The Persian Pickle Club (9 page)

Rita asked if we ought to go look for them right now. She wanted to get out of Opalina’s parlor. “I’ll drive,” I volunteered.

“Septima can wait till after club. If nothing’s wrong, she’ll give us ‘Hail, Columbia’ for thinking she can’t take care of herself,” Nettie said. She was right about that.

Without Mrs. Judd, I felt jolly, like I did in school when the teacher was out sick. Even Opalina’s quilt, which was set in the frame, waiting for us, couldn’t get me down. It was another of her crazy quilts, made from old funeral ribbons, the ones they gave out at buryings long ago in memory of the dead. Who else but Opalina would have saved them? I whispered to Ada June that I’d go cold before I slept under that quilt, and she whispered back that maybe that’s what it was for—to cover a cold body. Every time somebody admired a ribbon, Opalina told us about the person it represented, giving all the details of the death.

“I never saw a summer that promised so much in June and delivered so little in September,” Forest Ann said, cutting off Opalina, who was explaining that the ribbons that were lined up like sausages were for the members of one family that had been killed by a twister.

“It didn’t promise me a thing in June,” Nettie said. She was down-in-the mouth that day, maybe because of Velma. Forest Ann had told me that Velma had taken up with a combine salesman out of Coffeyville, which upset Nettie because he was a married man. She was afraid that Tyrone would find out, and I couldn’t blame her. Talk about catching “Hail, Columbia!” He’d thrash Velma within an inch of her life.

“Would you like to read, Queenie?” Opalina asked. The only book in Opalina’s house was the Bible, and I did not want to read Scripture. The last time I did, Opalina had me read the
begats
in Genesis.

“Oh, let’s not. Let’s just talk and tell Mrs. Judd when she gets here that we already read.”

“That would be a lie,” Nettie said.

I blushed and felt one of those horsehairs poke right into my back as punishment. “It’d be just a little fib,” I said, defending myself. If fibs were so bad, then I ought to tell Nettie that the goiter on her neck made her look like a frog.

“Queenie, why don’t you bring us up-to-date on the Celebrity Quilt,” Mrs. Ritter said. “We won’t wait for Septima and Ella.”

Mrs. Ritter always had a way of finding something enjoyable to talk about. The Celebrity Quilt was the reason I’d expected such a nice quilting that day. It was just about the most important thing that had ever happened to Persian Pickle, and I was the one who got to tell about it, because it had been my idea.

The Persian Pickle Club hadn’t been in any hurry to begin sewing on the Celebrity Quilt, of course. The longer that quilt took us, the more time we’d have before Reverend Olive came back to us with another project. Still, we’d started planning for it right away by making a list of people whose autographs we wanted to include—people such as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Ronald Colman, Babe Ruth, and Aimee Semple McPherson. When I put down Mae West as a joke, Nettie got so riled up that Mrs. Judd said, “Let her stay. It’s men that bid on these quilts, and men’ll pay more for Mae West than Sister Kenny.”

We asked Rita to write the letters to the celebrities because she was the writer in the group. She’s also the only one with a typewriter, but I know how to type, so I helped her. The two of us made a special trip to the library in Topeka to look up addresses of movie studios and radio stations and the White House. Then we went to lunch at the Hotel Jayhawk and paid fifty cents each for tuna-fish sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I had as much fun with her that day as I ever did with Ruby.

Nettie and Forest Ann cut out the squares of muslin for the people to autograph. Mrs. Judd bought the stamps to mail the letters, but she was against enclosing stamped return envelopes because she said celebrities were rich enough to spend three cents on stamps for a good cause. We’d put the last of the letters in the postbox on Monday, but that wasn’t what I was going to announce.

When Mrs. Ritter brought up the Celebrity Quilt, everyone stopped talking, except for Ceres, who didn’t hear very well. So I cleared my throat as loudly as I could, and she looked up and smiled and asked, “Yes, dear. Are you ready to roll?” That’s what we do when we finish the exposed part of the quilt. We roll, it over so we can work on the next section.

“Roll out the barrel,” Rita muttered.

“I have an announcement to make,” I said, ignoring them both. I looked around the quilt at all my friends smiling at me, except for Agnes T. Ritter, who was being her ornery self and still sewing. I’d thought ahead of time how I was going to put it, and I said, “Our first square has been returned to us.” When everybody clapped, I got so excited that I forgot the nice way I’d rehearsed it, and I blurted out, “It was Janet Gaynor—can you beat it?—and she wrote, ‘Happiness to you’ on it. Now, isn’t that just like her!”

I took the square out of the envelope and passed it around so everybody could admire the handwriting and the sentiment. “Imagine that. The last person who touched this before us was Janet Gaynor,” said Nettie. “I wonder who’ll send the next one.”

“Zane Grey,” Rita said. “I forgot to tell you, Queenie. We got another one yesterday.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope.

“Lookit there. He drew a dog on it,” Ada June said when Rita handed her the muslin.

“That’s not a dog. It’s a coyote,” Agnes T. Ritter said, peering across the table at it.

“How can you tell?” Ada June asked.

“I expect I know the difference between a dog and a coyote.”

“Maybe Mr. Grey doesn’t,” Mrs. Ritter put in. “Rita, do you want to tell the rest of the news?” I didn’t know what that news was, so I turned to stare at Rita with everyone else.

Rita blushed a little, and I wondered if she was pregnant again, but somehow, I didn’t think that was it. Besides, having a baby wasn’t something you announced, even at Persian Pickle, until you showed. Rita strung us out just a minute before she said, “I’m going to write an article for the
Topeka Enterprise
about the Celebrity Quilt, and they might even send out a photographer to take a picture.”

“Oh!” we all said, and Opalina touched her hair as if she was already primping for the photograph.

“Naturally, they’ll have to see the article first. I mean, they might not like it,” Rita said, and Opalina took her hand down. Agnes T. Ritter smirked at that. Nettie wasn’t the only Pickle who was out of sorts that day.

“I’m sure they’ll buy it. Your story about the school-board election was about the best thing I’ve ever read, and it didn’t make a bit of difference that the names were mixed up,” Forest Ann said, and we all nodded. None of us mentioned Rita’d misspelled most of them, as well.

Even if some of the club members were off their feed that afternoon, quilting went fast. We had barely finished talking about the Celebrity Quilt when Opalina said it was time for refreshments. “I’ll put the kettle on. I’m serving scones,” she announced, as if it was a surprise.

“I’d hoped you would, Opalina,” Mrs. Ritter said.

I had hoped she would not, but fat chance. Opalina always served scones, just like Nettie always served fruitcake. The scones weren’t as old as the fruitcake, but they were just as dry, with none of Tyrone’s bootleg to help them go down,

I slid off my chair, scratching my legs, and went into the kitchen to help Opalina, since the big tin tray she used was the size of a kitchen table. Sometimes things slid off it, not that anybody would miss her refreshments. I made tea while Opalina piled the scones on the tray, dropping one on the floor. It chipped, but it didn’t break, and Opalina brushed it off and set it back with the others. Then she carried the tray into the parlor herself.

“Oh, Opalina, what a treat,” said Mrs. Ritter. I was amazed that she could be so enthusiastic about those scones, which she must have eaten for forty years. “Might you be English?”

“French. Dux is a French name.”

“Dux is Anson’s name. You were born a Cooper,” Agnes T. Ritter said.

“I became French when I married Anson. That’s the way it works. Don’t you know that Agnes?”

Rita winked at me while Agnes T. Ritter moved her mouth back and forth for a few seconds, but instead of talking back to Opalina, she caught sight of something out the window and said, “There’s Mrs. Judd.”

It didn’t sound like Mrs. Judd. You could always tell her car because Mrs. Judd turned off the motor and coasted to a stop to save gas. The car outside was parked with the engine running.

The rest of the Persian Pickle realized Mrs. Judd was not acting normal, and we all stood up to look outside. Forest Ann even went to the window and peered out past the red glass plate Opalina kept there to catch the light. With the afternoon sun shining through it, the plate glowed like fresh blood. “It’s Septima, all right. She forgot to turn off the motor, and she’s running,” Forest Ann said. “Anybody ever seen Septima run?”

I took a step toward the window to get a better view, and it was not a pretty sight. Mrs. Judd moved like a runaway thresher. I knew something was wrong.

“Ella’s not with her,” I said, shivering. Even with Hiawatha and Duty to watch after her, Ella might have taken ill. Or she could have fallen or been burned by the cookstove. A dozen things could happen to a person who lived alone.

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation,” Mrs. Ritter said quietly, but she clasped her hands so tightly, the knuckles turned white. Only Agnes T. Ritter acted unconcerned. She bit down on a scone, and in Opalina’s parlor, which had grown quiet, the crunching sounded like a cow in dried cornstalks.

Mrs. Judd lunged through the door, flinging it so hard that it banged the wall and then came flying back and hit her on the fanny, bumping her forward into the living room. Her eyes, behind the thick glass of her gold spectacles, opened wide in surprise, and I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so worried.

“Ella?” Forest Ann whispered, asking the question for all of us. “Is something wrong with Ella?”

“Ella’s fine,” Mrs. Judd said. She caught her breath while the rest of us let out ours in unison.

Mrs. Judd gasped for air again. She looked pale and old as she slumped into one of Opalina’s horsehair chairs and slid into a corner. She looked around at the members of the Persian Pickle Club. “Ella’s fine,” she repeated. “It’s not her, thank the Lord.” Mrs. Judd gulped down a mouthful of air. “It’s Ben Crook.”

Nettie gasped and put her hands to her face. The blood rushed to my head, and I gripped the back of a chair to keep my legs from sliding out from under me.

“I said it’s Ben Crook,” Mrs. Judd repeated. “He’s been found. Hiawatha dug him up in Ella’s far-north field right before dinnertime.”

M
rs. Judd slowly looked around the room, stopping for a few seconds to exchange glances with each one of us. Her eyelids flickered when she came to Rita.

“How’s Ella?” Forest Ann asked, breaking the silence with a jerky voice.

“Prostrate with grief. Awful broke up,” Mrs. Judd said. “Just as you’d expect. She thought the sun rose and set … ?” Her voice trailed off and she looked at her hands a minute before she shook her head and told us, “Like I said, Hiawatha found Ben up north on the Crook place. Ben was out there by the road, where somebody’d buried him. Hiawatha came to Prosper and me to ask what to do.”

“He’s real smart for a colored,” Nettie said. She hadn’t approved of Hiawatha and Duty Jackson moving onto the Crook farm, but she’d changed her mind after she saw how well they took care of Ella. About the time Ben disappeared, Ella’s hired man ran off, so Mrs. Judd had driven Ella up to Blue Hill, where the Jacksons were barely scratching out a living, and the two of them invited Hiawatha and Duty and all the kids to move into the shack behind Ella’s house. They agreed to work the farm on shares and do chores for Ella. Even if they didn’t make much money, they’d have a place to live and something to eat. The day they moved in, Ella told Persian Pickle she’d always wanted to hear the sounds of children on her farm and that the Jackson kids were just like having her own.

When she heard that, Nettie sputtered all over Ceres’s Drunkard’s Path, which is what we were quilting at the time. Later in the evening, just before suppertime, Tyrone drove into the Judds’ yard and yelled from his truck, “Prosper Judd, the sun never set on a coon in Harveyville, Kansas, and it won’t this evening. You get rid of them Jacksons or I’ll run ‘em off myself.” Tyrone blamed Mrs. Judd for Hiawatha moving to Ella’s, but he was scared to take her on, which is why he threatened Prosper. Besides, Prosper had driven the Jacksons from Blue Hill to Harveyville.

Mrs. Judd came out from behind the sawhorse where she’d been killing chickens. Wiping blood and pinfeathers on her apron, she told Tyrone the sun would set on Hiawatha and Duty in Harveyville as long as they wanted it to, but she couldn’t be sure how many more Harveyville sunsets a gambling man who was behind in payments to the bank she owned in Eskridge was going to see. It would be a real shame not to have Nettie in Pickle anymore, but a person had to stand by her standards. If anybody else caused trouble about the Jacksons, she’d have to check the bank’s records on them, too. Tyrone sulked for a minute before he said that maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Hiawatha and Duty to spend one night, it being late in the day already. He’d have to think hard about letting them stay longer, however.

The Judds never heard from Tyrone again, and the Jacksons had lived at Ella’s ever since. Now, most of us wondered why there’d been a fuss in the first place.

But I wasn’t thinking about coloreds moving into Harveyville just then. I was being thankful that Hiawatha, instead of Ella, had found Ben’s body. Stumbling over Ben Crook’s bones would just about have killed Ella.

“Opalina, I could use a glass of hot tea—and one of your biscuits with the raisins in it. I missed my lunch,” Mrs. Judd said. Opalina looked up, startled, since nobody but Mrs. Ritter ever asked for a scone. She bustled about fixing a cup and a plate while the rest of us waited for Mrs. Judd to tell us the story in her own good time. There were two things you couldn’t hurry in Harveyville—the weather and Mrs. Judd. She crunched down on the scone and said, “Real tasty.” Opalina straightened up and passed the plate around, but only Mrs. Ritter helped herself.

Mrs. Judd belched a little behind her hand and brushed the crumbs off her lap onto Opalina’s carpet. Now that she’d had a chance to catch her breath and eat something, a touch of color came back into Mrs. Judd’s face. She settled back in the chair and looked up at us, and we leaned forward, knowing she was ready to talk.

“Hiawatha was walking along the road that hardly anybody ever uses, the one that goes by the creek, and he saw a bone sticking out of the dirt. He went over for a look, and when he realized it was a leg bone, he got real scared. He didn’t know whether to pull it out or push it back in. He had a presentiment who it was, so he came to our place to ask what to do. Prosper went for the sheriff, and I drove right over to be with Ella.”

“Was it Ben?” Nettie asked.

“Well, of course it was Ben. It couldn’t have been anybody else, could it?” Mrs. Judd paused a minute to consider what she’d said. “Well, I didn’t know for sure, of course, but I had my suspicions. After he dug up the rest of the bones, Sheriff Eagles came around to Ella’s, where I was waiting, and he said he recognized Ben’s skull right off. You know how Ben had that big gap between his front teeth. And all the teeth on his right side were missing from the time he got smacked on the side of the head with a singletree at the Hollywood Cafe. Anybody would have known it was Ben just from looking at the skull.”

“Oh,” Ada June said, sagging against the doorjamb and putting one hand over her face.

“Dr. Sipes came along with the sheriff. He said Ben’s skull had been bashed in. That’s how he died,” Mrs. Judd said.

Forest Ann put her fingers over her mouth and made a little gurgling sound. Nettie put her arm around Forest Ann and patted her.

“Was he murdered?” Rita asked. I shuddered at the question and exchanged glances with Ada June.

Mrs. Judd didn’t answer right away. She studied Rita a minute. “I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know that no man on God’s earth ever smashed in his own head, then climbed into a grave and covered himself up with dirt.” Mrs. Judd looked uncomfortable, and I hoped Rita would get the hint that she didn’t want to talk about murder. Well, who would? It was bad enough thinking about Ben’s body rotting away in Ella’s field all these months without paying mind to how it happened.

Rita didn’t get it, however. “Who did it?” she asked.

“If he left his calling card, I didn’t see it,” Mrs. Judd told her.

Rita was about to ask something else when Ceres interrupted. “What are we going to do, Tima?”

“Why, what we always do,” Mrs. Judd said, reaching for another scone, then reconsidering and putting her hand down. “We will comfort our friend in her hour of trouble. Prosper’s bringing Ella home to stay at our place for as long as she wants. There’s the funeral to be got through.”

“Ella won’t hold a viewing, will she?” Nettie asked. She had to move her whole body to look at Mrs. Judd, because the goiter had gotten bigger, and her neck didn’t turn at all. “I wouldn’t want to have to look at a man with his head bashed in.”

Mrs. Judd started to say something smart but thought better of it and shut her mouth for a minute before she said kindly, “You don’t have a viewing for a skeleton, Nettie. That’s all Ben is now—bones and overalls.”

“Oh.” Nettie shivered. “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” She was embarrassed for a minute. Then, to save face, she searched for something Mrs. Judd had forgotten. “Did you think about Reverend Olive, Septima?”

“Of course, I thought about him. That’s why Prosper drove to town to get the sheriff. I didn’t want Foster hearing about Ben on the party line and getting to Ella’s before I did. I’m afraid we’ll have to tell Foster now.”

“I don’t know why you’re afraid,” Nettie said with a self-righteous sniff. “He doesn’t scare me.”

“That’s a relief. You go call him,” Mrs. Judd said. “Tell him there’s no need for him and Lizzy to tend to Ella’s bodily needs. That’s our job. He’s to see to the spiritual.”

Nettie glanced around to see if anyone else would volunteer to make the telephone call, but none of us met her eyes, so, looking trapped, she went into the kitchen and turned the crank on the phone.

“Would you sit?” Opalina asked Ceres, which made us all realize we’d been standing ever since Mrs. Judd burst through the door. One by one, we found chairs and sat down. I got a horse-hair seat again.

Nobody spoke while Nettie made the call. Every now and then, one of us glanced at Rita as if to offer sympathy that she was going through another death so soon after her own sorrowful loss. I wished Mrs. Judd would say she was excused and should go on home, but she didn’t, and it wasn’t my place to tell her. So Rita sat quietly with the rest of us, listening to Net-tie’s loud voice.

Nettie stood a foot away from the box and yelled into the mouthpiece. She was careful about how she put things because she knew she was announcing Ben’s death to everyone on the party line. “Lizzy? This is Nettie. … What’s that? … Nettie Burgett. There’s not but one Nettie in Harveyville. Don’t you know that? Put the Reverend on the line. … Fishing? That ain’t a thing a preacher ought to be doing when a body’s in need. … No, Tyrone’s all right. It’s Ben Crook. They found him this morning. … What’s that? … He’s not behind any veil that I know of. He’s buried out by the creek road north of Ella’s place. You have your husband phone up Septima about the funeral, and don’t go calling on Ella, because she’s got the Pickles to take care of her.”

Nettie hung up the receiver before Lizzy Olive could reply. “I guess I told her,” she said as she bustled back into the room. Nettie sent a triumphant look at Mrs. Judd and was so pleased with the way she’d dealt with the Olives that she took charge. “Here’s another thing. We’ll have to find something to lay him out in. I expect he’s lost weight.”

For the first time since Mrs. Judd drove up, I felt like smiling, but when I realized what I was doing, I covered my mouth with my hand and coughed. Rita coughed, too.

“It’ll be a closed coffin,” Ada June said, and she winked at me.

Nettie blushed, realizing her mistake, then glanced at Mrs. Judd, expecting to be rebuked. Mrs. Judd only nodded.

“Well, of course,” Nettie said. “What I meant was, you can’t send a man to his last reward in overalls. Ella would want him buried in a nice suit. She thought the sun—”

“Oh, we all know that,” Mrs. Judd interrupted impatiently. She’d let Nettie be in charge long enough.

Nettie shut up and sat down, and it was quiet in Opalina’s stuffy room. We were all thinking about Ella, I suppose. I know I was. She was such a fragile thing, with a mind like a little girl’s sometimes. It would be awful to know your husband’s bones were scattered around a cornfield.

Rita finally broke the silence. “What do you think happened?” I guess it was a natural question, but the rest of us didn’t want to think about how Ben had died, so instead of replying, we shook our heads.

Finally Mrs. Judd said, “I haven’t got time to think on it just now. That’s why we’ve got a sheriff.” She stood and picked up her pocketbook. “Prosper ought to have Ella at the house before long. I’ll see that she gets a rest. You can make your calls after supper.”

That was the end of Persian Pickle for the day, of course, because there was work to be done, food to fix, and Ella to call on that evening. So we hurried after Mrs. Judd, not even offering to help Opalina clean up.

Rita looked thoughtful as the two of us walked out the door together. “Why would anybody murder Mr. Crook?” she asked me.

I didn’t want to talk about it. I shook my head and said, “Now, how would I know?”

Prosper, not Mrs. Judd, took care of the funeral arrangements. He insisted that the service be held outdoors, where Ella could sit in the sunshine and look at flowers instead of inside that dark, dank church. The Olives kept the church closed up so it always smelled like a root cellar. Prosper warned Reverend Olive just before the service to keep it short and not say one word about hell’s fire. “You upset that sweet lady, bub, and you’ll have to deal with me,” Prosper told him.

Of course, Prosper, who looked like Porky Pig in the cartoons with his pink face and little piggy eyes, wouldn’t have hurt anybody. What he meant was if Reverend Olive ran cross-wise of him, he’d cut off the church. Since the Judds were the biggest donors in Harveyville, that was enough to make Reverend Olive stop preaching after only fifteen minutes, and he never once mentioned hell. It didn’t matter what he said, however, because Ella was propped up like a rag doll between Prosper and Mrs. Judd and didn’t seem to know what was going on.

Reverend Olive finished by reading a few verses out of the Bible, and we sang “Going Home” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” Then the deacons lowered the casket into the ground while I thought of Ben Crook’s bones rattling around inside. Grover whispered to me that they could have stuffed what was left of Ben into a feed sack and dropped it in the hole and saved the expense of the coffin. I was shocked and told him to behave, but Rita snickered.

After Ben’s casket reached the bottom of that big hole cut into the weedy sod of the cemetery, Mrs. Judd gave Ella a rose, which confused her, and she tried to pin it to her dress. Mrs. Judd took Ella’s hand, and together they threw it into the grave. Then Prosper and Mrs. Judd said Ella wasn’t up to receiving people, and they took her home. The rest of us went inside the church, which was chilly even in the heat of the day, to drink coffee and eat cake. Rita asked if there wasn’t someplace we could go for a real drink, so Grover spoke up and said he’d treat the four of us at the Hollywood Cafe.