Her Own Place (6 page)

Later in the winter Mae Lee and Hooker set out together to check on a used tractor. It was a cold, windy Saturday. Hooker slowed his truck for the ruts in the dirt road. “Church Granger said this tractor is a good buy. I don't guess he would steer me wrong,” Hooker said. “He never has before.”

Mae Lee didn't know what she was looking for when she walked around the tractor. She merely duplicated every look Hooker Jones made. Somehow she felt she should. She nodded her head in agreement when Hooker Jones told the seller he thought the asking price seemed right much, but she didn't like it when he added that he'd be hard pinched to pay that much. It was her money, she thought, not his, that was being paid out. The least he could have done was say it would be hard for her. She said nothing, however; Hooker was old enough to be her father. Perhaps it was best that she'd remained quiet. The seller knocked one hundred and fifty dollars off the asking price.

In the cold truck with a nonworking heater, Hooker was gleeful. “We've got us a tractor and it's a fine one. Hardly broke in. I didn't let on how good it is.”

Mae Lee pulled her scarf around her face. The cold air that blew in through the ill-fitting cardboard in the old pickup window chilled her to the bones. She was hungry. There would be nothing much for the Saturday supper, but she planned
a really good dinner for Sunday. It seemed to her that if she could just scrape together a good Sunday meal, Saturday night didn't matter so much.

Before Mae Lee opened her front door, the smell of fried pork chops greeted her, but inside there wasn't a scrap of food in sight. The kitchen was clean and warm. She had only to read her children's faces to know they were hiding something from her.

Nellie Grace pulled her mother to a chair and put her hands over her eyes. “Don't look, Mama.” Mae Lee didn't look, only listened to her children set the table and put out the food they'd hidden. When she opened her eyes she was truly shocked.

Her daughter Dallace had prepared her very first meal. She had cooked the food that Mae Lee had bought for Sunday dinner. She watched her son, Taylor, roll up his sleeves to his little elbows and wash his hands in a washpan on the wooden kitchen bench. “We didn't eat a bite of nothing all day long, Mama,” he said excitedly. “We just all pitched in and helped cook.” Mae Lee forced a weak smile and tried to appear happy. What the children didn't know was that they wouldn't be going over to their cousin Warren's house for dinner the next day. Not after what happened last Sunday, when Warren was away on duty and his wife Lou Esther had said what she said.

Last Sunday she'd done just like she'd done ever since her parents had gone—gathered up the children and headed for her cousin's house for Sunday dinner. Warren was what was called well-to-do. He wore his shoes shined, and a suit to
work. He had taken Mae Lee and her children under his wing. Even when he wasn't in the area, the Sunday dinner was prepared for her family by his wife, Lou Esther. It was tradition.

Mae Lee had always felt welcomed and right at home for the weekly dinner, until last Sunday when her cousin was away working and Taylor, her fourth oldest, had asked for another helping of food, a single piece of chicken. There had been a platter still piled with fried chicken and more on the stove, even after everyone was ready for dessert.

Mae Lee had said no. “One piece is enough,” she'd said.

“But I'm still hungry, Mama, bad hungry,” Taylor said.

The hunger of a growing boy was in his eyes, so she gave him another piece. Lou Esther made no attempt to hide her displeasure. Her husband was away, and she was free to speak her mind. Her remarks were cutting and unkind: “Children who are fathered by worthless men are the hungriest children in the world.”

Mae Lee didn't wait for her children to have the usual Sunday's two desserts, one of which was always a delicious nutmeg egg custard. Ignoring their pained, silent pleas not to have to miss dessert, she ushered them away from the table and straight out of the front door. As she marched her crying children home she made a sworn oath that she would never set her feet under Lou Esther's table for a meal for as long as she lived.

Now, the morning of the Sunday after the episode, Mae Lee stirred and sleepily opened her eyes. It was still half-dark outside. She reached out from under her warm layer of quilts
and fingered the source of the cold wet thing pressed against her face. It was her littlest girl's nose. Her face and hair were dotted with melting snowflakes.

“It's snowing, Mama, snowing like crazy,” Amberlee whispered excitedly. She slipped under the warm covers.

Mae Lee bolted upright. She had planned to be out of bed bright and early to gather a few turnips for dinner, before other farmers started passing her fields, going to church. Like her mama, so many of them felt it was a sin to harvest on the Sabbath. Now she would never find the turnips. It was probably just as well. Her children hated them anyway. She made a roaring fire in the fireplace and turned the oil circulator down. She needed to save oil. She scooped up the wild hickory nuts her son, Taylor, had hidden in the wood box and gave them to him to crack open and pick for brown sugar hickory-nut fritters.

By midafternoon, the children were hungry again. When the snow stopped, they begged to be allowed to go back to their cousin's house. They didn't say why; they didn't have to. Besides the food, there was a TV set at Warren's. Mae Lee felt regret over her rash vow. She shook her head sadly. Never cut off your tongue to spite your lips, she thought.

She was sifting the words of her vow through her mind again and again when Warren came to the door. He was not his usual self. “Well, what's the excuse?” Warren asked. “Dinner is almost on the table.” He looked at the empty wood box. “I'll bring in more firewood from the porch while you get the children ready.”

Mae Lee suddenly realized that her rash solemn vow not to
eat at Lou Esther's table again had not included her children. She had only spoken for herself. She had vowed, “As heaven is my witness,
I
will not set
my
foot under Lou Esther's table for Sunday dinner again”—nothing about her children. They were free to go.

She didn't have to lie to make an excuse for herself.

Dallace, her oldest, held her head high as her mama buttoned the top button on her coat. “Mama, tell Taylor not to eat up everything on the table this time. I hate it when Cousin Lou Esther's face turns into sour milk because he wants more chicken or something.”

Mae Lee dropped her head in shame when she saw that Warren, standing in the doorway, had heard. She wished he hadn't.

“Oh, good Lord,” he groaned, “so that was the fire that started the kettle to boil. I should have known Lou Esther said or did something. I still can't believe that my own cousin wouldn't at least tell me, though. Try to overlook Lou Esther, Mae Lee. You know how she is. She says things without thinking. She didn't mean no harm.”

Taylor looked at his mama. “They better hold my hands then, Mama, ‘cause I'm mighty hungry.”

His mama pulled him close. “Eat all you can hold, son, and tote home all you can't.” With a hug and the whisper “Eat, eat” to each one, she waved good-bye.

Afterward she scrounged for food in her kitchen. There had been more than enough for breakfast, even some leftovers. As always her son had been hungry, hungry, and had eaten every scrap of food in sight. Her mama had always said, “If there
is a hungry child, a mother's hunger pain leaves.” But Mae Lee's hunger pains were rising, increasing like the chill factor of winds that multiply the cold. She had a strong craving for fried chicken. It seemed that if it was Sunday, you should have fried chicken or fried something. They may not have had it during the weekdays, but nearly always for Sunday dinner. She thought briefly of her brood of young chickens in the small henhouse, feeding on cracked-corn mixture, warm in the dull glow of a smoky, slow-burning kerosene heater. All she had to fry was one of her biddies. The very thought of a fried biddy doused her taste for chicken. She glanced at the almost empty Coca-Cola jug in the kitchen corner. There was enough kerosene to last the night, but she'd have to head for the general store the next day. Monday was her day to deliver fresh eggs and shop for her week's groceries.

She made a batch of hot-water cornbread pancakes and loaded them down with homemade butter and sugarcane molasses. The homemade butter was from Mrs. Whitfield's house. After Starlight had died, she never owned another cow. She always got a week's supply of milk and butter in exchange for her children feeding and watering Mrs. Whitfield's cow. Her children wouldn't eat the butter at first; they claimed they saw her cat in the butter. Mae Lee told them cats didn't ever go near butter, but in the future Mae Lee made sure she was at Mrs. Whitfield's house from the time the butter-making started until she got her share. “I'll get the churn ready and churn the butter for you, Mrs. Whitfield,” Mae Lee would offer, and would then use the wooden press to make a fancy mold.

“Why, Mr. Whitfield is going to be tickled pink when he
sees this on the dinner table,” Mrs. Whitfield had said once. “Mae Lee, I know you always say you don't have time to cook for anybody but your family, but you don't suppose you'd have time to make up a fresh batch of those good buttermilk biscuits of yours? Daddy—” she paused and smiled, “that's what I call my husband sometimes—loves fresh buttermilk biscuits. But I can't seem to make good ones.” Her eyes saddened. “I actually can't make any kind at all, Mae Lee. My mother didn't cook. And ‘Cook' didn't want me fooling around in ‘her' kitchen, as she called it, when I was growing up.”

She sat nearby on a high stool while Mae Lee made the biscuits. She had a couple of dollar bills sticking out of the eyelet-trimmed pocket of her pink housedress. Mae Lee hoped they were for her. She was fresh out of sugar and coffee.

Mrs. Whitfield traced her fingers lightly across the smooth countertops. “My husband,” she began softly, “would be glad to pay you whatever you'd charge if you'd agree to come in the late afternoon just to cook.” When there was no immediate reply from Mae Lee, she hurriedly went on. “There would be no cleaning whatsoever. I just love to clean house.”

Mae Lee glanced about and thought to herself, If you love to clean so much, why in the world don't you do it?

“Even Daddy says you work too hard on that farm,” Mrs. Whitfield volunteered. “Farming the land is too hard for a woman—too hard.”

At least you won't ever have to do it, Mae Lee thought. Mr. Whitfield was the county solicitor, but everyone knew that she was the one with the money. Ellen Whitfield didn't want for anything.

Mae Lee rolled out the biscuit dough. Her body rocked as though the rolling pin needed an extra push. “Farming is not too hard when it's your farm, your land, Miss Ellen. You see, that farm is mine, so it's not too hard at all.”

She didn't offer Mae Lee the money in her pocket. Mae Lee had, after all, turned the cooking job down. Anyway, her butter was good, and she needed the milk for her children. In a small way, Mae Lee kind of thought that one reason why the Whitfields kept the cow was to make sure her children had milk.

Over a steaming hot cup of sassafras tea, Mae Lee envisioned what her children might be doing right now at her cousin's house. Maybe dinner wasn't ready when they got there. Perhaps they were sitting in the warm company room with the fancy doily-laden, deep wine velvet davenport, looking through Sears catalogs and watching TV. Lou Esther would most likely be in the same room, juicily licking her fingers to flip the catalog pages, sticking torn paper bag pieces between the pages to mark something she was sure to order. Mae Lee thought of the identical rose-colored butcher linen dresses they'd both ordered once. Looking through the wish-filled pages together, each had been careful to seem disinterested in the smoothly pleated skirt and rosy pearl buttons that fastened the simple top, lest the other decide, too, that it would be perfect for Sunday church. And that was exactly where they'd met, with their shocked faces greeting each other from opposite ends of the pew.

Her cousin's wife was probably getting up and down to make the few steps to the small kitchen to stir the trays of
homemade ice cream freezing in her Kelvinator, and taking her time to put dinner on the table, not in the least concerned that Mae Lee's poor children would be starving. With fresh snow on the ground it would be quicker to make snow cream. Her children probably would have preferred it. Eventually the food would be ready, however, and with Warren home that Sunday there would be plenty for them.

The following spring Mae Lee realized how very right her cousin had been about the need to hold on to what money she had. She had to write and ask her mama for some money for seed, plants, and fertilizer. She didn't tell her mama that she'd had old Hooker Jones plow up every foot of clear farmland and plant produce. She knew all too well that her mama would once again urge her to try and find some good man to marry before she wore herself out working. Her mama would also fuss that Hooker Jones was too old for such a heavy work load. Once the farm work was caught up, she and Hooker planned to sell the corn, beans, okra, tomatoes, watermelons, and other field-fresh vegetables from his pickup in the back lot behind downtown Main Street.

Then near the end of summer, poor Hooker's wife Maycie fell sick again and was unable to help gather the crop. Half the time Hooker had to take care of her, and when the cotton-picking season started Mae Lee was forced to help. As soon as she got her children off to school, she made a daily morning trip to the little house where she used to live to take food to Maycie, before heading to the cotton fields to pick.

The warm sunshine from the mid-October sun streamed
down through the clear skies. It was midafternoon. Mae Lee stood and stretched her aching back. She took off her sweater and tied it around her waist. She glanced at her half-empty burlap cotton poke. If she stuffed the cotton into it well, she wouldn't have to empty it until she reached the end of the long cotton row. Next year, she thought, I'll ask Hooker to shorten the cotton rows.