“Thank you, Francie,” she said, plucking a shrimp wheel off the tray, then resting it on a napkin on her palm.
I went to Betty Jo Parnell’s mama next. She was deep in conversation, with her back to me. There wasn’t room to get around her. Besides, the lady she was talking to, Miss Rivers, was bound to notice me. Then I could offer them both the tray.
“He knocked him out stone-cold, don’t you know,” Mrs. Parnell said.
“I hope they catch that boy soon.”
“Oh, they will, I’m sure. My Henry is on it and they’ve enlisted some men up in Benson, too.” She took a sip of punch. “Oh, he’ll be caught. It’s just a matter of when.”
Miss Rivers noticed me then and gave Mrs. Parnell a little warning nod. She whirled around, all bright smiles, and said, “Well, don’t mind if I do.” She took a napkin and two shrimp wheels, stacking one on top of the other.
“I’ma need your mama a week from Saturday, Francie,” Miss Rivers said. “Please tell her.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I made my way to the next cluster of white ladies, with my ears tuned to talk of Jesse. By the time I got back to the kitchen with the empty tray, there was a pain in my heart. Mama had a sandwich ready for me and I ate it standing at the kitchen counter, though with every bite I kept thinking: through the door are the wives of men who might think nothing of killing Jesse if they so decided. I was serving them finger food and grinning and being polite. I hated this. I wished I was on my train, leaving this place forever.
Mrs. Grace poked her head in the door just then to tell me to take a tray of shrimp wheels down to Holly and her guests.
With the heavy tray, I made my way down the slope. Betty Jo Parnell, her plump body squeezed into her shirred-bodiced sundress, took a slow sip of her tea. Selma Sutter, the richest of the group—her father owned Sutter Pulp Mill down near the river and half the land of the county, it seemed—had her brow furrowed over her cards. Eva May Holland, the beauty of the group, was watching Selma closely, her lips holding back a tiny smile.
A plan formed in my mind and with every step it took shape. With every step I grew excited by its perfection. It would work, God willing, if I did it just right. Did it in such a way that I could not be blamed. All I had to do was act stupid—act just the way they expected.
“Oh—Mama’s shrimp wheels,” said Holly Grace when I reached them. “Listen, you all, these are an absolute delight. Wait until you taste them.”
“Two for each,” I said, all sweetness and light.
Holly gave a little snort, looked over at Selma like I was some ninny, and said, “We’ll certainly have as many as we like.” She placed first one on her napkin, then another, then started to reach for a third. But I moved the tray to the side before she could do it. She looked up, her eyes blinking with astonishment. “What do you think you’re doing?”
She had swam right to my bait and clamped down hard. “I’m doing what your mama told me to do and I gotta take my instructions from her.” I started serving the other girls, which infuriated Holly.
“What in the world are you talking about?” She glanced first at Eva May Holland, then at Selma Sutter. Fat Betty Jo she didn’t worry about. “We can have as many as we darn well please.”
“I don’t want to get in no trouble. I’ma have to tell your mama that you wouldn’t listen that you all was to get only two each.”
“That’s ridiculous—you idiot—you must be making that up.”
“No, ma’am. Your mama is serving on a budget and she said to make sure that nobody at this tea gets more than two shrimp wheels. She just can’t afford it since your daddy messed up a lot of his money on a bad investment.” I stopped short. I was saying too much and it might make her suspicious. She started to rise out of her chair. I backed up a little.
Holly caught her breath and a blush began from her neck to the top of her head until everything rising out of her bodice was bright crimson. Her lips moved but nothing came out. She checked her guests. They stared back. Betty Jo slowly set her own shrimp wheel down, looking slightly mortified.
“For Pete’s sake, Betty Jo, you’re not believing such foolishness, are you?” She shot a look to Selma, then to Eva May, who were also putting their shrimp wheels on their napkins and pushing them away. “I can’t believe you all would pay any kind of attention to this simpleton.”
Selma stared at her hands. Eva May looked off toward the house. An embarrassed silence filled the air. Finally Betty Jo, who wasn’t as bright as the others and therefore too straightforward, said in a whining voice, “Well, Holly, let’s face it—everybody knows your daddy did have that spell of financial—bad luck, so—”
“Shut your mouth, Betty Jo. That just ain’t so.”
“Actually, Holly,” Eva May piped up, “I really think I’m allergic to seafood anyway. The last time I had lobster, I broke out in hives.” Holly whipped around in her direction and just stared. Her eyes narrowed with disdain.
“You stupid idiot,” she said, her attention back on me. “Take them things back up to the house. We don’t want any.” Holly Grace sat down. When I hadn’t moved, she blew up. “Take ’em!” she said. I returned each to the tray, noting all the while how each girl seemed embarrassed and uneasy. Holly picked up her cards and took a sip of tea, in an attempt to put the whole thing right out of her mind.
But as I made my way back up the hill to the kitchen, I knew she wouldn’t be able to. Like I was gonna remember that slap, she’d remember this—always.
Waiting on Daddy
“What you doin’?” Prez asked, coming up behind where I sat on the porch steps in the twilight, staring at the woods. Juniper was darting in and out of the edge, chasing some poor creature for fun. Mama had washed my hair in castile soap. We all had our baths in the big tin tub in the kitchen. Now I sat on the steps, letting my hair dry in the last of the sun’s heat. As it dried, it slowly grew into a woolly bush around my face. Mama was going to straighten it after she finished baking Daddy a welcome-home cake. Prez soon brought out a bowl and was licking a wooden spoon full of chocolate icing.
“Here,” he said. “You get half.”
I picked up the other spoon and licked some of the chocolate off. Prez drew a line with his finger down the center of the bowl. “This my side and this yours,” he said, pointing to the two halves. I ran my finger along my side and came up with a nice helping of chocolate frosting.
“Whatcha doin’ out here?” Prez asked.
“Watching the woods.”
Prez had on his overalls and no shirt, his arms all coppery from the sun. He was what people called rhiny, with sandy hair bleached lighter at the temples. He had the same hazel eyes as Daddy’s mama, who died when I was ten and Prez was seven.
“What for?” he said.
“Because Jesse Pruitt’s in our woods.”
“How you know that?”
“I feel it.”
“Then they’ll come down here and get him,” he said, running his finger around the top of his side of the bowl, stopping exactly at the line he’d drawn.
“Right. And we gonna get some food to him and some money so he can get on. We gonna help him get away.”
Later on, Mama took out the hot comb and heated it on the stove. She sat me in the kitchen chair.
“Bend your head and hold your ear,” she said when she thought the comb had heated enough. I held my ear and my breath at the same time. When the heavy iron comb was that close to my face, I was afraid to breathe. It sizzled as Mama slid it through a place where the hair was still damp. “This part ain’t dry enough,” she said.
I stayed quiet. I wasn’t going to chance a word. I’d been burned on the ear too many times from making an unexpected move. “Bend your head way down,” she said. “Touch your chin to your chest.”
I arched my head down as far as I could and felt the heat close in on the nape of my neck. The kitchen, Mama called it. The hardest part to straighten. Each time the heat moved away—the comb bein
g placed on the fire again—I exhaled deeply and relaxed until Mama reached for it again to hold against the cloth to see if it was too hot, hot enough to leave brown teeth marks on the cloth. Then she waved it slowly through the air to cool it, her eyes far-off and patient. Thinking of Daddy coming tomorrow, I bet.
That night, in bed, I smelled vanilla. Mama must have put a couple of dabs behind her ears.
The morning was full of anticipation. While Mama pumped the water for boiling feathers off the chicken, she squinted up the road. As she stoked the fire in the stove, a noise outside made her move quickly to the porch to look out. She sewed a new patch on Prez’s pants, and her eyes were constantly moving to the open door to look down Three Notch Road. Each time she turned from the door, or the window, or stepped back into the house, a flash of disturbance showed on her face that I didn’t like.
I watched her closely and carried the weight of Mama’s waiting as well as my own. Soon I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to get out. I’d go and pick flowers for the Sunday pitcher. Mama used it as a vase because it had a chip on its lip. “Get the watermelon out the creek,” Mama called after me as I skipped down the steps. She had me put one in there the day before, so it could get cool.
Prez came along and we walked in silence. Then he piped up with, “What you think Daddy is gonna bring us from the road?”
“I don’t know.” I was busy wondering if maybe we should take this opportunity to search around for Jesse.
“You think some of them red swizzle sticks with the little monkeys on them?”
“I said I didn’t know.” He was quiet then, sulking. “Maybe some of them little soaps shaped like seashells like he brought us once,” I said to make him feel better.
“I don’t want no soap.”
We closed in on the place where wildflowers grew in abundance. We picked black-eyed Susans and coneflowers and some goldenrod. Just as I was leading the way into the woods for some nice fern, Perry called out to us from the road. He had his fishing pole and a bucket of bait. Without even a word to me, Prez laid his flowers at his feet and started to trot off toward Perry.
“You better ask Mama about going fishing,” I called after him. I was angry that he was running off and deserting me.
“Mama won’t care.”
“Ask her, then.”
He was only a few minutes in the house. Then he was out again, running up the road with Perry, laughing and waving back at me. I could have slapped him. The only reason Mama was letting him go, I knew, was because she was wound up and she wouldn’t have the quiet of mind she needed, having Prez underfoot asking when was Daddy coming.
Dry grass whipped at my ankles as I climbed down a small slope that led to some flowers I wanted that grew at the bottom. I forgot what they were called, but I loved how each green thistle shot out its furl of lavender like a bright promise.
The sun’s rays warmed me and made me thirsty. My hair was still rolled in the rags from the night before. Now it was getting all sweated out. If I didn’t get out of the sun, it wasn’t going to be pretty as I’d planned for when Daddy got home. I looked at the stand of pine ahead. I’d go on and get that watermelon, and some fern, too, while I was at it.
Carefully, I laid my bouquet down and entered the woods, following the footpath that led to the creek. Soft pine needles felt good to my bare feet, as did the cool damp clay beneath that. I could hear Prez and Perry in the distance on their way to the pond. Light filtered through the changing pattern of leaves above, and an odd smoky scent in the air grew stronger as I neared the creek.
Someone had made a cooking fire, I thought. I slowed and stopped, scouring the dense growth around and ahead. I listened for some shift in the air, then continued toward the creek.
I ran into Prez and Perry sidetracked by the creek and all it had to offer. With pant legs rolled up, they shared the flattened top of a boulder. Prez was skipping pebbles over the water’s surface. Perry was hunched forward, watching. They looked over at me.
“We came to get the watermelon, but someone ate it,” Perry said.
“A hobo got it,” Prez said stupidly.
“Or was it you two?” I asked.
“You just put it in the creek yesterday. How we have time to eat a whole watermelon?”
“What you think happened to it, Francie?” Perry whined.
I didn’t bother to answer. I looked around. Everything seemed right. But there on the ground, hidden under the cover of damp leaves, were shiny black watermelon seeds and several wedges of rind. “Jesse Pruitt was here.”
“Where!” both boys said at once.
I took a deep breath. “I smell his fire.”
They followed suit, expanding their chests. Prez squinted. “I do smell it, too.”
“And he didn’t hit no Bellamy,” I said.
“How you know?” Perry asked.
“Jesse wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“He supposedly knocked him out,” Prez said, skipping a pebble.
“I don’t believe it.”
“I think they gonna get Jesse,” Perry said.
“Shut up, fool,” I said. He was making me mad.
“I’ma tell you said ‘fool,’” Prez threatened.
“Tell. I don’t care.” I pretended to be looking up at the branches overhead. But I held my head back to keep the tears at bay. “Anyway, I think Jesse will get to the Southern Pacific and it will take him all the way to California.
“We’ll take care of him until he can get away. I’ll give him the money I got saved, and we’ll bring him food.” Both boys looked at me with admiration, which made me feel clever.
It was time to get back. Daddy might be there already and wondering where we were. I had to get the flowers in the Sunday pitcher and the rags out of my hair. I had to tell Mama that we didn’t have no watermelon. “You all still going fishing?”
“Yea,” Perry said quickly.
“Naw,” Prez said, shaking his head. “I want to see if Daddy’s come.”
As soon as we stepped out of the woods and I looked across the open field to our house, I knew it held disappointment. Perry and Prez ran ahead. I hung back and slowly made my way over to where I’d laid down my bouquet. Mama would probably be on the porch by now, driven there by a waiting that no longer could be contained inside the house. She’d be shelling peas or shucking corn, but her eyes would be mostly on the road. And her thoughts would be full of preparing for disappointment. We’d been disappointed enough times before, so that by now I always held back some of my happiness at good news, and I knew Mama did, too.
Course she’d be preparing for him, too. Just in case.
It was early afternoon. There had been no set time for Daddy to arrive. Last summer, after he’d been gone for three months, he just showed up late one night. I’d woken up, hearing his voice coming from the kitchen. As soon as I was sure it was not part of a dream, I’d gotten out of bed and found him sitting at our table across from Mama, sipping a steaming cup of coffee. How wonderful my daddy looked. How wonderful it had been to crawl into his lap, to breathe his smell of tobacco, Old Spice, and sweat.
I had been glad that Prez, sound sleeper that he is, was still snoring away, unaware of anything but some silly dream he was probably having, and for a few minutes, while Mama had busied herself making Daddy a late supper and before she could think to shoo me back to bed, I had had Daddy all to myself.
Mama wasn’t on the porch. She wasn’t in the house. Maybe she was down to Auntie’s, trying to get her mind off the waiting. Auntie was feeling stronger, we were happy to know. Daddy’s homecoming cake sat in the middle of the kitchen table and the stove was crowded with good food. Corn bread and fried chicken, greens and corn on the cob. I was suddenly hungry. We seldom got such good food all at once.
I went over to the pantry, opened the door, and checked the jars of fruits and vegetables. I put a couple of jars of turnips into our croker sack, and a jar of beets. I snuck ajar of Mama’s special pickl
ed peaches and said a little prayer that she wouldn’t notice.
“Take this and hide it by the outhouse,” I said to Prez, handing him the sack. “We’ll take it in the woods as soon as we can.”
“I Gotta Help Him”
Mama didn’t get back from Auntie’s until just before dinnertime. Her face was as readable as a stone. She walked over to the pantry and got out a jar of pickled peaches and set it on the table.
“Wash up for dinner,” she said. I let out the breath I’d been holding when Mama went into the pantry.
We ate in silence—neither Prez nor me having the nerve to ask any questions. We only spoke to ask that things be passed. I snuck a look at the cake now on the pantry counter, wanting some but afraid to ask. Besides, just because Daddy hadn’t showed yet didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to show at all.
I awakened the next morning in a warm glow of expectation that lasted for a few seconds, until I remembered. Daddy had not come in the night. I felt his absence even before I slid out of bed for my trip to the outhouse. I met Prez on the way back. “Daddy didn’t come,” he said, his mouth sagging with disappointment. It always took Prez a while for things to sink in.
“No—he ain’t coming, I guess.”
“I should’ve gone fishing.”
I had nothing to say to that.
I got dressed, put a couple of cold biscuits in my pocket, splashed some water on my face, and walked down to Auntie’s. I climbed the steps to her door and heard Miss Mabel’s voice coming from inside.
“Let me tell you, Lil and Lydia, I ain’t never been so scared in my life.”
I stood on the porch and listened.
“I was in the woods goin’ after my headache leaf and I heard this noise that weren’t no animal noise. Liked to scare me to death. I looked where that noise come from and there was that colored boy all hunched down in the bushes.”
“What you do, Mabel?” Mama asked.
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