by Bev Marshall
Sheila nodded. “That’s what Stoney said when I told him I couldn’t read none. He said people can’t eat books and writing good don’t put food on the table.”
The ride out to Mars Hill was like the pop-the-whip ride at the country fair. One minute we were veering left, then just as it seemed we were going to descend into a ditch, Sheila would whip us back to the right, fishtailing and skidding on loose gravel. It was exhilarating. We passed by the Parsons’ Place, the Keppers’, Johnny Moore’s store, and by the time we got to the turnoff for Mars Hill, my maple syrup-drenched biscuit had risen up and gone down in my stomach four times. I was glad when Sheila slowed down on the rutted road so that I could enjoy the beauty of the season. The red holly berries against waxed green leaves added a festive air to our drive; an orchard of pecan trees, with gray limbs stretching and reaching out in the blue sky, looked like an artist had painted them there. I waved at a brown rabbit hunkered in a clump of yellowed field grass, and stretching my head out the window, I squinted up at a hawk circling a newly plowed field. When we turned into the Carruths’ rutted drive, the smell of the turnips and collards planted in the front yard wafted toward us.
I don’t like to remember all that happened next. I think Sheila tried to erase it from her memory too because, when we got home, we never spoke of that day again.
Mr. Carruth wasn’t home when we got there, and I have asked God why didn’t He keep him longer at his brother’s house where he had gone to borrow an ax. Sheila’s mama had seemed pleased when she lifted her daughter’s hand and saw the band Stoney had given her. “It ain’t real silver,” Sheila said, “but it means the same.” The children had assembled in the room and their thin arms and legs and pale hair filled all the spaces between the fireplace and the straight-backed chairs placed in a semicircle in front of it. Sheila stood with her back to the bricks, her mama’s big stomach pushed into her side by one of the children.
“It’s pretty,” Sheila’s mama said. I noticed she had no ring at all.
Just then his shadow fell across the rectangle of sunlight from the open door. The room fell silent. I looked from one child to the other and saw the fear mirrored on all their faces as they looked at the grim expression on their papa’s face. He was holding the borrowed ax up in front of his chest. “What’s all this?” he yelled as he walked through the parting children to his oldest daughter.
Mrs. Carruth twisted her apron, looked down. “Sheila’s come home to tell us some news,” she said in a voice so low I could barely hear her.
But he heard her. “What news?”
Sheila started toward him, backed up, and then held out her hand. “Me and Stoney got married, Papa. On Friday.”
There was a peculiar smell in the room, and I remember thinking they must have cooked birds or something wild in the fireplace. The odor grew stronger and my already heaving stomach lurched and I tasted vomit. I watched Mr. Carruth frozen for a minute standing in front of his daughter and his wife. I couldn’t see his face, but the faces of the women told me something was terribly wrong. He swung the flat side of the ax like lightning. The flash of blade moved so quickly I nearly didn’t see it. He swung low and caught Sheila on the side of her left leg. She buckled, crumpled down like a piece of paper turning to ash in a fire. “Get up,” he bellowed.
She didn’t move and held her forearm over her face. “Papa, listen. Wait a minute.”
Grabbing hold of her arm he lifted her up just as the clock chimed three times. I jerked my head up toward the mantel, startled at the sound and the idea that there was a beautiful clock in this ugly house.
Sheila was crying, squirming against her father’s grip. “Stoney loves me; he’s gonna take good care of me.”
“He’s gonna take your money you work so hard for at that dairy barn. That and your cherry.” He spat in her face. “Reckon he’s already got that. Next thing he’ll plant a young’n in your belly.” He dropped the ax, a relief to us all, but then he used his fists to smash into her nose, her eye, her jaw. And when she bent over, her hump rising up toward him, it became the target of the fire poker he snatched up from behind his wife. His wrist gave way and softened the blow, but Sheila’s dress split open and red lines formed on her hump, matching the stripes of her dress.
I think we were all screaming, but no one tried to physically stop him until finally Mrs. Carruth grabbed the poker out of his hand and ran straight through her wailing children and out the door. When he turned to chase her, I ran to Sheila and lifted her up to lean on my shoulder. I don’t remember how we got back to the truck, where the Carruths went, how I turned the key, and somehow slid forward on the seat so that I could push in the clutch. But I remember the clouds of dust that billowed after us and then drifted in our windows covering us with red silt as I shifted into first, second, and third toward home.
Stoney helped me get her inside the house and then told me to go home, said he would take care of her. I didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t want to stay either. I wanted to close my eyes, open them again, and be safe in my bed. I wanted none of today to have happened. But what was before me was Stoney’s frightening face looming like a monster’s head over Sheila’s broken body. “Go,” he yelled at me. “Don’t say nothing ’bout this either.”
Tears stung my eyes, but I gulped them back and nodded. “See you later,” I whispered to Sheila, but she didn’t hear me. When I got back behind the wheel of the truck, I realized there was no way I could drive home, so I slammed the door and walked down to the barn where Daddy was worming cows. When I told him what had happened, he took off for Stoney and Sheila’s house. I was worried what Stoney was going to say about me telling, but he never mentioned it. In fact, no one ever said anything about that day again. If it hadn’t been for Sheila’s wounds and bruises, I would have thought it was all a terrible dream.
CHAPTER 5
I had been secretly worried Sheila wouldn’t remain my Best Friend after she was married, but my fears were unfounded. Although she didn’t work as often at the dairy, she still came down to visit nearly every day. She would walk barefoot across the hard, coarse grass and sit on our porch picking stickers out of her feet. “One little sticker, two little sticker,” she would say, laughing at Lil’ Bit who was trying to master the art of walking. He went at it with a determination that surprised us all. Watching him, I wondered why most babies don’t give up trying and settle for crawling through life. He would crawl over to the rocker and hoist himself up, sometimes mashing his fingers first. Then he would rise on his toes, actually on his very toenails, so that he looked like a ballerina. When he released his grip on the chair, he wavered for a second or two, and then his heavy bottom pulled him backwards, and he landed on the hard floor with a jarring thud that rocked his entire body. Several times Lil’ Bit would roll on backwards and hit his head so hard you could hear it crack against the boards. But he wouldn’t cry; he’d roll over, rise to his knees and crawl right back to the rocking-chair horse that had just thrown him.
Sheila and I were his cheerleaders. “Come on, Lil’ Bit. You can do it,” we would call to him as he stood, drooling and grinning his four-toothed smile, holding onto the rocker like a bull rider gripping a saddle horn.
“I can’t wait till Stoney and me have a baby,” Sheila said one morning when we were cross-legged on the porch, silking early corn together. She scraped her knife down a row of kernels and shook the red silk onto the newspaper laid out on the floor. “Course I don’t want twins like Mama got this time. They’re cute, but near ’bout ever time I seen them, one’s awake and one’s sleep. Then that one’s up and the other down.”
“I thought twins were brain-connected and do everything together.”
Sheila tossed her ear of corn in the dishpan and picked up another one. “Well, them two ain’t like that.”
“Does Stoney want a baby?” I asked still working my knife on my first ear. I was most interested in how to get a baby and what that felt like, but I didn’t know qu
ite how to broach the subject.
Sheila wrinkled her nose, stilled her hands. “It’s funny. Seems like he’s sad when he sees I got the rag, but he don’t talk about having none. When I’ll say ‘after we have our young’ns’ or something like that, he just looks off and don’t answer.
They had been married around six months then, and Lil’ Bit had begun walking and had acquired an impressive vocabulary. He called me “Netty” and Sheila was “She She.” Ma-ma and Da-da were his first two words. Uncle Walter had visited him only a few times in the past year, but each time he came, Mama got nervous about Lil’ Bit saying Daddy when he toddled over to my father. “He hears Annette call him that,” she explained to Uncle Walter. And although I could see some pain in his eyes, he’d nod and say, “Of course, it’s natural he would.”
I looked over at Sheila dotted with bits of red silk. “Mama says men don’t feel the same way about babies that women do. It’s because we got wombs and they don’t.”
Sheila nodded. “I reckon, but your daddy sure does love Lil’ Bit a whole lot.”
“Yeah, well, Daddy’s always loved babies, any kind. You’ve seen how he goes all moony over a new calf.”
Sheila’s eyes filled with tears. “But that’s what I mean. Stoney don’t have no feeling ’bout them calves. When Dusty had her kittens, he drowned them ’fore I had a chance to save a one.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I had hated Stoney for that when I’d first heard about it. But lots of kittens got drowned on Carterdale Road. There were just too many of them to feed. I tried to turn the conversation back to where I wanted it to go. “But Stoney doesn’t try not to have a baby, does he? I mean he still, you and him still…” I didn’t know how to go on.
Sheila’s eyes lost their sadness and she grinned. “Oh no. That ain’t no problem. I ask him nearly every night for it, and he ain’t never said no.”
“You ask him?” I blurted out squeezing my ear of corn so hard that juice shot out onto my arm. From the conversations I had overheard between Mama and Aunt Leda and their friends, it was the men who did all the asking and the women who had to do their duty at night even if they had canned forty jars of pear preserves that day.
“Why not?” she said. “It feels good, and besides it proves how much he loves me. If he said no,” she stopped, shook her head from side to side. “I can’t think about that.”
I wrapped a red silk around my forefinger. “I thought only men like to do it.”
Sheila looked confused. She wrinkled her nose and worked her mouth from side to side like she did when Mama tried to explain to her how to whip stitch. “I don’t think that’s true. Seems like if it was, there wouldn’t be so many children getting born around here.” She started back on her ear with renewed energy and her knife flew up and down the cob flicking silks in all directions. “Maybe you ought to ask your Mama, but I’m telling you ain’t nothing in this world any better as far as I’m concerned. Loving in bed is better than chocolate pie.” She laughed. “And you know that’s my favorite.”
Of course, I was never ever going to ask Mama such a question. The one time we had discussed “becoming a woman” Mama had said that was God’s way of giving us babies and calves, colts, and litters of kittens, puppies, and rabbits. Her face had turned as red as the apples in the fruit bowl on the table, and she had stared at them so hard for a minute I thought she was instructing them about wearing the rag instead of me.
No, I wasn’t going to ask Mama about men. It was Sheila I told my secrets to. Nearly every afternoon, after the school bus dropped me off, Sheila and I would sit in the rockers and talk as we watched the cars and trucks speed down Carterdale Road. It seemed the whole world lay stretched before us as we gazed out across the green pasture where the cows looked like paper cutouts against the blue sky. The faraway pines and oaks seemed to be miniature trees set up on a play farm set, and I felt as tall and powerful as a giant. When the gardenias beside the porch bloomed, we would pick the creamy blossoms and pin them to our chests like corsages, and their scent would nearly make us dizzy. Sheila said she imagined the fragrance of heaven would be like swimming in an ocean of gardenias. These were my favorite times with Sheila, the times when we would sit on the porch and whisper our deepest thoughts to each other.
I told Sheila everything. She knew about the letter I had written to Jimmy Stewart in care of MGM Studios in Hollywood, California. And then the next letter I had written to Clark Gable offering him free milk, cheese, and orange drink if he would consider visiting our dairy. I never heard from either of them. I told her about my secret dream of becoming a writer. I would live in New York City and go to all the fancy nightclubs where I would dance the tango with Gene Kelly. I saw myself seated at a round table with a starched white cloth, sipping an old-fashioned, smoking a Lucky Strike in a long cigarette holder. I described my silver lamé dress, the open-toed high heels, dangling earrings that reached to my glitter-powdered shoulders. A stream of men in black tuxedos came to my table begging me to autograph my book about Hollywood stars.
Sheila said Stoney was ever’ bit as good-looking as Clark Gable, and he had smaller ears. Except for craving the same fancy shoes, her fantasies were much less exotic. She wanted a Dodge like Mama’s, two babies, a gas stove, and a matching set of dishes.
I confided my worries about my small breasts and large pimples. Sheila worried about her mother. Her life with twelve children, eleven still living at home, wasn’t like the large family I had loved in the movie, Cheaper by the Dozen. The Carruths, Sheila told me, were the recipients of the church’s donation box every Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter. “We used to dive into those boxes before the church lady left the drive. Mama was supposed to save the stuff for Christmas Day, but she knowed we couldn’t no more wait that long than Papa could help drinking corn on Saturday.”
Corn liquor was the bane of Lexie County. Most folks could count at least one drunk who had to be helped to bed on Saturday nights. In our family it was Grandma’s sister, Aunt Molly. When she moved away to Louisiana, her new husband, a Cajun named Henri Fontenot, introduced her to beer. By the time I was old enough to remember Aunt Molly, she was well into her sixties, and when she came for visits, she preferred to stay in our guest room rather than with her sisters or brothers because Mama would buy for her. I remember walking by her room and looking in to see her passed out on the bed, her dress hiked above her knees, her orange-brown stockings rolled down to her ankles, and her thin blue-veined arm cradled around an amber-colored bottle.
But mostly it was men who swigged from bottles, jugs, and mason jars. I knew that Daddy kept his jug hidden in the dairy barn in the bottling room behind the milk cans. While Mama was willing to serve beer to her aunt, she wouldn’t allow Daddy to bring a drop of liquor into the house. Daddy never took more than a few swallows at a time, and I never saw him drunk, but Mama said that the Lord doesn’t use a measuring cup to gauge sin.
Sheila didn’t mind Stoney’s drinking. She said her papa vowed it was good for the digestion. I thought perhaps this could be true as Grandma gave me a tablespoon of whiskey with sugar for a sore throat, so alcohol, I reasoned, could have medicinal benefits. If liquor were in fact a life-sustaining drink, Stoney would live to a ripe old age. Sheila never worried about his binges, saying that most of the time he was funny, and not at all like her papa who was a mean and ugly drunk. “Stoney makes me laugh till my belly hurts,” Sheila told me. “Don’t tell nobody, but I had some brew too last night.” Little crinkles formed around her eyes, and she grinned showing all her small crooked teeth. “I danced. Lord, you should’ve seed me, Annette. I whirled and did the Cotton-eyed Joe, and then Stoney come up to me and I hopped up on his hips and wrapped my legs around his back.” She shook her head. “It were a sight, two of us dancing on one set of legs. Finally, his knees got wobbly and give out, and we fell down in a heap just laughing our heads off.”
I knew my mouth was hanging open in wonder and I purposely closed i
t shut. I couldn’t imagine Mama and Daddy doing something like that even when they were young. Mama said none of the Bancrofts had a bit of rhythm in them, and I reckoned the Cottons didn’t either, judging from the times I stood next to Daddy in church and listened to him singing off-key two beats behind everybody else. But it was the playfulness of Sheila and Stoney’s married life that amazed me. Nearly every couple I knew got solemn and dour right after the wedding. It seemed to me like marriage was about worrying and frowning till death do you part.
But I believed in the physical signs of love. I spied on Mama and Daddy, studied the love scenes on the screen at the picture show, and examined Sheila and Stoney’s amorous behavior as if I were a scientist. I needed to understand why Mama’s cheeks would flush and why Daddy’s eyes took on a mysterious glow. Their touching was like feather tickling, quick and light, but with Stoney and Sheila, the caresses went deeper, right to their very bones. I found the word for their love in the big maroon-colored Webster’s. “Passion, a strong feeling or emotion by which the mind is swayed.” I could see that passion applied to Mama and Daddy’s feelings for one another. Certainly, they swayed each other’s minds; they joked about it. Daddy would say Mama’s mind changed like the weather in December. But that word didn’t fit the relationship between Sheila and Stoney at all. And then one Sunday morning when I was sitting in church leafing through our songbook, I found the word rapture. Webster said, “ecstatic, transporting, ravishing.” Now I had a word for their love.
I wanted to be ecstatic, transported by love, ravished by a lover. I believed that Stoney was taken somewhere like paradise every time he stroked Sheila’s arm, kissed the rim of her ear, smacked her pear-shaped butt. I studied his eyes as they traced the shape of her body like lines on a map, and when she would look back at him with a knowing smile, I knew that they were in total harmony, traveling toward the same destination.