The Right Thing (21 page)

“Mr. George has a harelip.” Aunt Too-Tai looked tired.

“What's a harelip?” I couldn't imagine how George got along with a lip made of hair.

“The roof of his mouth has a hole in it. That makes it hard for him to speak or to eat, but that's no reason for you to stare.” She picked up her fork again and pointed it at the blue bowl of okra. “Now pass him some of that. We'll have no more rudeness at my table.”

Chastised, I passed the okra. We ate in silence, but inside I was seething. It was George's fault, surely—Aunt Too-Tai's being so unhappy with me, the ruination of my previously wonderful morning. Everything had been fine until he sat down with us, him and that scar. I spooned fried corn into my sullen mouth. It was delicious. Why did Aunt Too-Tai let him in the house, anyway? And so my thoughts went in a hateful round-song of self-pity and blame until dinner was almost done.

Perhaps it was the breeze, suddenly shifting to the south and wafting through the screen door, or maybe up until then the omnipresent aroma of smoked pork products had overlaid the smell of something burning, but my aunt's head lifted, her eyes narrowing. She sniffed the air.

“Do you smell that?” she asked, sharp and apprehensive. George stood up from the table, knocking his chair to the floor.

“You didn't say excuse me,” I accused before I remembered George didn't talk.

Aunt Too-Tai jumped up. George was already halfway across the backyard, those long flamingo legs pumping in a ground-covering stride. My aunt was running down the steps before I could speak another word.

“Wait!” I called after them from the kitchen table, my mouth full of biscuit and slack with amazement. Why were they running for the barn? In a tempest of curiosity, I ran outside, too. George and Aunt Too-Tai were nowhere to be seen, but a thin blanket of smoke lay over the backyard. Through the half-open barn door the cat streaked across the grass, an orange ghost in the hazed sunlight, its tail electric in alarm. The hogs squealed and milled in their pen. My eyes smarting, I slipped through the barn door in search of my aunt.

Inside was all choking smoke, lit with an eerie glow. The manure spreader was in flames just outside the back door of the barn.

“Aunt Too-Tai?” I tripped over the pitchfork and fell to the hay-covered floor. As I struggled to my knees, a strong arm grabbed me by the back of my shirt, yanking me upward and swinging me effortlessly over a bony shoulder. My forehead bounced on the back of my aunt's overalls as she ran with me through the barn, coughing. She banged the barn door open with her hip. My chin slammed the ground when Aunt Too-Tai flung me under the sweet gum tree.

“Stay there.” My aunt was already racing back to the barn. “George!” Her scream was broken with smoke. “Don't do it!” In the next instant the tractor's engine caught with a harsh growl. Coughing, gasping like a fish on a riverbank, I sucked the smoky air deep into my lungs.

“George!” Aunt Too-Tai sounded terrified.

Then, with a screech of straining gears, the tractor hove into view from around back of the barn, pulling the flaming manure spreader behind it. High on the wooden seat of the tractor, George's face was a scarred mask as he steered the tractor in a slow arc toward the pasture, down the rutted track leading away from the barn.

“George!” my aunt called. The tractor lurched onward while the fire in the manure spreader grew huge, fed by moldy hay, smoldering tires, and engine grease. George was hunched low over the steering wheel, the sleeve of his denim shirt smoking where a spark had caught. My aunt ran behind in the tall grass, calling for him to stop, but he held the tractor to its grinding track, hauling the burning manure spreader away from the barn.

George's shirtsleeve was in flames now. At the last minute he threw himself off the tractor just before the gate to the pasture and rolled when he hit the dirt, but one of the big wheels ran over his work boot before he could yank his foot out of the way. Driverless, the tractor shuddered on and knocked the old iron gate off the hinges, crushing it to rusted ruin while rambling onward into the pasture. Bob the mule galloped to the far end of the field near the pond, honking defiance as though the flaming manure spreader had been sent by Beelzebub to come and take him to hell.

“George!” Aunt Too-Tai stumbled down the path to where he was just trying to get to his feet. When she took his arm across her shoulders to help him get off the ground, George cried a wordless moan of pain. He didn't put any weight on his right foot.

Under the sweet gum, I stood up and something fell out of my shorts pocket.

The little matchbook.

I was a dead child: even Baby Jesus couldn't help me now. I closed my trembling hand on the matchbook and stuffed it deep in my pocket. My aunt and George were almost to the backyard, and the hogs were shrieking and trying to climb out of their pen. Down in the pasture the manure spreader was a bonfire, the tractor smoking now, too. Around it a field of flames wavered glass-blue on a black plain of ash, but the barn was safe and the fire would eventually burn itself out in the water-meadow. My great-aunt and George limped past me on their way to the back door, smoke-begrimed and exhausted, and I burst into tears.

In the kitchen, Aunt Too-Tai took care of George.

She cut what was left of the denim shirt off him, washing and salving the burn. George's arm was spalled and blackened, the skin raw, the smell sickening, like nothing I'd ever known. I stood in the corner by the icebox, still crying, and tried not to draw attention. After dosing him with a BC Powder, Aunt Too-Tai helped George out to the Chevrolet and drove forty miles back to Jackson, to the closest hospital that would treat Negroes. This time, I rode in the front. George lay across the back seat, his broken ankle on a bed pillow, cradling his burned arm across his undershirt and apart from that solitary cry he never made a sound. When we got to the University Hospital, my aunt and I sat in the colored waiting room with George until a harried resident came, put him in a wheelchair, and took him away.

Deep in the pocket of my shorts, I clutched the matchbook in my sweaty palm.
You must be more responsible, Annie.
Oh, a great weight of responsible descended with giant, thundering treads on my soul until I thought I would suffocate with it. All that long Sunday night in the waiting room, my aunt didn't call my parents. She never accused me of having set the manure spreader on fire. She didn't have to, for the cast of her mouth and the fact she wouldn't look at me buried me deep in the pit of responsible. Unable to bear her silence, I pretended to read a
National Geographic
while Aunt Too-Tai watched the big double doors for George to come out. When he did—on crutches, white gauze swathing his dark arm—we drove back to the farm in Monday's dawn.

George, Aunt Too-Tai—they were responsible for each other, and I was responsible for a burned manure spreader, a dead tractor, and the new scar George would wear for the rest of his life, the limp he would have until the day he died.

I spent the rest of that summer in Aunt Too-Tai's gloomy parlor on the spavined sofa, reading books she would hand me wordlessly before she went out to work on her farm, without the tractor and single-handed until George could come back. I read the Bible mostly, but also several severe, old-fashioned books about heedless children who came to spectacularly dreadful ends. When we had exhausted these instructional tracts, she told me to move on to the antediluvian set of encyclopedias for a little light reading. The day I got to the
O
volume, at last I was allowed outside and given various menial chores—but only under her watchful eye. Aunt Too-Tai gave up smoking.

Near the end of my visit we had a talk, Aunt Too-Tai and I. It would be time for me to return home soon, and we'd never discussed the events of that day. I had to find out if she'd forgiven me, as well as whether she was going to tell my mother.

It was late, I remember, and the air in the house was sleeping off the day's heat as though the relentless sun had beaten it half to death. Taking a deep breath to fortify myself, I knocked on the door to the room that Aunt Too-Tai and I had shared all that summer.

“Come in,” she called. Wearing her old housecoat, Aunt Too-Tai was sitting on her bed and had just finishing brushing her iron-gray hair in front of her pier glass. Her faded blue eyes met mine in the mirror. “What is it?”

“I'm sorry,” I muttered, dropping my gaze. “I'm so sorry about Mr. George. I didn't mean to do it.”

Turning from the long mirror, Aunt Too-Tai patted the bed, inviting me to sit down on it beside her. “It's a terrible thing, Annie—doing something you know you can never take back. I know you're sorry, child.”

I swallowed hard. “Are you going to tell my mother?”

Her face was grave. “Do I need to? I have a feeling that you've already learned an important lesson, maybe the most important lesson you'll ever learn. No matter how sorry we are, we still have to take responsibility for what we do. Forever. I don't think you'll forget it, will you?”

“No, ma'am.” I shook my head. “But it's hard, Aunt Too-Tai.” My chest burned, on fire with the longing to say something, anything, to make this right between us. I didn't realize then that Aunt Too-Tai had already forgiven me, that it would be many years before I'd forgive myself. “It's
real
hard.” And it still is.

Aunt Too-Tai smiled ruefully and smoothed the hair on my bowed head. “I know, child. That part never goes away, no matter how old you get.”

 

Later on that last week at the farm, George came back to work, but he wasn't able to get a full day in yet. I brought him a glass of ice water where he sat in the shade of the sweet gum tree, mending some arcane piece of machinery. He nodded his thanks as I approached.

“Here you go, Mr. George,” I said politely, and ran to rejoin my aunt in the garden. We were picking the tail end of the pole bean crop, and she was counting on my help.

“Pay attention to me now, Annie,” she said. Though my bucket was heavy and my fingers were tired, by then I knew better than to do anything but keep on picking pole beans and listen. Responsibility, Aunt Too-Tai said, is a ladder. We move up, we move down, and sometimes we miss a rung and swing out into the void, but the ladder is forgivingly endless. I was young, she said. Don't worry, she said. I'd have many chances at that ladder. She set her bucket down in the dirt and gave me a hug.

I still have the book of matches.

“I
still have the book of matches.”

“Really?”

“I've always kept it in the bottom of my jewelry box, like a kind of... keepsake, you know?”

The truck's windows are fogged to opacity, and Troy Smoot is curled around my bare feet like a snoring fur space heater. He jumped over into the back seat a while ago and laid claim to that end of the blankets, although I didn't notice him right away, being too caught up in my story about that summer spent down on Aunt Too-Tai's farm. It's warm here in the truck, wrapped in Ted's arms, pressed skin-to-skin against his smooth chest, so different from Du's heavy pelt of hair. I never knew horse blankets could be so comfortable, even though they still smell faintly of stable and laundry detergent.

Ted's been propped on one elbow, listening to me. In the grainy half-light of the truck stop's distant arc lamps, his face is thoughtful. I run my fingertip along his stubbled jaw, tracing the line of his generous mouth.

“Tell me about that matchbook, what it means to you,” he says.

I think for a long moment, and just like always, I'm right back under the sweet gum tree in Aunt Too-Tai's yard. Like always, I can still smell the smoke, hear the hogs screaming. I can see George and my great-aunt stumbling away from the burning pasture. I still feel the terrible weight falling upon my eight-year-old shoulders, the near-adult knowing that like Cain, I was indeed cursed and now would always bear the mark even if I tried to be good for the rest of my life.

“It reminds me that the shit you do comes with consequences,” I say finally. “And that sometimes other people end up paying those consequences. So I try, God knows I try, to do the right thing, but sometimes—okay, a lot of the time—my best intentions amount to being irresponsible instead. Like driving Starr to New Orleans. Oh, no question about it, I knew up front it wasn't the
responsible
thing to do. I mean,
responsible
would've wished her good luck, walked out of that tacky condo, and gone to my husband's partners' dinner, but I couldn't abandon her because it wouldn't have been right. She had no one, Ted. And I knew for sure that
responsible
would've left the Treebys' dog in the elevator, but that shit was so wrong I had to do something about it.”

“And,” I say, looking up to meet the interest in Ted's dark eyes, “
responsible
certainly wouldn't have made love with a near-stranger. At a truck stop in the middle of the night. In the back seat of a pickup truck.”

Ted laughs, stroking my bare shoulder. “Not so strange anymore, but I'm definitely with you on the innocent bystander thing, baby.” His lips brush the side of my neck, a sweet wandering along my collarbone. He kisses the hollow at the base of my throat, murmuring, “You never want to hurt the innocent bystanders.”

“So much of the time, the responsible thing doesn't feel like the
right
thing and I can't always tell the difference. It's like, oh, that talent some people have for finding water with a stick, whatever that's called. If there's ever a way, I'll find me some trouble and jump right into it.”

Ted yawns. “Well, I don't think
this
was trouble,” he says. “I'd call it damned incredible.” He gathers me to himself, holding me closer. “You cold?”

“No,” I say. “What time is it?” I lift my wrist to look at my watch but can't make it out. It doesn't matter: whatever o'clock it is, it's late and I need to get home.

And I need time to understand what I've just done. Like so much of my experience, having made love with Ted
feels
right, but—based on my track record to date—this may turn out to be as destructive as what my grandmother used to call the War for Southern Independence. Still, no matter how I look at it, I can't make myself believe that this wasn't a good thing, so long as no one finds out. No, not even the rosebush voice can make me believe that.

Ted suddenly rolls over onto his back with me in his arms, and now I'm on top of him, looking down into those whiskey-brown eyes. “You still want to go to Jackson?” he asks, smiling his lovely smile up at me. “Can't I convince you to turn around and head back to New Orleans with me?”

“Oh, Ted—awful as it is, Jackson's my home,” I answer, trying to keep it light. “Like you said, it's where they have to take you in.”

His arms around my waist, Ted's quiet for a moment, looking directly into my eyes with unsettling intensity. “So what was this?” He doesn't sound angry, I think, just as though he wants this one thing to be really clear between us. If I could make it that way, I would, but to me, what happened tonight was as profound as a parable: self-evident and bound to be diminished by explanations. Besides, here in the back seat of this truck, questions can be dangerous things, and then Ted goes and asks another one.

“Was this a . . . fling, something you do when you decide you need a little excitement in your life?” He doesn't sound happy.

“No!” I press my forehead on his chest, unable to look at him. “It was a very big deal. Lord, Ted—you're only the second man I've been with in my whole life. Hell, I don't even
flirt
. In fact, I'm always trying to cut way back on excitement.”

Ted appears to think on this. “Okay,” he says at last. “I guess I get that. Sort of.”

I've never been much for rationalizing. I believe actions stand or fall on their own merits—mine usually falling—but at this moment I badly want to tell Ted something he wants to hear. There are women in this world so good at smoothing things over that I'm in awe of them, but since I've always been really bad at smoothing, I can only keep my mouth shut and hope: please, don't let me mess this up, too.

“You going to tell your husband?” Ted plays with a strand of my hair, slipping the heavy platinum strands through his fingers. He asks as though it's a casual question, but underneath that I hear something more. I'm scared of something more. There's only one answer I can give in any case.

“No.”

Reluctantly, I roll off him, sit up, and hunt for the black dress. It's somehow ended up in the front seat and is covered in dog hair, Troy Smoot having used it for a bed when he was exiled from the back seat. With difficulty I struggle into it, remembering ruefully that it comes off a lot easier than it goes on. Where are the rest of my clothes? I can't find my underwear to save my life.

Ted has pulled on his jeans and cowboy boots and is hunting underneath the seats and between the horse blankets for my panties. “I can't find them,” he says after a pretty thorough search. It's as though they've returned to the underwear mother ship with all the odd socks, but I've already got too much on my mind to obsess about panties. Offering Ted his T-shirt wordlessly, I clamber into the front seat. He pulls the white cotton over his head before he climbs into the front seat with me and gets behind the wheel.

“Why not?” he asks, slipping the key into the ignition, his voice neutral.

I know exactly what he's talking about. Telling Du. I pull on my boots while I'm thinking about how to answer him. “Because I'm not going to leave him,” I say, deciding that brutal honesty is best. “Because this was between you and me, just us. Du and me, we're . . . used to each other, and I couldn't, really couldn't, live in Jackson without being married to him.”

“You mean you're afraid he'd leave you?”

I think this unsettling possibility over. “There's that,” I say eventually. “For one thing, for years everyone's been expecting Du to get fed up and walk out on me. My mother would literally die of shame. And I'm trying to be responsible here. Telling Du would do a lot of unnecessary damage, the kind that takes a lifetime to mend, if ever. He always forgives me, you see, and I, I . . . just can't do it.”

I can't set my marriage on fire and expect Du to get over
that
.

But have I already done damage here tonight, with Ted? Surely not. My own impulsive actions aside, I'm not about to try to fathom Ted's reasons. And anyway, aren't men supposed to want uncomplicated sex more than they want a bottomless beer keg and fifty-two weeks of football? Back at the Chi Omega house that was the gospel, all of us knew it by heart, and with the exception of my father none of the men of my admittedly limited experience have seemed to think anything different.

My explanation falls into silence. Ted doesn't say anything more, but his jaw tightens. With a sigh I'm not even sure I heard, he turns the key in the ignition and the big diesel engine fires up immediately.

I guess there's nothing left to explain.

 

It's a long eighty-five miles from the truck stop to Jackson.

Except for directions, Ted and I exchange very little real conversation. The more time I put between me and the Fernwood Travel Plaza, the more I'm sure what happened there probably wasn't one of my best ideas, and I don't think I can blame it all on the dope. Even the dog seems subdued. He's coiled beside me on the front seat, his nose on his paws, as though wishing his adventure could last longer.

I haven't thought about what to do with Troy either. Should I try to get him adopted into a good home, a good home far away from Jackson—somewhere out of state like, say, Manitoba? Should I threaten Jerome Treeby with a visit from the Ladies' League SPCA volunteers? They're always swooping in like World War II fighter pilots when it comes to animals in distress. Or should I just keep him myself?

Should I tell Du?

The enormity of the last fifteen hours is starting to sink in. I'm not the same Annie Sizemore who blew into Maison-Dit yesterday on the hunt for a cocktail dress. Hell, I'm not even the same woman who lied to her husband and drove to New Orleans in the middle of the night. Can I just slip inside my house tonight and pretend that none of this ever happened?

Should I tell Du?

Of course not,
the rosebush voice says crossly. My watch says it's 5:20. I know that soon the dark will be lifting, the dawn a pale, ice-white rind on the horizon. Soon, I'll be sneaking into my own home, changing into my nightgown. Before Du wakes up, I'll be lying in bed, trying to figure out how to explain my missing car—God knows where Starr left it—and my new acquaintance Troy Smoot. I can't say a word to him about Ted and Starr, not if I don't want to blow a gaping hole below my own waterline. No, if all goes according to plan, this night will soon become a memory, I remind myself, a memory that belongs to me alone.

But how, I wonder, will that memory fit into the tired narrative of Annie Sizemore, the spoiled, aging child with the irresponsible streak? And what about the change I can feel inside me like an underground river, its current carving deep into bedrock? How will I feel about this next year? What about five years from now when I'm forty, childless, perhaps still balanced on the high-tension wire between what I really am and who everyone thinks I ought to be?

All these thoughts run on a treadmill in my head, and then, too soon, just as dawn purples the east, we turn into the gates of the tall iron fence that protects my paranoid neighborhood from all the undesirables plotting to gain entrance. The massive, dusty pickup rolls alongside the parked Mercedes and minivans like a professional wrestler through a day spa, rumbling past the manicured, frost-leavened lawns and sprawling, too-big houses. Before we get to the corner, I ask Ted to stop and let me out.

“I need to walk home from here,” I say, knowing how it sounds but unable to think of a better way to say it. I may not have my keys, but I can sneak in anyway: there's a door key taped inside the mailbox, and Du's such a heavy sleeper. The truck idles on the street, diesel exhaust a dense white fog in the frozen air. I turn to Ted before I open the door.

“There's no way I can thank you enough.” So, wanting to make this as right as I can, I say with a tentative smile, “Bette said it—you're one of the good guys.”

He doesn't reply and I want to slide across the truck's bench seat to touch his face, to tell him I'll never forget him, never. Instead, Ted reaches over and ruffles the fur behind Troy Smoot's ears. “Be good,” he says to the dog. “Take care of her.” Stung, I shrug out of the blue jean jacket and try to hand it to him.

Ted looks at the jacket. He looks at me. “Keep it,” he says briefly. “I don't want you to be cold.”

I bite my lip. “Thank you.” The dawn light is powder-pale and bitter cold, a snappish cold assaulting my bare legs and face as soon as I open the door to the truck. Now I really miss my underwear. “Come on, Troy,” I say to the dog. The little terrier springs out and onto the sidewalk with me, nose twitching and on the alert for matters needing his immediate attention.

I don't want Ted and me to part like this. “Hey,” I say with my hand on the door, teeth already chattering. “Good luck this afternoon. At the races, I mean.”

“Thanks.” Without a glance in my direction, Ted's eyes look straight ahead through the windshield. “Girl,” he says, “you burn like butane—clean, fast, and too bright to look at. You've messed up my head like high-octane coke. Go on home now.”

No one has ever said a thing like this to me before in my life.

Not trusting myself with another word, I shut the door. I know Ted's watching me walk away from him, but I can't look back, I can't. Troy trots beside me on his leash made of hay rope, our breath icy egret plumes in the cold. We're at the corner when behind me I hear the truck turning around in a neighbor's driveway, then the quiet roar of its diesel engine drawing away.

Then it's gone.

 

There's a police car in front of my house.

My mother's Lincoln—a fastidiously maintained relic the color of dyed ranch mink she's driven for the past twenty years—is parked halfway on the lawn, as though the car hadn't stopped moving before she jumped out of it. The cold burns my lungs when I gasp at the sight, my boots planted to the brick walk. There's going to be no sneaking into the house now. Impulsively, I turn and look back over my shoulder, but Ted's truck is, of course, nowhere to be seen. A lone crow wings high overhead in the pitiless light of early, early morning, cawing
this way
to the rest of the flock. With the sincere dedication of a housebound dog who's not used to being outdoors, Troy pulls on his rope, barking at the bird.