I put on my gloves. Mr. Patch had given me a broom, but it was useless, so I crept along the tracks with my back bent, dropping wads of chewing tobacco into my pail. Occasionally, I found a scrap of cardboard or an empty coffee cup, but for the most part, since it was the men’s custom to stand at the wall and spit, I was in a field of chewed tobacco.
Dopey followed me along the top of the wall with his broom pointing out trash I had missed, and when someone walked by, he swept dust down on my head. He looked exhausted.
Throughout the afternoon, the men came by to see for themselves that Mr. Peppers’s daughter was indeed picking up their spit. Polecat and Jack pushed carts of board along the wall, pretending not to notice me until Jack jerked the cart to a stop, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked down. “Polecat! What’s that crawling down there on the tracks?”
Polecat looked. “Why, that’s a rat,” he said.
“Naw, not the rat. That other thing. The little fellow. The funny looking one with the ponytail and gloves.”
“Why, that’s Experiment! Experiment, did you fall down there?”
T. C. came by with a big wad of tobacco in his cheek and pretended to spit. Smiley stood beside him and frowned.
When I had worked my way halfway down the tracks and had nearly reached the invisible line that divided the front and back of the plant, Dopey emerged from hiding. Standing with his legs spread, as though a great gust of wind might blow him over, he shouted, “All right! We can stop here. I ain’t picking up after no niggers.”
I continued to stomp along with my pail, even though there wasn’t anything to pick up. The black workers didn’t throw things on the tracks the way the white workers did. Growing more and more agitated, Dopey followed me along the edge of the wall. “I said, all right now! Don’t go no further!” He took another pill. “I ain’t sweeping up no watermelon rinds, you hear?”
Suddenly, a silence fell over the plant. The corrugator still hissed; the M-12 chugged and banged, and the bailer swallowed, chewed, and spit up its scrap board, but the hum of voices had ceased. The floor, which had been crawling with lines of men engaged in a regular path of social intercourse, emptied. As if lifted by some magical hand, each employee now stood, back bent, head down, over his assigned job. Even Dopey managed to get down the ladder and stroke his broom along the clean tracks.
When I raised my head, I was eye-level to Henry’s black wing tips, polished to a dull sheen, never a shine. He wore a light gray suit with a navy blue tie. In the green fluorescent light of the plant, his shirt was whiter than paper. His gold watch and ring hung in the murky air like two distant stars.
“How’s my little worker?” he asked, smiling down at me.
“Your daddy is a handsome man,” Jeremiah had told me once, in the same matter-of-fact voice he used when he said, “Your daddy is a good man.” I saw this now, and at the same time, I understood what Florida meant when she said, “Henry, you’re turned off. As soon as you get away from the plant, you turn off like a light.” Now, he was on.
“Are you doing all right?” he asked.
“Yes sir.” I grinned at him and went back to work. For some time, I was aware of his eyes following my gloved hands as they reached for invisible trash, and I tried to do the job perfectly. When he was gone, I knew it without looking up.
Dopey, having decided it was too much trouble to get back up the ladder, and hoping to stop me from cleaning up more of the wrong trash, parked his broom in front of me. Leaning his wizened body on the handle, he adjusted his glasses and began to sing, “Always on My Mind.” I listened, amazed. Dopey could sing.
IT WAS A good summer to sing. In the morning bluebirds, cardinals, and chickadees belted out hymns until the heat sent them deep into the green woods. On most afternoons, thunder crashed liked cymbals. All night long, the katydids played in stereo. After work, driving the Bonneville up Mount Zion with the windows rolled down, I lip-synched to all the love songs on WXYB Continuous Country Music.
One hot Saturday night, at Frenchie’s Bar across the New Hope River, Drew snatched me back to reality. Frenchie owned most of the property on the other side of the river. His business acumen qualified him to be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Georgia Business and Industry Association, and even the Three Bears Country Club, but he did not run in those circles. He had a beard, for one thing—a short beard, but facial hair nonetheless. He went to tractor pulls, followed professional wrestling, and did not conjugate his verbs. He beat his three-hundred-pound wife and openly cavorted with other women. He hated black people and was responsible for the unofficial zoning laws that rocketed them over to our side of the river where we clucked our tongues and gave them a corner. Frenchie was a member of the two organizations that would have him—the NRA and the KKK.
That summer, I loved to venture across the river where country music abounded. With reservations, Drew would accompany me to Frenchie’s Bar, the only establishment in Counterpoint that accepted our University of Nebraska swimming pool ID cards, verifying that we were eighteen years old, the legal drinking age in Georgia. She met me in the parking lot. Humming, “Get off my satin sheets,” I swung Partyville in beside her Jeep. She was wearing a pressed white polo shirt and rumpled khakis; her hair, like mine, was pulled back into a tight ponytail.
“Well, there you are,” she said in a surly voice. “What a relief. Two rednecks have been doing wheelies around my car. Boy, was I impressed.” She mimicked them, drawling, “Hey there honey! Wanna come out to the lock and dam with us and get fucked up?” Then she did her redneck laugh, a noise that sounded both sinister and retarded, “Huh-huh.” Out of habit, I checked the parking lot for T. C. Curtis’s black Monte Carlo.
We climbed through the Harleys parked at the front door and entered the cinder-block shack where red neon lights flashed across tired faces at the bar. Drew selected a small table in the corner, and we ordered a pitcher of beer. We talked about our mothers. I reported that Florida was sneaking Bible verses into my lunch bag; Drew announced that Mrs. St. John had sent her a laundry bill—the nerve. We spoke in the well-modulated voices of Bridgewater girls, flashing the multicolored rubber bands on our braces when we laughed. We got very drunk.
The men leered at us, and a few stumbled over and tried to start a conversation, but Drew was curt. If the gentleman persuaded himself that her cold front was a bluff, Frenchie himself came out and chased him back to the bar. He had no interest in protecting a girl’s virtue, but when he saw a dollar, he didn’t let it get away. So we sat in our corner, like two Siamese cats in a barnyard, talking about sex.
“You won’t believe what happened at work today,” Drew said, flushing pink to her ears. “There’s this huge black guy, Gus, who’s always flirting with me? He’s horrible. He really is. I mean, he’s funny, but he’s horrible. We were on the dough line. The dough rolls out of a tube, Gus pushes a button that slices it, and I inspect the slices that come down the conveyor belt. That’s my job title: inspector. Don’t be too impressed. Gus calls me, Inspector Drew. Well, this morning, before I was really awake, I saw this huge roll of dough coming down the assembly line. It kept getting longer and longer; he wasn’t pushing the button that slices it. I looked back at him to see what the hell he was doing, and he goes, ‘Baby, this is how much I love you!’”
She laughed from her belly, crossing her arms over her chest, pushing her sleeves up over the line that marked her tennis tan, silver braces flashing, rocking back and forth in her chair. She wore no makeup, no socks, and no jewelry except for a pearl necklace that had belonged to her grandmother. She smelled of soap. She was everything I wanted to be.
We were halfway through our third pitcher of beer, arguing the importance of wang length versus wang circumference, when I made a comment about men’s balls.
“Stupid!” Drew’s blue eyes widened in amazement; her lip curled. “How many balls do you think a man has?”
I took a sip of beer, hiding my face in the mug. In the
most nonchalant voice I could muster, I said, “Three.”
The look on Drew’s face made me wilt. “Louise,” she said in a strained voice, clumsily taking a cigarette from her pack, “listen to me. A man has two balls: one, two. Two, okay?”
I shrugged, as if one more or one less ball made no difference to me, but she knew better.
“Jesus,” she said softly. “What am I going to do with you?”
WHEN I GOT home that evening, Florida was sitting at the kitchen table with a plastic bag over her head. “Daddy-Go had another stroke. Mother called tonight. She’s out of her mind. He’s going to go soon. He didn’t want to leave the farm. Says we’re killing him. Doesn’t remember that the place burned down. He was walking out in the yard, lost, trying to go home, when he had the stroke.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Her nose was red from crying.
“I’m coloring my hair. Your father is downstairs asleep in his chair. I’m going to be a redhead whether he likes it or not. Like you were when you went to Fernando’s in Atlanta. You might want to think about going back to him.” She eyed my ponytail, but decided not to criticize. “I refuse to get old and gray. How was your movie?”
Leaning against the wall to balance myself, I shut one eye and said, “Fine.” Florida had lost her sense of smell when she was pregnant with Roderick, so she couldn’t tell when I was drunk.
“Your father won’t go to the movies with me.”
“Mom, don’t start.”
“He just sits in that chair every night. Doesn’t communicate. Doesn’t have anything to talk about but work, work, work. That plant. That’s his life. I don’t know why he even comes home.” Lightly, she touched her neck, fingering the loose skin. “I’ve gotten old and ugly, Louise.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“We’ll have to go up there soon. Daddy won’t last much longer. Henry doesn’t think you should go to the funeral. Says it will upset you. You lost it at Roderick’s funeral. Just lost it. Mother doesn’t need to see that. And we don’t have a psychiatrist in Counterpoint right now. You’re sensitive, always have been. Roderick used to say, ‘She’s fragile,’ when you were a baby. Tell me not to drop you. You never think your child will die before you do. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
She began to sob. I edged out of the kitchen, keeping one hand on the wall. Suddenly, she ripped the bag off her head, splattering drops of red dye across the table.
“Go!” She screamed. “Go back to your room to get away from me. Crawl into your hole! You and Henry do the same thing. ‘Leave me alone!’ you say. ‘Don’t bother me!’ All right! I’ll die, too. I’m the one who should go. You all don’t need me.” The sobs choked her. “Don’t want me—this dried-up old hag! Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!”
My body went numb; I couldn’t speak. As fast as I could, I stumbled to my room, fell, got up again, and finally managed to get behind the closed door and crawl to my bed. For a while, I kept the walls from spinning by holding on to the mattress, but eventually I had to let go. At 3:00 a.m., when the phone rang, I was still puking.
I knew it was Death. Henry was in charge of Death. His footsteps in the hallway were slow and measured. The knock on the door was certain.
Chapter Eight
GRANDMOTHER DELEUTH HAD never liked her husband, but she’d been joined to him for sixty-five years, and the idea of life without him was unbearable. At the hospital, her heart attack followed his. Some relatives said it was the only thing they’d ever agreed on.
In the dimly lit kitchen, Henry held Florida in his arms. His back was very straight. There was a tautness to his face, drawing the skin tight over his cheekbones. His eyes burned with intensity. For a moment, as he held her that way, and she was still, I saw them as they must have been when they married.
Henry arranged everything. When he saw that I had been sick, he thought it was a violent reaction to my grandparents’ deaths, and he decided that I should stay in Counterpoint. He changed the sheets on my bed, went to an all-night grocery store and stocked the house with food, made sure I knew where to find my keys and my credit card, and then counted crisp twenty dollar bills out into my palm. He gave me Reverend Waller’s phone number neatly printed on a card. I was to go to work, as usual, and in my free time, visit Drew. They would call me every day from Red Cavern and be home in a couple of weeks, as soon as they had taken care of things up there.
Several days later, slumped over my ham and rye, I watched T. C. meander into the break room, toss his black lunch box on the table, and to the astonishment of all of us on first shift, sit down next to me. When someone popped the tab off a Fanta grape, it sounded like a gunshot.
“T. C., don’t mess with the boss’s daughter,” said Smiley. “You’ll get fired.”
T. C. bit into a pecan twirl. I sat stiffly, careful not to brush my arm against his shoulder, afraid to eat lest I offend him. When he had finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pushed the wrapper toward me. “How do you say that?” he asked, pointing at the label. I was suddenly terrified that he might be illiterate. Was I in love with someone who couldn’t read and write? Drew would be aghast.
“Pecan twirl,” I said quietly. Even though I hadn’t moved an inch, our shoulders were touching.
“What was that?” He grinned. “I’m a little hard of hearing.” He leaned his face in close to mine. “Did you say ‘pe-con’ or ‘pee-can’?”
“Theodore Curtis, you better get back over here on your side of the tracks!” someone called out.
“That’s right,” said Smiley. “Over on that side of the tracks they got a bad-ass cop on a horse. Real scary dude.”
“Y’all think he braids that tail himself?”
T. C. offered me half of his sandwich. It was nearly lost in his big hand, and seeing the shallow indention of his fingers in the soft white bread, I couldn’t help but imagine how he would hold my breast.
“Thank you,” I said.
Behind me, the men sniggered.
T. C. leaned even closer. He put one hand over his ear.
“Is that a yes or a no?” His arm was as big around as my leg, and as he turned closer to me, the span of his chest hid my face from the other men. He took jagged, heavy breaths, like an old man with a bad heart.
“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my hand steady as I removed a cigarette from my pack. His lighter came out in a flash. I had the wrong end of the cigarette in my mouth. He turned it around for me, ignoring the hoots from the back table. “I mean no,” I said. My voice sounded fake, the way it did when I showed my ID to a bartender. “I don’t want a sandwich.”
When it looked like we might not have a conversation, he said, “I’m real sorry about your grandparents. Where did they live?”
Then I did something crazy. In plain view of every hand at Southern Board, in a loud voice, I asked T. C. for a date.
No one was as surprised as Theodore himself. He became suddenly shy. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll have a beer with you after work.” Then he turned away from me to eat his sandwich. While he ate, I watched the white T-shirt stretching over the muscle in his back, the two damp curls swirling above his ear. With a leap of faith, I allowed T. C. Curtis to become the man who loved the woman in every country song I had ever heard.
“HE SOUNDS LIKE a real fixer-upper,” said Drew, when I described T. C. to her over the phone.
“It’s like negative capability,” I explained. “You know. John Keats, the poet? He said that negative capability is required to read poetry, or write it, or something. It’s the willing suspension of disbelief.”
“Education is wasted on you,” said Drew. “Does he have a big wang?”
“I don’t know!” I screamed, still embarrassed about the three balls. “We’ve only gone to second base.” Then more calmly I said, “I want him to fall in love with me.”
“Next time you hold his hand,” said Drew, “measure the distance between the bottom of his palm and the tip of of his middle finge
r.”
“What if he knows what I’m doing?”
“Louise, it’s not supposed to be this hard for a girl to lose her virginity. Just focus.”
NO ONE AT the plant said anything to me about T. C., but they discussed me among themselves, shouting over the roar of the machinery whenever I walked by.
“What’s that thing sticking out of Experiment’s cap?” asked Polecat. “She don’t have enough hair to make a ponytail. Smiley, don’t you think she should cut that thing off? Now that she’s old enough to date and all.”
“Hey Polecat,” said Smiley, stepping around me with a load of board. “Are you cold?”
“Hell, it ain’t but a hundred degrees in here.”
“Well, Experiment’s wearing gloves.”
“How much you think she weighs?”
“What I want to know is how much her daddy pays for her to go to that private school.”
They all tested me to see if I was smart enough to go to college. “Now listen, Experiment,” Polecat would say, climbing down his ladder. “Say you got a litter of six black pigs, and a litter of seven white pigs, and two of them black pigs gets the cough, but only one dies, and the dog eats four of them white pigs, but somebody trades you three black pigs for a lawn mower, how many pigs you got?”
When I gave the incorrect answer, he wanted to know what I studied at Bridgewater. The men circled me, curious.
“Latin? Who talks that?”
“Now Jack, you tell me what’s the point in paying somebody to teach religion when the preacher does it for free.”
“Hell, anybody can cut up a cat. Rabbits is harder ‘cause you got to catch ‘em first.”
Jeremiah was the only one who asked serious questions about Bridgewater. He wanted his son to attend. “I’ve been saving up for eight years now,” he told me. “I want that boy to have an education.” Dutifully, I answered his questions about entrance exams, course requirements, and dress codes, but I didn’t try to encourage him. Rudy Bloom had jumped off the Meshack Bridge at spring break, survived, and developed an ulcer. The other black kid, Franklin Harris, made the honor roll every semester, but he always ate lunch by himself. On the other hand, Gabriella Gubbel had shot herself, and she was white. Sometimes when I was working at the bailer, with my head stuck in the big mouth that chewed scrap board, I’d remember how we used to call out “Gabbygabbygabby! Gobblegobblegobble!” just to watch her cover her ears in pain. I didn’t know Jeremiah’s son, but I wanted to protect him.
The School of Beauty and Charm Page 14