by Lynn Pruett
Then she remembered the Mad Queen’s message. The letters seemed to float at her, squiggly and black like the man’s hair. FOR A HOT BLOW, COME TO THE HOLIDAY HOUSE. Blister, white and thick, foamed noisily as it obliterated the invitation.
She rinsed her gloves in the sink. A voice growled through the door to the bathroom. “I’m almost done,” she yelled, and quickly removed all her protective clothing.
HATTIE BOHANNON
Back at her desk, Hattie signed the official letter from the high school confirming that Connie had dropped out and was working as a waitress. At this time in her life, working suited Connie better than school had. She’d always been too energetic to sit down eight hours a day. There’d been no slack for her so-called behavior problems, which, Hattie knew, stemmed from a simple need to stretch her legs. Connie’s time-out was an experiment. Right now it was going well.
Next she opened the Maridoches Ledger and found her ad in the Church of the Holy Resurrection Bible Contest. Whoever correctly identified the book and verse would win a Bible from her. It was extremely easy to win; the hint—the name of the biblical book—was as large as the logo above the quotation. The winner also had to submit a one-page testimony explaining how the Bible improved his life, which limited the contest to those who already owned Bibles. Hattie resented the business compromises she was forced into to appease the church—like running this ad and hiring Gert Geurin. But Gert was good; the most irritating part of the contest was the winners who felt inspired to read their prize-winning essays to the customers in her dining room. Haw Sullivan had won her ad twice, which was against the rules. She reported him to the church. It was discovered he’d won forty-one Bibles under assumed names and set up a Bible booth at Tannehill Trade Days. He was disqualified.
She scanned the paper. Below a picture of a platter of fried chicken and mashed potatoes ran this week’s Bible verse:
Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day. But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.
—1 Timothy 5:5–6
She felt her face burn. Was this a coincidence or true divine intervention? A widow indeed: well, she’d been a widow in fact for nearly five years, ever since Oakley’d gone off to Walter Reed. But she was not desolate or desperate as Kenny Ranford had claimed. Why is a woman alone considered depraved or devastated? She’d read an article that said unmarried women were by far healthier and happier than married women. Maybe that accounted for her sense of relief rather than despair at the news that Oakley was returning. The last half of the quotation ate at her, though. Was this a reference to Jessamine? No, she thought. Widow could only be herself. Herself and Paul Dodd. Pleasure. If they only knew it wasn’t pleasure but experiment, dipping her toe into the vast chilly river, recognizing that a plunge promised exhilaration and danger. And this verse was here to remind her of it, of the danger.
She glanced over the verses running below the other merchants:
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18
Clearly a dig at the proposal to raise taxes to improve the schools, a perennial argument in Alabama. But it could also refer to her own testing of the waters. Oh, what a day. First the letter about Oakley, then the strange quotation, and at ten o’clock she’d heard a newsman report matter-of-factly that the sexual revolution was over, as if there had been a wall map dotted with colored pins charting advances and retreats, as if another small island had been brought to its knees. Having missed the revolution due to wedlock, Hattie wondered how she was supposed to act. As a single mother? She rejected that tag with its suggestion of looseness. Certainly not desolate. Widow sounded so old and dry. The revolution over, the social codes broken and in disarray, what was left? And why must she name herself something that had to do with her sexual activity or lack of it?
She next opened a letter from Vegetables of the South, Inc., informing her that they would no longer send her tomatoes. She reached Kenny Ranford after four tries. His voice could sweat through phone wires.
Kenny Ranford shouted, “One of my deliverymen almost beaned by you because you want to put on a show for your customers! What if you had missed?”
“I never thought about it.”
“You are either arrogant or a lucky fool.”
“Or else I am a good softball player.”
“Yes. Okay. You are a genius about the people you sell food to, but do not harass my workers.”
“Kenny, I am not going to buy gassed tomatoes.”
“You opened the box first. That is a violation. Before you see the tomatoes you are refusing them.”
“When I see Florida connected to tomatoes I know they are hothouse, not vine-ripened, no matter what the package says.”
“What is the problem with Florida Sun-Ripened Tomatoes?”
“Everyone knows it is too hot in Florida to raise tomatoes unless they come from a hothouse.”
“Oh? How does Carolina Sun-Ripened Tomatoes strike you?”
“Strike me?” Hattie could never get a good fix on Kenny. “Do you own those tomato hothouses?”
“I do not have to answer that. You could have asked me before you signed the contract, but now it is too late for that kind of impersonal question.”
“Look, Kenny, I have my own problems. If we run out of gassed Florida tomatoes in the next two weeks, I’ll serve fresh local tomatoes, fat and juicy.”
“That’s your funeral,” he said. “Expect no more tomatoes from me. I must go now. It is time for my four o’clock pill.” He gulped. “Digitalis. This business of business is bad for the heart.”
Hattie called Troy Clyde and told him of the tomato problem . He promised to go to Gadsden and buy as many flats as he could. He’d have Darryl till manure into the short field near his bean hills and then later on, after supper, he’d be ready to plant. Hattie sighed. At least there was someone she could count on.
She snuck into the storeroom looking for the gold chair so she could take a rest. It was gone. She went to the kitchen and asked Jessamine about it. The girl cast Gert a pointed look and said she needed privacy, so Hattie led her back to the office.
Jessamine began talking about the chair in a strange way. Somehow it related to Gert smoking and to Richard Reynolds and to an affair. She was spiteful, unrepentant, not sorry in the least. She stood there, her chin thrust forward, her hand sweeping and resweeping her fine blond hair, a gesture practiced to draw attention to it. Hattie wanted to pull her hair out by the roots, shout in her face, and tell her how egregious her mistakes had been. She wanted to shake the girl until she understood that she had committed social sins.
Hattie actually sat, quite shaken, in her chair behind the desk, growing paler and paler as Jessamine’s words came out. How could her daughter do this? To her, Hattie, who had scrambled and sacrificed in order to save Jessamine from shame. Had given up so much to be a mother again. Had covered all the bases and made the lie a truth. Jessamine was the last person she expected to betray the lie.
The longer she listened, the more her mind turned to Jessamine’s accomplice, Richard Reynolds, married and quite a bit older than her daughter. He was the one at fault and, should anything come of it, he should be the one to hang by the heels. She felt like searching the Bible and supplying her ad with a verse about adulterous men. Fidelity was one thing Hattie felt keenly about. It was why she hadn’t gone out with anyone but Paul Dodd since the telegram came. She believed in until-death-do-us-part. If Richard Reynolds were divorced, she had no problem—well, a little problem—with Jessamine and him getting together. But this was just a case of sex. It always was. Lust. Despite protestations of love.
Then Jessamine said, “He’s going to get a divorce.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Hattie.
Jessamine said, “Oh, Mama, he loves me. When I was with him, I was so happy.”
&nbs
p; “Did you do anything other than have sex?”
Jessamine sucked on her lips. “If you only knew what it was like, you would understand completely.”
Hattie cracked her jaw. She stared hard at Jessamine. Inside, though she was appalled. I am not this hard person. I know love and joy. Knew love and joy. Or did I? In those faraway nights she rode with Oakley to honkytonks scattered like debris across the lush mountainsides. When a shack, strung with blue lights, popped up unexpectedly among a forest of Georgia pines, she always asked herself, What does not belong in this picture? Today her answer was different. Then a newlywed, she’d matched Oakley beer for beer until, after several months, her skin plumped out. Often she was the only woman in the place. Late in the evening, if Chet Atkins was playing on the jukebox and if she’d drunk enough, Oakley’d call her his guitar and stretch her body across his lap. “Fellas,” he’d say, “I’m goin’ to play y’all a tune.” He’d hold her left breast in his left hand and run through several chord changes. His right hand strummed invisible strings between her hipbones. With her head flung back, barely brushing the raw pine planks, and the room too dark to tell the ceiling from the floor, she’d felt giddy and terrified, spinning and falling, held by a pair of sturdy hands.
“Mother,” Jessamine said, “you’re frowning. Quit thinking about work and listen to me.”
Hattie would call someone else, with such carrying-ons in her past, cheap. She knew on one level that her memories pointed out giant flaws in her relationship with Oakley. But on a deeper level she could not label that young woman in her memory, her former self, cheap. She’d been carefree and in love. She remembered the many mornings she awoke to a shifting sky of green leaves. Her legs carried the earth’s imprint to Oakley’s jalopy, where she shook sticks from her hair. Oakley’s eyes said, What fun, while he walked like he wished he were a feather that could float home. Instead, they’d climb into the car and grit their teeth as they bumped their way back to Maridoches.
That was how she lived her days until Aunt Leola drew her aside and left an indelible fingerprint on the inside of Hattie’s arm. “You’re a mother now,” Aunt Leola said. How magically, it seemed now, she’d become strict and orderly. It must have been tough to let Oakley go out alone, and yet as she searched her memory she found no trace of resentment. Perhaps the exhaustion of the early pregnancy made his trips undesirable, and after that it must have been the bulge. She could hardly have been a guitar worth its sound with a melon distorting the strings. So well had she become the conscientious housewife and mother, washing clothes, cooking meals, and canning tomatoes, that by the time Connie quit nursing, it didn’t occur to her to go out with Oakley and drink beer. Staring down their grown daughter, her sudden yearnings for that long-lost carefree life filled her near to bursting.
“How does it feel to be trash?” she said.
Jessamine’s face whitened. She stood up, her mouth and fists opening and closing. Paralyzed, yet flaming white, she finally moved in one swift turn toward the door and passed almost invisibly through it. She hooked the knob and swung it hard into the frame, which clapped in shock. The door shuddered.
Hattie’s heart was thumping and she felt chilled and she wondered why she was always so hard on her girls. Because I expect them to help me through this life, and they do not. The curtain of sadness finally descended. Oakley was not coming back. Now she was alone, the sole parent.
She tried to figure the quarterly taxes but the numbers swam. She broke her fountain pen in half, watched the ink squirt then pool on her calendar. A dark lake drowned out last week. How nice, obliteration, she thought, and took out a soap dispenser and cleaned her inked fingers.
The door opened and Hattie braced herself for Jessamine’s return but it was Gert, whose face was pinkly agitated. “There’s a delivery man with tomatoes like to made of rubber,” she said and held up her bandaged forefinger, a victim of the shipment’s unripeness.
“We’ll take them,” Hattie said. “We are desperate for tomatoes.”
Gert stood aside for Hattie to pass. “Miz Bohannon, if we pile them in paper bags with apples, they’ll ripen right up.”
“Let’s do it,” said Hattie, and she followed Gert to the kitchen.
Almost boozy with the smell of tomatoes, she returned to her office and glared at the rest of the mail still stacked neatly, waiting for her attention. She pushed aside the taxes and put her head down on her arms. Morning had been years ago.
A tap on her elbow woke her. She grumbled, “Go away.” Her eyes registered a masculine hand and followed its curled fair hairs to a khaki sleeve. She sat up and covered her mouth.
Paul Dodd leaned across her desk, fixing her with his eyes, and said, “It’s soon to be summer, too hot for much. How about a drive to DeSoto Falls this evening? I can get us in, special privilege.”
She felt a sharp sting, as if bitten by a mosquito, when he said special privilege. He could be using his special privileges to chastise Richard Reynolds. Yet she truly regretted the answer she had to give because he looked so fine and it had been a lifetime since she’d gone into the woods with a man at night. “I promised Heather I’d help her with her homework. It’s a little essay she has to write about her family. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
He’d shrugged, his shoulders drawing the khaki taut from his waist, the thing she remembered as she fumbled for an answer to Heather’s assignment: Write an essay describing your daddy.
The child implored with eyes hazel-gold, not found in the Bohannons. Hattie knew this day would come but, unprepared, she lied. “Title the paper Oakley Bohannon. He was a soldier in World War Two. He raised corn and tobacco. Tall and skinny, he laughed a lot.” Once she started lying, she couldn’t stop. She could not mention the depression that grew as his body declined in the grips of angina and lung disease. Or the last six months at home when he was delirious with memories of the war, or her own exhaustion. Nor could she say he was not Heather’s father. “He left you money to go to college with. He is going to be buried in Arlington Cemetery, outside Washington, D.C., a very select cemetery. President Kennedy is also buried there. His grave will be marked by a white cross and I will plant a small bush of pink roses on his plot, in honor of you, because you were such a rosy pink baby.”
Heather giggled. “Mama, I can’t write that.”
Troy Clyde picked Hattie up when there was an hour of sunlight left. The air was still warm and made her yearn for cool sheets and sweet light music, but instead she was wearing grubby jeans and her fingernails were caked with soap. They would plant tomatoes in the low field he owned on the banks of the Ruby River. He’d also bought rosebushes on sale. They stood, prickly and green, above the small forest of vegetable leaves.
“I was fishing in some mighty queer waters the other day,” Troy Clyde said, as they drove around the mountain. “On the Chattahoochee with a bunch of them bankers. Reverend Peterson was along, but I don’t think he likes fishing much. He wore this big old orange life preserver with fluorescent crosses on it and held on to his pole like it was a lifeline to the shore. I think when he came here was when that church quit having baptisms in the Ruby.”
“He’s been a constant presence at the truck stop since the fire,” said Hattie. “Every day sitting at a table with his papers spread out. Never orders a thing but ice water. Never leaves a tip. And Gert Geurin just moons over him. She’s started wearing makeup. I’m surprised he puts up with her. But she sits with him on her break and he seems real interested in her tales of kitchen life. It’s beyond me.”
Troy Clyde parked at the field. The sky was faded blue and the river a boiling brown. They got out and set to work. “Gert Geurin wearing makeup in your dining room. She’s a threat to your business.”
“As long as she keeps cooking, I’ll keep her.” Hattie dunked two root balls in a bucket of water.
“There’s too many tents in the trees,” he said, pointing his stick at the edge of the forest where soft white nests of caterpillar si
lk hung on each tree.
“Maybe there’s a plague of butterflies in our future. Ready?”
“A plague of fire ants more likely,” Troy Clyde poked holes in a furrow. “I hear you been on a date.”
Hattie placed a plant in each hole and mounded dirt around it. She nodded.
“You like him?”
“We’re not in kindergarten, Troy Clyde.”
“I just wondered if I had to beat him up or not.”
“That I will not tell you,” she said, and soaked the mud off her hands. She recaked her fingernails with the hard little soap.
“That sheriff must have the greasiest knees in town, if you count the number of arms he’s slipped away from.”
“Every day’s a new day, Troy Clyde.”
“Is that religion or talk-show talk?” he asked.
She flicked water at him and he asked her to do it again, he was sweating so much, so she didn’t. He knelt, in his sleeveless white undershirt, above the small holes while Hattie crouched beside him, a fragile tomato shoot poised over its place in the earth. They worked two rows in silence.
“Well, Hattie, I might as well tell you. I’m a free man.”
“A free man? What about Melanie?”
Melanie, Troy Clyde’s newest wife, worked at the bank. She was twenty-six years old and seemed to have her life charted all the way to the grave. Last year for their first wedding anniversary she’d bought twin plots in the cemetery. Troy Clyde took off in his jeep and slept in it for ten days, wondering if she’d bought the plots to exaggerate their age difference—he was forty-six—or to announce to the world that she had succeeded where so many others had failed: she was his final wife. A third reason had occurred to him, the one that sent him roaring back home: maybe she intended to shoot him. That was not a challenge he’d run from. From Hattie’s perspective, Troy Clyde came through everything smiling. He didn’t believe divorce rescinded conjugal rights and his ex-wives didn’t either.
