Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  “I just turned nine.”

  “That must make your brother—”

  “Fourteen. Timbo’s fourteen—and he’s rightly sick, Miss Susan.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Ivoe regretted them. In telling private family business she had broken an important rule.

  Lemon eyed Ivoe coolly. “Ain’t her place to say it, but yes, my boy is sick. I came to tell you I can’t work today. I got to get back to him.”

  “Fine, soon as you see to the kitchen. I imagine plenty folks’ll come by. You’ll have to do some shopping. You talk to Earl? You ask him what to prepare?”

  Lemon shook her head. It had not occurred to her to talk to Earl. She had offered him no sympathy on the passing of his father and, now as she thought of it, she had not even greeted him properly. “Look to me like you and Earl handling things. I ain’t never seen my boy like this.”

  “It’s fine, Lemon. You and Minnie decide between you who’s going to do the flowers. Alfred left explicit directions for his death: twenty-eight white lilies in all the vases and twenty-eight in the casket with him. He didn’t want to be embalmed so put candles everywhere before unpleasant odors bar everyone from the funeral. I started to turn facedown all the photographs but had to stop. Go through the house and don’t leave one unturned.”

  “Now, Miss Susan, I don’t plan on staying—”

  Susan waved at the seamstress to stop and stepped down from the stool. “Lemon, my husband has died. I’m sure God created more loving spouses, but surely you’re not supposing—”

  “Now, Miss Susan, we go back years and I been a good worker for every one of them. Even on my worst day, sick and all, I been more than decent. I ain’t never asked—”

  Ivoe watched her mother, who always preached about obedience, move her hand from her pocketbook along the side of her leg. It was a habit she knew well because she often did things that made her mother pat her thigh for patience. Until that moment, she had not doubted that Timbo would be fixed by one of May-Belle’s remedies and a little rest.

  “—and I ain’t asking now, Miss Susan. You gonna have to get on without me. Ivoe, let’s go.”

  Later that evening, Ivoe watched her mother at the stove. The long day and its trouble had her beat. After their return from the Starks Momma had prayed extra long before starting the wash. As she pulled the steaming bedclothes from the big cast-iron pot to hang on the line, Ivoe saw her crying. She told Momma Timbo would be all right as soon as Aunt May-Belle showed up and not to cry.

  “Who said anything about crying? Aren’t you hot out here? If you don’t want to see me sweat, help me.” Ivoe reached into her mother’s apron pocket for clothespins, which she held three at a time between her lips as she clipped one and then the other on opposite ends of Timbo’s sheet, placing one in the middle. People often asked Ivoe why her mother dried clothes at night. Momma hated when the wash took on the scent of the air around it, especially after the beef was cooked over hickory wood every morning behind the smokehouse, where they sold it by the pound. Night drying also prevented their special things—like her favorite indigo dress—from bleaching in the sun. Standing next to Momma at the line, she thought to grab her around the waist, squeeze her tight, but finishing the chore seemed more important.

  “Momma, I’ll get up with the sun and take the clothes down.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  She reached for something else nice to say when a moan followed by a foul smell filled the kitchen, calling Momma to Timbo’s side and leaving Papa and Ivoe to eat in the stench of her brother’s shit.

  .

  Ivoe stood outside the wire fence wishing she could stay among them. Too many flies swarmed around the cattle and there was no place to hide from the sun. Still, she was better off. School made her sick, and Timbo needed her more. He hadn’t eaten in three days, not even when Momma made his favorite, cracker pudding. Ivoe did her part, soaking the cloth in the pail by his bed, mopping his head whenever she got up to use the outhouse. She had even said a little prayer, doubtful that Papa’s God or Momma’s Allah was listening since no copy of Gulliver’s Travels had made it to her last Christmas. Maybe her prayer for May-Belle to hurry up and deliver that baby and return to Little Tunis was easier to handle. It couldn’t hurt to ask twice. She was standing on one foot, shaking loose the rocks and dirt from her shoe, when she saw the Indian children through a veil of rippled heat. She curled her fingers around the hot wire fence and took a deep breath.

  “Alligator, Alligator,” they said cloyingly.

  The first time the Caddo Indians teased her Ivoe knew that they were right. When she walked, the worn welt separated from the sole of her shoe, calling to mind the open jaws of an alligator. Still, for the “Sharing Hour,” a custom in their class every Friday, she determined to win their favor. Five children had told five stories about Negro life in the Brazos Bottoms. Ivoe told a different tale about the people who had lived there a century before. Since she was an iddy-biddy girl, Aunt May-Belle had spoken of the Caddo Indians. Every day when Ivoe took lunch she recalled one story in particular, as she watched the Caddo children eat corn mush from an orange clay pot so beautiful it shamed the rough casks in her own kitchen. Smooth with age and sized like a small pumpkin, lines and curved impressions gave life to two identical faces. “I know all about the twin brothers on this pot,” Ivoe began, confident her story could best Scheherazade’s finest. “My great-aunt said many years ago Father Sky gave special gifts to his sons. To this one”—she pointed to the openmouthed figure—“he gave a tongue that flashed like lightning. And to the other one, a voice like thunder.” Curiosity cut through the class like a breeze through the hackberry grove in spring. A girl younger than Ivoe asked what the brothers did with their gifts of thunder and lightning. “Mostly they play with them. You know how sometimes a dark sky turns bright then starts to crack up?” The girl nodded, her eyes equal parts trepidation and wonder. “Well, that’s just one brother trying to outdo the other one. Aunt May-Belle says there’s no harm in it. Sometimes they just get out of hand.”

  “Out of hand” was what Momma said whenever Ivoe followed her own mind and she was glad for the chance to use it. “Know how you can tell when the brothers get out of hand? Lightning runs out of the sky. Sometimes it splits a tree in half or pulls the roof off somebody’s cabin.” Satisfied that the twins lived in the sky, a little boy wanted to know where all the other Indians had gone. Ivoe drew their attention to the map hanging in the front of the class and pointed to the state above Texas. “They’re mostly in Oklahoma now.” The twelve-year-old Caddo girl, who knew all about Oklahoma but could not read the letters to spell it, let out a nervous laugh.

  It had crossed Ivoe’s mind that sharing her story might encourage the Caddos to speak to her and give her the chance to ask them about the fine beaded moccasins they wore. Maybe they would even become friends. But in the days that followed, as the Caddos let everyone else feel the pot, they ignored her. And now, the consummate proof of their dislike was heard in her new nickname.

  “Alligator, Alligator, don’t be late.”

  Ivoe dreaded the day ahead—her shoes smacking the wood floor all the way from her desk to the chalkboard, the Caddos’ snickering. She hated not hearing Miss Stokes’s reading from One Thousand and One Nights but turned away from the schoolhouse anyway. If genies really did exist she wished one would make Timbo feel better so he could smile at the Caddo girl (that’s all it ever took for him to win the girls at church), or make the Caddo boy jealous of how fast he could run, since everybody knew the only way to friend a boy was to best him at something. If the genie couldn’t see clear on fixing Timbo right away, maybe he could arrange for the new pair of shoes she knew better than to ask of her parents. At the end of the day, Papa was put off by his children; you could hear it in his voice when he said to Timbo: “Now how come a man what works all day gotta come home to children what begs instead of
giving they pa a kind hello?” Momma was no better. If Ivoe reminded her of the promised shoes, she was liable to hear, “Didn’t I just make you a dress?,” or “What about that new lunch pail Papa done give you?” There was no telling when she might get a new pair, so she wiped her eyes and headed for Deadman’s Creek, her favorite retreat for sulking. At the creek, she hunted for a long time in search of a branch neither too short nor too brittle. She stood on a boulder jutting out of the cool water and poked the belly of a sunfish with all the force she could muster.

  That evening Ivoe heard worry and anger in the rattling of every kitchen drawer, the slamming of every cupboard. Even the plate her mother set down spun to its final resting place, prompting Ivoe’s eyes to well.

  Lemon took her time tidying an already neat kitchen, then filled a glass for her daughter, sucking her teeth when a little water spilled. A child’s cry sure can remind you just how ugly life can be, she thought. Wasn’t enough to have a sick boy in the next room. What in the world had the girl so wounded? Ivoe still needed to learn how to not pay any mind to every little wrong some fool fixed on her. It was a young Earl Stark, Lemon recalled, who had taught her neither to bend nor break at hateful words. Listening to his parents’ foolishness about the people who lived in the Bottoms, Earl did what children sometimes do with information they don’t understand. Lemon was about Ivoe’s age when she heard him patting juba with a friend the way she had taught them, while they sang:

  Chicken when they hungry

  Whiskey when they dry

  Cotton when they hard up

  Cotton when they die

  A nought’s a nought

  A figger’s a figger

  All for the white man

  None for the nigger.

  It was all Lemon could do to stand there and not reach for the child, to rock away some of the hurt. She looked out the window, figuring the time left before the red sun disappeared and her man came home. “Nothing dries quicker than a tear, girl. Don’t you mind them that talk bad about you. That’s what folks do when they living low to the ground. And them that’s close to the ground don’t deserve your tears, your sweat, your nothing. Look over they heads. It ain’t hard to do. Look over they heads. Less you learn how, you won’t make it past my garden. Now, excuse yourself. Go get your lessons.” She listened for the flip-flop shuffle out of her kitchen before going to the cupboards, where she scanned the items two or three times, as if her gaze might multiply them. Four jars of tomato jam, a couple of pints of dilled okra, a two-pound bag of beans, and a cup of salt. She went over in her mind the number of chickens in the pen while removing the misbaha from around her neck. Timbo had filled three pails of vomit that day and fever still gripped him. Ivoe needed shoes, but without the little money her brother brought in . . . and she had already missed four days of work tending to him.

  Lemon lifted the pail of water she kept stowed under the table, splashed her face and washed her hands up to the elbows and her feet to the ankles. She knelt and bowed her head to the floor three times. She prayed the obligatory Maghrib, then raised her hands to her shoulders, the tips of her fingers just below her ears, to begin the Sunnah. Her right palm over the back of her left hand, the wrist of the left gripped by the right, she recited Du’aaul Istiftaah and the Ta’awwdhu, seeking refuge with Allah. She counted tasbih, glorifying Allah one bead at a time: “Subhan’Allah, Alhamdulillah, Allahu Akbar.”

  .

  The clink of the glass beads at her great-aunt’s waist sent Ivoe flying off the porch to the edge of their yard to greet the old woman. Aunt May-Belle dressed like Momma: a wraparound skirt down to her ankles, a blouse buttoned to the top, and a long ivory scarf thrown overhead like a veil that hung loose past her shoulders. Ivoe stood on tippy-toe to kiss her great-aunt’s cheek and took her hand, leading her through the swept dirt yard bordered on both sides by tin tubs of altheas and wild honeysuckle.

  “Good thing you came to see about Timbo. He ain’t in no kind of shape at all.”

  Flowers potted in clay casks along their course gave May-Belle a feeling of contentment shown in her storied face. A musky scent drew her eyes to the fig tree shading red spinach ready to bolt, but it was the tomatoes glimmering like rubies on emerald vines that made her gasp in delight.

  “You know, Ivoe, May-Belle’s getting old. My eyes pretty good but I need for you to do the reaching and the bending. You be my arms?”

  Ivoe nodded.

  “You be my knees?”

  “Yes.”

  “A bluebird danced a jig on the branch outside my window this morning. I said to it, ‘Bluebird, what good word you got for me today? That Ivoe dependable?’ Bluebird say, ‘Yes’m.’ Guess he knew what he was talking about.”

  Ivoe grinned. “Then no schooling for me today?”

  “Not in the schoolhouse. Plenty schooling all around you in nature.” To prove her point, May-Belle opened her hand and showed what looked to Ivoe like a rock made of ice. “You see this? This here what we call horn quicksilver. Gonna add a little cherry bark and some dandelion greens to boil with it to make a tea what fix Timbo up proper.”

  Ivoe took the porch steps confidently. It was only a matter of time before she and Timbo would be swimming in the creek again.

  “My stars! Them tomatoes is fit to be ate,” May-Belle said, closing the door behind her. “Them and that fig tree smelling up the whole yard. Looking pretty too. You got something special in mind for them?”

  “Special nothing, honey. We fixing to eat them—some now, some later. Reckon I’ll can a few like always,” Lemon said.

  “Well, ’cause you ain’t got nothing special in mind don’t mean nature ain’t got no designs on them. Mark my words, they fixing to do something.”

  “Right now, May-Belle, them tomatoes not on my littlest mind. That tree neither. Timbo can’t sleep for fever and too weak to chew.”

  “He be all right. Maybe not on your watch or mine. But on Allah’s watch he be all right.”

  “I been praying the Fard and Sunnah every day, hoping Allah’s watch will tick faster. Now listen, May-Belle, don’t you pay no mind to the sweet face that girl’s gonna put on you.” Lemon fixed her eyes on Ivoe. “Don’t you let her go to the creek. Last time she come running home hollering and carrying on so till I thought something terrible happened. Legs and feets was all covered with them devilish bloodsuckers.” She handed Ivoe a jar of water for the journey, eyeing her for some recognition. “I don’t care nothing about you standing there with your mouth all poked out. You know I’m telling the truth. Now take this and get on.”

  May-Belle rested a hand on Ivoe’s shoulder as they entered the hackberry grove. “Won’t be too long before I have to learn you all the remedies,” she said.

  “I rather learn with you than go to school, Auntie.”

  “When you start to put the bad mouth on school?”

  “Me and school don’t fit.”

  “You needs book learning, you hear me? Schooling put notions in the head what was never in mind before and we mean for you to get all you can get.” May-Belle raised a hand above her eyes. “Now you see that red tree out yonder? Go get me some of that trunk.” Watching the girl climb the tree (to Ivoe, who loved tree climbing, the bark had to come from the top), May-Belle wondered why a child as curious as this one was put off school.

  “You know, Ivoe, when I was about your age I sure hated to come to the woods,” she said, taking two handfuls of bark from the child.

  “How come?”

  “Scared of trees.”

  Ivoe’s eyes widened. “How you stopped being afraid?”

  “I acted like they was peoples—friends of mine. Even give them names.” May-Belle chuckled. “Anybody what saw me talking to those trees probably thought my dough wasn’t all the way done but that’s how I figured to use my little bit. See, Ivoe, when we children the Creator gives each
and every one of us a little bit of courage. And when that little bit is gone we get some more. You can’t get no more less you use up what the Creator done already give. Now, less you want to grow up a big and strong woman with iddy-biddy courage what’s only fit for a child, you better use up what you got.” She pointed down to a patch of tiny yellow flowers. “Now, grab me some of that.”

  Ivoe plucked the calico dress sticking to her damp chest as the sun drummed hot fingers against her neck, making her long for the creek. “Leeches don’t scare me no more, Auntie. All you got to do is peel them off. Timbo say you got to be quick about it. And I’m quick. Momma just don’t know how quick I am. She—” There was no chance to hope that they would spare her this time. The voices calling to her from the distance were already too close.

  “Look who finally learned alligators don’t belong in a schoolhouse.”

  Ivoe recalled her mother’s advice, but her own little bit of courage was as fresh on her mind as the dandelions she crushed.

  “Alligator, you hear us talking to you?”

  “I hear you,” Ivoe grumbled, releasing mashed flowers to grab the shoes she had tossed aside. When the boy recovered from the smack, like hot steel against his face, he ran off just as Ivoe knocked his sister to the ground, striking her all over with her broken shoes.

  Upland a mile from the grove where May-Belle watched Ivoe scramble, neither encouraging nor discouraging the scuffle, Lemon left the Stark house. Miss Susan had fixed her wagon all right, relieving her of all duties because she had done what any decent mother would do, looked after her son instead of kowtowing when Mr. Stark died. She ain’t put it that way, exactly. Never knowed any Stark to hit a thing directly. They had to go all the way around the mulberry bush, up one side and down the other, before they even thought about striking center.

  No need for double kitchen help now that Mr. Stark was dead, Susan had said. “Minnie can handle it.” Ssth. Minnie always was the favored one, even though she had to be told things twice and couldn’t plan a meal. Tell her to scramble an egg and Minnie would leave most of it stuck to the skillet. How did Susan expect to get along in a house that size with help that took a day and a half just to dust? Lemon thought. Give them Starks my best cooking for years. Cooked meals I be too tired to fix for my own. Now Mr. Stark gone and what I got to show for it? What I got but a head full of worry and a heart fixing to break?