The baby was named Barbara Jean—Barbara for Daddy no. 1’s mother and Jean for Daddy no. 3’s.
When Loretta’s child was first handed to her, she took note of the infant’s lopsided, half-smiling mouth and the almond-shaped eyes, already fully open, that were tilted up at the corners like an Egyptian’s. Loretta recognized that face instantly and said to herself, “Ain’t this some shit. It was No. 4 all along.” Then she turned to Mrs. Handy and said, “Got any whiskey?”
On a September morning fourteen years later, Miss Carmel read Barbara Jean’s name aloud from the roster in her ninth grade English class. After placing her clipboard down on her desk, Miss Carmel walked over to Barbara Jean and, for the first time, uttered the words that would begin most of their encounters for the next four decades. “Girl, did you know you were born on my davenport?”
Once Barbara Jean had married Lester and his business had taken off, most of the town lined up to kiss her ass in order to get on Lester’s good side. But Carmel Handy continued to greet her that same way. Barbara Jean supposed it spoke well of Miss Carmel’s character that the wealth she came into didn’t change her old teacher’s behavior toward her one bit. But she still hated her for it. It shamed her to admit it, but Barbara Jean felt relieved when, in her eighties, Miss Carmel developed the habit of telling each black woman around Barbara Jean’s age who crossed her path that she was born on her sofa. Eventually, the tale of the baby born in her front room became so bound up with Miss Carmel’s short-circuiting brain that nearly everyone forgot that the story was rooted in fact or had anything to do with Barbara Jean.
Carmel Handy’s block was one of the first to be demolished when housing developers and the university bought up most of Leaning Tree in the 1980s and ’90s. On the day they bulldozed that little brick bungalow, Barbara Jean drove over to Miss Carmel’s street and drank a champagne toast in the front seat of her new Mercedes.
As she stood in the All-You-Can-Eat at the center of an expanding circle of grief over Big Earl’s passing, Barbara Jean listened to Carmel Handy reminding her, yet again, of her low origins. Barbara Jean thought then of the taste of the champagne she sipped that day in her car as she watched the workmen scratch Miss Carmel’s home out of existence. That delicious memory helped her not to scream.
Chapter 7
The night before Big Earl’s funeral, Barbara Jean dreamed that she and Lester were walking along a rutted dirt road on a cool fall day. They exhaled clouds of white mist while rust, yellow, and brown leaves floated around them in a circle, as if they were at the center of a cyclone. Because of the storm of leaves, Barbara Jean was just barely able to make out the path ahead of them. She held Lester’s arm tight to keep from twisting her ankle in the tire tracks embedded in the road. Even in her dreams, she always wore heels.
After a time, the leaf storm around them thinned enough to reveal a river ahead. On the opposite shore, a small boy waved. Then, just as they lifted their hands to wave back, a woman in a silvery, iridescent gown appeared, hovering in the air above their heads. The woman said, “Lester, the water is frozen. Just walk on over and get him. He’s waiting.” But it was November or December in the dream and the river was clearly only half frozen. Barbara Jean could see the bubbling and churning current just beneath the brittle surface of the ice. She dug her fingers into the rough cloth of her husband’s winter coat to keep him from going out onto the river. As Lester’s sleeve escaped her grasp, Barbara Jean woke up with her pulse racing and both of her arms reaching out for Lester.
She’d had that dream, or one nearly identical to it, for years. Sometimes it was spring or summer in the dream and, instead of a dangerously thin layer of ice, it was a decrepit rope bridge with rotted wooden slats that spanned the water. But she always dreamed of the same road, the dirt trail that had once formed the western border of Leaning Tree. It had been paved ages ago, or so Barbara Jean had been told. She hadn’t gone near it in years. She always dreamed of the same waving boy, her lost Adam. The woman in the air also never varied. It was always her mother.
Barbara Jean awakened from her dream with a sore back from being curled up for hours on one of the two Chippendale wingback chairs that sat by the fireplace in the library of her home. The chairs had been reupholstered, at frightful expense, with burgundy crushed-velvet fabric adorned with a fleur-de-lis pattern that matched the design of the library’s hand-painted wallpaper. Every spring at the Plainview Home and Garden Walk, people made a big fuss over those chairs, and Barbara Jean loved them. But they were hell on her lower back if she sat in them for too long a time.
Barbara Jean and Lester’s house stood at the intersection of Plainview Avenue and Main Street. A three-story Queen Anne giant with a turret at its northeast corner and six separate porches, it had once been called Ballard House, and still was by most of the inhabitants of Plainview over the age of fifty. It was built in 1870 by a local thief named Alfred Ballard who looted some of the best homes in the vanquished South during the Civil War and returned to Plainview a rich man. Mr. Ballard’s descendants lacked his business sense and his ruthlessness. They failed to add to their fortune, wasted the money Ballard had left them, and eventually lost the house to the tax man. In 1969, after he expanded his lawn care business to Kentucky and got a contract to tend all of the state-owned properties in the northern half of the state, Lester bought Ballard House for his young wife and their son, Adam. It was a gutted, falling-down mess at the time, and although she loved the house, Barbara Jean had no clue what needed to be done to put it back together. Clarice, though, had been raised by her mother with the assumption that she would one day oversee a grand home. So Barbara Jean turned every decision in the renovation process over to her friend. Barbara Jean stood back and watched as Clarice transformed her massive shell of a house into the kind of showplace Clarice would have lived in if fate, in the form of a three-hundred-pound, corn-fed Wisconsin linebacker with blood in his eye, hadn’t stepped in and transformed Richmond from a potential NFL legend into a recruiter at a university whose football glory days were long past. Out of respect for her friend, Clarice never accepted a bit of credit for her hard work. Instead, she patiently tutored Barbara Jean, teaching her everything she knew about art, antiques, and architecture. Between the practical experience Barbara Jean gained from tending to the needs of her extravagant old home and from Clarice’s guidance, she eventually surpassed her instructor’s level of expertise.
When she stood from the antique chair to stretch her lower back, Barbara Jean’s Bible tumbled to the floor. After she’d had dinner with Lester, counted out his pills, and put him to bed, the evening had become a blur. She didn’t recall that she’d been reading the Bible before she fell asleep. It made sense, though. She tended to drag out the Good Book when she was in a dark mood, and the shadows had closed in around her that night, for sure.
Clarice had given Barbara Jean that Bible in 1977, just after Adam died. Lester had become frightened when his wife stopped speaking and eating and then refused to come out of Adam’s room, so he called in Odette and Clarice. They got right to work, each of her friends administering the cures they trusted most. Odette mothered her, cooking wonderful-smelling meals which she fed to her by hand on the worst days. And, during the long hours she spent sitting in bed beside Barbara Jean while her friend cried onto her broad bosom, brave Odette whispered into Barbara Jean’s ear that now was the time to be fearless.
Clarice came brandishing a brown suede-covered Bible. It was embossed with Barbara Jean’s name in gold letters on its front cover and had “Salvation = Calvary Baptist Church” printed on the back. For weeks, Clarice read to her about the trials of Job and reminded her that the fifth chapter of Matthew promised “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
But both of Barbara Jean’s friends had come bearing medicine for the wrong illness. More than courage or piety, what she needed, what she would scour Clarice’s Bible forwards and backwards searching for over the many years
that followed, was a clue as to how to get out from under the boulder of guilt that rested on her chest and forced the breath out of her. Well intentioned as it was, Clarice’s gift just armed Barbara Jean with a long list of good reasons to be seriously pissed off at God while the weight of her guilt ground her into powder.
Barbara Jean was finally able to leave Adam’s room after she and God came to an understanding. She would continue to smile and nod through services every week at First Baptist just as she always had, and she wouldn’t call Him out for being as demanding and capricious as the worst two-year-old child, ready at any moment to reach out with his greedy hands and snatch whatever shone brightest. In exchange for this consideration, Barbara Jean asked only that God leave her alone. For decades, the pact worked out fine. Then, with Big Earl’s sudden passing, God reminded Barbara Jean of who He was. Bringer of death, master comedian, lightning bearer. He made it clear to her that He had no intentions of honoring the terms of their truce.
Barbara Jean put the Bible on the eighteenth-century candle table next to her chair and walked to the mirror above the fireplace to inspect herself. She didn’t look too bad—a little puffy, but nothing some time with an ice pack wouldn’t take care of. Also, the sun wasn’t up yet, so she still had time to get a little rest to ensure she would look good for Big Earl. And she was determined to say goodbye to her friend looking her very best.
She had laid out her outfit for Big Earl’s service earlier that evening, before heading into the library. Out of respect, she would wear a black dress. But she chose magenta shoes, a matching belt, and a white hat with clusters of red and black leather roses around its wide brim to go with it. The little black dress was cut well above the knee and had a tiny slit on the right seam. Clarice would hate it and would have to bite her tongue to keep from saying so. But Barbara Jean wasn’t wearing it for Clarice. She was wearing it for Big Earl.
When she was a teenager and was ashamed of having to wear her mother’s flashy, trashy hand-me-downs, Big Earl made a point of telling Barbara Jean that she looked pretty every time he saw her. Not in a dirty old man way or anything. He would just smile at her and say, “You look divine today,” in a way that made her feel as if she were wearing haute couture. Or he would see her come into the restaurant in one of her mother’s shiny, too-short skirts and he’d turn to Miss Thelma and say, “Don’t Barbara Jean look exactly like a flower.” Anywhere else in town, she might have been dirt, but inside the walls of the All-You-Can-Eat, she was a flower.
Long after Barbara Jean had choices and knew better, she would occasionally pick one of the brightest and the tightest from her closet and sashay into the All-You-Can-Eat on a Sunday afternoon just to give Big Earl a reason to grin and slap his knee and say, “That’s my girl.” On those days, she left the All-You-Can-Eat feeling twenty years younger than when she’d walked in. So, for Big Earl she was going to squeeze into a black dress she wouldn’t be able to take more than a shallow breath in and she was going to look damn good in it, or die trying.
Barbara Jean knew she should get to bed, but she didn’t feel sleepy, just a little woozy still from the vodka. She didn’t remember getting the bottle from the liquor cabinet, but there it was on the table next to the Bible. That was her pattern. When her mind was too full of thoughts—usually about the old days, her mother or her son—she would reach for either the Bible or the bottle and end up with both in her lap before the night was over. She would sit in one of her burgundy chairs and drink vodka from one of the antique demitasse cups Clarice had found for the house. She sipped and read until the memories went away.
Barbara Jean always drank vodka, partly because whiskey had been her mother’s drink and she swore she’d never touch it. Also, vodka was safe because people couldn’t smell it on you. If you stuck to vodka and you knew how to control yourself, nobody talked trash about you, no matter how many times you filled your demitasse cup.
She put the cap back on the vodka bottle and returned it to the liquor cabinet. Then she took her cup and saucer to the kitchen and left them on the counter for the maid to deal with in the morning. When she returned to the library to turn out the lights, she contemplated reopening that troublesome Bible. She was in just that kind of mood, and it wouldn’t take long. After a few vodkas, Barbara Jean’s form of Bible study was to close her eyes, open the book on her lap, and let her index finger fall onto the open page. Then she would read whatever verse was nearest the tip of her nail. She had done this for years, telling herself that one day she would land on just the right thing to turn on some light inside her head. But, mostly, she spent countless nights learning who begat whom and reading of the endless, seemingly random smitings the Bible specialized in.
She thought about the day to come and decided to go on up to bed. Rather than disturb Lester, who was a light sleeper, she would lie down in one of the guest rooms. If he asked in the morning why she hadn’t come to bed, she would tell him that she had gone straight to the guest room after staying up late to pick out her outfit for Big Earl. If she looked well rested enough, maybe he wouldn’t suspect that she had spent yet another night in the library drinking and stocking up on ammunition for her ongoing battle with God.
Barbara Jean removed her shoes before she left the library so the sound of her steps wouldn’t create a racket as she crossed the herringbone parquet floor of the grand foyer. She climbed the stairs slowly and carefully, recalling one of her mother’s warnings about the missteps that could prevent Barbara Jean from accessing the better, more respectable life that Loretta had been cheated out of. Loretta had said that if a woman fell down the stairs, people would always gossip that either she was a drunk or her man beat her. And you couldn’t have them saying either thing about you if you wanted to get chummy with the type of folks who could actually do something for you. That was the way Loretta had divided up the world, into those who could or could not do something for her. And she spent most of her life designing plots to wrest the things she wanted from the people who she believed possessed them. In the end, it did her no good.
In her stocking feet, Barbara Jean crept along the second-floor hallway of her house. She tiptoed past the bedroom she shared with Lester. Then she passed by the guest rooms. The door to Adam’s room drew her to it as surely as if it had stretched out a pair of arms and pulled her into its embrace. She opened the door and stared into the room at the familiar low shelves crammed with out-of-date toys, the small desk strewn with faded crayon drawings, the miniature chair with a pale green sweater slung over it as if its owner might dash into the room at any second to retrieve it. Everywhere she looked there were things that she had sworn to her friends she had thrown away or given away decades earlier. She knew she shouldn’t go into this room; it did her no good. But she still had a stagger in her step from the vodka. And she comforted herself with the knowledge that, in the morning, she probably wouldn’t recall experiencing the ache in her soul and the fire in her brain that always led her to this same place.
Barbara Jean stepped inside and shut the door. She curled up on the short bed, atop cowboys and Indians on horseback engaged in endless pursuit of each other across the comforter. She closed her eyes—not to sleep, she told herself—just to rest and gather her thoughts before going to one of the guest rooms for the few remaining hours of the night. Moments later, Barbara Jean was on that dirt road again, clutching her husband’s arm while her shimmering mother floated above their heads whispering, “He’s waiting.”
Chapter 8
Big Earl’s funeral was held at Clarice’s church, Calvary Baptist. He wasn’t much of a churchgoer himself, but his daughter-in-law’s family had worshipped at Calvary for almost as many generations as Clarice’s people. It seemed like the perfect choice until the place started to fill up and it became clear that the university’s football stadium was the only building in town that could have comfortably accommodated everyone.
Each pew of the church was packed with mourners. Hundreds of folks who couldn’
t get seats crowded the outer aisles, leaning against the white plaster walls. Small clusters of people who weren’t able to squeeze inside the church stuck their heads into the opened side doors of the sanctuary, amen-ing Reverend Peterson’s homily and bobbing their heads to the music along with those of us on the inside.
Denise, Jimmy, and Eric sat in the row behind their father and me. Without having to be asked, all three of our kids had arrived that morning to comfort James and to pay their respects to the man who was the only grandfather they’d ever really known, since my father passed when they were still little. They’d traveled to Plainview from their homes in Illinois, California, and Washington to be with us, and I was happy and proud that they’d come.
Although the Calvary Baptist approach to faith was a bit hard-assed for my taste, I was glad the service was there. For my money, that church is the prettiest in town. Calvary is only half the size of First Baptist, but it has a dozen beautiful stained-glass windows, each one portraying the life of an apostle. The windows extend from the floor all the way up to the vaulted ceiling and, when sunlight hits the glass, a rainbow is projected through the sanctuary onto a mural of the Crucifixion on the wall behind the baptismal pool.
The highlight of the mural is the sexiest picture of Jesus you’ve ever seen. He has high cheekbones and curly jet-black hair. His bronzed, outstretched arms bulge with muscles and He has the firm stomach of a Brazilian underwear model. His mouth seems to be blowing kisses to the congregation and His crown of thorns is tilted so He has a Frank Sinatra cool about Him. It all comes together in a way that makes you wonder if Jesus is about to ask you to join the church or to run outside for a game of beach volleyball with Him and a dozen of His hot biblical friends.
The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Page 6