Then there was Oscar himself. A finer man couldn’t be found nowhere, and everybody on the island knew it. Everybody but him, that was.
My own brothers, Frank T. and Wiley, were nearly struck dumb when they met the new Mrs Williams. Oscar brought them up to the house as soon as they got back from their milk deliveries. At first I didn’t think she’d leave the bedroom, but there she was, her chin high. ‘Ain’t you all never seen a pretty woman before?’ I nearly said. I was that ashamed. Them two shuffled their feet on the parlor floor like they were ignorant schoolboys, not grown men. Frank T. put his hat to his heart like he wasn’t promised to Maggie Mandora. Wiley did the same, but he kept his mouth shut so as to hide where a cow had kicked out a few of his front teeth. They called her ‘ma’am’, and when she smiled that narrow smile of hers, both of them turned beet red. Frank T. took to patting down his brown hair like it could be tamed, and Wiley’s hand went to the back of his pants to make sure his shirt hadn’t come untucked.
It was plain to see that Mrs Williams cast a spell over men. Maybe it was that neck of hers, nearly as white as all the lace on her collar and shirtwaist. Or maybe it was her figure, buxom full but narrow at the waist. Her eyes were blue and her eyelids drooped just a tad, lending her a sleepy look. Her complexion wouldn’t win no prizes, though – it had a washed-out color – but all in all, she added up in a way that turned men silly.
‘Supper’s laid out on the stove,’ I told her when the men finally clomped off to the barn, Frank T. having told her she was mighty welcome to Texas. It was nearly time for me to go home, and if she knew about tomorrow’s dance set up just so folks could meet her, she hadn’t let on.
‘Pardon?’ she said. She was looking at the piano in the parlor, her long fingers tapping the sides of her yellow skirt. Earlier, she’d told me she was going to rest and I took that to mean she’d change from her Sunday best into something more everyday. But there she was, close to four o’clock in the afternoon and still dressed up. She’d taken off her black glass earrings, though, and I was glad for it. Nobody wore earrings that dangled, not during the day they didn’t.
‘I’ll be going on home directly,’ I said. ‘All you’ve got to do is heat up supper. It’s mostly what’s left over from dinner, fish and rice, it being Friday.’ Puzzlement showed on her face. I said, ‘Catholics don’t eat meat on Fridays.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said like she knew that.
‘Mr Williams likes his supper at five. Shortly, stoke up the stove, get it good and hot.’ Now another question showed on her face. I said, ‘Maybe you’re not overly familiar with a wood stove. What do you all have up there in Ohio? Gas?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived in a hotel for the past few years.’
Oh good Lord, what on earth had Oscar gone and done? I knew of only one kind of woman that lived in hotels. Tears burned the backs of my eyes and a sick feeling settled in the bottom of my belly. I turned away from Mrs Williams, just as I had resolved to turn away from Oscar and bury my feelings for him. I had to; I was a curse to the men that took up with me. When I was sixteen, Oakley Hill drowned five days before our wedding, his fishing boat found overturned and him all tangled up in rope. I was twenty-one when Joe Pete Conley, a man who had been courting me for five months, got lockjaw and died. That was June of last summer.
I was a danger to men, anybody could see it. When I told Mama and Daddy that, they sat me down. Mama said, ‘There’s women like that,’ and Daddy said, ‘Best you never marry. Best you just plan on taking care of us during our coming old age.’
Ever since Bernadette died, I had stepped around Oscar, telling myself I couldn’t care for him, not overly. I had to keep him safe. Not that he’d tried to court me. Likely he hadn’t even thought about it, mourning Bernadette the way he had. And if he had thought of it, could be he figured I was still grieving for Joe Pete Conley. But now there was Catherine Williams, come from out of the blue, a woman that had lived in a hotel and cast spells over men.
I kept all of that to myself when I went home and Mama asked about her. ‘She’s a Yankee,’ was how I put it.
‘Same as Oscar,’ Mama said. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why he married her. Likely he wanted somebody that knew him when he was a boy, somebody that knows his kin.’ I was washing the supper dishes and she was drying, a little bent over, the arthritis kicked up bad in her back. Daddy and the boys were on the veranda with their feet propped up on the railing, puffing on pipes as they watched the day shift into evening, their bellies filled with oyster stew.
‘Well, she’s old,’ I said. ‘And she’s nothing like Bernadette.’
‘Don’t talk to me about being old,’ Mama said. She was gray-haired and sorrowful about it.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And nobody’s like Bernadette. But we’re going to welcome Oscar’s new wife tomorrow night because that’s how we do.’
‘She’s not overly fond of waltzes, told me that herself.’
‘That’s something Oscar will have to sort out. She’s his choice, not yours.’
I held Mama’s words in my mind early the next morning as I rode in the wagon to Oscar’s. I sat with Wiley on the buckboard. He drove the horses while Frank T. was in the wagon bed, likely dozing some. Overhead, the stars started to fade as they gave way to dawn. We lived on the bayou, and as the crow flies, it wasn’t all that far from Oscar’s. But we weren’t crows. It was a mile from our place to the ridge road, the trail rough in places. There was the fence gate that marked Oscar’s western boundary to open and close. After that, it was a half-mile of ridge road, us going east, a speck of light up ahead.
That came from Oscar’s barn. He was at work, like always, but the house was as dark as a tomb. The boys dropped me off at the veranda steps, and when I let myself into the house, Mrs Williams’ bedroom door was closed. It was coming up on four-thirty, and there wasn’t even a sliver of light to be seen from around the edges of her door.
The very notion of it was a disturbance. Dairy farm people didn’t laze about in bed unless they were sick or feeble, and Mrs Williams wasn’t either. Leastways, I didn’t think so. I lit a few kerosene lamps in the kitchen, got a fire going in the stove, and went to work cooking breakfast. About the time I put the biscuits in the oven, Andre stumbled out of his room in his nightshirt. His hair stood up in little spikes, and his eyes were puffy.
‘Honey boy,’ I said, pressing him to me.
‘She gone?’ he said.
‘Hush that talk, she’s your daddy’s wife.’
‘I don’t like her.’
‘Well, your daddy does and that’s what counts.’
‘She said I ain’t allowed to say ain’t.’
Acting like a schoolteacher was no way to start with a child. I held him to me, feeling the smallness of his back and liking how he put his face against my shoulder.
‘She’s your daddy’s wife,’ I said. ‘Now get your britches on and go on to the outhouse. Bang on the door and holler in.’
I had biscuits in the oven. I’d cooked the grits, cracked the eggs, fried slices of ham and there still wasn’t the first sign of Mrs Williams. The men came in from the barn and ate, Andre ate too. My brothers looked all woeful that she wasn’t sitting there for them to gawk at while Oscar made excuses for her. ‘This heat,’ he said. ‘It takes the starch out of a person when you first get here.’
The sun had risen bright when I heard Mrs Williams open the bedroom door. I scrambled a few eggs for her while she was in the washroom. It was the Christian thing to do even if she was lazy. Lazy was something this house had never seen before. It was after seven o’clock, and I had the breakfast dishes washed, Oscar was cleaning out stalls with Andre helping some, and Frank T. and Wiley were in the city, dropping off bottles of milk at people’s doors. When Mrs Williams sat down at the table, I put some biscuits and slices of ham on a plate along with the eggs and grits.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Then, ‘Coffee, pl
ease.’
‘It’s warming on the stove,’ I said. ‘Help yourself.’
It took her a while to understand that I didn’t intend to wait on her hand and foot. She got up and poured herself a cup. Her clothes were a notch down from yesterday’s. Her skirt was dark green, and her shirtwaist had only half the lace, but these were still Sunday clothes and finer than anything I’d ever hope to own. She was showing off, I thought. Then I told myself that was envy talking, an ugly quality if there ever was one.
She ate, and I scrubbed the frying pan, my back to her. I’d done nothing but wash dishes this morning. Mrs Williams had done a poor job in the kitchen last night. I couldn’t find half what I needed. She’d put the forks where the spoons belonged, and the dishes were stacked wrong on the shelf. Every pot was speckled with stuck-on dried food. Some of the plates were, too.
She said, ‘The scrambled eggs are very good. As are the biscuits.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘There is, however, something that you’ve served which is new for me.’
I looked over my shoulder. Her fork hovered above her plate. I said, ‘Grits. Those are grits.’
‘I see. A Southern dish.’
I didn’t know what she was talking about. Grits was food, not a dish. I said, ‘You all don’t eat grits up there in Ohio?’
‘No. Nor, I must say, am I accustomed to so much fish.’
‘What do you all mostly eat up there in Ohio? Only meat and ’tators?’
She clicked her tongue. ‘Yes. Meat and potatoes.’
She talked prissy in that Yankee voice of hers, her words coming fast and like she was talking through her nose. I went back to scrubbing the frying pan. I said, ‘My daddy’s a fisherman, flounder, redfish, and snapper mainly. He traps crab in the bay and rakes oysters. He carries them into the city when he’s of a mind to. He has his steady customers here, too, Mr Williams being one of them.’
‘Your father has customers on this end of the island? I haven’t seen any other houses. Where is everyone?’
I heard the insult in her questions like she thought this was the ends of the earth. People in the city most always thought that. But they didn’t know. Some of us liked having room to move about; we wanted to look out the windows and not see piles of buildings. I wouldn’t trade our end of the island for nothing. We had plenty of neighbors. Some of them were relations: aunts, uncles, and cousins by the handful. Mrs Williams would know that if Oscar had told her about tonight’s dance given in her honor. But if Oscar wanted to keep the dance a secret, that was his business. I wasn’t about to tell her. I’d seen how she’d looked at me when I’d told her about rattlers in the outhouse.
I said, ‘There’re all kinds of folks here, cattle ranchers mainly. The Fultons have a fine house; they’ve got China rugs and a room filled with books from top to bottom.’ Now I was the one showing off. I said, ‘Course there’re the nuns and orphans at St. Mary’s, and a few Italians way down by the pass.’
‘The pass?’
‘The western end of the island.’
‘And these people with the library, where is their home?’
‘Near the bay. A handful of miles on down the island. But they ain’t here right now. Mrs Fulton and her littlest children are in Colorado for the air.’
At that, she sank into herself, going quiet. We stayed quiet all morning. I washed her dishes and wiped down the top of the stove, then swept the kitchen floor. She just wandered about. First she went outside to the front veranda and then she came in and looked through Oscar’s red book about the stars. I never could see the need for that book of his, not when the stars were right overhead, night after night, easier to look at than all that bitty print in a book. But that was Oscar for you, he liked to read. Mrs Williams must be the same way because she took up shuffling through the newspapers that Oscar made Frank T. and Wiley buy when they were in the city. She told me she thought she’d look at them out on the porch.
‘You mean the veranda?’ I said.
She mashed that around in her mind for a short time. ‘It is a beautiful word, isn’t it?’ she said.
Well, for Pete’s sake, I thought. Who had time to sort through words and call them beautiful?
She fussed around the piano, too. She opened the keyboard cover but didn’t play a thing; she just sat there with her hands in her lap. When she got tired of that, she brought out an armload of books from the bedroom and put them on the parlor table. She propped them up with bookends made of pink marble, and that made me think, Well, how do you like that? They went with the clock on the mantle except these bookends were rough and unpolished. She didn’t put Oscar’s book with hers; she left it on top of the newspapers.
I’d never been around a woman that had so little to do. I wanted to say, ‘Here’s the broom, the veranda needs sweeping.’ Or, ‘How about lending a hand with dinner?’ Women up and down the beach, Mama one of them, were cooking for tonight’s dance and here was Mrs Williams with not one worthwhile thing to do. But I held my tongue. Leastways she knew enough to make her own bed. I had looked when she’d gone off to the outhouse, expecting to find it a rumpled mess. But it wasn’t. She had tucked the corners tight, pulled the quilt neat, and laid the pillows just so. Like how she held herself, I thought. Stiff-necked and cold.
A little later, I walked down the hall and came across her in Andre’s room. She was holding the photograph that Andre had on the table by his bed. It was a picture of Oscar and Bernadette, made on their wedding day. I had studied it myself more times than I could count. It helped me to remember Bernadette as an alive person. In the photograph, Oscar sat on a chair and Bernadette stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder. They were in their finest, him all handsome in his suit and her looking like somebody from a magazine in her white linen dress. The sisters at St. Mary’s had made it for her. Last October, Oscar buried Bernadette in that dress even though Mama told him it wouldn’t look right. ‘I’ll have to rip out the seams to get it to fit,’ she told him. ‘I’ll have to put in a panel of material in the back. Even then it won’t lay right.’
‘It was her favorite,’ he’d said.
‘But, Oscar, to take it apart? Would she want that?’
Oscar’s jaw firmed up.
‘You’re one bull-headed man,’ she’d said. So Mama did what was needed to make the dress fit around Bernadette’s swelled-up belly. At the funeral, folks remarked on it. ‘Bernadette looks good laid out in her dress,’ they’d said. ‘So pretty.’ None of that was true. She was dead, and there weren’t nothing good or pretty about that.
It would hurt Andre hard if he knew Mrs Williams held the photograph of his mama, but I didn’t say so. I just nodded to her from the hallway and kept on with my chores.
It was the piano that broke the quiet. I was tidying up the washroom when I heard the first note, then the second and the third. She went at it slow, like her fingers were trying to find their way on the keys. She added more notes and picked up speed as she went up and down the keyboard, the notes going from deep to high-pitched. Warming up, I thought. She was getting a feel for it like how I did with my fiddle. I tried not to listen as I cleaned the washroom floor, sweeping sand and dirt into the dustpan. Music was for evenings when chores were finished, not for mornings when things needed doing. When she stopped and everything went quiet, I thought, There. That was all she knew. I heard her come down the hall and go into Oscar’s room. Something metal sprang open. The clasp on one of her black leather traveling trunks, I figured. Then she came out with some papers and walked past the washroom. Before I knew it, she was playing again but this time it had a melody. This time it was music, each note clear and deep and pretty and sorrowful.
It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. This music clutched at my heart; it made everything around me fall away. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself in the parlor but off to the side. Mrs Williams sat on the bench, there were sheets of paper spread out on the front of the piano. She played
, leaning into the music, swaying a little. Each note bore down. Each note pulled at me and stirred up everything I thought I was done with – the boys I had intended to marry, the loss of Bernadette, and the wanting of Oscar.
He stood in the doorway, I hadn’t heard the door open. Andre was with him, his little eyes wide with surprise. The music, carried by the breeze, must have found Oscar in the barnyard, the notes must have pulled him, too. He watched her, this new wife of his, her fingers casting a spell, the muscles tugging around his mouth.
Mrs Williams played on and on, laying bare the thing that hurt the most: Oscar picking a woman so different from me. I had my hands to my chest; my heart was near to busting wide open. Then she played the last two chords, deep and somber. The music hung in the air before it slipped away, overcome by the low crashing sound of the surf. Mrs Williams put her hands on her lap and folded them, that graceful neck of hers bowed.
‘Catherine,’ Oscar said after a while.
She turned around on the bench. Her face was wet.
He said, ‘You used to play that. When I delivered coal.’
‘I remember.’
‘I’d stand outside your window and listen. When I left Ohio, I figured I’d never hear it again.’ He paused. ‘I never knew what it was called.’
‘“Moonlight Sonata.” Beethoven.’
The Promise Page 9