Now she was with him, in his mobile home, grooming his feet.
“Thank you, Knot,” he said.
“I’m goin’ home awhile,” she told him. He asked why, and she told him she wanted to watch more of the soaps. It didn’t make sense—she could watch them there, he said. “I want to watch my stories in peace,” she replied.
“Peace, huh?” he said.
Pratt’s feelings about her drinking had not wavered. She drank far less than she had before his permanent return to West Mills—there were stomach problems—but she still enjoyed a few nice pours per week. Pratt raised a great deal of hell about those, too. Knot told Pratt that she would be damned if she were to give up the two weekly drinks, especially since Pep had persuaded her to accompany her to church twice a month. She even put money in the collection plate.
“What is it ’bout them soaps you like so much?” Pratt asked. “I remember a time when it was always a big ol’ book on your lap.”
“They pass the time,” she answered, putting her slippers on and heading toward his door. “I’ll be back over after the—”
“Oh!” Pratt exclaimed. “I knew it was somethin’ I was s’pose to tell you. You’ll never, in your whole life, guess who I seen up-bridge yesterday at the fillin’ station.”
“I ain’t gon’ try to guess,” Knot said. “Who?”
“Guppy,” Pratt said. “Him and his son was at the fillin’ station. That man is still strange. Just old and strange now.”
Every muscle in Knot’s body locked. That was the form fear had chosen for Knot today. It locked itself inside her. She could neither blink nor swallow.
What in the fuck is Mr. Guppy doin’ in West Mills?
Guppy’s son hadn’t remembered Pratt or West Mills, Pratt said. “They was on they way back to Maryland. Comin’ from visitin’ some people down in Charlotte. That’s what the son said. Ol’ Guppy ain’t say too much.”
The day after Miss Goldie had run Guppy out of town, she summoned Knot to the juke joint in the middle of the day. She was sweeping when her son-in-law escorted Knot inside.
“Me and Guppy come to an agreement,” Miss Goldie told her. That day she was dressed in a way that reminded Knot of a grandmother—not a woman who owned and operated a juke joint. “We thought it best he move on.”
“Where to?” Knot asked.
“Far from here,” Miss Goldie replied, working the broom in one of the corners of the big room. “He won’t be back. Not while I’m livin’.”
Knot went back and forth as to whether to ask Miss Goldie how she had managed the Guppy problem. Finally, she decided it might be useful to know the details, if Miss Goldie would share them.
“I’ll put it to you like this, Knot. And this is how you’ll put it to Guppy if he ever comes back here botherin’ you. Me, Guppy, and Reverend Walker had some dealings.”
“Dealings?” Knot repeated. “I don’t take yo’ meaning, Miss Goldie.”
“Oh, come on, now, Knot,” Miss Goldie had said, smiling. “You take my meanin’.” And after Knot had shrugged, Miss Goldie put her hands on her hips and clarified, “In my bed, Knot. The dealings was in my bed. The three of us. Many times.” She resumed with her sweeping. “Guppy couldn’t get enough of Reverend Walker. Couldn’t get enough. I never seen nothin’ like it in my life. I enjoyed it, though.”
“Oh,” Knot had said. “I see.”
Now Miss Goldie was no longer around to protect Knot from Guppy. She and Reverend Walker were both in their graves. Now Guppy was here in West Mills. Old, with nothing to lose, Knot imagined.
“He ask me how you doin’,” Pratt said. “I tell him you doin’ just fine. And he tell me to ask you ’bout the pox you had. Pox got hold o’ ya?”
Knot watched Pratt come back to the living room with underpants on, and he stood in front of her. Where was the limp that the gout had given him? He had come down the hallway so quickly. And it seemed as though he looked younger—as if the anger had dialed his age back forty years. She remembered, just as clear as crystal, the last time he had packed his old suitcase and left her house.
“When was you gon’ tell me I got a daughter, Azalea?” Pratt asked. “A daughter that’s a grown woman! A grown daughter that’s got two young’uns her own self!”
Knot said the first thing that came to her mind: “Fran say she ain’t need to know who her daddy is!”
“I ain’t ask you what Fran need to know, Azalea,” Pratt said. He paced in front of her. The muscles in his legs rippled with every step.
“We thought you was dead!” Knot shouted, and she picked up a magazine from the coffee table and threw it at the wall. “Even Otis Lee and Pep thought you was dead. You ain’t write or nothin’!”
“But when I came back with Vic and Vera, you couldn’a thought I was dead!” he said. “Why ain’t you tell me then? Or the first time I asked you who your girls’ daddy was?” He asked if Otis Lee and Pep knew. But before she could answer, he said, “Never mind. I don’t even want to know right now.”
Knot stood up and hastened toward the door. Her hands shook, and she felt as though a swarm of butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach.
“You betta not walk out that door,” Pratt told her. “We gon’ talk this here thing out!”
But Knot had already run outside. She missed a step and fell hard into the warm grass. How Pratt got down the steps so quickly, she could not imagine. But he was there, helping her up. And he held her.
“You coulda tol’ me, Azalea,” he said. He pulled her closer into his chest.
Knot let her arms drop to her sides. And she heard a loud cry. After hearing it three times, she realized it was coming from her own mouth. It was as though the hot sun, or Pratt’s loving grip, was drawing the sound out of her.
“I got ya, Knot,” Pratt said as he rocked her from side to side.
“I’m so sorry,” she said as best she could. “I’m so sorry, Pratt.”
“It’s all right. I gotcha.”
Knot put her arms around Pratt’s wide waist, and she surrendered to his tender embrace. He whispered and rocked. Rocked and whispered.
In the kitchen, Pratt handed her a glass of ice water. He had wrapped the cold glass in a dishrag—just as she would have—and sat next to her.
Who was Eunice’s father? he wanted to know.
“You don’t know him,” Knot said. He said he might. “You don’t. I ain’t even know him.”
Only once had Fran asked who her father was. The man who had played the role had not yet been in the ground twelve hours. To Knot, it had seemed that Fran’s question had been more about breaking the silence that had fallen on them in Fran’s kitchen than it was about getting an answer. If Knot had known how genuine Fran was being when she had once said she didn’t care who her real father was, Knot and Pratt might have been far less nervous when they sat her down an hour later.
“I kinda thought he was,” Fran said. Ten-year-old Lady Coy was sitting between her legs as she greased the child’s scalp. Knot had asked Fran if she didn’t think Lady Coy ought to go upstairs or outside to play while they talked. Fran said she didn’t keep secrets from her children. “But like I told you a long time ago, it don’t matter a whole lot to me,” she went on. She would be lying if she claimed to have never wondered what her father might look, act, and sound like, she said. But it had never been something she thought a lot about.
“Ma,” Lady Coy said. “Is my daddy my real daddy?”
“Be quiet, Coy,” Fran scolded.
That’s why you oughta send her outdoors, like I tol’ you from the first.
Knot glanced over at Pratt, who now donned a somber expression. He looked as though he had been the one who’d grown up without knowing his real father.
“It’s nice having you around,” Fran told him. “You already got my girls spoiled.” Pratt smiled like the Cheshire cat and leaned back in his chair.
If Fran wondered ’bout her real pa sometimes, Eunice probably wond
ered ’bout hers, too.
Feeling relieved, Knot leaned back in her chair as well. She might feel a little more relieved if she knocked on Eunice’s door and said, Yo’ real pa’s first name is William and he’s from Wilmington, Delaware. I called him Delaware William ’cause I didn’t want to know his whole name. Didn’t need to. And he could sing like nobody’s business. That’s all I know ’bout him. I’m sorry. But Knot trusted Breezy to know his wife.
Back at the mobile home, Knot and Pratt ate Spam sandwiches on Wonder Bread and shared a beer.
“A glass of water’ll be stronger than this,” Knot said, sliding her half glass of beer toward Pratt.
Pratt had cut the sandwiches diagonally. They tasted better that way, he had insisted. Goin’ the same place, no matter how ya slice it.
Sandwiches eaten and beer flattened, Pratt looked across the table and asked, “What else I miss while I was gone, Azalea? You ain’t got no husband under the floorboards or nothin’, do ya?”
Well, Otis Lee’s sister ain’t his sister. She’s his mama. He don’t know it, but I do. I knew it ’fore I even met you. And I ain’t gon’ tell him, or nobody else who don’t already know. ’Cause it’ll hurt him some kinda bad. And it ain’t none of my business.
“We in West Mills, on Antioch Lane,” Knot said. “If I tell ya anything else, I’ll have to make it up.”
Knot was right. Two years later in ’78, getting house numbers excited just about everyone in town. “We a real city now!” people said to one another. In ’80, West Mills’s first nursing home—privately owned—was built. The Penningtons and the Edgars were its primary investors. And in August of ’82, just a week after Knot returned to West Mills after having gone to Ahoskie to help Iris attend to the business of burying Leonard, Knot had to slap Eunice Loving.
“I need to go up-bridge,” Knot said to Valley, who lay on her couch as if he owned every thread of its upholstery. He had been staying in her house because there was a possum family living under his, and one of them had found a way inside. Until he could get someone to go out and close the possums’ passageway, he refused to stay there at night.
“Them fuckers act like they payin’ me rent or something, Knot,” he had grumbled when he came with a bag of clothes. He was more than welcome in her house, she said—especially since she was now spending most of her time at Pratt’s.
Valley told Knot that it was too hot to walk up-bridge and that he would not be going with her. He had made two mistakes: assuming she wanted him to come along, and assuming she planned to walk up-bridge while the day’s temperatures were in the high nineties.
A few minutes later, Knot stood in front of Fran’s porch and yelled, “Hey, in there!”
“Yeah!” Fran hollered back.
“What ya know?”
“Nothin’,” Fran replied.
“Take me up-bridge.”
“When?” Fran asked.
Knot made her way up the porch steps. She knocked twice with a knuckle and walked in. From the strong smell of pine-scented cleaner, Knot figured Fran had just mopped the kitchen floor. The smell reminded Knot of all her years as a domestic. She knew it had to have been Fran who had mopped because she had never seen Cedar or Lady Coy holding so much as a dustrag.
“Can’t you take me now?” Knot insisted.
Fran lay stretched out long on her couch. She wore a T-shirt and a pair of cut-off denim shorts and was smoking a cigarette. And since she was not wearing her wig, her short-cut hair was sticking in every possible direction. Fran was busy watching the game show Knot couldn’t stand. They just got married and they foolish enough to go on TV so everybody can see how much they don’t know one another?
“You hear me, Fran?”
“Ain’t got time to go up-bridge right now,” Fran told her. “I’m gettin’ ready to get supper goin’. Pratt can’t take you?”
“You getting’ forgetful,” Knot said. She reminded Fran that Pratt had left that morning to go to Chesapeake for his great-niece’s third wedding. “You gon’ take me or what?”
“Later on, Knot. Shit.” Fran smashed her cigarette in the ashtray.
Knot heard Cedar and Lady Coy talking in the room upstairs. She looked at the ceiling, then back at Fran.
“Well, can’t Cedar drive me right quick?” Knot heard Lady Coy say, “Nope.” That’s one sixteen-year-old who got enough mouth for us all.
Knot was surprised to find the girls at home. Since they had gotten their driver’s licenses—they had gotten them on the same day—the two of them had been taking the hour-long drive up to Norfolk two or three times a week to go to the shopping malls. According to Breezy, he was nearly going broke because all three of his children were constantly at those malls.
Figuring that no one in Fran’s house seemed likely to hurry and give her the ride, she let herself drop onto the felt tangerine armchair that matched the couch Fran lay stretched out on.
“Well, I’ll rest here awhile and talk to ya ’til ya ready, I guess.”
A minute later Fran had on the red wig that made her look like the woman from The Facts of Life, and the two of them were headed to Fran’s old Chevrolet pickup.
Knot heard a car speeding up the lane, kicking up rocks, the engine revving. It was Eunice. And she turned into Fran’s driveway. Lord, have mercy.
“What in the devil do she want?” Knot said.
Fran opened the truck door and tossed her keys and pocketbook on the seat. Then she put her hands on her hips. Eunice parked her shiny burgundy Datsun close behind Fran’s truck. She slammed her car door so hard, Knot wondered how the driver’s side hadn’t caved in.
“Fran Waters,” Eunice said. “We need to have a word.”
“No, we don’t need to ‘have a word,’ ” Fran told her, “’cause I ain’t in the mood for nothin’ you got goin’. So, you can get back in your lil car and—”
“Trying to get me voted out, aren’t you?” Eunice accused. Knot was glad that Eunice had the good sense to stand where she was. I ain’t got the strength to keep Fran off her if she say the wrong thing.
“Voted out of what, Eunice?” Fran asked.
“Don’t play dumb with me,” Eunice snapped. “I already know what you’re plotting. And all I have to say is, if y’all can find somebody who’ll do as much for those choirs as I have for free, then help yourselves.”
Knot almost burst into laughter when she heard what Eunice had come there to discuss. Instead, she giggled. She was sure Eunice had come because Breezy had, again, begun to spend a lot of time at Fran’s house—something Knot had decided, years ago, not to mention. Waste of my breath.
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout it,” Fran insisted. But since Eunice had come there about choir business, Fran reminded Eunice that she had, for the past five months, asked that Eunice put in an order to have the piano tuned. It still hadn’t been done, Fran pointed out.
“And for that you want me out?” Eunice asked.
“Didn’t I just tell you I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no votin’?” Fran said. Her job was to sit at the piano on Thursday nights for rehearsals, and for Sunday morning worship services. “I don’t know and I don’t care about nothin’ else y’all do.”
“I should’ve known you wouldn’t own up to it,” Eunice scoffed.
Knot saw Valley come out of her house and onto her porch, his hands on his hips. But before he could take the first step down, Knot waved her arm and fanned her hand, signaling him not to come.
Knot stood and listened as Fran and Eunice repeated the same foolishness over and over: “You want me voted out,” one daughter said. “I don’t care ’bout no choir president,” said the other.
Eunice ain’t offered me so much as a glance since she hopped outta that little car of hers.
To expect a hug or a conversation from Eunice would have been ridiculous, Knot well knew. But, shit, a lil head nod or just a lil look-over woulda been just plain civil, Eunice.
Over the years, these thoughts
about Eunice had passed through Knot’s mind many times, and she had mentioned them to Otis Lee more than once.
“I wouldn’t worry ’bout that too much if I was you,” Otis Lee had advised. Breezy and Eunice had been married two years. “I’m her father-in-law. And before that, I was just like a uncle to her. But sometimes I still catch her lookin’ at me like she scared I’m gon’ steal her china dishes.”
From somewhere around a corner, Pep had yelled, “She ain’t got no china dishes! I seen real china plates on the east side of the canal. And them plates Eunice Manning got ain’t it.”
“She’s Eunice Loving now, Pep,” Otis Lee reminded her.
Knot remembered feeling an urge to defend Eunice against Pep’s words, but she couldn’t. Pep and Otis Lee knew Eunice far better than she did.
While Fran and Eunice argued back and forth about the choir business, Knot had a chance to look Eunice over. If only Eunice behaved as beautifully as she looked and dressed, Knot thought to herself. Seldom did Eunice leave home without wearing a skirt suit. Arguing with Fran, Eunice wore a baby blue one. But for what? Just to run an errand or two or to go sit with Brock and Ayra? She looked as though she were en route to an office job, maybe at West Mills Savings and Loans. But Knot and everyone else knew that Eunice hadn’t worked anywhere since she sold the general store three years earlier, in 1979.
Just as Knot was about to walk over to Fran and ask if she was going to ever get a ride up-bridge—the store’s owner was known for closing for lunch—Cedar and Lady Coy came out onto the porch. Cedar lit a cigarette that was longer than the ones Fran smoked. She wore an A-shirt and a pair of white shorts to match. Four straight rows of pink hair rollers covered her head. All Lady Coy wore was a black slip. No rollers.
“I swear,” Lady Coy remarked. “Y’all be fussin’ over some of the dumbest shit.”
“Go back in the house, please, Coy,” Cedar ordered.
“Why you tellin’ me to go back in the—”
“You don’t help things,” Cedar cut in. “Won’t keep yo’ mouth shut. Go!”
Lady Coy went back inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. Knot wondered where they had learned to do all of that door slamming. They didn’t get that from me. Everybody know I throw dishes.
In West Mills Page 17
