Maud's Line (5 page)

The parting took longer than Maud expected. Evidently, Lovely and Mrs. Starr had found something to talk about, and Maud was thinking about ribbing her brother about that on the way home when her eyes again drifted over to the cluster of men around Mr. Singer. Three of those men were the same ones who had been talking about Booker, and the woman they'd been talking to was also with them. Maud knew there was only one thing that would draw that woman into a conversation with Mr. Singer and a whole group of men, and she suddenly felt the same way she felt whenever she found a snake in a hen's nest. She backed up from where she was standing and frantically looked around for any kin. She spied Early far across the fire, standing with his cowboy hat shoved forward on his head and scratching his back with his elbow in the air. Beyond him, she saw no other kin except Lovely. He was still talking to Mrs. Starr. Maud couldn't imagine what he could think to say that would take that long, and she suddenly felt a grinding irritation with him. She looked back to the group standing around Mr. Singer. The woman was nodding.

Maud was transfixed by that conversation. She couldn't join it, but she also couldn't leave while it was going on. She stood there and fumed, smelled the burnt wood in her nose, and tried to will Lovely to get out of his idiotic conversation and walk toward Mr. Singer. She glanced repeatedly his way and then again back at the group around her elderly neighbor. Eventually, she saw the backsides of the Starrs as they walked away; but Lovely, the idiot he was, walked over to Early and started talking with him. Neither of them looked in her direction, and instead of crossing to the other side of the fire to join them and maybe picking up a little of the conversation still going on around Mr. Singer, Maud stayed where she was until Mr. Singer turned back toward his car. Then she turned away from it all and started walking home.

Maud had only gotten as far as the Beechers' place on the near side of where the section lines crossed when she heard Lovely's voice calling her name. She kept walking without turning. She heard him running. Finally, he shouted, “Hold up, will you?” so loudly that she couldn't pretend she hadn't heard him. She slowed her walk and threw a look over her shoulder that she hoped telegraphed displeasure. When Lovely caught up to her, he panted, and said, “What've you got a bee in your drawers for?”

“You took too long. We've been up all night. Can't you think of anybody but yourself?”

Lovely drew his chin in and pulled to his full height. But he didn't snap back. He fell into a pace that matched Maud's and walked in silence at her side until she couldn't stand it any longer. She said, “Where the heck do you think Daddy went off to?”

“Work?”

“I doubt it. He left too early for that.”

“Maybe he's home, trying to get some sleep?”

“Could be, I guess. It'd be nice if he'd thought to take us with him.”

“Nice? Dad?”

The reminder of their alliance against their father put Maud in a little better mood, but it wasn't better enough to confide in Lovely her fears about Booker; if she did, he'd recognize that her interest extended beyond the realm of justice. She didn't want to have that discussion, so she said, “Are you courting Mrs. Starr or her daughter?”

Lovely didn't rise to that bait. He replied, “I wonder where the schooling will take place come fall?”

“Mrs. Benge's, probably.” Maud named the closest school on that side of the highway, the one on the bayou.

“Ft. Gibson's would be nearer.”

“Maybe there then. I don't really know.”

“I know you don't know. I was just making conversation.”

“Well, make it about something interesting. Did you get Mrs. Starr's blessing?”

“Wasn't looking for it. Was just listening to her tell how they'd been awakened in the night by the sound of cars starting. Evidently, they're light sleepers.”

Maud didn't care what kind of sleepers the Starrs were, but she did recognize that her brother's mention of the sleeping habits of Gilda's family was more connected to thoughts of beds than to a concern for their health. She said, “Did you make any progress on the daughter?”

“Taking her to the dance Saturday night.”

“What dance?”

“The one in town. Down on the corner. Gonna be fiddling.”

“How are you getting in?”

“Early's gonna take me on the back of his horse.”

Envy wasn't a large part of Maud's nature. But it'd been a long night, and worry over Booker hadn't left her. As she looked down the long dirt road that led straight to more dirt then to a wild of cane and tangled scrub and eventually to the sandbar and the river, she felt the same desolation she felt the day Betty was killed. The thought of a dance with fiddling and lanterns and people dressed up in clean clothes without her being there was almost too much to bear. A tear formed in her left eye, the one closest to the sun, and she wiped it away with a flick of her wrist, hoping that Lovely hadn't seen it.

If he had, he didn't mention it. Maud took a deep breath, set her jaw, and distracted her mind by thinking about the chickens she needed to let out and feed and then about whether or not her father was at home in bed. That thought sent her eyes searching the dirt for tracks that might have been laid that morning. But there had been more traffic than usual on the road, and she couldn't distinguish new tracks from old. She walked on in silence before Lovely finally said, “Gilda thinks a lot of you.”

Maud knew Lovely had just made that up to get her into a conversation about his girl, and by that time, she'd reined herself in enough that she didn't begrudge his romantic interest. She kept the conversation going in the direction he wanted all the way down the line until their house came into sight and she could see that their father's car wasn't there. She said, “Where do you think he's off to?”

“Work, I hope.”

“What do you think the chances are?”

“Maybe pretty good. He'll want to tell everybody about the fire.”

Maud hoped Lovely was right. But her father wasn't an eager employee. He avoided taking orders like a calf avoids a rope, and his skittishness didn't endear him to his superiors. Over the years, he'd had a number of jobs—construction work, road building, even a little grave digging—but he'd always wound up in a fight with somebody, often his boss, and either stormed off after a brawl or, more often, wound up on the ground knocked out and dirty. Mustard usually got the first lick in, but not always the last one.

Maud let out the chickens and fed them while Lovely milked the cow. Then they both sat to breakfast, ate quickly, and Lovely left to clear timber. Maud tended to her other chores, changed the bandage on her leg to a smaller one just to keep dirt out of her wound, and then walked down the lane and back up the section line to her aunt Nan's. She found Nan on her back stoop churning butter in the shade of a tree, and Maud took over the churning to give her a rest.

Nan was about the same age Maud's mother had been when she'd died, so Maud was partial to her, and Nan gave Maud what mothering she could. They talked at length about the fire, recounted how they'd become aware of its burning, what they'd done to get there, who'd said what to whom, and what they thought of the flames, the smell in the air, and the charred remains of the school. They wanted to return to the ruins, but Nan didn't have the energy to round up her children and Maud was too tired to walk the road in the sun alone. So they took turns churning and talked about their imaginings of the fire's site in broad daylight and their hopes for a new school. In the midst of that talk, Nan mentioned that Ryde hadn't come home.

The butter was setting up. Nan took over the churning to finish it off. Maud flexed her fingers to get her hand back into pliable shape and said, “Daddy didn't come home, either. At least not as far as Lovely and I could tell.”

Nan pursed her lips.

Maud said, “I saw both the Mounts at the fire last night.”

“They're bad'uns. You stay away from 'em.”

“I'm trying. You heard about our cow?”

“Yeah. You can bet it was the Mounts. They been acting like that since the river was laid in its bed.”

“We hadn't really wanted Daddy to know it.”

“Something like that's hard to keep. As soon as Ryde heared it, he was ready to take off after 'em.”

“I think he told Daddy. I hope they didn't take the law into their own hands.”

Nan kept churning. Maud looked off into the distance at the hills on the horizon. Eventually, Nan spoke. “Nothing would surprise me.”

Maud looked down at the dirt between her feet. A thing like an axed cow could get a lot of people killed. She recalled Betty writhing in the weeds. A shudder ran down between her shoulders and through her body to her breasts. She wiped a bead of sweat from between them. She wanted away from the violence as much as she wanted indoor plumbing and brighter light to read by at night. She applied her moist thumb to the dust on the toe of her left shoe. Worrying wouldn't fix what was out of her control, and she hadn't yet spoken a word about what else was on her mind. She said, “Did that peddler with the blue covered wagon stop here?”

“Sure did. I bought some cloth with my egg money.”

Maud didn't want to talk about cloth, but she knew how the conversation was supposed to progress. She prompted Nan to tell her the color and what she was going to make the material into. Only after she'd heard that, did she say, “Some white woman at the fire was accusing the peddler of starting it and cheating her, too.”

Nan cleared her throat. After a while she said, “That's Miz Pratt yer talking about. I heared her, too. She ain't never in her life got the good end of a deal.”

Maud felt relieved. That Booker could be a cheat hadn't set too well with her. She said, “What did you think of him?”

Nan let up on the churning. “He's a good-looking feller. Did ya buy from him?”

Maud told her the titles of the books she'd gotten in trade and then added, “Do you think he'll stay around long?”

“Well, Maudy-Baby, he's a peddler.” Nan started churning again.

Maudy-Baby had been her mother's name for her, and a lump came up in Maud's throat. In the dust at her feet, she imagined her mama dying in the yard, twisting on the ground. To get that image out of her head, she nudged her aunt with her shoulder. “I know. But he sure is pleasing to the eye.”

Maud played with the baby while Nan patted the butter into molds, took the noon meal with her aunt and cousins, and walked home, having secured a ride to the dance. She was lost in thinking about the fun of Saturday night when she walked through their first cattle guard and realized that the gate was open and lying on the ground. She felt certain she'd closed the guard behind her when she'd left. And, that morning, Lovely had taken a sack meal to the field because he was late getting started. There wasn't a car, wagon, or horse ahead at the house. She looked to the front pasture for the cows and saw Carrie, the milk cow, and her yearling lying in the shade of a pecan tree. She pulled the gate up off the ruts into place and looked to the second cattle guard. That gate was down, too. Her heart suddenly thumped fast. She felt stupid for leaving home without her gun. She looked hard at the house.

It was two rooms of unpainted boards resting on stacks of sandstones. When it had gotten so crowded that her grandpa and the rest of the family moved to another house, they'd left her close family in that one, and her uncle Blue and her daddy had built a porch across the front and the west side. Its tin roof was supported by five posts, four of which were visible from the lane. The house seemed empty, its two front windows like blind eyes, its two doors like cave mouths. She looked to the yard. It was a few patches of grass, a lot of dirt that she kept swept with a broom, and a line of sandstones winding from the porch steps to the pump. Some chickens were scratching around. But what Maud's eyes rested on was a tall and broad live oak tree. Its foliage was lush and many of its branches dipped to the ground. During the hottest days of summer, she retreated to its shade, and when she looked out from its cover, the rest of the farm appeared as separate as another country. Maud, as accustomed as she was to hiding beneath the branches and leaves of the oak, recognized the possibility that it could be concealing somebody as well as the house. At the distance she was from both, only a marksman could hit her. And although she didn't really believe she was likely to get shot in her own lane, stranger things had happened, and she did think it was within the realm of possibility that somebody who she couldn't see or sense was watching her. She looked in the dirt of the ruts for footprints, saw her own, and recognized Lovely's. But Lovely, even if he'd come back, wouldn't leave the guards down any more than she would. She looked for tire tracks and for those of wagon wheels. There were several sets, but she had stepped on many of those and none had rolled over her prints. She turned and reopened the first cattle guard and looked for prints beyond it. The same confused pattern speckled that dirt. She pulled that gate closed again. Then she walked back up the section line, watching the house and the live oak on her left as long as she could.

She went back to Nan's. Two of her cousins were playing in the yard. She spoke to the girl. “Renee, did a wagon or car come by while I was in the back with your mama?”

“None that I noticed.” The child was flat faced and brown headed.

“But you'd see one, right? You were in the front yard most of the time?”

Renee held a stick in her right hand. Words she'd drawn in the dirt to teach her little brother to read were between her and Maud. “I guess so. That'd be hard to miss.”

The house sat so close on the line that dust was always a problem. There wasn't any noise in the bottoms beyond the buzz of insects, chicken arguments, cow complaints, and the sound of Mr. Singer's tractors. Lately, those hadn't been in any of the fields close around. Probably, a car or a wagon would've been heard by all. Maud said, “How 'bout a horse?”