A Southern Place (12 page)

“I don’t want you thinking about me here, and the best way for that is not to go inside. You can see the museum when I leave, when you come to get me for good.”

He stood with his suitcase in his good hand, watching the truck wind down the blacktop drive.

Chapter 10: January 1959

Delores

Delores put the truck in gear and pulled forward, blinking back the tears as she followed the winding driveway back to the highway in the direction of home. It had broken her heart to leave him that way, to just drive away without even seeing the people and the place who took her brother, the only family she had left in the world. But no one argued with Cal when his mind was made up.

“With all the hell he’s been through,” Delores mumbled to herself, squinting to see the highway while she bit her lip until she tasted blood. “Who am I to deny his one simple request?”

So she’d let him go, watching him meander forward, a single suitcase in his remaining hand, into that house-turned-museum that promised to give him a new life.

Poor Cal, she thought, one of the few creatures on God’s earth actually happy with the shitty cards he’d been dealt, and what happens? In the blink of an eye he had gone from dirt-poor sharecropper, working his ass off and thanking the Almighty for every minute of it, to a one-armed charity case, given a compensation check and a luxury vacation in a secret spa that may have been famous years ago.

And yet he took it, smiling that scared, sad smile, showing the world he still believed that honesty, hard work and a belief in the American Dream could still work for him, buy him that little piece of agricultural nirvana he’d been salivating over since Mom died.

Delores slowed down and yielded for a four-way stop. Pulling forward, she noticed a lone teenager on an old bicycle, parked beside an ancient live oak and starring upward into its jungle of lush, green branches. He seemed to be the little town’s only inhabitant on this cloudless afternoon.

Her mama had told her how men were different, how the mere idea of what could come from the soil they thought they owned was more real to them than the concrete objects a woman could hold in her hand. “And it’s not like they live in a dream world,” Mary Pearl had explained. “We see the truth. It’s bigger than that. They’re smarter than we are, they can see the whole picture, generations beyond us. That’s why the Lord put them in charge.”

Delores had listened, and believed, as much as possible. Yet she heard the doubt in her mother’s voice, the unspoken words that were sometimes louder than the parables spoken. “They’re not making any more land,” her mother had said, her vocal inflections exactly as the late husband she repeated. “Be thrifty, live frugally, pay off your debts,” she said. “And—” she faltered for a minute, rubbing her iced tea glass with a dingy dishrag, “serve the Lord. Give joyfully to the Lord what is His.”

Delores smiled, remembering when Cal, trying so hard to understand the mystic rules and regulations of that world he wanted to make his own, had tried to reason with Mama about just what she meant. Delores turned down the barely audible radio, as though clearing the air would make it easier for the scenes rerunning in her head.

“But Mama,” Cal had said. “We
are
serving the Lord, by serving His land. We rotate the crops, and take regular soil samples, and then put back the nutrients we’ve taken out. We leave the grazing pastures for nature, keeping places for foxes, and deer, and coveys of quail to keep living and growing and making their place in the world.”

Delores remembered the passion in her brother’s voice, the way he named each creature with a quiet reverence, and how she knew he was envisioning each group of flora and fauna as he spoke. A heartfelt preacher proclaiming the love of Jesus had nothing on Calvin Mullinax; the wonders he saw on a daily basis were to him every bit as profound as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

“We leave the honeysuckle and trumpet vines to keep the hummingbirds happy, and we’ve got trees that’ve been homes for the wildlife for hundreds of years, and will be for hundreds more,” he had said. “When God looks at this place, He has to know we love and respect it, because we take care of it.”

“I suppose He does,” Mama had said, but Delores could hear the doubt, maybe even a smidgen of resentment from something or someone long before Cal. “But you need to be honest with yourself,” she said. “How much of that taking care are you doing for the Lord, and how much is for you?”

Delores felt a sharp pain in her gut—guilt—though she couldn’t be sure who or what she felt guilty for. Should she have said something back then, tried to intercede for the sharp and nasty tone her Mama had taken with Cal? But she’d been just a girl, she knew even less of what was really going on than Cal did. And Mama loved Cal; she was only telling him what she thought he needed to hear. Still, if Mama could’ve seen the future, seen all the pain he had coming down the road, would she still have said the same things?

An orange-striped cat darted out into the road; Delores screamed, then swerved to the right, veering off a steep shoulder and then jerking the wheel back onto the highway. She tasted bile as her heart beat in her throat, but smiled as she saw the fleet-footed mongrel already across the highway and halfway up a pecan tree, an empty bird feeder hanging from a lower limb. Her mind raced back to her mother’s words.

“You do things for the land, you borrow money, and plant again. You need a new harrow when you’re still paying off the tractor from two seasons ago. But you claim you’re doing it all for the land,” Mama had said, her eyes narrowing, her voice no longer sounding like the mama they knew. She set down her glass and used the rag to wipe down the countertops, rubbing harder with each new thought.

“December comes,” she said. “Your children learn way too early there ain’t no Santy Claus. So then there’s no Santy Claus, there’s no Lottie Moon offering, hell there ain’t been no tithe for the Lord in five years, ’cept what you hide from the egg money or change from the grocery store you don’t let on you have. You put out buckets to catch water from the leaks in the roof. You let your children wear hand-me-downs of other people’s clothes.” Delores remembered her confusion as to who “you” was supposed to be: she was talking as though to Calvin, but Cal had no children.

“You cash in your life insurance. You take a second mortgage, and a third, and you don’t tell nobody.” She spit out the last word with vengeance, her voice a raspy witch’s cry, like an evil storybook character had taken over their mother’s soul.

Delores had understood so little of it back then, yet now, years later, she could recall it almost word-for-word. She could see Cal’s face, ghostly white, his eyes glistening with held-back tears, his mouth an open “o” silently begging Mama to stop telling this awful story that no one wanted to hear. Yet Mama kept on, speaking as though not to them, but to another presence in the room. A presence that until that night had been a sacred one—that of their father.

“But Mama,” Cal had pleaded, gritting his teeth and staring into her eyes, “I don’t know what you mean, Mama. We’ve had some hard times, but we’re doing okay. Me and Sis are grown, too big for Santy Claus, and we’re getting by just fine. There’s lotsa folks that’s got less’n we got, and when the next crop comes in, we’ll be even better. We’ll be caught up at the bank, and maybe we can even fix up the house some, like you’ve always talked about. We don’t need much, we could be looking real good in just a couple of—”

“Son, we won’t never be caught up. Maybe, if we got out of this place, maybe there’d be hope. We’ve tied every penny into this farm for the last thirty years, and it ain’t much more ours than it was the day we took over. Maybe if we gave it up, then we could move into town and just break even. You’re young. You could get you a job with a future, one with benefits and a retirement plan. Your sister could get out and meet people, see another way of life than this hand-to-mouth ya’ll have grown up in.” She seemed to be winding down; her manic, pointless tidying became less intense, and her voice sounded softer, kinder, more mellow. But the words she offered scared Calvin even more.

“Leave?” Cal cried. “How can you even think about it? This is our home, and more than that, it’s Daddy’s home. To sell it off and just leave, that’d be like selling off a piece of him, is that what you want?” That was when Calvin broke down. The dam burst, tears dripped down his reddened face and his muscled torso was racked with shameless sobs.

Mary Pearl laid down her rag and walked across the room to her son. As she anchored him in her arms, he first tried to push away from her, then let himself be folded into her bosom as she shook her head and ran her fingers through his hair.

“There, there, now,” she murmured. “Ain’t nobody gonna sell off nothing. Your daddy’s blood, sweat, and tears are in every acre, and he was walking the fencerows with you, teaching you to love it the same as him from the first day we brought you from the hospital.”

“He did?” Cal asked, sounding more like a child than the man-of-the-house he was trying to become. They had heard those stories countless times, but on that night Cal wanted to be told again; he needed the reassurance that he, like his father and grandfather before him, belonged with the Mullinax land.

Mary Pearl held out her hand, motioning for Delores to join them in an awkward embrace. Cal wiped his face, then cleared his throat in manly fashion, as though his recent breakdown was simply a seasonal bronchial attack. His mother followed, sniffling loudly and rubbing her red-lined eyes. Delores showed no sign of tears, but stared downward, pretending to examine her mother’s worn canvas shoes. Delores seldom cried in front of others, but she could tell from the heated burning sensation of her nose that she was once again sporting her “Rudolph” look.

Crossing a rural creek bridge, Delores saw road signs communicating the mileage to Cussetta, Cuthbert, and Dawson. Deep in her own reverie, she’d driven more than halfway home without realizing it.

What had happened after the strange huddle ending their terror that night? Did they sit down at the table and have a snack before going to bed? Share old memories and funny stories? Pull out the Whitman’s Sampler box of family snapshots, with a tiny Calvin driving the tractor from his father’s lap and Mary Pearl braiding daisies into her daughter’s hair? Did they pray?

Try as she might, Delores could never recall any other events about the night in question. They never spoke of it to one another, and never again did the two children hear the voice or the words of the mother they had seen that night.

Delores reached for the radio dial, finding an instrumental tune that fit the melancholy feeling she couldn’t seem to shake. “Sleepwalk,” she thought the song was called, an eerily beautiful melody set to a pensive, almost ominous accompaniment.

“Poor, sweet Cal,” she whispered, pondering as though sleepwalking.

Whether awake or asleep, her brother’s world was a nightmare that no one could stop.

❦

“Sure, Imogene, I don’t mind. You stay there and get those little ’uns squared away. I wasn’t ’sposed to go in ’til second shift today anyway, so I’ll just cover yours and you can come in whenever you can. I was just planning to stop by Cal’s new place and check on things, but I can do that after work as easy as before. No problem, sweetie.” Delores hung up the phone, almost glad to be going on to work instead of just sitting around until later.

She had settled into living alone, staying busy with her job at the panty factory and being on hand for any questions that came up about Cal’s new house.

After eighteen months of stitching quarter inch elastic to thousands of thin nylon leg holes, Delores made her quota with little effort and often relieved the workload of other women. Bertha’s nervous condition had caused her to jam the machines three times in one week, so Bertha had doubled up on the pills to try and relax. She’d calmed down considerably, causing friends to watch her even more closely; she’d fallen asleep in the break room last week, and in the bathroom stall just yesterday.

Aunt Mamie Fincher, the eighty-pound, eighty-year-old granny who crocheted slippers for all the ladies on her shift, was so knotted with arthritis she could no longer sit for more than a half-hour at a time.

Three small children prone to asthma and an abusive husband prone to hooch made clocking in late a regular occurrence for Imogene Etheridge, the company’s youngest worker next to Delores, yet all of these women had an ally who kept their jobs, and therefore their families, safe.

Delores developed a routine and stuck with it, staying busy enough to seldom realize she was lonely. Cal had insisted she use his new truck as transportation, so she washed and waxed it every week, by hand. His bird dog had stayed on at Oakland with his friend, Will, but the butcher kept saving him soup bones, and Delores still delivered both bones and kibble to Will’s door every Thursday.

The new house was fast becoming a reality, and Delores stopped by often, bringing sausage biscuits, thermoses of hot coffee, freshly baked cookies, and other treats to the workers. It seemed reasonable to her. These men were building a new life for her brother, and Cal would be helping them if he could. She should at least do something.

And despite Cal’s intentions, she still brought in extra money by working at the Sundown on weekends.

While Mr. Foster, Cal’s boss at Oakland and hers at the factory, now seemed to avoid all contact with her since Cal’s accident, Horace Hall, the Sundown
owner, had taken it upon himself to be a sort of surrogate brother in her own brother’s absence.

“Don’t worry about the Sundown,” Mr. Hall had told her, calling to check on Cal back at the hospital in Atlanta. “I can get some gal to fill in or just serve from the bar myself. You stay there and take care of your brother. As long as you want a little weekend job, missy, you’ve got one with me. Always
.”

Delores hadn’t known what to say, mumbling “thank you” as he began to talk again.

“Your daddy was a good man. I knew him for years, and your brother’s cut from the same cloth. Hardworking men and proud of it. Good men,” he said. “Not like these—” He didn’t finish the sentence, and the sudden silence in her ear seemed loud and abrupt.

She wondered if she’d lost the connection, but then he spoke.

“You stay with your brother. You tell him the whole town’s pulling for him. We are, but he probably won’t much want to see anybody for a while. I imagine he’s taking it pretty hard. You stay home and do what you can for him, he’ll be more comfortable with family. He’ll be all right, Cal will, he’ll just get up and move on, cause that’s who he is, God love him. It’ll just take a while.”

Again she was lost as to what might be the right thing to say, feeling relieved when it sounded like he didn’t need an answer.

“Well, you take care, Delores,” he said, a summary statement like he was about to finish.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, hoping their awkward conversation was signaling to close. “Thank you for calling.”

“And remember, you need anything, I mean anything
,
you call me, you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Take care of your brother,” he said again. “And if you get ready to come back to work, just come on. There’s a place with your name on it, whenever you get ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Goodbye, now.” He hung up.

It was months before she saw the inside of the Sundown again. Cal had thought that between his settlement money and the fact that he’d be able to work again soon, there was no need for his little sister to go back to being a barmaid. According to him, she’d even be able to quit her day job in the fall and finally enroll at the vocational school. Delores listened and smiled, wanting to go along with him but knowing that the best laid plans weren’t always fail-safe. After Cal was released from the hospital, Delores spent her weekends at home, allowing time with her brother until he left for Warm Springs after Christmas.