The Persian Pickle Club (3 page)

“Oh, dear, it’s five!” Forest Ann said, as upset as if she’d looked out and seen a dust storm boiling up over the house. Ada June and I exchanged glances, and Nettie shot out an angry look, but whether it was to show her disapproval to Forest Ann or to warn the rest of us to keep our mouths shut, I couldn’t tell. None of us would have breathed a word of criticism, anyway. If Forest Ann let that man stop by her house every night at five o’clock, it was her business, not ours, even if he was married.

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a man to feed each and every evening. It’d be nice to go home to the radio and my sewing,” Opalina said. She wanted to let Forest Ann know she thought being a widow wasn’t always such a bad thing. I didn’t look at Forest Ann, however. I looked at Ella, who didn’t have a husband, either. She didn’t have even a radio to keep her company. In fact, the old Crook place had no electricity, but Ella didn’t mind. She sewed in the evenings by kerosene lamp—or even candlelight sometimes, because it was like having stars inside her house, she said.

Mrs. Judd looked at Ella, too. “Come along, sweetheart. You can stay to supper with me. You’re better company than Prosper. He can’t talk about anything but the crops drying up.” The rest of us sighed, because that’s all any of our husbands talked about. Mrs. Judd tucked the sugar-sack square of cloth with the butterfly she’d been embroidering on it into her sewing basket and stood up. “What do you say we make us a big dish of popped corn for dessert, Ella, even if it is the middle of summer? I haven’t had popped corn for the longest time.”

“Oh, my favorite!” Ella said.

Outside, Rita passed her hand around again for us to shake, and Ella couldn’t resist touching the hem of Rita’s pretty dress. “It’s just like milkweed silk,” she murmured.

Mrs. Judd told Rita, “You have any sewing you want done, you come see Ella here. She sews better than anybody in a hundred miles.” Then she added, “She’s a worker.” We all nodded, because that was the biggest compliment you could give a Kansas woman. You didn’t say she was smart or pretty. You said she was a worker. And Ella was a worker. In her embroidered white dress, with the wisps of hair curling around her thin face, Ella resembled the girl on the Whitman’s candy box, but she was a regular farmwife who chopped wood and slaughtered pigs. She was stronger than she looked—and older. She was as old as Mrs. Judd, which was more than sixty.

“Oh, I would, but I’m going learn to sew myself,” Rita said, and blushed. What she meant was that she was broke like the rest of Kansas.

“You do that.” Mrs. Judd opened the driver’s door of the yellow Packard, and Ella scooted in across the leather seat. The old touring car sagged as Mrs. Judd stepped on the running board. I noticed she’d rolled her stockings down around her ankles when it got hot during quilting and had forgotten to roll them back up. Her legs above the rolls were angled from rickets and as white as birch sticks. Mrs. Judd sank into the seat beside Ella and started the motor, and we watched as the Packard lumbered out onto the road. Sometimes it didn’t make it, and then Mrs. Judd had to tinker with the motor.

“I always think of Mutt and Jeff when I see Ella and Mrs. Judd together,” Ada June whispered.

“Or Laurel and Hardy,” I said.

“Or Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy?” Rita chimed in. The three of us laughed about that all the way over to my car. I drove a Studebaker Commander that Grover’s father had bought back when farming paid enough to live on. As I opened the door, I knew Rita was going to be more fun than a shoe box of kittens, and I turned around and hugged her, saying how glad I was she had moved to Harveyville.

That’s what this story is about—Rita coming to Harveyville and joining the Persian Pickle Club and learning the meaning of friendship. It’s about me, too, of course, and about how I never can keep my mouth shut.

T
he minute Grover came in, I knew something was eating at him. I knew because he didn’t tell me. In fact, he didn’t say a word, which is Grover’s way. When something’s gnawing on him, he’s silent as the dawn. Not me, however, and I got edgy knowing Grover was upset, so I talked a mile a minute.

“The cream doesn’t last in all this heat. I put it in the Frigidaire and it should have stayed cool in there, but when I poured it into the churn to make butter, it’d already gone bad. I had to scald the dasher to get out the sour smell. Funny thing is, the buttermilk’s fine. I don’t know why the cream’d go bad and the buttermilk wouldn’t. Maybe it was bad when I put it away.”

Grover didn’t reply, just took off his hat and tossed it over the knob on the back of a kitchen chair, so I kept on talking. “The bread’s moldy, too. It’s only two days old, and already I found mold. Tell me why there’s mold when everything’s so dry. Sometimes, I think I can hear the crops out there crying for water, calling, Grover, give me a drink.” I stopped, hoping Grover would laugh, but he was washing his hands and still not paying any attention to me. He had a little scrub brush at the kitchen sink that he rubbed on the cake of Ivory, then on his knuckles to get out the dirt. His shirt was wet all down the middle of his back, and the hair on his great big head was damp and matted in a ring on top where his hat had perched.

“I’ve got to clean out the refrigerator again and sprinkle it with baking soda to get rid of the moldy smell. I hate that smell as much as I do the stink in the hired man’s cabin. That shack smells like rotted oilcloth no matter how many times I air it out. Oilcloth and molasses and old pancakes. I don’t suppose hired men care about things like smells, though.”

“Uh-huh,” Grover said at last, still not listening. The water ran over his hands, but Grover didn’t pay attention to how he was wasting it. He just stared out the window, stared at nothing.

“That’s why I’m going to run away. I’m driving to Kansas City this afternoon to be a burlesque queen, or else maybe I’ll join the Catholic church so I can be one of those sisters. That way, I’ll never have to worry again about what to wear.”

“You going to keep the car, or you want me to go along to Kansas City with you so’s I can drive it back?” Grover asked. He shut off the water and turned around and grinned at me. “I sure would hate to lose that radio.” He’d spent a whole day installing a radio in the Studebaker.

“I thought you weren’t listening.”

“I wasn’t until you got to the interesting part about the burlesque queen.” He pronounced it “bur-le-que.” “I expect I’d buy a ticket to see that. Maybe I’d get a private show ahead of time.” I pointed my toe and swung my leg up in front of me—not too high—while Grover reached for the towel and dried his hands. “You upset about something?”

“Just you. What’s on your mind?”

“What makes you think something’s on my mind?”

“Grover.” I sighed. “We’ve been married five years, and it might as well be a hundred, because I know you that well. Either you tell me what it is or say you’re not going to tell me, but don’t say nothing’s wrong, because I know different.”

Grover used his fingers to comb through his hair. It was as thin as Depression wheat, but Grover was touchy about his hair, and I never mentioned he was going bald. “How come you’re so smart?” he asked, and I told him not to change the subject.

“Got any cookies?” Grover asked. I knew then that he’d tell me. Otherwise, he’d have turned around and gone out to the barn to brood.

“I’ve got jumbles and hermits, made with the black walnuts we gathered down on the creek last fall.”

“Both kinds.”

I took out my plate with the peach-and-plum decal on it and piled it with cookies. Then I put the pitcher of buttermilk on the table with a glass. The outside of the pitcher was damp, and little drops of water ran down the sides, forming a wet ring on the tablecloth. I took off my apron and sat down at the kitchen table across from Grover.

“You sure make cookies better than anybody, Queenie,” he said, putting a whole hermit in his mouth, washing it down with buttermilk, then eating a jumble in two bites.

“Grover Bean, don’t try to wiggle out of it with the compliments.”

“You won’t like it.” Grover picked up a jumble, and I pulled the plate away. Grover knew he’d have to tell me what was wrong before he got any more cookies. “There’s squatters down on the creek.”

I set down the plate, and Grover put his hand over mine. I was sorry I’d made him tell me. There wasn’t anything that scared me as much as drifters. We didn’t get many this far off the main road. Still, every now and then, I saw a man tramping past the farm or driving an old car jammed with kids and belongings, driving slow, like he was looking for something to steal. Sometimes they even came to the door, asking for work. If Grover was there, he’d give them a handout, but I always locked the screen and called Old Bob up onto the porch.

I knew most of them meant no harm, but some were desperate and would kill you for a quarter. Down in Kiowa County, a drifter put a pitchfork through a farmer who’d caught him stealing off a clothesline. And I myself had had three dollars and a meat-loaf sandwich stolen off my kitchen table while I was in the chicken coop, and I knew it was a back-door knocker, because nobody in Harveyville except Grover would eat my meat loaf. I had good reason to be scared of drifters.

“They didn’t break into the hired man’s shack, did they?” I asked.

“No, they just pitched a tent by the creek. That’s all.”

“I hope you shooed them right off. You know how I hate tramps.”

“They’re not tramps, Queenie.”

The way he said it made me look up at him. “Well, gypsies, then. It’s almost the same thing.”

“No, they’re not gypsies, either. Not these folks. They’re just people, hill people, down-and-out. They’re pretty near as broke as anybody I ever saw.”

“You told them to move on, didn’t you?”

“No,” he said, rubbing the little port-wine spot on his chin.

“We can’t have people like that camping on our land.”

“What do you mean, ‘people like that’?” Grover asked. He moved his hand away from mine and picked up a hermit and bit it in half, spilling crumbs on the table. “They’re people like Ruby and Floyd. People like you and me.”

“Don’t say that.”

Grover ate the other half, then picked at the crumbs on the cloth, putting them into his mouth. “Whether you like it or not, they are. There but for the grace of God—”

“Don’t you preach to me, Grover. Are you going to tell them to move on?” I interrupted. Grover looked at me so long without replying that he made me nervous. So I got up and took out another glass from the cupboard, then poured myself some buttermilk, but I don’t know why, because I hate buttermilk. Grover took the glass out of my hand and set it on the table. “You hate buttermilk,” he said. “Look at me.”

Grover didn’t tell me what to do very often, so I looked at him.

“Queenie, these people aren’t moochers. They’re just about our age, with a boy no more than six or seven years old and a baby. They’re in need, and it’s our Christian duty to help them.”

“You sound like Lizzy Olive,” I told him. And when I said it, I thought, No, he doesn’t, but I do.

“That’s not you talking, Queenie. I met these people. There’s nothing wrong with them except they’re broke. I’m sorry for them, and I want to tell them they can camp out there on the creek until they’re ready to move on. Maybe we could offer them the hired man’s cabin.”

I just stared at Grover.

“We’ve got no use for it,” he said. “There’s no reason in the world some family in need can’t live in it for a bit.”

“Are you telling me or asking me? I guess it’s your farm, so you can do what you want to with it.”

Grover sighed, and I could tell he was disappointed. “I’m asking, Queenie. It’s
our
farm. You know that. I’m not saying you have to invite them over to supper or to let them join your stitch-and-itch club.” He’d started calling it that this summer because the chiggers were so bad. When I didn’t laugh, Grover added, “I’ll tell them to move along if you really want me to.”

I don’t like to go against Grover, but sometimes he can be a sap, believing every hard-luck story he hears. He could call those squatters anything he wanted, but they were tramps to me. “There was a man and wife in Missouri who got killed when a tramp set fire to their farmhouse. They’d chased him off, and he waited until dark, then burned them alive. When he got caught, he said he wasn’t sorry. I read it in the newspaper last week.”

“These folks won’t hurt anybody, Queenie. I promise.”

“You can’t promise any such thing, because you don’t know them,” I told him.

“Well, I know you, don’t I? You wouldn’t turn your back on a less fortunate, and that’s just what they are.”

“If you want to help the less fortunates, what about Tom and Rita? We ought to extend a hand to our own kind first.”

“Tom and Rita may not have money, but they aren’t poor. Besides, they don’t want to throw up a tent on the creek.”

There was no use fussing with Grover when he had his mind made up, so I said, “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at them.”

Grover reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I misspoke about the shack. All I’m asking is that you let them camp here for a while. If you still think they’re tramps after you meet them, I’ll tell them straight off to hit the road,” he said. “Oh, and why don’t you put the rest of that buttermilk in a jar, since you’re not going to drink it. They could use it.”

He reached out for another jumble, but I swatted his hand. “They might like some cookies,” I said.

I packed up the cookies and the buttermilk and most of what else we had left in the refrigerator, telling Grover things were going bad so fast in this heat that giving them to the squatters would save me from having to throw them out later. I didn’t want Grover to think I’d gone soft.

“You’re not so tough, Queenie. That peppermint candy doesn’t go bad.”

“Now you watch out, Grover. Don’t you pick on me. They won’t be as likely to murder us if we fill up their stomachs. If they’re hard cases, I’ll tell them myself to move on.”

But I didn’t. Like Grover, I thought they were the saddest, sorriest people I’d ever seen, and my heart went out to them right off, especially the two kids.

When we drove up, the woman was kneeling down at that little trickle of water in the creek with a bar of harsh, home-made lye soap, washing out clothes. A pair of overalls and some shirts were already spread out on the rocks to dry. She was scrawny, but she was clean. They were all clean, and I knew they’d taken baths in the creek that day. The woman wore a dress that was more patches than dress, and the little boy had on a pair of homemade drawers made out of gunnysack. It made me itch to see that tough, old material next to his skin. I wondered why his mother hadn’t used a flour sack or a sugar sack to make underwear for him, then realized it must have been a long time since they’d bought a sack of anything.

Their old rattletrap Ford with a ripped canvas top was parked under a black-walnut tree, next to their tent. They’d laid stones in a ring for a fire and rigged up a tripod over the fire pit to hold a kettle. I knew there couldn’t be much in it. Jackrabbits were pretty poor pickings these days.

The man sat on the running board, with a stick in one hand and a pocketknife in the other. He stood when we drove up and threw the stick away, then carefully closed the knife and slid it into his overalls. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just the overalls.

The woman stopped washing and put on a felt hat, even though she was barefoot, and came to stand at attention beside her man. She jabbed him with her elbow and jerked her chin at his head, and he snatched off his hat, holding it in front of him with both hands. The little boy stopped playing and joined them, not looking at us because he was shy. I didn’t see any baby.

“Afternoon,” Grover said. They didn’t say a word at first, just stared and maybe wondered if we were going to tell them to pack up. “This is my wife, Mrs. Bean,” Grover said, and the woman nodded just the slightest bit. She glanced at the food basket I held, then looked away. Then she looked at it again.

After a minute, the man said, “Proud to meet ya.” But it sounded like he wasn’t sure.

Then the woman wriggled her toes and said softly, “How do.”

“Hi,” I said, and we stood there looking one another over. Then because silence is a burden to me, I said, “I’ve got buttermilk. It’s cold. There’s cookies, too. I hope they won’t spoil your supper.” Then I knew without anybody saying it that the cookies and buttermilk would be their supper. “In all this heat … things spoil so fast. … There’s just Grover and me. …”

The woman nodded again without smiling, and the man said, “We sure do thank ya.” They didn’t move, and neither did 1, so Grover took the basket out of my hand and handed it to the woman.

“You ought to drink the buttermilk soon, so it doesn’t go bad,” I said. The woman fetched two tin cups out of a wooden box on the ground while the man opened the basket and took out the jar.