A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (5 page)

When I got back to the house John Woodrow and his girlfriend had cleared out, cleared out and took my lingerie with them. But I said, That’s all right. I’ll wait. And I waited and waited, fell asleep that night with my clothes on, waiting for him to come in, but little did I know I’d seen the last of him.

I went back to the Hoovers’ when I woke up that next morning, and I left the pistol hidden under my pillow. I didn’t take it with me because having a pistol in a migrant house is one thing, having it on you in the Hoovers’ home
would be another. See, one was society, the other wasn’t. The rules are different, or, there’re rules in one place and none in the other.

Frances had me clean everything but the light bulbs that day. I’d never had any experience cleaning a bathroom or a kitchen or even dusting a dresser, but you don’t have to know how to clean to clean. I learned that real fast. If you know what clean looks like then you just take a mop or a broom or a rag and go at whatever’s dirty until it’s clean. That’s that. And I knew clean. Sudie Bee could fly through a house, picking up things with one hand and cleaning under them with the other. She and Lester could roll up a rug, hang it outside, beat it, and lay it back down faster than alot of people could vacuum one. She scrubbed our shower doors like they were something alive that had to be beaten back. Yes, I surely knew the meaning of clean.

When Lonnie came in for lunch I overheard her telling him all the things she’d had me do, like taking everything out of the linen closet and wiping the shelves down. When he told her he doubted if anybody coming to the wedding would run a white glove in there, she said, “I know, but it seems like such a shame to waste good seasonal help.” Then she told him she wanted to have me keep working in the house, cleaning, keeping things in order, and then she told him she also wanted me to serve and pick up at Tiny Fran’s reception. He said, “I thought you already asked one of the girls from the Butler place,” and she said, “I know
I did, but I like the idea of having this girl better.” All old Frances wanted to do was show off white help, a white girl walking around her living room carrying a tray. And all I could think was how that’d be a new low in the life of Ruby Pitt Woodrow. Sudie Bee would never have put on a black dress and a little white apron and offered little sandwiches to people, but then again, nobody ever asked her to. She’d have brought her nephew Whistle Dick to serve and keep empty cups and plates picked up, not much different from what I did at Tiny Fran’s wedding. I remembered mama and daddy’s anniversary party, how Sudie Bee peeked out of the kitchen door and caught Whistle Dick tasting something off the buffet. He came back in the kitchen and Sudie Bee told him, “Your mama say you ain’t got good sense, so I let you work for me doing something don’t take sense, and Mr. Pitt he pay you good money, and then you be sticking your old fingers in somebody’s food. You aint got to be no nigger just ’cause you black. And ain’t nobody in there ’gwine ask you to wipe they nose. You just picking up plates! You mess up and then what Sister ’gwine do fo’ money?” And all the time I was working at the reception, especially after I heard another one of Frances’s remarks, it was all I could do to keep my fingers off the wedding cake, and the more I thought of Whistle Dick, the more I wanted to. Then I’d have been out, just like he was when Sudie Bee caught him sneaking the pineapple slices off a ham.

R
uby got here the week before Burr got married, married to damn old Tiny Fran and her already starting to poke out some with Roland, lounging around all day, swinging in the porch swing and pulling out the front of her dress and blowing down it, yelling up to her mama’s bedroom window about how hot she was. Her mama used to tell her to go somewhere and cool off. She’d tell her, “I can’t change the temperature. Big people get hotter faster, you know that.” And that’d piss Tiny Fran off, plump plus being pregnant. She’d hop up out of that swing and go inside, slamming doors, cussing like a sailor, saying how she was going to show her mama the back of her hand and so forth. She would too! And I’d think, Yeah, and either one of you let Lonnie know what all goes on and he’ll take and use one of you to beat the other one with. If I’d been
her daddy I’d have had to slap that sorriness back away from my supper table and said, “Get on away from here, you road whore!” I don’t have the patience of some people. He didn’t know ninety percent of what went on around his house, but I did. I mainly worked up around the yard, in the garden and all, and I got my eyes full more times than a few. He knew she was bad, but he didn’t have any idea, not like I did, of how hard she rode her mama. I used to tell Ruby, I’d say, “No wonder Frances Hoover’s a bitch.” A man stays in the field all day, just comes in the house to eat and sleep, he’s going to miss right much of what goes on. Then he’ll look at his girl one day and she’s swoll up with God knows whose baby and his wife’s about to die for some attention, walking around trumped up all the time like she’s the goddamn Queen of Sheba, and he’ll just have to shake his head and walk right back out of the house and get on his tractor and plow that field, something he knows something about.

Lonnie Hoover was about as curious a man as you’ll meet, curious man, strange man. You’d watch him take something and take it until you’d be about to bust open to go in and snatch what was going wrong out from under him and fix it, just get the damn thing fixed in a hurry. Like if you knew and he knew and everybody in the whole world knew somebody was regularly stealing out from his barns, and everybody knew exactly who was doing it, somebody
right brazen, you’d see things gone and see things gone and wonder when in the hell Lonnie intended to do something about it. Or like if you knew who it was that took and borrowed a piece of machinery without telling somebody and then brought it back busted or just left it mired up in a field somewhere, you’d say, “When’s Lonnie going to make his move, get his business back in order?” But he’d move so slow and quiet, and then after what seemed like forever, you’d see extra bags of fertilizer packed back up under the shelter or a brand new disk or mower pulled up beside the barn, and you’d say, “Well, it was about time,” because you’d know Lonnie’d gone off somewhere with somebody and been made right with. Some quiet somewhere Lonnie and a man had sat in a truck and made arrangements for Lonnie to get back what was his, and usually more.

That’s how he worked fixing Tiny Fran, old Tiny Fran dragging around like a slug, leaving a trail, something else Lonnie’d have to clean up. I remember one time a long time ago Ruby asked me why he hadn’t just packed her up and put her away in somewhere to have that baby, or why he didn’t pay a doctor off in town or somewhere under the counter to get rid of the whole business. Both of those quiet slipping around ways seemed to her like the way Lonnie liked to operate. But I said Lonnie was too sharp to fix something just for right now. He was thinking way on down the road. Get her wedged in. Clamp down
on her. You get somebody like a Tiny Fran fixed up just for the here and now and it’d be silly and useless as finding the clown head up out of a Jack-in-the-box and shutting it back up inside and then leaving it out somewhere not thinking that the next one to come along will be bound to wind that thing up and watch it pop just for the pure fun of it. No, Lonnie intended to wedge her in, clamp down on her for the long haul.

Burr said he’d always remember how bright a day it was, how dry the dirt was deep down when he turned it up. He said that was what he had on his mind, all he was thinking of, the bright day and the dry dirt, and then he looked up down a row and saw Lonnie walking across the way to him. He said when he got to the end of the row he stopped the tractor, expecting to hear how Lonnie wanted him to do five more things before dark, but when the engine stopped Lonnie just squatted down and started handling a dirt clod and told Burr to get down, they needed to talk. Burr heard Lonnie out, all the “Boy, you might amount to something one day,” and “You might could be somebody if you had something behind you. To be sure you don’t want to work for farmers up and down this road the rest of your life.” Burr heard him, listened hard, and what Lonnie said sounded reasonable, reasonable at least to a boy whose daddy and granddaddy and great-granddaddy had rented land from men like Lonnie and whose mama would die in a rocking chair, hemming dungarees, smelling like bleach
and Argo starch. He just listened and agreed. “Marry Tiny Fran, whether you did it or not, just marry her and take a forty-eight-acre block, a good piece, drains good, not clay dirt, good loamy soil. Marry her and have something.”

So what do you do? If she’d lived in town it could’ve been somebody saying “Marry the town whore and I’ll give you Main Street, all up and down both sides, all the stores, all the things in the stores, Main Street.” Burr said he didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll do it, Lonnie. I like Tiny Fran okay.” But the fact was he thought the same about her everybody did. More times than a plenty I’d be out in the tractor yard with him and we’d see Tiny Fran go across the yard in something poured-on-looking and he’d do his made-up rhyme, “Between Franny’s thighs is where her fanny lies, and that’s what makes my britches rise.” So you see, he didn’t think she was okay. You generally don’t marry somebody you feel like you can tease about like that. He wasn’t a innocent lamb with blinders on, led, not knowing what all he might be in for with a girl like her. I just don’t believe he had a clear idea how much and how long he’d have to pay. I always heard paybacks is hell.

Sorry as she was, though, I cannot honestly say I’d have turned her down if she’d been offered to me. That’s a lot of property, and it’s a lot of ways you can think up to stay out from under a woman, stay drunk, stay at work, stay in front of the television set.

But I did turn down one piece of property, Ruby’s she
got when her parents died. I said, “I can’t take it, Ruby. I can’t take your land,” and she said, “It’s not mine!” I told her, “It’s got your name on it,” and she told me that was all that made it hers. I knew how she felt. She’d talked to me before. And it won’t so much like I felt like I’d be cashing in on marrying somebody with some money, I’d wanted her before I knew what she’d come from. I just didn’t want a place I didn’t know. I know this place. Not taking the land was a choice I and Ruby had to make, and after we made it, we just had to close the door.

And I act like Burr was out there in that field with a choice, but he wasn’t. He saw all that land he’d wanted and his daddy’d wanted and it wasn’t a choice at all. That sun hitting the hill where his acres would start must’ve been the best-looking thing he’d ever seen, except for his dream woman, but she was in his head and she’d have to stay there.

Go ahead! Say how trading a happy life for land is foolish, how your peace of mind is more important than a piece of fertile land. But let me tell you this, when you grow up out here, when you know your family’s been here long as theirs, meaning somebody like a Lonnie Hoover, when you know you can match time with them day for day, year for year, all this stretched out beside the road, back to the woods farther and farther, it pure hurts sometimes to look at it, looking at it after all that time you’ve
spent with your face so close down on it over a bean row, touching it, turning it over, then going home to not one damn thing that’s yours but some clothes and some pots and pans and a stick or two of furniture. You don’t rent a boy a corner of a toy store, one down on that Main Street, and let him play all day until dark, every day, then send him home. No! You let him play a while, get attached to something, then say, “Take it, son. You can have it. You handled it enough. It’s yours. It’s right you should have it.”

Let’s say Burr’s family rented from Lonnie’s crowd a hundred years. That’s a long time, especially when it looks to you like the whole rest of the world is drawing interest and all you’re doing is putting in sweat and taking out the tired frustration. Then something comes along like Lonnie’s bad situation that can end it and you and the rest of your line can have something, even if it is on account of what some teenage whore did one afternoon in the corn-crib with God knows who or how many. That’s one way of stopping what’s gone on.

School’s another way. Burr’s girl, June, got a college degree, but what do you think would’ve been her chance if Burr hadn’t told Lonnie he’d marry his girl? Not much. She’d have either been a Tiny Fran or swung back the other way around and been head over heels into the church down there and worried the pure living hell out of somebody wanting to witness all the time. Or she might would
could’ve joined the 4-H and spent all her time dragging a calf around out here. But she got off from this place, had a mind to do something. You have to get off somewhere to do something makes some money. If she’d been born with her daddy still renting she’d still be here, and we’d all look at her all the time and think how that’s a shame with her so smart.

No, you need something of your own, and you need it young so you can enjoy having it, not look back on all the work and wish you weren’t so damn tired all the time with not a thing to show for it but your memory of working. But Burr was lucky, hard a time as he had managing Tiny Fran, he’s told me he felt like he made out pretty good. He told me that a piece of something, the land, he’s said what that gives a man is two things, some pride and some time, and you can sit back if you’ve a mind to and look outside and see all those folks hunched over picking, digging, pulling up out of your dirt, setting something back down in it, doing all the things you used to do, save for the grace of Lonnie Hoover.

He died this fall be ten years ago, lost the left side of his head then next thing you know he was gone. I told Ruby, I said, “I hate to say it, but I’ll be glad to finally see what Lonnie has down in his will.” I knew he had one, a man with as much business as he had has to. I don’t. I’ll die interstate, nothing to pass on and no heirs. Ruby’s cancer
ate up most of everything we had saved, and if it hadn’t been for her brothers’ picking up what they did, I don’t think we’d have made it. Everything’s so goddamn high. But I figured Lonnie’d have things squared away.