The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (11 page)

Ruthie whimpered.

“We need to stop so I can feed her,” Hattie said.

“Now?”

“Soon.”

“We’re almost there. Can we wait?” Lawrence asked.

Ruthie’s whimper rose to a wail.

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

Lawrence pulled over to the shoulder of the road.

“Alright then,” Hattie said.

“Alright,” Lawrence replied.

“Well, I can’t …”

“Oh!” Lawrence climbed out of the car and stood next to it.

“Lawrence!”

“Oh!” he said again and walked a few paces down the highway.

He was angry. Was Hattie going to send him out of their rooms whenever Ruthie was hungry? He was sure that she had fed her other children in front of August. These were things a man and woman shared after a time.

“Hattie,” he said as he climbed back into the car when she’d finished, “there’s no reason I should have to walk to the next county every time you want to feed our daughter.”

As he spoke, Lawrence remembered his ex-wife getting up in the middle of the night to feed their daughter when she was a baby. She’d taken her out of her crib and brought her back to bed. In the light from the bedside lamp, Lawrence watched her unbutton her nightgown. Her breast flopped to the side like a bag of water. He saw the green veins under her skin. Delia put her nipple in the baby’s mouth. She reminded him of a possum or a sheep or some other teated thing. She never looked the same to him after that; even when she was dressed to go out for an evening, he would look at her and think of that huge lolling breast. Lawrence hoped that he was a better man now.

“Our daughter,” Hattie repeated.

Ruthie slept after her feeding. Lawrence hadn’t spent much time with her. She was usually sleeping during those few afternoons that Hattie was able to take her to see him. She might hold his gaze for a few seconds, then she’d nuzzle against his chest and fall asleep. August held her every night. August sang to her and rocked her. On the night that she was born, August smoked cigars and held her swaddled body. Lawrence got the news by telephone two days after the fact and didn’t see her until she was nine days old.

“She’s going to have a fine life,” Lawrence said, pulling onto the highway. “You’ll have a fine life, Ruthie. They’ll say, ‘There’s Ruthie, the prettiest girl in Baltimore’!”

A police siren wailed somewhere behind them. Hattie started and squeezed Ruthie so hard that the baby murmured in her sleep. Red and blue lights flashed across the highway and lit the trees along the shoulder of the road.

“State police,” Lawrence said.

He slowed and pulled to the side as the police car gained on them.

“What do they want?”

Hattie twisted to look out of the rear window. Her voice was shrill.

“Hattie?” Lawrence said. As the car passed, the siren wailed over his voice. Ruthie began to cry. Hattie bounced her nervously. Her shoulders shook when she hunched over to kiss Ruthie’s forehead.

“I thought … I thought they were coming for us,” she said.

“Hattie! Nobody’s coming, baby. Nobody’s coming. This is our daughter. We haven’t done anything to bring the law,” Lawrence said.

He put his arm around her shoulder.

“What am I doing here?” she said. “What am I doing here without my children?”

THE CHILDREN WEREN’T
just scared because Hattie was gone but because they were left alone with August. Out in the living room, his sons and daughters were shrill with hunger. He had been hiding in the kitchen for hours. “You all leave me be so I can think for a minute,” he’d said. None of them had come in to bother him, but it was nearly seven and by that hour, they’d usually eaten supper and put up the dishes.

Alice appeared in the doorway.

“Daddy?” she said.

“What, girl? I’m trying to set here in the quiet.”

“What are we going to do about Sunday school tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sunday sch—” It was the last thing August expected her to say. “Well, I guess y’all should go,” August said.

“I don’t have to. The littler ones do.”

“Well, then they should.”

“Their Sunday clothes aren’t clean.”

“So wash them.”

“There’s no soap. It’s Mother’s shopping day.”

“Use bath soap.”

“You can’t use bath soap! It doesn’t get stains out and makes the clothes all stiff.”

“Well, I guess they can be stiff for one Sunday.”

“Itchy, too.”

“Awww, Alice. I guess they ain’t going then.”

“Aunt Marion says if they don’t go, they’ll go to hell.”

“Alice, you like a woodpecker on my skull. They ain’t going to hell if they miss one Sunday.”

Alice folded her arms across her chest and stood up straight as a pole. August turned his back to her and bent to examine the contents of the icebox, though he’d been peering at the near empty shelves most of the afternoon. There wasn’t much: a little butter, a bowl of sliced peaches, some fatback. August hoped Alice would go back into the living room. Instead she crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Everybody’s hungry.”

“It’s Mother’s shopping day,” she repeated.

August was all set to ask her if she knew where Hattie kept the canned goods when Franklin started crying in the living room. August and Alice found him at the bottom of the stairs with a bloody lip and a lump coming up on one knee. Where the hell had the rest of them disappeared to while this boy was falling down the steps? Alice felt it necessary to tell August that Franklin could have broken his neck. As if August didn’t know these children were liable to kill themselves with their mama gone. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at the blood on Franklin’s face. He left a smear on the boy’s cheek, but all of his teeth were in his head and nothing seemed broken, so the three of them went back into the kitchen.

August said, as brightly as he could manage, “What y’all want for supper?”

Alice suggested they use the fatback to make a pot of string beans, but when August asked her to help him, she blanched.

“I don’t know how,” she said. “And besides we don’t have any string beans.”

“What you mean you don’t know how?”

“I mean I don’t know how.”

“What you been doing every evening of your life while your mama makes supper?”

Alice shrugged. “Homework,” she said.

“Your mama don’t teach y’all to cook?” August whistled between his teeth.

“You know she doesn’t like anybody in the kitchen.”

Hattie made it so nobody in that house knew how to do anything besides her. And worse, he hadn’t known that until this very moment. Must be a whole lot of stuff he didn’t know.

“Go on outta here and take Frank with you. And don’t lose sight of him. Next thing you know, he out the front door and running in traffic.”

After Alice left the room, August went through his pockets for change. Empty. That’s all right, he thought. Hattie kept a tin of emergency money—if this ain’t an emergency I don’t know what is—on the high shelf above the icebox. August pried off the lid. One penny sliding around in there on its own. He thought of places in the house where he might find money—his suit jackets or pants’ pockets, but he’d spent his last dime on cigarettes the night before. He could go into the living room and search under the seat cushions on the sofa. In front of all of his hungry children, he could rifle the furniture hoping for a couple of nickels.

“Floyd,” he yelled into the living room. “Floyd!”

August searched the kitchen drawers, just in case a coin had fallen behind the forks. That boy sure was taking his time. “Floyd!” he called again. August took the contents of the cabinets—a sack of flour and some salt and a bag of dried beans that would take hours to prepare even if August knew how to cook them—and set them on the counter as if they might magically combine into a meal for his children.

Floyd came in and leaned against the doorjamb.

“You wasn’t in hurry to get here, was you?” August’s tone was sharp.

“Alice said you were calling me,” he replied.

“Go round Aunt Marion’s and see if she cain’t come over here, or if she ain’t got some chicken cooked up or something. And don’t tell nobody,” August said. Floyd eyed his father and the bags of flour and salt, then left the room without a word. The noises from the living room were louder. August pondered the food on the countertop until his children’s shouting grew so urgent that he couldn’t ignore it anymore.

He charged into the living room to find Alice and Billups shoving each other. The children rushed at him as soon as he entered the room: Billups had pushed Alice, who was supposed to be watching Franklin, who had fallen again because nobody was paying him any mind. Where was supper? And did August know that Floyd went off somewhere even though he’s the oldest and grown and should be watching us? August looked from one face to another. Alice, her voice louder than the others, shouted, “Where’s Mother?”

The children fell silent.

August couldn’t think of a lie they would believe, so he settled for the first one that came to mind.

“She went round to help Aunt Marion because she ain’t feeling so good.”

“But Floyd just went … ,” Alice said.

August gave her a look like a knife in the chest. That shut her up. Bell was huddled on the window seat with her knees pulled up to her chin. She looked right at August and started to cry. Big, silent tears streamed down her cheeks, and he knew right then that she must have overheard something—you can’t hide anything from a house full of children. He should have done something for her but he couldn’t. He didn’t have it in him to look into those big eyes with all of that sadness in them. Lord, that was a sad child. August ignored her and felt like a coward.

“How come Mother took the baby with her?” Billups asked.

Bell looked at her father when he didn’t answer right away. She wiped her tears and said, “Because Margaret’s a little baby, and Mother has to feed her.”

“Why don’t you just tell us? If we aren’t going to have supper tonight,” Alice said.

“That’s how you talk to grown folks? I’ll slap you into yesterday!” August had never hit any of his children. The words sounded odd coming out of his mouth. Alice didn’t move. She didn’t even flinch. “You hear me? You hear what I’m saying!” August shouted. “I don’t want not one more word out of none of y’all. Shut up! All y’all shut up!”

August took the stairs two at a time and slammed the bedroom door behind him. He pulled the drawers out of the dresser and overturned them onto the floor. Surely Hattie had another stash of emergency money, a few dollar bills stuffed in a sock, maybe. He lifted the mattress and looked underneath. He pulled the shoeboxes from the closet and turned the pockets of Hattie’s dresses inside out. When he finished, every surface in the room was strewn with clothes and shoes, the pillows were on the floor, and the mattress was hanging off the box spring. August sat on the floor on a pile of Hattie’s slips. He rubbed his finger against the material and lifted it to his nose. It smelled like her: Murphy’s oil soap and butter and her skin. Lord Jesus Hattie, he thought, I never brought a woman home and I don’t do nothing other men don’t. And I ain’t never once gone away out of this house. I never would’ve. August threw her slip to the floor and stomped out of the room.

The scene in the living room had degenerated. Lord, but if Alice wasn’t her mother’s daughter, even down to her pursed lips and eyes full of accusations. The floor was littered with candy wrappers; the dish on the side table was empty. Franklin sat on the floor licking a butterscotch he held between his fingers. August had intended to tell them that there was no supper and he was sorry, but they’d have a good breakfast. And he was going to tell them that Hattie wouldn’t be back that night, so they wouldn’t keep staring at the front door. But he lost his nerve and stood silently in the middle of the room, his gazed fixed on the opposite wall so he wouldn’t have to look at them. They waited for him to speak, but August, head down, stepped around Franklin, made a wide circle around the couch where Alice sat and walked toward the dining room. “You all go on to bed,” he muttered.

August went outside and sat on the back step. The noises of the house came through the screen door. He heard Alice and Bell rounding the young ones up for bed. He smoked a couple of cigarettes. After the third, Bell called, “Mr. Greer’s at the door for you!” August squinted at his watch in the light coming through the screen door. Nine. Just the right time to leave for the nightclub.

“Tell him I ain’t coming.”

“He says he wants—”

“Send him on!”

August had planned to go to the Latin Casino that evening. The big band would play; he and his friends would dress sharp and hang out near the bar at the back of the club. After, they’d go to that juke where the bartender kept a stash of Tennessee corn liquor in a tub of ice. August didn’t drink much, but he liked the feel of the glass in his hand. He liked to sip at something over the course of the evening. Of course, he’d meet a woman who would make him laugh. She would dance with him until her shoulders were dewy with sweat. He’d see her home, give her a little kiss on the cheek, and leave her at her doorstep already primed for the next date. When he saw her again, he’d kiss her some more, and in this way a new affair would begin. These women didn’t mean anything. They just made his life a little more livable from one day to the next.