by Leah Weiss
Sugar says in a small voice, “So you can be my brother, maybe?” and Whiz grins in a heartbreaking way and pats her knee, but he is so forlorn.
I offer some of Mama’s wisdom because I don’t have much of my own. “Mama says hope is a road in life, and it’s easier to travel than despair. Sometimes a new perspective is all you need to make it through. So I wish you hope and a new perspective.”
Whiz leans forward, reaches in his back pocket, and for a second, I worry he’s reaching for the bottle of moonshine. Instead, he pulls out an envelope. It’s from the North Carolina College at Durham. A teaching college for Negroes. He holds it in both hands and starts crying.
“What’d it say? Did you get in?”
He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Too scared to open it.” He turns it over in his hands. “It came yesterday, and I can’t bring myself to see what’s inside. Not on the heels of Wade being buried.”
“Wade would be tickled if you got in. He’d be so proud. We all would”
“What if it says no?”
“What if it says yes? You’ve got to open it.”
Whiz takes his sister’s hand and lays the letter in it. “Would you open it for me, Sugar?”
Carefully, she slips her finger under the flap and pulls out the folded paper. Whiz is wound as tight as Oma’s cuckoo clock. Sugar unfolds the paper, and it crinkles like giftwrap. I can see the letter is dated March seventh, a week back. Sugar reads aloud, “Dear Mr. William Mayhew, we are pleased to inform you…”
Chapter 46
Bert: Tobacco Cloth
Now that we know Wade won’t come home, Mama worries extra bout Everett, and that puts my mind on him, too. I saw his army picture, but it doesn’t look like a boy who tells riddles. He looks like a man gone to war. What was he thinking when that picture got took? He doesn’t look scared. He doesn’t look worried. He looks like a soldier man.
The last riddle that come in a letter was this: What has a foot but no leg? Lu says she knows right off but won’t say. When we go to bed that night, I can’t help myself. “What’s the answer to that riddle?”
She says, “A ruler.”
I say, “What’s a ruler?”
And she says, “Forget it.”
The next morning, the air is cold as Christmas, but it’s early March. I come outside and see the streak of red peep over the horizon. Me and Lu walk up on Mama and Daddy standing at the edge of the field, worried. They look out at the new tobacco seedlings standing straight in rows. “Almanac didn’t say a thing about frost coming.” Daddy’s words come out in little puffs. “One almost came last night,” Daddy says. “The seedlings are in danger.”
“I believe it,” Mama says and turns to me and Lu. “We need everybody. Gertie and Sugar, and maybe Clara can help. And Grady, too.”
“But I don’t want to miss school,” Lu whines.
“Cora and Lydia will go, but the rest of you are needed here. School can wait. We got gauze to lay.”
I’m glad to stay home, cause I don’t like school one bit. When I learn one thing, there’s something else to know. Questions give me a headache, so I’m glad to stay home. I saw fat rolls of gauze in the hayloft when I first come and wondered bout it. Lu called it tobacco cloth and says it comes out when tobacco is young and a freeze comes late. The bolts come outta the loft and lay beside the field.
Daddy says, “We’ll work in teams of four. Unroll the gauze, then take metal pins”—he holds up U-shaped wire—“and stick em through the cloth into the ground to hold it in place. Space the pins three to four feet apart so we have enough. We got till sundown to beat the freeze. Careful not to disturb the baby plants.”
Irene and Wolf hold a bolt of gauze, and me and Lu take the ends and start unrolling. The light fabric flutters like butterfly wings, and when the hundred-yard bolt is spent, we walk down each side and stick pins through the cloth. Then we get another bolt and do it again.
I say to Irene to be talkative, “They still looking for Terrell Stucky?”
She straightens and tucks hair behind one ear. “Funny you should ask,” she starts and makes Lu pay attention. “Trotter Langley was picking up a load of oysters on the coast when he thought he saw Terrell Stucky. He wasn’t positive it was him, but it was the pearl-handled knife the man whittled with that made him take notice. He was whittling outside the fish store, but his hat was pulled low so he couldn’t see his face.”
“What’d Trotter do?”
“When he got back, he told Sheriff Cecil.”
“And?” Lu says. “Then what?”
“That’s all I know. I guess somebody went to check it out.”
Lu puts her hands on her hips. “Irene Rebecca Brown, you work for the Mercer County Reporter, for heaven’s sake. You have to be more curious than that. Finding a missing man who’s likely a murderer would be big news.”
“Sorry, Miz Nancy Drew,” Irene says. “But that’s all I know.”
“Anybody heard from Frankie Tender or Larry Crumbie?” I add quick before Irene gets in a mood.
“No,” is all she says, then Mama rings the dinner bell, and I straighten my back that aches from bending and pushing in pins, and there’s dust from my hair to my toes. I don’t wash up with the men at the barrel and don’t sit at the yard table in the chill. I go inside to the kitchen sink and use a washrag to clean my face and arms and hands. I carry out platters stacked with ham biscuits, bowls of canned corn and tomatoes, and rows of deviled eggs, then I eat in the kitchen where it’s warm. Mama has made two three-layer cakes. It’s her basic one-two-three-four cake I love. The recipe is so simple even I remember. You take one cup of softened butter and one cup of milk, two cups of sugar, threes cups of self-rising flour, and four eggs. One of the three-layer cakes has white icing and the other caramel.
After noon dinner, when we head back to the fields to lay more gauze, Lu says, “I wish I was at school.”
I say, “I wish there was more cake.”
But we lay down gauze till the field is covered, and my fingertips bruise, and my back burns from bending, and Lu looks as wore out as me, and we climb the stairs and fall across our bed. I don’t think about cake. I bet Lu don’t think about school.
Chapter 47
Lucy: Ghosts
Daddy was right. The killing frost did come late in March, and it would have taken out our baby tobacco plants before they got started, but we saved them. And a few days after the freezing nights pass, the gauze was rolled up again and stored in the rafters, but I didn’t have to miss school. There’s no urgency in putting gauze away. Only in putting it down.
With the coming of April, Bert gets nervous. She says, “I’ll kill myself if a swing band comes to town like a year back. Or I’ll run away and change my name.”
“What name would you pick?”
“That’s not the point, Lu. The point is I don’t ever want to see a singing man in uniform again. If I do, I’ll die on the spot.”
I don’t believe that fate will happen to Bert, but it happens to our president. He was having his portrait painted and died on the spot. We get the telephone call from the switchboard operator, Lillie, but we already heard from Aunt Fanniebelle, who gets news from a higher source. Mama says it’s no surprise FDR died. I ask her why’d she say that and she says, “President Roosevelt led us out of the Depression, through the Dust Bowl, and into this tangled war. He was serving an unprecedented fourth term. There’s only so much a body can endure—God rest his soul.”
So tonight, the half of America with radios has the other half in to listen, and we huddle and pray for a good connection, hungry to hear details about something that has changed history. Mama sends Grady to fetch the Mayhews. Our parlor is packed. Children on the floor, grown-ups in chairs or leaning against the wall. Lydia and Cora cry softly next to Mama. Whiz puts his arm around Sugar’s shoulders. He waits for college t
o start in September, but for now, he helps Miz Elvira in the back room of the library.
The last time my family was this grief-stricken was two months back over Wade Sully dying. This is a different kind of grief, where the weight of a mourning nation presses in… President Roosevelt, at age sixty-three, recovering from exhaustion at Warm Springs, Georgia, on his doctor’s advice, collapsed as he sat for a formal portrait.
“What happens now?” Bert says.
Mama says, “There’ll be a big funeral. A chance for folks to say goodbye.”
“No, I mean to us and the war.”
Daddy says, “Vice President Truman steps into the president’s shoes. Not sure if he knows what he’s doing—few vice presidents do—but he’ll learn fast. He’ll have advisors, but Lordy, I hope he’s not weak-willed.”
Daddy is cynical of politicians. He doesn’t think they live in the real world. They only pretend to be in touch with the working man’s problems I’ve heard him say after taxes were raised, the gold standard eliminated, and tobacco regulations tightened. Now our president has been worn out and died. America has a new president. Harry S. Truman, born into a simple farming family in Independence, Missouri. Mr. Truman was sworn in by Chief Justice Harlan Stone today on April twelfth at 5:47 p.m. as the thirty-third… The radio announcer speaks from far away.
We listen till we can recite the news by heart. Daddy clicks off the radio, and Mama says, “Mr. Truman. He woke up this morning never knowing what was coming before sundown. Sounds odd to say his name, doesn’t it? President Truman.”
I say, “It sounds like True-man to me. President True-man. With him coming from Independence, maybe he came with the right name from the right place at the right time.”
I catch sight of Sugar rolling her eyes, making fun of me, but Mama says, “What a lovely thought. I hope you’re right.” She takes a pin and sticks it in Independence, Missouri.
Listening to the radio took storytelling time away, and it’s late so our visitors leave, and we head to bed. As soon as the lights are out, Lydia and Cora come crawling into bed between us.
Bert complains, “Why can’t you girls sleep in your room? Y’all are getting too big.”
I say, “I like them sleeping with us. Especially tonight after the sad day we’ve had. One day, they’ll be too big but not tonight.” I tickle them to hear them giggle.
The bed full of bodies turns quiet, then Bert says, “I don’t get it. The whole dead president thing and everybody being sad over a man they never set eyes on. What good’s a president anyway if he can’t stop a war? Or grow back missing arms and legs on menfolk who come home hurt? He can’t save farms from being sold off or stop the hate that got milk cows and Assassin killed. He can’t save Aunt Violet from being locked away. So what good is he?” Bert is getting worked up.
“He’s only a man. He’s not a wizard or God.”
“What does the president living or dying have to do with us on a tobacco farm? Nothing, that’s what.” Bert turns her back on us, mad at something. She says, “If I was in my mountains, we might not hear bout a dead president for a long time. And when we do, we don’t cry. He’s too far away.”
Lydia cuddles against Bert’s stiff backside then she starts softly, “Sto-ry, sto-ry,” then Cora joins her, “Sto-ry.”
Bert knows they’ll keep on till she gives in. She doesn’t have a choice but to say, “Did I ever tell you bout blue ghosts?” And the girls clap and squirm with happiness, and Bert says, “Y’all settle down and be quiet, and I’ll tell you a love story,” and she rolls onto her back and faces the dark ceiling. She clears her throat but speaks softly so Mama won’t yell at us to go to sleep.
“Once upon a time, in the dark of my holler, we don’t have wolpertingers like Oma, but we got something special all the same. We got blue ghost fireflies. They rise up from the ground, turn on blue lights, and dance above the forest floor, looking for love. First time I seen em, I was smaller than Lydia. Pa woke me and my sister, Ruth, and told us to come with him. Ma stayed in bed, but Ruth and me got up, rubbed our eyes awake, and walked barefoot behind Pa cross the clearing, past the cemetery, through the apple trees, into the woods. There weren’t no moon showing, so Ruth held tight to Pa’s sleep shirt, and I held on to the tail of her bedgown. The night air was soft as I ever recollect.
“Pa didn’t talk while we walk, and he takes me and Ruth to a big rock. We climb up and sit on top and look down on dancing fairies swirling and floating. Pa says they’re called blue ghosts, and he never saw them anywhere but in our dell. Been said they’re the souls of Union and Confederate soldiers what died long ago in battle fought in our dell, and they never got to go home. The blue ghosts come in early summer to find mates. The boy fireflies are the ones keeping the light on so long, and the girl fireflies blink on and off. We three stayed there till they stop blinking and we were chilled clear through, and we went home holding on to each other.”
Bert stops talking, and the quiet settles on us, then Cora whispers, “Is that the end?”
“For tonight.”
“Were the ghosts trying to get back home? Is that why they blinked?”
“I guess.”
“Like Morse code in the war? Talking to their mama and daddy fireflies?”
When Bert doesn’t answer, Cora says, “I bet their mama and daddy misses them.”
Bert starts crying low, then she cries like a well divined that rises from within her chest. Maybe she cries for her ma and pa and that baby brother who never had a chance to be. Cries for her blue mountains rising into the clouds where you can wash your hands without soap and water. All we can do is put our arms around Bert and hold her tight and let her cry.
Chapter 48
Bert: Rendering
Rendering wax breaks my heart every time cause we steal everything the honeybee has. We done it back in late summer of ’43 when I first come and two times in ’44. Now it’s June of ’45, and the war in the east is over cause the Germans gave up but not Japan. Daddy says Japan is hanging on out of stubbornness, but they gotta give up soon. We don’t ask Weegee when peace will come. Till the west surrenders, our government buys our beeswax.
Every livelong day, we make the bees live on sugar syrup Gertie makes, and even when the flowers are gone from the fields and the orchards, they eat sugar water. They don’t roam free like usual. They mostly stay in the hives and work and don’t sleep, and the frames get heavy till it’s time. We watch for wax moths since they the only thing that’ll eat beeswax.
The first time I see a piece a beeswax up close with no honey or baby bees inside, I think it’s the purest thing I ever did see. It was like lookin in the face of God, the cells was so perfect, and I wish I had Lu’s ten-dollar words to say what I see.
Once, long before I come to Riverton, me and my sister Ruth was hunting blackberries two ridges over and come upon a cabin stuck back in the holler. A old woman was on the porch, sitting in a grapevine rocker working at a wicker table. A wore-out quilt was on the floor like a rug. We asked what she was doing and she said, “Making Venise lace for a wedding dress for a rich lady. This quilt on the floor keeps it pure from stain.” We watched and stayed back so as not to soil that lace she was makin. There was white silk thread and lots of colored bobbins and pins sticking in a pillow. It was so much over-under-around that my brain got discombobulated seeing the miracle she made, but it spilled out over the table and was hard to look away.
“How’d you learn that?” I asked, and she said it was her memaw that showed her. There won’t nothing fancy bout the cabin or her person, but she made the prettiest lace to beat all.
Lu’s rich cousin Patricia had her a wedding dress made with Venise lace. She’s the one who come down from the North with her college friends to market and turned us into movie stars. Last week, Lu got a letter from Patricia telling bout her fancy wedding and new life. I wonder if Patricia got her
Venise lace from that mountain woman? That wedding lace is pretty enough, but it pales next to the miracle of beeswax. And bees don’t even have bobbins or pins or patterns.
Like other rendering times, me and Lu and Daddy wear bee suits every day for a week and pull frames from the hundred hives. We smoke the bees first so they get sleepy, but they’re flummoxed at what we do, so every time I say thank you. I never work harder than at rendering time, but bee work never stops.
I don’t tell Daddy that I feel shame for taking so much from our bees, but I come close. I find him in the barn one evening near the end of rendering. It’s after supper but before story time, and he’s putting out feed. A lit Lucky Strike is stuck in the corner of his mouth, and the smoke rises into his eyes and he squints.
“You sorry for taking everything from our bees?”
“If we don’t, I don’t think we’d make it.”
We both say, “Thank God for bees,” and that tickles us, talking the same words.
Chapter 49
Lucy: Homecoming
On a regular Tuesday when the workday is done, and Wolf and Joe have gone back to prison camp, and evening chores have started, Aunt Fanniebelle calls with extraordinary news. “Y’all come to town quick. That Japanese Himoto is giving up, turning tail, and the whole dern war is over.” Mama holds out the receiver so we can hear about Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, skewed Fanniebelle-style. “Everybody’s running out their houses and hollering to beat all, and horns are honking and bells a clanging, and somebody shot off some firecrackers that startled my heart. Y’all come to town, you hear?”
As usual, my aunt speaks as though she’s omnipotent and sees everywhere at once. Germany surrendered three months back, but it took drastic actions to convince Japan to stop fighting. Mama says, “Ring the dinner bell, and don’t stop till everybody’s in the yard.” Then to Bert, she says, “Turn the radio up so we can hear the news for ourselves.”
