by Carolyn Wall
Will’m rocks the cubs and croons to them.
Love Alice sips her tea. She’s saying something—that she hitches a ride over to Buelton once a week, telling her truths to the Ladies Club there, and she and Junk hope to make enough money to pay rent on a house of their own soon.
Presently Ida comes across, carrying the empty soup bowl and her Bible.
“I could hear the racket clear to my place,” she says, “and I knew you was up to something bad.”
She stands at the top of the stairs in her slippers and shawl, clucking her tongue and wanting to know what’s going on down there that’s woke a righteous woman from her sleep. She shouts passages from the Book of Job while Junk hauls the dog runs and smaller cages up and out into the yard and scrubs them down with soap and water. He thinks they can be traded or sold. Ida scurries into the grocery every time he comes through the kitchen, then rushes back to peer down the stairs.
“You-all are goin’ to hell!” she hollers.
“How’s that, Miss Ida?” Love Alice chirps.
Ida sniffs. “This is all very upsettin’.”
“It’s my house,” I tell her. “And it needed cleaning.”
“Olivia, you are like the rich man, and the past is the eye of the needle.”
Be that as it may. Junk has ripped out the mildewed wood. The one great disappointment is that I have not found Pap’s doctoring books. I realize now that those books have become my personal crusade. I recall watching him make notes on the pages. Maybe it’s his handwriting I need most—something to tell me he was really here.
There’s only one other place the books might be—maybe Ida packed them up with her things when she moved to the cabin.
When Junk and Love Alice are gone, I go downstairs one more time. It’s not a bad place, this cleaned-out room. Right now, it’s colder than a well rope, but in summer it might be a fine spot for me and the boy to set a table, pull up our chairs, and eat a cool supper.
Will’m, at the top of the stairs, says nothing.
Ida, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped talking. “God will look in your heart and see how cruel you have been, Olivia,” she says. “Now fix me my supper—’fore a God-fearing woman starves to death.”
I lock the cellar door. I can’t help it.
That night, just before dark, I hear a volley of shots from the hill. Will’m covers the cubs, and, across the table, he looks at me. I’ll bet money, marbles, and chalk that at least one more wolf is dead.
33
It’s been twenty-four hours since Junk and I were in the cellar. Will’m’s gone off to school, riding the bus beneath a threatening sky, and Ida sits at the table, eyeing the cubs’ box and spooning up her breakfast. I’m tacking a quilt, a pale pink one with great dark roses. I’ve embroidered stems in a satin stitch, with leaves and thorns and curlicues. Although I’ve got two hanging in the grocery window, it’s been a while since I sold a quilt.
I think out loud. “I’ve given them sulfur and molasses. I’ve tried every damn thing I can think of—all that Dooby’s given me.”
“Well, they’re not getting my oats,” says Ida. Thunder rolls, shaking the house like a tin cookie sheet. The rain beats hard against the window. Such a storm is almost unheard of this time of year, and it’ll either melt the snow or freeze a new layer of ice over top of it all. Now that I’ve begun cleaning, I don’t seem able to stop. I put down my work and take my cape from its hook.
“Where are you going?” Ida twists in her chair.
“To your house.”
“What for?”
Ida’s eyes are wild, but I am pulling on my boots. I go out the back door, into the rain. She leaves her breakfast and follows me.
“I want to find Pap’s books!” I shout over the rain. “I think you may have them.”
I open the door and stand in the musty room, dropping my cape and shaking out my hair, still in its night braid. Boxes are stacked everywhere, sour and sagging with dampness, and splitting at the corners.
“You can’t touch my things without me saying so!”
“Then you’d better give me permission,” I tell her, “’cause that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
I pull the first box to the middle of the room, on a colorless rag rug that butts up against the iron footboard of Ida’s bed. The box has gathered years of moisture, and inside, wrapped in newspaper, are a half dozen chipped porcelain figures, a dictionary, and seven cups with no saucers. The next is a box of dresses I’ve never seen her wear. Hairpins, tins of buttons, dried roots wrapped in waxed paper, empty snuff jars, an old nightgown.
“Why do you keep all this stuff?” I ask her.
In her filthy gown, Ida sits primly on the edge of her bed. “My things are none of your business.”
She’s right, of course. This is her property. It’s so sinfully little to show for a lifetime—three blue dinner plates, a faded evening gown, worn-out boots, a tarnished silver pitcher. Two of the boxes hold nothing but crumpled paper. I stack them outside the door.
“That pitcher was a wedding present,” she says.
I can’t imagine Ida as a bride. I sit back and put my hands in my lap. “Why did you ever marry Pap?”
“To get away from my own, if you got to know,” she said. “He was a preacher man, like some kind of joke. Tate—” She paused. “Tate promised he’d take care of me for all his life. You see how he lied?”
I wrap everything and put it back, stack the boxes against the walls. “He didn’t lie to you, Ida. He couldn’t see his own death.”
“His death was your fault, Olivia!” she shouts after me. “And you owe me an apology.”
I turn in the rain and the muddy snow. “I apologize for not first getting your permission to look through your things,” I call back to her. “But I’m mad as hell at you for throwing away Pap’s things!”
“Why? What good were they?”
“They were his! And now they should be mine!” I shield my face with my hand. The rain has turned cold and it stings my cheeks. “There’s nothing left to tell me what he was like! Or—or who I am.”
“I can tell you who you are.”
“You never stop telling me!”
She comes in the house behind me, sits down to her cold porridge. “Make us a fresh pot of tea, Olivia.”
“Go home, Ida,” I say. “Put on a dry nightgown. I’ll bring you coffee later.”
I take off my wet cape and go through the hall to the bathroom, pause at the same mirror Saul looked into while he shaved every morning, all the years he was with me. Here, in the glass, is the woman I’ve become. Great dark blue eyes, a set chin, a once-pretty curve of jaw, a mouth that has not worn lipstick since the night at the juke joint when I told a man named Percy that Pauline was his. It’s no wonder that, sixteen years later, my Pauline did damn near the same. I never warned her, never said, Pauline, here’s what happens if you go down to the juke joint and come home with a baby. It’ll change your life, and you can’t ever go back.
I come out of the bathroom. Ida is still sitting, wrapped in her blanket that’s dripping on the floor.
“I told you to go home,” I say.
“I can’t. That ugly nigra is banging on the back door.”
“What?”
“That man from Rowe Street.”
I open the back door. Junk Hanley stands on the porch. His shoulders are hunched, and he holds his hat in his hands so that rain splashes on his head and runs down his face.
“Junk, come in here and get warm, have coffee—”
He looks past me at Ida and shakes his head. “No, ma’am, not just now. I come to tell you sumpin’.”
“What is it? Is Love Alice all right?”
His eyes are full of sorrow. “Miss Livvy—Mr. Harris’s wife—she’s comin’ to the end. She was scarcely breathin’ around sunrise. And now he’s askin’ for you.”
34
I scribble a note for Will’m on the back of a paper bag—fry an egg, and
another for Ida. An orange apiece, a cup of tea. Brown bread, but not too much jam.
I squeeze the remains of the milk and honey into the pups’ mouths, impatient to be away. Then Junk and I pile in the truck and set out in the rain that’s turned to sleet. We slide partway, and it’s a wonder we don’t end up in the ditch or the river, for my heart’s in my mouth and I drive like a mad person. On Main Street I run up on the curb, and we get out and go into the hotel.
There’s no one at the desk. Junk says, “I’m gon’ make sure them Ruses get home in this weather. I’ll check on you-all later.”
I hoped Wing would be in the kitchen, but he’s not. I take the front stairs, but he’s not on the second floor. Nor is he on the top floor, either, nor in the public bathrooms. Fool, I tell myself—his wife’s on her deathbed, where else would he be? It’s the one thing I’ve dreaded, seeing Miz Grace Harris, but it cannot be helped.
The side hall that leads to their parlor and bedroom is dark. I dare not call out, for I don’t want to wake anything, nor send up so much as a particle of dust. I feel as if I’m trespassing on a carpet of eggs. I peek around the parlor door, but the room is empty. Across the hall, he’s sitting in a cane-back rocker by Miz Grace’s bed, and his back is to me.
The room is papered in faded rosebuds and decorated with creamy curtains and embroidered pillow slips—likely done at the hand of the woman who seems lost, now, in the big bed. Her face is mostly bone, and her cornsilk hair is spun in ringlets. An odd sound comes from her throat when she breathes, the same way Will’m sounded when he took the whooping cough. I step in, feeling large and clumsy. My hat is in my hands.
Wing hears me, turns, and comes out of his chair like a very old man. “Olivia—”
I step back into the hall, but not before Miz Grace’s eyes open, enormous green eyes with lids like butterfly wings.
“Come in,” Wing says.
I know I must pay my respects, but I feel like I’ve stepped in quicksand.
Miz Grace turns her head, her eyes on my face. Her lips part slightly, and my name flutters out.
“Wing. Miz Grace,” I say with a nod.
Her fingers move, a command to sit. I unbutton my cape. Wing takes it, and I ease into the rocker.
“Well,” she says. “’Livia. Tell me—about yourself.”
I look to Wing, but he’s busy hanging my things in the wardrobe, like I’m going to stay. I have no idea what to say. Her eyes flutter down, and I think that when she opens them maybe she’ll have forgotten. Then I can talk about something else.
“Little Ruse has baked a chocolate cake,” I say. “We smelled it out in the street, Junk and I. Ruse buys his bars of cooking chocolate at our place.”
She nods, as if that was important information.
I look to the window. “It’s stopped raining, it’s ice that’s coming down now. Sleet. And—it’s near four o’clock. My grandbaby—Will’m—will be getting off the school bus. He’ll find the note I left him. He’ll be heaping jam on bread—two, three slices. Then he’ll eat it right off the spoon.”
Again, her eyes have closed, but she opens them when I stop. It seems a great effort for her, lifting those transparent lids, so I keep on. “I put up jam in summer—sandplum, apricot—he loves apricot. Not many strawberries around here, but plenty of blackberries. Love Alice Hanley and I go berry picking in summer. We take mustard sandwiches and—”
I don’t know whether she’s sleeping or not. I keep talking, mostly to cover the sound of her dying. “I’ve two wolf cubs in a paper box by my stove. Tucked into an old wool robe. They’re hungry all the time. They’ve lost their ma, and Will’m, he’s feeding them molasses and milk with a dropper. Thinks he can keep them alive—”
What an awful thing I have said.
She watches me through shuttered eyes.
“You should sleep now,” I say.
“No …”
I search my brain. “Love Alice Hanley. If you don’t know Love Alice, she’s a sight. Freckles on her nose, never hurt a soul. She’s got this gift—she can look at you and see your truth, that’s what she calls it. She had a baby once—”
“I know—who you are,” she says.
“Ma’am?”
“Wing—talks about you.”
I don’t know why this strikes terror in me. I look around, but Wing’s gone, and I wonder if she’s waited for this moment to accuse me of something. I’m guilty of so many things. I wonder if she’s privy to Love Alice’s gift, and maybe I’m the only one in the world that can’t see the future. Or the past.
“I can’t imagine why,” I say.
She tries to cough. I want to clear my throat for her, cover her mouth with mine, breathe air into her. Her lips stretch out, a smile almost. It’s a moment when truth is all that’s left, and it passes between us with such force that I hang my head and close my eyes. I rock softly, and when her fingers flutter on the coverlet, I hitch the rocker forward and reach for them. Her hands are as cold as last month. I get up and go to the lobby, to the rack Wing’s set up in the window, and bring her my best pink quiltie, cover her gently, slide one pale hand underneath. Then I sit by her bed, and the rocker makes its cricket sounds while I hold her other hand.
She sleeps for a long time, long enough for me to think that when she’s gone into death, and rested sufficiently, she’ll come again. After all, if it’s intended for us to strive toward perfection, God wouldn’t expect us to get it right in just one try. And I wonder other things—like, standing at the gates of life, whether a soul chooses its own body, or if it knows what’s ahead. And, if that’s the case, why would I choose to be born to Ida? Lord knows, I’m no hero.
After a while I feel Miz Grace looking at me. “Livia—”
“Yes’m,” I say, leaning close.
“I want to go out in the snow,” she says.
“Oh no.” I tuck the quiltie tighter. “It’s fearfully cold.”
“Please.”
There’s a bowl of water on her bedside table, and a linen towel. I wring it out and wipe her forehead. There’s lavender, too, for dabbing her wrists, and I fix her hair.
She reaches for my hand. “Livia—please.”
My back is aching, and my heart is heavy. This is more than I can bear. As I pass through the lobby, Junk comes in, wrapped in a whirl of wet wind and stamping his feet. There’s snow on his coat, and I can see by the outside light that it’s coming down hard.
“Miz Livvy?” he says. “You-all need anything here?”
“My truck—”
“It’s done buried out here. You ain’t goin’ no place this night.”
“But Will’m’s alone at the house—and Ida.”
Junk rubs his hands together. Blows on them. “Doc Pritchett’s boy brung his sleigh down. I’ll catch a ride up with him, an’ say you’re still here.”
“Thank you, and—would you mind staying on at the house tonight?”
“Don’t mind at all. I’ll send word to Love Alice.”
“And, Junk, there are eggs and bread in the larder. And you sleep in the four-poster.”
“All right, then,” he says, although I know he won’t. He’ll have brown bread and coffee, and spend the night on the kitchen floor, but Will’m will see to blankets and a pillow. Junk hunches his shoulders and goes out in the storm. I close the front doors and slide the bolt.
Wing is in the kitchen, his chair drawn up to the dark window, elbows on the sill. The glass is frosted over, and snow has piled up, outside and in. I put the kettle on, and set out cups, rummage in the icebox for supper things. There’s ham for slicing, and bread and butter, and some cold potatoes that I chop with butter in a skillet. It’s odd, cooking in this kitchen.
“Wing?” I say after a while, and he comes to the table, sits with his shoulders slumped, staring at his plate. I slide his tea across. “Please eat something.”
“She won’t last the night,” he says.
“Probably not.”
“T
wenty-two years.”
“Yes.”
“Life is hellaciously strange,” he says.
I pick up my fork, but Wing hunches over, and his hands fold over his face. A terrible sound rises out of him, so that I stumble from my chair to stand helplessly behind him, then wrap my arms around him. We rock a little, him shaking and me holding on.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Hush.”
“’Livia—”
“Wing. She wants to go outside.”
He looks at me as if I’m speaking Chinese.
“She wants to see the snow.”
“What for?”
I shrug. “I think we ought to take her. We could wrap her up, just for a few minutes.”
“Olivia—”
“Wing—how many things has she asked for?”
From the attic, Wing brings down her wheeled wicker chair, and I dust it and line it with a woolen blanket. We wheel it in, and she sees, and smiles, and Wing turns back the covers. She reminds me of one of Will’m’s cubs. Wing lifts her as easily as if she were a baby. He puts her in the chair, and I wrap a towel around her feet and add the quiltie, folded into six, she’s that small. Then we trundle her into the lobby, and Wing stops while I lift the blanket around her ears and over her head. She looks like the Mother Mary from the Christmas pageant at the Methodist church. I open the door, and a great swoop of snow rushes in. Wing wheels her out backward, shielding her from the wind.
Every light in town is on—Ruse’s Cafe lit up inside and out even though it’s closed, colored lights over the old newspaper office, the general store, and another row on the barber pole. Left from the holidays, I guess. A lamppost burns at the end of the block, and lights shine from a few windows on the northern slope. Headlights move slow out on the highway. The whiteness of the snow multiplies all that by a hundred, and Miz Grace Harris frees her hands to clap them like a child.
She pushes back the woolen hood, and lifts her face. Snow settles on her pale brows and lashes, and she licks a flake from her lip, and a sigh escapes, sailing up past the top floors of the hotel and into the inky sky.
