by Anne Lovett
You have to be careful, she said. No telling who’s listening in. Who am I going to talk to out here? Duke’s always working, and the old man’s always working. There’s only Elzuma, and I don’t think she likes me. Duke told me she used to tell fortunes, and I asked her to tell mine, but she said she didn’t do that anymore.
Who’s Elzuma? I said.
You don’t need a fortune, Momma said. What you need is a baby.
I’m not ready for one, Momma. Maybe when we move back to town.
You think he’s going to do that?
He’ll get his fill of farm life.
Who’s Elzuma? I said.
They weren’t listening to me. An argument had started and I wandered outside. I walked by a gas pump and inspected an open shed that sheltered a tractor, a wheelbarrow, a pile of timbers, three old signs, and some rusty tools.
I headed toward the sound of chickens and came on a chicken-wire pen, and behind the wire stood a short, squat colored lady with a bandanna tied around her head. I knew she had to be Elzuma. She was wringing the neck of a chicken.
Rooted to the spot, I watched the scrawny claws kicking, the strong brown hand tighten. There was a powerful odor of chicken mess, and my stomach heaved right then and there.
Hey, chile, she called but I was running fast as my legs would carry me back to Ava’s bungalow. I almost made it.
The sound of sickness brought Momma and Ava out, and Momma sent Ava to get a cold cloth. They cleaned me up, walked me back inside, and made me drink flat Coke which was disgusting.
Right in the middle of all the commotion Chap and Duke came to the door. Hey, girls, time to go, they said.
Mae Lee can’t go, Momma said. She’s messed up her shirt and she’s sick. You all go on and I’ll stay here with her. No need, said Duke, Elzuma can look after her. At that my stomach heaved again and I bent over.
All over my rug, said Ava.
I’ll get Elzuma, Duke said, but while he was gone Momma cleaned up the mess and Ava found me a T-shirt of Duke’s to wear. She sure wasn’t going to let me wear anything of hers. Little did she know that T-shirt made me stupidly happy.
Duke stuck his head back in the door. She’s coming, he said, soon as she finishes with the chicken.
Don’t say that, I begged.
I guess we can go, Ava said. Momma put me in their double bed with the chenille bedspread and turned on the radio to some music. You rest here, she said. Do not get up. I would stay with you but Chap really wants me there.
I lay back, dizzy again, and listened to the mutter of the car until it died away. Out in the fields I heard the swishing of the wind in the broomsedge and hoped the day would be too windy to fly, and they would have to put it off till I could come. I turned over, squealing the saggy springs.
Still Elzuma did not come. The radio played “Oh! What it Seemed to Be,” which sounded sappy, and “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy,” which sounded silly, and then they played one I liked, “Laura,” singing about the face in the misty light.
Bored, I slid out of bed and looked at the books in the bookcase. I picked out The Foxes of Harrow and was disappointed it wasn’t about animals. Then I saw a small, slim book kind of wedged in, and I pulled it out. I opened it; it was a kind of diary. When I saw Duke’s writing, I sucked in my breath and read:
We are quartered in a tea plantation in the hills of Assam. Officers in the main house and enlisted men in a converted tea shed. Tea bushes cover the hillsides. We are not far from Naga territory where headhunters still roam the hills. Met the first batch of Kachin recruits I’m supposed to train. We pay them in opium.
Just then I heard the screen door squeal open. I shut the book, slid it back on the shelf, and hopped back into bed just as Elzuma appeared in the door. She grinned at me. You mean to tell me killing a chicken makes you sick? How else you gone eat, girl? You think them chickens grows on trees? You can’t make no omlet lessn you break eggs.
I was already sick, I said in a small voice. And I don’t want any eggs or any chicken ever again.
Don’t you worry none, honey, she said. She smiled like she was full of sunshine and peaches instead of chicken blood. You change your mind soon’s you get hungry.
I was half scared of her, but since Duke said she would look after me, I trusted him. I hitched myself up in bed. Do you really tell fortunes?
She frowned. Who say that?
I just heard it, I said.
I use to, she said. Don’t do it no more.
How’d you do it?
Diff’rent ways, she said. Some work better’n others. Tea leaves, chicken feathers. Onct my old auntie down on the island show me how to do the cards, but that just a parlor trick.
Will you show me about the cards?
She frowned then. Better not.
But if it’s just a trick, why not?
She sighed, a long windy sigh with Africa in it. I guess it can’t do no harm. She went in the other room and came back with a pack of cards, just ordinary cards like Momma and Chap used for playing gin rummy. She shuffled them, talking all the while, like wanting to fill up the house with talk, while the radio played.
Elzuma told me about when she used to live in the bungalow when Mis’ Catherine, Duke’s mother, was a young lady, and then marrying Link Handy and having babies of her own, and moving out when it got too small for all of them to another house on the farm, and walking down the lane to work from there, and coming back here to look after old Mr. Robert, and living in the big house now in easy shoutin’ distance.
She sat on the end of the bed and laid out cards on the cover like she was going to start a game of solitaire. Queen of clubs, queen of diamonds. Two queens, two ladies in your life, she said.
Six of spades, trouble and strife.
I held my breath.
Two of diamonds, love to spare. King of clubs, friend always there. She smiled at me. Jack of diamonds, won’t be true. Four of clubs, he’ll make you blue. I giggled. I didn’t even have a boyfriend, if you didn’t count Starrett Conable. He was more like a pebble in your shoe you couldn’t shake out. I wondered if he was at the airfield.
Then she started to lay down a card, glimpsed at it, and it slid out of her hand. Done dropped one, she said, and scooped it up. I better start over.
She gathered up the cards, but not before I saw the one on the bottom. The ace of spades.
Something was howling, faint, in the distance, like a train whistle, like a ghost wolf. What’s that? I said, my heart beating fast. I felt dizzy.
That sick wagon, she said. She prodded me with her gentle, chicken-strangling fingers. You lay back down. It ain’t nothing.
She took the cards away and came back with some cool lemonade for me and held the glass while I sipped it. I finally lay back and closed my eyes.
I don’t know how long I lay there until I heard the car in the driveway and the voices. The door opening and closing and Ava’s hysterics. More voices in the other room and then Duke appeared at my bed. He took me in his arms then, and I had one moment of happiness with my head on his chest before he told me.
Chapter Fourteen
Where are they, the shadow-people? They hover between life and death, between absolutely alive and absolutely dead, and I have noticed some people are like that all their lives. Chap was never a shadow-person. He was in the sunshine all his life, except for those two days he lingered in the hospital. And if I had known that Duke was coming to tell me Chap was heading toward the shadows, I would have run. I would have run to the far reaches of the world, to the Pacific, where the news sometimes gets lost, and news unfound, news delayed, news unheard, is not ever true.
He had landed the plane perfectly. It was the stress, they told us. An occult heart condition, they called it, which sounded peculiar, and made me think of the ace of spades. Lion-hearted as he was, nobody suspected his heart might be weak.
They tried to break it to me gently. Chap’s in the hospital, they said. He’s going to be all
right. But children look at actions more than they listen to words, and all the red eyes and hollow faces, what they weren’t saying, made me scared and shaky.
They wouldn’t let me go to the hospital, and I had to imagine his arms around me, telling me he’d be home soon, and then he’d teach me how to fly.
I didn’t get the story of what happened until Starrett Conable told me one afternoon when he came over with a pan of chicken and dumplings from his mama and we sat out back on the steps. He told me because I asked him.
Chap and Elmo had each had a turn taking the plane up, then Chap took Mama for a ride and Elmo took Starrett because Mabel wouldn’t go. Mama had loved the ride, he said, and her eyes were all sparkly when she got out of that plane.
They were about to call it a day when Ava decided she just had to try it and posed for a picture by the plane—Chap with his old style leather flying helmet and Ava with her hair all windblown. Chap took off, telling her he’d give her a thrill.
The climbed higher and higher, circled, and dived. Ava must have liked it, even if she did scream, because Chap climbed to dive again. On the next dive, though, the propeller stopped, the plane bucked, and then it stalled.
Chap managed to glide it in perfectly, but then he slumped over. Ava had hysterics and Momma fainted. Elmo pulled him out of the plane. Starrett ran to the hut on the field and called for an ambulance.
Starrett shook his head. My poor dad, he said. He ain’t never going to get over it if your dad don’t make it.
Chap fought long and hard. We thought he was too tough to die. The second day after the heart attack he cussed out all the doctors, but the third day he passed away along toward evening. He told Momma he loved her. She said she hadn’t heard it in years.
I know better now, but I always looked at that moment as the time when everything began to fall apart.
Maybe if Chap hadn’t died things would have turned out differently.
His funeral was one big blur of faces and flowers, a scent of lilies and roses, folks hugging me and burly men calling me little lady. I could hardly see who they were, my eyes were so red and wet. And at the end they played Amazing Grace on the wheezy little organ and I broke down and Elmo Conable had to carry me to the car.
During the weeks afterward, poor Elmo wandered around like a lost soul. It didn’t help that Elmo Junior was still over there somewhere. During that time we didn’t see much of the Conables, though Momma went over from time to time with something she’d cooked. She fretted that we might have to move, but we could pay the rent because Chap had taken out some life insurance a long time ago, and she got a little bit from the Army.
I was missing Chap like crazy. Every once in a while I’d look out back at the garage and get a big lump in my throat, but I didn’t let myself cry. As long as nobody played Amazing Grace, I could keep it in. I thought I had to be strong for Momma so she wouldn’t worry about me. Maybe then she wouldn’t grieve so hard.
She kept on going to church every Sunday and I went with her, though I didn’t love the John Wesley Methodist Church and Brother Ben Higgins as much as she did. I was getting worried about her—I missed the old Momma I was used to. She was getting weaker and complained about the pain in her joints, saying it was rheumatism. Please, Momma, go to the doctor, I’d say. When Brother Higgins came by, I’d take him aside. Make her go to the doctor.
I’m working on it, he said.
But I thought she was just giving up.
And then it was fruit basket turnover time, time for Mr. Higgins to leave for another church, which I hated. Why did the bishop make them leave? The Reverend Mr. Hayworth, who replaced him, was blond, with a long solemn face, and looked about nineteen years old. Momma didn’t like him. One Sunday, after we got back from church, she pulled the hatpin out of her navy straw hat, stabbed it back in the hat, and threw the hat down on the bed. She closed the door. I thought I could hear her weeping in there.
She stayed in her room all afternoon, and I bounced around the house feeling lonely. I liked to go into the old garage sometimes because I could make myself believe any minute Chap would come in and laugh and crack a joke. I walked out there then and saw the light streaming down through the boards onto the spot where he’d had kept the engine. Some oil still lay on the floor, oil from the engine, and I dipped my finger in it and looked at it for a long time before I wiped it off on my play clothes.
I supposed Elmo had the plane now. Momma said she didn’t want to see it again or have anything to do with it.
I looked at that oil drying up and I knew he wasn’t coming back.
And then I broke down and cried.
Chapter Fifteen
Deaths always happen in threes, they say. But it was more than a year after we lost Chap when Duke’s grandfather died of a heart attack right after he got home from church on Easter Sunday. He left Sweetbay Plantation to Duke.
The very next week Momma was talking on the phone, a serious look on her face. She did what? I’ll talk to her. She hung up the phone with a sigh just as Ava’s Cadillac screeched to a stop in front of our house. I ran to the door and flung it open to see what was happening, and there she was struggling to lift a heavy green Samsonite suitcase out of the trunk. I ran down to help her. What’s happened, Ava? What?
She let me heft the bag. She fingered a small train case she used for her cosmetics and jewelry. I’m leaving him, she said.
You’re what? It was hard to breathe all of a sudden.
I’m not living on that farm, she said. No more. He went back on his promise. And—she looked up at the door, where Momma was standing with her arms folded.
Duke called here, she said. He said to just come on back and he’ll pretend like it never happened.
I’m never going back. He’s already quit his job at the plant and says he’s going to farm that place. I did not sign on to be a farmer’s wife. She looked at me like the Wicked Queen in Snow White. Mae Lee, you’ve got your roommate back.
I looked at Momma but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her face was blank as a poker chip. I followed Ava with the suitcase up the steps, in the house, down the hall, into my room.
Put it on the bed, she said, and flung open the closet door. Dammit, get your stuff out of my closet.
I folded my arms. Your closet is at Sweetbay, Ava. How was I to know you would want to come back? You have no right to just run off and leave him like that. Don’t you love him?
It is not your business, she said, and started pulling my things off the hangers. I could have fought with her, but I just picked up my clothes and hung them in the other closet. Can I have him? I said. I would love to live on a farm. I could have a horse.
She whipped around and stared at me open-mouthed, and I hid my smile behind my hand. Very funny, Mae Lee, she said, turning to face me, smiling her crocodile smile. Why on earth would he want you?
I was too used to her jabs to be hurt. I looked down at my skinny self which was growing taller and filling out way too slowly. I knew I would never look like her and she knew I would never look like her. Still I hoped for a miracle. Someday, Ava. Someday. Dog in the manger, was what I said. You don’t want him but you don’t want me to have him.
This conversation is too ridiculous to be believed, she said. I’m going back to get the silver and the rest of my clothes. He’ll be out in his precious fields and can’t stop me. Elzuma wouldn’t dare.
Momma appeared in the doorway with her hands clasped. Ava, you shouldn’t do that, she said.
Well, I’m going to do it anyway, she said. Are either of you going to help me?
No, we said in chorus, and she went out and drove away. Two hours later she came back loaded down with boxes which she stacked in the front room.
Duke called and she wouldn’t talk to him. Momma talked to him and told me Duke said to just let Ava show her tail till it turned blue. He’d take care of the problem. I didn’t see that he was doing anything, because she lay around the house for two weeks smok
ing and leaving butts in all the ashtrays and going to the movies and shopping and reading magazines. Pretty soon she spent up all her cash, and then, when she tried to charge things, found out he’d cut off all the charge accounts. She tried to write checks but found out the joint checking account was empty.
I have rights, she said to Momma later. How dare he humiliate me like this? Maybe I’ll see a lawyer.
Lawyer? What lawyer? Some friend of Hardy Pritchard? You want his name coming up again? Momma shook a finger at her. You want to start the gossip while Duke does not know squat about any o’ that? Honey, I know what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work. This Queen Bee mess could backfire you right into a divorce.
Duke sat tight out at Sweetbay and waited for her hissy fit to wear out. In the end she packed all her dirty clothes in a laundry bag for Elzuma to wash and went back to him, back to the farm, back to the big house that was now theirs, back to the fields and the crops and the cattle—and the horses. He invited Momma and me to come anytime.
Momma was not getting any better. But when she was having a good Saturday, she would take me to Sweetbay. I rode Ava’s horse, and sometimes Duke would ride with me, and during those rides I felt like I was riding in a sunbeam. He never said much, just pointed out things to me, taught me how to hold the reins, told me about getting along with a horse.
Just once, I asked him about the war.
He got a faraway look in his eyes. Someday I’ll tell you, he said. But not now. You’re too young to understand.
No, I’m not, I said, but he gave his horse a little nudge and said, race you to the tree, and when we got there—he won, of course—he laughed and told me I had a good competitive spirit.
I lived for those moments.
Duke was a good steward, and the cotton and peanuts and cattle grew and made them some money. Ava calmed down and started fixing up the house. Elzuma moved out of the back room by the kitchen, out to the bungalow, and worked for them part-time. Life looked sweet for them.
I didn’t know then that the sweet life could be like honeysuckle vine smothering a barbed-wire fence. I found out on the Fourth of July.