GodPretty in the Tobacco Field

by Kim Michele Richardson

  Rainey glimpsed over his shoulder. “Need something else, Roo?”

  Red-faced, I mumbled good night again and hurried across the field to the garden. I grabbed two squash and headed to the house. Stopping at the pump, I washed up, then stepped over to the clothesline to pluck off linens, stuffing them into a basket.

  I toted the basket up to the porch and set it down, surprised to hear a woman’s voice inside. I slipped inside and ran upstairs to my bedroom. Below, Gunnar called for me.

  Hurrying, I stripped off the old shirt of Gunnar’s that I used to protect my arms, and changed out of my heavy work dress into a clean one.

  In the kitchen I found Henny and Baby Jane Stump and their mama seated at the table next to Gunnar, who was studying papers.

  Henny was my best friend, well, besides Rainey, my only friend who lived close enough to claim. She was sixteen and the oldest of ten kids. Her little sister, Baby Jane, was eleven.

  The Stump family lived on the mountain behind us where rocks gather and the pines straighten up scrawny for breath. Gunnar’d been renting some of his land to Mr. Stump so he could grow food to feed his family. Gunnar would hire Henny for field work—when she’d show up.

  “Hi, Mrs. Stump. Lena’s baby come yet?” I asked about her fifteen-year-old daughter, and tossed a smile to Henny and Baby Jane. “Hey, Henny . . . Baby Jane.”

  Baby Jane scrambled up from the table and wrapped her small arms around me. She pressed her face to my chest, squeaking a sob into my dress.

  I patted her head and glanced over to the table.

  Mrs. Stump’s face was packed loosely with folds of hard times. Henny’s fragile cheekbones were tight and tear tracked. Henny didn’t answer about her sister. Mrs. Stump wouldn’t answer, just cut Baby Jane a look.

  Baby Jane scurried back to her chair.

  I wondered why they were here and what had them so upset.

  “RubyLyn,” Gunnar interrupted.

  “I was only—”

  Gunnar had his spectacles on, studying a letter of sorts in front of him. “You’re late,” he said without looking up. “My supper should’ve been on the table an hour ago.”

  I eyed the skillet he’d used to fry himself up a bologna sandwich while I’d been working. “Your bones ain’t broke,” I huffed. “Look at this mess. No one thought to wash the skillet?” I said fussier than I’d intended and knowing I was the only “no one” doing chores in this big house.

  The Stumps shifted in their seats. Gunnar stopped reading and knitted his snowy eyebrows together.

  I set my lower lip in defiance until Gunnar pierced me with his summery green eyes.

  “Ru-by-Lyn,” he shoved the syllables through his teeth.

  Even in front of company I knew Gunnar would never give. He was one of those people who don’t splinter—who grow stronger from others’ fractures. He splayed his hands in the air—those loud hands that never seemed comfortable to rest and you wondered where they might land.

  “Cleaning and dishes is women’s work,” Mrs. Stump admonished quietly.

  “Set some extra plates for the Stumps,” Gunnar said, rising from the table. Chairs scraped against the checkered-green linoleum as Gunnar and Mrs. Stump headed into the sitting room.

  Baby Jane rushed back to my side, and whispered, “N-n-need some help?”

  “No.” I bumped the oven door shut. “What are y’all doing down here anyway? What’s wrong?” I rested a hand on my hip and looked over at her sister. “I thought you weren’t feeling good, Henny.”

  “Pa’s worked out a deal with Gunnar and we’s just delivering on it,” Henny said, looking away and fidgeting with the collar of her dress.

  Before I could ask what type of deal, Gunnar came back into the kitchen with Mrs. Stump. He eased down into a chair and asked for coffee.

  They drank mostly in silence while I melted butter in the skillet and tossed in the chops. Mrs. Stump talked a little about fall crops while Gunnar listened with grunts. I sprinkled salt, pepper, and parsley onto the meat and tried to listen, too. When I finished, Baby Jane helped me out by setting the plate of meat in front of Gunnar. Quickly I added a couple teaspoons of vinegar and flour to the butter in the skillet and stirred it into a gravy that Gunnar liked.

  Dusk scratched narrow tracks across the walls by the time I put the basket of biscuits on the table. I was hungry and bone tired.

  “Iced tea,” Gunnar mumbled as I pulled out my chair to join them.

  I banged on the aluminum ice trays, filled five glasses, setting one in front of each of the plates, then plopped into my seat.

  With closed eyes, Gunnar leaned into his prayer-clasped hands, and said, “O Lord, if able, bless the weak who share our table—lead, guide, and direct our Sinner who prepared this dinner. Amen.”

  The Amens tightened on the Stumps’ lips. Gunnar grabbed the plate of cucumbers that I’d prettied atop a pink lettuce-laced plate.

  I peeked over at Baby Jane gripping her silverware. Her fork shook and fell onto the plate, clattering. “Ain’t . . . ain’t hungry, ma’am,” she whispered sideways to Mrs. Stump.

  Surprised, I raised my brows. The Stumps were always hungry.

  Gunnar poked her with a mean glare.

  Mrs. Stump pulled Baby Jane up from the table, smacked her face, and dragged her out of the kitchen and onto the porch.

  Henny kept her eyes downcast. Gunnar had another helping of cucumbers. Mrs. Stump returned with a twitching mouth.

  After a hushed supper, I collected the dishes and took them over to the sink. Gunnar and Mrs. Stump pushed back their chairs.

  “Bring some coffee into the parlor,” Gunnar called over his shoulder.

  I got out a tray and two china cups along with the creamer and sugar bowl. “Here,” I said, pouring the coffee and then handing Henny the tray, “help me carry this into the sitting room.”

  Henny walked turtle-slow out of the kitchen and into the long foyer. She glanced at the wall of sour-faced Royal ancestors and then up at the gleaming chandelier that she always loved and said she’d have someday. To me, it was one more useless thing to be dusted in this house of old things.

  Henny’s cups rattled on her tray as we entered the room and she fixed her eyes on the carved box on the mantel that I’d told her about.

  Mrs. Stump and Gunnar sat side by side in two flowery wingbacks, waiting. Me and Henny breathed in the cool air of the window unit. I took the tray from her and set it on the small table in front of them, then nudged Henny to follow me out.

  As I closed the pocket door behind us, Henny bubbled. “Sure is a pretty room. A family could live in a room like that. Y’all sure do keep it clean and all.”

  “Gunnar makes me keep it extra prissy for visits like today.” Though there hadn’t really been a today for at least a year that I could recollect, unless you counted the preacher . . . And I couldn’t recall a time when Mrs. Stump sat anywhere but in the kitchen until today. More than anything, Gunnar wanted it pretty for visits with his departed wife.

  “What’s going on in there, Henny?” I asked when we were back in the kitchen and out of earshot. “Gunnar doesn’t share a meal without good reason.”

  Henny picked up a dishtowel and wadded it in her hands. Dead air filled the room; then her shoulders shook. “It’s . . . th-the well. It’s gone dry again,” she sobbed. “And Sister’s baby is due this week.... We’ve plumb run out of space now that we’re burstin’ with twelve. Pa says a four-room house ain’t made for thirteen and he’s not about to bring bad luck down on the Stumps by giving it one more brat.”

  That was true. Everybody knew Jesus’s thirteenth dinner guest was Judas and how that turned out . . . Even though Gunnar had helped Mr. Stump build a sleeping alcove onto the back of his cabin a few years ago, it was damn near hard to borrow air with twelve others stirring it.

  “That damn well . . . it’s always going dry,” Henny cried.

  “Oh, Henny, use ours,” I offered. “The water truck stopped
by last week—our cistern’s full and our well has plenty. Heck, we have enough for the whole population of Nameless.” All 592 of them, if you counted the potheads and the Shake King dirt, Gunnar would always say, adding, we’re surely living like royals—a feeble joke about his last name and the middle name my parents had given me.

  “It’s hard, Roo. Pa won’t help. Baby Jane’s working for the Millers, and the little ones can’t help. I have to tote the water back up the mountain all by myself. And ’sides, Gunnar don’t like to share much. I can see it in his eyes when he catches me out there filling a bucket.” She bit on her nails. “So Pa’s been doing some big thinking.”

  I took the towel Henny was holding, and asked, “What’d that crazy daddy of yours do now?” Even though I was positive I didn’t want to know.

  A clap of the screen door and the fall of footsteps outside on the porch steps interrupted us.

  “What’s going on, Henny?” I yanked on her arm. “What’s Gunnar and your mama up to?”

  Henny turned to the window. “He’s . . . Oh, Roo . . . It’s Pa. He’s sold Lena’s baby.” She blubbered and then latched on to me, squeezing tight enough to pop off my sun-bleached freckles.

  Chapter 4

  Outside, secrets gathered and piggybacked onto winds that raced under a heavy Kentucky moon.

  I pried myself loose and leaned into the window. Henny’s mama had her head bowed with Gunnar’s, both of them whispering as they stopped along the back path. Head tucked low, Baby Jane lagged behind, spilling into their shadows.

  Mrs. Stump took a paper from my uncle. Half-bent from years of baby making, she grabbed Baby Jane’s arm and ambled slowly into the fields toward Stump Mountain.

  I turned back to Henny. “W-what do you mean sold?”

  “Pa . . . he’s done sold Sister’s baby to a Louisville couple who can’t have kids, so he can buy an acre from your uncle. They’re picking up the baby soon as she drops it.”

  “Dammit, Henny Stump, that’s nothing to joke about.” I scowled.

  “Cross my heart.” Henny dragged a big X across her chest, making her boobies pouf out like she always did when she wanted me to know she was a little older and trying to be smarter because she had me beat by time. Though, in truth, most everything around here was older in hill time. She held up her palm and traced two more X’s to punch the swear, then lifted her hand and pressed it to mine.

  I broke away. “Sold—”

  “It’s true, Roo. Pa’s fixin’ to have Ma work out a deal to use the three hundred dollars they pay him to buy land from Gunnar. We need more food, and the money can pay off our Feed Store credit and some things Pa needs . . .”

  “Things?”

  “His stuff.” She shrugged.

  His booze, I thought.

  “Ain’t his fault, Roo!” She read my eyes. “Them damn government men got his nerves all skinned up. He needs it, and just last week Baby Jane got a fever again and spread it to the babies.”

  “I can give her some of Gunnar’s Bufferins,” I said.

  “Ma made her up a tonic of shine and wild cherry. But Baby Jane still won’t eat and Ma had to fetch the granny woman.”

  “What’s wrong? What did Oretta say?”

  “She said there ain’t enough fat on Baby Jane’s bones. Feed her more. Used to be Ma couldn’t keep her from eating. Now, she’s having to whip her to get her to eat and stop spreading the fevers. But there ain’t enough food, Roo. And it was only yesterday that we finally got the electricity turned back on. Ol’ Kentucky Electric weren’t gonna do it, but then we put it in one of the babies’ names ’cause Pa done used up mine with ’em.”

  “Lordy . . . lordy-jones.” I stacked my prayers.

  “The baby’ll be here soon . . . Coming on Lena’s birthday.”

  “July twenty-six,” I said without thinking.

  “Twenty-seven,” she corrected, and shot me a suspicious look. “Sister’s birthday ain’t till this Sunday.”

  Henny rested her head on my shoulder, sighed. “I’ll never know my baby niece or nephew. The baby’ll be doomed and won’t ever have a sister ’cause the city folk can’t have themselves babies. Oh, I can’t imagine not having a sister, can you?” Her words spun in the air before crashing.

  “Sister.” The word bruised my heart. Henny and Baby Jane were the sisters I never had. And Henny failed a grade, so we even shared the same teacher when she’d show up for school. But in the looks department, I didn’t come close. Henny had curves like a stretch of Sunday road and a long, satisfying wiggle to call up a wolf whistle in a Saturday crowd down at the Feed & Seed. She was in a regular brassiere by ten, while I was still padding nothing more than a trainer, two months shy of turning sixteen.

  About the only thing I had going for me was a pair of pretty dancing feet and a deep set of bluegrass-green eyes. “Same as my mama’s,” Mrs. Stump had said, and both “about as useful as a skipping stone in a collection plate,” she’d added. Which Gunnar’d made sure to remind me after I’d dropped my prize rock in there one Sunday as an offering when I was six.

  Henny patted my back. “I don’t mean you, Roo. We’ll always be sisters.”

  I thought of my sister, Patsy. What could have been if she had lived.

  “Oh hell!” Henny said, seeing my face. “Look what I’ve done. Got ya thinking about her. I’m sorry, Roo.”

  I brushed off her apology and stuffed back the thoughts of Patsy.

  “We’s sisters. Always,” Henny said. “But it’s bad this time. Every time Pa ends up in the pokey, he comes home with another big idea. This time he met up with another feller in there who told him about the baby-buyers. Pa says he won’t take another twelve years of the government making him walk us kids to school. And Ma can’t do it with the babies clamped to her teats.”

  “But he has to,” I insisted. “Your littlest brother, Charles, and this new baby and the others can walk the paths together when the time comes. Maybe the baby’s daddy can—”

  “Nope, Sister still won’t name the daddy, but she swears he’ll take her and the baby away if Pa’d let her. But Pa told her no, that he wanted her around to help with chores when he gets his quit pay. Said he’s quitting ’cause his hip bones have been scratched thin from walking the ridge. He’s been having me write his letters again . . . Says them damn government men are gonna have to give him a donkey and disability pay ’cause it’s all their fault.”

  Like most in Nameless, Mr. Stump had been in the “Happy Pappy” work program ever since President Johnson came and made jobs for the unemployed daddies and other hurtin’ men around here.

  “Maybe he can get another job with ’em,” I said.

  “Just ’cause Gunnar landed a good government job a’killin’ convicts don’t mean everyone can get so lucky, Roo.”

  I winced. I didn’t think he was that lucky. Gunnar hardly talked about his old executioner job, not as a job anyway. Instead he talked about an old hanging—and how Kentucky was always messing up its executions. Talk that just seemed to make him more testy, and a little more bitter.

  “I bet that city couple has a big house and there’s a school on every street corner,” I cheered, picking up a towel to dry the pots. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing for the baby . . . maybe even lucky.” I glanced at her bare feet and hand-me-downs.

  “What do you mean?” She flipped back her long wheat-colored hair, narrowed her sparrow-brown eyes.

  I shrugged.

  “I know’d you’ve seen more. Tell me—”

  “No, I just forgot Lena’s birthday. It’s—”

  “It’s the Granny Magic, ain’t it? Ya done seen something in one of your fortune-tellers about—”

  “Don’t say that. I’ve told you I am not a granny woman.” I shivered at the thought of babies—childbirth.

  I tried long ago to tell Henny about my fortune-tellers, the good guesses, the easy money from the kids wanting them—leaving out that I always folded the sheet of tobacco paper counte
rclockwise, drew on the pictures, and then put it inside Mama’s snakeskin purse alongside her fortune-teller overnight to let it cure. Only then would bigger thoughts flow onto the fold-out paper designs I’d made.

  No one had ever seen Mama’s original, not even Gunnar. For years I’d missed it, then one day I cleaned out the purse and found me and Mama’s fortune-teller sewn into a double layer of hidden lining. Still, Henny didn’t listen, didn’t want to believe my fortune-tellers weren’t full of the woo-woo magic. I’d told her a dozen times that the only thing I could see was my own future out of this town that couldn’t afford to claim itself properly on a map.

  Last week, Henny’d begged for one of my fortune-tellers for the new baby. I’d sketched tiny pink and blue daisies all over the back of the paper, and a portrait of a swaddled baby in its center before folding it. Running out of thoughts and getting sleepy, I’d crimped the folds and tossed it into my mama’s purse to cure. The next day, I’d looked under the four blank triangle flaps and drew a blue heart under the first, a fat pink heart onto the second and third, and then on the fourth apron fold, too. Not ’cause I had a premonition about the baby being a girl; not for any other reason than for running out of blue ink.

  “Know ya want a fancy art place in a big town, but even Oretta says you’ve got the knowing,” Henny said softly. “Hate to talk about it, but you ain’t scared ’cause of what happened to your sister and ma—?”

  “I don’t care what that old granny witch says! I’m not going to be a hill charmer tethered to herbs and rock, staring at women’s cooters, waiting for a baby to fall out,” I grumbled. “Hoodoo won’t buy you Honey Girl slips, you know . . . ?”

  “Slips,” Henny snorted.

  “They’ve got them down in the Feed’s mail-order catalog for two dollars and ninety-five cents. Didn’t your mama ever have one?”

  “C’mon, Roo, stop talking crazy. Ya know Ma wouldn’t wear the devil’s underwear. She says they look like what you’d dress them naked girls with on them little matchbook covers—”