Life Is Short But Wide (7 page)

He didn’t leave his daughter alone that night, but early the next morning, after breakfast, he gave Rose some money, and said he would be back in “a little.” “You’ll be alright. Mz. Smith is right across the way, and I’ll be here checkin on you. I’m not gone.” Then he was gone … to seek his comfort in the forest, near his wife’s grave, with the huge sky full of plump clouds, slowly drifting along like his life.

His life fell easily back into its old shape. With Wings’s family, he was comforted. He walked a long path to Irene’s grave every morning, and just sat there awhile. He came back and sat by Wings’s door, looking into the multitude of trees, and the vast, unending sky, just thinking. Wings could see his friend was not going home soon. They built him a place of his own and, without anybody realizing it, the new place became Val’s home. It cost nothing, and it meant so much comfort. Looking into the sky one day, he thought, “I’m still home.”

With Wings’s help he gradually went back to rustling cattle, less now than before. There was another depression coming on. But he worked. “I have two daughters; one try into go to college, one tryin to keep a house for me. I got to keep makin money. They need money.” He didn’t realize that what Rose needed was him.

I
sure remember those times-, I was old enough then to see for myself once my mother got me really interested.

Rose took over the housecleaning, separating her mother’s clothes, crying as she held each piece to give to the poor, and to Mz. Smith to cut down for Juliet. Slowly she settled into the big house as the sole occupant. “Daddy is gonna be here sometime soon. Sometime.” She was surrounded with the remnants of her family, but … they were gone. Only the tears remained.

She cooked every day. So she always had something cooking for her father when he stopped to see her to give her some money. At first he stayed overnight, but waking in the morning to the sight of the empty bed, and of the closed-in walls, seemed to start his day off wrong. Walls seemed to break his mind down. To be close to life he needed to be out in the open air.

He always ate something to please Rose, but, soon, he seldom stayed overnight. She complained (she didn’t mean to) that he was wasting food she would have to throw out.

“Give it to the Smiths, Rose. Don’t throw nothin away!” He bought her one of the new iceboxes, and signed her up to receive a block of ice once a week. Three cents a block. “Now, save some food for yourself, baby.” He thought she didn’t really know how hard times were; but she did know. She thought he didn’t know how lonely times were.

Then, when a few wealthy people of the town put in electricity, she didn’t. She still used kerosene lamps and candles. Her water was free. There was always someone to cut wood for her stove and fireplaces, from her own trees. A neighbor passing by in his wagon or Joe Smith.

As time went by Rose was making her way in life with the help of her father, and a little help from Irene’s students. She liked teaching others to read and write. She liked having people near during the day. Sometimes she even thought of marrying, vaguely.

She had gone back into Tante’s room and began to read some of the books there. She would end up lying across Tante’s bed reading an afternoon away. She learned things to add to her lessons. She wished now she had shared more of Tante’s activities. She would close a book, thinking, “My, my, my! This world is really something!”

Val had spoken to her about fixing the shotgun house up to rent it out, and had even done some work on it. It really didn’t need much now. Rut Rose was slow to make up her mind. “I use that little house for teaching when I have students. I don’t know
if I want somebody that close to my house. I like it quiet and peaceful. Whoever I rent it to will probably have children, and I don’t want them mixing up in the yard with me. Stealing my eggs, running all over my garden, or killing and frying my chickens for their own self.”

During the depression Joe Smith’s job was paying less and less. What could a colored man say? He was struggling to pay his small rent, and was eyeing the shotgun house, thinking, “Gould I maybe fix it up and Bertha clean it up? Miss Rose might jes let us move in it, then she won’t be out here by herself. I can do nough work round here to even us up on the rent.” But he was a shy man, and didn’t mention it to Rose or Bertha.

Joe just continued on his weary, worried way to the lumberyard, with his dull brown eyes set in their reddened whites, staring ahead of him looking at everything, seeing nothing. He was looking for something he could find, fix, and sell.

He hung around the lumberyard waiting for some work. For a long time now, since the depression had come, his hours were fewer, and his pay much less. He thought, “Depression sposed to be over, but it sho ain’t gone from round heah yet.”

The depression years were slow, and hard on everyone. Farmers, laborers, electricians, auto makers, everyone suffered because no one had any money. Harder on some coloreds because when it came to hiring, other colors came first.

Even liquor bootleggers were barely getting by. Since the Wall Street crash in 1929, even the rich were having a harder time of life, but most of them were going to make it out all right. The poor people thanked God for Roosevelt’s New Deal that helped them survive. Sometimes you had to travel to get to the
New Deal, and Joe Smith was almost an old man. “I cain’t leave my Bertha and Juliet with jes nothin, even if I’m goin some-where’s to try to get somethin!”

Val, who had been a sad man a long time, finally gave up trying to live on, and died. It was an unexpected hard blow to Rose; she was miserable. She cried a vale of tears; wretched despair was her daily misery. At night she screamed aloud at God in her grief, in that empty, empty house.

Wings could not help her; he was in despair, agonized and sickened by Val’s death. To focus his mind he wanted to carve the headstone and dig the grave. He wanted to bury Val right next to Irene in the same wooded sanctuary that was full of birds and other live things that Val had loved. He wanted Val near his own grave. He was not superstitious, he was just used to his friend being near him.

Wings had found Val’s savings in a can in the feather case Val had used for a pillow. He took it to Rose, gladly, for his brother-friend.

Rose didn’t know how Tante found out because in her personal grief she had forgotten Tante. Tante sent a message through the Wideland newspaper office that she was coming home for the funeral. That helped Rose so much she was able to stop crying all through the days and nights.

She knew Tante could not afford the trip, and it would take at least two or three days on the bus. She informed the minister the funeral would be held in Val’s own parlor. “His body can lie there as long as it has to. This is his home.”

People came by to view the body as Rose sat at Val’s feet. When the body began to smell slightly, Rose still sat there, un-worried, unfazed.

•

Rose cleaned Tante’s room and the rest of the house, then sat back down to wait. “I must think of what to feed Tante while she is home.” Rose knew her father had been sending Tante some money each month to help her. “That’s what must’a killed him, all the strain of looking after us!”

She would be ashamed of such thoughts for a while, then the thoughts would break through again, “She must be through with college now! She can come on home and help me with this place!” A little light flickered in her brain. “We can have two grades in school! I’ll get that shotgun house ready for a real school for us to teach in!”

Rose had not forgotten her father had just died. She was no less grieved, stressed, depressed, and miserable. She just realized there was still a future, that life was not over, it goes on. With her arms resting on the kitchen table, she rested her head on them and cried again, dry sobs. She felt, almost, all alone in the world.

Tante finally arrived amid all the doings, and Reverend Smoke preached the funeral of Val. He kept his little greedy eyes on the front-row chairs where the bereaved daughters of Val sat. After he got them crying real hard, and everybody moaning and sniffling, he quieted his preaching down. They laid Val’s coffin in the wagon that Wings had brought to fetch him. Val’s daughters climbed onto the wagon and rode away with Wings, to bury their beloved father next to their dearly beloved mother.

Later, after they returned to their house, Tante began to pack to go back to university and to work. Rose was outdone,
feeling abandoned. She cried and begged and pleaded for Tante to stay home with her.

Tante sat Rose in a chair, and put her arm around her. She leaned close to her sister, whom she loved, and said, “Rose, I am not you. I am not through doing what I have to do for myself. I have a master’s degree. I want a doctorate. I know what I am doing with my life.

“Wideland is not my life. Now, you? You must decide for yourself. You can sell whatever property is here. I don’t care. It’s yours. I give you my half. I will get my own for myself. I wouldn’t sell it right now though; prices are too low. Prices are not going to stay low as they are now; I’m watching the stock market, and every day I read several newspapers.

“Hold this land awhile, while you decide just what you want to do with your life. Then do whatever that is! Because that is what I am going to do.” Tante stood up to finish packing, saying, “I am going to try to get the money to have a telephone put in this house for you so you can reach me and I can reach you whenever there is an emergency.”

Rose’s eyes were wide open. She couldn’t believe her ears, that her sister was saying these things. She couldn’t believe her sister was leaving her again. Her heart sobbed, “Here, alone; all by myself.”

Tante pulled her sister to her breast, saying, “You have to be an adult about your life now. You are a grown woman. If you have a dream, try to work toward that dream; if you don’t have a dream, you need to look around you, see what you do have, then work to keep it in the best way possible. You must like it here, you’ve never tried to leave. Rent that little house out, and keep teaching. I’ll do what I can for you, but the facts are I am working
on my dreams. I won’t have much to send. Life takes everything you have to keep going on. And I mean to keep going with my life.”

They walked together to the train station, and Rose waited for the train to come take her sister away. She watched her sister leaving her. Life’s pain had filled her heart til it had near broken it. But, this time, she didn’t cry.

Rose was used to her father and other cowboys. She knew how to cuss. She thought to herself, “I’m tired of all this leaving shit.”

Rose Strong went home to think.

For weeks Preacher Smoke had been telling different members of the congregation, “I’m worried bout that Rose out there in that big ole house all by herself! I’m gonna start checkin up on her; see is she doin alright!” The congregation was glad because they were mostly too busy trying to work and survive. Except Bertha, she checked every day.

The preacher lived in two small rooms at the back of the church. He had no wife. The congregation fed him every Sunday, but, naturally, being the man he was, he wanted more, needed more. He had, secretly, wooed a few of the women in the church. The ones he knew were alone and lonely. He stood for a god to them, so naturally they gave in to him.

He never brought anything with him, food nor money, and times were hard, so they couldn’t always feed him. But giving him some loving, his secret favorite thing, was easy. Besides, they needed some their own selves.

But Preacher Smoke didn’t know how to do his secret
favorite thing too well. It wasn’t his size, because size doesn’t make the man. He just wouldn’t have known what to do with any size “down there.” Soon the ladies began to pull back, and fly from his reach. He had a few who were older, lonely sisters he ate with, but he didn’t want them. They smelled of assifidity and cheap soap.

So, the next couple of weeks he did stop by Rose’s house in the evenings, to see how she was and if she needed anything. He had nothing to give her, and nothing to do there, except maybe kill a spider if there was one there at the time, but he stopped by the house to check and see anyway.