Her Own Place (20 page)

“Mama,” her daughter pleaded, “you do count. You always will. It's just that there is a lot of interest right now in family
history. Some of my friends can trace their roots so far back, it's, well, a little embarrassing for me to be hardly able to go back to my own father on his side of the family. So I just gave this picture a name and hung it up.”

Yes, Mae Lee reassured herself, it was right that the torn family quilt should end up with Amberlee.

The next two days were very much like the first two. From mansion to mansion, the historical accounts went on and on. But as for the slaves, when there was some rare recorded recognition of their contribution, it had only been for some honor bestowed for serving the master who owned them faithfully and with fidelity until death.

The quarters and cemeteries held her spellbound. Her eyes were always searching, poring over every mark or notch, looking for something, perhaps a few stones piled or shaped into some pattern, that might fit into her mind's puzzle and offer some fragile link in her family's broken and scattered chain.

Mae Lee fingered her brochures and looked upon the places they described. Could this be the house, she wondered, where her foreparent had loudly whistled his way from the kitchen through the breezeway while carrying food to the master's table? Her foreparent, according to stories passed down through generations, who had mastered the art of holding snippets of food under his tongue and in his cheeks and whistling loudly at the same time?

So Mae Lee continued her quiet search.

On the way home Mae Lee gazed at the trees alongside the interstate. They were lovely in the spring, white dogwood trees
weaving a pattern into the lush green trees like white lace trimming on a dark green dress. Growing in between here and there was the beautiful bright fuchsia-flowered redbud tree, called the Judas tree. The tree grew weak and crooked. After all, she thought, it represented a crooked man, Judas.

“I bet if I could get this tree home, growing up in my backyard would straighten it out. If you pull this bus over, I'll hop out and jerk up a few offshoots from those pretty trees,” she hinted hopefully to the driver.

“Probably wouldn't live.”

“Oh, it would live all right. I've got a green thumb.”

The bus driver smiled, but did not break his speed.

Less than a month after Mae Lee returned from what she swore would be the last bus tour she'd ever take just before the spring planting season, her farming plans fell apart. She was worrying over a flat tire on her wheelbarrow when she learned that Hooker Jones had suffered a stroke. His fanning days were over. The doctors didn't expect a full recovery.

Mae Lee's efforts to find someone to take over the farm-work were fruitless. For the first time in well over sixty years the land would not be cultivated. It was good farmland. The soil had been kept fertile through careful crop rotation. Mae Lee had learned that from her daddy. Even so, there were no takers for the job. People throughout the South were leaving the farming life.

Mae Lee's son, Taylor, also tried to find someone to lease the land, without success. “You've got to face it, Mama, farming is too much of a losing gamble these days,” Taylor said.

Mae Lee grew quiet. “The farm brought in real good money last year,” she finally said.

“I know, but what about the years before, Mama? You'd do better on the money end to rent out granddaddy's house until some offer comes along from someone who wants to buy or lease the land,” Taylor said.

Mae Lee eyed her son. “What about Hooker and his wife?”

“Mama, they can't afford to pay the kind of rent that house will bring.”

“They can afford to pay what I'm going to charge them, because it's going to be whatever they can give.” Mae Lee stared at her son in disbelief. “Taylor, you weren't too young to remember all those years they helped pull me through. Hooker and Maycie Jones would finish gathering their crops and then help me with mine. And you think they would accept pay? Not a penny. Why? Because I was a woman with five children to raise. One doesn't forget people like that, son, one doesn't forget.”

Taylor thought for a moment, then turned to face his mama. “I'm ashamed of myself, Mama,” he said. “So ashamed.” He kissed his mama and left.

Later, in her kitchen, Mae Lee spooned soup from a big pot into a small bowl. Sometimes she couldn't remember if she'd added salt or not. She took a taste and made a face. She added a pinch of salt and pepper to the soup and put a pan of biscuits in the oven to bake. She removed a few more pieces of baked chicken legs and breasts off the piled-up platters she was taking to Warren and the Joneses, and rolled out another pan of biscuits, enough for Ellabelle if she cared to eat, and Ellabelle would.

The singing voice of Elvis Presley on the radio made her step back in time. She remembered some remark he'd made about her people. They were called “colored people” then. And as she'd done then and from the day since she'd heard about it, she would refuse even to listen to him sing if she could do anything about it. She reached out to turn off her radio. Then she stopped. Elvis Presley was dead. Died in disgrace, when he was still a young man. And she was alive. The radio stayed on.

“Age sure has a way of causing you to turn around,” she said aloud. “It softens you. When you are young you find it so easy to decide whether you think a person is good or bad. When you are old you think of what made them good or bad and take that into account.”

Ellabelle helped load the food into her car. After they brought the Joneses their food basket, Mae Lee asked Ellabelle to stop her car near her old house. Ellabelle decided to wait in the car when Mae Lee said she wanted to walk to her cousin's house.

She wanted to walk the old small wagon road along which she'd hurried back and forth so many times. The road was somewhat overgrown, but she wanted to take it anyway. She used a heavy stick to push the bramble and underbrush aside. She paused now and then to listen to the sounds riding the winds. Wind chimes of the morning.

In a small clearing in the woods, the frame of an abandoned and rusting car peeped from under clusters of overgrowth. Its still shiny grill and exposed headlights, adorned with blooming wildflowers and the green flowers on the creeping poison ivy, shone forth like mirrors.

Mae Lee placed her food basket on a tree stump and studied the huge oak tree beside the old car, and for a few moments it seemed she saw her children playing there, heard their happy playful cries: “Doodle bug, doodle bug, come on out . . . your house is on fire. . . .” She could almost hear the sound of her hoe making its musical clinking sounds when she struck small rocks on her cotton row. She could smell the freshly plowed ground, feel the cool soil underneath her bare feet in the freshly plowed furrows. She could hear the gee, haw commands her daddy called out to Maude, his faithful old mule. Turn to the right, turn to the left.

Mae Lee lingered for a final look at the old car—a thing of beauty even in its tangled setting. She'd never seen it before. She wondered how long it had been there. Maybe, she thought, the cussing widow from the curious family down the road had caused the car to run off the road one night and end up there. She remembered how the woman used to dig ditches across the dirt road to force cars to slow down so they wouldn't run over her chickens. It was said that after she had a few nips of the “special tea” she made she would dig the ditches herself, single-handed, with her hoe.

Maybe one of the widow's sons, like their daddy before them, had taken too many nips of the “special tea,” started driving like they walked, from ditch to ditch, and run off the road. She hadn't seen any of them for quite some time. That was not surprising, though. They had always stayed pretty much to themselves. A few months after their mama died, they put a sign in the front yard: “Need a woman to live here.” Worse still, maybe it had been some stranger from far away
who had wrecked the car there. The thought of who or what may have been in the car was scary.

Something slithered into the undergrowth around the car, rustling the leaves and vines. Mae Lee picked up her basket and hurried on.

Now she couldn't get her thoughts of her mama out of her mind. It seemed Vergie should have been with her on the old wagon road.

After all her efforts, when she reached her cousin's house there was no one home. She had forgotten to call ahead.

The pleasant spring days had quickly pushed the weeks into summer. Mae Lee couldn't bear to think of her good farm soil growing only weeds and blooming wild morning glories. When farmland like that lies barren, your money dries up, Mae Lee thought to herself.

It worried her that she had spent so much money on a house, by far too big for a woman her age, and she fretted that she'd even pinched off her savings to take the bus tour.

I guess spending time around people with more money than you have can't help but affect your spending habits in some way, she thought.

Now that the weather was warm Mae Lee's front porch was starting to come alive again. Her friend Clairene plunked her tired body down on Mae Lee's front steps. “I'm not staying,” she announced. She fished around in a big plastic bag and handed Mae Lee an eight-ounce cottage cheese container. “I'm delivering the ‘friendship starter bread' today. It's day number
ten,” she said tiredly. “I've delivered the other two cups. Now remember to follow the directions exactly. Do not use a metal spoon, do not refrigerate, that's day one . . .”

“I know,” Mae Lee interrupted. “Do nothing day two, three and four. Stir with wooden spoon, day—aw, shucks, I have the directions. And Clairene, please don't go flashing that old chain letter again. There is no way you're going to get fifty thousand dollars within sixty days just by sending a dollar here and there to people you don't even know.”

After Clairene left, Mae Lee headed for the kitchen with the friendship starter bread. But before she had a chance to put it away, there was a knock on her front door.

When she opened it, the clean, neatly dressed, elderly man who stood there seemed respectable enough. He said his name was Fletcher Owens, and he had heard, he said, that she had a room to spare, and he wondered whether she might be willing to take in a roomer.

“I used to live here in Rising Ridge years ago, but my family moved away when I was fairly young,” he explained. “We used to live just beyond Catfish Creek in that old frame house down behind the Boyd's farm.”

“Oh,” Mae Lee said, “you're Phil Owens's nephew.” Although she didn't know scat about Fletcher, she did know his people, at least his daddy's family. The Owenses were a close-knit, well-respected family. Eventually they had all moved away from Rising Ridge, but she'd never heard anybody say a cross word about any one of them. She didn't know where they moved to, and had wondered if they'd sold the land they owned, across the Catfish Creek.

She considered herself a good judge of character. And this man was, to all appearances, in his early seventies at least, while she was in her midsixties. Even so, she had been ready to turn Fletcher Owens away until he offered to pay in advance for a room for a few weeks until he found a permanent place to stay. Mae Lee had never in her lifetime thought of renting out a room. But she thought of the money, and the two bedrooms that were empty of use, and agreed to let him stay.

After installing Fletcher Owens in one of the two vacant bedrooms and getting towels and linens for him, Mae Lee took the four fifty-dollar bills he had given her, got out the cotton bag from behind the flour bin in the kitchen where she had moved it last week, and added the money. She now had $5,240. Now she knew why the palm of her hand had been itching so much that morning. That was always a sign of money. It crossed her mind how it might look to her neighbors if she had a man living in her house, but she quickly dismissed it. He would be a roomer. From the moment Mae Lee had laid eyes on this tall handsome man with his flat stomach, she'd labeled him “kind.” Her concerns over how her children would feel about it lingered on, however.

She somehow felt that it seemed right and fitting that she should call him Mr. Fletcher, not Mr. Owens, and so she did. After a few days, when Mae Lee had seen Fletcher Owens leave the house every morning before he had had breakfast, she said, “I'll be glad to fix you a little breakfast when I fix my own.” Then she'd only had to say, “Why don't you come in and sit down and watch TV with me this evening,” for him
to make it a regular habit. Fletcher Owens loved television. Mae Lee found they had much in common. They saw the same side of things and loved the same wrong foods. It was all happening so very fast. She started spending less and less time volunteering at the hospital.

She also began sharing little things about her family with him, as well as sharing things about him with Ellabelle and her children. Fletcher laughed with her when she told him that her son, Taylor, wouldn't allow his wife near the kitchen when she visited. Mae Lee spread out her hand like she was smoothing wrinkled empty space. “Every time I go, it's the same thing. Mama cook this. . . . Mama cook that. I always said, ‘I'd like to eat your wife's cooking for a change.'”

Fletcher Owens smiled. “I sure would like to meet your Taylor, he seems like a fine young man,” he said.

“He wants to meet you, too. He said he'll probably come over here in a few days.”

Fletcher smiled. “I'm glad he wants to meet me.”

Mae Lee had been a little anxious about them meeting. When they did, she busied herself with her sewing, but she listened. Taylor wasn't blunt or unkind, but he sure didn't beat around the bush. “My mama tells me you are thinking of getting a house in Rising Ridge, Mr. Owens,” he said.

Fletcher leaned back in his chair. He appeared calm and relaxed. “Actually, I'm hoping to renovate our old family house if it's not too far gone.” He laughed, but quickly grew serious. “I'm retired now, so I've decided to come back to the land where I was born. But it appears that it's going to be quite a struggle to get a clear deed to the land. It's all heir property
that's been tied up for a long time. It's going to take some time to get it all untangled. But I suppose the one thing I do have now is time.”