Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Charles tripped Earl on the school stairs and sent him tumbling head over heels through the neatly marching ranks of children. Earl began carrying a pocketknife, secretly. Charles kept a short piece of pipe in his lunch box.

  He was suspended for a week. Mattie put him to work housecleaning. He scrubbed floors, washed windows, shook out curtains, polished the furniture with beeswax and the kitchen range with blacking. In the evenings he did his homework and read out loud from Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Mattie grumbled and complained. Mr. Varnado smiled reminiscently. “Boys look for trouble, my dear. I remember one Saturday night we put John Price’s wagon on the very top of the old town hall.”

  “You did?”

  “We did. Took it apart, carried it up the steps, and put it back together on the roof. Price was so mad he couldn’t hardly talk.”

  Charles shook his head with silent admiration.

  “Well,” Mr. Varnado said, “there were four of us and it was a small wagon.”

  Months and years passed smoothly in a jumble of things.

  Buck wrote now and then, short letters that Mattie propped up on the table for them all to read. He was fine, he said, he liked army life. He liked travelling and seeing all different places. Right now he was in Mexico. It was a terrible country, where people were poorer than niggers at home.

  Charles got a slingshot, large and perfectly balanced, leather-wrapped fork and handle; Mr. Varnado taught him to use it.…Nancy, now tall as he, walked to school with him every day.…His father, Hiram, had another son, and his stepmother, Barbara, died of childbed fever. Caleb’s wife nursed that baby with her own; they were only a month apart.

  Charles finished grammar school and went on to Boys’ High School.…A war began and Courthouse Square blossomed in flags and platforms and speakers and parades. The governor came to town and gave a speech about patriotic duty.

  Buck, now a sergeant of artillery, wrote from France. The people are friendly, he said, especially the girls; the farms are pretty but it rains a lot.

  Mattie opened a business of her own—on Laurel Street, just around the corner from the big Methodist church. It had been Schulman’s Bakery, but the German owners moved away with the outbreak of war. Mattie rented the building, its ovens and equipment still in place. She made the front a tearoom, bright and cheerful, with small iron tables and plants hanging in the windows and flower pictures on the walls. At the bakery counters she sold bread and rolls and cakes and cookies and jams and jellies and, by special order, tea sandwiches cut in fancy shapes. Nancy helped every day after school and all day Saturday. The place was that crowded.

  The war ended, banners and flags disappeared, uniforms vanished.…Buck moved to Fort Benning, in Georgia. The President himself had come to watch them parade, he wrote.

  Hiram Tucker died, sat down in his barn one evening and never got up again.

  Charles and Nancy and Mattie and Mr. Varnado went to the funeral. Buck was there, stiff and straight in his uniform. “I got special emergency leave,” he said.

  Samuel and his wife, Martha, came too. “Tough old bastard.” Samuel took a long drink from the bottle he had brought. “I come to be sure he really is going underground.”

  Charles noticed that his mother’s grave had sunk over the years, though his grandfather’s hadn’t. It must, he thought, be different kinds of earth.

  As they were getting ready to leave, Caleb touched Charles’s arm. “I’m fixing to keep Pa’s boys; Odell wants them like her own. You don’t have to worry none.”

  Charles nodded. That would make ten children for Caleb. Luckily eight were boys and could work on the farm. For a while anyway.

  “There’s something else you got to know,” Caleb said in his plodding serious way. “Pa left the farm to me. It’s free and clear and no debts. I sure hope that don’t upset you none.”

  “No.” Charles hunted for the right words. “I got no claim here.” He looked at the crowd of people in the churchyard, all of them related to him, all of them strangers. “Blood just ain’t enough.”

  Charles finished Boys’ High School and went to work as a bookkeeper at McClellan’s Department Store on Main Street.…Buck was transferred to Camp Martin in New Orleans.…Mr. Varnado retired from the railroad and spent his days at the drugstore with his brother. They bought a car. Mattie learned to drive and made her own deliveries. She hung small painted signs on both doors: DELUXE CATERERS. (She boasted that she did all the fancy tea parties in town.) On sunny Sundays Charles and Mr. Varnado loaded the car with their fishing rods and gear and drove the new paved road to Clear Lake. They’d spend the whole day there—no reason to hurry back; Mattie and Nancy would go to Sunday school, then church, then Christian Endeavor.

  “I never cared much for church,” Charles said.

  “Too much noise,” Mr. Varnado said.

  “Churches are real noisy places.”

  Mr. Varnado watched his cork bob gently as a fish nibbled and swam away. “After all those years on the trains, you wouldn’t think noise would bother me.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Charles agreed.

  “But I just plain don’t like noise now,” Mr. Varnado said, “and I don’t much like people anymore. After I dealt with people all my life on the trains—it makes you wonder.”

  Mr. Varnado handed his rod to Charles while he took a small metal flask from his inside coat pocket, the flask that had comforted him on so many long cold rides while the noisy rails sang in his ears. He took a swallow, passed it to Charles, who had a sip just to be companionable.

  On winter Sundays when the fishing ponds were frozen, Charles and Mr. Varnado sat in the parlor and listened to records on the gramophone. Sometimes Mr. Varnado played the piano and they sang together. Mr. Varnado had a pleasant light tenor, Charles a solid baritone.

  There was another letter from Buck—the longest one he’d ever written. He’d caught the flu at Camp Martin and almost died, but he didn’t. He’d left the army and become a policeman. He’d gotten married too: her name was Stella Arnaud. They were living with her family and looking for a place of their own. And, he said, they must all visit him anytime they came to New Orleans.

  Mattie laughed at that, but Mr. Varnado said that New Orleans wasn’t really so far, not with his lifetime pass on the railroads. He’d been to New Orleans a few times and wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Charles said that he would go with him.

  Charles was promoted to assistant head bookkeeper the same June Nancy graduated from high school and married Russell Grayson, who was assistant cashier at the County National Bank. The wedding was in the front parlor: Mr. Varnado gave the bride away. Mattie made hundreds of sandwiches and a tall white wedding cake and gallons of iced tea and strawberry punch with sliced berries in it. There was a record player on the front porch and extra chairs (borrowed from the church) placed carefully on the new-cut grass of the yard. The women sat there, talking and laughing while children in their Sunday clothes played careful games. All the men crowded around the washhouse, where half a dozen bottles of good bootleg were hidden in the tubs. Mr. Varnado had proofed each bottle himself—carefully shaking, then watching the bead rise.

  Mattie said, “Charles, there is somebody here I want you to meet. She’s a lovely girl. She and her parents come to church almost every week.”

  “Sure,” Charles said. He’d learned not to argue with his sister.

  “Her father’s manager of Aikens Grove.”

  Charles whistled. “Well how about that.”

  “He says it’s a beautiful place.”

  “It sure ought to be,” Charles said, “considering the amount of money gone into it these last ten years.”

  The money belonged to Mr. William Howell Wilson, and he’d decided to use it to restore Aikens Grove. His architects and researchers fanned out across the county, searching the memories of old people, trying to reconstruct the burned-out shell exactly as it had been. The house he finally built stood on the exact same spo
t, used the exact same foundations.

  People knew little about him, only that he was from Chicago, kept to himself, and lived quietly except for two large parties—at Christmas and at Midsummer’s Night. For these occasions, Chicago caterers brought their own staff to prepare and serve their own food. The bands came from New Orleans. Special trains brought in the guests.

  Mattie said, “Living way out there she doesn’t get to meet many young people. Come on now. I’ll introduce you.”

  Cora Stanford was sitting on the swing between the mulberry trees. The ripe fruits were falling all around her, spraying purple juice.

  “You’re sitting in a bad spot,” Charles said. “Mulberry stain won’t ever come out.”

  “Let’s go have a cup of punch then. Will you put some whiskey in mine? I’m not supposed to go near the washhouse.”

  Charles began a second job, a night job. Four or five times a week he drove bootleg. He’d gotten the job through his brother Samuel, now a mechanic at the garage in Sellers Crossing. They rebuilt cars for liquor runners, enlarging trunks, making compartments under seats, adding heavy springs so that the cars wouldn’t sag and bottom when they were loaded. They also installed big new engines. Samuel bragged that their cars could outrun anything.

  Charles was always afraid—of the empty roads, of the dark turns and tree cover where police could hide—but the job paid well, ten times his bookkeeper’s salary. He kept the cash in small Mason jars carefully fitted with new rubber rings and buried in the rows of tomatoes in the garden.

  Mr. Varnado said, “I don’t think I’ll weed the garden this year, Charles. Will you take care of it?”

  Charles smiled at the tall stooped old man who knew exactly what was growing in his tomatoes. “I’ll do it evenings after work. Yes, sir.”

  And he thought: I’m a midnight gardener. With secret out-of-sight midnight crops. Or a miner. With underground lodes and veins of gold.

  He was sleepy all the time, bone tired, but he was never late for work, nodding and smiling and lifting his hat as he walked through the store. Two or three times a day he rested his chin on his hand, pretended to be studying his ledger, and took a quick nap, eyes wide open.

  At the six o’clock bell, he filed away invoices, cleared his desk. Mr. Adams, the head bookkeeper, held up one finger, nodding at him.

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said.

  They got the last of the day’s receipts from the registers, totalled and bundled them. Mr. Adams took a long-barrelled revolver from his desk drawer, handed it to Charles, who slipped it into his coat. It had no hammer, so it went in smoothly. Mr. Adams picked up the bag and, shoulder to shoulder, they crossed the street to the side door of the County National Bank.

  Charles handed the gun back to Mr. Adams, “Good night, sir.”

  And he was off to his second job; his midnight garden grew.

  He thought occasionally of Cora Stanford. When he could, he borrowed the car on Sunday and drove to the manager’s house at Aikens Grove to see her. They sat under the deep shade of the big fig trees, in the musty-smelling air under the wide leaves, and drank lemonade and iced tea and ate small sugar-dusted cookies that sifted white across the front of his coat and his tie. When the weather turned cold, they sat inside by the fire and ate fruitcake and chicken sandwiches and cherry bounce. He sent her a lacy handkerchief for Christmas. And a lacy pink-and-white valentine.

  He bought a book, white leather and gilt-edged—Thoughts for Each Lovely Day—and gave it to her on her birthday with a note inside: Will you marry me?

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

  They were married two months later. He took his money from the Mason jars, counted it—just over five thousand dollars. He bought a car and a honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls; the rest he put in the bank.

  Cora’s father offered him the job of assistant manager at Aikens Grove Plantation. “You know bookkeeping and you know farming. You’ll be making twice the money. And Cora will love it.”

  Charles shook his head. “I can keep accounts all right, and I was raised on a farm. But not a farm like this one.”

  Mr. Stanford grinned. “This ain’t a farm, this is an enterprise. Or an experiment. Or whatever Mr. Wilson wants it to be.”

  “I never even seen him in town,” Charles said.

  “He never goes. He was gassed in the war, so his lungs are bad. And he’s worried about infections. But you’ll see him out here. He really keeps his eye on the place.”

  “I’d have to learn a lot of things all over again,” Charles said slowly.

  “He was real pleased when I told him your grandma worked as a governess on the old place.”

  “Why would he care about that? It wasn’t even his family owned it then.”

  “Continuity, he said. He likes continuity.”

  “He likes what?”

  “It don’t matter. He’s got peculiar ways, that’s all. Like the cotton. For the past two, three years we been planting way too much cotton and losing money on it. But he won’t hear of cutting back. He says cotton gives work to the people around here and it’s his duty to do that.”

  Charles asked, startled, “His duty?”

  “Sometimes,” Mr. Stanford said quietly, “I think he’s back in slave days. He’s the master looking out for his people. But don’t let that put you off. He’s a good man to work for.”

  The familiar smells of new-broken land, of animals and fodder and miles of green leaves, brought a small aching longing to Charles. “I almost forgot what this was like,” he said truthfully. “Makes me feel like I’m eight years old again.”

  “You coming to work?”

  “I am,” Charles said.

  TEN years later, in 1934, Charles Tucker was manager of Aikens Grove. (Cora’s parents were dead, killed in a collision with a logging truck one foggy morning three years past.)

  The plantation had grown larger, its operations more varied. Mr. William Howell Wilson was turning Aikens Grove into a spectacular farm, something from a picture book or a dream, a world of perfection and wonder and delight.

  There was still cotton; the summer fields still turned white, and the roads leading to the gin still were edged by a thick rim of cotton frost. There were wide fields of corn and peanuts and soybeans and sorghum. And timberlands where fast-growing pulp pines stood in neat precisely straight rows, black matchsticks stretching for a mile over needle-strewn grass-bare ground. There were pastures of fescue and clover and rye, neatly fenced, dotted with feeding stations and water troughs, crisscrossed by redirected streams, sprinkled with trees for shade on a hot day. There were beef cattle, Angus and Hereford, and a dairy herd (cheeses marketed under the plantation’s own label), and a model pig farm (country ham and bacon sold through specialty groceries across the country).

  And the horses, all the horses. The pair of Percherons—useless young monsters, the farm was entirely mechanized—who paraded once a year in the town’s Fourth of July parade. Nine Arabians in their brand-new barn, four mares in foal with shining rounded bellies. Six sleek dark Tennessee Walking horses, whose gait was so smooth the rider never tired. The Shetland ponies, matched strawberry roans, bad tempered and lovely.

  There were acres of side-by-side greenhouses of orange and grapefruit and kumquats. There was an experimental nursery for camellias, each new hybrid named for a famous battle in France. There were apple orchards and peach orchards. And, close to the main house, a special walled garden where an Italian gardener from New Jersey espaliered pears to the bricks and grafted different varieties of fruit on a single tree.

  Mr. Wilson had grown thinner over the years; his blond hair was completely gray. His cheeks burned with high flushed color; his blue eyes still seemed to be staring into the far distance. And he still coughed—a quiet hacking he scarcely seemed to notice, it had become so much a part of him—and every morning he folded half a dozen clean handkerchiefs into his pockets. He’d built a large screened sleeping porch across the front of th
e main house, at roof level, reached by a spiraling ship’s ladder. He had a feather bed and layers of blankets, and he slept there, no matter the temperature. He spent his mornings on horseback—he never seemed to cough while he rode—inspecting every corner of his property, picking his way across razorback ridges, jumping pasture fences, walking along the gravelly bottoms of shallow creeks. As he went, he wrote his observations in a small notebook, filing them neatly by subject as soon as he got home. He spent late afternoons on the telephone. (He talked to people all around the world, Bakersfield telephone operators said.) Evenings he read in the library or played the piano or listened to the gramophone. His collection of record albums filled one whole wall. (The maids were not allowed to touch them; the butler himself dusted them every week.) Sometimes he’d spend hours peering at the stars through a telescope, and sometimes he worked at his desk. He was writing an analysis of the military tactics of the American Expeditionary Force in France. He wrote by hand, carefully, slowly. In the morning his secretary typed what he had done and gave it back to him. She also took dictation, typed letters, ordered books from London and records from New York. (She was Myrtle Tucker, Caleb’s oldest daughter, who’d finished secretarial school in Bakersfield.)

  Mr. Wilson lived alone with few visitors. His wife came every December and stayed until the new year; his sister and her husband came in May for a few weeks. Every year the governor—whoever he was, whatever party he represented—had lunch alone with Mr. Wilson at the long mahogany dining table. Every few months Senator Smithers, who’d been in Washington for twenty years, came for cocktails. Once, even, during a campaign, he brought the Vice President with him. (Their staffs waited at the cars. Mr. Wilson would not allow so many strangers inside his house.) There was an Episcopal bishop from Charleston who came for tea the first week of Advent. A Catholic monsignor in red-piped cassock always came the week after Easter.