Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
The air was cooling in the late afternoon, the sun was setting behind the levees, and the only sounds were crickets and late-afternoon birds. They passed the mile of catfish ponds Jimmy had built twenty years before with the help of a neighbor farmer. The ponds were ringed with white herons, standing on one leg waiting to feed again on the treasure of captive catfish.
“Don't you love to see the herons?” Cecelia asked. “I can't believe how you build something one day for one purpose and a week later there are hundreds of herons using it for a pantry.”
“What else don't we know,” Jimmy answered. “Or expect to happen. Something we can't imagine falls from the sky every time we turn around and there you are, new challenges, new paths to take, new decisions to be made.”
“Well, I'll tell you one thing. If you get it into your head to go to the deadening and kill yourself with a gun or hang yourself like Mr. Allen did on Hopedale, then I will kill myself the next day, too, without bothering to bury you or burn you up in the cremator's oven or do a thing to help your children or grandchildren cope with losing you. That's a promise, Jimmy, so you can believe it. So be sure and get all those papers right for them.”
Cecelia looked straight ahead, down the long four-lane highway, her chin set, her hands folded primly in her lap. She had said it and she was glad she had said it.
Jimmy pulled the BMW convertible off onto the side of the highway and turned off the motor.
“Sure I think about it,” he said. “Who wouldn't?” She still would not look at him. “But I will not do it. No matter how bad it gets or how much I am a useless mind lying in bed with no body to do my will.” He started laughing. “Like one of those space navigators in
Dune,
except I'll be in a bed instead of a tank of liquid and I'll be doing Demerol and morphine instead of spice. I might shoot myself in your bed and get blood all over your grandmother's sheets and bedspread, but I will not go out into the deadening and I sure won't hang myself. I promise you that.”
She was laughing, too. She couldn't help herself. She was letting him get her tickled just like he always did if she tried to talk to him about something serious like when Little Jimmy started smoking marijuana or when he gave his friend Jodie five thousand dollars for his senatorial campaign.
“If you get blood on my Grandmother Tellie's linens from Paris I will get blood on your hunting guns and your first editions of William Faulkner's books and your autographed copy of Willie Morris's first book and everything else of yours in the house. I'll shoot myself and then I'll walk around the house getting blood on everything you like.”
“How about I go to that clinic in Switzerland you and your buddy Courtney think can make me well. What if I take you late this fall and we go to Switzerland and stay two weeks and let these alternative medicine doctors you believe in try out all their quasi-scientific tricks on me. If I do that, will you let me go hunting at Christmas with Jodie and the governor and the crowd that are going from Texas?”
“At least I said it,” she said. “At least I don't have to go around thinking it. You'd really go to Switzerland?”
“How much does it cost?”
“I'm going to pay for it out of my money Daddy left me. You will never know how much it cost.”
“I said I'd go. Now stop thinking all those trashy suicide thoughts and let's go to Doe's and eat. Get them on the cellular phone and tell them we are coming and that I want the center table by the picture window. They know which one.”
Jimmy pulled Cecelia over as near as he could what with the damned center console in the convertible. He hugged her and seriously kissed her, then he turned on the motor and put the top down and turned on the CD player to a CD of John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things” and held his back up straight and drove on into Greenville. He was thinking about what it was like to lie in bed on his back and have her climb on top of him and make him come. Okay, he'd go to the alternative medicine clinic in the Alps and at least he'd get to see some spectacular scenery. If it didn't work then he had to think of a way to do it that really seemed like an accident, or maybe murder. It was going to be hard as hell to do because she was on the scent.
She was on the phone talking to the manager at Doe's.
“We can have that table if you have to have it,” she said when she hung up. “Because it's a weekday but don't be surprised if we have to wait a few minutes when we get there. Bobby said your friend Jodie Myers was there with a woman from Jackson. He said she was very pretty. Hurry up, I want to see who he brought to Doe's.”
“I know who it is,” Jimmy said. “He told me about her last week. She's your third cousin from Jackson, the daughter of Ben and Rivers Luckett. She's lived in Mexico for the last seventeen years and just came home to Mississippi.” He turned and looked at Cecelia, then drove faster toward the town.
“Jodie told me about it last week,” he went on. “They met years ago, but she moved away. She likes him because he knows you and me. She says we're legendary for having a happy marriage. She heard I was the best crippled swimmer in Mississippi, and, besides, she's your cousin.”
“I know that. So she thinks we have a happy marriage?” Cecelia was laughing again. “Wait until I tell her about your threat to get blood on Grandmother Tellie's embroidered sheets and pillowcases. I don't know why I even let you sleep on those sheets. Well, if you really go to Switzerland I might decide to be happy with you.”
Jimmy pulled into the parking lot of the original Doe's Eat Place. He got out of the car and came around and opened the door for Cecelia. “Be on your best behavior,” he told Cecelia. “Marrying Angele Luckett might be the thing that puts Jodie in the Senate. Then we can go to Washington and sit up in a balcony and watch him preen around on the Senate floor.”
He took her arm in one hand and his cane in the other and they went up the two steps and onto the screened-in porch and entered the restaurant. Jodie and Angele saw them and waved them over.
“SO YOU'VE JUMPED
on Jodie's bandwagon,” Jimmy began, being so charming Cecelia started getting jealous. “We need you. We need a U.S. senator from the delta. You can't educate these people unless you speak their language and understand them. Jodie's one of them. He took a servant with him to Ole Miss, did you know that? He did. I swear he did. His accent used to be so thick the only people he could talk to were field hands. And this is not a racist thing. He's the farthest thing from a racist you can find. You watch. He'll be the finest senator this state has ever had.”
“He said I could be his education advisor,” Angele said. “I'll be good at it. I was raised on a cotton plantation. I taught in our school when I was sixteen. I taught the young people how to read. I know how to get it done.”
“Angele's a serious woman,” Jodie said. He put a serious expression on his face. “So how are you, Jimmy? Are you doing well?”
“I am doing as well as anybody can that has to watch Ole Miss play that crazy schedule they have for them. Have you seen that fullback Mississippi State got from Yazoo City?”
“Let's order,” Cecelia said, pulling her chair over closer to her cousin Angele. “I want to look at that jacket,” she told her. “I haven't been anywhere to shop in two years. I'd forgotten what beautiful fabrics feel like. The only clothes I have are mailed to me by Maison Weiss and I can't even get to Jackson to have them altered properly. Where do you live, Angele? I heard you were in Africa or somewhere.”
“I'm moving back to Jackson. To help run Jodie's campaign. Come and visit me and we'll get things altered at Maison Weiss.”
“They're going to talk football all night.”
“I think so. Jodie said they used to jump off a bridge into deep water all the time. He said it's a wonder they didn't put out their eyes.”
“Men,” Cecelia said.
“Men,” her cousin answered. “Well, I like them.”
“Me too,” Cecelia giggled. “At least you have someone to feel superior to if you keep one around.”
“I heard that,” Jimmy said. “If I was someone who wanted to drag someone to Switzerland to have alternative medicine gurus poke and starve and pry on him, I'd be careful of my mouth in public.”
I
One morning in the first year of the twentieth century, when Issaquena County had only begun to be cleared of trees, a little girl named Margaret was playing in a pile of sand when she saw a wagon come creeping across the bridge and turn onto the road to the house. The wagon was filled with black people. Two grown people on the seat and many children in the back.
Margaret stood up and watched the wagon move along the road. When it passed the fence that separated the yard from the pasture she waved and the children waved back. Margaret ran across the yard and up the steps to the porch. “Some people are coming,” she told her mother. “A lot of them.”
“From the floods,” her grandmother said. Her grandmother was sitting in front of a sewing machine making a curtain. They had only lived in the house one year and they weren't through fixing it up yet.
“Let's go and see who it is,” her mother said. She straightened her hair with her hands as she moved across the verandah and opened the screen door and went out onto the steps. The wagon had stopped twenty feet from the house and a tall man with a gray beard had climbed down and was walking toward them. He was a very thin man and he carried his hat in his hand. Margaret's mother waited for him to approach and let him speak first.
“We come from Deer Creek,” the man began. “Where the floods are happening.”
“Do you need food?” Mrs. McCamey asked. “We can feed you.”
“No, ma'am. We need to leave a boy somewhere. He lost his folks in the flood and we can't keep him. We're going to Anquilla to stay with my auntie. We can't take any more than the ones we got.”
“What kind of boy? How big is he?”
“He's a good boy. He's eight years old. Eli,” he called to the wagon. “Get down and come over here.”
A boy Margaret's size climbed down from the wagon and came to stand beside the man. He was a clean little boy, wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt and some overalls. His face looked like a place where nothing had happened for a long time. He stood quietly beside the man, not moving, his hands folded in front of him.
“He's not sick,” the man said. “He's a good worker. They worked over on Panther Burn Plantation. It's all flooded now. The house is gone. His momma and daddy were good people. They worked for Mr. Cortwright.”
“Where are you from, son?” Mrs. McCamey asked. “Where were you born?”
“Up by Deer Creek on Panther Burn,” he answered, looking her right in the eye. “I helped in the kitchen. I can make mayonnaise and I can churn.”
“Are you hungry?” It was Margaret's grandmother talking now. She had come down from the screened-in porch and was taking over.
“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “I could eat.”
“You all go and sit at that table under that tree,” her grandmother said. “We'll send someone out with cornbread and molasses. Margaret, go tell Baby Doll to bring food out for these people. Let me talk to the boy,” she told the man. “Come on, boy. Come here and let me see about you. What is your name?”
“Eli Naylor, ma'am,” he said. “My name is Eli Naylor.”
“You say you can make mayonnaise?”
“Yes, ma'am. I can hold the oil and drip it while my momma beats it. And I can churn and make butter and sweep the porches with a broom.”
“Could you stay here if we keep you? You won't get lonely and run away?”
“I have to stay somewhere,” he answered. “I have to have a place to be.”
“Then leave him here,” she said to the man. “Do you know how to write?”
“I can write.”
“Then I'll give you a piece of paper with our mailing address on it and you can send word of where you'll be when you get to Anquilla. How much is flooded on Deer Creek?”
“Everything is washed away from Panther Burn to Mr. Charlie Larkin's place. The Red Cross came and helped some people leave. They gave us food and quinine for the children. Eli's had quinine every day. I don't think he'll get sick. I can leave some of it for him.”
“No, we have it. You save what you have for your children. Come on over to the table now. You eat, then you get on to Anquilla before night comes. The mosquitoes get bad after dark along the bayou.”
“You all is lucky the bayou didn't flood back here. What do you call this bayou?”
“Steele Bayou is its name.”
“It's Lucky Bayou, is what it is.” He followed his children and his wife to the wooden table under the huge old sycamore tree and they ate cornbread and molasses and drank cooled tea and then they took their leave of Eli and climbed back into the wagon and rode off down the road and across the bridge. Eli stood beside the fence waving at them until they were out of sight. Then he followed Margaret into the house and through the parlors and back into the kitchen where he would live for the next seventy years.
This was in the old times, in the time of floods and malaria and yellow fever and starvation, when the Mississippi Delta was being tamed and made into a place where men could live.
II
In the 1950s there had been three weddings in four years. Three times they had decorated the parlors and the verandah and the halls and set up tables with linen cloths and napkins and polished the silver and filled the candlesticks with candles and brought the Episcopal priest up from Rolling Fork and married off the girls. First Margaret, then Aurora, then Roberta.
Now they were having funerals. First Mr. McCamey, then Dr. Finley. That was all the men they had, except for Guy, who was in school at Mississippi State. They had the husbands of the girls, but they all lived away, in New Orleans and Indiana. The McCamey men had been dying young ever since Margaret's grandparents had come down the Mississippi River in rafts and built the town and the church and the plantations. They had died of yellow fever and malaria from being on the river building levees. Now they were dying of cancer from being in the fields with the DDT they used to kill the boll weevils. The black people weren't dying of cancer yet. Only the white men were dying. The black people would die of it later, but the white men were first.
When Dr. Finley couldn't stand his pain he took morphine and went to sleep. When Mr. McCamey couldn't stand his he went out into the yard and hung himself from a tree that looked out across the bayou. He did it in the early morning so Man would find him when he came in at dawn. It was Man who had to cut him down and go up to the house and tell the women what he'd found. Man was six feet seven inches tall. When he got through telling the women and seeing that the body was taken into town to the undertaker, he went to the store and had Mr. Cincinnatus sell him a bottle of whiskey and then he saddled a horse and rode up the Deadning and sat out in the field he and Mr. McCamey had cleared when they were young and he walked around among the small, early-summer cotton and drank all the whiskey and cried and thought about Mr. Mac swinging in the wind like a sail, just swinging a little bit in his suit pants and shirt and tie still tied around his neck.
“It's the poison they been putting on the plants,” Baby Doll told him, when Mr. Mac got sick. “It's all that poison. I told you to wash it off your face and hands when you be moving it. It's got that bad smell. You need to wash it off when you come in from spraying it.”
“We're going to be spraying it from an airplane soon,” Man had told her. “Mr. Bubba Wade is fixing that old plane he's got up on his place so he can fly on top of the fields and spray it on and we don't have to carry it no more.”
“Who's going to run this place now?” Baby Doll asked after the last funeral was over. “Now all the men is dead except Guy and he's too young to run it. He's in Starkville.”
“He can come on home. Me and Mr. Mac wasn't that old when we started Esperanza. I wasn't much older than Guy is.”
“Guy could run it,” Baby Doll said. “But they don't want him to. They want him to play football.”
“Then Miss Nellie and Miss Margaret got to run it. Mr. Wade can tell them what to do. And I will run it like I always do.”
“You can't write. You got to write to run it. You should have gone in the school when they had the teacher here.”
“They didn't have the school. We didn't build it until after we built the store and I was grown by then.” Man walked away from Baby Doll and went back up to the store to talk to Mr. Cincinnatus because he didn't like to talk about who knew how to write and who didn't know how. He was the strongest man in Hopedale. He didn't need to write anything down. He needed to get someone to drive into Rolling Fork and get some parts so he could fix the plow on the tractor. He needed Mr. Cincinnatus to close the store and get the parts and some engine oil for the engine.
ELI NAYLOR WAS
sixty years old when the men died. Aurora's husband, Mr. Dudley, came down from Indiana and paid off the debts on Hopedale and put a new roof on the house and stayed a week going over the books and paying bills.
“Can you take care of these women now?” he asked Naylor.
“I'll do the best I can.”
“Do you have a gun?”
“We got Mr. McCamey's guns in the case.”
“You got people you can depend on?”
“I got Man and I got Sears and we got Mr. Cincinnatus at the store. Miss Margaret's got her pistol but we don't need it. No one's coming on Hopedale to hurt us, is they?”
“Okay. Okay, then. Guy won't be home for two years. He has to finish his education. It's going to be up to you, Naylor. You have to be the man.”
“I'll do the best I can.”
“You call me if you need me. You know how to use the telephone?”
“I can use it if I have to. I know how.”
“All right. All right then. I got to get back to my job, Naylor. I got to go home tomorrow. It's up to you now.”
AFTER MR. DUDLEY
left, Miss Margaret came into the kitchen and looked things over. “We have to clean out that cupboard, Naylor,” she said. “We'll get weevils if we let it go.”
“We been throwing everything in there. We had so many funerals we don't know what's going on. Abigail and Juliet were in there all the time eating cake when they were here.”
They pushed the table and chairs out of the way and started taking things off the shelves in the cupboard.
“Go get that paint out of the garage,” Miss Margaret said. “We need to paint these shelves before we put things back on them.” She pulled a shelf board out into the light and Naylor took it from her and laid it on a chair. Then he went out the door to the hall and down the hall to the porch and down the porch stairs to the garage and started looking for the paint.
III
November 1968. Hopedale Plantation, Issaquena County, Mississippi. It was three in the afternoon and the mail carrier's truck had come and gone two hours before but Naylor still wouldn't go to the store and get the check unless Margaret went with him and that meant they both had to wait until Miss Nellie had time to drive them in the Buick. Naylor walked to the store every day except the day the checks came, but Margaret never walked to the store because it got her shoes dusty and gnats came up from the bayou and got into her hair. There were no gnats in November and no mosquitoes either. The only bugs left to see were a few large grasshoppers in the picked field that had been the pasture when Mr. Floyd was alive and there were riding horses.
It was four thirty when Miss Nellie finally got up from her nap and straightened her hair and put powder on her face and told Sugar to get the car and bring it around to the front door.
“Come on then,” she told her mother. “Let's take him down there.”
Margaret took off her house shoes, which were all she wore now because shoes hurt her corns. She put on silk stockings that she had fixed with elastic so they stayed up under her dress and slipped her feet into the uncomfortable leather shoes. She straightened her back and walked out onto the porch to wait for the car. Naylor came out from the kitchen to join her.
“It is a check,” Margaret told Naylor for the tenth time that year. “No one can use it for anything until you sign your name to the back. It's only a piece of paper until you sign your name to it.”
He was silent. He wasn't going to argue with her because he had been arguing with her for sixty years and he knew it did no good.
“This is ridiculous,” Miss Nellie said. “You walk to the store every afternoon unless the check is there. It is only a quarter of a mile to the store. You can see the store from here.”
“I needed to get some cinnamon anyway,” Margaret told her. “It's all right.”
Sugar drove up with the Buick and opened the doors for them. “I could drive you down there,” he offered.
“No, I'll do it.” Miss Nellie slid her five feet two inches into the driver's seat. She could barely see over the steering wheel because Sugar had moved her pillow so she got back out and they found the pillow and arranged it on the seat and she got in again and her mother got into the front passenger's seat and Naylor got into the back and Sugar closed the doors for them and Miss Nellie started the engine and they drove along the gravel road that led from the house past the pasture and beside the bayou to the store.
“I might as well get some gasoline while we're here,” Miss Nellie said, and stopped the Buick beside the gasoline pump that stood between the store and the schoolhouse. Naylor got out of the backseat and opened the door for Margaret and then the door for Miss Nellie and they all went into the two-room store, which was run by Margaret's grandson, Cincinnatus, whose father had died when he was small.
“You all come to get the checks?” he asked, although he knew it was why they were there.
“Yes, he's going to sign his and we want you to take it to Rolling Fork to the bank,” Miss Nellie said. “I'll put Momma's in my account when I go in on Monday.”