Little Altars Everywhere (24 page)

Shep walks down there, and I can tell by the set of his shoulders he wishes this fellow had never shown up in the first place. Shep says: I told you to move on from here, old man. What you doing still hanging around?

I be lookin for my mules, the old fellow says, Sary and Mike.

Podnah, I done
told
you, there are no mules anywhere around here. This is my place, Pecan Grove, and there aren’t any mules.

I step down closer to the two of them. What do you want those mules for? I ask.

That black man looks at me like I don’t have good sense. He says, I gotta start my plantin is why.

And that’s when Shep’s gruffness just melts away, and I start to understand what’s going on. Shep stands there silent. For a minute I think he’s going to turn around and walk back inside and hide again. He’s done that eighty-four thousand times before, God knows. Walked away and left me to deal with everything. But this time he just keeps standing there.

I say, Well why don’t we go and have a seat?

I have always found that if you are ever in doubt
about how to behave, just act like a hostess, and it’ll get you over the rough spots.

The black man nods politely at me and I lead him and Shep over to the swing, where the two of them sit down. Shep has gone mute, but what else is new?

Why don’t I go and get us something to drink? I say.

Thank you, ma’am, the old man says. Shep just nods.

I go into the kitchen and pour us each a 7-Up over ice in my plastic glasses. I put a splash of vodka in with mine, and reach up in the medicine cabinet and bite off half a Valium, which is almost nothing. Valium and vodka make a good cocktail, but you absolutely
have
to get your amounts exactly right. I have no desire to get carried off to The Betty Ford Center, I don’t care how many movie stars I could meet there.

Back outside, I hand them each their cold drinks and they both say, Thank you.

Finally Shep finds his tongue and asks, Where you work, podnah?

The old man replies, Over to Dr. Jackson’s place in Bunkie, Louisiana.

Uh-huh, Shep nods and stares down at the ground.

I wish he’d look at me, share something with me, but he just stares at the ground. We both know that Brainard Jackson’s been dead for eight years. His children sold the farm for the new Garnet Parish Golf and Country Club. The only black men working over there now are the young ones who keep that golf course groomed and park the cars.

The old fellow just murmurs again, like he’s chanting, like he’s praying: Gotta find my mules. Gotta start my ploughin. A man can’t dawdle this time of year.

I sit there in the lawn chair, holding my cigarette away from them so the smoke won’t bother Shep. (He will only let me smoke outside now because it irritates his asthma.) The pinks and yellows and blues of the sky all over those green fields look gorgeous, and light spills on Shep and the old man. I can feel my cocktail start to leak through my bloodstream a little and my neck starts to relax. This is my favorite time of day.

All Shep does is look at his hands. Finally he talks and it’s like it hurts him to make the sounds. Where you stay at now? Shep says.

Over to my daughter’s, the man replies.

Where’s that? Shep asks.

The old man looks at him, but all he answers is, Gotta find my mules.

I feel like a Peeping Tom, witnessing the look in Shep’s eyes. He leans back in the swing and takes a sip of his 7-Up, and tears start to well up in his eyes. I swear that man just cries over everything these days. Here he is, sitting on the swing, a sixty-four-year-old man with tears streaming down his cheeks. All the things he has done to me, all that he has taken from me and hurt me with, and he has never cried about them. But he can sit here and cry over an ancient colored man he doesn’t even know. There is no justice in the world for me.

What about me? He’s a stranger! I want to scream. But I don’t. I don’t say a word. I have worn myself out trying to help people. And I have never gotten a damn bit of recognition for all my effort.

You don’t have to tell me why he’s crying. He’s seeing the shopping mall and the subdivision that took over the cotton fields he used to work. Seeing the 7-Eleven that took down his favorite pecan tree where they used to stop the flatbed trucks and set up the water cooler. He’s seeing all the fields and fields of farmland that he’d known all his life, and the kids diving into truckloads of cotton. Seeing himself follow
his
Daddy around, learning how to tell exactly what was happening with a cotton plant. He’s seeing Little Shep and Baylor when he taught them to farm. And then seeing both of them walk out of here with no interest at all in getting dirt under their fingernails.

Old man, he asks, how far did you have to walk to find my farm?

Well, nobody needs to answer that question. He knows the man had to walk at least five, six miles before he found anything except the Taco Bell and Wal-Mart, Carpet World and Minute-Lube. The old man doesn’t breathe a sound. And Shep slumps over in the swing and sobs until his chest is heaving up and down, until he has to take out his inhaler and draw on it. In spite of all he has done to me, I still want to hold him. But I sit there and leave him alone. I have gone to him too many times and had him turn me away.

The old Negro sits perfectly at ease with his walking stick across his lap. Like he knows just what his business is and he can sit and wait just as long as he needs to, thank you kindly. The sun is getting lower and lower.

I look at the rows of pine trees that ring the yard, thirty feet tall now, and I can remember the day they were planted. I look out at the mailbox and think of the five-million times I ran out there in the middle of a hot summer afternoon, believing that something would arrive that would change my life. I stare at my own hands, the way the veins pop up now, no matter how much lotion I rub on them. My nails still look good, but these are the hands of an old person, and you can’t go around wearing gloves in 1991 unless you
really
want them to think you’re batty.

Vivi, will you go inside and get me the cordless phone? Shep asks me.

I’m relieved to get away from all this silence. It’s just getting to be too much, sitting there with a strange Negro and a sobbing husband. I walk into the kitchen where you can smell the Lea & Perrins I’d started to put on the T-Bone. I stick that cut of meat back in the refrigerator, because we don’t need ptomaine poisoning here at Pecan Grove, on top of everything else.

The kitchen and the breakfast room are spotless. Between having Letta in three times a week and no kids here anymore, this place is like a mausoleum. It’s almost cool with the sun nearly down. I could turn off
the fans if I wanted to, but I love our ceiling fans in the evening. I have to admit Shep was right when he had them put in, even though we’ve got central air conditioning.

I go back to Shep’s bathroom, pick up the cordless phone, and walk down the hall with it in my hand. This is such a big house now with all of the kids gone. I swear—we’ve got more phones and TVs in this place than we do people. Sometimes I round a corner and think I hear one of the kids calling out, Mama, look at me! Look at me! And I’ll turn my head, but nobody’s there.

It was all so fast and furious—having them, raising them, watching them go. I thought when Baylor left:
Alright now, this is when my life can begin!
But it never did begin and I can’t tell you why.

Walking through that house with the cordless phone makes me feel like an astronaut who got disconnected from his spaceship. With just the two of us living here, I have all the quiet I want. I have too much quiet. I mean there are just so many Sidney Sheldons you can read. I go to the movies with Necie twice a week, I get my hair done. I used to do my volunteer work at the Veterans Hospital—until they got so bossy about making us wear those tacky little uniforms that I had to tell them where to get off. I look at other women my age sometimes and I think: Maybe I should look all content like that. Maybe I should be pulling out pictures of grandchildren and oohing and ahhing.
Maybe I should be happier. But those women are fat as hell and I still weigh only four pounds more than I did the day I graduated from Thornton High. I look ten years younger than any of them.

I don’t know, it all just came and went before I had a chance to realize. One day I was head cheerleader at Thornton High, then I lost the twin, and the next thing I know, Sidda is grown-up and talking to me like she’s some kind of refugee with a Ph.D. in psychology.

You can’t blame me for any of it. I had no idea in God’s world that DDT was poison. We didn’t know what was and wasn’t poison back then. You didn’t even think about such things. It is not my goddamn fault if it caused Sidda’s breathing problems. I didn’t know about smoking, either. A mother can’t know everything in the G.D. universe. I did my best.

You don’t have to tell me what Sidda was thinking when she asked for that picture of me and Caro taken at the kitchen table in 1952. I’m eight-and-a-half months pregnant in that photo and so is Caro. Both of us sitting at that round oak table. Had our feet propped up on the table, smoking Luckies, sipping a little bourbon and branch, reading Dr. Benjamin Spock. Necie took the picture. I remember where she was standing, right next to the drainboard where I had some chicken thawing out. I know why my oldest child wanted that picture. I am not ignorant. To bring it to her group, where they all sit around and whine while she tells lies about the way I raised her.

But I just handed over the damn photo like she asked. I didn’t want my saying No to be one more thing she can add to her litany
of abuses. She’s got the world thinking I’m Joan Crawford as it is. Even though I never once touched them with a coat-hanger.

Hell, I was just trying to stay alive. Four kids in four years and eight months, and a husband who did nothing but farm and duck hunt. Even when he was home, he wasn’t really here. Cook, clean, wash crappy diapers, wipe runny noses, listen to him run on about goddamn drainage ditches. That’s not what I was raised for, that’s not why I was created! I am not a goddamn maid. I have a bachelor’s degree from Ole Miss in Speech, not in Home-fucking-Ec. I used to be so much fun. I lived to laugh, to make other people laugh. Then I started praying, I started confessing once a week, I studied the lives of the G.D. saints. I tried to be holy, but nothing stopped the shakes like a bourbon and branch.

Sidda can’t explain this to her friends, I don’t care how many books she reads on the subject. She hates me now. She divorced me without even handing me any papers.

When I get outside, I hand Shep the cordless phone and he calls the sheriff’s department. Evening, he says. This is Shep Walker out at Pecan Grove. I got me a old black man out here and he is, well he’s…Then he chokes up with tears and can’t talk.

For heaven’s sake! I think. And he has always said
I
was the dramatic one. I reach over and take the phone from him. Hello dahling, I say. Vivi Abbott Walker here. Look, we’ve got an old man out here at our farm and he says he’s looking for his mules.

The man on the other end says, What?

I say, Mules.

Shep yells out, Mules, damn it! Doesn’t anyone even remember mules?

I tell him, Shhh, Babe, I’ll handle this.

My husband is acting like a big fat baby, I swear to God. You simply must have decent telephone manners in this world or you will get absolutely nowhere.

He is looking for his mules, I explain to the man on the phone. Mules, like they used to plough with. We’re calling because the old fellow can’t remember where he lives. And I think one of yall should come out here and get him and help him find his daughter’s house. Yessir, that’s right. Pecan Grove.

Only undeveloped land at the end of Jefferson Street Extension, Shep says.

Did you hear that? I ask the man. No, it’s
past
Bayou Estates subdivision.

Shep takes the phone away from me and says, Listen, podnah, send out one of your black officers, would you? This is a fine old gentleman here, this is a fine old man, I don’t want you to shake him up.

Shep clicks off the cordless phone and stares out at the last of the sunset. The old man starts humming a song Letta and them used to sing. It amazes me to watch how comfortable the old man is, sitting there like we had just called up and ordered the sheriff’s department to bring his mules out to him, right on the double.

We all three of us sit there not saying a word. Part of me wants to sob, and part of me wants to scream
bloody-murder. Part of me wants to take Shep by the throat and yell, You care more about this old black man than you do about me!

But I don’t say a word. I will not be dragged away from Pecan Grove in my old age because they claim I’m nuts (like certain people have implied when they thought I wasn’t sharp enough to know exactly what they were saying). They don’t know what sharp is. I have been sharp as a tack my whole life, so nobody better even
try
to fool me. No, I have suffered too much on this plantation to get carted away because of one unguarded moment.

We sit that way for—oh, I don’t know—about fifteen minutes. Until I’d seen at least two lightning bugs over by the clothesline. When the sheriff’s car pulls into the driveway, Shep gets up and walks over to the officer and I follow behind him. The officer is indeed a black one—young and handsome, I am ashamed to admit. But I have always loved a man in uniform.

Shep says to the officer, Look you know how us old farmers get when spring rolls around. Got to get those seeds in the ground. The old man’s looking for his mules. Help him find where he lives. Help him find his home.

And then Shep opens the front passenger door and helps the old man in most respectfully. The car backs out, and the old man rolls down the window and calls out to Shep: I sho nuff hope the Good Lord give us enough rain this year!

Shep walks over to the car and leans down to him, puts his hand on the man’s shoulder and says, I do too, podnah, I do too.