GodPretty in the Tobacco Field (4 page)

“What's going on in there, Henny?” I asked when we were back in the kitchen and out of earshot. “Gunnar doesn't share a meal without good reason.”

Henny picked up a dishtowel and wadded it in her hands. Dead air filled the room; then her shoulders shook. “It's . . . th-the well. It's gone dry again,” she sobbed. “And Sister's baby is due this week.... We've plumb run out of space now that we're burstin' with twelve. Pa says a four-room house ain't made for thirteen and he's not about to bring bad luck down on the Stumps by giving it one more brat.”

That was true. Everybody knew Jesus's thirteenth dinner guest was Judas and how that turned out . . . Even though Gunnar had helped Mr. Stump build a sleeping alcove onto the back of his cabin a few years ago, it was damn near hard to borrow air with twelve others stirring it.

“That damn well . . . it's
always
going dry,” Henny cried.

“Oh, Henny, use ours,” I offered. “The water truck stopped by last week—our cistern's full and our well has plenty. Heck, we have enough for the whole population of Nameless.”
All 592 of them, if you counted the potheads and the Shake King dirt,
Gunnar would always say, adding,
we're surely living like royals
—a feeble joke about his last name and the middle name my parents had given me.

“It's hard, Roo. Pa won't help. Baby Jane's working for the Millers, and the little ones can't help. I have to tote the water back up the mountain all by myself. And 'sides, Gunnar don't like to share much. I can see it in his eyes when he catches me out there filling a bucket.” She bit on her nails. “So Pa's been doing some big thinking.”

I took the towel Henny was holding, and asked, “What'd that crazy daddy of yours do now?” Even though I was positive I didn't want to know.

A clap of the screen door and the fall of footsteps outside on the porch steps interrupted us.

“What's going on, Henny?” I yanked on her arm. “What's Gunnar and your mama up to?”

Henny turned to the window. “He's . . . Oh, Roo . . . It's Pa. He's sold Lena's baby.” She blubbered and then latched on to me, squeezing tight enough to pop off my sun-bleached freckles.

O
utside, secrets gathered and piggybacked onto winds that raced under a heavy Kentucky moon.

I pried myself loose and leaned into the window. Henny's mama had her head bowed with Gunnar's, both of them whispering as they stopped along the back path. Head tucked low, Baby Jane lagged behind, spilling into their shadows.

Mrs. Stump took a paper from my uncle. Half-bent from years of baby making, she grabbed Baby Jane's arm and ambled slowly into the fields toward Stump Mountain.

I turned back to Henny. “W-what do you mean
sold?
”

“Pa . . . he's done sold Sister's baby to a Louisville couple who can't have kids, so he can buy an acre from your uncle. They're picking up the baby soon as she drops it.”

“Dammit, Henny Stump, that's nothing to joke about.” I scowled.

“Cross my heart.” Henny dragged a big X across her chest, making her boobies pouf out like she always did when she wanted me to know she was a little older and trying to be smarter because she had me beat by time. Though, in truth, most everything around here was older in hill time. She held up her palm and traced two more X's to punch the swear, then lifted her hand and pressed it to mine.

I broke away. “Sold—”

“It's true, Roo. Pa's fixin' to have Ma work out a deal to use the three hundred dollars they pay him to buy land from Gunnar. We need more food, and the money can pay off our Feed Store credit and some things Pa needs . . .”

“Things?”

“His stuff.” She shrugged.

His booze,
I thought.

“Ain't his fault, Roo!” She read my eyes. “Them damn government men got his nerves all skinned up. He needs it, and just last week Baby Jane got a fever again and spread it to the babies.”

“I can give her some of Gunnar's Bufferins,” I said.

“Ma made her up a tonic of shine and wild cherry. But Baby Jane still won't eat and Ma had to fetch the granny woman.”

“What's wrong? What did Oretta say?”

“She said there ain't enough fat on Baby Jane's bones
. Feed her more
. Used to be Ma couldn't keep her from eating. Now, she's having to whip her to get her to eat and stop spreading the fevers. But there ain't enough food, Roo. And it was only yesterday that we finally got the electricity turned back on. Ol' Kentucky Electric weren't gonna do it, but then we put it in one of the babies' names 'cause Pa done used up mine with 'em.”

“Lordy . . . lordy-jones.” I stacked my prayers.

“The baby'll be here soon . . . Coming on Lena's birthday.”

“July twenty-six,” I said without thinking.

“Twenty-seven,” she corrected, and shot me a suspicious look. “Sister's birthday ain't till this Sunday.”

Henny rested her head on my shoulder, sighed. “I'll never know my baby niece or nephew. The baby'll be doomed and won't ever have a sister 'cause the city folk can't have themselves babies. Oh, I can't imagine not having a sister, can you?” Her words spun in the air before crashing.

“
Sister
.” The word bruised my heart. Henny and Baby Jane were the sisters I never had. And Henny failed a grade, so we even shared the same teacher when she'd show up for school. But in the looks department, I didn't come close. Henny had curves like a stretch of Sunday road and a long, satisfying wiggle to call up a wolf whistle in a Saturday crowd down at the Feed & Seed. She was in a regular brassiere by ten, while I was still padding nothing more than a trainer, two months shy of turning sixteen.

About the only thing I had going for me was a pair of pretty dancing feet and a deep set of bluegrass-green eyes. “Same as my mama's,” Mrs. Stump had said, and both “about as useful as a skipping stone in a collection plate,” she'd added. Which Gunnar'd made sure to remind me after I'd dropped my prize rock in there one Sunday as an offering when I was six.

Henny patted my back. “I don't mean you, Roo. We'll always be sisters.”

I thought of my sister, Patsy. What could have been if she had lived.

“Oh hell!” Henny said, seeing my face. “Look what I've done. Got ya thinking about her. I'm sorry, Roo.”

I brushed off her apology and stuffed back the thoughts of Patsy.

“We's sisters.
Always,
” Henny said. “But it's bad this time. Every time Pa ends up in the pokey, he comes home with another big idea. This time he met up with another feller in there who told him about the baby-buyers. Pa says he won't take another twelve years of the government making him walk us kids to school. And Ma can't do it with the babies clamped to her teats.”

“But he has to,” I insisted. “Your littlest brother, Charles, and this new baby and the others can walk the paths together when the time comes. Maybe the baby's daddy can—”

“Nope, Sister still won't name the daddy, but she swears he'll take her and the baby away if Pa'd let her. But Pa told her no, that he wanted her around to help with chores when he gets his quit pay. Said he's quitting 'cause his hip bones have been scratched thin from walking the ridge. He's been having me write his letters again . . . Says them damn government men are gonna have to give him a donkey and disability pay 'cause it's all their fault.”

Like most in Nameless, Mr. Stump had been in the “Happy Pappy” work program ever since President Johnson came and made jobs for the unemployed daddies and other hurtin' men around here.

“Maybe he can get another job with 'em,” I said.

“Just 'cause Gunnar landed a good government job a'killin' convicts don't mean everyone can get so lucky, Roo.”

I winced. I didn't think he was that lucky. Gunnar hardly talked about his old executioner job, not as a job anyway. Instead he talked about an old hanging—and how Kentucky was always messing up its executions. Talk that just seemed to make him more testy, and a little more bitter.

“I bet that city couple has a big house and there's a school on every street corner,” I cheered, picking up a towel to dry the pots. “Maybe it's not such a bad thing for the baby . . . maybe even lucky.” I glanced at her bare feet and hand-me-downs.

“What do you mean?” She flipped back her long wheat-colored hair, narrowed her sparrow-brown eyes.

I shrugged.

“I know'd you've seen more. Tell me—”

“No, I just forgot Lena's birthday. It's—”

“It's the Granny Magic, ain't it? Ya done seen something in one of your fortune-tellers about—”

“Don't say that. I've told you I am not a granny woman.” I shivered at the thought of babies—childbirth.

I tried long ago to tell Henny about my fortune-tellers, the good guesses, the easy money from the kids wanting them—leaving out that I always folded the sheet of tobacco paper counterclockwise, drew on the pictures, and then put it inside Mama's snakeskin purse alongside her fortune-teller overnight to let it cure. Only then would bigger thoughts flow onto the fold-out paper designs I'd made.

No one had ever seen Mama's original, not even Gunnar. For years I'd missed it, then one day I cleaned out the purse and found me and Mama's fortune-teller sewn into a double layer of hidden lining. Still, Henny didn't listen, didn't want to believe my fortune-tellers weren't full of the woo-woo magic. I'd told her a dozen times that the only thing I could see was my own future out of this town that couldn't afford to claim itself properly on a map.

Last week, Henny'd begged for one of my fortune-tellers for the new baby. I'd sketched tiny pink and blue daisies all over the back of the paper, and a portrait of a swaddled baby in its center before folding it. Running out of thoughts and getting sleepy, I'd crimped the folds and tossed it into my mama's purse to cure. The next day, I'd looked under the four blank triangle flaps and drew a blue heart under the first, a fat pink heart onto the second and third, and then on the fourth apron fold, too.
Not
'cause I had a premonition about the baby being a girl; not for any other reason than for running out of blue ink.

“Know ya want a fancy art place in a big town, but even Oretta says you've got the knowing,” Henny said softly. “Hate to talk about it, but you ain't scared 'cause of what happened to your sister and ma—?”

“I don't care what that old granny witch says! I'm not going to be a hill charmer tethered to herbs and rock, staring at women's cooters, waiting for a baby to fall out,” I grumbled. “Hoodoo won't buy you Honey Girl slips, you know . . . ?”

“Slips,” Henny snorted.

“They've got them down in the Feed's mail-order catalog for two dollars and ninety-five cents. Didn't your mama ever have one?”

“C'mon, Roo, stop talking crazy. Ya know Ma wouldn't wear the devil's underwear. She says they look like what you'd dress them naked girls with on them little matchbook covers—”

“Important people wear them . . . Lady Bird . . . And, Rose said that elegant movie-star lady, Elizabeth Taylor, wears the prettiest slinky slips in the big motion pictures. It was in a movie picture called
Cat on a Hot Tin
—”

Henny crossed her arms. “Pa says Rose Law ain't nothin' but a dirty gypsy, and that 'spectable females shouldn't be sellin' trash out of the back of an automobile like that—”

“She's
not
dirty! She's a trader, and works hard. Rose has some nice things and really good books. And just the other day she gave me
The Great Gatsby
. Last month it was
Grey Maiden
by Arthur D. Howden Smith. After I read it, I gave it to Rainey and he liked it so much he read it twice.”

“Ain't that the book you said had them swords—and them swashbuckler peoples?”

“Yeah, it was great. Rose gets the
best
books.”

“Books is silly, Roo. Ya ran around here like a swashbuckler for a week and then got in trouble with Gunnar again when ya topped off more than the tobacco heads.” She frowned.

“I gave you
Charlotte's Web
after Rose gave it to me. You said you liked it.”

“Weren't nothing special.” Henny rolled her eyes. “Some
stupid
pig, that's what Ma said. I say
some stupid spider
.”

“Yeah, but you don't kill spiders anymore. And what about your
‘oh, Danny, I love you'
book you couldn't stop reading?”

Henny's cheeks flamed. We'd found the
Man Hungry
paperback by Alan Marshall when Rose asked me to toss a box of junk into the trash down at the Feed. Henny had been with me, spotted the fireball novel and snatched it up for herself.

“You sure like Rose's ol' excitement books, and your Mama sure likes those wool long johns she gives her for the babies every year.”

“Humph. Ma said Rose Law is so dumb she can't even catch herself a man. Now tell me about Sister's baby—”

I cringed. “Don't say that. Rose is smart and knows plenty about
everything
—books and movie stars and—”

Henny's eyes lit up. “Ma saw her, ya know? Saw that Elizabeth Taylor on a poster once when she visited my auntie over in Beauty, Kentucky. I sure would like to go see a real movie picture with you-know-who.”

“Who?” I asked, relieved to talk about something other than Rose and babies.

“Carter Crockett.” She smiled secretly.

“Crockett? Henny, no, he's a nineteen-year-old troublemaker. You know he quit school in seventh grade.”

“That's because he's smarter than them old lesson books.”

“What about his missing fingers?” Long ago, Carter's older brother, Digit, had cut off his trigger finger, then his middle one to dodge the draft. Weren't no time when brothers Carter and Cash decided they'd shuck honor and best their older brother: Carter sliced off both of his, then cut the tip off his left pinky, telling the officials a tall tale about corn pickers. Cash cut off his left pointer. And when Digit got out of prison with his hourglass tattoo, Carter'd tried to best his brother again, inking himself a big clock face with no hands across his arm, though Carter had never done anything big enough to do time in the big house, just the troublemaking stuff to land him into little town hoosegows. A little too much jaw-hawing out at the Gravel Road Lounge off Old Road 3.

“He's so brave.” Henny sighed.

“I've told you that boy and his two brothers are tomcat mean. Their daddy killed Rainey's daddy and—”

Henny snapped her shoulders back and flared her nostrils for my attention. “Everyone knows that was an accident with Rainey's pa. Beau Crockett said it was the color blindness—he thought he was shooting a deer in them woods.”

I shook my head. Gunnar thought different. He wholly despised the neighbors who lived on the other side of our farm. There'd been bad blood between the Crocketts and Royals for a long time. They were a low-life bunch, Gunnar said, and eighteen years later he still believed Beau Crockett intended on shooting Rainey's daddy because Gunnar gave the black family two acres of his land instead of selling it to the Crocketts.

“Carter is the cutest boy round these parts.” Henny's pale cheeks spotted. “And just look what he gave me.” She reached down under her collar and pulled out a necklace.

 

Beside his two other brothers, Carter Crockett had been the “cutest” until he turned twelve and dangerously handsome. Then something seemed to split off him inside, sucker out, and sprout straight
ugly
.