Dear Vick:
Autumn is here in full-blown color under crisp, bright skies, now. Normally, it’s my favorite time of year, but this year the whole town seems edgy and excited and weird. Everyone seems distracted. Ida worries me. She’s got this dangerous look—as if she’s ready to get the guns out and go hunting. Sandy and Amos confer behind the closed door of his office so often that people whisper about them—not the rumor of any romantic shenanigans, but what are they up to?
Rainey paces the floor behind the curtains of her shop and keeps to herself. Rob Walker looks haunted. And the other day, up at a farm in the Bailey Mill community, Dr. Hank Blackshear yelled at an ornery calf he was treating for a barbed-wire cut. Hank Blackshear yelled at an animal.
You know something’s worrying him if he loses his temper with one of God’s creatures.
Then, on top of it all, one of my favorite people, Eula Mae Whit, decided to die. Or pretended to. Just to draw attention, I think.
Like Millicent Hart, Miss Eula Mae swears she knows what really happened the night of the high school fire. “But that’s between me, the culprits, and God,” Miss Eula Mae insists. Once you get to know Miss Eula Mae the way I do, you’ll see why she’s lived so long. She never caters to anybody’s rules but her own. Not even God’s.
Or Willard Scott’s.
Katie
EULA MAE
Sometimes it’s good to look back on what might have been because what “might have been” might still be possible. But you have to take the chance by looking, first. And that’s the hard part.
EULA MAE
Where I Belong
My name is Eula Mae Whit, and I’m the oldest living native and resident of Mossy Creek. The reason I know this is because when I was a little girl, my great-grandma showed me the tree she’d planted the day I was born. It’s big now. The only living symbol of my one hundred years of life on this earth. Besides me, of course.
Might become the one and only, I thought the other day. ‘Cause I’d been taking short, shallow breaths since midnight.
The light of my life, my great-great-granddaughter Estelle, stood by the window of my private room at Magnolia Manor, looking disgusted. She probably didn’t like the fact that my granddaughter, Clara, was sitting by my side, holding my hand, making it all sweaty in her rush to see me dead.
Clara had gone down to Bigelow and brought back a minister from a church who was now into the second verse of Bringing in the Sheaves and singing it right in my ear. It sounded like Bringing in the Sheep to me, maybe because one of my cousins’ granddaughters, Carmel, had done nothing for months but talk about the old high school and how somebody set Samson the sheep on fire and how the truth was going to come out, you bet.
So I heard ‘sheep,’ not ‘sheaves.’
“Sing, Miss Eula Mae,” the minister kept urging. “Rise up out of your coma and let your soul sing as a lamb of God.”
Last I checked, I was less a warbling lamb than a dried-up raisin. Frankly, I prefer to be referred to as a fruit because fruit keeps me regular, whereas meat got me uninvited to the pinochle tournament at Magnolia Manor five years ago. I still carried a grudge about that. Gas was just a part of life, and those old fools better start to understand you didn’t get to be my age by keepin’ your innards all blocked up!
Anyway, so there I was, checked into a hospice bed at Magnolia Manor on my one-hundredth birthday, waiting to die. Partly because I was tired of hearing about sheep, but also because Willard Scott had said my name and showed my picture on national television that morning.
I have to say I looked right nice on TV with my last real tooth so handsome next to my pearly white dentures. I began bettin’ I’d die by midnight because tradition and Willard Scott have never let a Whit down. All the women in my family die on their hundredth birthday.
Except Cousin Chicken.
Chicken only missed it on a technicality, though Willard spoke her name on his Peacock Station. I really do believe Chicken caught Willard’s eye the way no other Mossy Creek woman has. Willard said Chicken was pretty as a picture! Now that’s high praise from a white man, as we Whits like to say with one eyebrow raised.
Anyway, Chicken drove her chicken-legged self to the baptismal pond behind Mossy Creek First Baptist to make a request on her future living arrangements. Frankly, I didn’t think God was going to grant it because there were saints more deserving than Chicken. But what I thought didn’t stop her. She went right on and asked that her eternal home be right next door to Jesus’ house.
The rest was pure speculation, but we thought she got so caught up in the Holy Ghost dance that she slipped, fell in the water and drowned. Chicken wasn’t found until the next day, but because she made sweet potato pie so good it would make you call on the Lord, I let her in what I call The Dead Hundred Club.
I used to think once Willard Scott mentioned your name, your number was up no matter where you lived in the country. But then I heard through the Whit family gossip and information line that Willard was sweet on Southern women. Especially if they were from Mossy Creek. I watched the Peacock Station everyday to see if he was going to be on because Mossy Creek women always got that cute little jelly label.
I was ninety-five when Clara told me Willard was married. For that bad news, I mixed a little concoction in with her soup, and she sat on the toilet for the rest of her stay. She left on the first bus heading north. You couldn’t trust a Whit who lived above the Virginia state line.
After Willard announced my birthday, I called the ambulance and got myself over to Magnolia Manor because, well, dying while standing at the mailbox could have made me sound like a show off on the Bereavement Report, and anybody that knew me knew I didn’t do things in a show-offy kind of way.
I was just bold. Straight as an arrow. Honest in a righteous way. Dignified to a fault. Truth be told, I scared the daylights out of people. And I was glad about it. I’m the oldest black person in this area. And in a hundred years, I’d seen just about everything. So people didn’t mess with me.
Only, I couldn’t say the same for my relatives, like Clara, from up North.
They had no respect for Southerners. No respect for people about to die. Clara’s sixty-five. Wore elastic in her pants and a two-inch heel on her shoe. She was just a little too sassy for my taste.
Personally, I didn’t like pants. I preferred the floral dresses from the Bigelow Wal-Mart. Breezy and easy to whip up if you had to go in a hurry. But not dignified if you were lying on the floor dead and your hem was hiked a little too high.
Clara didn’t used to be so unbearably Northern, but after she moved up to New Jersey she lost all the ‘country’ we tried to instill in her here in Mossy Creek. Why, by now she couldn’t kill a chicken if her family was starving. Worse than that, she’d forgotten the importance of land and home and heritage. She’d forgotten what being buried on family land in Mossy Creek meant to a Whit. To me.
All my family was here. Mama. Daddy. Gran. Poppy and all the greats before them. True, the first few came because they didn’t have a choice. But I chose to stay.
Clara thought my last day on earth was my hundredth birthday, and she was “struck with a sense of nostalgia,” so she said. Hence her visit. But what she wanted was to take my bony body back up North to be buried in the cold, hard ground next to people I didn’t even know!
“They ain’t my kin,” I told her. “Besides, I heard they don’t respect the dead up North. When you’re being paraded through town to your final restin’ place, none of them bow their heads or cover their hearts with their hats. They just stand in the street drinkin’ soda pop and planning how they gonna get your furniture out the back door. Heathens. That’s what I heard.”
“That’s just not so, Grandmama,” Clara insisted. But she couldn’t fool an old lady like me. She used to be a true Whit. Now she’s Clara The Heathen.
So I was lying there at Magnolia Manor, and Clara gripped my hand, and I parted my eyes just enough to squint
and see what she was doing. Sneaking to take my pulse, that’s what. The heifer. All she wanted was my land. She’d probably already got my flower bed dug up, my furniture on the side of the road, lemonade on the window sill, and the deed in her beefeater-sized hand!
My land was worth a ton of money. Bigelow Realty must have wooed her from New Jersey because they’ve been wantin’ to steal Mossy Creek land from true Mossy Creekites for generations, and they would take every slimy chance they got. But they wouldn’t get Whit land. Not as long as I was still here taking slow, shallow breaths.
Clara’s sweating hand was a terrible trigger for my bladder, and I couldn’t bear many more verses of Bringing in the Sheep. I was beginning to fear I had to give up my ruse of dying. I wasn’t in a coma, but the minister’s sheep song had given me a headache bad enough to make me wish I were.
I was a little disappointed not to die. I had hoped to see Josephine Baker dance with Sammy Davis Jr. my first day up in the great beyond, but I wouldn’t disrespect God’s enrollment policy by being anxious.
I had only about another minute on the bladder, so I sat up and grabbed the hymnal from the minister.
Clara screamed so loud she gave me a nice soprano note, and I started singing, “Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, hi ho the d-a-r-i-o, bringing in the sheaves.” They oughta have been glad I didn’t sing sheep.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed just as the minister fainted to the floor.
As I scuttled to the bathroom and got ready to shut the door, the look on Clara’s face was worth me wetting my Depends diaper. Her chubby cheeks were so puckered up she looked like a fallen chocolate cake.
I felt real joy in my heart.
Over by the window, Estelle was laughing so hard she nearly sat down on the floor. I smiled at my great-great-granddaughter, closed the bathroom door, and locked it. You never know when them Bigelowans were going to launch a sneak attack. They liked to catch you when you were vulnerable. Right then, my Depends were around my ankles.
I got put out of Magnolia Manor.
* * * *
On the drive home, Clara had me so hemmed up in a coat, I thought I’d suffocate or melt to death. We were in Clara’s car, a Chevy of some sort, and we drove through the streets of Mossy Creek I’d known since I was a little girl. Clara just wouldn’t give up and leave me alone, dead or alive.
“I don’t want to go to New Jersey, Clara. You can just take me home and let me die there.”
“Grandmama, you’d like New Jersey if you tried it. We have a big house.”
“So do I.”
“A nice yard.”
“Me too.”
“We have cabs.”
“What’s that?” I asked, ‘cause I suspected she was trying to pull a fast one on me.
“That’s when you call someone on the phone to take you where you have to go.”
I sat there blinking. “Why wouldn’t I just go across the road and ask Henry Louis’s retarded boy Al to take me? Or call Amos Royden over at the police station? Y’all don’t have slow folks or policemen up there that don’t mind carryin’ an old lady to the store?”
“Grandmama—”
“Just as I suspected, them city folk ain’t nothing but a bunch of uncharitable triflin’ heathens!” My short shallow breaths returned, so I closed my eyes. “Take me the long way home. Estelle?”
My great-great-granddaughter leaned over the back seat and lowered her voice. She knew I was old, but my ears were as keen as a bird dog’s. “Yes, Great Gran?”
“Write down the time. I left Magnolia Manor at two-forty three in the afternoon.”
“Great Gran, why do you want me to record what time we left? You’re just fine.”
“Everybody in this town knows Whit women die on their one hundredth birthday. Today is still my day. Just because I wasn’t one clogged artery from dropping dead, they threw me out, triflin’ hussies. Used to be, you could stay in the hospital until you decided to go home. Now they throw old ladies in the street. And I heard, about three years ago, they stopped circumcising boys.”
I shuddered at the thought.
Something happened to Estelle’s nose, so she sat back with her hand over it. I didn’t mind. Snot happens.
“Grandmama—” Clara patted my hand, “You’re getting excited for nothing. Aren’t the trees pretty? It’s leaf season.”
My granddaughter had that tone her mother Alma, God rest her soul, used to take when she was tired of me making my point. But the thing was, I knew what I was talking about. I decided to change the subject. “Over there, Estelle, that’s where I went the first time women were allowed to vote. I was young, then.”
The old Mossy Creek post office had been torn down years ago, but I could still see everything as if it were happening right then.
“My Mama and I were working as maids for the Hamilton’s,” I said to my only living relatives. “We got done in a hurry and planned to leave on time for the two-mile walk from Hamilton Farm into town. I was too young to vote, but I wanted to accompany Mama.”
“Lots of hell was going on in the world, but Mama was proud to go vote. I remember us leaving, and Mrs. Hamilton stood on her veranda. Mayor Ida’s grandmama, the one everybody called Big Miss Ida. As we started off, Mrs. Hamilton called us back. ‘Girls,’ she said. ‘Y’all going to vote?’”
We just nodded. We didn’t know what she would say. She came down the steps and stood in front of us. ‘Watch your mother’s back,’ she said. Then she pressed a cold piece of steel in my hand. ‘Put it up.’ I quickly hid the little pistol in the pocket of my skirt.
“I was scared and Mama’s bony knees were waving in the wind. ‘Don’t take that gun out unless you have to use it’,” Mrs. Hamilton said, “but if you do have to use it, they’ll have to lock me up with you.”
I’d been so scared, I couldn’t speak.
“What did she mean, Great Gran?”
“She meant for us to come back in one piece, and if we had to shoot somebody, then—” I merely shrugged.
“Did you?”
I was quiet for a while, one because talking so much was wearing me out, but also because I could still feel the fear in my body.
“There were protesters on the sides of the street and police everywhere. Women of every age and race were walking into town. Black and white, it didn’t matter. For a few hours, we’d become a sisterhood. Granted, we got in our line and they in theirs, but we was all there for the same reason. Women had finally been granted the right to vote.”
“I had family then,” I said in a stronger voice. “Family who remembered the old family. We knew when to laugh at each other and when to cry. We were close-knit. Wasn’t nobody trying to make somebody do something she didn’t want to do. We didn’t move away. We stayed in Mossy Creek and died in Mossy Creek.”
“Now, Grandmama, be reasonable,” Clara put in. “The old days were all well and good—at least to your way of thinking—but you can’t live here alone anymore.”
“I been fine here for one hundred years, Clara. When I die, there won’t be much to do except plant me.”
We all sat quiet.
“Great Gran, are you all right?” Estelle asked me.
“Yes, chil’.”
“So did you shoot anyone?”
“Estelle, you’d think you were fourteen instead of thirty-five.”
“You’re so interesting. I never knew how much.”
“Your great-great-grandmother can share all her stories after she’s settled at my house,” Clara said.
“Yes, Estelle, we shot the gun.”
“What!” Both of them looked like they’d seen a ghost.
“At who?” Clara screeched.
“That’s between me and Mama and ol’ Chief Cochran, rest his white policeman’s soul. I got a lot of secrets in me.”
I looked out the window. On the town square, a big blue monstrosity of plastic was reaching for the sky. Some kind of tent. “What’s goi
ng on over there?”
“Grandmama, you know what that is. Mossy Creek’s getting ready for the school reunion next month. I think they’re planning fun things for kids and a parade.”
“That’s why this is the best town to live in. At least we entertain each other better than them Bigelowans. You shoulda’ seen that Casey Blackshear with a softball bat in her hand and those braces on her legs going for home base last Fourth of July. That was a proud day for Mossy Creek.”
We headed around the square, driving slow because it was crowded with Saturday shoppers. “My Uncle Eldon’s church was up that sidestreet over there,” I said. “Didn’t have a name until I was about twenty-five. Everybody just knew where Eldon Whit’s church was. He farmed all week, then preached on Sunday.”
“I don’t suppose you want to explain blaspheming the Lord’s song this morning.”
“No, I don’t, Clara. I’m a bit closer to God than you, if only by age. Next time you want to have people sing at me, make sure they strong enough not to fall over when I sit up! You sent a boy to do a man’s job. That’s what you get for bringing a preacher from Bigelow.”
“Why do you hate those people down there so much?”
“Bigelow wasn’t much bigger than us at one time and suddenly they got big. Overnight, they snubbed us. The same maids we used to know didn’t speak no more. They deserted Uncle Albert’s little church and started taking their tithes to the fancy Presbyterian Church in Bigelow! Deserted the one all-colored church in Bigelow County and just about closed its doors! That was the talk amongst us for years. How could they? I mourned for every time I had to snag a splinter from the back of my mama’s thighs. Uncle Albert’s church went dirt poor. We could have used new church pews and would have gotten ‘em, too, if those Bigelow folks hadn’t got too big for they britches. Those Bigelowans got they moonshine out the mountains just like the rest of us.”
Clara just glared at me and nearly ran off the road. Typical. “Moonshine?”
I ignored her. “They still too stuck up for my taste. Keep your eyes on the road, Miss Missy Clara. I’m gonna die today, but I don’t want to be killed in this car before I go.”
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 28
