“People are going to talk about you if you go in the pool hall and the barbershop,” Peyton said.
“People already are,” Nora said, smiling. “Your aunt undoubtedly had the jungle drums going about my little fling with your uncle before the door was closed behind us.”
“Don’t you care?”
Nora blew smoke. “No. I don’t give a tinker’s damn about what most people think about me; I stopped that a long time ago. Now I only care about a very few. You. Your daddy. Chloe. Your grandmother, through that may be a lost cause. And that about does it so far. I’ve always had a very strict and selective list of people whom I care about at any given time.”
Chloe came in with fresh biscuits and squalled, “Peyton, you get that sorry cat off this table right now!” Peyton turned to see Trailways lapping strawberry jam from the jar Chloe had put on the table. There was a delicate tracery of little red paw prints all over the table-top. Peyton put Trailways back onto the floor and scrubbed at the prints with her napkin.
“Now I’m gon’ have to bleach the tablecloth and the napkin,” Clothilde grumbled.
Then she turned to Nora. “Doreen told me you said you might teach her a little bit. I sho’ would appreciate that. She’s a real bright girl. She don’t need to be a maid the rest of her life. Maybe just enough to read better. She could go to high school classes at night up to College Park if she could read better. They told her when she went to take the test.”
“I’d love to,” Nora said. “Let me get a week or so of my new job under my belt—if I get it, of course—and then we’ll set something up. Maybe a couple of afternoons a week, after school. She doesn’t work in the afternoons, does she?”
“No. She don’t go back until right before supper.”
“Well, you better tell her not to tell Mrs. McKenzie. She’s already accused me of maid rustling.”
“She ain’t gon’ tell. Like I say, she’s a smart girl.”
Peyton slid her grandmother’s little amulet into the neck of her blouse before she went to school. The hair was going to be enough for one day. She still turned her head quickly at her reflection in mirrors and windows, trying obliquely to catch this newcomer reverting to the Brillo-haired Peyton of the week before. So far she had not. The deer-girl with the long neck still looked shyly back at her.
That morning Miss Carruthers said, in front of the entire class, “Peyton, you look very nice with your new haircut. Very chic.”
After that no one said a word about her hair. She knew they would not. But they stared. She could feel the eyes on the naked back of her neck. This time, though, the eyes were without heat.
She took Trailways with her to the Losers Club that afternoon. She had to carry him in Chloe’s lidded sewing basket because he writhed and howled so. When she got to the shed behind the parsonage, Boot and Ernie were waiting.
“What you got in that basket?” Boot said.
“A king cobra, at the very least,” Ernie said sourly.
“Never heard of no cobra spit like a cat.” Boot grinned. “Come on, Peyton, let’s see him. Mamaw told me about him.”
Peyton opened the basket and Trailways leapt out. He stood in the middle of the floor glaring at them in turn, his little bowed legs planted apart, the spiky tail quivering. Then he found himself a spot on the frayed rug in front of the space heater, turned around three times, and settled into a boneless ball of sleep.
As happened often in the South after a spell of sullen rain, the weather had turned clear and cold and wild. A green wind came booming in from the west, tossing the trees and hurling lingering pecans down onto the tin roof of the shed. For a minute they simply sat in the warmth, listening to the wind and the wheezing purr of the little cat. Ernie was heating water for instant cocoa. Peyton knew it would be horrible, chalky and cloying, but it was the only kind his mother allowed in the house, and she was chilled through.
Boot reached out with his big leather foot and nudged Trailways gently. “Thought at least you’d got some kind of fancy cat,” he said. “That just a mangy little old barn kitten. They a million of ’em around our house.”
“They make me sneeze,” Ernie said. “He can’t stay very long, Peyton.”
“He’s a special cat,” Peyton said. “He came from Atlanta. My Cousin Nora went up there the other night for dinner and met some soldier, and they were at the Trailways bus station and she saw him behind a garbage can. She brought him home to me. Trailways is his name.”
“What she doin’ hanging around that bus station?” Boot said, scandalized. “They got bad folks in that place. They got bad ladies. Everybody knows that.”
“It figures,” Ernie said prissily. “Blood will tell.”
“She wasn’t hanging around it,” Peyton retorted. “She was only there to drop off the soldier. He was on his way to Fort Benning, and anyway, he was only about eighteen. Nora met him in the restaurant where she had dinner. An Italian restaurant.”
She cut her eyes at Ernie and Boot to see how her cousin’s lone dinner in Atlanta, and in an Italian restaurant at that, was being received. They were silent.
“They went to a jazz place and danced after that,” she added when she got no response. “She’s going to take me with her to Atlanta next time she goes.”
“Man, that is something!” Boot said admiringly. “I never seen no Italian restaurant. I wish she’d put me in that fancy pink car and take me to an Italian restaurant. When y’all going?”
“Probably next weekend. We’re going to spend the day. We’re going shopping, and to the museum, and a bunch of other things.”
“Well, you and your new haircut have got a full social schedule,” Ernie drawled. It was the first time he had mentioned her haircut. Peyton looked at him.
“Nora cut it,” she said.
“It’s quite pretty, if you like that kind of thing,” Ernie said, stirring hot water into three paper cups. “I’ve personally always thought that kind of cut looked a little butchy, but that’s just my opinion.”
“What that?” Boot said.
“Extremely mannish, shall we say.”
“Everybody thinks it looks like Audrey Hepburn’s,” Peyton said, color rising in her face.
“More like Aldo Ray’s. But never mind me. If your cousin did it, it must be holy.”
They were silent again for a while, sipping the clotted cocoa, and then Ernie said, “I’m going to suspend the club for a while. Nobody’s heart seems to be in it, and I’ve got better things to do.”
“Naw,” Boot cried. “My heart in it good!”
“Peyton’s isn’t. She’s all tied up with her sainted cousin.”
Fear flooded Peyton. Not to have the Losers Club, not to come through the virulent garden to this secret, sheltering place, not to have these constant ears into which to spill her secret humiliations…
“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m really not. I’m not going to do things with her much. She’s dumb. She does crazy things. And she’s staying with us at least until school’s out, I think. Isn’t that just the pits? Everybody’s going to be talking about us because of her. She’s already made Aunt Augusta mad as a wet hen. She went out to the garage by herself with Uncle Charlie yesterday, and stayed an hour, and came back smelling like whiskey.”
“Holy shit,” Boot said reverently. “I ain’t heard that.”
“I did,” Ernie said. “Everybody knows it.”
“See why I don’t like her?” Peyton said, close to tears.
“It doesn’t sound to me like you don’t like her,” Ernie said, elaborately examining his soft pink hands. Peyton always wondered how he kept them so well, doing the sort of work he did. Once or twice she had thought she saw the gleam of clear polish on his nails, but she could not be certain.
“What if I brought her one afternoon, so you could get to know her?” she said desperately. “You’d see for yourself how awful she is.”
“You know we said we’d never let outsiders in here,” Ernie
said.
“Well, she wants to see you, Ernie. She liked you when y’ll played together that summer. She wouldn’t have to come more than once, just so you could realize why I’m not going to get tied up with her. Besides, she might fit right in. She does the most awful, embarrassing things.…”
She felt a stab of guilt deep under the desperation, but it did not surface. Between Nora and the Losers Club, there was no contest.
“I’ll have to think about it,” Ernie said, and the conversation gradually faded and died. Presently Peyton picked up Trailways and stuffed him back into the basket and went home with him, her heart heavy, his wails cutting the dusk.
Nora came in pink-cheeked and windblown from her day around the town and went upstairs. She did not put her head into Peyton’s room, and Peyton did not climb the stairs to hers. From now on, she thought, she was going to exclude her cousin from her life, as best she could. The club, oh, she could not let the club go, not yet….
Nora wore a white sweater and gray flannel slacks to dinner that night. Peyton thought, but was not sure, that the sweater was cashmere. Lytton did not run heavily to cashmere sweaters. The candlelight gave her face a deeper glow over the slight windburn, and lit her chestnut hair to what Peyton fancied, having lately read Tennyson, was titian. Chloe had made her famous vegetable beef soup and fresh hot cornbread before she left, and there was an apple pie warm on the stove.
“Perfect for a cold night,” her father said, sliding into his seat. “We’re not done with winter yet, I don’t think. You girls look mighty pretty, or is it the candlelight?”
They were back at the table in the little breakfast room off the kitchen, but Nora had brought in the wooden candlesticks and lit the candles. The candles smelled faintly of something musky and junglish.
“Vervain,” Nora said. “Wards off Baptists. I brought the candles and the sticks from Cuba. An old man in our village made the sticks, and one of the old women made the candles. I have several sets; I thought Peyton’s grandmother might like to have one. She’s big on herbs, I know.”
Frazier McKenzie nodded. Peyton shot him a look but saw nothing on his narrow face other than mild approval of the dinner and the offer.
“I know she’d like that,” he said. Peyton thought that her grandmother would rather toss the candles in the railroad ditch than have anything magical in her house that she herself had not made.
“I had a call from the chairman of the Fulton County Board today, Nora,” Frazier said. “Everybody thinks the idea is a good one. We can’t offer you much in the way of a salary, but I think that could be negotiated if we do the class more than one quarter. I’d be pleased if you’d accept. I know Peyton would, too.”
Peyton dropped her eyes.
“Yes,” she mumbled.
“We wouldn’t start for a week or so, but as it happens we need a substitute in sophomore English on Thursday and Friday. Mrs. Camp is going to see her daughter’s new baby.”
“And it’s a good chance to look over the new schoolmarm, hmmm?” Nora said, but she was smiling her Halloween smile, her eyes crinkled.
“I’d love to substitute,” she said. “I’ll get her lesson plans tomorrow, or if she’d rather, we could do a book-discussion group. I’ve had other sophomores who liked that.”
“I think at this point she’d be grateful if you’d simply sit there and keep them quiet,” Frazier said. “She’s been trying to get away to see her grandchild for two months now. I think the book discussion sounds interesting. Why don’t you try it? Give you an idea of how your class will work.”
“I will, then. Did I tell you I was going to do an insider’s tour of Lytton today? I met the most amazing people,” Nora said. “This little town is absolutely full of characters and stories. What a novel it would make.”
“Novel?” Peyton said. “I think this is the most boring place I’ve ever seen. Why would anybody want to write about it?”
“And just how many other places have you seen?” Nora smiled. “I’d want to write about it. Any writer would. If you’d been keeping that journal we talked about, you could look back and see plainly what’s here. It’s fully as interesting as Grover’s Corners in Our Town or even Maycomb, Alabama. You have read To Kill a Mockingbird, haven’t you?”
Peyton shook her head.
“Well, then, that’s our first priority. In fact, I think I’ll use Mockingbird for my book discussion and first class. It catches the small-town South better than anything I’ve ever read, and it says some things about the South that need to be said.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll see.” Nora seemed to tire suddenly of the conversation. She drummed her fingers on the table and looked abstractedly off into the distance. There was a very faint frown between her brows.
“Who did you meet today?” Frazier McKenzie asked. “What stories did you hear?”
“Well, I met a lady in the library whose ancestors were full-blooded Creek Indians, though she didn’t look very Indian to me. She predates even the Pilgrims, she says. She’s trying to found an organization like the DAR or the UDC for the descendants of Indian chiefs. Now, that’s something to think about.”
“Oh, that’s Miss Ronnie Bates,” Peyton’s father said. “She’s no more Creek than I am. Her people came from somewhere in Iowa, I think. Nobody knows why she’s got this Indian bee in her bonnet.”
“Well, anyway, and then I went into the luncheonette for a sandwich and I heard two men talking about another man who dropped out of the Masons and took to his house and won’t come out because his daughter married a Negro. She’s thirty-four years old and lives in California, and I don’t see why he thinks it shames him, but the men seemed to think it made sense, though it was a loss to the Masons. Imagine the pain he must feel, never to come out of his house.”
“Otis Carmichael,” Frazier said. “Not many of the Carmichaels come out of the house much, to tell you the truth.”
“What’s it going to take to impress you? I took the car to the garage and met this old gentleman who drives a goat cart. He seemed to be having a wonderful time. Everybody knew him. His goat is named Mary Margaret, but he wouldn’t tell me his name.”
“Lord, Nora, did you meet every eccentric in Lytton? That’s Sweetie Sayre. None of the Sayres have been right in the head for generations. His sister, Miss Gertie, wears all white and an ivy wreath on her head. She goes to Atlanta on the bus that way once or twice a week. I think she preaches on Rich’s street corner.”
“And you don’t think all that is absolutely magical? You don’t think there are marvelous stories in Lytton? I find the whole town irresistible,” Nora said. “There’s such a kind of wacky sweetness to it. After Miami, you don’t know what a relief that is….”
“I trust that concluded your tour,” Peyton’s father said. He was grinning.
“Yes, except for the pool hall. I went in there to use the phone to call the garage—the car conked out right in front of it—and I had a great game of snooker with a couple of guys. I won, as a matter of fact.”
Peyton felt her eyebrows shoot up toward her hairline. She looked at her father. He opened his mouth and took a deep breath and then let it out slowly.
“Good,” he said.
After they ate, they went into the living room to watch television. Nora and her father sat quietly, absorbed in The Hallmark Hall of Fame, but Peyton curled into the blue chair that had been her mother’s and closed her eyes. Behind them, she saw a different town entirely from the one she had grown up in.
Nora met her substitute English class on Thursday morning, and by lunchtime it had passed into legend. Word leapt from Lytton High to Lytton Grammar like wildfire, and Peyton, eating her sandwich and reading Little Women alone in the lunchroom, looked up to find herself encircled by other students like a gazelle ringed by jackals.
“Hear your cousin’s over at the high school teaching nigger stuff,” Wesley Cato said. Wesley was fifteen and had repeated the seventh grade th
ree times. Peyton merely looked at him.
“She’s reading some kind of book about a nigger who raped a white girl and got shot by the police,” LeeAnne McGahee said. LeeAnne was twelve and looked eighteen, and was much admired for her immobile blond bouffant and her projectile breasts. Peyton had pointed her out to Nora in town the day they went grocery shopping, and Nora had said LeeAnne looked like the front bumper of a 1953 Studebaker. Peyton did not know what one of those looked like, but the tone of Nora’s voice had shattered LeeAnne’s Circe-like aura for good and all, at least in Peyton’s mind. She was able, now, to regard LeeAnne with something approaching contempt.
“That’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” Peyton said loftily. “It’s won all kinds of prizes. Nora gave it to me to read but I haven’t yet.”
They stared at her, uncertain after this unexpected reaction.
“Well, it must be a good book if they shot the nigger,” Wesley said.
“It’s about intolerance and prejudice in a little southern town,” Peyton said. “You really ought to like it, Wesley.”
“I hear there’s a retard in it, too,” LeeAnne said.
“Yep. So you’d like it, too.”
Shorn of their weapons, they smirked at her and sidled away. Peyton’s heart was hammering in her chest, but she was also elated. She had stood down two of Lytton Grammar’s most treasured icons and had actually come out the better for it. A flame of pure power leapt in her blood.
Maybe that’s the power Nana was talking about, she thought. Maybe I have power in my words.
By the end of the day the rumors were a conflagration. Nora Findlay was reading tenth-graders a story about niggers raping people and about other people killing them. No, she was reading a story about two little kids who were afraid of a retard. No, the story was about a lawyer and his two motherless children who grew up loving nigger.
And it was the gospel truth that three of the boys—football players all, repeating the tenth grade for the second time—had offered in graphic terms to service Nora right there on her desk, and she had looked at them and laughed and said, “Not on your best day, you horny little bastards,” whereupon the rest of the class had broken into cheers. And it was also gospel that when the class was over she had walked out lighting a cigarette, and looked back and grinned and made a circle of her thumb and forefinger at the remaining students in the classroom. The entire student body of Lytton Grammar School was humming and buzzing with Nora like yellow jackets in a windfall of rotten persimmons.
Nora, Nora Page 14