The Well and the Mine (15 page)

A big man, a head taller than me, Bill could smile and make you forget all about his size. That grin was part playing-hooky and part tying-the-cats-tails-together. And I thought that smile was one reason his businesses did right well—he had a furniture store, too. He carried good merchandise, priced fair, and he was an honest man. But mostly, everyone loved him. If the stacks of magazines and the fancy cakes didn’t get your feet to tapping, one great bellowed “How you?” from Bill would.

“Get ready for the cats to come,” I said.

He laughed, deep and slow, not one to rush amusement. The few boxes spread in front of him weren’t opened, and he held his pocketknife loose in one hand. “Good to see you, Albert. Been more than a week.”

We were in the back of the store, with my kids running wild in the front. They never got tired of coming—the girls’d kiss their uncle on the cheek, then head off to stare at the shelves. Shoes covered the left wall, next to bolts of cloth. Toward the back, cookies sat on shelves as long as two men put together. They were chocolate-covered; yellow-, red-, and green-iced with coconut topping; plain sugar; dipped in sprinkles. I could always find Virgie there. Tess would be by the soda cracker barrel, looking like she wanted to jump in, and Jack would be looking at knives.

“Leta keeps seein’ Merilyn in the daytime ’fore I’m back,” I said to my brother-in-law. “Finally decided I’d best come over here if I wanted to catch you.”

“Leta here?”

“At the house.”

He had a little piano for his daughter to play, and even though I didn’t have an eye for such things, I knew Merilyn’s dresses were at least a little more fashionable than Leta’s. Leta never mentioned it. I couldn’t have afforded a piano, but then again, my girls weren’t so musical, so I didn’t lose much sleep over it. His family had plenty, but he wasn’t la-tee-da. Lord, Walter Bank-head had built a house that cost $20,000 in Jasper. For that money, he better have contracted with God Almighty for streets paved with gold and some pearly white gates.

“Looks like you’re doin’ good business.”

Bill stopped moving altogether, his back still to me, and finally hung his head and let out a gust of breath. “Can’t make it another year at this rate. Gone have to close up.”

I wouldn’t have been more shocked if he’d told me at night he turned himself into a possum and hung from his tail. “That don’t make no sense. Not ten minutes goes by that somebody’s not gettin’ somethin’ rung up at the cash register.”

He ran a wide, wrinkled hand over his head. “They’re not payin’.”

I understood then, and I felt ashamed for begrudging him that piano. “How much you lettin’ everybody run up on credit?”

“Much as they need. I’m not gone tell somebody he can’t feed his children just because the mines are closin’ up.”

“How much you figure you’re owed?”

He ran his tongue over his teeth.

“You know I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ to nobody,” I said.

“Figure a few dozen owe me two or three hundred apiece. A few thousand altogether.”

“Merilyn knows you’re doin’ it,” I said, sure that she did.

“’Course. She’d string me up if I wasn’t. You see her turnin’ away a man trying to buy groceries?”

I didn’t bother to answer. “How bad is it?”

He shrugged. “Oh, it won’t mean no food on the table. We’re still better off than most. I’m plannin’ to close the furniture store next month—maybe hold on a little longer. General store here might make it to spring.”

“Can’t think of no way to help you.” Those kinds of numbers he was talking were too big to imagine. Any help I could give wouldn’t be much more than candy money for the kids.

“Nah—I wouldn’t ask you to. I shouldn’t have even brought it up, only it’s weighin’ heavy on me lately. It feels pretty good to say the words out loud.”

“Your family know?”

“Not the whole of it.”

“I’ll be prayin’ for y’all, hopin’ that things turn around.” Things turning around for him would mean things turning around for the whole town, of course, so there were plenty of prayers being directed along those lines even without me.

“It’ll all work out,” he said. “I got other ideas for what might come next.” His smile was back and his hands busy for the first time since he brought up the store. I knew he wanted me to ask about those other ideas of his, so I did, and he slit a couple more boxes without looking up.

“Not quite ready to say yet,” he said finally. Well, that lifted the mood. It was pure Bill Clark, leading and teasing like you would a horse with a sugar cube. He wanted me to press him for what was on his mind, and I wasn’t going to do it.

“Bill, you was born to torment people. I never seen anybody who liked to tell half a story and then just wait for people to froth at the mouth.”

“More likely I’m waitin’ for you to help me with these boxes.” He nodded toward a stack three boxes high lined up against the wall.

I shook my head at him, and crossed over behind his inventory-sorting table. He waved a hand toward a few medium-size cardboard boxes on one end, and we each bent down, knees cracking like dead leaves, and grabbed one.

“How’s Tess doin’?” he asked, shirt pulled tight across his back.

“Reckon she’s better.”

“Must’ve been hard on her. Merilyn told me she hadn’t quite shook the nightmares.”

“They’re better at least.” We set down our loads and went back for more.

“I ’member Merilyn always rubbed the girls’ ears when they had bad dreams. Swore it calmed them.”

“Leta’s done that. Gave her warm milk, too. Somethin’ must’ve took—ain’t heard her yellin’ or moanin’ lately.”

Bill always kept a notepad in his front pocket, tucked in with a blue fountain pen that sprang a leak fairly often. Wasn’t uncommon to see him with a bright white shirt, ironed smooth as a sheet of paper, and a blue stain oozing down his chest. I could see a blue speck already. After three boxes apiece, I stood back while he slit the top of one and started pulling out handfuls of white socks. His lips moved as he pulled out pair after pair, and soon he flipped open that notebook.

“Seventy-five pair,” he said. “Ought to be seventy-five more black ones.”

He opened the next box, big fingers prying the flaps apart after his knife did its job. “People might cut back on their bread or their coffee or even their shoes, but you just about got to buy some new socks pretty regular,” he said. Black socks piled up next to the white pile. “You know you was lucky the well is stream-fed so it didn’t go bad. This ain’t no time to have to be diggin’ a new well.”

I hadn’t spent much time thinking of it from that side. “You think somebody was hopin’ to turn the water?”

He glanced over, knife in hand. “Didn’t say that. Didn’t mean it, either. I don’t figure it means anything other than some woman lost her mind.”

“And in a month nobody around here’s noticed a crazy woman wanderin’ around missin’ a baby?”

“Even so.” The next box was jammed full of buttons. Looked like a rainbow got hammered to smithereens.

“Must be some reason they chose our house,” I tried again. I wouldn’t have minded hearing more than two words’ worth of thoughts.

“Nah. Don’t need to be a reason when a mind’s troubled.”

When I left to go collect the children from the front of the store, he was still sifting through rainbow bits. Funny, I thought during the few steps I had between leaving Bill and gathering up the kids, that he wasn’t more help filling in pieces to the puzzle. For a businessman, more education than me and more money, he didn’t seem to see much of a puzzle at all.

I headed on back home with the kids, dragging them away from the soda crackers and penny candy and the rows of buttons. They ran a little ahead of me most of the way, and I liked following their little footprints in the dust.

I smelled supper the minute I walked inside, and Leta must have heard the screen door creak, because she called as soon as I had both feet inside. Hot yeast rolls and thick slices of tomatoes and hunks of Vidalia and a pot of white beans and some fried squash. She’d outdone herself.

No man could have a better-looking bunch of kids. Sometimes sitting down to eat supper—even though Leta made fun of me for eating like somebody might snatch the plate away from me at any second—I’d forget to take a bite for looking at the children. I’d think all of a sudden that Tess’s hair was blacker than it used to be or that Jack didn’t used to have that many freckles on his nose or that Virgie had a way of chewing on her lip that reminded me of my mother. You’d think I’d have learned my own kids after all those years, but I was always finding something new. And the dinner table was about the only time I ever saw them all together and staying still.

There was something perfect about a spoon of thick heavy beans and a bite of sweet onion. That mix of hot and cold, soft and crisp. Leta was a great cook, good as any woman I’d ever known, but the real mystery was how she knew what should fit together, what mix of foods made the right mouthful. Beans and onion. Squash and tomato. It was the different tastes together, the ones that it didn’t make no sense at all to stick on the same fork, that your tongue really remembered.

6 Picking Cotton

Jack
IN 1934,
AFTER HE HAD TO CLOSE THE STORE, UNCLE
Bill ran for the state legislature and won. Toward the end of the Depression, he tracked down the addresses of miners who’d moved on, and he wrote more than fifty of them letters. They’d say, “Dear Tom: You owe me $375.00 for your grocery bill. If you’d pay me $150, I’ll be willing to cancel the debt.”

Just a short, simple letter with a different number and name on each.

I saw that list of names and addresses written out in Uncle Bill’s chicken scratch on lined sheets of Aunt Merilyn’s stationery. He typed the letters, and he kept the list of names to check through as he got back responses.

Some never wrote back. Some sent him five dollars at a time, saying they appreciated his understanding and would pay him back in installments. One man wrote, “You fed my family when they would have starved. I’ll pay you every cent I owe.” It took him five years, but he did.

That man was the only one who got a blue circle drawn around his name on Uncle Bill’s list. I’d see it every time I passed that sheet of paper tacked on Uncle Bill’s rolltop desk, right next to his Ships of the Navy calendar. I still remember his name, can still see it with the blue cutting through the top of the
t
’s: Norman Bett.

Uncle Bill would call out that name when he got a payment—“Here’s one from old Norman!”

I don’t know if there’s anyone left who knew Norman, who could pick him out in some faded, dog-eared picture that sat for too long in a shoe box or the bottom of a drawer. But his name is carved into my head, more than just a bunch of letters strung together.

His name hasn’t faded at all.

Mama’s sister Emmaline died at eighteen, and Aunt Merilyn named her youngest daughter for her. That daughter’s granddaughter named her youngest daughter Emmaline. When the family and friends packed into a tiny maternity-ward room in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2004, text-messaging the good news while they waited their turn to tug at the fingers of a dark-headed baby, they were also touching some part of a girl who died quietly on top of a handmade quilt in 1906.

Tess
WITH SCHOOL CLOSED FOR COTTON PICKING, WE USUALLY
helped out at the house, maybe walked up the mountain or took our time collecting the mail if we were lucky. Mama’d have plenty for me and Virgie to do—probably have us scrub the floors—and Jack would catch frogs or fish, something that wasn’t work. But we never picked cotton—it was hard work, Papa said, not for children, and the people living on the farm took care of it.

But in front of the fire, one night that fall, Papa crooked his finger at the three of us after he got our attention by whistling high and quick. We were sitting knee to knee not an arm’s length from the fireplace, heat sponges with heavy eyelids. (I wondered if being drunk was like being too close to the fire. I’d heard people say whiskey burned their throats. And when I went over to Marianne’s house one time, it turned out her father kept some homebrew in the butter churn on the porch and somehow it got knocked over and when Marianne and me went outside, the cat had gotten into the mess and was zigzagging all over the porch. It nearly hit the wall. I didn’t mention that to Mama and Papa. But that was how I felt when I tried to walk from the fire to bed. It seemed to me that sometimes the police might mistake somebody good and warm for being good and drunk.)

We all jerked at Papa’s whistle, and we started to spin around to face his chair. But he held his hand up and slid out of the rocker, his knees cracking as he eased down to the floor. He made a face.

“Y’all gone have to heft him up,” Mama said, not looking up from her mending.

“I’ll heft you,” said Jack right away, looking pleased to be eye to eye with Papa. Papa snatched him up and threw him over his shoulder, Jack laughing and wailing and kicking.

“How ’bout I heft you?”

I remembered Papa holding my wrists in one hand and Virgie’s in his other, lifting us off the ground ’til we were over his head. He could do it until we got off balance—down, up, ground, sky, Papa’s knees, Papa’s grin. He said he needed to get his exercise so he wouldn’t get tired and drop his shovel.

He set Jack on his feet, and Jack was as red as a sugar beet from the heat and the being upside down. “Listen here,” said Papa. “I’ve got a deal to make you. If y’all want to go pick cotton tomorrow, you can keep the money from whatever you pick. I’m gone help the Talberts, but we won’t be able to get it all. Last season a quarter of it sat there and rotted.”

“You don’t ever let us pick cotton,” said Virgie. Which all of us already knew, so I don’t know why she bothered saying it.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to try it once,” he said, looking at Mama.

“You can see what a day’s like for little girls and boys who do have to pick it,” she said.

She and Papa looked at each other and I hoped I could remember to ask Virgie later if she knew what that look meant.

“As much as we can pick?” asked Jack.

“Yep,” said Papa.

“We don’t know how,” I said.

“I’ll teach you,” he answered. “But we need to be out by six tomorrow.”

We never got to spend time with Papa alone. Sometimes he and Jack would work in the garden together, or maybe once a year he’d carry me or Virgie to town with nobody else in the car. But a whole day with Papa? I couldn’t remember one.

“So we’ll eat breakfast all together?” asked Virgie, half to herself.

“It’s up to your mama.” Papa had his hands on the seat of the rocker, heaving himself back to his feet.

“Sure will. Don’t see no reason not to,” Mama said. “If your papa’s not still on that floor.” She smiled a little, just a curve of her mouth. I about never saw Mama’s teeth.

Papa didn’t answer her, only gave one big push and snapped to his feet. He walked over to Mama’s chair as calm as you please and took her needle and sock from her hands. She managed to say, “What…?” before he pulled her to her feet, bent low, and tossed her over his shoulder.

“Albert Moore!” she shrieked. “I swannee, you deserve to be horsewhipped! Put me down!” She didn’t kick and pound on Papa’s back like Jack did, but she wiggled a little. Her braid twisted out of its ball and hung nearly to the floor. The bottoms of her feet were a strange sight from that angle, tiny, with dirty heels and toes and pale arches.

Me, Jack, and Virgie whooped and jumped up ourselves. We’d never seen Mama off the ground before. “Albert!” she called again. Then he turned and winked at us, bent down again, halfway sitting, and in one movement he pulled her into his arms, sat in her chair, and tugged her into his lap. She really started wriggling that time, tugging at his hands around her waist. “The children, Albert,” she said, her face pink.

“You can sit on his lap, Mama,” piped up Jack. “We don’t mind none.”

Mama huffed and stopped struggling. She gave that same half smile to Papa, and pretty soon he took his hands from around her waist, resting them on her hips. She was up like a shot, across the room before Papa even got out a laugh. His laugh was dry and deep, like the sound of rubbing your hand over his whiskers.

“Masher,” Mama said. She walked back over, looking like she’d bolt any second, making a circle around him to collect her sewing. He just leaned back and grinned. Socks and threaded needle in hand, Mama stopped and turned toward us, looked down at Papa, and ran her hand through his hair. For just one second, she left her still fingers there, but then she moved them quick, glaring down at him until he got out of her chair.

The next morning we headed out to the farm, walking instead of driving because it was bright and fine, even with the sun only beginning to peek out. The farm had sections of watermelon and corn, big chunks of land for them, but it was the cotton that was ripe for picking. Every plant had a very strict schedule.

Once we were in front of the cotton, it was almost all we could see—rows and rows of it, with the plain wood house and the dirt yard where the Talberts lived stuck there like an afterthought. I saw two hats—both straw and wide-brimmed—moving down the rows. Papa must’ve, too, because he hollered, “We’ll start on the far rows,” and with that, Mr. and Mrs. Talbert popped out from the cotton. Short and stubby, Mrs. Talbert looked like a mushroom with that hat.

“We’ll meet up with you somewhere near the middle,” yelled back Mr. Talbert. “Least I hope we do.”

That was all we said to them. Papa took us to the other side of the cotton field. He took hold of the first plant and pulled a stalk toward us. It was a cloud on a stick, a little dirty, but soft looking and puffy. It would be like picking a pillow. Papa explained how to pull the fluff out of the prickly boll, prying it out in one twist. He popped it in Jack’s sack, saying that one was for free. He assigned me and Jack to opposite sides of the same row and told Virgie to take the next one with him. I wished I was on the row with Papa. But then as soon as I had time to be jealous, he and Virgie were both back on our row.

“Take care and don’t get the brown part in with the cotton,” he said. “Shouldn’t be nothing but white when we take it to the gin.”

I’d wasted my time worrying about Virgie getting to spend more time with Papa than I did—he was off down their row, tossing cotton in his sack, before any of us had even opened our sacks.

“Y’all alright?” he called back. He picked so fast his hand was a blur.

“Yessir,” we all said, even though none of us had picked any. I wrapped my finger around my first boll. It didn’t feel a bit like a pillow; it was tough and sticky, and it fought to keep its piece of fuzz.

“Ouch,” said Jack next to me. “It bites.”

We went a few more feet, stooped and slow, wedging our fingertips under the cotton puffs and trying to get more softness than sticker. The sun hadn’t cleared the tops of the rows, and my fingers already felt raw. I checked for blood and didn’t see any. I heard rustling from Virgie’s row, but she didn’t say anything.

“Doin’ alright, Virgie?” I looked over, shoving the hair around my face back toward my ribbon.

“Tryin’ to get the hang of it.”

“My fingers hurt,” said Jack.

“We’ve hardly gotten past where we started,” I said. I stood up all the way and tried to retie my ribbon. “And my hair’s already coming apart. Virgie…”

She was knocking my hands away before I finished my sentence. She tied one tight pigtail, almost hurting my head. But I knew it would stay. “There,” she said. “And don’t look towards the end of the row. It only makes it go slower. Just look at one plant at a time. Then you’ll lose track.”

We went on like that, awkward and fumbling, until I finally did see a drop of blood on a piece of cotton. My fingers were bright red, tender, and scratched in several places. I felt proud. I stuck the bloody cotton on the finger that was dripping and pulled the ribbon out of my hair to tie it around the cotton. I couldn’t do all that work and stain the cotton.

The twigs and rocks cut into my knees even through my skirt, and my back ached.

“Virgie,” I called over the cotton. “Did I tell you about that woman at the revival?”

“Nuh-uh,” she said.

I stood up, but I could hear her still rustling, so I tried to pick while I talked. “This woman nobody knows came down front and cried and cried and when me and Aunt Merilyn went down there, she said she’d sinned and God shouldn’t love her anymore.”

“You went forward?”

“No, not like to repent. Aunt Merilyn went to comfort her, and I went with her. But doesn’t that sound sort of odd to you? Her talkin’ about God not lovin’ her?”

“Did you recognize her?”

“Well, no. But she was sittin’ down and I couldn’t tell much about her with her all hunched over.” I wiped my forehead, and a little shower of sweat rained down.

“Recognize her from what?” asked Jack, his sack of cotton forgotten. “From puttin’ that baby in our well?”

“Hush, Jack,” I said. “You’re too little to talk about this.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are. Quit interruptin’.”

“I want to know who did it,” he said.

“You’ll end up with lots more cotton than Tess will since she’s busy runnin’ her mouth,” said Virgie.

That made him smile, and he went back to picking.

“We don’t know her?” asked Virgie.

“Aunt Merilyn says she’s somebody’s sister from Brilliant.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense that she’d come to our well, then. Why would somebody we don’t know pick our well?”

We thought on that for a while. A gnat flew in my eye and I dug it out tangled in a little ball of sleep.

“She was passin’ by?” said Jack. Neither of us answered him, but I couldn’t think of a better answer.

“It can’t be her,” Virgie finally said. “That woman could have been upset at yellin’ at her little ones or havin’ some bad thought about her neighbor. Could be anything.”

I couldn’t argue with her, and I knew part of me just didn’t want to let go of the notion that the Well Woman wasn’t somebody we nodded at every day. Soon I stopped thinking about it and didn’t have nothing but cotton on my mind and in my hands and even in my mouth. The sun shone midmorning, and I still couldn’t seem to lose track of time. I’d never seen a slower-moving sun. We weren’t talking, only picking and stooping and tossing. I knew Negroes used to sing in the fields while they picked cotton. I couldn’t figure out why they’d do that. I didn’t feel a bit like singing. The back of my dress was wet with sweat. Jack’s hands were bleeding, I’d noticed. Virgie hadn’t seen. He had cotton wrapped around them as a bandage.

I stood and stretched, arching backward. Jack threw down his sack then, looking very serious. “I don’t think I’m much cut out for cotton picking,” he said.

“Baby,” I said.

He looked at his sack like he wanted to pick it up again, then stuck out his tongue at me. “You keep on going, then, smarty. You won’t have any fingers left.”

I looked at him and looked at my fingers. I’d have loved to prove him wrong, but then he’d get to sit and relax and cool off while I kept sweating and bleeding, and that didn’t seem fair at all.