce. It would be just my luck that one of them might decide to visit Daddy someday and he’d tell them about her. And if he didn’t, Ellamae sure enough would. That was one pickle barrel I didn’t want to be in, so I had to leave things just the way they were.
Everything else was going fine. I had nothing to complain about. My finances were still in pretty good shape. Other than our rent and the household expenses, me and Joyce didn’t have a lot of money going out. We was generous with our friends who needed loans now and then, but we had recently started cutting back on that. And it wasn’t because we had suddenly turned stingy, or had lost our compassion for people that had less than us. The problem was, every time we approached people about paying us back, half of them had a sad story about how the country’s ongoing depression had set them back, and the other half didn’t give no excuse or even attempt to repay the loans. It was Joyce’s idea for us to stop lending out money. “Odell, we can’t keep fattening frogs for snakes. The same friends we’ve been helping out for years ain’t in no better shape than they were before. Besides that, I still see some of the same ones in Mosella’s and other restaurants eating like hogs at a trough and spending money on other things like they didn’t have a care in the world. If we keep paying for everybody else’s good times, we’ll be in the same boat with them,” she said.
I agreed with her, but it cost us a few friends. After we stopped giving, they stopped coming around and started rolling their eyes at us in public and calling us “uppity Uncle Toms” behind our backs. It hurt when Buddy and Sadie told me some of the things people was saying about us, but it didn’t change nothing. The only friends that didn’t ask us for frequent handouts was Yvonne and Milton. I had a feeling that would eventually change because the first night we drank with them, they dropped a few hints about how some of the guests they’d entertained in their previous residence had been slow about paying up their drinking tabs. The subject had come up after me and Joyce had gulped down three drinks apiece that we’d been told was “on the house,” so we didn’t think to offer no tip or nothing else. But I couldn’t decide if they was lumping us in with that deadbeat bunch, and I didn’t ask. Me and Joyce had discussed the issue and like always, she went right along with whatever I said. We decided that until they straight up asked us to pay for our drinks, we’d continue to enjoy every freeb
ie we could get from them. She’d joked about us having a “callous” attitude. But she changed her tune when I reminded her how freehanded we’d been to other people such as us loaning money, giving free rides, and whatnot. She agreed real fast that it was time for us to reap some benefits for our generosity.
Right after my other two boys had come home from Alline’s house, I helped Betty Jean give them their baths and tuck them in for the night. After that, we went back out to the porch and relaxed with a pitcher of lemonade. The streetlight in front of the house had been out of order for weeks. But there was a lot of light coming from the coal oil lamp we had set on a brick near the front door in the living room. Mosquitoes, moths, and lightning bugs buzzed around our heads. I got so tired of swatting them with my hand, I gave up. Them creatures annoyed the hell out of me, but it could have been a lot worse. I recalled the lie I’d told Joyce about a swarm of yellow jackets attacking me the night I’d come home with sucker bites up and down my neck after my first date with Betty Jean. We had come such a long way since then. And I’d never felt better in my life. I walked around with my chest puffed out every day.