A Spool of Blue Thread (40 page)

“Linnie, I think they need the cash,” he told her.

“Cash?”

“They’d rather let the house fall apart and go on
eating
, is what I’m saying.”

“Well, how could that be? They still need a roof over their heads! They still need a roof that doesn’t leak.”

“Tell me: are people not having hard times in Yancey County?” Junior asked.

“Well, sure they’re having hard times! Half the stores are closed and everyone’s out of work.”

“Then why don’t you understand about the Murphys? They’re probably one payment away from losing their house to the bank.”

“Oh,” Linnie Mae said.

“Nothing’s the same anymore,” he said. “No one’s in any position to cut us a deal. And no one can give you a job. You’ll use up your seven dollars and that will be the end of it, and I can’t afford to support you even if I wanted to. Do you know what’s in my Prince Albert tin? Forty-three dollars. That’s my entire life savings. It used to be a
hundred and twenty before things changed. I’ve gone without for years, even in better times—given up smoking, given up drinking, eaten worse than my daddy’s dogs used to eat, and if my stomach felt too hollow I’d walk to the grocery store and buy a pickle from out of the barrel for a penny; a sour dill pickle can really kill a man’s appetite. I was Mrs. Davies’s longest-lasting roomer, and it’s not because I liked fighting five other men for the bathroom; it’s because I had ambitions. I wanted to start my own business. I wanted to build fine houses for people who knew to appreciate them—real slates on the roofs, real tiles on the floors, no more tarpaper and linoleum. I’d have good men under me, say Dodd McDowell and Gary Sherman from Ward Builders, and I’d drive my own truck with my company’s name on the sides. But for that, I’d need customers, and there aren’t any nowadays. Now I see it’s never going to happen.”

“Well, of course it will happen!” Linnie said. “Junior Whitshank! You think I don’t know, but I do: you went all the way through Mountain City High and never made less than an A. And you’ve been carpentering with your daddy since you were just a little thing, and everyone at the lumberyard knew you could answer any question that anybody there asked you. Oh, you’re
bound
to make it happen!”

“No,” he said, “that’s not the way it works anymore.” And then he said, “You need to go home, Linnie.”

Her lips flew apart. She said, “Home?”

“Have you even finished high school? You haven’t, have you.”

She raised her chin, which was answer enough.

“And your people will be wondering where you are.”

“It’s all the same to
me
if they’re wondering,” she said. “Anyhow, they don’t care. You know that me and Mama have never gotten along.”

“Still,” he said.

“And Daddy has not spoken to me in the last four years and ten months.”

Junior set his fork down. “What: not a word?” he asked.

“Not a single word. If he needs me to pass the salt, he tells Mama, ‘Get her to pass me the salt.’ ”

“Well, that is just spiteful,” Junior said.

“Oh, Junior, what did you imagine? I’d get caught with a boy in the hay barn and next day they’d all forget? For a while I thought you might come for me. I used to picture how it would happen. You’d pull up in your brother-in-law’s truck as I was walking down Pee Creek Road and ‘Get in,’ you’d tell me. ‘I’m taking you away from here.’ Then I thought maybe you’d send me a letter, with my ticket money inside. I’d have packed up and left in a minute, if you’d done that! It wasn’t only my daddy who didn’t speak to me; not much of anyone did. Even my two brothers acted different around me, and the girls who were nicey-nice at school were just trying to get close, it turned out, so that I’d tell them all the details. I thought when I went on to high school they wouldn’t know about it and I could make a fresh start, but of course they knew, because the kids from grade school who came along with me told them. ‘There’s Linnie Mae Inman,’ they’d say; ‘her and her boyfriend paraded stark nekkid through her brother’s graduation party.’ Because that’s what it had grown into, by then.”

“You act like it was my fault,” he told her. “You’re the one who started it.”

“I won’t say I didn’t. I was
bad
. But I was in love. I’m still in love! And I know that you are, too.”

He said, “Linnie—”

“Please, Junior,” she said. She was smiling, he didn’t know why, but there were tears in her eyes. “Give me a chance. Can’t you please do that? Don’t let’s talk about it just now; let’s enjoy our supper. Isn’t our supper good? Isn’t the meatloaf delicious?”

He looked down at his plate. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

But he didn’t pick his fork up again.

On the walk home, she began asking him about his day-to-day life: how he spent his evenings, what he did on weekends, whether he had any friends. Even though he’d drunk nothing but water with his meal, he started to get that elated feeling that alcohol used to give him. It must have come from spilling all the words that he had kept stored up for so long. Because the fact was that he
didn’t
have any friends, not since Ward Builders shut down and he’d lost touch with the other workmen. (To be social, a person needed money—or men did, at any rate. They needed to buy liquor and hamburgers and gas; they couldn’t just sit around idle, chitchatting the way women did.) He told Linnie he did nothing with his evenings, he’d often as not spend them washing his clothes in the bathtub; and when she laughed, he said, “No, I mean it. And weekends I sleep a lot.” He was past shame; he told her straight out, not trying to look popular or successful or worldly-wise. They climbed the steps of the Murphys’ house and let themselves in the front door, passing the closed-off parlor where they could hear a radio playing—some kind of dance-band music—and the sound of two children good-naturedly squabbling about something. “You peeked; I saw!” “No I didn’t!” Even though it wasn’t Junior’s parlor and he had never met those children, he got a homey feeling.

They climbed the stairs and went to their room (no lock on
this
door), and right away Junior started worrying about what next. On his own, he would have gone to bed, since he always got such an early start in the mornings, but that might give Linnie the wrong idea. She might have the wrong idea even now; he sensed it from the demure way she took her coat off, and the care she took hanging it up. She removed her hat and placed it on the closet shelf. Her hair was in disarray and she patted it tentatively with just the tips of her fingers, keeping her back to him, as if she were getting ready for him. Something about the pale, meek nape of her neck, exposed by the accidental parting of her hair at the rear of her head, made him feel sorry for her. He cleared his throat and said, “Linnie Mae.”

She turned and said, “What?” And then she said, “Take your jacket off, why don’t you? Make yourself comfortable.”

“See, I’m trying to be honest,” he said. “I’d like to get everything clear between us.”

The beginnings of a crease developed between her eyebrows.

“I feel bad about what you’ve been through back home,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t much fun. But when you think about it, Linnie, what have we really got to do with each other? We hardly know each other! We went out together less than a month! And I’m trying to make it on my own up here. It’s hard enough for one; it’s impossible for two. Back home, at least you’ve got family. They’d never let you starve, no matter how they feel about you. I think you ought to go home.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re mad at me,” she told him.

“What? No, I’m not—”

“You’re mad I didn’t tell you how old I was, but why didn’t you
ask
how old I was? Why didn’t you ask if I was in school, or whether I worked someplace, or how I spent all the time that I wasn’t with you? Why weren’t you
interested
in me?”

“What? I was interested, honest!”

“Oh, we both know what you were interested in!”

“Hold on,” he said. “Is that fair? Who was the first to start taking her clothes off, might I remind you? And who dragged me into that barn? Who made me put my hand on her? Were
you
interested in how I spent
my
time?”

“Yes, I was,” she said. “And I asked you. Only you never bothered answering, because you were too busy trying to get me on my back. I said, ‘Tell me about your life, Junior; come on, I want to know everything about you.’ But did you tell me? No. You’d just start unbuttoning my buttons.”

Junior felt he was losing an argument that he didn’t even care about. He had wanted to make an entirely different point. He said, “Shoot, Linnie Mae,” and jammed his fists hard in his jacket pockets,
except something in his left pocket stopped him and he pulled it out and looked at it. Half a sandwich, wrapped in a handkerchief.

“What’s that?” she asked him.

“It’s a … sandwich.”

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Egg? Egg.”

“Where’d you get an egg sandwich?”

“Lady I worked for today,” he said. “Half I ate and half I brought home to give to you, but then you were all set on us going out for supper.”

“Oh, Junior,” she said. “That’s so sweet!”

“No, I was just—”

“That was so nice of you!” she said, and she took the sandwich out of his hand, handkerchief and all. Her face was pink; she suddenly looked pretty. “I love it that you brought me a sandwich,” she said. She unwrapped it, reverently, and studied it a moment and then looked up at him with her eyes brimming.

“It’s squashed, though,” he said.

“I don’t care if it’s squashed! I love it that you thought about me while you were away at work. Oh, Junior, I’ve been so lonely all these years! You don’t know how lonely I’ve been. I’ve been so all, all alone all this time!”

And she flung herself on him, still holding that sandwich, and started sobbing.

After a moment, Junior lifted his arms and hugged her back.

She didn’t find a job, of course. That part of her plan didn’t work out. But her kitchen-sharing plan did. She and Cora Lee got to be friends, and they cooked together in the kitchen while they talked about whatever women talk about, and before long it just made more sense for Junior and Linnie to eat their meals with Cora Lee and her family. Then when the weather turned warm the two women hatched a
plot to buy fruits and vegetables from the farmers who rolled into Hampden on their wagons, and they’d spend all day canning, blasting the kitchen with heat; and later Linnie would be the brave one who went around hawking their products to the neighbors. They didn’t make much money, but they made some.

And Junior actually did fix up a few things around the house, just because otherwise they would never have gotten done, but he didn’t charge anything or try to get a deal on the rent.

Even after times improved and Junior and Linnie moved into the house on Cotton Street, Linnie and Cora Lee stayed friends. Well, Linnie was friends with everybody, it seemed to Junior. Sometimes he wondered if those years of being an outcast had left her with an unnatural need to socialize. He’d come in after work and find wall-to-wall women in the kitchen, and all their mingled young ones playing in the backyard. “Don’t I get supper?” he would ask, and the women would scatter, rounding up their children on the way out. But he wouldn’t say Linnie was lazy. Oh, no. She and Cora still had their little canning business, and she answered the phone for Junior and saw to the billing and such as he began to have more customers. She was better with the customers than he was, in fact, always willing to take time for a little small talk, and adept at smoothing over any problems or complaints.

By then he had his truck—used, but it was a good one—and he had a few men working for him, and he owned a fine collection of tools that he’d bought from other men here and there who were down on their luck. These were really solid tools, the old-fashioned, beautifully made kind. A saw, for instance, with an oiled wooden handle that was carved with the most delicate and precise etching of a rosemary branch. It was true that the sweat that darkened the handle had not been his forebears’ sweat, but still he felt some personal pride in it. He always took excellent care of his tools. And he always went to lumberyards where he could choose his own lumber board by board. “Now, fellows, I know anything you might take it
into your heads to put over on me. Don’t give me anything with dead knots, don’t give me anything warped or moldy …”

“What if I had been married?” he thought to ask Linnie years later. “What if you’d come up north and found me with a wife and six children?”

“Oh, Junior,” she said. “You would never do that.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well, for one thing, how would you get six children inside of just five years?”

“No, but, you know what I mean.”

She just smiled.

She acted older than he was, in some ways, and yet in other ways she seemed permanently thirteen—feisty and defiant, and stubbornly opinionated. He was taken aback to see how easily she had severed all connection with her family. It implied a level of bitterness that he had not suspected her capable of. She showed no desire to shed her backwoods style of speech; she still said “holler” for “shout,” and “tuckered” for “tired,” and “treckly” for “directly.” She still insisted on calling him “Junie.” She had an irritating habit of ostentatiously chuckling to herself before she told him something funny, as if she were coaching
him
to chuckle. She pressed too close to him when she wanted to persuade him of something. She plucked at his sleeve with picky fingers while he was talking to other people.

Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!

And if Junior was the wild one, how come it was Linnie Mae who’d caused every single bit of trouble he’d found himself in since they’d met?

He was a sharp-boned, narrow-ribbed man, a man without an ounce of fat who had never had much interest in food, but sometimes when he came home from work in the late afternoon and Linnie was out back gabbing with her next-door neighbor he would stand in front of the refrigerator and eat all the leftover pork chops
and then the wieners, the cold mashed potatoes, the cold peas and the boiled beets, foods he didn’t even like, as if he were starving, as if he had never gotten what he really wanted, and later Linnie would say, “Have you seen those peas I was saving? Where are those peas?” and he would stay stone silent. She had to know. What did she think: little Merrick craved cold peas? But she never said so. This made him feel both grateful and resentful. Lord it over him, would she! She must really think she had his number!