Clover (8 page)

“I don't know why I'm buying peaches,” she complained. “I'm so tired of working in these poor white folks' kitchens, I ain't got the strength to make a pie.”

“Huh,” Everleen grunts, “you and Miss Katie's the only ones still doing it that I know of.”

“I know, I know. But, Everleen, what else can I do? I'm too worn out to go into one of the mills to work. James Roy's got a right good job, but we got not one, but four chaps to get ready for school. To tell you the truth, I need another little job.”

Everleen tilts her head upwards and laughs about something that's making her tickled before she says it. She's really pretty when she laughs. She wears her long black hair pulled back off her dark-skinned face, and has the prettiest eyes you ever saw. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” she says about her dark skin color.

Everleen is still laughing. “I hear tell Miss Sara Kate Hill is looking for somebody to clean her house. Like she's some kind of rich white woman.”

Mary Martha shakes her head. “Girl, I may be hard up, but I'd eat water and bread before I set foot in that woman's house to clean. To this day I ain't got over Gaten marrying her instead of Miss Kenyon. Seems like every time one of our fine girls have the chance for a good catch, some cracker comes along and messes it up. I'll bet the new white principal who took Gaten's place won't marry one of our black teachers.”

“He won't marry a white one, either,” Everleen says. They both laugh.

They wave at a passing car and moan, “Oh Lordy, Lord.” It's Rooster Jones, breezing by in his brand new Pontiac.

“I'm surprised he even waved with his fine self,” Mary Martha says. “Talk in town is, he's started taking up with them trashy white gals with their long dirty hair, thin lips, and slim hips. They hang around the mill every night. He'll lose the shirt off his back now.”

“Girl, you are telling the Lord's truth,” says Everleen, shaking her head. “If our menfolk make a plug nickel, they get the hots for them. And Lordy me, if they can shoot a basketball, those girls trail behind them like a hound dog running a coon. And when they catch them, they cling to them tighter than a green cocklebur.”

“Either that, or they wise up, get their teeth fixed, and get all gussied up, then marry some old man of their own race, in his eighties with more money than they can spend. They can then live so grand, they can make their born rich sisters look pitiful, pitiful.”

Everleen may be kind to Sara Kate's face, but she sure can't stand her behind her back.

They start talking about my daddy again. They must have forgotten that I was sitting right there all the time. They can't know how much it hurts me to have them talk like that about my own daddy. I thought that all the talk about Sara Kate and Gaten would all be over by now. Before Gaten died, I had to listen to all the talk he and his brother did.

People in Round Hill may not know it, but my daddy
didn't just up and marry the woman with no thought. It wasn't even an easy thing for him to do. It gnawed at his gut. And my actions sure didn't help, either. I would be so different now if I had the chance. It's too late now. My daddy is dead.

I happen to know my daddy thought long and hard before he married Sara Kate. Maybe if all these women knew what the man went through, they would stop talking so bad about him.

I am only ten years old, but certainly old enough to know that my daddy had to make a choice. There is nothing else you can do, when you have people pulling at you from every side. One thing is for sure, you can't go with everybody at the same time. So Gaten had to make a choice.

I still think of the day he brought his lady to meet me. Gaten was nervous. More so than I had ever seen him. I may not know a lot of things, but I do know a lot about my daddy's ways.

The eyes of the woman by his side clocked his every move. She was waiting for him to tell me something. Gaten tried to, but he seemed as if he could not speak. His tongue seemed to press against his teeth. He stood mute before us. I suppose he wasn't prepared for the way I treated his lady. I could tell, he really wanted me to take to her. He should have known you just can't cram that kind of thing inside a
person's head and mind and make them like someone no matter what.

I cannot understand why Gaten always seemed to think I needed extra help in being raised, anyway. All my life, as far back as I can remember, I've just had one person at a time. First it was my grandpa before he died. And then I had Gaten.

When I was little I was alone with my grandpa most of the time. My uncle and aunt were in and out of the house every single day, but they didn't live with us. My daddy came home almost every weekend.

After I started going to school my daddy wanted to take me away to live with him. He was teaching school somewhere around Charleston, South Carolina. He claimed Grandpa had been too easy with me. Allowed me to pick up wrong habits. Gaten hated for me to spit and use coarse words.

Grandpa didn't teach me that kind of stuff. I learned it from my cousin Daniel. The one thing Gaten didn't really like was, I missed a lot of days at school. It was true that Grandpa did not make me go to school all that much. He said it didn't matter if I missed a few days here and there. I had the rest of my life to go to school.

To this day I believe it was my aunt Everleen who put it into Gaten's head to come and take me way down there to live with him.

I started crying when Gaten called to say he was coming for me. School or no school, I couldn't see how my daddy could begin to think of splitting up me and my grandpa. I couldn't have gone and lived away from Aunt Everleen, anyway. Who in the world would have fixed my hair? I've always been tender-headed. I've never liked people fooling with my hair.

I kind of believe my grandpa was crying also. He sucked-up real hard through his nose and wiped it with the back of his hand. I can never tell by his eyes if he is crying. He is getting kind of old and his eyes look watery all the time, anyway.

At first, Grandpa had said to my daddy, “But son, she's all I got. I just don't think I am prepared to lose her right now.” In the end, though, all he said was, “I will have my baby girl ready and waiting when you come for her.”

Breakfast was on the table when my daddy walked into the house. We had grits, ham and eggs, and red-eye gravy. Grandpa had spread butter and Aunt Everleen's homemade blackberry jelly on hot biscuits as soon as he took them out of the oven.

All the time we were eating breakfast, I didn't raise my head to look at my daddy. Every now and then, I did cut my eyes up to glance at him. Each time he was looking dead at me. My aunt had really fixed me up. My hair was pulled into a pony tail with a big purple bow. It matched
my new purple flowered dress, with puffed sleeves and a little white pique bib in front.

I dug little ditches in my plate of hot grits and watched yellow melted butter run through like little streams of water.

When Grandpa passed my daddy the hot biscuits for the umpteenth time, he tipped the Ball mason jar with the wildflowers I'd picked, and water spilled all over the red-checkered tablecloth.

Grandpa blotted up the water with a dish towel. “You might know Clover picked these weeds, I mean flowers. The child is a spitting image of her departed mama. Even when there was snow on the ground, her mama found red berries or something to pick and put on this table. This house hasn't been the same without her.”

He could never stand to talk very much about my mama. He said he loved her like she was his own daughter. I guess he now felt he was about to lose me, too. He was sad and started to cry. Real tears streamed down into the lines and wrinkles of his brown leathery face.

I sure never remembered seeing all those wrinkles in his face before. My daddy said, “Old age made them.” I guess day by day old age was using its hand to carefully draw them on. “Oh Lord, oh Lord,” he cried out, “help me, because I am weak. Send me your mercy to lean on.”

Like lickety-split, I was by my grandpa's side. I put
my arms around his neck. “Don't worry, Grandpa,” I said. “You will always have me to lean on, for as long as I live.”

I hadn't said more than two words to my daddy up to then. But now I was ready to lay some kind of fussing on him. “I'm mad now,” I fussed. “Really mad. You know for yourself that poor old Grandpa can't bit more take care of himself than a newborn baby. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Gaten, to even think of taking the only help he's got in this world away.” I just had to call my daddy Gaten, because for some reason the word daddy would not come out of my mouth.

I didn't know what my daddy was thinking. All I did know was, he looked at my grandpa—his own daddy—and he had to see what I saw. An old, feeble man. His eyes were even old. There was hardly any color left in them. It's strange that I'd never paid any attention to his teeth before. They looked as though they had been sawed off. Years and years of chewing had sawed them down, the same way old age had brought his voice down. A voice not half as strong as it used to be.

My daddy must have seen what I saw, because tears welled up in his eyes. Without a word, he walked into the hall, picked up my two packed suitcases, and the burlap sack that Grandpa packed for me. Only the Lord in the heavens knows what was in that sack. Anyhow, they stood
waiting and ready near the front door. My daddy carried them back upstairs.

A year later, my daddy was home for good. A principal's job at the Round Hill Elementary School opened up, and my daddy got the job. The only problem for me was, it was my school. I guess that's what turned me around for good from calling my father “Daddy.” I sure didn't feel right calling him Mr. Hill. So I called him Gaten. Besides, that's what everybody else in our family called him.

Things sure can happen fast in a person's life. Grandpa was dead and buried. And there was Gaten, all hurt and sad on account of a complete stranger, a woman named Sara Kate.

Uncle Jim Ed and Gaten were sitting on the front porch, talking about all they ever seem to talk about, the peach crop.

“Speak of the devil . . .” Jim Ed laughs when Chase Porter drives up. They all laugh.

“We were just talking about you, Chase, and wondering if you might have a spare spray machine belt. I had to stop short rounding a curve at full speed when I was spraying and the belt snapped.” Gaten looked at his brother. “Jim Ed had left our fuel can right in the middle of a row.”

Chase grinned. “I wouldn't have wanted to hear about what you said. I do have an extra belt, and come to think of
it, I'm sending someone to Spartanburg tomorrow to get some parts. You can send for whatever you need if you want to.”

“Well, that was perfect timing,” Gaten said when Chase left.

“Speaking of timing,” Uncle Jim Ed said, “I have asked you three times if we are going to spray peaches in the morning. I have yet to get a straight answer from you.”

“Yep, we've got to spray all right,” Gaten agreed. “I'll fix up the spray machine with water, and have it ready.”

Uncle Jim Ed got up to leave. “I'll take care of the spray machine, big boy. It seems like you've got a lot on your mind today.”

Gaten looked at the house. “The old home place is beginning to run down, Jim Ed. Needs painting. It's turning gray. Even the flowers seem to be struggling to hold onto the little life left in them.”

Jim Ed laughed. “At least it's only the trimming that needs to be done. The old brick still looks pretty good. Remember the imitation brick siding that used to be on it? I was so glad when Papa agreed to take it off and put up real bricks.” He glanced at the flowers. “You would be struggling to hold onto life, too, if you were as old as some of these flowers. Mama said she set out those crape myrtle and rose bushes right after she was married. I guess the hollyhocks and verbenas have kept reseeding over the years.
You and Miss Katie are the only ones who have them.” His face showed a trace of remembered sadness. He walked to a small bush. His hand gently touched the leaves. That same bush would later bloom forth with soft pink blossoms, clustered into little balls of petals that scatter and fall like silent snowflakes.

He looked at Gaten. “We sure well remember who set this one out.” Gaten looked at me. My mother set the bush out, just before she died. She had planted lots of things, but it was the only one that lived. She called it a marble bush.

Jim Ed made a play in the hopscotch game I'd drawn in a sandy spot at the edge of our yard. “TV hasn't changed the playing pattern of our little Clover too much,” he said. “She still plays some of the same things we did when we were growing up.” He shook his head sadly. “I can't pry that kid of mine away from the tube.”

Gaten smiled. “Clover may be a child of the eighties, but the same person of the twenties that raised us, raised her also.”

“I've got to get a move on,” Jim Ed said, stopping to take one last look at the old brick house with shutters and dormer windows. “The house is still in great shape. I only wish mine was half as fine.” He frowned and looked directly at Gaten. “I know it's something else that's really bothering you, younger brother. I can tell, you are hurting, man.”

When Jim Ed called Gaten “younger brother,” Gaten knew he meant for him to listen because he was older. They said as soon as Gaten could talk, he told everyone not to call him baby brother.

It didn't seem to bother Gaten one bit that I was listening to every word. He must have wanted me to hear.

“I've never been able to handle hurt, Jim Ed. Especially when it involves people I love so much,” he said.

I climbed out on a limb on our old chinaberry tree. “Look, Jim Ed,” I laughed, swinging from my legs, “no hands, no hands.”

“Get down out of that tree this minute, Clover,” Gaten ordered. There was a sharpness in his voice that even shocked Jim Ed.