A Painted House (22 page)

“Did she tell your parents?”

“Yes ma’am. Everybody knows now.”

“You mean everybody in your family knows.”

“Yes ma’am. We ain’t told nobody else.”

“Don’t,” Pappy grunted. He was settling back into his chair, his shoulders beginning to sag, defeat sinking in rapidly. If Libby Latcher claimed Ricky was the father, then everyone would believe her. He wasn’t home to defend himself. And in a swearing contest, Libby would likely have more supporters than Ricky, given his reputation as a hell-raiser.

“Have you had supper, son?” Gran asked.

“No ma’am.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes ma’am.”

The table was covered with food that would not be touched. We Chandlers certainly had just lost our appetites. Pappy shoved back from the table and said, “He can have mine.” He bounced to his feet, left the kitchen, and went to the front porch. My father followed him without a word.

“Sit here, son,” Gran said, indicating Pappy’s chair.

They fixed him a plate of food and a glass of sweet
tea. He sat down and ate slowly. Gran drifted to the front porch, leaving me and my mother to sit with Percy. He did not speak unless he was spoken to.

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After a lengthy discussion on the front porch, a meeting Percy and I missed because we were banished to the back porch, Pappy and my father loaded the boy up and took him home. I sat in the swing with Gran as they drove away, just as it was getting dark. My mother was shelling butter beans.

“Will Pappy talk to Mr. Latcher?” I asked.

“I’m sure he will,” my mother said.

“What will they talk about?” I was full of questions because I assumed I now had the right to know everything.

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll talk about the baby,” Gran said. “And Ricky and Libby.”

“Will they fight?”

“No. They’ll reach an agreement.”

“What kind of agreement?”

“Everybody’ll agree not to talk about the baby, and to keep Ricky’s name out of it.”

“That includes you, Luke,” my mother said. “This is a dark secret.”

“I ain’t tellin’ nobody,” I said with conviction. The thought of folks knowing that the Chandlers and the Latchers were somehow related horrified me.

“Did Ricky really do that?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Gran said. “The Latchers are not trustworthy people. They’re not good Christians; that’s
how the girl got pregnant. They’ll probably want some money out of the deal.”

“Money?”

“We don’t know what they want,” my mother said.

“Do you think he did it, Mom?”

She hesitated for a second before saying, softly, “No.”

“I don’t think he did, either,” I said, making it unanimous. I would defend Ricky forever, and if anybody mentioned the Latcher baby, then I’d be ready to fight.

But Ricky was the likeliest suspect, and we all knew it. The Latchers rarely left their farm. There was a Jeter boy about two miles away, but I’d never seen him anywhere near the river. Nobody lived close to the Latchers but us. Ricky had been the nearest tomcat.

Church business suddenly became important, and the women talked about it nonstop. I had many more questions about the Latcher baby, but I couldn’t sneak in a word. I finally gave up and went to the kitchen to listen to the Cardinals game.

I sorely wanted to be in the back of our pickup over at the Latchers’, eavesdropping on the men as they handled the situation.

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Long after I’d been sent to bed, I lay awake, fighting sleep because the air was alive with voices. When my grandparents talked in bed, I could hear their soft, low sounds creeping down the narrow hallway. I couldn’t understand a word, and they tried their best to make sure no one heard them. But at times, when they were
worried or when they were thinking about Ricky, they were forced to talk late at night. Lying in his bed, listening to their muted utterances, I knew things were serious.

My parents retreated to the front porch, where they sat on the steps, waiting for a breeze and a break from the relentless heat. At first they whispered, but their burdens were too heavy, and their words could not be suppressed. Certain that I was asleep, they talked louder than they normally would have.

I slipped out of bed and slid across the floor like a snake. At the window, I glanced out and saw them in their familiar spot, backs to me, a few feet away.

I absorbed every sound. Things had not gone well at the Latchers’. Libby had been somewhere in the back of the house with the baby, who cried nonstop. All the Latchers seemed frayed and worn out by the crying. Mr. Latcher was angry with Percy for coming to our house, but he was even angrier when he talked about Libby. She was telling that she didn’t want to fool around with Ricky, but he made her anyway. Pappy denied this was the case, but he had nothing to stand on. He denied everything, and said he doubted if Ricky had ever met Libby.

But they had witnesses. Mr. Latcher himself said that on two occasions, just after Christmas, Ricky pulled up in their front yard in Pappy’s pickup and took Libby for a ride. They drove to Monette, where Ricky bought her a soda.

My father speculated that if that really did happen, then Ricky chose Monette because fewer people would know him there. He’d never be seen in Black Oak with the daughter of a sharecropper.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” my mother said.

The next witness was a boy of no more than ten. Mr. Latcher summoned him from the pack huddled around the front steps. His testimony was that he’d seen Pappy’s truck parked at the end of a field row, next to a thicket. He sneaked up on the truck, and got close enough to see Ricky and Libby kissing. He kept it quiet because he was scared, and had come forth with the story only a few hours earlier.

The Chandlers, of course, had no witnesses. On our side of the river, there’d been no hint of a budding romance. Ricky certainly would not have told anyone. Pappy would’ve hit him.

Mr. Latcher said he suspected all along that Ricky was the father, but Libby had denied it. And in truth, there were a couple of other boys who’d shown an interest in her. But now she was telling everything—that Ricky had forced himself on her, that she didn’t want the baby.

“Do they want us to take it?” my mother asked.

I almost groaned in pain.

“No, I don’t think so,” my father said. “What’s another baby around their house?”

My mother thought the baby deserved a good home. My father said it was out of the question until Ricky said it was his child. Not likely, knowing Ricky.

“Did you see the baby?” my mother asked.

“No.”

“He’s the spittin’ image of Ricky,” she said.

My one recollection of the newest Latcher was that of a small object that reminded me, at the time, of my baseball glove. He barely looked human. But my mother and Gran spent hours analyzing the faces of people to
determine who favored whom, and where the eyes came from, and the nose and hair. They’d look at babies at church and say “Oh, he’s definitely a Chisenhall.” Or, “Look at those eyes, got ’em from his grandmother.”

They all looked like little dolls to me.

“So you think he’s a Chandler?” my father said.

“No doubt about it.”

Chapter 18

It was Saturday again, but Saturday without the usual excitement of going to town. I knew we were going because we had never skipped two Saturdays in a row. Gran needed groceries, especially flour and coffee, and my mother needed to go to the drugstore. My father hadn’t been to the Co-op in two weeks. I didn’t have a vote in the matter, but my mother knew how important the Saturday matinee was to the proper development of a child, especially a farm kid with little contact with the rest of the world. Yes, we were going to town, but without the usual enthusiasm.

A new horror was upon us, one that was far more frightening than all this business about Hank Spruill. What if somebody heard what the Latchers were telling? It took just one person, one whisper at one end of Main Street, and the gossip would roar through the town like a wildfire. The ladies in Pop and Pearl’s would drop their baskets and cover their mouths in disbelief. The old farmers hanging around the Co-op would smirk and say, “I’m not surprised.” The older kids from church would point at me as if I were somehow the guilty one. The town would seize the rumor as if it were the gospel truth, and Chandler blood would be forever tainted.

So I didn’t want to go to town. I wanted to stay home and play baseball and maybe go for a walk with Tally.

Little was said over breakfast. We were still very subdued, and I think this was because we all knew the truth. Ricky had left behind a little memory. I wondered to myself if he knew about Libby and the baby, but I wasn’t about to bring up the subject. I’d ask my mother later.

“Carnival’s in town,” Pappy said. Suddenly the day was better. My fork froze in midair.

“What time are we goin’?” I asked.

“The same. Just after lunch,” Pappy said.

“How late can we stay?”

“We’ll see about that,” he said.

The carnival was a wandering band of gypsies with funny accents who lived in Florida during the winter and hit the small farming towns in the fall, when the harvest was in full swing and folks had money in their pockets. They usually arrived abruptly on a Thursday and then set up on the baseball field without permission, and stayed through the weekend. Nothing excited Black Oak like the carnival.

A different one came to town each year. One had an elephant and a giant loggerhead turtle. One had no animals at all but specialized in odd humans—tumbling midgets, the girl with six fingers, the man with an extra leg. But all carnivals had a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, and two or three other rides that squeaked and rattled and generally terrified all the mothers. The Slinger had been such a ride, a circle of
swings on chains that went faster and faster until the riders were flying parallel to the ground and screaming and begging to stop. A couple of years earlier in Monette, a chain had snapped, and a little girl had been flung across the midway and into the side of a trailer. The next week the Slinger was in Black Oak, with new chains, and folks lined up to ride it.

There were booths where you threw rings and darts and shot pellet pistols to win prizes. Some carnivals had fortune-tellers, others had photo booths, still others had magicians. They were all loud and colorful and filled with excitement. Word would spread quickly through the county, and people would flock in, and in a few hours Black Oak would be packed. I was desperate to go.

Perhaps, I thought, the excitement of the carnival would suppress any curiosity about Libby Latcher. I choked down my biscuits and ran outside.

“The carnival’s in town,” I whispered to Tally when we met at the tractor for the ride to the fields.

“Y’all goin’?” she asked.

“Of course. Nobody misses the carnival.”

“I know a secret,” she whispered, her eyes darting around.

“What is it?”

“Somethin’ I heard last night.”

“Where’d you hear it?”

“By the front porch.”

I didn’t like the way she was stringing me along. “What is it?”

She leaned even closer. “’Bout Ricky and that
Latcher girl. Guess you got a new cousin.” Her words were cruel, and her eyes looked mean. This was not the Tally I knew.

“What were you doin’ out there?” I asked.

“None of your business.”

Pappy came from the house and walked to the tractor. “You’d better not tell,” I said through clenched teeth.

“We keep our secrets, remember?” she said, moving away.

“Yeah.”

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I ate lunch quickly, then hurried about the task of getting myself scrubbed and bathed. My mother knew I was anxious to get to town, so she wasted no time with her scouring.

All ten Mexicans piled into the back of the truck with me and my father, and we pulled away from our farm. Cowboy had picked cotton all week with broken ribs, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by Pappy and my father. They admired him greatly. “They’re tough people,” Pappy had said.

The Spruills were scurrying about, trying to catch us. Tally had spread the word about the carnival, and even Trot seemed to be moving with a purpose.

When we crossed the river, I looked long and hard down the field road that led to the Latchers’ place, but their little shack was not visible. I glanced at my father. He was looking, too, his eyes hard, almost angry. How could those people have intruded into our lives?

We crept along the gravel road, and soon the Latcher fields were behind us. By the time we stopped at the highway, I was once again dreaming of the carnival.

Our driver, of course, would never get in a hurry. With the truck so loaded with people, I doubted if it would do thirty-seven, and Pappy certainly didn’t push it. It took an hour, it seemed.

Stick’s patrol car was parked by the Baptist church. Traffic on Main was already slow, the sidewalks brimming with activity. We parked, and the Mexicans scattered. Stick appeared from under a shade tree and walked straight for us. Gran and my mother headed for the stores. I hung back with the men, certain that serious matters were about to be discussed.

“Howdy, Eli. Jesse,” Stick said, his hat tilted to one side, a blade of grass in the corner of his mouth.

“Afternoon, Stick,” Pappy said. My father just nodded. They had not come to town to spend time with Stick, and their irritation was just under the surface.

“I’m thinkin’ ’bout arrestin’ that Spruill boy,” he said.

“I don’t care what you do,” Pappy shot back, his anger rising fast. “Just wait till the cotton’s in.”

“Surely you can wait a month,” my father said.

Stick chewed on the grass, spat, and said, “I suppose so.”

“He’s a good worker,” my father said. “And there’s plenty of cotton. You take him now, and we’ll lose six field hands. You know how those people are.”

“I suppose I could wait,” Stick said again. He seemed anxious to reach a compromise. “I been talkin’
to a lot of people, and I ain’t so sure your boy here is tellin’ the truth.” He gave me a long look as he said this, and I kicked gravel.