by Carolyn Wall
“Oh no,” he said, “I got Ida for the business.” And he laughed and jumped back, for I guess he saw the skillet coming.
“When I’m ready, I’ll want from you what your pappy had.”
And with that, he was gone, and my hand was ablaze. I soaked it in cool water, slathered it with butter, and wrapped it in a cloth. I kept another scar. Further, I had no idea what he was talking about.
I figured Alton compensated Ida well, because the days after his visits, she’d drive into Paramus and come back with new dresses and frilly underwear. Once a bottle of lavender cologne and two silver hair clips.
Meanwhile, at school, I studied ancient history. I learned that the Egyptians had cures for gout, leg cramps, and constipation. It was a shame Pap wasn’t here to appreciate those things. Nights I cut cloth shapes that were Roman in design, or Greek, or Spanish, overlaying them onto darker shades for the illusion of shadow. Then I stuffed them and backed them and made twill bindings so the edges wouldn’t fray. Before long I sold three finished ones to customers at Ruse’s. After that, I had dollars in my pocket with which to buy thread, better scissors, and whole yards of pretty fabric.
The best thing of all was that Wing Harris had come to town. At first glance, there wasn’t much to appreciate. He was taller than most boys and built like a two-by-four so that his trousers bagged, and he wore his pap’s suspenders to hold them up. His face and hands were equally lean, and at thirteen, he had the longest feet in twelve counties. Teacher put him at a desk in the back of the room, but his knees would not fit, and after a while somebody brought him a decent table and chair.
Also in our class were three girls whose bosoms were rounding out. These girls gathered mornings by the maple tree, and rubbed rouge on their cheeks. They rolled up the waistbands of their skirts and licked their lips till I wondered what kept them from chapping. In the classroom they rolled their eyes at Wing and passed him notes. But his eyes shuttered down like he had other things to think about—which, after Miss Dovey’s talk, surprised the heck out of me. I thought boys were driven to kiss pretty girls and do touchy things every chance they got. I wondered if Wing was part blind, or maimed in some way. But before a week had passed, he spoke to me kindly, and though I couldn’t think why, one day he walked me home after school.
I began to speak, to answer his questions, and we went on to talk about Aurora and which creeks were best for swimming. How a body could buy cream puffs at the bakery, two for a nickel. Every day I left him standing at the bridge lest Ida see him. I wouldn’t have set her on him for the world.
On Monday of the second week, I caught him trying to see my face better, so I told him straight out that if we were to be friends, he must never do that. He took my jaw in his hand, and I jerked away. But his hands were firm, and he turned me back, ran a thumb over my broken lip and the other ropy scars, and told me I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. I called him a lying dog.
Wing said he played the trumpet, and that his mama and pap had bought the old Kentuckian Hotel in town. A couple of days later, he took me to see them, and there they were, older versions of Wing, chiseling and painting, shaking out spanking white sheets like they were expecting the governor to spend the night.
“You both come to help?” Wing’s pap grinned and handed me a paintbrush. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Then his ma made us flapjacks. When I got home, Ida was furious that I hadn’t relieved her in the store, but I didn’t care.
A few Saturdays later, the Harrises opened the Kentuckian’s doors, and I put the Closed sign on ours because everybody had gone to town for the event. Wing stood on the sidewalk and played his trumpet. Inside the polished lobby with its velvet rug, Mrs. Harris served raisin cookies and cups of punch while her husband took folks up in the new elevator, a great wheezing thing that scared me to death. I, myself, was stationed on the second floor, with a ribbon in my hair, pointing out the bathroom with hot running water and the privy with its wooden seat and pull chain.
When all the guests were gone and his folks were sprawled limp as boiled greens, Wing came into the bathroom, closed the door, and kissed me from a distance so that he had to bend into it, his lips touching mine.
“Wing Harris!”
“Aw, Olivia,” he said, and he put his arms around me and pulled me close. We kissed in a figuring-it-out way that made my lips sore. When he let me go, he said, “I’ll be shaving soon.”
I looked down at my body, wondering what I could contribute. I put a hand to my jaw.
“Don’t,” he said, kissing the welt.
I wanted to run away with him—or at least live forever with him and his folks at the hotel. Wing’s kisses in the bathroom sealed my heart.
18
In the cloakroom at school, I heard the rouged girls lamenting. Wing probably had a crush on the teacher, or loved a girl back where he’d come from. I knew better.
The town took an instant shine to the Harrises. Wing played his trumpet for Christmas celebrations, New Year’s, and track meets. He marched in the Fourth of July parade, and trumpeted for school graduations and weddings. He played at funerals. Nothing was anything without Wing’s brass music. And he played for me.
Ida felt differently. “Get off of my porch with that thing!” she’d shout at us. “You’re running off my customers.”
“He doesn’t run folks off, Ida. You do!” I said.
“Go on with you both!” She shook her fist, her yellow hair flying.
Wing and I fled to the woods, where I discovered that the space between his neck and shoulder was the perfect place to hide my face. He touched my ear and my hair and the tip of my nose as if they were beautiful, and he undressed me the way I’d seen little girls undress dolls. He never let me turn away or cover my private parts, but kissed them gently, and through all the times we laid each other down in those woods we grew closer in ways that stunned me. His body was long and smooth, and it gave off enough heat to ripen tomatoes. There was a sprouting of hair on his chest and fuzz on his cheeks. His privates lay comfortably against my hip, and although at first it embarrassed me, I loved what I did to him. I’d discovered a new dampness between my legs, and Wing seemed not to care that my bosoms weren’t much. When he gathered them into his hands, they were more. I was nearly fourteen; he was one year older.
Timidly, I figured out ways to tangle our bodies, positions I was sure nobody had heard of. He laughed at my antics, kissed my eyelids, and touched me in places that set me on fire. Through it all, we talked.
“It was God that called me to play the horn, Olivia,” he said one day when he’d buttoned his trousers.
I fingered the peeling mulberry root where I sat in my drawers and cotton undershirt, knees together. My bosoms had grown, although instead of being rounded like I’d hoped, they had dark red points that Wing said he liked. “You sound awful sure.”
He gave me a smile that included his eyes. “I am sure,” he said.
“God speak to you, did he?”
“Not in words.” Wing leaned back against the tree trunk. “More like a feeling.”
I knew in my heart that God wouldn’t talk to me. I picked up a woolly worm and cradled it in my palm. “Like what, exactly?”
“Well,” he said in a way that reminded me of him fiddling with the mouthpiece of his horn when he was ready to play. “Say you’ve got all these thoughts cluttering your head …”
“Uh-huh.”
“You climb in there. And you root around till you find the highest, clearest one.”
I pictured a kind of celestial billboard. “What if there isn’t a clear one?”
“But there is,” he said. “It’s your grandest purpose. When you find it, you know it’s right for you. Like with your quilts, Olivia.”
“Sewing’s not a grand idea.”
“Something else then.”
“Like what?”
“Well, what do you think about most?”
“You,” I said. “I can feel you ins
ide me every single minute.”
“Oh-ho!” Wing reached for me. “All right. But besides that, isn’t there anything—something that’s stuck in your heart?”
I stood up and thought about that while he pulled down my drawers and I stepped out of them. He came out of his own britches, and laid down beside me on the dry leafy ground. Wing took my nipple between his thumb and finger. He groaned with my stillness.
“I think about Love Alice and Junk. And Miz Hanley and Miss Dovey—the way white folks treat ’em so bad.”
“Well, there you go,” he said. “What else?”
“I miss my pap.”
Wing climbed astraddle of me.
“I never got to say good-bye. Or tell him I was sorry.”
Wing’s strokes were long and hard, and I never knew if he heard. Afterward, I rolled away. “I wish God would give me better instructions,” I said.
He threw an arm across me. “I love you, Olivia Harker,” he said. “And I’m gonna keep on loving you till the day I die.”
Finally, I told him about Ida never wanting me. How she’d gone away after I was born—and about her coming home. I told him that on the icy road I’d killed Pap with my chatter, but Wing held me close and said it wasn’t my fault. And that if Pap had to go, at least he carried with him to heaven the sound of my voice.
Wing and I loved for twenty-two months, four days, and three hours, and every minute was like the first. Ida knew. She said we should be dead of shame over what we were doing, and she prayed loudly and often for my salvation. But in my heart, I knew Wing had already saved me.
The following winter, Wing’s pap died of influenza, and one night three weeks later, his ma went to sleep and never woke up. I had no doubt that she’d loved Mr. Harris the way I loved Wing, and she could not live without him. I was sick with grief for my beloved. The whole town went to both funerals. Each time, I stayed in the hotel kitchen, laying out spoons and peeling waxed paper from covered dishes. Wing himself was so broken that he could lift neither his head nor his trumpet, and if Pap had taken my voice to heaven, Wing’s folks went without his music.
After that he seemed always to be busy somewhere in his head. He left school to run the hotel. I missed him desperately and went to visit him in town. I thought he’d take me up to one of the eight pretty rooms with the flowered quilts, but this was a new Wing, solemn and distant, standing crooked like his back hurt. I said I had come to see if he was all right. Then I told him the truth—I wanted to know if he still loved me. He looked away, and asked me the same. I couldn’t get my breath, let alone answer. Our time together shut down that easy, both of us in so much pain that neither of us could see past it.
19
In the months that followed, the town grew silent, like all of Aurora had packed up and gone home. Around the Kentuckian the brick buildings emptied out and became sooty shells with rats and only a lodger or two. The newspaper office shut down, and even Williford the baker closed his doors. Wing’s upstairs rooms were occupied by a couple of summer visitors or a hunter or two, and the honeymoon suite pretty much stayed rented to a man from Buelton who was cheating on his wife.
I missed Wing’s arms and the sound of his breathing. I’d have died for five minutes alone with him. Suddenly I was fifteen and trapped in a house with Ida.
Christmas night, I put on my coat and wobbled on high-heeled shoes down the highway, to a honky-tonk that had opened up. I sat on a stool at Silty’s Jamboree and admired the colored glass lamps that swayed over the pool table, and the way ladies sat in gents’ laps. In a strip of purple light from the window I waited for someone to speak to me. It took all of five minutes. By midnight I’d struck up an acquaintance with a bottle of sloe gin and three boys from Buelton. When one of them took me out to the car, I dropped into his arms the way I’d fallen into Wing’s. Afterward I cried. He left me blubbering in the parking lot, but soon the other two came out and kept me so busy I had no room to think. I saw then that this was how it would be. I gave the boys whatever they wanted, and I never stood by the road crying again.
Through spring and summer, I abandoned the store and school, and spent most of my time at Silty’s. The light was always dim and thick with smoke from the ladies’ cigarettes, so that everything seemed sad and blue. And then Silty hired Wing to play his trumpet on Saturday nights.
Wing and I never spoke, nor did we look at each other across the dance floor. If he was surprised to see me, he never said, and anyway there was always some gent to slip the bartender two bits for a half hour in the back room. I seldom declined. After a tussle on Silty’s narrow cot, he’d pull up his trousers and light a cigar. While I cleaned myself up, he’d dig out a half dollar. Then I’d wobble out to the bar and climb back on my stool. Finally, I stopped my monthly bleeding. And my bosoms swelled—the gentlemen liked that. They wanted the silliest things—to snap my garters, tear off my drawers, and spank my bottom with the flats of their hands. They taught me to say things that at first sounded awful, but after several drinks became funny.
By fall, the fellow behind the bar was a new one—not the one that favored me and gave me drinks on the house. The windows were painted black, and the new neon sign that hung from the ceiling sizzled and blinked. In the back corner, Wing lifted his horn, and the room throbbed with its wailing.
One night, when I sat running a hand over my belly, a laugh ran down the bar, gents taking bets on which of them my baby would look like. Wing’s trumpet whimpered, like all the air had gone out of it. That was the last night he worked there. My disappointment was bitter. I had relished him watching.
Just before Thanksgiving, the Reverend Timothy Culpepper came in, making right for the counter where I sat, my chin propped in my hand.
“Miss Olivia,” he said before anyone could toss him out, “this ain’t no place for a young lady.”
“Lady?” I said. Most of the Reverend’s hair was gone, and his whiskers were grizzled. “You callin’ me a lady, Reverend?” It sounded like a line from a joke, and I laughed.
He took my elbow. “I’m goin’ to get you home.”
I shook him off. “You go on now, and save some other poor soul, ’cause I’m just fine.”
“Miz Hanley don’t think so, Olivia. Nor Love Alice or Junk—they sent me to fetch you. Said for me to bring you up to their place. You can stay with them till your youngun’s born.”
I could not bear the thought of Love Alice seeing me like this. And anyway, somebody had plugged in the Wurlitzer, and out on the floor the ladies picked up their heels.
“You wanna dance, Reverend?”
“Miss Olivia—”
I put a finger to my lips. “You buy me a drink, an’ I’ll tell you a secret—”
Above the white collar and tie, his face shone with sweat. “No, ma’am, I don’t want to hear no secrets.”
“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. You know that fella Percy that comes by, sellin’ stuff?”
“I seen him, yes.”
“Well, I tol’ him the baby is his.”
“That be the truth?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged my bare shoulders. “But I told him it was.”
“Miss Olivia, this fella Percy—”
“You know what he’s doing right now?”
“I do not.”
“He’s in the back room, peeling a cigar band and feeling sorry for himself. Now, go home, Reverend,” I whined. My belly had begun to hurt, and I didn’t want to talk anymore. I turned to the gent on the other side of me, a sweet-smelling fella who had just purchased a half bottle. I smiled at him, sleepy, and I wished for a glass, although I would have drunk straight from the bottle.
Percy, in a cloud of cigar smoke, came out of the office. He jerked me up. I crossed the floor with amazing ease, floated out into the night, and left the Reverend standing there with his hat in his hand.
“Get in the car.”
He climbed in, too, and the Ford coughed. We moved onto the road and away from th
e place and its hazy lights.
After a while I pressed my legs together and said, “Percy, I gotta pee.”
But he looked straight ahead, and his mouth was set. I sighed and leaned into the corner, my face to the door. I was in that swampy place where nothing mattered.
Pain roused me. “Let’s go back, honey, and I’ll do you ’round the floor.” I giggled, but it came out a no-meaning sound. My belly hurt, and I was thinking it might just be my time. But that was too much to worry about. Whatever was going to happen would happen.
The mountain road was thick and black like even the moon was hiding. Inside the Ford, I didn’t open my eyes. I knew the only thing to be seen was Percy all whip-starched and pissed, and the little white lights winking on the dashboard. I did not want him to take me home. I began to think of ways to make him pull me into his arms.
“Lover—” I said, but the word came out like I’d only dreamed it, and anyway, he was already stopping in the middle of the road. He opened the door and gave me a shove, and I rolled out, landing with the gravel sharp under my shoulder, the blue se-quined dress ripping beneath me. He threw the bottle out, too. I heard it shatter, and when I opened my eyes, glass and blue sequins twinkled together like stars that had fallen on this side of the road.
“You’re white trash, Olivia,” Percy said, hunched over the wheel. “Just like your mama.”
I heard the Ford putting away, rattling on the bridge below, and I laid my head on the sand and waited for Ida to come down the steps and find me.
Wolves howled, high up and far away, my grandpap’s wolves. But my pap had said there was nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it seemed funny, me lying here like a wounded deer. Before long, Ida sure enough came down and laid a hand on my belly, while the gentleman she was entertaining stood off to one side blinking. Ida barked at him, and his thick hands took me up by the heels like I was a hog to be slaughtered. They hauled me in with Ida grunting and kicking open the door, and they carried me through the grocery and put me down in the middle of the big poster bed. Ida drew back her arm and slapped me good. Then again, without missing a beat.
