Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (23 page)

A part of me can’t believe I’m acting this crazy, while another part of me is saying, “Go, girl.” A little breeze comes up and ruffles my hair. I practice deep breathing from aerobics and look all around. The water is smooth as glass. The whole damn sky is full of stars. It is just beautiful. All the stars are reflected in the water. Right overhead I see Orion and then I see his belt, as clear as can be. I’m headed for the island, sliding through the stars.

Between the Lines

P
eace be with you from Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse” is how I sign my columns. Now I gave some thought to that. In the first place, I like a line that has a ring to it. In the second place, what I have always tried to do with my column is to uplift my readers if at all possible, which sometimes it is not. After careful thought, I threw out “Yours in Christ.” I am a religious person and all my readers know it. If I put “Yours in Christ,” it seems to me that they will think I am theirs because I am in Christ, or even that they and I are in Christ
together,
which is not always the case. I am in Christ, but I know for a fact that a lot of them are not. There’s no use acting like they are, but there’s no use rubbing their faces in it either. “Peace be with you,” as I see it, is sufficiently religious without laying all the cards right out on the table in plain view. I like to keep an ace or two up my sleeve. I like to write between the lines.

This is what I call my column, in fact: Between the Lines, by Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse. Nobody knows why. Many people have come right out and asked me, including my best friend, Sally Peck, and my husband, Glenn. “Come on, now, Joline,” they say. “What’s this Between the Lines all about? What’s this Between
the Lines supposed to mean?” But I just smile a sweet mysterious smile and change the subject. I know what I know.

And my column means everything to folks around here. Salt Lick community is where we live, unincorporated. I guess there is not much that you would notice, passing through — the post office (real little), the American oil station, my husband Glenn’s Cash ‘N’ Carry Beverage Store. He sells more than beverages in there, though, believe me. He sells everything you can think of, from thermometers and rubbing alcohol to nails to frozen pizza. Anything else you want, you have to go out of the holler and get on the interstate and go to Greenville to get it. That’s where my column appears, in the
Greenville Herald,
fortnightly. Now there’s a word with a ring to it:
fortnightly.

There are seventeen families here in Salt Lick — twenty, if you count those three down by the Five Mile Bridge. I put what they do in the paper. Anybody gets married, I write it. That goes for born, divorced, dies, cele brates a golden wedding anniversary, has a baby shower, visits relatives in Ohio, you name it. But these mere facts are not what’s most important, to my mind.

I write, for instance: “Mrs. Alma Goodnight is enjoying a pleasant recuperation period in the lovely, modern Walker Mountain Community Hospital while she is sorely missed by her loved ones at home. Get well soon, Alma!” I do not write that Alma Goodnight is in the hospital because her husband hit her up the side with a rake and left a straight line of bloody little holes going from her waist to her armpit after she yelled at him, which Lord knows she did all the time, once too often. I don’t write how Eben Goodnight is all torn up now about what he did, missing work and worrying, or how Alma likes it so much in the hospital that nobody knows if they’ll ever get her to go home or not. Because
that is a
mystery,
and I am no detective by a long shot. I am what I am, I know what I know, and I know you’ve got to give folks something to hang on to, something to keep them going. That is what I have in mind when I say
uplift,
and that is what God had in mind when He gave us Jesus Christ.

My column would not be but a paragraph if the news was all I told. But it isn’t. What I tell is what’s important, like the bulbs coming up, the way the redbud comes out first on the hills in the spring and how pretty it looks, the way the cattails shoot up by the creek, how the mist winds down low on the ridge in the mornings, how my wash all hung out on the line of a Tuesday looks like a regular square dance with those pants legs just flapping and flapping in the wind! I tell how all the things you ever dreamed of, all changed and ghostly, will come crowding into your head on a winter night when you sit up late in front of your fire. I even made up these little characters to talk for me, Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal and Princess Pussycat, and often I have them voice my thoughts. Each week I give a little chapter in their lives. Or I might tell what was the message brought in church, or relate an inspirational word from a magazine, book, or TV. I look on the bright side of life.

I’ve had God’s gift of writing from the time I was a child. That’s what the B. stands for in Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse — Barker, my maiden name. My father was a patient strong God-fearing man despite his problems and it is in his honor that I maintain the B. There was a lot of us children around all the time — it was right up the road here where I grew up — and it would take me a day to tell you what all we got into! But after I learned how to write, that was that. My fingers just naturally curved to a pencil and I sat down to writing like a ball of fire. They skipped me up one, two
grades in school. When I was not but eight, I wrote a poem named “God’s Garden,” which was published in the church bulletin of the little Methodist church we went to then on Hunter’s Ridge. Oh, Daddy was so proud! He gave me a quarter that Sunday, and then I turned around and gave it straight to God. Put it in the collection plate. Daddy almost cried he was so proud. I wrote another poem in school the next year, telling how life is like a maple tree, and it won a statewide prize.

That’s me — I grew up smart as a whip, lively, and naturally good. Jesus came as easy as breathing did to me. Don’t think I’m putting on airs, through: I’m not. I know what I know. I’ve done my share of sinning too, of which more later.

Anyway, I was smart. It’s no telling but what I might have gone on to school like my own children have and who knows what all else if Mama hadn’t run off with a man. I don’t remember Mama very well, to tell the truth. She was a weak woman, always lying in the bed having a headache. One day we all came home from school and she was gone, didn’t even bother to make up the bed. Well, that was the end of Mama! None of us ever saw her again, but Daddy told us right before he died that one time he had gotten a postcard from her from Tampa, Florida, years and years after that. He showed it to us, all wrinkled and soft from him holding it.

Being the oldest, I took over and raised those little ones, three of them, and then I taught school and then I married Glenn and we had our own children, four of them, and I have raised them too and still have Marshall, of course, poor thing. He is the cross I have to bear and he’ll be just like he is now for the rest of his natural life.

I was writing my column for the week of March 17, 1976,
when the following events occurred. It was a real coincidence because I had just finished doing the cutest little story named “A Red-Letter Day for Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal” when the phone rang. It rings all the time, of course. Everybody around here knows my number by heart. It was Mrs. Irene Chalmers. She was all torn up. She said that Mr. Biggers was over at Greenville at the hospital, very bad off this time, and that he was asking for me and would I please try to get over there today as the doctors were not giving him but a 20 percent chance to make it through the night. Mr. Biggers has always been a fan of mine, and he especially liked Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal. “Well!” I said. “Of course I will! I’ll get Glenn on the phone right this minute. And you calm down, Mrs. Chalmers. You go fix yourself a Coke.” Mrs. Chalmers said she would and hung up. I knew what was bothering her, of course. It was that given the natural run of things, she would be the next to go. The next one to be over there dying. Without even putting down the receiver, I dialed the beverage store. Bert answered.

“Good morning,” I said. I like to maintain a certain distance with the hired help although Glenn does not. He will talk to anybody, and anytime you go in there, you can find half the old men in the county just sitting around that stove in the winter or outside on those wooden drink boxes in the summer, smoking and drinking drinks which I am sure they are getting for free out of the cooler although Glenn swears it on the Bible they are not. Anyway, I said good morning.

“Can I speak to Glenn?” I said.

“Well now, Mrs. Newhouse,” Bert said in his naturally insolent voice — he is just out of high school and too big for his britches — “he’s not here right now. He had to go out for a while.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Bert said. “He said he’d be back after lunch.”

“Thank you very much, there will not be a message,” I said sweetly, and hung up. I
knew
where Glenn was. Glenn was over on Caney Creek where his adopted half sister Margie Kettles lived, having carnal knowledge of her in the trailer. They had been at it for thirty years and anybody would have thought they’d have worn it out by that time. Oh, I knew all about it.

The way it happened in the beginning was that Glenn’s father had died of his lungs when Glenn was not but about ten years old, and his mother grieved so hard that she went off her head and began taking up with anybody who would go with her. One of the fellows she took up with was a foreign man out of a carnival, the James H. Drew Exposition, a man named Emilio something. He had this curly-headed dark-skinned little daughter. So Emilio stayed around longer than anybody would have expected, but finally it was clear to all that he never would find any work around here to suit him. The work around here is hard work, all of it, and they said he played a musical instrument. Anyway, in due course this Emilio just up and vanished, leaving that foreign child. Now that was Margie, of course, but her name wasn’t Margie then. It was a long foreign name, which ended up as Margie, and that’s how Margie ended up here, in these mountains, where she has been up to no good ever since. Glenn’s mother did not last too long after Emilio left, and those children grew up wild. Most of them went to foster homes, and to this day Glenn does not know where two of his brothers are! The military was what finally saved Glenn. He stayed with the military for nine years,
and when he came back to this area he found me over here teaching school and with something of a nest egg in hand, enabling him to start the beverage store. Glenn says he owes everything to me.

This is true. But I can tell you something else: Glenn is a good man, and he has been a good provider all these years. He has not ever spoken to me above a regular tone of voice nor raised his hand in anger. He has not been tight with the money. He used to hold the girls in his lap of an evening. Since I got him started, he has been a regular member of the church, and he has not fallen down on it yet. Glenn furthermore has that kind of disposition where he never knows a stranger. So I can count my blessings too.

Of course I knew about Margie! Glenn’s sister Lou-Ann told me about it before she died, that is how I found out about it originally. She thought I
should
know, she said. She said it went on for years and she just wanted me to know before she died. Well! I had had the first two girls by then, and I thought I was so happy. I took to my bed and just cried and cried. I cried for four days and then by gum I got up and started my column, and I have been writing on it ever since. So I was not unprepared when Margie showed up again some years after that, all gap toothed and wild looking, but then before you knew it she was gone, off again to Knoxville, then back working as a waitress at that truck stop at the county line, then off again, like that. She led an irregular life. And as for Glenn, I will have to hand it to him, he never darkened her door again until after the birth of Marshall.

Now let me add that I would not have gone on and had Marshall if it were left up to me. I would have practiced more birth control. Because I was old by that time, thirty-seven, and that was
too old for more children I felt, even though I had started late of course. I had told Glenn many times, I said three normal girls is enough for anybody. But no, Glenn was like a lot of men, and I don’t blame him for it — he just had to try one more time for a boy. So we went on with it, and I must say I had a feeling all along.

I was not a bit surprised at what we got, although after wrestling with it all for many hours in the dark night of the soul, as they say, I do not believe that. Marshall is a judgment on me for my sin. He is one of God’s special children, is how I look at it. Of course he looks funny, but he has already lived ten years longer than they said he would. And has a job! He goes to Greenville every day on the Trailways bus, rain or shine, and cleans up the Plaza Mall. He gets to ride on the bus, and he gets to see people. Along about six o’clock he’ll come back, walking up the holler and not looking to one side or the other, and then I give him his supper and then he’ll watch something on TV like
The Brady Bunch
or
Family Affair,
and then he’ll go to bed. He would not hurt a flea. But oh, Glenn took it hard when Marshall came! I remember that night so well and the way he just turned his back on the doctor. This is what sent him back to Margie, I am convinced of it, what made him take up right where he had left off all those years before.

So since Glenn was up to his old tricks I called up Lavonne, my daughter, to see if she could take me to the hospital to see Mr. Biggers. Why yes she could, it turned out. As a matter of fact she was going to Greenville herself. As a matter of fact she had something she wanted to talk to me about anyway. Now Lavonne is our youngest girl and the only one that stayed around here. Lavonne is somewhat pop eyed, and has a weak constitution. She is one of those people that never can make up their minds. That day on
the phone, I heard a whine in her voice I didn’t like the sound of. Something is up, I thought.