John stepped away from the hood. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
The man looked surprised. “Why, I was just trying to be neighborly.”
John bent lightning fast, cigarette clamped between his teeth, and snatched up a rock. Mineral flecks glinted in the mid-morning sun. He stepped toward the junker and the old man’s expression changed from indignation to fear. John charged forward and let the rock fly just as the old man stepped on the gas, spinning a cloud of dust.
“Nosy old son of a bitch,” John muttered, breathing hard, smoothing his hair back into place as he stood in the road. I reached out to brace myself on the car hood, spots dancing before my eyes.
Sometimes a week would pass with the John I had first met, sweet and gentle and teasing. Before summer was over he bought an ice cream maker and it took so long to crank that our arms got tired. We stood in the kitchen with the back door open to let in the night air. Our laughter made the tracks and the yard seem not so barren, the smell of homemade ice cream muting the stench of bitter smoke. I still liked making John’s coffee and drinking it with him in the early dark of the mornings. We didn’t say much, just looked at each other over our warm cups. After he left, I sat on the couch waiting for him to come home. Each afternoon when I heard the car door slam, I ran across the scrubby grass and jumped into his arms, locking my legs around his hips. He would groan, pretending I was heavy, and kiss me all the way to the front door.
But the changes were hard to ignore, like the beer and then the whiskey he started drinking. It altered his breath, his speech, even how he kissed me. When he was drunk he slept so hard it was like he had gone away. I felt alone in the house with the scuttling mice. I came to hate being home while John was at work. Most days I sat in the front room looking at the clock, waiting to make supper. Going outside was no better, the sooty lot and the thundering trains and the smell of burning tires drifting over from the junkyard. All I wanted was to drink creek water from my hand, to catch a fish, to suck the juice from a honeysuckle between my teeth. If I couldn’t go home whenever I wanted, I needed at least to get away from that smothering house. Once over supper I asked John about getting a job. He gripped a bottle of beer hard in his hand. “It’s my opinion that a woman should keep at home,” he said. “It’s an outdated way of thinking, I guess, but that’s how it is. I’m supposed to take care of you, and that’s what I’ll do.”
I tried to tell myself maybe John was right about how a wife should be. He was older and wiser than me. At seventeen, I couldn’t be expected to know. Besides, I’d made my bed. I had swallowed a chicken heart, like that long-dead aunt. This was my penance. By the end of August, he made it known that I couldn’t visit Granny so
much. He told me I needed to grow up, that even the Bible said you’re supposed to leave behind your family and cleave to your husband. I told him the Bible also says you’re supposed to take care of your old and that Granny needed us. His eyes grew so black and mean that I thought he would hit me. He said, “I don’t know how come you love that old woman better than me.” After that, he stopped taking me to church or back up the mountain at all.
It’s strange the way time makes things different. Back then I always wanted to go somewhere. Now I have to make myself walk to the Cotters’ and the Barnetts’ and down the mountain selling ginseng. When I lived by the tracks I might have hopped a train if I’d had the courage. I thought of it sometimes when the rusty beds came squealing by, heaped with coal as black as John’s eyes. Now I wish there was never a reason to set foot on any ground outside the house and land where Granny raised me. But in those dark days I would have gone anywhere. The first time John said we were eating supper with his daddy, I was relieved. I even sang to myself as I made a yellow cake to take with us.
I learned that every few months, Frankie Odom called a family meeting. Frankie claimed it was important for kinfolks to sit down at the same table together, but John said it was so he could keep his nose in his sons’ business. “Only reason I’m going is because he puts bread in our mouths,” John said. “That’s how it is when you’re under somebody’s thumb.” I didn’t tell him that I was glad to be going. But my enthusiasm waned when I saw the house. Before John told me how stingy his father was, I might have been surprised to see the owner of Odom’s Hardware living in such a place. There was a slumped look about it, tall and peeling with black windows and missing shingles. The lot next door was heaped with trash, a neighborhood dumping ground. There were other vehicles in the driveway and John’s nephews chased each other in the brown grass. When we got out of the car I almost dropped the yellow cake. There was an odor outside like sulfur and dead rats. I knew the smell. One summer after a man had shot his wife at a house down the mountain, Granny and I were in the creek cooling off when a stink rose all around us, like a giant match had been struck. “Get out of that water,” Granny said. “Let’s get on to the house.” She picked up her skirts and I followed. As we
hurried through the woods, she said, “Devil’s loose on the mountain, Myra Jean. We better stay in for a while.” Now here the smell was again. I had grown up with the Holy Spirit. I wasn’t the kind to fear things unseen. But standing before the Odom house, I was afraid.
Nobody met us at the door. When we stepped into the foyer a black shadow darted along the baseboard. I told myself it was a mouse. The smell was even more intense inside the house. John led me to the kitchen where Lonnie’s wife Peggy was stirring a pot of soup beans. She looked up, sweat shining above her lip. “Hey,” she said. “You can put that down on the counter.” Eugene’s wife Jewel was filling glasses from a pitcher of tea. I had never seen the other wives before. They were tired and colorless, Peggy rail thin and spattered with freckles, Jewel dumpy with a pockmarked face.
We left the cake with the wives and went to the living room. The curtains were drawn, making the room dark and claustrophobic. I tried to smile but my chest was tightening. Frankie Odom didn’t get up from his recliner. “What do you say, darlin?” he asked. He had always been the friendliest of them. But there was something rotten under his grin, maybe the source of the sulfur smell. The three brothers were sitting on the couch. Only Hollis stood to clap John on the back and tip an imaginary hat at me. I had never seen them outside the store, Eugene and Lonnie both older than John, their foreheads lined and their middles thick. Hollis was the youngest, not much older than me, slighter than his brothers with eyes that flicked all over the room and never landed anywhere. John was strange among them, tall and lithe and ethereal. He was right about not belonging there. The smell seemed to be growing stronger. I counted backward to keep from bolting for the door. Then Peggy called us to the dining room. Most of the chandelier’s lights were blown. It cast lurid shadows on the close walls. At the table I thought they wouldn’t speak, all of them, including the nephews, bent over their plates and stuffing their mouths. I tried to eat with them, despite the knots in my stomach.
Finally, Lonnie said, “I’ll just tell you right off, Daddy. Peggy can’t come by and straighten up for you no more. She’s took a job at the bakery.”
Frankie Odom’s fork halted on the way to his mouth. “What?”
“We ain’t got no choice. They’s bills to pay.”
“Well,” he said. “It’s about like y’uns to let me and Hollis fend for ourselves. I know you boys is just waiting on me to die so you can get this place.”
Lonnie grinned around a mouthful of bread. “What would we want with this old place? Looks to me like it’s fixing to fall down around your ears.”
Frankie Odom slammed his fist on the table. I flinched but the others seemed undisturbed. “That’s because you dadburn boys won’t help me do nothing. I’ve worked like a dog all of my life to keep y’uns up, and what do I get for it?”
“Cheapest labor you can find,” John said. For the first time, I saw how much his eyes were like his father’s. “You think you could get anybody else to work that cheap?”
“Now, Daddy,” Eugene said, wiping his mouth with his hand. “You know times is lean at the store. Jewel’s had to go to work, too, down at the bank.” He pointed his fork in Hollis’s direction. “Hollis is setting right there. Why can’t he do something?”
Frankie jammed a spoonful of mashed potatoes between his lips, a white blob falling onto the table. He looked at Hollis with disdain.
“Why, Hollis can’t do nothing.”
Jewel spoke up sheepishly, without raising her eyes from her plate. “I reckon there’s people you can hire to cook and clean.”
“Hire!” Frankie Odom squawked, crumbs spraying. His face had gone a deep red. “You think I can afford to hire somebody? It takes ever dime I get to keep food on your tables and roofs over your heads.” After a moment of thought, he said, “I reckon I could take some out of you boys’s pay and get a woman to come in once or twice a week.”
There was a long silence. The Odoms looked around at each other, the women’s faces livened with panic. Then their eyes fell on me. It hit me all at once what they were thinking. I turned to John, hoping he could read my expression. “Well,” he said. “I guess Myra could do it. She’s been telling me she’d like to get out of the house.” Peggy and Jewel sagged with relief. They went back to their food, not waiting to see what I would say. After a while Hollis spoke up. “That’d be all right, wouldn’t it, Daddy?”
“I reckon,” Frankie said. “If she knows how to fix soup beans. Long as I’ve got a pot of beans and a pan of cornbread, I’ll be just fine.”
“Myra knows how to cook,” John said. “That’s one thing her granny taught her.”
I sat there like a stone, unable to look at anyone. The Odoms went on eating, the tension gone from the room. When his plate was clean, Frankie Odom said, “How about a cup of coffee?” Peggy stood up and went to the kitchen, like they all expected her to. I felt trapped, the table so crowded my elbows were touching Hollis’s on one side and John’s on the other. When I mumbled I’d be right back, I didn’t think anyone noticed I was leaving. They had begun to argue about the store. Their querulous voices, John’s the loudest among them, chased me out the front door. I sat on the porch steps, grateful for the evening air. I breathed deeply, trying to still my hands. I pictured what Granny might be doing at that hour, reading her Bible, mending old dresses, knitting doilies, eating cornbread and buttermilk. I wanted to forget her warning about being careful what I wished for. I told myself I loved John and it was worth everything to have him. I needed him to come out and check on me. When the door creaked open behind me, I turned around hopefully. But it wasn’t John, it was Hollis. My face must have fallen because he said, “He’s a little bit busy right now. Him and Daddy’s going at it hot and heavy. I’m like you, I don’t like to be in the middle of a fuss.” He sat down on the steps beside me, uncomfortably close. He paused, gazing across the yard. Then he turned and studied me.
“You’re looking kind of sickly,” he said. “You all right?”
I glanced at him. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”
“You know, I used to get sick a lot when I was little. I always thought it was something in this old house making me puny. But I don’t get like that anymore.”
I turned my face, hot and flushed, wanting him to disappear. Sweat trickled under my dress even though the sun had gone down, bats wheeling around the streetlights.
Hollis didn’t take the hint. “I know what happened in yonder,” he said. “Nobody asked you what you wanted to do. But me and Daddy won’t be too much trouble.” He put his hand on my back. It took every ounce of my will not to recoil from his touch. “Don’t you worry about none of it. You got a friend right here. I won’t let them run over you.”
After that night, John began dropping me off at the Odom house twice a week. The first time, Frankie Odom answered the bell and said, “Hey there, darlin.” I followed him with my purse clasped to my side, holding my breath as I walked into the stench. He showed me to a bag of hairy green stalks on the table. “Do you know how to fry okrie?” he asked. I looked at him for a moment without answering. I had fried okra many times, but never for breakfast. “Well, get busy,” he said. “I’m starving plumb to death.” He sat there as I tried to cook, not telling me where the iron skillet was or the lard or the flour or the knife, only talking about everything else as I sweated over the stove. He didn’t comment when I presented a plate of hot fried okra. He fell to eating and I stood fidgeting, not knowing what else to do. After a while he lifted his head from the plate as if remembering my presence and said, “You can give the bathroom a going-over.”
I searched for something to clean with until I found a jug of bleach and a scrap of yellowed shirt under the kitchen sink. I did the best I could with what I had to scour away the mildew and rust stains. When I heard the front door open and close an hour later, I hoped it was John coming back for me. I stepped into the gloomy hall and it was Hollis again, standing in a square of light in the foyer. “Got to work and figured out I lost my dadblame wallet,” he said, to no one in particular. Then he saw me and froze, head cocked like a bird of prey. “It’s your day to cook and clean, I guess.” I nodded. We looked at each other. It would have been impolite to go back into the bathroom and pretend to scrub. I stood still as he came creaking down the hall to me, aware of being alone in that foul house with two men I didn’t know and who didn’t feel like family.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “I ain’t seen that pocketbook since yesterday. I bet you it dropped out of my britches when I was out yonder pulling weeds.” He paused, appraising me in a way that made my ears warm. “Are you good at finding things?”
“What?”
“Two pairs of eyes is better than one. Come on out here with me and look for it.”
I stepped blinking into the sun behind him, out the back door and down the steps into the yard. My feet were heavy as if in protest, the bleach-smelling rag still in my fist. I looked down at it numbly and
dropped it in the dirt beside the stoop. He stopped, hands on his hips, surveying the yard. I stood a few paces behind him, waiting for him to go on. Finally, I shaded my eyes against the sun and asked, “Where were you pulling weeds at?”