The Sweet by and By (5 page)

“Mrs. Everett?” I move all my plastic bags into one hand and tap real light on the door frame. She does not look up at first. The phone startles her, and she answers, sort of pissed before she even says any- thing. I can tell from the way her nose is curled. It reminds me of Evelyn’s Pekingese, Miss Dolly, named after Dolly Parton of course, that she brings into the shop sometimes.

“Yes. Yes.” Ada Everett sounds impatient with whoever is on the other end. “I already told him we needed Dr. Hammond’s approval.” She rolls her eyes. “All right. Yes, please do.” I wait in the doorway. Her expression changes like turning on a light in a dark room. “Oh hi,” she says. “Rhonda, right? Yes. Welcome, Rhonda. Listen, you don’t really have time to sit down. I believe I showed you the salon, didn’t I?”

She is the most polite person I ever saw, even though she’s trying her best to push me out the door. It sort of scares me, that kind of cheerfulness. I don’t know why. You can’t be part of it. Like maybe she’s just had sex in a closet or something and is dying to tell somebody the secret, only the somebody ain’t me.

“I wanted to check in with you first, that’s all,” I say. “I remember the way.”

“Well that was kind of you dear, but you need to run on down there and get yourself organized. They’ll start lining up in the hall soon, and I know they’re all going to be so glad to see you. They’d much rather see you than me!” She laughs but it sounds like letting air out of a balloon in short spurts, a few short squeaks followed by a low sigh like she wore herself out.

I say, “Well I’ll go on then,” but I think, like hell they want to see me, they don’t even know me, and I don’t really want em to. I’m here for work, not to find a best friend. I already got one of those.

Outside the salon, there’s a line starting to form exactly like she said. This many heads means I’m gonna be here all day. Damn. A woman with a cane stands up on thin legs, but she looks strong. She’s

got a strong mouth, it shows from the way she sets her lips. Her hair has been taken care of, that much I can say. I can’t help it, I always notice hair, it’s one of the first things I see, man or woman.

“Excuse me,” she says. She is holding out her hand, and the veins make it look more blue than white. Pale blue like faded jeans against skin that looks like it ain’t never seen the sun. I shake her hand. I’ve never shaken hands with a woman before, and her skin feels like it’s barely hanging on the bones, saggy and thin. Her knuckles are big, she must have arthritis. She acts like she shakes hands with anybody in the world she takes a notion to, sorta proud and prissy together.

“I’m Margaret Clayton,” she says. “You must be the new hair girl.” This woman’s gonna make my life harder than it needs to be, I can tell. I don’t think I like her. I want to use some shampoo and scissors, collect the cash, and get out. In fact, I meant to tell Ada Everett that I

need to be paid in cash.

This old woman must be able to tell she’s rubbed me the wrong way. “I don’t mean any harm, honey, I call everybody a girl, doesn’t matter how old they are. I call that woman right over there a girl too. The girl who lives across the hall from me.”

She points to a woman only a few years younger than herself, clutching some kind of pillow to her chest. Maybe it’s an old doll. I think she’s talking to it. I’m thinking I’m gonna do just this one day since I’m already here, take the dab of money that goes along with it, and find me some other kind of job. Nobody told me there was crazy people in here. Just old people who can’t no longer take care of them- selves, that’s what the job notice said. Now I already see one crazy one, and there’s the one who’s standing in front of me who might not be crazy but is bound to be trouble, I can smell it. Hey, I don’t give a damn what people do as long as it don’t cramp my style none. Live and let live, that’s what I tell everybody.

“You waitin for a haircut?” I say. What a stupid thing to come out of my mouth seeing that we’re getting ready to go in a beauty shop.

“I do need one,” she answers. “Along with the rest of the state of North Carolina from the looks of it. Listen shug, you think you might be able to take my friend and me a little bit early? I know you don’t open for another half hour, but it sure would make my back feel better not to have to sit for so long, and my friend there, well she’s marching to the beat of her own drum, which right now, is a little tom-tom, but could turn into the timpani at any given moment if you know what I mean.”

“Timpani?” I say before I think. I don’t want her to know I don’t know what that is. She’s kind of fancy-acting for my taste.

She ain’t even fazed. “We’ve got to take advantage of the peace- ful moments. That’s true for all of us, don’t you think? What’s your name?”

“Rhonda.” I follow her into the salon and put on my apron. I reckon she thinks she’s gonna be first come hell or high water.

“I knew a Wanda once.” The woman sits herself down in the sham- poo chair and starts to lean her head back. Her friend, the crazy one, is lingering in the doorway without coming inside. “Bernice honey, come on in,” she says. “This is Wanda, come on and sit down. She’s the new hair girl.”

“Rhonda,” I say, but she doesn’t let on that she even hears me. What do I care if she knows my name, or if any of em know? They prob’ly can’t even remember what day it is or who’s the president.

“I’m going to stop talking, sugar, you just relax and do your work.” She closes her eyes. “You don’t have to worry about me distracting you for another second.”

“No problem,” I say, sort of automatic. The friend is sitting in a dryer chair, still whispering to her pillow with a face. I’m gonna get through today, that’s it. I’m not making any promises about next week. I’ve got a good six days to think about it, I’ll see how I feel then. This ain’t nothing but a trial run.

The warm water splashes my hands and the old woman’s forehead. I think she’s fast asleep with a smile on her face, but she surprises me.

“That feels divine. We are so glad you’re here, you have no idea,” she says. “Thank you for doing this, we know you don’t have to.”

I
don’t
have to, I think. But I’m here. My voice sounds softer. “I’m sorry, I forgot your name already.”

“Margaret, you call me Margaret. You’ll have plenty of time, honey, don’t worry. We’ll be here. That’s an understatement, right Bernice?”

Her friend laughs and says, “Fine, thank you, and you?”

ch a p t e r four

Margaret

O

ne of the ugliest things God put on this earth is a tobacco worm. I know this from direct experience, as does anybody

else who’s ever seen one, so I’m not being judgmental about a fellow creature. One of my first memories is of just such a nasty thing as that. I am five years old, sitting in gray dirt between rows of tall tobacco with the f lowers still on the plants, waiting to be topped. I am using a twig to poke at a big green worm with a pointed horn on its tail. It looks like a stinger, but it’s not. Tobacco worms won’t hurt you but they can sometimes be five inches long, and stepping on one barefooted in the summer is a disgusting mess. The workers have to pick them off the leaves by hand, they can’t just brush them off or shake them loose. They might as well be glued on. I am hiding in this field from my sister Catherine, called Callie, three years older than me, because I have stolen part of her stash of candy out of her underwear drawer where she hides it. Why she hides it there I don’t know because I always steal it. It looks like she’d have sense enough to move her treasure around, but some people would do exactly the same thing their whole life even if it were to kill them, which, depend- ing on what the thing is, it sometimes does. When she finds me I will throw the worm on her, which will ruin her by leaving her in tears, and me too, because Daddy will punish me by making me sit in the chicken coop. I hate it in there because it smells like

chicken shit, which should come as no surprise, but somehow is easy to forget until you find yourself sitting in the middle of it.

My daddy was the Reverend Reuben Driver Barclay. He owned several tobacco fields, all handed down to him by his own daddy who farmed his whole life. A couple of the bigger ones were near our house, but the rest were scattered patches of land all over John- ston County. Daddy was also a Baptist preacher, alternating Sundays between two or three churches. He had a man, Ardor Lee, who ran the farm and lived out in a shack way back on the edge of the field behind ours, but Daddy still went to the fields some part of every day. Ardor Lee didn’t have a wife or children, he was a loner. His hair was a mixture of gravy brown and whitish-gray, along with raggedy whiskers, you couldn’t really call it a beard, it was more like he only shaved once every two months. Callie said he wasn’t right in the head, not bad enough to be put away, but still not right. Mother said, “Ardor Lee may not be as bright as you girls seem to believe you are, but he works harder than either of you ever will, so don’t speak ill of him.” Mother always chose to think the best of people and wanted us to at least try and do the same.

The fact is Ardor Lee did not like us. We didn’t pay him any mind when we were little, but once we were older, he thought we were watching him all the time, and we were, because of his strange- ness. I often saw him talking to himself when he was harnessing a mule, having a full on conversation like he thought that animal could answer him back. Ardor Lee didn’t talk to any person much except Daddy. He might tell a field hand what to do, something Daddy had already told him, but not much beyond that. I never saw him say one word to Mother. He looked at the ground like he was scared of her, and my mother was the last person in the world anybody needed to be scared of unless they’d done something mighty bad. Ardor Lee did however yell at Callie and me if we even got close to his place. He’d been known to throw a rock at us too even though we never did

anything but look. His house only had one window and he couldn’t afford any curtains so it was wide-open all the time. Callie said one evening she looked in there and saw him with no clothes on and his hands on himself with his head back and eyes closed. She stepped on a dead pine branch that snapped and he saw her and yelled. I asked her if she told Daddy and she said no, didn’t I know what Ardor Lee was doing, because if I didn’t she sure wasn’t going to tell me. And I didn’t know exactly, but ever since then, he said things to scare us, like “Y’all girls better mind where you’re poking around, there’s a old woman lives in them woods who ate her baby, cooked him, and carved him up and ate him, and she’s liable to do the same to you.” If we told Daddy that Ardor Lee was trying to frighten us, Daddy said, “I don’t know why you all don’t leave that poor man in peace with all the work he’s got. He hasn’t got a soul in this world, and this farm is lucky to have him.”

I knew we were not poor. We didn’t have any money, nobody did, but even as a girl I could tell we had more than a lot of country people. My mother’s maiden name was Raynor. Her father owned and ran O. D. Raynor Dry Goods store and saved every penny he ever made, so when he died, Mother sold the store and hid away all that she got out of it, pretending like she never had it in the first place. Her father did not at first approve of her marrying my daddy. He didn’t envision his daughter as a farmer’s wife, the only reason he gave in was because Daddy was also a preacher and that meant he was more educated than most of the country boys that would be hanging around Mother. Education meant something to Mother’s daddy. Even though he didn’t have more than a few years himself, he could add numbers like they were going out of style when he was buying and selling in his store. Mother says sometimes he didn’t even write them down, he might look up at the ceiling for a minute and then come out and tell a customer what his total was.

My mother loved the land as much as she loved Daddy, she said she

had to be on it. She said she was never as happy as when her hands were in dirt. That’s what makes a woman born to be a farmer’s wife. Also being a preacher’s wife, she had to wash the dirt off herself every Saturday night and then, on Sunday morning, put on a long stiff dress and high boots, both of which suited her because she could have a kind of high and mighty way about her. Not that Mother looked down on people, far from it. I think it was her one aim in life to make folks feel like they all could do better if they only tried hard enough. My mother honestly believed that, and at times I saw that resolve as the hardest thing about her character, primarily because even as a young girl I knew that what she preached was simply not true. Some people try as hard as they are humanly able, and their lives never change at all. They are as empty-handed when they die as they were the whole time they were alive. Mother couldn’t abide it; she could not accept that people couldn’t rise above their lot in life with enough willpower, hard work, and faith.

When I got old enough, I worked every summer in one of Daddy’s fields. I never did the backbreaking work of priming, but I helped at the barns, handling sticks at first, then learning from the black ladies how to grab handfuls of tobacco and shake them, looping them with thick white string onto a stick so they could be hung up on the rafters of a tall barn to dry out. I loved to watch those women pull the to- bacco off the wooden sled when a mule sauntered up. They shook out their tobacco leaves like big fans in a rhythmic dance, and I tried to copy them but the leaves were huge and I shook so hard that I ended up dropping them all over the ground. The white women would have liked to scold me but they couldn’t cause it was my daddy’s farm, but the black women laughed out loud, especially the oldest one Glen- dolia, who had worked for my daddy’s family almost her whole life. “Child, your daddy ain’t gon have no crop left with you ’round here,” Glendolia said and then swatted me on my rear end with her kerchief. The men worked harder than any person was ever meant to. Bending

over pulling tobacco leaves, their hands covered in black gum that wouldn’t come off, under July and August sun that was like a fur- nace planted square on top of their heads. More than a few times, I saw grown men fall over in the field. Daddy insisted that Ardor Lee carry water around to everybody, but the sun was not interested in the frailty of us living down here. Its one purpose was to burn, and an eastern Carolina summer is still proof positive of that. I prayed at night for rain so the workers could have a day out of the fields, but it never rained during those summers, never ever. Daddy only stopped work once that I recall, when one of the primers had a heart attack. Daddy didn’t think the heart attack had anything to do with the heat, but he told everybody to go home anyway, he knew they’d all be thinking that it could have been any of them who died out there.