Touched

by Carolyn Haines

  As I started to sit down, my hand brushed the top of a strange object, a box, that had been left on the swing. It hadn’t been there when I came home and went to bed. It was a large box.

  At first I couldn’t think what to do except stand there with my hand on it. What could it mean, a box on the swing? I took it inside and went to the bedroom to light a lamp. It took only a moment to find the card. “To Mattie. Thanks for helping Duncan and JoHanna. Will.”

  In all of my life I’d never gotten an unexpected gift. I tore it open, thinking that I was dreaming once again, and this one much more pleasant than the one about Pecos.

  Inside the soft tissue were a white blouse and a pale green skirt. The material was buttery, it was so soft. I knew it would be cool. A white blouse and a skirt. The blouse had tucks and tiny buttons. Not severe but very elegant. Hardly daring to touch it, I folded it back exactly as it had been and put the lid on the box, then shoved it up under the bed until I could think what to do.

  Elikah would make me return it. And he would be furious with me. I had lied to him about the vegetables, saying that I had traded some of the taffy I’d made for them from an old man pulling a wagon through town. He’d lifted the lid on the pot where the potatoes were boiling and watched the smooth, white tubers shift and roll in the bubble of the pot. We decided that in the fall I would plant the turnips and onions and winter squash that did well in Jexville. There was no need to barter for vegetables when I knew how to garden.

  He hadn’t asked many questions, and I hadn’t elaborated on my lies. But how was I going to explain the skirt and blouse? If I told him they were from the McVays, then he’d ask why they’d sent me a present. The complications of the gift spiraled out of my head and around the bed, making the room spin with dire possibilities.

  The note had been signed by Will. I clearly remembered the way the soap had dried on one side of his face, interrupted in his shave by the rooster’s attack on me. I had no memory of the rooster slashing my hand, but if I closed my eyes, I could still smell Will’s soapy face, still see the small scar on his right hand as he held a compress against my wound. His eyes were the color of chocolate pound cake, lighter in the center with a dark rim. Duncan had his eyes, with a glint of challenge that came from her mother.

  The gift had to be returned. There was no way to avoid it. But even as I tried to force myself to accept that decision, I shrank from the image of standing on their front porch, box in hand, lifting it slowly over the threshold and into JoHanna’s hands. Never in my life had I wanted an article of clothing more. As my fingers brushed the coarser cotton of my sheets, I could feel the glide of the material. Like a whisper, a lover’s whisper on my skin. The feel of the skirt about my legs would be like tiny small strokes of pleasure with each step. I could not give it up. Yet I knew that I had to.

  In the gray light of dawn, Elikah’s face was red and bloated, his mustache unbearably askew on the pillow as he slept. I was uncertain whether to wake him for work or allow him to sleep since he looked ill. I made his coffee and woke him with a cup when he just had time to dress and eat before the barbershop opened at seven. He worked long hours and made decent money. Unlike most of the men I’d known, he didn’t drink every day.

  To my complete surprise, he took the cup of coffee and propped the pillows behind his head. “Mattie, you need some new dresses. Go down to the dry goods and pick something out. But make sure you can take it back if I don’t like it.” He sipped the coffee from the mug. “Something green. To go with your eyes.”

  I thought the floor had shifted beneath my feet. My own guilt almost gagged me, but when I turned to stare at him, he was examining a toenail that was giving him trouble. As the town barber, he felt obliged to give a demonstration of cutting it out of the quick and had planned to do so that day. It was part of his rivalry with Doc Westfall. Elikah had a need to uphold the “traditional” role of barber as surgeon and healer, even if he had to perform his operations on himself.

  “I’ll get you some hot saltwater to soak that,” I offered.

  He put his feet on the floor and handed the coffee cup to me. “No time. Just put my eggs on.”

  He was gone with a brush of his mustache, once again neatly groomed, across my cheek and a reminder to “find something pretty for yourself.”

  Perhaps I had dreamed the skirt and blouse, an omen of Elikah’s sudden generosity. A store-bought dress. Something I had never owned until that very night. And something I certainly had never considered walking into a store and buying. A dress cut out and made up in a shop.

  I sat at the table and finished my coffee, knowing that the first order of business was to take the skirt and blouse back to JoHanna’s. What had the doctor in Mobile said about Duncan? I could ask that and hope that Will was not at home when I returned the package. The thought of looking at him as I handed back his gift was too terrifying.

  I was struck so numb by my next thought that I almost dropped the coffee cup. What if JoHanna didn’t know Will had left that gift for me? Surely that was impossible. But what if he was gone and I went there, gift in hand, only to open the door on a situation that looked bad, for both Will and myself?

  A mockingbird fluttered into the chinaberry tree by the kitchen window. It watched me with sharp black eyes, head shifting from side to side, as if assessing the purity of my thoughts. I did not want to give up the skirt and blouse; had I found an excuse to keep it?

  I put water on the stove to heat and dragged out the bathtub and dumped the cold water from the night before into the yard. The cool water last night had washed away the heat, but I wanted to soak in hot water. Once clean, I pulled the box out from under the bed and slipped into the blouse. The skirt drifted over my head like a mossy green wave. I buttoned it around my waist and knew I would not give it back. I could not make myself, no matter the cost.

  Four

  “YOU’RE as flushed as a new bride, but then you are right new at it.” Olivia McAdams pulled a pale yellow dress from the rack where it hung. “It’s a day dress. Cool. Folks around here need to make some concessions to the heat.” She looked at the gray flannel I was wearing with a sympathetic eye.

  She wore a white blouse and dark skirt with dark shoes, a look some of the magazines advertised as “business girl.” She also wore lipstick and dark stockings.

  “Elikah said green.” I spoke before I thought, so I had to finish it. “And I have to be able to bring it back if it doesn’t suit him.”

  Olivia laughed out loud. “Well, he’s paying for it, I guess. Look around and I’ll see what we have right here in the sale rack. Maybe get you a good price so there’s something left over for some shoes.” She pointedly did not look down at my feet but turned her attention to some dresses hanging far against the wall.

  Gordon’s Dry Goods was a big wooden building divided roughly in half. On the west side were hardware and staples, overalls and long johns, candy and guns, dressmaker patterns, bolts of material and ribbons. There was always the smell of metal and the acrid bite of new lumber, the fatty pine resin still weeping on some of the boards that were dry-stored in the back. Men sweaty from the fields came in to buy a piece of harness or oil for a tool. They lingered as they did at the barbershop, not for long, but enough to pass the time and glean a tip about who was buying what. Or if the women came in, they bought their clothespins and bluen for their laundry and discovered that Mrs. Johnson had a new recipe for seven-egg pound cake that required one of the “just arrived from Mobile or New Orleans” heavier baking pans.

  Ready-made clothes were sold out of a separate register on the east side of the building. Here, light filtered in through a big glass window where displays had been set up to show off the smartest clothes. No wall divided the store, but there were two separate doors so that a customer could signal his or her intent upon entering, as if the whiff of perfumed powder or aftershave wasn’t enough to mark the difference of intent.

  With the yellow dress draped over her arm, Olivia
watched me as I stood, held captive by the array of choices, by the pale light that slanted in through the big pane and gave everything a blond look.

  “I’ll put this one at the counter. Go on and look around,” she urged, waving me on like a mother to a timid child. I suppose it was plain to anyone that I’d never shopped for myself before. I’d been in big stores in Meridian and in Gordon’s a time or two, but never with the idea that I could have something that I picked out. Something just for me.

  “Thanks.” I moved into the center of the store and turned around. There were racks of dresses and skirts and blouses, and even a stand of little hats for ladies. Going-to-church hats, nothing like the big straw picture hat that JoHanna wore. I’d never have the nerve to wear such a hat, but I might wear one of the little felt ones with a sprig of foliage or a pretty feather I could find in the woods. I went by them without touching.

  Lined against the wall were dresser-type shelves with drawers where beautiful lace panties resided in cool tissue-paper boxes. I’d looked at them once before when Janelle had dragged me in to shop with her for the Fourth of July picnic dress. She hadn’t bought any of the things either, but she’d made Olivia McAdams open every drawer and lift out each pair of panties, each brassiere, even some of the very expensive silk stockings that floated over my hand like water whipped with foam.

  On the same side of the store, but in the back, were clothes for men. The dark suit coats hung along one wall while the pants hung in the center of the floor on big wooden cylinders. There was a round rack filled with belts measured in waist sizes, and another, bigger rack with the only item of men’s apparel with pretty colors, the neckties. There were boxes of suspenders and bow ties, and the wonderful straw hats that Will wore at such a rakish angle.

  Olivia was shifting through dresses at another rack. After discarding five or six dresses, she lifted out a green print. “How about this calico? It should fit. We can make the alterations if you need them.” She motioned to the back of the store. “There’s a dressing room back there, behind the curtain.”

  I froze, hand reaching for a pretty red and yellow scarf that I couldn’t have but wanted to touch.

  “You want to try them on?” Olivia asked, her gaze following mine around the store. “There’s nobody here now but us.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to take off my clothes in the back of the store. Olivia watched the realization dawn on me and then laughed again, patting my shoulder. “You can take them home and try them on if it makes you feel better. Old man Gordon don’t have to know.”

  “No, I’ll try them on here. No point in taking them home and bringing them back.” The truth of the matter was that at home I’d have no one with whom to share the experience of my first store-bought dress. Will’s secret dress was for trying on at home alone. For this dress, I wanted another viewpoint, another female say-so.

  Olivia’s grin was spritely. For the first time I realized she wasn’t really a woman. She was large-busted and stout, a fact that made her seem grown. But she wasn’t married, and she helped support her mother’s brood of nine children in the rambling wood house they owned on Canaan Street. Janelle had told me all of this in a whisper the day we’d gone to look for her celebration dress. I’d been afraid Olivia would overhear.

  “Take them both,” Olivia directed as she got the yellow dress from the counter. “That way you won’t have to come out and get the other.”

  What could it hurt to try on the yellow? I took them and went back to the little closet that had been outfitted with hooks on one side for the dresses. It was hardly big enough to cuss a cat in, but it would do to change clothes.

  Peeling out of the gray flannel was like shedding the past. I thought of my sister and was stabbed by a twinge of fear. What would become of her now that I was gone? Would Jojo find some man to buy her off his hands the same way he’d done me? I was married, true enough, but Jojo had seen to that part.

  I tried the yellow first. It was cotton, and the sleeves were short and cuffed with lace and a hem that rose a good four inches above my ankles. I was too old for a sash, but the dress had a white belt that called attention to my waist.

  “Come on out,” Olivia ordered. “There’s a mirror out here so you can take a gander at yourself.”

  I didn’t want to put on my ugly shoes, so I stepped out barefoot, headfirst, to make sure no one had come in while I’d changed. On the other side of the store, old Mrs. Tisdale was selling dried beans to a little boy I didn’t know. I could hear the hard beans pinging into the scales as she weighed them out by the pound.

  Olivia took a look at my bare feet and put her hands on her hips. “Well, well, if it ain’t little Cinderella.”

  My image in the mirror transfixed me. Instinctively I reached up to pin up my straggly hair, anything to make me look older.

  “Try the green,” she said, never shifting from the worn pine floor.

  The green was not nearly as pretty, but it did serve to make me look married. It also made me feel less nervous. The yellow was as if I was exposed, showing something indecent, even though it was a perfectly decent dress.

  “I like this one,” I told Olivia.

  “I expect your husband will, too.” There was something dark in her eyes that was the opposite of her hearty laughter. “You want to wear it home?”

  I did, but I couldn’t. “I have to let Elikah see it before I buy it.” “You could wear it on down to his shop. I can’t see that he wouldn’t like it.”

  I shook my head. He wouldn’t like it if I put him on the spot like that in public. He liked to make his decisions at home, after he’d had some time to think. Wearing the dress down the street was as good as saying it was mine. I went back in the closet and unbuttoned it, letting it fall around my feet to step out of it.

  There was a quick tap. Then the door swung open, and Olivia stood there with another dress in her hand. “Here, try this one. It was hanging in the …” She stopped as she looked at the backs of my bare legs.

  I turned around quickly.

  “Ah, hanging in the front,” she finished, all life gone from her voice. “It might suit you better than the green print.” She stood there holding the dress as I stared at the floor, unable even to reach up and take the dress from her.

  “How old are you, really?” she finally asked.

  “Sixteen.” I had just turned the last week in June. The day I had been married, in fact.

  “Are you okay?” She just stood there.

  I nodded. “I, uh, broke Elikah’s favorite cup.” I tried to explain the marks.

  “You look a little young for marriage and a little old for a strappin’.” She handed the dress in to me and closed the door.

  I took the solid green dress with the white collar. It was cotton and cool, but not as carefree as the yellow one. Olivia hadn’t said so, but the yellow made me look my age. Young. But there were plenty of girls sixteen who were married and starting families. My own mama had married at fifteen, then given birth to me just after she turned sixteen. She was young, but she said she never regretted those years with Daddy. I remembered him some, sitting at the table in his engineer’s cap and his large hands seamed by coal. I was seven when he was killed. The next year Mama took up with Jojo. The railroad was going to put us out of the house, and even though she did washing and ironing for some of the railroad officials, she couldn’t make enough to pay the rent and feed four kids. It was Jojo or starvation, she said, and she made the choice.

  When Elikah came home for dinner, I showed him the dress. He made me turn around and pin my hair up and then he grinned. He told me to go back and get some decent shoes that didn’t make me look like I lived on a pig farm and had to wade through mud every day. He also told me to buy some underthings and described what he wanted. He was still grinning when he asked if I wanted him to write down a list.

  Instead of going back to Gordon’s after I washed the dishes, I slipped out the back and cut across the train
yard to go to the McVays’. It was hotter than blue blazes on the hard-packed dirt road, but my mind was whirling along as fast as my feet.

  What had the doctor said about Duncan? They had come back sometime during the night to leave the gift on the swing. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain JoHanna had put Will up to doing it. He wouldn’t have thought to buy something like that on his own. No man did. It was too much what I would have picked out myself, and men never thought that way. JoHanna had done it and then put Will up to signing his name so that I’d … what? Keep it? I hadn’t been able to think anymore along those lines because I didn’t know how to pursue it. In my experience, grown-ups did things to get something they wanted. But what could JoHanna and Will want from me? I had nothing to give them.

  The homestead came into view. I stopped to look for two things—Will’s red car and that damned rooster. My hand still burned when I washed dishes, the lye soap eating at the open area. It was healing without any infection, but I didn’t want to risk another encounter with Pecos.

  The red car was gone, but JoHanna was at the clothesline, bringing in the wash before the afternoon thunderstorm could arrive. She was folding the towels and dropping them down into her laundry basket, her back to the road. Pecos strutted back and forth beside her, his quick little rooster head darting this way and that as if he were boxing someone.

  “Mrs. McVay! JoHanna!” I called, ready to run if Pecos should move in my direction.

  JoHanna turned, her hand still on the line. When she saw me, she smiled and waved me over. My hesitation was obvious. “Pecos is fine as long as I’m here.” For good measure she reached down and tucked the rooster up under her arm.

  His beady black eyes drilled into me like pencil leads, but he didn’t make a squawk or ruffle a feather as I walked into the yard.

  “How’s Duncan?” I could see that JoHanna had aged in the past few days.

  She lifted her straw sunbonnet off her head and started to answer. I didn’t hear a word she said. Someone had butchered her hair. I knew I was standing there like a mouth-breather, but I couldn’t help it. There were places on her head where the shears had come so close it looked as though her scalp were burned, then other places where the growth was half an inch or more. Her beautiful chestnut hair was completely gone.