The Persian Pickle Club (6 page)

Forest Ann was a widow woman because of the untimely death of her husband, Everett Finding, who was dumb enough to drown in a glass of water. He was sitting on top of a reaper one day, reading a girlie magazine, when something spooked the horses, and Everett toppled over into the machinery. The horses ran away, dragging Everett and leaving pieces of him all over the field. Being fertilized by Everett, the next year’s crop was the best that farm ever harvested.

“Forest Ann’s kids had all grown up and moved away by the time Everett died, and she said spending the evenings by herself nearly killed her. Sewing kept her from going crazy. She says a woman without a needle is like a man without a plow.” I didn’t explain to Rita that Dr. Sipes was the real reason Forest Ann kept her sanity, because he stopped at the Finding house every night for a glass of buttermilk. Or maybe Dr. Sipes drank the bootleg that Everett had received in payment for helping Tyrone with his still. Forest Ann had as many jars of hootch as tomatoes in her root cellar.

“A woman without a needle is like a man without a needle,” Rita said, and I laughed, even though I didn’t get it. “Who is that real old lady?” she asked.

“Ceres Root. She came out here from Ohio when she was a bride, marrying Cheed Root after she’d known him for only two weeks. She was about to get hitched to a fellow her parents picked out, even though she didn’t think much of him because he hadn’t gotten off his horse when he proposed. Then Cheed came along, and they ran off to Kansas and have been sweethearts all their life, just sweethearts. Quilting helped her, too, when she lived in a dugout and had no neighbors the first year. All she had was her quilting, and she went to sewing during the day instead of housework. Once, she looked under her bed and found grass growing eight inches high.

“Cheed was so happy she’d married him that he’d do anything for her. When he went to town one day, she asked him to bring her back a piece of fabric she’d admired. Instead of a length, he brought her the whole bolt of cloth. It was Persian pickle, what some call paisley. Ceres still has a few yards of it left because it’s so precious to her. She’s particular about what she uses it for or who gets the scraps. Of course we all have pieces of it in our quilts. That’s how come we’re called the Persian Pickle Club.

“Now, I’ve told you about all of us, except for Agnes T. Ritter and Mrs. Ritter, and you know them already. Of course, there’s Ruby. She’d still be a member if she came back to Harveyville. Ruby and Floyd lost their farm last year when the bank in Topeka took it over, so they piled everything into their Chevrolet truck and went to California.”

I stopped a minute, remembering my last look at Ruby and Floyd waving from the truck, with the kids in back, playing on a mattress. The Persian Pickle had gone over to see them pull out, and I cried and cried, until Mrs. Judd said, “Hush, up, Queenie Bean. Don’t make Ruby feel worse than she does already. They’ve got no choice. In times like these, it’s root, hog, or die.”

“Ruby was my best friend, but I haven’t heard from her yet. Nobody has. Grover said they’re too busy eating oranges.” I knew Grover missed Floyd as much as I missed Ruby, but that was partly because he’d cosigned a loan on a tractor for him, and when they left, we’d had to pay it off ourselves.

“Don’t you mind that all those women are so
old?”
Rita asked. She was right about them being old. Everybody in Harveyville seemed to be old nowadays, because all the young people had gone off to look for jobs.

“That’s why I’m glad you’ve come. We’re the same age, twenty-three. Of course, Agnes T. Ritter is only twenty-five, but she acts like she’s thirty. Forty, even.”

“I think she was born old and cranky,” Rita said.

I nodded at that, then took off Rita’s thimble, which I still had on. It made a sucking sound as it came loose from my sweaty finger. “I don’t care how old the Persian Pickles are, because they’re my friends. When my mama died, they saw me through it. The Pickles are family.”

Rita clucked her tongue to show she was sorry about my mother. “Do you have a father?”

“I’m an orphan now. Same as Grover,” I said. I told Rita about Grover and me, how my father passed when I was in high school, and Mama just wasted away from grief.

“Grover’s mother was a member of Persian Pickle, just like mine, but I never knew her. She died when Grover was born, and his dad raised Grover and David, who is Grover’s big brother. He lives in Oregon now. After we were married, Grover and I lived with Dad Bean until he died two years ago. David inherited half of the farm, but he said he’d never be a farmer like Grover, and he sold us his half cheap. The Beans are real nice people.”

I started to tell her how Dad Bean had brought me that bunch of meadow flowers stuck in a milk jug when I lost the baby, but it wasn’t right to tell a pregnant woman about a baby dying, so I put the thimble back on and finished Rita’s quilt square in silence. When I was done, I smoothed the seams with my fingers and turned it over. “Now, this looks just fine. The Persian Pickle will quilt it for you after you make the rest of the patches. You can do it of an evening, when you’re listening to ‘The Bob Hope Show’ or ‘Fibber McGee and Molly.’“

“I read,” Rita said.

I thought about that for a minute. “Reading’s all right, I suppose, but with quilting, when you’re done, you have a quilt. When you finish with a book, you don’t have anything.”

Rita looked at me kind of funny, as if she hadn’t taken in the wisdom of what I’d said. Then, I thought she had something else on her mind and was deciding whether to tell me about it. “I read all the time because I want to be a writer,” she said at last. “I’ve applied for a job at the
Topeka Enterprise,
and I’ll write stories about Harveyville. They want somebody they can call in case we have a bank robbery or something here. It’s called a correspondent.”

“Harveyville doesn’t have a bank,” I said. When Rita frowned, I added quickly, “Still, I think that’s wonderful.” I looked down at her stomach. “But how can you be a newspaper writer when you’re going to have a baby?”

“Somebody else will just have to look after it. I can’t miss my chance.”

I wanted to tell her that if I had a baby, I wouldn’t trade it for all the newspapers in the world, but it wasn’t my place to do so.

“Here comes trouble,” Rita said, looking up at Agnes T. Ritter, who’d just opened the screen door. She started toward us, with Tom behind her. The two of them were almost the same height, but Tom had inherited all the good looks.

“It appears you drank all the lemonade,” Agnes T. Ritter said, scowling at Rita. “So much sugar’s not good for someone in your condition,” she added, as if Rita had a disease. “At least Mom doesn’t get the sugar mixed up with the salt, like some people.” Tom rolled his eyes at me, and I figured Agnes T. Ritter would throw that salt and sugar mix-up at Rita for the rest of her life.

Rita grinned at Tom and said, “Hi, ace.” Then she winked at me and looked over at Agnes T. Ritter and added, “Hi to you, too … Agnes T. Ritter.”

Before I left, I invited Tom and Rita for supper the next evening. That didn’t give me much time to dust and Hoover the house and put out my best quilts and cook the supper, but with Agnes T. Ritter picking on Rita the way she had, I’d gotten an idea.

At noon, after I told Grover about our guests, he told me to serve pickled pigs’ feet and sauerkraut, which was his favorite as well as Tom’s, but I wouldn’t do it. After all, Rita was from Denver and ate in restaurants where the food was cooked by Mexicans and Chinamen. Grover suggested fried chicken, but I told him Mrs. Ritter fixed it better than I did. So he said to make up my own mind, and finally, I decided on ham and red-eye gravy.

Grover approved. “There’s nothing better than redeye gravy and mashed potatoes,” he said. “Put plenty of bourbon in the gravy so Tom can drink it. You know how Howard Ritter is. Tom told me his dad’s farm is the driest place in Kansas, and he wasn’t talking about the weather. Why don’t you make a pie for dessert?” I knew Grover would ask for that.

“Okay. How about rhubarb?” It was Graver’s favorite.

“Rhubarb’s a little past its prime, isn’t it?”

“I found some late stalks that haven’t gone stringy yet,” I said, hoping Grover wouldn’t ask me where.

He didn’t. “I got chores to do before the old dog barks,” he said, leaving me in the kitchen as he headed out to the barn. That was just the way I wanted it. Men didn’t understand how much work there was in a supper invitation. It took me all the rest of the afternoon to do the cooking and set the table. There wasn’t a minute to spare.

In fact, I barely finished in time to go stand in the screened in porch with Grover to watch Tom and Rita walk down the the road, stirring up the yellow dirt that was as dry as ashes. It rose waist-high and stayed there, so you could see only the top half of them. The wind was blowing, too, not hard, just enough to get that darn dust all over my clean house. I ran back inside to close the windows, but they were already shut, with towels shoved into the cracks. Even so, little lines of dirt were forming near the openings.

Rita and Tom weren’t in any hurry and fooled around as they walked along. Every now and then, Rita bumped into Tom on purpose, and they laughed. Watching them reminded me of Grover and me when we were first married and liked to walk around the fields at dusk, kicking at the clods of dirt and jumping over the ruts that the rain had cut into the road.

Tom went off into our east field and picked up a handful of dirt and held it to his nose, then stood up and let it sift out of his fingers. It was powdery, like the dirt on the road. I saw him shake his head and frown and say something to Rita, but by the time they reached us, they were laughing and holding hands again, and so were Grover and I. Rita hugged me, and Tom kissed my cheek, and that was the start of just about the best evening we ever had. Tom and Rita said so, too.

Boy, were they glad to get away from Agnes T. Ritter. “I don’t care if you burn dinner, Queenie. Just don’t give me anything white,” Tom said. “If Agnes isn’t serving creamed onions or cottage cheese, it’s rice or chicken boiled so long, there isn’t any taste left, and custard for dessert. I never knew there was so much colorless food a person could eat.”

“Since she’s so crazy about eating white stuff, I told her to serve popcorn the next time she and Mom had club meeting,” Rita said. “Buttered popcorn.”

I didn’t understand. “You can’t quilt and eat buttered pop-corn.”

“That’s the idea, silly.”

Tom sat down on the arm of the davenport, putting his arm around Rita, who stood next to him. “What’s that you’re drinking, Grover?”

“Popskull,” Grover said. “Darn good stuff, too. It’s Tyrone’s leftover bourbon, which is better than what you buy legal these days. Sometimes, I think Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wrong about putting an end to Prohibition.”

“Tangleleg suits me. How about you, morning glory?” Tom put his arm around Rita, who wore a pretty yellow sundress, a yellow silk ribbon around her hair, and a tiny gold wristwatch on her arm.

“Is that stuff really bourbon?” she asked.

“It’s awfully strong,” I warned her.

“Well, hot dog, then! The bigger the kick, the better,” she said.

“I’ll just see to dinner,” I told the men after Grover brought the drinks, expecting Rita to follow me into the kitchen the way women did. Instead, she went out on the porch and sat down with Tom and Grover. I made the gravy and put dinner on the table, hurrying so I wouldn’t miss anything. When I was finished, I called everybody to come inside. Tom and Grover said things looked good enough to eat, but Rita forgot to say, “My, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” the way you’re supposed to. I guess they have different manners in the city.

“Tom applied for a job with a copper-mining company in Butte, Montana,” Grover told me, after he’d returned thanks, being especially grateful for friends and asking the Lord for rain.

“Me and about a thousand other men. There’s not much call for engineering graduates these days. I guess Rita will be a famous newspaper reporter before I even get the notice that I’ve been turned down.” Tom took an extra big helping of mashed potatoes. “You know, I’d kind of looked forward to coming back to Harveyville, but I’d forgotten how damn hard farming is. Toots over there’s been game, but she wasn’t brought up to slop pigs. This life is even harder on her than it is on me.” Neither Grover nor I could think of anything to say. We knew farming was hard, but it was the best life we could think of. We were silent until Tom said, “Queenie, this is the finest gravy I ever tasted.”

I nodded to accept the compliment. Then I said to Grover, “Maybe you didn’t know Rita’s going to write articles for the
Enterprise.”

“You writing up stitch ‘n’ cackle?”

I kicked Grover under the table. “For your information, it’s called the Persian Pickle Club.” Grover and Tom broke out laughing, anyway. Rita chuckled, too, and even I had to smile because “stitch ‘n’ cackle” really did describe Persian Pickle sometime.

Rita cut her ham into little pieces before she answered Grover. “I’m going to write about the school-board election.” She put a piece of ham into her mouth and chewed it. “Tom’s dad says the way people vote in it will tell whether good times are coming back. The new people running for the school board want to build a grade school, and that’ll make taxes go up. So if they win, I’ll say people believe good times are around the corner and they don’t mind paying more to the government. But if the old school-board members are reelected, it means voters think hard times are here to stay and they want to keep taxes low. That’s called a slant.”