“You sure there’s nothing wrong?” he asked again. “You ain’t tired of me, are you?”
“Tell me again, Floyd.”
“Tell you what, Delia?”
“Stop teasing. You know.” She slid her finger slowly up and down his tie, tracing the vertical lines in the pattern. “The reasons you like me.” She looked up at him as if the fate of the world rested on his opinion.
His face fired up again, and he quickly scanned the showroom to make sure no one was getting an eyeful. He cleared his throat. “I like you because you’re the most beautiful woman I ever seen. I like you because you know what you want and go after it.” Floyd smiled bashfully. “Me included.”
“Serious, Floyd.”
“OK, serious. I like you because you understand the way the world works. And you keep me positive. That’s important to a man such as myself. I like you because you make me believe I can do anything. Make me believe I’m a winner. You—”
“Do I really, Floyd? Do I make you feel like a winner?” she teased. “Well, I guess I wasn’t head cheerleader at Ole Miss for nothing. Score, Floyd, score!”
Her laugh was hard-edged now, derisive. “Now you be serious,” he said firmly. “You’re good for me, Delia. That’s all there is to it.” Floyd moved closer than he should.
No longer laughing, she said wistfully, “I merely distract, I’m afraid. I help you forget all you’ve lost.”
Maybe, thought Floyd. It was true that Delia kept him positive and sure, the way he was before family, death, and craziness ganged up together and conspired to bring him down. Being with her was like spending an afternoon with Norman Vincent Peale. Well, almost.
When Delia looked back up at him, he saw the tears in her eyes. She said, “But I use you, too, Floyd. It’s as if we cover each other’s losses.”
He waited for her to say more, only to see her smile at him sadly.
Later that afternoon he found out what she meant by her comment. They were two counties away and across the river in Arkansas, at their little honky-tonk hideaway on the levee. Instead of her usual beer, Delia was drinking bourbon, and lots of it. She began making jokes about the live entertainment, some local tractor driver with an impossible name, tuning his guitar not five feet from where they sat. Delia tried to think of all the funny words that rhymed with Twitty, some of them not very nice, and laughed out loud in the boy’s face.
The boy looked right at Delia and said he was going to sing something he had just written about illusionary love. When that plowboy began growling out his song, Floyd could tell from the tragic expression on Delia’s face she wasn’t going to make it through the whole tune.
And he was right.
When the boy got to the part about how his love for another was just make-believe, Delia threw her hands up to her face and burst out into loud, ugly sobs.
Floyd reached his arm around Delia and drew her into his shoulder, hoping to muffle the sounds of her anguished cries. But it was too late. Everyone was staring.
Panicking, Floyd rushed her out of the honky-tonk and back to the car, where she cried uncontrollably into Floyd’s shoulder. Eventually, sitting there in that hard dirt yard, the poor white boy still grinding out his music from inside the shack and Floyd nervously scanning the darkening grounds, she confessed her secret.
“Oh, Floyd,” she cried. “I’m pregnant.”
“But we never. . .How could. . .?” Floyd hadn’t done much more than hold her close and stroke her hair. She had not even allowed him to kiss her on the mouth.
She pulled back and looked up at him through her tears as if he were an imbecile. “Not you, Floyd.”
“Oh,” he said, at first relieved, then hurt. “Oh.”
“Yes, exactly!” she cried. “Oh.”
“You been seeing somebody besides—”
“That’s right,” she said. “And I’m in love with him, Floyd.”
As it slowly sank in that he had lost Delia, or rather never had her to lose in the first place, he was overcome by that old crippling sensation. The same one he’d had when Davie died, a trapdoor feeling like he was doing a free fall through space, all his insides floating up and bunching high in his chest. Gripping the wheel tightly as if to keep from being pulled through the floor by an ancient gravity, he stammered, “Who. . .who. . .” even though he was certain he didn’t want to know.
She wouldn’t answer anyway. She did go on to tell him other things he would rather not have heard. She said she was frightened. Her lover had been outraged when she had asked him to marry her. He had made threats. With tears glistening in those cobalt-blue eyes of hers, she looked up at Floyd and said, “It hurts all the more knowing the man you cherish would bring up the topic of killing you.”
Despite his sorrow, Floyd could see her point. “Maybe we should tell the sheriff, Delia,” he suggested.
That had stopped her tears. “No. No. No,” she said, as if that were the stupidest idea in the world. Then all at once her face unclouded and she became thoughtful. Looking at Floyd earnestly, she said, “Floyd, if anything does happen to me, even though in my heart I don’t believe he would hurt me, you tell Billy Dean. But only afterwards. OK?”
Floyd thought it a strange request. “After?”
“Promise me,” she insisted. “Not before. Only after.”
The incident with Delia had sent Floyd for a loop, and his lapse in emotional control caused him to do one of the silliest things he had ever done, something worthy of Hazel. On that last test drive Delia had left a bottle of her perfume in the car pocket, and one day Floyd rode around in the red-and-white Mercury for hours, all the way to the river and back, the windows up and the Chanel open, crying his eyes out.
That’s when Floyd hit bottom. It forced him to get a grip on himself. Using his best logic, he began to reason himself out of his grief. He told himself it was to be expected. Everybody knew Delia was a bit on the wild side, with two ex-husbands up North. Take it as a lesson, he told himself.
After only a few days Floyd had mostly put the whole thing behind him. It was a sterling testimony to the Science of Controlled Thinking. If anybody asked Floyd what his greatest secret to success was, as he often imagined them doing one day, he would have to say it was his ability to take feelings that would sink a less mentally trained person and discharge them like so much ballast.
He only regretted that he couldn’t tell Hazel how he had handled the thing with Delia. If he could get that one thing through Hazel’s head: When you can control your thoughts, you control your emotions. No need for hospitals and pills and such. But no, some people refused to put out the mental courage it took.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
MANY MANSIONS
From where he sat, in the shade of an oak in his own backyard, Johnny studied the crazy old man over at Miss Pearl’s, raking the ground beneath her stand of pines. Though he had been watching for quite a while in the midafternoon heat, Johnny couldn’t figure out what he was up to. After the man filled his barrow, he would bow his head over the load of straw. Then he appeared to talk at it and make gestures over it. When the man was done with his little ritual, he would wheel the barrow over to the flower bed and spread the straw among the gladiolas and azaleas and then talk at it some more.
Johnny decided to get up close and hear for himself what the man was telling the pine straw. It might be something his mother needed to know about.
“The harvest is great, but the laborers are few,” the man said, in a voice unlike any Johnny had ever heard before. It reminded him of thunder rumbling and rivers rushing and trees bending in the wind. Yet it wasn’t loud on the outside. It only felt loud on the inside.
The man wheeled his harvest over to the flower bed, with Johnny tagging along behind. It occurred to him that the man was wearing overalls, a hat, and a long-sleeve flannel shirt in the afternoon heat. The shirt was dark with sweat. Johnny thought he should be wearing khaki shorts and a thin nylon shirt like him if he was going to stay
outside. “Ain’t you burning up?” he yelled out to him.
Levi started at the voice coming from behind him. When he turned and saw the boy, all he said was “No,” and then went back to his straw.
Even though the man still sat out on the bench once in a while, Johnny had mostly avoided him. He was Vida’s father, after all. But now he decided to get a closer look. As he ventured nearer, he saw that his face was lined with deep wrinkles that reminded Johnny of the folds in his mother’s black velvet dress. When the man completely uncoiled himself to give his back a stretch, only then did Johnny notice how tall he was.
Johnny threw his head back to see into the man’s face. When the man looked back, Johnny decided those had to be the largest, roundest, deepest eyes in all the world. They were oceans of chocolate, and big enough to see him all at once. Most people’s eyes took in little parts of him at a time, his dirty hands or his uncombed hair or his untied shoes. This man’s eyes swallowed him whole.
“How come you wearing them long sleeves?” he asked.
The man quickly looked around, as if to see if anybody was watching. “I ain’t studying you,” he said very low. “Get on from here ’fore you get us both in trouble.”
Though the man wasn’t being very nice to him, for some reason Johnny wasn’t afraid. He wanted to be looked at again with those big eyes of his. So he asked once more, “Ain’t you hot, dressed that way? Did Vida make you wear them clothes?” It would be just like her to do something that mean.
The man gave Johnny a bemused look. “Vida? You think Vida puts my clothes on me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, secretly pleased he had got the man to look at him again.
“Well, she don’t. And if you has to know, young man, I dress this way because it makes you sweat more.”
“Why you wanna sweat more?”
Levi took off his hat, revealing hair so white and fleecy, it reminded the boy of a lamb he had petted once. Johnny would have petted the man’s head if he had offered.
With a bandanna from his back pocket, Levi wiped the inside brim of the hat, without bothering to answer the boy. So Johnny asked again. “So why you want to sweat more, huh?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” Levi said. He replaced his hat and then looked down at Johnny.
“Yeah, but why?”
“It be like this here. Sweat makes the air cool. Sometimes you got to get hotter before you can get cooler. Sometimes things got to get worser before they get better. Can you understand that?”
Johnny thought it was something his daddy might say. Maybe the man wasn’t crazy after all. To make sure he asked, “You know what my name is?”
The man looked up and again surveyed the yards around him, as if to see who had put this child up to testing him this way. Finally he said, “I reckon they call you Johnny.”
“What’s yours?”
“Levi Snow.”
“Why was you saying them Sunday school words to that wheelbarrow?”
Levi shook his head at the boy’s question and then leaned over the load of straw to resume his work.
“You playing like you a preacher today?”
Levi quickly drew himself up again. “I am a preacher.”
Johnny doubted it. If he were telling the truth, where was the man’s preaching uniform, the snow-white suit with the cross-of-diamonds stickpin? “You ever bury anybody?”
“Course. I done told you I’m a preacher. Now you best get on away from here and let me work.”
“Davie got himself buried.”
“Yeah, I heared about that,” Levi said, his eyes swallowing Johnny whole again. “If you believe in Jesus, you going to see him again.”
“We been waiting on him,” Johnny said.
Levi nodded. “In my father’s house there are many mansions.”
Yep, Johnny thought, that sure enough sounded like something a preacher would say.
Then Levi picked up an armload of straw and scattered it in the bed of red and white gladiolas while speaking in his special voice. “I send you like sheep among wolves.”
As Johnny contemplated how pine straw was like sheep and wondered where the wolves were, the scent of face powder drifted his way. Miss Pearl was strolling through the yard showing her niece, Miss Hertha, her prize roses. Always happy to see her, Johnny called out, “Hey, Miss Pearl.”
Johnny couldn’t understand what his mother had against her. She had blue cotton-candy hair and carried herself the way the fairy godmother did in his Golden Goose Classics and all the time acted as sweet as she smelled.
She looked over and, upon seeing Johnny, waved her handkerchief and began approaching, Miss Hertha by her side.
Johnny tried not to look directly at Miss Hertha’s face. At least he and his mother were agreed on her. Her buckteeth gave Miss Hertha a mulelike appearance, an impression reinforced by a long sloping nose and protruding brow. His mother said that even though she herself had been born ugly and poor, she had managed to do something about both. However, Miss Hertha, born ugly and rich, didn’t have the least excuse to go around looking like a field animal. His mother had made up a little joke about the woman.
“You know why they named her Hertha?” she would ask.
“Why?” was Johnny’s part to say.
“Cause it hertha look at her,” and then she would giggle.
“What are you-all doing out here?” Miss Pearl asked.
“Just talking to Mr. Snow,” Johnny said, trying to be proper around Miss Pearl.
Miss Pearl smiled, yet Hertha was quick to reply. “No, no, child!” she said, shaking her head at Johnny. “Levi here is not a Mister. Levi is a nigruh.”
“Leave the boy alone, Hertha. He’s only practicing his manners.”
Hertha wouldn’t be stopped. She motioned in Levi’s general direction. “He’s plain Levi. Understand, child?” she asked. “Only white people get to be Misters. And one day Levi will call you Mister, but never the other way around. Isn’t that right, Aunt Pearl?”
Pearl said nothing. She simply touched her lace handkerchief to her cameo choker. Johnny watched as she used her handkerchief to dab at the moistness that had gathered in dewy drops above her rosetinted lips. Next her hand went to her neck and then her lips again. For a crippled hand, it sure got around. Then she turned to study her gladiolas, ignoring her niece.
As for Johnny, he hadn’t discerned any meanness in Miss Hertha’s voice. Instead, it was like someone firmly telling him not to talk with his mouth full or to keep his elbows off the table. When he looked back at Levi, he saw that the old man stood there looking much smaller, his shoulders slumped. He was turning his hat around and around in his hands and his huge eyes studied the grass at his feet. His face did not contradict anything Miss Hertha had said. If Levi didn’t mind, Johnny figured that must be the way things were. Anyway, Miss Pearl would say so if it were wrong.
“Well, let Levi get back to his work, now, child,” Miss Pearl said. She looked over at the man and touched his arm. “Levi, when you finish up with the beds, the verbena by the front gate needs shaping.”
“Yessum,” he said, studying the ground. With his head still bowed, he addressed the woman he had known since childhood. “Miss Pearl, ma’am. If you don’t mind me asking, next time you see your brother, would you tell the Senator, Levi Snow sends his regards?”
Miss Pearl smiled affectionately at Levi. “Now, Levi, when you want some lemonade, knock at the back door and Creola will fix you some, do you hear?”
“Yessum, I sure will do that,” Levi answered, and then bent himself down again to the wheelbarrow.
As Miss Pearl pointed out her gladiolas to her niece, and Johnny stood there wondering if he had missed Miss Pearl’s answer to Levi’s question, the big reddish maid Creola came bounding out of the house and down the hill to where they were all standing. As usual, she was out of breath when she arrived.
“Miss Pearl!” she puffed, holding a hand to her heaving chest. “It’s the Sen
ator on the phone. It’s about Miss Delia.”
“What now!” Miss Pearl said, clearly exasperated.
Miss Hertha exclaimed, “I just knew my sister would do something to scandalize Daddy right before her party. What’s she done?”
“She gone missing,” Creola said, puffing.
“Oh, is that all?” Miss Pearl dismissed Creola’s message with a wave of her handkerchief. “Tell my brother there’s a difference between an emergency and a predicament.”
Creola looked at Miss Pearl quizzically and then said, “All I know is the Senator say it’s for real this time. He says Miss Delia went out hossback riding and that hoss done come back empty.”
“Oh, my,” Miss Pearl exclaimed, her eyes shifting to her poor broken hand. “Her horse. That is different.”
Hertha wasn’t convinced. “She’s up to something. I know it. Always trying to get attention.”
“Poor Senator,” Levi said as he watched the women rush back up the hill. “It going to sure nuff kill him if something happens to Miss Delia.”
“Miss Delia?” Johnny asked, at first not remembering. Then it hit. “She’s the pretty one,” he blurted proudly.
Miss Hertha, who was already halfway to the house, whipped around and gave Johnny a look that made him take a step behind Levi for safety.
“Um-hmm. Boy, you better hide,” Levi chuckled, “least till you learn who you supposed to practice your manners on and who you ain’t.”
Vida was in the parlor dusting the furniture when Johnny got back to the house. It was a task she saved for this time of the day, just before her programs began. Sure enough, when she finished wiping off the television, she clicked it on and settled back into a Stratolounger. Even when the maids came over for coffee, they had to leave before the start of her first show, the one where a poor white woman told about how hard her life was and they made her queen for the day. Vida always got a real kick out of that.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 19
