Swan Place (19 page)
Authors: Augusta Trobaugh
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Sagas, #African American
“She’s going to call some of the folks he works with at the chicken plant and see if they know where he is.”
This news brought fresh sobs from Crystal. “Oh, Dove, I’ve been his wife only six
days
, and I’ve run him off already!”
I didn’t know what to say to Crystal, so I didn’t say anything at all. When it was time for bed, Crystal curled up on the couch, and all throughout that long night, I could see the ghost-white flickering of the television set in the living room and hear Crystal blowing her nose, again and again. When the phone rang before daylight, I almost thought for a minute that it was the people at the hospital, calling to tell us that Mama was gone. But then I got wide awake in a hurry and went into the living room. Crystal answered it after the second ring.
“Hello?” Crystal looked at me with her red and tired-looking eyes.
“Oh, hi, Ada,” Crystal said, brightening a little. Then she frowned.
“What?” And while I stood there watching her, Crystal just sort of folded up and sat down on the floor. Hard.
“What is it?” I whispered, sitting down beside her. But she said not a single word. Just listened for a while longer and then hung up. And her face held something so serious that it almost looked like it was carved in stone.
“Roy-Ellis
. . .
” Crystal started, and then she rubbed her forehead and swallowed hard. “He’s gone,” she said simply.
“Gone?” Why, that just didn’t make any sense. Roy-Ellis wouldn’t be
gone,
for Heaven’s sake! He wasn’t
that
mad, so why would he be gone? And gone where? That’s what I wanted to know. But then when I looked at Crystal again, I knew what kind of
gone
she meant.
“What?” That one word just seemed to take all the breath out of me. And I’ve never seen anybody’s face turn as white as Crystal’s, and out of that snowy-white face, her pale mouth was making words, and I heard them like they were coming at me through some kind of a fog in my ears.
“That was Ada. From Across the Line. Where I used to dance,” Crystal added, for some reason. “There was an accident just down the road. Roy-Ellis
. . .
” Crystal didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t need to.
“It happened only a few hours after he left. That’s what the police say.” Crystal’s chin shook. “His truck went down into a ravine and nobody could see it from the road. That’s why it took so long to find him.” I watched Crystal’s face getting whiter and whiter. I got the phone and called Aunt Bett.
It was all like some kind of a bad dream, those next few days. Seems like the hours lasted forever but flew by at the same time. Aunt Bett fixing good clothes, once again, for us to wear to church for another funeral, and us all sitting there and me not really sure whether it was Mama’s funeral we were at, or
. . .
Roy-Ellis’s. Crystal was all shrunken up around the neck and shoulders, but she didn’t cry out loud. Not at church. And Aunt Bett brought us home but Crystal went to the cemetery alone. Just as Roy-Ellis had done for Mama.
Aunt Mee was in our kitchen once again, and all the people from Roy-Ellis’s work came and brought food, and when Crystal came home from the cemetery, a man in a dark suit handed her an envelope. She didn’t open it. Some of the people there were folks from Across the Line, and I wondered what Aunt Bett would say about that. But she sure surprised me. She was just as nice as could be to those folks she knew good and well worked in the “den of iniquity.” She shook their hands and thanked them for coming. All the folks from Aunt Bett’s church were nice to them. But before they started to leave, Aunt Bett said, “I hope you’ll come to church sometime.” And they smiled and murmured “Thanks,” but I don’t think any of them ever came.
At the last, there was only one person left from Across the Line—a woman I didn’t know. A woman with black, curly hair, perfectly arched eyebrows, like what you see on magazine models, and the reddest lips I had ever seen. I’d noticed her watching Crystal, so I figured maybe she wanted to say something about being sorry. But when she finally went and put her hand on Crystal’s arm, it was for saying something that surprised Aunt Bett and Crystal and me.
“Crystal?” she started, almost in a whisper.
“Yes,” Crystal said. Then, “I’m Crystal,” she added, as if to encourage the girl.
“Well, I’m Roberta—from Across the Line.” She paused. “Ada said I should stay behind and tell you about
. . .
Roy-Ellis
. . .
before the accident.”
“Oh,” Crystal sighed. “Do you have to do that right now?”
“It’s important,” Roberta said. “Can we go someplace private?”
“Okay.” Crystal sounded so weary. They went into the hallway, but I saw Aunt Bett reach over and straighten the afghan on the back of the couch, so she could try and be close enough to hear what they were saying.
Roberta started: “I’m real new at Across the Line—only started last week—and I didn’t know Roy-Ellis was married.” Roberta looked down at her shoes, and Aunt Bett sort of drew herself up, like she was bracing to hear something she didn’t want to hear.
Roberta went on. “See, he didn’t wear a ring, and all I knew was that he was a customer, and he looked pretty unhappy. So I told him
. . .
” She stammered to a stop. Crystal turned her head away, like she was scared of what Roberta was going to say.
“So I told him that I’d try to make him feel better.” Crystal closed her eyes and so did Aunt Bett. And seeing how Crystal was hurting, Roberta went ahead at breakneck speed.
“All I meant was that I’d keep the beer coming and the peanut dish full and smile and be nice to him.” Tears welled up in her eyes, but she jutted out her chin and almost yelled, “I swear to you, that’s all I meant!” She took in a couple of quick breaths.
Crystal opened her eyes and looked at Roberta.
“I believe you.”
Aunt Bett’s eyes snapped open.
“Oh, thank you,” Roberta said. “So please let me finish. This is something Ada said you needed to hear.”
“Go ahead then,” Crystal nodded.
“Well, he musta thought I meant more than beer and peanuts and smiles too, because he says to me, ‘I’ve had too many beers tonight, but I won’t let that turn me into more of an ass than I’ve already been.’”
“I was gonna tell him that isn’t what I meant, but before I could say a thing, he stood up, fished some bills out of his pocket, and tossed them onto the table. Then he looked right at me and said, ‘I got me a sweet little wife waiting for me at home, and that’s where I’m going. Gonna tell her I’m sorry.’” Roberta and Crystal were both tearful now.
“Ada said you should know.”
“Oh, yes,” Crystal breathed. “Thank you.”
Roberta turned to go, but then she looked back at Crystal.
“I’m sorry you lost him so soon, but you need to remember how much he loved you. There are lots of women in this world who never get that—not for a single hour of their lives.”
After Roberta left, Aunt Bett confessed to Crystal, “I’m sorry I eavesdropped, Crystal. I only did it so I could help you in any way I can.”
“It’s okay,” Crystal whispered.
“He was a good man,” Aunt Bett said. Then she smiled at Crystal and added, “Mostly.”
Crystal looked startled, and she stared and stared at Aunt Bett’s smile, like maybe she’d forgotten what it was like to see anybody smile, after all the sadness we’d been through. Then Crystal’s face softened a bit, and she whispered, “Yes. A mostly good man. A
really
mostly good man.”
How strange it felt for Roy-Ellis to be gone
—
and never coming back. I just hadn’t known how much he filled up our little house with himself—even when he was at work. Why, with just us there, we almost tiptoed around, and we took to whispering instead of talking. The house was that empty.
For a long time, I halfway expected that he would come in the door any minute, clump across the living room and down the hall, turn on the shower, and start singing honky-tonk songs like he usually did. Then he would come out of the bedroom, with his hair still wet and with little grooves in it from his comb, and he would be wearing clean clothes and smell real good from the aftershave lotion he would put on himself. It took a long time before I stopped thinking those things would happen.
Once again, Aunt Bett took to coming over often, and she and Crystal would go in the kitchen and shut the door. But this time, I stood in the hallway with my ear against the door. If Aunt Bett could eavesdrop, then so could I!
Aunt Bett said, “Crystal, I want to talk to you about the children.” Her voice was deep and serious.
“What about the children, Bett?”
“I will take them into my home, so you can get on with your life.” Aunt Bett said, and once again, I realized how close we were to having nobody in this world, except for Aunt Bett. But maybe that would be all right—I knew we would all be crowded in Aunt Bett’s house, but somehow, we could make do. Maybe I could even get me a job after school and in the summers, working in the dime store or something.
But Crystal must have thought about it already, because she said, “Thank you, Bett. That’s so good of you. But these children are all I have left of Roy-Ellis, and I mean to be a good mother to them, no matter what. Other than these children, I don’t have a life to get on with!”
“I don’t know. You’re awfully young to be saddled with three children and not even have a husband to help you,” Aunt Bett reminded her.
“I can do it, Bett,” Crystal reassured her. “I know I can.”
“Well, that’s more than I could possibly have expected. Are you sure?”
“I’m
sure
,” Crystal repeated, and her voice sounded all full of iron. Or something like that. And in a way, I guess I was surprised at Crystal. Maybe we thought she would kind of fall apart after Roy-Ellis died, but she didn’t. In fact, she started right in to looking for work in a beauty parlor. And I’ll bet Roy-Ellis never even knew that she’d gone to beauty college right out of high school—that she had been a beautician before and hated it so bad that she worked in a box factory until she could start dancing in roadhouses.
It turned out that the envelope someone from Roy-Ellis’s work gave to Crystal the day of Roy-Ellis’s funeral had $200 in cash in it, and that would hold us until Crystal could get work.
“I have a family to support now, and dancing isn’t a good way to have a steady paycheck,” Crystal said to me, and I sure do wish Aunt Bett could have heard that. But of course, Aunt Bett just thought that dancing in a roadhouse was terrible anyway, so maybe she wouldn’t have understood how hard it was for Crystal to give it up.
“And besides,” Crystal added, “it was our arguing about my dancing that made Roy-Ellis so mad that night. So I won’t ever dance again. Not ever.” And just like happened after Mama died, the world went on, and we went on with it.
I’m not even sure of when things began to feel a little bit all right again, even though Crystal still hadn’t found a job. All I know is that one day I went to hang one of Crystal’s pretty blouses in her closet and looked down at Roy-Ellis’s other pair of boots, where they still stood, like they were waiting for him to put them on, and I knew that the boots were just that: boots. Just things. But I did take his cowboy hat and put it in the top of the closet in mine and Molly’s and Little Ellis’s room. Because I wanted to keep it forever.
When I wrote in my notebooks, I wrote about Roy-Ellis as well. And pretty soon, I wasn’t just writing short things about people, but also about how the people were when they were with each other.
While Crystal was looking for a job, she practiced haircutting on all of us, and she did a fine job, even with Little Ellis, who didn’t like to sit still for such a long time. Why, we’d never had such nice-looking hair before. Then Crystal went to Aunt Bett’s house one Saturday morning and gave haircuts to all Aunt Bett’s children. Aunt Bett was grateful, but she wasn’t one to accept things for free, so when we were ready to leave, Aunt Bett handed three jars of her good pickles to Crystal and me.