The Well and the Mine (20 page)

“We know who we are,” said Lou Ellen, looking nervous, like they’d made a mistake in coming with us.

I was about done with being patient. And I’d noticed that Lou Ellen had a habit of holding her mouth open with her tongue, pointy and sharp, worrying the outside of her mouth. It made her look like a nervous animal.

“Just let me finish,” I said in a teacher voice, trying to ignore Lou Ellen’s wiggly tongue. The tip of it sliding on her upper lip, poking at the corners of her mouth. “Let’s start with the cotton. It could be clouds and we could be angels playing our harps in it or we could be birds flying in it or we could be building snowmen and have a snowball fight…or anything.”

“We could be boll weevils and eat it,” said Eddie.

You could tell he hadn’t never played pretend.

“No, that’s no good,” I said. “You got to think on it more than that. It’s not cotton, it’s something more…different.”

They all sat there for a while, looking at the cotton like it would shape itself into something all on its own. Then Lou Ellen said, “You ever seen where the creek runs fast over rocks and bubbles over?”

We nodded. “Well,” she kept on, “it could be fast water. The top of fast water and we could be the fish swimming in the current.”

We all thought that was a fine idea. So we flipped and wiggled upstream and downstream and Jack got caught by a hook and tossed hisself off the porch onto dry land. He lay there opening and closing his mouth until Eddie pretended to throw him back in the cotton-water.

Lou Ellen and me was swimming, flapping our tails and moving our fins a lot like we would flap our wings if we were chickens. As we floated in the water, her shirt got pulled up and I saw a long red mark on her side, rough and bubbly next to the rest of her pale skin.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked, pointing.

She looked down and tugged at her shirt, sliding off the bales. “I poured boiling water on me when I was little. Hit the pot handle and it dumped off the stove. Burned me good.”

“Wasn’t your mama watchin’ you?”

She gave me that look again that told me we spoke a different language. “She was workin’ with Papa. I was in charge of fixin’ supper.”

Then she fell back hard on the cotton, her skirt flying up along with her legs, flapping her arms to make a cotton angel. Her bloomers were made of flour sacks, too, and her shirt hitched up again to where I could see her puckered side.

“Papa has scars,” I said, words just falling out of my mouth. It hadn’t occurred to me kids, little girls, could get them. Scars came from piles of dirt and big chunks of wood falling on top of you or sharp things swinging and slicing. Dangerous dramatic things that didn’t happen to me.

“Yeah, my papa does, too,” she said. “You don’t got none?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Not one?”

I wanted to come up with one, something to match that cooked skin or the thick white stripe on Papa’s shoulder. I looked down, studying my feet and legs, moving up to my arms and hoping desperately for some new mark to jump out at me. Some sign of a big adventure I’d forgotten about. What I saw was the wide V left over from when I tripped and fell hard on a rock in the yard. Exactly in the middle of my arm, just below the crook of my elbow, it seemed no more strange than a freckle. I’d forgotten about the scream I’d let out when I hit the ground—I couldn’t remember why I’d been running in the first place—and how I nearly fell again trying to rush up the steps to find someone to fix me. I’d forgotten my arm dripped blood for a whole day, Mama leaning over me in the bed, checking on the bandage she’d wrapped around it and frowning deep lines into her forehead when she saw the cut was still seeping. Me thinking I might bleed on the bed and asking if I should sleep in a chair and Mama just brushing hair off my forehead and smiling.

I held out my arm to Lou Ellen and pointed. “I fell on a rock just out there by the steps,” I said.

She studied my arm more carefully than I’d studied her side, running one dirty finger over the mark.

“That’s nice,” she said. Her tongue was peeking out again, curling against her upper lip, and I thought, no, not like a nervous animal. She looked thoughtful, clever. Like a squirrel wanting to hide a pecan. Eyes blinking and whiskers twitching. “I like it.”

“It’s real small,” I said.

She jerked her head toward her side, then traced the shape of my scar again, nearly tickling me. More like a feather than a finger. “Yours is pretty,” she said. “It’s like how you draw birds in the sky.”

I took my time staring at my own arm, twisting it back and forth. She was right—if I’d fallen on a bunch of rocks, I could have a whole flock on my arm, little Vs trying to flap their way down to my wrist or up to my shoulder.

“Lemme see yours again,” I said. But this time she looked nervous, embarrassed. “Please,” I threw in.

She moved her hand to her shirt, but she didn’t lift it at all. “Just one look,” I said in what I thought was a sweet voice. Mama called it my whining voice, and the only thing it ever got me with Virgie was a quick hair pull.

But it worked on Lou Ellen. She tugged her shirt up a few inches and I got another look at her scar. Tough and raised and still angry, not looking like a thing of the past at all.

“It doesn’t hurt?” I asked.

She shook her head. “You can touch it.”

So I did, and it was no warmer than my finger. Not slippery or slimy or dry like a snake skin. It felt more like the seat of a car than it did a girl. It didn’t feel alive. It felt different from anything I’d ever touched, and I wanted to snatch my hand away at the same time I wanted to keep it there for as long as she’d let me. But I gave it one more poke with the pad of my finger and laid my hands back behind me on the porch.

“Nobody else has one like that, I bet,” I said. “I never seen one.”

She put her shirt down. “You think it’s ugly?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t. “I think it looks like a ribbon. Not a silk one, but one of those wrinkly kinds of ribbons. Taffeta or something.”

She shrugged and turned her face away so I couldn’t see if she was pleased or not. I waited to see if she wanted me to explain more about the kind of ribbon, but she didn’t ask.

We went back to playing.

With the last bits of sun slinking off and the moon already settled in the sky, only Lou Ellen and me were left, sitting with our feet dangling. The cotton was a cliff that touched the clouds and the dirt daubers buzzing around the roof were eagles and the porch floor was a fiery pit where you’d burn to a crisp if you fell. Jack had got mad when he burned to a crisp, so he and Eddie had stomped off.

“This was real fun,” Lou Ellen said. “Thank you for invitin’ us. But Mama’ll be worried if we don’t get home soon.”

“Is it just you and Eddie at home?” I thought it was odd that I hadn’t seen any other kids around the place.

“Oh, I got four older brothers—all grown and left now. Just us two still there. Plus my granny. She’s been with us since Granddaddy died. And my aunt Lou. She moved in this summer.”

“How come?” I couldn’t see Aunt Celia or Aunt Merilyn up and deciding to move in with us.

“Don’t know. She used to live with my granny, and Granny moved in with us after Granddaddy died. That was a while back. But Aunt Lou—they named me for her—stayed at the old family place until this summer.”

“My aunt Celia lives with my grandma. How come your granny didn’t stay with your aunt Lou?”

“Mama says she likes grandkids bein’ around. Papa says Aunt Lou’s a trial for one person to deal with.”

“Is she a trial?” I wondered just what that involved.

Lou Ellen shrugged. “Well, Granny got my bed and Aunt Lou got Eddie’s, so she might be a trial to him. And she is pretty high-strung. At the funeral for my granddaddy, my uncles had to carry her out she was crying so much.”

“Did you know him much?” I asked her.

“Visited him some. Why?”

“I ain’t never known anybody to die, not somebody I really knew. We go to the cemetery to see my grandma and grandpa on my mama’s side, but they’ve been dead as long as I’ve known ’em.”

“Known plenty dead, but not in the cemetery,” Lou Ellen said.

“Where else would they be?”

“If you ain’t got money to bury one in the cemetery, you bury it in the backyard,” she said. “Mama’s done buried three out there.”

“Three bodies?”

“Babies. Two of them born blue. One from crib death.”

She kept kicking her feet against the bales like it was normal to have babies lying in the backyard. Normal to have death coming up with the grass, up with the sun, up with the water bucket.

Albert
THE RACKET FROM THE CHILDREN PLAYING—SHRIEKS
and giggling and loud thumps that made me listen close for crying—had died down. I didn’t know who all Tess and Jack had roped into coming over, but the house shook from the silliness. But I hadn’t wanted to deal with it, hadn’t wanted to quiet them or run them off. Not when it was easier to just hide out on the back porch. And stand by Tess’s well. She never sat out back anymore, not after all the years we’d had to track her down and pull her away, all turned-down mouth and pitiful voice, from the quiet back here.

I could see why she liked it. You could be alone out back. Leaning against the railing, the wood rough under my hands, I could hear Jack and some other boy whooping around the yard up front, and I could hear Leta clattering in the kitchen—even her clattering seemed steady and purposeful—but I was apart from it. Still caked with the day’s work, my shirt stiff with dried sweat, legs complaining under me. But I didn’t want to wash up, didn’t want to sit down, didn’t want to wrap my arms around anyone. Not yet.

What I really wanted to do was have Jonah over for supper and then sit out on the porch and talk. See if he thought Bill Clark made any sense about somebody aiming to turn our water. See if he thought I should just leave the whole thing be, put it out of my mind. I thought I might should.

Bill had a colored man living next door to him for years before the mines started closing and the man moved to Detroit. Nobody said anything about it. No fuss or whispering or funny looks. So that’s what I planned on—I’d see if Jonah would come sit a spell.

I listened to crickets and felt the air cool and still didn’t go inside.

“Papa?”

I looked down and saw Tess at my hip. “If you’d been a snake, you’d’ve bitten me,” I said.

She snapped her little teeth at me, an old joke. “What you doin’ out here, Papa?”

“Just thinkin’.” I ran a hand over her mess of hair, slowly, and it sprang back up as soon as it got free.

“Why are you thinkin’?”

I laughed at that. “Don’t insult your papa. I think plenty.”

“I know that,” she said, little Leta wrinkles in her forehead. “But what’re you thinkin’?”

She seemed as good an audience as any. I tried out the words aloud.

“About havin’ Mr. Benton over. Thinkin’ on invitin’ him to supper some night.”

She nodded like we always sat out on the porch and talked about our plans. “I invited the Talberts over to play in the cotton,” she said, satisfied-like.

That surprised me, but I just asked, “Did y’all have a nice time?”

“Yessir. They was nice. And they’d never played in cotton.”

“Never?”

“No, sir. I had to explain it.”

“They gone on home?”

“Yessir.”

“Why’d you think to ask them?”

“Just thought it’d be nice.”

Unlike her to ask them. She didn’t think outside herself too much—not like Virgie, who’d mother any child, grown-up, or butterfly she came across—but maybe that biscuit guilt weighed on Tess more than I’d realized. Maybe Leta’d been right that it would do the children good to see that some people had it a lot harder than we did.

Or maybe I just didn’t know Tessie as well as I thought I did.

“Lou Ellen Talbert looks like a chipmunk when she sticks her tongue out,” she piped up all of a sudden. “Or a possum or somethin’.”

Tessie. I felt something like relief then, which snuck into my laugh, and I pretended to reach for her own tongue, fingers stopping short when she pressed her lips together tightly even as she smiled.

“But I like her,” she said once my hand was safely back on the rail. “She’s real nice. And I think you should have Mr. Benton over. It’d be nice for you to have some company,” she said.

I matched her serious tone. “I appreciate you saying it. I’ll take that into account.”

She stood by me awhile longer, stepping a little closer, finally leaning into me with her shoulder touching my hip. I knew I stunk to high heaven, but she didn’t seem to mind. We didn’t say anything else, and I was fairly glad. Leta was the one the girls could share their secrets with, but I wasn’t one for long drawn-out conversation that would likely be about dresses or dolls or boys. But Tess didn’t like dolls, I didn’t think. Couldn’t remember her ever asking for one or playing with even a dressed-up corncob. I wondered if she thought about boys yet. When did that start? Leta would probably know.

If I needed to know anything, she’d pass it along, surely. And I could enjoy not talking, just standing with Tess, feeling her shoulder against me and hearing the little puffs of her breathing.

Eventually she straightened and turned toward the kitchen door, and I didn’t want her to go quite yet.

“Why’d you come out here, Tess?” I called, making her stop with her hand on the doorknob. “You missin’ your well?”

For the first time, she looked over at it, cocked her head and made her curls flop, stared for a long second. She took a few steps back toward me, which brought her closer to the well, but she didn’t get too close. “No,” she said finally. “I wasn’t thinking about the well.”

“So why’re you out back?”

She cocked her head the other way, smiling up at me, and I saw her answer before she said it. Saw it in the set of that pointed chin and in her still-a-little-girl smile that was full of teeth.

“You’re out here,” she said.

Virgie
I FISHED THE HARD-BOILED EGG OUT OF THE POT, AND
Mama tossed the baked potatoes from one hand to the other until she dropped one in each lunch bucket. I didn’t dare toss the eggs. Tess and Jack and me each got one egg, and Papa got three in his bucket, along with the biggest potato. I wrapped his eggs in a towel so they wouldn’t crack. They went in the food compartment, and Mama would pour fresh water in the other side. We’d already washed and dried the breakfast dishes, and Mama was putting away the last of the saucers. The table didn’t have a crumb on it, and all the neatness made me think of Aunt Merilyn.