The clothes on the man behind the counter hang on his thin body like they would a hanger. He says nothing, just reaches out his bony hand with knobby knuckles for my letter and peers at the address and stamp by tilting his head back so his eyes will match up with his half glasses. He puts it with care on top of a pile of other letters sitting in a box with Outgoing written on it in perfectly shaped black letters. Then he turns to me and waits.
“Is that it?” I ask him. Seems to me it must be harder than this. He nods slow-like.
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“Thank you,” I mumble so I can still consider myself polite even though I doubt he heard me.
Now we just have to wait.
On the walk back home I feel lighter for a bit, but by the time I’ve passed Antone’s department store with the faded Closed sign in the window next to the sign for Human Hair Wigs, I start thinking I should have written “don’t tell Momma I wrote this” on the letter somewhere. She’ll be hopping mad ifGammy lets on I begged her to come. Shoot, I’ll be whipped no matter what so I might as well leave it be.
TEN
[
ou’re lucky I got too much to do today, little miss,” Momma says to me in a snarly kind of way, “otherwise I’d tan your hide darker than it’s ever been in your sorry little life. Now, go on. Take that rug outside and beat it good and hard. When you’re done, fill up the bucket and help me with these floors.”
Momma was surprised about Gammy coming, all right. When I heard her holler for me after hanging up the phone I knew it was Gammy who called, and Emma and me, we stayed clear of her altogether for a whole day and a half.
Gammy got my letter and called straight away to say she and Aunt Lillibit were gonna make the trip to see us. Now, I don’t know for sure if she told Momma I’d written her, but the meanness in Momma’s voice these past two days tells me she did. It’s the first time in my life I’m happy there’s a lot of housework to do. Momma’s
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puttin’ out the dog for Gammy. She pulled out the fancy nuts and everything.
The fanciest thing I’ve ever seen is Mr. Peanut, with his eyeglass and cane and that big ole smile. I love how his stick legs look about to dance. And I love his fancy top hat. People here don’t ever dress up. Momma has a real pretty dress, but she almost never wears it he-cause she says it makes her look like she’s expecting. Expecting what, I don’t know.
I’ve decided I want to get this label that’s stuck on the can off so I can keep Mr. Peanut. After I do this I’ll do the rugs real good but first…
There’s only one ridge of glue holding it on so I’m trying to slide my fingernail right up close to it so it doesn’t tear and then I can peel the rest off no problem. But the paper is getting jagged because the glue isn’t in a straight line.
Almost there, almost there. I’m a little over halfway down the can from the plastic top you can pull off and put back on “for lasting freshness.” If I quit now, Mr. Peanut will get ripped off tonight and then he’ll be thrown away and who knows when Momma will buy nuts again. We’ve had this can for years, it moved with us from Murray Mill Road. Momna pours a handful of nuts into the milky white dish my grandmother gave her—a housewarming present she said, but someone should’ve told her dishes don’t make you warm—and if some are left over she carefully pours them back into the can and puts them back up on the shelf. My cousin Sonny once touched all of them after he scraped dog doo offhis shoe and then didn’t even wash his hands (and I know for a fact Momma saw this, too) and Momma still poured the leftovers back in the can.
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“Why doesn’t Momma want Gammy to come visit us?” Emma asks me. She’s squeezing the suds out of the rag she’s been soaking in the bucket. We’ve got a floor-cleaning system: Emma rinses and squeezes and I rub the floor until the rag’s dirty and then we do it all over again in a different spot.
“I guess we’ll be finding out soon enough,” I say.
“She’s not going to tell us anything.”
“I know, stupid,” I say, pushing some of my hair back behind my ears so I can see better what all I’m doing. “But it’s bound to come out once she’s here, don’t you think ?”
“That the way you greet your kin?” Gammy says, pulling her body out of the car. She’s talking to me and Emma. We’re hanging back closer to the steps to the house in case Momma decides now she’s really gonna cream us good, now that all the housework’s finished.
“Come on over and give your gammy and your auntie a hug, right proper,” Momma says toward our direction. I can tell her voice is fake nice, but I don’t think anybody else could.
Gammy’s traveling dress smells like Clorox bleach. Aunt Lillibit doesn’t lean down for us to hug her but instead reaches out to pat us on our heads and then pulls her hand back like she’s having second thoughts about that, too.
Momma’s chattering up and down to them like a raccoon at a garbage can: How was the trip? You all tired ? You hungry ? I got corn bread, Momma, I can fix you up a slice. What about you, Lil? Ooh, looky your hair, all done up like it is—ain’t no place round here to 233
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get that done, I’ll tell you what. That too heavy, Momma? Lemme get it.
Chattering away, she is. And me and Emma, well, I guess we feel like the dog that chases the car and finally catches it. We don’t know what to do now that Gammy’s come on out to see us for her ownself. The way she’s looking at us, I reckon she’s feeling the exact same way.
“OwI”
“Hold still, child,” Gammy says. “Hold ya head still.”
“You’re pulling too hard. Ow [“
“This hair of yours…” She doesn’t finish the sentence but stands up from the edge of the bed and pushes me to the side so she can get up from behind me. When she leaves the room I look back onto the
bed. She left the brush, with my hairs stringing through it. When she comes back I do not like what I see. “Gammy, no!”
“Hold still or it’ll be a lot worse’n what I have in mind,” she says, snipping the scissors into the air to get ‘em all warmed up.
“I’ll pull the brush through.” I try to slow her down, but fingers are gripping the top of my head, keeping me from turning and reaching the brush.
“Your momma,” snip, “should’ve done this,” snip, “years ago,” snip,
“‘stead oflettin’ it git this bad.” Snip. “Gammy I” Snip.
“Please, Gammy,” I cry. But it’s too late—the chunks of rats’ nests
fall into my lap and, soon, to either side of me.
“Hold still.”
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The snips match my sobs.
“Why’d you have to come out here, anyway?” I ask her when my tears dry up.
“Oh, hush,” she says. “You know as well as I do why I came, so just be quiet.” The cold metal of the scissors slides against the back of my neck and gives me shivers. “I’m just evening up the bottom here and you’re all done.”
I never look in the mirror ‘cause I’m too scared to reach up and tell how short it is.
“Don’t look too bad, if I do say so m’self,” she says. “Now, run on and show your momma how clean you look.”
I close my eyes and think of that blind and deaf girl we read about in school, Helen Keller, ‘cause I’m feeling the way I look instead of rushing to a mirror.
“It’s short as a boy’s hair!” And the tears come back like they never dried up in the first beginning.
“Now, hush,” Gammy says, scooting me aside so she can get up
again. “You look just fine. Now, run on…I got to git supper started.” “What’re we having?”
“Nothing if that whine stays in your throat,” she snaps back at me. “Now, clean this room up and come on down and give me a hand when you’re done.”
“How come you don’t cut Emma’s hair?” I holler after her, but she’s already on her way down the stairs. It’s not fair Emma doesn’t have to have a haircut, too.
“Shh, little baby,” he says, stroking my hair, “quiet now. You just had a bad dream. I’m here now. Shh…”
FLOCK
“Daddy,” I say into my pillow, breathing hard after the word. “I keep seeing it.”
“The same thing ?”
“Yeah, it’s this little-bitty house with nothing but shelves in it—
rows and rows of chickens…”
“Shh, now,” he says again.
“….and they all have sacks over their heads but you can still hear
the clucking. Clucking, clucking. It’s so loud “
He strokes my long hair over and over. The next thing I know it’s morning time.
“You ask me, it’s white trash lets her child run all over town looking like that one does,” Aunt Lillibit’s saying to Gammy. They think we’re too busy playing jacks with the shells I saved from a beach vacation we took when Daddy was still alive to hear what they’re talking about. Emma’s been saving rubber bands for years, adding to the ball she started when we were back in Toast. It’s pretty bouncy now, her ball is. So it’s perfect for jacks.
“Your turn. You have to beat fives,” she says, but I shush her so I can hear what all they’re saying.
“That man’ll be the death of her if she don’t keep her head down and her mouth shut,” Aunt Lillibit’s saying.
“I tried talking to her about it, but she don’t listen to her momma like she should,” Gammy says. “Never has. I s’pose she never will.”
“You see the back of her head where the hair bumps out over that cut? She got to stop back-talking like she does.” They’re saying more but I cain’t make it out, and because I’m try36
ME & EMMA
ing to hear I mess up and the ball hits the ground before I can swipe up the six shells I was fixing to swipe up.
“And that Caroline takes right after her momma, you ask me,” I can hear Aunt Lillibit saying. “She’s got the welts to prove it. She and her momma need to take a lesson from Emma and be scarce.”
“Hush, now,” Gammy says. “That’ll be enough of that.”
“How come you never around in the evenings?”
Mr. Wilson’s setting in his armchair that looks like it belongs inside instead of here on the front porch, whittling wood like he sometimes does when he’s thinking real hard on something.
“How you know I’m not round come evening time?”
I shrug, thinking he sees me but then I add, “I just know, is all. Where do you go?”
He turns the hand-size piece of wood around in his big hand, looking at it like he’s seeing it for the first time.
“You know a man can work on his carving his whole life,” he says to the nugget of wood, “and not git any better at it. Did you know that? Other things, well, you git better at ‘em if you do ‘em over an over again through the years. Not wood. You can stay just as bad a carver as you were the day you were born if that’s the way it’s s’posed to be.”
“What do you mean, ‘the way it’s s’posed to be’? How do you know if something’s the way it’s s’posed to be?”
“You jes’ know.” He shrugs, and when he does I can see what he must’ve looked like when he was young, before age drew lines ‘cross his face. “Like you shooting that gun. That’s the way it’s s’posed to
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be. Like me playing on that six-string. I ain’t ‘shamed to say I ain’t half bad at it. It’s the way it’s s’posed to be.”
We sit there, me with my legs dangling over the side of the porch, him with his knife flicking wood shavings off onto the floor, while I think about what’s s’posed to be and what ain’t.
“You never told me where you go come evening time.”
“If it was yer business I’d tell you I go to play hill music down the road at Zebulon’s, but ‘tain’t yer business so I won’t be telling you that.”
“Can I come watch you play?”
He shrugs again. “If you like. Don’t your momma need you do chores ‘fore bedtime?”
“What’s Ze-boo-flan, whatever it’s called ?” Here’s a trick I learned from Orla Mae: answer a question with a question and everyone wins.
“Zeb-you-lon is a feed-and-grain store at the edge of town we likes to go. The sound’s good, what with them feed bags soaking it all up so it don’t sound tinny, and, anyway, Sonny can’t move that easy so
we come to him, not the other way round.”
“Who’s Sonny?”
“You a nosy one, ain’t ya? Sonny Zebulon’s the oldest living man in town. You come on down sometime and meet Sonny. He’ll like
you. Yeah, ‘sgood idea, come to think of it.” “Can I’ve a drink of water?” “You know where the kitchen is.”
When I get up to go inside Brownie cowers and Mr. Wilson looks over at her. “What’s got into you, dog?”
I go get my glass of water.
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Aunt Lillibit waits for people to mess up like she knew all along they were going to.
“Go on up and get me one of those extra blankets I see your momma has in the closet between the bedrooms, will you?” she calls over to me from the bed Momma’s put together for her and Gammy to share in the front room, as far from the hole in the roof as a body can be.
“Take care you don’t let it drag on the floor on your way back here!” Aunt Lillibit hollers up to me.
But there it is, the one corner I didn’t double-check to see was tucked into the crook of my arms before I made my way back down to her, trailing after me like a tail.
“What did I just say to you? Huh? Give it here.” She grabs the bundle from me and inspects the blanket corner for dirt, nodding her head like I just did exactly what she thought I’d do.
“Sorry.” Nothing more for me to do but stare at the floor and wish she’d release me.
“I can see why your momma can’t keep her house, what with you trailing dirt everywhere you set.” She turns back to the bedding and snaps the blanket into the air so it falls across the other two that’re already spread out on top of the mattress we hauled with us from Toast. Momma and Richard are sleeping on the box spring that fits underneath this one, and, oh, Richard was fit to be tied the first night of sleeping on it. He hollered up a storm at Momma about how we aren’t a way station for her meddling family and how come he’s expected to give up the soft mattress for the hard spring one when they’re the ones lucky to have a roof over their heads.