That evening as they all gathered around, the cotton girls were the first to speak in favor of telling the church members that it was really intended to be a Labor Day float. It had become like birthing a baby and not being able to tell. Pride was getting the best of them, overshadowing any logical fears they might have had earlier. They had kept their crepe-paper sign, honoring Word of Truth and Reverend Earl, under wraps until the last minute so that no one would suspect anything, but it was too beautiful to hide. They were members of the church now—Reverend Earl had baptized them last week down at Twelve Mile Creek—and they felt they were being downright deceitful not telling everybody the truth.
Ed, one of the foundry men, spoke in favor. “Everybody wanta come on into town and see the parade, if they know Word of Truth having a float.” Mr. Calvin agreed. Said he didn’t mind if people knew he bought all the crepe paper went on the thing. Roy Boy had wanted to tell from the beginning. Jessie was the only one not talking. He leaned up against the trunk of one of the pine trees, listening, and when he didn’t say anything, Maudie asked.
“We said all along we wasn’t telling,” he said. “Now what if something happen to the float ’fore the parade? All sorts of no-count people out there. You hear them drive-in boys coming by on the road all the time, hooting like they was up to no good.”
“Something happen? What could happen? Them drive-in boys been doing that for years. Ain’t nothing gonna happen,” Izzy said.
“White peoples don’t even know it down here, and black peoples, they ain’t studying us,” Roy Boy said.
Jessie stood away from the tree trunk. “All right, all right if, and I say if, somebody stay here with it ’til it’s time for the parade.”
Immediately, there was grumbling, “What’s you ’spect? I’m gonna give up my job at the foundry?”
“Got cotton to tend to. Can’t do that,” Izzy said.
“Somebody already here,” Lou Ann said, “Maudie.”
“Maudie? Maudie?” He threw down the piece of sassafras he was chewing on. “You gonna leave Maudie to take care of the whole thing, and her cripple? What’s Maudie gonna do, beat ’em off with her crutch?”
The others winced and glanced at Maudie. Roy Boy looked away and mumbled, “Ain’t no call to say that.”
“Well, I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Jessie turned toward Maudie, who was staring at him, her crutch limp in her hand. It began to fall away from her and she jerked it back.
“What I’m saying is, she can’t do no good if some big man come along. Ain’t fair to ask her to do the whole thing, and her . . .” He looked around for some support and heard none. “Well, what if two big men come along? They always riding around in them cars, honking horns and yelling.”
“Maudie be taking care of herself,” Izzy said, as everyone else was too embarrassed to speak.
“What I’m trying to say is . . . Why, hell . . .”
Mr. Calvin stopped him before he could do more harm. “Well now, if two big men come along, you ain’t gonna find me nowhere in the vicinity.” He winked at the cotton girls. “That’s one of Miss Maudie’s big words.”
“Sure right ’bout that,” Izzy said. “Ain’t gonna find us nowhere in the vicinity, neither.” She hit Lou Ann on the shoulder.
“Well now, if one good-looking big man come along . . .” Lou Ann grinned. Everyone laughed, relieved to have pulled the conversation out of Jessie’s awkward corner. They agreed that they should be at church next Sunday when the announcement was made. Gathering up their tools, they prepared to leave, ignoring Jessie, glancing sideways at Maudie. It had not gone unnoticed that Maudie had barely smiled at their jokes. She sat in the swing, pushing her crutch in the dust, watching the others call good-byes to her as they headed for their cars.
Jessie waved the last car off up the hill, pretending to laugh at some joke the cotton girls shouted out the window as a farewell. Jessie pushed off the tree trunk, picking pieces of stray crepe paper off the ground, flexing his shoulders all the while because Maudie staring at his back was like some sort of hot ray between his shoulder blades. He didn’t have to wait long.
She began through clinched teeth. “What do you mean, ‘can’t do nothing’?” When he didn’t answer she hit the side of the swing with her crutch. “‘She’s crippled’? ‘She’s gonna beat ’em off with her crutch’?” Again she smacked the crutch on the side of the swing and didn’t stop banging, hitting it again and again with each sentence. “I came here crippled. I’m staying here crippled. All those nights nobody even cared if I was alive or dead. All those nights here by myself, no running water, no plumbing, didn’t have no nothing,” she yelled. “Back here in this backwater place. Everybody else marching in Mississippi, everybody else doing something worthwhile, and I’m sitting here with the likes of you. Turn around and look at me, Mr. . . . Mr. ‘I can’t even read and I can’t even write, but I know it all’ Jessie. Turn around here and look at me.” Tears were choking her. “I thought you . . .” She pulled up by the swing’s chains and hurled the crutch at his back.
Maybe it would hit him. She hoped it would. It skittered past him along the ground and came to rest on a mound of trash—discarded lumber, bits of crepe paper, bent nails. Slowly, he walked over, picked it up, and walked back to her. She didn’t look at him.
“Guess you right, just ignorant. Don’t know no better,” he said.
“You don’t know any better,” she said. “Any better,” she yelled. She grabbed the crutch out of his hand and stood up, trying to walk to the back stoop of the church. He followed along beside and tried to hold her other elbow. She jerked away and threw the crutch up against the porch.
“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” he said, and held out his hand.
“Don’t you know anything about anything?” she yelled. She took his hand to step up and then tried to push it back at him, but he wouldn’t let her go. He pulled her around to him, so close that she caught her breath, so near that she was afraid of what she might say next.
“Guess I don’t know nothing ’bout nothing, but I know this.” He gripped her arm. “You listening? You listening to me?” his face inches from hers. She nodded. “It ain’t the float or the church or the voting school I care ’bout. Remember that night you told me ’bout Yolanda and you ask me, ‘Did I do it cause I felt guilty or did I do it cause I loved her?’” She didn’t say anything, looking down at the buttons on his shirt, the scent of him making her dizzy. “I said, ‘You do for the ones you love.’” She turned her head. Her face brushed against his shirt. “You hear? You do for the ones you love.” She nodded.
He pulled away, still holding her hand as he stepped down off the porch. “Before you, I didn’t know that.” Then he let go and walked out to his car.
Days later, she had made him take her out on the highway to Joyce Ann’s Fashions, the only store out in the county that sold clothes she might be able to afford. The tables were stacked with remnants left over from town stores and bought by the pound.
When she came out, she wouldn’t let him see her purchases. There had been a new skirt, long and light blue, and a blouse, fitted, with lace around the collar. The thing she was most proud of was the madras shirt, a pale blue plaid, extra-large, with short sleeves. To show off his muscles, she said when she gave it to him later. She had searched for half an hour in the stacks of men’s shirts. It was an irregular, but the imperfection was on the back of the shirttail, where nobody would notice.
And he had brought her a gift, an old double-barrel shotgun, the only thing he had in the way of protection. It had been his father’s. He had, even as she protested, shown her how to use it, then left two cartridges on the table beside her bed. Two would be all she would need if it ever came to that, he said. “You put them two in and pull the trigger, ain’t gonna be nothing left of whatever you was pointing at. And if you miss with that thing,” he had said, laughing, “ain’t no help for you.” Immediately, he had raised his hands and backed off. “Course, I a
in’t saying you need no help.”
CHAPTER 36
Dominique
AFTER THE BUS RIDE back from the sit-in, Dominique had disappeared. She was in the infirmary, someone said. It was a rumor. For the next few days, rumors of every ilk spread like confetti over Highlander: She wouldn’t talk to her father, to anybody. There was to be another sit-in. Her hand had become infected. The police were coming to take them all to jail.
Tab had not paid attention. She had not cared what happened. She was fed up with all of it, or maybe she just wanted to go home. No, she didn’t want to go home. She couldn’t face going home now. She couldn’t face being here at this place, either. The food had lost its flavor. The lake was too cold to swim in. Nothing was right.
Eugenia had been white-faced on Tab’s return, and then when she saw her safe, she had turned proud, having a niece do what she would have done—if she had been invited—if someone had had the decency to invite her along. She was the one who believed so fervently in what they were doing. She was the one who should have been included, should have taken a leading part in the sit-in, and she had told the leader this.
“It was not up to me, Eugenia. It was up to the ones who organized it, the ones who live in Nashville. Perhaps you might think about getting involved in your home state. I understand they have a candidate to challenge Wallace this time—fellow might not be half-bad, they say.” Eugenia nodded vaguely and let it drop. Change—revolutionary, bone-crushing change—was the answer, not some insipid, ordinary, and everlasting political process. She would find another way to help.
In one way, Eugenia felt she had accomplished what she set out to do all along: bring the girls—one anyway—to a new light. Through it all, Tab hadn’t cared to tell her that the sit-in was a fluke, that it had all been a big mistake.
Tina hadn’t said much to her sister. The lifeguards had told her the story. Tab hadn’t told her about the cigarette ember glowing next to her face, about what the Elvis boy had whispered in her ear.
Everyone seemed to forget about Dominique in the telling of the Nashville sit-in. She was a minor moment in their remembering of it. The catsup stories ran rampant. The howling rednecks, the sluggish blue-uniforms in the corner. Radios were on at night after supper, people listening for the news. Newspapers were brought in from off the mountain and grabbed at first light. Something was starting; at least it seemed that way to Tab. Or maybe it had already started. She didn’t care either way. She lay in her bunk at night, thinking of what she might say to Dominique if she saw her again, what she might do to her. One night, she had a dream in which she held Dominique’s hand and kissed it right on the burned spot. She woke up gagging, sticking her tongue out, wiping it with her sheet.
On the third day after the sit-in, Reverend Calder and Dominique walked into the dining room together, Dominique holding on to her father’s arm. Not that many people noticed. Eloise looked up, poked Tab in the ribs, and went on eating. They sat down at the table with Miss Wilma. Dominique looked stiff and tired, but otherwise she seemed unchanged, except for her hand, which was noticeably wrapped in white gauze. Tab could hear Dominique in snatches over the rattle of dishes and conversation, that same clipped Yankee voice giving her apologies to Miss Wilma for the trouble she had caused. Tab could see her father listening, making sure it was sufficient. And Miss Wilma answering, “Honey, wasn’t no trouble to me. How’s your hand doing, baby?”
After dinner, Dominique and her father walked over to Tab. Dominique had taken her father’s arm again, not leaning on him, but holding on. Tab felt her face going hot, all she had imagined saying now stuck in her throat. And Dominique’s apology, so full of tricks and turns, not an apology at all, but passing her father’s muster as she stood there still holding his arm. “Certainly you realize I never would have asked you to go with us had I been aware that you were not listening to what might happen in the first place, that you were too young in the first place. I had always assumed you were fifteen, my age.” And the last part, hardest to get out: “I hope you will accept my apology.”
She stood there with her father, waiting. Her father was already preoccupied with someone across the room. Hearing no response, Reverend Calder momentarily turned his attention back to them. “Oh sure, I accept,” Tab said, and wished she was the one standing next to her, helping to steady her.
“Fine, fine.” He took Dominique’s hand off his arm and patted it before releasing it. “Now you children sit down and make up. I need to speak to Jeffrey over there.”
And then Dominique said—so blatant that Tab had blushed—“But Daddy, we were going walking.”
“We’ll walk later, Dominique. I need to catch Jeffrey before he goes back to New York.” He left them to hurry across the room.
Dominique pulled out a chair and sat down next to Tab and Eloise, inhaling in stutter steps, staring out past them. Most people had left the dining room by then. Helpers were beginning to clean up. They watched her father talking to one of the men as they walked out of the room. “He needs to talk about going to Mississippi this summer.” Tab nodded. They sat watching dishes being scraped. “We need to go down there and help out.” She picked up a stray glass of iced tea and took a drink, hiding quivering lips that were about to fall into disorder.
“Hey, you drinking old man Spivey’s leftover iced tea,” Eloise said.
“No she’s not. That’s my iced tea. I told her she could have it.”
“You lie like a rug, Tab. That there’s your iced tea you got in your hand.”
Dominique came back to their room that night, appeared in the doorway—wooden blocks some child might have stacked precariously on top of one another, a tower that might scatter with the slightest touch. Tab was afraid to look at her, would not have dared to speak to her. Tina glanced up and went on with what she was doing. Dominique didn’t look at either one of them. She climbed up to her bed, lay down, and opened a book.
“Just so you’ll know,” Tina said to the lump that was on Dominique’s bunk. “We, the lifeguards, we’ve taken it on ourselves to go out and patrol the school after dark.” She had changed into jeans and a T-shirt, hopped up on her bunk, and began applying makeup. “We haven’t told anybody about it. We don’t want to alarm the older people. We just feel it’s necessary.”
Dominique didn’t take her eyes off the book she was reading. She nodded her head in agreement. “So you won’t mention it to anybody?” Tina said. Dominique nodded again.
Eloise came in carrying a load of laundry. “You going out messing with them boys again tonight?” Tina, concentrating on eyeliner, didn’t bother with an answer. Eloise dumped laundry on her bed and began to fold it. “What’s gonna happen when you out there kissing and somebody sure enough do come along?” And getting no response, she mimicked. “Come on over here, Mr. Policeman. I give you a kiss, too.”
Tina exhaled and put down her eyeliner and mirror. “It’s not just the lifeguards. There are several of us. We don’t want to upset the older people, so we’re doing it in secret.” She glared at Eloise’s back. “Gravy, I do believe you’re worse than Tab.”
“I seen you out there the other day making eyes at the colored one.”
“You saw no such thing.”
Tina waited for half an hour after lights-out before pulling the sweatshirt from under her pillow and slipping out the door. By that time, Eloise was making intermittent gurgling sounds in her sleep and Tab was listening for Dominique.
She had watched her that evening while she pretended to read a Seventeen magazine Tina had left lying on her bunk. Dominique had stayed in her bed, answering in one syllable the questions Eloise fired. “Do your hand hurt? Did you have a conniption fit on that bus like they say? Did your daddy give you a spanking? Mine woulda. You think the police coming to get us ’cause of what y’all did? And that wasn’t any of our doing.”
She had answered yes and no, yes and no, not hearing the questions, or caring about the answers. After awhile, she put the bo
ok on her face and pulled the sheet up to her neck, much like that first day.
When Eloise had turned their lights out sometime past nine o’clock, she didn’t realize Dominique hadn’t dressed in her pajamas, hadn’t brushed her teeth or washed her face. Eloise had curled under her covers and was sleeping minutes later.
The one window in the room was open and tree frogs were setting up a chatter. There was a full moon that moved a square of light slowly across the floor, reflecting up onto the walls, giving long shadows to the bunk beds’ frames and the look of small mountains and valleys to the rumpled bedcovers.
She could hear Dominique taking uneven breaths, trying not to cry. She hated the sound. It was too common for Dominique, way beneath her dignity. She wanted to tell her to shut up. She put the pillow over her face and tried not to hear. It didn’t block out a thing. She punched the pillow up, put it back under her head, and watched the light from the window inch its way across the room.
The jagged breathing and sniffling wouldn’t stop. When she was to the point of wanting to scream, Tab ripped off her sheet, went to the bathroom, pulled toilet paper off the roll, came back to their room, and climbed up the ladder to Dominique’s side. “Here.” She rustled the toilet paper on the top of the sheet and waited before a hand came out and took it. Dominique sat up in the bed and blew her nose, then flopped back down and pulled the sheet up.
“Scoot over.”
For a long moment, the covers didn’t move.
“I said, ‘scoot over.’”
The sheets rustled and the body underneath moved to one side. Tab pulled back the cover and slipped in beside her. She was stiff, like Tab imagined a corpse might be. She could feel her shorts were still on, and her shoes.
The Summer We Got Saved Page 25
