On Wings Of The Morning

by Marie Bostwick

  “Yes, Papaw.” I stooped over the bucket to squeeze the last drops of water from my shirt. The water wasn’t clean enough to give to the chickens but I could pour it over Aunt Ruby’s tomato plants.

  Papaw turned and started walking toward the hog pen, but he only got a few steps before he called to me over his shoulder.

  “Morgan!”

  “Yes, Papaw?”

  “You’re a good son.” He smiled and kept walking.

  I stood up and shook out my shirt. A quick, sharp gust of prairie wind lifted the wet fabric into the air, blowing dust onto the previously clean cloth. I held tight to the sleeves, and the shirt billowed out in front of me like a sail trying to draw me into the breeze, and I wished, for the hundredth time, that I was light enough and free enough to fly.

  2

  Georgia

  The 1920s

  I’ve always been a realist. I had to be, because my mother’s grip on reality was so tenuous. Someone had to be the grown-up in our family, and by the time I was six years old it was clear to me that Cordelia Carter Boudreaux was not putting in an application for the position.

  Cordelia Carter Boudreaux. Lord! How in the world did she ever conjure up a name like that? One thing I’ll say for my mother. She had imagination.

  Delia had no more claim of descent from New Orleans aristocracy than from the crowned heads of Europe, but it wasn’t her style to let something as inconvenient as facts stand in her way. We weren’t from anyplace half as romantic as the French Quarter or even the Bayou, just the cracker part of Florida, far from the beach, that humid, bug-infested part tourists never go to unless they accidentally read the map sideways and get themselves lost.

  I was the child of a moderately well-to-do, married storekeeper named Earl. He came to visit us on Sundays, bringing bags of groceries. There was always a bit of penny candy tucked in among the oranges, grits, and cans of tuna fish. My mother would give me the sack of lemon drops or sticky caramels and tell me to go outside and play on the tire swing in the yard while she and Uncle Earl talked. She made it clear that I was not to come in the house and bother her until she came to get me or she’d take my candy away. I guess the pull of my sweet tooth was stronger than my curiosity because I never did sneak inside to see what Mama and Uncle Earl were “talking” about. When I was older I pretty well figured it out.

  Earl’s store was at least three or four miles from our house. I don’t know how I figured out the directions, but once I walked there all by myself. How old was I? Four, maybe? Earl gave me an orange Nehi and a ride home in his car. He wasn’t mad or anything—in fact, he let me shift the car while he was driving—but he said I shouldn’t wander off so far because I might get lost or come across the path of a mean old gator with a hankering for the tender flesh of little girls. When we got to the house he patted me on the head and told Mama to keep a better eye on me next time.

  He was always nice to me, and other than cheating on his wife, he didn’t seem like a bad man. I’m sure if he’d realized what he was doing before he got himself mixed up with my mother, he’d have thought twice about adultery. Well, he wasn’t alone in that. Before Delia was through there were a lot of men who would have said the same thing. They could have formed a club and held meetings.

  I don’t remember Earl’s last name, though I know it wasn’t Boudreaux. I do remember that one dry, hot summer day—not a Sunday—he showed up at our house, a little shotgun cottage on the edge of town that was in no better or worse repair than the others on our street, and he was mad as hell. I was sitting cross-legged on chipped-paint floorboards of the front porch, cutting Dolly Dingle paper dolls out of an old copy of the Pictorial Review, so intent on my work that I didn’t hear him drive up. Earl stomped hard climbing the porch steps, making my scissors wobble so that poor Dolly lost three fingers on her right hand. I looked up and saw a man’s trouser legs and a pair of brogans covered with Florida dust. They looked like someone had sprinkled them with Hershey’s cocoa powder.

  “Hey, Uncle Earl!” I greeted my father by the only title I knew and waited for him to respond with his usual “Hey, yourself, June Bug!” but he didn’t see me. He wrenched open the screen door with such power that I thought he’d pull it off the hinges. He started hollering for my mother even before he got in the house and let the screen door slam closed behind him.

  “Jean! Jean! Where the hell are you?”

  Her heels made a hurried tap-tapping sound across the wooden floor. She had tiny feet, size fours, which she was very proud of. Even before we moved to the city, my mother wore high heels every day of the week.

  “Why, hello, Earl. What a nice surprise. I didn’t expect to see you until Sunday. I just made some iced tea. Do you have time for a glass?”

  “No! I did not come over here for tea. It’s a workday, Jean. I should be at the store looking after my business, but instead I had to drive over here to ask you a question—have you lost your mind?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about... . ”

  “Don’t give me that. You were over at Annabelle’s dress shop today, and you were tracking Marlene from one end of the store to the other, whispering little comments, holding dresses up to yourself, and wondering out loud, ‘Would Earl like this red better, or the blue?’”

  “Well, I was at Annabelle’s this morning, but I had no idea your wife was there. I was so busy deciding what dress to buy that I must not have noticed her. She’s not that hard to miss, is she? I did finally settle on the blue one. Shall I try it on and show you? It’s a little low-cut in front, but I didn’t think you mind that too much.” Eavesdropping on the front porch, I couldn’t see Mother’s face, but I didn’t have to. Her voice was breathy, and I knew she’d be looking at Earl with her eyes wide open and her chin tucked down, that she’d reach up to stroke his shoulder and bite her lower lip slowly, in that way that always made him swallow hard so you could see his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. It was a move that never failed—until today.

  “Knock it off, Jean!” I heard the scuffle of feet and wondered if he’d shaken off her caressing hand or pushed her away. “You humiliated Marlene today, and now everybody in town is talking about it! She came to the store in tears. I feel bad enough about things without you going and making her a laughingstock. She may not be as pretty as you, but that’s not her fault. I never wanted to hurt her. Tried to spare her feelings,” he mumbled in a voice husky with guilt.

  “I told her I’d quit seeing you two years ago and that I’d joined an Elk’s Lodge all the way over in Bleak Springs and had to drive over for a meeting every Sunday. She believed me, or at least she wanted to believe me, if only to preserve her dignity. Now you’ve gone and made that impossible!”

  “Well, I am so sorry! Forgive me for bursting Miss Marlene’s little bubble of domestic bliss, but you told me some things, too, a lot longer than two years ago. You said you were going to leave her. You promised, Earl!”

  “That was a long time ago, Jean. I was in a fever for you—I was delirious. You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I’d have said anything to have you.” His voice softened a little, with remembering, I suppose, or with wanting. Mama was beautiful, with looks that turned men’s heads and would for a long, long time to come.

  Earl’s voice grew firmer, as though he’d rediscovered his resolve. “But you had to know Marlene would never give me a divorce. She’s too good a Catholic for that. You knew that, Jean. I knew it, too, and you know something else? I don’t want to divorce Marlene. She’s been the best wife she knew how to be for thirty years. She’s put up with a lot from me, and today, when she came in the store crying like her heart was broke ... Well, I was never so ashamed of myself.” He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes I wish I’d never laid eyes on you. It’s over, Jean.”

  “I’m sorry, Sugar Bear. Really. Honey, I just love you so much and get so jealous sometimes that I can’t help myself.” Mama used the wheedling tone and endearments that always broke
down Earl’s defenses, but when he didn’t say anything I could hear an edge of panic creep into her voice. “Now, darlin’, don’t look at me like that. I said I’m sorry. I’ll stay away from Marlene from now on. I promise. I’ll never set foot in Annabelle’s again if that’s what you want.”

  “Jean, it’s not going to work this time. If the June Bug hadn’t come along, I’d have called it off years ago, but I was trying to do the right thing by her. I was going to move ya’ll over to Bleak Springs in the fall, anyway, before Georgia starts school, but that’s still too close. Word is bound to get out, and I don’t want kids teasin’ her ’bout not havin’ a daddy. She’s a sweet little thing. No reason she should suffer just because I’m a damned fool.”

  “But, Earl! Daddy!” Mama pleaded. I heard the sound of paper crumpling and Earl’s cold, businesslike voice.

  “Take this,” he said. “There’s two hundred dollars in that envelope and a check for another eight hundred. If you will leave quietly by the end of the week, you can cash that check when you get wherever you’re going, but if you make the least bit of fuss I’ll stop payment on it. My brother Bob’s a lawyer in Alpharetta. Here’s his card. You write to let him know your address and your bank account number. As long as you don’t contact me, or Marlene, or anyone we know except Bob, I’ll send you seventy-five dollars a month for as long as I live and I’ll leave a little something for the June Bug in my will. But if you ever, ever try to get in touch with me or embarrass my family in any way, that is the last dollar you’ll ever see from me.”

  “But, Earl. Honey ...”

  “Don’t test me on this, Jean. I’ve made up my mind.”

  That’s how my mother and I wound up on a train to Chicago in the summer of 1926, and somewhere on that journey, while the steady thump of wheels on rail ticked off the miles between Florida and Illinois, Mother made herself up.

  She was no longer Jean Carter, petite and pretty cracker, spurned mistress of an aging Florida grocer. Using a handful of French phrases she picked out of a French-English dictionary she’d found abandoned in the parlor car, and her own imagination, she invented Cordelia Carter Boudreaux, a genteel widow in reduced circumstances. Cordelia was the wife of the late Colonel Beauregard Boudreaux, an elderly gentleman of the Big Easy who had met and fallen for the charms of a young Atlanta belle on her post-debut tour of the South. It seems Cordelia admired the colonel but had been shocked when he proposed because she did not love him. However, her parents, people of impeccable southern lineage themselves, pushed for the match. Cordelia had been too malleable to resist, “I was so young, you see. Just sixteen. Mama said I didn’t know what love was, which was, of course, quite true. I suppose it still is.” She blushed and fluttered her lashes nervously delivering this last. The implication was that the colonel, while devoted to his child-bride, was too elderly to fulfill his matrimonial obligations to her. Cordelia was not only beautiful, she was pure in both body and breeding, an irresistible combination.

  “The colonel was a New Orleans Boudreaux, mind you. His family lived in the Quarter for generations. Though I do believe that there was a connection to the low-country Boudreauxes several generations before.” Here Delia would pause to take a ladylike sip from a glass of iced tea before continuing in a thick magnolia accent to whatever adoring male was most recently entangled in her web. “Colonel was an honorary title. Given as a courtesy, of course.”

  “Of course,” the man who did not yet know he was destined to be my next uncle would murmur. He was too far from the Mason-Dixon line to realize that Delia’s put-on patois and manners wouldn’t have passed muster inside the borders of Louisiana and too senseless with lust to care. Delia may not have had much education, but she was no fool when it came to geography. Chicago was the perfect place for her. She could never have pulled her act off in Atlanta or even in Raleigh.

  Our new life in Chicago required my mother to write a new autobiography under a new pen name. On the other hand, I was still Georgia June Carter, but I’d never be known as June Bug again. From the moment we stepped off the train at Union Station in Chicago, I was no longer my mother’s daughter, but her baby sister, whom she’d taken in after our parents died suddenly in a car accident, having previously lost their fortune due to the machinations of an unprincipled business partner. Living with an orphaned sister rather than an illegitimate daughter gave Delia an air of nobility and self-sacrifice that only added to her charm. And it wasn’t a totally unlikely ruse. Delia couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen when she gave birth to me, young enough to be my older sister.

  Still, I don’t completely understand how a Florida cracker with a bastard child and a monthly allowance from her former lover managed to pass herself off as the virgin widow of a southern aristocrat, but she did. Her story was embellished with such convincing details that I guess it just seemed like it had to be true, and, of course, her admirers wanted it to be true. They wanted to believe that they were the first to hold and completely possess that lovely creature. Before much time had passed, I think Delia believed the story herself, and that made all the difference. She was so utterly convincing.

  There is something I want to make clear here. You might suppose that I am bitter toward my mother, that I hate her for living a life of lies. It simply isn’t so. Delia wasn’t a liar so much as a hopeless romantic. Hopeless was the life she was born into—poor, uneducated, with a face and body that made men want her as a woman even while she was still a girl. Romance was what made her take the cards she’d been given and try to bluff her way to a better hand, and it was the part that made her believe her own inventions. Delia had a great and misguided faith in the power of myth.

  She truly did believe each new “uncle” was the prince on the white horse she hoped he would be, that this one really was unattached, or at least that he would soon become so, and that he really was going to marry her—just as soon as he could, whenever that was.

  No, I didn’t hate my mother. If anything, I pitied her a little. She couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t help believing in the power of love and that it was bound to find her eventually and right all life’s wrongs. It might have been better for me if she had been different, but there was no point in wishing that. Fairy tales aside, wishing never changed anything. I figured out young that you had to fend for yourself, but Delia never did. She was who she was, and nothing could change that, but that didn’t mean I had to go along with it.

  In many ways I’m grateful to Delia. Watching the mess she made of her own life made me determined not to make the same mistakes. I would make my own luck—not invent it, imagine it, yoke it to something as ephemeral as love. I would work for it and rely on myself.

  I told you. I am a realist. That’s the only way to get on in life. But it doesn’t hurt to have some luck. The first taste of mine came in August of 1927.

  At least, I’m pretty sure it was August. Delia and I were going on an outing with Bert, a car salesman and the first in a series of Chicago uncles. I know it was summer because I wasn’t in school, which was fine with me.

  Delia had enrolled me in parochial school. It was a quick three-block walk from the apartment we’d rented in a working-class neighborhood of brownstones. Delia said she’d chosen it so she wouldn’t have to worry about me getting home safely on my own if she worked late. There was probably some truth in that, but I think my education and our sudden conversion to Catholicism had as much to do with maintaining her image as a bayou belle as any concerns for my safety. In any case, my first year at St. Margaret’s had been a rocky one. During the first mass of the school year, I failed to genuflect before entering the pew. Not from any disrespect, but because I didn’t know you were supposed to. Until we arrived in the Windy City we’d been Baptists, when we’d gone to church at all, which wasn’t often. I tried to explain, but Sister Mary Patrick didn’t believe me.

  “Don’t give me any of your cheek, Georgia Carter. Shame on you! Telling such lies about your own sister. And
her so good to take you into her home, providing for you out of what little she has left from her dear husband’s estate after the lawyers cheated her out of the bulk of it. You’ll stay inside at recess to say the rosary and after school to clean the blackboards.” As you can imagine, things didn’t get any better for me when I tried to explain that I didn’t know the rosary. It was not an auspicious beginning to my academic career.

  So, even though the August heat was thick enough to make the brim on Delia’s hat curl and my legs stick sweatily to the leather rumble seat, I was happy—happy to be out of school, happy to be riding in Uncle Bert’s new roadster, happy to be headed out to Midway Airport with the rest of the crowds, happy and excited because I was going to see the most famous man in America and maybe the world—Charles Lindbergh, at the Chicago stop on his forty-eight-state victory tour!

  After his groundbreaking transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, the papers were full of Lindbergh and aviation. If there was other news in the world, no one cared. Every kid on our block was practically vibrating with anticipation because the Lone Eagle was coming to our city. I had never seen an airplane except in still photographs and newsreels, but that was about to change. I was one of the lucky ones who were actually going to see him because I had access to transportation. Bert had taken the day off work and borrowed a car from the dealership so he could drive us to Midway in style. He seemed a little smarmy to me, but I was willing to overlook that for the time being.

  We left early because we wanted to find a good spot where we’d be sure to see Lindbergh. So did everybody else. We were stuck in traffic, with the midwestern sun sweltering down on us. Bert offered to put the top up, but Delia demurred. “That’s all right. I imagine it would be even hotter with the sun beating on that black fabric. At least this way we can catch the breeze when it passes. But, of course, you know best, Bert.” Delia smiled and laid a gloved hand on Bert’s forearm. “If you want to put up the top, I’m sure that will be just fine with me.”