Blue (7 page)

August 1944

While Bessie was rocking me, I heard the screen door open and Momma come out on the porch. She reached for Bobby, so I got up and let her have him. She went and sat on the steps with him hugged up against her like he was sleeping on her lap. Only he didn't curl up against her the way he always done. He just hung there like one of the twins' paper dolls that don't care nothing about the person that's playing with it.

Ida and Ellie crowded in on either side of Momma. When Ellie felt how cold Bobby was, she come back and got the quilt and covered him up. Momma wrapped it around his body and cuddled him like he was a newborn and said, “Hush, honey, don't cry.”

But I didn't know who she was talking to, because every one of us was crying.

Then Bessie went and knelt on the porch floor behind my momma and put her arms around her and said, “Have mercy.” She leaned her forehead into the back of Momma's hair and said, “We stopped by the Hinkles' to use the telephone. Reverend Price will be here soon.”

Momma nodded, and I thought she looked grateful.

Bessie said, “I'm going inside and cook y'all a good meal. Junior is out back looking for some wood to build a box for Bobby.”

I knew Daddy had some cedar boards in the shed because he had made a wardrobe for Momma last Christmas. So I started around the side of the house to see if I could help. It was better than watching my momma suffer.

Junior was dusting off them leftover boards when I got there. He had put on his best blue jeans and a blue plaid shirt like he was going to town. I picked up a rag and started helping him. He didn't look at me or say a word.

When his daddy died, I didn't know what to say neither. Now I thought how Bessie was the one who always knew the right thing to say.
Have mercy.
It didn't try to make you feel better or explain something that couldn't be explained. It just felt like a prayer.

I spoke up to save Junior the trouble. “Daddy was gonna build Pete a doghouse from these boards,” I said. “When he comes home from the war.”

“I don't reckon Pete come home with your momma, did he?” asked Junior.

“No,” I said. “Leastways, I didn't see him.”

I could tell from the way Junior was eyeballing them boards that he was trying to figure how long to cut them. I knew he didn't want to go around to the front porch and measure Bobby for his coffin. “Wouldn't surprise me a bit,” he said, “if that dog would come dragging in here to sleep on Bobby's grave. Dogs have a way of knowing these things.”

I picked up a board and set it on end to make sure it come up to my waist. I knew exactly how high Bobby was, standing next to me. “This one's a good length,” I said to Junior. “Use it.”

So that's what we used to cut the others by. Junior put the boards across the porch with the extra part hanging out
over the edge. I sat on them to hold them still while he cut them with Daddy's handsaw.

The sawdust settled like snow on Junior's black shoes.

When it come time to hammer them boards together, I made Junior let me take a turn. I needed to hit something, and them nails was convenient. I imagined polio germs was on them nailheads. I hit them hard and straight.

It done something for me to smack them nails. It was like being mad took the place of hurting—for a while, anyway.

When the box was all nailed together, I went and got a can of oil from the cellar steps. I rubbed oil into the wood just like Daddy did on Momma's wardrobe, and it give the box a nice shine. Then Junior and I carried it around to the front porch. Momma was still there trying to cuddle with Bobby and using her thumb to push his curls behind his ears.

Reverend Price was there too. He had brought his wife, Mavis, with him, and Lottie Scronce too. Lottie is the woman from church whose two boys was killed in the war. Now here she was, standing with them other church people around the bottom of the steps, patting my sisters on the head and not saying much. Tears was dripping off her trembly chin. Then all of a sudden, just like she done at church every Sunday, she snapped open her pocketbook and pulled out a mint candy for each of my sisters.

The preacher was trying to make arrangements for the burial, but Momma wasn't saying much. Sometimes she would nod, like when Reverend Price suggested digging the grave under the mimosa tree. “I think it'll be easier to dig there,” he said.

But I knew he was looking at the lacy leaves and feathery pink blossoms and thinking how it would always be a pretty site.

Junior set the cedar box on the porch floor, and I took the quilt and folded it so it would fit inside. I made a little pillow for Bobby's head. And Lottie Scronce put a mint candy inside. She'd given Bobby one every Sunday since he was two years old, so I reckon she wanted to do it one last time.

Reverend Price asked me for a shovel, so I took him around back and let the women help Momma put Bobby in that cedar box.

I got the shovel from where it hung over two nails on the shed wall. Junior found a pickax, and the three of us walked down to the mimosa tree. We took turns digging, and I dug just as good as the men did because I was madder than both of them put together.

And besides, I had to do Daddy's part.

By the time Reverend Price decided it was deep enough, his white shirt was soaked plumb through and had smears of red dirt on it. He pulled a comb and a handkerchief out of his back pocket and made himself look like a preacher again while Junior and I drunk water from the dipper in the bucket on the back porch. Bessie brought the preacher a cup of cold water from the refrigerator.

I went inside and pulled on my blue Sunday dress. Then I grabbed Ida's and Ellie's navy blue dresses with the white pinafores and shoved them over their heads while they sobbed.

“Slick your hair down,” I said. I run a brush through mine and got a barrette out of the little cedar box my daddy made for me last Christmas. I seen a dime and two pennies laying there in the box. They put me in mind of the pennies Daddy give Bobby when he went away. I thought how Bobby hung on to them like they was his last piece of bread.

I took those pennies out of my box and went to the porch and put one in each of Bobby's hands. “There you go, Bobby,” I said. “That's from your daddy.”

But they slid right out of his hands onto that crazy quilt.

When everybody was all set, Reverend Price and Junior carried Bobby's box on their shoulders down to the grave. Ida and Ellie walked between them with their hands stretched up, barely touching the box with their fingertips but still trying their best to carry Bobby one last time. The rest of us followed so quiet all you could hear was our feet crunching on the dry grass. We stood around the grave, and Junior and the reverend wiggled the box into the hole.

I reckon the funeral home would've done a better job, but I know it would not have been done with as much love as we put into it. Every one of us took turns shoveling dirt on that box.

Mavis Price started singing “Amazing Grace” and Bessie joined in, singing the harmony. They stood there like two opposites—Mavis thin and neat with her white lace collar and her blue hat, and Bessie large and soft with her green flowered dress and Momma's pink apron. It was smeared with flour and food stains, and Bessie's dark hair had some flour in it too.

It really surprised me when I heard my momma singing, and the next thing I knew, I was singing along. I reckon we all sung a part of it at one time or another. Mavis sung every word of every verse in a voice pure as an angel's.

Then Reverend Price quoted the shepherd's psalm and we all joined in on account of we had memorized it in Sunday school. Reverend Price said some words that no one had memorized—things only a preacher would know—about
the ways of God and how we don't understand them. About the waters passing over us and how God promises he'll be with us anyway.

He asked us did anybody want to say some words about Bobby, and I just kept thinking,
Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite.
But it didn't seem like the right thing to say, so I didn't.

But then Momma surprised me by saying it herself. She told how Bobby said that every night to the nurses at the polio hospital.

She said the nurses loved Bobby like he was their own, and when the electricity went out in the middle of a lightning storm, one of them cranked his iron lung by hand for over an hour till the lights come back on. “She saved Bobby's life,” said Momma.

For a while, anyway.

That started up a bunch of questions about the polio hospital. Mavis Price asked how come the emergency hospital let her bring Bobby home. “Weren't they worried about you bringing polio germs home?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” said Momma. “People come and go from the hospital every day, you know. And I never got into the contagious ward—not even when Bobby was in there. But still, I had to get permission from the health officer before I could bring him.”

Ida wanted to know why didn't Pete come home from the hospital with Bobby. Momma threw her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, my Lord, I forgot about Pete. You know, the whole time I was there, I never told them he was our dog. But I called him by his name, and next thing I knew, everyone was calling him Polio Pete.”

Momma said the nurses would sneak good chicken meat
to Pete. “It got to where Pete was everybody's dog,” she said.

I think we was all just so glad that Momma was talking again. Mavis Price took her by the arm and the next thing I knew we was all wandering up to the house and singing,
“I'll fly away, oh glory.”

Bessie laid out such a spread on the table that a body wouldn't hardly believe there was a war on. We had mashed potatoes, cured ham, green beans, tomatoes, and biscuits with blackberry jelly.

The blackberries put Momma in mind of another story about the emergency hospital. She said back in June when it was still a health camp for children who'd been sick, Mrs. Earle Townsend promised the campers that if they picked blackberries, she'd make cobbler. Well, she was mixing up the batter when the telephone rang. It was Dr. Whims, the county health officer. He told Mrs. Townsend the campers had to leave in thirty minutes so it could become a polio hospital.

“Well,” said Momma, “Mrs. Townsend said she couldn't possibly send the children home without their blackberry cobbler. So Dr. Whims gave her forty-five minutes instead. When those children got back with the berries, they started packing their clothes while Mrs. Townsend did the baking. They were eating cobbler when the cars started lining up outside to take them home.

“Mrs. Townsend never did leave,” Momma continued. “She stayed right there and became the hospital cook.”

I looked at us crowded around our little kitchen table with two people on either side and someone at every corner with their knees straddling the table legs. I got to thinking how amazing it was that these people was there, laughing
and talking with us after so many weeks with just us three girls.

It was kind of strange that we was laughing on the day of my brother's funeral. But then again, most of these people had lost their own family members, and maybe that was why they was so good at bringing comfort to other people.

But all of a sudden, right in the middle of a hearty laugh over something Junior had said, Momma got real quiet and laid down her fork. She got up from the table and went outside on the back porch. We watched her go, and our laughing turned to pure quiet and followed her out the door.

August 1944

That's how it was with Momma after Bobby died. Some days she'd fix breakfast and clean the house and make sure the twins washed their faces and brushed their teeth. On them days, my sisters would tag after her like twin puppy dogs. They'd beg for stories about Bobby, but whenever she told one, they'd start crying.

So she'd sit down and pull them onto her lap and sing,
“Hush, little baby, don't say a word, Papa's going to buy you a mockingbird.”
It was a silly song that didn't make no sense, but it hushed them girls up every time. And it even brought comfort to me. Pretty soon I was thinking Momma had turned into her old strong self again.

But then I'd look up from picking cucumbers and see her sitting by Bobby's grave, shaking the twins off like they was a couple of pesky flies buzzing around her face.

I'd holler at the girls to come help me in the garden, and sometimes they did because Momma was ignoring them anyhow. But Ida got to where she started getting tummy aches every time it suited her. I knew she was just trying to get out of work. But it done the trick for sure. I wasn't taking no chance on one of them coming down with polio on account of me and that garden.

It seemed like there was one thing and then another
with that garden. About the time the vegetables was almost done, the wisteria out behind them sneaked across Daddy's ditch and started reaching for the dry cornstalks. Even if the garden was practically finished, I couldn't let the wisteria take it over.

I wasn't ready to declare war on it, but I knew I had to cut it back past the ditch. What would I tell Daddy if he come home and found that wisteria growing in his garden?

I wasted a big part of my day putting off the job of cutting it back. I knew by now, I couldn't do more than slow it down. Cutting it back wouldn't bring down the mansion in the woods. It wouldn't change anything, really. Still, I didn't want to do it.

But Daddy had left me in charge of his jobs. I had done some hard ones already—watching the girls for weeks while Momma was gone, burning Bobby's toys and digging his grave. I told myself that cutting wisteria was nothing compared to those things.

I just didn't feel like doing one more hard thing.

Finally I did what I had to do. I got Daddy's scythe out of the shed and started working. I tried to swing it through a whole bunch of vines, but they got tangled on my blade. I hacked and the blade just bounced off the tough vines.

And the worst part was the way the vines wrapped themselves around the branches of the cherry tree by the garden's edge. I had to get them out of the tree. I twisted and pulled and yanked and cut and made only the least bit of progress.

The sweat dripped off my eyelids and the tip of my nose. I stopped to wipe my face on my sleeve, and I studied the wisteria while I rested.

For the first time I saw wisteria the way my daddy seen
it. It might be beautiful for a few weeks each spring, but here in the middle of the summer, with it taking over whole trees and marching into the garden, it seemed like a pure curse.

Wisteria used to make me feel nothing but happy. But suddenly I saw why it put my daddy in such a blue mood.

I hadn't wanted to see it his way. I wanted to think of it only as the beautiful wall to my mansion. I wanted to hang on to sunny days with sweet purple petals raining down on me and Peggy Sue.

But now I had to think like the man of the house. I had responsibilities that I never asked for. It seemed like fun days were gone forever.

I felt a huge sadness just thinking about all the good things I lost since my daddy went off to war. Daddy himself, to start with. And fun family times like swimming in the river and hiking up Bakers Mountain. Bobby. Picture shows with Peggy Sue. Going anywhere just for fun.

My whole childhood—if you want to know the truth.

I had no intention of crying, so I fussed at the wisteria instead. I yelled while I whacked. “You think you can take over the whole dad-gum world, don't you? Just like Hitler, swallowing up one country after another. Just like polio. Grabbing one baby and then going for the next one. You know what? I hate you!”

I let all the pain about Daddy and Bobby come out against my beloved wisteria. I whacked. I sliced at it. I tried to break the vines with my bare hands, but I only rubbed my garden blisters open. My hands hurt so bad I finally stopped and just looked at them vines.

I had this feeling that if I stared at it long enough, I could see the wisteria growing. Or hear it, maybe. I had to come up with a better plan. I decided to stop for the time being.

I reckon I scared Ida and Ellie with all that screaming, because they actually helped me pick the last of the green beans. I took the beans to Momma and dumped them right there by Bobby's grave. “Here,” I said. “How about you string these beans while I pick the okra? I'll get you a knife.”

I got me a knife too, to cut the okra. I put on Daddy's long-sleeved garden shirt and buttoned the cuffs so the okra wouldn't make me itch. Then I went to the shed to get his work gloves.

It was cooler in the shed, and the smell of it was the smell of Daddy after he run the tiller or crawled out from under the truck when he changed the oil. I stood there and sucked in the smell of dirt and oil till it pulled me to the dirt floor.

“Oh, Daddy,” I moaned. “I know you're counting on me. I'm doing my best, but it's so hard.”

Next thing I knew, I was crying. I cried till my head hurt and my throat ached and I didn't have a speck of energy left in me. I wanted to stay in the cool, dark shed that smelled like Daddy. If I stayed long enough, maybe Momma would come looking for me.

But Momma wasn't worrying about me. She had got used to me taking care of her. It was like I was her momma, instead of the other way around.

I knew I had to go, and I knew what Daddy would say if he was there. “It's the first step that's the hardest,” he always said. So finally I wiped my eyes and my nose on Daddy's shirttails. I pushed my hair out of my face and picked up the knives and drug myself out to the mimosa tree. Momma was still sitting there, with her hair all scraggly around her face and her legs stretched out in front of her and her dress shoved up to her knees.

After all those times she told me to sit like a lady, I
had a notion to say the same to her. But she was so out of heart, just dragging one of the last wilted mimosa blossoms through the red dust with no gumption at all. I just couldn't be mean to her.

I held out the knife, and she looked at it like it was some object I brought from halfway around the world.

“Take it,” I said. “We got beans to can. And I still have to pick the okra, so you've got to string the beans.”

I seen I would have to get her started. I took off Daddy's shirt, used it to wipe the sweat off my neck, and then sat on it.

“Look, Momma,” I said. “This here's how you do it. Remember? You're the one that showed me in the first place.”

I wanted to get the canning done so I could read the paper. I wanted to check the war news to see if Daddy was making progress over there. And read the next chapter of the continued story.

“Momma,” I said, “you know how you used to read the story in the newspaper, a new chapter each day? Well, I'm reading it now. This month it's called
Hometown Girl.
” And then I started telling her the story. I handed her beans while I talked. “Good girl,” I said whenever she strung one.

I bet I strung ten beans to every one of hers. But at least she done something. And while we was stringing, I told her the whole story of
Hometown Girl
from the very first chapter.

“So if you want to know the rest,” I said, “I'll read it to you. But not till every bean is in a jar lined up on the windowsill.”

When the beans was strung, I picked the okra. If I put it off till tomorrow, those pods would be twice as long and three times as tough.

The next morning Momma washed the clothes and scrubbed the floors, and I thought maybe she was going to be all right after all.

But the next thing I knew, she was carrying the family picture around, hugged up to her chest. The picture was taken in front of Daddy's truck. Bobby had his hands over his face because the sun was in his eyes. Every time I looked at it I wanted to reach in and move his hands. And now, that picture, where you couldn't even see him good, was all Momma had to remember him by.

It was all my fault—for working him to death and then burning his things.

My sisters, who was clingy from the day they was born, got to where they wouldn't let go of Momma's skirt tails, even when she curled up on her bed or threw herself on Bobby's grave. It was bad enough seeing Momma on that grave so much of the time. But seeing my sisters there too—well, that just made me want to take off through the wisteria and never come back.

But I knew by now, there was no such thing as a place where bad things couldn't touch you.

One day about a week after we buried Bobby, I got to thinking how even with the war on, Daddy managed to take us every summer to Mamaw and Papaw Honeycutt's in Georgia. So I got this idea. I took the bicycle out of the shed and rode over to Junior's to get some help. Him and his momma was shucking corn under the sweet gum tree when I got there. I dropped my bicycle beside the tree and picked up an ear of corn and started shucking too.

“Have mercy, child, I hope you didn't come over here to work,” said Bessie.

“Well,” I said, “I might as well help you out, since I come to ask for a favor.”

“Well, you know me and Junior will do whatever we can. How's your momma today?”

“She's just like having another child around,” I said. “And Ida and Ellie are like two babies, crying all the time. You can't blame them either with all they been through. But I'm still thinking it's time to do something. I got a plan.”

Junior flicked a worm off the corn he was shucking and said, “Lord help us all, Ann Fay. When you get a plan, why do I want to run the other way?”

“Oh, Junior, I know you wouldn't mind getting outside of Catawba County and seeing a thing or two.”

“Just like I thought. This has something to do with your daddy's truck.”

“Look,” I said, “if you don't want to help out, I'll just drive it myself. I'm thinking it would do us all good if Ida and Ellie was to go to Georgia and spend some time with Mamaw and Papaw Honeycutt. Mamaw will make over them like they're the greatest thing since the radio. And that's exactly what they need.”

“Honey,” said Bessie, “if your sisters need a little loving, just bring them here and let me look after them for a while. I can love on them just as good as their own grandmother.”

I put my shucked ear of corn in Bessie's big metal dishpan and picked up another one. “I thought about that,” I said. “But it's just too close. They need to go someplace where they can't come whining home every day.”

Junior shook his head. “Georgia and South Carolina aren't letting people from the polio area into their states.”

“I know that,” I said. “I read it in the paper. But like Daddy always says, ‘Where there's a will, there's a way.' And by gum, I got the will.”

“Well,” said Junior, “I'm just dying to hear about your
way
, Ann Fay.”

“The way is, you're gonna sneak us in,” I said. “We won't
see anybody, so we won't pass out any germs. Not that we got any germs in the first place. We'll go at night when our license plate won't be so noticeable. All we gotta do is take some back roads across the state line. And me and Ida and Ellie will be in the back of the truck under a canvas. We'll put something back there to hide behind, some furniture or hay or something. If anybody asks what you're doing, you tell them you're taking a load to the kinfolks in Georgia.”

“Oh, great, I get to do the explaining!” said Junior. “And what about gas? We don't have enough ration stamps to get us all the way to Georgia.”

“Well then,” I said, “Mamaw and Papaw can meet us halfway. In South Carolina.”

“Why not all the way? Why don't they just come up here and stay with your momma and help take care of them girls?”

“Because there's a war on, that's why. My papaw runs the feed mill down there, and he's short on help as it is. He's even had Mamaw helping out part-time. I just know they couldn't come.”

Bessie said, “I'll stay with your momma while you and Junior take those young'uns to South Carolina.”

“But Momma,” said Junior.

“Don't ‘But momma' me, young man. Can't you see Ann Fay needs our help? And we're going to give it to her.” Bessie picked up a butcher knife and whacked off the thick green stem of a corncob.

Junior jumped back, but the white juice of that corn still splattered all over his face.