Sweeping Up Glass (11 page)

By fall, the fellow behind the bar was a new one—not the one that favored me and gave me drinks on the house. The windows were painted black, and the new neon sign that hung from the ceiling sizzled and blinked. In the back corner, Wing lifted his horn, and the room throbbed with its wailing.

One night, when I sat running a hand over my belly, a laugh ran down the bar, gents taking bets on which of them my baby would look like. Wing’s trumpet whimpered, like all the air had gone out of it. That was the last night he worked there. My disappointment was bitter. I had relished him watching.

Just before Thanksgiving, the Reverend Timothy Culpepper came in, making right for the counter where I sat, my chin propped in my hand.

“Miss Olivia,” he said before anyone could toss him out, “this ain’t no place for a young lady.”

“Lady?” I said. Most of the Reverend’s hair was gone, and his whiskers were grizzled. “You callin’ me a lady, Reverend?” It sounded like a line from a joke, and I laughed.

He took my elbow. “I’m goin’ to get you home.”

I shook him off. “You go on now, and save some other poor soul, ’cause I’m just fine.”

“Miz Hanley don’t think so, Olivia. Nor Love Alice or Junk—they sent me to fetch you. Said for me to bring you up to their place. You can stay with them till your youngun’s born.”

I could not bear the thought of Love Alice seeing me like this. And anyway, somebody had plugged in the Wurlitzer, and out on the floor the ladies picked up their heels.

“You wanna dance, Reverend?”

“Miss Olivia—”

I put a finger to my lips. “You buy me a drink, an’ I’ll tell you a secret—”

Above the white collar and tie, his face shone with sweat. “No, ma’am, I don’t want to hear no secrets.”

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. You know that fella Percy that comes by, sellin’ stuff?”

“I seen him, yes.”

“Well, I tol’ him the baby is his.”

“That be the truth?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged my bare shoulders. “But I told him it was.”

“Miss Olivia, this fella Percy—”

“You know what he’s doing right now?”

“I do not.”

“He’s in the back room, peeling a cigar band and feeling sorry for himself. Now, go home, Reverend,” I whined. My belly had begun to hurt, and I didn’t want to talk anymore. I turned to the gent on the other side of me, a sweet-smelling fella who had just purchased a half bottle. I smiled at him, sleepy, and I wished for a glass, although I would have drunk straight from the bottle.

Percy, in a cloud of cigar smoke, came out of the office. He jerked me up. I crossed the floor with amazing ease, floated out into the night, and left the Reverend standing there with his hat in his hand.

“Get in the car.”

He climbed in, too, and the Ford coughed. We moved onto the road and away from the place and its hazy lights.

After a while I pressed my legs together and said, “Percy, I gotta pee.”

But he looked straight ahead, and his mouth was set. I sighed and leaned into the corner, my face to the door. I was in that swampy place where nothing mattered.

Pain roused me. “Let’s go back, honey, and I’ll do you ’round the floor.” I giggled, but it came out a no-meaning sound. My belly hurt, and I was thinking it might just be my time. But that was too much to worry about. Whatever was going to happen would happen.

The mountain road was thick and black like even the moon was hiding. Inside the Ford, I didn’t open my eyes. I knew the only thing to be seen was Percy all whip-starched and pissed, and the little white lights winking on the dashboard. I did not want him to take me home. I began to think of ways to make him pull me into his arms.

“Lover—” I said, but the word came out like I’d only dreamed it, and anyway, he was already stopping in the middle of the road. He opened the door and gave me a shove, and I rolled out, landing with the gravel sharp under my shoulder, the blue se-quined dress ripping beneath me. He threw the bottle out, too. I heard it shatter, and when I opened my eyes, glass and blue sequins twinkled together like stars that had fallen on this side of the road.

“You’re white trash, Olivia,” Percy said, hunched over the wheel. “Just like your mama.”

I heard the Ford putting away, rattling on the bridge below, and I laid my head on the sand and waited for Ida to come down the steps and find me.

Wolves howled, high up and far away, my grandpap’s wolves. But my pap had said there was nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it seemed funny, me lying here like a wounded deer. Before long, Ida sure enough came down and laid a hand on my belly, while the gentleman she was entertaining stood off to one side blinking. Ida barked at him, and his thick hands took me up by the heels like I was a hog to be slaughtered. They hauled me in with Ida grunting and kicking open the door, and they carried me through the grocery and put me down in the middle of the big poster bed. Ida drew back her arm and slapped me good. Then again, without missing a beat.

She rolled me over to unfasten the blue frock and pulled it down past my underdrawers, but something like syrup was flowing from me, and the pain had gotten all wild and wrong.

“Go on and fetch Doc Pritchett,” she said to the man. And again, “Goddamit, fetch the doc!”

He took up his hat and shuffled out, saying, “But I paid good money, Ida Mae—”

I opened my mouth, and a long thin scream came out, like the highest of high notes on Wing’s golden horn. It shook the window glass and stuck like flypaper to the walls and ceiling. And I knew that what was supposed to be happening, was not happening at all.

M
y daughter was born before morning, and I named her Pauline because Love Alice had said I would. Maybe I just wanted Love Alice to be right.

I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with this whippet. For once, Ida let Miz Hanley come to our place. She showed up on a Thursday with her spine starchy and her mouth set. She clucked at how grown-up I was, and how sweet the baby, though I know she’d heard all about me from the Reverend. She showed me how to fasten the baby to my nipple, how to stroke her throat so she’d stop wailing and suck. I was miserable with Pauline in my arms and clamped to one breast. I suspected I should feel something warm, but it was all I could do to spoon oats in her mouth and change her stinking diaper while Ida reminded me where Pauline had come from. She called me Jezebel and Satan’s daughter. I told her I was Jezebel’s daughter, all right, and that brought such a barrage of shattered scripture that the baby woke screaming.

In the alcove by my bed, Pauline slept in an old dresser drawer. Against the cool nights, I’d nailed newspapers on the walls and folded quilts under her, but I had to creep in and out of bed so’s not to wake her, and my corner was no longer mine.

When she was a few days old, Wing came to visit, leaning in
the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets. He was polite with Ida and played with Pauline, but said nothing to me. In the end, he laid Pauline in her drawer and bought canning wax and a box of salt. Finally, we stood on the front steps, him mumbling that he would marry me if I wanted Pauline to have a daddy, but stiffly I said no thank you, get on with your business. And he did.

At the end of winter, when my daughter had begun to crawl and every blessed thing was caught in her fist and directed to her mouth, Mr. Solomon Cross came to town—to our door. He was covered with road dust, and had a front tooth missing so that he whistled when he talked. He held his cap in his hand and said to Ida, “Excuse me, ma’am, we’re paving the farm road, and you-all won’t be able to travel west for a day or two.”

She invited him in, saying, “I’m Ida Harker, wife of Tate Harker who’s dead and gone.” I thought she was setting him up for herself, but then she gave him a cup of coffee to warm him, and my wiggling baby, and said, “This here’s Pauline. Healthy a child as there ever was—and look what a sturdy mama she has. My daughter’s plain, but she makes fine bed-quilts and a tasty apple cobbler—takes after me in that way. Her name’s Olivia.”

He nodded and said yes, ma’am, what a nice family—and he came to call on me the next night.

This time he was cleaned up. Both his suit and his manners stood out like blinking lights in our sad little house. He told us to call him Saul. The only place for socializing was in the kitchen, so he sat at the table while I slouched in my chair, with a pair of Pap’s old trousers pulled over my long johns, two flannel shirts, and my hat in my hand like I was fixing to run. Ida and I had fought bitterly over my presentation, me arguing that I was what I was. That seemed all right with Saul.

He was a squat and balding man, but his manners were fine
and his eyes the purest blue I’d ever seen. He told me he made fair money with the road crew, but he’d be willing to settle down and find something else in Pope County—if he could have me for his wife. Said he’d take Pauline, too, and locate a house. Ida called from the bedroom that this was a fine enough house, and there was plenty of room if the two of us didn’t mind sleeping in the alcove until the undertaker moved her out of the front bedroom, which would surely be soon. Saul said he guessed that would be all right.

I consulted Love Alice. I should have been embarrassed to go up there after all that had happened, but Miz Hanley scooped Pauline right up, put her arm around me as I had known she would, and settled me in her rocking chair on the porch. She wagged Pauline off into the house and came back with a glass for me—lemon water and sugar. She didn’t ask after Ida, but stood cooing at the baby. I closed my eyes and drank my sweet drink, and I tried hard to pretend I was nine again, but I could not get it straight with Miz Hanley’s attention on Pauline’s babbling. Time has a way of ripping things from us, and it’s true what they say—a body can’t go back.

Presently Love Alice came up the road. When she saw me, she dropped the bundles she was carrying, causing her mother-in-law to cluck her tongue, and she ran up on the porch and hugged me tight.

“O-livvy,” she cried in her funny little voice. “It’s so good to see you, and that’s a truth!”

I had hungered for the sound of her, for the great dark eyes and the swoop of freckles like sparrow’s wings. Miz Hanley took Pauline inside.

“I’ve missed you so much, Love Alice.”

“Oh, ain’t it been awful,” she said.

“Please—will you come to see me sometimes?”

She sat down on the porch and crossed her legs, tucked her dress around her. “I do come, O-livvy. I shops there on Wednesdays when I got a nickel or two.”

“I don’t mean that,” I said, putting down my glass. “I mean—in my kitchen. I’ll make us tea like when we were girls.”

“That a long time ago.” Love Alice looked like she wanted to fly away. “Miss Ida be there.”

“Never mind Ida. I’ll take care of her. Please come. I’ve got a jar of sweet pickle that you like, and I’ll cut up a peach. Love Alice?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“I got things to think through, like Saul Cross wanting to marry me and take Pauline, too.”

“He seem a nice man.”

“But it scares me, you know? Bein’ with one man for all time. Especially one that Ida picked out.”

“Not me. I don’t want nobody ’cept Junk.” Then she got up on her knees and looked hard in my eyes. “You go on and marry him, O-livvy. It goin’ to be all right. An’ I will come on Tuesday.”

S
aul and I were married in Ida’s side yard. My hair was done up in ribboned braids, and I wore a long green dress to cover the boots that were all I owned. Most of the town turned out, I’m sure in deference to Pap’s memory. They stood around drinking cold tea and cider. Others clustered by the barn. While Ida served wedding cake to the whites, the coloreds settled in the back lot, laying out fried chicken on squares of newspaper and wagging their heads over Pap’s privy grave. Love Alice blew me kisses. I was edgy and near tears, jiggling Pauline on my hip, and maybe that’s why Ida said nothing about Junk and Love Alice, about his mama or Miss Dovey and all their friends and relations eating their dinner out past the goat pen.

Later, Wing came to me in the kitchen where I sat in a straight-backed chair, and he asked me if I really loved Saul. I said how could I, not knowing him at all, and what did it matter to Wing anyway. He said he guessed he’d find him a wife, then, and see if they couldn’t make a go of the hotel. I said why didn’t he just do that.

F
our years later Wing went off to a hotel convention in Paramus and brought home one Grace Marie Saunders, a wisp of a thing with eyes as big as bread and butter plates. I saw her only a few times—Wing could’ve put both hands around her middle—but everyone liked her. She seemed always to be cold, with a sweater wrapped about her, or sniffling into a hanky. She told Little Ruse, however, that she was right as rain and did, after all, have Wing’s love to keep her warm.

I did not go to Wing and Grace’s wedding, although Saul did because he thought it was the neighborly thing. He wore his now-thready suit, combed his hair over his bald spot, and drove Ida’s truck to the white church on the highway. He said afterward folks went down to the hotel lobby, where they served sandwiches no bigger than his thumb and punch with lemon slices floating on the top. He said Miz Grace was a fairy princess, decked out in flowers and lace, and that Wing couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Saul, himself, was a hard worker. He clerked for Mr. French in his hardware store because he knew wing nuts from lock washers, and could spot one flathead screw in a barrel of stove bolts. He knew something about everything. If a body needed indoor
plumbing, or linoleum laid, Saul was right there. If nobody called on him for some time, he’d go off looking to see where he was needed.

On Saturdays, Saul obliged Pap’s memory by firing up the still in the shed and turning out his own brand of Sunday morning brew. At one time, revenuers had plagued my pap mightily, once even bringing a federal marshal to our place, but the government’s mind apparently had turned to other things, because they left Saul alone. Although money was at an all-time low, customers came to us, the gents sampling Saul’s whiskey on the sly while their wives bought groceries. Ida no longer entertained gentlemen in the house, but took to wandering up and down the road, preaching pidgin gospel to neighbors who said it looked like the sickness was coming on her again. Ida called them backbiters, and told them to go to hell.