Family Linen (28 page)

Millard and I did this. We packed up a bag with things in it for the children and Fay and Elizabeth, and I went downtown and gathered up some things for myself, and Millard drove us all over to Buncoe and put us on the train going to Lynchburg, where Millard's aunt lived, this was Mrs. Edna Everhart. Edna Everhart had raised Millard and his two brothers and his sister, her and her husband by then deceased, so he thought a lot of her, and said she would be glad to help out. He had not seen her in years, and remembered her like an angel.

Well, this was not the case. In fact, she liked to not have took us in at all. I don't know what we would of done then! Millard called her on the long-distance telephone from Buncoe, after he put us all on the train, and told her we were on the way, and he said she squawked like a pulley hen. It seems that Edna Everhart had been as sweet as a saint in her middle years and then turned sour with age, as people sometimes will. But Millard said he was sending money, and said he was sending more than he'd planned to, to mollify her, so finally she said, all right. But she was not friendly at the outset and just about all she ever gave us to eat at first was hominy grits. She wouldn't let me cook, either, but later she got to like us and wanted me to fix her ham and red-eye gravy all the time. She'd dip snuff and listen to baseball on the radio. She was real interested in baseball, wouldn't hardly let you listen to the war news. So it was all right once we got there, we stayed for close onto four months, until Fay had the baby and Elizabeth got over her nervous breakdown.

Getting to Lynchburg, though, was something! I won't forget that trip as long as I live. Sybill and Arthur were real fretful, and anything you said to Sybill, you had to tell her dolly too, or she wouldn't do it. Fay was so excited about the train, she just loved it, and got up and walked back and forth, if you didn't watch her. She was real big. Elizabeth wore all black. She was playing it to the hilt by then, hard at work grieving. She sat and stared out the window at Virginia passing by, and cried real softly into one of a number of linen handkerchiefs she'd brought along for the purpose. She said her reputation was destroyed, and she was “ruined.” She wouldn't eat a thing. But Fay ate everything in sight, all the fried chicken we'd brought, and all the pies, and kept wanting me to buy her some more popcorn and Coca-Cola. Everybody on the whole train was looking at us. I'd walk out back on the platform from time to time, and smoke me a cigarette, and take a little nip of the bourbon Millard had poured into a bottle for me to bring. I thought we'd never get there.

But we did, and even if Edna Everhart herself took some softening up, her place was just about perfect for what we needed, some miles from town, with no close neighbors. All she said, to those that came by, was that she had decided to take in some boarders for the spring and early summer, and introduced us. We tried to keep Fay out of the way so Edna Everhart wouldn't have to introduce her too, and she didn't have to. As her time got closer and closer, Fay got sweet, and quieter. She used to sit for hours on Edna Everhart's back porch in the glider, with both hands on her stomach, feeling that baby move, and a smile spread out all over her face. This was a good time for me and Elizabeth too, we got on better than we ever had and Lord knows, than we did ever after. At first Elizabeth got all dressed up in black every day, and sat in a rocker in the front room and cried.

Now this cut no ice with Edna Everhart. “Why don't you get up and play hearts?” she said. Edna Everhart was wild for cards, and had not got to play any while her husband was alive, he was against it, so she wanted to play all the time.

But at first, the only thing Elizabeth would do was cry. Next, all she'd do was talk.

“Nettie,” she'd say, picking at my sleeve, “Nettie, listen here—” All the stories she told then were about how much Jewell Rife had loved her, and how fine a man he was, until by and by his leaving had turned into something fine and tragic that showed his “nobility,” which she called it, although she was real vague as to how all this worked. After we heard on the radio that the Nazis had invaded Denmark and Norway, and gone into France, it got even wilder, her saying that Jewell had gone off to Europe to get in the war, and then finally that he'd died in it, a hero.

Millard, who came over there to see us three times, said as far as he could tell, it didn't much matter what Elizabeth thought about where Jewell was. He had not showed back up at home, and nobody knew a thing, so Elizabeth's guess was as good as anybody's. Millard said everybody in town was buzzing with it, swearing that they weren't surprised a bit, and that they'd known all along it was coming. People will always say that, like it's important. Millard had put it out that Elizabeth had had to leave for a rest cure because she had had a nervous breakdown, and people said they had seen
that
coming, too. Millard said that the rest of us had just come along for the ride. Well, nobody questioned any of it, except to sympathize and ask, when were we coming back? Millard told them, when we were ready to. He said everybody felt real sorry for Elizabeth. She had a lot of friends in town there as I said, she was a well-known woman. Not a soul had heard from Jewell, or knew where he might be, and Mr. Bascom came by the flower shop one day to see Millard and cry like a baby, and say that he felt terrible, and it was all his fault. Well Millard set him straight on that, right away. But he was the best-hearted man, and he felt awful.

Then Mavis Lardner came to town, and came to see Millard too, which surprised him, since he really thought, as he said, in his heart of hearts, that Jewell had gone off with her. But it wasn't so. Jewell had told her a pack of lies, she said, all flattery and nonsense. He had let on like he wanted to go off with her
sometime
, and said his marriage was nothing but a social convenience, and said he'd take her to Florida. Florida! He told her to keep on working, where she worked there in Bristol, and save her money. But then it had been ever so long since he had come over there to see her, so she had called a friend of Jewell's up on the telephone, and found out that he had left town. Who was this friend? Millard asked, because several men that Millard didn't know had called up and asked for Jewell since he'd left, and wouldn't leave a message. Mavis wouldn't say.

Millard said she sat in the back of the flower shop smoking cigarettes, as mad as a wet hen, and thinking of what to do next. Finally she went in her purse and got out a little green chamois sack which turned out to have a big diamond ring in it, and tried to give the ring to Millard, for Elizabeth. “No, you keep it, honey,” Millard told her. Then Mavis got mad at
him
, and threw it across the flower shop and ran out the door crying. Everybody in there dived for the corner then, and set to searching, and directly the little Prince boy came up with it, and Millard gave him a quarter for it.

“And here it is,” Millard said, telling me all this on the back porch at Edna Everhart's house where Elizabeth and Edna were playing double solitaire.

“Let me see it,” said Elizabeth, throwing down her hand.

Millard stood up and gave it to her. Elizabeth took it and put it on her finger, and held up her hand. Elizabeth had real white hands with long skinny fingers, she used to call them artistic. Anyway, she put this ring on the ring finger of her right hand, and held it up, and turned it this way and that way in the sun. It was a dinner ring with one big round diamond set in the middle and little ones all around it. Fay came to stand behind her. “Pretty,” Fay said. The baby had dropped by then.

“Oh!” Elizabeth drew in all her breath in one great rattling sob, and took that ring off and put it in the green bag and just left it right there on the table, and ran upstairs and went to bed, and cried for the rest of the afternoon. Millard put the ring in his pocket, and later he put it in the bank in Elizabeth's safety deposit, and whatever has happened to it now, I couldn't tell you. Elizabeth, who turned against me later, never said. Anyway, she cried all that afternoon. Me and Millard took the kids and Edna Everhart for a ride in the car, and got everybody some ice cream in town, and Millard gave Edna the snuff he'd brought her, and the two rosebushes, which we planted for her in the side yard, and when the kids took their nap, we went out in the pine forest beyond the field and lay together on the soft pine needles, they smelled so nice. I cried hard that day when Millard left.

Because I liked it out at Edna Everhart's farm, for a fact I did, and when I think of those months now they seem slow, and blue somehow—you could see more of the sky, I reckon, the mountains being further off, and blue themselves. Elizabeth and me were close. At first she talked, as I said, and then she quit talking and cried—cried buckets. Now you'd think a woman wouldn't mourn a man the likes of Jewell Rife, but this is not true. She had loved him, and she mourned him, the way you'll mourn whatever it is you've gotten so attached to, no matter how bad it might be. Sometimes the worse it is, the more you'll mourn it. Be that as it may, this time passed too, and in late June, Fay had the baby.

Her water broke first thing in the morning, in the kitchen, and she stood there looking down at the floor not knowing what it was. I don't know if she would of come to tell us, or not. We were in there scrambling eggs. Elizabeth took her back to the bedroom and I lit out for town in Edna's old Ford, for the doctor. This was old Dr. Brown, Horace Brown, who was expecting me to come for him any day. We'd had him out there to see to Fay already. Edna knew him, and said he could keep his mouth shut. He was looking at somebody's throat, but when he finished that, he came on with me.

Now we had a hard time with Fay. She was scared, and couldn't understand, and kept trying to get up off the bed. She yelled so loud that Elizabeth had to take Sybill and Arthur and leave, it was scaring them. But it didn't take long, Fay was a strong, big girl, and here came the baby. Old Dr. Brown cut the cord and cleaned her off and looked her over good. She was fine. He had seen it all in his day, you couldn't surprise him none. He was real old. “Well,” he said, “this is one fine little baby, and I reckon you girls have figured out what you're going to do next.”

But the truth was, we hadn't. We had kind of been avoiding it. What I had thought was that me and Millard would take it to raise. But Elizabeth, in that way she had of thinking things so definite in her mind that it was like that's how they already were, had decided that baby would be hers, and she would raise it. She had it all set in her mind. Nothing I could say would sway her. I kept trying to talk to her about it until Dr. Brown ran us out of the bedroom, and then I kept trying to talk to her about it on the porch. I do pretty much as I please, and always have, but every time I have come up against Elizabeth, forget it. That's the long and short of it. Once she got something in her head, she couldn't hear a word you said. She wouldn't even argue with you. She just looked at you. Her eyes would go flat, and her mouth draw out tight in a thin little line.

She only said two things, which made me mad as fire because they made a crazy kind of sense. I had been saying how I had lost Lou, and wanted a baby. “Now Nettie,” she said, and her voice was pure reason, “I'm sure you and Millard will have your own children. Even if you don't, Millard has got three of his own already, which you took him away from, and that's enough. Furthermore, nobody in town has got any idea whether I might have been pregnant or not, when we left home, but nobody would believe that you were. You saw people all the time. And Millard would have told people by now, if you were.” Of course this was true, Millard being a talker.

“But this baby is Fay's,” I said. “Why can't we just say that, and I'm raising her?”

Elizabeth shook her head slightly, like she couldn't believe how stupid I was. “
Nettie
,” she said, very gently, “Nettie,
what would people think
?” I just stared at her, this being the very last thing in my mind.

“People are going to think whatever they're going to,” I said finally.

Edna Everhart was out there on the porch stringing beans and trying to listen to the ballgame. She kept turning the radio up. But Elizabeth had set her mouth in a line, she stood staring off at the mountains. I really let her have it, then. I asked her what she expected to live on, anyway, with no job and no husband and two children already, and most of her money gone, and said that she couldn't expect me and Millard to wait on her hand and foot for the rest of her life like we had been doing for the last four months. I asked her just who did she think she was.

“It's always money with you, isn't it, Nettie?” Elizabeth said. “I'm aware that my funds are somewhat depleted, of course. But I'll certainly be happy to pay you what I can for your services, if that's all you're interested in. I must say I'm surprised at you, however, although I suppose I shouldn't be.”

“
What
?” I hollered. Oh, I was mad!

“Girls, girls,” said old Dr. Brown, coming out.

“I wish all of you would just hush,” Edna Everhart said. “It's the bottom of the eighth, and DiMaggio hasn't got a thing off this Auker. He won't even get up again unless . . . ” She turned the radio up real loud.

Elizabeth said something I couldn't hear.

“What?” I said. I went closer.

“This will be my baby,” Elizabeth said. She looked at me steady then. “Because it is my right. You know who her father is.”

Now this was the one thing I never thought Elizabeth would say—and she never said it again, afterward—and it was the one thing I couldn't argue. She meant that this baby was part hers, because it was Jewell's, and since keeping it was the closest she could get to keeping him, she intended to do so. Some people are bound to hold on to what hurts them. The radio announcer said, “Rolfe moves off second . . . the first pitch to Joe . . . he lines it to left . . . Yes! Extra bases! Rolfe scores . . . the Yankee Clipper has stretched his hitting streak to thirty-eight consecutive games!” Edna Everhart banged on the arm of her chair. “Damn!” she said. Elizabeth sat down in the rocker and started to rock and fan.