The Well and the Mine (16 page)

“I don’t care for it myself,” I announced.

Virgie was just a shadow and a hat from the other side of the cotton. (She didn’t want to get sun on her face, but I wouldn’t let Mama put a hat on me. She said if I wanted to be ugly and wrinkled by high school, she wouldn’t stop me. Then it was too late to say I’d changed my mind.) “I don’t like it much, either,” said Virgie soon enough.

We stood looking at one another for all of ten seconds, picked up our sacks, and went to find Papa to tell him that we were through with picking. He didn’t seem surprised. And since he didn’t mind none, we plopped ourselves down under a pecan tree, comparing bloody fingers and feeling like nobody ever deserved a nice warm patch of grass more than we did. We went on and took out the biscuits Mama had packed for us, figuring it was close enough to lunchtime. Papa used to make the best sausage, and I missed it. Empty biscuits weren’t the same. He had a smokehouse set up against the barn, and the sausage came from it. I knew there was more to it, that you took pig parts and stuffed them in another pig part, but I didn’t care to hear about it once Papa started explaining it.

We’d all taken just a bite or two when we looked up and saw a strange boy and girl standing in front of us. We didn’t even see them coming. Neither of them was wearing shoes, but it was a nice day, and I didn’t care for shoes myself.

“Those sausage?” asked the boy. Not even a “hello.”

“Yep,” said me and Jack at the same time.

“You belong to Mr. Moore?” the girl asked.

“He’s our father,” Virgie said. It was written plain across her face that she thought it was a rude question.

“We live here,” said the boy.

About then I saw they had sacks like ours, only stuffed full of cotton.

“You been pickin’ cotton, too?” I said. “We did it for the first time just now.”

They looked at us like we were simpleminded when I showed them my fingers and Jack stuck his out, too. Their fingers were calloused and tough like Papa’s, and they were much browner than us, even Jack, who was brown as a nut. But even being that brown, something was off with their color. They had circles under their eyes like Papa when he’d worked double shifts and come up tired and short on sunlight. And their hair wasn’t blond or black or brown, but like it hadn’t been painted with any color at all.

“You never picked before?” the girl asked. I noticed then that her dress was made from a bleached-out flour sack same as our dish towels. “We always help Mama and Daddy.”

“The Talberts?” asked Virgie.

They nodded, and the boy wrinkled his forehead at our cotton sacks.

“You might get a dollar for all that,” he said, not looking too sure about it. “Maybe less. Ain’t got but a few pounds in there.”

“We can both pick three dollars a day,” said the girl.

Pretty soon they stopped looking at our sacks, though, and went back to looking at our biscuits.

“You eatin’ lunch already?” asked the girl. “We don’t stop for lunch. Work from can to can’t.”

She shook her head at us when we didn’t say anything. “When you can see to when you can’t. Light to dark.”

We each only had one biscuit, but we should have halved them and shared, really. We didn’t. And even though I felt guilty about them not having any lunch, mainly I wanted them to go away so I wouldn’t have to taste the guilt along with the biscuit. And it went away real fast—as soon as those children got out of sight. They turned around and walked back to the cotton rows and didn’t even say “nice to meet you.” None of us said anything about them. We swallowed our last bites and licked our fingers, alright with tasting a little blood and dirt and cotton if it meant getting those last crumbs. I dabbed at the crumbs on my skirt with my wet finger, and Virgie swept hers into the grass. Then the guilt came back up like heartburn.

I’d never had somebody ask me for food. People came to the door often enough, but really they were there for Mama and Papa. They decided who got a few eggs or a plate of beans or a whole chicken. It had been like that as long as I could remember, with people coming to the door, and you for certain gave them something.

Me and Virgie and Jack were supposed to be the kind of people who helped out. But we didn’t give those Talbert children nothing. That pained me, not just from the guilt, but because it took something so simple and confused it. I hated that, even though I wasn’t supposed to hate.

Ever since that baby died, pieces didn’t fit together as well as they used to. Some things were convoluted before, of course. Papa was the strongest man in the world, so of course nothing could hurt him, but he was cracked all over from the mines. God was good, but he might decide to send you to hell. Getting baptized in the river cleaned your soul, but I still had to take a bath on Saturday nights even if I’d just been swimming.

But usually I tried to ignore it when the pieces didn’t come together quite right, even when something big and heavy poked at the edge of my mind and tried to shove its way in. Especially then. When I went over to Missy Summerfield’s house for lunch one day—Mama said I could—I found out they had more than a maid. They had a polished table nearly as wide as our kitchen with a red-and-white china bowl full of oranges in the middle. Seven oranges, so many of them that they might mold before the Summerfields got around to eating them all, and somehow I didn’t think they would miss the oranges even if that did happen. We only got an orange in our Christmas stocking.

I’d also been over there on Sunday afternoons when Missy’s older sister had boys calling, and Missy would have me upstairs while she powdered her sister’s back so she’d stay clean and sweet-smelling during a whole afternoon of beaus. I was fascinated by that powder drifting through the air when Missy patted the puff against her sister’s back.

The other thing that I liked about Missy’s—and that I’d figured out on a visit before I saw that bowl of oranges—was that they had chicken or pork chops or some thick slab of meat with every meal. So I never minded being asked to dinner. Everybody got served by the maid, a thin Negro woman with a white kerchief on her head who said “Miss Missy” when she was talking to Missy. That struck me as funny. The day of the oranges, I thought they must live the best lives in the world. I was thinking about asking for an orange for dessert when the maid asked me if I’d like a slice of fresh tomato. I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Missy corrected me right in front of the maid: “Don’t say ‘ma’am’ to her. We don’t do that.”

Papa always told us to say “ma’am” to any grown woman, and I thought it was right rude not to. But I knew Missy’s parents had told her that being a Negro cancelled out being a grown-up. So one of us had parents that told us wrong, and of course I knew it must be the Summerfields but I figured she felt just as sure it was mine. After that I tried to stay away from the maid when I was visiting Missy because I never figured out whether I would still call her ma’am or not. That was the easiest way, but something pushed at me, nagging me that there was more to it. I ignored the push.

Some other big, heavy thought shoved at me after those Talbert children left, or maybe a bunch of thoughts stuck together. A picture in my head of Lola Lowe’s bunch of children eating just blackberries and bread. Whatever it was, it was too big to fit in my head. We told Papa about the children when he came over an hour or so later for his own sausage and biscuit, and I realized I didn’t even know their names. Just called them those Talbert children, and that seemed almost as bad as hogging my biscuit.

But Papa wasn’t mad at us for not giving them any. “I’ll bring them somethin’ special,” he said. “Don’t you worry about it no more.”

And sure enough, we had enough for breakfast the next morning, but he’d given them the rest of that sausage. I wasn’t even sorry not to have more of it, and the not-feeling-sorry made me feel more Christian, like I might still be good after all.

Albert
I’D BEEN THINKING ABOUT THOSE BOYS IN SCOTTSBORO
. Back in March, nine Negro boys were headed from Chattanooga to Memphis, and they ended up with two white girls in a railroad car. Two white girls in men’s clothes. The girls said the Negroes raped them, and wasn’t long after they got hauled to jail at Scottsboro that eight out of the nine of them got sentenced to die. Jury only held off on a twelve-year-old, and that wasn’t from lack of trying. I’d heard the colored fellows at Galloway talk about it, about how those girls were selling their bodies but just embarrassed to be caught with colored men. Most of us white men—me included—figured the girls were honest, and the boys weren’t fit to live.

I’d always thought that all that mattered was how a body treated people. Colored man, white man, polka-dotted man, I was gone treat them fair and kind. And that was that. Laws and such didn’t concern me—they was only fences and cords arranged just so, and I couldn’t see why it mattered where they were set up. I’d even mostly fall into wherever the cords pointed me. Because inside them, I was acting right.

Tess and those biscuits. She hadn’t acted at all, hadn’t shared with those poor Talberts. But she’d thought on it, felt guilty about it, known she should do something different. It made me wonder about the difference between doing and thinking. I’d never have figured Jonah to work out a problem I couldn’t, to see inside that woman’s head so clear. Now Bill, him being so successful, him I would’ve thought to have all kinds of insight. I’d never have considered it being the other way around. It shook me up to keep hearing Jonah’s words in my head over and over when I was trying to make sense of that woman and her baby.

Long as I didn’t do nobody ill, separate lines and separate churches and separate lives didn’t matter much. Probably mattered to those Scottsboro boys, all wrapped up in those cords I didn’t care about. And me, I was feeling tangled up a tad myself.

Leta
HARD TO BELIEVE DROPPINGS HAD ANYTHING TO DO
with a rose. On a fall day with a strong wind, the petals would fall in dainty red designs, and I’d have to snatch them up before I spread the manure. Sometimes Tess would see me with the wheelbarrow down at the animal pens, and she’d hurry out and scoop up the petals, wanting to dry them or toss them in the air. She loved them. I wasn’t so attached, but if I left them on the ground, it’d allow for black-spot fungus. So I saved the petals from the shovelfuls of horse manure—the best kind of manure. I’d fertilize the roses good at the start of warm weather and at the end of it, carting a wheelbarrowful and spreading it thick, then chopping it into the soil.

I picked off the dead flowers, looked them over for traces of brown on the stem. Bugs and rot got to them easier if anything dead stayed around. Didn’t want to overprune them—roses could go rotten from too much attention just like children could. Usually I’d fit them in wherever I had a hole in my day, a quick check for dead leaves, maybe give them a can of water. But on fertilizing days, I’d spoil myself a bit along with my roses. Most everything I did had to be done in a hurry, but this I didn’t rush. I laid out the shovelfuls dead even, smoothed them out like I was making a layer cake. I looked at every bloom, every stem to check for disease or bugs. I leaned in to breathe in the rose air. They were all red but for one dark pink one. I let Virgie talk me into that one.

My papa couldn’t grow roses worth a flip. He struggled even with the vegetable garden. One time he grew radishes as big as oranges, completely hollow on the inside. He said the problem was they grew so fast that they didn’t have time to fill up. He’d worked the mines when he was younger, but by the time I came around, he farmed full-time, so you’d have thought he’d get the hang of it.

My mother had started the rosebushes, planting one special for each of us. She’d planted me a pink tea rose before she died, although I couldn’t remember her doing it. But the bush itself was one of my first memories. I was so fond of it that the same year I started school, I started taking rose clippings and tending them in a bucket. Since my older sisters had only barely managed to keep their own roses alive, I took over when I was eight or nine.

Funny how even with sunshine falling straight on them, the petals are always cool.

Now when I was a little thing, I did like pink. I was the youngest, so my sisters took care of most of the housework, and that left me free to tend the roses. They coddled me a bit, too, me being the baby, and they’d try to keep from laying any work on my shoulders even after I was old enough. So I had years steeped in my roses from morning until night, talking to them when I wasn’t tending to them. I had names for them that I never told my sisters about—Esmerelda for the flashy bright pink one desperate for attention; Beulah for the solid, strong red; Virginia for the delicate white one that’d wilt with too much sun. I’d prick my finger on them and we’d be blood sisters. I’d put rose petals in my pillow case so I could smell them while I slept.

It was an odd attachment that puzzled me: the grown-up married me looking back on it from a distance. I had three sisters who doted on me, but I told my secrets to the roses. They were so beautiful, and they pulled you in every which way—the smell of them, the look of them, the softness of them. And they were the only part of the house that still had my mother printed on them, or at least I felt that way then. I suppose their smell and feel became hers in my mind. Janie, two years older than me, would sit with me—she couldn’t remember Mama much neither, so we’d imagine her together. (I did have the one clear memory of her lying dead on the bed, but I mostly kept it covered and put away.) We were always wanting Merilyn and Emmaline to tell us stories about her. But since they were busy cooking the meals and running the house, we were on our own a lot. We’d collect fallen petals and try to make a carpet, pushing each petal into the ground after we softened it with a little water.

I was lucky to have those years, so fanciful and pointless. My last year in grammar school, though, Janie got typhoid. She’d been tired and poorly, but when she showed Papa the rose-colored spots on her sides and belly, he nearly knocked over his chair snatching her up and yelling for my brother to hitch up the mule and go find the doctor.