He cranked his Buick and headed out Whitner Street, which took him all the way west, until he cut over on a side road, which led him to Thrasher Road, covered in gravel, his automobile rattling like loose bones in a nervous boy’s body. He lifted his just-shined wingtip off the gasoline pedal and pressed on the brake. He was about to approach what used to be his father’s place, 107 acres that spanned both sides of the road, with most of the acreage on the house side, on the right, but that never stopped Ike from thinking of this land as a bird, with the road as its body and the two sides of land as its wings. He wished that bird could fly him someplace else that day.
Ike had visited the South Carolina National Bank and discovered that his balance had dropped to $189.02. He knew that to most people, that was a lot of money, but not to Ike. He had no income, having lost his call to preach sixteen years ago and no employment in sight. He had been living off the sale of his father’s land, while he passed the time in a boarding house where five other men lived dead-end lives. Ike had kept the house and five acres but sold the rest, splitting the smaller twenty-acre side into two plots and selling them to two fellows, a Billy Udean Parnell and a Harold Creamer. Both men were blushed with love and both wanted to build a house for their intended. Mrs. Parnell’s family paid up in full in 1944, after the death of Mrs. Parnell. That same year, the Creamer family began missing payments and had missed the last five months entirely.
Ike was on his way to collect. But it meant coming within fifty feet of something he had not yet earned the right to do, and that was to return home as the man his father wanted him to be. Ike had kept the house and five acres, hoping that one day he could be that man. Maybe if he didn’t look at the old home place, but kept his eyes to the left, he could slide by. He gripped the steering wheel and bore down on the pedal, his Buick lunging forward and his tires squealing. He craned his neck hard to the left, seeing only the Parnell place and then the Creamer’s, where he turned into their driveway of dirt, his tires sending up dust, lots of it, like some scaredy-cat sissy boy jumping out of his way.
…..
Sarah and Emerson Bridge returned from the burial and found an unfamiliar automobile in the yard. She could see someone inside, someone small, perhaps an older boy. When she approached the window, he jumped as if she had scared him but then collected himself and opened the door and stepped out. He was wearing a nice dress hat, which he tipped at her, and a white shirt that looked brand new. And he had this neat, little trim mustache like the movie star Clark Gable. He wasn’t smoking but looked like he should be.
“Mrs. Creamer?” the man said.
“Yes, sir. I’m Mrs. Creamer.”
“Ike Thrasher here.” He bowed towards her but looked more like he should curtsy.
Sarah had never seen him before, but she knew who he was. He held the note on their ten acres, and she knew why he was there. She sent Emerson Bridge into the house.
“Is Mr. Creamer here?” The man was looking about the yard.
“No sir, he ain’t. But I am.” She was dizzy now.
“This is men’s talk, ma’am,” he said and ran his fingers lightly over his mustache. “A matter between me and your husband.”
Sarah steadied herself. Her blisters pressed against her shoe leather and burned. “It’s a matter between me and you now, sir.”
His shirt flapped in the wind. It sounded like bed sheets on the clothesline popping. He might not have been much bigger than a boy, but his face showed a lot of old man living. The lines in his forehead crissed and crossed in various ways, but mostly they lay vertical between bunched up skin like his stitching ran too tight. The tonic on his hair made it shine like a penny.
“I’ve looked the other way as long as I can. Y’all are behind close to fifty dollars. Going to have to start proceedings, if you can’t pay up. In full.”
“But we own this house. It’s paid for.”
“But the land it’s on is mine.”
Sarah widened her stance, the soles of her shoes pushing aside dirt. Harold had bought the land in 1935 for $36 an acre financed and agreed to pay a dollar and a half a month. She had $15.97 left of Mrs. Dobbins’s money, after giving Mr. McDougald $10 and pledging that much every month.
“I can catch up the last five months right now, seven dollars and a half.” This would leave her with $8.47. She started towards the house to get the money.
“I’m afraid y’all have gone too far now,” he called out at her back.
She put her foot on the bottom step and reached for the screened door. “And I can have more for you in a few days.” She was going to make more dresses to sell.
“I’ll just wait to talk with your husband.”
Sarah wrapped her hand around the handle, slender and running high to low, heaven to hell. “He ain’t here. We’ve just come from laying him in the ground.”
She heard the man clear his throat. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Sarah squeezed the metal, worn smooth from hands coated in sweat and dirt, catfish scales, potato peels and flour. And blood. “I’ll pay our debt, don’t you worry none. I ain’t the kind of woman to cut out on you.” She opened the door, let its rusty cry fill her ears. She was glad for it. She wished it was louder.
She stepped onto the porch.
Mr. Thrasher stayed in the yard, his hat held over his heart. His hair had more curls in it than a woman’s. The wind picked them up and tossed them about. The day had warmed into the upper fifties, but the March wind made it feel much colder. She would stoke the fire she had made that morning in the woodstove. She pushed the door open. “Won’t you come in?”
He kicked at the dirt with his right foot. He was a boy at heart. Sarah had stood at the kitchen sink window many early evenings and watched Emerson Bridge do the same thing when Harold would bring to a close what Emerson Bridge loved to do the most, throw a rock back and forth.
Sarah stretched the door wider.
Mr. Thrasher bent to wipe the dust from his shoes.
He followed her into the kitchen, saying, “But, I want you to know, Mrs. Creamer, that I will need the full amount.”
Something loud and sharp hit the window. Sarah looked out and saw Emerson Bridge in the yard about ten feet away. The window had a crack in it. He had thrown a rock.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said and went outside. Emerson Bridge was running towards the barn.
She wondered if she was fooling herself to think she could ever be enough. She looked across the old garden and thought about what life would be if Mattie had stayed. No burial that day, Emerson Bridge in school, free to learn his lessons, and not loaded with a papa gone way too soon and a mama, a makeshift mama, who’d never once thrown a rock. She’d watched Harold and Emerson Bridge enough to know that you swing your stiff arm back and then bring it forward, letting the rock go. She moved her arm that way now.
The door to the barn slammed shut.
She would let him be.
Mr. Thrasher remained in the kitchen, his arms folded across his chest. He looked cold. The kitchen was cold. The house was cold. Everything cold.
She looked inside the woodstove and found the embers cooling. She would start anew. She reached in the basket for the only paper there, the Dobbins newspaper. No longer was it balled up tight but open. “$680” in big, bold letters caught her eye. She smoothed out the paper against the table, the headline spanning the top of the page, “Grand Champion Brings $680—Dobbins Dynasty Ended.”
“Six hundred and eighty dollars?” she said out loud. “They must mean six dollars or sixty.”
“For what?” Mr. Thrasher unfolded his arms.
“For the grand champion at some kind of cow thing yesterday. But that can’t be right. That’s more money than Harold made all last year.”
“Grand Champeen,” he said and made a big sound with his nose. “You don’t say.”
“From what I heard, they have a big cow show, and one of them gets a blue ribbon and a big write-up in the newspaper w
ith a photograph. But I didn’t know they got big money, too.”
He moved his flat hand over the top of the page, trying to smooth it out more.
“I can’t believe it.” Sarah said.
“Believe it,” he told her and grabbed the top of his pants, pulled them up with a force. “Yep.”
The photograph showed a little boy standing beside the animal. The words “Ain’t It Wonderful!” ran beneath and said the winner was a Herron boy, seven years old.
“My boy’s almost that age, seven,” Sarah said.
“That’s right, you got a boy.”
“I do.” And Sarah had to feed him, put gasoline in the automobile, pay for his papa’s burial, catch up the light bill and now pay for Mr. Thrasher’s land.
The man took off in a flash, headed for the porch door.
“Wait! Your money,” Sarah said.
“I’ll come back around tomorrow.” The door slammed shut.
Tomorrow. She knew that word.
She looked at the photograph again. Mrs. Dobbins had called the animal a steer. The boy and the steer stood close to each other. They looked like they were friends. She imagined the steer following the boy around the yard like a dog and sleeping outside his window at night, even walking him down the driveway to the school bus and waiting there for his return.
Goosebumps ran up her arms and climbed her neck and face. What if she got Emerson Bridge a steer? It would bring in money to feed him. For a long time. Every morning, she would have hot biscuits, a whole basket of them, and a bowl of grits heaped so high, some would spill over the sides. There would be scrambled eggs cooked in butter and on the soft side the way he liked them and sausage patties she’d mashed and formed with her hands and fried to a crisp. And for his school dinner, she’d have a piece of fried meat between a cold biscuit and, for a surprise, would include a Hydrox cookie. On Sundays, she would make him two cobblers, strawberry and peach. And they would go fishing together and come home and fry what they’d caught crispy, and she’d make coleslaw from a good head of cabbage and have fried potatoes cut longways like fingers.
Fingers. On her hand. Both hands holding him, his belly full.
…..
The shaving kit that Emerson Bridge and his papa had used remained on the bale of straw. There were no windows in the barn, but enough light slivered in through the old wooden boards for Emerson Bridge to see. The kit looked like his papa’s boots, dark brown leather and covered in scratches long and deep.
He wondered if this was the last thing his papa had touched. He had seen his papa set it on the bale before Emerson Bridge left the barn that afternoon. He never saw his papa alive again. He’d gotten off the school bus and run to the barn to tell him “hey,” but that afternoon he didn’t find his papa laying across the bale or on the dirt, but standing in the back, propped up against a pole, and, in his hands, the shaving kit.
“For when the time comes,” his papa had said and instructed Emerson Bridge to stand on the bale.
“What time, Papa?” he’d asked.
But no words came, only his papa taking a thick, white cup from the kit and pouring in water from a mason jar. He spilled more than made it in. Then round and round with a little brush his papa stirred, until white lather rose up like a puffy cloud, and his papa put his eyes on Emerson Bridge and said, “For when you’re a man, son.”
A jolt shot from Emerson Bridge’s feet skyward, lifting him on his tiptoes. Even with the foot and a few inches tall bale, he still wasn’t as tall as his papa. He couldn’t wait to be.
His papa gathered lather on his fingers and smeared it on his beard, dipped his razor in the water and began moving the blade southward, his hand shaking. His papa was teaching him to shave. He bet none of the other boys at school had papas who had done that.
A John Deere tractor mirror hung about eye level on a nail on the post in front of him. It used to hang higher for his papa. “Why you teaching me now?” Emerson Bridge asked.
His papa cut his eyes at him. The sound of the blade against his papa’s skin, a scraping sound, cuts breaking out along the way.
Emerson Bridge felt a knot in his belly.
“Now is all we’ve got,” his papa said.
Emerson Bridge swallowed saliva to keep from throwing up.
His papa made two more swipes with the razor and then held it out for Emerson Bridge. “You’re the man of the house now, son.”
A ray of light fell in beside them, and in it specks of dust tossed back and forth. They were rocks, tiny ones. He wanted to run and get a rock and play. But in his papa’s hands was something straight and sharp, a razor. Not a rock.
Emerson Bridge took it, gathered lather, and imagined his hands as his papa’s. He brought the blade to his face.
“And I hope you’ll be a better man than I was. The Bible says to be kind. ‘Be ye kind, one to another,’ it says. I wasn’t always, but I hope you will be, son.” His papa’s breathing had sharp edges like it could break something. The way a rock could.
The sound of an engine cranking drew Emerson Bridge back to the world where his papa was no more. It was that man’s automobile. He hoped he wasn’t going to be his new papa.
He placed his hands on both ends of the shaving kit, imagined his papa’s hands there, and thought about kindness. Throwing a rock against his mother’s window was not kind. He brought the kit in close, placed it against him like his papa’s chest. “I will be kind, papa. Yes, sir. I promise you.”
…..
From River Street, Ike spotted the steer out front of Richbourg’s, just as the newspaper article had said. The animal stood to the left of the double glass doors and appeared as big as Ike’s Buick. “There he is,” Ike whispered. “The Grand Champeen.”
He surveyed the lot for the closest empty parking space and found one on the front row beside a tractor, one space down from the steer, no more than six feet away from Ike’s front bumper. The animal jerked his head high and pulled on a rope that ran from his halter to the tractor beside Ike, the steer’s nostrils flaring wide, as did his eyes, showing mostly white.
A large glass wall ran behind the steer and carried large sheets of white butcher paper, showing the store’s specials in splashes of bright red and deep yellow. Duke’s mayonnaise thirty-nine cents a pint. Beef roast fifty-three cents a pound. And then directly in front of Ike, the front page of the Anderson Independent, along with the store’s advertisement, topped in big block letters “Grand Champion steer shown at Fat Cattle Show & Sale now appearing outside our store. Come see him now and then visit him in the meat department in the coming days. Quality beef for your family.”
Quality, indeed.
Ike studied the steer’s thickness, his muscles, especially. “All man,” he said and ran his hand down his thigh. He felt nothing that counted. He was all bone.
He squeezed the steering wheel, the big round black circle that it was, and felt his fingers afloat in the grooves. They fit the way a girl’s would. A boy’s would fill the space. Ike pressed down, hoping to fill with his flattened flesh. He pressed until his fingers went numb. He wanted to call out, “Daddy, look, I can fill it up,” but the door near the steer swung open, a young boy shooting from it towards the animal, which shifted Ike’s way and pulled on the rope so hard, the tractor beside him shook. Manhandling, Ike was thinking. The Grand Champeen is manhandling a whole tractor. Ike wanted to say something to the animal, maybe call his name. But he couldn’t remember reading what his name was.
“I want to pet you,” the boy called out and stretched his arms towards the animal’s face, now thrust high into the air, the animal’s eyes wide and cut towards Ike. Ike had seen eyes like this before when he was a preacher, from people who’d walked the aisle at his church and proclaimed they were sinners in need of saving. When the numbers were sufficient, Ike would take them to his father’s pond, which he would enter first, the water nipple high as the sinners came, one by one, his right hand placed behind their head, his left in t
he small of their back, and he would say, “I baptize you, my sister or my brother, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, who died for our sins that we may spend eternity with him in glorious heaven.” And Ike would lower them backwards into the water and then restore them upright.
“I’ll save you, boy,” Ike called out to the animal and moved his hand to the door handle and pushed down, his left leg shoving it open. In no time, his left shoe hit the pavement.
But the child now was jumping up and down and squealing. Ike wanted to tell him to stop, that that’s how girls act, that squealing.
But Ike did not tell him that. Ike simply brought his leg back in and closed the door. And to the steer, whose eyes remained on Ike, he said, “It’s me, old boy, it’s me. You got to save me.”
…..
Sarah needed a plan to pay for the steer, and she wanted to write it down. She’d been carrying around figures in her head like groceries in a sack. She would take them out one by one and set them on pretty blue lines as straight as the stitches she tried to make. She took a sheet from Emerson Bridge’s blue horse school tablet he kept atop his dresser. She hoped he wouldn’t mind, that and borrowing his pencil for a few minutes.
The window beside the dresser was open. He’d gone outside that way. The wind blew the curtains in towards her. Maybe it would blow him in, too.
She sat on his bed. He would see her and trust that she waited on his return.
At the top of the page, she wrote Mrs. Dobbins’s $28.00. Under it, she listed $2.53 for Drake’s Store, $10 for Mr. McDougald, and $7.50 for Mr. Thrasher. She had $8.47 left. She would make one dress a day and charge a flat $3, which would mean clearing up to $2 a dress or upwards of $14 a week or as much as $56 a month. Subtract out the monthly $17.50 for the land and burial, $5 for food and gasoline, and another $3 for the light bill, which she was behind already $9. They could continue to live without a telephone.
She did the arithmetic. She should have $32.50 in clear money each month.
She didn’t know how much a little steer would cost, but it had to be a lot less than the $680 a big one cost. There would be feeding the animal, but she thought they ate grass, and they had grass. She wondered how little they could be, if maybe like a big dog, something to buddy with. Every child needed an animal to buddy with. And what if she could surprise him on his birthday, have the little steer outside his window on the morning of June 22nd. She would stand at his door and let the animal’s sounds wake him and watch his dimples spring forth. But, mostly, he would know that Sarah wanted him. She could get him to trust her this way.
One Good Mama Bone Page 6