In Memory of Junior (10 page)

Driving up the long driveway to the homeplace—after the 7-Eleven—I first saw the familiar green Ford truck, and then I saw, sitting on the front porch, Mrs. and Mr. Fuller, perennial visitors, bearing a vague resemblance to vultures.

I did not want to sit and talk to these people, these people who would visit Mercury if someone were sick there—they'd endure the heat for the sake of a visit—these salt-of-the-earth people Mother did used to like so much, while she still had her mind. These people who seem interested in Charlotte and the law in such a way that I know they disapprove, or at least can't understand that a
woman
could get a law degree, move away to Charlotte, and then
stay
there after her mama gets sick—and still not harbor a callous soul. And besides all that, be as old as I am without a
husband.
Sometimes I fantasize about putting people like this on the stand and asking them questions—for days—until I find out exactly why, what line of reasoning they use, why they believe so strongly in one narrow, bent moral code for all peoples on earth. If you planted them among the Arabs, then within six weeks they'd be cutting off thieves' hands left and right. I know they would.

But also, I can't deny that there is a kind of comforting steadfastness about them.

As I started up the front porch steps, they were both
ready, brimming. She was sitting, rocking energetically, smiling at me, and he was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.

“Well hey, Faye,” she said. “Miss Laura's looking a little better today. Didn't you think so, Harold?”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Fuller. “She seemed to have a little more color today—or something. She shore ate the hell out of another box of candy.” He leaned back comfortably. You'd think he lived there.

“Well, that's good,” I said, “about the color anyway. But it's probably not a good idea to leave her with chocolate, unattended.”

“I think you're right about that,” said Mr. Fuller. “I tried to tell Wilma.”

“No, you didn't,” she said.

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn't.” She turned to me. “How long you going to be able to stay, Faye?”

“I'll be going back tomorrow afternoon. The usual.”

“Which one you reckon is going to die first?” said Mr. Fuller, leaning forward again, looking at me.

I stood with one foot on the top step, one foot on the porch. You might think Mr. Fuller's question was unusual. It wasn't.

“Harold,” said Mrs. Fuller.

“I don't know, Mr. Fuller,” I said. “I just don't know. I'd hate to have to guess.”

“That Gloria is bound to be right expensive,” said Mr. Fuller.

“Well, she is,” I said. “But at least she's dependable. I'm glad Tate is willing to help out.”

“Poor Faison ain't moved a house in I don't know how
long,” said Mrs. Fuller. “That I know of. I don't imagine he can help out at all.”

“Well—”

“If you get this place, you planning to hold it or sell it?” Mr. Fuller asked me.

“Harold.”

“I really haven't thought that far ahead,” I said. “I've been so busy. But you know, as I understand it—and apparently you do too—it does depend on who dies first, you know, who gets the land and all.”

I moved toward the front door, hoping this conversation might die.

“I was just thinking you'd surely get it all if Mr. Glenn goes,
then
Miss Laura,” said Harold. “But if your mama happens to die first, and I certainly hope she don't—well, I hope neither one of them dies first—but, you know what I mean. If your mama dies and then Mr. Glenn dies it'll get interesting because my understanding is that he ain't got no will, and that Miss Bette and Miss Ansie ain't going to give up a portion of it without a fight. And now that Tate's landing that airplane out there all the time, and planning to build a hangar, you know he ain't going to want to sell.”

I had the screen door open.

He says, “You know Prince Thackery sold his farm for eighty thousand dollars a acre. I wish to hell I'd bought a few acres twenty or thirty years ago. Eighty thousand dollars a acre.”

“That's a whole lot,” I said. I didn't know what else to say. It's the kind of conversation I find myself in around here—feeling stranded, like you stop at an intersection and find the intersection flooded. The car knocks off, you get out, and there you stand. Nowhere to go.

“I think I'll go on in and see how they're doing,” I said. “It's good to see y'all again.”

“Somebody ought to do something with that bird in there, Faye,” said Mrs. Fuller. “The poor thing is going to freeze to death. I'd do something, but I don't want to, you know, intrude. Used to be it was just a few feathers gone from his neck. Now he's half-naked.”

Inside Mother's room, I saw that it was true. Tiny, white-tipped pimples stood on Florida's yellow skin, a feather here and there, some fuzz, but the bird was mostly bare around the shoulders. He was getting worse. Most of his upper half was without feathers. His neck was as thin as a pencil. Blood had hardened under one wing where the skin was torn.

“Good gracious, Mama,” I said. “Florida is not getting any better. He's getting worse, in fact.”

Mother looked at the bird, held out her hand for me.

“He doesn't look well at all, Mama,” I said. “And his toenails need cutting.”

Mother spoke haltingly, quietly: “Wilma cut my toenails the other day.” I have to admit that Mrs. Fuller is really good about that kind of thing.

“No, the
bird's,
” I said.

“He don't . . .”

“What?”

“He don't talk no more,” she whispered.

“Well I don't guess he does talk anymore. I'm going to take him to the vet. I wish those boys would do something around here. I swear. It's their daddy's bird, too.”

Gloria was getting ready to leave and I didn't see why she couldn't take Florida to the vet. I placed an old black skirt from Mother's closet—a closet still full of shoes and
dresses from the last forty years or so—around the bird cage, put it on the front porch, and asked Gloria to take him in. She's good about things like that.

You'd think that new Ballard College vet school that they made such a fuss over would work on birds, but they don't. There ain't but one vet in a hundred miles works on birds around here—Faye called all over the place—and his office was closed cause they was redoing it on the inside. So they had the whole thing set up in a house trailer in a field out beside their building.

So I walk up this little wheelchair ramp with this bird, thinking to myself the whole time, This here is how my life ending up. These here are my duties: taking Miss Laura Bales' sick bird to the bird doctor. It got me to feeling a little low.

My calling was to take care of peoples, not birds.

And if Miss Laura die while I'm up here, Faye will be there to get the credit of seeing her through, after all I done these last years, and I'll be in this here trailer with this bird.

About time I turn the doorknob to go in I want you to know that bird says, “What are you doing?”

I tell him, I say, “Taking you to the bird doctor, you crazy thing.”

Inside this trailer was a
mess.
Cardboard boxes all over the floor. A great big bird cage at the end of the trailer had this big old parrot and he screeched out, scared me to death. Florida went to fluttering around under Miss
Laura's black skirt—what fluttering he could. I should say bumping, naked as he is.

I sat in the one empty chair. This man sitting beside me with this cage holding a hungry-looking cat says, “You realize a parrot like at costs upards of two thousand dollars?”

“No, I didn't,” I said. Why would I know that?

“I wouldn't have one if you
give
it to me,” he says. He goes on about them killing his ears. “I wouldn't have one of them things if you
give
it to me,” he keeps saying, just talking away like he was on drugs.

This woman in a white doctor coat come in from the back. She look just like a parrot in the face.

And right then I thought again, This here is how I'm ending up my life, living with the birds. Going down the home stretch taking care of Miss Laura's bird. It made me feel right heavy.

The parrot-woman say to me, “Yes?”

“I'm bringing this bird in,” I say, “for Mrs. Laura Bales.”

“Yes. Let's see.” She had a big ledger book on the table. “Florida? We haven't seen Florida in three years. Good gracious.” She walked over and pulled up the black skirt on the cage. “My lord,” she said. She talk some baby talk and then say, “He could freeze.”

“I suppose he could,” I said. “But where he stay it's usually plenty hot.”

She took him on back in the back somewhere, and pretty soon she come back and say what Faye expected, that they going to have to keep him a couple of days and try to get his strength up. She say that he were a very sick bird, that if they tried to cut his toenails he liable to die.

Gloria carried off the bird. I don't know why Laura ever wanted that bird. Mama and Papa never allowed any animals in the house.

I see my sisters, dressed in white, setting the basket with baby Tate in it at the end of a corn row. I'm just home from Wadesboro. It's a Friday afternoon. Faison is standing there, dressed in white. They're all dressed in white. Spring planting. Mama is back at the house and Papa is in another field somewhere, and we're all of us together making a living with no outside help from anywhere in the world. Dressed in white. And there's no choice in the world in the years to come when I get home on weekends—from Wadesboro or Salisbury—but to, of course, whip Faison for all he's done wrong, and to whip Tate for all he's done wrong. Spare the rod and spoil the child. When I get out of the car, after driving up the long driveway, and step inside the front room, I'm torn between the already-inmy-nostrils smell of food cooking in the kitchen—cabbage, corn bread, fried fatback—and the dark dread of my duty to the boys, to Faison and Tate. And to Papa.

“Well,” Ansie would say, “they got in the pond yesterday. Both of them. And Faison got in the pantry before prayer meeting Wednesday night and turned on the molasses faucet and let it all run out in the floor. We got up what we could but it was one big mess.”

And then it would be a matter of catching them so I could whip them. If I didn't whip the boys for doing wrong then there would be a great worry around in the
air, a great uncertainty. If I didn't whip them, I might be whipped, still, by Papa, who was as serious and stern as God Himself. Papa feeling like whipping me would be as bad as him actually doing it because Papa's bad feeling would bring me to shame at what I would be doing to him, hurting him, shaming him, putting him in such a fix that he might crumble apart, fly apart, in front of my eyes.

You know, about Papa. He could always stand hard field work. He was a real man. He could bring his raging up to the surface, but it seems to me now when I think on it that he couldn't somehow stand any other feelings rising up to the surface. That's the way he had to be. All that other was never there because it would have made him weak somehow, you see. It would have. He was steady, a rock. That way he could keep his bearing. We all needed him to keep his bearing, his power. Even now we all need that. Even now that he's dead.

I think I kind of worship—or something—them all, standing there, all dressed in white, working in the fields, tending crops, plowing, cutting wood and bringing it in, walking down to the spring and bringing back cool butter and milk. And this must have been the same with Mama and Papa. They must have remembered the ones before them that way. What would that boy of Tate's—I can't remember his name—what would that boy remember? And didn't Faison have one? What would he remember?

“Gloria, Gloria . . . Gloria, look at those little rivers up there in the ceiling, running side by side, straight. Don't tell nobody this. Those boys were awful to me. And don't tell nobody, but I think about Evelyn more than I do Laura. I have to. I still burn with hate. It looks like after all these
years some of it might go away and I know it's wrong to hate—almost fifty years, almost half a whole century of it—but I hate her just the same, and I realize that the hate is piled up on the love, and the love can't get out, can't get no air. I did love her before I hated her. I don't know where she went when she left, what she did, who she lived with, how she died—if she has died. Bette said one time what she had heard. But what Bette heard was not right. It couldn't be. Back then I had never heard a word, seen a word or picture that could in any way account for that kind of love between any two women in the world. And I know Evelyn hadn't. There hadn't been any rumors of that kind of love that I ever knew about, no jokes about it, no inkling that a world created by God would tolerate such an evil and squalid abhorrence. It couldn't be called love.”

I looked from the front porch at the homeplace across the yard at the jonquils, buttercups, patches of new green grass. It was nice—had my feet propped up on the railing. The sun's rays slanted across the yard, through the trees, burning a kind of gold on the tree bark. In the edge of the woods was a dogwood tree with white petals. The air was fresh. It was all very nice.

“Right pretty, ain't it,” I said to Faison. He sat on the steps. We were holding down the fort while Gloria went to get Florida from the vet.

“You know what you ought to do?” he said, oblivious. He doesn't get into scenery. “You ought to take some time off
sometimes. Go fishing and stuff. When Uncle Grove comes, we at least ought to take him fishing. Me and Jimmy are supposed to go fishing, anyway.”