The Cotton Queen (7 page)

At first I sat on the toilet, pounding on my stomach to make it go away. I jumped up and down on the bed until I was as high as the ceiling and then went down to land flat on my belly, but nothing happened. I borrowed a huge washtub to set next to the bath. I filled one with ice water and the other near boiling. I sat in one and then the other. I screamed, I went light-headed, but I didn’t miscarry.

I knew that there were ways to make it go away. I had heard hushed rumors as a teenager and more as a young wife of people in dark alleys who would do things, for a price. I had no money. But even if I had, how could I find those people. I didn’t know who to ask.

My final attempt at ending the pregnancy occurred at an employment agency downtown. The less-than-helpful owner of the place dismissed me with disdain. Lacking a glowing recommendation from my last job, he was certain that he couldn’t help me. I walked down the street to where my car was parked. In the alley beside the building was a rusty metal stairway that provided access to the roof. I stopped in my tracks and stared for long moments. Then taking a deep breath of determination, I climbed those stairs.

They say that just before you die your life flashes before your eyes. I had a similar sensation. With each step upward, I remembered all the things that had brought me to this point. From the most immediate, the child I carried, my mind worked backward. Burl’s horrible attack. The death of my sweet Tom. My choice to marry young. My mind wandered back through all that I’d done and those things that were thrust upon me against my will. As I reached the top step and turned to look downward, I knew that my current course of action was very dangerous. I would surely lose the baby. But I could just as easily die myself. And it would probably look like suicide.

Laney would be alone in the world, just as I had been.

Would Uncle Warren and Aunt Maxine take her in? I was sure they’d be willing to. Or she’d go to live with Freddie and LaVeida after all. That would make the Hoffmans happy.

I thought about all the things I would miss. Watching Laney grow up. Seeing her become a young woman, marry, have children. I didn’t want to miss any of that. I didn’t want to die. And I didn’t want her to be left alone in the world, without parents, the way that I had been.

I sat down on the top step and put my head in my hands. Maybe I was just a coward, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk it. There had to be some other way. I tried to think. I tried to pray.

A woman having a baby out of wedlock in 1963 was immoral. Not only would I be a shame and embarrassment to my family, I’d never outlive the scandal. I’d undoubtedly lose custody of Laney. Women who got pregnant went for hurry-up marriages and fudging the date on the birth certificate. But I couldn’t marry this baby’s father. He was already married. And he was evil.

I knew there were institutions for unwed mothers. Young girls were taken in, fed and housed while their families made up stories about summer camps or visiting relatives in distant states. When the baby was born, it was given up for adoption with none the wiser. But those places were for teenagers, I thought. I had never heard of one that took a grown woman and her kindergarten-age daughter.

What else was there to do? What other options did I have? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know who to ask.

“What are you doing up there?”

The question came from the bottom of the rusting staircase. It was posed by a stranger, a bum really. A dirty, ragged man looked up at me curiously.

“Nothing,” I answered, guiltily.

He started up the stairs. There was something wrong with one of his legs and he held tightly to the handrail and half dragged himself up each step. I hurried down to waylay him, not wanting to put his age and health through the exertion of the climb.

“I was just admiring the view,” I assured him as we met at the first landing.

He glanced around and nodded. “It’s a beautiful world all right,” he said. His hands were grimy, the fingernails black, but his eyes were clear. “Some people like it better from a distance,” he said, indicating the top of the stairs from which I’d just come. “But me, I try to admire it close up.”

“Yes, I guess so,” I agreed. I opened my purse. I only had a dollar and seventy-eight cents. I apologized as I handed him a quarter.

“It’s all I can afford,” I told him. “I’m out of work and I’ve got a child to support.”

He nodded.

“You should go home, lady,” he said.

“What?”

“Go home to your family,” he said. “I would if I had some. It’s always easier to work things out when you’re surrounded by people who love you.”

I took his advice. I went back to Shady Bend Motor Lodges, loaded up our belongings and when Laney arrived home on the school bus, I put her in the car and we drove to McKinney.

Uncle Warren and Aunt Maxine were glad to see us. They were so warm, so welcoming, I actually started crying.

“Oh, honey, what is wrong?” Aunt Maxine asked me.

I couldn’t tell her.

“Is it Freddie and LaVeida going after custody?”

I shrugged. She took that as a yes.

“You go call Acee Clifton and see if he can see you tomorrow,” Aunt Maxine insisted. “You’ll feel better.”

I did as she told me. It was so late that I was sure he wouldn’t be in the office, but he picked up immediately.

“Hi, Acee, it’s Barbara Hoffman.”

“Babs!” The tone of his voice changed immediately. He was obviously pleased to hear from me.

“I’m in town this weekend visiting Uncle Warren and Aunt Maxine,” I told him. “I know how busy your schedule must be, but I was hoping that we could set up a meeting.”

“The schedule is the schedule,” he said. “It’s always crowded and if I try to juggle it, my secretary will throw a hissy fit. How about lunch? A fellow has got to eat lunch and I hate to eat alone. We could talk there.”

I agreed to meet him at a downtown café the next day.

It was beautiful and sunny with just the hint of fall in the air. I was wearing a new dress. Aunt Maxine had cut it out and stitched it together that morning. It was just a straight shift in cornflower-blue with three-quarter-length sleeves. I carried a little white cardigan, but the sun was warm enough that it wasn’t needed.

I got to the restaurant first. Doris Walker, a tall, big-toothed blonde who’d been in my class at high school was now working there as a waitress.

“Babs Quarles, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!” she announced far too loudly. I felt like every person in the building was looking at me. Perhaps because they were.

“Hi, Doris, it’s nice to see you,” I responded politely.

“You haven’t changed a bit, you know. You look just as pretty as when you were Cotton Queen.”

“I was never Cotton Queen,” I assured her. “I was first runner-up. LaVeida was the Queen.”

“Really?” She seemed genuinely surprised. “I’d have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I remembered you wearing that crown.”

“No, but it’s sweet of you to think so.”

“You all alone today, honey?” she asked.

“I’m meeting somebody.”

“Somebody like you want to sit in the back or somebody up here where God and all McKinney can see you?”

She popped her gum and gave a big smile as she asked the question.

“Here in the front window is fine,” I assured her.

She showed me to a booth with a perfect view of the courthouse square and handed me a menu. I looked at it eagerly. I felt less queasy today than I had in a week. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one.

“You know, I’m real sorry about Tom,” she said, more quietly and with a sympathetic smile. “He was a nice guy. I always liked him.”

“Thanks.”

Our exchange was barely completed when the front door opened and she turned to greet the newest arrival.

“Acee Clifton. Good Lord, look at you!” she exclaimed. “You’re spruced up finer than a prize hog at the county fair.”

Her glowing description did not, somehow, sound like a compliment.

Acee actually did look very nice. For Acee, I mean. He was dressed in a very sharp-looking, tailored suit. The double-breasted style and pinstripes made him appear taller and thinner than he was. His crisp white shirt was contrasted by the long narrow line of a navy-blue necktie. Doris’s words had brought bright pink embarrassment to his cheeks.

Doris sashayed up to him, and brushed some nonexistent lint from the shoulder of his jacket. It was as if she was checking out the quality of the material.

“You catching a bite to eat before you go off to wow some jury?” she asked him.

Acee cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Actually I’m meeting Mrs. Hoffman,” he said.

Doris shot a quick look back at me.

“Well, well, well,” she said loudly.

I felt my own face blushing.

Annoyed, Acee mumbled something about business and took a seat across the table from me.

“Just bring us some iced tea, Doris, and wipe that stupid grin off your face,” he told the waitress. “I’m sorry,” he added to me.

He certainly had no reason to apologize and I told him so.

We both relaxed a bit.

I expected him to bring me up-to-date concerning Freddie and LaVeida or maybe to lecture me again on how to conduct my private life. He did neither. He was chatty, in a warm, down-home way. He talked about high school. Things he remembered. Specifically things he remembered about me. Things he and I had said and done all those years ago. He recalled the details of a failed experiment in tenth-grade chemistry where we’d tried to alter alcohol properties and accidentally made our sample into butyric acid.

“The whole science lab, even the hallways outside smelled like vomit for a week!”

I laughed so hard, I actually snorted.

He was smiling at me across the table. I was more cheered up and lighthearted than I’d felt in weeks. Then suddenly something changed in the air. I don’t know if we heard something or felt something. But around us the sound was different and we were both immediately alert.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Every person in the place was suddenly looking around, as if they, too, knew something was wrong.

Doris burst out of the kitchen.

“The president has been shot!”

The shock of the words kept everybody paralyzed for an instant, then Acee jumped up.

“Come on,” he said.

With only a second to gather up my sweater and my purse, Acee left a ten-dollar bill on the table and rushed out of the café. His hand in mine, he hurried us down the street until we got to Howell’s Furniture.

“They will have the televisions on,” he told me as we went through the door.

He was right, they did. And we weren’t the first people there.

“What are they saying?” Acee asked as we gathered around the big box set with the others. “I know he was supposed to speak today at the Merchandise Mart.”

“He never made it,” Earl Butzen said. “He was shot driving through Deally Plaza.”

“Who did it?”

“It was like an ambush,” another man said. “There were shots coming from everywhere.”

“How bad is he hurt?”

“We don’t know,” Earl answered.

“They’ve taken him to Parkland Hospital,” Millie, Ed Finer’s wife added.

“President Kennedy is in Dallas?” I asked, surprised.

Acee squeezed my hand. “He’ll be fine,” he assured me. “He’s a strong, healthy man and young, too. He’ll be all right.”

I nodded, though I felt his words were as much to shore up his own concern as mine. I hadn’t voted for Mr. Kennedy. I hadn’t actually voted at all. I’d never been that interested in politics and figured that the country, the planet, could pretty much take care of itself without any input from me. All I really knew about the president was that he was fairly young and good-looking. He had a beautiful wife, two cute kids and his newborn son had just died that summer.

Now, as more and more people gathered in front of the TV in the furniture store I waited and worried about his fate.

Then we were seeing Walter Cronkite’s ashen face. “From Dallas, Texas,” he said. “The flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.”

In Howell’s Furniture in downtown McKinney several people screamed, a woman fainted. Acee Clifton’s arm went around me and pulled me into an embrace. He held me tight against his chest as if he could protect me from all the anger and hurt in the world.

“Damn it, damn it all,” he was whispering under his breath.

The next days were jumbled and strange as a new president was sworn in, a funeral prepared, an assassin arrested and then murdered in front of us on live TV. All of Texas was full of rumors. There were Cubans and Communists hiding behind every telephone pole. Gangsters and hit men were supposedly in every car with out-of-state plates. Even the CIA, the FBI and the local police were suspect. The Russians might be preparing to drop a nuclear bomb on us in the confusion.

It was a long weekend of fear and grief and sadness. In small towns in times of trouble, friends and family stick very close together.

Acee was there with us for most all of it. I didn’t think much about his presence. I figured that he didn’t want to be alone. Nobody did.

When little John John saluted his father’s coffin, I cried as hard as anybody. But in all honesty, there was some relief in looking at someone else’s problems, in letting my own rest on the shelf while I mourned. Dallas was a very, very dangerous place. But I was forty miles north and completely safe in McKinney.

Monday evening, I sat on the front porch swing with Acee. I was trying not to think about Dallas, trying not to remember all that was evil and terrifying about my life there. I was thinking about Jackie and the children and the loss of a fine man to his country.

I didn’t realize that Acee was holding my hand until he brought the knuckles up to his lips and kissed them.

I turned to stare at him. What I saw in his expression caught me completely off guard.

“I don’t know where to begin, Babs,” he said to me. “I was thinking that we could start seeing each other, get to know each other, find out if maybe someday we could love each other. But now, with all that’s happened, it no longer seems prudent to just wait and hope.” He hesitated taking a deep breath. “I think I fell for you when I saw you riding in the Cotton Queen Parade. I already knew that you were kind and sweet and pretty. But when I saw you that day, I realized that you were beautiful. I wanted to approach you then, to ask you to be my girl. But I was shy and scared and unsure of myself. Then Tom Hoffman caught your eye. Tom was a great guy. Everybody liked him. But I never quite forgave him for running off with my girl and breaking my heart.”