"I didn't let one weekday pass 'out my being at that place punching that time clock and hauling and cutting and grading that limestone," he said after a while.
"That's how you got such a good record." Annie Ruth could hear herself talking to him like he was an idiot, but she couldn't do any better. This conversing with her father was so new and strange to her that she didn't know what to say.
Mudear had had the knack for being able to talk with Poppa where he didn't have to make much of a contribution. Annie Ruth could see Mudear now sitting in her favorite recliner or stretched out on the big chair and ottoman on the porch talking a mile a minute about something she had seen on television about the legal system or something she had discovered on her own about horticulture in the experimental garden along the eastern side of the house. Poppa wouldn't even have to say a polite "Ummm" anymore. Over the years, he had learned how to pace his silences just so that his not saying anything in a certain way, certain nuanced silences, adequately held up his side of the conversation.
"Shoot, Annie Ruth, the record itself didn't mean nothing to me. That's not why I worked like a dog out there at those white people's mines. I worked like that not just to keep a roof over ya'll's head but to give you girls and your mother a little better. To put you and Emily through college so you wouldn't have to work like I did, work like a dog, to make a daily living. That's why I didn't never show up at ya'll's graduation exercises. I was working some overtime. Woulda sent Betty to college, too, but when I tried to talk to Mudear about it, she said Betty didn't have no interest in higher learning. And by then, she had already started making a few dollars doing hair."
Poppa kept looking down at his fingernails and then back at Annie Ruth as if to see if she was listening. Annie Ruth had an interested look on her face because she was. But she was having a hard time not looking confused, too.
"I know both ya'll got scholarship, I was proud of that, told the mens down at work 'bout it, but it was still so expensive. Your mother didn't seem to realize how expensive it all was. But then, you know how Mudear was."
He just sort of let that hang in the air. And Annie Ruth just murmured, "Ummm," and took a sip of her tepid coffee.
"Not that I'm trying to throw up to you what I did for ya'll. Not at all. I was just doing what a man s'posed to do for his family, a real man. And God knows you girls have been more generous than any children I know with your mother and me. Shoot, you all spoiled Mudear rotten. I guess we all did.
"Your mother knew it, too. Whenever I'd say anything about how good you girls were or try to brag on you, she'd shut me up. Say, 'Don't be telling me about my girls. Shoot, they the hand I fan with.' That's what she say, 'They the hand I fan with.'"
There was another pause, so Annie Ruth said, "Well, Poppa..."
"She didn't know the price of nothing, whether it was the cost of a college education or the price of a bottle of shampoo. It's sort of funny 'bout that. 'Cause she always played me so cheap. Always played me so cheap. Everything I did or bought or earned, she played so cheap.
"You girls, too, played me cheap. I guess she taught you that."
Annie Ruth was close to shocked. Not only had she rarely heard her father talk so much to anyone, especially his family. But she had never heard him utter a word against Mudear.
He was almost as surprised as Annie Ruth at his candor. But his talking about Mudear seemed to embolden him. He continued to speak as if he were throwing himself into an ice-cold pond.
"Do you remember when you were about five or so and you got real sick? Sick with the whooping cough?" he asked.
Annie Ruth shook her head. "No, Poppa. I didn't even know I ever had whooping cough."
"Well, you did," Poppa said, seeming to brace his spine against the straight back of the chair. "And your sister was sick, too. Emily had meningitis real bad. For a while, we didn't know if she was gonna make it or not."
"Now that you mention it, Poppa, I do remember Betty talking about us being real sick once."
"Well, you were. The doctor kept coming and there was so much medicine to get. And the doctor had to keep coming to see 'bout ya'll. I never been so crazy in all my life. I remember I felt like any minute I might lose my mind."
"'Cause we were so sick, Poppa?" Annie Ruth was truly touched by her father's show of concern. She and her sisters had figured that Mudear was right all the times she had told them that Poppa didn't give any more of a damn about them than a stranger in the street would, like any man would.
"Well, yeah, because ya'll were sick. You girls and Mudear was just about all the family I really ever had to call my own, my very own. And the thought of losing any of you ... losing any of you ... especially to lose ya'll because of my stupidness and pride."
He hung his head in shame over his coffee cup.
As soon as Poppa had mentioned the memory of that cold winter day without heat or lights to Annie Ruth, he had regretted it. How can I ever get this child to understand something that I'm still trying thirty-some-odd years later to figure out myself? he thought.
He had run the events leading up to that cold day over and over in his mind like a reel of tape perpetually set on PLAY.
It was in the Lovejoys' twelfth year of marriage that he had gotten his first promotion, something that didn't happen very often to a colored man at the chalk mines. That spring, he was so full of himself, he didn't think his feet stank. He finally felt that the folks who thought he was just a plodder had been taught an exquisite lesson. Word gets around, so Poppa wasn't a bit surprised to get a late-night telephone call from Mudear's people who lived in New York City. Poppa extravagantly, grandly, foolishly sent the money—$250—to Mudear's aunt's husband in the North for jail bail. Even Mudear gently tried to tell him her people up north couldn't be trusted. But he felt duty bound to show all those Negroes up "nawt" that a colored man in the South could take care of himself, his family, and even his people who were stupid enough to migrate north just when things were starting to get better down in Georgia.
It was a mistake that he could never forgive himself for.
The summer of that year passed without concern for the repayment of the $250. Poppa was having too good a time reminding Mudear where her family, most of whom had moved north unlike his stupid country people, had to come when they needed something. As the fall came, however, money was not quite so free for him and he began to wonder aloud when those trifling northern Negroes were gonna pay what they owed. By the time it started dropping down near freezing at night, Poppa was near panic. For the first time in his married life, he had overextended himself. One night, he had even set up the regulars at the bar at The Place. Now, he needed his money.
But he couldn't get anybody to even take his calls up north. "He ain't here" was all he got. And he needed his money. He had been able to keep up the mortgage payments on his little two-bedroom house in East Mulberry. There were groceries in the house and the water was still on. But by the time the white man with the hard hat and tool belt came to turn off the gas and electric, Poppa had no money, expected none for another month, and had nowhere else to get any.
That's when Annie Ruth, the baby, started making that croup-ing sound at night.
"Look like we just 'bout gon' lose your father," Poppa heard Mudear inform the girls one day after they had all recovered and the lights and gas had been back on awhile.
Ernest did feel as if he wanted to die. He could hardly make himself eat every day and he had dropped so much weight from his already slender frame that even his buddies down at The Place noticed it. But something in his face kept all of them from saying anything. They sensed this was not something open to casual questions or comments. As if someone had pulled down his pants in public, and he looked small and withered.
He kept going to work every day because besides still being the breadwinner, the man of the house, he told himself, work was the only place he could go just then that did not remind him of his stupid, prideful mistake. He could go every
day to the kaolin mines and dig and haul in the dry white powdery pits until he was so tired he didn't have the strength to think during the day.
Lord, where would we be now if I had had enough sense to tell them folks we ain't got it to spare or even if I had sent half of what I sent. Hell, if I'd sent a tenth of what I sent, it would 'a been more than they had. And I wouldn't of been left hanging, strapped the way I was.
He couldn't get it out of his mind. Again and again, he remembered getting the money from the bank, counting it over and over just to give himself the satisfaction of ownership, going to the Western Union office on Poplar Street. Waiting in line, waiting his turn in line. The way the white man's tissue-thin hair stood up on the crown of his head. The feel of the orange pencil in his hand as he signed the receipt for the money he sent up north.
Forever afterward, he hated all things northern.
"Don't let your pride get your ass in trouble. I knew better than to send those low-down, worthless northern Negroes my money. But I couldn't help it. I wanted to show them all. They always treated me like..."
"Treated you like what, Poppa?" Annie Ruth asked. She was beginning to get interested. The conversation with her father was almost like the ones she and her sisters had shared with Mudear when they were growing up and the woman felt like having them around.
Mudear would urgently call one of the girls to her side. Then, when she arrived to see what emergency Mudear had run into, she would be greeted with the question, "Daughter, tell me now, what does this woman on TV look like?"
It was not a casual question. It was test material. The Lovejoy girl would look at the screen, screw up her face squinting one eye, and appraise the target and say, "She looks like a blond Nancy Wilson."
Mudear would give her delicious rich laugh and clap her hands at her daughter's insight and perception and say, "Girl, you know you can call it!" And with that bit of praise, mother and daughter would return to their routines.
When Poppa realized that he was sitting at his kitchen table talking to Annie Ruth in the middle of the night, he had no idea what he had just thought and what he had actually said. Annie Ruth leaned forward the way he had seen her do when she was interviewing someone on television. Annie Ruth could always make it seem that for that moment you were the most important person in the world.
"What happened, Poppa, with the gas and electric?" Annie Ruth wanted to know. "What happened? How did you pay the bill, Poppa?"
When he didn't answer, she continued, "With Emily and me sick, I guess you had to do something mighty quick to get it turned back on, huh, Poppa?"
Two or three times in as many seconds, it seemed that Poppa was about to open his mouth and answer his youngest daughter, but just looking at her reminded him of Mudear. He couldn't chance seeing Annie Ruth look at him with wicked disdain the way Mudear did.
Annie Ruth thought he was going to cry.
Instead, he dropped his hands to his lap, leaned forward from the waist, and brought his head down so hard on the table he rattled their cups of Sanka and cream. Then, he slowly brought his head up again and upset the cup and saucer before him. The cup and saucer flipped over against his chest and fell down into his lap, leaving the front of his pajama top and bottom soaking wet and stained. But he didn't seem to notice. Poppa just kept banging his head on the tabletop and moaning a bit.
Annie Ruth was past shock at her usually quiet, even-tempered father and his show of grief. She wondered what he was drinking in that cup. He looked and sounded like legions of mourners at wailing walls, at funeral pyres, at mass graves. She tried to stop him from dropping his forehead so heavily on the table, but all she really accomplished was to sort of pat her father's head as he brought it up from the tabletop. After a few seconds, he stopped on his own and sat stiff and sad with tears in his eyes.
She felt so sorry for him. "Come on, Poppa, it's time to go to bed."
Annie Ruth leaned over to help him up from his chair. She fully expected to smell liquor on his breath. How else could she explain his talkativeness, his rambling, his strange extravagant behavior except to assume that he was drunk? But, other than the spilled coffee, she didn't smell anything but the fading scent of Old Spice. She was surprised the combination didn't make her sick.
Slipping her arm under his arm and around his back, she tried to lift him from his chair, but he seemed to be dead weight, much heavier than she had imagined, and when she remembered that she was pregnant, she let go of him so suddenly that he made a plopping sound as he fell back down, nearly missing the seat of the kitchen chair. Well, I can't leave him just sitting down here crying by himself, she thought.
"You gonna have to give me some help, Poppa," she said, steeling herself again to help him to his feet.
The sound of her voice seemed to bring him back to himself, and he mumbled, "Yeah, yeah, right, I gotta help my children. Right. I can stand up." And he rubbed his hand over his face a couple of times as if to clear his head.
He stood up shakily without any support from Annie Ruth. But he reached for her broad shoulders as he began to wobble. Seeing her father so unsteady, Annie Ruth could hear her mother's voice instructing the girls, "Your father's just an old fool. Don't pay him no mind."
As they headed for the steps, Annie Ruth asked him, "You want to just stretch out on the sofa tonight, Poppa?"
But he was adamant and said in a strong voice, "No! I want to sleep in my own bed. In your mother's and my bed."
"Okay," Annie Ruth said, but she thought, suit yourself and choose your poison.
She thought they would not be able to navigate the short flight of stairs to the second floor. But Poppa walked up the steps almost unaided. Then, he nearly collapsed onto Annie Ruth. She leaned him against the wall and then sort of scooted him through the first door on the right, to his and Mudear's room.
Finally, laying him in bed, she started to take off his wet pajama top and bottom soaked with Sanka and canned Pet milk, but she remembered the look of shame in the eyes of old men she had seen when she was an investigative reporter covering mistreatment of the elderly in nursing homes. As strange women in white uniforms roughly took off the old men's shirts and stripped them naked of their soiled and streaked pants as if they were store dummies, Annie Ruth would watch from her spot in a comer masquerading as a nurse's aide hired through a temporary service. Tom between averting her eyes and watching closely so she could make notes for her news report later on, she noticed that the old men in the bed would always manage to catch her eye with a look that begged that she not look any longer, that she not witness this indignity that they could no longer control.
But she watched.
As a new shift of nurses and assistants and attendants came in to hold their old dicks so they could pee, stooping beside patched-up wheelchairs as the men tried to help by tapping the side of their penises against the curved lip of the elongated plastic slop jars. In trying to coax urine from the eye of the lifeless piece of meat, sometimes an impatient attendant would turn to the low sink by the bathroom door and turn on the faucet of cold water in hopes of encouraging the old men's flow.
Eventually, all three of us Lovejoy women gonna probably have to take our turns undressing Poppa, washing his wrinkled old genitals, and wiping the spittle from his cheeks. It'll come soon enough. Let him keep some of his dignity now, she thought, and just pulled Mudear's pretty wine-colored comforter up over her father's sleeping figure before heading back to her room.
At the door, she turned and said, "Good night, Poppa," even though she felt he wasn't awake to hear her.
"Annie Ruth?" he said just as she was about to close the door to the bedroom.
She turned and came back to the bed.
"Yes, Poppa?" she asked, leaning over him.
"Your mother."
"Yes, Poppa."
He started to reach out for his daughter's arm, but he stopped himself and put his hand back under the cover. "Your mother, no matter what she was when she died, no mat
ter how she ended up. She was a sweet girl when we met."
All Annie Ruth could bring herself to say was "Ummm." Then, when he closed his eyes again, she patted his shoulder and repeated, "Night, Poppa." And left the room.
CHAPTER 20
He's damn right I was sweet when we first met. I couldn't help but be sweet. I didn't know no better. I was like my Mudear had been her whole life. She was a woman who always had a smile on her face. She loved her family and her life and it just seemed to love her back. We didn't hardly have nothing. Daddy seemed to work hard, but I think we rented our house all the time I can remember. But it didn't stop Mudear from seeming to love life. She was the kind of woman who hummed while she did her housework. She actually hummed a happy kinda tune while she went about her day.
I just assumed I had inherited that knack from her naturally. You know, like mother, like daughter. But that was before I came out from under that roof and found out how the world really was. Before I married Ernest.
CHAPTER 21
Betty had meant to just go upstairs, change her clothes, and go back down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and wait for Emily to come in. But after taking off her clothes and putting on some sweats, she didn't head back downstairs. Instead, she found herself drawn to her office desk across and down the hall from her bedroom even though she dreaded facing the piles of correspondence, accountant ledgers, and magazines there. Even with her home computer tied up to the ones at the shops, she seemed to have more and more paper flooding her office. But Betty was the kind of person who liked to put her hands on her work. That's why she loved the feel of books in her hand.
The room had almost as many shelves covering the walls as the library downstairs did. They were all crammed with books. In the library, the books were shelved in order by subject matter or alphabetically by author. The majority of the library book collection had come with the house. The family of the original owner had amassed an excellent collection of American and European classics as well as an extensive collection of old reference books and atlases. And Betty had added her own extensive collection of hardback books to the library. She had taken such pleasure in removing the old musty-smelling books from one section of shelves and replacing them with first-edition copies of fiction and poetry by black women writers. Betty even had a thin steel ladder that slid along the bookcases of one wall to enable her to reach the volumes on the top shelves.
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