“Yes, ma’am, Miss Hannah. You sure got a right to be mad.” Willie talked as if he had a mouth full of butter. Now Vida knew why Willie had insisted on coming tonight. That rascal must have taken up bootlegging! Probably had him a supply stashed close by.
“Boy, you might be fine to look at, but I’m a mean ol’ biddy. You see this here stump?” Hannah waved it proudly in the air. “Know how I got it? Got my arm chewed off by one of them damnedable cotton pickers.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Willie said, his voice smooth with admiration. “And the Senator let you open this here place ’cause of it.”
“You damned right. And I do whatever it takes to keep it. I’ll knock heads, bust knees, and pull your pecker out by the root if you get in my way. No matter how sweet-looking you be.”
“Yes, ma’am. You surely a rare woman. Rare as one of the blue hen’s chickens.” Willie gave her his devil’s grin. “And you sexy when you riled.”
Now smiling like a schoolgirl, Hannah straightened her wig with the pistol-toting hand and waved it back in Willie’s general direction. Her voice sweetened considerably. “Now, baby, you listen to me. I be the one who pays the sheriff, so I be the one who sells the whiskey—at least in this cotton patch. That be the nub of it. I’d hate to sick Sheriff Billy Dean on you. Be a waste of some fine-looking ass. Now, you behave from here on out.”
“I surely will, Miss Hannah. You a generous woman to be so understandable. You sure something special.”
Hannah shook her head and chuckled as if she knew she was the kind of woman destined to be done in by a pretty face every time. “Baby, if you bound and determined to sell hooch, you come see me. Maybe we can work something out.”
Vida couldn’t see into her own future, yet she could see Willie’s. And working a plot of land with her was not part of it. He wasn’t even eighteen, but as she had, he grew up fast. He learned early to think and act like a man. And now he had found a man’s way to make some traveling cash.
She disapproved of his bootlegging, yet she couldn’t help wondering if her brother might be generous enough with his ill-gotten gains to pay off their account with the Senator and let her travel with him, at least as far as Delphi. By foul or by fair, Vida had to get close to the sheriff.
She hoped the crazy Hazel woman could hang on that long.
Chapter Fifteen
A MANGER SCENE
As he did during most of his parents’ fights, Johnny retreated to his and Davie’s secret listening place in the dark behind the couch. Besides letting him overhear his parents, the position offered an excellent view of the tree. The motorized wheel of tinted cellophane rotated before a bare bulb, turning the aluminum tree from red to blue to green and back to red again. Tomorrow his mother and father would feel better. Surely Davie wouldn’t miss Christmas!
His parents continued the argument that had begun over supper. As usual, his father had been complaining about Hazel’s drinking and driving. Floyd said it wasn’t a family secret anymore. He claimed Hazel was on her way to becoming a legend across the county. Bigger even than the colored girl over in Montgomery they’d had to drag off the bus.
On several occasions the sheriff had personally driven Hazel and Johnny home, leaving the Lincoln behind, straddling ditches or sunk deep in muddy fields. A few weeks after Davie’s funeral, she had run a school bus off the road. Floyd said Hayes Alcorn had made a joke about it in a city council meeting. He cracked that instead of spending money on a siren for when the Russians attacked, Delphi should have an early-warning system for when Hazel pulled out of her driveway.
Johnny then heard his father say something about his mother trying harder. “Maybe go see Brother Dear,” he suggested.
Hazel had exploded. “That jackleg preacher? He told me Jesus took Davie to teach me a lesson! Said Jesus did it cause He loved me!”
“Well, maybe there’s some truth to it, Hazel. Maybe, on the upside, it can make you a better mother to—”
That’s when Johnny heard the back door slam. Even he knew not to bring up Jesus around his mother.
When he ventured into the kitchen he found his father sitting at the table studying his hands.
“Where’s Momma?”
Floyd looked up with weary eyes. “Out driving.”
The house went graveyard quiet. Floyd sat at the table casting about for a plan to save his business from his wife, and Johnny fell asleep worrying about the whereabouts of both Santa Claus and his mother.
A little past one a.m., Floyd grabbed the phone after the first ring. It was the sheriff. It seemed that Hazel had driven through his yard, smashed into Hertha’s life-sized nativity scene, and sent one of the sheep crashing through her parlor room window. Hazel had come to a stop in a clump of nandina bushes.
The sheriff sounded groggy. “I think she’s OK. A little too much. . .well, driving. She must of really put on some miles tonight.”
When Floyd said he would be right over to get Hazel, the sheriff told him not to bother himself. “Everything’s under control,” he assured him. “I’m getting some black coffee down your wife and a sleeping pill down mine. Didn’t even wake the girls. I’ll carry Hazel over directly.”
Hazel smiled at the sheriff as he came back into the kitchen. Then she wondered if she was smiling at all, her face being as numb as it was. So she tried harder.
The sheriff looked at her expectantly, as if he were waiting for her to say what was so funny. Then he smiled back. She felt sorry for him, the way Hertha had gone on like she did. Probably embarrassed the poor man to death. Her shouting and carrying on over that silly old sheep. Nothing worse than a woman that can’t control herself. Hazel pulled her shoulders up.
Leaning back with his hands propped against the counter and his boots crossed at the ankles, the sheriff smoked his cigarette without removing it from his mouth, the cloud curling up into his face, his eyes squinting against it. Hazel figured he could finish an entire cigarette without laying a hand on it. To her he had the look of a cowboy star. But not the old kind that wore a white hat and drank milk. Not a Goody Two-Shoes. He was the new sexy kind of cowboy. The outsider who had a dark secret in his past and could go either way and kept you guessing till the very end.
“I’ll take you home when you ready,” he said. “I think we can get the car out this time no problem.”
What was he saying? The car? Oh, yes, the Lincoln parked in the manger with the cows and the remaining sheep. And she was alone in the kitchen with the sheriff. That’s right. He had sent Hertha upstairs. It was all clear to her again. She had a handle on things.
Hazel knew she needed to say something, though her tongue felt as stiff as a sausage. Determined to sound sober, she weighed and measured each word as she said it. “You. . .make. . .’lishhuss. . .coffee. Shurff. I’d like anothern, don’t mind.”
“Well, I just poured you that one.”
Hazel giggled and said he was right, she remembered him doing that, now that he mentioned it. The sheriff stood there smiling at her. Hazel wondered again what he saw in Hertha. He was such a nice-looking man. Almost pretty, in a dangerous kind of way. Long black wavy hair. Sulking eyes with lashes a woman would envy. A face that looked hurt and angry and starved for love all at the same time. Hazel knew that look. She had grown up with it. Billy Dean Brister was one of her kind, the kind well-bred folks would just as soon throw out with the trash.
She felt alive around the sheriff. As if something were about to happen that could change everything. Something that could knock the world off its dead-center butt. It was the feeling she used to get riding with those route men in the hills. Like when Floyd first swaggered into the drugstore in tight-fitting bell-bottoms fresh from the war. Full of plans and hope and room for her.
“You finish that one up and I’ll pour you anothern. OK?”
Hazel thought she might have just winked at him. She hoped not. Sober, Hazel couldn’t look the sheriff in the eye, yet after she had been drinking, she could feel the t
hrill that lay beneath the fear. It was worth getting stuck in the mud to have him come rescue her. Being with him was like riding danger piggyback.
She wished she could tell him about the dream she had been having about Jesus. How He tells her to walk with Him across the Hopalachie River. She tells Him she doesn’t think she’s up to walking on water. Jesus tells her all she needs is a little faith, hope, and charity. When they get to the middle of the river, she realizes that she is all bound up with barbed wire, and the engine to the Lincoln is tied around her neck. She begins to sink to the bottom.
What she wanted to tell the sheriff was, it’s not so bad. The water is dark and warm, and the current caresses her as a lover would. It’s kind of peaceful down there where the only thing you can hear is the water rushing in your ears. She wanted to ask him what he thought it meant. And what it means that in the dream he’s standing on the shore watching, smiling knowingly, as if he has seen it all before. But she couldn’t tell him any of this. She knew her tongue was not up to all the words.
The sheriff reached up into the cabinet, pulled down a bottle of bonded whiskey, and poured himself a shot. “Merry Christmas,” he said, lifting the glass at Hazel.
“Happy Yew Near!” Hazel said, returning the toast by sloshing coffee over the side of her cup. It took a moment for her to realize that she had said the wrong thing. She laughed at her mistake to let him know she wasn’t all that drunk. “I mean, Happy Near Yew.” No, that didn’t sound right either.
“Happy Near You, too.” The sheriff winked at Hazel. Then he grinned and tossed back his drink. Hazel returned his wink and grin, not feeling at all as if he were laughing at her. No, he liked her, she could tell. The sheriff was on her side.
Floyd was waiting in the doorway when the sheriff led Hazel up the walk, his arm around her waist pulling her tightly to him for balance. Lost in the aroma of cigarettes and Old Spice, she was disappointed when the porch steps came into focus. She could have strolled with him all the way down the bluffs and clear out into the Delta night.
“Hazel! Are you all right?” Floyd took over from the sheriff, but his handling wasn’t as gentle. After he got her in the house, he grabbed Hazel by her shoulders and shook her once. “You could have killed somebody!” His eyes widened at the thought. “She didn’t, did she, Sheriff?”
“Nope. Not that we know of. You didn’t kill nobody, did you, Miss Hazel?”
Hazel turned and saw her friend grinning by her side, and she grinned back. “Only in self-defense.” She winked at the sheriff, thinking he understood what she meant. He shrugged it off with a grin and said his good-night.
Floyd called after him as he cut through the yard, “Sheriff, we’re awful sorry. I’m sure she didn’t mean nothing by it. Since Davie and all. . .” He stopped. “She’s not responsible for it right now.”
Hazel’s face lit up. “You think you know me so good, don’t you? Well, I am responsible. I did do it on purpose,” she announced proudly.
“Hazel!” Floyd shook her again. “You’re still drunk as Cooter Brown.”
“Maybe, but I still did it on purpose. When I saw that tiny baby in that manger, I knew I had to kill it. Had to get it before it grew up and made my life hell. I aimed the car right for that little crib. I think I got him.”
“You tried to kill Jesus?” Floyd said, incredulous. “You can’t kill Jesus, Hazel, honey. That’s a simple fact. Jesus going to live forever, whether we like it or not.”
“Not in my house, He ain’t. If He can’t be nice, then out He goes.” Hazel flung her arm so hard showing Jesus the way out, she toppled over. Floyd caught her. She looked up into his face. It seemed frozen in disbelief. Didn’t he understand? Everything was so clear to her now. Life could go ahead and roar past them like a freight train. She had everything under control. She had won.
Only Hazel wished Floyd would stop staring! What was he looking at? Then she turned and peered into the mirror that hung in the entryway. There she saw a madwoman, her hair in wild tangles and long black fingers of mascara reaching for her throat. Lipstick smeared almost to her ears, like a circus clown gone mad. A pair of dead eyes peered back at her from the farthest reaches of hell. This was what the sheriff had been grinning at.
Floyd spoke softly, carefully. “Hazel, it ain’t Jesus’s fault.”
For a long time she stared blankly at him. When Hazel spoke, it was as a small girl. “Then whose fault is it, Floyd?”
His eyes offered her nothing.
“Tell me,” she asked, “when is somebody going to be on my side?” Without expecting an answer, she dropped her head on her husband’s chest and he led her off to bed.
Chapter Sixteen
BROKEN THINGS
“Git!” Johnny yelled from up on the porch. “And don’t neither one of y’all stupid girls come back in my yard. I’ll shoot you both.” Nobody was going to get away with saying that about his mother.
He watched LaNelle and LouAnne Brister retreat, and didn’t take his eyes off them until he saw the sisters disappear through their own back door. It was early February, and his mother had been gone for a week. Johnny had yet to understand why, and the girls’ answer had only infuriated him. It was true that his father had left his mother at a hospital called Whitfield, down in Jackson, but the girls were calling it a nuthouse.
Still indignant, he tramped inside to look for his father, who he found sitting on the kitchen floor. “Daddy! What’s a drunk?”
Floyd glanced up from the vacuum cleaner, the motor in pieces all around him. “Why? Who’s been talking about drunk?”
“LaNelle said Momma was a drunk.”
Floyd frowned. “That right?”
Billy Dean Brister’s little girl had wasted no time in telling every person she saw about what had happened in her front yard Christmas Eve. The evening that, thanks to Brother Dear’s ad-libbed quip to a packed house, became better known as “the night shepherds kept watch over their flocks in flight.”
“LaNelle said Momma got sent to Whitfield with the crazy people for being a drunk and for running down Baby Jesus.”
“Um-hmm. Hand me that belt before you step on it.”
Cautiously, Johnny picked up the greasy thing by his foot, clutching it between his thumb and index finger and handing it to his father like a bait worm. Floyd inspected the belt and then looked up at Johnny again.
“Son, your momma might drink some, but she’s not your average drunk. Your average drunk drinks to get drunk. For no better reason than that. Pure and simple. Now your momma, she’s different. She drinks when she gets mad.”
“In fact,” Floyd said thoughtfully, as if the conclusion was at that moment congealing in his mind, “you might say your mother drinks at people.” He smiled at Johnny. “So when she comes home, we got to make sure we don’t get her riled up. You hear?”
“LaNelle said Momma was getting lettercooted.”
“Electrocuted.” Floyd put the belt down and picked up the vacuum cleaner hose. “Girl knows a lot for a six-year-old, don’t she?”
“It’s this way,” Floyd explained. “Your momma’s got all these thoughts backed up in her head that get her upset and make her want to drink. And when she’s not drinking, they make her want to stay in her room and sleep. That’s how come her to go to bed after Christmas and not get up.”
“Momma was tired.”
“That’s right. They call it depression. And down at Whitfield they got this special kind of machine that will suck up all the sad thoughts that can’t get out by theirselves.”
He put the hose up to his head to demonstrate and made a sucking noise with his mouth. Johnny’s eyes widened. “That way, she’ll have room for some brand-new ones. You and me’ll have to be extra nice so all her new thoughts will be happy ones. Understand?” his daddy asked, the hose still up to his head.
“Yes sir,” Johnny answered dubiously.
When Floyd dropped the hose to the floor, one of Johnny’s rubber balls came rolling out
.
“Hmm,” Floyd said. “I guess it wasn’t the motor after all.”
Chapter Seventeen
HIDDEN IN CLEAR VIEW
As Floyd drove over the Hopalachie County line, he said as fast as he could, “Half in and half out!” and for a brief moment the car and its three occupants were caught in between counties, belonging entirely to neither. For an instant Floyd Graham had beaten geography.
Hazel didn’t pay him any mind. What did it matter where they were going? Let him take the highway all the way up to Memphis if he wanted to. Or all the way down to hell, for what she cared. It was the same to her now. She only stared out her window, not at anything directly, mostly just away from her husband. It wasn’t the silence of somebody who had nothing to say.
“I know a little Mississippi town where the county line runs right down the middle of Main Street,” Floyd chirped. “They got a sheriff for each side of the road. Different laws and everything.”
Johnny shifted a little on the seat. He still wasn’t accustomed to having the entire back to himself. When the family used to go driving together, Davie would sit behind their father and Johnny directly behind their mother. Johnny scooted a few inches to the left and then to the right, trying to find the exact middle point between his parents.
“What I want to know is, what happens if somebody shoots a person from across the street?” Nobody offered a solution to Floyd’s dilemma.
The breeze from Hazel’s window carried the sweet smell of gardenias into the backseat. Even though Johnny had visited his mother in the hospital several times, she had never worn any of her familiar scents. She only smelled of things that stung his nose.
Johnny inhaled deeply, to make certain, and then he smiled. Sure enough, his mother smelled right again. That had to be a good sign. Her skin, too, was exactly as it was supposed to be, white as milk and sprinkled with the cinnamon freckles she hated so. The ugly bruises on her arms from the straps had disappeared, and when she got into the car, she still sat straight as a plumb line. His mother never could tolerate slouching.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 11
