Garters.htm (3 page)

All her years she had wondered about the thing between men and women, never truly understanding it. It was all necessary, of course, to have babies. But it had always seemed a decidedly embarrassing thing to do and a deucedly stupid way to act.

Now suddenly, in the middle of a Tuesday morning in the M. Cleavis Rhy General Merchandise, she felt for the first time the sweet, dark rush of desire.

Glancing back to Cleavis, she saw that his gaze had never left her. With pleasure she watched the rise and fall of his chest as if he too found the interior of the store suddenly short of life-giving breath. His powerful-looking hands lay flat on the counter, as if bracing himself. And the pencil he had been using now stood, in silent testament, broken between his fingers.

Esme turned her attention back to her stocking, carefully, and oh, so slowly smoothing the black wool up over her thigh. She sort of accidentally pushed the skirt a little bit too high, giving a momentary glimpse of the frilled hem of the leg of her white cotton drawers. Then she gently rolled the stocking down into place, revealing her smooth white satin skin. She twisted the corner and tucked it into place casually. With unnecessary drama she slapped her skirts back down into place before removing her foot from the chair.

Esme turned to face Cleavis Rhy. With a lazy, hip-rolling swagger she approached the counter. Never in her short, busy life had
Esmeralda Crabb ever had the opportunity to feel such power, such confidence. Standing before him she saw that his hands trembled slightly and that sweat had beaded on his upper lip. Desire. Ah, desire. An unexpected weapon.

With feigned wide-eyed innocence, she cocked her hand on one hip and said to him, "Let me know if you see anything you like."

His own oft-repeated phrase falling so glibly from Esme's lips shook Cleav from his trance. Quickly, he squared his shoulders. Nearly choking from the inexplicable dryness in his throat, and tortured by the very understandable discomfort elsewhere, he attempted an apology.

"Miss Crabb, I… I didn't… I'm sorry that… I…"

Her smile was triumphant. "Please, Mr. Rhy, you have my permission to call me Esme."

Without another word she turned and marched out the door, her backside
swaying provocatively. As far as Esme was concerned, it was all settled. She'd be Mrs. Cleavis Rhy before the turnips were sprouting.

Yohan Crabb was the laziest man in Vader, Tennessee. That was an accepted fact. Some thought he might be the laziest man in the world, but so far nobody could prove it.

It would have been bad enough if Yo Crabb were
drunk
and lazy. But, as a God-fearing man, Crabb had never allowed demon liquor to pass his lips. He was lazy for the mere sake of
being
lazy.

It was said that when Yo was born and his strange, foreign-speaking mother asked with her last breath to name him Yohan, what she was really trying to say was, "Son, I can already see that you ain't never going to turn Yo
han' to no good purpose."

When Yo married Providence Portia, the community had felt a spark of hope. Miss Providence was as hardworking as the day was long, and most thought she might be a good influence on Crabb. Unfortunately, most of Yohan's newfound energy was channeled elsewhere. The twins were born barely a year after they wed, and Esme eleven months later.

To Esme's knowledge, Yo had never stirred himself again.

Except, of course, to play the fiddle. And thank goodness for that. Were it not for the fine way that he played, Yohan Crabb would have been
totally
worthless instead of just
practically
worthless.

Pa
could
play that fiddle, Esme thought as she listened, walking back up the mountain. The sound got louder and clearer with each step toward home. How sweet and romantic it was, she thought, her heart still pounding from the memory of Cleav's warm blue eyes fixed upon her.

"Evenin', Pa," she greeted him as she stepped into the clearing next to the house, though
house
was an exaggerated term for the place the Crabbs called home.

Esme remembered when they had first come to live up on the mountain the year after Ma died. They had been sharecropping on Titus Mayfield's place, but without Ma to do the work, Pa had almost let the crop rot in the field. Mayfield had ended up picking it himself and then told Pa to vacate the house so he could get somebody who wanted to work.

They had come up the mountain, Esme at her father's side and the twins running up ahead, laughing and picking flowers.

"It's a fine, sturdy house, Esme," he'd told her. "I guess you'd call it a stone house. And it's not about to fall down. And the best part is that it's ours, all ours. Nobody's ever going to take it from us."

Even at eight years old, Esme had known her father well enough to be skeptical.

"It's a cave!" Esme had cried in horror as she stared at what was to be their new home.

"I'm sorry, darling," Pa had apologized. "Believe me, Sugarplum, I hate moving you children into a cave as bad as you hate moving into it. But there ain't no help for it."

Esme felt tears of despair welling up in her eyes, but she fought them back.

"We're going to live in a cave!" Agrippa's voice squeaked with excitement.

"I'm a cave girl," Adelaide insisted, pounding upon her chest.

"See," Pa had whispered to her. "It's gonna be all right, Esme. I never lie to you."

It was a stone house, of a sort, Esme had to admit. And bears had been living in it for hundreds of years, so it probably wasn't about to fall down. And he was telling the truth: nobody was going to take it from them. No other human would be willing to live there!

The cave now had a split log front for protection from the wind. The logs, culled from fallen trees and scrub brush, were chinked together every which way and supported, where possible, with rocks, mud, and anything else that Esme could drag up the mountain. There was also clearly a front door which made it seem almost like a house. Esme had cut a window one summer, but it was covered over and chinked up now. The cave was never too hot, but it surely could get cold. For that reason a stovepipe now came through a hole near the top of the logs. The stove made cooking possible and living bearable.

"That's a pretty song you're playing, Pa," Esme told her father.

The old man smiled up at her. Even nearing sixty, he was still handsome and a charmer to boot. "You like that, Esme-child?" he asked. "I thought up that little thing today."

She smiled briefly before a worried frown creased her face. "You wrote the song today? I hope it didn't take you all day."

"Purt near," he admitted.

"You promised you'd head down to the river and see if you could catch us a fish for supper."

Yo sighed and shook his head. "Esme-girl,
I
clean forgot it and that's the truth."

She felt the annoyance rise up within her."Pa, how could you forget. We don't have a blame thing to eat in the house!"

"I just forgot. Sugarplum," he answered. "You know how it is with me, I get to playing and I forget what time it is, I forget about eating and sleeping and purt near everything."

"Didn't Adelaide or Agrippa remind you?"

"Ain't seen neither since early this morning. Right after you left, that Hightower boy showed up, and they went running out to have a picnic with him."

"A picnic!" Esme's voice was incredulous. "Well, I sure hope he brought the food."

"Nope," Pa said shortly. "They both were carrying a basket of vittles."

Esme's spark of vexation quickly flamed into a full-fledged anger.

"Well, sure to graces, I bet there is not so much as cornmeal dust left in the house. How am I supposed to feed this family anyway!"

Her father had the decency to look embarrassed and hastily rose to his feet. "I'm sorry, Esme-girl," he told her cajolingly. "I'll head down to the river right now."

Esme sighed in exasperation and shook her head. "Pa, it's late afternoon, lt'd be dark afore you even got to the river."

Her father glanced up, surprised to notice the sun had nearly disappeared behind the mountain.

"You're surely right, Esme. Lord, girl—where you been all day?"

A flush of embarrassment stained her cheeks. She should have come straight back home and gone to work. Instead she'd wanted to hold those moments in the store more closely, to think about them, to inspect them, and she had spent the afternoon wandering along the river, daydreaming about Cleavis Rhy and the way he had looked at her.

"I went to town, Pa. I told you that."

"That don't take all day," her father said. "And you didn't bring nothing back. That young Rhy wouldn't give you nothing? He was always fairly generous to me."

Esme's chin came up defiantly. "I will not stoop to begging."

Yohan shook his head slightly in disbelief. "Accepting Christian charity ain't begging," he told her. "Believe me, Esme, it makes those folks feel downright warm inside to be able to help those less fortunate, like ourselves."

"Well, it don't make me feel 'downright warm inside.' It makes me feel downright queasy!"

Her father nodded. "I know. Your ma was the same way. She hated taking anything from anybody. Why, that woman worked herself down to a nub. Always thinking about what we were gonna eat and where we were gonna live."

"Well, somebody's got to worry about those things!"

Yo seated himself back on the ground, leaning against the rough wood of the house, and drew his bow sweetly across the strings of the fiddle.

"You've got the right of it there, and I cain't deny it," he admitted."But sometimes it appears to me that you've been considering the practical too much. You're neglecting to live and breathe. Feel that breeze stirring, Esme-girl? You can almost smell spring in the air. Spring's a-coming. Flowers gonna bloom, birds is a gonna sing. And plenty of young gals like yourself is going to be falling in love. That's what you ought to be considering."

Esme jerked the front door open with disgust. "I think a gal would be a good deal more likely to fall in love when she's got a full belly and a pantry full of food put by for the winter. Now, if you don't stop talking that nonsense and let me get to my work, I'm going to break that dang fiddle over your head!"

Yo chuckled slightly at the idle threat. "Just like her ma," he whispered to himself. A wave of sadness crossed his face. Putting the fiddle to his chin, he returned to his music, filling up the growing shadows with beautiful sounds, sounds of spring and romance.

Cleavis flipped open his gold watch and checked the time. "Six o'clock, precisely," he said to himself, smiling. Slipping the fancy timepiece back into the watch pocket of his trousers, he picked the sign up from under the counter and went to hang it on the door.

It read, CLOSED. ASK AT THE HOUSE. It was not a good sign. His father had painted it, and the big block letters were formed like those of a child and all the
e's
were upside-down. It didn't matter, however. Very few people on the mountain would actually bother to read it. And every living soul in and around Vader knew that if Cleav wasn't at the store, they should ask at the house.