GodPretty in the Tobacco Field

by Kim Michele Richardson

  Gunnar followed my gaze. “That damn snake . . . Too much for your young, pregnant mother. Her heart plumb busted after that. And when she got the pains in her seventh month, she wouldn’t let me fetch the doc for her. Said the same thing as your pa, that the Good Lord would heal her . . . I sent for the doctor, but twice she turned him away. Never had much dealings with pregnant women. Sorry for not seeing it all then.”

  He wiped his own leaky eyes. “I was so busy trying to mend my own damn heart to help with her healing . . . I’m sorry.”

  He’d tried to save her, but her faith believed only Jesus could.

  “I’ve been too hard on you. I can see that now. Stacking my failures on your fine art like that . . . A sore reminder of what I couldn’t do. And I hated their religion. Sickened that it took them, and was hell-bent on protecting you and giving you a proper upbringing. So much, I stuck mine on you, and it’s done nothing but drive you away.”

  Gunnar took his thumb and gently wiped a fat tear off my cheek. He stood. “Every day I pray for His forgiveness. Give me yours . . . I lost them. I can’t lose you,” he whispered hoarsely, and his eyes showed the troubled miles of his past and the promised road to regret. “We can start new with our land.”

  He flicked his hand toward the window. “It’ll be tough going, but we’ll get through the winter, and the fields, our fields, will rest and be better for it. We’ll grow good crops. You’ll make your art.”

  I looked past him. “And Rainey?”

  “I’ve sent Rainey on to Louisville where he’ll be safe. Become a fine soldier . . . It wasn’t your fault or his. It was mine, and if you give me one more chance, I’ll spend the rest of my life seeing that you have a good home and future here.”

  Slowly, I shook my head. “There’s nothing here but useless land—worn womenfolk.” I sniffed the tiredness of the house, us.

  “It can happen.”

  “It didn’t for Henny, Lena. Or Ada and Baby Jane . . . and there’s Abby. Darla Clark . . . and Dirty and Dusty . . .” I said.

  Gunnar swiped a hand over his eyes and walked over to the door. “There’s us. Family. And, I love you,” he said thickly. “Just one more chance to make it right—one more chance to be the father yours meant you to have.”

  He worked his knuckle over a wooden spot on the doorframe and knocked twice. “One more,” he pleaded, rapping it a third time.

  I looked away.

  “Rest up,” he called softly.

  When he was gone I buried my face into the pillow and wept for the family I’d lost—wept for Rainey and the nothingness I had left.

  Exhausted, I fell asleep and dreamed of a clanky Ferris wheel spinning round and round in shimmering green fields popped with tilting sunflowers and golden-eyed daisies.

  Chapter 36

  Ribbons of morning light spilled across tangled sheets, awakening me. Puffy-eyed, I peered at the clock, surprised to see it was almost eight, though I couldn’t name the day.

  A little sluggish, but I sat up feeling somewhat better. Gunnar’s words had softened, and I knew he meant them. Still, my heart was heavy and thoughts were burdened.

  Slowly, I stretched and tested my feet on the floor. It had been the first time in a long while that I’d slept without the nightmares. Knowing everything calmed my soul, and a quiet moment washed over me.

  I wandered out into the hall. Gunnar had left a cardboard box outside my door. I kneeled down and opened it and studied the beautiful portrait of Mama holding me on her lap under an umbrella of blue skies. She’d dressed me in pretty pink ruffles and a matching bonnet that shaded my wide toothless smile. I pulled out a stack of art, sifting through the textured pages. A smaller charcoal sketch of a beaming Abby swaddling a baby in the doorway of Gunnar’s barn. Another painting of a younger Mrs. Stump with her four little girls buttoned to her long skirts, hands draped along a budding belly. I recognized Henny’s pouty grin, Lena’s secret smile, Baby Jane’s soft eyes, and Ada’s fierce chin. Youthful hope brimmed in Mrs. Stump’s face. Beautiful likenesses of everyone.

  How hard it was for Gunnar to lay down this talent. How hard it must’ve been for Claire to hang up portraits of other women’s children instead of her own.

  I trailed a finger over the works and examined the art again. Families that should be seen: in foyers, sitting rooms, over the Stumps’ broken couch, and on Abby’s paint-worn walls. Pictures that gladdened hearts and hearth.

  I carried me and Mama’s painting to my bed, curling up beside it. Tired, I drifted back to troubled sleep.

  An hour later I woke to fresh tea on my nightstand. I gulped it down and felt more like myself. The house was quiet and I peeked out my door. Gunnar’s bedroom door stood cracked, which meant he was someplace else.

  I padded back to my window. The fog scratched across the fields. I stared out at the Kentucky corners of my world that could make you feel alive, forget time and other things.

  Beyond, mountaintop broke through clouds as the sun birthed a new day. A new day with a startling new knowing crept into my heart.

  A barefoot Baby Jane darted across the yard, dirty and unkempt. She stopped by the oak and glanced all around. Then she peeked up, catching my movement in the window. Concern crawled through her brows.

  Slowly, I lifted my hand, waved, and then I remembered and held up one finger for her to wait. Hesitant, she nodded back. I plucked the ribbon I had been saving for her off my bureau and dropped it out the window.

  Surprised, she scooped it up, admiring. Shyly, Baby Jane held up her basket to show me two eggs tucked inside. She took out a posy of daisies from her dress pocket and placed it atop them.

  A softness took hold of my heart and I waved again.

  Baby Jane set the basket under the tree and scurried away.

  Beside her basket, my hoe rested against the oak’s trunk. Its wood handle blackened from the fire, slick as creek stone from years of toil.

  I remembered when Rainey first taught me how to hoe. So many times, we’d broken spring blisters on that old thing, toughened our winter hands. Now Rainey would be holding a gun, toughening his heart. Likely never to come back to these parts. Forever lost.

  I needed to send him a good-bye letter. Tell him I’d changed my mind. I hoped a fitting excuse would come to me. I could never pretend it was a “good night,” or tell him that he was kin—dare to let him go off to war like that, hurting. I would rather him start life anew with this small heartbreak than with the bigger hurtings of a stolen namesake. He deserved that.

  “Good night.” I bent over and wept until I couldn’t wring out another drop. “Good night, dear Rainey. Find a safe life and a fine city woman.”

  City. Families . . . Mine.

  I knew if I pushed Gunnar, I could sell my land and move away. He couldn’t stop me from quitting school. I’d be sixteen in a few weeks.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, the messy hair, swollen eyes, and sloppy gown. Disgusted, I ran the brush through my tangles. I picked up Rose’s slip from the bureau and pulled out a clean dress from the closet, and changed. Inspecting, I shimmied up my skirts, pinched the fabric of my silky slip.

  Mountain woman, Emma had said, educated at Centre.

  I dropped my skirts, moved over to the dresser to find some paper to write Rainey, and then I saw it. My mind jogged the jelly-jar memories, beckoned the Ferris wheel in the field. Clanky, clanky.

  I studied the pile of things that Gunnar had brought up from downstairs, lingering on the packets of sunflower and cucumber seeds from the fair. I opened the tiny envelopes and shook some of the seeds onto my palm.

  My gaze shifted to the gold eagle emblem on the Future Farmers of America booklet, the club’s creed.

  Slowly, I thumbed through the pages. Curling my fingers over the seeds, I spied the colorful flyer next to the booklet, studying its advertisement.

  Clutching the booklet and flyer and seeds, I stepped over to the window. Dead fields lay silent. Acres of what had been
, wouldn’t be, and what could be.

  Gunnar’s beliefs and mine.

  His old, ailing hands trusting mine.

  Family.

  I rolled the seeds over in one hand and clenched them in a fist while I tapped the flyer and booklet against my leg.

  Believe, believe, believe . . . I opened my palm and blew, scattering the tiny seeds onto the sun-puddled windowsill. Setting the Farmers’ booklet atop the fallen seeds, I looked at the flyer in my hand.

  “I believe”—I pressed the green paper to my lips and peered down at the ledge to the words scripted onto the Farmers’ pamphlet—“ with a faith born not of words but of deeds . . . in less dependence on begging and more power in bargaining; in the life abundant and enough honest wealth to help make it so—for others as well as myself . . .” I quietly read the Future Farmers of America creed.

  Without thought, I tore a square out of the bright green flyer. Folded counterclockwise, crimped, unfolded, folded again, pressing creases while staring out to the land and mountains of my birth.

  “Believe . . .” The paper crackled over the Farmers’ litany. “I believe . . . in being happy myself and playing square with those whose happiness depends upon me . . .”

  I wiggled my fingers inside the paper pocket folds. Fresh tears splashed down on my new fortune-teller.

  Believe. Believe. Believe.

  No time to let it cure.

  I grabbed the Future Farmers of America booklet off the windowsill and ran down the steps.

  Gunnar sat hunched over the kitchen table, the candle cross pressed between his palms.

  I set the fortune-teller in front of him. “This is for us.” I tapped. “I think we should get a contract with them, Gunnar.”

  I laid the wrinkled Farmers’ booklet down beside it. “And I want to join this club that lets females in so I can learn more about agriculture and grow fine crops.”

  Gunnar rubbed a calloused tip over the gold eagle, nodded. Then he picked up the fortune-teller and studied it. Tears dampened his drawn cheeks. Gently, he slipped his bent thumbs and forefingers inside the tiny folds and worked the pickle-covered flaps.

  Six Years Later

  I’d found him.

  Or maybe it was Freddy who found us.

  “Howdy, pretty lady . . . Howdy, howdy, soldier,” the big wooden doll called out.

  Twinkly lights painted the summer evening skies. The Kentucky State Fair bustled with all kinds of folks from all over the Commonwealth, its last night pleated with scents of tired cooking oil, stale popcorn, and spent sparkle.

  We’d been bringing our twins here every year for the last three. Our daughters insisted on visiting Freddy as soon as we arrived and before we left, calling out their excited good mornings and blowing sleepy good-night kisses to him.

  Gunnar’d even bought us one of those fancy Polaroid cameras to mark our visits, saying, “The Sheriff of Nameless and his family deserve a fine camera!”

  I watched Bur and Gunnar carry the twins over to the balloon vendor across from Freddy. The four of them like that put a smile on my face.

  Baby Jane set her cage down beside me and handed me the prize money to put back for her college. I slipped her winner’s check into my purse. Excited, she wagged the shiny ribbon in front of me, waiting.

  For the third year in a row I pinned the ribbon onto her Future Farmers of America jacket. Baby Jane caught my hand and squeezed, then smoothed down the purple streamers draped over the locket beneath it. I’d given her the silver locket on her sixteenth birthday, tucking inside one of the slots my sketching of the basket that I had plucked off the tobaccos that long-ago day. Baby Jane’d saved part of that old fortune-teller, too, and placed my drawing of the hen alongside it.

  She kissed my cheek and hurried over to the balloon vendor to show off her award, turning heads with her bright smile and the same Siren-calling hips of her older sister Henny. Baby Jane’s Grand Champion hen called after her, fussing in soft, rolling clucks.

  Two teenagers strolled past, slapping Rose’s musical wooden spoons against their palms. They hummed “Black Jack Davey,” the song Rose taught folks to go along with their new spoons.

  I tapped my foot remembering how we’d sung it in the parking lot till Crockett’d showed up. . . . At first I worried about coming back to the fair until Rose said Cash Crockett had gotten into trouble after I’d left. “They caught him in a storage barn with a thirteen-year-old 4-H girl and fired him—sent him to the city can for a while, too.”

  I smoothed down the day’s wrinkles that puckered my old strawberry dress that Bur always teased me about. He’d laugh. “You’ve been wearing that old dress every year for this fair, sugar—done wore off the creases even.... How ’bout I buy ya a new one from the mail-order catalog?”

  A quivering wind kicked up. I covered the two flapping ribbons pinned to my chest that I had won for this year’s art exhibit. I’d already sold the illustrations to a book publisher in New York. A few years back, one of their businessmen had been traveling down our way and spotted my art at Zachery’s in Tennessee. He’d taken a fancy, using them for a hotshot author’s book covers.

  The burst of air calmed. Resting my tanned hands on Freddy’s white picket fence, I soaked up the night breeze.

  Then he walked up alongside the small crowded fence, tall-dark-handsome as a mountain shadow over flower root. Looking smart and straight ahead at Freddy he was all decked out in a pressed uniform, polished black shoes, shiny belt buckle, and his garrison cap angled just right.

  He hadn’t come back to Nameless. Not once. He’d not written to me either after that long-ago good-bye letter I’d posted to him. Though he’d been sending letters and money to his mama, regular-like. She’d go off to visit him once in a great while but kept tight-lipped mostly, saying he had made the army his career.

  Myself, I didn’t get away from the fields much, except for this fair, and maybe once a year to see Henny and her four kids over in Beauty. She’d call, begging a ride to the penitentiary so she could visit her man, and then over to the old state insane asylum to visit Ada.

  He brushed against my elbow as he eased himself into the row of people.

  My insides rattled, ears filled with a whooshing—same as it did in the tobacco fields back then. I gripped the fence, a knowing banging my chest.

  I was getting ready to slip away, when slowly, a slow-talking-hands-slowly, he stretched his pinky finger, hooked on to mine, and squeezed. Quietly, he stared up at Freddy.

  I kept my eyes locked on Freddy, too, and lightly pressed back.

  Soft and low, Rainey struck the words to “Sweet Kentucky Lady.” “ ‘Honey, there’s no use in sighing . . . Your eyes were not made for crying . . . Sweet Kentucky Lady . . . Just dry your little eyes . . . You’re still my rose of Kentucky. No rose is sweeter to me . . . ’ ”

  A small boy pushed up behind us, wound himself tight around Rainey’s long legs. A pretty Asian lady leaned in between them, sweetened Rainey’s cheek with a kiss.

  “Daddy, Daaa-dy!” the boy shouted up at Rainey, tugging, smiling big as the moon. “Mama says it’s time to tell Freddy good-bye! I don’t wanna!”

  Rainey dropped his hold and lifted the little boy up. “Time to go, son.”

  The boy shook his head. “I want to stay forever, Daddy,” he pouted, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

  “Hear, now.” Rainey hoisted his son a little higher. “We don’t have to say good-bye, Gunnar. How ’bout we just say good night?” he coaxed, latching on to his son’s pinky finger.

  Little Gunnar grinned and clamped back, then hugged his daddy’s neck.

  Rainey pressed a kiss into his son’s tiny black curls. Resting his head atop the boy’s, Rainey’s tender gaze fell to mine.

  “Good night,” he said softly over his son’s head and at me this time, and stretching his wiggling pinky.

  Good night

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you bunches to Liz Michalski, Ann Hite, Danielle DeV
ore, and others who gave their valuable time, feedback, and suggestions during first drafts. Thank you, Mike Schellenberger and Homer Richardson.

  Jamie Mason, thanks for being a wonderful writing friend. George Berger, thank you again for staying with me all the way.

  Agents Stacy Testa and Susan Ginsburg, my wise and talented representatives and my biggest cheerleaders, you have my deepest gratitude forever.

  To the folks at FoxTale Bookshop, in Atlanta, I’d be remiss if I bypassed your kindness and huge support. I love and thank you to the moon and back.

  John Scognamiglio, you are the. very. best. an author can have, and I thank you for being so very good to me. To Kensington and its amazing team: Vida Engstrand, Paula Reedy, Kensington’s amazing artists, and so many others behind my novels, I thank you for your dedication and endless hard work—always, always, I am grateful and indebted to you.

  Joe, I love you like salt loves meat. Son Jeremiah and daughter Sierra, I love you forever.

  To you, wonderful reader: Thank you for inviting me into your home.

  Please turn the page for an intimate conversation

  with Kim Michele Richardson about

  GodPretty in the Tobacco Field.

  GodPretty is a phrase that I made up to show starkness in the brutal and beautiful land and its people and mysteries. The term is necessarily paternalistic in the book and means to the one character, Gunnar, to keep a good and Godly soul if you are of a religious nature as he is. To Gunnar, GodPretty is applicable to females, while a male would be “righteous.” Gunnar uses my coined phrase GodPretty to push his strict moral code on his fifteen-year-old niece, RubyLyn. It came out of the uncle’s yearnings for his niece—wanting her to be pretty and pretty in the eyes of the Lord, so God would protect her when he no longer could, so that she would have a good life and be smiled upon by others not only because she’d be pretty but because her soul would shine, too. From the opening scene you can feel the title, the contrast with the ugly tobacco fields, giving a foreboding presence. Gunnar controls RubyLyn with this phrase, his large presence, big hands, hard ways of talking, acting. So when he punishes her, she can’t resist, can’t fight, until one day . . .