Clover (12 page)

“I think
you
ought to take this mail to Miss Katie,” I tell Sara Kate when she hands it to me to take. “It will give you a chance to visit. You always said you were going to on account of how good she's been to us since Gaten died. It
would be good if you get to know folks in Round Hill better, anyway.”

I didn't tell Sara Kate that people were starting talk that she was a stuck-up nasty white so-and-so.

I think to myself that just maybe if Sara Kate goes with me, Miss Katie might show us the boat.

It's almost 12:30
P.M
. I can tell without even looking at a clock. Through the still, hot and dry air, the theme song from “The Young and the Restless” blares out. Plunk—plunk. It seems like everybody in our section is hard of hearing.

A speeding dump truck with two wheels on the hard surfaced road, two on the dirt, rounds the curve. Sara Kate and I part. One on one side, one on the other. The sandy grit stings our faces.

Miss Katie is in her front yard. Her print dress is pulled and puffed up behind by cockleburs. Her white fluffy hair hangs in two plaits. Miss Katie looks as old as her house.

She dry spits specks of tobacco from her tongue and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. But when she starts to talk, tiny pieces of tobacco fly out like greasy blackberry seeds. “Excuse my yard,” she says. “Too hot for somebody my age to keep things up like Clover's daddy used to keep up his place. It's still kept up so good you'd think white folks lived there.” She looks at Sara Kate, gives a sick grin and drops her head. Embarrassed!

Sara Kate turns her usual pinkish red. I look down at my
feet and kick the ground. I don't know what I'd do with myself sometimes if I didn't have my feet.

Miss Katie waves us in, out of the sun. “A heat stroke can slip up on a person before they know it.” She moves slowly, every move studied, thought out, like an old woman. Miss Katie is old. She eases into a rocking chair and fans with a cardboard fan. It has a picture of a little black girl on it. Her hair is fixed like little girls in old TV movies. It's a funeral home fan.

Miss Katie tells us to sit down. But there are no empty chairs. She starts gathering up stuff. There is more magazines and sweepstakes mail than you can shake a stick at. Every letter shows her getting closer and closer to millions of dollars. Every stamp that ordered another magazine changed the prize to even more millions. At least that's what Miss Katie was led to believe.

Gaten once said, “If Miss Katie saved the money she spent on magazines trying to win the sweepstakes, she'd be pretty well-off for an old lady.” But my daddy couldn't tell Miss Katie nothing. Nobody can.

Propped on a table crowded with whatnots, artificial flowers, and faded starched crocheted doilies that stand up is a big blue-bordered notice from American Family Publishers that reads in bold print,
THE NIGHT WHEN MRS. KATIE LEE BROWN WON THE WHOLE TEN MILLION DOLLARS!

Sara Kate's eyes search the rooms. Rooms filled with as much stuff as a Sears & Roebuck catalog. There are store bought ready made brooms everywhere. They are neatly placed beside homemade ones, made from wild broomstraw gathered from open uncultivated farm land. The sprigs of straw are tightly tied together with strings of brightly colored print cloth.

Sara Kate tilts her head to one side like a rooster eyeing a crawling caterpillar. She studies the straw brooms. I imagine, like me, she's thinking, what on earth would Miss Katie need brooms for? There is no place to sweep. The only place you can even see the floor is in the narrow path that leads from one room to the other. A needle threader in the path shines like a brand new nickel.

Miss Katie tells her how close we are to the end of the world. Someone stole a shovel and hoe right off her front porch. She can't bring stuff like that inside, because she says it's bad luck.

Miss Katie catches me eyeing some pretty towels. “They right pretty, ain't they, Clover,” she says, flashing a wide toothless grin. She brags that the teeth she ordered years and years ago from an almanac are still as good as new. They ought to be. She never wears them. They say nearly every Sunday she cries out in church, “Oh Lord, I come off and left my teeth.”

I guess Miss Katie will stop giving me a couple dollars to
cut her grass. She says she's started ordering a batch of fancy hand towels from Fingerhut, in case she has to hand someone a little something. She orders more stuff. She'll send something she gets in the mail back for a free gift. Usually it's some old flower. She never reads far enough to see that if she doesn't send the plant back after so many days, then they bill her and keep sending flowers. So Miss Katie's plants keep coming and she keeps paying.

“The Young and the Restless” is still on TV. “I just have that old thing on,” Miss Katie says. “I don't watch that trash. It ain't fit for no Christian.” All the time, though, she is stealing quick looks. Moving her head so we don't block her view. She peeps like a crow checking out a watermelon patch. On television, an emergency broadcast signal sounds. . . . “This is an emergency test,” the announcer says, “a test of the emergency broadcast system. . . . This concludes the test,” he says at the end. Miss Katie shakes her head. “One day, it will be for real,” she whispers.

A shaft of sunlight cuts a path across the room where Sara Kate is sitting. Miss Katie wants her to move out of the hot sun, but there is no place for her to go. The sun has zapped the wind's energy. It's as still as the painted pictures hanging on the torn wallpapered walls. A small, squeaking electric fan pushes sheets of hot air into the corners of the room.

Miss Katie's house never changes much, not even at Christmas. She just sets out little baskets of fruits, nuts, and candy on chairs or on her bed. She can't decorate. There's no place to add a single thing.

Miss Katie knocks a big bundle of S&H green stamp books to the floor and sets off a mouse trap. Kah blam! She peeps from under her hooded eyes, “There ain't a rat in this house.” Sara Kate is scared to death. “I keep a trap set all the time,” she explains. “Some old rat may sneak in here with his nasty self. But he sure won't live long enough to sneak around. They may crawl in, but they don't crawl out.”

Miss Katie sure picked a good time to offer us something to eat. Hands that carry out bleeding rats now bring us big plates of fried pies and carrot cake loaded with thick confectioners sugar icing. She spreads a yellow napkin over my lap and plops the plate down on it.

“It's just a little something,” she says. “I know how chaps are. They always want a bite of something sweet.” She turned to Sara Kate. “I'll let you help yourself. I'm so glad you're here. Maybe for once Clover will eat something here. Always wants to carry it home. That's not polite, is it, Miss Sara Kate?”

Sara Kate's eyes are glued on those greasy pies. Sara Kate don't eat nobody's greasy stuff.

I pick up my pie and look at Sara Kate. She reaches for
my plate. “Oh no, young lady, you're going to have to save this for supper.” She turned to Miss Katie. “Clover won't eat anything but sweets if she's allowed. Is it all right if I take it home for dessert tonight?”

Miss Katie grins, “Why sure, Miss Sara Kate. Clover is blessed to have a mama like you.” Her smile faded. “Her daddy would have been so proud of you. Real proud.”

“I'm clean out of new tin foil,” she said, smoothing out an old wrinkled piece. I don't say nothing but I know why she is all out of tin foil. She keeps using it all up wrapping them five-dollar bills in it to send to those TV preachers.

“You must come and eat with me sometimes,” Miss Katie is saying. “I had my preacher and his wife over a few months back. I made the best barbecued pig feet and tails. They said it was the best something to eat they'd had in a long time.”

Sara Kate doesn't say she knows about pig feet. She'd watched Baby Joe eat plate after plate of them at the family gathering before she married Gaten. I still believe it was the sight of all that grease that made her sick.

Miss Katie shows Sara Kate a pickup notice she got for a television. She comes back to our house to use the phone. I dial the 1-800 phone number for her. She speaks really strong. “I don't have no way to get down there for my TV,” she says. “You see, I don't have no car to get way down near Hilton Head, South Carolina. I have a hard time just finding
somebody to carry me to the store. I don't reckon you could send it to me, could you?”

We don't know what they said to her. But she said, “Well, thank you anyhow for picking me as the winner.”

Poor Miss Katie is really sad. She digs in her apron pocket for some change and tries and tries to pay Sara Kate for a toll-free call.

I think Miss Katie knows she was fooled this time. She seems tired and slowly rocks her body in a straight chair that does not move. Her arms are folded, her mouth chewing away at nothing but empty space. She swallows the empty air. Her lips quietly smack, like a box turtle eating lettuce.

Sara Kate is hurting, too. She sucks in her breath, short and quick. Her body makes little jerks like a child trying to stop crying. If she is not careful and keeps on holding all that hurt in, she's going to start working her mouth, licking her lips and making them quiet sounds like an old woman again.

We stayed around Miss Katie a long, long time. And she didn't breathe word one about her boat. What they all say is true. “Miss Katie sure won't talk about her boat.”

If you think the diamond wristwatch she won was bad, you should have been there the day the UPS truck delivered the boat. It was a really big package. They say it will blow up into a big boat like a life raft. I know Miss Katie
didn't expect that. The boat wouldn't have been so bad but she had to pay a big delivery charge on top of all the money she sent to them every time she sent back the easy puzzles she solved.

I might be wrong but I believe if Miss Katie had put all that money together she could have bought her a real boat to fish in.

They say when two people live together, they start to look alike. Well, Sara Kate and I have been living together for a long time and there is no way we will ever look alike.

But in strange little ways, we are starting to kind of act alike. Things like the way she helped me out with the fried pies at Miss Katie's house. And little by little, a part of me is slowly beginning to change towards Sara Kate. Even the picture of her face that shed no tears at my daddy's funeral looks different in my mind now. Maybe it's because now I know it wasn't that Sara Kate didn't cry because she didn't care. She didn't because she couldn't.

The truth is, and it's not just because Daniel says so, Sara Kate is strange. Mighty strange sometimes. Like the time I brought her some peaches. “Oh, Clover, you're so good. I love peaches.” She just carried on till I said, “You know something, Sara Kate, it wouldn't hurt you one bit to come up to that peach shed for some peaches.”

You won't believe this, but her eyes lit up and she thanked
me for asking her. Imagine that. Thanking somebody for something that's part theirs in the first place! On second thought, maybe she's a little scared of Everleen.

Anyway, things are shaping up pretty good between us. She doesn't get so mad anymore when I speak my mind. Everleen gets ticked off, though, if I say Sara Kate is changing towards me. She and Miss Kenyon still can't stand her.

Once when I told Everleen how Sara Kate was cleaning up everything so good, she grunted and turned her head. I could see she'd narrowed her eyes to a thin slit and was studying the fence-locust trees, lively and green in spite of the drought. Having those trees means you've got good underground water on your land. At least that's what she says.

Finally she said, “Sometimes a new broom sweeps too clean. Almost all the old family pictures except Gaten's have been swept away.” Everleen is right about the pictures. It makes me a little sad that Sara Kate put them in a closet. I think I'll ask her to put them back. Other than that, the new broom can stay like it is. I'm glad Sara Kate won't make me make up my bed and clean up like Gaten used to.

Everleen is busy brushing fuzz off the peaches. “As slow as they are selling we won't need any more today,” she says.

“If we do,” Daniel complains, “Clover will have to carry
the baskets. I've been doing her share of work nearly all month.”

Aunt Everleen turned to me, “What is that stepmama of yours doing, Clover? Sitting around drawing those flower designs and such, I guess.”

I didn't say anything. I really didn't have to. My aunt nearly always answers her own questions. She moved her chair into a shady spot. “Lord knows I can't see how Sara Kate makes any money at something that piddling. But I reckon she does. Jim Ed offered her some money from what we've been taking in from the peach crop. She said, ‘Thanks very much, but right now we are solvent.' One thing we can give the woman credit for, she doesn't back down from providing for you, Clover. Folks say, she stands to get a right good settlement from the accident. Thank the Lord the man had good insurance.”

Everleen frowned, “Come to think of it, Sara Kate hasn't breathed a word about it to me.” She fanned away bees. “I just remembered, Sara Kate sent word that she wanted to see me. She will probably tell me how much . . .”

Everleen doesn't finish. Just spreads out whatever she's thinking like peanut butter on a slice of bread leaving it there for you to select the kind of jelly needed to finish her thoughts.

Daniel is carving away on a block of wood with his daddy's sharp hunting knife. “Daniel,” I warn, “you better stop
fooling with that knife. If you mess around and cut yourself you're in real trouble. Sara Kate's not here to put on a tourniquet like she did when you gashed your hand before.”

Aunt Everleen bristled up like a bantam rooster. “Daniel doesn't have a mama to take care of him? No mama standing right here. Right before his face. Who ended up carrying him to the doctor for his stitches anyhow? If you chaps think I can't take care of you, maybe you both should just up and go live with Miss Sara Kate since she is such a first aid expert.”