Authors: Jean Thompson
“Wonderful and blessed, Mrs. C., wonderful and blessed.”
Jeffy always said that. There was a sense that you were meant to answer back, “Hallelujah,” but Mrs. Colley never could bring herself to do so. Jeffy was short and round-bottomed and cheerful. Like all the other black people in Hi Ho, he went to the A.M.E. church. He drove an Oldsmobile Cutlass with a license plate that read PRAY MOR. He was a bachelor and the A.M.E. ladies were always trying to marry him off. Mrs. Colley thought that Jeffy enjoyed all the fuss and attention and would hold out as long as possible before he got himself a wife, and then he would say it was the Lord's plan. Mrs. Colley attended the Lutheran church and would have called herself religious, although not to the point where she thought religion made any actual difference in the world.
Jeffy set the pie basket on the porch and said that strawberry-rhubarb was his favorite pie. “Until you come along with next month's, that is.” It was the joke he always made.
“Pray that there is a next month, Jeffy,” said Mrs. Colley, trying to make it come out humorous instead of small and quavering, as it did. Jeffy clasped Mrs. Colley's hands in his big brown ones and when he bowed his head she felt obliged to do likewise. When Jeffy raised up again and said, “Amen,” Mrs. Colley felt embarrassed, as if she'd taken advantage.
The last stop on the pie route was always her daughter Margery's, so that Mrs. Colley could visit with the grandbabies. Margery did not bake her own pies because she worked part-time, in addition to chasing after two kids whenever she was home and never having a minute to herself.
Mrs. Colley tried not to pass judgment on any of this, or on the state of Margery's house, which today as usual was at sixes and sevens. Cheerios floated in the kitchen sink. Every towel in the house seemed to have assembled on the bathroom floor. The television was on, although no one was watching it. The President was doing a commercial for the War. Ronnie and his little sister, Crystal, were playing chase. Ronnie had a potato peeler in his mouth and his arms spread out, airplane-style. He made
rat-tat-tat
noises as he tried to trap Crystal in a corner and dive-bomb her. “Look, darlings, Grandma's here! I brought you a strawberry-rhubarb pie!”
“I hate strawberry,” said Ronnie, talking around the potato peeler.
“I hate rhubarb,” Crystal chimed in, although she didn't really. She was just being cute.
Margery cleared a space for the pie on the kitchen counter but didn't go out of her way to act appreciative. Margery sometimes sneaked cigarettes. Mrs. Colley was not supposed to know about this but she did anyway. Margery still wore her red smock from work. She was a sales associate at SuperStuff. Margery said, “They cut back my hours again.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Ronnie, knock it off,” Margery called, but without energy. The thunder of feet kept shaking the house. “Yeah. I guess I should be glad, since it's only the worst job in the world.”
Mrs. Colley watched as Margery took a number of items out of the freezer to start supper: a bag of Tater Tots, package of corn, fish fillets stuck together in the shape of a brick. Mrs. Colley said, “I saw somewhere that fish can give you mercury poisoning.”
“Not if it's frozen, I don't think.”
They didn't say anything else about the hours cutback, and after a while Mrs. Colley took herself home.
It didn't used to be that husband and wife both had to work to put food on the table. She and Mr. Colley had managed. But there had not been so many things to buy back then, and there hadn't been a stock market, or there had been but it wasn't full of crooks who sucked all the money out of the world overnight. Times were hard. Jeffy Johnson said it was the seven lean years like in the Bible. The President said there were always sacrifices in time of War. Mrs. Colley took a Rainbow pill and slept for nine and a half hours.
June was cherry pie month, one of Mrs. Colley's favorites, even though cherry juice stained like the dickens. Mrs. Colley still got up on a stepladder and picked cherries from her own tree. There was nothing quite as pretty as a cherry tree, the sprays of red fruit against the green leaves. The birds were never happier than in cherry season. June was always good. June was fireflies and brides. Crops were planted and there had not yet been too much or not enough rain. School got out and children planned long campaigns of play.
Mrs. Colley and Mrs. Pulliam ran cherries through the hand-cranked cherry pitter, saving the juice to can later. Mrs. Colley used a plastic form to stamp out the lattice crusts, which was cheating, sort of, but couldn't be helped. She knew her crust was not the equal of Mrs. Pulliam's, although only a longtime subscriber might notice the difference. She flattered herself that she had a better flair for the fruit pies, a more generous hand with the fillings than Mrs. Pulliam. Her best cherry pies made you wish there was such a thing as a cherry pie tree.
The last few weeks she'd kept a close eye on Mrs. Pulliam, watching for signs of discontent. But Mrs. Pulliam pitted cherries and weighed out sugar and did her share of the chores without complaint. Just as Mrs. Colley was taking the last of the last batch of cherry pies out of the oven, Mrs. Pulliam said, out of nowhere, “Bobby called.”
Bobby was Mrs. Pulliam's bad son in Chicago. He did not often call. Mrs. Colley, as she was meant to, kept her eyes on the pies as she asked, “Well, how's Bobby?”
“He's part of a group now.”
When Mrs. Pulliam didn't say anything more helpful, Mrs. Colley was forced to ask what kind of group.
“It's a No More War group.”
You might expect as much from long-haired, pot-smoking Bobby, and Mrs. Colley was about to murmur something by way of consolation, when Mrs. Pulliam spoke again. “Bobby says we aren't winning the War, we're losing it.”
This was such an unexpected idea that Mrs. Colley had no response, only stood there with her hands in oven mitts. Mrs. Pulliam went on. “He says we keep having Wars just so everyone stays all stirred up and scared.”
“Now what possible reason would anyone have for wanting that?”
Mrs. Pulliam only shrugged and went back to balancing the month's accounts.
The last week in June the meatpacking plant fired all the Mexicans. The government said it was not safe to have foreigners, people of unknown, undocumented backgrounds, motives, and sympathies, at work in the sensitive area of food supply. Many of the Mexicans just disappeared. Overnight, it seemed, they were gone. They left behind cars, the children's bicycles, food in kitchens, shoes in closets. It was hard to get new workers to replace them. The worst job in the world wasn't at SuperStuff, in spite of what Margery said. Everyone knew the worst jobs were probably in the meatpacking plant, in the slaughter room, or the hide room, or the rendering room. The Texas bank that had already bought up a lot of the farms took over the plant and cut back on the shifts.
Mrs. Colley found that she missed the Mexicans, the black-eyed babies, the snatches of Spanish radio on Main Street. Some people said they must have done something criminal, clearing out like that, but Mrs. Colley wondered if they weren't just afraid. The Mexicans who remained behind were having a hard time making ends meet, and the churches in Hi Ho organized a food drive for them. The Lutheran pastor, young Reverend Higgs, gave a sermon about charity and brotherhood and overcoming differences, which made everybody feel better, since that was exactly what they'd done. Summer baseball leagues started up. There was a bank robbery in Des Moines and Mrs. Colley was terribly worried about her son, John, who worked in a bank, until she reached him on the phone and found out it was a different bank. The War was said to be winding down, although things still blew up now and then. For whole days at a time you could almost forget there was a War going on; there was too much else to crowd it out. But the War was like a pie you'd left in the oven, something nagging at you, a task left unfinished.
July was for blueberry pies. Blueberries were grown in cool places, and when you sifted through the fruit, washing and straining and picking out stems, you thought of pine trees, of gray, chill lakes and seagulls. Blueberry was the easiest of the fruit pies, nothing to pit or peel, and that was a mercy. July was always so blamed hot. The sun rode the sky all day long. There was no rain (the drought had been going on almost as long as the Wars), except for those times when a black storm swept in and sent forks of lightning and crop-shredding hail.
There was a Fourth of July parade, with the fire truck going five miles an hour and running its siren, the high school band, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (by which was meant the old-fashioned Wars that were already in the history books), marching in formation, and some convertibles donated by a car dealership. Mrs. Pulliam got her hands on a quantity of nearly flawless blackberries and donated a dozen pies to the Freedom Celebration picnic. When you cut into the pies each blackberry was still perfectly shaped, glistening with grains of undissolved sugar. No one had ever seen or tasted anything like them.
Mrs. Pulliam stood beneath the awning that covered the picnic tables, accepting compliments. Mrs. Colley was pleased to see her friend getting the recognition that she deserved, pleased also that Mrs. Pulliam seemed to be enjoying herself, after a fashion. She had even dressed up a little, for her, in a new red and white blouse that seemed more cheerful than Mrs. Pulliam herself. For there was a kind of formality, even aloofness, to Mrs. Pulliam as she acknowledged people's thank-yous, and that was to be expected. There was for every artist the awful moment when they stepped out from behind their splendid creation and revealed the meager, human-sized self that was bound to disappoint by comparison. People filled their mouths with sweet corn and potato salad and fried chicken and pie, pie, pie. The excellence of the food was some consolation for the fireworks show, which everyone agreed was not as good as last year's.
In mid-July it was announced the SuperStuff would be closing. The national chains were all cutting their losses, tightening their belts. The store hired a number of the Mexicans to stand on street corners with red, white, and blue signs that said Everything Must Go! Prices were reduced by twenty, then thirty, then forty percent and more. For a time the SuperStuff's parking lot was jam-packed and they did more business in a weekend than they might have in a month. Mrs. Colley stocked up on those items of apparel which a lady of her age and size required. People wandered the aisles. There was a pleasant sense that everything in the store was available for the taking, for free or very nearly free. Everyone in Hi Ho had new dish towels and sheet sets and garden hoses and CD players and fishing rods and generators, and then the store was shut for good.
Margery found work a few hours a week at the dry cleaners, running clothes through the machines that tumbled them and took out spots and gave them that dry cleaning smell. A while back there had been some kind of alarm about dry cleaning, about the chemicals used, but then it was determined that exposure was within acceptable limits. Mrs. Colley babysat Ronnie and Crystal to help out. Ronnie said he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up. Crystal said she wanted to be a television lady. There was a scare about eating beef, something that had nothing to do with the Mexicans, and just like that you couldn't give beef away. Everyone knew the scare would wear off sooner or later but before it could, the Texas bank closed the meatpacking plant and hauled all the equipment down to Texas or who knows where and padlocked the gates. Most of the local farmers had long since sold off their cattle because of the drought, but still it was a blow. For a time there was talk that the state might build one of its new prisons in the county and bring back some jobs, but nothing ever came of it.
You wanted so badly to believe that life was basically good, that people were basically good. And Mrs. Colley did believe it. She might not go around announcing that she was wonderful and blessed, but she reminded herself often that there were many terrible places she could have been born into but had not. Nothing abnormally bad had ever happened to her personally or was likely to happen except for, eventually, dying, oh well. But nowadays there was so little you could trust to stay good, as if there was a pinhole at the bottom of the world and all the best things were leaking out of it.
In August, everyone's water bills doubled. It came out that the water utility had been bought up by a company in Belgium. Belgium! Most people in Hi Ho were unaware that you could do such a thing as sell the water, and it was unclear why anyone in Belgium should own a lot of the water in Iowa. It was some consolation that Belguim was not one of the hot countries; when people looked it up on maps, it was right up there with normal nations like France and Germany. The new Belgian water company said the increased bills reflected higher costs for security, that it was now necessary to guard against the possibility of the water supply being blown up or poisoned. That was odd, since the workers at the filtration plant still kept the side gate wide open in summer. That way they could leave their cars in the shade of the adjoining park, and take their lunch coolers out there at break time.
“Bobby says it isn't really countries that fight Wars now. It's corporations. The corporations are bigger than the countries.”
“I just can't keep up with all of Bobby's ideas,” said Mrs. Colley, which she hoped was a tactful way of saying she was tired of hearing about them. Bobby and Mrs. Pulliam talked a lot these days, and after every conversation Mrs. Pulliam offered up some new, outlandish opinion.