The Three Miss Margarets (7 page)

“You know why Vashti and Nella left town.”

“Yes. What does that have to—”

“When you picked me up last night, you knew whose daughter I was.”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t lie!”

“For Christ’s sake, how could I—”

“My father is part of your story.”

“How the hell would I know you were John Merrick’s daughter?”

“So you do know about John Merrick!”

“Yes. But I didn’t know he was your father last night when I came here with you. That’s the truth.”

But it wasn’t the whole truth. There was something else . . . then she had it. She looked at the bookshelves. “This morning you weren’t planning on coming back, were you? You were just gonna take off. But then you went poking around my books and read my father’s name in the front.” He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. She remembered how happy—no, how flattered—she’d been that he’d come back with his goddamn coffee.

“Okay, I did look at your books,” he said. “I look in people’s medicine cabinets too. I read the mail upside down on my doctor’s desk—”

“Where did you go for coffee?”

“A place called McGee’s.”

“Did you ask Sammy McGee about me, or was his wife the one waiting tables?”

“Look—”

“Her name is Faith. She wears a red handkerchief fixed like a flower in her breast pocket.”

“I didn’t—”

“Never mind. I’ll get it from her.”

“I asked a couple of questions. It’s what I do. I ask questions.”

“You were going to use me.” She wanted to kill him. She couldn’t believe she’d been such a fool.

“And last night you were using me,” he said. “My guess would be to get back at Sheriff Billy Joe Bob—”

“Don’t change the subject. You came back here to get the dirt on my father—”

“I came back because I remembered you didn’t have a fucking car!” he shouted. He paused. “And because I wanted to ask you about your father.”

“Thank you! Now get out.”

“Look, I still have to drive you back to the bar.”

“I’ll get there on my own.”

“You’re a million miles from nowhere.”

“I’ll manage.” She hadn’t a clue how. But the idea of a twenty-minute drive with him was impossible. She snatched up her purse and stalked out. He came racing after her and grabbed her arm.

“Where are you going?”

She tried to back away; he held her even tighter. “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted.

They stood so close she could see the vein on the side of his temple beating. For a crazy minute she thought he might pull her down on the ground and start making love to her right there. Or she might pull him down. Or she might twist out of his grip and slap him hard. Or they might both laugh. They teetered on possibilities.

Then he dropped her arm and said, “To hell with it. Walk to town, I don’t give a shit.” And he got into his SUV and took off so fast he literally left her standing in a cloud of red clay dust. Which was another one of those things she thought only happened in bad fiction.

By the time she had walked halfway down the dirt road, Laurel was already regretting her grand gesture. It was a chilly morning, and she had the hike from hell ahead of her unless some kind soul picked her up. Which would be embarrassing, given the number of people who knew she’d left the Grill with the guy from New York. Furthermore, Hank would kill her if she was late for work again. Or, worse, fire her. Bad as her job was, she didn’t want to lose it. She tried to walk faster, but she’d forgotten to take her caffeine pills, so the headache that had been threatening all morning was beginning to kick in.

When she got to the highway, all the cop cars had cleared away. Ed and his troops had moved operations elsewhere. Josh was probably trying to find them so he could get all the gory details for his story. Well, lots of luck on that.

The highway traffic hadn’t started yet; it was too early. The good news was she wasn’t likely to run into anyone who knew her. The bad news was, she wasn’t likely to run into anyone who knew her and might offer her a lift. Damn Josh.

She heard a horn. Surprised, she looked up. No one used their horns in Charles Valley except the tourists. Denny was approaching in his old green pickup. He waved, drove past her, made a U-turn, and pulled up alongside her.

She climbed into the front seat gratefully. “Bless you. What are you doing out this way so early?”

“I went over to the bar to get a delivery and saw your car in the lot. Figured your date, not being a well-brought-up son of the South, might have left you stranded this morning.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Chapter Seven

L
I’L
B
IT WALKED ONTO HER PORCH
and looked out at the empty highway. She watched as Denny Larsen’s green pickup drove past her house, made a U-turn, and stopped. A girl had been walking along the side of the road, partially hidden from Li’l Bit’s view by the magnolias. Li’l Bit thought it was Laurel McCready, although that could have been her imagination. Laurel had been on her mind a lot lately, not that she would ever admit that to Maggie. The truck picked up the girl and drove off. The highway was deserted again.

Li’l Bit lowered herself into the old wooden rocker that had been built for her father and was strong enough to take her weight. The medical examiner had taken away his black-plastic-covered gurney. Soon he would be discovering answers she already knew, to questions she and Peggy and Maggie had agonized over months before. Then it would all be over. She looked at the porch swing Maggie still used every afternoon when she came over, even though she had to hoist herself up into it and her feet dangled above the floor. Peggy’s wicker chair was next to it, the seat padded and upholstered with a fabric of pink cabbage roses, the frame so fancy with Victorian curlicues it looked more like the work of a mad pastry chef than a chair.

How many times had she sat on this porch with people she loved sharing hot or cold beverages with, depending on the weather, and talking? Talk was her hobby, her sport of choice, her lifeline. Talk was what made her what she was.

“Different,” Maggie had said once. “We’re different.”

“Actually, we’re weird,” Peggy said.

Li’l Bit herself used the word
outsider.

But however you said it, it added up to the same thing. They were not like most people they knew.

T
HE SHAPING OF HER CHARACTER
had started here on the porch with her father, Harrison Banning III. She sat at his feet, absorbing his maverick’s passion for radical ideas and his loneliness. She had always been his girl. Mama was a great beauty, but highly strung and given to “moods.” At times, the mere sight of her oversized daughter could drive her to a frenzy. “Get out of my sight, you big clumsy thing!” she would scream. Then she would sob, “My baby, my poor little baby!” until Millie, the housekeeper, managed to coax her upstairs to bed and soothe her to sleep.

And Daddy would take Li’l Bit out on the porch and try to make it better by explaining that Mama didn’t mean to be hurtful, it was just that she’d never gotten over the loss of Li’l Bit’s older brother, who died before she was born. And Li’l Bit would try to believe him, even when she overheard Mama laughing with her friends and calling her “my child, the horse,” or “the Giantess.” Or when she moaned, “Why can’t you at least develop a sense of humor? A homely girl can be popular if she can make people laugh.” But Li’l Bit remained solemn and shy and unpopular—especially with kids her own age. Daddy said not to worry. “They’re ordinary and you’re special,” he said. “Wear their rejection as your red badge of courage, Li’l Bit.”

Mama rolled her eyes in exasperation and said, “Will you stop calling her that? Do you want to make her even more ridiculous than she is already?” But Li’l Bit understood that the pet name was her father’s way of trying to make her life right and she clung to it. Then Millie started calling her Miss Li’l Bit, others in town soon picked up on the name, and there was no going back.

Eventually she understood that her daddy was wrong. Mama
did
mean to be hurtful. Beth Banning was the kind of woman who didn’t like other females. The only way her daughter could have pleased her would have been by paying her the compliment of being exactly like her, which shy and clumsy Li’l Bit couldn’t do. Instead, she became her daddy’s lieutenant in the ever-escalating war that was her parents’ marriage.

When she got older, she realized her father had not played fair with her mother. When Harrison met Beth, she was an Atlanta girl. She had a substantial pedigree and an active social life her daddy could no longer afford, because he’d been a cotton broker and the market had crashed.

Young Beth agreed to marry the hayseed from Charles Valley because he was small-town royalty and, more important, thanks to the first Harrison Banning’s having invested heavily in Coca-Cola decades earlier, the family was still rich. She decided it was better to lord it over the yokels in a rural backwater than to continue dwindling in the city she loved. It came as an ugly surprise when she realized she had married not the town’s prince but its rebel.

Li’l Bit never knew exactly what it was that made her father cast himself in that role. It could have been the brutality of his own father, a pillar of the Church of God who spoke in tongues, parented through pain, and was an enthusiastic behind-the-scenes supporter of the Klan. It could have been the years Harrison spent in New York getting his law degree at Columbia. Whatever the reasons, Harrison Banning developed a lifelong antipathy to all forms of organized religion and became a member of the NAACP. Both stands were undertaken from heartfelt conviction. An added bonus in later life was the fact that they drove his wife crazy.

Li’l Bit’s mama threw temper tantrums and had sick headaches. She invoked her most powerful mantra: What-will-people-think-of-us? It didn’t even touch Harrison. Sunday mornings, while God-fearing people were in church, he sat on his porch reading the newspaper. And his sizable donations to the NAACP went out four times a year like clockwork.

Her father’s sympathies were well known in the Negro community, and to the extent that any white man was ever going to be trusted there, he probably was.

Negroes who were forced to deal with the white legal system went to Harrison as a matter of course. He kept their cases out of court, where they would have lost, and pulled strings when he could to get sentences reduced and fines rescinded. His greatest source of pride was his role in the battle to reopen the colored high school in Charles Valley. It took the elders of three Negro churches seven long years to get it reinstated. During that time, when they needed legal advice it was Harrison they called.

None of this made him popular in the white community. The men continued to do business with him because he was too rich and too good a lawyer to be ignored. But he was not welcomed as a dinner guest by their wives. Beth grew shrill and shrewish as she was forced into social limbo at his side. Harrison shrugged it off.

At night he sat on his front porch with his young daughter at his feet and talked about hearing Paul Robeson sing, the writings of Ida B. Wells, and William H. Hastie being appointed the first Negro federal judge. Li’l Bit learned to revere the NAACP and the Harlem Renaissance. She could recite Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” by heart. Her heroes were W.E.B. Du Bois and James Russell Lowell. And her daddy. With all her heart, she believed her daddy was the bravest man on earth. And as she grew into her teenage years, his courage made it easier to bear being the Giantess.

Then everything changed. It started on a bright Sunday morning when Millie’s oldest son, George, cut his arm almost to the bone mowing hay. He was bleeding so badly, there wasn’t time to go over to the next town, where the doctor was young and good and willing to treat colored folks. So Millie’s cousin Lottie ran to get old Doc Brewster, who everyone agreed was so prejudiced it was embarrassing. While Lottie banged on the back door of his house and screamed that a child was dying, the doctor told her to go home and come back on Monday. He wasn’t going to disrupt his Sunday dinner because some little jiggerboo had scratched himself. George bled to death while Millie and Lottie were trying to get a car to drive him to the next town. Later, Doc Brewster would explain he hadn’t taken the situation seriously because Negroes always got hysterical and gibbered over nothing.

The story was so ugly no one wanted to think about it. Folks liked Millie; she was hardworking and churchgoing and had a cross to bear putting up with Beth Banning. But old Doc was set in his ways, and it was unlikely that he would have had the skill to save Millie’s boy even if he had been willing to try. So people said it was too bad and forgot it.

Li’l Bit wanted to scream. A terrible thing had happened and they couldn’t just go on as if it hadn’t. She couldn’t make it better for Millie, but she wanted to make a statement, loud and clear, that not all whites were like Doc Brewster. She came up with an idea that was simple but bold. Mama would hate it, but she hadn’t cared for years what Mama thought. Daddy would see the rightness of it. They had talked for so long about equality for Negroes and human dignity, now there was something they could do.

Heart pounding, she broached the subject.

“You want to do what?” Mama screamed as predicted. Li’l Bit tuned her out like radio static and turned her attention on her father, knowing this was going to be their finest hour.

“Daddy, after the funeral for Millie’s George, I want to have the reception here at our house.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Mama yelled.

Li’l Bit kept her eyes on her father. “We’ll ask Millie and her family and all her friends to come here for lunch.”

“In my house? You want me to entertain Negroes in my house?” Mama’s voice was heading toward the stratosphere. Li’l Bit ignored her.

“We’ll make it pretty for them, Daddy. We’ll use the china and the silver, and I’ll put flowers on the table.” Mama was making inarticulate sounds of rage now, but Daddy was silent. “We have to show that we care, Daddy. We have to say to Millie and her family that what happened was wrong.”

Mama found speech again. “If you care about Millie, young lady, you won’t say a word about this to her. You won’t be that cruel.”

There was no way to ignore her anymore. She faced her mother.

“It’s not being cruel to want to do something for her.”

“You think she’d want your
reception
? You think she’d want any part of doing that to me?”

“This has nothing to do with you.”

“Millie would be mortified if she knew you were even thinking like this. She isn’t one of those uppity niggers you and your father are always talking about.”

Daddy never let anyone use that word in his house. Li’l Bit waited for him say something. But he stared blankly, as if he was in a dream, as Mama ranted on.

“I know what you’re up to. You want to drag poor Millie over here so you can prove a point. You want to show her how smart you are.”

“No!” But there was just enough truth in the words that tears started stinging her eyes.

“Because you’re a selfish mean girl and you always have been.”

The tears were spilling over now, running down her cheeks.

“You and your father giving yourself airs, thinking you’re better than everybody else. You’re nothing but a homely girl who can’t get a beau!”

Finally Daddy seemed to wake up. “Beth—” he began, but she drowned him out.

“This is what you’ve done to her!” she screamed at him. “You’ve turned her into a freak. Are you happy? This is the only child I’ve got left, and you’ve made her into a freak!” And she ran out, slamming the door behind her.

Minutes seemed to go by. Daddy was very still, staring at the closed door. Li’l Bit swallowed back her tears and went to him.

“She’s wrong,” she said. “I just wanted to do something—”

“I know, honey.”

“She’s wrong about Millie too.”

“No, honey, that’s where
you’re
wrong. Millie doesn’t need us to have a reception for her. She needs to grieve with her own kind.”

It was the first time she’d heard him say anything like that.

“Why don’t we ask her? At least she’d know we thought of it.”

“She’d think she had to come.”

“We’d tell her she didn’t.”

“Li’l Bit, leave it alone.”

“But if you just told her—”

“No.”

And then she realized. “You’re afraid she might say yes.”

“I don’t want to put her in an awkward position.”

“You don’t want to do it any more than Mama—”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Then why don’t we ask her, Daddy?”

“It would be a strain on her. She needs comfort now.”

“Let
her
tell us that.”

“I told you to leave it alone! Millie and her family wouldn’t know what to do if they were guests in our house.” He took a long pause, and then he said quietly, “And I wouldn’t know what to do either.”

He looked beaten. She wanted to throw her arms around him and tell him it was all right, she was sorry she ever had the idea, and he was still a brave good man. But then he said something that made it impossible.

“Your mother’s right,” he said.

That was what she couldn’t forgive.

In one way it wasn’t very significant. Life went on. Millie came back to work with an ache in her eyes that was hard to look at. But she still cooked and cleaned. She was still the only one who could soothe Mama when an evil spell hit. And Mama and Daddy continued their war.

But in another way everything changed. Li’l Bit and her father still sat on the porch and talked, but never again about Negro rights. Gone were the stories about Robeson and Ida B. Wells. Daddy tried to find other topics, she could see him racking his brain, but she didn’t want to tell him about the misery that was her school day. And the weather was good for only a few minutes. Soon, he began going inside early because it was too chilly, or too dark, or just because. Finally he stopped coming out on the porch altogether. So Li’l Bit, not knowing what else to do, sat out there alone.

She felt she’d lost everything. The feeling stayed in the core of her until the night so many decades later, in a situation that was so different and totally the same, when she had finally taken action the way she had wanted to when she was young and still believed all wrongs could be righted. When her daddy was her knight in shining armor.

L
I’L
B
IT SHIFTED IN HER CHAIR
. The mass of magnolia trees down by the highway had gotten so blurry she could barely make them out. She wiped her eyes angrily. She was old and silly, getting all watery-eyed about something that happened a million years ago. But of course she knew the tears weren’t just for old losses.