by Carolyn Wall
She rolled me over to unfasten the blue frock and pulled it down past my underdrawers, but something like syrup was flowing from me, and the pain had gotten all wild and wrong.
“Go on and fetch Doc Pritchett,” she said to the man. And again, “Goddamit, fetch the doc!”
He took up his hat and shuffled out, saying, “But I paid good money, Ida Mae—”
I opened my mouth, and a long thin scream came out, like the highest of high notes on Wing’s golden horn. It shook the window glass and stuck like flypaper to the walls and ceiling. And I knew that what was supposed to be happening, was not happening at all.
20
My daughter was born before morning, and I named her Pauline because Love Alice had said I would. Maybe I just wanted Love Alice to be right.
I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with this whippet. For once, Ida let Miz Hanley come to our place. She showed up on a Thursday with her spine starchy and her mouth set. She clucked at how grown-up I was, and how sweet the baby, though I know she’d heard all about me from the Reverend. She showed me how to fasten the baby to my nipple, how to stroke her throat so she’d stop wailing and suck. I was miserable with Pauline in my arms and clamped to one breast. I suspected I should feel something warm, but it was all I could do to spoon oats in her mouth and change her stinking diaper while Ida reminded me where Pauline had come from. She called me Jezebel and Satan’s daughter. I told her I was Jezebel’s daughter, all right, and that brought such a barrage of shattered scripture that the baby woke screaming.
In the alcove by my bed, Pauline slept in an old dresser drawer. Against the cool nights, I’d nailed newspapers on the walls and folded quilts under her, but I had to creep in and out of bed so’s not to wake her, and my corner was no longer mine.
When she was a few days old, Wing came to visit, leaning in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets. He was polite with Ida and played with Pauline, but said nothing to me. In the end, he laid Pauline in her drawer and bought canning wax and a box of salt. Finally, we stood on the front steps, him mumbling that he would marry me if I wanted Pauline to have a daddy, but stiffly I said no thank you, get on with your business. And he did.
At the end of winter, when my daughter had begun to crawl and every blessed thing was caught in her fist and directed to her mouth, Mr. Solomon Cross came to town—to our door. He was covered with road dust, and had a front tooth missing so that he whistled when he talked. He held his cap in his hand and said to Ida, “Excuse me, ma’am, we’re paving the farm road, and you-all won’t be able to travel west for a day or two.”
She invited him in, saying, “I’m Ida Harker, wife of Tate Harker who’s dead and gone.” I thought she was setting him up for herself, but then she gave him a cup of coffee to warm him, and my wiggling baby, and said, “This here’s Pauline. Healthy a child as there ever was—and look what a sturdy mama she has. My daughter’s plain, but she makes fine bed-quilts and a tasty apple cobbler—takes after me in that way. Her name’s Olivia.”
He nodded and said yes, ma’am, what a nice family—and he came to call on me the next night.
This time he was cleaned up. Both his suit and his manners stood out like blinking lights in our sad little house. He told us to call him Saul. The only place for socializing was in the kitchen, so he sat at the table while I slouched in my chair, with a pair of Pap’s old trousers pulled over my long johns, two flannel shirts, and my hat in my hand like I was fixing to run. Ida and I had fought bitterly over my presentation, me arguing that I was what I was. That seemed all right with Saul.
He was a squat and balding man, but his manners were fine and his eyes the purest blue I’d ever seen. He told me he made fair money with the road crew, but he’d be willing to settle down and find something else in Pope County—if he could have me for his wife. Said he’d take Pauline, too, and locate a house. Ida called from the bedroom that this was a fine enough house, and there was plenty of room if the two of us didn’t mind sleeping in the alcove until the undertaker moved her out of the front bedroom, which would surely be soon. Saul said he guessed that would be all right.
I consulted Love Alice. I should have been embarrassed to go up there after all that had happened, but Miz Hanley scooped Pauline right up, put her arm around me as I had known she would, and settled me in her rocking chair on the porch. She wagged Pauline off into the house and came back with a glass for me—lemon water and sugar. She didn’t ask after Ida, but stood cooing at the baby. I closed my eyes and drank my sweet drink, and I tried hard to pretend I was nine again, but I could not get it straight with Miz Hanley’s attention on Pauline’s babbling. Time has a way of ripping things from us, and it’s true what they say—a body can’t go back.
Presently Love Alice came up the road. When she saw me, she dropped the bundles she was carrying, causing her mother-in-law to cluck her tongue, and she ran up on the porch and hugged me tight.
“O-livvy,” she cried in her funny little voice. “It’s so good to see you, and that’s a truth!”
I had hungered for the sound of her, for the great dark eyes and the swoop of freckles like sparrow’s wings. Miz Hanley took Pauline inside.
“I’ve missed you so much, Love Alice.”
“Oh, ain’t it been awful,” she said.
“Please—will you come to see me sometimes?”
She sat down on the porch and crossed her legs, tucked her dress around her. “I do come, O-livvy. I shops there on Wednesdays when I got a nickel or two.”
“I don’t mean that,” I said, putting down my glass. “I mean—in my kitchen. I’ll make us tea like when we were girls.”
“That a long time ago.” Love Alice looked like she wanted to fly away. “Miss Ida be there.”
“Never mind Ida. I’ll take care of her. Please come. I’ve got a jar of sweet pickle that you like, and I’ll cut up a peach. Love Alice?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“I got things to think through, like Saul Cross wanting to marry me and take Pauline, too.”
“He seem a nice man.”
“But it scares me, you know? Bein’ with one man for all time. Especially one that Ida picked out.”
“Not me. I don’t want nobody ’cept Junk.” Then she got up on her knees and looked hard in my eyes. “You go on and marry him, O-livvy. It goin’ to be all right. An’ I will come on Tuesday.”
21
Saul and I were married in Ida’s side yard. My hair was done up in ribboned braids, and I wore a long green dress to cover the boots that were all I owned. Most of the town turned out, I’m sure in deference to Pap’s memory. They stood around drinking cold tea and cider. Others clustered by the barn. While Ida served wedding cake to the whites, the coloreds settled in the back lot, laying out fried chicken on squares of newspaper and wagging their heads over Pap’s privy grave. Love Alice blew me kisses. I was edgy and near tears, jiggling Pauline on my hip, and maybe that’s why Ida said nothing about Junk and Love Alice, about his mama or Miss Dovey and all their friends and relations eating their dinner out past the goat pen.
Later, Wing came to me in the kitchen where I sat in a straight-backed chair, and he asked me if I really loved Saul. I said how could I, not knowing him at all, and what did it matter to Wing anyway. He said he guessed he’d find him a wife, then, and see if they couldn’t make a go of the hotel. I said why didn’t he just do that.
22
Four years later Wing went off to a hotel convention in Paramus and brought home one Grace Marie Saunders, a wisp of a thing with eyes as big as bread and butter plates. I saw her only a few times—Wing could’ve put both hands around her middle—but everyone liked her. She seemed always to be cold, with a sweater wrapped about her, or sniffling into a hanky. She told Little Ruse, however, that she was right as rain and did, after all, have Wing’s love to keep her warm.
I did not go to Wing and Grace’s wedding, although Saul did because he thought it was the neighborly thing. He wore his now-thre
ady suit, combed his hair over his bald spot, and drove Ida’s truck to the white church on the highway. He said afterward folks went down to the hotel lobby, where they served sandwiches no bigger than his thumb and punch with lemon slices floating on the top. He said Miz Grace was a fairy princess, decked out in flowers and lace, and that Wing couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Saul, himself, was a hard worker. He clerked for Mr. French in his hardware store because he knew wing nuts from lock washers, and could spot one flathead screw in a barrel of stove bolts. He knew something about everything. If a body needed indoor plumbing, or linoleum laid, Saul was right there. If nobody called on him for some time, he’d go off looking to see where he was needed.
On Saturdays, Saul obliged Pap’s memory by firing up the still in the shed and turning out his own brand of Sunday morning brew. At one time, revenuers had plagued my pap mightily, once even bringing a federal marshal to our place, but the government’s mind apparently had turned to other things, because they left Saul alone. Although money was at an all-time low, customers came to us, the gents sampling Saul’s whiskey on the sly while their wives bought groceries. Ida no longer entertained gentlemen in the house, but took to wandering up and down the road, preaching pidgin gospel to neighbors who said it looked like the sickness was coming on her again. Ida called them backbiters, and told them to go to hell.
While Saul was both moonshining and selling hardware, I stitched my quilts and sold a few. The next summer, he built me a stall where Farm Road One ends at the highway to Paramus. On weekends, I sat up there with a hat on my head and a few bills for change. From time to time, folks stopped their cars, and for four or five dollars they took home a quilt.
Although we never talked about it, or about anything else that really mattered, Saul and I raised Pauline the best we knew how. When she was three, he drove over to the county seat and filled out papers that gave Pauline his name. And he was good with Ida. He asked nothing from me except to fix his supper, which was fine because a terrible ache occupied my head and my heart, and rendered me useless in any other way.
Finally I walked up to Doc Pritchett’s and had him look me over, and much to my embarrassment, he pronounced me fine and said it was probably all in my head. I knew what he meant—if my ma’am had been crazy, then I would be, too. I told Ida and Saul I’d had a case of the grippe, but was now right as rain. I never mentioned my hurting again—not even to myself. Instead, I planted twice as much squash in the mounds by the back porch, and cleared another patch for the sweet potatoes I’d drop in when the weather turned. I hoed till I couldn’t stand up straight, and at night I snipped fabric, squared corners, and stitched till I fell asleep with my head on the table.
After a while, Saul and I addressed the problem of Ida, how crazy she made me—and how hateful she was to Pauline, who was already wild as a March wind. Ida could no longer tolerate Pauline sleeping in her room, so nights we carried Pauline’s cot to the grocery and hauled it back to the bedroom in the mornings. Meanwhile, Pauline’s nightmares kept us up. Finally, Saul drove Ida’s pickup over to Buelton where he bought lumber enough to start work on a cabin across the yard. He built one room with a single window and a door on the south side. I dragged the cot out there, and paid Big Ruse fifty cents for a chair.
We moved Ida into the cabin on a fall morning. I think she was secretly pleased with the attention Saul had given her, and she came over for breakfast, lunch, and supper. She conversed with Saul and took her tea at our kitchen table. I served her in silence, but every night when supper was done, I sent her home. I reveled in the hours that I had without Ida underfoot. And in all those years, I never opened the cellar door.
Saul was covering up the tar paper on Ida’s place when at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, he had a heart attack and died. I wasn’t surprised, somehow, for he was too hard a worker, and he’d overly loved my brown sugar cakes. I buried him up in the foothills, right where the land starts to rise. I didn’t cry. I was weary of tears, although I hadn’t shed one in years.
Pauline, on the other hand, fell to pieces.
There was no handling her, and in my heart, I understood that, too. Without love, there is only a great empty space that we fill with whatever’s handy. By the time she was fourteen, Pauline had taken up with a crowd that traveled in an old jalopy from one juke joint to another. One night in spring, she left home.
Rather than figuring out where life had gone wrong, it seemed easier to think that what happens to us happens. Saul was buried on the hill, Ida was living in her tar paper shack, and somewhere Pauline was awash in gin. I, on the other hand, was stitching with a frenzy, and hoeing, planting, reaping, and canning. I raised two crops of new potatoes, turnips and mustard greens, beets and red and yellow peppers to sell in the store. I built a chicken coop and bought four more laying hens and a rooster. Sold eggs for a penny apiece and purchased two more layers. When the mule died, I bought another—Ida called him Sanderson Two—and I hitched him to a plow. There wasn’t a square foot of earth I did not turn up, except for Pap’s grave.
Along about October, when I’d worn myself to the nub, I laid down my hoe and spread out on the earth as I had on so many nights of my childhood. I longed for a change, but I couldn’t imagine what.
23
Down at the Kentuckian, Miz Grace Harris apparently did not get on well—in fact, she got considerably sicker. Over the years, I heard through Love Alice that Wing drove her the length and width of the state in his Ford, looking for a doctor who might cure her. But it was some kind of double lung problem, they said, and there was no fixing it. Finally Wing sent her to the South of France to lie in the sun. He borrowed the money from Big Ruse to do it. But when she came home, the doctors recommended she be put in an iron lung. Miz Grace said that was no way to live out her days, with a machine to do her breathing. I could appreciate that. She stayed in the hotel. Wing fixed up two downstairs rooms for them and rented the rest.
I never went there to visit, but I listened when folks talked of her, and of him. And I begged Love Alice for news. He never played his trumpet, she said, nor left the hotel, for Miz Grace had taken to her bed. And she stayed there for a half dozen years.
Sometimes, in those days, Ida came out of her cabin and watched me hoe. To further irritate me, she stopped brushing her hair and never took a bath, wearing one flannel gown till it fell from her body. She said I was loony, lying there on the ground at the end of every day, but I laughed and told her I could hear its heartbeat.
Then one day, Pauline showed up on my doorstep, a dirty blue blanket in the crook of her arm. It was like time had backed up, and this was my own child being handed to me. But it wasn’t. This was a brand-new life. I took that tiny thing, sat down on the floor of the grocery, and buried my face in it.
“He hasn’t got no name,” Pauline said. She wore shoes with high brittle heels, and her hair was oily. She looked tired beyond her years, and her no more than a child herself.
The baby smelled sour, like it hadn’t had a bath in its life, its scalp flaky with cradle cap, and altogether not much bigger around than my wrist.
“We’ll call him William Tate Harker,” I said. “After my pap.”
She shook her head. “Not Harker. He’s a Cross, like you and me and Daddy Saul.”
I nodded. “William Tate Cross, then.”
Her face was stained with grit. Or tears. So was the baby’s. I sat there rocking him. “He needs fattening up.”
“I know.”
“We’ll mix honey in some milk. Put in an egg.”
“You do it, Mama,” she said. “I can’t stay.”
“What?”
“I need you to take him.”
“Pauline—”
“I’m goin’ to California. Gonna be in motion pictures. I’m pretty enough, don’t you think? An’ I can’t be weighted down with a baby. He won’t be much trouble for you, he’s real good, don’t hardly cry at all.”
God love me—a sm
all, wounded thing had come to my store. But I loved this one even before I unwrapped his blanket. I never felt so sad in my life as when Pauline left us sitting there, and went out the door and down to a car full of racketing young people that was waiting for her on the road.
24
At first I thought Ida was crazy as a loon. She stood outside her shack nights, even in the wind and rain, her hair blowing wildly about her head, an old horsehair blanket around her shoulders. Then I realized she was looking through the window, watching me and the boy with God knew what on her mind. Only once did I wonder if she was lonely, then decided on the spot that I had ached for my ma’am since the day I was born. It was her turn to hurt. Still, after that, when the weather was bad I bedded the baby down, went out, and led her into her shack and to her bed. From somewhere she’d gotten a corncob pipe. I brought her tobacco, and she smoked into the night.
In the house it was just me and Will’m, and it wasn’t long before he was crawling about and then toddling, and begging for sugar teats and other syrupy things.
I manned the store, worked on my quilts, and taught Will’m at the kitchen table. When he was six, I walked with him daily to the schoolhouse. I told him the only rule we lived by was to love each other and ourselves—which I had to say over and over, because Will’m was old enough to see that I did not include Ida. He loved her anyway.
Ida lived her life in her bed, reading her Bible and railing at everything. She ate the food I brought her, and although she was allowed in our house at mealtime, she hardly ever came. As Will’m grew, I often sent him to take her tea, or a cup of coffee. Twice I eavesdropped and heard her conversation with him to be gentle and even wise. Will’m covered her when she fell asleep. More than once, he tamped out her pipe. At first it angered me that he could pull this from her while I could not. Truth was—Ida and I were a roller coaster of hurts, a runaway ride that would never stop.
