The Tin Can Tree (11 page)

“Well, no.”

“They had some kind of falling-out,” Missouri’s daughter Lily said. Everyone looked at her, and she said, “Well, that’s what Maisie Hammond said.”

“Maisie Hammond don’t know beans,” Missouri said. “Haven’t you learned not to listen to gossip?”

“If I was you, Joan,” said Mrs. Hall, “I’d just march right up and ask him. I’d say, ‘James, will you take me to meet your family?’ Just like that, I’d ask.”

“No,” Joan said.

They went on watching her, waiting for her to say
more, but she didn’t. She concentrated on grouping the leaves together by the stems, a small cluster at a time, so that they lay flat against each other, and then she held them out to Missouri and waited patiently until Missouri gave up and started tying again. Each time Missouri took the leaves from her there was a funny numb feeling in Joan’s fingertips, from the leaves sliding across layers and layers of thick tobacco gum on her skin. Tobacco gum covered her hands and forearms, and it had worked in between the straps of her sandals so that there was black gum on the soles of her feet. Tonight when she walked barefoot through the house she would leave little black tracks behind her. She rubbed the tip of her nose against a clean spot on the back of her hand, and Missouri clicked her tongue at her to tell her to hurry. “I want to get
home,
” she told Joan, and Joan swooped down on another bunch of leaves and handed them to her. In her sleep she would see tables full of tobacco leaves, stack upon stack of yellow-green leaves with their fine sticky coating of fuzz and their rough surfaces that reminded her of old grained leather on book covers. Whenever she told her aunt about that, about dreaming every night of mules and leaves and drying barns, her aunt thought she was complaining and said, “Nobody
asked
you to do it. I even told you, I said it right out, I didn’t want you doing it. Secretaries don’t work tobacco, honey.” But then Joan only laughed and said she liked seeing leaves in her sleep. “There’s lots worse I could dream of,” she said, and Mrs. Pike had to agree.

Missouri had started talking again, now that she saw Joan wasn’t going to answer any more questions. “Let’s get back to sitting,” she said. “What led me to speak of it was, your working and all so soon after that, uh,
tragedy occurred. Now, honey, don’t you mind Mrs. Pike. I know her, she feels like even James shouldn’t of come. Feels like it shows disrespect. But look at it head-on and—”

“Well, not disrespect,” Mrs. Hall called across. “Not that, exactly. But I see Lou’s point. I wouldn’t have come today, Joan. I don’t mind telling you.”

“What would I do at home?” Joan asked. “Sit?”

“Exactly what led me to my discussion,” said Missouri. “What
sitting
does, is—”

“You could have stayed around and helped out,” Mrs. Hall said. “Made tea and things. A person needs company at a time like this. And James there, why, he is very close to being Janie’s cousin-in-law, or once removed, or whatever you call it—”

Once again they all looked at Joan, but she went on grouping leaves and they sighed and turned back to the table.

“
Anyway
,” said Mrs. Hall, “with his own brother on the verge of—”

“Well, this is sort of pointless,” Joan said. “You just think one way, and me another. I don’t think she wants any more than her own husband there, and that’s what she’s got. And Simon too, if she wants him.”

“Ain’t
that
a funny thing,” Lily said suddenly. “Up to last week, it was Janie
Rose
she never paid no attention to—”

“You hush,” Missouri said. “This is Miss Joan’s
relatives
we’re talking about.”

“Well, I know that. Now, won’t it Simon she used to brag on all the time? Won’t it Simon that was spoiled so rotten he—”

“Hush.”

“My feet are killing me,” said Mrs. Hall.

Her second hander, the pale one named Josephine, looked down at Mrs. Hall’s feet and gave one of them a gentle kick with the toe of her sneaker. “With me it’s sneakers or barefoot,” she said. “What you wearing leather shoes for?”

“Because I’m older than you. I have to look decent.” She snapped off her twine and turned to the barn. “Boy!” she called.

“Will you look?” said Missouri. “She’s a stick and a half ahead of me, and you two are poking along. Hurry it up, Lily.”

Lily handed her the next bunch and then stretched, raising her thin black arms an enormous length above her head. To show her disapproval Missouri jerked her string with a twanging sound, and one of Lily’s leaves fell out of its bunch on the stick and landed in the dust. “Oh, Lord,” Missouri said. She handed her string to Joan and bent to pick up the leaf, holding the small of her back with one hand. A pink slip strap slid down over her shoulder. “Four hours ago it was four o’clock,” she said when she retrieved the leaf. “Now it’s four thirty. When’ll it ever be five?”

“Won’t help you if it is,” called Mrs. Hall, “so long as you’ve still got leaves on your table.”

“Well, I can’t help it if they loaded the most leaves on me.” She pulled her strap up again and took the end of the twine away from Joan. “I was saying something,” she said. “I have that fidgety feeling, like I wasn’t finished.”

“Sitting,” Joan reminded her.

“Sitting? Oh, sitting. My lord, how long I been
on
that? Well, anyway.” She snapped her fingers at Lily, who was gazing open-mouthed at a pecan tree, and Lily jumped and handed her another bunch of leaves.
“Originally,” Missouri said, “I was getting around to a remedy for Mrs. Pike. Well, now I’ve gotten to it. Mrs. Pike is going to have to start working again.”

“Working?” Lily said. “
I
didn’t know Mrs. Pike worked.”

“Will you
hush?
” Missouri switched the twine to her left hand and reached across to slap Lily’s arm. “I don’t know where you spend all your time, Lily,” she said. She took up the twine in her right hand again and snatched Joan’s leaves from her. “Well, it so happens she does work. She’s a seamstress. Teen-iney stitches and a Singer for her machine work. Miss Joan can tell you. Most of it’s altering things, but she makes things from scratch also. Reason you might not know,” she told Lily, “is she does it at home. Works in. A lot of right important people go there. Mrs. Lawrence, the judge’s wife, does—saw her drive up to the door once. Do you see what I’m getting at, Miss Joan?”

“Well, yes,” said Joan. “You’re saying this would snap her out of it. But being a seamstress is like working in a beauty shop—you have to carry on a conversation. And Aunt Lou just isn’t capable right now.”

“Of
course
not,” said Mrs. Hall. “Why, she just don’t have the heart to do that. Will you
look
at you people?”

“I got the answer,” Mrs. Hall’s first hander called. “I don’t see why you are all worrying.” She kept on handing as she spoke, thrusting precisely neat bunches at Mrs. Hall with lightning speed. “It’s like when you’ve been sick,” she said. “They have to walk you around by the elbow a while. Well, Mrs. Pike needs to be walked around too, only in the talking sense. Joan here only works every other day; she can spare the time. She can greet the customers and tell them the news and
all, so’s they won’t even notice how quiet Mrs. Pike is. Then by and by Mrs. Pike’ll start to get interested in what Joan is talking about. She’ll begin uncurling and saying a few words herself. That’s why she was such a favorite before, Mrs. Pike was; she could talk up a storm.”

Missouri was watching her with her mouth open. “Charleen,” she said, when Charleen had finished speaking, “you are just as silly as you look, Charleen. You must think Miss Joan is some kind of a walking newspaper. Do you? She don’t say two words in a day, Joan don’t. Customers would drop off like apples in the fall, and Mrs. Pike would have one more reason not to get a grip on things.”

“Silly yourself,” Charleen muttered, and bent closer over her pile of leaves.

“Mrs. Pike’s no worse than my sister Mary was,” said Mrs. Hall. “When Mary’s oldest died she sat on the porch seven days and seven nights and it rained on her. I thought she’d
mold
, before we got her in again. Mrs. Pike is at least talking some.”

“Not much,” Josephine said. She was scraping tobacco gum off her hands with a nail file while Mrs. Hall tied a knot at the end of her stick. “I went up to her at the burying and, ‘Mrs. Pike,’ I said. ‘I surely am sorry.’ And you know what she said? She said, ‘This is where Simon’s bedroom was going to be.’ I tell you, it scared me.”

“Well, they were going to build a house there,” Mrs. Hall said. She slammed another stick in the stand. “I say they should have put Janie Rose by the church, but that’s a individual matter.”

Missouri took off her straw hat and began fanning
her face with it. “You can rest,” she told Joan and Lily. “We’re even now. Boy?”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, come on and get it.”

Joan and Lily leaned back against the table, half sitting on it, and Missouri tilted her head back so that she could fan her neck. “Sun’s about gone,” she said, “but still working. What was it I was thinking, now? Lily?”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Lily said.

“Hush. Wait, now—oh.” She stopped fanning herself, clamped her hat on her head again, and bent for another rod. “Stop that standing around,” she commanded. “Charleen, I take it back.”

“What?”

“What I said. I take it back. You only half silly.”

“Oh, why,
thank
you.”

“Only half as silly as you look. Stand up straight, Lily, you’re a mess. What’s that all over your hands?”

“It’s tobacco gum, what you think?”

“Oh.” She snapped off her length of twine, with Mrs. Hall watching closely, and reached for Joan’s leaves. “I’m a little vague, but I’m thinking,” she said. Then she frowned into space for a while. Finally she said, “Growing old surely do damage a person.”

“Well, is
that
what you’ve been getting ready to say?” Mrs. Hall asked irritably.

“
Oh
no,” Missouri said. “It was something entirely different. I was working up to something.”

“You were talking about Aunt Lou,” Joan reminded her.

“Well, I know I was. If you all would just let me—”

“Personally,” said Mrs. Hall, “I think this is a lot of fuss for nothing. You think it’s something wrong if
Mrs. Pike sticks to herself a few days. Well, something
is
wrong. Somebody died. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

“It’s just as well,” said Missouri. “You keep distracting my mind.”

“Why, Missouri—”

“You
said,
” Missouri reminded her, “you said that was all you was going to—”

Mrs. Hall sighed and turned her back, muttering something but not attempting to argue any more, and Missouri nodded to herself several times. “There now,” she said. “Now, what was I—?” But when Lucy clicked her tongue in exasperation, exactly like her mother, Missouri waved her free hand at her to tell her not to speak. “Now I remember,” she said. “Growing old surely do—Well. Anyway. Now, of course we’re not saying anything’s wrong with Mrs. Pike. Sure she’s sad. Going to go right on being that way, always a little sad to the end of her days. But that don’t stop us from trying to make her feel better; that’s just natural. We all got reasons. Maybe we want to stop remembering the dead ourselves. Or a host of other reasons.”

She bent down and slapped a fly on her leg. “Oh, you,” she said to the fly, and then reached out for Joan’s leaves. Joan was holding the leaves too high and far away, and Missouri had to snap her fingers at her. “
Come
on,” she said. Joan came to life and handed the leaves over.

“
Anyhow,
” said Missouri. “Now I’ve lost my place again. Where was I?”

“Mrs. Pike,” Joan said.

“Mrs. Pike? Oh, her. Well, no, I was passing on to someone else. What’s-his-name. What’s his name?”

“
Mr
. Pike?” Lily suggested.

“Just hush. Though he’s in this too, of course. No, just hush—Simon. That boy of theirs. You know him, Joan?”

“He’s my cousin,” said Joan.

“Oh, yes. Yes. Simon. Going to go to pieces if things go on this way. Do you see now what I’m getting at?”

“Well, no.”

“It’s as plain as the nose on—Boy? Come on, now, quit that poking. I’m saying it’s Simon should be in her beauty shop with her.”

“In her—?”

“I mean in her sewing shop. Look what you done now, got me all confused. Well, that’s who you want.”

“You mean he should entertain the customers,” Joan said.

“That was my point.”

“Well–”

“He’s the only one can help now. Not hot tea, not people circling round. Not even her own husband. Just her little boy.”

“I don’t see how,” said Joan.

Missouri made an exasperated face. “
You
don’t know,” she told her. “You don’t know how it would work out. Bravest thing about people, Miss Joan, is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there’s such a thing as dying. Do I have to tell you that?”

She snapped her twine tight and held it there while she watched Joan scrape up the last of the leaves. “I despise finishing the day on half a stick,” she said.

“Well, I’ll be,” said Charleen. She leaned back against the table, shaking her head and watching Mrs. Hall tie the end of her stick. “I never. Was
that
what you did all this talking to say?”

“It was,” said Missouri.

At the other end of the table, Mrs. Hall suddenly looked up. “That’s true,” she said slowly, but when they turned toward her she only shook her head. “That’s true,” she said again, and lifted her tobacco rod gently from its notches and handed it to the waiting boy.