The Wilful Daughter (34 page)

Slowly he sat his big frame down. The muscles pulled at his shirt buttons. June found that striking. This shy, young man, so unlike the Piano Man, was far handsomer than she remembered. She had never seen Michael up close. “You must never think of yourself as nothing. You can drive and fix a car, you can take care of this farm. You take care of your mother and your sister. Sometimes you take care of me. Don’t think of yourself as nothing.”

He smiled and without a word she leaned into him and kissed him.

It was slow going at first, his lips met hers and he stopped breathing. She waited to see if he would kiss her back. She counted to five before she felt the sensation that she was being kissed in return. She rubbed her tongue across his teeth and made him part his lips. It didn’t take long before they were entwined in a passionate kiss the likes of which she hadn’t had since the Piano Man.

He pulled away. “Ma’am, June, I’m not supposed to bother you.”

“
That didn’t bother me in the least, Michael,” she blushed. “I actually liked it.”

He swallowed hard and kissed her again, but this time she allowed herself to sink back into the pillows and rest there. When he sat up he touched her face and her hair then rose. “I have to go.”

June smiled when he left. She tingled a bit. Michael was a fairly decent kisser. The smile lingered on her face as she thought about what it would be like to be loved by someone big and burly like the shy farmboy. She daydreamed knowing he would come back for more. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few kisses to pass the time and make her feel like the woman she used to be before. . .

The baby kicked and June laughed aloud. “No, I didn’t forget about you. But maybe I can get me a little love for a change.”

* * *

June had kissed him and he felt different. Different kissing a real woman. She had been married and she was about to have a baby and she had taken a liking to him. Maybe when the baby was born she would . . .

As he walked home alone he wondered what he could do? Ask her to be his girl? If she decided to stay there, why couldn’t he?

Because she was the Blacksmith’s daughter and he had heard all the old men talking about the Blacksmith and how he protected his daughters. He could protect her; he was big and strong enough. He took care of his mother and his sister. He just didn’t have anything to offer her. And she sure wasn’t going to come live in the cabin with him, Cora, and Millie.

Maybe they could live together at Miss Fannie’s. He’d be a good father to her baby. Treat it like it was his own. And give her more, lots more. Fill her up all the time. The men folk said that’s how you keep them. Michael would love lying next to someone who smelled that good and looked that good every night.

Of course she might change. Like Toby’s wife. She was a hag and always nagging him to do something. He couldn’t imagine a tiny woman like June bossing anyone around. No, if June was his woman, he’d be the boss.

June was rich, he kept forgetting. She had been to school, even started college and her family would never accept him.

He wondered why she had let him kiss him.

He wondered did she really like him.

Most of all, he wondered, how could he get her?

* * *

The doctor came on the same day as a letter came from Minnelsa in New York. June wondered if her father had heard she was there with the Piano Man. Minnelsa’s letter was filled with joy. It was bliss between she and Peter. They were staying with old friends of Peter’s but they would be back before the baby. Maybe not, June thought, as the doctor probed her and said: “It’s gonna be sooner than even I thought. Fannie, Cora, Ella.” The women gave him their full attention.

“
You should prepare yourselves. In the next few days you’re gonna have a baby.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There was really going to be a baby born in the big old house. Ella cleaned up an old cradle she had gotten in one of her trades. More diapers were cut and made, then washed and hung out to dry in the warm breeze so they would be ready for the new arrival. Baby clothes were pulled out of old trunks and placed before June and Millie, who was there every waking moment to pick through what she considered the best.

June still refused to let them call for her mother.

Michael came every chance he got, especially when Millie wasn’t around. He would kiss June gently on the cheek, like a dutiful suitor, and bring her little bouquets of flowers that he had found in the field, asking her if she needed anything that only he could get.

At first he would sit on the edge of the chair opposite the bed where he could look out and see the diapers and blankets and baby things blowing in the wind. He sat there because he came straight from the fields and brought with him a strong yet masculine smell. It reminded her of the Blacksmith, the smell of a hard day’s honest work, as her father always said, before he cleaned up in back of his house. A smell he did not abide, of course, from his daughters’ suitors.

Then Michael would come back later when he was clean and fed. He smelled of fresh starch and homemade soap that took the musty odor away. His hair was neatly brushed and his shirt so white that she wondered when the bleach was going to eat it away. “He’s got only one good dress-up shirt,” Millie giggled. “He washes it every night.”

She got him to move his chair closer to the bed. She got him to hold her hand. And, finally, she got him to kiss her now and then. When she got him to sit on the bed, they kissed often. They touched more, talked less and seemed not to care if anyone in the busy house saw them. And for a while no one did.

Until Cora saw them.

Now Cora didn’t want no trouble. She just stood outside of June’s room with a basketful of baby clothes that, as she had put it to Mattie, “that lazy, good for nothing, high yeller gal hadn’t lifted one finger to get for her own child.” She watched with disgust while they embraced and their lips smacked when they separated and they made the little noises that lovers made when the only thing in their world was the two of them.

“
Lord, please,” Cora whispered to herself and looked around to see if anyone else was watching the display of affection. “I don’t want this heifer for my son. Not a rich, almost white colored girl with a baby by some unknown man.” June’s father was literally paying for someone else to take care of her. Once Michael had June, he wouldn’t want the girls that had surrounded him all his life. Girls that could cook better and clean better, and make better wives because they didn’t think they were so pretty because they didn’t have a daddy to buy them a man when they needed one. Girls who wouldn’t leave at the first sign of trouble like too hungry winters or too hardworking summers.

Cora walked away from the sight of them. Maybe June was lonely. Hell, she was lonely too. Been lonely for five years since Bill had died. She hadn’t had the time to take another man to her bed, although a few had tried. She looked in the tall mirror on the wall at the bottom of the steps and took in her features: her thick shoulder length hair that was pulled in a tight curly knot at the back of her head, a wrinkle-less face. “I’m not even forty yet.”

There was something about her face, something old she knew. She could sense it as well as feel it. She got closer to the mirror and touched her skin. Soft as a baby. No Jezebel makeup had ever touched her face. She had never even wanted to paint her lips. Bill had told her she was perfect with her big, round hips, small waist and, as he had said many night before he kissed them, her just right breasts. Bill’s lips hadn’t touched hers in five years. Five years since he had been found shot dead outside the white man’s town and nobody ever could ask why. What she saw on her face now was fear and exhaustion.

Bill’s death had left her with a toddling Millie and a man child named Michael. She was hoping that some way or other Michael could move on from this life, maybe even go to the Institute. But he claimed he wasn’t interested. He liked his work around the farm for Ella and Fannie.

She had been June’s age when Michael was born but she had a husband beside her. Maybe June would let go of the boy once the baby was born and with her sister. She mumbled: “That kiss was too passionate.” Looking up the stairs she prayed: “Lord, I wonder if anything else has gone on between them. Once a man gets a taste of a woman, once he got her scent set right in his nose and the feel of her skin set right on his palms, once a man started remembering the curves of a women’s body so well that he could build her next to him in his sleep, he wants that woman all the time.”

“
What you mumbling about, Cora?” Ella was staring at her.

“
I’m hoping that Michael doesn’t have his eye set on that girl.”

Ella laughed. “They probably both lonely. It will wear off when that baby gets here. ‘Sides she can’t do nothing now you need to worry about.”

They made eye contact. “Ella, it ain’t now I’m worried about.”

She planned to intercede the only way a mother could. Woman to woman.

By the time Michael slipped down the stairs and out the side door, the house was calm and fairly quiet. Millie was on the front porch shucking corn with Ella. Mattie and Fannie had gone out to pick berries for pie. Cora climbed the stairs and brought the clean baby clothes into June’s room.

“
Any pains today?” she said attempting to make conversation.

“
None,” June replied as she touched the tiny clothes and diapers. “Sometimes, Cora, I can’t believe that I’m really gonna have a baby. That a child is gonna come out of me.”

“
Gonna be soon, doctor says.” Cora eyed her carefully. She seemed so happy at the moment Cora felt it was a shame she was going to have to talk to her the way she had planned.

“
I know. Any day now.” The room was silent. Outside she could hear the chickens cackling, and a pig oinking probably fighting to get more food. Inside a baby was coming soon. Outside was a thousand miles away.

“
When you have your baby, are you gonna stay here?” June stared at Cora and Cora stared back. “Well, are ya?”

“
I don’t know yet, Cora. I mean my sister was supposed to take the baby. But now she’s in New York and I’m not sure.” The girl’s eyes dropped. “I never really knew what I was going to do.”

“
Then,” Cora said standing over her with the empty basket, one hand on her hip in a strictly business pose, “if you don’t know what you’re gonna do, why you spending so much time with my son?”

June looked up a bit embarrassed. “I like Michael. We’re friends”

“
Friends?” Cora dropped the basket to the floor. It made June jump in the bed. Cora looked as if she might hit her. “What you doing getting his hopes up? You going to stay around for him?”

“
He told you that?” June half whispered.

“
He told me nothing. I got eyes. I can see. I saw this afternoon. Him kissing you like you belong to him. He washes that same shirt every night and brings you flowers every day. He’s sweet on you.”

June blushed. “I do like him, Cora.”

“
But he’s just a boy, June.”

“
There are lots of men around here that had wives and babies when they was 16.” June tugged on the covers trying not to look at the older woman.

“
You thinking my son is going to marry you?” Cora put both hands on her hips to steady herself. She felt a fine bead of hot sweat rolling slowly down her back.

“
No, but,” June cleared her throat, “would it be so bad if something happened between us?”

“
He’s a boy!” Cora shouted.

“
He’s a man, Cora. Most of the men his age are with their women and out of their mother’s houses.” She paused than added: “I know you love him.”

“
He’s my baby. Like that baby that’s growing inside of you. I want what’s best for him.” The bead of sweat cleared her waist and she touched her back to make it disappear: “Do you love him?”

In the silence that filled the room June remembered the day she had told Willie that the only man she could ever love was the Piano Man. Willie said there would be others. “But he’s the first,” she had told her brother.

“
Cora, people don’t always marry for love.”

“
You want my son to give your baby a name, ain’t that it?”

“
No, that’s not it either. Michael is important to me.”

Cora paced about the room in anger. Her coal black eyes gleamed. Sweat had covered her back and now started to form on her upper lip. She stayed away from the girl’s bed, stayed away for fear it might provoke her own anger.

“
Look, Miss Rich Atlanta Lady, my son don’t need your daddy’s money. He don’t need your type. You rich spoiled girls get yourselves knocked up by the first fool that touches you and you come down here and want someone to marry you and give you a name. You come in here with your long hair and your fancy clothes and your city ways and try to take any man you please. But you act like ain’t no other women around for my boy to look at. Well I have you know it’s plenty that want him. Would let him get inside of them and give them a baby in a minute. Why would he need you and some other man’s bastard child when he can make and have his own?”

Cora breathed hard. So did June. Every colored mother in Atlanta wanted her son to marry one of the Blacksmith’s daughters. Not here, not with a belly growing in front of her. “Cora, I know you know all about me. I did something wrong and now. . .”