Authors: Dori Sanders
Mae Lee worked alone, her hands moving from one cotton boll to the next as fast as they could go. At the rate she was picking, before the end of the week she'd have another bale of cotton ready to be ginned. The entire cotton crop would be finished before it was really cold, because once again it was a poor crop. It had rained almost every day during the late summer and early fall. The cotton was damaged and wouldn't bring a good price. Cotton was at its best if there was dry weather in the weeks prior to harvest. She remembered the years before DDT, when the boll weevil wiped out her daddy's cotton crop. Her daddy tried growing tobacco. The boll weevils didn't like it, but the young boys in Rising Ridge sure did. They stripped the leaves and smoked the green tobacco.
Even though the poor cotton yield meant little profit, Mae Lee didn't mind too much. She and Hooker had made good money with the summer produce crops, and with the profit from the cotton, though small, they would both come out all right. Best of all, Mae Lee would be finished picking cotton sooner. She hated to pick in the cold, and the fall days would soon be getting really cold. She hated it most when she had to brave the frosty mornings. The cotton work gloves, with the fingers cut off so her bare fingertips could grasp and pull
the cotton from the bolls, were usually wet from dew or frost. They did little to keep her hands warm, and nothing at all to keep the hard, pointed, knife-sharp outer bark of the open bolls from puncturing and piercing her stiff, bleeding fingers.
From a distance Mae Lee watched her children walk up the narrow dirt road home from school. Taylor carried his baby sister's little primer. Little Amberlee was a year younger, but taller than her brother. Her older girls walked behind. She waved and called out to them. They didn't hear her. She was a little concerned that Taylor had not rushed to the cotton field where she was, the way he usually did, but instead had waited to see her at home.
Afterward, while she finished preparing the supper that Dallace had started for her, she watched Taylor slide into a chair. Mae Lee wanted to cook at least a part of the supper every night. Her daughter wasn't quite thirteen years old, too young to have to be the head cook in the house.
Mae Lee hugged her oldest daughter, “Smells good, Dallace. Now you go get your schoolbooks and study your lessons.”
Taylor propped his elbows on the table and cupped his small face in his hands. He was small for an eight-year-old. “Mama,” he blurted out, “where's my daddy? I wish my daddy would come back home, Mama.”
At all times Mae Lee hated that question, but she hated it most at night. She poured cornbread batter into a large, black cast-iron skillet and slid it into the oven. She was in no hurry to answer her son's question. She closed the oven door, and looked directly at Taylor. “I don't know, baby, I really don't know.” She lifted his little face upwards. “I'm going to go and
feed the chickens, and when I come back inside I want to hear you helping your little sister read from her primer.” Outside, Mae Lee fed her chickens and cried. When she went back inside Taylor was asleep in his chair.
At the supper table Taylor asked to be excused when he finished eating two wedges of hot buttered cornbread and a glass of buttermilk. He didn't eat any vegetables. Mae Lee thought he was too tired and sleepy to eat, so she made a little pallet for him on the floor near the new oil circulator, so he could rest until time for bed.
Mae Lee washed her children's socks and underwear and hung them on the backs of chairs to dry. She didn't want the dirty clothes to pile up. She was still feeling a little guilty about doing the washing the Sunday before. Her mama wouldn't have washed clothes on a Sunday no matter what. But it had been such a bright warm day. Mae Lee would have picked cotton that day if there had been no one to see her and think she had no respect for the Sabbath.
She had fallen asleep, and forgotten to move Taylor into his bed, when she heard him call out to her. “Mama, Mama, I hurt, I hurt, Mama.” She rushed into the next room. Her son looked at her as if he was afraid. She felt his forehead. He was burning up with fever, and was talking crazy, out of his head, jabbering like a two-year-old.
She glanced at the clock. It was after twelve, the middle of the night. She covered her sleeping children, her little stairsteps she called them. She gently shook her oldest child. “Dallace, honey,” she whispered, “Taylor is sick. I've got to get him to the doctor. I'm going to Church Granger's house. Take good
care of your sisters and don't open the door for nobody but your mama.”
She pulled on her pants and field boots, tied a belt around her cotton flannel gown and pulled it up under her heavy sweater and coat. She wrapped her sick child in blankets from his bed and hurried through the chilly October night to the Grangers'.
The bright moon cast eerie shadows from trees alongside the narrow path. She could feel the warmth of her son's feverish body. He was breathing harder. Her brisk steps quickened into a slow steady trot.
It seemed that, almost before she knocked, the front porch was flooded with lights and Church Granger was at the door. Maybe the dogs had barked. She didn't remember hearing them.
“My baby is sick,” she cried. “I've got to get him to the doctor!”
Church turned quickly, walked to the foot of the stairs and called up to his wife. “It's Mae Lee, Liddie. Her son is sick. I'm taking her to Dr. Bell's.”
“Wait,” Liddie called back, appearing seconds later at the top of the stairs. Mae Lee watched her pull her robe about her as she hurried down the steps. She looked at the sleeping child in Mae Lee's arms. “Oh, Mae Lee,” she moaned, “you had to carry him all the way here.” She peered beyond Mae Lee. “Where are your children? I'll go get them and bring them here.”
“No, no,” Mae Lee hastily responded. “My Dallace won't
open the door. They'll be all right. She'll take care of her sisters.”
Liddie turned to her husband. Her eyes were anxious. “Hurry, Church, hurry.”
Church Granger tried to take the heavy child from Mae Lee's grasp, but her hold on her son was firm. The child felt almost weightless in her strong arms.
He drove faster than Mae Lee had ever ridden in her life. She held on to her son and pressed imaginary brakes to the floor every time he rounded a curve, but she didn't ask him to slow down. Instead she studied the moon that seemed to travel along with them, and tried to think about setting out to find her son's daddy. He had asked about his daddy. Taylor needed his daddy. She nestled her chin against his warm head. “I'll find your daddy,” she whispered. The long country road seemed to stretch forward forever into the moonlit night, like the sometime worries of motherhood, long roads with no end.
As they drove on, Mae Lee thought about how concerned Liddie Granger had seemed over her little Taylor and her little girls at home. She remembered the day Liddie had been so worried over her own crying baby, she'd driven down to the cotton field where she and her mama were hoeing to ask for help. Mae Lee'd been furious seeing Liddie Granger drive her fine car down from her big fancy house on the hill. Now she couldn't believe that she had been so angry with Liddie for causing her mama to stop hoeing and go check on a crying baby.
At Dr. Bell's house, Church remembered he should have telephoned so he'd have been waiting for them. He called out to the doctor's barking dogs. “Be quiet, Duke, now, now, Trouble. Duke, Trouble, calm down, hush up.”
“It's me, Bland,” he called out, banging on the door, “Church Granger.”
Dr. Bell took one look at the sick child. “Get me some cold water, Church,” he said. “There is ice in the refrigerator.” He put cold cloths on the boy's forehead and an ice bag at the back of his neck. He slid a thermometer under Taylor's tongue. When he pulled it out he shook his head. He didn't reveal the temperature. “Taylor's throat is really inflamed, Mae Lee. Nothing to be alarmed about, but I'll give him an injection of penicillin and keep an eye on him for a while.” He took a small bottle from his medical bag and broke the snap seal. Tears rolled down Taylor's cheeks as the doctor injected his behind, but he didn't cry out. His mama obliged on that.
Church watched with Mae Lee as Dr. Bell changed the cold compresses once the heat from the child's body had warmed them. “Mae Lee,” Church said, “I'm glad you came directly to me without waiting. I wish you had a phone so you could have just called us. With your parents gone, don't you struggle with those children alone. When you need help, call on me or Liddie.”
“I did,” she whispered, “and I will. Thank you.”
After some time it was evident that Taylor was cooler and less restless. The ice packs had started to work even before the penicillin. As Dr. Bell took the child's temperature again,
a relieved look crossed his face. He turned to Mae Lee. “The fever is going down,” he said, then added, “but that doesn't mean it might not come up again. Be sure to keep him home a few days, and try to get him to take as much fluid as possible.”
“I'll keep an eye on them,” Church told Dr. Bell.
Once Taylor was well, he seemed to have forgotten about wanting to find his daddy. Mae Lee was grateful. The episode had finally confirmed in her mind what her divorce had put on paper, that she didn't want ever to lay eyes on Jeff Barnes again. Her child had been sick, and she had had to turn to a neighbor for help. If it hadn't been for Church Granger's willingness to oblige, Taylor might have died. She didn't know where Jeff Barnes was, but whatever the children might believe, he had spurned them, left his family to get by on their own without his help or caring or even, so far as she knew, curiosity. Biologically he might be their father but that was all. The children owed nothing to him but the fact of their birth, and she wasn't ever going to feel guilty again about them not having their father around, no matter what they might say. They would just have to get along without him.
Months before Mae Lee's daddy wrote that her mama had taken a turn for the worse, she had known that her mother was in poor health. In the summer of 1959, when her parents visited and stayed for some days while her daddy built a room onto the house for Taylor, she'd watched her mother's weak attempt to cook supper. “I'm so tired, Mae Lee, so tired,” she whispered. She held the edge of the kitchen table and eased her body into a chair. “I think you'd better finish cooking supper, honey,” she said.
Mae Lee had urged her mama to slow down. “You've been pushing yourself too hard. You've lost so much weight. Now that poor Grandma and Grandpa have passed on, you and Daddy need to move back so I can take care of you,” she begged.
But her mama had insisted on staying down in Low Country. She said Sam had planted a few things and she'd stay on with him until after the harvest. She'd wrestled with her
kidney ailment for quite some time, and would be all right, she said.
A short time later the news of her death came. Mae Lee left her children with Warren and Lou Esther and hurried down to Low Country to be with her daddy.
It was good that Warren brought the children down later. Despite her children's obvious discomfort and bewildered sadness, their presence at the ceremony helped their grand-daddy to handle his grief. It reminded him that there were still things to live for. Even so, when Warren urged him to return to Rising Ridge with them after the funeral, he was unwilling to go. Mae Lee didn't pressure her daddy to leave. He needed time alone, she reasoned, to unfold his grief.
She felt a part of the foundation of her life slipping away. Within the year, before her father could settle his wife's estate, he died suddenly from a heart attack. Mae Lee had recognized that when her mama died, her father seemed to lose his very will to live, yet knowing that still did nothing to prepare her for the blow. This time there was no point in bringing the children to the funeral. She left them with Lou Esther and went alone with Warren down to Low Country South Carolina to make arrangements for the funeral.
It was clear that her father had known his health was failing. He had left a key in an envelope addressed to her, a key he knew she would recognize as the key to his strongbox. He had not written even a hint to its whereabouts. Apparently he trusted his daughter to know that, as in the old days, the strongbox would be securely positioned in some spot behind a board or plank with some special marking that would hold
meaning only to an immediate member of his family. To find the strongbox Mae Lee had only to walk through the rooms of her grandparents' house and then point out a plank for Warren to take a crowbar to and pry loose. Inside the box, money was stuffed into small, brown paper bags and little cloth drawstring tobacco pouches. A rubber band held several insurance policies together.
In the several days that followed, Mae Lee went from room to room reluctantly placing household things and clothing into little piles. They were things she hated to leave behind, but, she told Warren, “I'm already wearing my mama's soul, I guess I don't need to add to the load.” Later, just before they started to leave, she found the corncob doll her mama had made for her when she was a little girl. She wrapped the doll in an embroidered pillowcase and took it home with her.
Several weeks after the funeral, Mae Lee sat staring out of the window while her cousin Warren explained what he had done to settle their grandparents' estate in the Low Country. He'd made sure all the land taxes had been paid and didn't foresee any problem in selling the land. It was all good farmland. Warren advised her to hold on to the house and several acres around it. He'd overheard talk on the train when he was working as a porter that land in that coastal area was becoming increasingly valuable. “You'll be able to pay the taxes. Counting the money they and your mama and daddy had hidden away in the house, and the insurance policies, plus what the land will bring when it's sold, you're gonna be pretty well-off, pretty well-off, Miss Mae Lee,” he said.