She glanced in that direction but her eyes dropped quickly to the sack lying on the forest floor.
“What’s in it?”
“Corn.”
The shy blue grosbeaks might like corn. Maybe with it she could get closer to them. She should thank him, but she’d never learned how. Instead she gave him the second-best thing, a tidbit of her precious knowledge of birds.
“The orioles are my favorite. They don’t eat corn, though. Only bugs and grapes. The grosbeaks, though, they’ll prob’ly love it.”
He nodded, and she saw that her reply was all the thanks he needed. He asked more questions about school and she told him she studied the birds sometimes in library books. Sometimes she brought those books to the woods. Other times she came with only a tablet and crayons and drew pictures which she took back to the library to identify the birds.
Out at his place, he told her, he’d put up gourds for bird-houses.
“Gourds?”
“The birds love ‘em. Just drill ‘em a hole and they move right in.”
“How big of a hole?”
“Depends on the size o’ the bird. And the gourd.”
In time he pulled out a watch and said, “It’s goin’ on four. You best be gittin’.”
She got only as far as the deadfall beyond the nearby hillbefore dropping to her knees and untying the twine with trembling fingers. She stared into the sack and her heart raced. She plunged her hands into the dry golden kernels and ran them through her fingers. Excitement was something new for Elly. She’d never before had something to look forward to.
The next day he didn’t show up. But near the sumac bushes where they’d met twice before he left three lumpy green and yellow striped gourds, each drilled with a different-sized hole and equipped with a wire by which to hang it.
A gift. He had given her another gift!
All of the hunting season passed before she saw him again on the last day. He sauntered over the hill with his shotgun and she stood waiting in plain sight, straight as a needle, a flat, unattractive girl whose eyes appeared darker than they really were in her pale, freckled face. She neither smiled nor quavered, but invited him straight-out, “Wanna see where I hung the gourds?” Never in her life had Elly placed that much trust in anyone.
They met often after that. He was easy to be with, for he understood the woods and its creatures as she did, and whenever they walked through it he kept a respectable distance, walking with his thumbs in his rear overall pockets, slightly bent.
She showed him the orioles, and the blue grosbeaks, and the indigo buntings. And together they watched the birds who came to take up residence in the three striped gourds—two families of sparrows and, in the spring, a lone bluebird. Only after they’d been meeting for many months did she lift a palmful of corn and show him how she could call the birds and entice them to eat from her hand.
The following year, when she was fourteen, she met him one day with a glum expression on her face. They sat on a fallen log, watching the cavity in a nearby tree where an opossum was nesting.
“I can’t see you no more, Glendon.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m sick. I’m prob’ly gonna die.”
Alarmed, he turned toward her. “Die? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, but it’s bad.”
“Well... did they take you to the doctor?”
“Don’t have to. I’m already bleedin’—what could he do?”
“Bleeding?”
She nodded, tight-lipped, resigned, eyes fixed on the opossum hole.
His eyes made one furtive sweep down her dress front, where the acorns had grown to the size of plums.
“You tell your mother about it?”
She shook her head. “Wouldn’t do any good. She’s tetched. It’s like she don’t even know I’m there anymore.”
“How ‘bout your grandma?”
“I’m scared to tell her.”
“Why?”
Elly’s eyes dropped. “Because.”
“Because why?”
She shrugged abjectly, sensing vaguely that this had something to do with being a child of shame.
“You bleedin’ from your girl-place?” he asked. She nodded silently and blushed. “They didn’t tell you, did they?”
“Tell me what?” She flicked him one glance that quickly shied away.
“All females do that. If they don’t, they can’t have babies.”
Her head snapped around and he shifted his attention to the sun peeking around the trunk of an old live-oak tree. “They shoulda told you so you’da known to expect it. Now you go on home and tell your grandma about it and she’ll tell you what to do.”
But Eleanor didn’t. She accepted Glendon’s word that it was something natural. When it happened at regular intervals, she began keeping track of the length of time between the spells, in order to be prepared.
When she was fifteen she asked him what a child of shame meant.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I am. They tell me all the time.”
“They tell you!” His face grew taut and he picked up a stick, snapped it into four pieces and flung them away. “It’s nothin’,” he said fiercely.
“It’s somethin’ wicked, isn’t it?”
“Now how could that be? You ain’t wicked, are you?”
“I disobey them and run away from school.”
“That don’t make you a child of shame.”
“Then what does?” When he remained silent, she appealed, “You’re my friend, Glendon. If you won’t tell me, who will?”
He sat on the forest floor with both elbows hooked over his knees, staring at the broken stick.
“All right, I’ll tell you. Remember when we saw the quails mating? Remember what happened when the male got on top of the female?” He gave her a quick glance and she nodded. “That’s how humans mate, too, but they’re only supposed to do it if they’re married. If they do it when they’re not, and they get a baby, people like your grandma call it a child of shame.”
“Then I am one.”
“No, you ain’t.”
“But if—”
“No, you ain’t! Now that’s the last I wanna hear of it!”
“But I ain’t got no daddy.”
“And it ain’t your fault neither, is it? So whose shame is it?”
She suddenly understood the cleansings, and why her mother was called the sinner. But who was her daddy? Would she ever know?
“Glendon?”
“What?”
“Am I a bastard?” She’d heard the word whispered behind her back at school.
“Elly, you got to learn not to worry about things that ain’t important. What’s important is you’re a good person inside.”
They sat silently for a long time, listening to a flock of sparrows twittering in the buckthorn bushes where the gourds hung. Eleanor raised her eyes to the swatches of blue sky visible between the branches overhead.
“You ever wish somebody would die, Glendon?”
He considered soberly before answering. “No, guess I haven’t.”
“Sometimes I wish my grandparents would die so mymother and me wouldn’t have to pray no more and I could pull up the shades in the house and let Mother outside. A person who’s good inside wouldn’t wish such a thing, I don’t think.”
He reached out and laid a consoling hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he’d ever touched her deliberately.
Eleanor got her wish the year she turned sixteen. Albert See died while on circuit___in the bed of a woman named Mathilde King. Mathilde King, it turned out, was black and gave her favors only for money.
Elly reported his death to Glendon with no show of grief. When he touched her cheek she said, “It’s all right, Glendon. He was the real sinner.”
The shock and shame of the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death rendered Lottie See incapable of facing even her daughter and granddaughter thereafter. She lived less t
han a year, most of that year spent sitting in a hard, spindle-backed chair facing one corner of the front parlor where the green shades had been sealed to the edges of the window casings with tape. She no longer spoke except to pray, or forced Chloe to repent, but simply sat staring at the wall until one day her head slumped over and her hands dropped to her sides.
When Elly reported her grandmother’s death to Glendon there were again no tears or mourning. He took her hand and held it while they sat silently on a log, listening to the woodlife around them.
“People like them... they’re probably happier dead,” he said. “They had no notion of what happiness is.”
Elly stared straight ahead. “I can see you whenever I want from now on. Mother won’t stop me, and I’ll be quittin’ school to stay home and take care of her.”
Eleanor removed the tape from the shades, but when she pulled them up Chloe screeched and huddled, protecting her head as if from a blow. Her manic fright no longer held any connection to reality. The death of her parents, instead of freeing Chloe, cast her deeper into her world of madness. Shecould do nothing for herself, so her care was left to Eleanor, who fed and clothed her and saw to her daily needs.
When Elly was eighteen Glendon’s father died. His grief was a sharp contrast to Elly’s own lack of emotions upon the deaths of her grandparents. They met in the woods and he cried pitifully. She opened her arms and held him for the first time. “Aw, Glendon, don’t cry... don’t cry.” But secretly she thought it beautiful that anyone could cry for the death of a parent. She cradled him against her breast, and when his weeping stopped, he expunged his residual grief within her virgin body. For Elly it was an act not of carnal, but of spiritual love. She no longer prayed, nor would she, ever again. But to comfort one so bereaved in such a manner was a prayer more meaningful than any she’d ever been forced to say on her knees in that house of shadow.
When it was over, she lay on her back, studying the pale gold sky through the tender new shoots of spring buds, and said, “I don’t want no children of shame, Glendon.”
He held her hand tightly. “You won’t have. You’ll marry me, won’t you, Elly?”
“I can’t. I have to take care of my mother.”
“You could take care of her just as good at my house, couldn’t you? And it’s gonna be awful lonely there. Why, we could take care of her together. I wouldn’t mind having her live with us—and she remembers me, doesn’t she? From when I used to deliver ice to your house?”
“I never told her about you, Glendon. She wouldn’t understand anyway. She’s crazy, don’t you see? Scared of the daylight. She never goes out of our house anymore, and I’m afraid if I tried to take her out she’d just plain die of fright.”
But Chloe died anyway, within a year of her parents, peacefully, in her sleep. The day she was buried, Elly packed her few meager possessions, closed the door on all those drawn shades, boarded Glendon’s wagon and never looked back. They drove to Calhoun, picked up a wedding license at the courthouse and were married within the hour. Their wedding was not so much the consummation of a courtship as a natural extension of two lonely lives that were less lonelywhen combined. Their married life was much the same: companionship, but no great passion.
And now Elly was marrying again, in a similar way, for similar reasons. She lay in her bed, thinking about tomorrow, a lump in her throat. How was it crazy Elly See never ended up making a marriage that was more than a commonsense agreement? She had feelings too—hurts, wishes, wants like anybody else. Had they been sealed inside her so long that they’d become dried up by all the years she’d been forced into submission and silence in that darkened house? Nobody had taught her a woman’s ways with a man. Loving the boys was easy, but letting a man know how you felt about him was another thing.
Why couldn’t she have said, Will, I’m scared you’ll get hurt out there with the bees? Instead she’d thrown an egg. An egg, for mercy sake, when he’d done so much for her and only wanted to do more. Tears of mortification stung her eyes and she covered them with an arm, remembering. Something strange had happened when he went away laughing instead of angry. Something strange in the pit of her stomach. It was still there when he returned to the house for supper, a feeling she hadn’t had before, not even with Glendon. A highness, sort of. A pushing against the bottom of her heart, a tightness in the throat.
It came again, strong and insistent as she pictured Will, all lank and lean and so different from Glendon. Shaved every morning, washed three times a day and put on clean britches each sunrise. Made her more dirty laundry in one week than Glendon had made in a month. But she didn’t mind. Not at all. Sometimes, ironing his clothes, she’d think of him in them, and the feeling would come again. A tumble in her stomach, a rise in her blood.
When he had come into the kitchen earlier, and had taken her arm, naked-chested, dark-skinned and still wet from washing at the well, she’d felt almost lightheaded from it. Crazy Elly, wishing Will Parker would kiss her. For a minute she’d thought he might, but he hadn’t after all, and common sense told her why. ‘Cause she was pregnant, plain and dumb.
She curled into a ball on the bed, miserable, because tomorrow was her wedding and she’d been the one who’d had to do the asking.
CHAPTER
9
On his wedding day Will awakened excited. He had a secret. Something he’d been working on for two weeks and had finished by lanternlight last night at two A.M. Stepping from the barn, he checked the sky—dull as tarnished silver, promising a gloomy, damp day. Women, he supposed, liked sun on their wedding days, but his surprise should cheer her up. He knew exactly when and how he’d present it to her, not until it was time to leave.
They met in the kitchen, feeling uncomfortable and anxious with each other. An odd start to a wedding day with the bride dressed in a blue chenille house robe and the groom in yesterday’s overalls. Their first glances were quick and guarded.
“Mornin’.”
“Mornin’.”
He brought in two pails of bathwater, set them on the stove and began building a fire.
“I suppose you were hopin’ for sun,” he said with his back to her.
“It would’ve been nice.”
Smiling to himself, thinking again of his secret, he offered, “Maybe it’ll break up by the time we leave.”
“It don’t hardly look like it, and I don’t know what I’ll do with the boys if it rains. If it does, should we wait till tomorrow?”
He glanced back over his shoulder. “You want to?”
Their eyes met briefly. “No.”
Her answer made him smile inside as he headed for the chores. But at breakfast time the tension escalated. It was, after all, their wedding day, and at its end they’d be sharing a bed. But something more was bothering Will. He put off approaching the subject until the meal ended and Elly pushed back her chair as if to begin clearing the table.
“Elly... I...” He stammered to a stop, drying his palms on his thighs.
“What is it?” She paused, holding two plates.
He wasn’t a money-hungry man, but he suddenly understood greed with disarming clarity. He pressed his hands hard against his thighs and blurted out, “I don’t know if I got enough money for a license.”
“There’s the egg money and what you got for selling the scrap metal.”
‘That’s yours.”
“Don’t be silly. What will it matter after today?”
“A man should buy the license,” he insisted, “and a ring.”
“Oh... a ring.” Her hands were in plain sight as she stood beside the table, holding the dirty dishes. He glanced at her left hand and she felt stupid for not having thought to take off her wedding band and leave it in her bureau drawer. “Well...” The word dwindled into silence while she pondered and came up with one possible solution. “I... I could use the same one.”
His face set stubbornly as he rose, pulled his hat on low and lunged across the room toward the sink. “Th
at wouldn’t be right.”
She watched him gather soap, towels and bathwater and head for the door, pride stiffening his shoulders and adding force to his footsteps.
“What does it matter, Will?”
“It wouldn’t be right,” he repeated, opening the back door. Half out, he turned back. “What time you wanna leave?”
“I have to get me and the boys ready to go and the dishes washed. And I suppose I should pack some sandwiches.”
“An hour?”
“Well...”
“An hour and a half?”
“That should be fine.”
“I’ll pick you up here. You wait in the house for me.”
He felt like a fool. Some courtship. Some wedding morning. But he had exactly eight dollars and sixty-one cents to his name, and gold rings cost a damn sight more than that. It wasn’t only the ring. It was everything missing in the morning. Touches, smiles, yearning.
Kisses. Shouldn’t a bride and groom have trouble restraining themselves at a time like this? That’s how he always imagined it would be. Instead they’d scarcely glanced at each other, had discussed the weather and Will Parker’s financially embarrassed state.
In the barn he scrubbed his hide with a vengeance, combed his hair and donned freshly laundered clothes: jeans, white shirt, jean jacket, freshly oiled boots and his deformed cowboy hat, brushed for the occasion. Hardly suitable wedding apparel, but the best he could do. Outside thunder rumbled in the distance. Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about rain. He had that much to offer his bride this morning, though much of his earlier elation over the surprise had vanished.
In the house Eleanor was on her knees, searching for Donald Wade’s shoe under the bed while upon it he and Thomas imitated Madam, kicking and braying.
“Now settle down, boys. We don’t want to keep Will waitin’.”
“Are we really goin’ for a ride in the big wagon?”
“I said so, didn’t I?” She caught a foot and started forcing the brown high-top shoe on. “Clear into Calhoun. But when we get to the courthouse you got to be good. Little boys got to be like mice in the corner during weddings, y’ understand?”