A Song of Home

by Susie Finkbeinger

  “You want me to hang up your jacket?” I asked.

  “That’s all right.” She moved her hand up to clutch at the collar.

  “Are you staying?” I asked.

  “Pearl …”

  “If you aren’t going to stay you should just leave now,” I said. “Before Daddy sees you. I wouldn’t even tell him you were here.”

  “Pearl Louise.” It wasn’t a scolding like I would have expected. Instead, my name came out of her like a sigh she’d been holding a good long while. Then she looked up at me, meeting my eyes. When she said my name again it was with more edge to it.

  “I won’t have you hurting Daddy again,” I told her. “Not anymore, Mama.”

  “Listen here—”

  I didn’t stay there to hear what she might have to say to me and I didn’t stay put to have her give me a bar of soap to bite for being a sassy-mouth little girl. It felt like power, walking away from her like that. I knew it wasn’t right, but I hoped it hurt her even a tiny bit as much as her leaving us had broken me.

  I didn’t want to throw stones at her, that was true. But I didn’t mind if she hurt, even just a little. It was what she deserved.

  I waited until I was up in my room with the door closed before I let myself cry.

  Ray and Daddy came inside not half an hour later. By then my eyes were dry and I was nursing a powerful headache. I heard Daddy tell Ray to go on upstairs and before I knew it, my door opened.

  “You all right?” Ray asked, his voice a whisper.

  I told him I didn’t know and he nodded like he understood. If ever there was a gift that Ray Jones gave me, it was that he knew me through and through.

  Without having to say a word the two of us went to the register in the floor, lowering down to put our ears to it. If Mama and Daddy talked clearly enough, we’d be able to hear most every word.

  We laid on our sides, Ray and I, facing each other.

  “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?” Daddy asked. “You could’ve called.”

  “I was afraid,” Mama answered. “I wasn’t sure I’d end up here. I was just afraid.”

  “Of what?” Daddy’s voice sounded strained. “Of me? When have I ever given you cause to fear me?”

  There was a pause and Ray blinked a bunch of times fast like he did when something made him nervous.

  “I was scared you’d tell me not to come,” Mama said. “That you’d say you didn’t want me anymore.”

  “Mary,” Daddy said. “You can always come back home to me.”

  “I don’t know that I can,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think this was a mistake,” she said. “I can’t stay. I shouldn’t have come in the first place.”

  “Why did you then?”

  “I didn’t know where else to go,” she answered. “Pearl doesn’t want me here. She told me as much. I should just go.”

  Hearing her say my name made me get up off the floor. Before I knew it I was at the bottom of the steps. Then I was moving toward the kitchen. I could see the light that glowed around the closed door. I leaned against the wall beside it, letting my head rest back.

  “She’s hurt, Mary,” Daddy said. “Did you think she’d run to you?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed. “I guess not. I just hoped.”

  For a moment all I heard was the ticking clock from the living room and a couple sniffles I supposed had come from Mama.

  “I won’t have you come and go,” Daddy said. “If you’re staying, that’s fine. We’ll make do. But if you’re fixing to go again, you might as well just go now.”

  They went quiet again and I held my breath, waiting for what one of them might say next.

  “Abe left me,” Mama said, her voice small and hardly breaking the silence. “A few weeks ago.”

  “Where’d he go to?” Daddy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How have you been making it?”

  “I’ve done some work,” she said. “There’s a hotel up in Adrian I’ve been cleaning.”

  “I never would’ve left you like that, Mary,” Daddy said. “I never would’ve had you working like that.”

  “I didn’t have much choice, did I?”

  Daddy sighed and I heard his heavy boots on the floor when he took a couple steps.

  “He left me a note.” Mama’s voice shook. “Like I left you.”

  I imagined Mama walking into the apartment or house or lean-to or wherever it was she’d been staying. There on the dresser or desk or table was a note, folded in two and sitting up like a tent or in an envelope under a paperweight. Her name was spelled out across it in black ink.

  “I just couldn’t believe it,” she said.

  I pictured her reading that letter and having to sit down to deal with the bad news. What I felt thinking on that wasn’t pity for her. If somebody’d asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them what it was, that tightening of my stomach and throb in my head. All I knew was that I didn’t feel sorry for Mama. Not even a little.

  “He never cared about you, Mary,” Daddy said, his voice flat. “Not like I always did. Like I always have.”

  “Tom, don’t.”

  “I was nothing but good to you.”

  “Until Beanie …” Mama started. “You never held me after. You never comforted me. You blamed me.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. It couldn’t have been. But Daddy didn’t talk back to her or stick up for himself. He’d never been one for that sort of thing. If I’d had any spine at all, I’d have pushed through that kitchen door and given Mama a piece of my mind.

  She wasn’t the only one who’d lost Beanie. It was well past time she heard that.

  But I didn’t move from my spot. I didn’t have the courage.

  Neither Mama nor Daddy made even the slightest sound for more than a minute and I thought they were both frozen, turned to stone so they wouldn’t break into a hundred pieces from grief and heartbreak.

  “Stay here, Mary, with us,” Daddy said. “This is your home as much as it is mine.”

  “I don’t expect you to put me up,” she said.

  “You’re my wife,” Daddy said. “I’ve gotta keep my promise I made to you on our wedding day. I won’t have you staying out on the streets.”

  “I can find a place,” she said. “I could take in laundry or something.”

  “You’re still my wife, Mary.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You’ll stay here,” Daddy said.

  “Tom,” she said. “I’m expecting.”

  It seemed all the air’d gotten sucked right out of my chest and I worked at pulling some in. The sick feeling in my stomach got stronger and the room started to spinning.

  I knew what it meant that a woman was expecting. All the grown folks used that word when they were talking about a woman who was going to have a baby.

  Mama was expecting a baby.

  As many times as I’d asked God ever so politely to give me the gift of a little brother or sister, I hadn’t thought I’d be so broke up upon finding out He’d answered my prayers.

  “What?” Daddy asked, his voice sounding every bit as baffled as I felt.

  “I hid it as long as I could,” Mama told him. “Abe told me over and over he never wanted to be a father.”

  “Is it mine?” Daddy asked. “I’ve got to know. Is it mine?”

  “How could it be?”

  “That night,” he said. “When I came to see you.”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “It could be,” he said. “Couldn’t it?”

  “Tom.”

  “Just tell me, Mary.” His voice was thin, sounding like it could break at any moment. “Is it mine?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I already knew about the baby,” she said. “I’d known for a week or two.”

  “And you still let me be with you?” he asked. “Lord, Mary. Wh
y’d you let me if you knew that?”

  “I missed you.”

  “Then why didn’t you come home with me?” he asked. “That night, you could’ve come home.”

  “Because being with you made me remember all the hurt.” Her voice seemed far away, wispy, like a breath of wind. “I shouldn’t have come back here. I should have known better.”

  “You’ll stay, Mary,” he said.

  “Everyone will know,” she said. “They’ll all stare at me.”

  “Don’t know what I can do about that. Stay anyway.”

  “I don’t deserve it,” she said. “Being here. With you.”

  “It won’t be like before.” His voice sounded firm.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not ready to forgive you.”

  “I don’t expect you will.”

  “Yup.”

  The kitchen door swung open and Daddy stepped out. He stopped when he saw me there. Running his hands over his face, he let out a deep sigh.

  “You can talk to her if you want,” he said.

  I looked in at her. She’d taken her coat off since I’d gone upstairs and I could see she had on one of her dresses that I’d always liked best. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a cotton dress with little green flowers all over it. She’d even made one like it for me out of that same fabric. I’d long since grown out of it, but I still remembered how proud I’d been to walk down the street in Red River, matching my mama like that.

  She’d gotten so thin around the shoulders and arms, though, that the dress hung. Her eyes fell to mine and she put her hand on the slight roundness of her stomach.

  She didn’t smile and she didn’t frown. She just held her face blank.

  I set my face away from her and toward Daddy.

  He walked with me up to my bedroom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  There’d been no fat calf slaughtered to cook after Mama came home, and no ring put back on her finger. Daddy hadn’t draped a new robe over her shoulders. We hadn’t gathered all the town to come and celebrate the return of Mama.

  We just turned out the lights and went to bed.

  The next morning, before I’d come down for breakfast, I heard Daddy make Mama promise not to try and find Abe Campbell. She wasn’t to write a letter or make a telephone call. He didn’t want her going looking for him or inviting him to come find her.

  “He’s gone, Tom,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to look if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”

  “Still,” Daddy said. “I don’t want you even trying.”

  “If it’ll make you happy I won’t even think of him,” Mama said.

  “I wish I could make you promise a thing like that.”

  Once Ray and I came down they stopped talking. They didn’t even look at each other. I thought I’d choke on how thick the air in that room felt.

  Opal stayed in the kitchen while we sat at the dining room table. She’d hardly looked at me when she brought out the pot of oatmeal Mama had asked her to fix.

  “Do you want to eat with us?” I asked her.

  She lifted her eyes to mine and shook her head. The way she didn’t smile at me made me think she was upset with me. I couldn’t think of what I might’ve done that would get her mad at me.

  Not even Ray ate much of his breakfast that morning.

  It wasn’t until Ray and I had stepped out on the porch to go to school that I said another word.

  “Why do you think Opal was upset?” I asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Nah, you didn’t do nothin’,” he answered.

  “Then why was she so quiet?”

  He shrugged. “Probably ’cause your ma came back.” He inhaled deep and looked across the street. “What’s Bert doin’?”

  Bert was standing in that new-built pigeon coop, the door of it wide open behind him. Even from where I stood I could hearing him talking to that bird like it was a baby.

  “He don’t have that bird outta its cage, does he?” Ray asked.

  “Why’s he got to keep her in the cage?” I crossed my arms.

  “So it gets used to the coop.” Ray jumped off the porch, landing flat on his feet like he always did, and rushed over to Bert. “Put it back in the cage.”

  Bert turned soon as he heard Ray and held up his cupped hands with a big old smile spread across his face.

  “She likes it in here,” he said, loud enough for me to hear him even.

  Just then, as if she’d been planning it, that pigeon lifted herself up out of his hands and through the wide-open door.

  “Sassy,” Bert hollered after her, making his way out of the coop. “Come back here.”

  I stepped down off the porch, watching that bird light on the top of the coop and listening to her trilling away as if she meant to scold Bert for yelling at her. She bobbed her head, the morning sunlight catching the purple of her neck feathers.

  I watched the boys for a minute or two, my arms crossed and shaking my head at their foolishness. Bert was trying his darnedest to get up to the roof of that coop and Ray was trying to give him a boost. All the while, the both of them hollered out for her to come back. With how red their faces were, I thought they were both plenty sore with that bird.

  After a minute I made my way across the road. Looking back at the house to be sure Mama wasn’t spying out the window at me, I tucked my skirt up the way Aunt Carrie’d taught me so I could climb without the whole world seeing my underthings. All it took was pulling myself up on one branch and reaching over for another before I was within reach of the bird. She only pecked me once or twice, smacking my hand with one of her wings a little, and then I had her, the feathers of her wings and under-belly soft against my palm.

  “Why are you flying away from those silly boys, huh?” I asked, keeping my voice smooth as I could to soothe her. She pecked at my thumb, but it didn’t hurt so much that I was going to let her go. “You cut that out, all right? Now simmer down, would ya? That’s a girl. Good. Calm. Good.”

  Ray and Bert stood at the base of the tree looking up at me. I shook my head when Bert put out a hand for me to give him Sassy.

  “Y’all need to learn a thing or two about how to talk to ladies,” I said. “They don’t take so kind to being hollered at, you know.”

  “We’d’ve caught her,” Bert said, trying his hardest to sound like Ray. I thought he was hoping to impress me. “She was just playing with me.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, my fingers curled around Sassy’s body. “You better be careful. This girl’s liable to fly on back to the Litchfield’s again if you don’t treat her nice.”

  “I’m nice to her,” Bert said.

  “You shoulda kept her in the cage like you were told,” Ray said. “She ain’t used to the coop yet.”

  Bert looked up at Ray with a hurt look like he was fixing to boo-hoo. “Why doesn’t she like me?”

  “She’s just gotta get used to you is all.” Ray put out his hands for the bird. She didn’t fight him one bit when he took her from me. “You just gotta be gentle with her.”

  Bert’s forehead wrinkled and his fists clenched as he watched Ray take the pigeon into the coop and put her back inside the cage.

  “She likes you better’n she likes me,” Bert said, a whine to his voice so heavy it almost made me laugh.

  “Nah,” Ray said, shaking his head and closing the coop door. “She don’t neither.”

  “Does too.” Bert turned and stomped away from us, up the porch steps, and into his house. He didn’t slam the door, and I thought that was on account his mother would’ve let him have it for such a thing.

  Ray and I just watched him go.

  “You think he’ll be sore at us for long?” I asked, climbing back down from the tree.

  “Maybe half an hour or so,” Ray told me. “Maybe a couple minutes more.”

  “He’s a funny kid.” I untucked my skirt and smoothed what wrinkles I could out of the fabric.

  “Yeah. He sure is
.” Ray wiped his nose on his sleeve. “We best get goin’.”

  “We gonna wait for Bert?”

  “Nah,” Ray answered. “He’ll find his way all right.”

  Before we left the Barnett’s yard to take Magnolia Street to the main road, I turned and looked back at our house. Mama stood in the big front window, her arms crossed and eyes on me.

  My chest tightened and I had to force myself to take a good breath. She’d seen me up in that tree with my skirts all bunched up. As much as I wished I didn’t care what she thought of me, my thud-thud-thudding heart told me different.

  Miss De Weese had got it in her mind to teach us a song in the French language. Back in Red River we’d never sung anything at school, let alone something in a different tongue. She’d told us it was about plucking a bird and she’d drawn a hen on the board. All the body parts were labeled and didn’t sound anything like I would’ve guessed.

  We sang about plucking feathers off the head, neck, and back and I tried not to think of Bert’s pigeon all the while. The part of the song I didn’t understand was how a person was going to pluck feathers off a bird’s beak or eyes. That didn’t make any sense to me, and I wondered if French birds just grew their feathers different than American birds.

  After we finished the song, I about put my hand up to ask but thought better of it. It didn’t matter, not really. What did matter was how that song had served to take my mind off Mama, if only for a little bit.

  Besides, Miss De Weese said it was about time for us to get going for lunch. I had to look at the clock twice to be sure she was right. All that singing in French had made the last bit of the morning speed away from me.

  Bert seemed to have forgotten about Sassy getting loose that morning and her liking Ray and me more than she liked him. Either that or he was mighty quick to forgive. Either way, he just about hopped all the way back to our neighborhood alongside Ray, telling him this or that about something or another.

  Whatever it was, it seemed Bert could think of nothing on earth quite so important right that moment. When I turned and looked at Ray’s face, it was all smiles and I thought he was near to laughing at Bert. Not out of meanness, but because of how Bert’s voice grew louder and louder the more he went on.