Sonny looked me over until they disappeared, then asked, “You got a dog?”
“Old Bob’s his name. He’s a big dog, a hunting dog, but he’s nice and gentle. You come see him sometime,” I said.
“Our dog, Pup, is in the bushes. He don’t take to strangers. Got more cookies?”
I nodded.
“I like cookies. Hate buttermilk. It makes me puke. Drink it only ‘cause I’m real hungry. What else you got in that basket, lady? Got a bean sandwich?”
“I’ve got your supper. We’ll wait till your mother gets back.”
“Got possum?”
I made a face and shook my head. “No possum. Possum’s as bad as buttermilk. I brought chicken.” I wouldn’t eat possum, which was as bad as eating squirrel. I’d starve to death before eating some things.
“No sir. Possum’s the best eatin’ they is,” Sonny said. “We been eatin’ fried dough. Ma made a fried doll cake yesterday. It was real pretty. Day before, we had taters.” He stared at the basket for a minute. Then he went down to the trickle of water in the stream and squatted down to make a dam by piling rocks across the water. Circles of blackened rock along the bank showed that other drifters had camped there. I wondered if Grover had known about them, too.
As I watched Sonny play in the creek, I hummed a little song to Baby and was still singing when Grover came back with Blue. When Blue got out of the car, he wouldn’t look at me or thank me for letting them stay in the cabin, and I was afraid his feelings were hurt by that dirty old place. We should have let the Massies stay where they were. Blue kicked the rocks out of the stream, then nudged Sonny up with his bare toe. When Grover walked by me, carrying a box of battered pots and pans to load into the car, I asked if the Massies were disappointed with the shack.
Grover shook his head and whispered, “I think he’s afraid he’ll cry if he opens his mouth. The woman said that shack was nicer than any place they’d ever lived in, even at home. You’d have thought it was a palace, the way she acted.”
The Massies were poor indeed, because the shack wasn’t anything more than upright boards with battens to cover the cracks and keep the snow from sifting in during the winter. The stove was held up by wire, and the built-in bunk was narrow. I remembered when Nettie once made a cover for a daybed, and Mrs. Judd called it a “hired man’s quilt” because it wasn’t very wide. The only other things in that cabin were a table with a warped top and two nail kegs for chairs. I hoped Grover had thrown away the 1931 calendar with a picture of a naked woman on it that hung on the wall.
“This house is pretty dirty,” I told Zepha after Grover drove us all over there with what was left of the Massies’ things. “I’d have cleaned it myself if I’d known somebody was moving in.”
“1 like to clean, missus,” Zepha said. “It’ll be real nice when I’m done.”
“The roof leaks,” Grover said, “but I guess you don’t have to worry about that. If we get rain, we’ll all just stand outside and dance.”
“It don’t look like much to fix. You got any boards around? I’ll fix it if you got boards,” Blue said.
Grover told him he did, and when Blue went inside, I prodded him with my elbow. “You can fix it, Grover. We shouldn’t let them move into a shack with a broken roof.”
Grover shook his head and said, “That’s his way of paying us back. It helps his pride.”
“I guess pride’s the only thing they’ve got.”
“And not much of that, I’d bet.”
Before we left, I stuck my head inside the cabin and said, “After supper, we’ll come around with the things we stripped from here last fall and took up to the home place. With nobody living here, we didn’t want to leave things lying around, for fear somebody would steal them.”
When I got into the car, Grover asked what things were those. We’d never had anything else in that cabin.
That evening, Grover filled up the little cream can with milk and put some boards, a bedstead, and an old feather tick into the truck. He thought I should take along some quilts since I had so many, but I told him he wasn’t the only one who was sensitive about the Massies’ pride. Zepha had quilts of her own, folded up inside the tent, and she might be ticklish about accepting another woman’s second best. The easiest way to insult a woman was through her quilts.
Instead, I took along a big basket to make a bed for Baby, a can of stove black, a decent broom, and some old feed sacks I’d bleached for dish towels. Grover said those rags were better than what the Massies had on.
“That’s the idea. I’ll give them to Zepha for cleaning cloths, but she’ll use them to make clothes for the kids.”
The Massies were lined up, waiting for us when we arrived after supper. Zepha wore shoes and had pinned a scrap of ribbon to her hair. Sonny stood straight and tall, with his feet together, as if he were a clothespin soldier, and I was especially glad for his sake that we’d brought along the surprise.
“I’ve got something special for you,” I said, pointing to Sonny. “But you’ve got to help with it.” Grover lifted the ice cream freezer out of the car and set it on the ground, and the three of them gathered around and stared at it. When they didn’t respond, Grover and I realized at the same time they didn’t know what it was.
“Ice cream,” we told them together.
“Ice cream? I ate ice cream once. From a store,” the boy said, his eyes wide.
“This is just as good, but it doesn’t make itself. You have to turn the handle on top until it won’t turn anymore.” Grover put Sonny’s hand on the crank. “You do that till your arm gets too tired. Then your dad will take over, and when his arm gives out, I’ll take a turn. The harder it is to move, the closer we are to eating ice cream.”
Sonny began turning the handle, and the Massies stood over him, their heads moving in a circle with the handle. “What do you bet when it’s his turn, Blue won’t cry uncle?” I whispered to Grover.
“I’m counting on that.”
Zepha looked up at me, her eyes wide. “By golly, I never saw nothing like that. Does it make them little brown cones, too?”
“It’s a mean trick to play on that boy of yours,” Grover said. “Mrs. Bean and I get too tired to turn the crank. We figured we’d get Sonny to turn it for us so we could have a dish of ice cream without doing a lick of work.” That was another of Grover’s fibs, because he would sit on the porch all day turning that handle.
While Sonny and Blue cranked the ice cream freezer, Zepha showed me the shack. I told her I’d never seen it so clean. In fact, I’d never seen it clean at all.
“I hope you don’t mind if I picked your flowers,” she said, pointing to the brown-eyed Susans that were in a broken bottle on the table.
“I like them. I’d like to make a quilt like that some day.”
“Oh, you’ns patch?” she asked, her eyes lighting up.
“There’s not much else I’d rather do.”
“I’m the same. I look across the land, and all I see are quilts. I carry my scrap bag in the car so’s I can go to patching while Blue drives. If I didn’t have my quilting, I’d have gone crazy with all this moving around. I quilt every chance I get, ‘cept on Sundays, of course. Every stitch you take on the Sabbath, you got to take out with your nose in the next life, but I expect ev’-body knows that. You’ns want to see my quilts?” she asked, blushing and looking at her dusty shoes in embarrassment.
Blue, who was listening from the doorway, said, with a touch of pride in his voice, “That one’s got a hot needle and a galloping thread.”
“Go’n, Blue. You talk too much,” she told him, but I could tell she was pleased. “I didn’t bring all my quilts. If’n I did, they’d reach to the sky. I left my lumpy comfortables at home, and some I traded for gas and such on the road. These uns that I got with me are Blue’s favorites.” Three quilts were stacked on the rusty iron bed, and when Zepha unfolded them, I held my breath. They were made of old homespun, and the stitching was almost as fine as
Ella’s. “Why, that’s Wandering Foot,” I said, pointing at a quilt made of home-dyed blue and white.
“No sech a thing. I ain’t fool enough to let my Blue sleep under a Wandering Foot. He’s hard enough as it is to keep to home. I call that Turkey Tracks. He can sleep under Turkey Tracks and not run off,” Zepha said. She spread out another quilt. “This has got the pieces sewed on instead of patched. It’s a Piney.”
“We call that a Peony,” I told her.
“That’s what I said, a Piney. Now, here’s my pride. It ain’t my work. Granny Grace, our neighbor lady, made this one.” Zepha unfolded a quilt made up of tiny triangles no bigger than my thumbnail, and they all met perfectly at the corners. Even Ella had never made a quilt like that. “People was always asking Granny Grace to sell it. Why, some woman offered her twenty-five dollars, but Granny wouldn’t take it. She wouldn’t sell a quilt that was made out of the dress Aunt Bessie drowned in. That was her youngest girl. Granny give it to me the night before me and Blue left home. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I never was so tickled with a thing in my life.” Zepha looked up at me. “I guess Granny Grace give it to me because it’s called Road to Californy.”
“Oh, isn’t that the best name! Will you let me copy it? Some-day when I’m good enough, I want to try it.”
Zepha was pleased and promised to draw it out herself if I brought her some paper. Then I said if she did that, I’d trade her the pattern for fabric scraps. It’s funny how quilting draws women together like nothing else.
After we’d eaten our ice cream and bid the Massies good night, we drove down the old road to the highway. “I’ve got an errand to run. You want me to take you home first?” Grover asked, fiddling with the radio dial in hopes of getting the weather.
“I guess I’ll go along for the ride. Did you offer him work?”
Grover chuckled. “I told him a dollar a day wasn’t much, but it was as good as anybody around here ever paid. Blue’ll mend fences, spread manure, do other chores. It won’t be for long.”
“What about Tom? He’d be glad to work for a dollar a day.”
Grover thought that over for a minute. “Tom’s got a place to live, and he doesn’t have a family to support. I’ll offer him work at harvest, when I need men, but I can’t ask my best friend to be my hired man.” I understood. I wouldn’t ask Rita to be the hired girl, either.
Grover and I rode out into the country. In the moonlight, it looked like the Kansas farmland Grover and I knew when we were growing up and there was plenty of water. I could almost smell lilacs and honeysuckle. We passed a fallow field that all of a sudden made me shiver, it was so dried up and ugly, and I slid over next to Grover to get warm. He put his arm around me, asking if I was cold, and I told him I was.
We drove toward Auburn and stopped at a house just this side of the river. Grover got out of the car and knocked at the back door, spoke with a man for a few minutes, then followed him into a shed. A few minutes later, Grover came back to the car and put a box into the back of the truck.
I waited until we were on the road again before I said, “Is it a good water pump?”
Grover put his arm around me and asked how come I was so smart. I turned the dial until I found Fred Waring’s Pennsylva-nians on the Topeka station, and we drove on through the dark without talking. I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until Old Bob jumped up on the car and Grover said softly, “Wake up, hon-eybunch. We’re home.”
Chapter
3
I‘d come to be Rita’s friend. Of course, I couldn’t say anything so silly to her. I told Rita I was there to get to know her better. It took me longer to come calling than I’d planned, what with the Massies moving in and, after that, me having to put up tomatoes and to dry peaches. Bottled tomatoes I like, but dried peaches are a waste of good time, since there’s nothing that tastes worse than dried peach pie, unless it’s a rail fence. Grover likes them, however, but then, Grover likes anything.
“That’s nice of you, dearie,” Mrs. Ritter said. “You girls go sit out where it’s cool.” Mrs. Ritter smelled like the blackberry jam that was cooking on the stove.
Rita smelled like a hired hand. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead, and sweat rings stained her dress under her arms. There were blackberry stains on her apron, which was really one of Mrs. Ritter’s and was big enough to go around Rita three or four times.
Agnes T. Ritter started to take off her apron, too, but Mrs. Ritter spoke up. “Agnes, would you help me with these dishes while we wait for the berries to cook?” Agnes T. Ritter sighed and retied her apron. She filled the teakettle from the pump on the sink and put it on the cookstove.
“Don’t spill the dishwater on the floor. Nettie says if you do that, you’ll marry a drunk,” I told her.
I guess it served me right for being mean, because Agnes T. Ritter said right back, “I hear you set up a squatter village on your place.”
“Agnes!” Mrs. Ritter said. “It’s not our business.”
“It is if we all get head lice,” she muttered.
I itched my head for fun and turned to Rita. “Let’s go sit under the trumpet vine and scratch chiggers.” I could see the red welts on Rita’s arms and knew she hadn’t waited for my invitation. She’d probably gotten them in the blackberry patch.
We walked across the yard, where Mrs. Ritter’s hollyhocks and morning glories were in full bloom despite the heat that wilted man, beast, and even Grover, and sat down on a wooden bench. It was as cool a place as you could find, being in the shade of the sod house that Tom’s grandfather had built when he moved onto the land, way back in the 1870s.
Now, the old place was a toolshed, but it was still pretty, because somebody had planted trumpet vines to hide the sod, and those orange flowers covered the house and hung down over us, blocking out the sun.
Rita wiggled back on the bench, then stood up fast and said, “Oh, hell. If it’s not the chiggers, it’s splinters.” She pulled a half-inch sliver out of the back of her leg and sat down again carefully and fanned her face with her hand. “I don’t know what’s worse, the cookstove or the heat out here.”
“Were you helping with the jam?” I asked.
“No, I was just heating water to rinse the dinner dishes. Agnes says we have to pour boiling water over everything. I forgot to do that yesterday, and she washed the dishes all over again after I’d dried them and even put them away. Agnes sure knows her onions about dirt. All she does is criticize, criticize, criticize. I wish she’d stop telling people about how I didn’t know the difference between salt and sugar. She’s brought that up ten times, and even if it had happened to someone else, I wouldn’t have thought it was funny. Why, a person who cooks every day could get them mixed up.” Rita pulled a trumpet flower off the vine and put the end in her mouth and sucked out the sweetness.
“What happened?”
Rita threw away the blossom and picked another. “1 made a cake, only I used a cup of salt and a pinch of sugar instead of the other way around.”
“Anybody could do that,” I said, even though it seemed pretty peculiar to me. “Shoot, I bet even Agnes T. Ritter could get them mixed up.”
“Why do you call her that?” Rita asked me, pretending the flower was a little horn and blowing through it. “Why do you always call her Agnes T. Ritter instead of just Agnes?”
The question made me blink. She’d been Agnes T. Ritter all her life, and I’d forgotten why, so I had to stop a minute to remember. “We started calling her that when we were kids. You know that baby rhyme, ‘Jack, be nimble, Jack, be quick?’ Well, one day Floyd said, ‘Agnes T. Ritter, Agnes T. Quick.’ And Agnes T. Ritter got so mad that it just naturally stuck.”
“I can tell she doesn’t like it. She frowned every time you called her that at the club meeting. She frowns a lot.” Rita seemed pleased about that. She peered through the end of the trumpet flower as if it were a spyglass. “How come you’re called Queenie Bean?”
“Because th
at’s my name.”
“Oh.” Rita scratched the back of her neck, and I could see a little red chigger bump. “Try not to scratch. It’s better if you don’t,” I told her. “Sometimes a little butter and salt mixed together help.”
Rita made a face.
“You don’t eat it,” I said quickly. “You rub it on the welt.” I didn’t tell her Grover used tobacco spit.
Rita stretched back, leaning her head against the dry wire grass of the soddy behind her, and that was when I realized she was pregnant. Seeing me look at her stomach, she said, “Six months. It seems like ages.”
I started counting backward, and Rita knew right off what I was doing. “December. We were married the end of December. I got pregnant the first month,” she said. “Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Everybody counts. Agnes even counted out loud.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Me, too. I didn’t want a baby right off.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean the counting. I think you’re so lucky to have a baby.”
“You can have it,” Rita said. I must have looked shocked, because she added, “Queenie, it was a joke.” She didn’t sound like it was a joke, however.
Rita was quiet for a minute. A hummingbird stopped in midair and stuck its beak down the throat of an orange trumpet, then flew off.
“I like the green hummingbirds best. The red ones are mean,” I said, changing the subject. It wasn’t polite for me to talk about the baby if Rita didn’t want to.
But she changed it right back. “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, it’s nice to have a baby, only with things the way they are, it’s not a very good time. Sometimes I get awfully down in the dumps. Agnes said getting pregnant is all my fault. Maybe she doesn’t know it takes two to tango.”
“Agnes T. Ritter is sour cherries,” I said indignantly.
“Agnes is bad cheese.” Rita giggled.
The Persian Pickle Club Page 4
