Twang (16 page)

She got a real surprised look on her face, then said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pardue,” and, “Your dog has the most beautiful, expressive eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“I couldn’t do without my Erastus,” said Bobby Lee. “I’d be absolutely lost without this feller.”

Jennifer asked was Erastus trained to help folks in wheelchairs, and Bobby Lee said, “Only thing he’s trained in is chasing rabbits and scratching fleas.” She started laughing and I was feeling real encouraged they were hitting it off so good.

We got seated around the table, and I said for everybody to bow their head while I asked the Lord’s blessing:
Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and our lives to your service. In Jesus’ name, Amen
, and then I started helping myself to mashed potatoes and butterbeans and collard greens. I had hot pepper sauce and vinegar on the table, so I passed them to Jennifer, along with the biscuits and the platter of pork chops.

Bobby Lee helped himself to some sorghum syrup, and when he was done, I said to Jennifer, “You want some for your biscuit?”

“No, thanks,” she said.

“You don’t like sorghum on your biscuit?” I patted the side of the jar. “Ain’t nothing better than a hot biscuit with butter and sorghum.”

“Um . . . no, thank you. I really don’t care for any.”

“Just try it. Go ahead, you’ll love it. I guarantee.”

Tonilynn reached over and grabbed the sorghum right out of my hand and set it way over beside her plate and said, “What’s on your head, Aunt Gomer?”

Well, she knew good and well what my garland was for, but I figured she was just trying to make conversation on account
of Jennifer wasn’t talking much. “It’s my pennyroyal, to cure swimmy-headedness and headaches.”

“Modern folks call that aromatherapy,” Tonilynn said. “When a smell can help things.”

“Well, whatever you call it, I believe the Lord gives us remedies in our natural world, and pennyroyal helps a lot of things. In addition to soothing human heads, it’s a dandy natural insect repellant.” I turned to Jennifer. “You like playing in the dirt?”

“What?” She looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

“She means gardening.” Bobby Lee used his biscuit to sop up some pot likker.

“Oh, um . . . I guess.” Jennifer forked up a single butterbean, looking hard at it before she put it into her mouth.

“Well, I’ll have to take you out and show you my garden when we’re done. I’m aiming to plant my melons and my zinnias tomorrow.”

“Aunt Gomer,” Tonilynn piped up, “we talked about this. You need to relax. It’s not even April yet and the last average frost date is April fifteenth, and there’s a reason the weatherman calls it a
killing
frost.”

“I’ll relax when I’m dead. I’m gonna get out there tomorrow and do my tilling.” I turned to Jennifer. “Got to work our dirt hard on account of the clay and limestone. Tell you one thing, when the Lord starts sprinkling his yellow talcum power is how I know spring’s here.”

Bobby Lee shook his head. “The Lord’s talcum powder,” he said under his breath in a snide voice, but I got keen ears.

“Ain’t a thing wrong with calling pollen the Lord’s talcum powder!” I said.

Tonilynn didn’t say word one to her sassy offspring. In fact, she was cutting up Bobby Lee’s pork chop!

“You’re ruining him,” I said.

Tonilynn squinted her eyes at me. “How would you like it if you couldn’t get up and walk or run around?”

“That boy, that
man
,” I said, “is a lot more capable than you give him credit for. Bobby Lee could be somebody if you didn’t smother him.”

“Hush your mouth!” Tonilynn said, and her face got pink.

I did not. I said, “When it’s something Bobby Lee
wants
to do—like fishing—he literally flies in that wheelchair! But when you come around, he turns into a helpless invalid.”

Nobody said anything for a long spell. I saw Jennifer sliding her butter knife up under the side of her plate so the pot likker from the collard greens wouldn’t run into anything. I had a mind to tell her that the pot likker was where all the good vitamins were, but I didn’t want Tonilynn fussing anymore. So I turned to Jennifer and said, “I saw you on the television after that song of yours about the honky-tonk tomcat came out, and I told Bobby Lee your voice reminds me of Patsy Cline’s, so pure and all. And you look like Cher, back when she was doing that show with Sonny Bono. Look just like an Indian with your long silky black hair and that pretty skin. You got any Indian blood?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” she said, her eyes darting this way and that.

I could not imagine not knowing what blood was in my family tree. “Well,” I told her, “you ought to look into that whole Indian thing. That right there might be something that would benefit your career. Seems like if you got black or Indian blood in you, they roll out the red carpet.”

Tonilynn gave me an evil look.

“Everything is real good, Miz Gomer,” Jennifer said.

“Talk about a good cook,” I said. “My mother made the best buttermilk biscuits in this world. She also made fried chicken,
pound cake, apple cobbler, peach pickles, and fig preserves good enough to die for. She tried to teach all of us children soon as we could stand on a chair to reach the stove. ’Course, my first love was gardening and mostly I stayed outdoors, but I did manage to pick up a few tricks. It was Tonilynn’s mother who was a real natural in the kitchen. Norma used to win ribbons at all the fairs.”

“Really?” Jennifer turned to Tonilynn.

“That’s what I’m told,” Tonilynn said.

“Norma no longer walks this earth,” I teased.

“What happened?” Jennifer set her biscuit down and looked at me.

“When she saw Tonilynn, she died.” I knew as the words leapt out of my mouth, they was a tad on the mean side. That poor skinny thing grabbed hold of the table, and I noticed her fingernails were bit down past the quick. Tonilynn gave me one of those exasperated looks of hers before she turned to Jennifer and said in the softest voice, “She died in childbirth.”

Jennifer’s eyes got all sparkly the way they’ll get when tears are fixing to spill, and I figured it was a good time to bring up the subject of marriage, so I said, “There’s bound to be hard things on this earth, but I’m the type who chooses to look at the silver lining of every cloud.”

I got quiet for a minute to let Jennifer’s curiosity build. Tonilynn and Bobby Lee knew what I was fixing to tell because I’d told it umpteen times. “When I came of age, didn’t no man come courtin’ me. My three sisters had beaus coming out the woodwork, but at six-foot-two-inches tall, I towered over most of ’em. At first I didn’t mind being alone. I didn’t want to do anything anyhow but work in my garden. I was purely content.

“But then my sisters got married and moved off, and when I was thirty-five, Mama and Daddy went to their graves within
six months of each other, and left me with only my hens clucking and fussing and hunting bugs in the yard.

“Well, I still had my garden, and gardening was the first job. Says so in Genesis. Says God formed man and then he planted a garden and there he put the man to till it. But what got me is what he said later, that it wasn’t good for man to be alone, and I may not be one of those feminists, but I believe that includes females too.

“Of course I talked to the Lord about it, as he’s the one said ‘Ask and ye shall receive.’ I told him I was still menstruating regular and that I was mighty lonely down here, and I didn’t doubt in my heart he would answer me.

“Time galloped on and I stayed busy, kept my faith strong. I can still remember clear as anything the day I was out in the garden picking a mess of butterbeans and up drives Dr. Fred telling me Norma had died in childbirth. But what shocked me was when her husband ran off the day of the funeral. Left his infant daughter, Tonilynn Jasmine Pardue. Now I can’t judge Dan. How could you blame an eighteen-year-old boy?

“Tonilynn was the most precious thing. Little bright-eyed face with eyes like a hickory nut and hair like dandelion down. And smart as a whip. Knew how to read when she was four years old. But had her a wild streak.

“That’s why I wasn’t surprised when she got in the family way when she wasn’t but fifteen, and her not married. I threw her out of the house because young folks need to learn their actions have consequences.”

Just by the way all the color had drained out of Jennifer’s pretty face, I knew she was most likely misjudging me, so I added, “Believe me, it wasn’t no picnic. I missed my girl so much. I missed seeing that precious child she birthed. I didn’t get to do all the cuddling a grandma wants to do.” I paused to look hard at Tonilynn when I said the next part. “But I did
what I had to, called ‘tough love’ when it hurts you
and
the other person.

“And you know what? After they came back up here to Cagle Mountain, I never did find out which one of those boys was Bobby Lee’s daddy. But the years have passed and none of that matters. I couldn’t love Tonilynn or Bobby Lee any more. In fact, they’re both like my very own.

Jennifer stared at me with those unusual green eyes.

“Some things are just better the way they turn out to be than if we’d got what we asked for. All those years I pined for a family, and I finally got me one, and I can honestly say I couldn’t have dreamed up anything better. That’s the beautiful thing about a family. Doesn’t have to be what’s written in Webster’s—male marries female, their sperm and egg meet, and they have children. No, families are built on love, and, honey, if you need yourself a family, we’d be proud to have you. Anytime you need a place to run to or just folks you can let your hair down with, you come on up here to Cagle Mountain.”

“Well . . . thank you,” that child squeaked in this tiny voice.

On the trip home, Tonilynn asked me to guess what Aunt Gomer’s two greatest fears were. Feeling a little shell-shocked, I just said, “What?”

“Satan and having to go to a nursing home.”

I didn’t respond.

“Know what I say to her whenever she gets all worked up?” Tonilynn turned her liquid brown eyes from the road and looked at me like the answer was obvious. “I tell her, ‘Aunt Gomer, first off, you don’t have to be scared of the devil. The Lord’s stronger than him and that’s like saying you don’t have faith.’

“And about the nursing home, I say, ‘Aunt Gomer,
if
, and that’s a big old
if
because 99 percent of the things we fear never happen, but
if
you have to go to a nursing home, you’ll be so out of it you won’t even know you’re there!’ ” She laughed and slapped the stonewashed denim stretched over her thigh.

I don’t think I even blinked. It was an eye-opening experience seeing from whence Tonilynn came. Her homestead was certainly what folks would call backwoods, maybe even
backwards
. That old tin-roofed farmhouse with tar-paper siding, hens pecking around a tractor tire on its side in the
front yard, a lopsided well house with a communal drinking jar, and a hound dog whimpering at some dream as he slept beneath the kitchen table. I thought of how Aunt Gomer maintained that God answered her prayer with her sister’s death, and that brought forth something I’d overheard one of the sound technicians at the studio saying about Tonilynn. He said, “She’s just one of those wack-job born-agains who acts like Jesus is her best friend.”

But wasn’t it nice to feel like part of a family for a while? I sure didn’t have to put on airs to hang out at Cagle Mountain. And even if Tonilynn was hopelessly wacko when it came to religion, she was unpretentious not to mention entertaining and easy to talk to. The same with Bobby Lee. What you first noticed about Tonilynn’s son, after the wheelchair, was how ruggedly handsome the man was, with his sun-kissed skin and his long, unstyled chestnut hair. He favored his mother quite a bit, but where Tonilynn had deep brown eyes and a cute nose, Bobby Lee had hazel eyes and a classic Roman nose. Not bad to look at.

It was that very night, as soon as I decided to redirect my energy away from judging Tonilynn to just accepting her, that I opened up a space to create what I’d been yearning for—a true friendship. Where there’d been a cavernous, lonely ache inside of me, a tiny flame of hope flickered to life. The flame grew brighter with each thump of my heart as it dawned on me that I could reveal things to Tonilynn without fear of judgment. Not that I wanted to reveal everything. There were some things I’d
never
share.

Generally I avoided the terrace at Harmony Hill, but the next evening a full moon lured me out onto the bricks. It had
been more than three months since the ugly incident with Holt, and as I stood there looking up at the nighttime sky, a recollection moved in of the two of us during one of our good times. At one end of the terrace was an enclosed sitting porch, with candle chandeliers and a fireplace, and Holt and I were sitting on the sofa there, our legs entwined as we gazed out the big window, watching the stars make their appearance. Suddenly he jumped up, pulling me to my feet, and we danced to Josh Turner’s deep, sexy voice singing, “Why Don’t We Just Dance,” and laughed at how we were acting it out.