Walking Through Shadows (12 page)

Not long after Sheila had told me that she might be expecting, Lloyd and Stoney went off to Louisiana to breed the Ayrshires. I was still at the early stage of my time where I needed a soda cracker before I could get up in the mornings without vomiting. I dreaded their going, but I knew Lloyd had been planning the trip for over a month, and Sheila was thrilled that Stoney was going too. Mama offered to come over and stay with me for the one or two nights they’d be away, but I told her I had Annette if I needed anything. The truth was that Mama was getting on my last nerve, and I really can’t say why. She always gave sound advice, which I generally followed, but she was getting to the stage in life where she couldn’t stop giving it. I found myself being short-tempered with Annette too though, and Lloyd, as well. I was sure it was my being in the family way that caused me to get upset so easily. Dr. Brock told me not to worry, that lots of women got “out of balance” when expecting a child. He said that it’s something doctors call hormones that were changing inside me, and he advised a cup of chamomile tea before bedtime, and of course, the soda crackers for the morning.

So after my nausea passed that morning, I rose and helped Lloyd pack his travel bag and made biscuits for the trip. You would have thought Sheila was the one going as she danced around the truck blowing kisses, hanging onto Stoney’s guitar which she was going to sleep with. She kept waving good-bye long after the truck was out of sight, and I finally said, “You want to come in and have a cup of coffee before you go to the barn?”

Sheila jumped back into reality then, literally lifted off the ground. “Oh no, I got to get to the barn right now. I’m helping with the milking since they short-handed till Stoney gets back. Ain’t that something? Me, doing the milking!” Her smile could have stretched a mile.

I watched her running down the hill and wondered what it would be like to live just one day in her head. My own mind was always filled with so many thoughts of obligations and responsibilities and yes, regrets and some guilt. But my destiny was to be born smart and that blessing can also be a burden. I turned back to the house, actually jealous of Sheila’s simple ways. Why couldn’t I feel excited about milking a cow? Why wasn’t I happy for Lloyd to go on a trip with his beloved Ayrshires? Hormones, I decided. I hoped I wasn’t going to be in a bad mood for the entire confinement.

I didn’t see Sheila for the rest of the day, and I supposed that she was out shoveling manure singing a happy song over every pile she scooped. I wandered around the house feeling sour. I just couldn’t make myself sit and crochet even though I had a cap and bonnet set nearly finished. I sat at the player piano for a while and pumped out a few songs. “Danny Boy” brought tears to my eyes, and I started worrying Lloyd was going to be killed in an automobile accident. I imagined Clyde Vairo coming to the door, hat in hand, twirling it around the brim. “Rowena,” he’d say. “I’m afraid it’s bad news. It’s Lloyd.” I laid my head on the piano keys and cried then. What would I do if Lloyd never returned? I couldn’t run the dairy, could I? Well, I thought, maybe I could. Didn’t I keep the accounts, order supplies, figure weekly wages? All I would need would be workers to do the milking. I’d paint the barn, too, a nice brick red like I’d seen in magazines. I’d increase production of the orange drink, as Lloyd always ran out before his last customer. I’d redesign the bottle caps. I’d be alone though. Lloyd wouldn’t lie next to me each night. There’d be no one to enjoy going over the profit and loss statement I prepared each month. Who would care about new bottle caps? I bowed my head. “Oh, please, dear Lord, bring Lloyd home safe to me. Don’t let anything bad happen to him.”

“Mama?” I turned and saw Annette standing in the door leading into the dining room.

“What?” I had snapped at her again. I softened my voice. “What is it?”

She wrinkled her forehead the way I’ve told her not to. She thinks she’s never going to get old and have wrinkles. “Something’s wrong with Sheila I think.”

I sat up straight and wiped my face with the hem of my apron. I wasn’t alarmed right then. Annette has a liberal imagination. One time she was convinced that she’d seen a rhinoceros in the woods behind Mama’s pecan orchard. Then for weeks she had hoarded a bit of coke bottle glass shaped like Leda’s marquise-cut diamond ring thinking it was a valuable precious stone. And nothing could persuade her that her hair wasn’t going to spontaneously curl when she got her period. “Why do you think something is wrong?” I asked.

Annette stood like a stork with her right foot resting on her left knee. “I went up to her house and knocked after the truck left, and she wouldn’t come to the door.”

“Whose truck?”

“I don’t know. I knocked and knocked and finally Sheila came up to the screen on the window in the front room. I hollered that it was me, and she said, “‘I can’t talk to you now. Please go on home.’”

“Hmmm, well, maybe she just doesn’t feel like having company right now,” I said, knowing this was unlikely. Sheila was always happy to have Annette up there.

Annette dropped her foot and walked to the piano. “But, Mama, something might be wrong. She didn’t sound like herself. Her voice was all, all, all scary sounding.”

If Stoney hadn’t been off with Lloyd, I wonder if I would have gone up there. But he was and I felt responsible for her. It crossed my mind that she could be sick, maybe miscarrying. I had to go help if needed. I told Annette to stay home and practice her piano, that I’d go up to Sheila’s house and set things right.

The sun was an orange slice bobbing low in the late afternoon sky, and I shaded my eyes with my hand as I walked on the path up the slanting ground to Sheila’s house. I stood on the porch a minute, collecting myself, before I knocked and called her name. “Are you okay?”

The dark outline of her appeared in the door, but she didn’t open it to welcome me in. “Miss Rowena, is it milking time? I ain’t late, am I?”

I remembered then she was replacing Stoney today. “I imagine they’re getting started,” I told her. “But that’s not why I came.” I hesitated unsure of how to say what I wanted. “Annette said you might be sick, and I was worried that if you were, you know, p.g., well that maybe something had happened?”

I heard her breath coming out in a big whoosh. “Oh, no. That ain’t it. I’m pretty sure I am now, but…” I could see her hands moving to her stomach. “It’s fine. Ain’t nothing gonna hurt this little one.”

Why wouldn’t she open the door? My irritation with her rose up. If she wasn’t sick, then what was the matter with her? Annette had mentioned a truck; maybe something had happened to someone in her family and they’d come over to tell her about it. “Is everyone all right at your mama’s?”

“I reckon so.”

“Well, is there anything you need? I mean if you have trouble maybe I could help?”

Sheila didn’t say anything for a long time like she was considering telling me, but then she said, “No, I ain’t needin’ no help.”

Frustrated isn’t the word for what I was feeling then. I took a firm tone with her. “Sheila, Annette said you had company and then she came up here and you wouldn’t let her in. She said you didn’t sound like yourself.” There, no more of this avoiding the obvious.

“I’m sorry. Oh, I hate to think I made Annette feel bad.” She lifted her hand to the screen door, and I thought she was going to open it at last, but she rested her hand against the thin wire. “Miss Rowena, don’t be worrying about me none.” Her hand moved to her head and she stepped farther back into the house. “Please don’t tell Stoney nothing. There ain’t nothing to tell.”

She was right about that; I didn’t know any more now than I did when I left my own house. “Okay, Sheila. I’m going now. If you say everything’s all right.”

Finally, she sounded like her old self, her voice was light and happy again. “Yes, yes. It is. I’m gonna get my boots on right now and get to work.”

It wasn’t until after Lloyd got home from his Louisiana trip that I found out that Sheila didn’t go down to the dairy that afternoon. Digger told Lloyd that he had to do the cleaning-up and bottle-washing, but that the next morning she showed up early and milked more cows than Shorty ever did and in less time.

When I told Lloyd about the truck parked up there and Annette’s worrying, and my going to see about her, he said it was most likely that her papa had gone there and hurt her again. Lloyd said, “Sheila’s scared Stoney will kill him if he finds out he’s still beating her. She wouldn’t want you or Annette to know, especially Annette, as her tongue slips pretty often.”

So that all made sense to me. Lloyd was right about Annette spilling the beans. I wasn’t about to tell her about Sheila’s baby until she told Stoney, and for whatever reason, she was still keeping her baby a secret.

That night I turned the puzzle of it over and over in my head until I got myself too upset to sleep. I thought about Doris dying, Lil’ Bit far away in Chicago, Mama getting old, Sheila’s papa beating her, Lloyd getting kicked in the head by one of those mean-tempered Jerseys. I woke up Lloyd and told him I was in a state. He rolled over and patted me like a child, but he never opened an eye. I got out of bed and went to the window. The moon and stars were hidden by dense clouds and before me there was only the endless darkness of the night. I thought of Genesis, the world as the void, a black abyss. Nothingness. I shivered, frightened beyond reason, and my fear turned into panic. I ran across the room, back to the comfort of my bed. Once safely beneath the soft sheets, I told myself that my awful hormones were making me think wrong things, and I must calm down. I began breathing slowly and deeply, and that was when I felt my baby move. It was the tiniest flutter, but I knew my child was okay, and I snuggled against Lloyd’s warm back with a mound of hope for my pillow.

The next morning Sheila came down to the house wanting to borrow the wish book. I sent Annette for the catalog, and when she left the kitchen, Sheila leaned over and whispered, “I’m gonna tell Stoney about the baby tonight. I’m gonna wear that pretty nightdress you gived me.”

“You’re sure then?” I knew she hadn’t been to the doctor.

“Yep, I know I am. I’ll tell Annette tomorrow; she’s gonna be so excited.”

I smiled. “She will. Come up as soon as you’re done at the barn. I’ll make a cake and we’ll celebrate.”

Annette came back then with the Sears & Roebuck catalog and held it out to Sheila. I saw that when she reached for it, Sheila’s hands were shaking, and I had to look away so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. I remember thinking that God had finally blessed her by giving her this baby to love. I thought of Mama’s adage about it being darkest before dawn, and I recalled the previous night’s torment that lay behind the joy I felt at this moment.

After Sheila left, I walked out on the porch and watched her trot up the path to her house. She held the wish book against her chest, the hump on her back, which I hardly noticed anymore, bobbing up and down as she ran. She stopped midway, and I followed her gaze across the yard to Stoney. He stood on their porch waving his arm overhead, urging her to hurry on home.

It was like some kind of amazing dream I couldn’t wake up from, like I was caught in a net somebody had throwed over me, like I was watching myself — not Stoney Barnes — not that self, but some other fellow sitting on my porch paring his nails with a pocketknife. I seen their heads first, bobbing up and down as their boots traveled on the uneven ground coming up the rise toward the house. Mr. Cotton was sitting beside me in Sheila’s chair, and when they started across the yard with her, I heard him suck in his breath like he’d been hit with a board in the gut. I kept to my nail cutting, saw the oval white peelings falling on the porch twixt my boots. I didn’t want to look on her face. When I glanced at the mound of her, I pretended she was a cloth dummy or a sack of chicken scratch being loaded into the ambulance. I said something or other to Mr. Cotton ’bout her not coming home no more, and I went in the house and sat on the couch, listening to the engine crank, the tires on the gravel, the sheriff yelling couldn’t nobody leave now. I wanted them all to go on home. I wanted every goddamned one of them out of my yard, but I didn’t have no say even if it were my own property. Rented, but mine by payment just the same.

I headed for the kitchen, half expecting to see Sheila slicing up a tomato for my dinner, wiping her hair off her face with the back of her hand like she was in the habit of. I was expecting to hear her singing some little ditty, stopping when she’d look up and see me. Some days I’d take her right there on the kitchen floor, tomato juice dripping off her fingers onto my chest, her giggling and kissing me all over my face and down the side of my neck, squirming like a wriggle worm till I’d hold her so hard a bruise would come up on her arm. When I seen the empty room, I squeezed my eyeballs shut, and I felt tears pushing against them. I got the heaves choking on my loss. That’s when the sheriff come to the door hollering my name.

He said to come on outside, and I went and sat on the folding chair that didn’t belong in my yard. I looked up when a wild turkey flew overhead, its shadow darkening the sheriff’s face. Then my eyes fell down to the gun snapped in the holster on his side. I had a twelve-gauge in the closet. Hadn’t ever shot anything much with it though. I wasn’t a good shot like my brothers.

Sheriff told me I was in shock, said to answer best as I could in my condition. I said I reckon I would try my best, but he was right about me; I couldn’t stop crying and all them people standing around staring at me. I hadn’t cried none since I was thirteen and Daddy took the strop to me for the last time. That time I had grabbed that long strip of leather he used for whetting his razor and curling it around my fist, I jerked him to me till I could see the dark hairs inside his nose and I banged my head against his face till I seen blood spurting out and that’s when I stopped crying.

I didn’t tell the sheriff much of nothin’ about Sheila and me. It was private; none of his goddamned business. I told him that when I left for the early milking, she were lying on her side on her bed, all curled up, sweet dreaming, and when I said that, I could see her there. Some mornings she would turn over to me, lift her arms and hike her nightgown up. “You got time,” she’d say grinning as big as her little mouth would stretch.

“What time was that, when you left the house?” Sheriff Vairo wanted to know.

“Must’ve been around two-thirty. Milking commences about then,” I said. “We started late though ’cause Mr. Cotton weren’t there until maybe another hour.”

I let out a hoot when the sheriff asked me if’n I locked the door to the house behind me. We hadn’t never used the big skeleton key to the front door; most times Sheila left it wide open. We didn’t have nothing worth the trouble of stealing. He frowned at me, and I said, “I ain’t checked to see if anything is missing. Sheila might’ve had a little money put away. She sometimes held back a little for presents and such.”

I started thinking about the tie bar she bought me for my birthday. I needed to go get it, hold it in my hand, feel the heft of metal, the heat from her that might be left there. She gave it to me a month ahead of my day. Couldn’t wait to give it to me once she’d bought it. Sheila was like a child in that. I swear she believed in fairies and ghosts and trolls that she said lived underneath the Flowerdale Road bridge. She could make you believe crazy stuff. She could make you go crazy, turn you into a real loony once she got a hold on your mind through them eyes of hers.

Sheriff asked me a few more questions about Sheila’s daily doings, where she went to, who she knowed, and he wrote fast in his notebook, and then left off with me. Said he wanted to question the niggers next and they better not be run off somewhere. Right away then, Digger come shuffling out from behind the tree with his head down. “I ain’t gone nowheres,” he said, “but I don’t know nothin’, Mister Sheriff, sir.”

I walked back toward the porch. My fingers was scratching on my legs, and I couldn’t stop them. A fire was inside my head. I seen her staring eyes, her opened mouth, and I leaned over and spewed white vomit on the goddamned holly bush Sheila had planted beside the steps.

The first day I ever set eyes on Sheila Carruth was on a Wednesday. I know that because it was four days after I had my last date with Kathleen, which was on Saturday night. Sheila weren’t nothin’ like Kathleen, and I sure didn’t plan on dating a girl with a hump on her back. I could do better. Had done better. Kathleen was some dish. Big jugs like cantaloupes, long blonde hair, a switch in her walk that took your eyes to her warm hips. She was smart too. Worked in a bank as a teller, and I seen her count money out faster than a professional gambler dealed out cards. Money was the cause of our breakup. There wasn’t no other reason it could’ve been. Kathleen said I was the best-looking boy in Lexie County, said she got chills just thinking about my hands running over her. I satisfied her all right. No question there. That Saturday night she wanted to go to the show, and I told her I didn’t have no money to waste on Jimmy Stewart, and that was the end of it. She were always figuring on how to get me to spend more money on her, expecting presents when it wasn’t her birthday, saying she was dying for a pearl necklace. I had told her straight out from the git-go that I wasn’t makin’ nothin’ down at the dairy. Mr. Cotton didn’t pay fair wages in my mind, and I had to lay out a lot of cash on my durn truck which kept breaking down on me. Piece of shit was what it was, but my old man wouldn’t loan me enough for something better.

Sheila thought that truck was a queen’s chariot. She’d sit up high, flapping her hand out the window like she was waving at her subjects. She was like that, always living some fairy tale kind of day. I reckon that was part of how she got me. I hadn’t never knowed a girl who could make believe so good that I felt like I was some goddamned hero in a picture show.

First time I saw Sheila though all’s I thought was, man, she’s got a hump, and she don’t know shit about cows. She didn’t look at me when Mr. Cotton said who I was. She didn’t look at nobody, put her hand over her mouth and nodded at the concrete floor smeared up with cow piss and grain. That were her job, to clean out the barn after milking.

After a week or so, Sheila started coming down to the dairy during milking, before she had to be there. I suspected it were me, and not them cows, that was drawing her there, but I didn’t pay no mind to her. I flirted with little ole Annette, who had a giant crush on me. The girl couldn’t pass by without her face turning the color of a ripe tomato. But Sheila, she didn’t interest me, not at first. Then one afternoon she was there when I was milking old Sid. Usually, I watched Digger’s pace on the teats and tried to time my finishing with a cow, so’s that he would have to milk Sid, but on this day, Digger was still pulling on Bell’s teats, and Sid was the only Jersey with a full bag left. All Jerseys got nasty tempers and will kick and butt us milkers, but Sid was the meanest one of the bunch. Sid wore a mule collar backwards around her neck because the crazy cow liked her own milk. Without the collar she would turn her head, bending her body like it were rubber, and suck her own teats dry. I reckon she thought I was stealing the drink she wanted for herself, and when I sat on the stool, she side-stepped and used her long tail to swat my face so hard I fell backwards off’n the stool. I heard them two girls, Annette and Sheila, laughing their heads off, and I was about to cuss Sid and them, when I felt Sheila’s hand on my arm pulling me up. I came up close on her, and she looked right into me for the first time, and I swear to this day, I don’t know what it was that made me want to kiss her right then and there. It might have been them eyes of hers. I felt like they were magnets and I was a tenpenny nail sliding toward them. Them blue centers were clear and perfectly round. They reminded me of my hound watching me eat, begging with eyes that made you toss your cornbread at him. Annette’s mama called her in just then, and Sheila and I were left standing there in the dark barn. She said something about Sid being a “caution” or some such, and I grinned down at her to watch her eyes light up like fireflies winking in the night. She were about to leave, and I caught her arm. “You wanna go for a drive tonight?”

Sheila didn’t look surprised like I had expected. She nodded and smiled. “I reckon I could,” she said. “What time?”

I told her seven and she run off then and I hit Sid’s head with my fist and told her she were gonna give up her milk whether she liked it or not. After we finished, I hurried home to eat and clean up for the date. Daddy near ruined it all. He threw the wire cutters down on the table beside my plate and said he wanted me to fix the back pasture fence before dark. When I told him I had a date and would do it next day, he snatched up the cutters and threw them in my lap. Gave me a bruise, but didn’t hit my jewels, and I was grateful for that. “I said I’ll do it. Tomorrow,” I told him, and he saw my jaws locking up and walked over to his seat. Pete and Daniel kept their heads down like they wasn’t my brothers who could help with the fence if they weren’t the lazy asses they were.

Ma tried to ease up the air like she always done. “Hugh and Earlene might stop by with the boys later,” she said. “Seems like we don’t see enough of our grandsons even if they don’t live but two miles from us.” Daddy was a fool for Hugh’s two boys, Arthur and Billy, who were two and four. He never played with any of us that I could remember, but when them two showed up, he’d get down on all fours and let ’em ride him like a horse. So he brightened up right then and said he reckoned the fence wasn’t going nowhere before tomorrow.

When I knocked on the door of the Cottons’ smokehouse where Sheila was staying, I heard her singing “Beautiful Dreamer” and she hit the high notes like a little songbird. I saw right off she’d spent time fancying herself up for our drive. She had on a dress nice enough for church and she’d tied her hair up with a green ribbon trailing down the back of her. I thought to myself then that if it weren’t for the hump she was almost pretty.

She slid right in the driver’s side of the truck and didn’t move all the way to the window so that I could feel her thigh against mine. I turned out onto Carterdale Road, and she started humming the melody to a song I didn’t know. “You got a nice voice,” I said to her. “I heared you singing ’fore I knocked.”

Sheila giggled like I’d told a joke. “Ain’t nothing to singing. You just open your mouth and let the songs out.”

“I play the guitar,” I said. “It’s my fingers that makes my songs.” I turned off on Flowerdale and thought about the woods a mile down where I had taken Kathleen the first time. I wasn’t sure about what to expect with Sheila yet, but I figured to keep all my options open at this point.

“Ooooh, you got a guitar? Maybe you and me could sing a duet sometime.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll bring it next date.” I didn’t say what I was thinking which was if we have another one, depending on how this one turns out.

Before we’d gone another quarter of a mile, the goddamned tire blew. Bang! It were done for just like that. The tires were bald, but I hadn’t expected one of them to blow. Sheila fell up against me and started laughing crazy like. Ha ha ha ha. What was funny about us having to walk home because I didn’t have no spare?

I got out and started kicking the shit outta the busted tire. I reached down and picked up some rocks and threw them at the truck bed. “Junk! Heap! Piece of crap!” If I could find a board I’d smash the windows too, and I was looking around for something else to throw when Sheila came over to me and held my arm. I snatched it away from her. I wasn’t gonna listen to no “You’re scaring me. Don’t be upset.” whining like I’d heard so many times from Kathleen. But Sheila opened my fist and put a big rock in it.

“Throw this’n. See if you can hit the rim. It’ll make more noise.” She was grinning so big I could see near ’bout all her teeth.

I took the rock and did like she said. “Bull’s eye,” she yelled. “Can you do it some more times?”

I couldn’t help grinning even though I was still plenty pissed off at my truck. This little gal had taken the edge off me though. She was holding another rock out to me, and I grabbed her wrist and pulled her up close to me. I could feel the rock against my chest, and then she let it loose and I could feel her little jugs a-rubbin’ up against me. “You’re something, girl,” I whispered. I leaned my head toward her and she rose up on her toes and kissed me. I say it were a kiss, but I hadn’t never had one like it. Her mouth went sideways and up and down, and I felt like she must have had four sets of lips a-workin’ on that one kiss. My peter started getting into it then, and I ran my hands over her back, pulling her into me. It weren’t till I got home and was laying on my bed still aching from her that I realized I were rubbing that ugly hump like it was a golden egg.

After that night I was done for as far as the single life goes. In just a week’s time I couldn’t do nothin’ without thinking about them eyes of hers, her little jugs that was so sweet to taste, her pretty voice that could follow any note I strummed out on my guitar. She’d let me do just about anything to her that I could think up, and I didn’t think near as good as her. One night when we was stretched out on a blanket in the bed of my truck, I asked her where she learned all them things about what pleases a man and she told me she didn’t know how she knew. Said she just done what felt natural to her. I had my suspicions though. I didn’t think I was her first, but she swore I was and I didn’t figure her for a liar. She was like a kid in a woman’s body and that combination is hard to resist for somebody like me.