A Christmas Memory (5 page)

The cook, accompanied by her assistants, Queenie and myself, rose every morning at four to fire the stove and set the table and get everything started. Rising at that hour was not the hardship it may sound; we were used to it, and anyway we always went to bed as soon as the sun dropped and the birds had settled in the trees. Also, my friend was not as frail as she seemed; though she had been sickly as a child and her shoulders were hunched, she had strong hands and sturdy legs. She could move with sprightly, purposeful speed, the frayed tennis shoes she invariably wore squeaking on the waxed kitchen floor, and her distinguished face, with its delicately clumsy features and beautiful, youthful eyes, bespoke a fortitude that suggested it was more the reward of an interior spiritual shine than the visible surface of mere mortal health.

Nevertheless, depending on the season and the number of hands employed on Uncle B.’s farms, there were sometimes as many as fifteen people sitting down to those dawn banquets; the hands were entitled to one hot meal a day—it was part of their wages. Supposedly, a Negro woman came in to help wash the dishes, make the beds, clean the house and do the laundry. She was lazy and unreliable but a lifelong friend of Miss Sook’s—which meant that my friend would not consider replacing her and simply did the work herself. She chopped firewood, tended a large menagerie of chickens, turkeys and hogs, scrubbed, dusted, mended all our clothes; yet when I came home from school, she was always eager to keep me company—to play a card game named Rook or rush off on a mushroom hunt or have a pillow fight or, as we sat in the kitchen’s waning afternoon light, help me with homework.

She loved to pore over my textbooks, the geography atlas especially (“Oh, Buddy,” she would say, because she called me Buddy, “just think of it—a lake named Titicaca. That really exists somewhere in the world”). My education was her education, as well. Due to her childhood illness, she had had almost no schooling; her handwriting was a series of jagged eruptions, the spelling a highly personal and phonetic affair. I could already write and read with a smoother assurance than she was capable of (though she managed to “study” one Bible chapter every day, and never missed “Little Orphan Annie” or “The Katzenjammer Kids,” comics carried by the Mobile paper). She took a bristling pride in “our” report cards (“Gosh, Buddy! Five A’s. Even arithmetic. I didn’t dare to hope we’d get an A in arithmetic”). It was a mystery to her why I hated school, why some mornings I wept and pleaded with Uncle B., the deciding voice in the house, to let me stay home.

Of course it wasn’t that I hated school; what I hated was Odd Henderson. The torments he contrived! For instance, he used to wait for me in the shadows under a water oak that darkened an edge of the school grounds; in his hand he held a paper sack stuffed with prickly cockleburs collected on his way to school. There was no sense in trying to outrun him, for he was quick as a coiled snake; like a rattler, he struck, slammed me to the ground and, his slitty eyes gleeful, rubbed the burrs into my scalp. Usually a circle of kids ganged around to titter, or pretend to; they didn’t really think it funny; but Odd made them nervous and ready to please. Later, hiding in a toilet in the boys’ room, I would untangle the burrs knotting my hair; this took forever and always meant missing the first bell.

Our second-grade teacher, Miss Armstrong, was sympathetic, for she suspected what was happening; but eventually, exasperated by my continual tardiness, she raged at me in front of the whole class: “Little mister big britches. What a big head he has! Waltzing in here twenty minutes after the bell. A half hour.” Whereupon I lost control; I pointed at Odd Henderson and shouted: “Yell at him. He’s the one to blame. The sonafabitch.”

I knew a lot of curse words, yet even I was shocked when I heard what I’d said resounding in an awful silence, and Miss Armstrong, advancing toward me clutching a heavy ruler, said, “Hold out your hands, sir. Palms up, sir.” Then, while Odd Henderson watched with a small citric smile, she blistered the palms of my hands with her brass-edged ruler until the room blurred.

It would take a page in small print to list the imaginative punishments Odd inflicted, but what I resented and suffered from most was the sense of dour expectations he induced. Once, when he had me pinned against a wall, I asked him straight out what had I done to make him dislike me so much; suddenly he relaxed, let me loose and said, “You’re a sissy. I’m just straightening you out.” He was right, I was a sissy of sorts, and the moment he said it, I realized there was nothing I could do to alter his judgment, other than toughen myself to accept and defend the fact.

As soon as I regained the peace of the warm kitchen, where Queenie might be gnawing an old dug-up bone and my friend puttering with a piecrust, the weight of Odd Henderson would blessedly slide from my shoulders. But too often at night, the narrow lion eyes loomed in my dreams while his high, harsh voice, pronouncing cruel promises, hissed in my ears.

My friend’s bedroom was next to mine; occasionally cries arising from my nightmare upheavals wakened her; then she would come and shake me out of an Odd Henderson coma. “Look,” she’d say, lighting a lamp, “you’ve even scared Queenie. She’s shaking.” And, “Is it a fever? You’re wringing wet. Maybe we ought to call Doctor Stone.” But she knew that it wasn’t a fever, she knew that it was because of my troubles at school, for I had told and told her how Odd Henderson treated me.

But now I’d stopped talking about it, never mentioned it any more, because she refused to acknowledge that any human could be as bad as I made him out. Innocence, preserved by the absence of experience that had always isolated Miss Sook, left her incapable of encompassing an evil so complete.

“Oh,” she might say, rubbing heat into my chilled hands, “he only picks on you out of jealousy. He’s not smart and pretty as you are.” Or, less jestingly, “The thing to keep in mind, Buddy, is this boy can’t help acting ugly; he doesn’t know any different. All those Henderson children have had it hard. And you can lay that at Dad Henderson’s door. I don’t like to say it, but that man never was anything except a mischief and a fool. Did you know Uncle B. horsewhipped him once? Caught him beating a dog and horsewhipped him on the spot. The best thing that ever happened was when they locked him up at State Farm. But I remember Molly Henderson before she married Dad. Just fifteen or sixteen she was, and fresh from somewhere across the river. She worked for Sade Danvers down the road, learning to be a dressmaker. She used to pass here and see me hoeing in the garden—such a polite girl, with lovely red hair, and so appreciative of everything; sometimes I’d give her a bunch of sweet peas or a japonica, and she was always so appreciative. Then she began strolling by arm in arm with Dad Henderson—and him so much older and a perfect rascal, drunk or sober. Well, the Lord must have His reasons. But its a shame; Molly can’t be more than thirty-five, and there she is without a tooth in her head or a dime to her name. Nothing but a houseful of children to feed. You’ve got to take all that into account, Buddy, and be patient.”

Patient! What was the use of discussing it? Finally, though, my friend did comprehend the seriousness of my despair. The realization arrived in a quiet way and was not the outcome of unhappy midnight wakings or pleading scenes with Uncle B. It happened one rainy November twilight when we were sitting alone in the kitchen close by the dying stove fire; supper was over, the dishes stacked, and Queenie was tucked in a rocker, snoring. I could hear my friend’s whispery voice weaving under the skipping noise of rain on the roof, but my mind was on my worries and I was not attending, though I was aware that her subject was Thanksgiving, then a week away.

My cousins had never married (Uncle B. had
almost
married, but his fiancée returned the engagement ring when she saw that sharing a house with three very individual spinsters would be part of the bargain); however, they boasted extensive family connections throughout the vicinity: cousins aplenty, and an aunt, Mrs. Mary Taylor Wheelwright, who was one hundred and three years old. As our house was the largest and the most conveniently located, it was traditional for these relations to aim themselves our way every year at Thanksgiving; though there were seldom fewer than thirty celebrants, it was not an onerous chore, because we provided only the setting and an ample number of stuffed turkeys.

The guests supplied the trimmings, each of them contributing her particular specialty: a cousin twice removed, Harriet Parker from Flomaton, made perfect ambrosia, transparent orange slices combined with freshly ground coconut; Harriet’s sister Alice usually arrived carrying a dish of whipped sweet potatoes and raisins; the Conklin tribe, Mr. and Mrs. Bill Conklin and their quartet of handsome daughters, always brought a delicious array of vegetables canned during the summer. My own favorite was a cold banana pudding—a guarded recipe of the ancient aunt who, despite her longevity, was still domestically energetic; to our sorrow she took the secret with her when she died in 1934, age one hundred and five (and it wasn’t age that lowered the curtain; she was attacked and trampled by a bull in a pasture).

Miss Sook was ruminating on these matters while my mind wandered through a maze as melancholy as the wet twilight. Suddenly I heard her knuckles rap the kitchen table: “Buddy!”

“What?”

“You haven’t listened to one word.”

“Sorry.”

“I figure we’ll need five turkeys this year. When I spoke to Uncle B. about it, he said he wanted you to kill them. Dress them, too.”

“But
why
?”

“He says a boy ought to know how to do things like that.”

Slaughtering was Uncle B.’s job. It was an ordeal for me to watch him butcher a hog or even wring a chicken’s neck. My friend felt the same way; neither of us could abide any violence bloodier than swatting flies, so I was taken aback at her casual relaying of this command.

“Well, I won’t.”

Now she smiled. “Of course you won’t. I’ll get Bubber or some other colored boy. Pay him a nickel. But,” she said, her tone descending conspiratorially, “we’ll let Uncle B. believe it was you. Then he’ll be pleased and stop saying it’s such a bad thing.”

“What’s a bad thing?”

“Our always being together. He says you ought to have other friends, boys your own age. Well, he’s right.”

“I don’t want any other friend.”

“Hush, Buddy. Now hush. You’ve been real good to me. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Just become an old crab. But I want to see you happy, Buddy. Strong, able to go out in the world. And you’re never going to until you come to terms with people like Odd Henderson and turn them into friends.”

“Him! He’s the last friend in the world I want.”

“Please, Buddy—invite that boy here for Thanksgiving dinner.”

Though the pair of us occasionally quibbled, we never quarreled. At first I was unable to believe she meant her request as something more than a sample of poor-taste humor; but then, seeing that she was serious, I realized, with bewilderment, that we were edging toward a falling-out.

“I thought you were my
friend
.”

“I am, Buddy. Truly.”

“If you were, you couldn’t think up a thing like that. Odd Henderson hates me. He’s my
enemy
.”

“He can’t hate you. He doesn’t know you.”

“Well, I hate him.”

“Because you don’t know him. That’s all I ask. The chance for you to know each other a little. Then I think this trouble will stop. And maybe you’re right, Buddy, maybe you boys won’t ever be friends. But I doubt that he’d pick on you any more.”

“You don’t understand. You’ve never hated anybody.”

“No, I never have. We’re allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn’t want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner.”

“I won’t do it. He’d think I was crazy. And I would be.”

The rain had let up, leaving a silence that lengthened miserably. My friend’s clear eyes contemplated me as though I were a Rook card she was deciding how to play; she maneuvered a salt-pepper lock of hair off her forehead and sighed. “Then
I
will. Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll put on my hat and pay a call on Molly Henderson.” This statement certified her determination, for I’d never known Miss Sook to plan a call on anyone, not only because she was entirely without social talent, but also because she was too modest to presume a welcome. “I don’t suppose there will be much Thanksgiving in their house. Probably Molly would be very pleased to have Odd sit down with us. Oh, I know Uncle B. would never permit it, but the nice thing to do is invite them all.”

M
y laughter woke Queenie; and after a surprised instant, my friend laughed too. Her cheeks pinked and a light flared in her eyes; rising, she hugged me and said, “Oh, Buddy, I knew you’d forgive me and recognize there was some sense to my notion.”

She was mistaken. My merriment had other origins. Two. One was the picture of Uncle B. carving turkey for all those cantankerous Hendersons. The second was: It had occurred to me that I had no cause for alarm; Miss Sook might extend the invitation and Odd’s mother might accept it in his behalf; but Odd wouldn’t show up in a million years.

He would be too proud. For instance, throughout the Depression years, our school distributed free milk and sandwiches to all children whose families were too poor to provide them with a lunch box. But Odd, emaciated as he was, refused to have anything to do with these handouts; he’d wander off by himself and devour a pocketful of peanuts or gnaw a large raw turnip. This kind of pride was characteristic of the Henderson breed: they might steal, gouge the gold out of a dead man’s teeth, but they would never accept a gift offered openly, for anything smacking of charity was offensive to them. Odd was sure to figure Miss Sook’s invitation as a charitable gesture; or see it—and not incorrectly—as a blackmailing stunt meant to make him ease up on me.

I went to bed that night with a light heart, for I was certain my Thanksgiving would not be marred by the presence of such an unsuitable visitor.