A Place Called Wiregrass (3 page)

“Well, I declare,” Miss Claudia said and wrinkled her brow.

“Richard was forty-three when he had his nerve attack.”

After she offered me more money than I expected, we discussed my hours and general responsibilities. Maybe I’d been wrong about Claudia Tyler—“Miss Claudia” she said everybody called her. As I approached the bedroom door, she held up her hand. I leaned forward, still uncertain whether I could take her and her mansion on.

“I really only had Bertha around because the poor old thing needed the money that bad. Her with that little retarded boy and all.” Miss Claudia gazed at the comforter covering her legs. “But I never called her my housekeeper. And at eighty, I’m not starting now. Just tell folks you’re my companion.”

T
he key was almost in my assigned mailbox when the swish-swash of polyester made its way out of the cinderblock office. Miss Trellis carefully stepped, to avoid a puddle deposited by her window air-conditioning unit. The way she worried so, you would’ve thought the black cloth shoes she wore had been bought in New York City. She leaned to the left and then to the right like her swollen midsection was the balance between her two feet.
Poor old thing,
I thought and pulled a postcard advertising a tire store and a missing Hispanic boy from my mailbox. My heartbeat resumed a normal pace. No bills.

“Oh, me,” Miss Trellis groaned and put her elbow on top of the metal mailboxes jumbled together in birdhouse fashion. A mound of flesh plopped where a tricep might have once been. “Your grandbaby told me you was working two jobs now,” she said, barely managing to catch her breath.

“Yes, ma’am.” I made a mental note to remind Cher to be careful what she told Miss Trellis. All I need is for us to break her rule about gossiping and get thrown out. My cousin Lucille was my only fallback, and she hadn’t returned my last phone call.

“Poor old Claudia Tyler,” the worn-out woman said. “Me and her used to sew together down at the Emporium. Oh, I forget you ain’t from here. It was the big department store up
town. Anyway, we was the tailors, me and her. She was a Ranker back in them days.”

I turned my eyes from the postcard and studied Miss Trellis. I wanted to call her a liar because I knew the woman who lived in the courthouse-shaped home could’ve never been a seamstress. “You did?”

“Oh, yeah. Back in them days she didn’t have it so good. No siree.” She paused to slap a gnat. “Not until the old man Tyler’s son up and quit his wife. Then things got a whole lot better for Claudia. Next thing you know, Tyler’s son and Claudia up and married—real fast like.” Miss Trellis stuck her neck out long and bugged her gray eyes. I could see the crooked red lines in her sockets.

Lord, she’s crazy as a coot.
“Well, that’s real nice.”

“I ain’t even gonna say what all us girls knowed about it. So don’t even ask me.” She drew her neck back into its double-chinned shell and closed her eyes.

“Well, let me get going,” I said, taking a step towards the Monte Carlo. She made me nervous, and I couldn’t help but think she was trying to set me up to break her gossip rule. Besides, I could hear the air conditioner running in my car and knew I didn’t have the gas to waste listening to some pathetic hag like her.

But Miss Trellis was on a one-way journey. “And then the Benson’s Department Store come to town and bought out the Emporium. Just gave Claudia’s husband a plumb pile of money. That’s how they come up with all they got. Old Man Tyler was long gone by that time. Wade, Claudia’s husband, he just got ever dime of it.”

When I saw a white pickup pull in behind Miss Trellis and park, I jumped at the opportunity. Just when I was fixing to get in my car, I heard the last comment that confirmed my impression. “If you was to give me all her money, I wouldn’t
take it. No, ma’am,” she said. “She’s got so many problems, bless her heart. Money ain’t gonna buy you happiness.”

She didn’t move from her position when the man with a ruddy complexion and an orange cap with the word
Caterpillar
opened a mailbox. What I didn’t hear her tell the man as I drove off was how sorry she was for me and my poor little granddaughter. But I didn’t have to hear her words. I knew her type and could’ve written the lines for her. Old or young, black or white, bitter spirits speak the same language.

The blaring sound of screaming turned my attention away from tales about Miss Claudia to the inside of the metal frame box I called home. I jogged to the silver handle and tried to picture the tragedy unfolding.
Bozo,
I first thought. But he would never lay a hand on Cher. Not unless he’s wasted out of his mind and decided to beat information about me out of her.

“Cher!” I bolted inside the trailer. The TV blasted, and I surveyed the room to make sure nothing was out of order. I saw the white phone cord spring behind the kitchen wall. Cher leaned against the pantry door.

Just as two women began to fight over their lesbian cousins, I turned the talk show off. “I could hear that mess screaming all the way out to the car. You like to give me heart failure with that thing.”

Cher tucked a strand of brown hair back behind her ear. She created a breeze when she swept passed me and picked her book off the red-and-white-checkered couch. If it had been my furniture back in Cross City, I would’ve gotten after her for plopping down so hard. She sat Indian style, pulled her bare feet under the couch cushion, and tried to retreat into a world of fiction. I never did know why she liked reading so much. Halfway through any romance book I ever tried to
read, I’d jump on to the end. Just say what needs to be said, too much rattling for my tastes.

The end of the phone cord was lightly swinging against the kitchen wall. “Who was on the phone?” I asked and put the lid back on the jar of peanut butter.

“I wasn’t on the phone.” Without opening her eyes, she turned back to her book. Its cover was bright and cheery, with a young blonde-headed girl holding the rope to a horse. The white cord on the kitchen phone was still bouncing.

With my own kids, I’da blistered their tails for sassing me. But I tried to be more patient with Cher. Counting to ten in my mind always helped. She deserved special measures. Especially with me and Bozo splitting up.

“Did you get that math test back yet?” I asked, laying the car keys on the kitchen countertop.

“Ninety-three. And it’s algebra, not math.” She chewed on the ends of her brown hair, never looking up.

Opening the refrigerator door, I chose again to ignore her pissy attitude. “Miss Claudia said she wants to meet you. I was thinking maybe this Saturday we could…” I turned to the sink, which looked out over the living-room area, and she was gone. The slamming of her bedroom door reminded me that she was stuck between a child’s world and a teenager’s.

Hormones, I decided. I stood at the closed pine door, but decided not to knock. She’d started her period when we first got to Wiregrass. She’s got a lot going on inside that little ninety-eight-pound body of hers, I reminded myself. Trisha Yearwood’s voice oozed out of the space between the pine door and the gold linoleum floor. I figured she was daydreaming of a boyfriend or dreaming about riding a big horse like the one on the cover of her book. It was only while she was taking a shower that I discovered her dreams were more ridiculous than any schoolgirl fantasy. A fantasy that Cher needed to dismiss from her mind.

The picture was torn at the edge and a little faded. She had hidden it from me inside her pillow. I would’ve never found it unless some of the pillow stuffing had not been hanging out the corners of the half-closed zipper.

They didn’t look like convicts, her mama and daddy. But then again, in the picture Cher didn’t look like the smart girl she was. In fact, she didn’t look like a girl at all, just a bald six-month-old leaning on her daddy’s tattooed arm. Her little ears displayed two tiny gold balls. I told Suzette piercing a baby’s ears was trashy, and now I was holding the celluloid proof. Suzette had her brown hair parted on the side and, looking into her wide brown eyes, there was no denying she was Cher’s mama. The blue plastic background with smoke drifting from the chimney and snow on the ground looked weird with them in the foreground. Why were they all dressed in short sleeves? And it probably was the dead of winter when they had the picture made. Most likely at the grocery store or some other unplanned place. No wonder when I found that picture in a kitchen drawer back in Cross City, I promptly threw it in the trash.

The first week with Miss Claudia was a settling-in time. By Friday, I knew my way around the place, and it didn’t seem quite as huge as it had before. Her regular friends came and went from two to four o’clock. My pick was a real sweet black lady. The tiny woman with round glasses stopped by mostly on Tuesdays. I decided she must be one of the late housekeeper’s relatives still keeping check on Miss Claudia. Rich people always seemed to have hired help who were just like family. But I refused to be put in that category.
This was just a way to keep up with the bills,
I reminded myself every day when I pulled up the long concrete driveway.

Richard got on my last nerve, as I predicted he would. I
call it the “Short Man Syndrome.” All he’d do is talk big about how much money he made in stocks and how he used to own racehorses. So much for Mr. Big Shot—he couldn’t even keep an appointment without his eighty-year-old mama reminding him.

Only once did he start to get out of hand. I was washing the dinner dishes and had half tuned out his lecture on the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle when I felt the digging glare. My back was to him, but I could picture him leering at me from the kitchen table. Still in uniform, I knew he was looking through my cheap polyester slacks at my panties.

“It’s a pure shame my mama don’t live closer by. She just loves interesting stuff like you talk about,” I said, turning to him with the crystal tea pitcher in my hands. “I bet she’d be after you, seeing how y’all about the same age.” When he scrunched his face and retreated to his garage apartment, I couldn’t help but get tickled. The idea of Mama, whose hair was shorter than his, ever going on a date with a nerve patient was hilarious. She’d stomp on his nerves like a bull in a china store. Before I knew it, the chuckle erupted, and I slapped my soapy hand over my mouth. For a second I felt lighter. It was the first time I had laughed since leaving Cross City.

Ladies from First Methodist paraded through the afternoons at Miss Claudia’s. I let each enter through the big white door with the brass door knocker. Big or skinny, with gray or dyed-blue hair, they all had the same little turned-down smile that I decided must be required with the Methodists. A woman by the name of Elizabeth was the worst. I’d say some pleasantry like, “How you doing today?” She’d just turn her ash-blonde head ever so slightly and give me a tired smirk. And I know the worn smile was not because she’d been cleaning house all day, but instead was her way of saying, “Who do you think you are talking to me, White Trash?” without exercising her voice.

The good thing about Prune Face—the pet name I secretly gave her—was she never stayed long. Soon she’d appear in the living room again, with her brown Bible in tow. After I closed the door, I’d watch from the living-room window as she got into her big Chrysler. I imagined her sitting in a metal chair the following Sunday reporting to her Sunday school class that she had visited the ailing Claudia Tyler. Check one more visitation off the sick list for Prune Face.

Not that I ever understood why Prune Face brought her Bible. They were in plentiful supply at Miss Claudia’s house. She kept one in every bedroom and even a small black Bible in her downstairs guest bathroom. During the end of my first week, I found her propped up on four pillows with unusually flat hair. She had her big book spread across her lap. I was dusting the antique armoire and had almost made it to the legs when I heard the voice.

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” For a second, I wondered if Miss Claudia had taken one too many pain pills as she sat there, eyes closed and red lips grinning. Within a twinkle of my eye, she was back onboard.

“Isaiah 43:19,” she said and opened her eyes real big. I smiled and kept dusting.

“Do you own a Bible, Erma Lee?”

With my back to her, I bit my lip. I had told all I wanted to about personal business. “Yes, ma’am.” I thought of the little white Bible Aunt Stella’s church gave me decades ago when I joined Antioch Missionary.

“I just love this verse. It lets me know that, even at my age, God’s not done with me yet.”

I turned to face her, and she was swinging her glasses as easy as she’d swing a jump rope. “He’s got a plan for all of us. For Patricia, for Richard, and you too, Erma Lee.”

Now don’t even start this religious mess with me,
I thought.
It makes you weak and pious, like that old Prune Face, who visits you just so she can go brag to the preacher what a good Christian woman she is.
“Yes, ma’am.”

Religious fanatics were all over Cross City. I was used to them. And I decided to say what she wanted for the sake of a paycheck. As I watched her painted fingernail move across the thin, white sheets, I felt sorry for her.
How on earth could this woman even know what the wilderness and desert her Bible spoke of were really like? Had she gone hungry? Had she gone to the emergency room to get stitches above her eye after her old man broke a plate over her head and then worried the next day because she was missing work and couldn’t pay the electric bill? No, I know better. And no matter what Miss Trellis claims about Miss Claudia sewing at some store, this woman had it good now. I had the scars from the wilderness and the blisters from the desert, and I survived it by myself. I was the only one I could count on.

By the beginning of April, Bozo’s calls dwindled down to one or two a week, most often after he’d tied one on. I could predict them. He’d call at twelve-thirty or one in the morning and either cry like a baby, begging forgiveness, or rant and rave so loud I would hold the phone ten inches from my ear and could still make out the cuss words. After the first week, I learned to hang up and unplug the phone.

The day before the week-long Easter break, I had one of the worst days imaginable. The morning started with me running late, then the solenoid switch on my car giving me a fit. I borrowed the old man’s pliers from next door and rigged it enough so it’d crank. A trick I have Bozo to thank for teaching me. At school, a little girl threw up her corn dog right by the conveyer belt that ships the trays for us to wash. Then Miss Claudia’s leg was acting up, and I had to haul her to the
doctor’s office. After waiting two and a half hours for the doctor, I took Miss Claudia home, then cooked Richard supper, and washed his last pair of underwear.