It was his mother’s eyes that had disturbed him. They had dimmed from the crystal blue of a spring sky to the washed-out gray of winter. He could see no farther into her than into a pond on an overcast day. For the first time he did not know what she wanted of him.
Floyd slowed the car. “We’re passing over the Big Black. Look out for gators!”
Beneath them, the current was deep and the water dark like iron. The river gave off a coolness that, even on a summer-hot day in late May, gave Hazel a shiver. Hugging herself, she rocked to and fro ever so slightly in her seat. If she would only scoot over some, the boy thought, his father would surely put his arm around her.
“Hazel, honey, ain’t you got nothing to say to us?”
Hazel wouldn’t turn her attention from a pasture of strange-looking cattle, trying to remember what they were called. They had grotesque humps up high on their backs and seemed to be watching her with baleful looks, stirring a memory of a warning her mother had offered long ago.
“Everything’s going to be just fine now, Hazel. Even got a new maid coming tomorrow to help out,” Floyd assured her. “Real go-gitter. Come right up to me and asked for the job. She’ll be a real comfort to you. Wait and see. Everything’s gonna get back to normal.”
Floyd beamed reassuringly at his wife, who kept a tight hold on herself, staring out the window. It was anybody’s bet what normal was for her anymore. For all Floyd and Johnny knew, maybe this was exactly the way a body was supposed to act after weeks and weeks in the ivy-covered hospital getting fixed.
His daddy’s arm remained outstretched along the back of the seat. What was his mother waiting for? If she would only sidle over a foot, everything could get back to the way it had been.
Floyd switched on the radio. Someone who had the voice of a jittery colored man was singing about his hound dog.
“Y’all listening to this?” He turned the music up loud. “That ol’ boy’s from Tupelo. Would you believe he’s white to boot?”
Floyd tilted his head toward his wife and sang a verse. Then he smiled hopefully. “Hazel, honey, just think. You might of scooped him up some ice cream when he was little.”
Johnny thought it would be a fine thing indeed if they could all sing about hound dogs, but his mother didn’t agree.
Hazel couldn’t care less about the song. She was trying to remember something important. What was it? It had to do with the bluffs. No, beyond the bluffs. Gradually, as the road became familiar, it came back to her. Just on the other side of this narrow band of hills was that sudden descent into an endless flat floodplain. It was out there that she had put mile after mile on her Lincoln, looking for God knows what. Or was it God she was looking for?
She remembered the day Floyd had taken her up into these bluffs for the first time. From where, with the wave of his hand, like the devil tempting Jesus, he had shown her the frightening secret of what lay on the other side of these soft, eroding hills. That sharp decline into the largest collection of flatness on earth.
It was strange what stayed put in her head and what went missing. Of course she knew she had been the mother of two children, and now she was the mother of one. Johnny had stayed. Davie had gone. Yet she felt nothing about his leaving. There was only a dead spot, like ground that had been scorched by lightning. It was as if, in her feelings, he was still falling.
Yet she remembered, as if it were yesterday, that late afternoon she had stood by her husband on top of the bluff, how her head had spun at the wonder of it all and how she had trembled at the thought of so much unbounded space. Then, she had put her arm around Floyd for balance, and he made her feel anchored. How she had loved him so. She still had that memory. Now a memory was all it was.
After crossing the bridge into Delphi, Floyd decided to go right through the middle of town instead of turning off on one of the residential lanes and bypassing the Saturday crowds. He even turned at the courthouse, going out of his way to round the busy square.
For the first time during the trip Hazel gave Floyd a look, and it was by no means a nice one. But she didn’t say a word. She put on her sunglasses and pulled down the visor. Her back was as straight as a fence post.
Like any Saturday in Delphi, the downtown was awash with people. They were talking in friendly huddles on the sidewalks and calling to each other from across the street. People stopped what they were doing to watch the Lincoln make its way through town. White and colored, everybody waved and nodded as Floyd drove past. Hazel ignored them, staring straight ahead through her butterfly sunglasses, holding her chin up high as if she had a big insect balanced on her nose and was disinclined to disturb it. That way she didn’t have to see people shaking their heads and blessing her heart as she passed.
The Lincoln was a rolling advertisement of Hazel’s last debacle, with the prominent dent in the hood where she had tried to run down the Baby Jesus. It would have seemed natural for Floyd, the owner of Delphi Motors, to have had the dent removed long before now, but that’s not how Floyd dealt with his family’s embarrassments. He once told Johnny that in a town as little and high-hat as Delphi, everybody knew everything about everybody else, whether it was true or not. He said a man looks plumb sorry covering up what folks already know. “Now take the killdee,” he explained. “She lays her eggs in the gravel, right under your nose. But you’d never see them ’cause they blend in so good. Yep, honesty is the best policy,” his father had concluded. “Sometimes dragging the truth out in the open, every jot and tittle, is the best way to hide things.”
So Johnny’s daddy had decided to display his wife for all Delphi to see the very day she got out of the mental hospital. He was hiding her out in public view like a bird egg.
Despite Hazel’s obvious feelings on the matter, Floyd slowed down in front of Gooseberry’s Department Store. The Gooseberry twins were standing out front in their usual Saturday spot, calling people by name—first and last—as they walked by. They knew everyone. If you wanted to get word out countywide, people knew to tell it to the Gooseberrys.
Sid and Lou were hard to tell apart. Each was the size of a small barn. They smoked fat cigars and hadn’t a full hank of hair between them. Matching tape measures were draped around their necks and hung down their stomachs resembling limp yellow suspenders that had given up the battle.
The brothers lived by themselves two houses down from the Grahams and belonged to that group of Delphinian families who passed down history as well as money. Floyd had once told Hazel the Gooseberry brothers were descended from Jews. “In fact their great-granddaddy was the South’s only Jew Civil War hero.”
“How come them to go to the Episcopal church if they’re Jews?” Hazel had asked.
“What I heard was that the family had to turn Episcopal when Jesus picked up such strong support amongst the Klan.”
Angling the car in front of the brothers’ store, Floyd yelled too loudly, “Hey, Sid! How’s business, Lou?”
Johnny noticed the tomato-sized splotches rise up on the back of his mother’s neck. There was something she needed of him now, yet he couldn’t figure out what.
Sid worked his cigar to the corner of his mouth and called out, “Why, it’s ol’ Floyd Graham.” He loped over, placed his hands on the car roof, and leaned down into Floyd’s face, his cigar still burning. “How in the world you been, Floyd?”
Lou came around to the other side. Hazel pushed the button for her window. Before the boy thought about doing the same, Lou had already placed his pudgy fingers over the ledge and thrust his jowly cigar-smoking face through the opening. “Why, is that Miss Hazel you got in here?”
“Welcome home, darlin’!” Sid shouted, as if Hazel had lost both her mind and her hearing.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Lou yelled at the back of Hazel’s head, which was rapidly disappearing in a cloud of smoke.
Floyd nodded in Hazel’s direction. “Don’t she look good, Sid?”
“I was about to say it. She sho’ do look good.�
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“Bless her heart,” the brothers said in unison.
Hazel’s shoulders notched upward. Johnny noticed that the blotches had joined up, and now his mother’s neck was a solid swath of red.
“We’ll have you over to the house real soon,” Floyd said, and then backed the car into the street, heading up Gallatin. The brothers waved them away.
Hazel finally spoke. “They all know, don’t they, Floyd? The whole damn town knows.”
Floyd smiled the same smile Johnny had seen his father use when an angry farmer had brought back his Mercury coupe. “Sweetnin’,” he purred, “you know everybody would of found out soon enough. Now it’s all in the open. Ain’t that the way?” He smiled again sweetly and tilted his head to the side, not bothering to explain to her about the bird egg.
When Hazel didn’t answer, Floyd answered for her, “Well, it is, honey. You got to trust me on this.”
Then Hazel uttered one syllable. “Ha.” It was hardly discernible from a cough.
BOOK TWO
LOST CHILDREN
Chapter Eighteen
THE KEEPER
Overall, Floyd was pleased with how things were turning out. As he told Johnny, one of the pills Hazel took would make her sick if she drank, and the other would keep her from getting all knotted up inside. Floyd said the medicine was already a great comfort to him, but to be safe, he showed Johnny how to use the phone—“In case your mother does something funny.”
Johnny didn’t know what he meant. His mother hadn’t been fun in ages.
“You know how whiskey smells, don’t you?”
Johnny nodded. He instinctively knew all the smells that attended his mother, and what mood each signified.
“Well, then, when you think you smell it on her or if she gets to walking crooked or starts to talking funny, you call me right then.” He led Johnny into the stairhall, to the little cubbyhole built into the wall. That’s where the telephone sat, squatting there in the hollow like a giant black toad. Floyd put a chair against the wall so Johnny could reach it.
“Just pick up this part shaped like a door handle and put this end up to your ear and this one to your mouth. When the lady says, ‘Number, please,’ you say real loud and clear, ‘Four-oh-three.’ I’ll get here before you know it.”
Later that morning, after Floyd had left for work and Johnny sat at the kitchen table eating his Cheerios, there came such a loud knock at the back door that it made him nearly jump out of his pajamas. He spied a set of dark, frightful eyes under a monstrous straw hat, peering hard at him through the screen.
“Anybody home in there?” came a shout.
He knew this woman! He had seen her skulking around the neighborhood for weeks, looking like she was up to no good. He’d tried to tell his father but he wouldn’t listen. And now here she was dressed in a white uniform. She was the new maid?
“My name Vida Snow!” the woman boomed in a voice too big for her scrawny body. “I told to be here this morning. Y’all aiming to let me in or no, little boy?”
Johnny decided not to. They didn’t need a maid, especially not this one. Not when he could take care of his mother. He decided to hide under the table and hold his ears until she went away.
“I ain’t walking all the way back to Tarbottom. Little boy, I seen you. Now let me in!” She beat on the door with the handle of her dirty umbrella.
She stepped back from the door and in a voice raised loud enough for the neighbors to hear, she bellowed, “I supposed to clean house for a po’ sickly white woman!”
Johnny heard his mother’s feet hit the floor with a blam! “Good night in the morning!” she cried out, banging the door behind her and clumping down the stairs. “Who’s out there calling me names and it ain’t even noon yet?”
This was the most animated his mother had been in months. Maybe they could throw the woman off the porch together!
By the time Johnny crawled out from under the table, Hazel was at the door, clutching her pink chenille robe at the throat. She asked sharply, “What are you carrying on about?”
Looking up into Hazel’s face, the visitor threw her a startled look of recognition. The look vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Now, you must be Miss Hazel Graham. My name is Vida. Vida Snow. I’m sure happy to be working for you.”
Johnny noticed that the woman was at least pretending to be nice to his mother. Hazel only stared at her blankly.
“Maybe you ain’t expecting me. Mr. Floyd hired me, and I get two dollars a day. He told me so.”
Hazel sighed and opened the screen door. “Yeah, I been told, too. Come on in, I reckon.”
The woman walked straight over to the sink, leaned against the counter, and crossed her arms like she was setting claim to that very spot. As Johnny hoisted himself back into his kitchen chair, Vida studied him closely. “How many children you got, Miss Hazel?”
Hazel didn’t answer immediately. She poured herself a cup of coffee and eased herself into a kitchen chair. “Just the one,” she finally said. “But I imagine Mr. Floyd already told you that, too,” she added coldly. “What else did he tell you?”
Vida reached into the pocket of her maid’s uniform and pulled out two bottles of pills. “Said I supposed to give you a blue one and a yaller one every morning. No more, no less.”
“Anything else?”
Vida looked down and smiled self-consciously. “And he said to watch you close ’cause you be real bad to spit them out.”
“He hire you to be my maid or my keeper?”
Vida shrugged. “I reckon it’s time now.” She took a clean glass from the drainboard, filled it with tap water, and then uncapped the pills.
Moving no closer than an arm’s length from where Hazel sat, Vida bent over and cautiously slid the water and the two pills across the table, as if she were setting out a plate of food for a dog of questionable temperament. She stepped back to watch.
Hazel reached for the pills. “Don’t worry. I ain’t going to jump you. No matter what you been told by Mr. Floyd Graham.” She swallowed the pills and then held her mouth open for Vida to see. “There. Ain’t I a good girl?”
“Yessum,” Vida said. She hung her hat on the rack behind the door and began bouncing on the balls of her feet, her eyes darting around the kitchen, appearing for the first time a little less than confident. “Where you want me to start, Miss Hazel? Washing, ironing, scrubbing?”
“How would I know? Floyd hired you. He can tell you where to start. I’m sure he gave you his number.” Lifting herself up from the table, Hazel added, “Only stay out of my bedroom, if you don’t mind.” At that she turned and trudged out of the kitchen.
Vida didn’t seem to take offense. Johnny watched as she went about taking inventory of the kitchen, squinting and shaking her head. She clucked her tongue at the sink. She bent over and whistled at the knobs on the stove. She scuffed her shoe against the linoleum, nodding curiously to herself. Only when she walked into the pantry did she lose her squint, for a long moment staring wide-eyed at all the cans and jars and boxes of food.
Her attention lit on Johnny again. The maid’s eyes were now hard and alert. It was obvious that this was a woman of very few words and very many opinions. “What you call your name?”
He dropped his eyes to the linoleum. She had no right coming in here and asking his name and making his mother sad.
“Cat got your tongue? Don’t matter none. I done been told. Johnny, ain’t it?” She squinted at him and shook her head, rendering a silent opinion he did not feel was at all favorable.
“I’m Vida.”
Still looking down, he said, “I know who you are. You the one been hiding in the bushes. I seen you there. Spying on the sheriff’s house.”
“Hmm,” she said disagreeably. “And I know who you are. You the one riding in the back of that big old car while your momma slings gravel and tries to run folks off the road.”
Johnny glanced up at her. “How you know?”<
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They glared at each other for a moment, neither one giving, and then Vida leaned against the sink once more, crossing her arms. “What’s wrong with your momma?” she asked.
He crossed his arms as she was doing. “Tired,” was all he said.
“Tired,” Vida echoed and then shook her head. “Nosuh! It ain’t tired.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with Johnny, crossing her legs at the ankles, all of her energy seemingly spent. “Nosuh!” she said again, mostly to herself. “I know tired. And that ain’t tired.”
Chapter Nineteen
SWITCHING PLACES
Hazel lay in her bed waiting for the clattering of dishes, the fall of footsteps on the stair, the two hard knuckle-knocks on the door, and finally the resolute face of that horrible little woman who doled out oblivion, two pills at a time.
Each morning the maid followed on Floyd’s heels after he dispensed his morning kiss as efficiently as Vida did her medicine. With a pitying look, he assured her, “You get some rest and let me take care of everything for a while. Time is the best healer, you know.”
She thought a moment about time. Since Vida had begun overseeing Hazel’s medication, time ran like a clock somebody had thrown down a well. She could hear it ticking, loud and unceasing, and knew seconds and minutes and hours and days must be piling up somewhere, yet she couldn’t remember what it had to do with her. Wasn’t Johnny supposed to be starting to school soon? Or had he already begun? It wouldn’t surprise her if he walked in with a high school diploma in his hand.
No, she could only deal with time in small doses. Each day she opened her eyes to see the world in a kind of stark, harsh glare. It was in the morning that she knew she had a husband who barely tolerated her, and one child that was alive and wanting and the other dead and gone.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 12
