The Persian Pickle Club (4 page)

“Would you have some?” she asked me, which made a lump come into my throat. As poor as they were, they had offered to share their charity basket with us.

“Why, thanks just the same. We already finished ours,” I said, reaching into the basket for the sack of cookies and holding it out. “Your little boy might like one of these hermits. The nuts came from the very trees we’re standing under. You go right ahead and help yourselves.”

The woman nodded her thanks and passed a cookie to the man, then to the little boy. “You say ‘ ‘Bliged,’ “ she told him, and he muttered something, his mouth full of cookie.

“Where do you folks come from?” I asked.

“Missouri,” he replied. “We been on the road two months. We took a wrong turn and ended up in Oklahoma. There sure ain’t nothing there. We’re headed for California is what we are, but we ain’t got the money for gas, so we figured we’d give Kansas a try. We’ll move on toward California when we get a little money in our pocket. We’re looking for work.”

“Any luck?” Grover asked.

“Plenty of luck. Luck, jes’ like a grasshopper in a chicken house’s got luck,” the woman said. “The car give out right here—two days ago. Blue says let ‘er sit. I says we ain’t got the choice. We cain’t move till he gets a part.”

The man nodded. “Blue’s my name. Joe Blue Massie, but folks call me Blue. That’s Zepha. This here’s Sonny.” Sonny scowled at the buttermilk in his mother’s cup but took a drink, anyway. He didn’t look up when his father introduced him. “Baby, she’s in the tent.”

“Blue says the part’s going to cost us. We’d like to move along. We don’t mean to camp out on private property. We got respect for what belongs to other folks. The fact is, we just cain’t move till we get that part. You tell them what part, Blue.”

“Water pump.”

“That’s a problem all right,” Grover said. “Do you have the money for it?”

I wanted to kick Grover for being such a dope. Of course they didn’t have the money.

Blue sized up Grover for a minute, maybe wondering if Grover was thinking of robbing him. “Bit. I’d be ‘bliged to find work. I work hard.”

“Most people’d like to find work, but there’s none around here that I know of,” Grover said. “You can see how the crops are burning up. That creek there, it ought to be up to the bank. If this was a good year, those rocks in the stream you’re drying your clothes on would be underwater, but it’s not a good year. We haven’t had a good year in a long time. I’m not hiring, myself, and I don’t know anybody who is. If they did, they’d give the work to local boys first.”

Blue nodded, expecting that answer.

“I sew right smart,” Zepha said, looking at me hopefully.

“I wish I had a need for it,” I told her. “There’s a widow lady here, a friend of mine, who does sewing: She needs all the work she can get.”

None of us could think of anything else to say, so we all watched the boy cleaning out the cup with his tongue. “He sure does take to that buttermilk,” Zepha said.

“You send him up to the house after milking tonight. We’ll give him some fresh milk. Your baby might like it,” I said.

Zepha was so grateful, she couldn’t even reply, just looked down at her toes. So I glanced over at Grover and nodded. He knew what I meant and said, “You folks are welcome to stay here for a few days, until you get that part for your car. The fact is, I know a little about engines and could take a look at it for you. Maybe I’ve got something on hand that will do. I can’t see any sense in paying good money for a part if you got it on hand.”

Blue and Zepha looked tickled, and Blue wiped his hand on his overalls and shook Grover’s hand. “By dogies, that’s real nice. We won’t be a bit of trouble, will we, Zeph? We’ll be careful with the fire, too. We won’t hurt your land none, Mr. Bean.”

Zepha added, “No need for you’ns to trouble yourself about the car. Blue’s real good at that.”

“We’ve got a better place for you to stay,” I said, looking to Grover for approval. Now it was his turn to nod, and when he did, he smiled at me. “There’s a hired man’s cabin between here and the house. It’s not much, and it’ll have to be cleaned up, but it’ll keep you out of the rain.”

The two of them looked startled, then realized I’d made a joke, and they laughed, the man slapping his leg. “That’s a good ‘n.” Lack of rain was something we all shared, and we felt a little easier with one another.

Then the woman realized we’d offered them a place to live, and she asked, “You mean that? I never heard of nothing so nice. Last week, we got dogs sicced on us. Show them where you got bit, Blue.” But Blue only scowled.

“We could drive you folks over there right now,” Grover said. “You just load what you got in our car.”

“We wouldn’t want to trouble you none,” Zepha said.

“No trouble at all,” Grover told her. He helped Blue move things out of the tent while Zepha and I packed them in the cardboard boxes that were stacked on the ground. Then I heard a cry from the tent, and I handed my load to Zepha. “Let me see to her,” I said. Zepha nodded.

The baby didn’t put much effort into crying. She was a little bit of a thing, with the face of an old woman, but she was precious to me, and I felt a stab of pain as I picked her up, knowing that although I wanted a baby more than anything in the world, I’d never have one of my own. Grover and I had been married only a year when I miscarried, and the doctor took out most of my insides to save my life. I was lucky to have a man like Grover who didn’t blame me for being childless and never once brought up that I was the reason we had an empty place in our lives. Still, every time I picked up a baby, I felt as if I’d let Grover down.

I hummed a little song to the baby to get the lump out of my throat, and after she quieted down, I asked Blue her name.

“Baby.”

“I mean her Christian name.”

He looked at me kind of funny and said, “Baby.”

We couldn’t get everything into the car at once, so Grover and Blue said they’d take a load over by themselves and come back for us. Zepha went along to unpack. I volunteered to sit with Baby and Sonny.

Sonny looked me over until they disappeared, then asked, “You got a dog?”

“Old Bob’s his name. He’s a big dog, a hunting dog, but he’s nice and gentle. You come see him sometime,” I said.

“Our dog, Pup, is in the bushes. He don’t take to strangers. Got more cookies?”

I nodded.

“I like cookies. Hate buttermilk. It makes me puke. Drink it only ‘cause I’m real hungry. What else you got in that basket, lady? Got a bean sandwich?”

“I’ve got your supper. We’ll wait till your mother gets back.”

“Got possum?”

I made a face and shook my head. “No possum. Possum’s as bad as buttermilk. I brought chicken.” I wouldn’t eat possum, which was as bad as eating squirrel. I’d starve to death before eating some things.

“No sir. Possum’s the best eatin’ they is,” Sonny said. “We been eatin’ fried dough. Ma made a fried doll cake yesterday. It was real pretty. Day before, we had taters.” He stared at the basket for a minute. Then he went down to the trickle of water in the stream and squatted down to make a dam by piling rocks across the water. Circles of blackened rock along the bank showed that other drifters had camped there. I wondered if Grover had known about them, too.

As I watched Sonny play in the creek, I hummed a little song to Baby and was still singing when Grover came back with Blue. When Blue got out of the car, he wouldn’t look at me or thank me for letting them stay in the cabin, and I was afraid his feelings were hurt by that dirty old place. We should have let the Massies stay where they were. Blue kicked the rocks out of the stream, then nudged Sonny up with his bare toe. When Grover walked by me, carrying a box of battered pots and pans to load into the car, I asked if the Massies were disappointed with the shack.

Grover shook his head and whispered, “I think he’s afraid he’ll cry if he opens his mouth. The woman said that shack was nicer than any place they’d ever lived in, even at home. You’d have thought it was a palace, the way she acted.”

The Massies were poor indeed, because the shack wasn’t anything more than upright boards with battens to cover the cracks and keep the snow from sifting in during the winter. The stove was held up by wire, and the built-in bunk was narrow. I remembered when Nettie once made a cover for a daybed, and Mrs. Judd called it a “hired man’s quilt” because it wasn’t very wide. The only other things in that cabin were a table with a warped top and two nail kegs for chairs. I hoped Grover had thrown away the 1931 calendar with a picture of a naked woman on it that hung on the wall.

“This house is pretty dirty,” I told Zepha after Grover drove us all over there with what was left of the Massies’ things. “I’d have cleaned it myself if I’d known somebody was moving in.”

“1 like to clean, missus,” Zepha said. “It’ll be real nice when I’m done.”

“The roof leaks,” Grover said, “but I guess you don’t have to worry about that. If we get rain, we’ll all just stand outside and dance.”

“It don’t look like much to fix. You got any boards around? I’ll fix it if you got boards,” Blue said.

Grover told him he did, and when Blue went inside, I prodded him with my elbow. “You can fix it, Grover. We shouldn’t let them move into a shack with a broken roof.”

Grover shook his head and said, “That’s his way of paying us back. It helps his pride.”

“I guess pride’s the only thing they’ve got.”

“And not much of that, I’d bet.”

Before we left, I stuck my head inside the cabin and said, “After supper, we’ll come around with the things we stripped from here last fall and took up to the home place. With nobody living here, we didn’t want to leave things lying around, for fear somebody would steal them.”

When I got into the car, Grover asked what things were those. We’d never had anything else in that cabin.

That evening, Grover filled up the little cream can with milk and put some boards, a bedstead, and an old feather tick into the truck. He thought I should take along some quilts since I had so many, but I told him he wasn’t the only one who was sensitive about the Massies’ pride. Zepha had quilts of her own, folded up inside the tent, and she might be ticklish about accepting another woman’s second best. The easiest way to insult a woman was through her quilts.

Instead, I took along a big basket to make a bed for Baby, a can of stove black, a decent broom, and some old feed sacks I’d bleached for dish towels. Grover said those rags were better than what the Massies had on.

“That’s the idea. I’ll give them to Zepha for cleaning cloths, but she’ll use them to make clothes for the kids.”

The Massies were lined up, waiting for us when we arrived after supper. Zepha wore shoes and had pinned a scrap of ribbon to her hair. Sonny stood straight and tall, with his feet together, as if he were a clothespin soldier, and I was especially glad for his sake that we’d brought along the surprise.

“I’ve got something special for you,” I said, pointing to Sonny. “But you’ve got to help with it.” Grover lifted the ice cream freezer out of the car and set it on the ground, and the three of them gathered around and stared at it. When they didn’t respond, Grover and I realized at the same time they didn’t know what it was.

“Ice cream,” we told them together.

“Ice cream? I ate ice cream once. From a store,” the boy said, his eyes wide.

“This is just as good, but it doesn’t make itself. You have to turn the handle on top until it won’t turn anymore.” Grover put Sonny’s hand on the crank. “You do that till your arm gets too tired. Then your dad will take over, and when his arm gives out, I’ll take a turn. The harder it is to move, the closer we are to eating ice cream.”

Sonny began turning the handle, and the Massies stood over him, their heads moving in a circle with the handle. “What do you bet when it’s his turn, Blue won’t cry uncle?” I whispered to Grover.

“I’m counting on that.”

Zepha looked up at me, her eyes wide. “By golly, I never saw nothing like that. Does it make them little brown cones, too?”

“It’s a mean trick to play on that boy of yours,” Grover said. “Mrs. Bean and I get too tired to turn the crank. We figured we’d get Sonny to turn it for us so we could have a dish of ice cream without doing a lick of work.” That was another of Grover’s fibs, because he would sit on the porch all day turning that handle.

While Sonny and Blue cranked the ice cream freezer, Zepha showed me the shack. I told her I’d never seen it so clean. In fact, I’d never seen it clean at all.

“I hope you don’t mind if I picked your flowers,” she said, pointing to the brown-eyed Susans that were in a broken bottle on the table.

“I like them. I’d like to make a quilt like that some day.”

“Oh, you’ns patch?” she asked, her eyes lighting up.

“There’s not much else I’d rather do.”

“I’m the same. I look across the land, and all I see are quilts. I carry my scrap bag in the car so’s I can go to patching while Blue drives. If I didn’t have my quilting, I’d have gone crazy with all this moving around. I quilt every chance I get, ‘cept on Sundays, of course. Every stitch you take on the Sabbath, you got to take out with your nose in the next life, but I expect ev’-body knows that. You’ns want to see my quilts?” she asked, blushing and looking at her dusty shoes in embarrassment.

Blue, who was listening from the doorway, said, with a touch of pride in his voice, “That one’s got a hot needle and a galloping thread.”

“Go’n, Blue. You talk too much,” she told him, but I could tell she was pleased. “I didn’t bring all my quilts. If’n I did, they’d reach to the sky. I left my lumpy comfortables at home, and some I traded for gas and such on the road. These uns that I got with me are Blue’s favorites.” Three quilts were stacked on the rusty iron bed, and when Zepha unfolded them, I held my breath. They were made of old homespun, and the stitching was almost as fine as Ella’s. “Why, that’s Wandering Foot,” I said, pointing at a quilt made of home-dyed blue and white.

“No sech a thing. I ain’t fool enough to let my Blue sleep under a Wandering Foot. He’s hard enough as it is to keep to home. I call that Turkey Tracks. He can sleep under Turkey Tracks and not run off,” Zepha said. She spread out another quilt. “This has got the pieces sewed on instead of patched. It’s a Piney.”