The Dry Grass of August

by Anna Jean Mayhew

  Mama handed Davie to Stell and pushed at her hair, smoothed her skirt. “I’m going to fix my face.”

  I hadn’t noticed Mary going out, but I saw her through the blinds, walking in the front yard. “I’ll get Mary.”

  She was standing by the walk.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Looking at Florida. A strange place, seem to me. Almost no trees, just scrubby things bended down by the wind. And them,” she said, pointing at the palm trees that lined the street, “looks like somebody took good trees and gave ’em a shave.”

  “Those’re palm trees. You remember Palm Sunday, in the Bible?”

  “Course I do. Hosanna and praise Jesus. The hour has come to sing His—” She stopped. “You mean like the palm branches they waved at Jesus?”

  “Same thing.”

  “What you say,” said Mary. “What you say.”

  The front door opened and there was Uncle Taylor, smiling, his arms held wide.

  I hadn’t seen him in over a year, not since he and Aunt Lily came to visit us before Davie started walking. But he was as handsome as I remembered, his hair bleached by the sun, his blue eyes sparkling. He grabbed me up, swinging me off the front walk.

  “Jubie! How’s my favorite niece?” Even if he said that to Puddin and Stell Ann, too, which he always did, I knew he only meant it to me.

  “Hey, Uncle Taylor.” I hugged him back. He smelled like lemons.

  He put me down and held me out, squinting, studying me. “You’ve grown, girl. What have you been eating, spinach and baked vitamins?”

  “Too much of everything, if you ask Mama.” I reached for Mary’s hand. “You remember Mary, Uncle Taylor?”

  “Of course I do. How are you, Mary?”

  “Just fine, Commander Bentley, just fine.”

  “I’ve got a nice room for you upstairs. Y’all come on in and let’s get you settled, then we’ll go down to the beach. Jubes, where’s that good-looking mother of yours?”

  “She went to the bathroom.”

  He opened the front door for me and Mary. “We’ll find her.”

  Mama was in the entry hall. Uncle Taylor wrapped his arms around her. “Hey, big sister, I’ve been looking for you!”

  Mama buried her face in his chest. She said his name over and over. She started to laugh. “Oh, Taylor, I’m so glad to be here.” The laughter turned to crying, first like tears of joy, then like her heart was breaking. I knew that kind of crying, the hiccupping sobs that wouldn’t stop. I was embarrassed for her.

  “Pauly-Wauly.” Uncle Taylor held Mama close. “You’ve had a rough time, old girl.”

  CHAPTER 4

  There was a time in my life before Mary, a time when Mama and Daddy weren’t fighting, when they still called each other Pauly and Willie. Maybe if I’d never known them happy, the trouble between them wouldn’t have bothered me so much. But I remember Shumont Mountain and the four-room log cabin next to Rainbow Lake where Mama and Daddy had spent their honeymoon. We moved there in the summer of 1944, a few months after Grandmother Bentley died, leaving Mama and Uncle Taylor a tidy sum. Daddy said we’d stay there till the war was over and he could start his business in Charlotte. While we lived on Shumont, he was home at night and almost never got drunk.

  Our cabin was on a flat place between two peaks reached by a road of twenty-one hairpin curves that Daddy and I counted out loud whenever we went up or down the mountain, stopping at least once to let Stell throw up. The road was something that didn’t change. Years later when we went back for summer vacations, we had to go around the same twenty-one curves between Bat Cave and Shumont.

  Stell was seven that summer and I was almost four, with Mama and Daddy all to ourselves in the years before Puddin and Davie. There was no electricity or running water in the cabin by Rainbow Lake, and Mama still says hell isn’t hot, it’s cold like Shumont Mountain in the dead of winter. But it was also a place of light and cattails, of tomatoes growing in the front yard, going on horseback with Daddy to pick apples, swimming together in the lake that left us smelling faintly of rust. When I remind Mama, she says, “Yes, it was those things, too.”

  We arrived on Shumont just as the blackberry vines were drooping with ripe fruit, and the blueberry bushes soon would be. Mama pointed them out and said, “We could have great fun making jelly, if we just knew how.” The next time we went down to Black Mountain for groceries, she bought a book—Fruits of the Appalachians: Legends and Recipes—and read it after supper, by the light of our kerosene lamps, making a list of what she needed: pectin, Mason jars, wax, sugar, cheesecloth.

  The day we made jelly, Daddy was stoking a fire in the front yard when Mama came out on the porch. He said, “You’re mighty fancy for someone who’ll be up to her elbows in berries.”

  She twirled in her cotton print dress and sandals, the skirt flaring around her as she danced down the steps, her hair tied back in a pink satin ribbon.

  Mama’s gold hoop earrings and bracelets flashed in the sun as she stirred the pots over Daddy’s fire, while Stell and I strained the hot berries in cloth bags, the juice running down our arms onto our shirts. Mrs. Straley, a neighbor who’d come to help, said, “You’uns is more the color of berries than girls.” I brushed at the stains covering my shirt and shorts. Stell smiled, her teeth white in her purple face.

  Daddy sampled the jelly. “Tastes great! But will it jell?”

  “Sure it will,” Mama said, but she sounded uncertain.

  When we’d finished, two dozen pint jars sat on the porch rail, sparkling like amethysts and sapphires. Mama gave us a cake of Ivory soap. “Get in the lake and scrub the stains off. Stell Ann, watch your sister.”

  I was standing waist deep, my arms covered with lather, when Mama raced down the path from the cabin. She kicked off her sandals, ran out on the pier, and dove into the lake in her berry-stained dress. When she came to the surface, she let out a whoop that echoed off the mountains. Stell sat on the end of the pier, watching Mama, who went under again, stayed down a long time, and came up out in the middle of the lake. Daddy was on the opposite shore, his shotgun slung in the crook of his arm, grinning.

  “C’mon on in, Willie, the water’s great!”

  He put down his gun, stripped to his underwear, and dove in. Mrs. Straley, who’d walked out on the dock, said, “Yore daddy’s gone crazy.”

  “He’s done that before,” Stell said.

  “Gone crazy or gone swimming?”

  Stell didn’t answer.

  The jelly we made turned out just fine. Daddy’s favorite was the spicy brown apple butter Mama put up in the fall, which he ate with hot biscuits and fried frog legs, after Mr. Straley taught him how to gig. Daddy let me stand in the marsh grass at night and watch as Mr. Straley beamed a flashlight steady on a frog to blind it while Daddy impaled it on his gig, an old broomstick with tenpenny nails in the end. They tossed the frogs into a sack that hung from a tree limb. The bag kept on wiggling, which made me feel bad. Mama cooked frog legs at least once a week, but I never would eat them. I made do with everything else, snap beans and limas, corn on the cob, tomatoes and green peas, collards boiled with fatback, new potatoes, and leathery dried apples.

  Our bathroom was an outhouse across a creek, and Mama wouldn’t let us use it at night. So Stell and I, who slept together in a single bed, peed in an enamel pot that was cold to my bottom, summer or winter. When I had to get up in the night to squat over the johnny, I’d crawl back in next to Stell and try to stay awake to listen to Mama and Daddy. Sometimes they laughed so loud it shook the wall between our rooms.

  In the winter, when the front room smelled of kerosene and wood smoke, Stell and I played Parcheesi and Chinese checkers to the shuffling and snapping of Bicycle cards as Mama and Daddy played gin rummy. There was an old piano with pump pedals and perforated rolls of music. Mama and Daddy harmonized to “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball” or “A Bicycle Built for Two” or Daddy’s favorite, “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Ne
llie.”

  Stell asked Daddy why he liked that song so much.

  “Your mama knows.”

  Stell looked at Mama. “Is it because you fell in love?”

  Mama shook her head. “Not right away.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Daddy. “The first time I saw you, I fell for that mess of curls and those gorgeous hazel eyes.”

  “Then you got married and had two little girls,” I said.

  Mama smiled. “Something like that.”

  That night, Daddy stood at the kitchen sink pumping water, singing, “Wait till the sun shines, Pauly.”

  Even before they married, there were problems with Daddy’s mother, Cordelia Watts, who thought that a college girl like Mama would never appreciate a country carpenter like Daddy. In Mama’s opinion, Meemaw wouldn’t have approved of anyone her baby boy took for a wife. And right off, they disagreed about religion. Meemaw asked Mama what church she went to, and Mama said, “Methodist, of course,” which was well known of girls who attended West Virginia Wesleyan.

  Meemaw said, “The Watts’re full-immersion Baptists. Always have been.”

  Mama told us she went to one baptism and never saw anything so primitive. She stayed what Meemaw called a “city Methodist,” and eventually Daddy became one, too.

  When I think of Shumont, I remember a June morning after Puddin came along. We’d gone back to the mountains for a vacation. Mama was nursing Puddin in one of the wooden porch rockers, a scarf around her shoulders against the chill. Daddy was splitting kindling, and Stell and I were helping Mrs. Straley churn butter. Daddy had his shirt off, and in spite of how cool it was, he was puffing and sweating.

  Mama hummed while she rocked. Mrs. Straley let us churn until we got tired, then she finished, moving the plunger up and down as if there were nothing to it. She poured off a glass of buttermilk for herself and spread fresh butter on a slab of homemade bread for me and Stell. That morning is what I remember when I think of the log cabin on Shumont, and it’s hard to understand how bad things got between Mama and Daddy after that.

  CHAPTER 5

  Stell stood by a building between Uncle Taylor’s house and the dunes. She shouted over the roar of the surf. “We’re staying in here—with Sarah.”

  The cabana reminded me of the breezeway at home, filled with light, catching the wind, with bamboo blinds to lower if it rained. Straw mats covered the floor, and strings of Japanese lanterns crisscrossed the ceiling. Three bunks with plaid spreads, summer blankets folded across the end of each. Our suitcases on luggage racks. Stell pointed to a door. “Our own bathroom.”

  “Cool! And where’s—” Then I saw her, plain and quiet, sitting on the third bunk. “Hey, Sarah.”

  “Hey.” She was all bony angles. Her brunette hair, tied back with a green ribbon, was thick and glossy. Like her mother’s. Her eyes looked fuzzy and sad behind the thick lenses of the horn-rimmed glasses she nudged with her finger. Nothing fit my memory of my pleasant cousin.

  “How you doing?” I asked her.

  “Okay.”

  The screen door banged open and Puddin came in.

  “Y’all come to the beach! It’s great—oh, hey, Sarah.”

  Sarah looked at Puddin.

  Puddin said, “I saw your daddy. Where’s your mama?”

  “Gone.”

  “When’s she—”

  Stell said, “Puddin, hush.”

  Puddin looked at Stell, startled.

  Mama should have explained things to her.

  Sarah brushed past me. She was long-legged and skinny as a rail. Mary would be after her to eat. The screen door slammed behind her.

  Puddin asked, “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Don’t ask about her mama, okay?” I said.

  “Why?”

  Stell said, “Just leave it be.”

  I went after Sarah as she headed for the house, catching up with her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Everybody asks about Mother.” Again she pushed at her glasses. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick. “She’s gone. There’s nothing to say.” She went through the back porch toward the kitchen. Her shoulder blades stuck out under her blouse. I stood on the path, looking down at the sandy soil.

  Sarah and I had so much fun when they’d visited us in Charlotte, riding our bikes to Freedom Park, lying on our backs in the grass, finding elephants and rabbits in the clouds, talking and laughing until it was past time to go home. Except for Maggie, I’d never had such a good friend.

  Where was Aunt Lily? Did Sarah ever get to see her?

  I went in the house. The kitchen and dining room were empty, but I heard Mama and Uncle Taylor’s voices coming from a room at the end of the hall. A door stood open onto a narrow, steep staircase leading to the attic. I looked up and saw Mary. “Hey!” I climbed the stairs.

  Her room was long and narrow, hot and stuffy, with a single bed near the only window, a short chest of drawers under the eaves, a metal folding chair with a torn vinyl seat. The roof pitched sharply downward on both sides of the bed, and we couldn’t stand upright except in the middle of the room.

  “You okay up here?” I asked.

  “A bit warm.” She stood by the open window, her face glistening with sweat.

  Uncle Taylor appeared in the hole in the floor where the stairs ended. “Mary, here’s a fan. Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mary said.

  I said, “It’s really hot up here.”

  Uncle Taylor plugged in the fan. “This’ll help.” He switched it on and set it to oscillate. A strong breeze blew through the room.

  “Thank you,” said Mary. “Makes a difference.”

  Uncle Taylor said, “Jubie, get your suit on. The water’s great.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  “Okay, and Mary? We need to keep the hall door shut. The air-conditioning . . .”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After he left, I asked, “Is it really all right?”

  She put her flowered bag on the bed. “Only be up here maybe twice a day.”

  “Did you bring a bathing suit?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t swim.”

  “You’re not going in the gulf?”

  She looked out the window. “That’s not likely.”

  In the cabana, I changed into my new one-piece suit, hoping there’d be boys on the beach who might notice how well I filled it out. Just before I left I tied a towel around my waist to cover the welts on my thighs.

  I’d never seen sand so white and water so blue. The waves weren’t as fierce as on the South Carolina beaches, which made the surf seem friendly. Board fences ran from Uncle Taylor’s house, across the dunes, and down to the high-tide mark, fencing off the property. That seemed strange to me. Owning the beach is like owning a mountain or an island, putting your name on something that belongs to the whole world.

  “Hey, Jubes!” Puddin ran over the dunes. Mary was behind her, carrying Davie, who had on his bathing trunks. Mary was still in the dress she’d traveled in. She put Davie down and sat on a dune behind us.

  “Mary!” I beckoned her. She shook her head.

  “Yoo-hoo!” A woman puffed through the sand, waving her arms. She was round and fat in the middle with skinny legs, a barrel on broomsticks. She gasped her way to me. “You are Taylor’s niece.”

  “Yes, ma’am, June Watts.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, June Watts. I’m Lula Willingham, your uncle Taylor’s neighbor. I knew y’all would be here today. I’ve lived next door for four years and Taylor tells me everything. I want to meet your mama and all her babies.” She pointed at Mary. “Is that your girl?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, glancing back at Mary, who I knew could hear us.

  Mrs. Willingham’s two-piece was tight around her stomach and thighs, with stripes of sunburned skin above and below—the most uncomfortable-looking suit I’d ever seen.

  “Must be nice to travel with help. I know your mama needs it
with all you children. Five or six of you, right? Taylor was worried about having enough of everything to—”

  “Four.”

  “Four? That’s not so many. Still and all, having a girl lets it be a vacation for your mama. Else she’d have to fetch food and carry wet suits and haul that toddler around. Those your brother and sister?”

  “Yes, ma’am, Puddin and Davie.”

  “I’ll be back in half an hour and I want to meet everybody. Ev-ree-body.”

  “Bye, Mrs. Willingham.”

  “Bye-bye,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m off for my daily walk; makes me feel not so old. Not fifty yet, even if the years do keep racing by.” She was still talking when she got to the fence.

  Sarah came down to the beach and walked right past where Puddin and I were sitting on our towels. She shook out a beach blanket, put her sandals and glasses on it, and went into the water up to her waist. Her somber silence was ominous. I ran down to the water and waded in. “Hey,” I hollered over the noise of the waves, “you okay?”

  She jumped. “I was till you scared me.” She started for the beach.

  “Huh-uh, you weren’t.” I followed her.

  “Just leave me alone.”

  “I will if you’ll tell me what’s wrong.”

  “You want to know what’s wrong? Ask your daddy!” She snatched up her glasses and ran.

  I was still standing there when Mama and Uncle Taylor came over the dunes, Stell Ann behind them. Mama was in her black latex one-piece and she looked happy. Cheeks pink, red-gold hair on fire in the late afternoon sun, hand in hand with Uncle Taylor. She stopped where Mary was sitting and said something. Mary got up and headed back toward the house.

  “You been in the water yet, Jubie?” I could see Uncle Taylor looking at the welts on my legs.

  I nodded. “Sarah was with me. She went for a walk.” I pointed. She was way up the beach.

  “Is the water cold?” Mama asked.

  “No, it’s great. Where’s Mary going?”

  “To fix supper.”

  Uncle Taylor spread a beach towel, and Mama dropped her sunglasses on it.