The Wilful Daughter (22 page)

Suddenly Bira’s face brightened and she turned to her daughter letting her hand go and confiding in her the deepest secret in her soul.

“
You know I had been thinking for weeks, why doesn’t God just let me die, when this big monster of a man with this handsome boyish face walks into the store. Maybe he had been there before, I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what day it was, I was so lost. But Miss Fannie will tell you that for the first time in three weeks, I looked up and saw the face of another human being. And recognized that that human being was alive and not there to disturb me. He looked at me, my straggly hair, dirt on my face and he asked Miss Fannie was I the girl. I was fifteen, your father barely eighteen, but with more manners and more manly than any one I had ever known.

“
Miss Fannie told him: ‘She needs some water,’ and he got the colored water bucket and dipper and brought it over to me.

“
I watched his every move.”

June was delighted with the story. “Did you, Mama? Did you like him that much?”

“
Oh yes.” Bira gave a girlish giggle that June didn’t know her mother had in her. “I watched him like a hawk. As he got the water and the pail and as he knelt down beside me. When he asked me to drink, I did without question.”

“
Your eyes met, Mama, and you knew?”

“
Yes girl, our eyes met and I knew. I wasn’t sure what I knew, but something stirred in me and I knew I was dirty, I needed washing. I knew that I didn’t have to die if I didn’t want to. I knew that he was not going to let me if he had a choice.”

“
So you were in love with papa,” June smiled.

“
Almost at first sight, as they say. But I didn’t want him to see me like that so I ran out of the general store and down to this pond as fast as my legs could carry me. Only thing was he followed me.”

June giggled as she followed her mother’s story. “I told him I was dirty and he said he would make sure he got me cleaned up. I told him my family had been killed and he said he knew. I told him my mother was an Indian and he said he didn’t care. I told him about the night the white man came and he didn’t care. I told him I had nothing to live for and he told me he wanted me, needed me, to live.”

Again she touched June’s face. “I never asked your father why he loved me or how he knew he loved me. We never had time for that. We had to learn about each other. When he found out I could read, he had me teach him. We read to each other every night before we went to bed in those years before Minnelsa was born. He told me he wanted his own shop and I worked with him to make his dream come true. That’s why we had to leave Alabama. He wanted to set up shop there, although he never talks about it but that’s where we are going. Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella live near there.”

* * *

The train made another stop and June watched the people get off. Soon Bira had fallen into a deep sleep probably, June thought, thinking of her first moments with her father. June didn’t understand her father but she understood, she thought, the power of love.

The train lurched forward and for the first time in weeks June was hungry. No, she was starving, ravenous. Without disturbing her mother she gently removed the picnic basket from overhead and pulled out the chicken and potato salad her mother had made along with some biscuits. She ate like a condemned man until Bira awoke and watched her with sleep filled eyes. “They’ll feed you, child. They’ll feed you and love you and never ask any questions. That’s just how they treated me.”

June felt her stomach settle for the first time in weeks, the food traveling to a place where it was relaxed and comfortable. “Save some for me, Baby June.” She hadn’t called her that in years. “I’m a bit hungry myself.”

By the time the train crossed the Alabama border, June had eaten enough food for two good sized farmhands. Her mother ate a bite or two. But Bira was watching each bush, each tree to see if it recalled her. “I left here so unannounced, so unhappy.”

“
Are you unhappy with me Mama?” June’s voice shook with nervousness.

“
No, sweetheart.” Bira hugged her daughter close to her. “At first I was disappointed, very disappointed. I wondered how you could have all we gave you and then destroy yourself the way you did. But as your father continued to bellow and scream I begin to realize that perhaps what we thought was love, giving you the best home, clothes and the best education that money could buy, was not the love you needed. You and all your sisters, and especially your brother,” Bira sighed. “I miss him and regret that I didn’t know what to do about him, all of you deserve more love than you can get from us.”

June was not sure what her mother was saying. Love had been the key word. Love like she wanted to have for the man that fathered her child. Love that she had for her sister, letting her sister marry that man knowing what he had done to her and to himself. Love, she thought, then yawned and slept.

As the train came to their stop June realized she was hungry again but said nothing to her mother who had packed up the wicker basket and settled back into her seat reading a book. Everyone in her family seemed to read a lot. June didn’t mind sometimes. Willie used to read to her, and she to him. Then they’d discuss the book and talk about how life would be if they were the characters. She hadn’t read for pleasure since he died. She found no joy in it.

Now she wondered what was she supposed to do in this little Alabama town until the baby was born. The things she had been taught by her sisters, only because her mother was so busy, the knitting, the sewing, the crocheting, the cooking, she regretted having never excelled at them. She had no talent at painting like Willie, and could not play an instrument like Rosa. She could sing but she didn’t think it likely that they would let a pregnant unmarried woman sing in the church choir.

That’s when she remembered the lie she had to tell. The lie that she had to live with forever so as to satisfy her father. Here in Tyson, Alabama to Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella she was a young widow. They knew the truth but that’s how they would introduce her. Supposedly she had run away from home and eloped but on the way back after a month of living in the poor house in the Carolinas her husband died while working in a saw mill. Her father had thought of this lie so as to satisfy the curiosity of the people in his old hometown. He had even given her a ring that he had once found as a boy, kept it as good luck around his neck till he meet Bira, then put it into a box of past treasures when he proposed and bought his wife a gold band. June was now Mrs. Jackson, and she looked at her lackluster ring.

It should have been bright and new. It should have been from the Piano Man. But this was her fate and she was tired of crying about it. In her dismay she simply whispered: “Oh Willie, I wish you were here.”

The train stopped and June was suddenly afraid. This was the last time she would see her mother for many months and she had just really gotten to know her. She would be left in the company of strangers, distant related southern women whose names she had seldom heard until two weeks ago. Fear gripped her insides and swelled along with the dizzying feeling that she was starving. She swooned and fainted into the seat.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

June awoke in the back seat of a huge car her head on her mother’s shoulders and facing a cocoa brown woman with shocking white hair.

“
My, my, but you scared us, Little Bit,” a voice said from the front seat. The voice was piqued and soft and so dainty June thought this must be how a doll would sound if it could talk.

She moved and Bira suggested: “Slowly dear, things take time.” She gave her mother a tiny smile and looked at the white haired woman. She smiled at her too. Not because she had suddenly lost her fear but because this woman reminded her of what a chocolate cake with white icing looked like. The voice from in front was that of the driver. All she could see was a hat with lots of feathers sticking out.

“
Give her some water, Ella. Help her settle down.”

Aunt Ella, white hair and piecing brown eyes, spoke back. “Don’t think a woman in her condition having been on a wobbling train and then fainting for a spell needs to wake up to plain water. She needs something with salt in it.”

Bira spoke up. “Want some chicken, child? There’s some left from the trip.”

“
No thank you, Mama,” June replied softly.

“
She ate on the train?” the tiny voice from the front rang out.

“
That’s what Bira said, Fannie. You just drive and let me take care of things back here.”

Fannie swore under her breath but all could hear her as she complained: “Used to be so simple in the wagon, but no we had to have a car.”

“
No, we didn’t have to have no car,” Ella said to the back of the head of the driver. “My son give us the car so that we could get around better.” She looked at June. “Now ain’t this car better than some old mule pulled wagon?”

“
Yes’m.”

“
So you ate and it stayed down,” the woman continued and June nodded. “Well that’s a good sign, real good sign.”

“
But,” Bira added, “it could mean that she farther along than she knows.”

“
True, true.” Ella looked at June and touched her stomach hard. June pulled back. She wasn’t sure what was about to happen. She had heard they practiced strange roots in this neck of the woods.

“
Relax, Little Bit. Trying to see if I feel some movement.” The old lady took her hand away after a moment. “How far along do you think you are?”

She turned to her mother and Bira answered: “No more than two months.”

“
Two months. That would be the first time you lay with this man?”

Shock measured on June’s face and Ella laughed aloud. “Lord, girl, don’t look so amazed. We know why you’re here and we know what you did. We ain’t asking for details. We just trying to help the situation.”

June turned to her mother who had a sheepish grin on her face. I am the brunt of this joke, she surmised, but answered, “A little over two months.”

Ella put a thin hand to June’s chin: “Gonna take some doing, but we’ll see. It’ll work out. I know it will.”

Bira just smiled.

It was the biggest house that June had ever seen. But she was sure that couldn’t be. It was bigger than the white folks’ mansions on Peachtree Road. After a moment of just coming up the road and staring at it head on as if it were one of the wonders of the world she realized that it looked so large because it was out in the open, away from anything else. Surrounded by trees and bushes, a swept side yard and no barn nearby, the three stories rose high above her imagination. This place would have been wonderful for Willie until she tried to imagine him pulling her up three stories to get in late at night.

Once closer to the house she realized that Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella didn’t live alone. Several people came out of the huge place laughing and smiling and saying hellos to her and Bira as if they had known her all her life. Fannie got out of the front seat and stretched a bit. She was a short, pudgy woman who didn’t seem to take well to sitting for so long. Aunt Ella on the other hand was tall and willowy. She resembled a bag of bones in her dress.

At once people were talking to her. “Sorry to hear about your loss,” one man said and June just knew he was talking about Willie until she realized the ring on her finger and the name they kept calling her: Mrs. Jackson.

“
Call her June,” Bira insisted holding her daughter’s hand tightly, she hadn’t even realized she was shaking. “After all, she wasn’t married long enough to be called Mrs. Jackson by her elders. June will be fine.” She and June passed through the small crowd.

Everyone wanted her to go up to her room to sleep but June was too nervous, too excited. She allowed herself to be escorted to her room-a huge space with a larger than life bed on the second floor- and then she found her way back down to the parlor.

The room was huge like the ballroom at the Masons Lodge, only larger. There were at least four sofas and eight huge chairs. Nothing matched-just bits and pieces of furniture and trappings from the lives of the people who lived there, June could only guess.

June learned that with the exception of a couple she hadn’t met yet, these people that had been so charming in their greetings were residents of the grounds but not of the house. They all worked for Fannie and Ella.

The man that greeted her first managed the colored general store that Fannie and Ella owned. Cora cooked and helped keep the place clean along with her son Michael, a boy of about 16. He was working in the fields with the husbands of some of the other ladies. The other man who smiled politely nonstop at her mother was Ella’s elder brother. He had once been sweet on Bira but said not a word the whole time her mother was there.

Millie, Cora’s eight year old daughter, had stayed out of school just to see the new visitors. Her thick hair was braided like big ropes and stuck out in short pigtails on the side of her head. Her dark brown legs were dried and ashy, and it was obvious that someone had taken the time to dress her nicely and fix her hair but the joys of childhood, jumping rope and playing in the dirt, had caused her to have a disheveled appearance. While Ella, Bira and Fannie sat in the big mismatched chairs and talked about life Millie turned to her mother and said: “You sure they ain’t white?”

“
Hush up girl.” Cora popped her bottom but Millie didn’t budge. It was obvious that this child was used to getting her way but also used to the whippings that came with being mischievous. June smiled at her. And Millie smiled back. Ella saw this and said: