The Well and the Mine (24 page)

Sneaking out made the whole thing seem all the more exciting. I made plans to meet her the next night, after everybody else had gone to bed.

I didn’t say anything to Virgie. I thought she’d scold me for thinking about those dead babies when we had plenty to think on right here at home, and she’d definitely scold me for thinking about sneaking out, which I’d have to do. Not that I’d ever asked about staying out late, but neither me nor Virgie had ever gone out past regular bedtime unless we were spending the night with a friend. Papa always talked about not understanding parents who let their daughters stay out ’til all hours of the night. I knew that meant we wouldn’t be like those girls.

I tried to keep from feeling guilty about keeping a secret, telling myself I wasn’t doing nothing wrong, only visiting a friend. It really wasn’t lying if I just didn’t mention it. Wasn’t no reason to feel like I was disrespecting Mama and Papa.

When I came in from school the day I was supposed to meet Lou Ellen, Mama was drawing water from the well, her back to me. I wrapped my arms around her middle and made her “oof.”

“You’re gone squeeze me plumb in two,” she said, not really complaining, reaching around with one hand to pat me as much as she could. “You have a good day, sugar?”

I didn’t say “yes, ma’am” like I meant to. Instead I said, “I told Lou Ellen I’d come over to her house tonight,” all the time wondering why those words were so determined to come out.

“After supper?” asked Mama, not seeming too concerned.

“A good bit after supper. Around bedtime.”

“Why you goin’ over there so late?”

I didn’t like the idea of lying to Mama, but I wasn’t stupid, neither. “We wanted to have an adventure,” I said, thinking as fast as I could. “I never been out that late before, and we thought it’d be fun to be out by ourselves, have the whole backyard for a little while with the moon shining down and not another soul around. It’ll be like we’re the only ones in the whole world, and I bet it all looks so different late at night.”

I thought about just what all that could involve, and I started seeing the nighttime as I described it. “Maybe the crickets get together and play in a big band after we’re in bed. And I bet the owls are out and they have fun tippin’ the birds off their branches while they’re sleepin’, to see if they’ll wake up before they hit the ground.”

“First time I heard you talk like that in ages, Tess.” Mama usually told me to stop daydreamin’ when I started imagining things, but this time she didn’t seem upset about it at all. Instead she smiled, which made her eyes crinkle up like I hadn’t seen in forever, and she ran her hand over my hair. “Never thought I’d miss it like I did. Not scared of possums or boogeymen bein’ out there?”

I shook my head and didn’t correct her that I was only nervous about the fairy-eating possums, not the normal kind. And I didn’t think they’d be out that night.

“You waited late to tell me, didn’t you?” she said, balancing the full bucket of water on the side of the well. “And don’t think I didn’t notice that you were tellin’, not askin’.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. May I please go? Please? I just really wanted to get out for a little while and do somethin’ different. And Papa always said he don’t want us goin’ out late at night. I figured you wouldn’t let me.”

Mama shook her head, half smiling. “He meant with boys. Don’t know that he’d much care about you goin’ to look at a yard.” She looked up at the ceiling, the tip of her tongue sticking out from her teeth. “But then again, he’s a mite tense lately. Best not to mention it. You just go on and head over there when you need to…but he’ll be asleep when you get in, so be quiet.”

She didn’t even tell me a time to be home, and I made up my mind that it wouldn’t ever do no harm to tell Mama my business. She took it real well.

It did seem like a whole different yard by the time I got to Lou Ellen’s a little after nine o’clock. Usually I watched the dark from the porch, but this time I was walking through it, smashing it down with every step. Not knowing what my feet were going to hit every time had me breathing quick by the time I got to Lou Ellen’s, even though it was a short walk.

She was waiting for me on the porch, an itty-bitty shadow in a rocking chair. The shadow waved, then hurried down the porch steps, her slippers making soft
tunk-tunk-tunk
sounds instead of the usual
thonk-thonk-thonk.
Her nightgown came to her knees, and she hitched it up so she wouldn’t get tangled in it. She’d hardly said hello before she was pulling me by the arm past the house and toward the woods. (Even though most of the land was made up of fields, they did have one little patch of pines off to the side of the house.) I was glad for the feel of her hand around my wrist. Everything else seemed unfamiliar. The trees made one giant, dark wall, and with the shadows, the ground had a whole other set of black, flat trees. Patches of moonlight would break through when the branches swayed, and I wanted to play hopscotch on those bright spots. It was as quiet as it was dark—lightning bugs and even the crickets seemed like they were asleep. All I could hear was our feet tiptoeing and the wind blowing the pine trees.

Then my arm was let go, and I nearly ran into Lou Ellen where she’d stopped.

“Here they are,” she said, pointing right in front of the woods.

I was only looking at ground. Dirt, a tuft of weed, and grass here and there. No markers—not even a stone, much less a name.

“Y’all didn’t mark ’em?” I asked her.

“We know where they are,” she whispered. “Papa measured out five steps from the three big pines. There’s a baby in front of each.”

She took a few steps and pointed straight down.

“So you just know?”

“Yeah,” she said like it was obvious.

“And people go on and walk over them like they’re not even there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t.”

I wondered how long I needed to stand there. I wasn’t quite as interested as I’d thought I’d be. But I knew it was only polite to stay a few minutes, so I started thinking about those babies tucked underground, wrapped in a sheet or blanket. I didn’t think about what was under the blanket.

“Why do you suppose we put dead people in the ground?” I asked Lou Ellen.

“Where else you gone put ’em?”

Maybe that was it: no other choice. But I hated the thought of a baby in that cold, hard ground with worms and slugs and roaches rooting around.

“Are they in boxes?” I asked.

“Wrapped in cloth. Least the two I ’member are.”

That made it worse. If it was my baby, I could see thinking our nice cool well with mermaids and sparkling fish was a better place. Maybe Virgie had been right and the Well Woman wasn’t pure evil or out of her head. Maybe she had some good in her. Like Birmingham had some pretty streetcars and also men tucked in coke ovens. It was still an odd thing to do, mind you, turning our well into a grave, but I’d never stared hard at the dirt before and thought what it would be like as a blanket. If I loved something dearly, I’d have a hard time wrapping it up and covering it with dirt like it was garbage you didn’t want the dogs getting into.

I saw a shadow move across the only window that had a light, soft but bright enough for me to make out long hair, not electric, but like one of the oil lamps Mama kept around for when we had a thunderstorm.

“Your mama still up?”

“Nah, that’s Aunt Lou.”

“You think she’s noticed you’re not there?”

“Prob’bly, but she’d just think I came out to go down the hill.” She nodded toward their outhouse. “She’s just pacin’ anyway. She don’t sleep too good. Walks around and talks to herself. Don’t know where she is sometimes.”

“She alright?”

“Sometimes. Other times it’s like she ain’t even in the same room with you. Won’t talk or nothin’.”

“Oh.” I started to turn away, thinking to say I needed to head on home, but she kept talking.

“I took her by your place one time, you know. Before she even moved down here. She wanted to get a look at the town when she was visitin’, and Mama sent me out to show her y’all’s house since your papa owns the farm.”

“Why didn’t you come in?”

“Didn’t know you then.”

A thought came to me. I knew why most people had been walking past our house. “Were you out showin’ her where the baby got throwed in?”

“This was before that happened.”

“Oh.”

“She moved down here…well, couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks later. She’s sort of a gossip. Likes to know about people. Mama knew that, so I was just supposed to point y’all out and tell her about you.”

“So what’d you tell her?”

She shrugged. “That your sister’s real pretty. That your mama and papa give away to anybody that comes askin’, that they’re big on goin’ to church, good people. Your papa don’t never talk down to us or act like he’s better than us.”

“Nothin’ about me?”

“Um, I dunno.” She looked like she was thinking hard as she could. “I don’t think so.”

I wished I hadn’t ever asked her to jump on cotton, even if she did have dead babies in her backyard. She must’ve read some of that on my face, because she was quick to add, “But I did tell her that Mama says if anybody’s doin’ God’s work, it’s the Moores.”

I still thought I could have been mentioned by name. Some people thought I was real personable. Plenty she could have said. I started to say that, but the front door to their house opened, and we ducked down behind the porch. It wasn’t Lou Ellen’s mama coming to yell at her for being out so late—it was Aunt Lou who’d come out on the porch.

She was a big woman, broad across the shoulders. It was only a crescent moon, but it caught her face just right. She was the woman from the revival.

I got home without thinking, putting one foot in front of the other and winding up at our front door. I climbed in bed and barely got the covers over me before I fell asleep. No bad dreams at all. And I woke up clearheaded, even though it seemed like I’d just closed my eyes. I loved waking up to the smell of coffee and the sounds of the fire crackling. I only had my ears and nose to tell me things while my eyes stayed closed. I could hear Mama clanking pots in the kitchen and Papa making the floorboards creak while he finished getting the fire going and fetching water for our basin. I wished it was the thick smell of bacon that had drifted under the covers along with the coffee-flavored air, but biscuits were nice, too. I could stay buried under the quilts for at least a few minutes and do nothing but soak it all in. But this morning I wanted to do more.

“Virgie. Virgie. Virgie.” I kept saying it even when I saw her frown. “Virgie.”

“What?” She didn’t even roll over, just stayed perfectly still, arms crossed over her chest.

“Virgie.”

“I said ‘what?’” She sounded annoyed and still half asleep. She wasn’t moving at all, and I wanted her to be a little more enthusiastic about this whole to-do. I was the one who’d gotten in late and had to tiptoe around and find the key Mama left for me on the porch and jump every time Papa shifted or snored and try to stay away from the squeaky board on my side of the bed. Virgie had been dead asleep. And I’d laid there bursting with the news for what must’ve been hours and hours and hours.

I leaned close to her and talked right in her ear. She hated that.

“I’m pretty sure it was Lou Ellen Talbert’s aunt that put the baby in the well,” I said.

That made her roll over, one eye peeping open, head shifting a little. She’d drooled on her pillow in her sleep. “Why do you say that?”

I told her about the babies’ graves and Aunt Lou.

“So she would’ve known who we were,” Virgie said, head still on her pillow, but eyes getting wider by the second. “Would’ve had some connection to us even. And you really think she was that upset at the revival?”

“She was beside herself.”

“We don’t know that she had a baby.”

“Well, we don’t know that the sun’ll come up in the morning, but it always does.” I’d heard Papa say that before, and it always sounded smart when he said it.

“What are you talking about?” asked Virgie, rubbing at her eyes with one hand.

I tried to move along, not sure about the sunshine explanation. “We can’t know for sure unless we talk to her.”

“You didn’t ask the Talbert girl?”

“Lou Ellen. No, I didn’t ask her.”

She raised herself up on her elbows, looking down at me. “Why not?”

I raised up on my elbows, too. “Now how do you think I should have worked that in? ‘So do you know if your aunt had a baby she didn’t tell nobody about and threw it in our well just for fun?’”

“Shhh,” she said, looking toward the kitchen. “Don’t get bent out of shape. I just thought it might be easier to ask her than to ask a grown woman we don’t even know.”

“Why do you think she’d tell her little niece about a baby? About havin’ one or dumpin’ one?”

Virgie flopped back on her pillow with a
whoof,
and I wondered that the pins in her curlers didn’t stab her in the brain. She lay there and I sat up Indian-style, my knees jabbing into her left leg. But she didn’t move her leg or even look at me at all.

“Can you keep a baby a secret?” she asked, face half in the pillow again.

I shrugged. “If it don’t cry much.” Then I remembered. “But she’s from Brilliant. She could maybe keep the secret if the baby hadn’t never been here. Never been to Lou Ellen’s.”

“You might be right, Tess,” she said, drawing her knees up so they banged into mine. “It might really be her.”

She laid and I sat, so quiet I heard an egg hit the frying pan. Then the oven door open. Maybe the biscuits were ready.

“So what do you want to do?” I asked. “Tell Papa? Maybe have him call Chief Taylor?”

She was all the way out of bed and pulling a dress out of the wardrobe before she answered. “No. Let’s go talk to her ourselves.”

I didn’t think that was such a great idea, but I had to admit I was curious.

Leta
JACK HAD SHOT A SQUIRREL FROM THE FRONT PORCH,
and I added it to the stew for dinner. We’d had a lot of stew and cornbread—filling stuff that made the children miss meat less. But squirrel was perfect for stew; the meat was too overpowering to eat by itself.