Her Own Place (9 page)

Aside from the money coming in from the children, the
farm was starting to turn a good profit. Mae Lee had started planting more and more summer vegetables. They were good cash crops. Hooker had built up a steady customer trade, including several small grocery stores that had standing weekly orders for the fresh produce in season. To get the orders ready for Hooker to deliver meant that Mae Lee, Hooker, and Maycie would have to start picking as soon as they had enough daylight to see. They were usually wet from the heavy dew before they were done, but the money they earned made it worthwhile.

Even so, Mae Lee had an uneasy feeling that bad was bound to happen before too long. Somehow, it just seemed to be the pattern of her life. When things were going really good for her, something would always pop up to take away her happiness.

The true reason for her concern was the fact that she hadn't heard from Taylor for several weeks. Then Taylor wrote to say that he had been wounded and was in the hospital in Hong Kong. In his letter Taylor didn't say how it happened. He simply wrote that the shrapnel in his right leg was mostly in the knee area and most of it wasn't too deep, and they thought they got it all.

Her daughters sought to comfort and assure her that Taylor was all right, and Taylor had written and said so himself. But Mae Lee couldn't seem to pull herself together. She was beside herself with worry.

In his next letter, however, Taylor was able to ease his mama's concerns. He wrote that he was really being well cared for. The nurses were wonderful, he said. They voluntarily went beyond the call of duty and spent their free time writing letters
for some of the wounded and cheering them up. He told her about what they did and how much they helped.

One of the nurses even added a note at the end of Taylor's letter. “Dear Mrs. Barnes, Please don't worry about your son. He's getting along fine, and making a swift recovery. Rest assured that he is receiving every attention, and we're all looking after him.”

Several weeks later Taylor wrote again, this time from a hospital in San Francisco. He would be there for the next four months, he said. Again he assured her that he was well taken care of. Thereafter, although Mae Lee wanted Taylor home as soon as possible, she worried less.

Mae Lee was glad that he was back in the United States again; she even thought of taking some money and going out to California to see him. Dallace and Annie Ruth, however, persuaded her to wait until Taylor was able to come home. “Mama, it's a long trip, and you'd just be in the way out there,” Dallace insisted, “and you know Taylor would much rather for you to wait until he's all well again.”

So Mae Lee waited for her son to come back to Rising Ridge that fall.

That summer found Mae Lee busy making plans for a wedding. Annie Ruth was engaged to Bradford Pierce, a young real estate developer from Greensboro, North Carolina. As excited as Mae Lee was about the wedding, she was even more so when she learned that her former classmate and longtime friend Ellabelle Ellis was moving from North Carolina back to Rising Ridge the week before the ceremony was scheduled.
Ellabelle wasn't moving back to the country, but would be living in town. It didn't matter to Mae Lee, as long as she was in the area. Ellabelle had an automobile, and could run out to see her anytime she liked.

Mae Lee scarcely gave Ellabelle a chance to unpack. “I'll help you do everything after the wedding,” she promised. “Annie Ruth is marrying into a pretty high-class family. From what I hear, her in-laws are well-off. It's going to take a pile of money and a lot of work to get this place in shape for a wedding.”

Ellabelle looked over the sunglasses resting on her nose. “Mae Lee, you've got to remember, the wedding is being held at the church, not at your house. The people coming here after the wedding will see only one thing, the food. We can get this place so prettied up, it'll make your fancy new in-laws wish they lived in the country.”

Mae Lee leaned back in her chair. “I do have some money I can lay my hands on, but I can't put too much into one wedding. I've got four daughters.” Mae Lee frowned as she looked across the nearby fields. “If I'm going to make anyone from town wish they lived here, I sure better help Hooker knock some of the witchweeds out of the fields, especially right near the house.”

Ellabelle pushed her glasses up on her nose. “All I can see is pretty red and yellow flowers.”

“Take your shades off, Ellabelle. I know it's been a long time since you lived in the country, but don't try to pretend you don't know that's witchweed blooming.” Mae Lee laughed, but then grew serious. “I see Maycie heading somewhere with a
hoe. It's mid-July, they ought to be caught up by now. Hooker is a good farmer, but he has a problem keeping the grass down. I really don't think he plows close enough.” She stood up. “I can't stand seeing poor Maycie working in this heat alone. I've got to go help her.”

“I thought you said Hooker Jones was working the land on the halves, Mae Lee,” Ellabelle said.

“He is working on the halves,” Mae Lee answered quietly.

“I bet you don't see white farmers out helping their sharecroppers hoe,” Ellabelle snapped.

“Maycie's ailing, Ellabelle,” Mae Lee said sadly. She looked across the fields, her mind far from the wedding preparations. “You know, Ellabelle,” she said, “after this year I'm never going to plant another cottonseed. I'm going to raise produce again. Hooker and I have turned a pretty good profit so far. As far as the rest of the land, I'll have Hooker plant soybeans. They say it's a good cash crop. At least we won't have to hoe and break our backs picking in the fall. You don't pick soybeans. I'll hire Church Granger to thresh them. He has a spanking brand-new combine. If I rent Warren's farmland that he never uses and plant that, along with what I have, I could come up with close to a hundred acres. Probably too much for Hooker to plant and plow. But I can always get one of Jonah Walker's sons to help out.”

“Let me tell you, woman, you are something!” Ellabelle declared. “I wonder what Jeff Barnes would think if he was still alive and could see how you've turned this farm into real money. I'd like to see his face.”

Mae Lee went inside. When she came out, she had on a
long-sleeved shirt, a thick layer of Vaseline on her face, and a straw hat in her hand. “Please say you'll be here early tomorrow morning to help me start getting things in shape for this wedding.”

Ellabelle shook her head. “I'll be here, Mae Lee.”

Mae Lee was starting to make a pot of coffee when Ella-belle opened the back door. “Rise and shine,” she called out, “We've got a busy workweek ahead of us. Maybe we should have asked Lou Esther to come over and help us.”

“She has her work cut out for her, so she'd better rest while she can; she's going to bake the cakes and pies.”

By midmorning Ellabelle was hanging the curtains, starched and ironed, over the clean windows as soon as Mae Lee finished washing them. She backed away from a window, beaming over their work. “We make a pretty good work team,” she proudly bragged.

“My girls won't know this place,” Mae Lee said after they had rearranged all the furniture. “They'll be coming in just before the wedding and leaving right afterwards. They have to get back to their jobs in New York. Taylor's the one I'll miss seeing.”

Taylor had written his mother from San Francisco that although he couldn't travel across the continent yet for the wedding, he was getting along much better and that he'd applied to and been accepted at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte for the fall term.

Mae Lee paged through a
Good Housekeeping
magazine with a tongue-dampened finger, thinking of the big fancy wedding
the local minister's daughter had. There had been flowers everywhere. Mae Lee could just see her pretty daughter with a long train on her wedding dress trailing behind her as she walked down the aisle holding on to the arm of her cousin Warren. She closed her magazine and watched Ellabelle pull her mama's mismatched flowered cups and saucers from the cabinets to be washed.

“You know, Ellabelle, I clean forgot about flowers. I've got to find some. When Annie Ruth talked about having flowers sent in I told her that Rising Ridge had a florist. I couldn't see her sending in way overpriced flowers I'd end up paying for.” She opened her magazine again. “On second thought,” she said, “the more I think about it, it might not be a bad idea to just gather up wildflowers and ferns and bank the church with them. I think I remember seeing something like that on television once. There are blooming wild roses everywhere, and the ferns and moss alongside Catfish Creek are the prettiest I've ever seen.” There was a faraway look in her eyes.

Ellabelle shook her head. “When I said to show your high-class future in-laws a side of country living, I didn't mean go to the opposite extreme. How could you get all the plants there and keep them fresh? You'll end up looking like you're too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash.”

A satisfied look crossed Mae Lee's face. “Hooker Jones and I could do it. Everybody said we couldn't make a go of the farm but we did. We can pull this off too.”

Ellabelle laughed. “Everybody also said, if you and Hooker weren't careful you'd forget and sell your front door steps and then wouldn't be able to get into the house.”

Mae Lee showed Ellabelle a picture of a garden wedding in the magazine. “I think it'll be nice if we serve and eat outside in the garden after the wedding,” she said.

Ellabelle stared at her friend in disbelief. “Have you lost your mind? I do believe the hot weather has dried up all the liquid in your brains, Mae Lee. It
would
be nice to eat in the garden, but you don't have a flower garden. And as far as eating outside goes, we'll have to, because we sure can't fit into this little place.”

Ellabelle made Mae Lee a tomato-and-onion sandwich, smoothing on enough mayonnaise to choke a horse, and poured a glass of lemonade for her. She looked at her friend. “Mae Lee, if it weren't for your swollen ankles, you would look the same as you did your last year in high school.” Ellabelle refilled her empty glass with lemonade. “If I'd had any inkling whatsoever that you were starting to marry off your daughters, I would have waited to move back to South Carolina until you were done. You should have asked the Lord to give you boy babies. Boys are easier.” She laughed. “Boys are easier.”

Mae Lee laughed, too. It was good that Ellabelle was back. She was a good friend. She had been the first one of her friends to marry and leave the farming community. Ellabelle's parents had always hated the sharecropping farming life. So, during the war, as soon as Ellabelle received the government insurance from her husband, her parents talked her into buying a house in North Carolina. Ellabelle always said her heart stayed in Rising Ridge, though. The air was different, she said; she missed the air of the piney woods.

Mae Lee had missed Ellabelle. She'd started getting along
better with her cousin Warren's wife, Lou Esther, in recent years, but they weren't companions. They didn't spend the better parts of the days talking. Still, Lou Esther was always there for her and the children.

On the day of the wedding she paid the children from nearly every family in the area to help Hooker Jones and his wife dig and cart in the ferns and moss from the moist banks of the creek. Lou Esther and Warren cut all the washed-out pink wild roses in the area, and didn't get a scratch on their hands and faces. They spread old pieces of canvas cloth and heavy burlap bags on the wood floors and banked the altar platform with the greenery and flowers. Elsie Rae, Lou Esther's sister down from New York, made and tied pink taffeta bows at just the right places. The old maid sisters, Honesty and Hattie Vee, who lived in the big, two-story house near the church, allowed every single red climbing rose they had to be cut and used in the church. So Mae Lee had her flower garden for the wedding after all. It was beautiful. She selected the Lord's Prayer and, at Ellabelle's request, Ave Maria to be sung at the ceremony. “They are perfect songs for a wedding,” she said. They set the stage for themselves as well as for Annie Ruth; the songs were just the right touch to make two old friends cry.

Standing and watching her daughter repeat sacred vows, Mae Lee felt the pain of her parents' death. The joys of seeing her children going to college and getting married were halved by the absence of her parents.

No one noticed that there was no flower garden for the reception at Mae Lee's house. The surrounding trees made a
bower of shade, and the neighbors' cut flowers made the yard appear to bloom.

The day after the wedding, Mae Lee and Ellabelle sat under the shade trees. Mae Lee soaked her feet in a small tub of warm water and Epsom salts. She looked in the direction of the Granger house. “Now that's a mansion if ever there was one,” she said, adding, “you probably won't believe this, Ella-belle, but back in May, as soon as their baby boy graduated from high school, Liddie Granger packed up and left Church Granger.”

“I don't believe it!”

“I knew you wouldn't.”

“You mean to tell me Liddie Granger left that fine house?” Ellabelle questioned.

“It's not the house I think about a woman leaving,” grunted Mae Lee. “It's Church Granger I think about. Everybody talked about what a wonderful father Church was, how he took his boys hunting and fishing and bought each one a new car the day they got a driver's license.” Ellabelle moved her chair so she would have a better view of the Granger's house.

“Not too many women can walk away like Liddie Granger did. It's going to be hard for the boys coming home and there's no mama in the house. She just up and left.” Mae Lee drew a long breath. “Liddie Granger will probably regret what she's done.”

Mae Lee never forgot the kindness Church Granger had shown her the night Taylor was so sick. During the months
and years that followed, he had helped her with various things. She didn't care what anybody said, Church was not only rich-rich, but was a kindhearted and caring man. Yet his wife hadn't found him so wonderful, or she wouldn't have taken up and departed so abruptly.