The Truth According to Us (17 page)

In the olive-less kitchen, Nettie's face fell, and Jottie could feel hers doing the same. “Could we chop up some pimientos?” she whispered hopefully
.

“Pimientos is red, and them ladies ain't blind,” growled Nettie. “They should be on to the cake by now.” She gripped her hair with both hands and pulled
.

“It's all right. I'll fix it.” Jottie touched Nettie's shoulder. “I'll fix it.”

She swished toward the parlor, fluttering her pink dress. The only good thing about Rose League days was that she got to wear her prettiest dress. She entered the parlor, pretending to be modestly unaware as every eye turned to her, and sidled to her mother's chair. “Mama?” she said in a stage whisper
.

“What is it, honey?” said her mother benevolently
.

Jottie twisted her hands together in what she hoped looked like maidenly
confusion. “Felix and Vause came in and stole the rest of the olive whip,” she whispered. “They tried to steal the cake, too, but Nettie wouldn't let them.”

Again, the faintest of pauses occurred while Mrs. Romeyn decided how to present herself in the face of this infraction. Then she chuckled
.

Other chuckles echoed hers as the ladies nodded and gurgled, understanding food larceny to be part of the male prerogative. Jottie, smiling with relief, glanced through the window and beheld Felix and Vause coming up the front stairs
.

Everyone else beheld them, too
.

“Felix!” called Mrs. Romeyn in a carrying soprano. “You just come right in here and apologize to these ladies!”

Felix appeared at the parlor doorway, lean and careless, his uncanny good looks on full display. Behind him came Vause, shining and smiling. The ladies sighed with appreciation
.

“What did you say, Mama?” asked Felix politely
.

“What do you mean, you wicked boys, by stealing our olive whip?” cried Mrs. Romeyn. “Good thing Nettie saved the cake. You-all apologize this minute!”

Almost imperceptibly, Felix flicked a glance at Jottie. She widened her eyes:
Help!

As the Rose League watched, Felix's gaze circled the room and came to rest on a plump, rosy lady whose hat boasted an artificial peach. He beamed at her as if he had woken that morning from a dream of her, and she smiled back, growing rosier still. “I cannot tell a lie,” he began. The ladies giggled. He pointed to Vause. “He did it.” Without hesitation, Vause nodded. “You know, I try to keep him on the straight and narrow, but,” Felix appealed to the ladies' compassion, “he's weak. He couldn't help himself. He struggled with the demon olive. And he lost. Didn't you?” he demanded, turning to Vause
.

Vause nodded. “It was real good olive whip,” he said, his blue eyes ashamed. “I'm awful sorry, Mrs. Romeyn. We don't have olive whip at my house.”

Mrs. Romeyn inclined her head, acknowledging this compliment to her provisions. “Well,” she said, “I guess I'll accept your apology this time.” She
smiled beautifully at Vause and her son, and swiveled with regal aplomb to collect any expressions of esteem
—
or, better yet, envy—that might appear among the Rose League at the contemplation of the tender ties between mother and son. “Run along with you, now.”

Jottie's eyes followed Felix and Vause, watching hungrily as they turned away, released from captivity, free to do whatever they pleased, free not to please, free not to serve, free not to lie about olive whip
.

In a state of high gratification, Mrs. Romeyn commanded her daughter, “We'll have the cake now, Jottie. Tell Nettie to bring out the coffee, and just be careful with those plates!” She leaned toward a nearby lady. “They're Wedgwood, and I just
hold
my breath with all these children around.” The lady tittered. “Hurry up, Jottie,” Mrs. Romeyn urged. “Don't be poky.”

“Yes, Mama,” said Jottie
.

Vause, departing, dropped her a wink
.

Jottie sighed and picked up the receiver.

“…Why, Jottie Romeyn, we'd be pleased as punch if you'd come! We never thought you'd want to! Oh, I'm just so
glad
!”

On Saturday morning, Bird and I listened for the sound of Jottie slapping her gloves together. It came—a soft
whap
—and then Jottie called, “Come along, girls! Time to go!”

We raced down the stairs, each trying to beat the other. Bird won; she always did, because she pushed. Mae was waiting for us at the bottom with her little suitcase. She was going to see my uncle Waldon, like she did every weekend. His farm was right between two of ours, the north farm and the big farm. My grandfather had owned three farms, and when he died, he left them to Father and Emmett and Jottie. I once asked Jottie why he hadn't included Mae and Minerva, and she said that he'd figured they had enough to do, taking care of husbands; they didn't need farms, too. Grandfather had been right about that, because those farms were a lot of trouble. As far back as I could remember, they'd been failing. All you had to do was mention them, and the grown-ups would start moping about sick cows, broken machinery, sour milk, drunk farmhands, on and on, until you were sorry you'd brought it up. Every Saturday morning, Jottie had to drive out to check on north farm and big farm, and every Saturday, there was some new and awful problem that she had to try to fix. Pretty near every week, she'd
come home declaring that we were all going to die in the poorhouse. There was another farm, too, but it was way over by Mount Edwards, and only Emmett ever went there. It was called the mountain farm, though it wasn't on the mountain.

Jottie was poking at her hat in the hall mirror. “Into the car with you,” she said.

Bird and I bounced out to Jottie's car. We settled ourselves in the backseat and rolled the windows all the way down, even though it wasn't real hot yet. Jottie glanced back at us over her shoulder. “Just roll them up when we get to Sam's.”

“Oh Lord,” groaned Mae. “Can't you drop me off first?”

“No, ma'am, I cannot,” said Jottie firmly. “It'll only take a minute.”

Mae moaned again. Sam Spurling lived on our north farm. His brother Wren ran north farm and big farm, too. There were hundreds of Spurlings around Macedonia, so you always had to make clear which one you were talking about by saying the Up-the-River Spurlings or the Sideling-Hill Spurlings or the Winchester-Avenue Spurlings (those were the fancy ones). There were a whole set of them called the B&O Spurlings (we tormented the life out of those children). But everyone knew Sam Spurling without any other words attached. He lived in a little falling-down house—more like a shack—with a million cats. Jottie said they were all descended from two cats he got to clear rats out of my grandfather's barn in 1918.

The cats had been multiplying ever since. Once, when she was in a snit about my education, Jottie set me the problem of figuring out how many cats Sam had. Four kittens to each cat, with each cat having one set a year. I got up to 1923 and a thousand and something, and then I went and hid under the house. Later on, while I sat on the sofa not having cake in punishment, Bird said, “Oh, that's easy. Let me just think for a minute…” She rolled her eyes up in her head and twirled her spoon and said, “…carry the two makes seven, he's got seven thousand six hundred and forty-eight cats.” All the grown-ups gave puffs of admiration. It was years before Bird admitted she made that number up.

We rolled the windows up as soon as we turned off the main road, but it didn't do any good. The smell came through the bottom of the car. Jottie set the brake, took a deep breath, and climbed out with a box in her hand. Bird scooped up the bag Jottie'd given us, and then we filled our cheeks with air and ran to the apple tree that crouched over on one side of the yard. A flood of cats came yowling and creeping and scraping after us. They were almost all of them scrawny and mangy and mean from hunger, but they pretended they liked us, until we set down their scraps. Then they stopped winding between our ankles and lunged for it. I always tried to hold some aside for the littlest, weakest ones, the kittens just tottering along.

The cats turned Jottie's stomach. She said they smelled. But what really smelled was Sam's house. I don't know how Jottie managed to stand on the front porch and knock on the door. You can plug your nose from the inside, but not while you're talking.

“Sam! It's Jottie. I got some applesauce and some meat loaf out here for you, but you got to come out and get it or the cats'll be in it.”

I couldn't hear what he said.

“Sure you can, Sam. Come on. I don't care. I won't even look. I just don't want the cats eating my good meat loaf.”

He said something else.

“I'm not even looking. I'm standing here with my eyes closed. Come on, now, Sam.”

The door opened a crack, but it was dark in there. He wasn't on the electricity.

“There you go, now,” said Jottie, handing him a bundle. “Anything else you need? Want me to bring some milk down from the big farm? Or eggs?”

Mumble
.

“You sure?”

Mumble
.

“You're welcome.”

Jottie picked her way through cats and muck back to the car, where Mae was scrunched down with a handkerchief over her nose. Jottie
looked at us, thronged with cats, and shuddered. “Come on back, girls, before the fleas eat you alive.”

We piled into the car. I turned to look at Sam's falling-down house as we drove away. There was a cat walking along the swayed back of the roof. I leaned over the front seat. “Why does he live like that?”

“Sam?” Mae removed the handkerchief from her nose. “I guess he likes it that way.”

It was a silly answer, the kind you'd give a child, and I was beyond it. “Why?” I asked. “Why would he like all those cats around?” I turned to Jottie. She could be relied upon.

She smiled at me, quick and understanding. “He never cared much for people,” she explained. “He couldn't talk—remember, Mae, how he stuttered so bad it sounded like he was choking?”

“I guess that's right,” Mae said.

“He could talk fine if there was no one around,” Jottie added.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I heard him once,” she said. “When he didn't know I was there.”

“What does he look like?” I'd never seen all of him, only his hands and his leg once, when he'd stuck it out the door so Jottie could pour some peroxide on it.

“He looks like a cat,” Mae said, giggling.

Jottie laughed. “You know, he does! He doesn't shave, so his hair's grown over most of his face. Might have a tail, for all I know.”

“That's a sight I can live without, Sam Spurling's tail,” Mae mumbled.

Bird meowed, and we all laughed, but I wondered. I wondered if something had happened to Sam to make him the way he was or if he had grown that way without noticing. If a person could grow to be like Sam without noticing, there was a chance that I was just as strange and hadn't noticed it. What was I like? I wondered. Did most girls my age feel the way I did, as if the people I thought I knew had turned out to have a thousand little tunnels leading away from the face they showed the world? Was this something everyone else had already grasped? The buried parts, now, they were fascinating but ominous, too. And I
thought, Maybe that's why Sam Spurling decided to live with a million cats. Maybe a million cats were easier to understand than one or two people.

—

The next stop was Waldon's farm. It was a nice place, his farm, but Mae didn't reckon herself for a farmer's wife, and after she married Waldon, she kept trying to name it something pretty, something that didn't sound like a farm. She called it Liondel for a while, and then she changed it to Willowdeen Hall. She put that one on a sign, but Waldon took it down. The summer of Layla Beck, she was calling it Hampshire Downs, but no one else called it that.

My uncle Waldon was on the porch when we came up the drive. Bird and I loved Waldon. He was the kindest man who ever drew breath, the only grown-up who never, even under the most dire provocation, lost his temper with me and Bird. He was long and narrow, and his face was long and narrow, with a white band at the top where his hat kept the sun out. When he wasn't smiling, he looked real serious, but just let him catch one glimpse of Mae and he'd start smiling.

“I have to make myself comfortable,” I yelled over the seat. That's what Jottie liked us to say when we had to go to the bathroom.

“Me too; I'm about to burst,” Bird said at once.

We saw Jottie's eyes narrow in the mirror.

“I
do
,” Bird said. We all knew she was lying. She just wanted to talk to Waldon. She talked his ear off every chance she got. When she was a little girl, she'd stowed away in his laundry hamper because she loved him so much, but then she'd wrecked it by calling his name. She'd wanted him to find her.

“You can just wait until big farm, missy,” Mae said to her.

“I'm going to wet my pants,” Bird said.

“Not if you know what's good for you, you're not,” Jottie warned. She pulled up in front of Waldon's steps, and Mae and I hopped out.

“How-you, Waldon?” Jottie called from the front seat.

“Just fine, Jottie,” said Waldon. “Right as rain. How-you?” He caught hold of Mae's arm and held it tight.

“Oh, fine. Did you go up to Martinsburg this week?”

“A-yup, on Wednesday. Saw Wren.”

“Willa's got to go inside for a second,” Mae broke in. “I'll just go with her.”

She picked up her little suitcase and we went inside Waldon's house. It was cool in there, and Mae had put a dish of tiny soaps in the bathroom to make it smell nice. After I did my business, I picked up each soap and gave it a sniff. There was a rose one and a violet one and one that smelled like grapes. I used regular soap to wash my hands.

When I came out, the house was quiet. “Well, bye,” I called, but no one answered. I walked down the hall to the kitchen. “Bye.”

There they were, Waldon and Mae, and I saw why they hadn't answered me. They were busy kissing, hard. They didn't even know I was there. Waldon picked up Mae and set her on the counter, and she wrapped her legs tight around him, all while they were still kissing. I had never seen anything like it before. I watched and then I couldn't stop watching, even though I wanted to run away, too. Then Waldon made a sound, and I got scared they'd notice me and I tiptoed backward into the hall and went around through the parlor.

I flopped into the backseat of the car, and Bird said, “What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled.

“Why're you all red?”

I looked up and saw Jottie's eyes in the mirror again, looking at me kind of curious. I wondered if she knew what was going on in the kitchen. Before, when I'd heard about the things that grown-ups did, I'd thought it sounded terrible and embarrassing. But Mae hadn't minded. She'd been part of it. She'd
wanted
to. Maybe it wasn't like what I thought. Still, I felt funny. I turned to Bird. “I'm hot,” I said. “Ain't you ever been hot?”

—

Up at the big farm, Jottie shooed us away. “I got to talk business with Wren,” she said. “Don't chase the chickens.” Bird and I rolled our eyes
at each other. We didn't chase chickens anymore, ever since we found out that it killed them.

“Let's go jump in some hay,” Bird said.

I thought about hay and sweat stuck together. “No,” I said.

“You want to scratch the pigs?”

“No. They smell,” I said.

“Well, ain't you just a lady,” said Bird. “You smell, too, you know. Probably to a pig, you smell like you-know-what.”

I stuck my tongue out at her and then, to show that I was above it all, I went to sit on the fence. I thought about Mae and Waldon kissing until I was so nervous I almost fell off the fence, and then I watched Jottie talking to Wren. Her hands were cutting the air, one, two, three. Had Jottie ever kissed anyone? Had she kissed Vause Hamilton, so long ago? She must have kissed somebody, sometime. Or maybe not. How common was it? Wren listened to Jottie and nodded and turned his hat in his hands. After a while, Bird forgave me and climbed up beside me. We called the cows, and they galumphed over, drooling, and stared at us.