Flavors (13 page)

“Huh uh. I tired. Where we goin'?” he asked, eyes unfailingly trusting.

“Home. Try to keep going, okay? It's not much farther.”

I aimed my stride straight ahead because I knew the next turnoff, still several miles away, would be into our village.

The day was sunny but not as hot as usual for late August. As the sun began to give way to dusk, a soft cooling breeze occasionally ruffled my sweat-dampened hair. The momentum built inside me, like a rising, bubbling creek of sweet cool water.

Then I heard it.

Instinctively, protectively, I pulled Little Joe from the rough pavement onto the road's dirt shoulder. I turned to look in the direction of the approaching vehicle.

The battered old black truck rattled to a halt, engine coughing and burping as it idled. Grandpa, eyes set straight ahead, muttered in a cool flat voice, “Get in.”

We clamored aboard. Wordlessly, Grandpa turned the truck around and
chugalugged
back down the road. The silent trip ended a while later when we lumbered down the dirt road and chugged to a halt in the dirt parking lot.

Grandma met me at the front door with the biggest hickory stick I'd ever seen. Without a word she took me into the bedroom and began to whap me with her weapon. Actually, I felt little pain, so numb was I with disappointment.

And embarrassment, a new thing with me. Alien. Frustrating.

I worked up a few tears, just to validate the punishment, but when I walked out of that bedroom and past Nellie Jane, her expression was one of amusement. At least, that's the way I read it. When I scowled at her, she sorta – smirked.

Anger rose up in me. The injustice singed me. My escape being aborted and the beating all added up to a humongous
dose of aggravation. I began to do the dragon-breathing thing and exploded.

“It didn't hurt!” I shrieked at Nellie Jane.

Her grin grew wider. “Mama?” she sing-songed. “Sadie said it didn't hurt.”

Grandma appeared, nose a'flare. “Oh, she did, did she? Well, come ‘ere, girl. We'll see what hurt is.” She yanked me back into the bedroom for another whaling.

That time, my tears were real. And my trust in Nellie Jane dropped dramatically. And again, more dramatically than ever, placelessness swallowed me whole.

 

In retrospect, I knew that I'd done wrong, disappearing like that with Little Joe. My grandparents had spent frantic hours looking all over the farm for us. Not until they asked the Donalds if they'd seen two kids were they enlightened. The elderly couple had pointed them in our direction.

“Sadie, they was worried half to death,” Nellie Jane confided later that day. “And I was, too. Didn't you stop and think how we'd feel when you just up and disappeared? Why, anything coulda happened to you. With ol' Bill Chancy living across the woods, ya'll coulda been snatched by him.” Chancy had been questioned and released in a local rape-murder case several years back. The stigma continued to trail him like black smoke.

I shrugged, eaten alive with guilt by now. “Why did you laugh when I got a whupping?” I asked, hurt, needing to understand.

Nellie Jane just looked at me strangely for a long moment. “Sometimes – when things are really, really bad, I don't know how to act. So I end up grinning like a possum. I try not to, but I feel that grin just stretching over my face. I just can't help it.” She shrugged limply. “Stupid, ain't it? And mean.” She looked so sad I nearly cried. My emotions were like up in a whirlwind one moment and plunging over the Mill River dam the next.

“Yeah. It really made me mad when you laughed at me.”

“Wad'n at you. And I'm sorry.”

I knew then that it was not at me. Somehow, mystically, I understood Nellie Jane's complex psyche, one that, at times, failed to distinguish between love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. But in her, love and loyalty always, eventually, won out. That was the important thing.

“S'okay,” I murmured and we hugged each other in mutual forgiveness.

Grandma wasn't quite as quick to show mercy. I still had to own my sin.

“Just wait till I tell your Mama and Daddy what you done,” Grandma had told me right after the dirty deed of my running off. Now, I faced that confrontation with fear and trepidation. Not that Mama and Daddy were ever, ever mean. But they were really big on doing the right thing and I had not done the right thing by running away.

Guilt pulled heavily at me, like I alone dragged Grandpa's steel-bladed plow through hard, rocky terrain. Each time I looked back upon it, the black transgression appeared more and more revolting.

The week seemed interminable as I waited for the axe to drop. Cousin Doodle-Bug was dropped off for yet another visit, but I ignored him. He no longer seemed as inclined to pester me after the thrashing he'd gotten from Grandma on his last visit.

I spent lots of solitary time in the meadow. Thinking on what I'd done. Thinking on how I'd really
done myself in.
One day, I ventured into my favorite barn stall. I lay on the hay-carpet and reminisced about the summer, missing home and
Maveen more than ever. I thought how Gene had up and moved out the day before my caper.

“I love Maveen, Ma. She's my wife and I'm going to her. We'll get a Mill Hill house in a few days. But in the meantime, I'm going to be with her.”

He'd packed his bag and left faster'n you could say, “Scat.” I was happy for Maveen, knowing how crazy she was about Gene, and I was proud of him for standing up for her. I decided then and there that when I married, I wanted to marry somebody who would always put me first. Like Gene did Maveen and Daddy did Mama.

Today, I felt my bladder throb and went to the only barn stall with a door. There, I climbed up on the rustic, smelly toilet seat, squatted, and just as I began to relieve myself through the less-than-sanitary hole, I heard something.

About the same time I smelled cigarette smoke

A snicker? Then another. A definite sniggering laugh. More than one.

I promptly finished and jumped down from the perch. I heard the scuttle of retreating footsteps and rushed to discover the identity of the interlopers. Doodle-Bug and Clarence Henry, by now at a safe distance, turned around, hooting and howling, springing up and down like goofy jumping-jacks, hollering, “We seen you! We seen you!”

They'd been peeping through the bottom missing slat on the toilet stall as I did my private duty. I should ‘a known it was them because they were always sneaking around behind the barn smoking Gene's Camel cigarette butts.

Anger and embarrassment warred.

Anger won, evoking my dragon-breathing, teeth-clenched eruption, this time no Puff the Magic Dragon.

“
I Hope God strikes you blind you ol' blackguards!
” I shrieked, not sure exactly of the name's origin but knowing that it meant
somebody was the lowest of the low. It was a term Grandma used when especially inflamed at somebody.

“Stupid ol'
Lamaar!
” I tacked on for good measure, almost hoping for a fight with Doodle. I felt that I could, in that moment, snatch up a rock or a hoe or something to whale the daylights out of ‘im.

Undeterred, they disappeared over the hill, still howling with laughter.

I strolled limply down to Frances' pen and found her napping as usual. I sighed and returned to my stall-haven where its silence swallowed up my sense of violation. I settled into and soaked up its peace and quiet. I found myself wishing more than ever for home and hearth.

A soft rustling caught my attention. From the opposite wall of my stall, I saw the hay divide as a copper-colored snake glided territorially from beneath the heap and then move again beneath the fragrant cover. The rustle of straw continued, but I could no longer see it.

Shock coursed through me.

I was on my feet and scurrying away before the import struck me fully. “Grandma!” I ran into the house yelling. “Grandma! There's a snake down there.”

Grandma was out the door following me, pretty well keeping astride as we cautiously approached the vicinity where I'd last seen the slimy intruder.

“Right there,” I pointed from a safe distance. She snatched a hoe from the wall hook and commenced to slowly, cautiously part the straw with the implement's sharp metal blade. “There it is,” she muttered.

I turned away, covering my face with both hands. I shuddered as, moments later, I looked over my shoulder when
Grandma displayed the headless serpent, now hung lifelessly over the hoe's blade. It was about five-feet in length with intricate coppery and tan markings. Beautiful. Hypnotically so, like a great cheetah.

She looked at me, her eyes somber, concerned. “It's a copperhead, Sadie. It was providential that you seen it when you did. It coulda bit you ‘fore you knowed what happened. You coulda been killed.” She moved outside to hang the reptile over the barbed wire fence, muttering, “Thank the good Lord.”

And I knew in that moment.

Grandma loved me.

Loved me, she did. But that still didn't keep her from informing Daddy and Mama of my dastardly deed. I knew she would, because she told me so. I knew that, to Grandma's way of thinking, something so serious as running away warranted extra accountability from the guilty.

Little Joe, of course, was an innocent bystander. This drama, my flighty abandonment of sensible behavior, had been told and retold at every opportunity, at least four or five times a day. Every time I heard it, I felt more vile and contemptible. A mere worm. Even Nellie Jane seemed to avoid me.

The lowest was when Clarence Henry and Doodle-Bug shunned me.

I wasn't even worthy of ridicule.

Grandpa Melton, great storyteller that he was, could not resist the temptation to embellish a bit. “If I hadn't a come along when I did, Sadie was a'headin' em' off past that church and store. Why, they'd a ended up no tellin' where.”

That depiction turned my mouth inside out like a persimmon before frost. I wanted to scream that I did so know where
I was going and had no intention of taking the wrong turnoff, but I bit my tongue, allowing Grandpa his moment of glory and also realizing I was already in deep enough crap without calling poor ol' Grandpa a liar.

Saturday arrived. My folks would come to collect my little brother and me early in the day. I awoke before anyone stirred. Before even Old Red crowed.

I picked over my grits and bypassed the caramel-y concoction of butter and golden syrup. I slipped out the front screen door unnoticed and crept around to the back of the house.

Usually, on Saturdays, anticipation made my pulse leap and my feet restless. I would hover in the parking lot, eagerly watching for our old car to crest the hill and noisily lumber its way toward me. When it chugged to a stop I would yank open the door and throw myself into Mama's arms before she could even swing her legs to the side and slide her feet to the ground. After a long, fierce hug, I'd dash around and greet Daddy the same way.

Not this time. Today, I hid in the backyard, amongst Grandma's flower bushes. After what seemed an eternity, I heard my parents' noisy, chugging engine when it arrived and died. I heard the car doors open and, moments later, slam shut. Then quiet prevailed.

With my back firmly pressed to the weathered, paint-less exterior house wall, I perched there, knobby knees drawn to chest, as still as a feline-stalked mockingbird. Time stretched out and the damp, red clay-dirt grew hard under my bony fanny. I squirmed and shifted my bottom.