"Then how come she's still goin' barefooted?"
"Well, she cain't go barefooted anymore. And you got to start showin' her proper respect. You hear? Take in that lip and answer me."
"Yes'm."
"Look at me when you answer me."
"Yes'm."
"Now if I hear of you and your Aint Loma fussin' about this again, you go'n get another whippin'. You understand?"
"Yes'm."
Loma was at our house as much as at her own, I reckon, and for a long time after Mama laid down the law I didn't call her anything. But because Mama and Papa and Grandpa and Granny started speaking of her to me as "your Aint Loma," I gradually thought of that as her name, and after the awful first time, saying it wasn't much harder than saying doodly-squat or Peter Rabbit. By time Mary Toy was old enough to talk, Loma was Aint Loma to both of us. And though I finally forgot why she broke my soldiers—until the nightmare — I never forgot or forgave her for doing it.
When Miss Love came into my life, Aunt Loma was still my prime hate, and getting even with her was still my prime goal.
Mama thought hating folks was sinful. She could make allowances for anybody. When I'd get to fussing about Aunt Loma, she'd say, "Your Aunt Loma means well, son. I know she's hateful sometimes, but she's got a good heart."
Good heart, my foot. Aunt Loma's heart was down on a level with Mr. Angus Tuttle's, and he had caused me more whippings than I could count. Us boys were always trying to get back at him. Just for instance, one day we sneaked into his barn, just fooling around, and chanced to see a gallon of the yellow paint that he put on the handles of all his farm tools so if somebody showed up with a yellow-handled hoe, everybody would know it was stolen from Mr. Tuttle.
Well, it was real cold the day we went in there, and his barn was full of mules, horses, and cows brought in from his farm; sharecropper tenants being bad to steal, if you live in town, it's the custom to bring in all your animals, wagons, and farm tools for the winter. What we did, and it was my idea, we dipped every horse, mule, and cow tail in that yellow paint. When one flipped, good gosh it sent a spray of yellow all over the dern animal, the stalls, the hayracks, everything. Then we got the idea to paint all the hoofs yellow, too, and the cows' horns, and we caught a rooster that was up on the rafters and painted his beak and toenails.
You never saw anybody mad as Mr. Tuttle when he got home, and he never doubted who'd done it. That night Mama didn't just ask me to be a better boy; she insisted on it.
If I had told her just how much I hated Mr. Tuttle, she wouldn't of believed it. But compared to the way I felt about Aunt Loma, he was like a favorite uncle.
There were a few other people I couldn't stand, like Hosie Roach, the mill boy in my class at school. Most mill children went to school just two or three years, then dropped out to work at the spindles. If they were too little to reach the spindles, they stood on boxes. Children caught playing on the job got a whipping from the supervisor. I didn't like to think about that. I didn't like to think about mill children at all, and never had to as long as the mill ran its own school. Then a few years back, though the Cold Sassy Weekly ran editorials against "allowing cotton mill folks to mix and mingle with the children of our fair city," the school board voted to close the mill school and let the lintheads come to ours. Papa was one of the board members in favor. If he'd had to sit next to Hosie, I bet you he'd of thought twice.
Hosie was still not through high school, even though he was twenty-one. He'd work a few months in the mill, then come to classes a few months. Sometimes he worked at night after being at school in the day. So he hadn't been promoted regular, despite he was right smart for a mill boy. Our superintendent kept trying to get him to quit school, but Hosie vowed he was go'n graduate if it took him till he was thirty years old.
We were always fighting at recess. I really hated him, and the feeling was mutual. But compared to Aunt Loma, Hosie Roach seemed like a best friend.
Then there was Grandpa Tweedy, my daddy's daddy out in Banks County. He talked hard times morning, noon, and night. Called himself a farmer, but you never saw him behind a plow or driving a team. Lazy, great goodness. Like the lilies of the field in the Bible, he toiled not, neither did he spend his own money. He was always asking Papa to help him out. All he ever did was sit on the porch and swat flies, and like I said, even had him a pet hen to peck them up.
When Papa left the farm at sixteen to go work for Grandpa Blakeslee, he made twenty dollars a month and had to send half of it home to pay the field hand who took his place. That was the custom. But even after Papa married at nineteen, making forty dollars a month, he still had to send Grandpa Tweedy ten of it till the day he was twenty-one. My mother never said she didn't like her father-in-law, but I could tell she didn't, and that may of been why.
What started me hating him, he wouldn't let me fish on Sunday. Said it was a sin. I remember I put out some set hooks late one Saturday, thinking if I caught a fish, it wouldn't be a sin to take him off the hook next morning. End his suffering, you know. Early Sunday I ran down to the river and one of the lines was just a-jiggling! But when I ran up the hill and asked Grandpa's permission to get my fish off the hook, he said, "Hit'll still be thar t'morrer, Lord willin'. The Lord ain't willin', it'll be gone. Now git in the house and study yore catechism till time to leave for preachin'."
Of course the fish was gone Monday morning. But I got back at Grandpa Tweedy. I'd noticed a big hornet's nest in the privy, just under the tin roof, so I bided my time behind a tree till I saw him go in there. Giving him just long enough to get settled good, I let fly a rock and it hit that tin roof like a gunshot. Grandpa burst out of there in a cloud of hornets, trying to swat and hold his pants up at the same time. He knew I'd done it. "Will Tweedy, I'll git you, boy!" he yelled. "I'll git you!"
I just couldn't hardly stand him. One time when he was fussing about tenants stealing out of his woodpile, I watched while he drilled holes in several sticks of stovewood, filled the holes with gunpowder, sealed them over with candlewax, and put them on top of the woodpile. "What if somebody gets kilt?" I asked him.
I was just a little bitty boy, so I believed him when he said, "Ain't go'n hurt nobody. Hit'll jest scare the livin' daylights out of'm."
Next morning at breakfast we heard a big whomp, boom from the tenant shack. A few minutes later, the cook rushed in and said, "Mist' Tweedy, one them white-trash chillun's hand done got tore up, po li'l lamb, an' dey stove's ruint."
Grandpa saucered his coffee and took a big slurp before he spoke. His voice was hard. "Well, then I reckon they won't steal no more a-my far wood."
You can see why I despised Grandpa Tweedy and didn't have a dab of respect for him. But compared to Aunt Loma, he was King Arthur and I was a Knight of the Round Table.
Lying there in the dark, thinking about Aunt Loma, I got really mad. She could of at least pretended to be glad I'd escaped from the jaws of death on that trestle. It wouldn't of hurt her. But she hadn't said one word, and then flounced off without so much as a good night to Grandpa and Miss Love.
I wondered would she meet her match in Miss Love. Or would Miss Love do like Mama and kowtow to Loma for the sake of peace in the family?
18
IT'S NOT to my credit that the next morning I forgot all about telling Lightfoot we'd pick blackberries.
I couldn't of gone. I had to wait for Toddy Hughes to come by and interview me for the Atlanta newspaper. Also, I felt awful tired, and Dr. Slaughter had said I better stay quiet and not get hot. Mama would have a fit if I tried to go off somewhere. She wouldn't even let me milk that day. Got Loomis to do it.
There wasn't any way to let Lightfoot know, but I should of at least remembered.
I guess what messed me up was so many folks coming to call, from right after breakfast on. If they weren't asking me about getting run over by the train, they were asking Mama about Grandpa and Miss Love.
I was on the front veranda with young Toddy Hughes about ten
o'clock when Mr. Son Black rode up bareback on his red mare mule. He had unhitched her from the plow and she still had on her collar, the traces draped over her neck. Wearing an old felt hat and dirty overalls, Son sat sideways, slumped, with one leg crossed over the mule's shoulder and the other hanging loose. He looked so seedy I wondered what Miss Love, or even Aunt Loma, had ever seen in him.
"Whoa, Lucy," he said to the mule, then kicked her halfway up our walk and asked where my granddaddy was. He sounded mad. "I want to see him. He ain't come in yet at the store."
"That ain't surprising Son," Toddy Hughes said with a leery grin, "bein' as yesterd'y was Mr. Blakeslee's weddin' day. Or ain't you heard?"
Son spat. "I heard."
"Well, and I just guess they slept late," Toddy called as the mule turned away and trotted down the walk.
"Mr. Hughes!" snapped Mama, who came out on the porch in time to hear that.
Toddy stood up quick, blushing, and said, "Sorry, ma'am. Sorry. Well, I'll mosey along. Got to go write this up and put it on the telegraph to Atlanta. I, uh, reckon they'll use it right away, Will. The paper ain't likely to of had anything like bein' run over by a train and lived to tell it before. Uh, be seein' you, ma'am." He tipped his straw hat to Mama. Looked like he couldn't get away fast enough.
He was gone before I remembered I was going to tell him about Lightfoot McLendon running out on the trestle to help me off and about Loomis saving my dog. Likely they wouldn't of put Loomis in the paper, him being colored, but I meant to ask Toddy to try.
It's no credit to me that I was sort of glad he rushed off before I could tell him about Lightfoot. I didn't want to hear what Pink and Lee Roy and them would say about me and her if they saw her name in the paper. Also, it would take Mama and Papa a month to convince folks that, no, I wasn't at the trestle with a mill girl. She just happened to be picking berries nearby.
Aunt Loma spent most of that morning at our house, fussing about Miss Love and jerking the baby around like it was all his fault that his grandpa had disgraced the family. She kept saying, "I'm go'n get even with Love Simpson if it's the last thing I ever do."
Despite everybody acting so nice the night before, nobody went to call on Grandpa and Miss Love—at least nobody that I heard of. Even the few who weren't mad for Granny's sake likely didn't know what to say, under the circumstances, and nobody was going to risk criticism by paying a formal call or taking a wedding present. Not even those who had hugged her the night before would do that.
I wondered if the newlyweds had anything to eat. I knew Miss Love could make coffee, but after boarding so many years, she might not know how to cook anything else. "You go'n send them some dinner?" I asked Mama. "I could carry it up there."
She said, "You got to rest, like Dr. Slaughter told you. And I'll say it right now, Will: you are not to go runnin' up there all the time like you used to. We don't owe Love Simpson any favors. And you can see your granddaddy at the store. You understand?"
I understood, all right.
But Grandpa didn't.
He never appeared at the store at all that day, or at our house, either. When he didn't even come by for his whiskey, I and Papa and Mama must of each thought Miss Love didn't object to a man's having a little toddy at home. But then real early Saturday morning he stopped in as usual before work, like he still didn't have a closet of his own, and came out of the company room scratching his head and hitching up his trousers with his arm stub, the way he always did when he was excited or upset. Right in front of Mama, he said, "Will Tweedy, git on up home, son, and see can you hep Miss Love any. She's a-tearin' the place apart! Scourin' floors, washin' win-ders and curtains, and scrubbin' furniture like they's cooties or bedbugs in ever piece. She had me workin' all day yesterd'y."
"You, Pa? Housework? Shah!" Mama didn't believe it.
"Yes'm. Sunup to bedtime." A sheepish look came on his face. Pulling at his bushy beard, he announced, "Mary Willis, you and Loma got to come go th'ew yore ma's thangs."
Mama didn't answer.
"I ain't never see sech a one for cleanin' house as Miss Love." He spoke with a pride that he tried to hide. "You got time to hep her any, Mary Willis?"
"No, Pa, I haven't," she said. "Queenie and I are cannin' soup vegetables today. We got to, or lose everything, one." I was surprised she spoke up to him. She never had before. "And," she added firmly, "I'm countin' on Will to pick the vegetables."
Grandpa was a little taken back. "Well," he said. "All right. But send him on up soon as he gits th'ew."
My mama was really something when she got mad. Blue eyes blazing, hands on hips, she watched her daddy go down the walk and cross the railroad tracks. "Tearin' into that house like it was hers!" she muttered.
I thought Grandpa had prayed away all the town's hard feelings, and maybe he really had. But that was Thursday night and this was early Saturday morning, and he'd just showed he didn't know pea-turkey about how grown daughters feel when a young stepmother is brought into the family, or how they feel about being told to clear out their mama's personal belongings to make room for the new wife's things.
I saw what was going through Mama's mind like she was in the funny paper with a balloon coming out of her head:
It's enough he up and married like he did, said the balloon. It's enough they neither one, Pa nor Love, went anywhere the day after the weddin' and now everybody's sniggerin' about it. But to find out Miss Love cain't wait a minute to take over Ma's house is too much and then some.
Even I could see that for the bride to start fall cleaning the day after the wedding, in the middle of the hottest summer on record, was the same as announcing to the world that the first Mrs. Blakeslee was sloven and her house too dirty to live in—and that the Blakeslee daughters hadn't cared enough for their poor bereaved papa to keep it clean for him.
Mama and Aunt Loma always did think Grandpa should of hired a cook for Granny. Aunt Loma said as much to her daddy one time, but he just laughed. "Last buyin' trip I took," he said, "a New York feller got to talkin' bout Southern ladies rockin' on the porch at five o'clock ever evenin'. He called it a waste of woman power. Thet's the only time I ever seen eye to eye with a Yankee. Anyhow, Loma, yore ma had a long sight rather be a-workin' than a-settin'."
I was fixing to ask Mama what I was to do—I mean, was I to mind Grandpa or her—when she said in a spitting voice, "Will, pick everything that's ready and then make haste on up to your grandpa's."
She was scared she had gone too far in crossing him. And she was mad at herself for giving in.
I never in my life stripped a garden so fast, and my feet raced each other past the depot and the Cold Sassy tree and the nine houses between Grandpa's house and ours. I was about even with the Tate house when I caught the first muffled sounds of "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-Ay" on Granny's piano.
Miss Effie Belle's 102-year-old brother was sitting on their front porch, his square, moldy, splotched face unsmiling and vacant. I knew he couldn't hear Miss Love's music, not without his ear trumpet. But Miss Effie Belle could. Eighty-nine, and skin and bones like a mummy, she stood listening at her open front door, hands on hips and very grim of face.
Miss Effie Belle had a grim face any time, punctuated by a big pink wart that stuck out from the side of her upper lip like the feeler of a bee. She being the kind that put down newspapers so old Mr. Tate wouldn't track in dirt on her floors, you can imagine that she wasn't taking kindly to Miss Love's music. She would be thinking that when you've married somebody else's husband, if you play on her pi-ana it ought to be a contrite hymn that starts, "Lord, my sins be as scarlet" or "Too shamed to lift my head, Lord, too stained to hope for Heaven." Miss Effie Belle would call Miss Love awful to be playing dance-hall music.
I reckon the bride thought that with the parlor windows shut, nobody could hear it. That did dull the loudness, but not the joy and bam with which she played. The music really wasn't fittin', under the circumstances of Granny being dead and all, but it sounded mighty fine.
I didn't know whether to knock or just go on in, like I used to when Granny was alive. I knocked. But of course Miss Love couldn't hear me over the racket, so I tiptoed into the hall. Just then she went to singing, for gosh sake. "TA-RA-RA-BOOM-DE-AY! TA-RA-RA-BOOM-DE-AY!" I stood listening to the deep, rich good-times voice. Without a pause after the last "boom-de-ay," she burst into a chorus of "I'm Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage" and then sang "It'll be a hot time, in the old town, to-ni-ight!"
I sure would of missed something if that train had of killed me!
I stepped over the parlor rug, which was in the hall, rolled up like a long log. Nearby was a pile of dusty ragged sheets that Granny had kept draped over the upholstered parlor furniture. Following the song to the parlor, as if Miss Love was a Pied Piper, I stopped at the door in pure amazement.
The room, pounding with music, was so bright with sunlight it might near put my eyes out. It had always been dark and cool in there. I'd never seen the rich red velour on the loveseat and side-chairs or on what Granny called "my gentleman's and lady's chairs." Of course the sheets weren't on the furniture when Granny had lain in state in there, but even then, because of her being dead and all, the blinds were closed and the draperies drawn.
Today, despite the windows were closed, Miss Love had opened the shutters wide. And the dark heavy draperies weren't just pushed apart; they were down and laid across a chair, like a sweaty dress after Sunday morning preachin'.
The good smell of wet wood rose from the floor, still damp after being scrubbed. Granny's big upright grand piano had been pulled way out, at an angle to the wall, and I saw Miss Love's new gold wedding band on the piano top beside a rag and a square of beeswax in a saucer. I guess she had been about to polish the rosewood but sat down to play instead. The rug being out and the draperies down, the piano sounded tinny and alive.