by Carolyn Wall
“I’m sorry.”
Pap hung his coat on a porch nail.
“How you, Mr. Harker?” Love Alice burbled.
He sat down at the table, poured tea into a saucer, blew on it, and drank. “Fine, Love Alice. You? And Junk?”
“We well,” she said, showing her big white teeth.
“I’ve got deliveries to make, Olivia,” Pap said. “I won’t be long.”
Here was a chance to repair the damage I had done. “Take us with you! Please, Pap.”
He shook his head. “Not to the Phelpses’.”
“We’ll stay in the wagon, and we won’t be any bother.”
“Olivia, I got to put my foot down over this.”
“But—”
“Them Phelps boys are mean as whipped weasels. In fact, today I’m cuttin’ off their supply. What goes on out there—” Pap got that pinched look on his face like he’d said too much. “I’ll be back in a while.”
Soon as he’d gone out, I said rudely, “You-all got to go, now.”
“Uh-oh, O-livvy,” Love Alice said. “You up to sumpin’.”
“I’m gonna hide in the wagon. You can come.”
“Not me,” Mavis said, backing out the door and down the steps. “Us ain’t allowed to go out there.”
In the end I hunkered alone between two bales of hay, under the old woolly blanket Pap used to cover the jugs. Pap licked the mule lightly.
I had once asked him how he knew the number of jugs to deliver. He told me to pay attention—a man might ride by our house, take off his hat, and wave it three times. “It’s a sign, Olivia. You got to learn to read the signs.”
With me bouncing along in the back of the wagon, we headed east to where the hills evened out. I knew a few things about the Phelps boys. They were a lot like their land—gone to seed and thorn since their pap had died. I never knew their ma’am, but I’d seen the old man. For a while, his three sons hung around Ruse’s Cafe.
But then Ruse’s boy took sides with the Phelpses till Big Ruse throttled him with a flapjack turner and locked him in the outhouse. The Phelps boys had a good laugh over it, but after that, they left Little Ruse alone, and kept pretty much to themselves.
Then one day old Mr. Phelps went and died, and the two bigger boys turned mean, James Arnold being barrel-chested, bragging, and always the leader. Alton was in the middle, smart-mouthed and hateful. Booger was the baby, puffy-eyed, white-faced, and light in the head. He walked hunched over, with arms hanging like a monkey’s, and the other two beat the living tar out of anyone who made fun of him. Booger quit school after the third grade because his teachers couldn’t do a thing with him. One day the sheriff came to get the three from school, and none of them ever came back. A few weeks later, we heard that their ma’am ran off with a traveling salesman.
Today, I wanted a close-up look at Booger. We angled in at a falling-down gate, and drove up to the big house. Pap whoa’d the mule, and I heard him call, “Hey in the barn!”
I turned back a corner of the blanket, and peeked out at James Arnold Phelps in his overalls and no shirt. He was as big across as he was tall, and his beard was matted with food and twigs. He asked if Pap had brought the drink.
Pap climbed down, and when he flipped back the blanket, uncovered the corked jugs, and saw me there, fire came to his eyes, and I feared for my life.
“Looks like you boys got into it early,” he said, but his eyes were still on me.
James Arnold’s lip curled like a dog that’s been trifled with. “Yessiree, Mr. Harker. These is hard times.”
“Well,” Pap said, lifting out the jugs. “Drink up, boys. These two are on the house.”
James Arnold shook his head. “Two ain’t gonna do us, no way. How many jugs you got in ’at wagon?”
Alton came out of the barn. Alton wasn’t near as big as his brother, but he swaggered even when he was standing still. “I hear you refusin’ to sell us whiskey, Mr. Harker?”
“I am, Alton,” said Pap. “You boys drink half the night, and then go scaring the hell outa folks. Last week you ran old Bristow’s horse flat to death. Took my shovel up there, and helped bury him—Bristow had that animal a long time.”
Alton grinned at his brother.
Pap shook his head. He turned to climb up on the wagon seat.
But James Arnold was fast for his size, and he fisted Pap’s jacket and spun him around. Slammed him hard against the wagon so that his hat fell off. James Arnold put his face close to Pap’s. “We ain’t gettin’ no new supplier, Mr. Harker,” he said. “You cut us off, and we’re gonna tell the sheriff over to Buelton that you’re crankin’ the meanest hooch in these parts.”
Pap said, “Sheriff likes my liquor, too, boys. Tell him what he already knows, and see if he don’t bring a federal marshal to your barn on a Saturday night.”
I clapped my hands over my mouth and heard Pap draw a breath. “I’ll leave you-all now. You got things to take care of—your daddy’s ranch, your brother Booger—how’s he doin’ anyway?”
James Arnold drew back his fist, and he hit Pap hard across the cheekbone. I saw Pap’s head snap around sideways, and if James Arnold hadn’t put a hand flat on his chest, Pap would have gone down. A wide red gash had opened on his cheek.
“Booger’s dead,” James Arnold said between his teeth. “Drank your fine corn liquor, Mr. Harker, then went and shot hisself, that’s how he’s doin’.”
Pap put up a hand to touch his face, and I threw back the blanket and leaped to my feet.
Alton Phelps grinned in that toothy way dogs sometimes do when they’re dying. “Well, lookee here, what we got in this wagon.”
I clenched my fists. “Filthy pig men!” I shouted. “You-all got pig faces, an’ you’re wearin’ stinkin’ pig britches!”
Alton came around and gathered me up by the overall straps, his breath and his bad teeth sour in my face. “Little girl,” he said, grinning, “your mama let you talk like that?”
“My ma’am don’t live with us yet.”
“Olivia,” Pap said. “Don’t say any more.”
“Well,” Alton drawled, “seems I heard about her. ’Em crazy-house whores set a man on fire. When she comes home, girlie, you tell her Alton Phelps be up to pay his respects.”
I couldn’t collect spit fast enough, but delivered a gob to his eye so that he yelped and jerked back and I near fell over the side while he wiped it away with the heel of his hand.
“Little bitch!” he swore at me. “Who d’you think you are?”
“I’m Olivia Harker, and you’re nobody!”
“Wrong, girlie. I’m Alton Phelps. And this here’s my brother, James Arnold Phelps. You’ll want to remember our names. Devil sure knows I won’t forget yours.”
Then Pap head-butted James Arnold, knocking the wind clean out of him.
Alton came between them slow, like he was thinking things over and was no longer in a hurry to settle this hash. He brought out a square of scarlet cloth and wiped his face with it. “Well now, Mr. Harker, you goin’ to sell us more jugs? To help ease these troubled times?”
Pap shook his head slow. “I am not. But I’m real sorry to hear about Booger. I know you boys loved him. If I can help with the burying—”
James Arnold said, “Already done. Hard goddamn ground, boy’s half gone to dust.” He lifted Pap by the shirtfront and said, hot in his face, “I know what you’re doin’ around here, Harker, and I want you to stop.” Then he hit him again.
I heard Pap groan, but he got to his feet. Picked up his hat and slapped the dust from it. With great effort, he climbed up on the seat and pulled the hat low. Hawed the mule and eased the wagon around the barn. I stood in the back, staring down Alton Phelps till he disappeared in shadow.
“Sit down, Olivia,” Pap said at last.
Then we lumbered onto the road and drove back the way we’d come.
After a while Pap said, “We get home, you’ll need to take needle and thread to this cheekbone—”
�
��Yessir. Pap, what happens in their barn on Saturday night?”
He took out a rag and held it to his face, looked at the blood. “Olivia, you heard things you shouldn’t have. I need you to forget we were ever here.”
11
The week before Ma’am came home, Love Alice leaned across the table and chirped, “I never said this to you, O-livvy, but I’m goin’ to tell it now. Sometime I know thangs.”
“What things? Like times tables and stuff?”
“No,” she said in a whisper. “Stuff I oughtn’t to know—like when a body’s goin’ to die. Or if some woman’s man is slippin’ around.”
“You’re making that up.”
“It ain’t right, I know,” she said. “God gonna punish me. Gonna say, Love Alice, you can’t come into heaven ’cause you peeked in folks’ heads an’ you know they secrets.”
I shook my own head till my braids danced. “Love Alice, nobody knows what other people are thinking.”
“You ought to believe me.”
I held my teacup in both hands. “Then what’m I thinking right this minute?”
Love Alice tilted her head so that her freckles slid downhill. She looked like a robin listening for worms. “You thinking ’bout your mammy. You goin’ to have heartache, an’ I’m sorry for that. God’s own grace, O-livvy, it’ll be a long time befo’ you happy.”
“You’re just saying those things ’cause I told you about Ma’am coming home.”
She shook her head. “You scared a her, and she ain’t even here yet.”
She was right; I was afraid. Not only of Ma’am, but scared that maybe Love Alice really could see the future. I was glad to hear Pap’s footsteps on the porch.
“And, O-livvy,” Love Alice said in a whisper, “someday you goin’ to have a little girl of yo’ own.”
“Not me, I’m never going to marry. I’m gonna stay right here and work with Pap till I’m an old, old lady.”
Love Alice smiled sadly. “Yo’ little girl, she have hair like the sun. An’ you goin’ to call her Pauline, uh-huh.”
12
On a hot Monday afternoon, Ma’am came home. She rode in a fancy buggy that Pap had hired. He had baked her a lopsided brown sugar cake from eggs I gathered in our henhouse, and he talked of building an indoor privy. There were fresh-laundered sheets on the big four-poster. And he planned to give her the new mule Sanderson for her own. He would buy her a saddle if she wanted one. That day, we closed the store early and put a sign in the window, but nobody needed telling.
Pap met Ma’am on the road, and lifted down her carpetbag. She took his arm, and he led her up the long walk and the steps, into the grocery where she stood looking at the shelves of canned goods and pickles. Golden curls were piled on top of her head, and her body was slender and curved like a willow branch. Then she spotted me peeking from behind the curtain. Pap went to the kitchen to make coffee.
She came right to me—I was almost as tall as she was—and said, “Filthy, that’s what this place is. Well, I’ll never work a single day here. And you—you stay clear of me. Don’t do anything to get on my nerves. No laughing, no crying, no raising your voice.”
In the kitchen, I could hear Pap setting out cups and cutting cake. Ma’am ran a finger around the edge of the potato bin, like what dirt she found there was my fault. Then she studied my face. “You’re so plain,” she said.
I knew then that whatever illness had befallen her, it had not been bad enough.
Pap called us to coffee, but she declined and took to her bed for a “stretching out.”
I tried to tell him, said, “She’s too fancy, and anyway, she doesn’t like us.”
But he laughed in a tinny way, and told me to go ahead and start supper. We’d leave her alone, and she’d settle in. He went down to the cellar where he made not one sound, and I wrapped the cake in a cloth and put it in the larder. Then I washed a cabbage with salt to kill the bugs, and took great comfort in whacking it hard with the butcher knife. I threw the core to the goats and went off to the outhouse, banging the screen door three or four times. The more noise I made, the better I felt. But my belly was tied in a knot.
I cut up a potato and a scrap of yellow pepper, added a handful of green peas, and stirred up beaten biscuits that I set to rise. Went out to sit on the back porch steps and shaded my eyes, looked out across our place, past the dried-up creek to the first slope of Big Foley. I wondered what Ma’am would say when she heard the wolves howl—or if they knew she was here, and were right now up there, tiptoeing around.
Before long, I announced loudly that supper was ready. Pap came up first, looking anxious around the mouth, and he straightened the forks and set out salt and pepper shakers. The bread turned out decent. Ma’am didn’t come, and Pap and I stood looking at each other until I marched to the bedroom door and knocked lightly. There was no answer, so I turned the knob and looked in. The curtains were drawn so there was not one bit of light to see by, but I heard Ma’am say in an aggravated voice, “What is it?”
“I’ve got supper on the table.”
She sighed and sat up. Put a hand to her back like the bed had given her an almighty crick.
Pap was at the table when she came in, but he jumped up like he was on fire, and pulled out her chair. He tucked her into her seat, brought the dish towel, and laid it in her lap. When I set his soup on the table, he gave it to her, cut open a biscuit, handed her a knife, butter knife he called it. I brought two more bowls.
Ma’am took one look at the cabbage soup with fresh peppers and peas, and she curled her nose. “This is a sorry enough welcome supper.”
“Ida Mae—” said Pap.
“I should have known she wouldn’t be handy in the kitchen. Swear to God, children do nothin’ but set the nerves on fire.”
I waited for Pap to tell her cabbage soup was his favorite, and the bread the best yet. But although he moved his mouth, no words came out.
“Well,” she said, “you can’t expect me to take over the kitchen. I’ve forgotten everything I knew about cooking, and I don’t care to learn again.”
“Olivia will do better,” Pap said, looking at his bowl.
I stumbled from my chair, turning it over and upsetting my milk glass. I didn’t know which of them I hated more. “I didn’t make it for you, you crabby old loon!” I shouted. “I made it for Pap on account of he likes it! I wouldn’t cook for you if you were starvin’ on the steps of hell. I don’t know why you came back here anyway. I hate you—and I hate that damned ol’ donkey, too!”
It was far more than I’d meant to say, but I guess some dams needed to be broken.
She flew out of her chair and jerked me by the arm. She was amazingly strong, bending my head over the sink, shoving a bar of lye soap in my mouth. I came up, gagging and wheezing, pleading for Pap to make this stop. But he just sat there, looking at his supper and saying nothing. In his need to keep the peace in his household, he slid sadly from my grace.
I spent the night in my alcove, with the curtain drawn, listening to her sobbing and Pap promising her the moon. He would tear down the still, stop his doctoring, and pay more attention to the store so that she would not have to. He’d take on more of the cooking—she needn’t turn a hand.
She sobbed on, whining and whimpering about being stuck out here in the boondocks.
Pap told her he would get a loan from the bank and buy a car so that she might take frequent trips into Buelton. He would see to it that she lived a life of comfort. He spoke to her as if she was that pretty young thing that he remembered, and I realized then what had happened—my birth was the cause of her nervous condition. I wondered, in those whispered moments, if he apologized for my plainness.
Later, I heard him lead her off to bed. A few minutes later, he rustled around in the kitchen, groaning and shifting things so that I knew he’d bedded down on the floor. It was then that I decided to call her Ida, and although I prayed nightly for God to take her away, he never did.
Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, I envisioned Pap and me moving our things to the cellar, where Ida could not touch us. We would cook our dinner over a candle flame and bathe in the tub he used for surgeries. We’d tend to our patients and never have to see Ida again. If we were lucky, sooner or later, someone would come down and tell us she was dead.
For the most part, I ignored her. On Saturdays and Sundays I made paper patterns for fancy aprons and sun bonnets, cut fabric I’d taken from the store, and stitched them up. Early mornings on my way to school, I’d carry them to Dooby’s where he let me line my things up in his window. My business was booming, but Pap’s was something else. As time went by, fewer wounded things came to our house. Folks seldom called him to deliver their breech calves or bind up a wound, and we missed the greens and fried apple pies. Daytimes, he minded the cash register, but even that wasn’t the same. Folks hurried through their shopping and cast anxious eyes on the kitchen curtain.
That fall, Pap brought back a man who installed electric lights in the grocery, one in the bedroom, and a dangling cord for a bulb over our kitchen table. He ran a roll of black wire from our house to one of the electric poles that had been put up along our road. Pap gave him four boxes of groceries, and signed an IOU for the rest.
After school, I minded the store and did my stitching there or under the kitchen light while Pap went up the mountain to cut cordwood that he delivered in the wagon. It brought us a dime or two. He came home after dark, ate whatever I’d left on back of the stove, and slept in his blanket on the kitchen floor.
From my cloth I cut spike-roofed houses and round red apples, and stitched them onto bleached muslin. I sewed gingerbread boys on dish towels and embroidered their eyes and mouths. Twice a month, on Sundays, I went around Aurora collecting scraps. Angus Sampson’s wife, rolling up toweling for my bag, said I was the prettiest sheeny man she’d ever seen.
Food was getting scarce, and there was an electric light bill to pay. With so little business, we could not order more canned goods or tooth powder, and we stopped taking from the dairyman and lived on goat’s milk. At the end of the week, there were few coins left over to drop in the kitchen drawer. In the dark of night, men sometimes came to our back step, asking for a bottle of Tate Harker’s swill, but Pap wagged his head and warned them off. But he could not resist going out on a call when a horse bruised a hoof or a calf insisted on coming into the world by its hindquarters. These trips to the country brought us summer squash, melons, and ripe tomatoes, which, he said, would help restore Ida.
