by Bev Marshall
CHAPTER 14
ROWENA
Digger is the one who told me that Sheila had been found. He stood in the backyard, yelling up to the porch where I stood waiting for news. “Miss Cotton! Miss Cotton! They found her. She dead. Murdered in the cornfield.” I remember opening the screen door to go inside. I’d have to tell her mother, but my knees felt like jelly and I stood hanging onto the door, wondering if I could walk at all. Effie Carruth had heard the shouting, and she came running toward me from the living room where she’d been nursing her new baby.
“I’m afraid it’s bad news.” My voice was a whisper. “She’s been found. She’s dead.”
Effie was already crying, she crossed her arms over her chest, and began rocking back and forth. “No, no, noooo.” The room began spinning around her face, and I knew if I didn’t sit down quickly, I would collapse in front of the poor woman. I made it to the kitchen table and fell into Lloyd’s seat. Effie was moaning between her words. “I knew it. I knew she were dead. I said it. I said it.” Her dress was open, and I could see the blue-veined breast, the nipple wet and dripping onto the floor. I wondered what she’d done with the baby, but I felt bound into the chair and couldn’t manage more than a hand stretching out to her grief.
I watched her stagger toward the door and realized she was going to her girl. I summoned strength then and stood. I held her shoulders from behind her. I didn’t want to look into her face. “Wait. You don’t want to see her now. Stay here until your husband comes.”
“But she needs me. My baby needs me.”
I pulled her back to the chair where I’d been sitting and she crumpled like a rag doll over the table. We both heard the half-nursed baby crying then, and Effie lifted her head. She looked confused as if maybe she thought it was Sheila, her firstborn, who was crying instead of her last-born child. There were so many Carruth children I had wondered how she kept their names and ages straight in her head. Did she remember each birth separately or did they all blend into one painful memory? I could recall every detail of Annette’s birth. They say you forget the agony when you look on your baby’s face, but that’s a bald-faced lie. I cupped my stomach, thinking I would have it all to remember again in just a few months. Effie’s baby stopped crying and I heard one of the children’s voices saying, “Here, boy, suck my finger.” Yes, there were other children in the house; most of them were sprawled out on the floor in exhausted sleep. Where was my own child? I hadn’t seen Annette for hours. Annette! She would be devastated. Sheila was her closest friend. It seemed that Effie’s crying was coming from high above me, and I saw Annette’s grief-stricken face in a green haze. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want,” I said aloud. “He maketh me.” I couldn’t think straight. What? He maketh me to lie down beside still waters. Or was it He leadeth me beside still waters? Make or lead? Which one? It seemed so important to know. I was actually headed to the front room to get my Bible when I came to my senses and turned back to the kitchen. I turned on the light and saw that Effie sat staring at her hands like they belonged to someone else. I walked over to her and buttoned her dress. I longed to lay my head on the table and grieve for Sheila, for myself. I would miss her so terribly. But I couldn’t, mustn’t. Her mother was in my keep, and I didn’t know how long it would be before somebody came for her. It was nearly supper time. I had the catfish Lloyd had caught yesterday, the crowder peas in a dishpan in the sink, corn already silked. Would that be enough though?
I felt his presence before he knocked, and I looked up at Mr. Carruth, who had altered into another man since I had met him that morning. His face was a terrible mask of grief, rage, disbelief, the Lord only knows what he was feeling for sure, but I was frightened out of my mind when he opened the door and grabbed his wife’s shoulder. He lifted her up and shoved her toward the door, where she stood with her head bent into the crook of her raised arm as if it would shut out the sight of him. He hadn’t spoken, and I cleared my throat, trying to summon up some civility, but I didn’t need to think of that because he was out of the room already, headed toward the children. In seconds, it seemed, they filed through my kitchen, a parade of tow-heads bent like broken flowers of varying heights. Mr. Carruth followed them all with the baby slung over his shoulder, the baby’s head bouncing upside down against his father’s back.
I headed straight for the telephone chair and asked for Mama’s number. I wouldn’t allow myself one thought, one feeling, one aching sob. I stroked my stomach with one hand while I held the receiver close to my ear. Mama would know what to say, she would help me take care of my little unborn baby. But as I listened to the static on the line, I wondered if I would be able to speak. When I heard Mama’s hello, I couldn’t open my mouth, and then she said, “Rowena, is it you? They found her, huh?”
It was her saying my name that let the floodgates open, and I burst into tears. “Mama, she’s dead. Our little Sheila is dead.”
CHAPTER 15
Sheila came to us on my birthday. Lloyd had gone to town to purchase a sewing machine that was meant to be a surprise for me. I wanted something more personal like jewelry, but except for buying my wedding ring set, I doubt Lloyd has ever been inside Dauber’s Jewelry Store even though it’s right next to Vest’s, where he buys his work boots.
Annette met Sheila out by the road and brought her up to the house but she wouldn’t come inside. When I went out to the porch to welcome her, I needed a moment or so to collect myself before speaking. I never saw anything more pitiful. Besides the hump that rose up like a small hatbox on her back, there were the bare feet, the wispy blonde hair, the white eyebrows over blue eyes too large for her pinched face, all of which put me in mind of one of Mr. Charles Dickens’ characters.
Lloyd had been against hiring the girl, but I had persuaded him that it was his Christian duty to help her get away from that tyrannical father of hers. I said, “Now, Lloyd, how will you feel if the girl’s father kills her one day and you didn’t do a thing to help?” He blew out his breath in a big “Psssss” like he always does when he’s resigned to something or other, and I started thinking about curtains for the smokehouse right away.
I wanted to do more for her, but you have to be cautious with charity. Mama warned me that plenty of people do bite the hand that feeds them and it’s because they resent your taking away their dignity. So I was careful not to overdo it with the child. I say child; she was fifteen, but she was so tiny and playful, she seemed as young as Annette, who was nine that July Sheila came.
At first I thought she was simple-minded, and I wondered if maybe her father had hit her in the head too often and caused damage there. But naiveté doesn’t always mean ignorance, and while Sheila was never going to be a scholar or even understand the punch line to Lloyd’s silly jokes, she had a sort of wisdom about life that, at times, astonished me. After she’d been with us for a couple of weeks, I saw the proof myself.
Doris had visited that day, and I was so blue I didn’t feel I had the strength to cook the noon meal. I was standing in front of the pantry shelves staring at the rows of mason jars filled with figs and peaches, thinking nothing sweet was going to take away the bitter taste of Doris’s suffering when Sheila called my name. I turned to see her standing in the kitchen door holding a tiny biddy. “A newborn,” she said. “Lookie, Miss Rowena, it’s already trying to peck my hand.”
“I see,” I said. I guess I’ve seen thirty or more biddies break open their shells and I wasn’t in a mood to humor Sheila’s fascination with a chick that was going to turn into a squawking hen destined for our Sunday dinner.
Sheila ignored my sour tone. “Ain’t it just the cutest little thing?”
I glanced at the bit of yellow fluff in her palm and said, “It looks like a normal biddy to me. I guess some people think they’re cute.”
“But ain’t it the miracle that starts you considering?” She was standing so close to me I could smell the residue of birth on the chick, and I wrinkled my nose. “I mean, I was thinking
about your poor sister, Miss Doris, and how she must feel so thankful for her own place in the Lord’s plan.”
I stepped away from her. “Thankful? How can you say such, Sheila? You know she’s dying of cancer.”
Sheila stroked the back of the chick with her forefinger. “Yesum. I do, but Lil’ Bit is here, healthy and happy, and that’s a miracle, ain’t it?”
“Well, yes, of course, but he nearly died before we got him.”
Sheila bobbed her head exactly like the chickens did when looking for bugs in the ground. “That’s what I mean. The good Lord needs your sister up there in heaven, but He knowed her leaving was gonna put a hole in your heart, so He showed you how to patch it by mending her baby. He knowed you was longing for a baby you couldn’t have, and He let Miss Doris be the one to give a son to you. I know when your sister takes her trip to heaven, she’s gonna lift up with a happy heart, knowing what she’s leaving here on earth. I know I feel thankful just to be here with folks like y’all.” She ducked her head and whispered. “I feel like I’m part of the miracle too.”
I stared at her for a long while. Sheila didn’t mind the silence between us; she stared back at me with eyes filled with a knowledge alien to me. I considered her words. Hadn’t Doris just today said she felt such peace in her heart when she saw her little son in our house? When my sister bowed her head and said the Lord’s Prayer, was it possible that she sincerely meant the line, “Thy will be done on earth?” Had God’s will been to give us a miracle? Even so, I couldn’t be happy or grateful or even peaceful that Doris was being taken from us, but I thought that perhaps I could learn to accept what couldn’t be changed and I did take some comfort in Sheila’s words. “Thank you,” I said. Before she turned and left my house, I touched my finger to the soft down of the sleeping biddy. “It is a cute chick,” I said. “And to think it came out of an eggshell. It is a wonder.”
That was the way of it so often. Sheila opening up my mind to what was seemingly complex and then in her halting, limited vocabulary guiding me to see a simplicity that felt, well, more natural to me. I suppose it is the Bancroft blood that causes me, in Lloyd’s words, to make mountains out of molehills. Lloyd’s people are so matter of fact, and if you can’t see it, smell it, or taste it, well, it doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned. But the Cottons are a good family; Lloyd’s mother was a Graunston of Scottish descent. On our first visit after Lloyd proposed, his mother showed me their coat of arms, and when I told Mama about that, she gave up on trying to marry me off to Harry Gatlin, who was studying law at Ole Miss and laughed like a girl. I admit though I had to feign regret when Lloyd’s parents moved up toward Jackson. Every time Mrs. Cotton visited our home, I felt like a schoolgirl who didn’t know a thing about running a household. Of course, my own mama could make me feel much the same, and not just about housework. But when Mama points out my mistakes, it’s not to show off what-all she knows, it’s for my own good, and those are the same words she used back when she had to punish one of her girls. “This is for your own good,” she would say in a real sad voice. Poor Leda is the one of us who heard that sentence the most.
Mama also believes acquiring culture and refinement is good for you. She raised all three of us girls to revere Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and we took both piano and elocution lessons until tenth grade. Leda was on the debate team and went to the state contest, which she lost to a boy from Greenville whose daddy was the former mayor. That was two years before Leda began dating Howard, Lloyd’s brother, and that’s how I met Lloyd. Leda and Howard set us up on a blind date, and well, we just took off from there. Then Howard jilted my sister, and she turned her eyes on Lloyd, causing a big rift between us for quite a few years. When I said to Sheila that in his play, Othello, William Shakespeare wrote that jealousy is a green-eyed monster, she shook her head and said she didn’t believe in monsters, just fairies and trolls. I had wanted to follow Mama’s example and help Sheila learn the things she needed to know for her own good, but I gave up on trying to educate her through book learning and tried to teach her more basic skills like how to can vegetables and how to crochet and quilt.
Sheila’s first lesson involved courting. She didn’t know the first thing about the etiquette for a young lady, and I had assumed that her ignorance would most likely never become apparent since I doubted anyone would ever ask her to step out. Boy, was I wrong! In just a few weeks, Stoney fell for her. At first I didn’t believe Annette when she told me about them. I even admonished her for telling a cruel joke. “The Bancroft women do not participate in that kind of humor,” I said.
“But, I’m telling the truth, Mama; they’ve already gone out last night,” Annette told me with her hands on her hips. “And she doesn’t have any nice dresses to wear.”
I went straight to my closet then. There’s something so satisfying about giving hand-me-downs to someone who really appreciates them. When Annette brought Sheila up to the house, I got right to work on the dress she’d chosen for her date, and by the time she went out to wait for Stoney to pick her up, she looked nearly lovely — at least from the front where her hump couldn’t be seen.
Over the next weeks I thought about Sheila and Stoney as a couple quite a bit. It just didn’t make a lot of sense to me that a handsome boy like that would fall for a girl like Sheila, but as Mama says, if the man’s private gets hard, his brain gets soft, and I could tell that was the way with the two of them. I don’t like to think about it, but something in me just knew that Sheila wasn’t being a lady on those dates, and I worried Stoney was taking advantage of the poor girl, and she’d come up with a seed planted in her belly and no husband. Mama and I discussed this possibility, and she said, if I were correct, he’d never marry her. “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?” was her mantra when Doris, Leda, and I were dating. Doris and I believed her and were both virgins on our wedding days, but I suspect Leda gave a few gallons to some thirsty men in her younger days. Of course, this proves Mama right as Leda lives with a woman now and has never worn a wedding ring. I tell her she shouldn’t give up on finding a husband, that it’s never too late, but Leda doesn’t seem to mind being an old maid. She says she and Sylvia are happy as clams, and although I’ll never understand her choice, I have to admit they do have fun together.
I needn’t have worried about the courting though. Stoney and Sheila were married, if not properly in the church, at least legally. I talked Lloyd into renting out our tenant house to them, and they seemed truly happy over there.
Before the wedding, Doris died, and we had to get through the funeral and help Walter sort through her things. It was a terrible time for all of us, especially Annette, who was of an age that magnifies the sorrows of this world. She spiraled into a deep depression, against which I felt helpless. Then suddenly, she recovered and was her old self, running around the dairy like always. I’m certain that it was Sheila who somehow lifted her spirits. She had a power over Annette that was near magic, and more than once I caught myself wondering if those fairies of hers might not exist. Then I’d laugh at myself, wishing something so frivolous and silly to be true, and me a grown-up woman with a family to see to. But Sheila could do that to you; she was so earnest and convincing. I noticed even Lloyd would lean closer to her when she’d tell some made-up story about magic coins or some such. He’d say it was nonsense after Sheila went home, but his eyes and ears were all hers when she was around.
“Admit it, Lloyd,” I said to him in bed one night. “You’re glad I made you give Sheila a job. You like her, don’t you?”
Lloyd turned over and laid his head on his arm and grinned. “I like you best,” he said. “She doesn’t have those.” He was pointing to my breasts, and I blushed. I take after Mama; we both wear D-cup brassieres.
I won’t say what happened next, but Lloyd excelled beyond his usual that night. I had to put my hand over his mouth so Annette wouldn’t hear him. She might have heard something though, because the next morning when Lloyd came in from the mi
lk run for breakfast, she wouldn’t look at her daddy, and when he asked her did she sleep well, she turned a deep pink and barely nodded yes to him. I knew I should talk to her about the birds and bees, but I couldn’t make myself do it just yet. Right after Lloyd left, Annette said she and Sheila were going to play jacks on the porch, and I laughed at myself for making a private joke about what kind of balls interested her the most. I thought about sharing it with Mama, and then came to my senses and scrubbed down Lil’ Bit’s high chair until it looked brand new.
If I didn’t understand Stoney’s attraction to Sheila, I certainly couldn’t fathom what other men saw in her. I would never have believed any man would find her appealing except I overheard a conversation about her between Lloyd and his brother Howard. Howard, like my sister Leda, hasn’t been fortunate in love, but therein the similarity ends. Lloyd’s brother is a cad with women. I suspect he knows ladies of the evening and there was talk that Howard runs a poker game on Friday night. More than one of my friends has told me that they’ve seen him out with Fred Prather, who succumbed to the sin of gambling before he was out of high school. With all that, I forbade Lloyd to visit his brother’s house without me, but still Howard is welcome in my home. He is, after all, Lloyd’s blood and his only brother. When Mama questioned my wisdom on inviting him for Sunday dinners, I told her that, if Jesus could allow Mary Magdalen to wash his feet, I guessed I could fry a chicken leg or two for Howard.
