The night I turned twelve, I already owed her a hundred and thirty dollars plus change.
CAME a visiting evangelist, a real pulpit pounder, young, all shoulders, full of examples, using a voice with more ups and downs than any foot-treadle Singer. He wore too much oil on his hair so he could flop it side to side and make a point. Other Baptist girls and women praised him. Shirl and me decided they were hypocrites. Instead of saying, “I dearly love the way that boy looks. He’s sure got one Mount Zion of a chin on him, don’t he?”—they’d go, “The Lord has certainly given our visiting pastor a pleasant appearance, to the greater glory of God.” “Full of the spirit of the blood of the lamb” can mean “Cute.”
This bold boy devoted six Monday nights to Genesis. Church was jammed, women mostly. When the preacher took off his black coat and slowly rolled up his shirt sleeves—admiring his pale arms’ own beauty—it seemed our communion for the night would be his white-bread biceps, honey—probably a taste treat, too. He was full of lingo and brackets, that one. He told us, right off, how out of all the churches he had faced, he’d never seen such good-looking Christians under one consecrated roof. Folks lowered their eyes, grinning a little. Then he added that he knew the extra temptations of the flesh thrown into the paths of those cursed with beauty—he could read minds just by looking pew to pew. Faces sobered, eyes aimed at knees, at handsome knees. Soon the boy’s voice rushed at you broad and deep as you heard the Mississippi was—not like our usual preacher’s frozen ditch of sound.
“Yes.” The boy wonder unbuttoned his collar and the shirt by accident fell open on a chest surprisingly hairy for a person his age. “Yes, as your youth nowadays might put it, those two gardeners ‘had it knocked,’ were ‘made for each other,’ went ‘hand in glove’ with the green world. They walked around unclothed. Why dress if you never set foot out of your own greenhouse? Their one job? Enjoy the grounds and animals and love each other round the clock.”
Of course—he explained, a regular scholar—there won’t no clocks yet. Clocks came with clothes. Clothes were clocks. What need of a clock if you’re never going to die? Who’d bother setting a alarm clock if there won’t no Death to put the “dead” in “deadline”?
Shirl and me sat holding hands, studying each other’s cuticle condition.
Since I got permanently cut out of the Summit crowd, we’d had some hard times but finally—when she seen that I was It for her—we drew closer. First Shirl complained that Emily Saiterwaite’d blamed her for how I’d misbehaved. I urged Shirley to spend more time in our tree house, where we both forgot the ranking and squabbles below. The catchy preacher was giving hell to Adam and Eve for messing up a good thing. “They didn’t know when they were well-off, did they, brothers and sisters? This pair got offered the deal of a lifetime but could they coast on it? Well, could they?” Everybody grew still, like fearing they’d be called on, blamed. Why did church always point the finger our way? Preacher after preacher told Lucy she was a Sinner. A tad of mischief was all I’d admit to. Maybe I wanted to do wrong but I’d never really got the chance.
Instead, I sat in church planning what I’d bring on our next elm-tree picnic. “My friends—my pretty-is-as-pretty-does loved ones—back then the whole world was a combination resort and greenhouse. The only two people alive were the perfect couple—most likely to succeed. They got free food. Everything grew on trees then. No rents, no taxes, no maintenance, carefree as monkeys. Every day in Eden was another brand of Sunday. It never even rained in that garden. Genesis tells us how a nightly dew refreshed things on a frequent basis. No umbrellas, no nothing. These caretakers did not even have to (I’ll use a farming term in this fine farming community of yours), have to weed.’ There weren’t any. And what’d they do with this bounty? What?”
I sat holding Shirl’s perfect hand, I sat remembering her first visit to the tree house. I’d built the place with Pop’s help, hoping I could one day know one friend good enough to let her in the club. If you put a floor inside a elm tree’s bell shape—you’ve made you a perfect dome-topped room. For wallpaper? Why, yellow and green leaves, moving. You can peek down without others seeing up and in. A tree house is the most private public place in the world.
That first time up, I’d climbed ahead of Shirl. I stared back, warning her which handholds were rickety, which sure—I couldn’t have her fall on her first visit. I sat back on my haunches and waited. I had heard how babies arrive in the world headfirst. Shirl’s forehead slid into sight. Blue eyes seemed about three-fourths of her whole noggin. She’d never been up so high in her life. Seeing how cozy I’d made it shocked her into saying, “Ahh.” To have her in this leaf room—was like being both in a church and on some private dirigible kite. With street sounds squawking far below you, you felt a sweetness akin to best lonely moments of clear thinking in the privy.
“This,” Shirl announced, “is our real home.” She commenced tying this limb to that one, swagging green aside like drapes. How safe I felt when she spoke, “Home.”
Next visit, Shirley brought two cloth-covered hangers. Warm days, we’d shuck our dresses. We’d play Mom and Poppa while wearing just chemises. She hooked our clothes over some handy limb. Dresses turning in the breeze looked like bright flags flying. A whole nation we’d discovered and founded. We were its two co-presidents, its favorite actresses. And nobody knew.
Even on street level, we lived out our own treasure map. Other folks saw Falls—but the true one was ours. We hid flowers for each other inside empty lampposts, in a statue’s hand that unscrewed off the war statue downtown. Nobody knew. We adopted one step of the courthouse to be our message board. On my way to school from the highroad on the hill’s crest, I’d lay out two magnolia leaves under a blue rock alongside a store-bought seashell. Hurrying home, I’d find—on our holy spot—my things vanished and her substitutes: a rhinestone button missing a few back molars, plus a nasty green comb she’d found somewhere. I sat down beside this news from her. I laughed. Adults stepped past me. Nobody noticed my chuckling or cared. Such tidbits were our code and meant something definite. They meant: Us. They said: We live in this town, too. We count in general because we matter to each other. Us, separately, we ain’t one whit more interesting than we find each other to be. Which is pretty interesting. Every grownup on Falls’ sidewalks knows our names, our folks. Nobody really knows us. We like it this way. We go to school—we don’t care about school. We sleep in grownups’ houses. Those ain’t our true home. Us two lived disguised as little girls. We only put up with it because it frees us for one another, we can hold hands right in church while being hollered at, we can sleep so near each other. We carry a garden in our looks at one another, a secret garden—the best kind.
Now the boy preacher was heading down the final stretch and—no surprise—here come Jesus. Nailed to the tree for our sins. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, run through with pikes and set upright with perfect naked innocence, pinned to it. Shirl and I knew, you could do more things with a tree than just get tacked there. I kept my fist around the knuckles of a pink fine live girl.
“Blood of the Lamb” didn’t hold a patch to the cut-wrist sisterhood betwixt Shirl and me. So, in the nobbed and worked-up church we sat trying to look like all the other wicked ones. Only, we won’t wicked! During the last hymn that ran for forty verse, one called “Just As I Am, Without a Prayer,” the boy ordered Sinners to come up front now, admit to having fallen off and dropped and lost it. Get right with God. You’ll feel better. Tell every soul present how you’re stained and soiled within. How you’ve lost hope of all garden possibilities but how you want back in. Others shoved past us—coarse bear-sized adults, faces bunchy with regrets—dragging forward right in front of everybody, scared as hell of hell, fearful of their weedy crimes. Meantime, we just settled lower in our pew, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, alone together in peace. If you are the secret garden, how can you be turned out of it?
7
CAME the year of d
runkenness by accident. Shirl played Virgin Mary in our church Christmas Spectacle. Folks still mention the day: many a teetotaling and Bible-pounding Baptist got knee-walking drunk through no wish of their own.
Since Luke Lucas was Deacon, he donated forty-some gallons of cider, long in storage. For a man so known as tightfisted, this kindness seemed a switch. Fact is, the cider’d been in storage for right long. Lucas must’ve had his doubts about how hard the stuff was. His worried wife, plump Doris, loaded this heated brew with cloves, nutmeg, sliced preserved pears. That only made the children line up for their share. Everybody stood around waiting for the pageant to begin. It was late starting every year.
While folks milled about till the Mitchell twins quit tussling long enough to have their angel wings belted on correct, men/women/children kept bellying up to trestle tables for another ladleful of tasty mulled cider. The weather was warm that year. First sign: six people, outdoors, saying in a chorus, “Is it hot out here or is it just me?”
We’re now talking about Christians that hadn’t let one drop of devil water ever cross their God-fearing lips. To find yourself four sheets to the wind for the first time and on Christmas, that felt new.
Our churchyard was soon strewn with folks seated right slam in the bushes. They kept swallowing cup after cup—still sending staggering children for refills while they kept puzzling about what’d happened to them. Everybody felt overwhelmed with holiday warmth. There’d been such a line around the cider, I hadn’t got myself one drop. Pitifully clearheaded, I wandered from bunch to bunch. A straight-A student from my Normal School class, oldest son in a family of nine, reeled up to me and slurred, “What’s Thursday’s geography homework?” then angled off, muttering about responsibilities. One set of ladies, overcome, decided to hold a Bible lesson (in self-defense), but somebody was reading the part where Easter happens.
The ancient bachelor choir director, known for his tenor voice so high it stepped on certain sopranos’ toes, known for his begonias, known for once going North to the Juilliard School, where he had a quick but total breakdown, then come straight home, a fellow famous for the long patience he showed his own foul-tempered mother—the very choir director who’d been so taken with Ned the First and who wore a black armband long after the killing and who once admitted considering hisself Ned’s secret widow—he seemed changed today. I found him standing between the boxwoods and our church—he was beating fists against the church’s boards, and hard, loud, punching whilst muttering many bad words I’d never heard yet but someway knew were totally illegal here. His knuckles really bled. “Look,” he smiled, showing me raw fingers’ backs, the matching red marks printed on our white church. “Look, Lucy, you didn’t think I had it in me, did you?” and—glad-acting—went back to pounding.
I hurried to my own folks. Momma, plunked on cold dirt, was all but spread-eagle, had her skirt well up past ankles, not minding who saw. She kept touching Poppa’s cowlicks, saying that she wanted herself a farm. She adored turkeys, Irish wolfhounds, peacocks to drape every bush. She just loved Christmas and she dearly loved a snowy farm at Christmas. “Just think, Prince Consort, on our property you could go out and cut any Christmas tree you liked.”
“Hate farms,” he grinned, then went serious, holding up one finger: “‘The sweetest wings tour sourest by their needs; / Wilies that lily fester worse’n … deeds.’”
“Close,” Momma said and—in front of everybody—pulled his head her way, kissed him wet and full on (in) the mouth. Then they struggled to their feet and hurried home, willing to miss Shirley as the Virgin Mary. A mistake.
In the cemetery nearby, I couldn’t but notice Mr. Kingston chasing Mrs. Buxton, plump and the mother of seven. She quaked and danced and finally fell back onto a new grave. He said, “I’ve had my eye on you since we was eight, gal,” and they thrashed about. Well, such changes upset a child plenty, honey. Nobody hates surprises like dogs and children do.
I ran near tombstones, looking for my aunts. I passed a huge lady and her short mild husband. She was complaining, “DeWitt, for the past fifteen minutes, I’ve felt distinctly sick.” He told her, “Ruth, for the last forty-eight years I’ve felt sick. For the last fifteen minutes, I’ve felt wonderful.”
In the midst of this hurly-burly, two well-known local dogs (both yellow), having followed their owners to church, now stood very still. Posed side by side, hounds only let their eyes move, catching a crazy behavior pattern never before glimpsed hereabouts, especially on the church grounds. Mutts seemed scared of how—if primed proper—even your strictest local Baptists could act more decidedly doglike than most casual dogs.—Worrisome.
I cut past our hefty bank president, cornered by four sketchy little boys, their hands out. Kids were just drunk enough to finally come up and ask the great man for a quarter (apiece, please) and—today only—he was stoned sufficient so he reached into pin-striped trousers and fished out a dollar gold piece for each big-eyed boy. “Gol-ly,” one said. That, sugar pie, is how long ago this happened. People still said Golly. Still meant it. Then, believing that the banker might change his mind, one kid yelled, “Scatter.” They all did.
Seeking everyday decency, I found my maiden aunts. Dressed alike in black, they perched at graveyard’s edge, one per headstone. They rested not twenty feet from where one fellow and another man’s upended wife still grappled, petticoats a type of salad that they swam in. Aunts—backs to graves—hadn’t noticed. Instead they were talking shop: piano. These three ladies were cruelly overeducated for a town this size. A wind blew and they all held on to their dark hats but otherwise seemed fine.
They addressed a pupil and, though the aunts looked okay from a distance, as I drew nearer I saw they were maybe making a mistake. Standing before them, Mary Eliza Woolrich, supposedly their best student this year.
Ruler, the oldest sister, said, “You call yourself talented?”
(Now, honey, everybody knows that a small-town piano teacher cannot afford to tell her students the whole truth about their long-range career goals.)
“Well,” argued the Lake, youngest of my aunts, “at least Mary Eliza here works. Imagination might not be her middle name. But our only gifted one in the last nine years could think of nothing but MEN. Myself I’d rather have a plodder like her here than some genius who quits. No—it’s a lie what I just said. I’m not myself today. Genius is always worth it.—Now run along, Mary Eliza, you’ve leached enough free coaching out of us for one day.”
I watched the girl weave away. I felt glad to notice: She was far too looped to understand what-all’d just happened.
Ruler pitched into a favorite topic. I understood that she was three full octaves drunker than her sisters. “I am often asked about Maestro Liszzzt’s nationality. By birth, he is Hungarian admintentlyly, admittided—I admit. And in Liszt’s social faddishness, in his easy morals, un soupçon français perhaps. His sense of design is, I’d be the first to add, not un-Italian. But, as a moral force, in sheer uplift, Liszt the idealizer—can only be called German, High Churman. His sweep, his …”
Her cowed younger sisters usually sat still during this but today they all spoke at onct. Lake said, “Oh, pack it in.”
Sea went, “You’re always talking Liszt.”
And I watched the two youngests skip away, stand to one side smiling, then start playing patty-cake. “Aren’t we something, Lucy?” Lake asked grim little me. “Why, I haven’t had this much fun since Andrew Johnson died.”
I swung around our church’s rear, needing peace, some pouting room. Shirley’s hefty mom sat slumped on back-porch steps, swilling her cup’s dregs, sucking cloves. Around her free finger, she now twirled Shirley’s silver halo. The Mrs. saw me, waved me nearer. “Feeling funny, Lucy. Maybe stage fright for our pet. Was up all night putting last touches on her costume—powder blue and white. I hate how the veil is going to cover up our darling’s curls—but you cannot have a bareheaded Virgin Mary. Everybody knows how Mary looks and I ain’t going t
o break no new fashion ground.—Here, take a load off your dogs. Been meaning to talk with you. Woman to woman like. Lucy, child, I see you sometimes a-studying me, squinting when I get out my brush set and go to freshen up Shirley’s curls again. Don’t judge me too harsh. For one thing, I’m a fool for holidays. Especially ones where she gets the lead.”
First off, the Mrs. claimed she wanted to make something clear: She didn’t blame me for how Summit Avenue was called Summit owing to its being the highest point for five counties. It won’t my fault that the blue-blooded folks who’d settled this town had picked the choicest view and coolest area for their own. Only natural. The valley was close, yes, and the peanut mill that made so much cash for those atop the heap did throw a heavy smell over certain houses at the big hill’s bottom, but, she wanted me to know, I was a child and innocent. “Thank you,” I said, unsure. She accepted.
“I like my darling having friends good as you. Let’s not hide our light under a bushel. Now, concerning our favorite topic, yours and mine, about how she came to be. I hail from way out in the country, swampland. You want a clove to suck? No? Mine is your own pappy’s home ground. You probably think your daddy’s folks are dirt poor. I knew the boy by sight, but not to speak. See, out Bear Grass way, Lucy, why his people are the rich ones—like your momma’s here in Falls. Give you some idea. The Honicutts owned a fine cabin, five whole acres.
“Us? We hardly had a full roof. Why, when it rained, only rained a bit less indoors than out. Young ones on a damp straw pallet—brothers and sisters of a age where they can’t help but to notice one another, nights. Daddy cut his foot, died of his jaw locking. Momma, on her own, had no more idea of how to farm than some city child would. The one pretty thing in that tatty hut: oiled paper for window glass. (Can’t afford glass, you rub cooking grease on a paper sheet, light gets through, some of the rain’ll bead up on it.) Pages got cut out of this Godey’s Lady’s Book my brother found by the roadside. One page—glued in the window near our sleeping spot—it showed two beauties, Lucy. They were all rigged and stirruped in this lace and finery. Every time the sun came up, it showed me them. One was walking a squinchy little dog no bigger than a dinner roll. Both strolling in a park as pressed and like cut on the bias, as the ladies’ frocks.—Darling, that picture kept me going. Won’t much, Lucy, but it proved plenty for a thinking girl like me. It give me this notion, see. Oh, even then I knew how I looked. Maybe we didn’t own no looking glass but the ponds’ll show you enough. I saw I was too big-boned to ever wear them bows and sashes and suchlikes. But every time I studied the ladies from Godey’s, yellow as they’d turned and out of date as the styles already were, I felt I ought to be around a person that could get spiffed up that good. I’d then wade out in the swamps, I’d tie a pink ribbon round some cypress tree’s trunk. I’d slide the sash low, then tiptoe off and turn back, saying, ‘Middy style.’ I’d cosset the ribbon higher, then I’d check back, smiling, ‘Empire style.’ I longed—don’t think it silly, child—to just help dress somebody up each day.