Sweeping Up Glass

by Carolyn Wall

  4

  I want to kill Ida. It’s not the first time. When I was thirteen, Dooby told me something about her I wish I’d never known.

  When I was first conceived, it was Dooby’s pap down at the pharmacy that sold Ma’am the powders with which she tried to empty her womb. The first child she spat out like an unripe persimmon, but the second was me, and I would not go. I clung to her dark inner lining until she grew round in the belly and was sick most of the time from the bitter German beer the doctor ordered to make her gain weight. Later folks told me I was delivered sputtering, squalling, and already starved.

  In the months that followed, while Pap ran the store and doctored dogs and cats, Ma’am lay dying of this or that. Her nerves, she said, were frazzled at the ends like burnt matches. Although I squealed like a nest of mice, she would not take me up, nor change me, nor feed me, until Pap, coming from his work, snatched me out of my crib. He stripped off my diapering, soaped me, and rinsed me till I was fit for company. He fed me all the supper I could hold, and although he rocked me into the night, he could not stop my crying.

  The racket was too much for Ma’am, and even though Pap tried to put me in the crook of her elbow, she wouldn’t take me, but preferred to sit rocking an empty blanket. In short order, Ma’am slipped into an abyss from which no one could save her. She walked the length of the house, wrung her hands, and cried, causing the last of our customers to speak in low voices. They wouldn’t have come at all, but they loved Pap dearly.

  Sometimes Ma’am vomited into a bucket in the kitchen. Most of the time she lay in the big four-poster while a succession of ladies from Aurora came and went with covered dishes. Pap brought her the bedpan and changed her sheets, for she would not set her feet on the floor nor raise her head. Doc Pritchett gave her powders and enemas, liver tonic and sulfur with sugar and molasses, but nothing worked. She would not even swallow soup, and she was no bigger around than a stick horse. Finally, Pap sent for a doctor from Buelton. He came one Saturday afternoon, applying an assortment of poultices to Ma’am’s belly and chest, and finally leeches to the palms of her hands. Nothing helped.

  Shortly thereafter, Pap gave up trying and hitched the neighbor’s horse to our wagon, for our mare was old and in need of being put down. He wrapped Ma’am in a blanket and laid her gently in back, with pillows around her so she would not roll. They say I stood on wobbly legs at the door of the grocery, and watched them go off down the road. Nobody remembers if I cried or not.

  What came after, I remember well.

  Folks came to shop. They bought packets of yeast and slices of cheese, rhubarb in summer, sweet potatoes, and cans of yellow waxed beans. There was only Pap to wait on them, running up and down the stairs with me under his arm. Time went by, one day melting into the next like warm candle wax.

  Folks we’d known, and a number we didn’t, came to the store and stayed to visit, to pat me on the head, and to remember, suddenly, that they also needed a pound of headcheese or two ham hocks. Pap tore off sheets of butcher paper and penciled signs for the front window—three bundles of collards for a nickel, six eggs for a dime. We took in money. I scrapped with the chickens for their eggs, and every morning I milked the goats. Pap brought home three more nannies, and twice a week he sent the warm milk to Mrs. Nailhow, who made cheese and kept a portion for herself. We sold the cheese for an outrageous eight cents a pound. Before I went to school, I knew the grocery business backward and forward.

  We were also the unofficial postmasters. From a small metal box I sold penny stamps. A man in overalls and a blue cap came Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, delivering letters that I sorted into bundles, for I’d already learned the names—Sampson, Ruse, French, Andrews, Phelps. Harker, that was us. I knew which were bills to be paid to the dairyman. At six, I could tuck the money into an envelope, address it, and drop a penny from the cash register in the box for a stamp. In all that time, there was never so much as a postcard from Ma’am, and that was fine with me.

  One century became another. Pap initiated me into the world of home doctoring—the mysteries of mange and foot rot, and the damage a motor car could do to a slow bluetick hound.

  Finally, our old mare stumbled and broke an ankle. Pap dug a hole and shot her at an angle so that she’d fall right in. Then he set a fire of leaves and sticks, and stunk up the air with her cooking. He covered her bones with loam, and for years, cornstalks planted there grew ten feet high. Pap bought a cantankerous mule by the name of Sanderson, and we hitched her, braying and bellyaching, to the wagon. Evenings, we delivered groceries, and picked up sweet hominy at the Daymens’ farm, watermelon and pumpkins from the Sylvesters’. Early mornings, we hauled bales of hay from one field to another. Pap was a good hand at turning a dime.

  I went with him nights when he carried brown jugs to the outlying farms, and I kept watch by the road while men came for a trade. We raked in haunches of rabbit, fresh vegetables, apples, and tomatoes. We piled them in bushel baskets in the store—and we ate like kings.

  After school, I ran the grocery. Coloreds came on Wednesdays; whites bustled in on Tuesdays and bought up stuff like it would be a month before Thursday came around.

  Miss Dovey was one of our Wednesday shoppers. She was black as night and so bony you could have scrubbed clothes on any part of her. She kept her hair in a rag, and under her long dress she was barefoot, like most of her kin. She shuffled in one morning while I was sitting on the floor, trying to stitch two hankies together. I had just uttered a swear word my pap had forbidden, when she looked over the counter.

  “What in the world you doin’ down there, Miss Livvy?” she said. Her glasses were thick as Mason jar bottoms and the same celery-green.

  “I’m tryin’ to sew a dress for my dolly, Miss Dovey,” I said. “But my thread won’t stay still.”

  She took my work in her hands. “Hand me that needle, and I’ll show you how to knot that thread.”

  And she did, the two of us sitting cross-legged on that wooden floor, her instructing me in the ways of gathering and hemming, lining up edges, and sewing on buttons. I often had to scramble up to box groceries and make change. The coloreds finally collected in great numbers to watch. I remembered my manners and jumped up, saying, “You-all stay here, and I’ll get refreshments.”

  They were trapped while the daughter of their horse doctor, whom they worshipped near as much as God, went off to the kitchen. I slathered butter on bread while out in the store they counted out change for salt and rice they didn’t need. I cut my sandwiches in tiny squares to make them go further, and they nodded and praised my buttering.

  When the rest went home, Miss Dovey took her leave. At the door, she paused to lay her hand on my head. Coloreds did that. Once I asked Pap why, and he said it was a blessing.

  In the months that followed, I sewed up rag dolls, hemmed baby gowns and aprons. White ladies admired the fine stitching. While I watched the store and showed off my handiwork, Pap went downstairs to check on his patients. Every time I passed the cellar door, he was whistling, and I don’t know which of us was happier.

  But then there were the funerals—solemn, silent Sunday morning burials that, oddly enough, preceded colored church. I guessed the time was convenient, folks being already gussied up and planning to fry chickens for their dinners anyway. First Lacy Settle’s boy dropped, then her oldest nephew, and before we knew it, two fellas who lived in shacks out along the river. The caskets were plain, the eulogies mournful, and those young men went to heaven without one note of a song. Standing in line to drop a clod of dirt in the hole, I loudly asked Pap if they’d come down with some disease that was catching, and why we weren’t shouting our usual halleluiahs. It was the only time I ever recall Pap putting his hand over my mouth.

  From Sunday to Sunday, Pap also kept his still fired up, and I learned the value of a brown glass jug. He never allowed me a drop of corn liquor, nor did he drink much himself. On occasions when he and a half dozen men sat around our yard
on upturned crates and passed a jug, they included me in their conversation until Pap sent me squarely off to bed. Even as he wound slowly into drink, singing and waving his arms in storytelling, I forgave him for any sin he might be incurring. He loved me, and he could do no wrong.

  Pap and I took turns with the wet wash and the scrubbing. Old Miz Prince from near Buelton brought us a half bushel of tomatoes for Pap’s delivering six puppies. Her brown dog Bessie was too old for a litter, and the birthing was twisted, the poor dog panting, and Miz Prince apoplectic. Afterward, Pap and I peeled tomatoes for two days and made chili sauce with onions that we spooned on everything.

  For the most part, I was in charge of the kitchen, frying up peppers and boiling greens, making gravy from flour and lard. Although my corn cakes were flat and my biscuits came out like lumps of coal, Pap choked them down with a smile that went clear to my feet. He was as handsome as a moving picture star, and he had charm enough to give away. I wonder now that the ladies didn’t fall at his feet while Ma’am was gone—or perhaps they did, but he had the grace to keep it from me.

  5

  For as long as I can remember, Junk Hanley had been bringing his mammy to our store on Wednesdays. One day he said, “Mr. Harker, we beholdin’ to you, and it’d be an honor, sir, to sweep yo’ steps.”

  Even I was smart enough to know what that meant, but to say it would only remind us how poor we all were. We did, after all, have a lot of steps.

  “That’d be fine,” Pap said. “Fact is, I been looking for a sweeper, couple times a week.” Then he twisted his lips, like he was working on a harder thought. “Need wood cut on the hill, too, hauled down for selling, and other things—tater patches turned in spring.”

  For all that and more, Pap would pay him a quarter a week. Junk’s grin was as big as a melon slice.

  I knew the stories about Junk, and I loved them.

  Aunt Pinny Albert said when Junk was a baby, his mama dropped him on his head, accounting for why his skull was back-flattened and he walked with a sideways shuffle. His head was shaved clean as an onion, and his eyeballs were great white marbles that he mostly kept shuttered. He had a bent-up ear and a crooked nose, and every button on his shirt was a different color. He came from the only literate family in Pope County.

  Junk’s daddy was a collector of scrap metal and old rags but his grandpap was a newspaperman in the War Between the States, and then in Glover County for twenty more years. Ida said newspapering was a white man’s job, and it was a sin for him to be in possession of its paycheck. I like to think both coloreds and whites sat on their porches reading his penny paper. I bet they nodded their heads and said, “That Hanley sure can turn a phrase.”

  When he was young, our Junk went off to the Army. He was shipped up north to Three Mile Flats where he learned to march and salute and scrub outhouses with a toothbrush. Before long, the Army delivered Junk north to Euclid, Montana. There, he met up with black-faced men from all over the country. They rode in saddles and brushed up on their shooting. After a while they headed south into desert country where they engaged in one of the last Apache battles on the western front.

  Only a few men in Junk’s battalion could read and write. In the one letter he sent home, Junk penciled that he harbored bad feelings about shooting the Indians. Then one day Junk received a letter meant for somebody else. It was a sad good-bye from one Miss Jackson of Falsette, North Dakota. She signed it “Love Alice,” Junk figuring “Love” was part of her name.

  He politely wrote back. Turned out Love Alice was colored, too. They fell head over heels in love, right off. When the skirmish was over out west, Love Alice hitchhiked down from Falsette. She met up with Junk in Omaha, where they were married by a traveling reverend in the back of a pool hall. They settled down for a honeymoon in the storeroom. In exchange for a cot, they scrubbed floors and dishes—which Junk had become quite a hand at—waxed the bar and chalked the pool cues. They ate soda crackers and sardines for breakfast, lunch, and supper, and sent a postcard home. They signed it: Junk and Love Alice Hanley.

  Sudsing kettles across five states, they made their way to Aurora and settled down with Junk’s mama and a truckload of kin, including Aunt Pinny Albert and her two bowlegged sons, in a three-room house on Rowe Street. They were quiet and respectful, and they went to church regular.

  Love Alice herself was no bigger than a sparrow, lighter of skin than her husband, with a freckled nose that spread across her face. When she came to live in our town, she was a married woman of thirteen, and I loved her right off.

  Like others on Rowe Street, the wood on the Hanleys’ house was rotting. In winter, the windows were boarded, and in spring the boards were ripped off for the breeze. The front and back porches sagged with useless things, and in summer the youngsters chased ribby dogs around the dirt yard, running ass-naked like the day they were born. Whenever I passed by, the oldest child delivered a whap to the little ones’ ears. I suspect he wanted them at attention or maybe on their best behavior, but they just stood watching me, their thumbs in their mouths and their skinny businesses dangling below. Then they smiled with teeth white as milk.

  For the most part, their mamas and pappies worked as maids or janitors. But jobs were scarce, and as time went by, more and more young colored men left town. Aunt Pinny Albert kept her bowlegged boys at work in a laundry, and her three sisters cooked and cleaned for families in Buelton. Others worked farms farther away.

  Finally, Junk’s brother, Longfeet Abram, won a rusted old bus in a poker game. On good days, Longfeet carried his neighbors and kinfolk to their jobs and back, and they pitched in for the gasoline. But the bus was cantankerous, and it belched and backfired and smoked something fierce. Longfeet parked it in the shade of his pappy-in-law’s—the Reverend Timothy Culpepper’s—place. Daily, he’d open the hood and climb up inside, tinkering with one thing or another.

  Like most folks around here, the Hanleys and the Albert sisters raised corn and tomatoes behind their houses. They bought their flour, bacon, and coffee from us. Once a month, the relief truck set up on the shoulder of the highway, and folks lined up for brown beans and rice, tickets for a quart of milk from the dairy, and packets of seed corn. When they were sick, they doctored themselves. If consumption hit, or influenza, they were carried out to Doc Pritchett’s place where they sat out by the gully and waited their turn.

  It was in that gully that Love Alice lost her baby, its life running down the insides of her legs so that before she could even cry out, she was squatting in a puddle of her own dark blood. I wondered if my pap could have saved her baby, but when I said that, it made Love Alice cry harder.

  One old house at the end of the road was their place of worship—the Rowe Street African Methodist Episcopal Church—and they met there not only on Sundays, but other nights, too, eating out of covered dishes and praising God with a vengeance. On summer nights, their singing drifted down to us. They prayed for Longfeet Abram who was in jail, for the soul of Love Alice’s baby, and I’m sure they prayed for us, too.

  Meanwhile, it was good to have Junk around. He came in the afternoons and chopped wood or helped tend the store. He’d hang onions, and fill the barrels with red beans or dried northerns. Most of the time, Pap was downstairs nursing some sick thing, and I’d go to the kitchen to slather jam on two pieces of bread. Junk was partial to persimmon, which Miz Leona Abernathy had sent down as thanks for curing her cats of the stomach upset. Junk and I sat on the grocery counter—by then we had a big bronze cash register that clattered and clanged when I pushed the buttons—and ate our bread. And we talked about everything.

  Sometimes Aunt Pinny Albert sent fried pies and tarts as thank-you’s for the dippers of peas that were too much for us, and an occasional hank of embroidery cotton that I threw in the box. I’d have given away every blessed thing we had, and from time to time, Pap sat me down and explained about the cost of Ma’am’s doctors, and her hospital bill.

  Then one day Junk’s mama sent
word—I could accompany them to their Wednesday church meeting if it was all right with Pap. I let down my braids. Pap dragged a brush through my curls and tied them with a ribbon. He told me I was the prettiest girl in ten counties. He was the only one who’d ever said that. When Junk came for me, I put my hand in his, and we set out up the hill, me in fresh-ironed overalls, an eyelet shirtwaist, and a big white bow on top of my head.

  Miz Hanley was waiting on her porch. Her navy blue dress bulged at the seams, and her face was so tight it seemed her cheeks needed letting out. Her hair was short and curled tight, and her gloves had most of the fingers worn through. A handbag was over her arm. She said she’d sent Love Alice on ahead with the covered dishes, on account of us taking so long. Then she gave Junk a look, and he moved smartly, with me running to keep up.

  “Your pappy been all right, Miss Livvy?” Miz Hanley said, her breath coming in puffs.

  “Yes’m.”

  “He a fine, fine man.” She put a hand on my back. “Don’t you ever let no one tell you different.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She looked at me sideways. “You ever set foot in a church?”

  I had not. My ma’am, in her earlier days, had worn my pap smooth out with her circuit-riding ways, and he never took to religion after that.

  “Well, you jus’ keep your wits about you, and be the lady your pappy raised you to be.”

  I looked at Junk, but he was apparently working on keeping his own wits, and anyway, we had come to the steps of the big white house they called the church. Ladies with pretty faces and gentlemen with their hats in their hands stood about on the porch, saying howdies, and everyone smiled at me and touched me like I was made of glass. We went inside, Junk ducking his big head to clear the door, and we stood to one side while the ladies bustled about setting up chairs and laying out forks. Boards had been laid on wooden sawhorses, and the whole thing was heavy with platters of food.