Mrs. Judd came out from behind the sawhorse where she’d been killing chickens. Wiping blood and pinfeathers on her apron, she told Tyrone the sun would set on Hiawatha and Duty in Harveyville as long as they wanted it to, but she couldn’t be sure how many more Harveyville sunsets a gambling man who was behind in payments to the bank she owned in Eskridge was going to see. It would be a real shame not to have Nettie in Pickle anymore, but a person had to stand by her standards. If anybody else caused trouble about the Jacksons, she’d have to check the bank’s records on them, too. Tyrone sulked for a minute before he said that maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Hiawatha and Duty to spend one night, it being late in the day already. He’d have to think hard about letting them stay longer, however.
The Judds never heard from Tyrone again, and the Jacksons had lived at Ella’s ever since. Now, most of us wondered why there’d been a fuss in the first place.
But I wasn’t thinking about coloreds moving into Harveyville just then. I was being thankful that Hiawatha, instead of Ella, had found Ben’s body. Stumbling over Ben Crook’s bones would just about have killed Ella.
“Opalina, I could use a glass of hot tea—and one of your biscuits with the raisins in it. I missed my lunch,” Mrs. Judd said. Opalina looked up, startled, since nobody but Mrs. Ritter ever asked for a scone. She bustled about fixing a cup and a plate while the rest of us waited for Mrs. Judd to tell us the story in her own good time. There were two things you couldn’t hurry in Harveyville—the weather and Mrs. Judd. She crunched down on the scone and said, “Real tasty.” Opalina straightened up and passed the plate around, but only Mrs. Ritter helped herself.
Mrs. Judd belched a little behind her hand and brushed the crumbs off her lap onto Opalina’s carpet. Now that she’d had a chance to catch her breath and eat something, a touch of color came back into Mrs. Judd’s face. She settled back in the chair and looked up at us, and we leaned forward, knowing she was ready to talk.
“Hiawatha was walking along the road that hardly anybody ever uses, the one that goes by the creek, and he saw a bone sticking out of the dirt. He went over for a look, and when he realized it was a leg bone, he got real scared. He didn’t know whether to pull it out or push it back in. He had a presentiment who it was, so he came to our place to ask what to do. Prosper went for the sheriff, and I drove right over to be with Ella.”
“Was it Ben?” Nettie asked.
“Well, of course it was Ben. It couldn’t have been anybody else, could it?” Mrs. Judd paused a minute to consider what she’d said. “Well, I didn’t know for sure, of course, but I had my suspicions. After he dug up the rest of the bones, Sheriff Eagles came around to Ella’s, where I was waiting, and he said he recognized Ben’s skull right off. You know how Ben had that big gap between his front teeth. And all the teeth on his right side were missing from the time he got smacked on the side of the head with a singletree at the Hollywood Cafe. Anybody would have known it was Ben just from looking at the skull.”
“Oh,” Ada June said, sagging against the doorjamb and putting one hand over her face.
“Dr. Sipes came along with the sheriff. He said Ben’s skull had been bashed in. That’s how he died,” Mrs. Judd said.
Forest Ann put her fingers over her mouth and made a little gurgling sound. Nettie put her arm around Forest Ann and patted her.
“Was he murdered?” Rita asked. I shuddered at the question and exchanged glances with Ada June.
Mrs. Judd didn’t answer right away. She studied Rita a minute. “I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know that no man on God’s earth ever smashed in his own head, then climbed into a grave and covered himself up with dirt.” Mrs. Judd looked uncomfortable, and I hoped Rita would get the hint that she didn’t want to talk about murder. Well, who would? It was bad enough thinking about Ben’s body rotting away in Ella’s field all these months without paying mind to how it happened.
Rita didn’t get it, however. “Who did it?” she asked.
“If he left his calling card, I didn’t see it,” Mrs. Judd told her.
Rita was about to ask something else when Ceres interrupted. “What are we going to do, Tima?”
“Why, what we always do,” Mrs. Judd said, reaching for another scone, then reconsidering and putting her hand down. “We will comfort our friend in her hour of trouble. Prosper’s bringing Ella home to stay at our place for as long as she wants. There’s the funeral to be got through.”
“Ella won’t hold a viewing, will she?” Nettie asked. She had to move her whole body to look at Mrs. Judd, because the goiter had gotten bigger, and her neck didn’t turn at all. “I wouldn’t want to have to look at a man with his head bashed in.”
Mrs. Judd started to say something smart but thought better of it and shut her mouth for a minute before she said kindly, “You don’t have a viewing for a skeleton, Nettie. That’s all Ben is now—bones and overalls.”
“Oh.” Nettie shivered. “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” She was embarrassed for a minute. Then, to save face, she searched for something Mrs. Judd had forgotten. “Did you think about Reverend Olive, Septima?”
“Of course, I thought about him. That’s why Prosper drove to town to get the sheriff. I didn’t want Foster hearing about Ben on the party line and getting to Ella’s before I did. I’m afraid we’ll have to tell Foster now.”
“I don’t know why you’re afraid,” Nettie said with a self-righteous sniff. “He doesn’t scare me.”
“That’s a relief. You go call him,” Mrs. Judd said. “Tell him there’s no need for him and Lizzy to tend to Ella’s bodily needs. That’s our job. He’s to see to the spiritual.”
Nettie glanced around to see if anyone else would volunteer to make the telephone call, but none of us met her eyes, so, looking trapped, she went into the kitchen and turned the crank on the phone.
“Would you sit?” Opalina asked Ceres, which made us all realize we’d been standing ever since Mrs. Judd burst through the door. One by one, we found chairs and sat down. I got a horse-hair seat again.
Nobody spoke while Nettie made the call. Every now and then, one of us glanced at Rita as if to offer sympathy that she was going through another death so soon after her own sorrowful loss. I wished Mrs. Judd would say she was excused and should go on home, but she didn’t, and it wasn’t my place to tell her. So Rita sat quietly with the rest of us, listening to Net-tie’s loud voice.
Nettie stood a foot away from the box and yelled into the mouthpiece. She was careful about how she put things because she knew she was announcing Ben’s death to everyone on the party line. “Lizzy? This is Nettie. … What’s that? … Nettie Burgett. There’s not but one Nettie in Harveyville. Don’t you know that? Put the Reverend on the line. … Fishing? That ain’t a thing a preacher ought to be doing when a body’s in need. … No, Tyrone’s all right. It’s Ben Crook. They found him this morning. … What’s that? … He’s not behind any veil that I know of. He’s buried out by the creek road north of Ella’s place. You have your husband phone up Septima about the funeral, and don’t go calling on Ella, because she’s got the Pickles to take care of her.”
Nettie hung up the receiver before Lizzy Olive could reply. “I guess I told her,” she said as she bustled back into the room. Nettie sent a triumphant look at Mrs. Judd and was so pleased with the way she’d dealt with the Olives that she took charge. “Here’s another thing. We’ll have to find something to lay him out in. I expect he’s lost weight.”
For the first time since Mrs. Judd drove up, I felt like smiling, but when I realized what I was doing, I covered my mouth with my hand and coughed. Rita coughed, too.
“It’ll be a closed coffin,” Ada June said, and she winked at me.
Nettie blushed, realizing her mistake, then glanced at Mrs. Judd, expecting to be rebuked. Mrs. Judd only nodded.
“Well, of course,” Nettie said. “What I meant was, you can’t send a man to his last reward in overalls. Ella would want him buried in a nice suit. S
he thought the sun—”
“Oh, we all know that,” Mrs. Judd interrupted impatiently. She’d let Nettie be in charge long enough.
Nettie shut up and sat down, and it was quiet in Opalina’s stuffy room. We were all thinking about Ella, I suppose. I know I was. She was such a fragile thing, with a mind like a little girl’s sometimes. It would be awful to know your husband’s bones were scattered around a cornfield.
Rita finally broke the silence. “What do you think happened?” I guess it was a natural question, but the rest of us didn’t want to think about how Ben had died, so instead of replying, we shook our heads.
Finally Mrs. Judd said, “I haven’t got time to think on it just now. That’s why we’ve got a sheriff.” She stood and picked up her pocketbook. “Prosper ought to have Ella at the house before long. I’ll see that she gets a rest. You can make your calls after supper.”
That was the end of Persian Pickle for the day, of course, because there was work to be done, food to fix, and Ella to call on that evening. So we hurried after Mrs. Judd, not even offering to help Opalina clean up.
Rita looked thoughtful as the two of us walked out the door together. “Why would anybody murder Mr. Crook?” she asked me.
I didn’t want to talk about it. I shook my head and said, “Now, how would I know?”
Prosper, not Mrs. Judd, took care of the funeral arrangements. He insisted that the service be held outdoors, where Ella could sit in the sunshine and look at flowers instead of inside that dark, dank church. The Olives kept the church closed up so it always smelled like a root cellar. Prosper warned Reverend Olive just before the service to keep it short and not say one word about hell’s fire. “You upset that sweet lady, bub, and you’ll have to deal with me,” Prosper told him.
Of course, Prosper, who looked like Porky Pig in the cartoons with his pink face and little piggy eyes, wouldn’t have hurt anybody. What he meant was if Reverend Olive ran cross-wise of him, he’d cut off the church. Since the Judds were the biggest donors in Harveyville, that was enough to make Reverend Olive stop preaching after only fifteen minutes, and he never once mentioned hell. It didn’t matter what he said, however, because Ella was propped up like a rag doll between Prosper and Mrs. Judd and didn’t seem to know what was going on.
Reverend Olive finished by reading a few verses out of the Bible, and we sang “Going Home” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” Then the deacons lowered the casket into the ground while I thought of Ben Crook’s bones rattling around inside. Grover whispered to me that they could have stuffed what was left of Ben into a feed sack and dropped it in the hole and saved the expense of the coffin. I was shocked and told him to behave, but Rita snickered.
After Ben’s casket reached the bottom of that big hole cut into the weedy sod of the cemetery, Mrs. Judd gave Ella a rose, which confused her, and she tried to pin it to her dress. Mrs. Judd took Ella’s hand, and together they threw it into the grave. Then Prosper and Mrs. Judd said Ella wasn’t up to receiving people, and they took her home. The rest of us went inside the church, which was chilly even in the heat of the day, to drink coffee and eat cake. Rita asked if there wasn’t someplace we could go for a real drink, so Grover spoke up and said he’d treat the four of us at the Hollywood Cafe.
I wasn’t sure drinking in a public place was the right thing to do after a funeral. I felt self-conscious walking from the church to the Hollywood, past the Flint Hills Home & Feed, where all those farmers were gathered. Most of them stood with their backsides against the front of the store, each with one cracked high-top shoe against the wall, as if they were holding it up. Those who couldn’t find room to lean against the store sat on the edge of the wooden sidewalk, whittling and taking sneaky glances at ladies’ ankles. There was a lot of shifting around when Rita walked past.
“How do,” Butch Izzo said, touching the brim of his cap. He wasn’t any too nice-looking, with the hair growing half an inch out of his ears and the arms of his union suit hanging beneath his shirtsleeves. Rita wrinkled her nose and ignored him, but I’d known Butch all my life. So I took a licorice button from the paper sack he held out and told him I was sorry about his cow Bessie, who had gotten cut up in barbed wire and had to be shot.
“One of the family. It’d like to kill me when I done it. One of the family,” he said.
“Is he talking about Mr. Crook or his cow?” Rita asked when we’d gone on past. She giggled, then put her hand through Tom’s arm and said, “Come on, ace.” I wished I could do that with Grover, but he’d cut off his arm before he’d hold hands with me in front of the Home & Feed crowd.
Not all the loungers were in front of the feed store. Some were in the Hollywood. It had been a saloon way back, then became a candy store and restaurant when Prohibition was passed. Of course, everybody knew that was just a front for selling illegal whiskey. In those days, you’d have taken your life in your hands to order food in the Hollywood. The fib about it being a cafe was just so the sheriff would have an excuse not to raid the place. He never did, except every once in a while when he had to to keep up appearances. Mostly, he liked having all the drunks in one place, where he could keep an eye on them.
Now that Prohibition was over, the Hollywood was a tavern again and had been brought up-to-date. In addition to the long walnut bar and the varnished wooden booths behind the door, where people sat when they didn’t want to be seen, there were cocktail tables and a jukebox. Rita seemed right at home as she sat down at a silvery table in the middle of the room and told Tom, “Order me a Manhattan, will you, honey?”
She took a package of Chesterfields out of her purse. Tom struck a match for Rita, and she stretched her neck, lit her cigarette, and blew out a cloud of smoke. Tom lit his cigarette, then held the match out for Grover, who had rolled one of his own. “Three on a match,” Rita said, shaking her head. I guess I looked stupid, because she explained, “It’s bad luck.”
The men at the bar turned to get a glimpse of Rita in her maroon silk dress and matching lipstick. One muttered, “Hey, kiddo!”
“If those mashers don’t stop eyeing you, I’m going to give somebody a punch,” Grover said to me, and I squeezed his hand under the table. He knew as well as I did that they weren’t staring at me in my crepe funeral dress and my mother’s felt hat with the cherries on it. They made me look like a dumpy black salamander.
I didn’t know what a Manhattan was, but I wish I’d taken a chance and ordered one instead of a root beer, because it was so pretty. Hanging over the edge of the glass was a bright red cherry like none I ever saw growing on a tree. Rita took it out and bit off the fruit, which she rolled around inside her mouth before swallowing it. Then she wound the stem around her little finger. “This is the life,” she said, and Tom grinned at her.
“Almost as good as a bottle behind the corncrib,” Grover said, and we all laughed, although I knew Grover would rather sit next to a corncrib any day than in the Hollywood. He hated being inside almost as much as he hated dressing up. He’d left his suit coat in the car. Now he rolled up his shirtsleeves and loosened his tie.
When I looked at Tom, I remembered what Grover had said about him not being a farmer anymore. He wore a dark blue suit that hadn’t come out of the Spiegel catalog and a hat tipped back on his head like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Remember when we used to sneak in here and buy a pint?” he asked Grover. “It’s a good thing we were always too short on money to buy any more. A quart of that stuff and we’d have died a wicked death.”
“Queenie always liked it,” Grover said.
“I did not!”
“Just about as much as rhubarb pie,” Tom said, nudging me in the side with his elbow and laughing.
Grover didn’t laugh, however. He put his elbows on the table, which wobbled, so he fished some wooden matches out of his pocket and stuck them under the short leg.
“This is a swell place,” Rita said. “It’s like the cocktail lounge where I worked.”
“I thought you were a waitr
ess in a cafe, the Koffee Kup Kafe,” I said. “With K’s.”
“Oops,” Rita said, giving me a naughty glance. “You caught me. I was a cocktail waitress at the Pair-a-Dice in Lawrence. Tom’s folks would have had a fit if they’d known, so I had to make up a story.” Rita used the tip of her maroon fingernail to get a piece of tobacco off her tongue. Then she finished her drink and said, “That hit the spot. Order me another, would you, Tom? Funerals are so damn depressing.”
Tom called to the waitress and made a circle in the air over our table.
“I would have found a reason to stay home if the Enterprise hadn’t asked me to do a story on the murder,” Rita continued.
“You already did a story when they found the body. Why would anybody in Topeka care about what happened to Ben Crook?” Grover asked.
“Because it was murder. This is what’s called a follow-up story. Murder in a wheat field is big news.”
“Cornfield,” I corrected her. “Ben was buried in a cornfield.”
“I don’t think that’s an important detail.” Rita kicked off her patent-leather slippers and stretched out her legs, resting her feet on the chair across from her. Tom slid his arm around her shoulder. I wondered if she was getting drunk, but I wasn’t sure, because women I knew didn’t get drunk, not even on New Year’s Eve.
“Rita thinks this could be a major story, right?” Tom said.
“Right. My big break. It’s called a scoop,” Rita said, pausing while the waitress set down another Manhattan and a root beer. Rita bit off the cherry again, then tied the stem into a little knot and held it up to inspect it. “Who would have guessed when I started writing those dinky stories for the paper that I could become a star reporter?”
The Persian Pickle Club Page 9
