by Jim Grimsley
She loomed in the door and studied Nora.
“Did she tell you?” Mama asked.
“Did who tell me what?”
Mama jerked her head toward Nora. She looked like she wanted to spit. “This one. Did she tell you what she done?”
Daddy narrowed his eyes at Nora and pulled his hands out of the washbasin. He reached for a towel to dry his hands.
Mama pulled the letter out of her bosom, the envelope slightly moist and wilted. “This here letter,” she hissed, “is from a boy.”
“How do you know, Louise, you can’t read.”
“Carl Jr. read the name to me.”
“That little son of a bitch was by this house?”
Carl Jr. and Daddy fist-fought over money Daddy owed Carl Jr.; Daddy threw Carl Jr. out of the house. He was living with Uncle Snookie, Mama’s brother, at Willard’s Fork.
“He come by to get some clean overalls,” Mama said.
“That rat-ass son of a bitch ever steps foot in this house while I’m here, I’ll fuck him up bad.”
“I had to give him some clothes,” Mama explained, slightly withered by Daddy’s response.
But his curiosity about the letter defeated his anger against Carl Jr. Daddy snatched the letter away from her and peered at it. Daddy could read, and in fact got to be pretty good at it later in life when he was no longer working; he would sit in his house on the one chair he and Mama had left, and all day he would read pornographic books, girls prancing naked on the paperback covers, dancing with the tips of their nipples two inches long or more, stiff as bolts. Facing Nora, Daddy read the name on the envelope, then opened the letter and mouthed the name at the end.
“This is from that son of a bitch Lyle Bates,” Daddy spat.
“I knew that’s who it was from.” Mama shook her head and all her chins. “She’s been pining after that one.”
“Hush, Mama,” Nora whispered.
“Make me a cup of coffee while I read this letter.” Daddy fixed Nora with a stare and spoke to her in a low, flat tone.
“That’s why she’s rushing down to that store two and three times on a Saturday,” Mama kept nodding and eyeing Nora, a gleam of satisfaction in her eye. “She’s been mooning over that boy.”
Nora served Daddy, who sat peering at the letter. Lips moving the slightest bit. He read something and smacked his lips. “Oh, horse shit,” he hooted. “When did you let him touch your titties?”
“I never done no such of a thing.”
“It says right here, ‘I love to run my hand up under your blouse where your titties are.’”
“It don’t say anything like that.”
Daddy glared at her. His smirk had slowly changed to something else, before my very eyes. “Did you let him stick his fingers in your pussy, too?”
Tears sprang down Nora’s cheeks so suddenly it was as if a wound had opened. Daddy rose over her like a shadow, and she huddled without moving. Daddy’s tone was low and cold. “Answer me, girl. You let him rub your pussy?”
“No, sir.”
“You sure you hadn’t?”
Speechless, she nodded her head. “I never done it,” she croaked.
“So if I check it, I’ll find out it’s just like I left it.”
Nora blushed to the roots of her hair. Mama stood behind them both with her legs planted wide. Nora’s chin trembled and she spoke with a broken voice. “Daddy, I didn’t do anything with Lyle Yates, I didn’t do what he said, Daddy, I swear it. He’s been after me, and I kept telling him to leave me alone.”
“She’s a liar,” Mama swore. “She’s been after that Yates boy since I don’t know when, parading all up and down the road.”
“Hush, Mama,” Nora said, trembling, and Daddy struck out, once, fiercely, across her face. The crack was like gunfire, and Nora’s head turned, her hair whipped around; I see it even now in such detail, as if it is happening in front of me, slow motion. She gave a small cry and her nose started to bleed. She held her hand up under her nose but stood still.
“Get out of my sight,” Daddy said.
She stumbled through the door that led to the back of the house. A few minutes later I found her holding a wet cloth over her nose. She glared at me like a bird of prey. “What do you want?”
“Are you all right?”
She laughed. “No, I’m not all right. Daddy just knocked the hell out of me.”
I twisted my toes all together and stood there. She lay on the bed and looked at nothing in particular. A question floated in the air between us, because I had heard what Daddy said, but I feared to ask it out loud, and Nora stared right through me. Then turned her face to the wall.
I helped with supper. Mama fried fatback black at the edges, boiled cabbage flavored with fat. I cooked a pot of soupy rice with black pepper. For once Nora was nowhere near to boss me, but Mama kept glaring at me which was almost as bad.
“You’ll be getting boys to send you that love mess in a letter,” Mama accused.
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes, you will, I know. You’ll be dragging all around here like your sister, laying in there in the bed pouting because her daddy told her what’s what.”
“I don’t have to do everything she does.”
“Don’t sass me, missy.” Mama cuffed me across the face, hard.
Nora stayed in the bed through dinner, but the rest of us ate. Carl Jr.’s place sat empty, and we all felt it more so with Nora gone too. I had to feed the kids and Otis started to eat off my plate again, but I laid my fork against the tender part of his wrist till Daddy laughed and Mama made me stop. When Otis whined and Daddy smacked him, I was glad in my heart.
Later I slipped into the bedroom with a fatback and biscuit for Nora, and she ate it huddled against the headboard. She hunched over the biscuit like a field mouse. She licked every crumb from her fingertips and chewed the fatback rind last of all.
Next morning, Mama woke Nora and me and said to come to the kitchen, even earlier than usual, before dawn. Daddy sat in the chair with a cut on his cheek and another one on his arm. Carl Jr. sat next to him with one ear all bloody and his clothes tore up pretty bad. Him and Daddy had become the best of friends now. He looked at Nora and said, “We damn near killed Lyle Yates. Swore he wasn’t doing a thing with Nora, lying bastard.”
Nora blinked at him and never said a word. Mama had lit a fire in the stove. Nora sent me to the well for water, and I stepped fearfully onto the porch and down the steps.
We cleaned both of them up and bandaged the cuts. Mama dabbed alcohol onto Carl Jr., blowing on the wound to fend off the sting. Carl Jr. cooed and pumped his legs. Nora took care of Daddy and pronounced, “It’s going to take stitches for you.”
“It won’t,” Daddy spat.
“Daddy, your cheek is cut open.”
“It don’t reach that deep.”
“It’s nearabout all the way through.”
“Oh, shut up.” He pressed the cut back together, dabbing it with alcohol himself, tears streaming down his face. “Pull off my shoes and wash my feet.”
He looked her in the eye. For a moment, the tiniest flicker of rebellion flickered across her face.
Without a word she unlaced his boots, took them off. She filled a pan with hot water and peeled the socks down his white, veiny legs. He soaked his feet and she rubbed them. She knelt over the pan with her cheeks pink and flushed, dress wet and clinging to her back, her hands glistening, Daddy’s toes curled back with happiness. She toweled the feet dry and pulled clean socks over the smattering of hair on the top of each foot. Daddy had a tuft of black hair on each big toe.
Daddy looked at Nora in satisfaction. “I like how you take care of me, little girl.”
“I ain’t so little anymore.”
Whether she meant to be coy or not, Daddy took it as flirtation, and laughed.
That evening I found her in the bedroom with a paper sack; Corrine snored beside her, sleeping like a log. When Nora saw me coming she shoved
the sack under the edge of the bed. I knew right then she was leaving. She looked at me and blinked. I pretended I had not seen anything.
We went to bed. She rested there in her dress with the covers pulled up to her chin, and I pretended not to notice that either. Near midnight, with Otis snoring and Carl Jr. sprawled across him, she slid out of bed. She sat there in the dark for a long time. A tap sounded on the window, and she opened it and handed out the bag. She stood over me for a moment, then kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cool and moist. She whispered, “That letter never was from any Lyle Yates, either. I fooled Daddy this time.”
She grinned. I grinned back. She slipped out the window and was gone. The print of her kiss remained on my cheek; if I close my eyes I can feel it still.
When Daddy found out she was gone, he spit a mouthful of coffee halfway across the kitchen, then fastened his gaze on me. “Were you in the bed with her?”
“Corrine and me was,” I answered, and Corrine hid behind my skirt.
“And you didn’t wake up when she got out of bed?”
“No, sir.”
“You laid there asleep.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you didn’t see what jackass it was run off with her.”
“No, sir. I didn’t see anything because I was asleep.”
He glared at me for a while. We all speculated who the boy or man might have been. Mama still believed she had eloped with Lyle Yates, but Daddy assured her Lyle Yates needed too much mending to be thinking about eloping with anybody right now.
“She was a strumpet,” Mama said. “Strutting around here like she did. She acted liked she was the mama.” But even as she said this, something sad and lonely filled her eyes.
“She probably had a boyfriend in every cornfield,” Madson declared.
Daddy reflected on what Madson had said, chewing the end of a match. “She probably did, son.” He hawked and spit in Mama’s spitcan, and announced, “I don’t want to hear another thing about it.”
He sat there brooding. Now and then I could feel his gaze on me.
That night I slept between Corrine and baby Delia in the middle of the bed, with my head at the foot of the bed, and woke at the slightest noise in the room.
During the day I kept a wary eye. The work Nora had done fell on me, including all the cooking, since Corrine proved sorry help. I boiled grits, fried fatback, mixed biscuit dough, and stoked the fire in the stove. I pulled off Daddy’s shoes and socks and washed his feet. I stirred the sugar into his coffee. By the time we learned what had happened to Nora, that she had married Burner Boyette and lived on the farm right down the road with the whole Boyette family, I had replaced her in nearly every way.
I discovered I made a better cook than Nora had affected, that I made the biscuits lighter and fluffier than she did, stirred the grits better with fewer lumps, and I fried a good chicken the few times we had it. I could make a gravy out of the least bit of drippings and flour.
At night, I continued to sleep upside down in the bed, staring at Corrine’s, Baby Hob’s, and Delia’s feet. Hob slept with us whenever Daddy wanted Mama for his business. Often I hardly slept. I was listening for something, a step in the night. I would know the sound when I heard it.
I began bathing during the day when Daddy worked, or early in the morning, when he was still asleep. Even then he would find me sometimes. He would amble to the doorway without warning and I would freeze. “Excuse me, honey,” he would say, and smile, and I would cover my breasts with my hands.
Once Otis walked in on me while I was washing. I slapped him sharp across the face and sent him squealing to Mama, who slapped him again herself when she found out what he had done. “I never meant to,” Otis squealed, dancing, while Mama’s blunt hand lashed at him.
“You little peeping tom son of a bitch,” Mama hissed, “you stay out of that room when you ain’t supposed to be in there.”
At night I dreamed about Nora. In the dream we were sleeping together, only Nora and me, and she curled herself sweetly around me and kept me warm with her arms. Then I would wake up and see feet sticking out from under the blankets, and I would draw my legs under the covers and lie there missing Nora in the dark.
THE NEXT TIME I saw her she was expecting her first child. She had been living down the road at Maxie Boyette’s farm all this time, when for us it had been like she flew to the moon. Mama and I walked to visit.
“Hello, Ellen. Hello, Mama.” She spoke with the tip of her chin quivering, her voice quivering too, and led us to their tiny bedroom.
We sat on the bed. Nora held Mama’s hand like a little girl again. Her eyes filled with tears and, to match her feat, so did Mama’s. They sat sniffling and holding hands. The backs of Nora’s hands were nearly as rough and brown as Mama’s.
“You’re going to have a baby,” Mama said.
Nora rubbed her belly. “I sure am. If it’s a girl, I’m going to name it after you.”
Mama blushed and ducked her head a bit. “I was thinking you didn’t miss me at all.”
“Oh, Mama.”
“It’s the truth.”
They sat together. They still held hands but their fingers had loosened.
“Who’s looking after the younguns?” Nora asked me.
“Corrine,” I said.
“Corrine is right smart with them younguns,” Mama added, but that was a lie.
The moment becomes important and large when I look back at it. I am seeing Nora with new eyes as I look back on that room. She has become kinder, softer, at least on the surface. She smiles at Mama without that little twist to her mouth, that sneer. Her lips have learned to relax for the moment. When she speaks, her voice drips with affection. When she looks me in the eye, for a moment, the Nora I remember needles like a knot at the center of each pupil.
Her lip trembled, and she gazed at Mama with watery eyes. “I miss you, Mama. I don’t like to be here.”
“I know you don’t, sweetheart. You’d rather be at home with me, wouldn’t you?” Mama beamed, feeling herself so loved.
“They treat me kind of funny.”
“Minnie Boyette is a funny woman,” Mama nodded her head.
“I think that woman hates my guts. That’s what I think. For taking her son away.” She lowered her voice and ducked her head toward the door. She smoothed her hand over her stomach. “But I got me a baby coming. She don’t matter.”
“She’ll be all over you when that baby comes. Minnie Boyette is one funny woman all right.” She paused, as if she expected Nora to say something, but Nora watched the door.
On the walk home, Mama continued to weep and dab at her eyes with one of Daddy’s stained handkerchiefs. We trudged along the side of the road. My shoes had begun to pinch again, and I resented it because Nora had two pair and took both of them when she left.
Mama said, “You won’t ever leave me like your sister done. I know you won’t.”
“That’s right, I won’t, Mama,” I answered, and petted her arm. But she gave me such a dull-eyed look, with such a flavoring of ash, that I hardly believed myself.
“She didn’t say a word about the wedding,” Mama sniffled. “My own daughter.”
“She said it was a justice of the peace.”
“That’s so sweet,” Mama said.
“She loves you, Mama,” I added, with an ache of loneliness in my own belly. “She said how much she missed you.”
“She did say she missed me right smart, didn’t she?”
“Anyway, it was Daddy who run her off, not you.”
She heard me but set her lips tight together and never answered. I had, maybe, spoken more bluntly than she liked. We finished the walk in silence.
BURNER BOYETTE SOON quarreled with his family over Nora and moved them both into a house outside of Pine Level, to help with another man’s farm. The house leaned precariously, hardly more than a shack with a bed and a kitchen table in it.
Burner picked me up in his boss’s truck and
drove me for a visit, to help take care of their new baby boy, Burner Jr. Excited to be away from home, I actually longed to see Nora again, though the anticipation had its sharp edges. We drove over a bumpy dirt road, turning into a narrow, wooded drive-way out of sight of the main farmhouse and the farm buildings. The house stood secluded in a narrow cleared yard and the woods bowed in from every side. An apple tree heavy with green apples grew to the side of the plank porch, where an old swing hung from a rusted chain. The apples had attracted some worms but enough remained whole that I ate myself a bellyful, raw and cooked, while I stayed at Nora’s house.
Every morning Burner got up before daybreak to join the farmer and his sons bringing in the peanut harvest. Nora had been excused from that, for the first time in her life, because of the new baby; she was grading and tying dry tobacco instead, in one of the three rooms of the house where they lived. The dry tobacco took up most of the room, and each night Burner brought more.
I helped while I was there. We graded the leaves from golden to brown to trash, bundled the dry leaves, and wrapped their tops with another leaf, tight, like a head wrap, the lower leaves flaring out like skirts. We sat in the room or out in the yard with our piles of cured leaves, the dust working up our nostrils till we sneezed.
“I hate how this stuff gets up your nose.” Nora rubbed hers with the back of her wrist. “But we sure God need this money with that baby in yonder.”
“This tobacco’s got a pretty color,” I noted. “It’s not all dark and dried like Mr. Taylor’s always comes out to be.”
“Daddy always did say Mr. Taylor burnt up his tobacco in the barn.” The mention of Daddy made her thoughtful.
“There’s spiders in dry tobacco, sometimes,” I noted, to ease her thinking.
“I know. You remember when Mama found that wolf spider?”
“Good Lord,” I nodded my head in a knowing way, and the gesture reminded me, without any warning, of the way Mama nodded.
“She like to jumped out of her step-ins. If she was wearing any.” Nora fanned herself with tobacco leaves as she flushed red with laughing. She looked lovingly down at her own baby, dimpled and white in his nest of cushions, snug in a box on the floor. “I hope my younguns don’t ever see me like we’ve seen Mama.” She pursed her lips and set her jaw.
