Poor Jim Bowie burst into tears when he saw me, and I had to take him on my knee and convince him that I was not mortally wounded. Sul Ross called me Old Golliwog until I caught him and sat on him. Lamar snickered, and even Harry smiled. There was nothing I enjoyed more than being a source of amusement to my brothers.
I didn’t sleep well that night on my lumpy rags. I woke up sluggish and cranky the next morning. Mother decided it was pointless to finish my hair before we got to Lockhart, so I suffered the further indignity of having to wear an enormous ruffled cap over the rags all the way there in the wagon. My head was huge. I looked deformed; I looked like Lula Gates’s brother, poor old feeble-minded Toddy Gates, who had water on the brain. (Questions for the Notebook: Where did the water on Toddy’s brain come from? Did Mrs. Gates drink too much while carrying him?) I prayed that we wouldn’t meet anyone I knew and then felt guilty for drawing God’s attention away from serious matters to what was, after all, only an item of vanity. I admit I got more nervous the closer we got to Lockhart, but Harry kept telling me it would be a cakewalk.
We pulled up to the hall, and as the horses came to a stop, I leaped from the wagon and ran around to the back door before I could draw a crowd. Mother and Viola followed behind with a basket filled with hairpins and ribbons and tongs. They parked me on a stool and set to work on me, yanking the rags from my head. There were several other girls being tortured in the same way, so it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Mrs. Ogletree even primped her boy Georgie, whom she’d gadded up in a green velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. He churned with excitement on his stool, his blond sausage curls bouncing on his cambric collar.
Lula trembled and clutched a tin bucket to her chest and looked like she was going to be sick at any moment. The identical twins, Hazel and Hanna Dauncey, were an interesting and identical shade of grayish green. The sight of all this obvious distress in the others perked me up.
Miss Brown swept in wearing a new and unbecoming chartreuse gown and clapped her hands for attention. “Children! Mothers! Attention, s’il vous plaît.”
Instantly, there was complete silence. There was not a peep, a squeak, a rustle, not even from the squirmy Georgie. I realized that Miss Brown had the same threatening hold over all her other pupils as she had over me. Why, I thought, I bet she smacks all of us. Probably not Harry, but everybody else. So it’s not just me. Well, how about that.
“In ten minutes you will line up,” Miss Brown said, “from youngest to oldest, and then you will file into the auditorium behind me in an orderly—an orderly—fashion. You will then sit in the row of chairs along the back of the stage until it is your turn to play. There will be no talking. There will be no fidgeting. And there will especially be no pushing. Do I make myself clear?” Mute nods all around.
“Do not forget to bow or curtsy after your selection. Mothers, ten minutes.” And she turned and swept out, kicking her train behind her in one practiced motion. Viola and Mother both fell on me again with a vengeance, beating and thrashing my hair with brushes and tongs. Finally they stepped back to admire their work.
“There,” said Mother, “don’t you look a picture? I wouldn’t have recognized you. Look.” She handed me a mirror.
I wouldn’t have recognized me, either, what with the elaborate structural pile teetering on my head. Above my forehead rose a steep cliff of hair, which then swooped into an intricate pointy arrangement at the crown, all massed above triple pontoons of hair along each temple; bringing up the rear was a trailing cascade of fat curls down my back. This magnificence was topped off with the world’s largest pink satin bow. Mother and Viola looked well pleased. They didn’t bother to ask me what I thought, so I didn’t have to say that I thought I looked . . . appalling.
“See how pretty you look?” said Mother.
My hand drifted up to my hair.
“Don’t you touch that,” said Viola. “Don’t you dare.” She gathered up their tools while Mother struck up a conversation with Mrs. Gates.
I sidled over to Lula and whispered, “Hey, Lula, are you all right?”
She looked at me with her enormous hazel eyes and nodded but didn’t—couldn’t—speak. I noticed with envy that she had escaped drastic coiffuric ministrations; her pale, silvery-blond hair hung down her back in two neat braids. I tried to jolly her out of her panic. I nudged her and whispered, “Lula, look at what they did to my hair. It’s the worst, isn’t it?” Lula’s lips were clamped together. She responded with a long, quivering breath through her nose. I had the feeling she didn’t remember how to speak English.
“Lula,” I said, “you’ll be all right. You’ve played that piece a million times. Take some more deep breaths. And if that doesn’t work, well, you’ve always got your bucket.”
I looked around. Harry stood before a mirror in the corner, dousing himself with lavender pomade and painstakingly parting his hair with a comb, over and over. I had never known him to take such care with his appearance before. As the oldest student, he would play last, but he would have to sit onstage and suffer through the rest of us until it was his turn.
Miss Brown returned, and we received final admonishments from our mothers before they hurried out. My last whispered instructions were from Viola: “Don’t touch that hair. I mean it.” We lined up in silence. No one talked or fidgeted or pushed. Harry winked at me from the back of the line. Lula quaked in front of me, shivering all the way to the tips of her braids.
“Lula,” said Miss Brown, frowning, “you have to put that bucket down.” Lula didn’t move. “Calpurnia, take that bucket from her.” I tapped Lula on the shoulder and said, “Give it over, Lula. It’s time.” She stared at me in mute appeal. I ended up prying it from her damp hands.
Miss Brown said, “Children, this is the time for your very best deportment. Chins up. Chests out.”
She opened the side door to the auditorium, and we marched in behind her to what sounded like hard rain on a tin roof. It was applause, and Lula flinched like a startled fawn. For a moment, I thought she would bolt. I did a rapid and complex series of mental calculations about the range of possible blame that could be assigned to me if she got away, but good old Lula stuck it out and stayed in line.
Then I saw Miss Brown floating majestically upward at the front of the line. Why? How? What was happening? It took me a second to remember that there were a dozen or so steps up to the stage and she was walking up them.
Steps! I had forgotten there were steps. Hundreds and hundreds of steps. I had seen them before, but they were not part of my mental practice; I hadn’t practiced them in my mind’s eye. My ankles went wobbly, and I felt hot and cold all over. Lula glided upward in front of me without any apparent problem. I followed in terror and somehow made it to the top without falling on my face, and then stopped myself just in time from staring into the dazzling limelights that marked the edge of the precipice. We made it to our chairs, and the applause died down like a passing storm.
Miss Brown walked to the edge of the stage and curtsied to the audience. She gave a small speech about this splendid occasion, about Culture making inroads in Caldwell County, oh yes, and how young minds and fingers benefited from exposure to the Great Composers, and how she hoped the parents there would appreciate her hard work in molding their children to value the Finer Things in Life, since we were still living, after all, almost on the edge of the Wild Frontier. She sat down to more applause, and then we got up, one by one, in varying states of misplaced confidence or paralyzing terror.
Do I need to tell you what happened? It was a massacre. Do I have to tell you that Georgie fell backward off the piano stool before he played a single note and had to be hustled off, wailing, in his mother’s arms; that Lula played flawlessly and then got violently sick the second she finished; that Hazel Dauncey’s foot slipped off the pedal in the dead silence before she began, filling the auditorium with a deep reverberating sprrroiiinnnnggg; that Harry played well but kept looking out at a certain part of the audience for
no good reason that I could tell; that I played like a windup clockworks with wooden fingers and forgot to curtsy until Miss Brown hissed at me?
I DON’T REMEMBER much more about the day. I managed to blot it out. But I do remember vowing in the wagon on the way home that I would never do it again. I told Mother and Father this, and there must have been something in my voice because, the next year, despite Miss Brown’s formidable efforts, I handed out the programs, along with Lula, who was barred for life from playing in the recital.
CHAPTER 7
HARRY GETS
A GIRLFRIEND
Domestic races of the same species . . . often have a somewhat monstrous character. . . . They often differ in an extreme degree in some one part. . . .
SHORTLY AFTER THE PIANO RECITAL, danger entered our lives and stalked my family.
I must have dimly realized that Harry would marry one day and have a family of his own, but I reckoned it wouldn’t happen for decades, at least. After all, Harry already had a family, and we were it. I, especially, was it. His own pet.
For some days after the debacle in Lockhart, he’d been acting odd. He stared off into space with a dumb mooncalf look on his face that made you want to slap him. He didn’t answer when spoken to; in fact, he seemed barely present. I had no idea what was going on, but this was not my dear, clever Harry. No, this was some dilute, watery version of him.
I cornered him on the porch and said, “Harry.”
“Hmm?”
“Harry! What’s wrong with you? Are you sick? What’s the matter with you?”
“Hmm,” he said, and smiled.
“Do you feel all right? Should you see the doctor?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. In fact, I feel grand,” he said.
“Then what is it?”
He smiled mysteriously and pulled a much-handled carte de visite from his pocket. It was one of the new kind with a photographic portrait on it. (“The height of vulgarity,” according to Mother.)
And there She was. A young woman (certainly no longer a girl) with big, protuberant eyes; a fashionably small, squinchy mouth; a long, slender stalk of a neck; and such a great quantity of hair massed above it that she looked like a dandelion puff before the wind decapitated it.
“Isn’t she a corker?” he said, in a congested voice I’d never heard before and hated instantly. I hated her instantly too, for I saw her plain for what She was: a hag, a stooping harpy, a feaster on the flesh of beloved brothers. The Destroyer of My Family’s Happiness. Of my happiness. I stared at this apparition.
“A corker?” I said, reeling. My brother was evaporating before my eyes, and I had to find a way of stopping this dreadful abduction. My thoughts scattered in all directions like undisciplined troops facing their first fire, and it took me a moment to marshal them. But before my first skirmish, I needed some intelligence.
“Where did you meet her, Harry?” I said, innocent as any spy.
For a second, the glaze passed from his eyes and he faltered. I’d struck some tender tissue, but I didn’t understand its import.
“Why, uh, I stopped off at the supper on the grounds in Prairie Lea the other night. They saw me on the road and invited me to visit for a piece.”
Ah. Now, there were two churches in Prairie Lea: the Baptist church, which was acceptable, and the Independent Church of Prairie Lea, which was not. The local Leapers were considered a low and trashy lot by many people. These included my parents, who were both robust Methodists. (Granddaddy had declared he’d had enough sermons to last a lifetime and now chose to spend his Sunday mornings tramping across the fields. Reverend Barker, who enjoyed Granddaddy’s company, seemed to take it in stride. It was only Mother who was embarrassed.) And although Mother had once or twice entertained Leapers in the house, she tended to lump them all together, fairly or not, with snake handlers, fallers, foamers, and other fringe examples of the henhouse sects.
A part of my mind I had no idea I possessed until that moment took over and, like a great general, called all to order. I primed my weapons, surveyed the terrain, picked my target. I could see the battle ahead in time and space. I was the Great Stonewall. I was General Lee himself!
“The Baptist church, Harry?” I asked, sweet as pie.
“No.” He hesitated. “She belongs to the Independent Church of Prairie Lea.”
Blessed relief flooded through me. The enemy was mine. “Oh, Harry,” I said, all sisterly concern. “She’s a Leaper?”
“That’s right. So what?” he said mulishly. “And don’t call them that. They’re Independents.”
“Have you told Mother and Father?” I said.
“Um. No.” He looked edgy. My opening salvo had hit its mark. Then he looked down at the picture, and I watched him go all sappy again.
“How old is she?” I asked, forging ahead. “She looks kind of old.”
“She’s not old,” he said with indignation. “She only came out five years ago.”
I added five to eighteen, the typical age for coming out, and came up with the usual result. “She’s twenty-three,” I said, aghast—and secretly jubilant. “She’s practically an old maid. Besides, you’re only seventeen.”
“That makes no difference,” he said. He plucked the card from my hand and huffed off.
At dinner that night, Harry mentioned that he might hitch Ulysses to the gig and take him out for exercise.
“Why don’t you ride him?” said Father. “You don’t need the gig.”
“He hasn’t been in harness for a while. It would do him good,” said Harry.
Time to fire off my next round. In a loud voice, I said, “Are you going to see her?”
The table thought this an interesting inquiry and grew still. Everyone except Granddaddy stopped eating and stared at Harry with interest, even the boys who were too young to understand what was going on. Mother swiveled her head, looking first at me and then at Harry. Granddaddy went on placidly addressing his beefsteak.
Harry flushed and cut me a look to let me know he’d settle with me later. He’d never glared at me like that before. There was something close to hatred in that look. Fear shot through me. I broke out all over in hot prickles.
“And who is her?” said Mother.
Granddaddy’s knife skreeked against his plate. He patted his mustache with the big white linen napkin that flowed down his chest. He said mildly to his only daughter-in-law, “Good God, Margaret. That’s ‘who is she,’ not ‘who is her.’ The verb to be never takes an object. Surely you know that by now?”
He peered at her and said, “Why, how old are you, Margaret? I reckon you must be close to thirty. Old enough to know better, I should think,” he said, and turned his attention back to his dinner. My mother, aged forty-one, ignored this.
“Harry?” she said. She gave him the gimlet eye. The prickles racing across my skin coalesced into itching pink welts. Our family’s future hung by a thread.
“There’s a girl—a young lady—at the Prairie Lea picnic tonight that I’d like to take for a short drive, ma’am,” Harry stammered. “Only a short one.”
“And,” said Mother, in a frosty voice, “exactly who is this young lady? Have we met her? Have we met her people?”
“Her name is Miss Minerva Goodacre. Her people are in Austin. She’s spending the month with her aunt and uncle in Prairie Lea.”
“And they are . . . ?” said Mother.
The thread pulled taut.
“Reverend and Mrs. Goodacre,” said Harry.
“And are you referring to Reverend Goodacre of the Independent Church of Prairie Lea?” said Mother.
The thread creaked and frayed.
“Yes,” said Harry, flushing deeper. He pushed himself away from the table and bolted from the room, calling over his shoulder with false cheer, “So it’s all right, then. I won’t be late.”
Father looked at Mother and said, “What was all that about?”
Mother noticed the rest of us sitting openmouthed and
snapped, “You are so obtuse sometimes, Alfred. We’ll discuss it later.”
Sitting next to me, Sul Ross, who was swift for his age, broke into a chant: “Harry’s got a gur-ull, Harry’s got a gur—”
At this point Mother looked volcanic. I hissed, “Shut up, Sully,” and elbowed him viciously in the short ribs.
Out of the blue, Granddaddy said, “About damned time, too. That boy was starting to worry me. What’s for dessert?” One of the interesting things about Granddaddy was that you couldn’t always tell if he was present or not.
Dinner dragged on forever. Whatever we had for dessert, it was ashes in my mouth. When SanJuanna came in to clear the table, Mother said, “You are all excused. Except for Calpurnia.”
The others trooped out while I hunkered down at my place. Father lit a cigar and poured himself a larger-than-usual glass of port. Mother looked like she badly wanted one and rubbed her temples.
“Now, Calpurnia,” she said, “what is it you know about this . . . this . . . young lady?”
I thought of the way that Harry had glared at me. “Nothing, ma’am,” I said, sounding the retreat and recalling my battalions as fast as I could.
“Come, come. Surely he must have told you something about her.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said.
“Stop this, Calpurnia. How did you find out about her? And what is happening to your face? You look all blotchy.”
“Harry showed me her visiting card, that’s all,” I said.
“Her card?” My mother’s voice rose. “She has a card? How old is she?”
“I don’t know anything,” I said.
Mother looked at Father and said, “Alfred, she has a card.” My father looked interested but not alarmed. Clearly the significance of this fact escaped him.
My mother got up and started pacing. “She is of an age to have a card, and my son has been calling on her without telling us. He has been courting her, and we’ve never even met her. She’s a Leap—she’s an Independent, Alfred.”
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate Page 6