by Nancy Bell
“For one thing, there were four cafés downtown and a shoeshine parlor and a newsstand.”
“No foolin’?”
“No foolin’. And every Saturday night, the stores stayed open until ten o’clock so that all the farmers could come into town to do their business.”
“Way cool.” If anybody had asked me, I would have said the town was quieter in the olden days, not livelier.
“Not only that, we had two picture shows on the square— two! One was old and dirty and showed mostly cowboy movies and serials, while the other, which was just a little nicer, showed the first-run movies. Every Sunday afternoon, my friends and I would wear our church dresses to the matinee.”
“You dressed up to go to the movies?”
“Well, yes, but only on Sundays. That’s the way everybody did things back then. And the ladies all wore hats and gloves even if they were just going to the grocery store. Everything was more formal in those days.”
“That’s lame.”
“It’s just the way things were. People set a greater store on their reputation in the community and who their family was than how kind they were or how honorable.” Biggie looked out the window for a long time until I began to get uncomfortable. I wondered why she was telling me all this.
“What kind of movies did they show?”
“Oh, you know. You’ve seen old movies on television. When I was a child the war was on, and we mostly saw movies about that. People were very patriotic.”
“I’ve heard that word, but I’m not real sure I know what it means.”
“It means they talked a lot about how great our country was— and how bad our enemies were. We had to, you know, support our soldiers in the war. We grew Victory Gardens in our backyards and saved tinfoil and cooking fat for the war effort. And the ladies all knitted socks and gloves for the soldiers. My daddy served on the draft board.”
“Well the town sounds neat. I wish it was still that way— except for the dressing up part. The war sounds cool.”
“The war wasn’t cool at all. People were killed, J.R. And there were other bad things as well.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, the colored people all had to sit in the balcony when they went to the picture show— and they couldn’t go in any of the cafés on the square.”
“Why?”
“That’s just the way things were in those days. And something else, you know that water fountain on the courthouse lawn?”
I nodded. “It doesn’t work anymore.”
“I know, but that’s not the point. The point is there used to be two there, and they were marked with signs that said COLORED and WHITES. They tore the colored fountain down sometime in the seventies.”
“Yeah, I know all about segregation. We studied civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr. in school. I know one thing, I’d a darn sight rather drink after Willie Mae than Cooter McNutt.” Cooter McNutt lives in a cabin out on the banks of the creek. When he’s in town, you can smell him coming a block away.
“I doubt if you know all about it. You had to be there. Someday, I’ll tell you more. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about right now. Today we’re going to talk about me. Did you know my father was once mayor of Job’s Crossing?”
“No, ma’am. I thought your daddy was a farmer like Mr. Sontag. Didn’t you grow up out on the farm?”
“Where did you get that idea, honey?” Biggie patted my knee.
“Because you’re all the time talking about what fun you had out in the country.”
“J.R., it was my grandparents who lived on the farm. I did spend a lot of time out there, but I grew up in this very house.” She looked at the crepe myrtle tree covered with pink blooms outside my window. “In fact, this was my room. I used to look out at Ruby Muckleroy’s house from this very window. She was Ruby Morris then, and we grew up together. Now you can’t see the house anymore because this tree has grown so much. I remember when my daddy planted it here. It wasn’t more than six feet tall….”
She continued to look out the window not saying anything. Finally, I cleared my throat, and she looked at me like she’d just come back from somewhere far away.
“When I entered high school the war had been over for a number of years, but the veterans, those who made it through, were still coming home. Some had signed up for extra hitches in the service; some were injured and had to stay in service until their wounds healed. A few, those who quit school to join up, tried to go back to high school, but that never worked very well. How can you go by high school rules when you’ve seen people die on the battlefield?”
I shrugged my shoulders, wondering what this had to do with her wanting me to go out to that ranch with her.
“By the time I was a sophomore, most of the veterans had drifted away to go to college on the G.I. Bill or to take jobs at the steel mill. One stayed though.” She smiled. “A good-looking fellow with coal black hair and light blue eyes. He had one little curl that kept falling down over his forehead no matter how much he combed it back with the little black comb he kept in his shirt pocket.” She looked out the window some more then shook herself and spoke again. “He seemed so glamorous to all us girls. Most everybody had a crush on him at one time or another, even though our mothers had told us to steer clear of him. They didn’t need to worry. He didn’t pay any attention to us at all. I guess we seemed like babies to him. Some said he was dating a girl from Center Point.”
“Biggie, Monica’s going to be here pretty soon.” I was hoping to speed this story up. Biggie ignored that remark.
“I had always been something of a tomboy, so I never paid as much attention to him as the other girls did. I was too interested in fishing and hunting and, most especially, horseback riding with my grandpa out on the farm. Then, between my sophomore and junior year, a funny thing happened.”
“What, Biggie?” I was hoping this story was going to get interesting again.
“My skinny little body that had always been mostly elbows and knees changed. I began to get curves. Mama said I was a late bloomer, and I guess I was. Suddenly, I started thinking there might be more to life than horses. I began to pay more attention to my clothes and my hair. I went to the dime store and bought a powder compact, some Maybelline mascara, and a tube of bright orange Tangee lipstick.” She smiled, thinking about herself at that age. “I wanted people to notice how I looked; but when they did notice, I squirmed and blushed.”
Now I was really getting bored. I snuck a look at the clock beside the bed. Only fifteen minutes had passed since Biggie started this story. She saw me, of course.
“I know, honey. All this must seem pretty dull to you, but you have to know. I never thought you would, but now… well, circumstances have changed.” She shifted to a more comfortable position on the bed. “That’s when the boys started treating me differently. Where before we had played ball together and ridden our bikes out to the creek and climbed trees, now they wanted to ask me out on dates. And I liked it— a lot. I learned to dance the latest dances and to toss my head and flirt.”
I tried to imagine Biggie flirting, but it was impossible.
“One night our crowd had gone as a group to the state park. The moon shone down on the dance pavilion. We were having a great time until someone played ‘Star-dust’ on the jukebox.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a song, J.R. I was sitting outside watching the moon’s reflection in the lake when I heard this voice asking me to dance. I turned around and it was him, the veteran. I hadn’t even known he was there that night.” She closed her eyes and continued to speak. “We danced that number, then another and another. I fit just right in his arms, and even though I wasn’t such a good dancer, I could follow him perfectly.”
I wanted to get up and run out of there. Why was Biggie telling me this?
“Finally my friends got ready to leave,” she continued. “He asked me to stay with him, said he’d take me home when I was ready. I stayed
even though I knew Papa would be furious if he found out. Papa needn’t have worried. That boy was a perfect gentleman, taking my arm when we left the dance floor (the other boys just walked away and left you standing there), offering to buy me a Coke, pulling a chair out for me to sit down in. That night I fell in love, honey.”
“Biggie, do I need to know all this?” I was getting more embarrassed by the minute.
She reached forward and squeezed my ankle. “J.R., you do. Now, you need to be patient. I’ll try to make it shorter.” She took a deep breath. “After that, we saw each other every chance we got. Of course, I had to sneak around. My daddy would have had a conniption fit. By the time this all happened, the young man had left high school and taken a temporary job at Mr. Brown’s garage. He had plans to take a test to finish high school then go on to college and study mechanical engineering. He loved cars, but he didn’t want to be a mechanic for the rest of his life.” She smiled. “I saw him all that spring. We would slip off and go to the movies at Center Point or Gilmer. Sometimes he would take me over to Gladewater to the honky-tonks where we would dance. I felt so grown-up. He would have maybe one beer, but he never let me drink.”
“And nobody found out?”
“The other kids knew, of course. The girls all thought it was great and used to cover for me, but the boys were different. They teased me a lot, and once I found a nasty slur written on my locker at school.”
“Why?”
“Because they were jealous, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe they thought I was, you know, having relations with him. I wasn’t, though. That came later.”
“Biggie!”
“My stars, J.R., you hear worse than this on TV every day!”
“I know, Biggie, but you’re my grandmother. Give me a break!”
“Just be quiet and listen. In June, he got a letter saying he had been accepted to Texas A&M in the engineering department. I was glad for him but heartbroken that he would be leaving town. How I was going to miss him! I even thought of running away and finding a job in College Station just to be near him.”
“Biggie! That was crazy!”
“I know. It was foolish, but someday, honey, you’ll know how it feels to be in love for the very first time.”
“Not me. I don’t even think about girls.”
She gave me a look then continued. “One night after we’d been to a movie, he asked me to marry him— later, he said, after he finished college. Well, when you’re sixteen, four years is a lifetime. I burst into tears and said I couldn’t wait that long. I was young and in love, and I wanted to be with him right then. We talked for hours that night. He tried to convince me that we could wait, that he could come back for visits, maybe even bring my parents around. I wasn’t having any of that. I told him it was now or never, that I wouldn’t wait for him.”
“I guess you haven’t changed very much, huh, Biggie?”
She smiled. “Well, I’ve always been hardheaded. Anyway, finally he agreed. But he said he wouldn’t take me with him unless we got married.”
“Biggie, even I know you can’t get married when you’re sixteen.”
“At that time you could in Arkansas. One day, we slipped off to Texarkana and got a marriage license. The next week, we were married by a justice of the peace. We went to Paris for our honeymoon— Paris, Texas!”
“And your parents didn’t know?” I sneaked another peek at the clock. It was almost two.
“No. I had told them I was spending the night with a friend.”
“So what did they say when you got back?”
“They never found out. After the honeymoon, I went back home and slept in my room just like before.”
I looked around at my room with its solid green walls and sports posters and imagined what it must have been like when Biggie was a girl. In my mind, I saw flowered wallpaper— maybe ruffled curtains and a lace bedspread. I sighed and wondered if this room would ever feel the same to me again.
“Finally,” she continued, “it was time for him to leave, and I was determined to go along. I packed my bags one night and slipped out of the house while Mama and Daddy slept.”
“So what happened? Did you move to College Station?”
“Yes— for four days. That’s how long it took my daddy to find me and bring me back. He threatened the boy with jail if he ever tried to see me again, and he could have made it stick because I was a minor.”
“And that was it? You just came back home?”
“Almost. Daddy made me get divorced from him. I cried myself to sleep every night— wouldn’t come out of my room for weeks. And I couldn’t hold down food anymore. I lost so much weight, my parents threatened to put me in the hospital and have me fed by a tube. My parents arranged a marriage for me to Albert Wooten. He was the son of friends of theirs. I had always liked Albert, just not in that way, doncha know.”
“Why, Biggie? Why’d they have to go and do that?”
“There was reason enough.”
“And Albert? He agreed— just like that?”
“Albert wasn’t a very forceful person, if you know what I mean. And he had always liked me a lot. I felt trapped, so I just gave in. I was just a kid, and I didn’t see how I had any choice. But I promised myself then and there that nobody would ever force me to do anything against my will again— and they never have. We had a big church wedding and seven months later your daddy was born.”
“Biggie! You mean…”
“That’s right, honey. Your daddy was the child of the man I loved, the veteran, not Albert. Albert knew, of course, but he never threw it up to me. He was a quiet man, a good provider. He never interfered with anything I wanted to do— and he raised your daddy like his own. In the end I came to love him, but in a different way, if you know what I mean.”
“When did Albert die?”
She looked at me. “Die? Albert didn’t die as far as I know. One day, after your daddy grew up, he just got into his car and drove out of town. He left a piece of paper giving everything he owned to me— except one thousand dollars and the car he drove off in.” She smiled. “I never even missed him. Isn’t that funny? He used to send me postcards from places like Omaha and Boston, and he’d send money when he could. But after a time, the cards and letters stopped, and I never heard from him again.”
I shook my head. “I always thought my granddaddy died. Whatever happened to the first guy?”
“Oh, I never saw him either, and finally the hurt healed. Once in a while, word would trickle back to town about something he had done. You see he became quite famous. He turned his love of cars into a career, first as a race car driver then later as a designer of new car prototypes.”
I sat for a long time thinking about what Biggie had told me. “Wait a minute, Biggie. That guy, the man at the fat farm, they said he was a driver. Was he the veteran?”
“Yes, honey, Rex Barnwell is the veteran. That’s why I had to tell you this story. Others know, and before long somebody would have told you. I wanted it to come from me.”
“Biggie! That means Rex Barnwell is my granddaddy. Right?”
“Right. But he doesn’t know it. Now may be the time for him to find out.” She leaned over and gave me a hug. “Okay?”
I didn’t answer.
“Okay?”
“I guess. What difference does it make anyway? He doesn’t know me, and I don’t know him. But, Biggie, why are you so set on me going out there if he doesn’t even know you had his baby?”
“I’m not sure myself,” she said. “Something just tells me you two need to meet. Oops, there goes the doorbell. That must be Monica.”
I slid off the bed and headed for the door. I had my hand on the doorknob when Biggie called my name.
“Yes’m?”
“We don’t have to ever talk about this again if you don’t want to.”
I nodded. That was fine with me. I’d never wanted to talk about it in the first place.
5
What’s wrong wit
h you? You look like you just swallowed a frog.” Monica was dressed in camouflage pants and a tee shirt. She had her baseball capon backward.
“Worse than that,” I said, “but I can’t tell you. It’s a Family Secret.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, heading for the kitchen. “What’s Willie Mae making? It smells good!”
I followed her out to the kitchen where we found Willie Mae dropping spoonfuls of oatmeal cookie dough packed with raisins and pecans on a cookie sheet. Our noses told us a batch was already baking in the oven.
“Ooo-wee, Willie Mae, you’re the best cook in the whole wide world,” Monica said, sidling up to Willie Mae. “Can I have some raw dough?”
“It’ll give you worms,” Willie Mae said, hiding a smile. She likes Monica. “Set yourselves down at the table and hold your horses. I’ll have you some ready directly.”
We were just getting ready to plow into hot cookies and cold sweet milk when Biggie came down the backstairs. She was dressed in her new black pantsuit with a yellow, black, and white scarf. She even had on a pair of black, open-toed shoes.
“Hey, Miss Biggie, you look good enough to eat,” Monica said around a mouthful of cookie.
“We’re all invited to tea out at the Barnwell ranch,” Biggie said. “Willie Mae, do you know where Rosebud went?”
“Last time I looked, he was washing the car.” Willie Mae slid another pan of cookies into the oven. “What you want with him?”
“I want him to drive,” she said. “We’re taking Julia and Ruby along with us.”
“Biggie,” I said, “Prissy is lost.”
“Lost? How?” Biggie bit into a chewy cookie.
“She’s just disappeared. I’ve looked all over for her. Mrs. Moody’s gonna kill me.”
“She sure is.” Monica drained her milk glass. “I’ve seen how she takes on over that dumb dog.”
“You’re pretty goofy over your dog,” I said.
“Buster? Well, sure. He’s an outstanding dog. Remember when he rescued us from the bottomless pit on Frontier Day that time? If it wasn’t for Buster barking so much, we’d still be down there.”
