Family Linen (25 page)

This is hogwash. Daddy would of wanted Elizabeth to marry anybody but Jewell Rife, I believe he could of seen right through Jewell Rife in a New York second. He would have wanted me to keep on running the mill, too, which I could of done, or anyway kept it and then leased the land for coal, which has happened since. It's all water under the bridge, now. But we had had a serious falling-out at that time, Elizabeth and me who were as different as night and day anyway, and I had married Marvin Sizemore, a man who was twenty years older than me, because I couldn't think what else to do next.

I got the whole thing up. I was eighteen, Daddy was dead, and Elizabeth had gone and sold the mill and she planned to live right there in that house, it looked like, and polish the silver until the day she died. We had already sold off my horses. Well, I stood it as long as I could, living there with them, and her not wanting me to take any job because whatever I took it in mind to do, she said it was beneath me, and would violate our parents' memory, and then she'd cry, and then Fay used to get all upset and cry too. I stood it for about two months, and then one day I went out in the country with Lucius Knight to look at a horse out at Marvin Sizemore's, that Marvin was boarding for some people, it was a horse that Lucius Knight was thinking of buying. Lucius and I were old friends. This was a pretty little mare, but weak in the hindquarters. We stood out in the field looking at her, it was spring, and then Lucius asked would I mind riding her around once or twice and see what I thought, so Marvin saddled her, and I did. Redbud was blooming everywhere, and dogwood, but the leaves on the trees weren't out yet. Nothing was green but the meadow. The horse kept shying to the left. When I got off I bit my lip and looked down, indicating to Lucius what I thought. The Knights were one of the few families in the county who still had anything at that time, although they were land-poor. “Well I'll think about it,” Lucius said to Marvin Sizemore, and we all knew that meant he wasn't interested. I handed Marvin Sizemore the reins and looked at him good for the first time, and that did it.

I don't know to this day exactly what got into me. Marvin's wife had died two years before, leaving him all alone with that little hardscrabble farm. She had died of her lungs. They'd never had any children. Anyway, that little farm was the prettiest place, smack in the middle of Long Valley, with Blue Creek running through it. Marvin had a little white house with a tin roof and a white fence, it sat in the middle of the meadow with no trees at all around it. Marvin's farm looked like a farm that a child might draw. It looked real simple and sweet to me that day, all straight lines. “How have you been getting on now, Nettie?” Marvin said. He talked slow, like all the Valley men. Marvin was spare and faded, light eyes, graying hair, overalls washed so much they were nearly white. Nobody had ironed them for him. “I've been all right, I guess,” I said. I looked at Marvin and I looked at the farm. Why not? I thought. I thought, I'm like
this
, this is how I am, I might just as well do this. I looked at him awhile, until he started smiling at me.

So I was married, living out there, when Elizabeth took up with Jewell Rife. I don't think I could of done a thing to stop it, if I'd been still there. It was like she was drunk on him. She acted crazy, different from any way she'd ever acted before. She'd hum, and giggle, and blush, and say things that didn't follow whatever she'd said before. Jewell Rife went up there every night for dinner, and every Sunday he took her to church and then they went for a ride in Mr. Bascom's car. Mr. Bascom had asked Jewell to go in with him, and work there, but Jewell said no, that he had some other irons in the fire. He thought he'd just live on Elizabeth's income, was what he thought I reckon, and it's what he did. It made me mad as fire when I found out about it later, because that was my money too, or it could been, if I hadn't been so bullheaded. Anyway, Elizabeth was in love with Jewell Rife, and everybody in town was talking about it, she was such a spectacle. Everybody
knew
Elizabeth, was the thing of it, because she went to church every time they cracked the door, and went to all those little clubs, and because they had known Daddy, and also you just couldn't miss her, she was a big woman, all dressed up. Some people thought she was a fool, and others said it was a good thing. Everybody had something to say about it. Elva Pope said, “Oh, isn't it
wonderful
?” when I ran into her on the street, and started crying. Everybody watched and waited, to see what kind of a business Jewell Rife might go into, but he confounded them, and didn't go into a thing.

And they
did
get married, by and by, in the Episcopal church, and Marvin and I went to it, sat in the back. I was pregnant. Everybody in town went to that wedding, it seemed like, and I felt I didn't have any relation to any of them. We led a quiet life, just me and Marvin, out there in Long Valley.

Elizabeth looked so full of life and joy, she looked like three people, like somebody actually about to bust right out of their skin. She wore a white satin suit and a hat with a veil, and he wore a striped navy suit, grinning from ear to ear, like the cat that swallowed the canary. They ran down the aisle like they were running straight into paradise instead of the Hotel Roanoke, where they went for the weekend in Mr. Bascom's car. I looked over at Marvin. He smiled that little smile of his, where the corners of his mouth turned down, and put his hand on my stomach. “We'd best go on now, Nettie,” he said, so we did.

It had almost come my time when she came out to the farm to see me. She had a boy drive her out there in the new Packard which Jewell had just bought. I got the idea she hadn't told him she was coming, and that maybe she didn't want him to know. Jewell and I had not spoke above ten words at that time, nor he to Marvin. We didn't know him at all—I
never
knew him, really. Anyway it's not clear in my mind, to this day, exactly what it was that Elizabeth wanted that day she came out to the farm. I think she was asking for some kind of help, and I would of helped her if I could of, she was my sister, but then she turned on me there at the end. She always turned on me.

Anyway she came right in the house looking everywhere, poking all around to see how we lived—or I thought that, and maybe I was too quick to take offense, maybe she was just trying to be friendly. It was hot, Marvin out in the field, she wore a seersucker suit and high-heel shoes. She looked everywhere. There wasn't that much to see, I didn't take a thing from Mama's when I got married, and Marvin never had much to begin with. I was in the kitchen putting soup beans on to cook, my stomach was out to here. She came in the kitchen. “I'd love a glass of iced tea,” she said, but I didn't have any made up, and gave her some water. We had two chairs. She sat in one of them and I sat in the other, with my feet splayed out.

“What is it?” I asked.

But Elizabeth wouldn't say. She smiled that kind of a big loony smile she'd been smiling ever since she ran into Jewell Rife, and ran her tongue around over her lipstick.

“I just thought I'd come see you,” she said.

A fly buzzed around and around the kitchen. It was dead noon on the kitchen clock.

I hate to beat around the bush. I said, “Now, Elizabeth, I've been out here going on three years, and you never came out here before. So something is the matter, I reckon, and you'd best just go ahead and tell me what it is.”

She kept looking all around the kitchen at first one thing and then another, darting her eyes every minute or so over at my stomach which was sticking way up under my calico dress. She swallowed hard, and licked her lips, and shut her mouth.

“Things are not—” she started. “It's just not—”

“Not what?” I asked. But she wouldn't say. I got up and turned the fire down under the soup beans and put the lid on. “You're not happy, are you?” I said. “Not like you were at first.”

“Of course I am!” Elizabeth stood up and brushed down her skirt and reached for her purse. “I certainly am! That's just like you, Nettie,” she said. “All of this is just exactly like you.”

I let that go, and watched her. She was all agitated. She went out of the front door and called the boy, who came in bringing a stack of diaper cloths, and told him to put them down. I was mighty glad to have them, which I said. She said goodbye, and the boy drove her off home, raising a cloud of dust which hung in the air for the longest time after they left. I sat on the front steps and looked at it. It came to me that she thought she was some fine princess, visiting poor relations. I got so mad. I stomped all around and went back in and cleaned the whole house I was so mad. There is a streak of pride in the two of us, I see this now, that has run in between us like lightning, and burned up what should have been. So I didn't know what was the matter then, but I know for a fact that the trouble between her and Jewell started that early on.

I had my baby, Lou, and she was the prettiest thing. I remember how in August one time we were laying in the bed, Marvin and me, with Lou in between us, and it was thunder storming outside, rain drumming on the tin roof, which was how come Marvin couldn't work that day, and the light all pale and watery in our room. We had us a white iron bed. Lou was cooing away. I was so taken up with my baby then that I guess I kind of forgot, for a while, about Elizabeth and her visit. I don't believe I ever did tell Marvin, who was not much of a talking man anyway, about it. If I'd had to guess at the trouble between Elizabeth and Jewell, though, I'd have said it probably had something to do with their personal relations, and with what he might have wanted, or expected, of her—she was not a young woman, Elizabeth, nor used to men.

But then by and by she got pregnant too, and had Sybill, and then she had Arthur. I plumb lost track of it here. Because it was at this time that my own baby Lou took sick, and stopped growing any, and Marvin and me carried her to the doctor in town, and then we carried her all the way down to North Carolina to Duke Hospital in the truck, I recall it like it was yesterday, it was raining then too, and Marvin driving his new truck, and the windshield wipers beating back and forth like crazy and Marvin and me spent the night at the Bull Durham Hotel, they wouldn't let us stay in the hospital with her. We stayed down there three days, and talked to every doctor in the place, and at the end of that time we took her home. She was cooing and giggling on my lap the whole way home. But she had leukemia, and died just seven months later. Her coffin was not as big as a footlocker.

After that, it's hard for me to tell what happened, for a while. Marvin gathered up all Lou's baby things, after about a week, and took them over to his sister's. I sat in a kitchen chair, in the day, and couldn't do anything. At night, Marvin and me would lay in that white iron bed right next to each other flat on our backs but not touching, and not talking either, Marvin not being then or ever, as I said, a talking man, and we'd just lay there. You could hear the crickets outside, and the tree frogs, and the train sometimes away off down Long Valley in the night, sounding real lonesome. It was the worst I ever felt, and the most lonesome I ever was, laying right next to Marvin Sizemore in that bed. It was like we couldn't stand to talk, or touch each other.

Finally one morning I got up and told Marvin I was leaving. He stood in the bedroom door in his work pants smoking a cigarette while I dumped the dresser drawers out on the bed and packed up everything I had in a cardboard box. It didn't take long. Marvin looked real old. I used to love him, I thought. “Don't you want—” he started, but I said no. “I don't want a thing,” I said. When it's time to go, you'd best get a move on, I think. I have always traveled pretty light. I hauled that box out to the pickup, Marvin standing there on the front porch smoking his cigarette and watching me. It was still early morning. The grass was real green, wet with dew. He watched me while I pulled out and drove off. Now I don't remember this too good except for little things, like that Marvin had his thumbs hooked in his pants loops, watching me go, and that I had planted a bunch of crookneck squash along by the fence and they were blooming. Yellow flowers.

I went on into town and rented a room from Lula Morris in the hotel, and the next day, I paid a boy to drive the truck back out there. Not too long after, Marvin sold that place for near about nothing, I heard, and went to live with his sister down in North Carolina, on a tobacco farm. The only thing I kept was a little yellow curl of Lou's hair, in a locket that used to be Mama's. I started waiting on tables at Ed's, and took up with a lot of men. Now I'm not proud of this time, nor do I regret it either. It helped some.

Eventually of course I met Millard Cline who used to come in there every day about eleven o'clock for a piece of coconut pie, and we started running around together. We used to go out on the highway to roadhouses, and dance. I remember dancing by a blue light, and somebody singing “Careless Love.” Millard had a weakness, he was bad to drink, but he was a lot of fun. Sweet-natured. After a while, he left his wife and kids for me. So you see how it is. If anybody's passing judgment, I've not got a leg to stand on, I've not got a thing to say. I left one good decent man, and married another woman's husband, and don't regret any of it, to this day. You do what you have to. I quit over at Ed's and started helping Millard with the flower business, and since his wife stayed on in their house of course, we just got us a couple of rooms over the shop there, and lived in them, and were happy. We were real happy. Millard could make you a bridal bouquet, or a funeral wreath, or whatever you fancied in between. He could do anything with flowers. So we were running the flower shop, and going out dancing on Saturday nights, and Elizabeth was really in trouble.

I'd seen Jewell out once myself, with a woman named Mavis Lardner. They left the place they were at, when we came in. I didn't say a word to them. Millard said that Jewell was becoming known around town as a ladies' man, and also that he was known to make trips from time to time, and come back to town flashing money. He used to play the guitar and sing around here at dances. He was so good at it, that those that heard him said he ought to go over to Nashville and make a record, and be a star. But Elizabeth never did go to those dances, or say anything about them to her friends, nor about Jewell's guitar playing. One time he came back with a mink coat for Elizabeth, and another time I heard he'd brought her a diamond ring. Which she wouldn't have, either one of them. She was not that kind of a woman. But Mavis Lardner was seen by somebody's cousin, over in Bristol, wearing a diamond ring that might have been that one. She was trying on clothes at King's.