Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind (2 page)

G
O CALL THE
sheriff,” I told her as I turned back to the porch railing. I should’ve thought to get the tag number, but by then the car had roared down the street and turned right on Lincoln. A pall of black smoke drifted down in its wake.

Not hearing any movement behind me, I turned to see Lillian’s arms around the little bastard, his head against her white nylon uniform. He turned loose of the grocery sack long enough to wipe the sleeve of one arm across his running nose, smearing his glasses even more. It was enough to turn your stomach.

Lillian looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You can’t call the sheriff on this pore little chile. What he done to you?”

“
He’s
not done anything to me. Except be here. But I mean to report his mama.” I crossed my arms against my chest and climbed on my high horse. “She can’t just go abandoning a child on somebody’s doorstep. I’ll report her to the sheriff and the district attorney and anybody else I can think of. The idea of just dropping him off on me and leaving town. You’re mighty right I’m calling the sheriff. If they hurry, they can catch her on the interstate and bring her back. This child’s her responsibility, not mine!”

This tirade brought forth another wet snuffle from the little stray and another squinty-eyed glare from Lillian.

“Yessum, and I guess you want this whole thing on the front page of the
Abbotsville Press
, too, don’t you? You thought of that? You thought what all this town gon’ be talkin’ and whisperin’ and specalatin’ about? You thought about what yo’ preacher gon’ say? An’ all yo’ church people? An’ Miz Conover?”

Well no, I hadn’t. Lillian had been giving me good advice for as long as she’d been with me, some twenty years now. We knew each other inside and out, and neither of us hesitated to say what we thought. Even so, we both knew how far to go without overstepping ourselves, so I guess that made us friends as well. LuAnne Conover accused me of being too friendly with the help, said I’d encourage thieving, which would lead to back talk and then, if I wasn’t careful, to downright laziness. She said it’s better to have a businesslike arrangement and keep my distance. But LuAnne had never been able to keep help more than six months at a time, so I didn’t see her advice as all that sound.

Besides, Lillian was a capable, self-assured woman, unlike me, who had to ask Wesley Lloyd what I thought about most every subject. She had a lot of common sense, too, in spite of that gold tooth she had put in a few years back. In fact, I put more stock in what Lillian thought than I did LuAnne Conover, who had to tell anybody who’d listen how important her husband was. Leonard, a slump-shouldered, paunchy man who Wesley Lloyd never had much use for, was big in county politics. He had to run for half a dozen offices before he finally won one. Leonard’s name on the ballot got to be such a joke around town that we all felt sorry for him and elected him a few years ago to some clerical office in the courthouse annex just to get him out of sight. When Wesley Lloyd told me to vote for Leonard, he’d said the clerk of court didn’t have to be a lawyer or college educated or even
acquainted with the law. So since Leonard qualified on all counts, I’d cast my ballot for him and now I had to put up with listening to LuAnne tell how lawyers and judges depended on him, and how influential his decisions were. To hear her tell it, the county’s business wouldn’t get done without Leonard being there to keep everybody straight. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Wesley Lloyd had also said that Leonard couldn’t do much damage clerking in the courthouse, because he knew how to take instruction. LuAnne loved to bask in the glow of Leonard’s job and, even though I’d been guilty of the same thing with Wesley Lloyd’s position, I was now trying to get over it.

Lillian, however, had more sense than either of us. I studied what she’d said a few minutes, walking back to the railing and clenching it as my knees began to tremble. I knew she’d looked farther ahead than I’d been able to in my state of shock.

“All right,” I said. “Go wake up Deputy Bates.”

“I ain’t gon’ disturb that man’s sleep. He work all night an’ he need his rest.”

I heaved a dramatic sigh and went into the house myself. “Well, at least do one thing without an argument,” I said as I headed for the stairs. “Get that child inside before the whole town sees him.”

Deputy Coleman Bates was my boarder, one that Sam Murdoch had strongly urged me to take in after Wesley Lloyd’s demise. Not because I needed the money, because I didn’t. But because Sam had said he’d sleep better knowing I had a man in the house. “There’re a lot of wicked people out there, Julia,” he’d said. “And a woman alone, especially one with your assets, would be an attraction to every thief, and worse, in this town.” And he went on to point out that a deputy sheriff’s car parked in my driveway would be a deterrent that no alarm system could match. So I’d fixed up the back upstairs bedroom, the one that opens onto the sleeping porch, which connects to the back stair
case, and taken in a boarder. There was some comment about it at first, some speculation that Wesley Lloyd hadn’t left me as well off as people had assumed. But soon after this young man moved in, I traded in Wesley Lloyd’s Park Avenue, not wanting to be driving around in his deathbed, so to speak, for one of those little foreign coupes. Then I had the trim on the house touched up, and the drapes replaced in the living room, and on top of that, I made a sizable contribution to the church organ fund. That stopped the tongues wagging about my financial position.

I banged on Deputy Bates’s door and called to him to get up, we had some bad trouble downstairs. I had no qualms about disturbing his rest, for he’d been in my house for a full six weeks and this was the first time I’d had to call on him. He’d told me that he left the Atlanta police force for a quieter, less stressful job here in Abbotsville, but I figured a little stress now and then wouldn’t hurt him. So I banged on the door again.

I heard his feet hit the floor and a drawer crash open. The door sprang back, and Deputy Bates stood there in his boxer shorts, red and white stripes, with bleary eyes in his head and a dull gray pistol in his hand.

“What?” he asked, his eyes darting from side to side. “What’s the trouble?”

“It’s not that bad,” I said, pointing at the gun. “You probably won’t need to shoot anybody.” The one who needed it was already dead.

He blinked at me, then shook his head. “Let me get some clothes on,” he said.

I went back downstairs and out into the kitchen, where I heard Lillian bustling around. She had that abandoned child seated at the table with a huge slice of chocolate cake and a glass of milk in front of him. I took a deep breath and felt my mouth tighten into a sharp line.

“We’re not entertaining company, Lillian,” I said. “This
child’s moving on just as soon as I find somewhere to move him on to.”

“Chil’ren get hungry,” she said as she checked a pot on the stove. She wouldn’t look at me, so I knew she didn’t like the attitude I was taking. Too bad.

I ignored her and walked over to the table. I stood there, tapping my foot and looking at him as the anger in my heart turned my hands into fists. He slumped lower and lower in his chair until his face was about level with the second layer of the cake. The Winn-Dixie grocery bag was on the floor beside his chair.

“What do they call you, boy?” I demanded.

Tears flowed like a gushing stream out from under the smeared glasses, but he made no attempt to wipe them away. He held his hands in his lap and just sat there bawling without making a sound.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” I said. “I asked you a simple question, so sit up straight and answer it.”

His scrawny shoulders started heaving then, though he made an effort to pull himself up in the chair. Lillian decided to intervene then, though the Lord knows it didn’t take much for her to make that decision.

“Junior,” she said to me, and sharply, too. “They calls him Junior an’ that ain’t no way to talk to no baby.”

I rolled my eyes at the thought of a nine-year-old baby. I knew I shouldn’t be talking so hatefully, but every time I looked at that child I wanted to do some damage to somebody, and I couldn’t reach the one who deserved it.

“Well, he won’t be called Junior around here,” I announced. “Not in this house, he won’t. It’s illegal, and as long as you’re in my house,” I said, turning back to the little sniveler, “which won’t be for long, you’ll be called Lloyd.”

“Yes’m,” he mumbled, sounding like he was underwater. Which he was.

“Okay, Miss Julia,” Deputy Bates said, coming into the kitchen. As he walked through the sunshine streaming in the window, his gold-filled watch and the fine blond hair on his arms put me in mind of a Pawley’s Island lifeguard, suntanned and sparkling with light, I’d once taken notice of. He’d put on a pair of blue jeans over the boxer shorts I’d previously been greeted with, and he was wearing cowboy boots, for the Lord’s sake. Still, he made a fine figure of a man to be so young, with all those muscles filling out his white T-shirt. Nothing in his hands, I was happy to note. “What’s the problem?”

“This,” I said, pointing a finger at the child, whose blotched face screwed up again and overflowed with another torrent.

“How you doin’, Bud,” he said, nodding to the child, ignoring the river of tears and turning to Lillian with a grin. “Got any leftover coffee?”

“Pourin’ right now,” she said, her face beaming like it did whenever a man was around to feed. This one, in particular. She’d taken to Deputy Bates from the first minute he’d walked into the house in his dark blue uniform complete with badge, nightstick, pistol, walkie-talkie, and I-don’t-know-what-all. You know how some women are.

I rolled my eyes again and sat down across the table from Deputy Bates. “If everybody’s been served,” I said after Lillian had set a steaming cup in front of him and put a fork in the child’s hand, “I need some help here.”

“Tell me,” Deputy Bates said, and I did.

“That’s some story,” he said as I finished with an indignant shake of my head. “You didn’t know anything about this?” He indicated Little Lloyd with a lift of his eyebrows.

“Nobody did! Not one soul. Did they, Lillian?”

“No’m,” she mumbled, stirring a pan of corn like it needed all her attention.

“Did you know anything, Lillian?” I demanded, half rising from the chair. “Did you?” Fear and shame rushed over me like an ocean wave. I felt rolled over, turned around, and left with the gritty taste of sand in my mouth.

“Jus’ talk, you know how peoples talk.” She wouldn’t look at me as she busied herself with moving pots around on the stove.

“You mean,” I croaked, my hand on my heart, “that people
knew
what Wesley Lloyd was doing all this time, while I…I had no idea?”

I couldn’t take it in, the thought that I’d been walking around town, going to church, the hairdresser’s, the Winn-Dixie, holding my head up in oblivious pride while everybody else had known my husband—the banker, the church elder, the moneymaker, the leader of men—was philandering with a floozie. Faces of my friends, neighbors, church members, merchants—the paperboy, for the Lord’s sake—flashed through my mind, all whispering, watching, tittering, and gloating. Some of them laughing at me, others feeling sorry for me. I didn’t know which was worse.

I
SANK BACK
in my chair with a sinking feeling in my soul. “What in the world am I going to do?” I whispered.

“Let’s think this out,” Deputy Bates said. “First of all, the Department of Social Services can take Bud here. They’ll look after him for a few days while we try to get a line on his mother. If we can’t locate her, they’ll find a foster home for him.” He stopped and ran a finger across his mouth as he thought. “I guess there’d be a hearing when they do locate her. She could be declared unfit, maybe, and then he’d be a ward of the state. You’d have to testify, you know.”

The child was watching him as closely as he could out of those glasses, taking tiny bites of the cake between hiccups. But when Deputy Bates said “ward of the state,” Little Lloyd put his fork down and hung his head again. Lillian walked over to the table, the heels of her shoes flopping on the linoleum. She stood there with her hands on her hips as she looked me straight in the eye.

“You do all that, Miss Julia,” she said, “an’ ever’body know what they been ’spectin’ be the gospel truth. You get the law an’ the courts an’ all in this, and it’ll come out in the public, ever’ bit of it!”

She was right. I could see myself telling a judge just how Wesley Lloyd Junior Springer had been sprung on me. The whole town would be slapping their knees. Wesley Lloyd had been too sharp a businessman for people not to enjoy his fall from grace. Even if he was dead and buried. As for me, I’d been too proud of him, and of myself, to be able to escape the eyes cutting in my direction as I passed, or the small, knowing smiles as people put up a pretense of the respect I was accustomed to.

“What am I going to do?” I whispered again.

“Well,” Deputy Bates said, “I can put out some unofficial feelers, see if we can locate her that way. If she’ll take him back, then that’ll be the end of it. If she won’t, or I can’t find her, you can decide then whether to get social services involved. Not much you can do about it going public then, ’cause reporters watch the docket for interesting cases. And this would be interesting.”

“You could look for her unofficially?” I asked, feeling some hope. “I mean, so nobody’d know why you were looking?”

He rubbed his hand over his hair and twisted his mouth. “I can try, but I can’t promise much. I could do this, though,” he said, sitting up in his chair. “I could sure nose around here, check arrest records, voting lists, run her name through DMV, see if there’re any other, I mean, any relatives at all in town. Just do a general background check to be sure what she’s claiming is true.”

“Oh, it be true,” Lillian said, looking directly at Wesley Lloyd’s spitting image. “’Less Mr. Springer had a brother don’t nobody know about.”

“Lillian, please,” I moaned. Then with a sudden thought, the answer came to me. “That’s it!” I said. “We’ll say this child is Mr. Springer’s nephew! We’ll say he’s his brother’s, or his sister’s, son, come to visit me. That’ll do it, and it’d explain the resemblance, too.” I laughed at the simplicity of it.

“Uh-uh.” Lillian pursed her mouth, shaking her head. “That
ain’t gon’ work. Ever’body knowed the Springer fam’ly ever since before Mr. Springer’s gran’daddy give the land for that church ’cross the street. Mr. Springer growed up in this town and never left it ’cept for the time he went to that Davisum Collidge. Nobody’d believe he had a brother nor a sister, ’less they figure it was his daddy what had hisself a yard chile.”

I hung my head and moaned again, knowing she was right. Wesley Lloyd had no cousins, either. He’d been a loner since the day he was born, and in this town that kept up with kinships going back a hundred years or more, the old men in the barbershop and on the bank corner would be telling and retelling any attempt to make a lie jump a generation.

“I don’t want this whole town whispering about me, making things even worse than they are,” I started, as humiliation bowed my head again. “Right now, I don’t much care what they say about Mr. Springer, but anything they say about him makes me a laughingstock. I won’t be able to hold my head up in this town again.”

I felt my throat close up as tears blurred my eyes. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and covered my face, trying to get myself back under control. Every time I closed my eyes, that child’s image flickered in my mind. And when I opened them, there he was in the flesh staring at me out of those fishbowl glasses. Breathing through his mouth, too. What had I done to deserve this?

“Miss Julia,” Deputy Bates said, “it won’t be that bad. Seems to me you’re to be commended if you decide to keep this little boy until we find his mother. Besides, you haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”

He was trying to be kind, so I managed a quavery smile at his innocence. “That’s not the way it works, Deputy Bates,” I said. “Don’t you know it’s always the wife’s fault if a man strays? Or drinks too much? Or gambles? Or goes bankrupt? There’s
always something the wife’s doing, or not doing, that pushes a man over the brink. That’s just the way it is.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“It’s the truth, and not much to be done about it, either. Especially now that Pastor Ledbetter is doing a series on how the welfare of the family hinges on the wife and mother.” I took in a deep breath and occupied my hands with folding my handkerchief in pleats. “So. I might as well get used to the fact that all the telephone lines will be buzzing with gossip and rumors. Everybody’ll be dredging up anything they can think of to excuse Wesley Lloyd and blame me.”

“Womens be the worst when it comes to ’scusin’ a man,” Lillian said.

“That’s right,” I agreed, “and it’s because they think if they’re good enough, their husbands won’t do anything wrong. As if that had anything to do with it. They can’t admit that a man’ll do whatever he wants, regardless of what kind of wife he has.” I sniffed and dabbed at my eyes, the injustice of it all cutting to the quick. That child’s watery eyes, so like Wesley Lloyd’s, watched every move I made. Warily, as befitted his situation, I thought.

I made one last swipe at my eyes and squared my shoulders, self-pity giving way to a flood of anger. “And I’m living proof of it, because none of this is my fault! I haven’t done one blessed thing wrong, because I did everything, I mean everything, just the way Wesley Lloyd wanted me to. Why, I didn’t walk out of this house without his approval. I didn’t express an opinion or even ask a question without looking to him first. The Bible says, ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands,’ and that’s what I did, and this is the thanks I get for it! This whole mess is his fault, and he’s the one who ought to suffer for it.”

I could feel strength and determination coursing through me
as I spoke. My back got straighter and I didn’t feel like crying anymore. Lillian was squinting at me as the spoon she was holding dripped creamed corn on the floor. Little Lloyd stared at me, his mouth gaping open, and Deputy Bates smiled a little uncertainly.

“I know what I’m going to do,” I said.

“Uh-oh,” Lillian said.

“I can’t wait to hear it,” Deputy Bates said.

Little Lloyd sniffed and wiped his nose with his napkin.

“Lillian, get this child a Kleenex,” I said.

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” I went on, feeling my way as I talked. “The first thing I’m
not
going to do is call any of those child welfare agencies. Keeping this child is my cross to bear, even though I don’t deserve it, and it’s the only way to get back at Wesley Lloyd. He hid this child for a decade, but I’m not hiding him. And I’m not going to hide my face, either. None of this is my fault, so why should I act like it is? There’s not a reason in the world. They’re going to talk no matter what I do, so I’m going to give them something to talk about. I’m going to hold my head up if it kills me, and I’m not going to protect Wesley Lloyd Springer from the consequences. This is his son, and everybody’s going to know it, without any guessing. I’m going to flaunt this child before the whole town, so let the cookies crumble!”

“Uh, Miss Julia,” Deputy Bates said, “how’s that going to affect Mr. Springer?”

“Why, Deputy Bates, don’t you believe in eternal life? You must not be a Presbyterian, because we believe the dead live on in one place or the other. And, believe me, Wesley Lloyd Springer’s suffering now wherever he is. Nothing was more important to him than his good name, and I’ve lived my whole life trying to come up to his high standards. Well, I’m through doing that. I’m
taking this child with me everywhere I go, and I’m going to make sure they know who his father was. Let them make what they will of it!”

“You thinkin’ that’s a good idea?” Lillian asked with more than her usual skepticism.

“You might ought to consider how that’ll affect this little boy,” Deputy Bates suggested. “I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but it might be pretty hard on him.” He shrugged. “Just something to think about.”

The child’s head had been swiveling from one to the other of us as we talked, and I wondered how much he knew or understood about his precarious situation. Not much, I decided, as I noted the dazed or addled or, have mercy, half-witted expression on his face.

I looked at him long and hard, taking in the streaked and splotched face, the crooked bow tie and glasses, the scrawniness of him, and felt my stomach churn.

“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “And he has some choices. He can stand up for himself and face them down alongside of me. Or he can hide in a closet until his mother comes back. Or maybe he’d prefer to be turned over to the sheriff and social services.” I leaned across the table to catch the child’s eye. “You don’t want to go to an orphanage, do you, boy? Answer me that.”

“No’m.” His shoulders shook with the effort to keep from crying.

“See there, he knows what’s good for him,” I said, feeling a sense of triumph now that I’d decided on a course of action.

“Miss Julia, quit scarin’ that chile,” Lillian rebuked me. “Eat yo’ cake, honey, an’ don’t pay her no mind.”

“And you quit undermining me,” I told her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Deputy Bates, you find out everything you can about this boy and his mother, but keep it quiet or some do-gooder official’ll be on my doorstep wanting to take over. Lil
lian’ll be helping me here with the child, and Little Lloyd!” He jumped as I turned to him. “You are Mr. Springer’s only surviving child—Lord, I hope—and you’re proud of who you are. You understand that?”

He nodded his head miserably, but I didn’t have time for pity.

“I hope you know what you doin’, ’cause you makin’ trouble for yo’self and ever’body else, now,” Lillian accused. “Mr. Springer didn’t have no legal chil’ren, an’ you might be makin’ a bigger mess than you already got.”

“He didn’t have two legal wives, either,” I snapped back. “But I’m stuck with what he did have, and I have to make what I can of it. This child is Mr. Springer’s son, and sooner or later, credit will come to me for going above and beyond my Christian duty, and a few extra stars in my crown wouldn’t surprise me, either!”

“Well, maybe,” Lillian allowed, wiping her hands on a dish towel and trying not to roll her eyes. She knows how I feel about that.

“You’re a pistol, Miss Julia,” Deputy Bates said with a wide grin. “I thought Atlanta was hairy, but this’ll be something to see.”