Pay the Piper (27 page)

“Kathleen, that woman who's Savano's secretary, brought in a carrot cake.”

“A carrot cake?”

“It had real carrots in it. It was delicious.”

“My goodness, a cake with real carrots in it. Why don't you go on and watch television while I cook.”

“Sallie always liked for me to be in the kitchen while she was fixing dinner.”

Sallie had a different personality and mentality. “Well, it gets on my nerves,” she told him, ending those moments.

Heading on toward the tennis court, she thought how Hal would never again farm, and looked back toward the big house, which had dwarfed them all standing there, with its great columns, screened porches, wide verandas, and the dark orchard overshadowing everything; Daddy looked so small going inside; Savano rode the shiny tractor that was like a Tootsie Toy. They had faced then their own house a stone's throw away through pecan trees, and it was nearly hidden by privet hedges flattened against the screened porch that ran across its front; because in the old farmhouse the windows were nearly as tall as the high ceilings, there was light. A tall privet hedge divided their house from a cabin next door where three blacks lived: Annie Mae cleaned for her; there was her sister Marcie, and Willie, who was Annie Mae's husband but father of the baby Marcie was soon to have. Nearly hidden by nondescript bushes, Pepper's cabin was in front of Annie Mae's. Along the highway, other blacks lived, not connected to the place. On down the highway, with a railroad paralleling it, lived her closest white neighbor, eight miles away. Just then, Hal had put his foot on the brake, crying, “What the hell is Field doing?” He had been cutting their grass for the last time of the season. Hal got out to explain. “You've got the belt on wrong. You're cutting the grass backwards.”

“I say.”

“Whoa!” he had been crying when they stopped. “I'm telling Mister Little Hal on you,” talking to the stubborn mower as once he talked to mules when he was a hostler. I wanted the old South, and I got part of it, she thought. Try not to let things she was not used to irk her. Daddy had promised any blacks who remained on Matagorda free houses as long as they wanted. Otherwise, they can go to town, Hal said, when she mentioned their living conditions. All Field required of her was a bottle of Dr. Tischnor's on the kitchen windowsill; he took a tablespoon a day for his dizzy spells. She begrudged him nothing. She used to be fearful finding him stretched out on a floor in the house, but found him so often she stepped over him now and stopped worrying about his being dead. In the kitchen, he endlessly wiped out an ashtray, reporting what happened beyond the kitchen window. “There go the sick wagon carrying Miss 'Cilia to the horsepital again,” he might remark; then she joined him. She needed diversion too. She again saw the sliver of white heading in and out among the old pecan trees. When Mama breathed strangely and could not wake up from her pills, they rushed her to the hospital. Then she would be contrite; no one ever spoke the truth about why she was there. A flu shot perhaps had not worked out with prescription medicine she was taking. When she arrived here, she so innocently had asked, “How many flu shots does Mama get?” It was too bad, she thought, there were doctors always to give a person like Mama what she wanted.

From this bedroom Laurel had looked out in amazement to see Mama running through the orchard and crossing the railroad track, flagging down Savano in his truck in front of the old commissary, where he stored seed. Daddy discovered her missing and was soon there. She had wanted Savano to take her to town for a flu shot. Another time, she came over to “borrow” Hal's truck to get to town herself but bogged down in mud outside Annie Mae's, and Willie escorted her home. Laurel had to think in amusement of Rick, longing for the grandparental relationship he read about in youthful books, the kindly old couple on their farm, spending the night at Daddy and Mama's. He woke to doors opening and closing, to Daddy whispering, “I knew you had some hidden. Where did you get them?” and to his warning her not to wake Rick. She was doing her best as a daughter-in-law. She had started down her own driveway to catch Mama that day and was soothing her by Savano's truck when Daddy arrived; he thanked her. Hal said Pris hoped Laurel would treat Mama better than his other wives had.

Every Friday Mama had her hair done. It was painful thinking of that last time she phoned about going out for oysters. There had been no reason for her to tell Mama she'd have to ask Hal, except her own ingrained Southern habit of being subservient to men. And she did try to be different from the way Hal described Sallie, and to build Hal up into being the man of the house, running the show. But my God, he was so passive. Her role model was William, and the comparison was not fair, she knew. She declined the invitation to that thin voice coming from across the orchard, heard for the last time the voice as faint as a star that never learned to shine.

Hal, too, was still haunted by his refusal. The night of the funeral he made hard love twice. She could not forget when the phone rang later that Friday, Daddy's own voice that sounded as if he was under the sea. “I couldn't save Priscilla this time,” he had said.

Mama died under the dryer; she would have hated dying with her hair in rollers. I would have, Laurel thought. Daddy as usual was waiting for her outside the shop. His parents' lives filled her again with a dreaded sense of future boredom with Hal; things were bad enough now. The beauty shop's owner said she and the girls had seen Miz MacDonald asleep under the dryer so many times; this time they knew something was different. Miss Millie put the bottoms of small match boxes over her customer's ears to protect them under the dryer. She called from her Golden Peacock Shop wanting to comb out Mama's hair. Laurel had to tell her, “That's been done by the funeral parlor.” Miss Millie began to cry. “It won't be right,” she had said. The funeral director had left a card with his slogan:
The Difficult We Do Right Away. The Impossible Takes a Little Longer
. The card had no longer seemed humorous, and she remembered shredding it. When she stood over Mama's gravesite in Delton, she told her silently, Mama, you lost the battle.

“People just don't understand. Priscilla and I were together so long,” Daddy had whispered. Comments must reach him, the kind his children made, who each said, “Daddy is a saint.” But she went on with her private feeling that Mama had something to suffer in her life's lot, too.

“One thing you can say about Priscilla,” Daddy had said. “She certainly knew how to run a house.”

Mama's ultimate compliment; Laurel cringed for her and for her epitaph. She sat at the funeral wondering what in the world Hal might say about her some day, fearing it would be something as far removed from what her life was really about.

When it was known Mrs. MacDonald had died, people flocked to the house bringing food. For weeks, notices came in the mail of monetary gifts to charities in her name. She and Pris set up a filing system and divided the work of answering four hundred letters of condolence, having to cross-index what else these people had offered, memorials, flowers, food. She still felt dizzy. The cortege in Delton had filled several city blocks. As she sat writing the letters, remembering the funeral, she wondered where all those people had been when Mama was alive, dying of loneliness. She wrote to names so important to her in the past, when she had been awed by country club members, and looked back to the night she first saw Hal MacDonald, and Clyde McCoy had been playing on a hotel's rooftop, and wondered who, back then, could have imagined she would end up as mistress of the legendary Matagorda, so lonely in its fading splendor.

When the house cleared of visitors after Mama died, a nephew of Daddy's was left. He was wearing a long overcoat from World War II down to his shoes. Camellias had been blooming at the back door. He said he was setting up a company to sell a detergent of his own invention, X-Cell. “It removes surface tension from water,” he said. “You can float a pin on it.” He asked Hal to be vice-president, and she sat with her blood running cold, she remembered. It was the first time she admitted the kind of faith she had in her husband. “Boogey,” she said behind Martin's departing back, relieved by Hal's refusal and complimenting him on how sweet he had been. Field had been emptying ashtrays. He spoke aloud to himself. “Freaks don't bring forth no fruit. God hates that.”

She could go on laughing. Streak of fat, streak of lean, she thought. The kind of salt pork her mother told her to cook with turnip greens. She thought that way about Hal's family; the members seemed made up of two streaks, sanity and insanity. She thought with a great deal more pride about the solid country folks who were her people, up in the hills: my stock, she told herself.

That day when Field was settled with the lawn mower, she said, “What is Annie Mae doing?” The girl had come out of her dim, raggedy house next door and run a few steps toward the highway.

Hal had laughed. “Jogging. Copying you. I saw her the other day.” Annie Mae had already gone home.

“She'll be playing tennis next,” she had said, her racquet between her knees. She was sorry about changing her own jogging route. She had liked running through the orchard and ending up coming past Annie Mae's. But early on a man's voice inside there cried, “Who does she think she is, a man?” And another voice she thought was Pepper's went, “Sssh.” She hadn't met Willie yet, since he worked in town. He did not come to her welcome-home party for Hal; she hadn't known anybody else to invite, so she asked all the blacks on the place. She had liked Carrie's throwing her apron to her face and crying, “This is a happy day!” Annie Mae had been sipping punch and said, “Willie say he sorry he can't come.” Laurel had thought, I'll bet, eyeing the privet hedge. She was much more aware of him in that house beyond it than if he had been in the room with her.

Jogging was not in vogue here for women, or not for women her age. There had never been a YWCA for sports, because blacks would have to be admitted. They outnumbered whites in the region. When she asked Hal his reactions to Africa, he'd said, I just felt at home. She went on laughing about dropping into a grocery on the highway one Friday evening when she first came. She suddenly realized she was the only white person in the store. God, she had thought, I'm in a black grocery and they're too polite to ask me to leave. Then suddenly she realized she was only in the Mississippi Delta and it was payday. A black woman customer had said, “I like that coat you're wearing.” She had thanked her and been about to say, I got it in Bloomingdale's, then remembered she had nobody black or white to talk to her about her former existence.

The threesome next door was inherited. Previously the girls' mother worked for Sallie. But Gertrude and her husband were members of the NAACP and moved to Chicago. Gertrude reported also her grandmother up there was dying, and the grandmother said she could not die till Gertrude got there. The couple were the kind of blacks she wanted to know. Gertrude came by obviously to give Hal's new wife the once-over before letting Annie Mae work for her. If she had known what was ahead, she would not have passed muster. She served Gertrude cucumber sandwiches and iced tea in the living room, and Carrie reported back, “Gertrude say you a nice white lady.” She inherited Gertrude's cretin daughters. How could they belong to those parents! She worried that her liberal's heart bled less. “Why don't you and Marcie go to Chicago?” she suggested, implying they ought to be with their mother. “Us don't like it up there,” Annie Mae said. Carrie was no help. “Up there you be a town mouse hiding from the cat. I rather stay home and be a country mouse eating cheese in peace,” she said.

Maybe Annie Mae wasn't supposed to know better than to polish a leather table with ammonia. “That's for the bathroom,” Laurel told her between clenched teeth; however, her old insecurities rose up, and she let her know if Annie Mae did not clean bathrooms, she would do it.

Often she was remorseful, looking around at furniture here, which she and William struggled so hard to buy, making Hal comfortable. He seemed to have been given most of what he had by Mama; now his furniture had departed with his wives. She did not take the pleasure she expected in her new pieces. She remembered hoping the MacDonalds would think what she had was nice enough. Her new things were bought with money William gave her in buying back the house he gave her in the divorce, which he'd been paying the mortgage on all along. That the down payment on their first house came from her money was not so much comfort. “I'm up to my ass in debt,” William said on one of their last encounters. She'd had the feeling he meant forever.

When Annie Mae came to clean, bringing large bundles of laundry from her own household, she felt she ought to be grateful she did her laundry and Hal's too. Marcie wouldn't stay alone in her old house, and she came along. Most of the day she slept across the kitchen table. Ought she offer the pregnant girl a bed? Field might be stretched out on the floor somewhere. Marcie had begun to watch TV, and she hadn't had the nerve to ask her to turn down the sound because she could hear it where she was writing. Typing, at least. What was she doing, except keeping to her old schedule? Her mind was fractured; too much had happened to her. Anyway, people had told her the South she had in mind was gone. But she had to come on and find out for herself. The sixties had ended while she waited for Hal in Connecticut. No longer was she comfortable going to the hills, poking about and listening, because everyone there knew who she'd married.

Hal had a coterie of friends who remained loyal. They gave a dinner party, which was her introduction to them. She looked back at that night, thinking of all she learned, so quickly. There had been the clean slate and Hal refused a drink. His farming and hunting buddies chided him as being ridiculous. A man asked her, “Why didn't Hal sleep with Sallie like everybody else? Why would he marry her?” And she realized Hal thought Sallie's sexiness enhanced him, and that he had looked like a fool to his friends.