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Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League

Page 24

by Jonathan Odell


  For certain, Vida thought, this boy would kill her if he had half a chance.

  She let go of his wrist, and as if that had been the last thing holding her up, she slumped to the floor. She sat there in a heap with her eyes closed and her hands limp in her lap.

  Johnny remained tensed, ready for whatever this crazy woman might do next.

  Vida looked up at him. Here was a son who loved his mother so much he was prepared to kill for her. For the first time she realized why she hated Hazel so.

  Vida shook her head wearily. “Johnny Earl Graham,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard over the sound of the running water. “You got a wagonload of fight in you.”

  Now with tears streaming down her face, she carefully reached up toward the boy. He raised his fists at her as his own tears fell.

  “And child,” she said as she gently wiped a single teardrop from his cheek, “in this bad ol’ world, I ’spec you going to need ever last ounce of it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  MORNING PICNIC

  Vida’s steps were leaden as she slogged down the muddy road to Tarbottom. She couldn’t work today, that was all there was to it. Anyway, Miss Hazel didn’t need her. She had a son to tend to her, to love her, to worry over her. As for Vida, her thoughts were of her own bed, in her own room, her own dreamless sleep.

  When she got to her cabin, her father was sitting out on the porch. She felt his eyes on her as she climbed the steps. She knew he was waiting for some explanation but she said nothing. She passed through the open door and didn’t stop until she fell hard upon her bed, collapsing under the weight of losing Nate for the second time. It had crushed the very breath out of her.

  Levi followed her into her room. “Vida, you sick?”

  How could she answer him? How could she put into words her sickness. Years of plotting and scheming. Childish plans that had put them in Delphi, within striking distance of the man who wanted her whole family dead. Thinking she could weave a web around an entire town and snatch up every word spoken about her son. Only to be undone by a six-year-old. She had been so foolish.

  “Daddy,” she said, her eyes closed. “I ain’t never going to see Nate again. I know it now.” She wasn’t sure why she’d told him. Maybe she just needed to say it out loud to someone. To make it real. To let go of the folly. She looked up at Levi.

  He was watching her with blank eyes. Did he even understand? She had lived so long with her silly connivance, never telling him what she was feeling or thinking or hoping. Her plans had been all she’d needed. Even her dream of killing the sheriff now seemed ridiculous. What did any of it matter now? She was alone again. How could he ever understand her loss?

  A faint smile appeared on Levi’s face. He looked down on her dirt-streaked uniform and her muddy tennis shoes. “Snowflake Baby,” he said finally. “You still my Snowflake Baby, ain’t you?”

  She could feel the emotion rising in her throat. “Yes, Daddy,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I reckon I am.”

  Her father sat down on the edge of the bed and held open his arms to her. Reaching up around his neck, Vida laid her head against his shoulder.

  “That’s real good,” he said softly. “I been so sad about losing her.”

  Hazel waited for Vida’s approach, but it never came. When Floyd had dropped in earlier to dispense his morning kiss, at first she could hardly look at him. She had long stopped asking if he loved her. He couldn’t say it without that “anyway” sound to it. She wondered how much patience he had left with her. How much time did she have before he moved her out, and moved in the one with French perfume?

  The maids had given Hazel’s fears a name. Delia. The same woman who had come into her house and laughed at her. Humiliated her. Made fun of her furniture and her food, all the time scouting Hazel’s home for her third husband. Not for one minute did Hazel believe she was really dead. Mainly because her own jealousy was so alive.

  When she did manage a look at him, even with his salesman’s grin and head-tilt, he appeared nervous.

  “What’s wrong?” she had asked.

  “Nothing,” he said too quickly, glancing at this watch. “I really got to go.” He made a beeline for the door.

  “Floyd,” she called after him, “let’s get away from here. Take a trip together. Maybe drive down to the coast? Maybe stay at that Edgewater Beach Hotel.”

  With his hand on the door handle, he turned over his shoulder and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. Or confess, maybe. Her heart stopped.

  Then he seemed to recover. “It’s ginning time. Everybody’s flush. I’m going to be plenty busy, what with the new models arriving soon and all the trade-ins. Now’s not a good time.”

  It had to be Delia. Maybe she was hiding out somewhere, waiting for Floyd to run away and join her. Why else would he be acting so jittery?

  “What about Johnny?” she almost blurted after he had shut the door, wanting to remind him there was more to consider in this world than just himself and Frenchie. Yet she said nothing, knowing that in a few moments the river would be there to fetch her and for a few hours wash away any regrets.

  However, it was Johnny, not Vida, who came to her room. Hazel thought he looked as guilty as Floyd.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked the boy. “Where’s Vida?”

  Johnny looked down at his feet. “She’s gone home.”

  “Why?”

  He only shrugged.

  A cold shiver ran through her. If Floyd had fired Vida, did that mean he had new plans for her, too? Had he decided to send her to Whitfield again? That sounded about right, she figured. “New models and trade-ins,” he had said. Hazel guessed that was as nice a way as any to be told. That way Floyd could be all alone with his new model while his trade-in was getting rewired.

  “We don’t need her no more,” Johnny said, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Huh?’

  “Momma, I can take care of you. We don’t need Vida coming in our kitchen. I can feed you.”

  “Johnny, what are you talking about?”

  “I made you a picnic. It’s ready.”

  “A picnic? You mean outside?”

  He nodded excitedly. “A breakfast picnic. Orange juice and toast and Cheerios and grape jelly and chocolate cake. Vida never did that, did she?” He reached for her hand and tugged. “Come on. It’s on the ground. We got to go before the dogs get it.”

  “But. . .”

  “Please,” he begged. “I got it all ready. Come see.”

  Hazel didn’t have the energy to argue. Anyway, with Vida gone and no antidrinking pill this morning, she was having her own picnic ideas.

  Johnny found her pink quilted housedress in the closet and selected a scarf for her hair. Hazel slowed briefly before the makeup mirror yet talked herself out of looking. She did make a stop at Floyd’s collection of Jim Beam decanters in the kitchen. Finally, with Johnny leading the way, Hazel walked out of the house with her yellow tumbler and into the dreary morning light.

  Deep in the yard under an oak, on his Wagon Train bedspread, Johnny had laid out plates and napkins and knives and forks and most of the food from the house. He had even set out a large bouquet of fresh-cut roses in a Mason jar of water—roses that looked suspiciously similar to the ones from Miss Pearl’s garden. Somehow he had managed two kitchen chairs down the porch steps.

  “Johnny, it’s so nice,” she said, touched by his efforts.

  “Better than Vida. I told you so.”

  Carefully, Hazel sat herself down in a chair. She balanced her bourbon on her lap, trying to remember how long that doctor at Whitfield had said the Antabuse stayed in her system. Was it fourteen hours? Or fourteen days?

  As she contemplated her drink, sitting before the spread laden with the odd assortment of foods, Hazel was haunted by a vague memory, as if she were acting out some scene from long ago. Where had it been?

  She raised the glass to her nose and took a whiff of the liq
uor. Yes, that smell was part of it. But there was more. What was missing?

  Johnny climbed into the dinette chair beside her. “It’s wet today. So we got chairs to sit down on.”

  “I see,” she said, still trying to remember.

  “On a real picnic,” he explained, “you supposed to sit on the ground.”

  “That’s right,” Hazel said.

  “Like we did by the bridge. Remember? We had moon pies and grape Nehis. The big fish they pulled from the river? And remember how Davie took off for the bridge and I caught him? Do you remember, Momma?”

  “Davie,” was all Hazel said, and she began to cry, only a little bit at first.

  “What’s the matter, Momma?” Johnny asked, panicking. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing, honey. Nothing.” The more she tried to reassure him, the harder she cried. “It’s. . .not. . .you,” she sobbed.

  Johnny didn’t believe her. He started to dance frantically around the bedspread, picking up servings of food and bringing them to her. And when she shook her head, trying to tell him it wasn’t the food, she would break out into a new round of sobbing, which only sent him in search of the dish that would make her stop.

  Not able to bear his repeated efforts to make her happy, she hid her face in her hands and wailed, and she would probably have continued for hours if it had not been for the voice of an uninvited guest.

  “What a lovely idea,” the intruder chirped, her crippled hand waving her lace handkerchief over the feast. “A morning picnic. Now, whose idea was this?”

  Shocked tearless, Hazel peeked up over her fingers into the perfectly composed face of Miss Pearl Alcorn.

  “I suspected something special was up when I saw Johnny in my rose garden.”

  Johnny looked up guiltily at Miss Pearl.

  She said nothing else about the roses. Instead she turned to his mother. “Hello, Hazel.”

  Hazel didn’t speak at once. All the ugly things she had rehearsed over the summer to level at Miss Pearl had vanished from her head. Still holding her hands up to her tear-stained face, a soggy “Hello” was the best she could do.

  Miss Pearl smiled sweetly and then looked up at the sky. “Who said picnics are best saved for sunny days? I think we have more need of them during the gray, gloomy times, myself.”

  She looked down at Johnny. “Child, would you hand your mother and me a paper napkin from your elegant setting there? The ragweed is dreadful this time of year.”

  Pleased to learn how to be of help, Johnny quickly did as he was told.

  With her good hand, Miss Pearl took the napkin and touched it to her perfectly powdered face, giving Hazel a chance to blow her nose and dry her eyes.

  “It’s been a fretful season, hasn’t it, Hazel? So many offensive things in the air. Pollens and such. Smells of cotton poison wafting up from the Delta.”

  Hazel nodded, not sure what the woman was talking about.

  “I want to apologize for not visiting this summer. To tell you the truth, I was a little intimidated by that unpleasant little maid of yours. Levi’s girl. How did a sweet man like Levi manage to raise a. . .oh, never mind. I’m sure it’s a shoddy excuse on my part.” Miss Pearl looked down on Hazel and smiled sadly. “I know it’s all been a trial for you.”

  Hazel studied the woman curiously. Something offensive in the air? That dreadful little maid? Was Miss Pearl attempting to sum up Hazel’s entire hellish summer?

  “Anyway, even though I haven’t called, doesn’t mean you haven’t been on my mind.” With what Hazel discerned as a definite look of pity, Miss Pearl asked, “Hazel, dear, how are you?”

  Hazel dropped her eyes to the glass in her lap. How in the world was she supposed to answer that question? My husband has been cheating on me with your dead niece? I’m one sip away from the nuthouse? I’m the sorriest excuse for a mother since Ma Barker?

  She wished Miss Pearl would leave so she could down the contents of the tumbler and several more like it. But Miss Pearl’s regal presence kept Hazel from moving at all. She tried to remember what the maids had said about Miss Pearl. She seemed so laughable then. However, today she was as scary as ever. Hazel smiled weakly and made a feeble attempt at smoothing her hair.

  “And how’s that hardworking husband of yours? A regular Horatio Alger, isn’t he? I haven’t seen him around much.”

  Hazel opened her mouth to answer but found herself having to choke down a sob. She put the napkin up to her mouth and dropped her head.

  “I see,” was all Miss Pearl said. And for a moment they were all very quiet. Miss Pearl handed her napkin back to Johnny and said, “Child, would you be a dear and get me a glass of ice water? And maybe some fresh napkins.”

  “We got tea,” Johnny offered, eager to do anything for Miss Pearl.

  She smiled and nodded. Johnny took off at a dead run for the house.

  Miss Pearl looked into the distance again and waved the handkerchief in an arc over the neighborhood. “You know, my ancestors used to own all this land. Most of the county, as a matter of fact. In the days when this part of the world was considered frontier. The backwoods.”

  Miss Pearl seemed to be speaking more to the landscape than to Hazel. “We go way back. Men in our family put their names to the deeds and handed them down to their sons. It’s always been that way. We bred some great men, they say. Big part of this state’s history. And you know what I’m struck with, Hazel?”

  Hazel was getting irritated. She was not in the mood for another history lesson that ended up exposing her own poor-as-dirt roots. “No,” she said at last, “what strikes you?”

  “That most of the men I have known personally, especially the ones they call great, are dull to the point of genius. Don’t you find it so?”

  “Huh?”

  “No imagination. They really don’t seem to know what they want.” Miss Pearl solemnly touched the handkerchief to her bosom. “Not deep down.”

  She turned to Hazel. “You see, I have a theory. I think men are able to see one thing at a time. Usually the last thing that happens to be dangling in front of them at any given moment. The more shine and glitter the better. As you might imagine, this gives them the tendency to lurch. This way and that. To and fro.” She waved her handkerchief in time to her words. Her whole body was undulating absurdly, as if she were acting out her theory to some audience larger than just Hazel. The maids were right. This was the silliest woman she had ever met. All she needed now was a maypole.

  Miss Pearl continued her little dance. “Always unbalanced,” she said, leaning farther to one side to demonstrate. “They break the surface like pond minnows striking at shadows.” Miss Pearl giggled at the thought. “And the little ripples they make convince them they are oh so very dangerous and bold. Ultimately it merely makes them predictable.”

  Hazel had no idea what Miss Pearl was trying to say, much less why she felt so strongly about it, acting it out the way she was. Hazel was beginning to feel a little embarrassed for the woman.

  Unabashed, Miss Pearl went on with her theory. “Women, on the other hand, aren’t as prone to lurching. You know why?”

  Hazel shook her head.

  “Because we do know what we want, and we hold on for the duration. We know what will fill us up. We are more attuned to life’s vital essences.”

  Without warning, Miss Pearl thrust her crippled hand into Hazel’s face. “We grab and hold on to what is important.” Hazel snapped her head back, frightened by the twisted fingers.

  “Hazel, we don’t let ourselves become distracted by the fancy of the moment. We are the steady ones. Never, ever,” she said fiercely, shaking her hand in Hazel’s face, “lean on a man for balance. You know why?”

  Staring at the hand, Hazel took a wild guess. “Because they lurch a lot?”

  “Exactly!” Miss Pearl exclaimed, throwing her hand over her head.

  Not knowing what to say now, but pleased to have got the right answer, Hazel shook her head knowingly, as i
f she had grasped this crucial difference between the sexes. It did sound familiar. Hazel wondered what Miss Pearl would say if she knew how much she sounded like Sweet Pea.

  Miss Pearl fell back into the chair next to Hazel and took a few moments to catch her breath. Then, in a much more somber tone, she said, “Hazel, let me tell you the story of someone who will never be in the history books. Or have a statue in the capitol rotunda at Jackson.”

  She drew her handkerchief to her heart, as if swearing to the truth of the story, and began. “Many years ago, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was abandoned by her husband. For an octoroon in New Orleans, no less. He left her with forty acres of undrained swampland, six children, and a blind mule. Yet the woman knew what she had to do. Somehow she was able to raise her a plot of corn, and with that produced her first batch of whiskey. Once a month she loaded up that whiskey on the back of that blind mule and led it and six children twenty miles to an old beech tree that grew on the Natchez Trace. She camped out under that tree until she had sold every last drop. To travelers, drifters, and highwaymen. To whoever had a dollar. Later she built her a little house on that very spot and hired two girls to work the back room, if you know what I mean. She may have even pitched in herself.”

  The woman’s pale blue eyes misted over.

  “No,” Miss Pearl said sadly, “you won’t see her picture in the history books. I once saw a tintype of her when I was a little girl. It was hidden away at the bottom of a steamer trunk. I still remember. It was taken when she was eighty-two years old, and she was still a beautiful woman, if you can imagine that. She sat erect, her head unbowed, unapologetic. When my father saw me looking at that photograph, he took it from me and tore it to pieces. I was told I would risk scandalizing the family if I spoke of her in polite company. Hazel, that woman raised a governor and a secretary of war. Today nobody even knows her name.”

 

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