by Gin Phillips
“Nothin’ about me?”
“Um, I dunno.” She looked like she was thinking hard as she could. “I don’t think so.”
I wished I hadn’t ever asked her to jump on cotton, even if she did have dead babies in her backyard. She must’ve read some of that on my face, because she was quick to add, “But I did tell her that Mama says if anybody’s doin’ God’s work, it’s the Moores.”
I still thought I could have been mentioned by name. Some people thought I was real personable. Plenty she could have said. I started to say that, but the front door to their house opened, and we ducked down behind the porch. It wasn’t Lou Ellen’s mama coming to yell at her for being out so late—it was Aunt Lou who’d come out on the porch.
She was a big woman, broad across the shoulders. It was only a crescent moon, but it caught her face just right. She was the woman from the revival.
I got home without thinking, putting one foot in front of the other and winding up at our front door. I climbed in bed and barely got the covers over me before I fell asleep. No bad dreams at all. And I woke up clearheaded, even though it seemed like I’d just closed my eyes. I loved waking up to the smell of coffee and the sounds of the fire crackling. I only had my ears and nose to tell me things while my eyes stayed closed. I could hear Mama clanking pots in the kitchen and Papa making the floorboards creak while he finished getting the fire going and fetching water for our basin. I wished it was the thick smell of bacon that had drifted under the covers along with the coffee-flavored air, but biscuits were nice, too. I could stay buried under the quilts for at least a few minutes and do nothing but soak it all in. But this morning I wanted to do more.
“Virgie. Virgie. Virgie.” I kept saying it even when I saw her frown. “Virgie.”
“What?” She didn’t even roll over, just stayed perfectly still, arms crossed over her chest.
“Virgie.”
“I said ‘what?’” She sounded annoyed and still half asleep. She wasn’t moving at all, and I wanted her to be a little more enthusiastic about this whole to-do. I was the one who’d gotten in late and had to tiptoe around and find the key Mama left for me on the porch and jump every time Papa shifted or snored and try to stay away from the squeaky board on my side of the bed. Virgie had been dead asleep. And I’d laid there bursting with the news for what must’ve been hours and hours and hours.
I leaned close to her and talked right in her ear. She hated that.
“I’m pretty sure it was Lou Ellen Talbert’s aunt that put the baby in the well,” I said.
That made her roll over, one eye peeping open, head shifting a little. She’d drooled on her pillow in her sleep. “Why do you say that?”
I told her about the babies’ graves and Aunt Lou.
“So she would’ve known who we were,” Virgie said, head still on her pillow, but eyes getting wider by the second. “Would’ve had some connection to us even. And you really think she was that upset at the revival?”
“She was beside herself.”
“We don’t know that she had a baby.”
“Well, we don’t know that the sun’ll come up in the morning, but it always does.” I’d heard Papa say that before, and it always sounded smart when he said it.
“What are you talking about?” asked Virgie, rubbing at her eyes with one hand.
I tried to move along, not sure about the sunshine explanation. “We can’t know for sure unless we talk to her.”
“You didn’t ask the Talbert girl?”
“Lou Ellen. No, I didn’t ask her.”
She raised herself up on her elbows, looking down at me. “Why not?”
I raised up on my elbows, too. “Now how do you think I should have worked that in? ‘So do you know if your aunt had a baby she didn’t tell nobody about and threw it in our well just for fun?’”
“Shhh,” she said, looking toward the kitchen. “Don’t get bent out of shape. I just thought it might be easier to ask her than to ask a grown woman we don’t even know.”
“Why do you think she’d tell her little niece about a baby? About havin’ one or dumpin’ one?”
Virgie flopped back on her pillow with a whoof, and I wondered that the pins in her curlers didn’t stab her in the brain. She lay there and I sat up Indian-style, my knees jabbing into her left leg. But she didn’t move her leg or even look at me at all.
“Can you keep a baby a secret?” she asked, face half in the pillow again.
I shrugged. “If it don’t cry much.” Then I remembered. “But she’s from Brilliant. She could maybe keep the secret if the baby hadn’t never been here. Never been to Lou Ellen’s.”
“You might be right, Tess,” she said, drawing her knees up so they banged into mine. “It might really be her.”
She laid and I sat, so quiet I heard an egg hit the frying pan. Then the oven door open. Maybe the biscuits were ready.
“So what do you want to do?” I asked. “Tell Papa? Maybe have him call Chief Taylor?”
She was all the way out of bed and pulling a dress out of the wardrobe before she answered. “No. Let’s go talk to her ourselves.”
I didn’t think that was such a great idea, but I had to admit I was curious.
Leta JACK HAD SHOT A SQUIRREL FROM THE FRONT PORCH, and I added it to the stew for dinner. We’d had a lot of stew and cornbread—filling stuff that made the children miss meat less. But squirrel was perfect for stew; the meat was too overpowering to eat by itself.
Everybody sliced their cornbread into triangles and spooned stew on their plates, quick to take a bite and tell Jack how tasty it was. He smiled with every bite he took.
“Next time I’ll get a rabbit,” he said.
“Next time get a deer,” said Tess.
“Might as well tell him to get a buffalo,” said Albert, eyes not looking up from his plate. For the first time in a while he was getting to eat with the children, and I hoped he finished quick before he fell asleep in his stew.
“I could shoot a deer,” Jack said. “I could.”
Nobody argued with him. I thought the stew could have used a little more pepper. And a touch more onion.
“We were thinking about the baby in the well,” said Virgie, her face down while she wiped at her mouth. “About how—”
Albert shook his head and interrupted her. “Not now. Not that. Just talk about school or your friends or what the neighbors are up to. I don’t want to talk about anything but what’ll make me smile. Nothin’ to make me think.”
We all watched him as he shoveled in more stew, hand propping up his head. Virgie only nodded, looking heartsore and guilty.
“Missy’s little brother fit a whole frog in his mouth at recess,” said Tess. “He won a piece of licorice off some other boy. But I bet it tasted like frog.”
“I could fit two frogs,” Jack said.
9 Coffee and Supper
Jack THAT NIGHT SHE WENT OVER TO LOU ELLEN TALBERT’S was the first time Tess snuck in. By the time we were teenagers, she was doing it at least once a week. She always told Mama where she’d be, and if Mama ever happened to say no, she wouldn’t go. But most times Mama would nod at her, and Pop would never notice she was out late because he went to bed so early.
Once she was tiptoeing up the back steps and stepped in the slop jar—which was really an old pot to pee in, not a jar—that stayed on the porch at night so you didn’t have to walk all the way to the outhouse. Pop had his bed to himself by then; his breathing had gotten bad enough that he tossed and turned all night and didn’t want to disturb Mama. Pop slept like the dead even with his tossing, which was always puzzling because he had an internal alarm clock that beat all I’d ever seen. You could tell him you wanted to wake up at 4:33 in the morning, and you could bet money—not that we ever would—that it wouldn’t be 4:32 or 4:34 when you felt him shaking your shoulder.
But he didn’t hear Tess walking up those porch steps the night of the slop jar. The rest of us did because she tripped and clomped loud
ly on the planks as she got near the door. Then she hissed, “Shoot!” as loud as she’d clomped. After that, the clatter and slosh of her stepping in the slop jar pushed us over the edge. Mama’s bed was squeaking from her laughing. And still Pop didn’t wake up. By the time Tess hopped in trying to keep one foot—the one without a shoe and sock—off the ground, we’d quieted ourselves.
“At least nobody’s gone number two,” she whispered, and that made us all shove our heads in our pillows to keep from waking Pop.
Tess still lives in the family house, after outlasting two husbands and moving back to take care of Mama. She’s there by herself now, with a schnauzer that tries to eat dirt out of the flowerpots.
Virgie started teaching after two years of college—she graduated the last year you could still get a teaching certificate after only two years. I sold papers with Tess helping me, and we all scrimped and saved for her college. Nobody got new shoes those two years. Then she started teaching about thirty miles from home and lived with another girl in a boarding house. She loved it, and she met the man she married when they were both at Troy State College for the summer upgrading their certifications. She kept teaching all during the war while he was overseas. Then when he came back, she quit and started on her family.
She lives in Birmingham and her sons take her up to see Tess for long weekends or weeks at a time. Sometimes I join them and we argue over which was Pop’s favorite pie and who snored the worst at night and which of Virgie’s boyfriends was the one who accidentally opened the door while Tess was peeping through the keyhole and gave her a black eye. We talk very little about politics or books or movies—we like to unroll the past and touch up the details. And between us all, we can fill in each other’s gaps.
Albert I SLEPT FOR SIXTEEN HOURS STRAIGHT THE FIRST DAY in November. Then I ate a bowl of vegetable stew and went right back to sleep for another ten. By the time I finally got my head on straight again, I couldn’t hardly remember why I’d wanted Jonah to come over. But I knew I’d decided it was a good idea and didn’t much matter what anybody might say.
When I asked him, he said no.
I’d driven over to his house, knocked on the front door, and taken in the porch floor while I was waiting. The door and walls of the house looked solid enough, but whole sections of the porch were rotting—Jonah’d laid plywood across the bad spots on the floorboard. His wife opened the door before I could lean down to get a better look.
“Ma’am,” I said. She was a strong-looking woman, maybe a head taller than Leta. I couldn’t think of her name, though I was sure Jonah must’ve mentioned it sometime over the last few years. Surely.
“Mr. Moore,” she said back. “You need Jonah?”
“I’d appreciate it. You doin’ alright?”
“Yessir.” She turned, then stopped before her hand left the door. “You like some tea? Fresh made.”
I could tell she didn’t expect me to take her up on the tea. “That’d be real nice.”
When Jonah came out, I was leaning against the railing, not putting much weight on it, hands in my pockets. I was thinking how he could best patch the porch more permanent, without having to replace everything.
“’Afternoon, Albert,” he said from the doorway. The screen closed behind him when he took a step. “Kids know better than to play out here,” he said, seeing where I was looking.
“All the wood goin’ bad?”
“’Fraid so. Ain’t got around to trackin’ down some new.”
His wife came out with two glasses of tea, handing me mine first, which I thanked her for. He called her Renee when he thanked her, and I tucked that away.
“So what brings you by?” he asked after a sip. “Somethin’ wrong?”
“Nothin’ wrong. Just wanted to see about you comin’ by for supper tomorrow if you’re not workin’.”
“Supper?”
“Nothin’ special. You could bring Renee.”
He ran his hand over his chin like he was feeling for stubble. “Well, I thank you. I didn’t think you knew what you was sayin’ when you asked me the other week. Not sure you do now. But I’m gone say no just the same.”
I hadn’t thought about him turning me down. “Why not?” I asked.
“You got to stand there and ask me why not?”
I wished he wasn’t making this so difficult when it’d already taken me long enough to ask. “Look, ain’t no reason to say no. I been thinkin’ on it. Figured out I was actin’ wrong.”
He looked at me like I’d sprouted wings. “What’re you talkin’ about? You ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, glad he’d given me that little bit of help. “I thought I treated everybody fair, so none of the rest of it mattered.” Nigger Town, laws about restaurants and such, police takin’ coloreds in whenever they felt like it. ’Cause it wasn’t me. But this was me. This visit. “What you said about the woman and her baby, it surprised me. Shouldn’t have, though, long as I’ve known you. Wanna do better by you.”
He took his time drinking his tea, kicking at the porch a time or two. It was a clean porch, well swept, but no paint on it or the rest of the house. Paint would’ve helped with the rotting.
“The rest of it still matters, Albert.”
I shook my head. “I was wrong, and I know it, and I aim to make it right.”
“The rest of it still matters,” he said again.
“Not to me. Not now.”
“You askin’ any more colored men over for supper? Writin’ any letters to the governor sayin’ we ought to be able to eat in y’all’s restaurants?”
I only looked at him.
“You a good man, Albert, but it ain’t ever not gone matter.”
I’d watched Leta argue with the children before, and I noticed she usually talked less than I did. I’d go back and forth with them, trying to tell them why they was wrong, and she’d only repeat herself until they gave in. In the back of my head, I knew it usually worked on me, too.
“Come for supper,” I said.
“Ain’t gone do that. But I thank you.”
“Come for supper.”
“Albert…”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Might be fine. Probably would be. But might not. Ain’t worth riskin’ the might-not.”
“Come for supper.”
“Mule-headed.” He set his tea glass down, stared at the ceiling long enough to draw a few breaths. “You so set on it, I’ll come for coffee tomorrow.”
“Why not stay for supper? Ain’t no difference.”
“You know the difference.” And I did—with coffee we could sit out on the porch, and it wouldn’t be the same as having him inside the house, much less at the table.
Virgie I FINALLY GOT TO MEET NAOMI’S PREACHER AND POTENTIAL husband, Bradford. She invited me to go with her family on a night they were having a fellowship supper after church, and Naomi and Bradford and Tom and I stayed long after Aunt Merilyn and Uncle Bill headed home. At the beginning of his sermon, Bradford told a story about a preacher who told his congregation that they should throw all their whiskey and homebrew into the river. Then the song leader stood up and announced that the closing hymn would be “Shall We Gather at the River.” I did laugh more than I usually did during a sermon, and I laughed a good bit on the walk home.
Naomi couldn’t stop looking at him. I tried looking at Tom out of the corner of my eye to figure out if I could get captivated, too, but it only made my head hurt.
We were still a good ten or twelve houses away from home when the sky opened up. Busy talking, we hadn’t noticed any clouds, so we froze when that first sheet of water hit us, then started yelling and running, with the boys asking if we wanted their jackets. We didn’t want to stop long enough to take them. As we ran, I felt my dress twist around my legs, and I couldn’t seem to keep it straight. After we’d made it a couple of blocks, I realized that it wasn’t just that the material was wet: my crepe dress was shrinking.
<
br /> “Naomi, we got to stop at your house!” I yelled over the sound of our feet hitting the dirt and puddles. “My dress’ll be up to my hips by the time I get home!”
She clearly thought that was about the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and she stopped completely, throwing her head back laughing with the water pouring off her face, running into her mouth and down her chin. Her dress was plastered to her, and I knew mine looked the same, but neither of us had curves for it to look too shocking.
“Get home,” Naomi said to Tom and Bradford when she’d gotten hold of herself. “God might strike you dead if you get a look at Virgie’s legs.”
“I didn’t say that…” I started, knowing she was teasing me for being prudish but thinking it sounded like a comment about my legs, which were just fine.
“Quick,” she shooed. “Her knees are about to peep out.”
And they were, even though I was pulling at the skirt as hard as I could. Tom looked about to split in two, not wanting to look like he was after a peek at my legs, but not wanting to leave me.
“You ought to head on,” I said to him. “Naomi and me’ll be fine.” All this had gone on with rain so hard you had to squint your eyes, and I think the weather made the boys agree quicker than they normally would have. They wished us goodbye and took off.
By the time we got to Naomi’s house my dress was several inches above my knees, and it was short-instead of long-sleeved. We banged on the door, not wanting to drip inside, and Aunt Merilyn didn’t open the door all the way before she turned and ran back for towels. By then Naomi and I were both talking at once about my dress, and soon enough I had a towel around my head and Aunt Merilyn and Naomi both squatting on the balls of their feet yanking at my dress.
I pulled at my sleeves, wondering how I’d get home without my dress shrinking back up. Tess and I were going to see Lou Ellen Talbert’s aunt the next day, and I felt a little frivolous thinking more about crepe than about that dead little boy. But the truth was that I’d thought about him—and his mother—less and less. Somewhere between the basketball game and sitting with Jack in the hospital, the dark, awful life I’d pictured for the mystery mother got harder to imagine. Then she got less dark and awful. More normal. And a little more boring.
