When I Crossed No-Bob (2 page)

I don't want to tell this pretty little girl that I haven't been baptized yet and that my pappy swiped me with a poplar stick because I was up to no good, not after she told me what her big brother can teach her.

"I'm from a family," I say right proud. "About the meanest family there ever was."

I don't know what gets into me. Momma always says it's the devilment I get from Pappy, but I take to splashing Little Bit a little bit, and then a lot. She tells me to quit it and I don't. And all of a sudden, she's mad and I'm mad, and we're on the banks and we're down in it, fighting, and I'm painting that clean little pink face with mud and this Little Bit? She's no little chip. She's scratching and punching and we go at it, and all the while I'm thinking,
This here wedding is big fun—just like an O'Donnell wedding.

But then they come screaming. They all do. The whole wedding party comes running down to the creek, screaming all at once. They don't mumble but say outright that I'm bad
bad bad. Evil. Painting a white girl black like that, and then trying to drown her. Little Bit cries to hear them and her mother holds her tight.

In all the fuss, I can't find Momma.

Only the menfolk hold me by the arms. No one else will touch me. They don't want to get themselves dirty. I lean this way and that, trying to find the man with the mule. Maybe he knows where Momma is.

"Someone get this girl's momma," Mr. Frank Russell says.

Everyone nods, mumbling yes, that's what should be done. A few women take their sons and daughters aside, like they don't want their children to see the likes of me. They head out to help pack away the food and fold the linens.

Nobody seems to know where my momma is.

I am the last one at the wedding picnic and nobody knows what to do with me. I'm old enough to set out on my own, so that is just what I do. I start out alone on the road. People loading up their wagons, looking at me passing, shake their heads. Brother Davenport is talking with Mr. Frank when Miss Irene, the newlywed bride, stops me and takes my hand. She tells her new husband they'll take me home. She says she knows where I live.

I can see that it angers and pleases Mr. Frank at once. He looks at me and frowns, and then looks at his new wife, who is smiling a soft, lippy smile that makes me ashamed of myself and the way I look. He hitches up his wagon to his mule and we three climb in, ready to go to No-Bob.

After the brightness of the wedding, all I see around me is the gray gray grayness that is No-Bob, as though while we were gone all the color ran out of the land. Nobody's at my house in No-Bob. No Momma, nobody. The sky is white. Mr. Frank and Miss Irene don't know I can read the GONE TO TEXAS sign on the door. And I know it to be true.

We step over the circle of eggshells. Neither Mr. Frank nor Miss Irene asks and I don't explain. If you are ever anxious for your sweetheart to come back from a trip, Momma says to put a pin in the ground with the point up and then put an egg on
the point. When the insides run out of the egg, your sweetheart will return. The empty shells circle our house. Never mind that we could have eaten those eggs.

Momma went off with the man with the mule to find Pappy and to be free of me. She told me herself she had a fierce love, a fierce love for Pappy but not for me. I look at all the eggshells around our house, and I know she is gone, I know this to be true all at once, and it makes me feel as blank as the sky.

Mr. Frank leans into his new wife's side, and I think that he must be smelling her yellow hair while he whispers some of the things I hear. I hear: "The O'Donnells are trouble." I hear: "self-willed" and "haughty." I hear something about discipline.

"We've never had a speck of trouble from the O'Donnells, Frank."

Mr. Frank says louder, "I don't care, Irene. We can find some of her people. They'll have to take her in. Anyplace but ours." I hear Mr. Frank say some other words I've never heard. Miss Irene shushes him, and then I hear him say "filthy."

Least he doesn't say I'm ugly.

Miss Irene, she says there are some things she can fix, and even though I can't see her face, I can tell from the sound of her words that she's smiling sweet.

Mr. Frank sets his mule in motion, and the three of us are riding again, passing the oak where General Jackson is said to have hitched his horse while taking a rest off Jackson's Military Road.

As soon as we cross the stream and head out of No-Bob, we pass the two Indian women Little Bit and I saw down at the creek. They are walking single file on their way to the Cohay bottoms where they will probably camp and make more swamp cane baskets to trade.

I am a squatter like the Indians. I should go with them and make camp too. But no, if I go down to the river and camp like an Indian, Momma will not find me when she comes back to get me.

Queen Anne's lace waves at us, lining the dirt road out of town, our passing wagon raising red dust. I wonder which flower or herb would make a good healing tea for the hurt I'm feeling now.

Mr. Frank's dwelling house is all log, and he even thought to build it up off the ground away from dirt, bugs, and termites. The corncribs and the smokehouse are built with logs too, but they are built right on top of the ground. There are stalls
too, though there is no horse or plow in sight. They've already had a barn raising and someone thought to plant a grove of young pecan trees out front, which will make for good shade when they mature.

Wooden steps lead us up to a front porch where two piles of firewood are stacked high up to the roof. Inside they have a fireplace made out of rocks with big hooks fastened into the side to swing pots round on. Meal and flour barrels set in one corner of the kitchen, and an old muzzle-loading shotgun leans up in another corner, near a spinning wheel, the shuttle to the loom, and a closet built with lock and key. Pegs driven between the logs in the wall hold saddlebags, shot pouches, and a holster. The floor is not bare earth, but laid logs split into planks. I can smell the newness of the pine wood. There are chairs around a table and a setback for all the dishes.

Miss Irene takes my hand gently and tells me Mr. Frank carved the closet doors. All their doors close with wooden latches. That Mr. Frank, he went all out and bought seven panes of glass for all seven of his windows. And now he has glass windows such as I've never seen. It looks to me that Mr. Frank built his house to last a good long while.

Miss Irene has already come and decorated the walls with pictures of flowers and baskets of fruit, but I don't understand
why she would want a picture of a dead fish hanging in her front room.

Mr. Frank hauls in a mattress from the barn and sets it near the fireplace.

"You'll stay here the night," he says. "We'll see about tomorrow."

Miss Irene fixes up the mattress with a sheet and a quilt. "Perhaps your mother will come tomorrow," she says. "Sweet dreams, Addy."

Lying down on the mattress, I listen to them talk, late into the night. I hear Mr. Frank saying "Garner O'Donnell." Garner is my uncle, the one who shot Pappy. I hear Mr. Frank tell his new wife that Garner tried to cheat him out of his own land. Mr. Frank says that even though the judge in Raleigh ruled for Mr. Frank, he's still sore at that Garner and all the other O'Donnells.

"Mean makes mean and more mean," I hear Mr. Frank say.

"Oh, Frank," Miss Irene says. "That was one man. You can't blame them all for what one did."

I listen to Mr. Frank's voice and it sounds like he still has some of what Pappy used to call "grudge business" to take care of with Garner and maybe even with all the other O'Donnells.

"The O'Donnells are trouble, Irene. She'll only bring harm."

My toes touch the smooth surface of warm stones at the foot of the mattress and I breathe in the smell of pine needles and dried moss it's stuffed with. Miss Irene boiled rocks and put some under the quilt to keep my feet warm. Even though it is not cold, I can't stop shivering.

I wonder if I should stick a pin in an egg for Momma. I know about hoping and praying for something, and I've heard prayers myself when I've paid attention in church, but I still don't know the words. So I lay there in the dark, tapping my toenails against the rocks, saying my own words of prayer.

"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday," I whisper. "Friday, Saturday, Sunday." I say that over and over.

This is the farthest I've ever been from home.

Already, I have forgiven Momma. At least she didn't send me to the orphans' home in Jackson. These here are hard times. Not but a month ago Hazel O'Donnell sent her two girls, Mattie Lou and Dora, off down the road to fend for themselves. They were fourteen and fifteen, both not much older than me.

It's a shame I'm making so much trouble, and this on their wedding night. I could climb out the window right now and
leave. I'm not scared either. I remember my momma talking to that man with the mule. I hope he is a nice man. I hope he takes good care of her until she finds Pappy. "Now go on." That's what she said to me.

I hook my thumbs in the armpits of my too-tight cast-off dress from a cousin whose momma said she'd never take in a child from my momma. I don't know why the O'Donnells didn't like Momma. A castoff. That's who
she
was and that's what I am now. I should leave, I should. I don't got no momma, no pappy, and no home. I might as well be dead.

The rocks heat up my feet plenty so I can start to sleep. It's a long time, but just feeling the rocks with my toes and thinking about Miss Irene being so nice makes me feel good enough to sleep.

I get up before the sun, bring in some wood from the front porch, and build a fire. Mr. Frank and Miss Irene have a good new log house, but not much else. There sits a three-legged skillet over hot coals, so, remembering how Momma used to make me and Pappy johnnycakes, I get together a poke of cornmeal, mix it with some cold water, put it on a clapboard, and set it near the hot coals. Momma complained about my
cooking, but she never complained that I cooked. I eat one piece of bread to show Mr. Frank I won't take up too much room or food.

If Momma was here, she'd be going through their house. She'd see what she could find of theirs to make her own. But I shake Momma thoughts out of my head and look outside the window.

Mr. Frank is smart. I can see he is already outside working, digging up the ground himself with a grubbing hoe, laying in crops, growing them something to eat.

Nobody has to show me to work. Like most folks, they have a smokehouse in the backyard, an outhouse, a barn, a pen for their one hog, and the pasture way out back. Out past the pasture are the woods, the longleaf pines taller than anything else around. The outhouse is near the hog pen, which I think is smart—it's all just one big smell, in one place, unless of course the wind changes direction.

I head out to the barn with a clean bucket. Someone must have given Mr. Frank and Miss Irene a cow for their wedding, so I milk this cow, run my hands over her back, and pet her until her eyes close and I know she wants to be left alone. I toss hay to the mule and clean out her stall. I pet her hair and nuzzle with her. I want to get up on her back and lay there for a
while, but instead, I get corn from the corncrib and feed the chickens. I don't see any eggs so I crouch down to the chickens and say hey, thinking that might make them give me an egg.

Miss Irene keeps her water bucket on the back porch, not the front porch, and I bring in a bucket of fresh water, knowing they'll want coffee.

They have a nice well dug deep in their front yard. They don't have a springhouse and I think to lower the milk into the well wall to keep it cool and fresh. The wind blows and the mouth of the well plays music. I hum along.

Inside Miss Irene is grinding coffee for a fresh pot and she is a might pleased with my johnnycakes. She struggles with the weight of the water bucket, slopping the water, trying to pour it into the kettle to boil. I say, "How 'bout we make the water my job?"

Mr. Frank comes in smiling, looking at his Irene.

"Look at what Addy made us for breakfast, Frank."

It's like Mr. Frank forgot I was there and his smile disappears. He eats fast and heads outside again. He's got corn and cotton planted and I can see his eyes making plans for more. His land has a big reed brake and he's opened up a nice farm on this tract. This Mr. Frank, he knows about land and how to make it make food and maybe even a little money.

I fill the wood box in the kitchen with wood and tote out the ashes. Near about midmorning when I come back in, Miss Irene stands over the kettle stirring up black smoke from something burned and terrible-smelling.

"Mr. Frank's ma and pa are coming," she says. "Can you cook?" Miss Irene is nice and soft but she cannot cook.

At noon Mr. Frank's ma and pa arrive with jars of pickled peaches, stewed tomatoes, and Little Bit and her little brother, little Jack.

Little Bit is all pigtails and giggles and she jumps off the back of the wagon and hugs me like I'm her sister, like fighting the way we did yesterday is what we always do. A pecan-colored man named Sunny Rise and his son Jess Still Rise drive the wagon. They work for Mr. Frank's ma and pa. Miss Irene gives me two plates heaped full of food to give to the colored man and his son.

"Why they call you Jess Still?" I ask the little boy. His left eye stays fixed on me while his right eye checks out what else is going on.

"On account of I stands still all the times," the little boy says. His father laughs.

"He's a good boy," his pa says. I look at Jess Still and can't help but wish I could be so good without having to try so
hard. While they pull the wagon around, I watch their backs lean in together and all of the sudden I miss my momma and pappy something terrible.

Miss Irene has spread out a nice table. She says she wants this to be an extra-special lunch because she feels bad that she took away their Frank. She says when Mr. Frank's pa and older brother left to join in the fighting, Mr. Frank got real close to his momma on account of all the time they spent together during the war years, and what with the grandpa leaving, and the grandma dying, and then the terrible news that his brother Henry was killed—well, it was hard, hard on everybody.