A Place Called Wiregrass

by Michael Morris

  Right when she reached to open the towel cabinet in the bathroom, I blocked her. Standing in the doorway with my hand against the cabinet, I decided she would not turn me off like her clock radio. She looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, but I just continued to look at the side of her wet head.

  “Gah, all I need is a towel,” she moaned.

  “All you need is to tell me the truth.” I decided to count to twenty this time. I watched specks of water drop from her ear lobe.

  “I know who it is. Did you think I was so stupid I wouldn’t check the number?”

  She folded her arms and looked down at the floor.

  The words I should have said earlier to LaRue erupted onto his offspring. “I’m surprised he even has a phone. Probably just for his drug deals. I wish I could’ve had five minutes with that parole board. Oh boy, they’d be sorry.”

  “He’s not like that anymore. He’s got his own business now,” she said in an unsteady tone.

  I wondered how many times she’d practiced that line, hoping to convince herself of his truthfulness. If I wasn’t so mad, I wonder if I would have laughed. The idea of this three-time drug offender owning anything other than a pharmacy was too ridiculous to even waste breath on. And so much for that white-haired judge telling him twelve years ago LaRue would never see the wickedness of a crack house again.

  “How did you even get his number?” The very mention of his name seemed to harass something vile in my soul. I tried hard not to say his name, choosing instead to use only pronouns and filthy words not fitting for polite conversation.

  “The library, okay?” She looked up and then withdrew once again. And there I was thinking she was spending those days after school seeking out books about horses, not searching phone books for a jackass.

  We stood our ground, still and silent. She broke first by reaching up to open the towel cabinet. I moved outside to the door frame and allowed her access.

  I decided to take the sympathetic route. “Baby, I love you and just want the best for you. You know that. There’re just some things you don’t know…”

  “You just try to control me. Why can’t I call him? Why? He is my daddy, you know.”

  Controlling accusations. The questions. This was all too familiar. LaRue’s influence once again. He put Suzette up to that kind of talk too. “I don’t care if you talk to him,” I lied, not wanting a rerun of another life pushed towards disaster because of my objections. “It’s just the calls cost so much. And well, I just don’t want you to get all confused.”

  “It’s too late,” she screamed and slammed the door.

  I stood outside the pine door and heard the lock click. I didn’t even try to knock. I’d let her count to whatever number she needed to to cool off. As if we were playing a game of hide and seek, I dashed into Cher’s bedroom.

  The picture was still zipped inside her pillow. I glared at LaRue holding my baby on his lap. Had it not been for my fear of completely losing Cher, I would have ripped the cheap celluloid into a zillion pieces. No amount of counting could harness my anger towards that thing, that LaRue LaRouche.

  Even though I thought the world of Missoura, I was not pleased to see her sitting in Miss Claudia’s living room. I had waited all weekend to tell Miss Claudia about Cher’s calls to her biological father. My nerves were just about shot, and now I had to wait that much longer for some guidance.

  “Erma Lee, I want you to look. Dedrick Aaron Jackson, Missoura’s grandson.” Miss Claudia held up a photo. I had just hung my pocketbook on the coat rack.

  I sighed, remembering the fine line I walked between employee and friend. I held the photo of the Army captain and remarked he was nice-looking or something to that effect.

  Missoura talked about how good he was doing and how he liked Fort Benning. “So lucky to be stationed close to home,” Miss Claudia added and sipped her iced tea.

  I guess I was not the only one who found Miss Claudia to be a good listener. I swear, I had washed three loads of clothes, mopped the kitchen, and cut three roses and put them in a vase by Miss Claudia’s bed before Missoura left. Right when I opened my mouth to ask for my own guidance, the phone rang.

  “Why yes, she is. Who may I say is calling?…Oh, I liked to not have recognized your voice.” She nuzzled the phone against her blouse. “Come on over here. It’s Gerald.”

  I wiped my hands on my pants and grabbed the receiver. “Hello.” I was conscious of Miss Claudia standing next to the kitchen sink.

  “This’s Gerald.” The clanging in the background would have given him away. “You want to uh…” Louder clanging. This time I heard a muffling sound and Gerald’s voice yelling something undetectable. The clanging stopped. “Yeah…uh, like I was saying. They having a fish fry this Saturday at the Moose Lodge. Well, I mean, with you not knowing a whole bunch of people yet, I thought…Do you want to go?”

  Not now, I thought. This is not a good time. “Well, I might need to help Miss Claudia that day. You know, do some stuff for her and everything.” Dead silence. I always had a tendency to talk more whenever the other person dropped the conversation. “Her with her hip and all.” Miss Claudia turned to look at me. I was sinking with each second. “Just let me call you back.”

  “What in the world was all that about?”

  I knew she had every right to ask since I brought her name into it. “Nothing.”

  “Sure didn’t sound like nothing to me.”

  I went back to the sink and finished washing casserole dishes. She kept her perch next to me.

  “Erma Lee, what did you mean, doing things for me?”

  “Saturday. I told you I’d go get you some fabric on Saturday, remember?” I didn’t look at her, concentrating instead on the scorched corners of grime on the dish.

  “I declare. We can pick up that old fabric anytime. I hope you weren’t using that as an excuse for whatever it was Gerald wanted?”

  I looked at her. Both her hands were propped on the cane, and her head was slightly turned. Sometimes she was so dramatic that I thought she could’ve acted on one of those afternoon stories.

  “Just some fish fry at some lodge or something.”

  “You don’t mean the annual fish fry down at the Moose Lodge?”

  Right then I hated the fact she knew every nook and cranny of Wiregrass. I decided she must rank right up there with the courthouse as a Houston County institution.

  “Well, if he asked, you have to go. Richard went a little while last year. Stayed as long as he could. His nerves, don’t you know. But anyway, he said they had the biggest crowd he ever did see.”

  I blew up at the loose strands of hair that were hanging over my eye and continued washing the casserole dish. “Yeah? Well, I don’t think it’s good right now.”

  “Now, Erma Lee, I sat right in that living room a week ago and heard you talking about that man.”

  I sighed, realizing how a horse had to feel after being ridden on a long journey.

  “I certainly hope it’s not because you’re afraid of still being a married woman. You’re for all intended purposes divorced. Just a matter of…”

  I scrubbed the brush on the last remaining bits of scorched food. “It’s not that. I just…”

  “Well, I hope you certainly don’t think you have to babysit me. And speaking of that, Cher can stay with me. We’ll cook us some popcorn and…”

  The thud of the dish crashing to the sink made her jump. “Look, I got too much on my mind to decide right now.”

  She blinked hard and looked over my right shoulder. “I see,” she said and then patted the silver top of her cane.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, brushing suds of dishwashing soap on my forehead.

  Her expression never changed. She just reached over and put her blue-veined hand on my arm.

  “I just found out this weekend that when Cher said her daddy was coming, she didn’t mean Bozo. She meant her biological father.” I never used the phrase real daddy, because LaRue could
never reach this standard no matter how hard he tried. “Me and her had it out, and now she won’t even talk to me.”

  Miss Claudia wiped the suds from my forehead. “When did all this happen?”

  I laid out the naked details and was even sort of honest about his time in prison. I told her he was in for drugs and left off the charges of child abandonment.

  “When I was a girl going through all that mess with Old Man Maxwell, I used to daydream what my daddy would’ve looked like if he’d still been alive. How many wrinkles would he have around his eyes? How many streaks of gray would he have around the temples? I even made up an image.”

  “This is different. You had a good daddy. Hers ain’t worth squat.”

  “Makes no difference. Sometimes a fantasy is easier to face than the truth. Especially about the person you’re supposed to love.”

  Miss Claudia didn’t ease my worrying, but she did help me understand what Cher might be thinking. That night when Cher got in the shower, I called Gerald back. It was such a brief conversation I wondered why I had picked up the receiver three times before finally dialing his number.

  “I hope that fish fry ain’t dressy,” I said with a chuckle, knowing I was scared to death I would be out of place.

  “Ain’t nothing but a bunch of boys frying fish and having a little fun. I’ll pick you up at seven,” Gerald said.

  After he hung up, I held the receiver against my chest and wished life could be as easy as Gerald made everything out to be.

  Ten

  “I have stared at four walls until I’m about half crazy,” Miss Claudia said, standing in the doorway of her side porch. She was on a mission, dressed all pink: hot pink skirt, light pink blouse, and a white scarf with little pink roses on it. A khaki wicker basket draped her arm, and at first glance I thought she had packed for a picnic. When I helped her down the porch steps, I realized the basket served as her pocketbook.

  “Bum hip or not, we’re going to town,” she declared and handed me her car keys.

  Fabric World was our first stop that afternoon. She lingered with the sales clerk, asking all about the young woman’s origins and telling about her years as a seamstress. I noticed by the way Miss Claudia looked down and nodded her head that she was disappointed the young woman did not know of the Emporium. “This is my companion, Erma Lee Jacobs. She’s not from Wiregrass either,” she said, allowing the auburn-haired girl with a fair complexion to join my outsider sorority. “Tell me, what are the young girls, oh, say high-school age, wearing now days?”

  The young woman escorted us to a big counter with jumbo-sized books filled with patterns. “Oh, Lord have mercy. I wouldn’t let my dog wear that thing in public,” Miss Claudia said when the young woman pointed to the first selection. Her comments were met with laughter from the sales clerk.

  Charmed another one, I thought.

  “I’m going to need Cher’s measurements.”

  “Now, Miss Claudia,” I said with one hand on my hip. “I can’t have you doing this.”

  She continued to flip through the pages of the plastic binder and pretended to ignore my presence. “And just who will stop me from making an outfit on my own sewing machine in my own house?”

  I leaned over the catalog filled with patterns. “Your hip. You can’t be sitting up sewing. What about the pedal?”

  Over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses she looked up at me. “I already thought of that. I’ll use the good leg to pedal and prop the bum one on a chair.”

  “I just can’t have you…”

  She raised one eyebrow and dropped her chin even lower. The same soft hazel eyes could slice through concrete when she found something blocking her way. “This is my business. Not another word out of you.”

  I could only mumble and roll my eyes.

  “What? If you have something to say, Erma Lee…”

  “I said you didn’t take us to raise, you know.”

  She resumed looking at the catalog. “You hush. Here, how about this periwinkle one for you?” When she tried to shove the bulky book in my direction, two pages flipped over the spot her thumb marked.

  I glanced at the soft sleeveless top with big blue buttons and the short skirt cut somewhere at the model’s knee. On the rare occasion Bozo practiced romance, and on the more frequent occasion of kissing up after a drunken rage, he would tell me how crazy he was about my legs. “Oh no. You’re not going to…”

  “All right. You win. You can set a pillow under my leg and run in and out fetching me tea while I sew. Happy now?”

  The pace of my heart slowed a little. I actually pictured a wave of my nerves settling to a lake ripple. She was spoiling me rotten, and I never let myself forget it.

  Miss Claudia made the bad times seem distant and strangely unimportant. I felt safe with the tall woman who used a cane. The truth was, I did not see her much older than myself. All I saw was a confident, determined woman who could overcome any obstacle set in her path.

  Days leading up to the big to-do at the Moose Lodge, Miss Claudia worked steady on her sewing machine. Her bedroom was set up like a makeshift tailor shop, with a step for me to stand on while she pinned the skirt hem and held a tomato-shaped cloth ball full of pins. The concentration of her wrinkled brow and the couple of pins sticking out of her mouth showed me a hint of the top-rate seamstress she once was. During the creation, I stuck my head in the room every so often to make sure her left leg was inclined on the wooden desk chair and that the pillow cushioning her leg had not flattened.

  The final product was as good as anything from the mall. I stood in the mirror of her bedroom and fidgeted with the skirt, wondering if I was too old to wear such a short length.

  “You just look so pretty,” she said, cupping her hands up to her chest. The way she looked at me made me think how she might have reviewed Patricia in her coming-out dress. The painted picture of her in that very dress hung in the formal living room. When I asked Miss Claudia what exactly the event was, she dismissed the Cotillion as “a bunch of high rollers thinking their you-know-what don’t stink.”

  “I mean to tell ya, you’re good now,” I said, turning my head to get the full-mirrored view in every possible direction. “No wonder Mr. Wade went and married you.”

  “Oh, my word,” she said, playing like she was embarrassed.

  “I’m serious. This is the best sewing I ever saw. And that’s coming from a trained seamstress herself.” Another moment I longed for a built-in eraser in my mouth. I was afraid that last part sounded big-headed. To counterbalance, I quickly added, “You just don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

  “I’m just tickled to do it. You know, Wade did fancy my skills. I remember the day after his daddy hired me. I fixed up a suit with a New York City label, not knowing who on earth it was for. When I placed the thread in the needle, I pure shook, racking my brain to remember all the lessons Nettie taught me.

  “The next day, Wade walked in the back to where we girls were and had on that very suit I worked on. He wanted to know who did the job. Thinking something might be the matter with the suit, everybody turned and pointed at me. That woman who runs your mobile-home park was the worst—Trellis stood up and pointed.” Miss Claudia leaned over the machine and stuck her tongue out. “Might as well had put a spotlight on me. Anyway, he just came right over and shook my hand. I was such a timid thing back then. I just looked down at the scraps of material on the floor. And even though he wasn’t a loud talker, he made sure everybody in the room heard him say it was the best-fitting suit he owned.

  “Later he told me he liked my looks and told them to give the suit to me just so he’d have a reason to get better acquainted with me.” She shook her head the same way I did whenever Cher acted silly.

  “Did he ask you out on a date then?” I asked, knowing full well Miss Trellis had already told me the man was married at the time. I don’t know why I asked it. I guess part of me still had some doubts and wondered if I could catch Miss Claudia in a lie
.

  “No, not then. Wade was married, don’t you know.” She tapped the sewing machine with her polished nails and rolled her big hazel eyes up towards me.

  I shrugged my shoulders and felt ashamed that I had doubted this woman.

  “Oh, yeah. He was married to poor Colleen. Her problem was beyond nerves. She had certifiable craziness.” Miss Claudia licked her lips and sighed. “One day she’d hear voices and come running in the store screaming somebody was trying to kill her. The next day she’d walk the streets not knowing where in the world she was. I don’t care what anyone says, Wade was good to her.”

  I nodded my head in agreement, recalling the adulterous scandal Miss Trellis had alluded to.

  “Wade would come in the back and talk to me about all the problems he was having with her. That’s how it started out with us, strictly friends. After all I’d been through, don’t you know. But Wade was different in his ways. He had the softest voice. Nothing sissy, mind you, just caring and honest.” Miss Claudia chuckled and gently patted her hair.

  “Then the next thing I knew he missed an entire month of work. The girls in the store said he had Colleen put away in the crazy house. They talked about how cruel he was to lock her away like that. I just never let on that I knew one way or the other.

  “He didn’t court me for a few months after all that. And even then, it was only a meal or two in the room I rented over the bakery. But one evening when he was leaving, Trellis and that husband of hers were driving by real slow like, snooping for a robbery. They got the scoop all right, just in time to see Wade walk down the side stairs of my room. The next day at work, you’d think I was at a home for the mute. When I sat at my sewing machine and said good morning, they just all looked at me. Only later, I learned those girls were going around telling the whole town what a home wrecker I was and how I had taken advantage of the boss.

  “Those women at the store thought they knew it all. Before Wade locked Colleen up, she ran around the house with his pistol shooting holes in the wall big enough to put your arm through. A few weeks later he came home and found her in the bathtub with her wrists slit. She was half dead when he rang for the doctor. Old Dr. Miller never breathed a word. He just shipped her away by ambulance the next morning. Wade protected that woman as long as she lived. After his divorce and during all our married life he paid for her hospitalization. I kept the payments up until three years ago, when they sent me a letter saying Colleen died of a stroke.”