Clover (13 page)

Everleen drew a long breath and sort of rolled her tongue in her mouth. She needed to spread on a little more hurt. “At least I won't have to worry about cooking for the two of you,” she said. “I won't have to bake my good cakes or make my good homemade ice cream.”

I can see Aunt Everleen is a little peeved with me. I guess I sort of picked the wrong time to brag on Sara Kate. Especially since Daniel and I are wearing the new shades Sara Kate bought us. I have to tell you they are the prettiest shades I've ever seen.

Through the tinted glasses the hot, bright, cloudless sky turns into a cool topaz-colored bowl. Without the shades an airplane streaking across looks like a lump of silver. With my shades on it turns into a lump of topaz floating in a topaz sky.

Aunt Everleen had not seemed too happy the day we got
the shades and I sure don't want to stir up more trouble now.

I go over to her and say, “Oh, Aunt Everleen, if you stop cooking darkness will cover the earth. Our world will look just like this . . .” I put my shades on her and step back. “Aunt Everleen,” I say, “you look some kind of cool. Real cool.”

Chase Porter cruises along the highway in his brand new pickup. He blows his horn and throws up a hand. We wave back.

“There goes real money,” Aunt Everleen says.

“He is sure getting friendly,” my uncle puts in. “Hardly a day passes that he doesn't stop by.”

Everleen rolls her eyes skyward, “Believe me, it's not on account of us. Chase thinks just by chance the pretty new widow might happen to be here. I could tell by the way he was feasting his eyes on her at the wake it wasn't going to take long for him to start really looking at her. Mourning for them is short. He'll probably be going after her soon.” I think to myself, you don't know it, but he already has.

A carload of tired women wearing plastic shower caps stop by the peach shed. They have finished the first shift at the textile mill. The shower caps keep the cotton out of
their perms and greasy Jheri-curls. I'll bet the stores that sell the shower caps make a lot of bucks.

They buy peaches and say they have to hurry on. One of the women had had a wisdom tooth pulled when a zodiac sign was in the head. Because of the mistake she claimed she was in
some
kind of pain.

Everleen laughed, “Girl, once I would have called you backwoods backward. But now I guess you are kind of stylish high class. Maybe even getting on the level with the higher-up women since some of them look to the stars and signs for guidance. They may all do that for all we know.” Everleen laughed a nose giggle. “Maybe we ought to get Miss Sara Kate a
Farmer's Almanac
!”

Now I don't believe for a minute it would make a speck of difference to Sara Kate where the sign was if she needed to plant something or have a tooth pulled. But then again it just might. It's surprising here of late to learn about the weird stuff that some of them actually believe in.

When they leave, my uncle and aunt go back to the Chase Porter business. They are riding high on their seesaw again. If Everleen says something good about Sara Kate, Jim Ed pulls her right back down to Mudville. She does the same to him when it's her turn.

“Sara Kate won't do too bad if she bags a rich cat like Chase. I still can't get the fancy lizard boots he wore to Gaten's wake out of my mind,” Everleen said.

Jim Ed looked at the acres of land stretching beyond the peach orchards. “I don't know if it's the widow or this land Chase has his eye on. You know he'd stand a chance to get a portion of it if he married Sara Kate.” Money is raising its ugly head for Jim Ed. You can tell when it touches his sore spot, he becomes bitter.

Everleen grunted, “I can't see that as his reason. Chase has plenty of land and will come into even more, plus money when his daddy's gone. He'll have more land and money than he'll ever need.”

Jim Ed breathed a heavy sigh and shook his head. “A white man
never
gets enough land or money.”

They have forgotten about some of the good stuff Chase has done. Right off hand, I really can't think of a single soul in all of Round Hill who doesn't think a lot of Chase Porter. Many times he will just up and do a good deed for someone and never let it be known that he was the person who did it. It never mattered if they were white or black.

For instance, one year a late spring freeze killed nearly everyone's peaches except his, and some peach growers down in low country. Poor Miss Annie Grace, with her old half-blind eyes, believed she had peaches in her half-acre orchard. And when she tried to bargain with Chase Porter to sell him her peaches, he didn't have the heart to tell her she didn't have peach one.

You see, there is a vine that often times grows in peach
orchards, entwined into peach trees. It's that vine that tripped up my uncle Jim Ed. It's called the trumpet vine or the trumpet honeysuckle. Well, it has these bright red-orange blossoms. It blooms around the time peaches get ripe. Anyway, Miss Annie Grace saw those blossoms in a good many trees and she thought she had peaches. Those blossoms will fool you even when you have good eyesight, much less when you can't half see to begin with.

Miss Annie Grace hopped up and sold Chase Porter her peach crop right over the telephone. Soft-hearted Chase bought her nonexistent peaches. All she wanted for the peaches, since she thought there were not that many, was for Chase to do some tractor work for her. She traded for him to disc her orchard at summer's end and send his hands in the spring to disc, prune, and spray her peaches.

What knocked everybody for a loop was seeing a small trailer full of peaches pulling out of Miss Annie Grace's orchard. What had really happened was Chase Porter's hired hands had slipped the peaches, his peaches, into her orchard. Gaten and Jim Ed couldn't even have pulled it off if they'd wanted to. The peach shed was closed. They had no peaches.

Only someone like Chase Porter would have done a thing like that anyway. He is known for doing unusual things. Anyone can see why you won't hardly find anybody in Round Hill that will speak hard of Chase.

For some school paper, my daddy once wrote, “Between farmers, there is that communality of souls. In their own special way, farmers have a unique form of religion. All are at times forced to share common experiences and hardships. Together, with usually the same reverence and respect, they bow to the weather for the outcome of their crops . . .”

I can't seem to get Sara Kate and Chase out of my mind. I guess I won't be too bent out of shape if Sara Kate takes up with Chase again. Lord knows he's trying hard enough to get her back.

I have to realize that Chase Porter is really not so bad as he seemed to be the day he messed up with the nigger word. He showed after he'd said it that he knew better. I guess he just plain forgot. Most everybody, young and old, can't remember nothing anymore. Miss Katie said she believes the microwave ovens are cooking our brain cells.

I'm beginning to see I have to speak out for Sara Kate. My aunt and uncle simply can't go on always putting the woman down. “Sara Kate is lonely,” I put in for her. “Terribly lonely.” The words barely leave my lips before Everleen shoots them down. “Well, look whose side our own little Clover is taking.”

Yes, I am taking Sara Kate's side right now. But they can't seem to understand that just because I am, it still
doesn't mean I am turning against them. Why can't they see that when you live with someone and they aren't mean or nothing they kind of grow on you?

So, I say to them, “You guys don't have to live and eat with Sara Kate every day of your life and have to watch all the sadness and loneliness that wells up inside her. And you don't have to get embarrassed and all because she does, if she happens not to be able to keep from crying in front of me.”

Just thinking about it makes me start to cry. “Oh, little honey,” Aunt Everleen says all sugary-like. She looks at Jim Ed and gives him one of her unspoken speeches. Not quite charades. Her body doesn't move, only her eyes. I guess you could call it eye-speak.

She pulls the words from her mouth and puts them into her eyes. They tell Jim Ed to back off Sara Kate, at least in front of me.

Since my aunt and uncle still get a little uptight about Sara Kate I decide to stop telling them some things that happen at our house. But I think I better tell Aunt Everleen how the plastic flowers got off Gaten's grave. She and Miss Katie were about to open up a full-fledged investigation.

Miss Katie had stormed up to the peach shed after she discovered the brand new plastic flowers she put on Gaten's grave were gone. She was having a living fit. “Go call the police, Everleen,” she pleaded. “Go call them. Anybody low-down and dirty enough to stoop to touching something
on a dead man's grave need to have the law put on them. It would be beneath me to even spit on the ground where they've stepped.”

Aunt Everleen was all set to track down whoever stole the flowers.

All I could think of was someone might have seen me and Sara Kate in the graveyard that early evening.

“Sara Kate,” I said, after I told her what was going on, “I think you're in trouble. I think I ought to tell Everleen.” She agreed.

Come to think of it we wouldn't have even gone to the graveyard that day if the man that made Gaten's tombstone hadn't called to say he'd placed it on Gaten's grave. He insisted that Sara Kate go check it out to make sure everything was all right. He said he'd been able to get the finest marble found in the state of Georgia. Probably trying to make a big thing over it so she wouldn't be blown away by the bill.

Otherwise, I honestly don't think the woman would have gone to Gaten's grave. Sara Kate is not a graveyard visitor. I hardly think she would have bothered getting a tombstone when she did if Jim Ed hadn't kept hinting he was going to have to break down and buy one himself.

Well, anyway, there we were in the graveyard. It was after sunset but not yet dark. I stayed inside the truck. You don't catch me fooling around in a graveyard if it's broad daylight and surely not if darkness is about to sweep in.

Gaten's grave was a pathetic sight. Sun-faded plastic flowers from Family Dollar, K-Mart, or yard sales in mayonnaise jars wedged into the earth. If it had been closer to a Sunday the dried-up real flowers would still have been fresh. Sometimes people picked a fresh bouquet from their yard.

Sara Kate was snatching everything off and cramming it into a green plastic bag.

I know Sara Kate is very proper and truly smart. Real smart. If people around here could see the stuff she draws they wouldn't believe she makes up all that fancy stuff right in her head. They would declare she copied them from someone somewhere. Even so, there are things she doesn't know.

Like, for instance, among our people in Round Hill you don't go asking a widow if she likes the kind of flowers you want to put on her dead husband's grave. You just do it. The dead belong to all to remember. I can only hope and pray that no one saw us there.

I wasn't able to sort out Everleen's true feelings when I told her Sara Kate took the plastic flowers. I stopped short of telling her she threw them away.

When Sara Kate told Everleen she'd made a dreadful mistake, Everleen said, “Repent, sinner and go thy way, and sin no more.” Although she smiled it didn't make her words less serious.

As soon as I hear Sara Kate thank Everleen for coming, I know I'd better stick around for a while. Sara Kate had asked her to come. I've got to find out why. So I hide and listen. I have so many secret places in this house, it's pitiful.

Sara Kate is not one to beat around the bush. Before she even offers Everleen some ice tea, she just up and says, “I want to talk with you about Clover. I hope you have some free time.”

Everleen laughs. “Today, for a change, I do have time. They poked fun at my supper last night. So that husband and son of mine won't get a bite to eat from me tonight. And they won't eat Kentucky Fried Chicken either unless they walk.” She jangled a set of keys, and laughed some more.

“They sure can't go to my mama's house looking for something good to eat. Not on a Thursday night. Mama is so
hooked on ‘The Cosby Show,' she won't even cook for my daddy. He hasn't had a decent meal on Thursday night since the show started.

“Oh my goodness, gracious,” she gasps. “Will you listen at me. Running off at the mouth a mile a minute. You were the one who wanted to talk.”

Sara Kate sounds upset. “I'm so worried about Clover, Everleen.”

“She's not down sick or nothing, is she?” The words rush out Everleen's mouth.

“Oh, no, no,” Sara Kate answers hurriedly. “It's just that Clover is too troubled for a ten-year-old child. She's holding in too many thoughts about her father. Here of late, she refuses to even say his name. And if I mention him she immediately clams up.”

You're right about that, Miss Sara Kate, I think to myself. I used to talk about Gaten all the time, until she started correcting every little thing I said, and kept telling me to stop talking to myself.

But, you see, when Gaten was busy working on his computer or something, he'd tell me to play his turn at tic-tac-toe. My left hand would be Gaten, my right—me. I used to beat him all the time. I still do. That's how come when I'm playing by myself sometimes, Sara Kate will hear me say, “Your turn, Gaten . . . I beat you again, Gaten . . .”

Maybe some of the things I do make Sara Kate think I'm as crazy as Cousin California. Like the game, Killing my Shadow, for instance. It is a little crazy, I guess. You play in the hot sun. Trying to step on a shadow that moves every time you move. You can kill the shadow if you step on the head. And you can only do that at twelve o'clock sharp on most summer days. I guess I am too old to play it, but my grandpa taught me that game.