by Leah Weiss
Her bedroom door opens, and I stay in my room cause this is her and Larry’s business, though I don’t hear him yet. He’s one sneaky man coming in without making a sound. Is he gonna throw me out tonight? My belly cramps with worry. I listen hard for Larry’s voice but don’t hear him. I listen hard for his manly footsteps on floors.
It’s only her voice I hear talking.
It’s only her footsteps I hear shuffling down the hall.
Nobody’s here but us two.
Chapter 9
Lucy: Family
The next day, I’m in a pickle. Will Bert Tucker come back, go to the river where we met, or not come at all? When I hear a knock on the kitchen door, my heart gives a leap—but it’s only Sugar Mayhew. Across her arms, she carries the parlor curtains she’s washed and ironed for the fifty cents Mama left on the table. I follow and help her hang them, her being half a head shorter and a year younger than me. Today she doesn’t wear her eyepatch like she should.
“What you looking hard at?” She flashes and her good eye glares at me while her lazy eye looks over my shoulder.
“Where’s your eyepatch? In your pocket? If you don’t wear your patch, you can’t cure your amblyopia. You need adhesive tape?”
Sugar fusses straightening the curtains, but she won’t answer my questions. Instead she wears an air of righteous indifference when I’m only trying to help. She heads to the back door, scoops up the two quarters on the table, and drops them in her pocket. At the last minute, I get brave enough to ask, “Can you help me make beds?” and that stops her.
“Why you always whine bout makin’ beds?” she throws back at me. It’s true she’s heard me complain before, and she’s a forthright girl not scared to say things when the grown-ups aren’t here to witness her attitude. She lives in the house across the way with her daddy, Yancy Mayhew, and mama, Gertie. Her brother, Whiz, enlisted two years back. His formal name, William Mayhew, was printed on the front page of the Mercer County Reporter, along with five other colored boys who signed up. When Whiz was promoted from private second class to private first class, Gertie bragged on him, which was her right. All the Mayhews are people of quality—except Sugar and her sassiness.
I say like always, “The corners of the featherbeds are too heavy for me to lift,” because they are.
“You best grow you some muscle, Lucy Brown. I got my own chores to do with daylight burning.”
She rubs me raw, but I endure it. “It’ll only take a minute,” I fib, knowing it’ll take more to make up five beds.
“Two,” she counters, moving into negotiations.
“You’ll help make two beds?”
“Two for two.”
“You want two marbles for making two little beds?” The girl’s small collection is growing, mostly because of me. Sugar turns to leave when I say, “I pick em. The beds and the marbles.”
“Suit yourself but get a move on.” She adds, “You a worrisome girl,” sounding for all the world like a grown-up when she’s but a girl herself. Sugar does not live up to her name.
We head to Mama and Daddy’s room, fluff the feather pillows, and set them by the open window to air. I make light conversation, being friendly. “Do you know there are three hundred and twenty-five different kinds of hummingbirds in the world? They’re the only birds that can’t walk or hop. They only fly, and they can live up to twelve years.”
Sugar gets on tippy-toes and smooths out the bottom muslin with her skinny arms, not caring a whit about the miracle of hummingbirds. She is tucking the top right corner in firm when a flat, square package falls out on the floor. It’s a rubber wrapped in cellophane under Daddy’s side of the mattress, something I’ve seen before, and I know it keeps babies away. Sugar picks it up, paying no mind, and slides it back under the mattress. Maybe her daddy has got the same thing on his side of the bed. She unfurls the top sheet and cracks it in the air, and it settles like a picnic blanket. Sugar makes this dreaded job look easy.
Without a curious glance around my parents’ bedroom, she moves to Grady’s, where his bed looks like a battle was fought and the sheets won. She snaps his bed in order with me a weak observer, then she leaves, carrying my two plainest marbles. I shout, “Thank you,” and watch Sugar cross the yard with her head high, her boney shoulders back, and her stride long. She once told me that we were uppity rich white folks and she wasn’t my maid and for me not to forget. I said I never think of her as my maid, that she was free to do what she wanted with her life, but the look on her face said different. She said, “You a blind fool, Lucy Brown.”
I know some uppity white folks, but that’s not us.
After Sugar leaves, I make the other beds, finish my chores while the sun slides west, and deliberate what I should do about Bert Tucker, when it takes care of itself. She makes her way through the same tobacco field down a row that’s been suckered, looking at her feet, watching for snakes. I wait in the shade of the oak tree.
Bert looks smaller than I recollect. Maybe it’s because her wild hair is tamed under a brown bandanna and her shirt is too big. Maybe because the tobacco field is wide and she’s but a flint of a figure. Despite looks, Bert Tucker is already a giant in my mind.
She walks up to me, and I turn shy. “Hey” is all I say before she starts.
“She bout worked me to death today cause she thinks Larry is for sure coming back from fishing in that Dismal Swamp, and this time, she wants him to stay home for a spell. Last thing I done was put on a mess of beans and ham hock with new potatoes, then she told me to skedaddle so she could clean herself up best she can. I was mighty glad to get outta there and extra glad to see you.”
I grin, tickled, and say, “You sure keep a pile of words inside that mouth of yours.” I take her hand and pull her toward the barn and into its shadowed interior with rough beams and dust mites and the pungent smells from stalls and tools and leather. We climb the worn ladder and work our way out to the open loft doors and the iron pulley to the bails of fresh hay. We sit with a plop. I pick a strand of hay and stick it between my lips. Bert does the same and leans back and puts her hands behind her head. I feel light-headed to see our bare feet side by side, almost the same size, with dirt around the toenails.
Bert says, “I never seen such a brood of brothers and sisters as you got. There’s bodies everywhere. You ever get em mixed up? Forget their names?”
“No, silly. I can name my brothers and sisters.”
“Let me hear,” Bert challenges me, and I start at the top like I should, taking my time to help them stick in her memory.
“My big brother Everett’s in the army, and we speculate he’s to the east fighting Nazis since he speaks a little German because of Oma. Mama’s got a picture of him in uniform she keeps on her bedside table if you want to see what he looks like. Everett tries to see humor in everything, and he closes every letter with a riddle I figure out right away, but it takes the others longer.
“Helen is next. She’s twenty and married with a baby coming around Thanksgiving. Her husband, Wade, is in the Pacific, so she moved back home for comfort and to help at mealtimes. It’s on account of Everett and Wade we got two blue stars in the front window that show our war sacrifice but hopefully not the ultimate one, the gold stars, if they die. Don’t think Mama could survive getting a gold star. Two weeks back, Daddy signed a beeswax deal with the government that said our two army men could come home and work bees, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Daddy thinks civic pride will win out.”
Bert looks perplexed at so much information, but that’s okay. We’ve got all the time in the world for her to understand.
“Next is Irene who, at eighteen and a half, is old enough to court, but she’s picky and hard to please and has a know-it-all side that gets tiring. Men are not beating a path to her door.” I tell it like it is. “She works at the newspaper doing advertising work but wants to be a real repo
rter someday.
“Grady’s the only boy living at home, and he’s quiet enough. He’s the one who called you out at supper but got a warning from Mama for being rude. He’s almost sixteen to my thirteen—”
I pause and ask, “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Me, too. When’s your birthday?”
“January twenty-second.”
“Mine is January twenty-ninth. We were born one week apart.” I can’t hardly breathe from such a propitious coincidence. “We’re almost birthday sisters.”
When I sit there like a bumpkin, Bert says, “Go on with the naming.”
“Well, I’m number five, and you know my name is Lucy. Cora’s next. She’s the one with pale skin. She was an orphan in need of a family, and we all voted to turn her into a Brown. She’s a thinking child short on words.”
I wait to see if Bert pokes fun at Cora’s milky skin and watercolor eyes, but she doesn’t. If she did, it would taint our friendship. I stand up for my sister. We all do. I tell folks that Cora is the only one who’s got her own entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume I, page 218: ALBINO.
“And last is Lydia, who’ll turn five in a month and wants a butterscotch cake and is still defining her personality.”
Bert surprises me when she says, “Which one’s Nancy Drew?”
“She’s not family.”
“You said her name special.”
“When?”
“At the bridge.”
“You don’t know Nancy Drew?” I work to keep my shock contained, for I thought Nancy Drew was world famous. When Bert shakes her head, I say, “Well, she’s about the most brilliant girl detective in a book you’ll ever know. I’ve got every Nancy Drew book that’s been published, thanks to Aunt Fanniebelle. Mama thinks the books are banal, but I think a real girl can be that smart and successful. At least I aim to be.”
I try to keep self-pride out of my tone. My strong kinship with my literary heroine borders on worship. “I believe solving mysteries is a virtuous endeavor.” Then to include Bert, I say, “For example, how did your meek Aunt Violet—a woman without a mean bone in her body—get tied to the likes of Larry Crumbie? Now that’s a mystery we can solve that could make a difference, don’t you think? At least we’d understand better.”
“I never seen him.”
“That’s a good thing. He doesn’t have any redeeming qualities I can tell.”
“He might send me away when he come back.”
I pat the back of Bert’s hand and say with conviction, “If that happens, you come here. You always got a home with us. Did I tell you Mama was a schoolteacher before she got married?” and Bert’s face lights up like I hoped it would. “She’ll correct your grammar all the live long day but don’t take offense. She fell in love with Daddy because he loves books and plays the fiddle and raises bees.” Right then one flies in the barn to check us out then darts away.
Bert says, “Is that what’s in them white boxes?”
“Yep. Millions of em in a hundred boxes making honey and baby bees and beeswax. Do you know a bee only lives forty-five days and that only the female honeybee stings?” I shift so I face Bert and ask the question that’s got me curious about her sense of adventure. “Why do you have a hankering to see the big wide world so bad?”
Bert shocks me when she blurts out, “I kilt Ma and the baby, so Pa exiled me from the family as punishment. Like the Israelites.”
My jaw drops. What can I say to that? My friend sits there with her face locked tight, her eyes hard, her lips pinched. She looks out the loft at a normal day that suddenly isn’t normal anymore. She goes on matter-of-factly. “It’s not like I kilt em directly, but they dead all the same…cause a me. And Pa knows. He bought me a one-way bus ticket to here.”
My common sense returns. “Bert, you’re talking silly. You’re not a killer. Maybe you have a one-way ticket cause your pa didn’t know when your aunt’s baby would come. Did you think of that?”
Bert stays quiet. I’m confounded as to what to do next. Maybe if I know more, I can help my friend sort things out, so I say, “If you want to tell me what happened, I’ll be glad to share that burden with you. That’s what best friends do.”
“Well…” she says, tempted.
“You want to tell me. Otherwise, why would you have confessed and confided?”
So high in my hayloft, a dark slice of Bert Tucker’s life crawls out of her parched heart that seeks relief. I hear about a torn sheet two lengths of a baby coffin, flattened bosoms, a dead rabbit, a secret cave behind a waterfall, a hope to stay a girl a little longer, and a child birthing that went bad. I listen up to where Bert’s pa leaves her heartbroken at the Trailways bus station.
I’m crying and Bert’s crying, and Daddy hears us in the hayloft. He calls out, asking if we’re okay, but he doesn’t climb the ladder and confront female tears. I yell, “Bert’s telling a sad story, that’s all.”
“Well, long as nobody’s hurt… You know where the Vicks is if you need it.”
That makes us snort-laugh right in the middle of crying the same kind of ugly, with puffy eyes and red noses and swollen lips with spittle thick in the corners. We’re worn out when the crying stops, and we lie back against the hay, damp clean through.
I whisper, “You still got on that strip of cloth?”
Bert lifts her shirttail to show dingy muslin stretched across her ribs and raw skin around the edges.
“Does it hurt?”
“Like hell.”
I feel a pang of jealousy cause I don’t need a strip of muslin.
Chapter 10
Bert: Plum Crazy
I been at Aunt Violet’s two weeks since forever, and every day she loses another piece of her mind. I go to washing clothes in the yard pot and hanging em on the line when a big man comes by on a bicycle. He knocks on the screen door and steps back polite. Aunt Violet opens the door right off, so I know he’s no stranger. They talk but I can’t hear what they say cause I’m too far away. When he turns round and points to the woods at the back, she screams and beats on his chest with her fists, then runs inside. The big man, who’s got the air of simple, waves at me like nothing’s wrong. This buffaloes me with her getting upset at his coming. He rides away on his bicycle.
I come inside to find my aunt looking at the wall, hands by her sides, knocking her noggin against that wall. Thud. Thud. Thud.
“Why you doing that?” I say, cause what she’s doing is plain stupid.
She don’t stop. Thud. Thud. I take her by the arm and pull her to the chair to sit. Her forehead’s done swoll and turning bruised. I was planning to go see Lu when I finish chores, but I can’t leave Aunt Violet like this. I hold a wet rag on her bruise and stroke her shoulder, soft like my sister, Ruth, does me when I’m outta sorts.
Fat tears run down my aunt’s cheeks and drop off her chin, but she don’t make a sound. She don’t move. She’s pitiful and a sad that breaks my heart. I stand beside her for the longest time as the day passes and my feet grow numb and I gotta relieve myself. I run do my business fast, and when I come back from the privy, she’s changed. She snaps her head round fast as a rattler and points a skinny finger in my face. “You got to git so my Larry comes home. He wants to take care of me but you scared him off.”
All my pity for her fades like fog. Her eyes don’t settle right, and for sure she’s turn plum daft. What was Pa thinking sending me here? Why would Larry Crumbie want to come back to this?
“You that floozy what run him off,” she mutters.
I throw back, “I’m your brother’s girl. I’m Allie Bert Tucker.” I reach in my pocket and rub hard on Miz Brown’s smooth button for comfort, touching a long nail I snatched in Lu’s barn yesterday when I told her my troubles. The nail is rough and crooked. I could gouge her muddy eyes out with it. Stick it all the way into h
er eye socket, into her puddin brain if I had a mind to be mean.
“I seed the way you cut your eyes at him.”
“How can that be? I never laid eyes on the man.”
“You want him… You want him,” she sings and yanks her hair.
“You old dingbat.”
She hums and tugs at the shoulder of her housedress. She catches a loose thread, picks at it so the seam starts coming undone, and I see pasty flesh. Then she turns on me like a nasty rooster. “You gotta git, git, git,” she says and pokes hard at my chest.
I’m tired of this foolishness. I’m tired of sticky heat, but I say. “Where you figure I can go?”
“Back to where you come from.”
“That’s a long way from here. A day’s ride on a bus I got no ticket for.”
“Go back, go back, go back,” she says over and over and starts giggling like she made a funny.
I get my hackles up like Ma warned me not to. “I’d leave you in a heartbeat, you ugly pig. If I got a ticket, I’d leave you high and dry to fend for yourself.”
Her face shifts and slides into something vile, and I git scared.
Something bad is coming.
Chapter 11
Lucy: Government Work
The day after Bert confides her exile of biblical proportions, we start our beeswax business. The big difference between before the government job and after will be making sugar syrup for the bees to eat every day. That will trick our bees into staying in the hive longer to make more honey and subsequently more wax. When left on their own, they can travel five miles searching for nectar and pollen. If we deliver the sweet to their door, they stay home and make wax for new babies.
Daddy and Yancy Mayhew already cleared a corner of the barn, and Grady built two long worktables waist high and put in a wall of shelves for new mason jars. Today, two wooden crates covered with government stamps were delivered, and a small crowd of the curious watches Daddy pry open the crates with a crowbar. One holds a scale, the wax molds, cardboard shipping boxes, labels, wax paper dividers, and a book to record quantity and shipping dates. The other holds hundreds of quart jars and lids.