The Future Has a Past (14 page)

Fred liked Vinnie with her nice face, neat hair and strong little body. She had good, nice long legs, but it looked like her calves had tennis balls in them. She had muscles because she was always walking to some job or bus stop. Fred courted Vinnie when he could catch her.

Vinnie didn’t want to have no truck with sex, protection or not, because she just didn’t want no more accidental babies for her shoulders to bear and now . . . they got all these new diseases and things . . . But that might be why he was stuck on her more than any of the other women that were trying to get him; church women, waitresses and barflys. All after him! Well, he had a house and they could eat chicken or fish and get their clothes clean too! If they could get him. But he didn’t fall for any of them. Leastways none nobody could see. But he was a man, so, you know, there was somebody somewhere. But it wasn’t in Vinnie’s face.

After a while, chasing her and not being able to catch her, he decided he wanted to marry her. But he didn’t want to marry any extra baggage like hanger-on grown-up kids. He didn’t like the way her children, grown children, treated her. He thought they used her, you might say. Vinnie and Fred argued about that a lot.

Fred would say, “That boy is grown . . . a man! Let’s make him get a part-time job at least, wherever he is. He isn’t in college! Let him work! He’ll appreciate life more and appreciate you more, too. Why does he let you suffer like you do? Killin yourself! You a fool for your kids, Vinnie!”

Vinnie didn’t want to hear that.

Then again, he would say, “Vinnie, baby, that daughter of yours is a good girl cause she is still in college, but she could get a part-time job and help herself some, too. She is young and strong and they have special jobs for college students. We can help her with her tuition for college, but all these extra expenses, extra things, they can both do without em. It will teach them to grow . . . be independent!”

But Vinnie didn’t want to hear that either. She kept thinking, “But I’m a mother. A mother! Those are my children.”

So.

One day he happened to lend some money to a man on a little Toyota that ran well. When Fred didn’t get paid back according to the agreement, he thought of Vinnie, whom he really cared about, always being tired. He signed the pink slip over to Vinnie, saying, “Here. Ride to your jobs and give your feet a rest.” With that he left off courting her . . . as close. Just stop by maybe once every week or two, or so. Some people are like that; if they give you something big enough they get mad at theirself and step back a ways for awhile.

Vinnie missed him. Now, Fred was mostly gone, there wasn’t even that tiny little bit of romance in her life that makes a person welcome each new day. She would just be in that house, alone, with that stack of money-order receipts. Or sit by her window, looking for her eagle. That eagle always lifted up her heart a little. It seemed to know just where it was going and just what it was doing.

Wynona lived on one side of Vinnie and Josephine lived on the other side. Josephine’s house was a little perkier, fresher, cleaner. Had a nice yard and garden that the owner, Josephine, worked in every day.

Josephine was a nice-looking forty-nine-year-old woman who had been married three times and had three divorces from which she had garnered enough money to end up buying her own home and a triplex she rented out and kept up. Oh, she was smart! She took care of herself!

She being nice-looking, there were gentlemen who came around to court her, but, somehow, they didn’t seem to last long.

But Josephine said that didn’t bother her. “I don’t need these rocks comin over here to weigh me down. They just lookin for a slave and a house! I ain’t cookin for no man, woman, chick or child. I got more sense than to marry me a job! Washin and cleanin up after somebody. No, Lord! I’m waitin for a rich man to come find me! Or a good strong man with two jobs or one real big job will do!”

Josephine dressed nice and kept her hair up and had professional manicures. She wore gloves in her garden and in her kitchen sink so her hands were nice with moderately long shapely nails.

She liked to entertain a little so she often gave ladies’ luncheons and invited a few church members and other friends of hers, including Vinnie when she wasn’t working, but seldom or never did she invite Wynona. “Them cats and that dog just follow her around. She full of animal hairs and cat hairs on my furniture just drive me crazy! And I don’t need any extra work. If I wanted to clean up pet hair I’d have a pet of my own, but my pet wouldn’t shed like that!”

The luncheon ladies would sit and talk gossip and admire Josephine’s house (which was why she invited them) and the new dresses or hats Josephine had, she always brought out to display.

Josephine was a smart woman, always had been, and she let everyone know. “My mother didn’t intend, and I don’t intend to grow up to be nobody’s fool!” Then she would describe what a fool some women could be for men, which instances included some of her friends sitting at that very table. She could go on and on about men and how well she knew them. “You ought to get rid of that man if he don’t know how to treat a woman!”

All her friends were not really friends, but she served a good lunch and you could catch up on the latest gossip. But Josephine thought she had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, which didn’t matter anyway because all she really wanted was an audience. As Wynona mentioned to Vinnie, “So . . . she buys the food, prepares it and cleans up after they are all gone, with her smart self. I’m tellin you, ain’t nobody gettin clean away in this world without it costin em somethin! She’s workin right on anyway!”

Josephine never had seen the eagle flying near her house. She seldom looked up.

Vinnie has to be the one to tell you about this because she knows all of it.

“Well, everybody was busy doing their own lives when all of a sudden two or three things happened around the same time.

“First, a lady, no, a woman moved into the neighborhood right across the street from me. The woman, whose name turned out to be Betha, I think, lived with her mother or her mother lived with her, anyway, they were together. Betha had a boyfriend named Tom or Dick or something. She was loud and you could hear her saying Dick all the time so everybody thought that was his name.

“They drank and partied a lot over there so Betha was usually high off that liquor. Didn’t take them but about fifteen minutes to move all their furniture in, but a few days later I saw them carry in a new phonograph player. A record player. Everybody in the neighborhood could hear that loud music all times of day and night. People shoutin out their blues and Betha screamin right along with em. Now, I love music, but there is a way to listen to it and keep it in your own house. We were all wonderin how to handle all the noise when something else became clear: when the music was turned off you could still hear all the screamin!

“You could hear her screamin at her mother when she wasn’t screamin at Dick. She was just a screamin, loud woman. Her mother was about seventy or eighty years old and that loud music must have driven her crazy. I thought back to my son’s drum-practicin and I knew what she was going through.

“Betha cussed her mother out somethin truly terrible too! I mean, she called that poor old lady, her own mother, bitches, M.F.’s (you know), ho’s and oh, all kinda bad, sick, dirty things! I would never dare talk like that to my mother, rest her soul. Never!

“Wynona would just cringe when she heard Betha screamin out bitches and all that other stuff at the old mother. She said, ‘I rather my kids not be round me than talk to me like that.’ Course her kids were not around Wynona very much at all anyway.

“Now, there was a little screened-in front porch that Betha brought the old mother out to sit in, rain or shine, wind and all. I would see her as I went back and forth to my jobs. Betha sat that old, sickly lady on a wooden chair that had most of the back wood-rest broken off. The old lady, her mother, leaned back, all day, on one board left on the sideback of that chair. I am not lyin! Was a old rickety table there and Betha shoved her mother’s food plate on it and with a bent fork, no knife, and a cloudy glass of water or soda pop; that was her meal. Tryin to sit up on a broken rickety chair and eat off a rockin table. No dozin off to sleep in that chair. That old lady never did seem to complain though. Scared to, I guess! She just sat there starin way off through that screen round the tree or two in their yard and off into the sky. I bet she sees my eagle sometimes. I love that ole eagle, but I bet that bird is after Wynona’s hens.

“Anyway, the old lady always had a nice, polite smile for you as you passed, even from across the street. It just made me and Wynona so sick and sad to see her treated like that, we felt like cryin. Josephine shook her head and said she was going to call the cops, no, the police. (Josephine is very proper in her speech.) But, no police ever came. Probably because Josephine didn’t call; I know she didn’t want Betha getting mad at her!

“I finally started walkin over to that side of the street when I came home from work and I would say a few soft kind words to the old lady, whose name, she told me, was ‘Mrs. Megalia Foster,’ so I called her Mrs. Foster and smiled and talked to her for a few minutes, through the screen, cause I didn’t want that big Betha comin out hollerin at me or the old lady. Chile, it was sad. I took to taking her a dish of dessert or a bowl of beans, rice and a big piece of buttered cornbread when I was cookin for myself between jobs and saw her out on the porch. Well I knew she would be out there because she just always was out there in all weather. Betha always came out then, smilin, and she would say, ‘I’m gonna put this away for Mama for later.’ I believe Betha ate it once it got inside the house, but I shouldn’t be so mean to think like that because it was her mother. Once I started goin over there takin food, Wynona started doin it too.

“Josephine put her hand on her hip and told us, ‘You all are fools! You better learn to stay out of other folks’ bizness!’

“I don’t know where I got the time from, but I looked around my house lookin for some chair that the old woman could sit on and rest her back. Wasn’t nothin there, so, later on, I went down to the secondhand furniture store and bought her, bought her!, a cheap, good, stuffed comfortable chair. And I don’t know where I scraped that money up from. Just looked through every little savin spot of mine and told the clerk why I was buyin the chair and we worked on the cost together. Plus, God is good.

“I was tryin to get it into my little car to take it to the old mother when Fred came along and so we met again. He was in his truck and he offered to carry it to her for me. He sometimes has a tender heart that will open for me.

“I got real nervous and fluttery when I saw Fred because I really like that man. More than like him. I love him. I miss him. I surely do. It has taken every ounce of strength I have to keep myself from callin him on his own phone he gave me. But, I’ll tell you more about that later.”

Wynona has to be the one to tell you this.

“When Fred drove up in his truck with that chair in the back of it, I was lookin out my window, as usual, cause I don’t have nothin much to do once I clean over my house in the mornins. Anyway, they put it on the porch with Betha’s smilin permission and sat Ms. Foster in it. The old mother just leaned back real slow as she smiled up at the people round her tryin to make her comfortable, but in that smile was a few tears. I was so glad to see Vinnie had done what she had done because Ms. Foster sat out there way late into the night sometime, two, three o’clock in the mornin hours. Don’t ask me how I know, I just know! I sit in my window a lot.

“Once Vinnie asked Betha if she could take the old mother to church of a Sunday and Betha smiled at her (she smiled at everybody but her mother, it seemed) and said ‘Yes.’ After the church meetin, Vinnie took Ms. Foster for a ride. The old mother was just as happy as she could be sittin there in that car goin somewhere! As they rode, they talked and Vinnie asked her, ‘Why does your daughter talk to you like she does?’

“Ms. Foster looked down into her lap as she folded that little raggedy handkerchief over and over again. She finally said, ‘I don’t know, chile. I didn’t raise her that a way. I am a church-goin, when I can, woman. A God-lovin and -fearin woman. Always was. My mother was too. I worked all my life . . . all my life. From the fields when I was a young girl, to the kitchens when I was married. At the hospital, where I was workin when I got sick, I was workin. I never in my life talked like my chile do.’

“Ms. Foster was quiet a minute, then she said, ‘Betha was named after my mother, who died eight months pregnant with her twelfth child while she was pullin sugarcane stalks. Bled to death fore they got help for her. My poor mama.’ Ms. Foster took a deep breath, then said, ‘Betha never did like school.’ She unfolded the handkerchief again, then proceeded to fold it up again. ‘I wanted her to get an educationer. Learn somethin. Do somethin . . . else. But . . . she hate school; she love boys better. I guess she never learned no new words to say cept them cuss words, so she just keep on sayin them old words she picked up in the streets and them juke joints.’

“The old mother began to cry silently then, tears rollin slowly over the hills and valleys of her worn face. Vinnie tried to drive the car and hug her at the same time, and couldn’t, so she pulled the car over and held her. Then as she wiped her tears with that folded handkerchief, Ms. Foster says, ‘I forgive her . . . cause she is mine. She all I got . . . cept a Security check . . . and she take that. I don’t care.’ Old mother Foster tried to pull herself together then, and sat up straight as she could. ‘I don’t care. I ain’t long for this here earth nohow. Death is my friend. For a long time now. I waits for him. God is good . . . He’ll make a end to that ole devil’s work.’

“I don’t know where she got the money from, she spends every dime she don’t need for bills on her grown children, but Vinnie took old mother Foster to have a good meal. She say she got the old mother to laugh now and again. So Ms. Foster had a good time. THAT day anyway.