June wasn’t aware of what she could have possibly done to unravel Fannie’s nerves. She was fond of the old woman so she didn’t repeat the questions.
Fannie didn’t bother to answer, just put away the bread and went out on the porch.
As June was about to mount the stairs for bed, Fannie hollered in to her: “You got the ways with the young people, June. You could teach the little ones. I watch the way you play with them, and the way Millie has remembered everything you taught her.”
“That doesn’t make me teacher material, Miss Fannie,” she sat on the steps to rest, shouting back out the door. This was something she could never do at home. The quiet of the Blacksmith’s house was often like a tomb until the Piano Man came. She shook him out of her head as the old lady came in and sat next to her. Outside people said their good nights.
“No, maybe not. But if you wanted to you could. You could earn your keep. Could keep that little baby all to yourself.” Fannie patted her tummy.
“Miss Fannie, I don’t know how to do much that you and Aunt Ella and Cora didn’t teach me. I’ve been thinking I could go to Tuskegee and get a teaching certificate and come back and have a school here.”
Fannie smiled and slapped her knee. “See that’s how you should be thinking. Paying your own way.”
“But I’d have a baby and no husband. I wouldn’t be able to get the money to go unless it came from papa, and papa is not going to give up anything unless I do what he wants.”
June stretched and Fannie rubbed her back. “June, did anybody ever ask you if you wanted to keep this baby?”
June shook her head. “I guess they all, we all, thought what was best for you. Your parents didn’t ask and here I am telling you to keep the baby and get a job and raise it. I don’t mean to get into your business, girl, but I was thinking about how hard it’s gonna be for Minnelsa.”
“I know you right, Miss Fannie, but I don’t know what to do. Everybody always decides for me. Then I decide if I’m going to do it or not. I guess I’m just doing things like always. Doing what I’m told when things get out of hand.”
She got up with Fannie’s help to go to her room. When she reached the top of the stairs Fannie called out: “June?”
“Yes, ma’am?” she wanted to rest not talk anymore.
“Do you want to keep your baby?”
June learned against the door. It took her so long to answer Fannie called up again. “I don’t know, Miss Fannie. I never had a chance to think about it before. It seems right and then when you look at it from my papa’s view and my sister’s view. . .I don’t know.”
* * *
She was combing Millie’s hair one afternoon when her water broke. “It’s too soon,” she said after she sent the child to get the women. They helped her into the house and up the stairs. They helped her out of her clothes and asked about the pains, but she wasn’t having any. Cora sent Michael for Sara, the midwife, because, after all, it was too soon.
“You don’t feel nothing?” the gnarled old midwife said after poking and prodding. “Cause something ain’t right. It ain’t yer time.”
“I’m just uncomfortable, Miss Sara,” June was trying to be polite.
“Hum, well you just stay in this bed. And keep Millie up here with you. You need something make her get it. Don’t get out of the bed at all, you hear?”
June nodded and watched as the entire group of women left the room to decide her fate. Millie sat down next to her with a slate June had found in some of the boxes that Fannie and Ella had gotten from the school with the piano. The girl was learning her letters and numbers faster than June could teach her. She was a good student too, but June felt that was because Millie wanted to please her so much.
The colored doctor came the next day. He was seldom called upon to visit outside of Tuskegee. Most people still tended to go to “root ladies” and “uneducated doctors” for their ailments, but he was old friends with Ella and Fannie, and he knew of the Blacksmith so he made the house call without question.
“You’re in the best place to be in your condition, little lady,” he said to her with fatherly concern. “This baby ain’t ready to come out quite yet. Needs a couple more weeks. Ain’t nothing you can do but stay here in this bed and get waited on hand and foot. I’ll be back through here in three days’ time and check on you then. If the pains start, then the baby’s going to come and we just got to pray for the best. But if you can, just lie in this bed.”
And so June did just that.
Ella decided that it was time to call on Bira to come and be with her daughter. “No matter what that stubborn old coot of a Blacksmith says.”
“No, don’t worry mama just yet.”
“But child, it’s almost your time.”
“I know, but I think Minnelsa should be with me.”
Ella frowned: “June this is your baby.”
“It’s gonna be Minnelsa’s baby soon.” Fannie and Ella looked at her. “Don’t be mad. I am doing the right thing. I know I am. If Minnelsa’s going to be its mother she should be here to see it into the world.”
They didn’t seem satisfied with the answer but it was an answer. They sent for Minnelsa but word came back that Minnelsa and Peter had taken a little vacation, a little honeymoon to New York City. June was disappointed. “I’ve never been anywhere,” she cried. “Minnelsa didn’t even want to go to New York.”
“She went for her husband’s sake,” they told her. June cried and cried until Fannie and Ella insisted on calling for Bira again. June still said not yet. Besides, she didn’t tell them she was crying because she knew she would have learned to love and enjoy New York in a way that Minnelsa couldn’t.
The pains hadn’t started and June was tired of being in bed. She wanted to get up and move about. Teaching Millie was fine and having Michael read to her from time to time with his unsteady broken rhythm because he was unsure of the pronunciation of the words was nice. His voice was pleasant and he was always so sweet to her. She started to notice that whenever he came into her room he was clean and smelled as if he had just bathed. He seemed so shy and yet so endearing. Cora was constantly telling him not to bother her, but June said she needed a friend.
On the day before the doctor was to return she asked Michael: “How come you don’t have a girl hanging around you all the time like all the other men folks?”
He put down his book and swallowed hard.
“I guess don’t nobody like me. I mean I like girls, lots of girls. But working here and being with my mama and all, I don’t get to see them till Sunday and. . . I just ain’t got one.”
He was smiling and she was smiling. She kept on crocheting and he was about to start reading when she interrupted him. “You gonna get married one day?”
He dropped his book and looked up at her with a funny shocked grin. “Ma’am?”
“Michael,” she insisted, “I told you not to call me ma’am. I’m barely two years older than you. You make me feel like an old lady when you call me that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Then call me June.”
“June.” The word came out of his mouth on gilded flowers. He spoke it so purely that she knew immediately he was sweet on her. Before the Piano Man, before the baby, she would have tortured the soul of any man who reacted to her that way. She would have led Michael to believe all kinds of things but never meaning to love him, truly love him. That had been another lifetime. Now she had Michael as a friend and admirer. She knew what it was like to love someone and get nothing in return.
Except the baby in her belly.
“I asked you if you ever going to get married.”
“Well, ma’ am. . .I mean June,” she heard it again clear as a bell. It was different from the way he said anything else. “I guess if I find the right woman. I mean a woman who loves me and what I am ‘cause I ain’t much.”
“What do you mean you ain’t much, Michael? Who told you that?”
He cleared his throat
again and nervously answered. “Well, I ain’t no rich Blacksmith, like your father. And I ain’t no piano playing professor like your sister’s husband. Hell, I don’t think I’d ever want to work in a saw mill like your husband. I just do what I got to do. Means I ain’t that much.”
She had never thought of him that way. “Michael, come and sit here,” she instructed him to come over to the bed. He didn’t at first, looking to the door to make sure no one would come in. “It’s okay. You can sit by me.”
Slowly he sat his big frame down. The muscles pulled at his shirt buttons. June found that striking. This shy, young man, so unlike the Piano Man, was far handsomer than she remembered. She had never seen Michael up close. “You must never think of yourself as nothing. You can drive and fix a car, you can take care of this farm. You take care of your mother and your sister. Sometimes you take care of me. Don’t think of yourself as nothing.”
He smiled and without a word she leaned into him and kissed him.
It was slow going at first, his lips met hers and he stopped breathing. She waited to see if he would kiss her back. She counted to five before she felt the sensation that she was being kissed in return. She rubbed her tongue across his teeth and made him part his lips. It didn’t take long before they were entwined in a passionate kiss the likes of which she hadn’t had since the Piano Man.
He pulled away. “Ma’am, June, I’m not supposed to bother you.”
“That didn’t bother me in the least, Michael,” she blushed. “I actually liked it.”
He swallowed hard and kissed her again, but this time she allowed herself to sink back into the pillows and rest there. When he sat up he touched her face and her hair then rose. “I have to go.”
June smiled when he left. She tingled a bit. Michael was a fairly decent kisser. The smile lingered on her face as she thought about what it would be like to be loved by someone big and burly like the shy farmboy. She daydreamed knowing he would come back for more. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few kisses to pass the time and make her feel like the woman she used to be before. . .
The baby kicked and June laughed aloud. “No, I didn’t forget about you. But maybe I can get me a little love for a change.”
* * *
June had kissed him and he felt different. Different kissing a real woman. She had been married and she was about to have a baby and she had taken a liking to him. Maybe when the baby was born she would . . .
As he walked home alone he wondered what he could do? Ask her to be his girl? If she decided to stay there, why couldn’t he?
Because she was the Blacksmith’s daughter and he had heard all the old men talking about the Blacksmith and how he protected his daughters. He could protect her; he was big and strong enough. He took care of his mother and his sister. He just didn’t have anything to offer her. And she sure wasn’t going to come live in the cabin with him, Cora, and Millie.
Maybe they could live together at Miss Fannie’s. He’d be a good father to her baby. Treat it like it was his own. And give her more, lots more. Fill her up all the time. The men folk said that’s how you keep them. Michael would love lying next to someone who smelled that good and looked that good every night.
Of course she might change. Like Toby’s wife. She was a hag and always nagging him to do something. He couldn’t imagine a tiny woman like June bossing anyone around. No, if June was his woman, he’d be the boss.
June was rich, he kept forgetting. She had been to school, even started college and her family would never accept him.
He wondered why she had let him kiss him.
He wondered did she really like him.
Most of all, he wondered, how could he get her?
* * *
The doctor came on the same day as a letter came from Minnelsa in New York. June wondered if her father had heard she was there with the Piano Man. Minnelsa’s letter was filled with joy. It was bliss between she and Peter. They were staying with old friends of Peter’s but they would be back before the baby. Maybe not, June thought, as the doctor probed her and said: “It’s gonna be sooner than even I thought. Fannie, Cora, Ella.” The women gave him their full attention.
“You should prepare yourselves. In the next few days you’re gonna have a baby.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There was really going to be a baby born in the big old house. Ella cleaned up an old cradle she had gotten in one of her trades. More diapers were cut and made, then washed and hung out to dry in the warm breeze so they would be ready for the new arrival. Baby clothes were pulled out of old trunks and placed before June and Millie, who was there every waking moment to pick through what she considered the best.
June still refused to let them call for her mother.
Michael came every chance he got, especially when Millie wasn’t around. He would kiss June gently on the cheek, like a dutiful suitor, and bring her little bouquets of flowers that he had found in the field, asking her if she needed anything that only he could get.
At first he would sit on the edge of the chair opposite the bed where he could look out and see the diapers and blankets and baby things blowing in the wind. He sat there because he came straight from the fields and brought with him a strong yet masculine smell. It reminded her of the Blacksmith, the smell of a hard day’s honest work, as her father always said, before he cleaned up in back of his house. A smell he did not abide, of course, from his daughters’ suitors.
Then Michael would come back later when he was clean and fed. He smelled of fresh starch and homemade soap that took the musty odor away. His hair was neatly brushed and his shirt so white that she wondered when the bleach was going to eat it away. “He’s got only one good dress-up shirt,” Millie giggled. “He washes it every night.”
She got him to move his chair closer to the bed. She got him to hold her hand. And, finally, she got him to kiss her now and then. When she got him to sit on the bed, they kissed often. They touched more, talked less and seemed not to care if anyone in the busy house saw them. And for a while no one did.
Until Cora saw them.
Now Cora didn’t want no trouble. She just stood outside of June’s room with a basketful of baby clothes that, as she had put it to Mattie, “that lazy, good for nothing, high yeller gal hadn’t lifted one finger to get for her own child.” She watched with disgust while they embraced and their lips smacked when they separated and they made the little noises that lovers made when the only thing in their world was the two of them.
“Lord, please,” Cora whispered to herself and looked around to see if anyone else was watching the display of affection. “I don’t want this heifer for my son. Not a rich, almost white colored girl with a baby by some unknown man.” June’s father was literally paying for someone else to take care of her. Once Michael had June, he wouldn’t want the girls that had surrounded him all his life. Girls that could cook better and clean better, and make better wives because they didn’t think they were so pretty because they didn’t have a daddy to buy them a man when they needed one. Girls who wouldn’t leave at the first sign of trouble like too hungry winters or too hardworking summers.
Cora walked away from the sight of them. Maybe June was lonely. Hell, she was lonely too. Been lonely for five years since Bill had died. She hadn’t had the time to take another man to her bed, although a few had tried. She looked in the tall mirror on the wall at the bottom of the steps and took in her features: her thick shoulder length hair that was pulled in a tight curly knot at the back of her head, a wrinkle-less face. “I’m not even forty yet.”
There was something about her face, something old she knew. She could sense it as well as feel it. She got closer to the mirror and touched her skin. Soft as a baby. No Jezebel makeup had ever touched her face. She had never even wanted to paint her lips. Bill had told her she was perfect with her big, round hips, small waist and, as he had said many night before he kissed them, her just right breasts. Bill’s lips hadn’t touched hers in five years. Five years
since he had been found shot dead outside the white man’s town and nobody ever could ask why. What she saw on her face now was fear and exhaustion.
Bill’s death had left her with a toddling Millie and a man child named Michael. She was hoping that some way or other Michael could move on from this life, maybe even go to the Institute. But he claimed he wasn’t interested. He liked his work around the farm for Ella and Fannie.
She had been June’s age when Michael was born but she had a husband beside her. Maybe June would let go of the boy once the baby was born and with her sister. She mumbled: “That kiss was too passionate.” Looking up the stairs she prayed: “Lord, I wonder if anything else has gone on between them. Once a man gets a taste of a woman, once he got her scent set right in his nose and the feel of her skin set right on his palms, once a man started remembering the curves of a women’s body so well that he could build her next to him in his sleep, he wants that woman all the time.”
“What you mumbling about, Cora?” Ella was staring at her.
“I’m hoping that Michael doesn’t have his eye set on that girl.”
Ella laughed. “They probably both lonely. It will wear off when that baby gets here. ‘Sides she can’t do nothing now you need to worry about.”
They made eye contact. “Ella, it ain’t now I’m worried about.”
She planned to intercede the only way a mother could. Woman to woman.
By the time Michael slipped down the stairs and out the side door, the house was calm and fairly quiet. Millie was on the front porch shucking corn with Ella. Mattie and Fannie had gone out to pick berries for pie. Cora climbed the stairs and brought the clean baby clothes into June’s room.
“Any pains today?” she said attempting to make conversation.
“None,” June replied as she touched the tiny clothes and diapers. “Sometimes, Cora, I can’t believe that I’m really gonna have a baby. That a child is gonna come out of me.”
The Wilful Daughter Page 25
