Paradise (14 page)

Anna Flood said, “See. Just look at him.”

She was watching Deek’s sedan circle the Oven and then cruise slowly past her store. “Why does he have to hover like that?”

Richard Misner looked up from the woodstove. “He’s just checking on things,” he said, and went back to laying the fire. “Got a right, doesn’t he? It’s sort of his town, wouldn’t you say? His and Steward’s?”

“I would not. They may act like they own it, but they don’t.”

Misner liked a tight fire, and the one he was preparing would be just that. “Well, they founded it, didn’t they?”

“Who’ve you been talking to?” Anna left the window and walked to the back stairs, leading to her apartment. There she slid a pan of meat leavings and cereal under the stairwell. The cat, turned vicious by motherhood, stared at her with warning eyes. “Fifteen families founded this town. Fifteen, not two. One was my father, another my uncle—”

“You know what I mean,” Misner interrupted her.

Anna peeped into the darkness trying to see inside the box where the litter lay. “I do not.”

“The money,” said Misner. “The Morgans had the money. I guess I should say they financed the town—not founded it.”

The cat would not eat while being watched, so Anna forfeited a peep at the kittens and turned back to Richard Misner. “You wrong there too. Everybody pitched in. The bank idea was just a way of doing it. Families bought shares in it, you know, instead of just making deposits they could run through any old time. This way their money was safe.”

Misner nodded and wiped his hands. He didn’t want another argument. Anna refused to understand the difference between investing and cooperating. Just as she refused to believe the woodstove gave more warmth than her little electric heater.

“The Morgans had the resources, that’s all,” she said. “From their father’s bank back in Haven. My grandfather, Able Flood, was his partner. Everybody called him Big Daddy, but his real name was—”

“I know, I know. Rector. Rector Morgan, also known as Big Daddy. Son of Zechariah Morgan, known throughout Christendom as Big Papa.” And then he quoted a refrain the citizens of Ruby loved to recite. “‘Rector’s bank failed, but he didn’t.’”

“It’s true. The bank had to close down—in the early forties—but it didn’t close out. I mean they had enough so we could start over. I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t honestly say it didn’t work. People prosper here. Everybody.”

“Everybody’s prospering on credit, Anna. That’s not the same thing.”

“So?”

“So what if the credit’s gone?”

“It can’t be gone. We own the bank; the bank doesn’t own us.”

“Aw, Anna. You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand.”

She enjoyed his face even when he was putting down people she liked. Steward, for example, he seemed to despise, but it was Steward who had taught her the scorpion lesson. When Anna was four, she was sitting on the new porch of her father’s store—back in 1954—when everybody was building something while a group of men including Steward were helping Ace Flood finish the shelving. They were inside, resting after a quick lunch, while Anna derailed ants on the steps: introducing obstacles into their routes, watching them climb over the leaf’s edge and go on as though a brand-new green mountain were an inevitable part of their journey. Suddenly a scorpion shot out near her bare foot, and she ran wide-eyed into the store. The talk stopped while the men weighed this infantile interruption, and it was Steward who picked her up in his arms, asked, What’s bothering you, good-lookin’? and relieved her fears. Anna clung to him while he explained that the scorpion’s tail was up because it was just as scared of her as she was of it. In Detroit, watching baby-faced police handling guns, she remembered the scorpion’s rigid tail. Once, she had asked Steward what it felt like to be a twin. “Can’t say,” he answered, “since I was never not one. But I guess it feels more complete.”

“Like you can never be lonely?” Anna asked.

“Well, yes. Like that. But more like…superior.”

When Ace died she came back to Ruby and was about to sell out—the store, the apartment, the car, everything—and return to Detroit, when he came riding into town, alone, in a beat-up Ford. Calvary’s new minister.

Anna folded her arms on the wooden counter. “I own this store. My daddy died—it’s mine. No rent. No mortgage. Just taxes, town fees. I buy things; I sell things; the markup is mine.”

“You’re lucky. What about the farms? Suppose a crop fails, say, two years in a row. Does old Mrs. Sands or Nathan DuPres get to take out their share? Borrow on it? Sell it to the bank? What?”

“I don’t know what they do, but I do know it’s no gain to the bank for them to lose it. So they’d give them money to buy more seed, guano, whatever.”

“You mean
lend
them the money.”

“You’re making my head ache. Where you come from, all that might be true. Ruby’s different.”

“Hope so.”

“Is so. Any problem brewing sure ain’t money.”

“Well, what is it then?”

“Hard to figure, but I don’t like the way Deek’s face looks when he’s checking the Oven. He does it every day God sends now. More like hunting than checking. They’re just kids.”

“That fist painting scared a lot of people.”

“Why? It was a picture! You’d think somebody had burned a cross!” Annoyed, she started wiping things—jars, case fronts, the soda pop cooler. “He should talk to the parents, not go hunting for the kids like he’s a sheriff. Kids need more than what’s here.”

Misner couldn’t agree more. Since the murder of Martin Luther King, new commitments had been sworn, laws introduced but most of it was decorative: statues, street names, speeches. It was as though something valuable had been pawned and the claim ticket lost. That was what Destry, Roy, Little Mirth and the rest were looking for. Maybe the fist painter was looking for it too. In any case, if they couldn’t find the ticket, they might break into the pawnshop. Question was, who pawned it in the first place and why.

“You told me that’s why you left—nothing to do—but you never said why you came back.”

Anna wasn’t about to explain all of that, so she elaborated on what he already knew. “Yeah. Well. Thought I could do something up north. Something real that wouldn’t break my heart. But it was all, I don’t know, talk, running around. I got confused. Still, I don’t regret going one bit—even though it didn’t work out.”

“Well, I’m glad it didn’t, whatever the reason.” He stroked her hand.

Anna returned his touch. “I’m worried,” she said. “About Billie Delia. We have to come up with something, Richard. Something more than choir competitions and Bible class and ribbons for fat vegetables and baby showers…”

“What about her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She came in here a while back, and I knew right away she had something on her mind, but the truck was late with my goods, so I was short with her.”

“Which is to say what?”

“She’s gone off. At least I think so. Nobody’s seen her.”

“What does her mother say?”

Anna shrugged. “Pat’s hard to talk to. Kate asked her about Billie Delia—hadn’t seen her at choir practice. Know what she did? Answered Kate’s question with another.” Anna mimicked Pat Best’s soft, cold voice. “‘Why do you need to know that?’ She and Kate are close, too.”

“You think she’s courting harm? She couldn’t just disappear without anybody knowing where to.”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“Talk to Roger. He should know. He’s her grandfather.”

“
You
ask him. Not me.”

“Say, what is all this feeling about Roger? I’ve been here three years, almost, and I can’t make out why folks freeze around him. Is it his mortuary business?”

“Probably. That and, well, he ‘prepared,’ if you get my meaning, his own wife.”

“Oh.”

“That’s something to think about, ain’t it?”

“Still.”

They were quiet for a moment, thinking about it. Then Anna walked around the counter and stood at the window. “You know, you right smart about weather. This is the third time I disbelieved you and was proved wrong.”

Misner joined her. Just touching the pane they could tell the temperature had dropped suddenly into the teens.

“Go ahead. Light it,” she said, laughing and happy to be wrong if it made this man she adored right. There were church women who disapproved of his obvious interest in her—her and nobody else. And Pat Best was skilled at hiding her own interest in him. But Anna thought there was more to it than perhaps their own plans for this handsome, intelligent man and their various daughters and nieces. She was certain the disapproval was mostly because of her unstraightened hair. My God, the conversations she had been forced to have when she came back from Detroit. Strange, silly, invasive probings. She felt as though they were discussing her pubic hair, her underarm hair. That if she had walked completely naked down the street they would have commented only on the hair on her head. The subject summoned more passion, invited more opinions, solicited more anger than that prostitute Menus brought home from Virginia. She probably would have straightened it again, eventually—it wasn’t a permanent change or a statement—except it clarified so much for her in the days when she was confused about so much else. Instantly she could identify friends and those who were not; recognize the well-brought-up, the ill-raised, the threatened, the insecure. Dovey Morgan liked it; Pat Best hated it; Deek and Steward shook their heads; Kate Golightly loved it and helped her keep it shaped; Reverend Pulliam preached a whole sermon about it; K.D. laughed at it; most of the young people admired it, except Arnette. Like a Geiger counter, her hair registered, she believed, tranquillity or the intensity of a rumbling, deep-down disorder.

The fire, smelling wonderfully, attracted the mother cat. She curled up behind the stove, though her eyes remained alert to predators—human or otherwise.

“Let me make some coffee,” Anna said, eyeing the clouds above Holy Redeemer. “This might get serious.”

Ace Flood’s faith had been the mountain-moving kind, so he built his store to last. Sandstone. Sturdier than some churches. Four rooms for his family above; below, a spacious storeroom, a tiny bedroom, and a fifteen-foot-high selling area crammed with shelves, bins, cases and drawers. The windows were regular house type—he didn’t want or need display; no big, wasteful “looking-in” plate glass for him. Let folks come inside to see what he had. He didn’t have many things but he had a lot of what he stocked. Before he died, he saw his store change from a necessary service in Ruby to a business patronized by the loyal for certain items, though they balked at his prices and more and more drove their trucks to Demby for cheaper (and better) supplies. Anna changed all that. What Ace’s Grocery now lacked in size of inventory it gained in variety and style. She offered free coffee on cold days, iced tea when it was hot. She put out two chairs and a small table for the elderly and those who drove in from farms and wanted to rest awhile. And since adults, nowadays, never frequented the Oven next to her store—except for special events—she catered to the appetites of the young who liked to gather there. She sold her own pies, made her own candy along with the lots she picked up in Demby. She kept three kinds of soda pop instead of one. Sometimes she sold the black-as-eight-rock peppers the Convent grew. She kept hog’s head cheese in the cooler, as her father had, along with local butter and salted pork. But canned goods, dried beans, coffee, sugar, syrup, baking soda, flour, salt, catsup, paper products—all the items nobody could or wanted to make at home—took up the space Ace Flood once used for cloth, work shoes, light tools, kerosene. Now Sargeant’s Feed and Seed sold the shoes, the tools, the kerosene, and Harper’s drugstore sold the needles, thread, counter medicine, prescriptions, sanitary napkins, stationery and tobacco. Except for Blue Boy. Steward had relied on Ace for that and wasn’t about to change his habits.

In Anna’s hands, Ace’s Grocery blossomed through variety, comfort and flexibility. Because she let Menus cut hair in the back on Saturdays, incidental purchases rose. Because she had a nice toilet downstairs, casual users felt obliged to become customers before they left. Farming women came in for peppermint after church; the men for sacks of raisins. Invariably they picked up a little something more from the shelves.

The contentment she drew from Richard’s fire made her smile. But she couldn’t be a minister’s wife. Never. Could she? Well, he had not asked her to be one—so enjoy the stove heat, the nape of his neck and the invisible presence of kittens.

After a while, a station wagon drove up and parked so close to the store, both Misner and Anna could see the fever in the baby’s blue eyes. The mother held the child over her shoulder and stroked its yellow hair. The driver, a city-dressed man in his forties, got out and pushed open Anna’s door.

“How you all doing?” He smiled.

“Fine, and you?”

“Look like I’m lost. Been trying to find eighteen west for more’n an hour.” He looked at Misner and grinned an apology for having violated the male rule of never asking for directions. “Wife made me stop. Said she’s had it.”

“It’s a ways back the way you come from,” said Misner, looking at the Arkansas plates, “but I can tell you how to find it.”

“’Preciate it. ’Preciate it,” said the man. “Don’t expect there’s a doctor around here, is there?”

“Not around these parts. You have to get to Demby for that.”

“What’s wrong with the baby?” Anna asked.

“Sort of pukey. Hot too. We’re fairly well supplied, but who’d pack aspirin or cough medicine on a little old trip like this? Can’t think of every damn thing, can you? Jesus.”

“Your baby coughing? I don’t believe you need cough medicine.” Anna squinted through the window. “Ask your wife to come in out the cold.”

“Drugstore’ll have aspirin,” said Misner.

“I didn’t see no drugstore. Where ’bouts is it?”

“You passed it, but it doesn’t look like a drugstore—looks like a regular house.”

“How am I going to find it then? Houses round here don’t seem to have numbers.”

“Tell me what all you want and I’ll get it for you. Then tell your wife to bring that baby inside.” Misner reached for his coat.