Authors: Carolyn Wall
“If we had a rabbit, we’d eat it ourselves.”
She laughs. “’Pends on how bad you want ’em to live. ’Course, they also miss they mama’s lovin’. Will’m don’t know how to be a mama unless you show him.”
“Miz Hanley, I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t a good hand at being a ma’am.”
“You took care of your girl the best you could. When she ran off, it weren’t ’cause you didn’t love her. And you done a pure wonder with that boy.”
I don’t want this wound opened, and I hate that what’s under the skin is so raw. “I wouldn’t count on that.”
Miz Hanley pinches her lips together. “Well, I’m goin’ to tell you now, like I shoulda tol’ you then.”
“I wasn’t your responsibility,” I say.
“I loved you like you was my own,” she says. “You an’ your pappy was good people all your lives. Someday before I die, I gon’ tell you more truths than your head can hold. Right now, you need to know how to do for them pups.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
She fiddles with the top two buttons on her dress, and Junk and I both draw back, but she laughs. Her neck is wattly and her chest is sunken. “You take one a them cubs,” she says, “and you lay it belly down on your chest.
Here
. Put a blanket ’round both of you. They feel your heartbeat. Yo’ breathin’. They think you’re their mammy, they might stay on this earth.”
I nod and change the subject. “Junk, it’s time I cleaned out my cellar. I’d be pleased if you’d help.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all, Miz Livvy,” he says.
Miz Hanley is buttoning her dress.
“Well, then,” I say. “We’ll start as soon as you’re free.”
“I’ll come on up when I’ve finished choppin’ for Aunt Pinny Albert.”
His mama reaches up and pats his hand.
I thank her again and drive home to make lunch for Ida and the cubs. But Ida’s asleep on her cot, her pipe having burned out in a saucer. Her soup is cold, but the buttered bread will be all right in its cloth. In the house, I put away the jam and throw crumbs to the chickens.
Junk comes in the middle of the afternoon. He’s got a wide broom, a mop, and a gallon bucket of some kind of cleaner. For the mildew, he says. I unlock the cellar door and light a lamp.
“Everything goes,” I say, following him down. “But there’s one thing, Junk—my pap had a couple of big black books, and we need ’em badly if Will’m’s to keep the cubs alive.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This cellar’ll make a fine storeroom,” I say bravely, but the farther we descend the less certain I feel.
I pull on the light chain, and the shadows retreat, but I’m glad Junk leaves the extra lamp burning. Love Alice looks down from the doorway.
“I’ll make us tea in a while,” I call up. “And there’s a bit of sip-pin’ whiskey for Junk when we’re done. Lord knows he’ll need it.”
The whiskey is a new turn of events for me. It riles Ida, who says it’s another rung on my ladder to hell, but a drop of it puts me to sleep when nothing else will. Right now, the important thing is to clear out this place. I lift a pair of cages from their pegs.
“Go on and take down those old shelves,” I tell Junk.
They fall apart in his hands.
I use wire cutters on the dog runs and then leave him to scrub the four high windows that will let in light when the snow thaws. I tuck up my skirt, and take a hammer to the wall that separates the room that once was my pap’s. After an hour, we’re down to the center beam. We leave it, because, as Junk says, it holds the place up. He remarks that there’s hardly any water seepage, and I ought to think about putting in a coal furnace as it would keep us warmer, but I say I’ve no way to pay for furnace nor coal. Junk says ain’t that the truth.
There are boxes of powder that have turned to solid, and bottles of crystallized liquid. Rolls of tubing and tins of syringes, dried and rusty. He piles it all at the foot of the steps, says he’ll bury it later. In the end, I’d be more help if I got out of his way, and I hand him the hammer so he can get on with the work.
Upstairs, Love Alice and I drink our tea with a drop of whiskey and a lot of sugar.
She says, “Spirits is good for our throats in this kind of weather.”
Presently the door bell jingles, and I get up to see, but it’s Will’m coming through. He pecks my cheek and puts his books on the table, seems surprised that the cellar door’s open. I tell him he can go down, see what the hammering’s about. He comes back up with a look on his face that says I should have waited till
he was home, or at least told him my plan. He never gave me trouble about the locked door. I forget that when a body goes and leaps off his own private cliff, he leaves behind the people who knew him, and all they can do is stand there and mourn.
At least the cubs are familiar to him, and he goes to their box and lifts out one and then the other. He doesn’t say much, but sits and strokes the fuzz that now covers their hindquarters. Junk lumbers up the stairs, puffing, carrying great armloads of stuff. He’s already made several trips to the barn, where he’s stacking the reusable wood.
Will’m rocks the cubs and croons to them.
Love Alice sips her tea. She’s saying something—that she hitches a ride over to Buelton once a week, telling her truths to the Ladies Club there, and she and Junk hope to make enough money to pay rent on a house of their own soon.
Presently Ida comes across, carrying the empty soup bowl and her Bible.
“I could hear the racket clear to my place,” she says, “and I knew you was up to something bad.”
She stands at the top of the stairs in her slippers and shawl, clucking her tongue and wanting to know what’s going on down there that’s woke a righteous woman from her sleep. She shouts passages from the Book of Job while Junk hauls the dog runs and smaller cages up and out into the yard and scrubs them down with soap and water. He thinks they can be traded or sold. Ida scurries into the grocery every time he comes through the kitchen, then rushes back to peer down the stairs.
“You-all are goin’ to hell!” she hollers.
“How’s that, Miss Ida?” Love Alice chirps.
Ida sniffs. “This is all very upsettin’.”
“It’s my house,” I tell her. “And it needed cleaning.”
“Olivia, you are like the rich man, and the past is the eye of the needle.”
Be that as it may. Junk has ripped out the mildewed wood. The one great disappointment is that I have not found Pap’s doctoring books. I realize now that those books have become my personal crusade. I recall watching him make notes on the pages. Maybe it’s his handwriting I need most—something to tell me he was really here.
There’s only one other place the books might be—maybe Ida packed them up with her things when she moved to the cabin.
When Junk and Love Alice are gone, I go downstairs one more time. It’s not a bad place, this cleaned-out room. Right now, it’s colder than a well rope, but in summer it might be a fine spot for me and the boy to set a table, pull up our chairs, and eat a cool supper.
Will’m, at the top of the stairs, says nothing.
Ida, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped talking. “God will look in your heart and see how cruel you have been, Olivia,” she says. “Now fix me my supper—’fore a God-fearing woman starves to death.”
I lock the cellar door. I can’t help it.
That night, just before dark, I hear a volley of shots from the hill. Will’m covers the cubs, and, across the table, he looks at me. I’ll bet money, marbles, and chalk that at least one more wolf is dead.
I
t’s been twenty-four hours since Junk and I were in the cellar. Will’m’s gone off to school, riding the bus beneath a threatening sky, and Ida sits at the table, eyeing the cubs’ box and spooning up her breakfast. I’m tacking a quilt, a pale pink one with great dark roses. I’ve embroidered stems in a satin stitch, with leaves and thorns and curlicues. Although I’ve got two hanging in the grocery window, it’s been a while since I sold a quilt.
I think out loud. “I’ve given them sulfur and molasses. I’ve tried every damn thing I can think of—all that Dooby’s given me.”
“Well, they’re not getting my oats,” says Ida. Thunder rolls, shaking the house like a tin cookie sheet. The rain beats hard against the window. Such a storm is almost unheard of this time of year, and it’ll either melt the snow or freeze a new layer of ice over top of it all. Now that I’ve begun cleaning, I don’t seem able to stop. I put down my work and take my cape from its hook.
“Where are you going?” Ida twists in her chair.
“To your house.”
“What for?”
Ida’s eyes are wild, but I am pulling on my boots. I go out the back door, into the rain. She leaves her breakfast and follows me.
“I want to find Pap’s books!” I shout over the rain. “I think you may have them.”
I open the door and stand in the musty room, dropping my cape and shaking out my hair, still in its night braid. Boxes are stacked everywhere, sour and sagging with dampness, and splitting at the corners.
“You can’t touch my things without me saying so!”
“Then you’d better give me permission,” I tell her, “’cause that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
I pull the first box to the middle of the room, on a colorless rag rug that butts up against the iron footboard of Ida’s bed. The box has gathered years of moisture, and inside, wrapped in newspaper, are a half dozen chipped porcelain figures, a dictionary, and seven cups with no saucers. The next is a box of dresses I’ve never seen her wear. Hairpins, tins of buttons, dried roots wrapped in waxed paper, empty snuff jars, an old nightgown.
“Why do you keep all this stuff?” I ask her.
In her filthy gown, Ida sits primly on the edge of her bed. “My things are none of your business.”
She’s right, of course. This is her property. It’s so sinfully little to show for a lifetime—three blue dinner plates, a faded evening gown, worn-out boots, a tarnished silver pitcher. Two of the boxes hold nothing but crumpled paper. I stack them outside the door.
“That pitcher was a wedding present,” she says.
I can’t imagine Ida as a bride. I sit back and put my hands in my lap. “Why did you ever marry Pap?”
“To get away from my own, if you got to know,” she said. “He was a preacher man, like some kind of joke. Tate—” She paused. “Tate promised he’d take care of me for all his life. You see how he lied?”
I wrap everything and put it back, stack the boxes against the walls. “He didn’t lie to you, Ida. He couldn’t see his own death.”
“His death was your fault, Olivia!” she shouts after me. “And you owe me an apology.”
I turn in the rain and the muddy snow. “I apologize for not first getting your permission to look through your things,” I call back to her. “But I’m mad as hell at you for throwing away Pap’s things!”
“Why? What good were they?”
“They were his! And now they should be mine!” I shield my face with my hand. The rain has turned cold and it stings my cheeks. “There’s nothing left to tell me what he was like! Or—or who I am.”
“I can tell you who you are.”
“You never
stop
telling me!”
She comes in the house behind me, sits down to her cold porridge. “Make us a fresh pot of tea, Olivia.”
“Go home, Ida,” I say. “Put on a dry nightgown. I’ll bring you coffee later.”
I take off my wet cape and go through the hall to the bathroom, pause at the same mirror Saul looked into while he shaved every morning, all the years he was with me. Here, in the glass, is the woman I’ve become. Great dark blue eyes, a set chin, a once-pretty curve of jaw, a mouth that has not worn lipstick since the night at the juke joint when I told a man named Percy that Pauline was his. It’s no wonder that, sixteen years later, my Pauline did damn near the same. I never warned her, never said,
Pauline, here’s what happens if you go down to the juke joint and come home with a baby. It’ll change your life, and you can’t ever go back
.
I come out of the bathroom. Ida is still sitting, wrapped in her blanket that’s dripping on the floor.
“I told you to go home,” I say.
“I can’t. That ugly nigra is banging on the back door.”
“What?”
“That man from Rowe Street.”
I open the back door. Junk Hanley stands on the porch. His shoulders are hunched, and he holds his hat in his hands so that rain splashes on his head and runs down his face.
“Junk, come in here and get warm, have coffee—”
He looks past me at Ida and shakes his head. “No, ma’am, not just now. I come to tell you sumpin’.”
“What is it? Is Love Alice all right?”
His eyes are full of sorrow. “Miss Livvy—Mr. Harris’s wife—she’s comin’ to the end. She was scarcely breathin’ around sunrise. And now he’s askin’ for you.”
I
scribble a note for Will’m on the back of a paper bag—fry an egg, and another for Ida. An orange apiece, a cup of tea. Brown bread, but not too much jam.
I squeeze the remains of the milk and honey into the pups’ mouths, impatient to be away. Then Junk and I pile in the truck and set out in the rain that’s turned to sleet. We slide partway, and it’s a wonder we don’t end up in the ditch or the river, for my heart’s in my mouth and I drive like a mad person. On Main Street I run up on the curb, and we get out and go into the hotel.
There’s no one at the desk. Junk says, “I’m gon’ make sure them Ruses get home in this weather. I’ll check on you-all later.”
I hoped Wing would be in the kitchen, but he’s not. I take the front stairs, but he’s not on the second floor. Nor is he on the top floor, either, nor in the public bathrooms. Fool, I tell myself—his wife’s on her deathbed, where else would he be? It’s the one thing I’ve dreaded, seeing Miz Grace Harris, but it cannot be helped.
The side hall that leads to their parlor and bedroom is dark. I dare not call out, for I don’t want to wake anything, nor send up so much as a particle of dust. I feel as if I’m trespassing on a carpet of eggs. I peek around the parlor door, but the room is empty.
Across the hall, he’s sitting in a cane-back rocker by Miz Grace’s bed, and his back is to me.
The room is papered in faded rosebuds and decorated with creamy curtains and embroidered pillow slips—likely done at the hand of the woman who seems lost, now, in the big bed. Her face is mostly bone, and her cornsilk hair is spun in ringlets. An odd sound comes from her throat when she breathes, the same way Will’m sounded when he took the whooping cough. I step in, feeling large and clumsy. My hat is in my hands.