Clover (11 page)

I look at all the different things Sara Kate has been drawing. “How in the world did you learn to draw like this?” I ask her.

“I've always liked to draw since I was a child,” she said, “and then when I was older, I went to school to study design and commercial art. Afterwards I apprenticed for a while, learning textile design, fabric, wallpaper, and such. And I've been doing it ever since. I am under contract to do designs for several textile mills in the Carolinas. It's nice because I can work at home and send the designs to them.”

“I wish I could draw like you,” I say.

“I'll make up a box of paints for your very own, and I'll teach you. Right now we better get to the store.”

Sara is reading labels in the frozen foods section at the Winn Dixie grocery store. We just left Harris-Teeter's. The music is better over here. Good dancing music is playing.

I try to stand still. I know how much Sara Kate hates it when I dance in the stores. Right now, though, I don't think I'm going to be able to keep from dancing. Everything inside of me is pulling at me, begging me to dance.

I start snapping my fingers. Sara Kate is looking at me. I look her straight in the eyes and then moon dance down the aisle. I add the new steps Daniel showed me. It's easy on the slick waxed floors.

A gray-haired woman I don't even know breaks into a
wide grin when she sees me. And then with her eyeglasses draped on a chain around her neck, a half gallon jug of Clorox in one hand, and a three-pound bag of pinto beans in the other, she dances down the aisle with me.

Sara Kate is watching us, but I don't hardly care. I just go ahead and get d.o.w.n. She has stopped frowning and I sort of believe she wishes she could dance with us.

A large sign in the store says
REGISTER TO WIN A COLOR TELEVISION
. The drawing will be held in two weeks. I grab a big, big stack of entry blanks for me and Daniel to fill out. The sign says you must be over eighteen to enter, so we'll put his mama and daddy's name on them.

I see the store manager hurrying towards me. I know he wants me to put them back. I head toward Sara Kate. He is right behind me. Sara Kate is over by the tea and coffee. She picks up a box of Lipton's Blackberry Tea. I touch her on the arm. “I picked these up for you, Sara Kate.”

“Thanks, honey.” She doesn't even look around.

The store manager turns as red as his red hair. He scratches his head, turns to leave, stops, looks back, then walks away. There is no way he's going to take on Sara Kate Hill. She looks like she's somebody real important.

At the checkout counter Sara Kate lets me buy one bar of candy and one pack of sugar-free bubble gum. The checkout clerk looks at me, then at Sara Kate. Her long brown
hair hangs in dirty ropes. Most of the clerks have their hair frizzed just like us when we get a curl. Some look like a bush, but most wear a controlled frizzy. I can't picture Sara Kate wearing any kind of frizz.

The clerk turns the Lipton tea boxes over. I can tell by her eyes she's never had peach and blackberry tea before. I haven't, either.

Sara Kate tells me to run back and get ice cream. She doesn't tell me to put any back when I bring peach, vanilla, and strawberry. I never buy chocolate. Gaten and I never liked it. We liked milk chocolate candy, though.

It's a good day to buy ice cream. It's not the third of the month when the Social Security checks come or the time for whatever check comes on the first. Best of all, the woman in front of us didn't have to write a check and turn in a thousand coupons. She did hunt in her pocketbook for a penny until Sara Kate gave her one.

The clerk blows and shrugs her shoulder when Sara Kate whispers she may not have enough money. I imagine she thinks if you can afford to buy all that high-priced stuff you ought to have plenty of money. She has enough. She takes two fifty-dollar bills that look like they've been ironed from a wallet with little tan designs on it.

Sara Kate is passing everything on the road. She is driving Gaten's truck really fast.

It's broad daylight, yet a sleepy possum wanders onto the highway. Sara Kate slams on the brakes so hard a bag of groceries slides off the seat. Her outstretched arm holds me back.

“You're going to mess around and get me killed,” I fuss. “And all on account of some old possum. He ain't got no business out here in the first place. He knows he can't see this time of day with his pink eyes.”

“I told you to fasten your seat belt, honey.” Sara Kate is looking at the opossum. “He must be sick.”

On the side of the road a dead black snake, turned belly-side up, shines like a silver belt. I'll bet anything that old sick possum was eating on it. You couldn't pay me to eat no possum.

We pass a house where an old woman is plowing through a pile of clothes at a yard sale. Her feet are stuck into a pair of worn fur-lined bedroom shoes. A bright purple garment with splashes of yellow is tucked under her arm. The main thing she seems to need is a pair of shoes.

If Sara Kate hadn't forgotten to buy bird seed, we wouldn't have had to turn right around and go back to Harris-Teeter's the very next day. And we wouldn't have run into Miss Kenyon.

Sara Kate is the only person in Round Hill that buys food for everything that flies or crawls. I can see buying
seed for birds in the wintertime. But you're not supposed to feed them in the summer. We head back to the store.

I sure hope Sara Kate won't go buying the fancy dog treats and stuff she did the last time. Gideon staggered up one day all drunk up, and Sara Kate let him go in the kitchen for a glass of water. Well sir, he ate every bit of the dog food on top of the refrigerator. It didn't kill him, though.

When we drove into the parking lot and she parked right beside Miss Kenyon's car, I thought I'd die. If Sara Kate had known how much Miss Kenyon hated her guts for taking Gaten away from her, she'd never have parked there. Sara Kate wouldn't have known it was Miss Kenyon's car in the first place. She's not into cars.

Well, anyway, when we came out of the store, there was Miss Kenyon.

“Hey, Miss Kenyon,” I said.

“Why, hey, Clover,” she grinned, but swallowed it when she turned to Sara Kate.

“Mrs. Hill.”

Sara Kate smiled, “Hi.”

“I didn't know you were still in Round Hill,” Miss Kenyon lied.

“Oh yes, I'm still around,” Sara Kate said, “but I've been very busy.”

“I suppose you're busy with your book.”

“My book? I don't understand.”

Miss Kenyon is almost in Sara Kate's face. “The first thing you people usually do in life is write a book. So I'm sure you've joined all the other white Southern women writers. Eager to grab at the chance to say all the things you would love to say, but afraid to say.

“You want to know how I feel about what most of your kind write? I think, if it's in your mind to write, it's in your head to say.” She is stepping on Sara Kate's toes. Her face is as red as a beet.

Miss Kenyon's shopping cart was in the hot sun. Her ice cream was melting. She didn't care. Nothing could stop her. It was like a play on TV.

“If you ever write like the others, even in fiction, that our houses are dirty, our black men are shiftless, and dare use the word nigger, you'd better be prepared to leave Round Hill, South Carolina.”

I don't believe Sara Kate knew how to get Miss Kenyon told off. Gaten must have figured she needed looking after. I guess that's why he married her. He would have counted on me to help her out. I couldn't let Gaten down. “Come on, Sara Kate,” I said, “we got to get home.”

No matter how hard I try, I cannot get this book thing out of my head. Maybe Sara Kate is writing a book about the people in Round Hill. Maybe Daniel found it, and sneaked it out when he couldn't get me to do it.

I think of the way Sara Kate was looking around Miss
Katie's house. She sure can't write that the house stinks. As soon as Miss Katie opens her door the smell of air fresheners and scented potpourri hits you. She spends days on end stuffing the strong-scented leaves, wood shavings, and dried flowers into little Ziplock plastic pouches. She gets paid two or three cents a bag. She said she made might near a hundred dollars one month.

Yep, Miss Katie's got junk. But at least you won't see roaches flying and jumping all over the place like bull frogs. I reckon not. Miss Katie's got roach powder in every crack and Ball mason jar lid she can find.

I think now of that day Sara Kate sat there flipping through all Miss Katie's
Vanity Fair
and
Forbes
magazines. Maybe Miss Kenyon was right about Sara Kate marrying my daddy to get into our lives and show us up. Miss Kenyon said we would provide the fodder she needed.

Now if Sara Kate needs a dirty house to write about, she ought to go to Skip Howe's house. Skip is one of my classmates. He is white and lives in one of the dirtiest houses I've ever seen in my whole life.

When Skip got hurt real bad cutting grass, the teacher picked me to take a fruit basket to him. Talk was that Skip's real hurt was not so much from what the lawn mower did, as what his daddy did to him for borrowing Tom Jenkins's lawn mower. Skip's daddy has been missing ever since the accident. They say his daddy liked to killed him. His mama hushed the whole thing up.

Skip had no business going over to old stingy Tom Jenkins and borrowing his lawn mower in the first place. He knew he didn't know how to use a power lawn mower. To begin with, there is not enough grass to waste your spit on in the red clay yard jammed with old wheelless cars, auto tires, rims, beer cans, and chickens. Nothing can grow. You wonder why they would even want to cut a spot of grass no bigger than a minute. Folks say, Jenkins had no business loaning people as poor as the Howes anything.

Poor Skip. He didn't know not to pull grass out of a lawn mower while it was still running.

I had to pick my steps around dog mess all over the yard, then dodge chicken mess on the front porch. On top of all the dirt inside, Skip's mama was smoking. Smoking and coughing. The fingers on her trembling hand were stained yellow as gold.

The skin on her has so many lines, it looks like chicken scratching. “Them some right pretty things you wearing honey,” she said, adding, “especially them shoes.” I do have on a pretty dress for a change. I said, “Thank you.” I look down at my shoes. My aunt Ruby Helen sent me the dress and shoes.

I guess they do seem kind of fancy for Round Hill. One thing is for sure, Gaten would have never spent that kind of money on clothes. He claimed his money was always tied up in his peaches. “Can't ever guarantee a peach crop, baby,” he always said. “Farming is a card game. You're
playing dirty pool, but you never get to hold a trump card.” Or he might have said ace, I can't remember. I do know he did say, “The weather can call its hand anytime. And in a second, the game is over.”

Skip's mama was dressed in dirty pink cutoffs and a sleeveless turquoise polyester blouse. A yellow plastic headband held her hair back. She didn't have a tooth in her mouth. Skip was sick, yet he was dirty as he could be. Talk about poor, they are some kind of poor.

I'm not sure Skip knows it, though. He seemed happy enough snuggled in an old couch with springs popping out everywhere. An old spread with foam rubber backing was shedding all over the place. He grinned as he read all the names signed on his get-well card.

Skip answered for me when his mama offered food. “Aw, Ma, she don't want nothing to eat.” He knew good and well I was not about to eat a bite in that house.

Skip's mama brought him a big plate of pinto beans and white biscuits. She brushed a few strands of bright red hair off his forehead. Skip had a really neat baseball cap turned sideways on his head. That's the style. Like everything they had, it was secondhand.

His mama tried to get him to take off his cap to say his blessing and eat. But he wouldn't do it. His old hateful daddy must have torn up his head. I will bet you anything that even as poor as Skip is, he had some kind of new
haircut hid under that cap. I reckon, if you don't have a penny to your name, you still want to look in style. Poor Skip was some kind of ashamed when a big fat roach crawled right into his pinto beans.

Gaten always told me never to look down when someone spoke to me. But I had to look down then. I sure couldn't look at Skip. I was so sorry and ashamed for poor Skip, I could have died. I didn't care if he was white.

There was a smell in that house that was more than a smell of dirt. It wasn't Skip's hand and arm, all closed up in dirty bandages, either. After Mrs. Howe told me she was eaten up with cancer, the smell filled the room. It swallowed up the smell of everything. Even the loud-smelling pinto beans. It was the smell of death.

I told them I had to go, and split.

Gaten had our supper ready when I got out of the tub. We had skillet cornbread, hot dogs, and beans. Gaten loved him some cornbread. The beans seemed to move on my plate. I couldn't eat a bite. I told Gaten about the roaches and the cancer. He only said, “Now, now, Clover, let's not get carried away.” I think of how I could fool Sara Kate into going down to their house to borrow a cup of sugar.

I think of the look that would come over Sara Kate's face if she walked into that house and Skip's mama said, “Have a seat.” And I smile.

Whenever I look towards Miss Katie's house now, the first thing I think of is the big prize she won. A boat.

I hope it won't be like the diamond wristwatch she got as a big prize. A black plastic thing with a diamond the size of a speck of sand staring out at you like a piece of broken glass.

The big envelope in our mailbox announcing
You May Be A 10 Million Dollar Winner
is for Miss Katie. The mailman wouldn't keep putting her mail in our box if she stopped making glue out of honey and egg whites. She uses it to glue on all those faded, rain-washed stamps she finds. Her mailbox is so loaded with ants, the mailman hates to stick his hand in it.