by Gin Phillips
“Reckon not.”
I didn’t want her to feel unwelcome, but I couldn’t leave the clothes. The fire had got going strong and the clothes were boiling, all but chaining me there to the pot. I found myself wishing she’d come a few hours earlier when I’d have welcomed a break.
It took twelve trips from the creek to fill up the iron wash pot sitting at the edge of the hackberries, and after six trips my arms felt like they might pop out of their sockets. Then there was the fire to be stoked underneath, which at least didn’t take much strength. While the straw and twigs lit up and teased the bigger logs into burning, I’d sort through the clothes, making piles of the darks and lights and whites. Only needed to boil work clothes, sheets, and anything really dirty. That meant about everything of Jack’s.
But once the wood was going, I couldn’t afford to waste it by taking a break, no matter how my arms screamed or my face burned or my throat begged for a gulp of cool, dry air instead of the steam pouring out of the pot. The clothes were tossing around, overalls and shirts and socks bobbing over and through the foam. It was the dirtiest load, in need of the longest soak. I’d do sheets separate. The dresses and the rest of the clothes—ones not needing boiling—I’d scrub over the washboard as the others boiled. The clean, sudsy dresses were piled on top of an old blanket, waiting to be rinsed. I looked at Lola, then looked at my piles of clothes, then looked down at the clothes still cooking and gave them a swirl with the old broom handle. Lola spoke before I figured out what I wanted to say.
“No need to stop,” she said. She was standing over the soapy pile. “These done?”
“They’re done.”
“And this the rinsin’ tub?”
“It is,” I said, nodding at the silver circle filled with clean water. “But don’t you be doin’ that, Lola. Just pull a chair out from the kitchen and visit with me a spell. I’ll take a rest before rinsin’ time.”
The wash took a whole day’s work once a week. It would be nice to have another pair of hands, even if I didn’t want to admit it. If the sun was bright, I might be able to finish the ironing before bedtime. But if it turned cloudy and cooler, the ironing would have to wait until tomorrow. I liked to wash in the creek on account of the heat from the fire, but without the girls to help, it wasn’t worth the hike there and back.
Lola made an impolite, horselike kind of sound. “I sure as Sam Hill ain’t gone sit here and yammer while you work,” she said. “I got time—Ellen’s mindin’ the little ones.”
So I kept on stirring while she started dunking clothes piece by piece, drenching them then wringing them out, finally draping them over the clothesline.
“I’ll leave you to hang ’em as you like,” she said.
We went on like that for a while, no sound but water sloshing and wood crackling. I pulled a pair of overalls out, shook them until the steam died down, and looked them over. I used the tips of my fingers to hold up first one leg, then the other, then smoothed out the bib to where I could see it without any shadows or folds. Mostly clean. No smell to them. I added them to the washtub, which Lola had almost emptied.
“I’ll work on scrubbing these,” she said. “You get to hangin’ when you finish up.”
By the time I finished dipping out the sheets, the fire had died down of its own accord. I did as she’d told me, not seeing any sense in commenting or arguing. If she was rinsing, then I ought to be hanging. We got into a good rhythm by the time she started rinsing the second batch of clothes, handing me a piece at a time to pin up. After the heat making my face pour sweat (“perspiration,” I always corrected the girls) and the steam making my hair woolly, I welcomed the easiness of hanging. Nothing but snapping and tucking and smoothing.
“Good girls you got,” Lola said. “Pretty.”
“Nice of you to say so,” I said. I looked over and noticed the basket by her feet then—our old straw basket. Lola saw my eyes fix on it and waved one wet hand toward it.
“Girls left this for me with apples in it. Nice of them.”
“You didn’t have to bring it back. But I thank you.”
I did wonder what possessed the girls to take her apples. I hadn’t gone by her house in more than a year. Last time I went over I took her some eggs, and I could barely remember even visiting with her. But the last year had been a hard one, and we’d been giving away all of our extra. Between kin on Albert’s side and mine, plus whoever happened by the door seeing if we could spare anything, I hadn’t even thought to make a visit.
“They wanted to see my new baby.” Lola had both hands back in the water.
Now that was more unusual than apples. The girls weren’t baby crazy, hadn’t ever been ones for doting on dolls or making cow eyes at little ones. And they didn’t even know Lola. “Can’t imagine what put that in their heads,” I said, more to myself than to her.
The bag of clothespins slapped against my hip as I inched my way down the line. My face had already dried, but I could taste the salt on my knuckles when I’d stick one wooden pin in my mouth while I clamped another one on the line.
“I figured they were worried about Frankie,” Lola said.
I only looked at her, clothespin between my teeth.
“I couldn’t think why they’d come by at first,” she kept on. “Thought maybe you’d sent ’em to say hello, but they didn’t even know we’d growed up together. I asked Ellen if she was friendly with them, and she said not particularly. Then I thought about that dead baby. Thought they might be feelin’ kindly toward babies right now. Maybe needed to see a healthy one.”
If the girls had gone by Lola’s because of the baby, I thought it was more than needing comfort from the sight of a healthy child. I thought Lola figured that, too. She kept rinsing, her head toward the clothes, her hands as regular as if they were set to music.
“I do keep my children fed, Leta,” she said just as I was getting lost in a breeze tussling my hair and whipping my dress. “I care for them right. I’d take the last blanket off my own bed and the food off my own plate for them.”
“’Course you would.”
“You don’t think they’re bad off?”
The breeze wasn’t as relaxing as it had been. I jostled the pins in their bag, not fishing the next one out yet. “Ain’t nobody well-off right now,” I told her. “You’re doin’ the best you can, same as everybody.”
“Didn’t want you or your family thinkin’ poorly of me.”
I wanted to slap the fire out of Tess and Virgie. I wanted to tell Lola nobody thought ill of her, though that wasn’t true. But there was worse things than being poor. I wanted to tell her I thought she’d handled a hard life with not one lick of luck as well as anybody could have. Her father was a drunk, and her mama never had anything for those kids. She did her best to keep them from him, but Lola’d still come to school with welts across her legs and arms and who knows where else even when she was a little bitty thing. There wasn’t anything new about it—I could name a dozen women who had the same story—but it didn’t make it any righter just because it wasn’t the first time or the first woman. I thought she’d really loved that first boy she married, but then he died not long after her first baby was born. And ten children later, she still didn’t have no one to lean on what with the dull-witted fellow she’d married the last time not able to find a job within two hundred miles…and even if he did, she’d never see a penny. I thought for Lola to still be standing, still as good-hearted as she was when we’d played ring-around-the-rosy at Tess’s age, was a sign she was made of a rare, precious thing. Of course you didn’t say such things.
“I ain’t got a bad word to say about you, Lola. Not one.”
She might have smiled, but she was looking down, and I went back to my hanging. I didn’t think I’d ever mentioned anything about Lola to the girls—nothing I hate more in this world than gossip—and I wondered what they’d thought of her. Maybe them poking around a bit wasn’t a bad thing. Virgie was nearly grown, and she’d been so bus
y helping around the house, she’d hardly seen the insides of any others. Not other than kin and her own friends. Let her and Tess see how blessed we were by their daddy’s work and backbone. Tess had a way of seeing the world as nothing but a playground full of goodies. It made her a happy child quick to smile, but I worried about what kind of adult it might make her. She’d complained one time I sent her on a picnic with just a cold baked potato. She thought it was shameful. I wondered if Lola and her children made her think about that baked potato. I had noticed her talking a little less about magic things at the bottom of the well lately, living a little more in this world than one inside her own head. I hoped that was good.
If my girls wanted to see what the job of living was costing some of these women, I didn’t think it would hurt them none.
Virgie HENRY HARKEN MET ME AFTER CHURCH TWICE MORE. I had less and less to say, and he tried harder and harder to buy me candy.
The last time he walked me home, he wanted to stop by and say hello to Dr. Marshall, whose office was across from the bank. Everybody knew he’d had to replace the bank’s stained-glass windows three times because he kept backing into it while he was trying to park. We used Dr. Grissom, so all I knew about Dr. Marshall was his driving problems.
“His car’s here, so he must be inside,” said Henry.
“Y’all use him?” I asked.
“My papa’s friends with him, so, yeah, we always do.”
“I hear he’s a real bad driver.”
Henry laughed. “He keeps sayin’ ‘whoa’ instead of stompin’ the brakes.”
That was the first time Henry ever made me laugh. And he was interesting for that second. But I still didn’t like him too much, and I didn’t see any reason to work on changing my mind. There was another boy at church who’d started sitting next to me—Tess and I sometimes sat in the pew in front of Mama and Papa—but a lot of times he was late and there wasn’t space for him. Those times he’d wait in the back and walk me to the car. But the car was as far as it ever got.
Papa didn’t even comment on that boy, and I figured it was the short distance. It stood to reason that the farther a boy walked me, the more serious he was. A nice short trip to the car suited Papa fine. Every now and then a boy might walk me home from school, but Tess would walk with us, and Papa didn’t even know about that usually. I’d tell Mama and leave it up to her whether or not she thought it was worth mentioning. She usually didn’t, and I was glad. Because as much as Henry had spooked me that first time he showed up at church, soon enough I didn’t fret about walking with a boy at all. I relaxed when I realized it didn’t mean a boy loved you or wanted to marry you—it meant he thought spending five minutes with you might be a nice way to pass the time. Or maybe he liked looking at you and wanted to look a little longer. Walks were easy, natural things where nothing much was expected of me. Boys loved to talk, and there wasn’t much to listening. I could nod and say, “Hmm, I didn’t know that,” and boys were perfectly happy. Or if I wanted to say something—anything—they were pleased as punch with that, too. It was hard to go wrong once I realized they only wanted to interest me.
So all that walking served its purpose, and in a few weeks I got to where it seemed normal for this boy or that to show up by my side. For some reason Henry asking me (or maybe asking Papa) that first time had given the all clear to the others, and I was grateful to him for that, for somehow pushing me into this thing that had so terrified me.
And I was grateful to him for introducing me to Dr. Marshall. The doctor answered his door when we knocked that Sunday afternoon, and suddenly I was staring at a tuft of white hair and a big, wide smile with the straightest teeth I’d ever seen. I liked him right away. He shook my hand like I was a grown-up man, with a firm grip instead of taking hold of my fingertips. He said I was lovely and what was I doing with “this Harken fellow.”
“I didn’t stop by so you could bad-mouth me,” Henry said.
“Just thought I should warn her,” Dr. Marshall said, looking at me. “He cleans up nice, but this one’s trouble.” Then he asked if we’d like to look around the office, but I said I had to be getting home for dinner.
“Virgie Moore,” he said. “I didn’t put it together at first—y’all found that baby.”
“Yessir,” I said, and I repeated what I’d heard said over and over after anybody mentioned finding the baby. “Isn’t it the most terrible thing?”
But he was the only person who didn’t come back with the normal response: “It sure was.”
Instead he said, “Not the most terrible.”
Neither Henry or me answered him, and his smile popped up again, not as big, and I thought how the lines in his face suited him. I couldn’t imagine him as a young man.
“I probably shouldn’t have said that.” He shrugged. “But there’s some damn long, drawn-out ways for babies to die. Some awful things to happen. Bein’ buried in a well ain’t close to the worst I can think of.”
“What’s the worst you can think of?” asked Henry. Part of me thought he’d watched too much Frankenstein and was interested in ghoulish things. And part of me wondered what Dr. Marshall would say.
No smile this time, but the doctor thought on Henry’s question for a good while.
“Well,” he said to Henry, “I don’t know about the worst, but being alone, really alone, is right up there on the list. At least that baby’s mother left him with people who’d care about him, who’d do the right thing by him.”
And then, without him even looking at me, much less asking me a question, I answered him. The words came out of my mouth smooth and easy and like I talked with grown-ups I’d never met all the time.
What I meant to say, I thought, was that we wanted to know who’d done it.
I said, “We want to know his name.”
Dr. Marshall acted like that was just what he’d expected me to say. Like in all the other conversations he had with girls who had babies found in their wells, the girls said exactly that same thing.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s just the thing.”
Tess I WENT WITH MY COUSIN EMMALINE TO THE BAPTIST brush arbor. Uncle Bill and Aunt Merilyn sat behind us, but they didn’t watch us nearly as close as Mama and Papa did. Plus the brush arbor meant we were outside, with just poles around us, and a roof made of saplings and brush all woven together. It was a homemade tent, pulled straight out of the woods. That right there made their meetings better than ours—you felt wind on your face and sometimes a moth would fly right past you aiming for one of the lanterns hung around the pulpit, which was really only a tall, narrow table with a little shelf near the bottom. Moths would hover around those lanterns, swooping in under the tent all the time the preacher was speaking, like they’d been called to God themselves.
Never mind that lanterns seemed like a bad idea because just one misstep from someone and the whole church service could go up in one whoosh. God’s presence was supposed to take care of that.
The good thing about the Baptists was that they sang a lot of the same songs we did. When I went to Methodist meetings with Emmaline, I had to mouth nonsense words to look like I knew what I was doing.
This particular Baptist preacher I didn’t care for too much. He was too bony for one thing, with cheekbones that looked like you could slice yourself on them. And he sounded angry, shouting every word. I thought that might have been because he hadn’t gotten enough to eat. But his bad mood caught hold of his sermon; he preached about how this earth wasn’t our true home and we were only here for a brief time before we passed along to our true home. He talked about not being tied to money or earthly things and how we should shun this world and love the other. I wondered if he was right. I never liked sermons about this world being just a train stop. It had always seemed like a pretty nice place to me, with magnolias and chocolate cake and baby chicks. But it could be that I’d missed something important, that really the earth was a place as full of hatefulness and danger as the preacher said. That
the Well Woman was only the beginning of me seeing what was important. Maybe the fairy-eating possums counted for more than the magnolias.
Plenty of other people must have thought it was a real humdinger of a lesson. A handful of women and a couple of men hustled forward, wiping at their eyes, crouching down on the ground in front of the preacher and waiting for him to hug them and pat their shoulders. I’d never seen so many people come forward. I wondered if they all wanted to be baptized, which I thought would be interesting since we’d have to take the lanterns down to the creek. The moths would probably come with us.
But none of them needed to be saved apparently—they only felt overcome by their sins and wanted to be prayed for. The preacher started up “Amazing Grace,” then bent down to comfort—or scare, I wasn’t really sure—the people who had come forward. Several of the women were crying, and one was bawling so much that her collar was wet. She didn’t look the least bit familiar.
“Who is she?” I whispered to Emmaline. Aunt Merilyn and Uncle Bill didn’t even glance at me.
“Don’t know,” she said.
The other men and women were surrounded by clumps of people shaking their hands, folding them in their arms, sometimes kissing their cheeks. That one stranger woman didn’t have nobody holding on to her. People would walk past her, pat her and smile at her, but nobody stayed long enough for her to get her own clump going.
Aunt Merilyn must’ve heard my question. She leaned forward and tapped my shoulder. “I think she’s from Brilliant,” she whispered. “Moved in with a sister somewhere around here. I forget who.”
Well, since she’d gone and broken the rules herself about no talking in church, I decided I’d break them again myself. “She don’t have nobody, Aunt Merilyn,” I whispered over my shoulder. “Nobody’s staying with her.”
Aunt Merilyn, bless her heart, didn’t even answer me. She looked at the woman awhile, glanced at the other sinners who’d come forward, and hopped up out of her chair and took off toward the front. That caught me by surprise, but I’d pick moving around over being stuck in a chair any day. Plus there was the woman’s feelings to consider. I followed Aunt Merilyn, and Emmaline followed me.