Whistling Past the Graveyard (3 page)

“Partway only. But better’n walkin’ in this heat.”
And ending up buzzard dinner.
I pulled open the door; its old hinges squeaked loud enough to startle the baby into crying. I climbed up on the seat and put my feet on either side of the basket.
“You mind holdin’ James while I drive? He needs comfortin’.”
I looked down at that baby. He reminded me of the newborn kittens the LeCounts’ calico had in the holly shrubs on the side of their house last year, all pink and wrinkly. And he was oh so small. I figured I’d break him if I tried to pick him up.
“He looks okay down there to me,” I said. “Maybe he’ll quiet when you start drivin’ again.”
She looked at me with a sly smile that said I wasn’t foolin’her.“Here now.” She reached down and scooped him up and plunked him in my arms. I couldn’t do nothin’ but grab hold.
He wasn’t much bigger than my pajama bag, but lots squirmier. And his squallin’ was getting louder.
“Tha’s right. Now jus’ slide this sassy”—she picked up a pacifier from the basket—“into his mouth and give him a little jiggle.”
I did, and James’s squalls slid down to whimpers. Then he started sucking on that sassy and got quiet and still.
“There now,” Eula said. “Better.”
He was better. And me, too, now that I knew I wasn’t gonna die in the ditch.
She let out the clutch and the truck jerked into motion. She smiled over at me and James, and I felt like she and I already knew each other better than just meeting.
She said, “Now ain’t it a lucky thing that I found you.”

3

e

ula drove me lots farther than I’d hoped. I reckoned we were moving in a direction that more or less got me closer to Nashville, since Eula knew that was where I was headed. The hot air whirled around the inside of the truck, some relief from air sticky as cotton candy. James had fallen asleep and was getting real heavy for such a little thing.

The trees grew closer and closer to the road, crowding in like they wanted to take over. There was places where their branches reached right out and shook hands over our heads. Still, most of the time the sun baked us like biscuits right through the windshield.

My arm was turning numb when Eula glanced at me. “You got yo’self a real nice touch with a baby.” She smiled over at me. She had a little space between her two front teeth, which were extra white against her dark skin. She looked at me like I was special.

I couldn’t help the lick of pride I felt, even though it was a sin. Mamie always said the only thing I was good at was making trouble. “Never held one before.”

“Well, now, you’s got a gif ’ then.” She sighed, keeping her eyes on the bleached-out pavement. “I got that gif ’, too. It’s real special . . . ‘rare as hen’s teeth,’ my momma used to say.”

A gift, huh? Too bad Mamie’d never know. “You been a maid long?” She nodded. “Since I was prob’ly not much older’n you.” “I’m only nine and a half!”
“Um-hmm.” She sat up a little straighter and lifted her chin. “Got schoolin’ up till I was eleven—the colored school only go to eighth grade anyway. Read better’n my momma ever did.” She got quiet for a minute and I listened to the hum of the tires and the rough growl of the truck’s engine. “I started out takin’ care of the neighbor’s young’uns while she worked . . . six of ’em, they was.” She smiled. “Law, my hands was full, but I was happy as a fox in a henhouse.Then when my momma died, I had to get me some real work with cash pay, not just chickens and eggs. That’s when I started with my first family.”

“What about your daddy?” My daddy worked all the way down in the Gulf so he could put clothes on my back and food in my belly. “Didn’t he take care of you?”

Her face got hard and she made a sound like she was choking. “Pap couldn’t even take care of his own self. Can’t recall a job lasted him more’n a month. He just too mean.”

Poor Eula. My daddy hated being away from me, but he sacrificed so I could have everything I needed. He didn’t get home much, but when he did, we did all kinds of fun stuff. One time he bought me my bicycle from the Western Auto and taught me how to ride—it’s a blue Western Flyer, bought big so I didn’t outgrow it. It was pretty dangerous at first ’cause I had to hop off the seat to put my feet on the ground when I stopped, but it fit me just right now. And me and Daddy almost always go to the drive-in movie when he’s home; we get popcorn and Orange Crush. And when I was seven, he took me all the way up to Calling Panther Lake to go fishin’.

“You been workin’ for the same family all these years?” I asked. Patti Lynn’s maid had been with them since her parents got married; Patti Lynn and me both loved Bess to death—she made the best chocolate chip cookies in the whole of Mississippi. We liked her daughters, too; they come to help when there was lots to do, but went to school regular and didn’t work like Eula had. And I couldn’t even remember when Ernestine didn’t work for the LeCounts.

Eula’s face went soft and kinda sad. “No’um. Been several.”

“You always been a maid to a family with kids?” I really wanted to put James back in his basket before my arm fell right off, but I didn’t want Eula to think I didn’t really have a gift ’cause it was the first one I’d ever had.

She seemed to know what I was thinking. “Go on, put him down. He stay asleep now.”
That’s when I realized there was no way I could put him down, ’cause my numb arm wouldn’t work. “Um . . .”
“Uh-huh. I see.” Eula nodded, slowed the truck, and pulled off onto the grass beside the road. I didn’t recall when we’d turned off the highway with the painted center line and onto this country road with the tar bubblin’ up from the sun.
She got out and walked around the truck. She was really tall . . . and I’d never seen a woman so skinny. After opening the passenger door, she reached out and took James. As she lifted him from my arms (thank you, baby Jesus), my fingers went all tingly and it felt like ants was biting all over my arm.
Eula tucked James into his basket with hands so sure and practiced I felt ashamed of my pride in my gift.
As she climbed back in the truck, she said, “We be home soon, sugar.”
“But I’m goin’ to Nashville.”
“Well, course you are. But there ain’t nobody on the roads to give you a ride today. You can come home and have supper with me and Wallace, sleep, then be on your way to Nashville t’morrow. Maybe I get Wallace to drive you partway.” She nodded and smiled and I thought Wallace must be a real nice man.
’Sides, I was hungry. I’d eaten a jawbreaker already and wanted to make my candy last as long as I could. And I’d only seen one other car since I’d gotten in the truck, and it was headed the other way.
“What about James, don’t you have to take him home?”
She leaned back against the seat, wrapped her hands around the steering wheel, and stared out the windshield. “I keepin’ him.”
“Overnight?”
She dipped her chin as she put the truck in gear and it shuddered back onto the road.
A while later, we run out of pavement and was travelin’ a dirt road, kickin’ up a plume of dust. We passed a long stretch of brown-watered swamp, edged with water weeds and green scum. It was full of old cypress and tree skeletons that dripped with gray moss. A bit after that, we turned off that dirt road onto a double-rutted lane that cut into the woods.
As we drove through the tangle of trees and weeds, branches made screeching noises as they scraped the rusty truck. Goose bumps shot down the back of my neck and I tried to tell myself it was just ’cause of the sound, but it really was more than that. The trees swallowed up the sunlight. With my sun-blind eyes, everything was fuzzy and gray and I couldn’t see nothin’ at all in the shadowy places. We’d left the real world, the world of Cayuga Springs and Mamie and Patti Lynn far behind and was in a place that felt darker—and not just ’cause of the light.
The truck made a curve in the lane. I looked over my shoulder and the square of bright that was the hole to the road was gone; there wasn’t nothing but woods and gloom. I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Mamie always said I never did look before I leaped.
I told myself I should be glad to be someplace safe from the law and Mrs. Sellers—and that a woman as nice as Eula was gonna give me dinner and a place to sleep. Anyway, I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t never go home again. And I couldn’t walk to Nashville when I didn’t know how to get there.
Sure wish I coulda said good-bye to Patti Lynn.
I’d thought about running away plenty of times. I’d even thought about asking Patti Lynn to come with me. But her momma and daddy lived together and she didn’t have a grandmother who hated every cotton-pickin’ thing about her. It really wouldn’t be fair to ask her to give up all her good stuff just ’cause I wasn’t keen on running away alone.
I always figured it’d take about a week to get ready. I’d store food in my closet a little at a time so Mamie wouldn’t notice and pack up my favorite clothes and Daddy’s lunch box from my fort. I’d write a long note to Daddy and Patti Lynn, who were the only two people who would miss me.
But as it turned out, leaving Cayuga Springs was an emergency, and all I had was some sticky penny candy in my shorts pockets.
The truck hit a particular bad hole and about bounced me off my seat and onto James. Lucky I grabbed the door and kept where I was; I’d crush that baby for sure.
Eula looked over at me. Instead of hollerin’at me to be careful of the baby, she laughed right out loud. “You should see your face, child . . . all eyes and eyebrows.” She made a face that looked like somebody done sneaked up on her and poked her in the backside, the whites of her eyes big and round.
“I didn’t look like that!”
“Yes’um, you did.” She made the face again.
I laughed right along with her this time.
We were still laughing when the lane ended in front of a house. It sat up off the ground on square, brick supports. The metal roof looked rusty and the porch sagged a little. The white paint was most peeled off, but the house somehow still had a tidy look about it, like somebody didn’t have money but still cared. Some chickens were scratching in the yard, and a rooster was flappin’ his wings on a stump at the edge of the woods. A big ax was next to the stump, and some chopped wood was layin’ on the ground around it.
The door to the house swung open and a big bear of a man, wearing gray pants with suspenders and a white shirt with short sleeves, walked out. He was nearly as tall as the doorframe . . . nearly as wide, too.
Eula stopped laughing. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and she cleared her throat.
The man come off the porch. “I was ’ginnin’ to wonder where you’d got to. Deliverin’ pies don’t take all day.” His voice was so deep it more rumbled than talked.
The second he laid eyes on me, he stopped in his big-bear tracks. Now his eyes had that just-poked-in-the-backside look. “What you doin’ with that white girl, Eula?”
Eula jumped out of the truck.“Now, Wallace, it gon’be all right. She on her way to—”
James let out a cry like I was pulling his arms off or something.
The man pushed past Eula and stuck his big head though the open passenger-side window.
“Lord in heaven, woman!” He spun around so fast, Eula jumped backward. “What was you thinkin’, stealin’ a baby?”
I didn’t like the way he yelled at her, or the way he leaned his big body over hers. She didn’t back away, but I could see the scared in her eyes. I jumped out. “She wasn’t stealin’! James’s family is busy with the Fourth Festival. She’s takin’ care of him.”
He looked over his shoulder at me with dark eyes as narrow and hateful as Jimmy Sellers’s. The man had little, square teeth that looked way too small for his head. “Who is you?”
“Starla Claudelle.” I stood up extra tall; Mamie said you had to stand your ground with the colored.
“Wallace,” Eula said, and put her hand on his giant arm.
He swung his eyes back to her.“You always was stupid, but you done lost your mind! You can’t take care of yo’self for even half a minute.”
“It ain’t what you think—”
“You get permission to take this baby, this white girl?”
“No, but—”
He raised a hand the size of a frying pan and swung. She flinched and ducked. He didn’t connect with skin and ended up only messing up her hair. The front stuck straight up now where it come loose.
I wanted to break his nose. Truth be told, I was too scared—which made me madder ’n a hornet.
He lifted his hand again, but didn’t swing. “Don’t you push me, woman!” His hand went from flat to a fist. He breathed real deep twice and then shouted, “Get in the house!” He looked at me. “And take them chil’ren with you!”
Eula took my arm and shoved me toward the front porch. “Go. It’ll be all right, child.” Then she snatched James in his basket from the truck.
I looked over my shoulder. The man had both hands on his head like he was trying to keep it from exploding. He walked in little circles, muttering, “Now you gone and done it. We dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.”
Eula hurried me up the steps, across the wood porch, inside and through the house and into a tiny room in the back that was even smaller than my room at home. The floor was covered with cracked blue and gray linoleum, and the little window didn’t have a curtain. There was an empty baby cradle with a knit blanket folded inside it and a rocker. I wondered where Eula’s baby was, but didn’t get the chance to ask.
After setting baby James’s basket on the floor, she bent down, took my face in her hands, and looked in my eyes. “Listen to me, child. You gotta be real quiet while I get things straightened out with Wallace. He in a foul mood, and when that happens . . .” She didn’t finish, but I could see she was most as scared as I was. “I get him to see, then we have some ham hock and green beans, maybe I make up some corn bread, too. You like corn bread?” She nodded as she spoke and I nodded right along with her. “Good then.”
She turned and left the room, closing the door behind her. I heard a key turn in the old lock. I wasn’t sure if it was to keep me and James in, or Wallace out.
It was all I could do to make myself breathe. I wanted to trust Eula. I really did. She was a Christian. She was kind. But that Wallace was another thing altogether. He looked like he could be worse than Mrs. Sellers, Mamie, and Jimmy Sellers all rolled into one big bundle of mean.
And what did he mean, “steal” James?
I moved real careful and put my ear to the door. Eula’s footsteps sounded like she was afraid the floor might splinter right under her. Boy, did I know what that was like, being afraid just the sound of your feet moving on the floor could make someone mad at you. Patti Lynn’s maid, Bess, called it “walkin’ on eggshells.” I reckon that’s as good a way to describe it as any.
Holding my breath, I waited for the sound of the man’s deep, angry voice, but all I heard was the squeak of the screen-door hinges and the sharp clap as it closed.
This wasn’t at all what I’d imagined when Eula asked me to come home for supper. Eula was so nice, I thought it was gonna be like dinner at Patti Lynn’s—everybody around a table, polite and nice, talking about their day, telling silly knock-knock jokes.
I decided I’d better figure out a way out of here, and fast. The window was small, but big enough me and James could get through, if I could get the bottom sash all the way up.
My stomach got all knotted when I saw the rusted-closed window latch. I worked up all the spit I could in my dry mouth, then spit on it. I waited until I counted to fifteen for the spit to do its work. Then I hit the little lever until the heel of my hand was fiery red and burned like the dickens.
The latch wouldn’t budge even a hair.