The Wilful Daughter (45 page)

“
I used to try to walk Rosa to school when we were growing up. She was afraid he might see us so we met at the corner down there.” He pointed to a grove of trees that marked the corner of Beckwith and Vine. A corner all of them were familiar with. It was the blind spot of the Blacksmith’s porch view. Behind those bushes, you could fix yourself up or dust yourself off after a long walk to come court one of the girls. Behind those trees you took the first kiss, the first touch of what you hoped would be many similar moments. Most of them figured the Blacksmith knew what went on behind those bushes but he couldn’t cut them down because it wasn’t his property. He had sold it years ago.

“
First time I came to call on her, to take her to a dance he stopped me before I got in the door.” He turned to Peter to emphasize his words as if the Piano Man hadn’t heard them. “Before I got in the door.

“
He asked me if I had any desire to make myself an important man. I was wearing hand me down pants, shoes, everything. I was clean from head to toe but his stare, that look in his eyes like I was trying to steal something from him, made me feel that I needed to go back home and start over again. So I just told him that I was trying to get out of high school so I could become a doctor. He asked me where I was going to study. Before I could answer he wanted to know how was I going to get the money to continue my studies.”

The other men sympathized with him. They had each suffered a similar fate. “It was Bira who escorted Rosa onto the porch and suggested that we leave. I thought, I’m home free, her mother likes me. But when I brought Rosa back from the dance, the old man told me that I could call on her again-when I got my degree from medical school. And when I asked her how she felt about all this she said: ‘He’s my father, he’s got rules.’” He sighed. “I remember when he closed the door in my face I realized that I had never even been inside this house, seen all the treasures that people had told me about. I just remember him closing the door in my face and the smell of pipe tobacco. Expensive pipe tobacco I had been told. What he spent on that pipe tobacco could have fed me and my brothers for a week.”

They were all silent for a minute until Waddell said softly, as if they were all in his confidence: “I got a buyer for the land. I haven’t told Jewel yet. She actual thinks I should ask her father’s permission to take the job and sell my land. Mine! I have earned every bit of it with the things I put up with.” They all, including the Piano Man, mumbled agreement. “I have lots of better things to do with my Sunday than sit around here and watch him lord over all of us.”

“
Truth of the matter is,” James added. “He’s probably not as big a man as he thinks. I looked into the clauses that he had added to each of our contracts and it turns out that if we can prove we paid the taxes, and we all know he’s made us pay the taxes, buy the most expensive furnishings, dress like white men in the white house, then he can’t say a word if we sell it. It’s all ours any way. He signed it over to us in front of a lawyer. His lawyer.”

“
But Fawn says. . .” Charles went on to say and James cut him off.

“
Fawn doesn’t own the land, Charles. Look at the contract. You are the sole owner of the land you got when you married her.” Then he laughed sarcastically. “He wanted to be like a white man with all this property and all this family and dowry stuff. Marrying off the first daughter. Well he got it. The way he has set up each of our contracts we can do just what rich white men do, sell everything from under our wives and we don’t even have to tell them.”

“
Of course,” Reverend Charles added after clearing his throat. “We wouldn’t want to do that.”

“
Of course not!” they all replied, quickly changing the subject. That evening Piano Man found some excuse to go back to the house-his house, his land he remembered as he got there- and pulled the contracts for the property from under a floorboard in the bedroom.

It seemed to be a lot of legal mumble jumble, but finally it made sence to him. He could sell the property here anytime he wanted without problems. The one in Alabama would be harder to sell because of the clause about Ophelia.

That was until he noticed that the clause said ‘gave her his name.’ Hell he could sell it any time he wanted to, he had done that already.

He dreamed about selling his land all spring. Of moving away, and taking Ophelia and leaving Minnelsa with her family. He thought of it especially on Sundays when he played with his little daughter in their field of flowers.

Minnelsa would have a baby of her own, she would have her family. He would have money from the property and his daughter.

He could even look for June, if he wanted. And Ophelia was so young she would probably never remember when she older the big house on Beckwith Street or all the stone faced family dressed too much like white people’s pictures in books.

He told no one about his plans or his thoughts. Especially not the other sons-in-law. He kept everything to himself.

By the month of June, with Minnelsa so big she could barely move, and, wondering aloud from time to time why she had gotten herself into this mess, the Piano Man welcomed the summer distractions. The church had more weddings, and that meant more playing, more chances to be away from his home-away-from-home.

And there was his home. The home they had built on the property the Blacksmith had given them. Peter had little input into the plans, even though the Blacksmith insisted that his talented son-in-law have a sitting/piano room. It was the home that Minnelsa wanted more than anything else. She spent more time there than he did before all this. Now he used it as an excuse to get away.

He had to make sure the grounds were taken care of, that the place was clean and nobody was breaking in. He had to go there constantly to get things for Ophelia, toys and clothes that she had left there.

And when he wasn’t doing that he was with Ophelia, being a father, playing with her, loving her. He spent a little time with Minnelsa who was wrapped up in her pregnancy. When he slept with her, he felt the baby move.

His baby, in her. Legally he knew but not lovingly. He still thought about who he could sell the property to without it getting back to the Blacksmith before he had a chance to complete his plans. This became his daily project.

When he returned from teaching one early June afternoon he found Jewel sitting on the porch with her mother and sister weeping. He knew immediately what had happened but he waited for them to say it.

“
Waddell has taken a job in New York.” Minnelsa was close to tears. “He actually expects Jewel to go with him.”

Bira stared at him because she knew that men shared secrets. She knew that he and Charles and James all knew about this. “He told her it was her duty as his wife to go with him. He’s leaving in two days and she doesn’t want to go.”

Bira said nothing. Wasn’t she the woman who had followed her husband out of Alabama without question? He didn’t understand why she was not explaining all the things about wifely duties to her crying daughter until Jewel looked up at him, red eyed and lost and said: “He’s already sold most of our land and he didn’t even tell me.” Bira held her tightly and she wept even more.

The Blacksmith tried to find Waddell and straighten him out, but “legally, there was nothing he could do.” Waddell told the Piano Man the next afternoon as they sat outside his home. He had gone there in the guise of checking on things, but it was actually to meet his brother-in-law.

“
So you’ve sold it,” the Piano Man asked.

Waddell loosened his tie and smiled. “Everything but the acre with the house. Got a good price for it. The old man was pretty upset with me. Stormed about saying that he had meant for that property to be passed down to his grandchildren. Mumbled something about keeping it in the family. I reminded him that according to the contract it was mine to do with as I wished. I could produce evidence that I had been fiscally and physically responsible for its upkeep.”

“
What did he say?”

Waddell leaned back happily. “Not a damn thing. There’s nothing he can do. But he insisted that I not force Jewel to move to the sin and degradation of New York. Can you imagine that? He’s telling me what I can and can’t do with my own wife.”

Waddell left town pleading with Jewel to join him as soon as she had thought about it. He reminded her that once she moved back in with her father she was up before the crack of dawn and once again his servant. He reminded her of the duties of a wife to cling to her husband.

Peter watched as a confused Jewel turned to her sisters for comfort. They said nothing against their father. They said nothing for their husbands. He asked Minnelsa: “Does the bible not say a wife shall cling to her husband?”

“
Yes, I know, but it’s so far away,” she answered eyeing him as if for the first time.

“
You’ve been to New York, Minnelsa. You didn’t find it that bad.”

“
Peter, it was just a visit. I knew we weren’t going to live there. I could never live there. My family is here.”

He didn’t argue with her about it. He just knew that if June had been there she would have told Jewel to leave.

Not one of them asked their mother what to do, and, to Peter’s surprise, Bira never told them.

It seemed that Jewel’s husband’s departure set in motion a chain of events that the Blacksmith was not prepared for.

On the day Jewel moved back into her old room at her parents’ house, crying because she wasn’t sure whether to join her husband in New York, asking Bira: “Mama would you come there and be with me if I had a baby?” a woman came to the Blacksmith’s door looking for Reverend Charles.

“
What business do you have with my son-in-law?” Bira asked, offering the woman she had never seen before a seat.

She was young and had a tender smile on her pretty brown face. She put her hand over her mouth to blush a bit and revealed a few missing teeth. When she spoke she talked softly. “Your house is bigger than our church back home.”

Bira politely smiled.

“
I know Reverend Charles from. . . Well you see I was one of his parishioners from a while back when he was just a junior minister in Tennessee at my church.” She stopped talking and turned to see Jewel standing in the doorway. “I don’t want to cause no trouble with any of y’all here but, well, I heard the Reverend had come into some money and since he knew me very well and gave me four children. . .”

“
Four children? You were married to Charles?” Bira asked.

The girl blushed again and Jewel came in and sat by her mother for support. “I tried to put it nice as I know how, but the truth was I lay with him in the name of saving my soul.”

“
And on more than one occasion, I gather.” It was not the kind of statement that usually came out of Bira’s mouth.

“
He told me he was gonna marry me each time. I guess that’s kind of dumb but I loved him and believed in him. Then he said he had a calling someplace else. Next thing I know he done leave me a little money and he gone.” She looked embarrassed for a moment before she added: “Look, I ain’t asking nothing for me. But he got four children and he needs to take care of them, don’t you think?”

Bira and Minnelsa nodded. Jewel asked: “Do you have proof that Charles fathered all your children?”

“
Yes’m, I got plenty of proof.” She rose and politely bowed as if she were before royalty. Then she went outdoors and returned with four boys, ages ten to four, all the spitting him of Fawn’s husband.

The women did not point the way to Fawn and Charles house. Bira insisted on feeding the children and their mother since they had come such a long way. As she fixed the plates with Minnelsa’s help she sent Jewel to fetch her father.

The Blacksmith, once he heard the news, decided it was best that he not leave his shop. He gave Jewel two notes: one for the Reverend who was at his office in the nearby church asking him to come by the shop at his earliest convenience. The other for lawyer Gibbs. “He’s to give her money and send her on her way until I can talk to the minister about his sins of the flesh.”

Jewel rode home in the lawyer’s car fanning herself from heat and nervousness as Gibbs kept saying over and over: “This is certainly a big mess.”

For the first time in many years the Blacksmith was late for dinner.

When he appeared Fawn was with him. She spoke to no one but she cried for two days over what she had learned and what had occurred. Within hours of the Blacksmith learning about his offense, the minister was gone from Atlanta, a few dollars richer but with his contract for the property returned to his father-in-law since annulment proceedings were already underway.

The marriage was legally ended so quickly that it scared the Piano Man. With Waddell and Charles gone he thought about his property long and hard and stayed to himself more and more. He thought about leaving more and more. He thought about what it meant to be the Blacksmith’s son-in-law every morning the old man made him rise and partake in his early morning ritual.

What would he do when the baby was born? He went back to his home on his property and sat on the porch watching the trees move in the light wind and the clouds drift above the greenest of grass. He smelled the flowers and watched as the fields were plowed. “This is mine,” he said aloud. “Mine,” he screamed over and over, louder and louder, until he was afraid the men plowing in the distance would hear him.