by Lynn Pruett
Again Hattie was confused as Gert launched into a tale like the one Jessamine had told her that involved the gold chair and cigarettes and Richard Reynolds and underwear hanging on the doorknob.
“Who told Reverend Peterson about this?”
“Richard Reynolds did, at confession during service. He said he’d been with a prostitute up here.”
“Jessamine is not a prostitute.” She shot Gert a look.
“No, ma’am,” Gert insisted. The cook did not go on and defend Jessamine’s virtue, which Hattie had hoped for. If she had done that at church, she might have stopped this rumor.
“We have no prostitution here. Shoot, I don’t even sell girlie magazines or allow condom dispensers on the premises. If those folks come, they are going to look pretty foolish, don’t you think?” Hattie said. “There’s nothing going on in Maridoches this month but hot weather. I wish those churchwomen had jobs. Then they’d quit poking their noses where they don’t belong.”
“I need that sick day off,” said Gert.
“So do I,” said Hattie. “They’re all beginning to be sick days.”
Gert thanked her and backed toward the door, feeling behind her for the knob, which she grasped and turned twice before finding a grip with her sweaty palm.
Hattie had a good mind to call Reverend Peterson and ask him what he was up to. He was a slight man with a pale face who subsisted on ice water. She did not believe him capable of any full-blooded action. And so she returned to signing checks for payroll, relieved that Jessamine had not been publicly named but also despairing for the way bad publicity flew around town for free while truthful advertising cost so much.
As the day wore on, she felt uneasy so she called Paul Dodd. She’d never called him before and it felt strange, but as a businesswoman she’d call. His voice sprang back at hers, eager for contact. When she asked about prostitution in her parking lot, he assured her there was none. She had the cleanest place for miles. She laughed and invited him to come to dinner at her place.
THE BOHANNON SISTERS
That evening Hattie’s daughters fled the dinner table, like a flock of startled birds, in a single clatter. They fled, they told one another as they sat on the front porch, eating blueberry pie, so Mama and Sheriff Dodd could have their coffee in peace. They knew Mama’s placid face would soon appear and her polite voice would dish out pleasantries. The sheriff would think her remarkably calm, but they knew white anger burned beneath the seamless smile. They had better eat the pie pretty damned fast.
Darla, the pie thief, plowed through her second piece with a relish that matched her enthusiasm for the first. Her legs dangled off the porch. She’d make herself sick on pie before the sheriff got a single bite.
Connie swung listlessly in the porch swing. Her pie sat on her lap, untouched. “Think of all the calories in one slice of pie.”
“Please don’t spoil good pie.” Jessamine leaned against a pole.
“A pie’s for eating. What’s the big deal?” Darla said.
“Mama made it for Sheriff Dodd. She hasn’t baked a pie in forever. She must be dying in there, right, Heather?” Connie swung forward and rapped Heather’s head with her foot.
Heather alternated bites of crust with bites of filling. When her mouth was full, she breathed into the gray tabby’s face, then watched the cat’s nostrils twitch. “I was only trying to make him feel at home.”
“Burping at the table is disgusting.” Darla said, through her full mouth.
“He lives alone,” said Connie. “He probably burps a blue streak whenever he has to. It’s a natural reaction.”
“But a burp doesn’t become a tarzan yell, Heather dear.” Jessamine finished.
They shouted with laughter, then stifled their mouths in fear of drawing Mama outside. For a long while, the sound of tines scraping competed only with the fluttering of hickory leaves.
“What I want to know,” Jessamine began carefully, “was why you sat in Daddy’s place, Darla?”
“Well, he wasn’t going to sit there. He’s not that important.”
“God, are you ever dumb, Darla.” Connie broke the crust off her pie. “How many men has Mama invited to have dinner with us?”
“At least I didn’t lean away from him like he was a leper.” Darla glared at Jessamine, who was not supporting her.
“If you hadn’t plopped in Daddy’s place, then he wouldn’t have had to sit next to me,” Jessamine said. “And I had to lean away from him. His thighs are enormous. They kept rubbing against my leg. Then Mama would push me back at him with her leg. I mean, his thighs are as big around as the cannon on the square. It was very unnerving.” She ate her pie in quick bites.
“I thought when Mama pulled that long blond hair out of her salad that you’d take the hint.” Darla eyed the pie tin. A quarter remained. She scarped up the juice on her plate by slanting her fork.
“Hey, Hobart, care to clean my plate?” Connie handed over her pie but pinched off a triangle of the crust for herself. “I hope we didn’t spoil it for Mama.”
“I wouldn’t say mentioning how cheap his deputies tip was a good topic of conversation,” Jessamine said.
“If he wants to impress Mama, he’ll see that his deputies give me good tips.”
“I wish that he would marry Mama,” said Heather. She flicked a blueberry at the cat’s nose, where it stuck.
“Why would you want that?” Darla said. “Like Mama said. He’s nothing but a friend and business acquaintance.”
“Because everybody has a daddy except us.”
“We have a daddy,” Darla said. “Don’t you remember him?”
“No,” said Heather.
“He used to carry you around when you were little,” said Connie. “He kissed your head all the time.”
“Yuck!” said Heather.
“That was before he got too weak,” Jessamine added. “Before he just went in his room and wouldn’t come out. I remember standing outside the door, hearing him choke.”
“Yeah,” Connie said. “That sound scared me at night. I used to think it was a monster, coming to get me. I wanted him to go away. Isn’t that awful?” She wiped her eyes and looked out at the yard.
“Poor Daddy,” said Jessamine.
The girls sat in silence, watching the traffic at the truck stop, listening to other families slam car doors on their way inside to eat.
Darla, who had been watching a crow strut up and down the shed roof, leaned toward Heather. “If anybody asks you about Daddy, or if they say anything you don’t know about him, which makes what they say a lie, just deck them.”
“Okay,” Heather said. “I’ll just deck them.”
“Right,” Connie said. “It’s important that we help Mama look around and find our daddy. So, we should be nice to any rich man Mama brings home in case he’s the right one for us. We wouldn’t want to scare him off, would we, Jessamine?” Connie’s voice was innocuous.
“Yes, that’s right.” She stretched. “Mama would be a lot happier if the VA would get the facts straight.”
“I’d be a lot happier if we got paid without selling catfish. The damn restaurant smells like fried fish all the time. I think it’s the new grease the Inedible Fat man made us buy. It’s the worst smell in the world,” Connie said. “I say let Mama have some fun with Sheriff Dodd.”
“You all are nothing but idiots!” Darla shouted.
The screen door squeaked. Mama and Sheriff Dodd stepped onto the porch.
“Here you all are,” Mama said, smiling pleasantly. “We thought we’d find the pie out here.”
“Blueberry’s my favorite,” the sheriff said.
“Yes, Mama, it’s hard to resist that delicious blueberry pie of yours,” Connie said.
“We thought we’d sit out here for our dessert but all the seats appear to be taken.” Mama smiled at Paul.
“I’ll go.” Darla jumped up from the floor. She and Jessamine were rapidly washing their front teeth with their tongues.
Of course, Connie flashed her stain-free smile for Mama.
“You two could stand to be considerate.” Mama stepped toward the swing.
The girls rushed inside, Connie first, carrying the pie tin. “Okay,” she said, “give me what you got.” Thanks to Jessamine’s food stretching expertise—blowing air into the pie filling with a pastry puff—and Connie’s eye for arrangement, they produced one decent and one mangled piece of pie. They watched through the screen door as Heather presented Mama with the good slice and Sheriff Dodd the wrecked one. “For burping at supper,” she told him.
Hattie’s daughters decided it was a lovely evening to hoe the garden, an activity that promised blisters, good exercise, and the foundation for a tan.
DARLA BOHANNON
After hoeing until dark and rinsing the tools under the hose, Darla still felt her stomach grabbing and releasing. The house was brightly lit upstairs where her sisters were laughing about the day at the truck stop. Jessamine and Connie, both dumb blondes in her opinion, seemed to think everything that happened was funny. She was always out of the loop.
She went inside and passed by the kitchen where Mama and Sheriff Dodd were sitting in candlelight, talking softly like two old cousins. She turned abruptly into the living room to keep from yelling the words that had rushed to her throat: Mama was a traitor. She stood in the dark, listening to her sisters laugh upstairs. Mama is lonely, she said to herself, but that was a lie. Mama is making me lie. To him. She walked to the mantel and picked up her favorite picture of Daddy. She held it in the arrow of light cast by the lamp in the hallway. “I’m the only one like you,” she whispered. “I’m skinny and I have brown hair. I will protect you and us.” In the photo, a very young daddy was leading a mule pulling a load of jugs. His face was squinched up. He was yelling at the photographer, a woman, whose shadow stretched like a tall steeple toward his long bare feet.
Darla felt a jolt of loneliness in her stomach. She placed the picture back on the mantel and went outside. Mama didn’t hear her leave, too distracted by the sheriff. She walked down the slope to the garage and worked the stuck doors open wide enough to let herself in. An old dry dirt smell enveloped her as her eyes adjusted. Whiffs of oil and metal and dried hay were what she sensed in the closed-up air. Light from the overheads at the truck stop streamed in through cracks in the plank walls. She could see blankets wrinkling the elegant outline of Daddy’s blue Oldsmobile, the Jetstar 88. She flipped the red wool comforter off the roof, sending up a fluff of cat hair, and crawled into the car. Mama had the key so she sat with her hands on the wheel, wishing the windows weren’t electric, a fancy extra from a 1965 model. The rearview mirror stretched in staggered panels across the entire front window. Daddy installed it because he kept running into things.
He had always worked on the car on Sundays. Darla remembered watching his blackened hand glide from under the car to lift hexagonal lock washers, which smelled of oil and ranged in color from rust to steel. Using his fingers as measures, he’d slip the washers on, like rings, until he had the one he needed. Sometimes his thumb, sometimes his pinky fit the washer. She could never guess what he sought, though she rearranged the washers, trying to be helpful. Ringed, his hand would glide back and he’d disappear totally under the car.
The steering wheel moved a quarter turn to the left, then locked. She would leave pitiful Maridoches and find Daddy. She did not believe he was dead. It was all so simple. An orderly had screwed up his name and now he languished somewhere as Bohannon Oakley so doped up he couldn’t straighten things out. She would drive to Washington. He might not recognize her grown up. There was no way he wouldn’t recognize the Jetstar.
Yet as she thought this through it seemed too hard. Mama had tried this herself and had failed. Maybe the only way in was in. Exhausted she fell asleep. When she woke, the sky was dark. It had come to her in sleep that she should join the Army. It was the only way to find him. Outside the garage, the dark house and mountain loomed behind her like immovable weights, while in front of her the shifting lights of the truck stop promised easy motion. She went inside the restaurant and helped herself to a cup of coffee. She was relieved that Gert had not come in yet. Rudy, the night cook, never seemed to remember her. She asked him for a ride to Gadsden, where he lived.
“Sure,” he said, rolling down his sleeves and drying his hands on a towel. “And I’ll do it for free. I’m too tired to even ask for something in return.”
Darla smiled. He really didn’t know who she was. They rode to Gadsden in his white Cavalier, listening to Hank Jr. wail about parties and the old days. Rudy dropped her at the recruiting office. All she had to do was wait until it opened.
HATTIE BOHANNON
It happened as I passed the cross lit with white bulbs, fronting the Church of the Holy Resurrection. I came up Raider’s Hill and at the crest there was that cross shining in the dawn light and it was then I felt my self squirm back into my proper body, as if what I’d been doing was astral projection, not making love. I needed that cross to pull me back. Otherwise I would have run out on children and work, abandoned the world I’d put in motion, and existed as a wild licentious being. Instead, the white light cooled me into the stiff form I’d inhabit until the next rendezvous.
On the horizon red brightened to yellow, spreading heat across the sky. All day everything would burn. I eased the VW into our yard and walked casually past the tomatoes as if I’d just risen and was engaged in the usual morning assault on the slugs. There were no lights on in the house. The girls must have overslept. Quietly as a thief, I pushed open the door to my own kitchen.
Heather, hands dug deep in the pockets of a faded yellow dress, looked up, startled. The light made her hazel eyes golden, like marbles of truth. We are blue-eyed people, the Bohannons, except for Heather. She stared solemnly and then said in a tone I recognized, “Mama, where is your other shoe?”
My left foot was bare, clotted with red clay. My right was wrapped in a blue leather sandal beaded with a shooting star. Dampness hugged my hips where the lacy hem of a negligee bunched in my jeans. I crossed my arms over my chest. She could have asked just as easily about my missing bra.
She opened the refrigerator door and struggled with a half gallon of milk. She swung the jug onto the counter and peered around it. “What’s that smell?”
“Summertime. It’s the smell of summertime.” The heat the night had not contained flooded my face as salt, salt filled the room. I hugged myself tighter.
Heather poured milk in a glass. “Jessamine’s in the shower. With the door locked. I had to pee in the yard.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My mouth was dry. If I had awakened thirty minutes earlier; if I hadn’t slept at all. I ground my bare foot into the welcome mat. The rough fibers pricked like needles.
“Can I salt the slugs today?” she asked. She’d been banned from the garden after I’d found mounds of salt in the rows, little crystal tombs cupped over slug rinds. Salt in large amounts was lethal to vegetables, so I’d swept it out. Thus the slugs munched on. Each morning the yellow blossoms of the pumpkin vine lay shriveled on the ground.
“Yes.” I poured all our salt into a yellow bowl and gave her a spoon. “Put the slugs in here.”
“They’ll drown in all this salt,” Heather said. At the door she turned and said, “Maybe I’ll find your other shoe.”
Standing in the tub, I felt a bead of sweat form behind my ear. It tickled my neck, grew fat and inched, like the tip of a tongue, over my ridge of collarbone before picking up speed between my breasts and slipping down my soft stomach into a tangle of curly hairs, where it sat like a shiny jewel. It fell like a drop of hot wax onto my thigh. I turned the shower on cold, full-blast to douse that voluptuous woman, to tighten her into the serene owner of the truck stop, the starched one, a woman so fine people rarely cursed in her presence. Untouchable. The widow self. That one.
I remembered as I slid my damp body into my uniform that Gert was off today. Jessamine w
ould have to step in and cook, and Darla would have to stay home from school and help her. Carrying my work shoes, I relished the feel of the cool floor on my bare feet. I knocked on Darla and Connie’s door. When Connie groaned, I went inside.
She was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette. I knocked it from her hand and slapped it out with my shoe on her favorite pink halter top, which was lying on the floor. Her mouth opened and shut as her skin faded so pale no color was left in it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I promise I won’t ever smoke again.”
I glared. I had no time to get into an argument. “It will kill you,” I said. “Where’s Darla?” Her bed hadn’t been slept in.
Connie searched the house while I went out to the garden and then to the garage and down the slope to the truck stop. Maybe Darla was out running as she used to do. But Connie found her running shoes; worse, her fanny pack was missing. I called Troy Clyde and he dashed over in his jeep.
I phoned Paul, expecting something rosy in his voice, an understanding that I needed something from him now, after I’d given him my trust.
But he spoke as if I were any concerned mother. He sounded tired and yawned as I described my worries. He said there had to be a twenty-four-hour wait before he could start any official search for a missing person. Teenagers ran off all the time, he said. How often do they end up dead in a ditch? I asked. Those are just the ones you hear about, he said. Maybe the girl didn’t want to be the subject of the church’s protest against your place today, he said. Maybe she wants to hide from that.
I hung up, all thoughts of my night with him evaporated. So they were coming. The fools from the church, so blind they followed the cracked minister. If I met them in the parking lot, I could tell them they were wrong about prostitution, but when I thought of Jessamine and Heather and my evening, my resolve fled. I couldn’t admit these things in public. I shouldn’t have to. My breath came up hot in my throat; sweat bloomed on my forehead. How could I get rid of these crazy folks? What would the truckers think? They’d get on their CBs and tell all, and then the place would swarm with men seeking the wrong kind of service. Why had I given Gert the day off instead of firing her? My mind was moving like a tilt-a-whirl.
