The Day of Small Things (14 page)

Mama’s angry voice is in my head, all jagged edges and hard words but, light as a whisper on the wind, Granny tells me that I must cross the river like John Goingsnake did and there I will find a place to keep me safe. There is a picture in my head of two sisters with dark hair and I know it’s them Granny Beck means.

(Least)

I
rise from Granny Beck’s grave and look around, saying a good-bye to this high place where the buds is just beginning to swell on the apple trees at the edge of the woods. I say good-bye to Granny Beck and leave her and the Quiet People—quiet but for Mama, whose anger hums and buzzes in my head all the way down the road till at last I come to the river and its roaring song drowns her out.

I have but one thought—to get away from them folks and that paper from the doctor that will keep me from ever having babies. I have left a note that says
GON TO MY BRUTHER
. So now they will know I ain’t ignorant and can take care of myself. Hard as times is, they’ll be glad not to have to take me in and I don’t believe none of them will try to find me.

Mama’s go-to-town clothes is big on me but I put them on, hoping to look right when I am among folks, and though I am barefoot, I have a pair of slippers in my poke to wear when I come to the bridge. I have a hat too,
the kind I have heard Lilah call a cloche. It comes down most over my eyes and puts me in mind of a bucket. But it should hide my face and the marks on it till I get across the river and find the place of safety Granny showed me in my mind—the house by the road where two dark-haired girls live.

I follow the path along the riverside till I come near to the bridge. There is a sight of folks on the road—wagons with horses or mules, folks afoot or riding—and I think it might be best to wait on crossing till not so many is there to take notice of me. So I find me a place to set, up in the woods above the road, where I can watch the people passing over the bridge and get accustomed to the idea of going out in the world.

Whilst I sit watching, an automobile comes just a-whirling down the twisty road on the other side, sending up a cloud of dust behind its wheels. It turns up the road to a big house that sits on a kind of bank a ways up above the railroad. In the papers and magazines Lilah sometimes brings for me to look at, I have seen pictures of automobiles with girls and young men riding in them, smoking cigarettes and laughing. Sometimes even, it would be a girl driving.

Two trains go by while I sit there, one going one way, and in a little while, another one coming the other way. Or maybe it is the same one and it got where it was going and turned around. Lilah has told me some about the trains and how you can pay money and get inside and ride on them to far-off places and I have seen them passing from across the river. Still, it is something new to watch them stop at the little gray house down by the tracks and see the people coming out or getting into the cars. Maybe someday,
after we are married, I think, me and Young David will ride on the train together.

I lean my back against the big old tree I am setting under and close my eyes. The stirring of the wind in the leaves makes me think of the times Granny Beck sung to me at night, soft and whispering so Mama wouldn’t hear. I try to make out the meaning in the sounds. Time was that the Little Things talked to me that way but they have been silent since the day Mama died.

The hoot of the train whistle wakes me and I open my eyes to see the red car at the end disappearing around a curve. It must not of stopped, for the little gray house is all shut up and there aren’t no people walking around. I don’t see no folks at all, only the red light of the setting sun shining off the windows of the house high up on the bank.

I study on that house for a minute. It is too big for any family I ever heard of and I wonder could it be the place Lilah told me about—the boardinghouse she worked at back when she was saving up for getting married. She said it weren’t far across the bridge and that she could walk home on her afternoons off.

“There’s two sisters runs it,” she told me, “but one of them got sick and had an operation so they hired me to help with the chores—just like what I do at home—cooking, cleaning, washing—but now I’m getting paid. They’re awful good to me. I have already bought sheets and towels and a twenty-five-piece bride’s set of Mirro brand aluminum cookware.”

Well, I think, I can cook and clean and wash. Reckon would they hire me? And I imagine me meeting Young David when he returns come winter, and showing him the
sheets and towels and the twenty-five-piece bride’s set of Mirro brand aluminum cookware.

It is by thinking of how proud my sweetheart will be that I am able to pull the hat onto my head and push my feet into the slippers and then head for that bridge, knowing full well all that I am leaving behind. The shoes make a slapping sound on the planks of the bridge and I stay in the middle after once looking over the side down to where the water dashes against the rocks and birds come flying out from the underside of the bridge. Looking down like that makes me feel all queer and discombobulated and I don’t do it a second time.

Over the railing and up the river a little ways, I see a tall gray, long-leggedy bird with a long sharp beak, standing on a rock in the river as still as if he is froze. Then all at once he gives a creaking cry, like a rusty old pump handle, spreads his great wings and flaps away, his legs trailing after him, up and up the river till my eyes can’t follow him no more. I watch a little longer, wishing I could go after him.

But I can’t. And I can’t go back, so I turn my face to the other side of the river. At the end of the bridge there is some more houses or some such. Maybe they are the stores that Mama talked of going to for they have big windows in the front with all kindly of things setting there. The front doors is closed, though I can see a light in the upstairs of the biggest store, the one made of red bricks.

Dark is coming on and I hasten up the road to the big house, hoping that this is the place Granny Beck told me to seek. I can’t hear her no more now that I’m across the bridge and it comes to me that I’ve left all that behind, on the other side of the river.

When I reach the end of the road, I stop to catch my
breath and look up at the house. And my heart jumps in my bosom for there, setting on the upstairs porch, is two dark-haired women. They have the reddest lips and the pinkest cheeks and their hair is hanging down in fancy curls. Both of them has on long coats of some bright shiny cloth; one is poison green and the other is bright yellow with red pictures of some kind on it. The women is smoking cigarettes and laughing, but when they catch sight of me, the one in green stands up and leans over the railing.

“Hiya, kiddo,” she calls down to me and I can smell a sweet smell like honeysuckle all mixed in with the cigarette smoke. “Are you looking for someone?” She picks a speck of tobacco from her tongue and flicks it off her fingertips while she waits for me to make an answer.

“I’m looking for work,” say I, keeping my face down. “Is this here place a boardinghouse?”

The two girls set in to giggling and then the green one speaks up. “I reckon you could call it that—though some don’t stay very long. What kind of work can you do?”

The other one says something real quiet-like and they both go to giggling again but I don’t pay no mind.

“I can cook and clean and do the wash,” I tell them, “milk a cow, tend a garden … all them things.”

They whisper back and forth and then the green one says, “You’ll have to talk to the boss when he gets back, but I believe he might have work for you. Tell me, kiddo, what’s your name?”

That stops me for a minute. I don’t want to tell it, lest folks from the other side of the river was to come looking for me. Then I look at the one in yellow and see that the red marking on her housecoat is some kind of fancy birds and I think too of the book about Baby Ray.

“My name is Redbird,” I tell them. “Redbird Ray.”

Redbird Ray

(Redbird)

T
he days and nights all run together in this place and I can’t keep track of how long it is I’ve been here. Every time a train passes and hoots out its lonesome whistle call, I tell myself I must find a way to leave—and the trains run six and seven times a day.

But then I think I’ll wait another week—the money is coming in and the dancing is like strong drink and me always wanting more. Besides, I am fearful of the questions that folk might ask if it was known who I am … and I am fearful of a reckoning to come. And, the boss has laid out money for my clothes and such and he’ll not let me leave.

Oh, sometimes I feel like the yard dog on his chain and sometimes that I am a rabbit in a snare, here in this house that never sleeps, where the hungry eyes of the traveling men follow me and the loud wild music and the dancing of a night swirl like blackbirds in my head, confusing my thoughts and wiping away memory. I can’t be Least anymore, but if Least is gone, who will meet up with Young David when the snow flies?

From the window of my room I look down to the train tracks, shining silver and curving out of sight, and watch the cars rolling by like long dusty snakes. Where they are in such a hurry to go, I can’t tell, no more than I can guess where the river ends up. It don’t matter for I dare not stray too far from this place—the river and the bridge and the road to Dark Holler and the burying ground. If I can hold out till winter, till Young David comes back, I’ll find a way. Even now, I watch every train that stops, watch the folks alighting to see if he might be amongst them. Every now and again there’s a tall man who, for a moment, makes me hold my breath in hope, but it’s never him.

The smoke and cinders of the locomotive have scorched the grass to either side of the silver rails. Nothing can grow there, but beyond the tracks grassy fields stretch down to the river and far to the right are the great heaped rocks the girls call the Injun Grave. I remember the story of John Goingsnake’s Nancy and I wonder if she lays there.

On the slope below my window stands a single apple tree, its branches bent low with greeny-yellow fruit. That apple tree helps me track the time—when its fruit is fallen and only a last few swiveled-up apples hang from the bare branches, I will know it’s time to go.

In the room next door, Lola and Francine are waking up and getting ready for the night. I never knew there was women like them but they have been good to me, in their way, and have kept the boss from bothering me. They say they don’t like the things they have to do but they don’t try to leave.

“It’s a bum life, kiddo,” said Francine, the first time I asked her if she liked laying with all those different men,
any who had the money to pay for her, “but you get used to it. Besides, times are tough—at least here I’m sure of three squares and a flop. And I can put some by—the boss don’t get it all. Me and Lo are saving our tips and in another year we’ll get away from Gudger’s Stand and buy us a little farm in another state where no one knows how we got our money. We’ll let on to be widowed sisters and we’ll pick up a nice place cheap at a bank sale and go to raising chickens and teaching Sunday school.”

She waved a little booklet with a tan cover at me. “This here government pamphlet explains how it works. With an initial investment of $150 and fifty White Leghorns …”

The evening I first come here, and told them my name was Redbird, them two women, Francine and Lola, come downstairs and talked to me a little more and Francine asked where was my home and how old was I. Some of what I told was the truth—that I didn’t have no people nearby and that I needed work. But I said that I was eighteen and that was a bald-faced lie for I’ll not be sixteen till October though my bosoms make me look like a woman. I told them that my sweetheart had gone off to work on the roads and that we wanted to marry but my mother was agin it.

“Are you in the family way?” Francine had asked right out, her eyes going to my belly. Francine is sharp as a tack and I was thankful I could tell her no, my period had come on me just the day before.

“But you’re on the run from someone, ain’t you?” and afore I could answer, she took my hand in hers. “Never you mind, Redbird; we’ll help you hide till your feller comes back.”

She looked at my shape again, drawing her eyebrows together till they made a V just at the top of her nose. It seemed like she was trying to make up her mind about something, but then Lola spoke up.

“No, Francie, not right off, anyway. Vergie’s short-handed in the kitchen and will be glad of a girl to help. Besides, look at her face.” And with that, Lola reached out and real gentle-like pulled off my hat.

Francine’s mouth fell open. “Good God almighty, Redbird Ray, what the hell happened to you?”

I knowed my face was still some swole and that the bruises and cuts, though healing, was ugly, for I had heard Lilah’s mama talking about how dreadful I looked. But I figured it was all to the good for hadn’t none of those folks back at the house seen me except with my face so awful-looking—and I thought that maybe when it went back to the way it had been, they’d never know me at all. And I had it planned what to say, if someone asked about my face, so I was ready.