Guests on Earth (9 page)

“Isn’t he going to eat with us?” I asked Ella Jean.

“He don’t never eat with nobody,” she said.

Aunt Roe did not even look at us as she handed Ella Jean and me our plates of green beans, cornbread cut from the skillet, and something mysterious from the other pot. I had a special plate—blue and white china. Ella Jean grabbed us two dishrags for napkins and we took our seats at the bare wooden table just as Baby Doll got up. Aunt Roe gave her a plate to take out for Granny.

“She won’t eat hardly a thing, though,” Ella Jean remarked to me. “Lives on music and air.”

I, on the other hand, found that I had turned into a glutton; this was the best food I had ever put into my mouth, and suddenly I was ravenous. Ham and onions had been cooked along with the beans, for hours it seemed, by their smoky, salty taste. The cornbread was crisp and crusty outside, chewy and moist within. “And what’s this, exactly?” I asked, eating the other dish, a piece of something with thick gravy on it.

“Meat,” Aunt Roe said.

I did not pursue this topic, but ate every bite.

“It really is good, Roe,” Ella Jean said, confirming for me that this was indeed a special supper.

“Everything is just delicious!” I added sincerely, and Aunt Roe nodded, once. She herself ate standing up, though there were chairs at the table. I sensed that she preferred to take her meals this way.

Suddenly we were joined by a barefooted girl in a flowing sort of nightgown, I believe, and a fringed, flowered shawl that dangled almost into my plate as she stood behind me and stretched her arms out over the table. She was very pale and very beautiful. Her eyes were shut; her silvery hair cascaded all down her back.

“Mama, Mama!” the little boys chanted, pulling at her gown. Without her kitchen uniform and hairnet, I would never have recognized her.

Never opening her eyes, their mother began, “May the Lord bless this food before us, may He bless and keep us every one, especially these sweet little children, and make His face to shine upon us all the days of our lives, so that we may go forth and do His bidding in the wide world, and live each day in such a way that we may enter into His kingdom, where we shall all be blessed to eat His heavenly food forever, and sing with His heavenly angels and say with them this heavenly prayer, ‘Our Father, who are in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .’ ”

I joined in the Lord’s prayer, as did Ella Jean. Aunt Roe did not.

“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” we said loudly, and Ella Jean got up to pull out a chair for her mother, who was hugely pregnant again, I realized. Aunt Roe gave her a plate of food as she reached over to take my hand.

“Now, I’m Trula,” she said. “Ella Jean has been talking about you coming up here for the longest time, and I love you, and God loves you.” Her eyes were as simple and blue as the sky.

“I love you, too,” I said, surprising myself. This remark seemed to please her, and she began to eat. I looked at Ella Jean but she was looking down, not looking at me on purpose, I felt. Clearly, there was a lot she had not told me. The little boys tumbled off their bench and out the door, leaving a mess behind. The dogs were barking in the yard.

“Where is Mister Bascomb?” I asked, for I was dying to know.

“Why, he’s off doing the Lord’s work,” Trula said sweetly, in unison with Ella Jean, who said he was playing music at a honkytonk in Tennessee. Finally Ella Jean looked at me, and we both burst out laughing, Trula along with us, her laugh like little bells ringing. I got it, all right. I wondered if she had always been like this, or if it was more recent, the result of too many babies, or too much Jesus. I got up and cleared off the table and washed the tin plates in a basin of water that Aunt Roe had heated up on the woodstove so hot that it almost scalded me. I didn’t mind. I wanted it to scald me, the same way I wanted to eat what they did and do what they did.

“Show her the garden, then,” Aunt Roe said to Ella Jean, who took me out the back door through the pecking chickens, past the “back house,” and up a dirt road toward the great overhanging mountain, where darkness and mist were already gathering.

“There it is,” Ella Jean said, pointing at the large garden, which was as tidy as the house was messy, row on row of corn and glossy green plants such as squash and beans and potatoes, ripe red tomatoes neatly staked. “Aunt Roe got here just in time to help us put the garden in, thank God,” Ella Jean said. “Or else I don’t know what we would of done.”

“You mean she doesn’t live here all the time?” I was shocked.

“No, she don’t live noplace, I reckon, just goes where she’s needed. I was mighty glad when she showed up, I’ll tell you.”

A big stuffed scarecrow in jeans and a black frock coat stood in the midst of the pumpkin vines, presiding over all. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“That’s Daddy,” Ella Jean said, not laughing. “Leastways, that’s his old coat. Daddy is something else. I wouldn’t of let you come up here if he was home.”

“Why not?” I asked. “What would happen?”

“Well, that’s the thing of it,” Ella Jean said. “He might be sweet as pie, or he might take drunk and start sworping around. You just don’t never know.”

“Is he really a preacher, then? Like your mother said?”

“Well, more or less. He’s been known to preach, let’s just leave it at that.” Ella Jean‘s quick grin flashed white in the gathering darkness. “Up there’s the tobacco field,” she added, pointing out a patch of ghostly-looking little white tents that didn’t look like tobacco—or anything growing—to me, and I said so.

“That’s just how it gets when you go to cut it, all droopylike,” she said. “We’ll be getting it in the barn this week.”

“You’ll be getting it into the barn?” I stopped walking and looked at her.

“Yes mam.” She did not look back. “Along with a passel of otherunses. People around here are real good to help each other out when hit’s a job of work to do.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll hang it up, and let it get good and dry, and then we’ll take it to market. That’s good money and a good time,” she added. “Music and everything.” We turned back toward the house, where the sound of music already came drifting from the porch as if on cue. “Down there’s the privy,” she said. “We better go on down there and use it, fore it gets plumb dark,” and so we did, one after the other. There was a choice of dried corn cobs or old catalogue pages for toilet paper. When I came back out, Ella Jean took my hand and led me up the path to the front porch where several neighbors had gathered, including Earl, who was now playing a guitar almost as big as he was, while Granny strummed the “dulcimore” on her lap and Trula fiddled. Ella Jean grabbed up her banjo and there we stayed, all of us, singing the moon up, as lightning bugs rose from the brush into the trees and Wilmer came out to hunker down in front of his barn and listen.

At one point, Ella Jean and her mother put their instruments down and stood together at the porch rail, almost touching but not quite, as they flung back their heads and closed their eyes and sang “Barbry Allen” in the old way, with that flip of the voice at the end, their high tremolo voices quivering out over the holler. The last note still hung in the air when there came the sound of a loud car engine—with no muffler, it sounded like—and then it was there below us, with slamming doors and voices raised. The dogs started barking like crazy.

“Oh Lord,” Ella Jean said.

“Who is it?” I asked. “Is it your daddy?”

“Not hardly. And he ain’t my daddy, anyhow,” Ella Jean said, leaving me to ponder that as I watched the arrival of Ella Jean’s older sister, Flossie, who had not come back to stay, she told everybody at once, tossing her yellow ponytail. She just wanted her clothes, that was all, she was moving to Knoxville, and this was Doyle—the boyfriend who stood back by the treeline smoking a cigarette and wearing a snapbrim straw hat with a green feather in it.

“Oh no, honey—” Trula flew down the steps to envelop her oldest daughter in tears and recriminations, but Flossie said she didn’t care if she was going to hell or not, she was going to Knoxville first, if everybody would just get out of her way and let her get her stuff.

While Flossie made her way into the back house, trailed by all the rest, I decided to venture back down through the woods in the moonlight to the privy by myself. I found my way all right and was coming back up the path when suddenly I was grabbed from behind, one strong arm around my waist and another around my neck, a hard fist in my mouth.

“Now don’t be scared, honey. I don’t want nothing but a little kiss.” Flossie’s boyfriend had a deep, insinuating voice. “I’ve always had a hankering for a city girl.” The bristles of his beard scraped my neck, and I could smell his awful hair pomade. I could not speak, for now he was choking me as his other hand moved under my blouse. It was pitch dark, with that woodsy smell all around. I could not move or breathe. I tried to struggle, but lost my footing on the dark path.

“God damn it!” the man said, and suddenly I was thrown off to the side, into the bushes, as a dark furious struggle of some sort occurred, punctuated by the noise of blows and grunts, “Oof! Ugh! Ah!” like the balloons of speech in cartoons. Then it was over, and the man was gone, and Wilmer was leaning over me. He picked me up and set me on my feet. He smelled terrible.

“Thank you,” I said, clutching the back of his rough wool shirt as I followed him out to the clearing where the man, seeming not much the worse for wear, was piling Flossie’s bundles into the car, cursing all the while. Crying now, Flossie herself got in and slammed the door. Granny still sat in her corner, in her quilts, watching—or not watching—it all from her high perch. The car rattled off down the mountainside.

Trula picked up her fiddle again. She and Ella Jean sang “The Demon Lover,” and I soon joined in on the chorus. “Well met, well met, my own true love, Well met, well met,” says he. “I’ve just returned from the salt water sea, and it’s all for the sake of thee.” The demon lover talks the young wife into running off with him, leaving her husband, who is a “house-carpenter,” and a “tender little babe” behind. At the end of the song, both lovers drown in the “salt water sea” and then go to Hell. All the ballads ended tragically, and all the women died, or so it seemed to me, especially in the terrible “Omie Wise,” and yet I felt a pure, undeniable exhilaration upon learning these old tunes. Granny strummed her dulcimer in darkness with her eyes closed, yet she never missed a note or a single word when she sang solo on “The Wagoner’s Lad” in her strong old voice. That song seemed to go on forever, verse after verse in the night.

The moon rode high in the sky, so bright it cast shadows behind every tree, when everybody finally drifted off to bed. As Ella Jean and I made a final trip down the path to the privy, I could hardly believe what had happened there; I did not tell her about it, for some reason I did not understand. We slept up in Ella Jean’s little loft in the back house, where I found a number of my old Nancy Drew books—I did not mention this either. Ella Jean’s breathing instantly grew slow and regular, her warm heavy arm flung across my stomach; but as for me, I was too excited to sleep, lying awake far into the night breathing the cool, scented mountain air and gazing out through a pie-shaped chink at the starry sky.

I
N THE MORNING
w
e ate anything we could find and then sat out on the porch in the sunshine playing checkers and drinking black coffee out of tin cups while we waited for Earl to come back and get us. Granny sat in her corner as if she had never left it—maybe she hadn’t!—picking out a fast little tune on Earl’s guitar. The little boys wrestled in the dirt yard below while Trula sat on the steps painting her toenails pink. She could scarcely reach them over her big stomach. Up the hill, Aunt Roe was already out working in the garden. “I’ll fly away, oh Lordy, I’ll fly away,” Granny sang. “When I get to heaven by and by, I’ll fly away.” We joined her.

“Y’all sound good,” Trula said.

“King,” I said to Ella Jean, crowning the black disc. I had scarcely slept yet felt strangely rested and alert, with every nerve on edge. Mist still hung in the trees though the sun shone hot and bright already; the deep blue sky was cloudless.

“Don’t y’all want to do your nails too?” Trula asked, offering the little bottle of nail polish.

Ella Jean and I had just finished painting each others’ toenails when Earl’s old truck rumbled into the clearing. We grabbed up our shoes and bags and ran barefooted down the warm stairs and across the yard to jump in the back of the truck. “Bye! Bye!” the little boys cried, waving. Trula waved, too, and even Baby Doll, who came out to sit sullenly beside her mother. Granny dozed in the sun in her corner. We bounced down the hill past the barn where Wilmer suddenly appeared in the door with a big smile on his face, wearing his familiar overalls and wool shirt and that snap brim straw hat with the green feather on it. He touched the brim and nodded, once, as we rode past.

E
ARL DROPPED US
a
t the stone gate and we set off up the hill, swinging our bags. The grounds of Highland Hospital had never looked more beautiful—the long green slopes of perfect grass punctuated by flowering oak-leaf hydrangeas and crape myrtles, stone benches and birdbaths placed here and there, the bright, orderly flower beds as we neared the top. Everyone we encountered waved or spoke to us, and we spoke back. But suddenly Ella Jean grabbed my arm, jerking me off the driveway with such force that I almost fell down.

“What are you . . .” I began, but stopped as I saw the Carrolls’ long, black, shiny Lincoln shoot past us like a bullet, with Johnson at the wheel.

“Something is wrong,” I said.

Instinctively we both slowed down as we continued on up the hill, achieving a literal snail’s pace as we neared the top in time to witness the Lincoln slide to a stop in front of Homewood. Its huge front door and the car doors sprang open at the same time. Out came Mrs. Hodges, almost falling down the stone steps as she rushed to envelop Mrs. Carroll in such a hug that Mrs. Carroll’s red pillbox hat went spiralling down along the pavement. “Ai-eee, ai—eee!” Mrs. Hodges wailed. Her hair stood out from her head in big clumps. Miss Malone and Mr. Axelrod appeared in the open door behind her with serious expressions on their faces.