The floor in the hallway was constructed of long, wide planks of heart pine, waxed to a deep honey glow. Over the century the soft wood had been dimpled countless times by the sharp heels of white people now long gone.
The creaking beneath her feet sounded out like thunder as she cautiously made her way into the library. She came to a stop before the fireplace. On the marble mantel shelf, the gold clock’s tick-ticking was loud enough to wake the dead. For a moment she stood stock-still on the ancient French wool rug of muted colors and stared up at the oil painting of a long-dead ancestor that hung above the clock.
Vida slowly looked around the room, taking in its contents. She wondered if her own ancestors could have dusted and shined these very heirlooms. A great-great-grandfather could have planed and laid down the very floorboards beneath her and maybe felled the trees from the extinct Delta forests she had heard about, before cotton took over the world.
Vida’s interest turned toward more recent times. She had stolen inside the house to watch and to listen, to touch and to gather up smells. She came to glean from the house any trace of a living, breathing inhabitant. Yet in the midst of the splendor, she could detect no sign of the sheriff. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him in the house. Where did he sit? Where did he eat? Surely not at the grand mahogany table, in a chair with a hand-embroidered seat. Where did he sleep? In the giant four-poster bed upstairs with the canopy as big as the night sky?
No, this was not where he lived. Though she kept up with his comings and goings, watching him swagger to his patrol car in the morning and disappear into the house in the evening, she couldn’t imagine him existing once he passed through those doors with the polished brass handles and the beveled glass that distorted like prisms. There was nothing of him here. This was old, and elegant and civilized. Where did a low-rate man such as him disappear to in a house like this? Where did they hem up the sheriff so he wouldn’t upset the ways of fine, civilized white people?
One careful step at a time, Vida softly padded up the stairs. She wanted to see the bedroom again. Maybe there was something she had missed before.
Vida knew her way around the house very well by now. When Hertha took the girls out to the Columns to see her daddy, sometimes she would take Missouri along, leaving the house empty and unlocked. If she could get Johnny to take a nap or sneak away while he was busy under the house, Vida was free to roam through the rooms, touching their contents, hoping in some way to brush up against an understanding of Nate’s daddy and perhaps bring her one step closer to his downfall, all the while remaining alert for sounds of an approaching car. Stealing her son away was the price the man paid to be sheriff. If it was the last thing she did, she would take that away from him.
Yet so far in all her visits, she had not come upon the sheriff here. No journals or records or old letters. No notes scribbled in a masculine hand. Not even the stink of stale cigarette smoke lingered. The only scents were those of Hertha and her blood relations.
In the bedroom she opened the giant doors of the mahogany armoire, where his clothes were kept. Taking her time, she went through the inside drawers and fingered each item, lifting it up to her face, smelling the fabric of undergarments and socks and handkerchiefs. Vida had never forgotten the sharp, piercing odor of the sheriff when he had fallen upon her. But it was not here. Everything was so freshly laundered as to be absent his presence. Missouri was more of a fact in this house than he.
She closed the last drawer and turned to look at where he slept, a massive four-poster bed with a flowered canopy. Did he ever dream of his son there? she wondered. Lord, she thought, did he even know his own son’s name?
She knelt and looked under the bed. There was room enough for her to hide, and then to rise up in the dead of night. He would wake with an ice pick in his heart.
Vida crossed the room and climbed the bed steps. Carefully she sat herself down on the elaborately embroidered coverlet and ran her hand over the duck-down pillows. Did he ever feel any emotion for his son besides hate? she wondered. If not, she would settle for that. For if he still hated Nate, if in his heart he still raged at the boy, then that was evidence that Nate had once lived. Knowing even that would be a great comfort.
She descended from the bed and smoothed away any evidence that she’d been there. Her visit today was almost done. There was only one more place she wanted to look.
Downstairs, Vida stood for a moment in the hall, listening and watching. The house had darkened. It was getting late, and the sheriff would be arriving soon. Yet she heard no engine sounds or tires against gravel, only the clock in the library marking the seconds. She made her way stealthily to a little room off the parlor. She wanted to check the drawer again. In all the house, that one drawer in an old rolltop desk was the only thing kept locked, while silver, gold, and crystal lay out in the open for the taking. Whatever was in that drawer must be important indeed. She was determined to find the key.
She tried the drawer as she always did, and it resisted as usual. Then it lurched open. A fold of paper had wedged itself between the drawer and the frame and had kept the lock from catching. Someone must have been in too much of a hurry to notice.
She removed the paper, and there in the bottom of the drawer was a trove of treasure. Astonished, Vida reached down and stirred the contents about. On closer look, she saw breast pins with colored glass, bracelets going green, broken pocket knives, a tarnished Sunday school attendance pin from her father’s old church. Junk. She picked up a dime-store locket and realized what she had found. These were the trifles Creola had complained about, the ones the sheriff had pocketed on his raids down into Tarbottom.
Holding the locket in her hand, she debated whether to steal it back for Creola. Deciding against the risk, she dropped the locket back in the drawer and pushed it shut. As she did, she shook her head in wonderment. This had to be the queerest place in the world! A house where a man can walk in through the door and then completely vanish, without leaving a trace. Where treasures are laid out for the taking and trash is kept under lock and key.
As she turned to leave, she noticed she was still holding the paper that had jammed the lock. She flipped it over and saw that she was holding an envelope. It smelled strongly of perfume. On the front somebody had written simply “Billy Dean.” She opened it and found a single sheet of fancy purple stationery with pretty handwriting. It was from Miss Delia.
Maybe her daddy was right. Maybe indeed God had his good days. The letter was exactly what she had been praying for.
Vida shoved the envelope into her pocket and fled.
The very moment he saw Vida leaving through the sheriff’s side door, Johnny thought, “Now we got something good on her.” From his bedroom window he continued to watch as she scurried back across the yard.
For reasons he could not understand, his mother seemed to have softened her views on Vida. Each time the maids came by, taking over the house, she sat on the stairs and listened yet never sprang their trap. He was beginning to fear that Vida was taking over his mother as well, that his mother was going to be on Vida’s side.
But this she couldn’t ignore.
He found his mother sitting up in bed with the curtains pulled and the radio on, half hidden in the shadows. Tingling with excitement, Johnny jumped up beside her and breathlessly told her all he had seen.
When he was done, she said very softy, “I swan. Tell me again.” After he had finished his second rendition, she asked, “Did you see her tote anything out?”
“No ma’am. Her hands was poked down in her pockets.”
“I swan,” she said again. “Ain’t that something.”
Johnny thought he saw the ghost of a smile flicker across her face. He had done well. He thought she winked at him when she said, “Let’s have us a secret. OK?”
Turning toward the window, Hazel indeed felt her spirits begin to lift. Johnny’s news confirmed what she already suspected. Lately she had lost a silk scarf and a hairbrush and
a garnet pin. She had put this down to the pills and her volt-damaged memory. That is, until Floyd started complaining that he couldn’t find his new gold-plated tie clip or his favorite hammer. The pieces were falling into place.
For the longest while Hazel was silent, gazing off into the distance like a gambler considering how to play a very good hand.
The next morning Hazel heard Vida stomping up the stairs, rattling the breakfast tray. Normally this was the part of the day Hazel hated the most. Vida coming in sullen, as gracious as a prison guard, plopping the tray down on the bed and saying only, “Medicine time, Miss Hazel.” But this morning Hazel was certain there would be more words passing between them than those.
Vida rapped twice with a free knuckle, then pushed open the door with her foot. She took one step into the room and spied the empty bed. That stopped her cold. She almost fell out when she spotted Hazel in the armchair over by the closet door, wooden-backed and defiant.
Hazel had dressed herself in her favorite driving clothes, a navy-blue poplin with a box-pleated skirt and a little round hat bobby-pinned to her head. She had even managed some makeup.
“What you staring at?” Hazel asked, unable to hide a satisfied smirk.
“Nothing, I don’t reckon,” Vida stammered, not trusting what she saw. “Maybe ’cause I ain’t never seen you in nothing ’cept bedclothes.” She set the tray on the foot of the bed and considered Hazel again. Finally she asked, “What you-all made up for, Miss Hazel? You going out today?”
Sizing Vida up, Hazel said, “Thought I might. If that’s all right by you.”
“What I got to do with anything?” Vida reached for the glass of orange juice on the tray. “I’m your maid.”
“More like my overseer,” Hazel muttered.
“Yessum. Well, here your medicine.” Vida stuck out her hand. In her palm were the two round pills, one blue and one yellow. In her other hand was the glass of juice.
Hazel set her jaw. It was now or never. “I don’t reckon I’ll be taking no pills today.” Her voice was a bit shaky.
“I reckon you will, Miss Hazel.”
“Not if I don’t want to.”
“Miss Hazel, ‘want to’ got nothing to do with it. Mr. Floyd say you got to. You don’t take your pills, I don’t get my bonus.”
Hazel’s mouth dropped. “He pays you a bonus?”
“Yessum. Two bits a pill,” Vida said matter-of-factly, as if this were common practice in households across Mississippi.
Her hand was almost in Hazel’s face. “Here you go. Swaller them on down.”
Hazel took a breath to steel herself. She knew she didn’t have energy to waste. “Vida,” she said, deciding to get to the point. “Things have been going missing around the house.”
Squinting hard at Hazel, Vida asked in a measured voice, “And what that got to do with me?”
“Well. . .” Hazel hesitated. This was going to be harder than she had imagined. “Well, who else could have took them? I mean, after all. . .” Then she blurted, “Vida, please don’t make me take no more pills!”
Vida, still squinting, thought it out and said, “You trying to blackmail me, Miss Hazel? You calling me a thief?”
“You don’t understand. I don’t care about the things you took. You see, nobody has to know,” Hazel explained in a rush of words. “I don’t want to take them pills no more. They make me tired. I can’t think. I can’t feel nothing. Vida, I don’t care what you took. Keep it all. Take some more, I won’t tell. I promise. Please. It’ll be our secret.”
“Miss Hazel, since the day I got here the onliest thing I took from this house is nasty looks.”
“But things are missing,” Hazel said, desperate now. “Floyd’s going to be upset when I tell him it’s been you. Don’t make me have to tell him.”
“You go on ahead and tell it on me if you want. Come on down to Tarbottom and search my house. Everybody else is. You ain’t going to find nothing ’cause I ain’t took nothing.” Vida waggled her open palm at Hazel. Her voice was firm. “Now, you swaller these pills, Miss Hazel, before you get me and you the both in a fix.”
The little gumption Hazel had been able to muster for the confrontation was ebbing fast. She panicked. Her one opportunity was slipping away. “But Johnny said he saw you sneaking around in the sheriff’s house.”
“You think I ain’t got the sense of a June bug? If I going to take up thieving the neighborhood, you reckon I’m going to commence with the high sheriff’s house? If you think that, then let’s me and you call Mr. Floyd and see who he believes.” Then she waited, patting her foot to the passing seconds.
Hazel sank back in her chair, defeated. What Vida said was true. Floyd would certainly side with his maid over his wife. Vida’s explanation would be best because it was the simplest, the easiest to live with. Poor ol’ Hazel was acting crazy again. It was the shortest distance between two points. Hazel dropped her head.
“Want me to help you in bed, Miss Hazel? Or you want to sit up for a while? Same difference to me.” Again Vida held out her hand. “Long as you done took your medicine.”
Hazel remained slumped in the chair. Couldn’t even get a colored maid to be on her side. She had handled it all wrong from the start. She shouldn’t have tried to blackmail Vida. Now she had made her mad. She would never listen. And there was so much she needed to tell somebody, even if it was a colored somebody.
She needed to tell about dreams and drowning, and about how it feels to be beat up, bound up, and thrown away, like that poor colored boy in the river. She needed to tell how he still haunted her.
She needed to tell about losing a child she never really knew to begin with, and about how it feels to see the remaining one fretting his childhood away, constantly staring at her as if she were already a dead body on the bottom of the river, waiting to be dragged up, his worried eyes scanning the surface above her, calling out for her; and about how she wanted to reach up through the currents for him, but was pulled back by the weight of knowing nothing she could do would make a damn bit of difference. She needed another woman to tell it to. That and more.
How she believed her husband had other reasons for wanting to keep her down. How Gardenia Paradise was last year’s fragrance, and now when he leaned over to kiss her good-night, he smelled of something French and sophisticated. She wanted to tell how her own reflection had vanished completely from her husband’s eyes and been replaced by another’s.
She lifted her head to see Vida still standing there, unmoved, her hand outstretched. Hazel was a fool to think that just because she and Vida hated the same people, they themselves could be friends and share secrets. So instead of telling Vida all these things, Hazel took the pills as she was told and let herself be put to bed like she was a child.
Closing her eyes, she drifted back to that day she had stumbled across her father’s jug in the woods, and how its wondrous contents had lifted her spirits higher than the chinquapins along the creek below her, higher than the hills that had hemmed her in. She had only been a silly, full-of-feelings girl. She should have listened to her parents and kept her eyes shielded against hope. Now she understood. It was important for her kind to steer clear of hope. Not because they weren’t capable of it. But because they were unable to sustain it.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
IT’S ONLY MAKE-BELIEVE
It was Wednesday, and regular as clockwork Delia had arrived right before twelve, ready for her weekly test drive. Floyd, like all the other business owners in Delphi, took each Wednesday as a half day, closing shop at noon. Come rain or shine, she would be there just before he sent Hollis, his shop mechanic, home and locked the doors. That way they could drive off together and no one would notice how long they were gone.
“Well, look who’s here!” Floyd said, acting surprised. “Think I might could interest you in trading up today?” He grinned and cocked his head.
“Depends, Floyd,” Delia purred.
“On what?”
&n
bsp; “On how well you service after the sale.”
Floyd blushed. She always made him blush. No matter how hard he tried to play along, attempting to match her insinuation for insinuation, she upped the ante until he had to retreat in embarrassment.
So instead of thinking of something clever to say, he just admired her for a moment. Today she had on a misty sea-green dress made of some delicate fabric as wispy as smoke, causing her to shimmer before him like a mirage. He looked up into her eyes. Even with all her joking, something was different about her today. It was something he didn’t know she was capable of. Delia was obviously sad. Though Floyd wasn’t one to encourage negative feelings, he asked her about it.
Laughing unconvincingly, she said, “Nothing’s wrong with me that a test drive with you won’t cure, Floyd.”
Still her mood bothered him, somehow making what they were up to more real. “We got to be more careful,” he said. “I think we better find another way to meet. You been test-driving that Mercury Montclair for three months now. If word gets back to the Senator—”
“Daddy?” She rolled the bluest pair of eyes Floyd had ever seen, even bluer than Hazel’s that day at the Tupelo Rexall. “It’s coming up on ginning time,” she said. “He’ll be too busy to care about anything or anybody except getting his cotton picked.”
Floyd knew that wasn’t true. The Senator doted on both his daughters, Delia as well as the ugly one. “The Beauty and the Duty,” as the sheriff himself had once let slip about his wife and her sister. The Senator would first ruin and then kill any man who harmed either one.
He got up from his desk and walked across to where she stood. His office had windows on three sides and jutted like a peninsula into the showroom, and he came as close to her as he dared, close enough to catch the smell of her perfume and see the flecks of gold in her eyes. How could someone as high-class as Delia really want to be with him? he thought. Somebody who had come out at the Delta Debutante Ball. A woman who wore cashmere like a second skin.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 18
