Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  An hour later, the Warden came home. In the crook of his arm was tucked a gorgeous bouquet of carnations and baby’s breath.

  “They call this a nosegay, Edna. You wear it on your wrist.”

  While he fiddled with the box, I slid our mason jars off to the side then hurried them into the kitchen. I don’t think the Warden would’ve cared if we had a few, but my leaving the room with hidden mason jars sealed our night as a private moment between just Edna and me.

  As I watched from the tiny square of linoleum that made up our kitchen, Edna stood up in her yellow summer pajamas and held out her wrist. Her father, all blustering and red—the way he got when the humidity was as high as it was, or he was about to be gentle, or both—slid the bouquet on her wrist. He pulled out the ribbon that had gotten wrapped around her thumb and made sure it was centered just so.

  The Warden turned up our radio and held out his hand for a dance. Edna took her father’s hand, and they waltzed around the living room. He spun his daughter around while I wiped away a tear or two. After a minute, I quietly shut off the lights in the kitchen and left them alone.

  × × ×

  Before you knew it, we had POWs being housed in the encampment at the Fort Bend County Fairgrounds, turning something so innocent and playful into a place for captured and caged humans. Before Pearl Harbor, folks around town would talk about the war as spectators, especially on Sunday when the thick paper came out. How Denmark surrendered the very same day it had been invaded by Germany, followed by Norway and the Netherlands and Belgium. How France had agreed to let Germany occupy its northern half, only to have Italy invade its southern half. Basically, how the rest of the world was falling like eggs in quicksand. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and America came undone, too.

  It was a new feeling, to think about being in America and being in harm’s way—but they’d blown up Hawaii, and now there were spies everywhere. Even though the encampment was for POWs—for folks we had captured and such—it constantly reminded us of this new feeling of vulnerability. We had the enemy here with us in Sugar Land, Texas, of all places. If they were here, they could be anywhere.

  The prisoners in our POW camp who could work manned the local fields and businesses, replacing our men who had gone off to war. It was an odd switch to me and ruffled a few of the old birds around town, them thinking these POWs might form some kind of group determined to poison our lands and food supply. When it was pointed out that they would then also be poisoning their food supply, the old men would grizzle and say, “Of course!” as if the goal of every honorable POW was suicide. A very Japanese thing to say, I thought to myself.

  Through it all—and years beyond—I felt satisfied knowing we, in Guardtown, were safe. I doubted anyone would waste ammunition blowing up a prison. But safety still didn’t keep us from ordinary death.

  On September 8, 1949, the phone rang. I let it go two rings, as was some odd custom I’d picked up along the way.

  “Dara?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Doctor Dixon here at Central Unit—the prison.”

  I leaned back against the wall, feeling its cold against my shoulder. “Yes?”

  “It’s the Warden, Dara. He fell down the concrete steps on his way to the mess hall for his daily walk-through, and died.”

  “What?”

  “The fall didn’t kill him, though. It was another stroke. The stroke caused him to fall. It ripped through the part of his brain that controlled his body, which means that his heart probably stopped before he hit the last stair—if that helps to hear.”

  “Another stroke?”

  Doctor Dixon paused.

  “He’s been having strokes for years now. You didn’t know? He went blind in his right eye a few years back, and last year he started having trouble moving his right foot.”

  “I asked him about that,” I said. “I asked him why his foot seemed to be dragging. He said it was just old age.” I rubbed my stomach where it stretched out the fabric of my skirt. “He was blind in one eye?”

  Doctor Dixon didn’t say anything.

  “And his headaches?” I asked.

  “Those are from his condition also.”

  “So he didn’t feel it? The fall?”

  “He was probably out before he hit the first stair.”

  “Out,” I repeated. “And now he’s gone?”

  The girls looked up from the dining room table, where they were pitting cherries.

  Doctor Dixon’s voice got low. “Yes, ma’am, he is.”

  I shook my head at Miss Debbie and Edna then turned to the wall to process it all—only my mind wouldn’t stand still. He had many strokes? He was blind in one eye? He fell and now he is dead?

  I hung up the phone without saying goodbye and stood for a while with my forehead pressed to the wall. When I turned around, the girls were standing there. They’d heard enough to know what I was going to say.

  Miss Debbie’s arms hung down at her sides. “What is going on, Nana Dara? Who was that? Who’s gone?”

  “Is it Daddy?” Edna asked.

  “Your daddy has died. He had a stroke and . . .”

  Miss Debbie started crying right away. I handed her a dishtowel that I’d tucked into my waistband. She used it to blot her face before she grabbed the phone and pulled it around the corner to call her boyfriend, Bo.

  Edna didn’t cry—not there. She nodded to me that she understood, then walked into the bedroom she still shared with her sister and shut the door without making a sound.

  My heart spasmed. I felt it skip a few beats, then swell and contract back in my chest. I thought of a million things I needed to do—a list of funeral arrangements and other miscellaneous things—in order to keep me away from the tender spots. I wondered how the girls were going to get through this. I tried to console myself that at least this had happened after they were grown, Miss Debbie being twenty-four and Edna twenty-two—but then I realized he’d never get to walk them down the aisle like he’d wanted. Never rock a grandbaby.

  My breathing tightened. I clenched my fists. I ran through more lists: casket, notification to the paper, the wake, the plot, the head-stone—I’d need to order it now.

  I looked over at a picture of the Warden we’d had taken at the Cherry Festival five years earlier. As instructed, we’d both put on a cherry hat and toasted the camera with a tall glass of cherry juice. It was on the table next to that damn mustard couch of his.

  Every Sunday morning, when he’d iron his pants and his shirt for church, he’d also iron the armrest covers on that damn couch. There were punch stains and wine stains and cigarette burns on the couch, but those armrest covers looked brand new.

  And that’s when I started to cry, in choking waves of tears—seeing how much the Warden cared for things that other people might not value. Seeing how he looked deeper than a few scars to see that this was a comfortable God damn couch. It was just long enough for all four of us to sit on without squishing up against each other too much. It was used enough to weather a few oily spots from overturned popcorn bowls, but it was clean. It was loved. He was a man who knew how to love—not just fall in love, but really love, even after something isn’t new anymore.

  That couch had been long enough for him to sit on one end and for me to lie down at a nice angle and get my feet rubbed through my socks. He’d tease me about pulling off my socks, and I’d threaten to pull my feet away, as if him giving me a foot rub was a gift to him.

  It was on this couch that I’d seen him late one night, in the third year of our marriage, slumped over, looking at his dead wife’s picture, drinking gin and whispering. My guess was it was their anniversary. I never asked, just tiptoed back into bed and shut off all the bedroom lights.

  That was the couch both girls slept on when they were sick, so the sick one wouldn’t wake up the other in that tiny room they shared. I’d bring out a hot pan of water with rosemary floating in it to clear their lungs while the Warden would run out for whatever medici
ne we could use to make us think we were doing something. That couch held more than its share of dirty tissues and had soaked up buckets of cool water running from washcloths held on burning foreheads.

  I walked over and curled up on it that night, where I prayed my fifth rosary since my youth. I prayed for the Warden. I said the rosary for the secrets of his soul. I said it as my way of greasing the doorman at the pearly gates, just in case the Warden had hidden some misdoings from me.

  I prayed when all I could think about was how I would ever be able to sleep in our bed again. I remembered that he never said anything about me lying to him about my letters with Rhodie—that he loved me and left me my secrets. I remembered the smiling faces of the people in the cafeteria on the day the Warden knelt down on that creaky stage to propose to me, and the moonlight on our wedding night, and the way the fans blew that white ribbon around the flowers on Edna’s wrist when he danced with her on her prom night—and I prayed.

  I prayed the rosary because, God dammit all, I did love that man, after all.

  THE KING OF THE TWELVE-STRING GUITAR

  The week the Warden died, in the fall of 1949, I was paging through the paper to make sure they had listed his obituary correctly when I came across a blurb on page three: Lead Belly, Former Central Unit Inmate, Strums a Low Note.

  The article told how Huddie had built himself quite a name with folks like Woody Guthrie raving about his musical skill. The crazy Negro—he had made himself a reputation as a musical genius.

  The focus of the article, though, was how Huddie had contracted ALS, or what had come to be known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The short of it: Huddie—the self-proclaimed and widely acknowledged “King of the Twelve-String Guitar”—was dying.

  Well, shit.

  I closed the paper right up. It was too much. I had just buried the Warden. And to add to it, I felt like I’d lost my entire family. Mama and Daddy were long gone, and my stepdaughters had turned their grief inside themselves, far away from me. Since the Warden died, I had sat in our home night after night having silent dinners with his daughters, the ones who didn’t want my condolences—or maybe I was too lost in my own gray world to hand them out.

  Huddie dying? I couldn’t manage that right now, so I set the paper aside until I felt strong enough to handle it.

  The next day, I opened it up again. The article called Huddie—Lead Belly—“one of the most prolific folk singers of the day, and also one of the most violent,” having landed himself in jail for attempted murder or stabbing at least three times. It said that a few years after his first album came out, the doctors told him he had ALS, and that he would die from it:

  . . . Lead Belly’s symptoms include tripping on stairs and, to his heartbreak, a decreased ability to make quick, accurate chord changes. Now, he’s bedridden in New York City, with some difficulty swallowing due to muscle weakness . . .

  I flipped the paper down and pushed my plate of spaghetti to the side of my gold TV tray. Two loud birds chirped at each other outside. I looked out across my small room. A force of blood moved through me with each breath I took.

  The thought of my friend lying there, possibly alone, in bed, not able to play or sing, surged through my already damaged heart and broke it down even further. The Warden, God bless him, had left me a nice sum of money on his death, and I decided autumn might be a really beautiful time to visit New York City.

  × × ×

  The very next morning, me feeling deeply that he didn’t have much time left, I woke the Warden’s girls and asked them to have some coffee with me. Miss Debbie, her hair in curlers under a cotton hankie, said she didn’t drink coffee—that it made her too aggressive.

  “Oh, is that what does it?” I said.

  She answered by putting a pillow over her face.

  Edna, sitting up in the bed next to her sister’s, folded her book over and said she’d be down shortly.

  Five minutes later, we all sat around the dining room table, a small circular thing that the Warden’s parents had given him after he got married to his first wife. I ran my fingers over the scratch marks on the rounded edge, where little Edna had decided to practice her fork skills.

  “I have some news,” I started. “Some travel news.” I clasped my hands on the tabletop near one of the many vases of funeral flowers that had just started browning. “I need to see a friend . . .”

  They sat there about as perky as starving soldiers on the front line. I continued, “In New York.”

  Coming to life, the girls gasped in stereophonic sound. Edna’s eyes lit up—New York!—while Miss Debbie looked like she’d seen a vision of the end of the world. She held her hand to her throat. “Why on Earth would you go to New York?”

  “My friend is dying.”

  Edna, all long legs and arms in her loose pajamas, leaned forward. Her wooden chair creaked. “You have a friend in New York?”

  I resisted the urge to say who this friend was, not because he was colored and not because he was a musician, but because I didn’t want to use his name to make myself seem more interesting to the girls. In short, I didn’t want to brag—not that Miss Debbie would find the news of me being cozy with a womanizing, murderous Negro singer to be braggable in the conventional sense.

  “I will be back in one week,” I said. “Can I trust you two alone here?”

  Miss Debbie rolled her blue eyes up toward her curlers. “We’re adults.”

  Edna looked up at me. “You want company on the trip?”

  “Oh honey,” I said, touched that she’d want to come, “I would love your company, but I’m afraid this trip might be a little much. He’s dying, after all.”

  She stiffened up. “I know death.”

  “I know you do. But this death is a bit much maybe.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, he’s a colored man.”

  Miss Debbie leapt up from her chair and onto her righteously rigid legs poking out from her angel-wing-white nightgown. “What! A Negro—and a man! No, Nana Dara, you are not going. New York was one thing, but these are three things! Strike Out.”

  Edna laughed. “This isn’t baseball.”

  “No.” Miss Debbie turned to her, hands on her hips now. “This is life.”

  Edna leaned back against the wood rails of the chair back. “I think it’s exciting. I didn’t know you knew folks like that.”

  “Well, I did work in a prison.”

  “Oh my God!” Miss Debbie literally stomped her foot. “Is he an ex-convict?”

  I put my hands out in a gesture of calm and placed one on each of their upper arms. “I will leave you some money for food. If there’s an emergency, call the hospital number I’ll leave you, and they can find me. I can trust you, right?”

  Miss Debbie scowled. “Can we trust you? I feel like I don’t know you at all.” She turned away, loving her moment on the stage.

  Edna shrugged and stood up. She pressed her cool hand over mine—a great sign of affection from her. “You ought to leave me the information, Nana Dara, for fear that Miss Debbie here might have the police called.”

  I smiled. “Good idea, honey.”

  × × ×

  The trip to New York didn’t move in exactly a straight line. I took buses and trains, and I even needed to spend two nights in a “roomette” on one of those new, lightweight Pullmans.

  Not much for seeking out the company of strangers, I stayed mostly inside my little blue-and-green roomette, looking out the picture window in amazement at the changes in the countryside as we headed up north—watching all the farmlands get smaller and darker somehow while I waved hello to the cows, who didn’t appear bothered in the least by the train’s smoke and noise.

  My roomette came with a sitting chair as comfortable as any on solid ground, a foldaway bed, a sink, and small toilet. All I could ask for.

  In my mind, I planned what possessions I would take to live in one of these rooms if I wanted to spend my days on a train, seeing the world. I dec
ided I’d bring my family portraits, a phonograph with as many records as I could fit on a single shelf, Mama’s old suitcase filled with books—thinking I could also prop my feet on the suitcase when they started throbbing—that picture Rhodie drew for me after our weekend together, my bloody souvenir from cutting the head cook, and a few of the artworks made for me by Edna and Miss Debbie before they started getting dreams of their own.

  Clearly my time on the rails—with the fields moving by and the sky standing still—had turned me sentimental. Letting it overtake me in the way that mood can, I decided to write some letters to my long-lost friends.

  First: that ape Ken. Ken who’d come by our house for barbecue every so often with his mousy wife and their loud children. I wrote and told him he’s always welcome, even now that the Warden is gone—especially now. I confessed that maybe I’d like to see him and play some more cards—just me and him now. And though I knew he probably wouldn’t take me up on it, writing it down made me feel like at least I was doing something to maintain connection, to be open.

  As I sealed the powder blue envelope, a nice young man came by and knocked on my roomette. He slid the door open and asked if I’d care for more wine.

  “Why yes,” I said, “it’s helping me write my letters.”

  He tipped his hat. “I do my best, ma’am.”

  “Only,” I said, “why don’t you make it champagne.”

  “I’ll bring you a fresh rose too.”

  I smiled and thought that the world just couldn’t get any nicer than it was right then and there, in the cozy chair of my roomette.

  After my tray arrived, complete with a linen napkin, an orange rose, and the tiniest bottle of champagne I’d ever seen, I wrote to Beauregard. I told him all that had happened with the Warden dying and me heading off to see Huddie in New York City, riding a new, aluminum train that shined so brightly I had to cover my eyes when I stepped in. I wrote that I hoped all was well with his pretty wife, Evelyn, and those two boys of his. I told him I remembered going to get drinks with him and Evelyn and that it had stopped me from my own internal madness after I’d gotten that notice from Rhodie. I thanked him and told him he’d been one of my best friends ever and that hopefully some day when he had the time—maybe when his kids had moved on—we could get together again. I signed it with love.