She sighs and pushes herself away from the counter then she takes off her sweater and ties a blue apron around her waist. “So tell me, how’s that best friend of yours, the one you knew in school? Sue? I haven’t seen her in a while.”
“She’s fine, too. I saw her just yesterday. She’s pregnant,” I say as Great Aunt Sophie turns on the portable radio in her kitchen window. A big band tune comes out softly.
“Pregnant again?” she asks over her shoulder as she starts making coffee in her new automatic drip. The air whooshes into the sealed coffee jar as she opens it. “How many will this make?”
“Just three.” I take another bite of her pie. “Her husband wants a boy this time.”
“Humph,” Great Aunt Sophie says. “Like he can control that.”
I smile. Some things I just know I inherited from Great Aunt Sophie and no one else. “That’s what I say. She won’t listen. She’s in love.”
“You’re a good girl, Louise. Have I ever told you that? You are. You need to find a nice man and have children. I’m not going to be around forever to tell you this, so you better hurry up.” Her automatic drip gurgles and she sways a little to the music as she brings a cup down from the cabinet.
I watch her. Great Aunt Sophie isn’t the kind of person you would ever think of as a dancer, but she loves to dance. Not that she ever dances with anyone, but I know that if she’s having one of her good days, she’ll sometimes dance to her refrigerator and back when she cooks. And when she used to bring her bicycle out of her garage, she would sometimes dance with it all the way to the road.
“I’m sure I’ll find a nice man someday, Aunt Sophie.”
“Yes, yes. I suppose so. You’re only twenty-five. I’d like to see the day, that’s all.” She pours a cup of coffee and comes to sit beside me at the table.
“Twenty-four,” I remind her, thinking that ever since I had that Yes-I’m-old-enough-to-have-coffee conversation with her several years ago, she always seems to make me older than I am whenever coffee is involved, even though she never gives me any. I’m old enough to sell men’s underwear. I wonder what she would say if I tell her that.
“I got married when I was twenty. I told you that once, didn’t I?” She has the creamy eggshell-thin coffee cup in both of her hands as she takes a sip.
“No ma’am. I don’t recall that you did.”
“My Harry. He was a good old soul. I had a dream about him.” She pauses then laughs. She sets her cup down and leans back in her chair as she puts a hand to her cheek. “When was that?” She shakes her head. “Ha! I can’t even remember. Maybe it was as close as last night.”
“You had a dream about Harry?” I never knew my great-uncle. He died long before I was born.
“I dreamed I was sixteen again and my hair was long and blond.” She pats the sides of her newly permed hair. It’s the purest silver you’ve ever seen, like a new nickel, and it smells something powerful. It makes my nose tingle when the breeze from the open doorway blows the smell my way.
I look at Great Aunt Sophie carefully. “Your hair was long and blond?”
She smiles, a tad mischievously. “Long, maybe. But not blond. But that’s what dreams are about sometimes, aren’t they? How you want things to be.” She nods to the plate in front of me. “Do you like the pie? Harriet’s apples weren’t great this year.”
“The pie is wonderful,” I assure her.
“Did I ever tell you how I met my Harry?” she suddenly asks, but distantly, like she’s asking someone else in the kitchen, someone behind her in the doorway.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Don’t be silly.” She’s definitely talking to me now. I recognize that tone. “I know I told you a long time ago. When you were little. Remember these things, Louise. They’re important.”
It’s an art, I realize. Guilt is an art. And Great Aunt Sophie is a master artist. When are you getting married? Why don’t you stop by and see me? Didn’t you ever listen to me when you were little? I would never backtalk Great Aunt Sophie, but the answers are always there: In time, I do, and no. Sophie orbited my world when I was little, large and looming like a full July moon. I used to watch her carefully—the best way to avoid her was to always know where she was—but I never listened to her much. I should have known I was going to be tested later.
“Yes ma’am,” I promise her.
“All right, so listen up. There were three girls in our family—Anna, the oldest, me in the middle, and your grandmother Charlotte, the youngest,” Great Aunt Sophie begins, counting off each sister on a different crooked finger. “Anna married when she was seventeen to a boy over the state line in Tennessee. She had been married about two years when her first child came along. Mama and Daddy packed me and Charlotte up and sent us on a train to help her out with the baby.
“Mama sent me with secret instructions to have an eye out for every little detail so I could tell her when I got home. Anna married into a family with money, you see. When Charlotte and I got there, the house was as big as any place I had ever seen. But everyone lived there. The whole family. Ma and Pa Coleman, Anna and her husband, another son and his wife, and two daughters, not to mention a couple of housekeepers. It seemed to me that they needed all that space because nobody was ever going to leave. And the family just kept growing. Charlotte and I were put in the same room, the only room they had left, I think.
“It turns out Anna already had a woman to help with the baby, Evangeline, so Charlotte and I weren’t really needed. But Anna was happy to have us there and we spent a lot of time together. It was just like when we were girls. Anna was close to twenty then, I was sixteen and Charlotte was going on fifteen. We spent hours just walking around the orchard on the estate. Sometimes we’d go into town and people would remark on what pretty girls we were.”
Sophie smiles at the memory. But then she shakes her head. “I always thought your grandmother was the prettiest of us three. I told you she had this beautiful head of golden hair, remember?”
“I remember,” I say.
“Somehow, the brown eyes we were all born with seemed to look better on her. Now, Anna was tall and stately and fit right in with money. I was somewhere in the middle, but there we were in this little town in Tennessee and suddenly I was a beauty. There were several dances in town and we were never wanting for a partner. Anna let us borrow her lipstick. Oh, those days, Louise,” she sighs. “Someday, when you’re old enough, you’re going to look back on your life and remember things that, even though you didn’t know it then, will make you know who you are now.”
“I’m not so young,” I have to say.
To that she just laughs. “Anyway, after we had stayed long enough, Mama and Daddy called for us to come back to North Carolina. We were upset something terrible. We’d had the time of our lives. But then I remember Anna coming into the room and telling us that there was another dance that very night in town and we were all going to go. Of course that made everything all right because then we would get to say goodbye to everyone. We had been there almost three months. The whole summer.
“I was wearing my best blue dress that night and my hair was pulled back with a ribbon. There was this boy, you see, that I thought I fancied and I wanted to look nice for him.” She laughs lightly, amused at herself. “What was his name? I can’t even remember. He always smelled like cloves because he chewed them to help this toothache he had.”
“It wasn’t Harry?”
“Nooo,” she says with elongated emphasis. “That night, someone new, someone I had never met before, asked me to dance. That was Harry. Oh, this is horrible to admit, but I didn’t want to dance with him. He was handsome enough, I suppose. His clothes were clean and starched, but old, I could tell. I had become a little high and mighty, spending all that time in that big house, living with one of the most respected families for mile
s around. But I didn’t have a good excuse not to dance with him, and I had to be polite. So we danced. And, Louise, it was like time stood still.”
Aunt Sophie holds her hands out and, with effort, makes them freeze for a moment, as if it’s very important to her that I understand what she means. “He was such an incredible dancer. Never marry a man who can’t dance, Louise. Never do it. He was much taller than me but he moved like grace. Fast dances, slow dances, whatever the band played. His hands felt rough even though he barely touched me. I learned he lived on a farm with his family. He was nineteen and the oldest of eleven. We talked and talked and laughed and laughed. He told me he had come to all the dances I came to, but never had the nerve to ask me until then. That made my heart flip. I was having the best night of my life, and I can say that with confidence, Louise, because I’m old. You can’t say that now so don’t even try.”
“Yes ma’am,” I say, but I think about it anyway.
“We danced five dances in a row, then the band leader said goodnight and the band played I’ll See You in My Dreams. Harry took my hand and put something in it. It was a button, the little bone button I had lost off my sweater the first time I went into town with Anna and Charlotte. He said it was the first time he saw me. He worked afternoons at the local filling station and he said I walked right by him like a queen in a parade and my button fell right off. He was too shy to run after me, so he kept it in his pocket. He said he liked to take it out and think of me. That’s when he said he loved me. I didn’t know what to say. I started crying right then and there because I loved him, too. That’s the way things happened back then.”
She pauses to have a sip of coffee and it seems like she’s going to stop there. So I ask, “What happened next?”
She shrugs. “I left the next morning. I was so sad I couldn’t say a word. And Mama always used to say I was awful to live with for the next few months. But then the next spring, Mama, Daddy, Charlotte and I went to church one Sunday and who should be there but Harry!”
“Here?” I say, smiling at her as I lick my finger and press it against my plate to pick up the last few crumbs from the pie crust.
“Yes, here. I couldn’t believe it myself. He was staying at the boarding house that used to be on Carberry Avenue, where the Burger King is now, and old Mr. Johnson had hired him at his filling station. I couldn’t go up and talk to him, of course, but Daddy went up and shook hands with him then introduced the rest of us. Charlotte knew who he was but I pinched her arm to stop her from saying anything. She said I left a bruise that lasted weeks.”
“He came all the way up here just to be near you?” I shake my head. Of all the people I know, Great Aunt Sophie is the last person I would have suspected of harboring a romantic past.
“Yesiree. He sold all he had, saved up for months, and came to Clementine, North Carolina because he loved me. He called on me a few days later and we started courting. We had to wait nearly three years before we married. He had to save up for a house. Daddy approved of him because he was such a hard worker, and always so polite. Daddy bought a car, his first, and Harry always knew what to do for it. He could fix anything. Old Mr. Johnson eventually let Harry buy him out. Of course, when Harry died, I sold the station to Harlen Duckett. It’s a good thing I never learned to drive, Louise. There’s too many memories in the smell of a gas station.”
She squints then looks down into her coffee cup. “Harry died two days after our twenty-first wedding anniversary. Did I ever tell you that? Life is like living in a house and death is like walking out the door. It’s that simple. Harry walked out the door to go to work, and two hours later I got the call. It was a Thursday afternoon. But you want to know something? He loved more in his forty-four years than most people do in a lifetime. He did a lot of things well, Louise, but the thing he did the best was love me. How many people can say that?” She picks up her cup and takes another sip. “Not many, I think.”
I push my plate away and rest my chin in the palm of my hand, studying her. “Didn’t you ever want any children?”
“I wasn’t able,” she says quietly and my heart breaks right then and there, so quickly I don’t know what has happened at first. I didn’t see it coming. No one ever told me. I always assumed it was because Sophie didn’t like kids much—their unpredictability, the patience it took to deal with them. She was always exasperated with me with I was younger. I sit up and look at her, startled, sad, ashamed of myself for asking such a question.
She smiles at my silence. “Harry wanted them, but he said he didn’t care so long as he had me. The year after he died, your grandmother Charlotte, who had moved to Maine with that no-good sailor man she married, died. She had one daughter, your mama. She came to live with me, then, and I consider her mine. She was my saving grace, I guess. And she gave me you, of course. So you liked the apple pie, did you?”
“It was wonderful,” I say softly.
“Would you like another piece?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’ll pack up a piece for your mama,” she decides with a nod. “You can take it over to her later.”
“Okay.”
She sighs and leans back in her chair. “Life has been mostly good, all in all.”
I smile at her.
She laughs and reaches over to pat my hand. “Remember these things. I’m not going to be around forever.” She suddenly looks over at the kitchen door. “Will you look at that! September’s not even gone and October is already trying to come in!” I turn to see that the breeze has blown in some dry fallen leaves from her back yard, scattering them across the kitchen floor as if someone had walked in, but then turned and left before we could see him.
Sophie gets up and takes her broom from the broom closet, waving me back down in my attempt to help her.
“So what was your dream about?” I turn in my seat and ask her as she sweeps. “The dream about Harry.”
She stops to think. Her breath is a little short already. “I dreamed we were dancing.”
She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning on her broom, with the sun behind her. I can only see her silhouette, like an echo of her. Like a memory. Like a dream.
“You’re a good girl, Louise,” she says, walking out the door and disappearing.
Then the only thing left is a door full of sunshine.
Y’all Come
by Martha Crockett
“When you live in the country everybody is your neighbor
On this one thing you can rely
They’ll all come to see you and never ever leave you
Saying y’all come to see us by and by”
—lyrics from a bluegrass song popularized by Jim and Jesse in the 1950s
I was raised in the “Y’all Come School of Southern Hospitality.”
If you’re from the South, you know it well. For those of you who are not, I’ll explain. The basic tenet of this school is that anyone who shows up on your doorstep—or who calls or writes to say they’re coming—is welcome to a meal at the very least, but also a bed if need be. No questions asked. No payment required. In fact, any offer of payment must be turned away with a show of offense at the offer. This offer is extended not only to friends and family, but also to just about anyone you know and to anyone who might know them.
My father was a Southern minister. Not “Reverend” or “Pastor.” He eschewed those titles. “Preacher” was acceptable because he did preach. But as he explained it, he was merely one of the brethren in the congregation, the one that the others paid to minister, so that’s what he wanted to be called.
Being raised a preacher’s kid—PK, for short—had many ramifications in my life. The one most relevant to this story is the fact that we moved quite often. As much, if not more, than military families. By the time I was eighteen, I’d lived in thirteen different houses. This meant that we h
ad an extensive network of brethren across the South. Colleagues of my father’s and friends we’d all made during our brief stays in various places. We were forever hopping in the family Rambler to visit them, or to attend a revival on the other side of town, or for my father to preach a revival for a church in another state, or to visit family who’d stayed put in Florida. There was even a vacation or two thrown into the mix. In other words, my childhood in no way could be considered still. We rarely traveled outside the South—I can only remember a couple of trips above the Mason Dixon line—but travel we did.
You would think that during all these trips, I would’ve stayed in a lot of motels. But try as I might, I can only remember a handful of rented rooms. And believe me, I remember each and every one because I loved to swim and motel pools were a huge treat. My sister and I could swim at night in a motel pool without worrying about critters nibbling at our toes. They had lights under the water, for goodness sake. If a cottonmouth happened to slip into the water—which did happen (to us kids, any snake in the pool was a cottonmouth)—we could see him coming and swim in the other direction like Johnny Weissmuller chasing a crocodile.
But, as I said, motel rooms were few and far between. The vast majority of family trips were spent in a succession of private homes. I was acquainted with some of the people who put us up, either from one of our brief residences in their fair town or previous revivals there. But like as not, I’d never set eyes on them. Sometimes even my parents hadn’t. When someone discovered we were going to, say, Boston (one of the two ventures into bona fide Yankee country), they would inevitably say something in the nature of, “My Great-Aunt Mildred lives two miles from Plymouth Rock.” They’d lean closer and confide, “Married a Yankee after the War, bless her heart. She’d love to hear a proper accent again. I’ll call her in the morning.” So we’d stay with Aunt Mildred. And even through all those impositions, I can’t remember a single time when we were greeted with anything but open arms and hearts. And when we left, the last thing my father would say before he backed the Rambler out of their drive was, “Y’all come.”
On Grandma's Porch Page 22