by Gin Phillips
They lived in a clapboard house set up on cinder blocks, all of them packed in nothing but a big sitting room and a kitchen. If I’d put my head to the outside wall, I could’ve seen through the holes between the planks. Not that there was much to see—a stove, two rockers with the seats fraying, a table and chairs, and a small iron bed in one corner. I guessed the kids slept on the floor.
It had taken Tess and me an hour to climb the tree and get enough ripe apples to fill the basket—it’d really be another week before they started dropping to the ground ready to eat.
“Hello, Mrs. Lowe,” I said, holding out the basket. “We brought you some apples.”
“Right nice of you,” she said, just standing there looking at us, no smile at all. She didn’t look overcome by goodwill. We’d never come by before, and Mama and her weren’t especially friends. Nobody was good friends with Mrs. Lowe. She mainly stayed in her house with all those little ones. “Y’all here to see Ellen?”
Ellen was in Tess’s class. She only had one dress, worn thin like paper, with more patches than dress. We should’ve figured Mrs. Lowe would want to know why we were dropping by.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “We just had some extra apples and thought y’all might like some.”
Still no smile.
“And we ain’t seen your new baby yet,” said Tess. “But I heard he’s precious.” She grinned when she said it, dimples showing, tilting her head a little in that way that made her curls shake. I’d said I would do the talking, but I couldn’t do what Tess did. She could turn on charm like pulling the light switch, the right words coming out so bright and easy. Adults were always patting her head, laughing at her, whispering to Papa and Mama how clever she was, what a cute little thing. And it wasn’t like she even had to pull the string—it just happened. My hands were clammy and my mouth was dry and my shoulders hurt from holding so stiff, and I’d rehearsed what I wanted to say all the way over, and then Tess just turned on her light.
And I was so glad she did that I could have cried.
Mrs. Lowe looked at us awhile longer, then she stepped back and swung the door open wide. “Come on in.”
I stepped through first, followed by Tess. Lola Lowe’d had half as many husbands as she had children, and they kept on dying. Her fifth was in Kentucky trying to find work. One keeled over of a heart attack, one choked on a chicken gizzard, one got smacked by a car walking home from town one night. I couldn’t remember the fourth one.
Mrs. Lowe took the basket, carrying it over to the kitchen, which was really just one corner of the room with shelves and the table and stove. “Y’all want your basket back now? I can dump out the apples.”
It was only an old strawlike thing with the edges chewed up. “No rush, ma’am. Just keep it until the apples are gone,” I said.
“Have a seat,” she said.
There were four cane-bottomed chairs around the table, so I pulled one out. Tess did, too. Mrs. Lowe pulled out the third one, which had a piece of twine tied in a loop around two of the legs. She noticed me looking down.
“The boys kept resting their feet on the wood bar and it finally broke in two,” she said. “String does just as well holdin’ the legs together. Sorry we ain’t got a sofa.”
“We don’t have one neither,” said Tess quickly. “Just rockers. And my brother’s just like that, always tearin’ everything up. Boys are nothin’ but trouble.”
Mrs. Lowe smiled at that, probably not so much at the words as at the way Tess shook her head in such a serious, grown-up way.
Then we sat and looked at each other, and I tried to think of anything else I knew about sofas or chairs or apples. It was a different kind of quiet than at our house. When none of us were talking, it was comfortable, peaceful, like at night after the birds and crickets are asleep. This kind of quiet made me want to jump up from the table and run clear to Jasper.
“Did you say you wanted to see the baby?” asked Mrs. Lowe.
“Yes!” we both answered, too loud and too fast. She likely thought we were there to kidnap it.
He was alive and well, it turned out, a little chubby and more than a little red. Mrs. Lowe held him just like Mama used to hold Jack, and I thought how every woman seemed to know where to put their hands and how to fit the feet and knees and elbows against them so everything was tucked in snugly. Mama had told me to never let Jack’s neck snap back and never let his head jerk. It did once or twice accidentally, and I prayed for his brain not to jostle too much and run out his nose.
“His name’s Franklin, Frankie we call him.” Mrs. Lowe tipped him down so we could see his face better. “Ain’t he a big, jolly one? Only four months.”
He was big, but awfully quiet. I couldn’t remember Jack ever being quiet. When he wasn’t crying, he’d coo and gurgle and make silly sputters. But Mrs. Lowe only smiled at her boy—she had a chipped front tooth, I noticed—and didn’t seem to mind him keeping to himself. I guessed she appreciated a quiet one.
“Can I hold him?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, already holding him out to me. I eased one arm under his back, cupping his head like Mama told me, and scooped him toward my chest. Then I wasn’t sure what to do with him. “Would he like me to sit or stand?” I asked Mrs. Lowe.
“Don’t matter,” she said. “Just rock him a bit side to side.”
So I did, walking and bobbing around the room. I hadn’t held Mrs. Stanton’s baby or Mrs. Torrence’s when we stopped by their places—we went to those two first because they were closest to school. (For those first two visits, I’d felt sick to my stomach all the way there. At least by the time we got to Lola Lowe, I’d gotten over the nausea of practicing a good hello.) Mrs. Stanton was even out on the porch rocking her George, so that time we only waved hello and walked close enough to ooh and ahh a little at how precious he was, even though he was frowning and wrinkled. We didn’t stay more than five minutes at either place, and we didn’t have to go inside. This was a more sociable visit, which really meant it took more work.
“He’s good,” I said.
“Yep. Not colicky or nothin’. Sweet as pie.”
I sat down again and swayed back and forth in my chair. Frankie seemed equally happy. Tess stood behind me and stroked his peach-fuzz head.
“Your mama doin’ alright?” asked Mrs. Lowe.
“Yes’m,” Tess answered.
“Did you know we went to school together in Townley?”
“No, ma’am,” we both answered. Mama had never mentioned knowing Lola Lowe when she was a girl. But Mama didn’t talk much about being a girl herself.
“Met her when I was about your age,” she said, nodding to Tess. I figured then that she didn’t know our names, but it was too late to tell them to her. “She had the longest braids I’d ever seen.”
“Our hair won’t grow that long,” said Tess. “It gets to our shoulders and just stops growing.”
Mrs. Lowe went on like Tess hadn’t spoken. “She was a real pretty girl. Real sweet, too. One of the few girls I thought highly of in school. ’Course, she went on to high school and nearly finished, and I left after grammar school to help my mama. Married my first husband not a year later.”
She must’ve been barely older than me when she married.
“But your mama brought me a pound cake when I got married. Nobody else brought me nothin’. Thought real highly of her. Tell her I said hello.”
A girl barely able to stay on her feet wearing nothing but a rag of some sort pinned around her bottom wobbled over to Mrs. Lowe. Pee was leaking down her leg, dripping on the floor. Her face was all screwed up and she was starting to whimper.
“Lord have mercy!” said her mother, scooping her up, but holding her away from her body. She snatched a stained sheet—probably a clean one—off a stack of laundry in the corner and lay it across the table where we were sitting. When she started to unfasten the baby’s diaper, I scooted back my chair and turned to face the other way. That pee’d run right through t
he sheet onto the dinner table.
I watched Mrs. Lowe wrestle a cloth around the baby’s bottom, digging for safety pins in the pocket of her used-to-be-flowered dress, and I didn’t see an ounce of temper in her face. She looked as calm and mild as she had since we walked in, never mind the peeing or the staining or the crying. I’d been thinking she was the most likely of the women on the list because she had the least money and the most children. So she’d be stretched thinnest, I’d figured. She kept herself apart from the other women—maybe not by design, but she did it just the same. Of course from the minute we laid eyes on the baby I knew I’d been wrong, but I was beginning to feel ashamed of myself for even thinking it. My tongue felt thick and my temperature’d shot up like when the teacher called on me in class or when I’d walked home with Henry Harken. I told myself I was being bashful and silly like Ella said, but the feeling just sunk deeper. My stomach curled up in a ball as I sat there watching the baby in my lap eat his fist.
It would have been easier for me to understand—and for get about—the baby in the well if it had been Mrs. Lowe that put him there. I’d have known that having kids didn’t make you lose your mind—just having a houseful of them. And it wouldn’t be as if a woman who’d sat in our kitchen sipping tea had done it. Lola Lowe was barely a real person to me. At least until I walked into her house and saw her smile at her children. I started to see the problem with my plan—I was going to get to know all these women if I talked to them long enough. And then they’d all be real.
A yellow-haired boy with hair down to his eyebrows put both hands on my knee. Snot ran thick and yellow from his nose; smudges had dried on his cheeks. I had a handkerchief in my pocket, and I jostled the baby around a little so I could pull out the little square and hand it to him. (Mama always said a lady should never be without a handkerchief.) He looked at it like I’d handed him purple galoshes, so I wiped his nose for him, then gave him the cloth.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He mumbled and drug his sleeve across his nose so that I couldn’t understand him. “What was it?” I asked again.
“Mark.”
“After the apostle,” his mother called, looking over her shoulder.
“I’m Virgie.”
He stared at me. I pointed at Tess. “That’s my sister, Tess.”
“How old are you?” asked Tess.
He looked at his mother. “Six,” she answered.
One year younger than Jack, and he wasn’t half my brother’s size. He looked like he was barely out of diapers. “Can you hold up six fingers?” I asked, holding up six of my own behind the baby’s back.
“Six,” he said. “I’m six.” He didn’t let go of the handkerchief I’d given him, didn’t move his fingers at all. “Apples,” he added, pointing at the basket. “I like apples.”
“He likes everything,” Mrs. Lowe said, talking out one side of her mouth with a safety pin in her teeth. “Don’t have a picky kid in the bunch.”
“What’re we havin’ for supper, Mama?” Mark asked, flapping the handkerchief. He didn’t really seem too curious. His nose was running again.
“Blackberries and bread.”
His expression didn’t change.
“I love blackberries,” Tess said.
“They’re better in pies,” Mark said.
“I like ’em plain,” she said.
“I used to.”
I’d heard Papa and Mama both say about one person or another who couldn’t find work that they’d starve if it wasn’t for blackberries and bread, and why didn’t Mama bring them by some real food.
The little girl on the table started howling then, probably not liking the cold air on her wet rear end, and the baby in my arms seemed to catch her bad mood. He screwed up his face and mewled, so I stood up and started pacing. The door opened then and Ellen walked in, looking surprised to see me and Tess. She tugged at her one dress, and I saw the thoughts flash across her face as clear as if they’d been spelled out in a bubble over her head like in Little Orphan Annie. She realized how we were seeing this—her mother changing a diaper on the kitchen table, her brother with dried snot on his face, our basket of apples the only food we could see in the place. The stove wasn’t lit, and I knew they had no firewood or coal to burn in it. It was one thing to be poor as Job’s turkey, but it was something else to have somebody from the outside stick themselves in the middle of it. She said hello without looking us in the face, held out her arms for her baby brother, and crossed the room as soon as I handed him to her. We only stayed another few minutes, but Ellen never met our eyes once.
We didn’t really talk on the way home. I felt dirty and sad and glad that I’d left that boy my handkerchief.
Tess IT WOULD’VE MADE MORE SENSE TO THINK THAT LOLA Lowe had a cradle full of eggs and that that houseful of children had hatched out in one bundle. To think of each of those ten big-eyed, all-knees-and-elbows kids tucked in her belly made me ache. It was much nicer to think of them packed safely inside an egg, plenty to eat and a warm body keeping them snug.
“Why would somebody have so many kids?” I asked Virgie. We’d sat down on the porch steps when we got home, and nobody had noticed us yet. I was trying to get a sulfur butterfly to land on my finger, but he wasn’t having any of it.
She shrugged, hands crossed in her lap.
So I kept talking. “’Cause I don’t know why you’d have ’em if you can’t feed ’em.”
“I don’t think she planned on not feedin’ ’em,” she said. The stupid butterfly landed on her shoulder. She didn’t notice, and I didn’t tell her.
“I bet they haven’t had anybody call on them in ages,” I said. “Bet they was glad to see us.”
“Hush up, Tess.”
“What?”
She jerked to her feet. “Can’t you ever just sit and not talk? You’re givin’ me a pain in my head!”
She’d yelled. That took me aback. Virgie never lost her temper—she clammed up cold and hard and far away. Even that one time when I dipped my finger in ashes and drew big eyebrows and a mustache on her while she slept, she only flung herself out of bed and stomped off without a word. But she was almost shaking this time.
“I was only talkin’. Don’t take my head off,” I said.
“So quit talkin’.”
“You quit listenin’.”
“You’re such a baby.”
“You’re a nag.”
“I said quit talkin’.”
“You can keep on sayin’ it all you want!”
She sighed and stalked off toward the woods, and happy as I was to get in the last word, I was still confused. And that won out. “What’s the matter with you?” I yelled after her just as she reached the edge of the yard.
She stopped but didn’t turn around. “I don’t think it was such a nice thing we did today,” she said.
I dreamed a dream more sound than picture that night. Mrs. Lowe’s baby Frankie was screaming underwater, but instead of a voice, he had a stream of bubbles pouring out of his mouth. I was only up to my knees in the water, and I reached down and plugged my finger in his mouth. He smiled and smiled, sucking away, and I didn’t make any move to pull him out of the water.
Leta THE GIRLS WERE SO QUIET AT SUPPER. I COULD’VE sworn they liked biscuits and gravy. But they ate slow like they were having to stuff it down. I hadn’t beat all the lumps out of the gravy, and the biscuits didn’t rise as much as I’d have liked. My sister Merilyn made such fluffy biscuits, more air than dough, and mine never seemed to be that light. And they might have gotten a little too brown on the bottom.
“Somethin’ wrong, Tess?” I asked. She was always more likely to open up than Virgie.
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t like your biscuits?”
“I do. They’re real good.” She shoveled half a biscuit in her mouth to show me.
“Think they’re alright, Papa?” I looked over at Albert, who’d finished his plate and was reaching for anothe
r biscuit.
“What’s that?” he said, clearly thinking about nothing other than where the gravy spoon had gotten to. I pulled it from under a cloth and handed it to him.
“I said the girls are mighty quiet.”
“Prob’bly too busy eatin’ to talk,” he said. “Best biscuits in the world, Leta-ree. Ain’t no finer cook anywhere than your mama. Y’all remember that.”
5 Jonah
Jack SOMETIMES I WAS ALLOWED TO GO CAMPING WITH boys from school. Not overnight—not until I was ten or twelve—but long enough to roast marshmallows and sit around the fire.
There was a group of us, and Paul Kelly was always the center of it. A big boy, three years older than me, he could shoot any squirrel or bird he aimed at, and he always built the fire. I’d seen him wrestle high school boys and beat them. Once he ate a roach on a dare.
One night he bet he could hold his breath for the time it took him to get the fire going. And he did—it was only seconds before sparks from his flint caught on the little pile of leaves and twigs. He never even turned red. Paul Kelly. He was the one who always talked about niggers. I’d heard the word at school, but not like Paul said it. He said he hated them. Must’ve said it twenty times with that fire lighting up his face.
It would be dark and still and with that fire shining on him and him built up in my mind already, he seemed like John the Baptist (who ate locusts himself) or some other prophet who could call down all sorts of things from heaven.
In church we learned about Cain and Abel. Abel tended the flocks and Cain worked the soil, and the Lord preferred Abel’s offerings of fat firstborn animal sacrifices to Cain’s offerings of vegetables. (Even as a teenager, Tess would keep on about that pas sage all the way home from church—“Do you think God would like squash? Do you think Cain got in all that trouble just because God was allergic to green beans or some such?” And eventually Papa would tell her to hush because she was being sacrilegious, and he’d try to keep his mouth from twitching. But Cain was jealous that the Lord favored Abel, and he killed his brother. The Lord heard Abel’s blood cry out to him from the ground, and he cursed Cain to wander ceaselessly across the earth. And to make sure that Cain wasn’t killed before he got in a life’s worth of wandering, God put the Mark of Cain on him.