by Robert Inman
Standing here among these people now, she felt an instant of shock, of awakening. She blinked in the bright fluorescent light of the Dixie Vittles, a bit bewildered and disoriented.
“Miz Bright, are you all right?” Luther Fox asked. His brow wrinkled with concern.
She took a deep breath, saw the rest of them staring at her. “Fine,” she said a bit too loudly. “I’m just fine, Luther. Thank you.” She turned and saw Doris grinning at her, the counter empty. She put down the jar of peanut butter.
“Hi-dee, Jimbo,” Doris said. “Let me guess. Y’all gonna have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for supper.” She turned the jar, searching for the price, then entered it on the cash register and added tax.
“Peanut butter and banana,” Jimbo said.
Doris arched her eyebrows. “Goin’ gourmet tonight, eh?” She giggled. “Seventy-nine cents, Miz Bright.”
Bright took the money from her coin purse, the exact change, and Doris rang it up. “Want it in a bag?” Doris asked.
“Please,” Bright said.
Doris slipped a small bag from underneath the counter, flipped it open with a snap of her hand, and dropped the peanut butter jar inside along with the cash register receipt. She handed the bag to Bright. “And here’s your Casino Caper card.”
“You mean you give away those things for peanut butter?”
“One to a customer, every purchase, no matter how large or small. That’s the rule.”
Bright took the small white card and handed it to Jimbo.
“Roseann still over yonder?” Doris indicated Bright’s house with a shake of her head.
Bright stepped out of the way to let Luther Fox up to the checkout counter. “No, she and Rupert have gone on to the beach.” Of course, Doris would have seen the Winnebago pulling out of the driveway at midafternoon, at a time when she had little to do but slouch against the cash register and watch the world ooze by in the heat. “Jimbo is staying with me this week.”
“That’s real nice,” Doris said. “I remember I used to go to my grandmama’s house out in the country every summer and stay for a week or so. We’d pick lots of blackberries and make blackberry nectar and preserves. My grandmama had a big old crock jar she used to put the blackberries in, and let ’em sit for a day or so, then she’d cook ’em on the stove in a big iron boiler and squeeze everything through a piece of muslin to get the seeds and stuff out …”
Luther Fox was beginning to twitch a bit. He set down his gallon of milk and a box of Aunt Jemima Instant Grits. He cleared his throat politely, but Doris went on. “Grandmama would take some of the juice and put some Sure-Jell in it and make preserves, and then she would bottle some up as nectar, and a little bit of it, she’d put some yeast in it and let it work and make blackberry wine.” Doris threw her head back, laughing. “I remember I come in one afternoon and Grandmama was drunk as a lord. She’d got into the blackberry wine and thought it was nectar.”
“‘Scuse me,” Luther Fox said, impatient. Bright backed away, looked over her shoulder and saw Jimbo and Monkey Deloach standing by the door, examining something.
“Well,” Doris said, reaching for Luther’s items, “I just wouldn’t take nothing for spending them weeks in the summer out in the country with my grandmama. A young’un needs to get away from his parents and learn something from the older generation, doncha think?”
“Yes,” Bright said. “Well, I suppose we best be—“
Monkey Deloach tapped her on the shoulder. “I … hummmmm … I, ah, hummmmm …”
Doris stared at him. “Spit it out, Mr. Deloach, spit it out.”
“He’s got two cherries,” Monkey said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Actually,” Monkey said, “he’s got … hmmmmmm … four cherries. Two on each card.”
Jimbo held up the two cards, the ones that said DIXIE VITTLES CASINO CAPER at the top and SCRATCH AND WIN at the bottom, the one Bright had gotten just now and the one from the morning. Jimbo had scratched off the black rectangles to reveal two sets of bright red cherries on stems.
“Cherries?” Doris’s eyes bulged. “Gawdamighty,” she bellowed. “He’s got FOUR CHERRIES!”
“What, what?” Bright could hear a ripple of noise go down the checkout line.
“Holy guacamole!” Doris shouted. “Miz Bright, you done won FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!”
Bright stood there with her mouth open, feeling a bit faint, the noise exploding around her, people yelling, running from all over the store, Jimbo tugging on her dress, Monkey Deloach at her elbow weaving back and forth and humming like a high-voltage wire, Doris leaping up and down and screaming, “FOUR CHERRIES! FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!”
All Bright Birdsong could think was I hope I don’t make a fool of myself.
BOOK 2
5
First memory of her father, Dorsey Bascombe: knee-high leather boots, scuffed and wrinkled from long wear in the woods, rich with the smell of neat’s-foot oil.
Bright hunkers deep in the kneehole beneath Dorsey’s big wooden desk, safe in the dark cool cavity, listening to the sounds of the lumberyard outside—the rattle of chain and singsong calls of the black men hoisting logs from the flatbed wagons, the chug and whistle of the big steam engine that powers the mill, the slap-slap of the long conveyor belts, the bite and whine of the huge saws. She smells the good, clean smell of freshly cut wood, secret growth opened and pungent. The spring morning splashes across the smooth wood floor of the one-room lumberyard office and across Dorsey’s swivel chair with its tattered cushion. She hears her father’s voice outside, clear and strong and sure of itself, the words indistinguishable, and then the creak and slam of the screen door. He stops for a long moment and she can sense his eyes sweeping the room. She is very still and quiet, a mushroom growing in a cave. After a moment, Dorsey strides across to the desk, sits down in the swivel chair. She can see the rising tan sweep of his boots and the khaki twill pants above, rough and faded at the knee. The boots are enormous, taller than her head, and they fill the opening of her cave as Dorsey eases the chair up to the desk. She wants to reach out and fling her arms around the boots, bury her nose in the cleft between them, smell their oil and sweat, feel the wrinkled leather against her cheek. But she remains quiet, deep in the kneehole. She hears the scratching of Dorsey’s pen overhead, imagines the strange black scribbles he makes in neat rows on paper. He stops, leans back in the chair, pondering, then hunches forward again. Scratch-scratch.
Another pause, longer this time. “Ahem.” He clears his throat. “I wonder if the termites are under my desk again.”
Bright reaches up and taps lightly on the bottom of the long middle drawer with her knuckles.
“Yes, by goshen, I believe they are. Termites in a lumberyard. Verrrrry dangerous. Why, they could eat through the floor and we would fall, desk and all, clear to China.”
Bright stifles a giggle, thinking of them tumbling softly together down a dark, magic hole, her cheeks pressed against the leather of her father’s big boots. She taps again on the underside of the drawer.
“Best keep ’em distracted,” Dorsey says with a sigh. She hears the clink of heavy glass and then Dorsey eases the chair back a bit and stretches his long khaki arm under the desk with a piece of rock candy in his palm. Bright plucks it from his hand and stuffs it in her mouth, savoring the warm sweetness. Then she reaches out and pats his hand and his huge hand closes about her tiny one and gives her a soft squeeze.
“Ahem,” he says again, his voice wrinkled with gentleness like the leather of his boots, “soft-shell termites. Baby soft-shell termites. The most dangerous kind. Well, maybe that’ll hold ’em for a while.”
He releases her hand and she sits back in the corner of the knee-hole as he returns to his work. Scratch-scratch. Buzz and whine. Pen on paper, lumberyard droning outside, the air sweet and warm with wood smells, the candy flooding her insides with its own sweet warmth, the spring morning a cocoon about her. She sleeps.
>
“A lumberyard is no place for a small child, especially a girl,” Elise Bascombe fretted. “She could …” She trailed off with a shudder, imagining the worst.
“Nonsense,” said her husband, Dorsey. “It’s perfectly safe as long as she does what I tell her.” And he said it with a finality that brooked no argument. Dorsey Bascombe would take care of things.
So Dorsey took his small daughter frequently to the lumberyard in the warm months, waking her gently in the early morning with the sky just beginning to pale outside, helping her dress while the smell of Hosanna’s biscuits and ham and grits drifted up the stairs and filled the house. They ate quietly in the kitchen while Bright’s mother slept in the big front bedroom with the flowered wallpaper and chintz curtains. After breakfast, Dorsey would go to the stable in back of the house and saddle his horse and bring it around to the front steps, looping the reins around a nandina bush, and go back inside and sweep Bright up in his arms and climb into the saddle with her in front. And then they would ride across town to the lumberyard by the river as the morning blossomed, Bright high and safe in Dorsey’s arms, senses brimming with the smell of leather and horse and Dorsey’s after-shave and the clip-clop sound of hooves on bare earth.
Dorsey Bascombe was a progressive man. He would eventually be the first citizen of the county to have a motorcar, and he would be one of the first lumbermen in the entire South to use portable sawmills and logging trucks.
The portable sawmill came first, and it marked him as an imaginative entrepreneur, a man worth watching. Before his time, sawmills were cumbersome, fixed operations, and the woods came to them. Logging crews went deep into the forest and cut the trees, sawed off the branches, and hauled the whole logs to the mill on mule-drawn wagons. It was slow and inefficient, and the output of the sawmill was governed by the backbreaking process of getting the logs to the mill, often over miles of bad road from remote locations. But Dorsey Bascombe invented a portable sawmill and changed the lumber business. It was a simple thing, no more than a big circular saw driven by a steam engine, all of it compact enough to be loaded onto wagons and taken directly to the woods where the trees were being felled. Slabs of bark and waste wood were used to fire the steam boiler, and the mule-drawn wagons came from the woods loaded with rough-sawn lumber, ready to be stacked in the lumberyard to air-dry in neat crisscross piles that looked like rows of new houses on the sprawling lot; and later, to be sized and smoothed at Dorsey’s big planer mill. When one tract of timber had been cut, the mill could be taken apart and moved to another location, set up and operating in a day’s time. Other lumbermen laughed at first at the notion of taking a piece of machinery into the deep woods. But when Dorsey’s operation doubled and tripled its output, they came hat-in-hand to study what he had done and marvel at the simple common sense of it. Weekly, railroad cars loaded with Dorsey Bascombe’s fragrant pine went lurching off toward Atlanta and New Orleans and Memphis from the rail spur that ran alongside the lumberyard, the one the railroad men had built when they saw what Dorsey was doing to the lumber business. Railroad men, Dorsey said, could smell money a mile away.
Over the years, Dorsey would stay a step ahead of the competition. At the end of the Great War, he would purchase his first logging truck, as powerful engines were developed to heave the mechanized equipment of war through the muck and mire of Europe. Not long after, he would strike upon the idea of using the big steam boiler that powered the planer mill to provide heat for a kiln, a large tin shed where the rough-cut lumber could be dried in a fraction of the time. Even later, he would initiate the practice of replanting what he had just cut, scoffing at the notion that the South had so much virgin timber at its disposal that you would always be able to just walk away from a denuded tract of land and give it fifty years or so to regenerate. “Timber’s a cash crop,” he would tell anyone who would listen, “or should be. Just like corn and cotton. Yes, we’ve got lots of wood in the South. We’ve also got lots of blockheads trying to cut it down. The South doesn’t have anything to waste.”
But in the beginning, Dorsey had only the small lumberyard, a crew of no more than ten or twelve black men, his wits, and a sixth sense about cruising timber—the process of determining the number of board feet of finished lumber in a stand of trees. Dorsey could stride into the woods in his big leather boots, look the trees up and down for a few minutes, do a few quick calculations on the back of an envelope, and give you the best fair price you were likely to get for your timber rights. People said that Dorsey was a shrewd man and he had an odd gleam in his eye, but he would deal with you fair and square. That was the Dorsey Bascombe of Bright’s early childhood.
Before Bright, there was Elise. It was the one time, Dorsey liked to say, when he had gladly made a fool of himself.
She was slim and delicate with porcelain skin and strawberry hair and long tapering hands that held a cup and saucer as if she cradled baby birds, a New Orleans girl whom Dorsey met on a business trip in 1909. Dorsey was thirty-five years old. Elise was nineteen. He loved her instantly and incurably. He postponed his return from New Orleans a week, then two, while he paid ardent court, calling on her daily at the wide-verandaed two-story white house just off St. Charles Street. Her mother watched the proceedings with growing alarm. It was not unusual for an older man to court a younger woman. But my goodness, she fretted, this man was practically middle-aged. Elise’s father, a cotton trader, was less distressed. He made inquiries about Dorsey Bascombe and found that while he had an unorthodox approach to the timber business, he had interesting prospects. He treated Dorsey civilly but didn’t interfere, neither encouraged nor discouraged, leaving the matter to the women of the house. Dorsey kept at it doggedly, making little headway with any of them until finally, with an urgent wire in hand from his banker back home, he appeared on the doorstep one oppressive summer afternoon.
The black maid met his knock, a gnarled old prune of a woman. “You again,” she said through the screen door.
Dorsey stared at her for a moment. “Miss Elise,” he said. “May I…”
“She’s napping. Young ladies nap this time of day. Least, proper young ladies.” By the way she said it, he could tell that no proper young New Orleans gentleman would call on a proper young lady at such an hour. Dorsey felt like an idiot, a backwoods bumpkin smelling faintly of pine tar and decaying undergrowth. He decided to throw himself upon the mercy of the court.
“I’m desperate,” he croaked, cringing as he said it.
The old woman’s eyes widened. “You some sort of preacher?”
“No. Why?”
“Preachers act crazy sometimes.”
Indeed they do, Dorsey thought, indeed they do. So it is with fools in love, who are somewhat like preachers in that love becomes a religion. Fools are born to worship women, even unto madness.
“Well, I’m not a preacher, but I’ve got to see Miss Elise.”
Something in the ancient woman’s eyes softened then, and she said, “Well, I say you can’t bother Miss Elise while she’s taking her nap back yonder on the sleeping porch round this side of the house.” She pointed a long bony finger. “Now go!” And she motioned him with an impatient wave of her hand in the general direction of Galveston, Texas, and disappeared back into the dark bowels of the house.
Dorsey stepped off the porch and peered around the side of the house and saw the thick high hedge blocking access to the rear of the premises. To hell with it, he thought, and waded in, thrashing about in the lush, tangled growth, the foliage tearing at his coat and skin, trying to keep quiet but growing increasingly desperate and enraged until he bellowed an oath and flailed mightily with his arms and sprawled through the far side onto an open space of Bermuda grass, carrying a large dense patch of the hedge with him. “Gawd Awmighty,” he heard softly from an open window to his left and looked up to see the old black maid duck back from view. He stood, brushing himself off, trying to regain his dignity. The left sleeve of his coat was ripped nea
rly away from the rest of the garment and he could feel the sting of a raw scrape along his left cheek. His chest heaved with exertion. He bent over and put his hands on his knees, catching his breath, then looked up and saw the wide screened window of the second-floor sleeping porch.
“Miss Elise,” he called softly, cupping his hands around his mouth. He called again, then looked around in the grass for something to toss against the screen, saw nothing. So he shucked off his tattered coat and balled it up tightly and flung it toward the screen. It hit with a thud and he heard a tiny cry inside. After a moment she appeared at the screen, hair tousled from sleep, rubbing her eyes. His heart stopped for an instant and he felt faint. She was a child, really, soft and vulnerable.
“Miss Elise,” he said, “I’ll come right to the point. You must marry me or I’ll lose my business. Not to speak of my mind.”
She brushed the hair from her face. “What do you mean, lose your business?”
Dorsey fished the telegram from his shirt pocket, held it toward her. “My sawmill is stuck in the mud halfway between town and my logging site, things are at a standstill, the note is overdue, and the bank is threatening to foreclose.”
“Then you best go home and take care of your sawmill and your bank,” she said, starting to turn away.
“Given the choice,” he called, “I would choose you.”
She stared at him, a tall man with a sun-browned face, hair already beginning to gray slightly at the temples, slightly bowlegged. But handsome in a sort of rough-hewn way. Yes, definitely handsome, even though he looked quite ridiculous just now with a snippet of hedge embedded in his hair and blood oozing down his cheek and a wild look in his eye.