Fair and Tender Ladies (28 page)

I am
glad
I am ruint, and don't have to worry over such as that.

But I was telling you about Groundhog Day, when me and Violet were sitting out in the sun and Oakley dropped by. I said, I don't guess you want to gamble now do you? Oakley sat right down on the quilt and said
Cut me in, honey,
and Violet did while Rush fiddled Lonesome Valley. We played hand after hand and smoked cigarettes and had the best time, in spite of the gob pile that has caught on fire now and won't quit burning, sending the sulfur smell down here like boiling eggs. But I guess it is always something! And we had a fine time in spite of the sour yellow smoke and in spite of knowing that all this pretty sunshine means winter is coming back.

 

So I remain your faithful,

 

IVY ROWE.

Oh Silvaney,

 

So much, so much has happened! and there is so much I can not tell to a living soul, I will write it to you instead. I hardly know where to start. I think I will do like Joli does with the crayons that Victor brought her from town—she takes the black crayon, and bites her lip, and outlines everything first. It takes forever, she presses down so hard. But then when she puts in the color, it's easy.

This is it. The mine fell in, and I got married.

I will fill it in later.

Because first I want to tell about Franklin Ransom, and I see that there is no place on the page here for me to put him, no black lines I can color him into. It was always like that. I never could see his outline clear. Franklin is the son of the richest man in Diamond, but yet he's needy. And he has been to more schools than anybody else around here except the doctor, but he hasn't got any sense. He likes to drink and laugh and play the fool, but he is sad inside. This is what he looks like, Silvaney—a long thin face with a large straight nose and a cleft chin and level eyebrows over dark eyes that look liquid. Franklin's eyes are very large and seem to be always moving on to the next thing, somehow. His skin is like a baby's, his hair is dark and fine, his fingers are long and thin. He doesn't have hardly any hair on his body to speak of, and wears the prettiest clothes. Shirts you want to rub between your fingers. His teeth are white and even—well, he looks like a movie star and I'll swear it. It's the truth. And he is a man that knows how to get around women, too. I guess if you are born looking like Franklin looks, and you are an only child since your brother died, well you would be just as spoiled as Franklin. I don't believe his mother ever told him No in all his life. But then of course he got so spoiled they didn't know what to do with him, so they sent him off to school at the age of ten and he has mostly stayed gone since then, off at one school or another or else with his grandmother in Kentucky, I believe this is the only person he really loves. It is his mother's mother, Nana he calls her, only Nana and his mother have not spoken for years since they had a big falling out.

Mostly, Franklin stays over there and fools with horses. But then he comes over here to see his parents, only they usually don't get on too good after a little while, and then he will leave again. He drinks a lot and has never had a paying job. One time his daddy decided that he would learn the mining business from the word go, so they set him to work running the mantrip, but he ran over his own foot on the track—you know you have to run a mantrip in the dark, mostly—and crushed two toes, and his mama got hysterical and said she could not permit him to go in the mine again, he is all she has. Doctor Gray had to go up there and give her a shot for her nerves. Her nerves is awful ever since Dennis—that was Franklin's brother—got killed when he was 14 and Franklin was 12.

Got killed or killed himself—there's those that will tell it both ways. In any case he fell off, or jumped off, the cliff on the other side of Diamond Mountain. Everybody says that Dennis was too adventuresome for his own good, and always had been. Too high strung.

So Dennis broke his neck and his mama's heart.

He also made it impossible someway for Franklin to grow up, and Franklin says that to this day he can still hear his brother screaming as he falls, or jumps, into Indian Creek. Franklin was right there when it happened. Franklin says he has to drink, to keep from hearing his brother scream. I guess if you come up in a big family like we done, you will lose one or two and take it as a matter of course. But I don't know. I don't know about that and I dont know about Franklin, either. I do know that he can tell you about his brother in such a way as to make you cry, and make you want to take your dress off.

For Franklin has that way about him which makes a woman want to make it better, all the time, and that way about him that makes you know you never can. And fun? Lord, Franklin is
a lot
of fun.

I remember one time I went up there. His parents were off someplace gallivanting, and we had the house to ourselves. He had asked me to dinner. Dinner? Shoot! All we had for dinner was corn beef out of the can and saltine crackers and bourbon whisky from Kentucky that went down smooth. Franklin wasn't studying dinner, nor was I. It was summer, hot as blazes. We turned on the overhead fans. Mrs. Ransom had covered all the furniture up with white sheets, which is what she did every time her and Mister Ransom went out of town, to try and keep off the coaldust. Her whole life is a battle with coaldust.

So I was up on top of the hill visiting Franklin Ransom in that fine house and eating saltine crackers and corn beef out of the can and drinking some, and when it started getting dark, all that whitesheeted furniture came looming up like ghosts, like islands, and Franklin went over to the phonograph and put on a record, Who's Sorry Now and said Ivy, come here.

What for? I said, and he said, I want you to dance with me.

Dance?
I said. I can't dance like that.

Come on over here honey, he said, but I said no. I was sitting on the floor eating off the coffee table.

He came over and reached down for my hand. Ivy, he said, and I got up and danced and it was easy. I never have danced like that before, Silvaney, it was like movie dancing. And may be I will never do so again! But it was easy, easy.

The overhead fan blew down on us and Franklin swirled me around and around like the wind, in the dark, between all the looming rising mounds of white. I felt like I was dancing in the clouds, in the midst of a thunderstorm.

The music stopped but we went on dancing, and every time we would dance by the coffee table, Franklin would lean over and grab the bourbon and we'd take a drink straight out of the bottle. Later he took me in his parents bedroom and laid me down across the pale green satin bed. And later still, he turned on the bedside light and got me to look in the mirror door. I had never seen a mirror door before. I had never looked at my whole body all at one time.

And Silvaney, oh Silvaney, I am beautiful! Beulah said we look good in red but we look even better in nothing. I
am
beautiful!

Then there was a real storm, and then after that, Franklin and I sat out on the lawn chairs naked and smoked cigarettes, all I could see of him in the night was the glowing tip of his cigarette burning red, and then we made love again right there on the wet grass. It smelled so good. It brought me around, a little.

I have to go home, I said, getting up, but Franklin said, No Ivy, it's too late, they will be asleep and you'll wake them up. Just stay here.

I have to go, I said, but he wouldn't take me, and I was too crazy drunk to walk down the mountain myself and I knew it.

We slept in his parents bed, and in the morning, we did it again, and then he said Ivy, do you know what I like about you?
This?
I said. I got to giggling. No, he said, you are like me, Ivy.
You will do anything.
And I said, Franklin, that's just not true. But he said, Oh yes it is, honey. Yes it is. Franklin thinks he is quite a judge of women and horses. And he
is
fun!

I did not feel half bad walking the red-dog road down the mountain that next morning, in fact I felt like running and whooping it up, yelling and swinging on grapevines like we used to do up on Pilgrim Knob. Because it is a fact that if you are ruint, like I am, it frees you up somehow.

I walked in the house and Joli ran up and hugged me.
Mama, Mama, where did you go?
she said. Beulah was frying eggs with her baby propped on her hip, I have been visiting, I told Joli. Then I went over and took the egg-turner from Beulah and she sat down.
Well,
Beulah said. She looked at me and I could tell she wished it was
her
coming down the mountain ruint instead of me.

I certainly hope you will make sure to get what's coming to you, she said.

I immagine I will, I said.

Curtis came through then and said, Good morning Ivy, in a different way, a way I didn't like. But I didn't say a word. I decided that I had made my bed and I would lie in it, Silvaney, same as before.

I thought, I am getting to be a expert at making beds!

But even way back then, even that sunny morning that I felt so good, I knew Franklin had something wrong with him. He does not mind making a mess, but he won't clean it up. For instance I said, Now we have got to straighten up here, when I woke up and I wasn't drunk any more and I saw what we had done to the house. But he would not let me touch a thing. Stop it, Ivy! The colored women will do it, he said. But I never knew if they did or not. I believe he halfway wanted his folks to come back and find the mess. I never knew if they did or not.

Another time he tried his best to get me to wear one of his mama's dresses out to the Busy Bee roadhouse, where we used to go, but I would not. I think he wanted somebody that knew her to see me in her dress. She hated me, so they said. I don't know, myself. I never met her. I knew Franklin's daddy, Mister Ransom, who used to come in the store, and liked me fine. Anyway this was a rose-colored sheath dress that I would give my eye teeth for, but I wouldn't wear it, even when he tried to make me put it on.

Franklin is good-looking and fun, but he is so strange. He went to all those fancy schools and never read a book that he will own up to. He will be so sweet one minute, and then go funny the next.

I remember one time towards the end of summer when we were out riding in his daddy's car. We got to the new bridge, which is where we always turned back, and that day Franklin just kept on going. What are you doing? I asked. He said, Let's go on a little trip, honey.

I can't go on a trip, I said.

Why not?
Franklin put his hand on my leg and turned in the seat to look at me. Silvaney, he is so good-looking!

When he drove across the bridge, I looked down and saw some little boys fishing and they waved.

I'm going to take you to Memphis Tenessee, Franklin said. He was drinking, had been drinking all that day. His daddy didn't even know he had the car—thought Franklin had driven it down to the machine shop to get Buddy Thigpen to change the oil.

I said, Franklin, I can't go to Memphis. You know I can't go to Memphis. That's crazy. He was driving fast and I was getting scared. He crossed the bridge, turned right, and headed south.

Franklin,
I said.
Turn around.

Instead he grinned at me.
Honey, I am going to take you to Memphis,
he said.
I am going to buy you a new red dress and take you to the Peabody Hotel.

Turn around, I said.

They've got ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, he said. They swim in the fountain there. But I guess you wouldn't know about that. You haven't been there, of course. You haven't been anywhere.

Turn around, I said. Trees went flashing past us on both sides, now a house, now a glimpse of the river. The road stretched out straight in front of us like a ribbon in the sun with the end of it shining. It was August, and hot. Dust devils danced by the side of the road, and the end of it shimmered like fairyland. I think it was then that I started crying. Because I
wanted
to go, Silvaney, I really did! I wanted a new red dress. I wanted to see the ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, and see how funny they waddle, and find the end of that shiny road. Franklin finished off the bottle and threw it out the window and it sailed shining through the air into the woods at the side of the road. Hot air rushed past my face. I was having trouble breathing.

You've got to turn around, I finally said.

Stick with me and I'll take you places, Franklin said. You're my baby.

No!
By then I was screaming.
Joli is my baby.
Because I knew that by then they'd be wondering where I was, what was taking me so long getting home from work, and Joli would be pulling on Beulah's skirt and asking where Mama was, and Beulah would be short with her, moren likely Beulah was still packing.
Stop this car, stop it stop it. Turn around,
I said.