The money changed things a bit for Luella. The future did not seem so dark or bleak, even if she was alone, because she had a little nest-egg and it proved to her her mother was thinking of her. “I’m not gonna rush and spend it. I’m gonna wait for the money the preacher give me and then I’ll do something round this house.”
The house was full of secondhand furniture and castaway furniture given to Sedalia by people her mother or she worked for, except for her grandmother’s trunk. They all had been proud of that trunk, no one could touch it, so it must have come to her new. Now it sat in Sedalia’s old room with the imitation cream lace scarf across the top and a blue, slightly chipped vase filled with imitation flowers sitting in the middle of it. Luella kept the lace scarf washed and pressed and the chest dusted and oiled. Her heirloom. All the furniture was bits and pieces of different times and styles but all wood.
She still bathed in a tin tub and, being slightly plump made that very uncomfortable and she couldn’t sit and soak in the hot water heated on the stove or lean back and drowse on a tired evening. She had to kneel in it, get on with the bath and get out. So she decided she would spend some of the bank money and build a real bathroom. She had started calling her neighbor-friend, “Aunty Corrine,” and she asked her to help her work it all out.
Workmen were called and the bathroom was put in on the outside, an appendage to the old house. Luella went in that bathroom twenty times a day to look at the shiny new bathtub with polished brass fixtures. She hung new, pink fluffy curtains and threw an almost-new, round, pinkish rug on the floor beside it. Where she used to bathe once a week in that tin tub, now, for awhile, she bathed every day. It seemed to take so little to make her happy.
Time passed, quieting her pain, but not her loneliness. The kitten, puppy and bird were loving and wonderful, but they couldn’t talk. Feeling guilt for spending money, Luella bought a little radio and, holding the package tightly under her arm, she rushed home to plug it in and turn it on. To have sound in the house. She dared not listen to it play the blues on that one little station, her heart and her body responded to it so strongly it kept her awake nights. She cried quietly those nights and couldn’t understand what was wrong with her because she wasn’t thinking of her mother.
But she could listen to quiet music in the evenings. Then she heard a different quiet in her house and realized how wonderfully serene it was. She would sit for hours, stroking her pets, just listening to the little radio that added a beautiful facet to her life.
But, then, there was Preacher Watchem; every Sunday he shook her hand and told her he was working on the money, but, “A’hem, times is hard, Sister, give the Lord time.” Finally she thought she should speak to him herself privately.
In the meantime, though their lifestyles kept them from being friends, exactly, Mattie had gone to school with Sedalia and when she saw the bathroom being put in, she came tipping over to look at it. Mattie ohhhhed and ahhhhed as her fast eyes looked over the house, seeing the radio and the other little few things Luella had bought for herself.
Luella didn’t want to be bothered with Mattie and her foolishness. She was trying to keep Mattie standing so to lead her back to the back door when Mattie sat herself down. “I surely don’t mean to worry you, Luella, but I’m in such a fix right now. Not goin to last long, but, well, here it is now. I need to borrow ten dollars til a week or so. You know, I got these childrens over there I got to take care of. Lord, it’s so hard sometime, but I do my duty, thank the Lord. So . . . I sure would preciate it if you have ten dollars . . .” Her voice dwindled off.
It so happened that Luella had started washing again for two of her best customers and she had twelve dollars in her purse. She gave ten dollars to Mattie, who left soon thereafter to go buy a pack of beer and a carton of oatmeal, then stuck the change in her own cache. Later she sat down with a beer, smiling and thinking about Luella’s money. She didn’t know about the bank money, but she did know Preacher Watchem was supposed to give Luella something.
When Corrine heard about the loan, she nodded her head thoughtfully and said, “You know, Mattie gets help from the city and a little bit more help from her daughter. It is not your job to take care of her responsibilities.”
Luella smiled in sympathy with Mattie. “Well, it was just ten dollars and she gonna give it back.”
Corrine laughed a short laugh, “You’ll see Jesus walk in your front door before you’ll see that ten dollars again. You hope she gives it back. Don’t forget the way your mother saved that money; a very little bit at a time. Bending over them washtubs! And she didn’t never borrow anything from Mattie and she was raising you all by herself. And it does not take long for money to be gone! For good. All of it!”
Luella nodded thoughtfully as she smoothed her dress. “You right, I’ll ask her for it back.”
“You can do that, but I would use that ten dollars to keep from ‘lending’ her any more money. Tell her to pay that money back first! And Mattie talks to a whole lot of people,” Corrine mused. “Have men started calling on you yet?”
Luella smiled sadly at the very ridiculous idea.
Several days had passed since Mattie had borrowed the ten dollars and she had had several visitors to drink up her beer and she had talked about Luella and “all that money her tightfisted mama left her!” A few fellows had leaned over the fence to see if Luella was working in her garden. Several, if Luella wasn’t in her yard, would knock on the door, hard, as if they had a right to do it.
“How you doin, Luella? Girl, I haven’t seen you since the other day. Why you always hiding your fine self away?”
Luella would answer, standing at the door, “How do? No, I haven’t seen you since school days. I ain’t hiding. I’m just livin. Ain nowhere to go to get out none.”
“Oh, it’s places to go, Ms. Luella! You been to the Hi Ball Inn yet?”
Luella laughed, “No, I have not! My church would put me on a cross if they was to think I . . .”
“Church don’t have to know everything, Luella!”
Something in her brain told Luella this was not what she wanted. She had never thought anything special of the men who came anyway. “No sir, I don’t blive I’m goin to the Hi Ball Inn.”
When she saw the men, any of several, fix his body to step inside the house, she spoke quickly. “It’s too soon after my mother passing for me to think thoughts like that . . . and I’m not taking company.”
Once a man came by, she knew him from frequent, casual, public meetings in passing, and she let him, hesitantly, into her house. He pulled out a half-pint of gin and set there, drinking it all; then ate the food she had on her stove for her own dinner. After his dinner and returning to the living room, he commenced to take off his shoes, til Luella stopped him.
“Oh, Sam, you got to go now. Aunt Corrine will be here soon and I got to get ready to go to church with her.”
A little drunk and full of food, all he could say was, “Huh?” She helped him up and into his jacket, all the while he sputtered about he would wait for her, “take a nap whilst you gone.” His body wanted to lie down real bad.
But Luella persisted, doing everything to get him to the door. “You want me put out of church, Sam?! And ain’t you still married to Dolly? No, I think you better go.”
It was right after that that she decided not to talk to all who stopped “to holler” at her, out in the yard.
Corrine and Luella, in the end, laughed and talked about these men, Corrine thought she was showing mature good sense. “Any woman with a house can always have a man, cause most of em are always looking for a home.”
Until. One morning, early, Luella stepped off the three little steps leading down to her backyard to do some work in her vegetable garden. A tall, brown, broad-shouldered man with his hair slicked back was shining in the morning sun. His overalls had been laundered and even had a crease down the front of the pant legs. And there he was, digging in her dirt! Had small, little piles of weeds he had already picked along the row. When she appeared, he smiled up at her with even white teeth and said, “You up awful late this morning, Ms. Luella. I looked over your fence and saw you needed some help with this here beautiful garden of yours.” He worked as he spoke, slowly, lazily.
“You know, workin a garden relaxes me, so I thought I’d just hop on over your gate and get in a little work and pleasure fore I go to work on my job. I sho hope you don’t mind?”
Well, Luella didn’t know just what to say even if she hadn’t been flustered when she looked at his grand smile lighting up his face and, then, into the deepest, dark-brown eyes she had ever looked into. She forgot there hadn’t been many she had looked into anyway and especially none, as he stood up, his hands covered with her dirt, none looking down at her with such bold admiration.
She stammered, “Well . . . I . . . who are you? Do I know you?”
“Well, mam, no you don’t. I ain’t been in your nice little town long.” He knelt down again. “My name is Silki Gains. Hey, come on down here, let’s get to work on these here weeds.”
Without another thought Luella looked around for her trowel and garden gloves; they were near him. She moved to reach for them and his hand closed around hers. “If these all the tools you got, let me finish this row. I got to go anyway; got to get to work, then you can take over.”
He gave her a job. “Here,” he let go of her outstretched hand that hung in the air a second in time. “You gather them little weed piles up and put em wherever you put em.” Luella did as he bid her to do.
He finished the row, asked to wash his hands, went into her house, washed them, came out, put his hot hand on her shoulder and smiled and left for his job at the factory, saying over his shoulder, “See you next time!”
Luella was left standing in a now darkened garden with a trowel in her hand which she held tighter, trying to feel him as she remembered his smile, those eyes, that smooth skin, that thrilling voice.
She was up and out early the next morning. Hair brushed and tied back with a bright pretty kerchief. Dress, not new, but flowery fresh and too nice for yard work. She worked in her garden longer than she had worked in it for a long time, even under the steadily rising heat from the sun.
But . . . he didn’t come.
Luella did that every day for a week. Silki hadn’t come back. But the garden was doing grandly. Better than usual. The collard greens and mustard greens, onions, tomatoes, okra and a small plot of corn fairly flew up out of the ground. The vegetable garden looked healthy and smelled wonderful.
Things were growing inside Luella, also. Feelings. Thoughts of Silki made her heart thrill a little. Questions every young girl thinks about, only for Luella more so, because she was not such a young girl anymore. When she bathed, she rubbed the rag slowly over her body, looking at the skin on her plump arms and legs. Feeling the texture of the hair under her arms and everywhere. She examined her feet, her toenails. Her hands, her fingernails. “I will stop biting them.”
That week she spent a little more bank money for a bottle of perfume with matching cologne and body powder, a pale lipstick and a jar of perfumed Vaseline for her skin, face and all. She thought of the money Preacher Watchem had of hers and she determined to put her foot (now with the polished toenails) down. “Preacher or not!” she spoke to the kitchen walls. “I need some new clothes! Spose he ask me out? I didn’t see no weddin ring on his finger!”
Now, Luella didn’t know, but Silki had been watching her every morning. Corrine had noticed him, now and again, but didn’t have time to just stand and watch him from behind her curtains, so she thought he might be in the area waiting for someone else, waiting mongst the trees for shade. But Silki had a plan.
Silki had given himself his new name. Actually he was born Cecil Ray Picket, the fifth child of nine, in a sharecropper shack in Mississippi. Even his busy mother noticed he was different from her other children; he was a dreamer, always staring off into space, sucking his tongue dreaming up ways to stay out of work and out of the sun out in the fields. Of the year or two he was allowed to go to the one-room school, he made good use of the time by learning to read and count. He was not far ahead of his class, but with more interest because the stories in the books were so different from his life and he hated his life.
Silki found every excuse to stay out of the fields with his father and was often “sick” enough to stay in the house with his mother. He was smart enough to do everything he could to help her around the shack; sweeping the floors, raking the tool- and junk-filled yard, feeding chickens and weeding the house garden and . . . holding a baby and reading to his mother as she worked. The woman was so proud to have a child who could read, her whole soul fairly fluttered to each word pushed through his lips by his determination.
As poor as they were, the mother gave him any change she could filch from the meager money for little things they just had to buy. He would, now and then, steal a penny, nickel (never a dime), when possible, slyly whispering to his mother it was one of his brothers who had stolen it (if it was missed) and that one would get a whipping. Needless to say, his brothers and sisters grew to hate him. Already having hard times and somebody gonna lie on you, too?!
Cecil Ray loved to go to town with his mother and once he stole a cheap magazine. He would have paid for it, but he just didn’t have the money. The magazine was full of pictures of what looked like rich white life and movie stars. He loved the clothes on the men and the painted, fast beauty of the women wrapped in furs. It set a love of clothes on him for all his life. For pretty women too, though the ones he knew were not pretty in the same way the white ones in the magazine were. He did not know the white ones in the magazine were not pretty in that way either. He thought their beauty was natural.
He didn’t know much about make-up beside lipstick. He stole a tube of lipstick for his mother and because she loved her son, the helper, she put it on for him when his father was not home because she did not want her husband to worry about the money.