By the time we were voted in, the country club battle seemed somewhat shallow and the victory a bit hollow. But Aunt Helen stopped by the newspaper to meet me face-to-face and remind me history was being made.
“It takes brave people to stand against a crowd,” she said, holding out her wrinkled hand to shake mine. “I’m proud of you, girl. When you taking me out there for lunch?”
I had little time to go to the club now that I was a member because of the upcoming festivities downtown. I worked with Tom on our Green Forward editorials and invited each of the downtown merchants to write a short guest column about why they liked being part of the heart of Green. I hired a freelance artist to design a cute map of downtown that could run in the paper and be distributed by each business. Tammy went on a building-wide cleaning campaign that was astounding in its results, and Iris Jo organized newspaper tours for the day of the Ice Cream Social.
The event had turned into a fund-raiser to buy sidewalk benches and to replace a few hideous modern streetlights with expensive old-fashioned ones that suited the character of the town better. The occasion had begun to pick up steam, literally, since the July weather was the hottest on record.
Kevin called. “I can do free blood-pressure checks in the lobby of the paper,” she said. Someone from the school board office called. “May we have a table for school registration dates, the Parent-Student Association and other education news?” The high school athletic booster club had leftover spirit ribbons they wanted to sell. The Green Fire Department asked to bring one of its trucks and agreed to shoot fireworks that the chamber had somehow come up with. “We got the art guild to put together a great exhibition,” Rose said, “with some very nice work for sale.”
The 4-H Club volunteered to do a petting zoo, but we wound up turning down that offer. “Have you ever smelled goats in summer?” a member of Green Forward asked.
“Maybe we’ll do something in the fall,” I told the nice student who called. I was probably losing my mind even to suggest the fall event, but he seemed so disappointed about not being part of this.
I ran into Katy several times on the streets downtown, and she had begun to be marginally friendlier. She even introduced me to her friend, Molly, an African American girl I had seen getting on and off the school bus near the paper.
“She rescued me from some bullies at school,” Katy said, poking the other girl in the ribs. Clearly the two had become good friends before school let out for summer. I wondered sometimes if it were easier for Katy to make a new friend than to try to pretend she wasn’t sad around her old friends.
They sat on the loading dock one day, Katy smoking and Molly fiddling with an old CD player. “Hey, girls,” I said. “We need some help, and Tammy said you might be the answer. How about running the snow cone stand during our downtown festivities?”
I tried to assess their interest. “You get to keep half of what you make. The other half goes to the downtown fund.”
Both girls seemed pleased, as though looking for something to shake off their boredom. During the next few days, they were in and out of the paper a half dozen times, planning with Tammy, asking for materials for signs, copy paper for flyers, tape, and scissors and a variety of other things. Their enthusiasm rubbed off on others at The News-Item, and interest in the festivities picked up.
The day of the celebration turned out to be the hottest ever recorded in Green. The newspaper, Eva, and the hardware store had scraped up enough money to buy all the volunteers green T-shirts with “Go Green!” on the front and a list of our downtown association members on the back.
By mid-morning most of the shirts were soaking wet, and volunteers were wiping their faces with the white handkerchiefs still carried by most men in Green.
The homemade ice cream helped. When we tried to count how many dishes of ice cream we served, we would start laughing—“get tickled,” as Tammy said—and have to start over. The best I could figure, we had about three dozen ice cream freezers in action, with a backup supply in the freezers at the Cotton Boll Café. Some of the ice cream cooks were purists, turning up their noses at the suggestion they make anything but vanilla. Others were somewhat famous in Green for their Fresh Peach or Butterfinger ice cream. The unofficial taste tests had an underlying competitiveness.
By the middle of the afternoon, the thermometer at the bank read 103. I worried that people might drop from heat exhaustion, but the heat steered more people into businesses. The churches turned on their lawn sprinklers for the children to play in.
The one person who didn’t seem hot was Eva, who wore white linen slacks and a sleeveless silk shirt and looked as though she were ready for a day of bridge at the club. The only thing I could find wrong with her was a little lipstick on her front tooth.
“My mother told me that ladies don’t sweat,” she said with a laugh. “They glow.”
“Well, that explains it then,” I said. I do not recall ever sweating so much in my life.
Some of the people I had begun to think of as friends made it a point to show up. Pearl and Marcus and most of the members of the Lakeside Neighborhood Association were there, wandering around, meeting and greeting with years of experience. Mr. Marcus ate a Blue Raspberry snow cone, turning his lips and tongue blue and generally distracting from his dignified appearance—one of the funnier things I saw that day.
Aunt Helen arrived in a nursing home van with a half dozen other women and stayed for an hour before it got too hot. “You did it,” she said. “You drew a crowd downtown. Fine work.”
Several of my newspaper regular visitors came and contributed cookies for Tammy to serve in the lobby. Even the usual local politicians showed up, including Mayor Oscar, who had achieved hero status with his retirement announcement, and Major, shaking hands with one arm and wiping his face with the other.
Pastor Jean brought a trio of small boys. “Meet my friends, Miss Lois. They live near the church, and we’re having a special day today because they’re such special fellows.” They looked like urchins from a poor nation, with dirty clothes that were too small and ragged tennis shoes. I bought each of them a snow cone and made sure they got to sit inside the fire truck and sound the siren.
Iris Jo visited nearby with several people at the school tables, including Katy's mother and Craig, the catfish farmer and coach, who smiled and walked over to visit when he saw me. Or was his name Chris?
I was surprised at how happy I was that he had made it.
“Nice to see you again,” I said, holding out my hand. “I owe you a big thank-you for cleaning up my yard months ago. I’m sorry I haven’t stopped by to say thanks.”
His handshake was firm, and his hands calloused. “Good to see you again too. You are one busy lady, aren’t you?” He gestured toward all the activities. “Congratulations on pulling this off.”
“Oh, lots of people did this. Thanks for coming.”
“Iris Jo told me you have been a ball of fire to get this thing going. She said you put it together by sheer force of will. My guys are sure enjoying themselves. They need a little something to do in the summer.” He nodded over to where the football team clowned around at the booster table.
“Craig, I mean Chris.” I stumbled on his name.
“Two first names,” he said. “Happens all the time. No problem.”
“Well, anyway, you gave me directions that day out past my house, and you had your dogs with you. I understood Mannix and Kramer, but Markey?”
“Markey Post, the actress. My brother loved her and named my puppy for her.”
Just then Katy came up to ask where to find more ice. “Hey, coach,” she said. “Want to buy a snow cone?”
The two of them walked off, and I shook my head, amazed at how connected I suddenly felt to so many people.
As I stood there, Rose came up and gave me a big hug. “We’re having our best day ever at the Holey Moley,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
For the rest of the day, I flitted around, thank
ing people for coming and offering discount subscriptions to the paper. I gave away coupons for free classified ads, passed out surveys asking people to tell us what they wanted to read about, and drew names for door prizes.
If I thought I had been in the middle of things on the city desk in Dayton, I was mistaken. I felt like an air-traffic controller who suddenly gets a chance to take a flight after years in the tower. It was as though I had been sitting on the sidelines before I came to Green, a spectator in my own life.
Being on the field was a lot more intense, harder really, but on most days it was more fun.
13
Bayou Lake is low due to the recent drought, but spirits
are high because Billy Ray Cyrus will be here performing
his hits from the early nineties at the Bouef Parish Fair.
—The Green News-Item
One day I dashed into the post office, and my car wouldn’t start five minutes later. “It's the heat,” Tammy said, pulling out jumper cables. “It drains the battery faster than anything.”
Another day I went out to the parking lot and a long crack had appeared on my windshield, from the bottom almost to the top. “It's the heat,” Tom told me. “If you have a little nick in your windshield, it spreads when you have your car shut up on these hot days.”
Despite the lack of rain, the heat settled on you like a damp blanket, with humidity soaring. The only laugh I got that week was when Tom said, “You just have to get used to the humisery.”
Temperatures topping one hundred and humidity to match consumed conversations—from Bud and his agriculture report to the ladies from the garden club who watered their flowerbeds twice a day.
“You’re going to be shocked by the light bill,” Stan said one morning.
“I’m wilting on my route,” Rose said, moving slowly at the Holey Moley. “My new hobby is tracking how hot it gets in my mail truck.”
High school football practice was moved to 5 a.m., and still parents complained. I heard from Iris Jo that Chris had lost lots of his catfish. They died or were too fishy smelling when he took them in to sell.
The lake was so low the beautiful homes at Mossy Bend were sitting up high and dry.
“Having lived through July in Louisiana,” I told Marti on the phone, “I thought I could live through anything. I hadn’t counted on August.”
My yard was cracked and brown, and my flowers barely held on. The hydrangeas that had been so beautiful earlier in the summer wilted and begged for water. When I went out to water, the mosquitoes got after me, apparently the only creatures that flourished in these temperatures. My air conditioner ran nonstop, and I found myself dreading small errands.
Katy proved to be a bright spot during these hot weeks. Since the downtown festival, she had become downright chatty, occasionally popping up in the newspaper parking lot or dropping by my office. Sometimes she would ask me a question about the paper, trying to act as though the answer didn’t matter. At other times, she would tell me something going on in Green, something the kids talked about or that she heard at church.
“You coming back to our church?” she asked one day.
“I don’t know … maybe one of these days when things settle down a little. What brought that up?”
“Pastor Jean asked about you the other day. She saw me and Molly talking to you at the festival, and she asked if we were friends and if I might be able to talk you into visiting the church again. Said we sure could use you.”
I made a joke and changed the subject.
People had not let up on trying to get me to church.
“Have you found a church home yet?” was another of those questions I came to dread. Pastors from the big churches downtown kept saying I was “always welcome.” Mr. Marcus tried to get me to come speak to his Sunday school class at the Morning Star Baptist Church, and the angry pastor from another town put me on his church newsletter mailing list.
To top it off, Marti was steadily dating a seminary student she had met through a friend of a friend and was church shopping in Dayton. “I am determined to find a place where I fit in spiritually,” she said. “I have high hopes for this relationship, and I need to get back to church.”
Going to church was a big deal in Green.
“Never plan any kind of community gathering on Wednesday evenings,” Tammy said one day at the Holey Moley, “because that's prayer meeting night. You can’t stir up a crowd for anything else on a Wednesday.”
Linda agreed as she packaged up Tammy's costume jewelry purchase. “If I skip church, I still put on my church clothes to go out to eat. That way people think I attended services.”
The staff at the paper planned its vacations around vacation Bible school. It beat anything I had ever seen.
Aunt Helen was what was called locally “a church-going woman,” and she often mentioned her faith. Since the festival, we visited every week or so, usually over a meal at the Cotton Boll Café. She asked good questions and listened to my answers, occasionally throwing in a piece of wisdom that immediately put an issue in perspective.
One evening at the diner, I brought up a topic that weighed on me. “I don’t understand why so many things are done in shades of gray in Green. How can people live with the double standard, going to church on Sunday but being so mean during the week?”
“Lois, a lot of things in life aren’t clear-cut,” she said. “People are given choices. That's why God gave us a brain. I think he’d be insulted if we just went along without ever asking questions or trying to figure out a new way of seeing something.”
She poured creamer from a tiny plastic container into her coffee, adamant that caffeine did not keep her awake at night. “Matter of fact, that's one of the things I like about you … you’re always questioning God.”
“I hate to disagree with you, Aunt Helen,” I said, “but for once, you are wrong. I don’t question God. I ignore him—or her or whatever it is.”
Although she was not an overly affectionate woman and one of the few people in Green who did not seem to feel the need to hug, she reached over and touched my hand.
“Sugar, you may not realize it, but you’ve done nothing but question God since the day you got to town. I would bet good money this started before you got here, maybe right about the time your friend died. I’d say God is working in ways you haven’t even begun to imagine.”
Our regular waitress stopped at that moment to offer Helen a special bite of cobbler. “We tried this recipe out today,” she said, ignoring me. “See what you think.”
“Sold!” Helen said, smacking her lips “I’ll be back for more.”
The waitress usually snapped at me and treated Helen like royalty, going back to our first meal there together.
“She's a Yankee, isn’t she?” the woman asked and thrust her order pad in my face. “I might as well tell you right now. We don’t do Miracle Whip, and we don’t do Pepsi.”
Helen helped me make decisions about the paper with her outspoken opinions. I asked her about things I was hesitant to broach with Iris Jo, such as where Lee Roy had come from and his relationship with Major.
“I am not a fan of either of those two,” she said when I visited her room one day. “They spend too much time looking after their own interests and never acting on behalf of anyone else. They’re thicker than thieves, and you need to keep your eyes open.”
“Could you be a bit more specific, please?” I asked. “I mean, do you have any information I can use?”
“I have suspected for years that Lee Roy is stealing from the paper, but I don’t have any proof. There's something going on with him that just does not add up. I’m not sure about my nephews. You’re a smart thing. You’ll figure it out one of these days.”
Then she changed the subject. “I wish folks would quit complaining about the blasted weather. It's always hot in August, and I will never understand why people act every year like it surprises them.”
During our get-togethers, I also talked abo
ut my future.
“I miss the city,” I told her one evening. “There was always something going on there. And I miss the big newsroom with all its hustle and bustle. Even the yelling and the cranky copy desk.”
She gave one of her trademark harrumphs. “Plenty going on here, too,” she said. “But you’ll have to be the one to decide where you’re supposed to be.”
“I admit I’ve enjoyed this more than I ever thought I would,” I said. “I’m even thinking I might want to get on the publisher track somewhere, run one of the big papers. I think I could do it. What do you think?”
“Of course you could do that, but you’ll never get rich working for someone else,” she said, always adamant about my building financial independence. “You need to take advantage of that keen mind of yours. There isn’t some man coming along on a white horse to save you. He’ll probably be driving some broke-down pickup and want you to pay the note on a new one.”
“Do you think the McCullers should have held onto the paper?”
“Goodness gracious, no,” she said, immediately. “Those boys were running that newspaper right into the ground and Green right along with it. You have to have a lot of heart to run a newspaper, a passion of sorts. That's why God sent you down here to us.”
“But, Aunt Helen … ”
She threw up her wrinkled hand. “Shush. No more. You’re the right person for this place. It's the right place for you. Now, let's move on.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“I’m an old woman. I have to speak my mind,” she replied.
One evening we saw Katy and her parents leaving the Cotton Boll as we arrived.
“You need to help that girl,” Helen said. “Rustle up some work for her. She needs something to keep her out of trouble.”
Ashamed that I had not thought of hiring Katy, I ran the idea by Iris Jo, conscious of how the girl's presence might be a reminder of her loss.
Gone to Green (Green (Abingdon Press)) Page 11
