Life Is Short But Wide (13 page)

Time passes quickly when you can fill the hours with happiness. Except for rumors of war, President Roosevelt’s New Deal had, for the most part, pulled the nation out of its crushing slump. The whole banking world was involved. Other nations
were suffering. Stalin had been robbing Russian peasants of their land and bodies, for big industry. There was a Gulag; people were reduced to slaves. Stalin called it Socialism.

The devil was jumping around with joy-, he thought he was conquering the world.

Bootleggers thrived, Prohibition happened; yet, and still, even more liquor flowed over the drinking world. The Keystone Kops and the Marx Brothers ran across the screens. The Ku Klux Klan came back stronger. Ragtime and George Gershwin were part of the background music for souls who just wanted to listen, or dance. Most of the world worshipped speed. Automobiles and planes, whatever.

The world and Life had picked up much speed now. There had always been wars, but now so many more people at a time were killed. Or starved. Or maimed and crippled. Or made homeless. Or childless. Fatherless, motherless. Just like now.

Many would make fast money. Fast money; not all were known, except the underworld
(as they are called).
Yet the world and Life were not going as fast as they would go. Yet. But Mankind was gaining traction.

But Leroy and Rose did not involve themselves with all that. Their world was small. His job, the garden, the chickens; everyday things filled every day.

I
believe it was late 1937 when Rose discovered she was pregnant. I’m not sure-, it’s all I can handle just remembering my own business from that long ago.
She was so bright and happy when she told Leroy, it infected his feelings. He did not really care for children. It was enough for him just to have them coming to the little classroom.

As time passed, and Rose’s little belly started poking out,
Leroy adjusted. The thought of his own child was now different. “At least I ain’t gonna have to worry bout feedin it, or if it’s mine. And I ain’t gonna have to look for no place to rent! We doin just fine here. So come on, son!”

When Rose’s baby was born it was a girl. Because it was not a boy, Rose felt the baby was her own to name. She thought about a special name a long time. She thought of her family; her mother, her father. You can know in your heart that you have someone on earth who is your family, like Tante, but if they are not there for a long time, you feel alone.

She prayed, “Oh, thank You, dear God, for the gift of my little baby girl. I will love her. I will cherish her, and protect her. I will tell her all about You, God, so she will know right from wrong, and have a good life. Because I know you have to know right from wrong to see which way to choose in life. Oh, thank You, dear Father.”

Because it was a girl, Leroy didn’t mind his wife naming the child. Since her mother’s and father’s deaths, Rose’s soul had longed for something, someone of her own. She named the baby Myine Wee, because her heart told her so; the baby was hers. “I will never be alone again, God. I have Myine” (pronounced as Mine). “And we are a Wee!”

Let us leave the little family attending to their life for a while.

I got to tend to something for a minute.

Now … there is a whole lot of things I haven’t told you. I can’t get everything in all at once. I have to stop and breathe, or go to the bathroom, or eat.

My mama is sitting here looking and listening to me, seeing that I get it all right. She likes hearing this story again.

Now … Let us talk about the other side of that
“Y”
I told you about at the beginning of this story. The Herman Tenderman side.

And love, chile, love.

HERMAN

Now, I need to tell you about Herman Tenderman because I watched him grow up also. He was always so quiet he was almost invisible. The community finally came to know him as a very nice, studious, hardworking young man, even as a child. Always helping his mother. He sure did love her. I didn’t know her too well, just from church was all we knew.

Now, I’m starting at the beginning of the time my mama started paying attention to Herman, so we have to back up, go back to the beginning again. His story is happening simultaneously with Rose’s, before she even married and had Myine. Keep that in your mind so I don’t have to repeat myself in EVERYTHING that was happening at the same time to these people. It’s a good story, but you have to pay attention.

We are on the other side of that “Y,” getting to the crux where these lives join, and we get into the stem of the “Y” or story.

Herman Tenderman grew up in a fatherless family. There was just he and his mother, Odessa. His father had been long gone from the time he was a baby. They were very, very poor. In those times, like in these times, poverty was spread all over the world, except for the fortunate few who were rich and had survived the wars, and the Wall Street crash in America that had affected the central banking centers almost everywhere in the world.

His mother, Odessa, died when he was about eight years old. She had tried to raise him right, but could hardly keep food on the clean, bare table, or clothes on his back. I’ll tell you.

Odessa had worked like a man for years as a field hand, picking whatever was in season. Every season. ALL long days. And she begged the overseers for more work. She worked too hard for a woman. Always tired, always hungry, always needing everything. And having babies three times, and losing one.

She had been able to keep a small shotgun shack for Herman and her daughter, Pearl. But they lost that shack when Pearl got sick, and Odessa had to use the little money she had for medicine. Her sister, Peach, called Aunt Peachy, let them use her closed-in back porch. “Only for a lit’l while, Odessa, cause it too crowded up in here!”

Pearl died at four years of age, and Odessa cried tears that seemed like her blood, because they came from such a deep place in her heart. She blamed herself because she was unable to afford a doctor or any medical care for Pearl. She had taken bone-thin Pearl, with her rasping breath and mucous-filled
nose and eyes, to a white female doctor. She had thought, “I knows a woman won’t let no chile die.”

But the doctor had said, “There is nothing I can do for this child if you have no money. I have to keep up with my own patients!” The doctor handed her a pill. “Here, give it this aspirin. That is about all I can do for you.” Then she had spoken to her nurse, “Who’s next?” and turned away from Odessa, and the congested child you could hear struggling to breathe.

Odessa had wrapped the ragged, but clean, blanket closer around her baby, and turned to walk, slowly, out of the doctor’s door. Disheartened, broken-spirited, Odessa took her Pearl home, and cried for two days as she watched her small beloved child die. She blamed herself. Her young son, Herman, did everything a child could do to comfort his mother.

He tried to bring his mother tea or even just hot water in a cup. His Aunt Peachy would look up, see him in the mildly dirty kitchen, and run him out. “Ain’t nothin in here for ya! You let yo mama git her own! We all got to face dyin, this ain’t nothin new, chile. Now ya get on outta here mongst my things!”

Stay close with God, dear chile, and try never to get too poor around anyone. Work-, work hard, save-, go to school, learn something, lest you be caught poor one hard day, without a God perhaps, and counting on human beings on this earth, and you will mostly, and surely, suffer for it.

Odessa couldn’t grieve long; she had to get out to find some work, make some money. She had to get another place of her own, away from the hard, selfish hands of her sister, Peachy, so Herman and she could have some little peace in their dreary, bare life.

“Peachy don’t owe me nothin, but this here chile ain’t have no fault in me bein broke. I got to take care my son!”

She found work at the garbage dump, earning barely a few nickels a day. With her sister, Peachy, pushing her, Odessa finally found a really broken-down, dilapidated two-room shack for herself and her son. She paid, and also did work in exchange for that condemnable shack.

She also walked and walked until she found a butcher shop to clean up, and a few toilets in cheap diners. She was dying on her feet. She didn’t cry anymore, just lived on deep sighs. No more tears left. She would get on her knees and pray til the dawn came glimmering through her hazy windows. Sometimes she fell asleep as she prayed, her head resting on the foot of the worn mattress they used for a bed.

Her eyes were always seeking some new job to do. She forgot how to sleep; when she did get to lie down her eyes stared into the darkness, looking for an answer to how to keep Herman alive. And, above all, keep him well. “Don’t get sick, son! Heah, pull that sweater tight round yo neck! That there rain is sho cold rain. Don’ want it runnin down ya back.”

Herman tried to help. He went around to the garages that had sprung up in town since automobiles were on the newly paved roads. But he was so young, so small. Sometimes a thoughtful man would let him sweep the floors, or wipe the oil off of whatever was soaking in it. When his mother, Odessa, found out, she fussed with him.

She wanted him to get over to the school. “You get on ovah to that there school Mz. Rose is teachin. I done spoke to her, she gonna let ya. We find a way to pay. I wants ya to get you a edercation. Don’ be no fool like I is! Learn you somethin! I means
that, Herman. Let me do the worryin round heah! You do the schoolin!”

Odessa did outdoor jobs; chopping wood, cleaning yards. She even patched a roof once. Cheap labor, paying almost nothing, sometimes a few eggs. Even that was all right with Odessa. Her son would eat breakfast.

Usually they had one good meal a day; Odessa worked hard for that. That meal had to hold them until the next day. She kept a pot of beans simmering slowly, and ready. Herman didn’t like to eat alone, without his mother. He wanted to be sure she had something hot to eat whenever she came back to the shack. Coming and going to school, he was always picking up stray kindling to keep the fire in the stove going, so his mother wouldn’t have to worry about it.

As Herman grew, he learned. He watched everything his mother did, and learned to do it. He went to Rose’s school as Odessa wanted. Sometimes, she would come home from some field with a few vegetables and a few pieces of fruit for “my boy,” with a smile on her weary face. “God gave us these, son.”

For his part, her dinner would be ready and waiting. Not usually anything special, but hot rice and beans. If he had done some work at the butcher’s, he got a few chunks of chicken to put in the beans, or a chunk of a ham hock; that made it special.

Everyone knew Herman was a good worker, even as small as he was, and that he didn’t steal. His not stealing helped him a great deal. When people trust you, you go farther in life. He helped his mother in every way his little body could. He was learning love all the time. He dearly loved his mother.

His mother was painfully grateful, and thanked God all the time because her son was so kind and good. She loved her son.

Herman was a brown-skinned boy. He looked out from large, round, clear, black eyes with surprisingly long beautiful lashes. A long, narrow nose, flaring at its end, was set in a narrow face. His lips were firm and medium sized, but not thin. He looked a bit unattractive until you really looked at him; then he was handsome. His was a man’s face. He had long arms with large hands, and long thin legs with large feet. He moved neither fast nor slow, but rather, steadily.

Odessa could not afford even the small school fees. Rose hadn’t asked for any money; she knew there was none. But Odessa had gone to talk to her. “I’ll scrape by best as I can, and send ya somethin ever time I has a nickel over. I mean that, Mz. Rose. Jest, please, let my son come here for some learnin.”

Rose had taken only a few moments to decide after looking into the dark, intelligent, sad eyes of Herman. She didn’t believe in people getting something for nothing. To Rose, that was part of learning to live also.