Walking Through Shadows

by Bev Marshall

  CHAPTER 11

  It was a while before I took another trip out of town, but the rodeo down at Liberty coaxed me to take another day off. Rowena despised rodeos and wouldn’t go to one if someone offered her a brand new cook stove to spend an hour there. Annette is a chip off the block though and wouldn’t miss sitting in what her mama called the dirt pit of horrors, for anything. She begged for Sheila and Stoney to ride with us, and the four of us crammed into my truck and set out on a Saturday.

  On the twelve-mile ride out, I found out that Stoney had entered the bull-riding contest, which was just the dumbest idea he’d ever had. I told him so, too. He wasn’t even a good horseman. “A bull can gore you quicker than you could believe,” I told him. “You fall off your bull, and if you’re lucky, there’ll be enough of you left to be carried off on a stretcher.” Stoney’s jaw was set though, and he didn’t say anything to that. “You tell him, Sheila. You don’t want to be a widow at the end of the day.”

  But she wasn’t any smarter than Stoney. She laughed. “Stoney ain’t gonna get kilt; he’s gonna win.” She was half-sitting in his lap, and she squeezed herself against him more. “Ain’t you gonna win?”

  Stoney grinned big. I could see his chest swelling up. “I reckon I might,” he said, as I pulled the truck onto the grass and cut the engine. He took off to get signed up, and I ushered the girls over to the stands where we got good seats on the third row. I bought the girls some peanuts when the vendor came by, and Sheila dove into her little brown bag right off. She tossed the nuts into her mouth and threw the shells at the birds that circled overhead. No, she wasn’t worried one bit. “The prize is twenty dollars,” she told me. “If Stoney wins, think of all the things we could get with that much money.”

  “If,” I said, “he doesn’t get killed. Last year Bucky Moran was gored so bad in his thigh, he’s gonna walk with a limp the rest of his life.”

  Sheila popped another peanut in her mouth. “Stoney’s fast. If he falls off, he’ll beat that bull to the fence. Hey! Lookit that.”

  I followed her pointing finger to the clown in the orange wig who was tossing a lasso around one of the barrels set up for the race. “I wouldn’t want to be a rodeo clown,” Annette said. “A couple of them get hurt bad every year, don’t they, Daddy?”

  Sheila wiped her fingers on the front of her overalls. “If they’d let women be one, I’d try it. They is so cute. It must be a real good feeling to make people laugh all the time.”

  Stoney came up to us about then, held up four fingers to Sheila, and walked off. She squealed and jumped up and down. “Number four! He’s number four. That’s my lucky number; he’s gonna win.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that winning wasn’t a possibility. Stoney would be competing against cowboys from the neighboring states of Louisiana and Texas who were well-known rodeo champions.

  But Sheila kept on eating peanuts with a confident grin while we watched the other events. Darnell Glascock won the calf-roping by expertly throwing his lariat over a running brown calf and tying its thrashing legs in eleven seconds. I was pulling for my second cousin Eric who entered the contest and embarrassed our family by taking twenty-eight seconds to truss his calf. My friend, Homer Knight, was in the bull-dogging event and he wrestled his steer to the ground in eight seconds, which earned him second place. The saddle bronc and bareback riding were next, but my seat was getting hard. So I stood up and stretched. “Let’s go see how Stoney’s making out and wish him good luck,” I said to Sheila and Annette.

  We found him squatting beside a muddy truck talking to some other men I didn’t know. When Sheila called out to him, he stood and smiled at us. “Come to wish me luck?”

  “Uh huh,” Sheila said, pulling him away from the men. “I’m gonna give you a magic kiss that’ll keep you safe, too.” She stuck out her tongue and ran it in a circle around Stoney’s lips and then thrust it into his mouth. She drew back and laughed. “You never had a magic kiss before?”

  I heard Annette’s breath sucking in, but I couldn’t look away from them. Stoney laughed. “My mouth ain’t what needs magic. Kiss what parts you don’t want that bull to puncture.”

  Sheila bent her knees and ducked her head. “Okay.”

  I thought of those times I’d watched them in the barn then, and I knew she’d do it. But Stoney caught her by the arms and pulled her up. He whispered something in her ear which made them both laugh. I felt my face turning red; I didn’t like standing there watching Sheila make a fool out of herself, but she didn’t give a hoot. She giggled and kissed him again.

  She wasn’t laughing an hour later when we saw Stoney’s brown hat sailing off his head as he and a monstrous Brahma bull shot out of the gate. To win, a cowboy has to stick for eight seconds, and Stoney lasted for only three. The only thing we saw was the white hump of the furious bull who turned to charge at the puny rider he had just thrown. Sheila was right about Stoney’s speed; he fell on his back and somehow managed to flip over, jump up, and scramble to the fence rail before the dust covered him from our view. All the while Sheila was screaming at the top of her lungs, “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.” When we saw that he was safe, I turned to Sheila figuring she was going to be filled up with disappointment, but she was laughing. “Did you see that? Ain’t he something? He done so good, y’all. I can’t believe it. Do you think he won?”

  Not one other person at that rodeo would have asked such a question, and for a moment I wondered if my eyes had played a trick on me and I hadn’t seen what she had. I knew better, of course, but that’s when I understood what that saying about rose-colored glasses really means. When Stoney strutted over and proudly accepted her compliments, I thought maybe that kiss she planted on him sure did have some magic power — over Stoney anyway.

  Sheila didn’t have much power over herself though. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to stand up and fight when she needed to. There was a time when I tried to make her see things straight.

  I remember that it was on the morning Rowena and me had had a little fuss over me going to Howard’s to play cards. I don’t know to this day how she found out, but she did and she was slamming pots around the kitchen when I came back from the milk run. Didn’t fix me any breakfast, said she was too busy to be feeding sinners who gambled in dens of iniquity. I turned and walked out of her kitchen and stayed away from the house all day. When Rowena gets like that, there’s no use trying to reason with her. She gets over it fast though, and so I figured she’d come around by nightfall if I stayed out of her way. About mid-morning Annette came sailing by the barn door loaded down with pine cones for making Christmas decorations. I figured that would lift Rowena’s spirits and she’d forget she was mad at me. I ate some brisket out of Shorty’s dinner pail and then Stoney and I took off for town.

  I had returned from the late run and was in the bottling room when I heard Sheila come in, her boots scraping slowly on the floor, like she was reluctant to get to work. I turned around just as she came through the door. I had switched on the overhead bulb, but it doesn’t cast out much light, and Sheila was in the shadows. When she didn’t come on in and start gathering up the bottles, I walked over to her. Before I got there I said something like, “How’d the Christmas doodads turn out?” She didn’t answer, and then I saw the bruise on her face. I’ve seen enough injuries to have a fair idea of how to judge what caused them, and looking at the circle of red slits inside the puffy purple rise below her eye, I would say the fist that made it was wearing a ring. I lifted my hand to her face, and she shrunk back from me. When she limped over to the bottling table, she winced. I followed and knelt in front of her. “Let me have a look,” I said. She lifted her dress. The large mass of blackish skin on her leg made the face wound look like nothing. I kept my knees on the damp floor waiting for words to come to me. “Stoney?” I asked, trying to keep my voice low.

  She grabbed my shoulder. “No. No, he didn’t.” She was crying now. I hadn’t ever seen her cry, and I rose up
and took her in my arms. I was surprised at how soft she was against me. The hump wasn’t the heavy rock I thought she carried all this time. She buried her face against my chest, and I took a breath and then I smelled it. She had been taken along with the beating. I let her cry awhile, and finally she pushed back from me and hung her head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lloyd. I done wet your nice shirt.” She ran her hand across Rowena’s embroidery that spelled out Cottons’ Dairy.

  “Sheila, you can’t allow this. Stoney is gonna hurt you bad one day.”

  Her hair whipped back and forth against her face as she shook her head. “No, no. I told you. It weren’t him that done it.”

  I cupped her chin and lifted her face to look into her eyes, and I saw that she was telling the truth. Stoney had been with me most of the day, hadn’t he? I read fear in her eyes. Sheila was scared of my finding out, but I knew. It had to be her papa who’d done this. I felt sick. “Goddamn him,” I said. “May he burn in hell.” I thought then that I should have called the law on him when she came back from Mars Hill all bruised up after she announced her marriage to her folks.

  Sheila put her hand over my mouth. I know it was crazy; I don’t know what came over me, but when her palm touched my lips, I grabbed her wrist and kissed the spot where the blue vein ran up her arm. She allowed it, stood quiet while I lifted her bangs and touched my lips to her forehead. I just wanted to comfort her like I would Annette; that’s probably all I was feeling.

  She drew back from me. “Mr. Lloyd,” she whispered. “Please. You don’t know. You can’t tell. If Stoney finds out, he’ll kill him.” She clutched my shirt in her fist. “Please. Please.”

  She was right; Stoney would kill him. I wanted to do the job myself and she wasn’t even my wife. “He’s gonna see what’s been done to you. How’re you going to explain this?” I touched her face.

  Sheila chewed on her lip. “I’ll think up something. Stoney believes near ’bout anything I tell him.”

  I had to smile at that. She was simple, but she was most likely right about Stoney. “Next time,” I said. “Get a gun, and you use it on that bastard you call Papa.”

  Sheila shook her head. “It weren’t him,” she said. “That’s all over and done with now.”

  I wondered how she could protect such a devil, but I guessed that Rowena’s mama was right about blood being thicker than water, so I didn’t push her to say the truth. After she left, I decided to keep a closer watch on who visited up there at my tenant house.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was around five months later, after that day in the barn, when Walter and his bride showed up at our house. God knows I’d have done anything in this world to be fair to Walter; he had lost his wife and suffered plenty. Lil’ Bit was his son; he had every right to ask for him back, but it went down hard and bitter for all of us.

  Rowena, of course, took it hardest. It was like she was ghost-walking that morning they came for him. She wandered around the house, in and out of rooms, standing in front of the stove when there wasn’t anything to stir. I did what I could. Held her and rocked her in my arms all that night, but she wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t say Lil’ Bit’s name. Annette was sad, but she was young and kids bounce back from worse things than this is what I told myself.

  The day after Walter left with Lil’ Bit sitting on the new wife’s lap, I was set to take down the crib in the middle room, but Rowena wouldn’t have it. She hung onto that baby bed like it was a life raft in a room full of raging water. I reckoned she thought as long as we kept it there that maybe Lil’ Bit would come home. Then the next day, Rowena took to her bed and just flat gave up. I told her we would go to Chicago to visit them; I said I’d get her a new set of china; I read the Bible to her; then I called her mama. But even Mama Bancroft couldn’t get her out of that bed. She left the house shaking her head and wiping her eyes with that fancy little lace-edged handkerchief she keeps in her sleeve.

  It was Sheila who brought Rowena back. I never did understand exactly how she did what she did, but one night I walked into the front room to find her dancing to some old ragtime music on the Victrola. Annette and Sheila were high-kicking along with her, and I thought it beat all I’d seen since Darby had delivered twin Jersey calves in the back pasture. I didn’t know how we could ever pay Sheila back for helping out like she did, but she didn’t want any thanks.

  The opportunity to return a favor came when I began looking for a bull to breed with the two Ayrshires I had bought back in the fall. Roger Moak over in Tylertown said he had a registered Ayrshire, but I took one look at the old bull and knew the papers were doctored. He wasn’t fit for old Patch, our sorriest cow. Then I read in the Farmer’s Journal that there was a breeder over in Louisiana who had the finest Ayrshire bulls in the country. That man turned out to be Doug Patterson, the fellow who had sold me my cows at the Jackson State Fair. When I telephoned him, he remembered me, and I arranged to take both of my heifers over there for a visit. Stoney was hot to go on the trip. He hadn’t been out of Mississippi but once for a ball game in Alabama one of his brothers was playing in, and he hadn’t ever stayed in a roadside cabin neither. I needed a hand all right, but I had figured on taking Shorty or Digger. I told Stoney no and I thought that was the end of it.

  The next afternoon after I got back to the dairy from the milk run, Sheila was waiting for me in the barn. She was all lit up about something, smiling, moving fast around the barn like a little hummingbird going from one chore to another. “What’s got you humming?” I asked her.

  She giggled. “Might be you.”

  “What’s this about?” I stood watching her swish the broom around like a dance partner.

  “It’s a secret,” she said. “Can’t tell yet.”

  More foolish nonsense is what I thought. “Well, let’s get going on these bottles,” I said lifting a crate to the table beside the sink.

  “No. Not yet, Mr. Lloyd. Uh, you is needed up to the house. That’s right. Miss Rowena, she said you best come up there quick.”

  I straightened up from the load and wiped my forehead. “Oh Lord,” I said. “I’ll bet her mama’s hit another tree with her old Buick.”

  Rowena told me earlier in the day that her mother was picking her up and they were going shopping in Zebulon. “Why can’t you pick her up?” was my reaction. Rowena’s mama was a terrible driver. The worst I’ve ever seen. She hadn’t learned to drive until she was in her fifties, and, like a lot of the older folks in the community, she couldn’t break the habit of pulling close up to trees and posts like she had done when she drove a buggy and needed a hitching post. Her eyesight wasn’t the best, and her spectacles didn’t help with her distance judging. “I don’t like you to ride with her,” I said.

  But Rowena was determined. “I can’t go hurting her feelings telling her you think she’s a danger to her own family.” She set her flowered Sunday hat square on her head, and I knew there was no talking her out of it. “Anyway, she hasn’t had a mishap in over a month,” she said over her shoulder as she sailed out of the house.

  Before I went in the house I looked for Mama Bancroft’s banged-up Buick in the driveway, but there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. I was worried the damage might be so bad she couldn’t drive home. I went in the house and called out for Rowena, who answered me from the front room. “In here, hurry, Lloyd.” I dreaded the sight. She must’ve been hurt bad this time; she might be lying on the couch in a leg cast maybe, maybe worse. The old lady didn’t make it, or she made it and was gonna be moving in with us for round-the-clock care. I squeezed my eyes shut once and then quickly opened them. I was prepared for whatever this afternoon would bring.

  “Hi,” Rowena said, unbandaged, alone, pretty in her clover-colored dress spread out on the couch.

  “Where’s your mama?”

  Rowena patted the cushion beside her. “Gone home. Come sit.”

  I eased down beside her. “She have a wreck?”

  Rowena smiled. “No. She had a little trouble parking, bu
t we got that worked out.” She kissed my cheek. “Ask me where we parked.”

  I was relieved, but aggravation was setting in now. She was acting more like Sheila or Annette than herself. “Rowena, I got more chores to do. I don’t have time to play a guessing game.”

  Rowena kept her smile. “Okay, you can go in a minute, but you’ve got to hear what I have to say first.”

  I stood up. “Say it then. Time’s a-wasting.”

  She took both of my hands in hers and looked up at me. “Lloyd, I went to Dr. Brock’s office. I thought I might be and I am! Lloyd, we’re going to have a baby.”

  I was stunned, struck dumb as a fence post. The thought ran through my head that she might be crazy, having some kind of hallucination, and I wished for the first time that her mama hadn’t gone home early. “A real baby?”

  “Uh huh. Middle of February. Or thereabouts. Doctor said I’m fit as a fiddle, too.”

  I looked at her stomach, couldn’t see any sign of it. “You’re sure?”

  Rowena stood up and put her hands around the back of my neck. She jiggled my head back and forth. “Get it through to your brain, Lloyd. You’re going to be a daddy to another child.”

  I believed her then. “It’s a miracle,” I said.

  She kissed me all over my face, cheeks, chin, nose, eyelids. “Exactly,” she said breathless with her efforts. “We’re having a miracle baby.”

  I hated to leave her, but there was still work to be done, so I left her and went back to the barn. Sheila was nearly finished with the scrubbing when I walked in. She turned and grinned as wide as her lips would stretch. “Congratulations, Mr. Lloyd.”

  I was a little disappointed that she had been told before me, but I didn’t let that show. “Thank you, Sheila. We’re both real real happy. It’s a true miracle.”

  Sheila disagreed. “No, it were just everyday magic. Ever since Lil’ Bit left, I’ve been telling Miss Rowena y’all need another young’n to put in that crib, and that I knowed how to get one.”