The Persian Pickle Club (7 page)

“You see those better times, Tom?” Grover asked.

“Maybe,” Tom said slowly, using his spoon instead of his knife on the butter. It had been as hard as ice when I’d put it on the table, but the heat in the room had melted it, and Tom could have scooped it up with his slice of bread. “Not personally, I haven’t. I guess I can’t complain, since we’ve got a roof over our heads and something to eat. It could be a lot worst. I could be one of my creditors.”

“Yeah, things are so tight here, they ought to call this place Hardlyville.” I noticed that Grover’s napkin was still folded on the table. We never used napkins except for company. “Had any luck finding work here, Tom?”

“You bet. I’ve made all of fifty cents this summer.” He chuckled, but the rest of us didn’t. “Edgar Howbert hired me to do a day’s plowing for a dollar, but I finished in half a day, so all I got was fifty cents. If Rita sells this article of hers, she’ll make twenty times what I did, and she won’t have blisters, either.”

“You spend the fifty cents in one place?” Grover asked, which was so funny that we all burst out laughing.

“I thought about taking it over to that place at Blue Hill and putting down a bet with Tyrone Burgett. You know, easy come, easy go. But it’s too far to walk, so I guess I’ll buy a farm with the money instead.”

“It’s not fair,” Grover said, getting serious again. “Work like a nigger and what do you have?” He looked at me and said, “Negro.”

“Hell, those Negroes have got it even worse than we do,” Tom said. “Edgar offered Hiawatha Jackson fifty cents a day to do some work, and Hiawatha took it. I don’t know if I’m madder that Edgar cut wages ‘cause Hiawatha’s a colored or that he didn’t offer the job to me at the same price.” Hiawatha and his wife, Duty, lived on Ella’s farm and kept an eye on her.

“Edgar Howbert’s a cheap bastard,” Grover said.

“Hiawatha was glad for anything. He told me his oldest boy’s been all over the state looking for work and that western Kansas is so dry, you couldn’t grow a bone there. He came home with dust pneumonia.”

“I’ve heard some of those farmers out that way are packing up and heading for the Sahara Desert because it’s got more water,” Grover said. “How are you holding up, Rita?”

Grover meant did she want any more food, but Tom misunderstood and said, “She ought to take it easy. Little Agnes there doesn’t let her sleep.”

“Agnes?” Grover said. “You aren’t going to name it Agnes, are you, Rita?” I’d told Grover about the baby as soon as I’d gotten home.

“I’d rather eat goldfish.”

“Agnes sure can get on your nerves, all right. Maybe we should have let her drown that time she fell in the creek. I told Tom to let her lie,” Grover said.

“Aw, if I hadn’t pulled her out, Floyd would have, and I’d have gotten a licking,” Tom said.

“Why would Floyd do a thing like that?” Grover asked.

“He was sweet on her. Didn’t you know?”

“Floyd?” I asked, looking at Grover. He was just as surprised as I was.

“Sure, but Agnes had her heart set on going to college. She wouldn’t marry a farmer, and I guess that was just as well,” Tom continued. “If Floyd had married her instead of Ruby, Agnes’d be an Okie now.”

“Ruby and Floyd are not Okies!” I said fiercely.

“Call ‘em what you like. There are plenty of us who are fifty cents away from being Okies,” Tom replied. We were all silent for a minute, thinking that over. Then Tom said, “I was smelling the dirt in your east cornfield. I bet it’s dry all the way down to China. It hasn’t rained since we came here.”

“We had a cloud last week,” Grover said. “But I think it was just an empty on its way back from Kentucky.”

“This bourbon tastes like it came from there, too.” Tom swallowed the last little bit in his glass. “I sure miss the days when Rita and I spent Saturday nights drinking rye and playing cards.”

“Your dad would have a fit if we did that here.” Rita chuckled. “Sometimes, I feel just like that old lady in your club who lives off by herself without even electricity. What’s her name again?”

Instead of answering, I got up and began to clear the table.

“Ella, isn’t that it?” Rita asked.

“I’d rather be lonesome than live with Ben Crook. I can tell you that,” Grover said. “Remember him, Tom?”

Before Tom could answer, I said, “Speaking of remembering, did you remember to save room for pie?”

“I remember Queenie’s pies, all right. That’s for sure,” Tom said.

I asked Rita to help me clear, and Tom and Grover started talking about the weather again.

Rita and I took everything off the table and stacked it in the kitchen. Then I sent her back to the dining room while I got out the pie, stopping for just a minute to admire it, because it was the prettiest pie I’d ever made. The top crust was the palest shade of brown, sprinkled with sugar. A line of crimson oozed out of the vent I’d cut. I sliced it into four pieces, then whipped the cream and put it into a serving bowl with a big spoon and carried it all in.

Tom gave me a big smile when I set his piece in front of him, and he told me even his mother’s pies weren’t as good as mine. I passed around the cream, and we all waited until everyone had spooned it out before we picked up our forks.

As they cut their pie, the men discussed corn. Tom asked Grover how many bushels he figured he’d get from an acre, but instead of answering, Grover put up his finger to tell Tom to hold off a minute. He put a big bite of pie into his mouth before he said, “The way I see it—” He swallowed, stared at his pie a minute, then gave me a questioning look.

Tom tried his pie, and got the very same expression on his face. He didn’t swallow, however. Instead, he pinched in his cheeks, keeping the pie in the middle of his mouth “Queen-ie …” Tom said, moving the food in his mouth from side to side.

“What’s wrong?”

“What kind of pie is this, anyway?” Grover asked.

“Rhubarb,” I said. “Don’t you know rhubarb pie? I thought it was your favorite.”

“It doesn’t taste like rhubarb,” Tom said. He finally swallowed what was in his mouth and made a face.

“I picked it today, on the north side of the barn,” I said. Then I cut my own piece, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

Rita tasted hers and spit it out onto her plate.

Grover studied what was left of his pie, moving the crust aside, then picking at the filling. “This is not rhubarb, Queenie.” Grover grinned at me. “It’s Swiss chard! You made a rhubarb pie out of red Swiss chard!”

“Swiss chard!” Tom roared.

“No such a thing!” I insisted.

But Grover was right, and I turned as red as the chard while Grover laughed so hard, he almost fell over backward—which would have served him right, making fun of me like that. Tom tried to be polite and put his napkin over his mouth, but he sputtered behind it and shook his head while tears came into his eyes.

Rita laughed, too, after she wiped the red off of her little white teeth. “You’re worse than me with the salt and sugar. Even I know the difference between rhubarb and Swiss chard.”

“Well, they look a lot alike. They’re both red, and they have green leaves and stalks. …” There was no use explaining.

“Honey, you won’t live this down for a hundred years,” Grover said, when he caught his breath, and I knew he was right.

I was so embarrassed that I was glad to gather up the plates and escape into the kitchen. The three of them were still laughing when I took in the plate of cookies I’d made that afternoon and served them for dessert instead.

I left the dishes in the sink, where I could do them the next morning, and after we’d eaten the cookies, I went out onto the porch with the others. Grover poured out some more liquor, then said, “I sure am glad I bought Tyrone’s bourbon instead of his rhubarb wine.” Tom and Rita laughed, but I gave Grover a poke, and he didn’t say anything more.

We sat there a long time, talking and laughing, and I could tell Tom and Rita didn’t want to go. Before they left, we asked them to sign our guest book on account of it was Rita’s first time in our house. Tom wrote, “Next time, I’ll take pie in the sky, if you don’t mind.”

As they started across the lawn, Rita called, “See you in the funny papers.” Grover and I watched them walk down the road in the starlight. Once Tom turned back and sang,

“K-K-K-Queenie, Beautiful Queenie, you’re the only B-B-B-Bean that I adore.”

After a while, his singing faded and was drowned out by the racket from the crickets. Then Tom and Rita disappeared into the night. Grover smelled for rain, but we both knew there wasn’t any in the air. A coyote howled a long way off, and Old Bob barked. Grover put his arm around me and said, “Time to hit the shucks,” and we went inside.

“You’re pretty nearly the best friend Rita could have in Harveyville, even if she might not know it yet,” Grover said, hooking the screen door and following me into the bedroom.

I raised my eyebrow to ask what he meant, but in the dark, he couldn’t see the gesture.

“I know Tom appreciates what you did.”

“Fixing dinner isn’t so much trouble. I liked doing it,” I said, pushing up the bedroom window as far as it would go. The air was still hotter outside than in, but before morning there might be a breeze to cool us off, and I didn’t want to miss it. You couldn’t be a farmer without being an optimist about the weather. I stared into the night sky, but there were no clouds.

“1 don’t mean inviting them for supper. I’m talking about your pie. That was a real nice thing to do, Queenie.” Grover took off his clothes and sat down on the edge of the bed to wind the clock, even though he always woke up long before the alarm sounded. As he turned to read his watch in the moonlight, checking the time against the clock, the light coming through the window into the dark room caught the bald spot at the back of his head, making it gleam like a silver dollar. Grover reached over and set his watch on the bureau, got into bed, and held out his hand for me to come to him. “Both Tom and I know there isn’t a farmgirl alive who can’t tell the difference between rhubarb and Swiss chard.”

I
‘d taken dinner out to Grover in the field, and we ate it sitting on a wall of the old adobe house that somebody had built way back in history. The house had all but blown away —dust to dust, but then, what wasn’t dust in Kansas these days?

We were in the shadow of a big cottonwood that must have been set out by the people who built the house. There’s a special kind of man who plants a tree when he knows he’ll move on before it’s big enough for him to sit in its shade. Grover was that kind of man, and I told him so, but he wasn’t listening to me. He was looking out across the field.

I took a piece of gooseberry pie from the dinner basket and looked at it with pride before I held it out to him. The crust was golden, and the berries were as plump and pretty as jade beads. “It’s better than what we had at Persian Pickle yesterday,” I told him. This had not been a bumper year for refreshments at club. Instead of the popcorn Rita had suggested, Agnes T. Ritter dished up tapioca pudding, and the time before that, Nettie served her fruitcake, which she mixes up every few years in a five-gallon drum. She said it would last for fifty years, and I told Ada June it had twenty more to go. The only good thing was that Nettie had soaked it in some of Tyrone’s bootleg. When I whispered to Rita that it was a shame we couldn’t just lick the whiskey out of it, she replied Tyrone must be a real pip to make booze that good. I meant to remember the word.

“You want this, honey?” I asked Grover, who still wasn’t paying any attention to me.

“Who’s that coming?” he asked.

I shaded my eyes and looked over the field. “He’s in a real pip of a hurry, whoever he is.”

Grover turned and gave me a funny look. “It might be Blue.” The Massies had become so much a part of our lives that it was hard to remember when they weren’t living in the shack. Grover would come across sticks laid in a strange pattern in the field and know Blue had left them as an omen. Or I’d look up from my work in the kitchen and see Zepha standing in the door with Baby, both of them silent as Indians. Sometimes I’d come home and find an old scrap of home-dyed goods tucked in the screen and know she’d sent Sonny with it. Every now and then, I caught Sonny sitting in the Studebaker, pretending he was listening to the radio. At first, I felt queer when these things happened, but now we were used to the Massies’ ways.

“Maybe he’s going to let us know he found a snake up in a cottonwood,” I said. Blue had told Grover that if we saw a black snake in a tree, we’d have rain in three days.

“That’s crazy. I’ve never seen a snake in a tree,” I said when Grover told me.

“You’ve probably never seen rain, either.” We’d both been checking trees ever since.

I moved out from under the cottonwood while I watched the man disappear into a gully. When he came out into view and started down the rise, we saw it wasn’t a man at all.

“It’s not Blue. It’s Zepha,” Grover said. “Why do you suppose she’s moving so fast?” I didn’t have any idea, but it couldn’t be anything but trouble, so I wrapped up Graver’s pie and put the dinner things back into the basket. Grover wouldn’t be eating his dessert. By the time I was done, Zepha was within hailing distance.

“Hey, you, Zepha. We’re over here. Is everything all right?” Grover yelled. Sometimes Grover isn’t so smart. If everything had been all right, Zepha wouldn’t have been running in the heat without her sunbonnet.

“Miz Bean,” Zepha called as she slowed down. She didn’t say anything more until she reached us. Then she had to catch her breath before she could speak. While she did that, I tried to think what could be wrong at the house. Then I realized she hadn’t come from home, but from the direction of the hired man’s shack. I hoped Sonny and Baby were all right.

I held out a hand to her and led her into the shade, then reached into the basket for the jar of lemonade and held it out, but she shook her head. Instead, while she gasped for breath, she picked at a thorn in her bare foot.

“There’s a woman come along,” she said after what seemed like a long, long wait. “She was in a Model A. A skinny woman with a face like a lizard and no lips. She said to tell you to come a runnin’, Miz Bean. Her sister’s time’s come.”

“What’s that?” Grover asked. None of what Zepha said made sense to him, but it did to me.

“That was Agnes T. Ritter. Zepha means Rita’s gone into labor,” I told him. “She’s early.”

Zepha nodded her head up and down. “She couldn’t find you at your place, so she come to the shack to ask if us’ns knew where you was. She sez it’s bad. I wondered if maybe that baby’s sideways. I knew of that happening to a woman onct. I can’t think who ‘twas. She got bloated up when the baby wouldn’t come and screamed for two days and went crazy from the pain. When that baby finally got borned, Granny Grace, who ketched it, she couldn’t save it. The woman died a-yellin’, and her old man went around the rest of his life with his hands over his ears to keep out the sound. Now, what was her name?”

My stomach felt queasy, and I looked over at Grover, who was pale. “There was another woman,” Zepha started, but I shook my head and pointed to Grover. Zepha understood and didn’t tell the story, but she said fiercely, “Your man ought to hear about it. Men need to know the trouble they cause us’ns. They ought to have a baby just one time, and have it through their nose, too. That’d teach ‘em.”

Zepha looked at Grover as if a woman’s trouble was all his fault. Then she turned to me. “You tell her be careful. I heard a bird peck at the window three times last night. That’s bad luck for sure.”

I didn’t hold with such things, even though Nettie and Forest Ann swore they were true, but I shivered, anyway. Grover took the basket out of my hands and said, “Go on, Queenie. You can run to the Ritter place ‘cross fields faster than we can go home for the car. I’ll take the dinner basket on back to the house and be along as soon as I can. Tom’ll need somebody with him. Run, Queenie.” He gave me a little shove.

“Tell ‘em to put a knife under the bed,” Zepha said as I started off. When I paused to ask what she meant, she called, “A sharp knife under the bed cuts the pain.” I hurried as fast as I could, stopping only to take off my shoes and stockings. Then I ran like a field hand all the way to the Ritter farm, while Zepha called, “Don’t you forget that knife!”

Half the Persian Pickle Club was already there ahead of me. After she’d come for me, Agnes T. Ritter went back home and called Ada June’s, and all up and down the party line, women picked up the phone and listened in, including the members of the Persian Pickle, who knew they were needed.

As I ran across the Putter’s barnyard, I saw Ada June’s Hudson and Forest Ann’s old Dodge truck. The dust in the air behind Mrs. Judd’s Packard hadn’t even settled yet. She stood next to the car with a paper sack in her hand, talking to Tom, and when I came up, I heard her say, “It’s not going to do you a bit of harm, and a little nip might relax you. I knew your dad wouldn’t have any, so I brought you a bottle of Prosper’s. You put it where Howard Ritter won’t see it and take a swallow when you feel the need. I don’t hold with drunkenness, being a good member of the WCTU. But the Lord has His reasons for everything He puts on this earth. Shut your mouth, Queenie Bean. I keep it around for fruitcake.”

Tom looked relieved when he saw me. “I’m glad you’re here, Queenie. We tried to call you everywhere. Then Agnes thought your hired man might know where you were, so she drove down there.”

I put my arms around Tom and hugged him. “Is she all right?”

Tom’s eyes went wild for a minute, and he shook a little. Then he got ahold of himself and said, “I don’t know. The pain hit her all of a sudden. The doctor’s in there now, along with Mom and Agnes. She’s only seven months.”

“Seven months,” Mrs. Judd said. “Seven months is plenty of time, boy. The fact is, a smaller baby means an easier birthing. Rita won’t get tore up so bad. Why, you’ve got nothing to worry about, Tom.”

“Grover’s coming as fast as he can,” I said.

“You share that bottle with him. Just don’t tell Howard where it came from, and you don’t need to mention it to Nettie and them, either, since Prosper won’t take his business to Tyrone. He says Tyrone’s tangleleg tastes like Esso gasoline. Queenie, you go on inside. Rita would rather see your pretty face than mine.” I started for the porch, then glanced back and saw Mrs. Judd with the bottle halfway to her mouth.

The members of the Persian Pickle Club had taken over the Ritter kitchen, which still had the spicy smell of plum butter that Mrs. Ritter had been making the day before. Nettie’s butterscotch pie was on the table next to Ada June’s bread pudding, and Velma, Nettie’s daughter, was slicing tomatoes. Ada June built up the fire while Nettie filled the kettle. You’d have thought we were getting ready for a church supper if it hadn’t been for Mr. Ritter, who was walking back and forth, muttering and bumping into everyone.

Finally, Nettie said, “Howard, would it trouble you too much to chop some wood for the stove? We might need us a whole tree by the time this is over.” He nodded, looking glad that somebody had given him a job to do. He went outside, and before anyone thought to stop him, he’d chopped enough wood to last until Christmas.

“How’s Rita?” I asked, and Nettie and Forest Ann looked at each other and back at me, making me remember the time I had lost my own baby. The two of them had sat with me all one afternoon, patting my shoulder and rubbing my back and feeding me bites of food that I didn’t want. They’d told me all the superstitions they could think of about how I’d get pregnant again in no time. Of course, they were wrong, but the doctor hadn’t told me yet that he’d cut out so much of me, and they made me feel better. I hoped Rita would draw strength from the Persian Pickles, just as I had.

“Queenie, you can do more good with Tom than you can in here,” Nettie said, tying a Boy Scout knot in the scarf around her goiter. She didn’t tell me old wives’ tales anymore because we both knew I would never get pregnant again. Maybe Nettie wanted me outside because she thought if I wasn’t in the same house with somebody in labor, I’d forget that I couldn’t have a baby myself—as if I could ever forget that.

“I’ll stay,” I said, then glanced at Velma, who looked a little peaked. Who could blame her? It wasn’t right for a single woman to have to listen to childbirth sounds. So I told Velma to go out and keep Tom company. She’d be glad for a swallow of Prosper Judd’s liquor.

“She’s to stay,” Nettie said sharply, but Velma went outdoors, anyway.

Agnes T. Ritter stepped inside the kitchen just then, and I thought Zepha was right. She has no lips. Her eyes were little slits, and I couldn’t tell if she was scared for Rita or mad that Rita was causing so much trouble. I touched her hand and asked, “Is Rita all right?”

Agnes T. Ritter shrugged. “How would I know? I never saw a baby born before. But I’ll tell you this, Rita being almost as small as a midget doesn’t help her any.”

We heard a cry from upstairs, and I bit down so hard on my lip that I tasted blood. “Is she in pain?”

“Well, of course she’s in pain,” Agnes T. Ritter said, as if I were as much of a dummy as Charlie McCarthy.

“You forget about the pain,” Ada June said, to herself more than to Agnes T. Ritter, who wasn’t listening, anyway. “I don’t know why. You just do. Rita won’t remember it.”

“Zepha, the hired man’s wife—” I said, then stopped. I’d sound as foolish as Nettie if I repeated what Zepha had said.

“What?” Agnes T. Ritter asked. Her eyes were so narrow that I couldn’t see any white through the slits.

I looked at the floor and said, “It’s just a superstition. She says if you put a sharp knife under the bed, it cuts the pain.”

There was silence for a minute, then Nettie said, “I heard that.”

“I heard it, too,” Ada June said. “Of course, I never knew of anybody who did it.”

“It’s stupid,” Agnes T. Ritter said. “Quack medicine. Just what you’d expect from a squatter.”

I wanted to tell her it wouldn’t do any harm, but I never came out ahead arguing with Agnes T. Ritter. So I licked the blood off my lip and turned to the window to watch Grover, who was just getting out of the car. He slapped Tom on the back, and the two of them went across the yard. Then Mrs. Judd came in, dragging Velma back with her, and flopped down in Mrs. Ritter’s kitchen rocker.

“I hope those two don’t forget what’s going on inside,” she said, looking at Velma, who was slouched on a kitchen chair. Everybody knew that when Nettie went into labor with her, Tyrone got so drunk, he passed out and forgot all about the baby until he climbed into bed and almost squashed little Velma.

“I thought Velma might like to be outside,” I said. Velma was pouting, making it clear to everyone she didn’t want to be here at all. She was a real pretty girl, and she used to be a nice one, too, but lately she’d turned more sullen than Agnes T. Ritter. Maybe Tyrone took a strap to her. He always threatened to do that, and I didn’t think either Velma or Nettie could stand up to him.

“I don’t know anything about babies,” Velma muttered.

“Well, I wouldn’t brag about it,” Mrs. Judd said, twisting her head to look at Velma. “I never thought being dumb about a thing made any sense.” She turned to the rest of us. “It’s time she knew about the wages of sin.”

“Septima!” said Nettie. “Velma’s
my
daughter. Anything she needs to learn about sin, she can learn from me.” Ada June’s eyes twinkled as she turned away, and I looked down at the table so Nettie wouldn’t see me smile. I rubbed my hand over the worn oilcloth, which had been scrubbed so many times, I could hardly see the pattern of tulips and Dutch girls. The cloth was cracked in places, and the backing showed through.

“Did anybody brown the flour?” Mrs. Judd asked.

“What for?” I asked.

“To rub over the baby, of course.”

I went to the stove, pried off the stove lid with the lifter, then popped in a few sticks of wood to build up the fire. When they caught, I took out the skillet and poured in enough flour for a loaf of bread. At just that minute, Opalina and Ceres came into the kitchen. Opalina set down a little jar of piccalilli. It was a joke with the members of the Persian Pickle Club. The only thing Opalina ever brought to any gathering was a little jar of piccalilli, but that was all right with us, because Opalina was a terrible cook. I wondered who on earth would want to eat piccalilli after having a baby.