A Spool of Blue Thread (30 page)

“What, you’re thinking he’ll bring in a stump grinder?”

“Seems like that would make more sense.”

Abby called, “Hi, everybody.”

They turned, and Red said, “Hi, Abby! Hi, Dane.”

“Red,” Dane said, impassively.

Abby had always thought Red’s looks didn’t go with his name. He should have had red hair and that pinkish skin that went with it; he should have been freckled and doughy. Instead, he was all black-and-white, lean and lanky, with a boyishly prominent Adam’s apple and wrist bones as distinct as cabinet knobs. Today he was wearing a T-shirt that was more holes than fabric, and khakis with dirty knees. He could have been one of his father’s workmen. “These here are Earl and Landis,” he was saying. “They’re the guys who took this thing down.”

Earl and Landis nodded without smiling, and Ward lifted a palm.

“You took it down just the two of you?” Abby asked the men.

“Naw, Red helped plenty,” Earl said.

“Only with the muscle power,” Red told her. “It was Earl and Landis who knew how not to take everything else with it.”

“Laid her in place like a baby,” Landis said with satisfaction.

Abby lifted her eyes to study the canopy of leaves above them. So many trees remained that she couldn’t detect any change in the filtering of the light, but still, the loss of the poplar seemed a pity. The cross sections strewn about looked perfectly sound, and the sap filled the air with a scent as vital and sharp as fresh blood.

The men had returned to the subject of stump removal. Earl was of the opinion that they ought to just go ahead and cut the last of the trunk level with the ground, while Landis suggested waiting for Mitch. “Meantime we can strip these branches,” he said, and he set a foot on the nearest branch and gave one of its shoots an experimental tap with his axe. Abby liked hearing workmen discuss logistics. It made her feel like a small child again, sitting on her father’s counter swinging her feet and breathing in the smells of metal and machine oil.

Earl yanked the cord of his chainsaw and set up a deafening roar. He lowered the blade to the thickest part of a branch while Ward bent to grab another branch and haul it out of the way. “I don’t guess you brought an axe,” Red shouted to Dane.

Dane, who was lighting a cigarette, shook out his match and said, “Now, how would I ever have gotten my hands on an axe?”

“I’ll fetch another from the basement,” Red said. He propped his own axe against a dogwood. “Come on, Ab, I’ll take you up to the house.”

“You’re sure I can’t do something here?” she asked. It seemed a shame to go off and leave Dane.

But Red said, “You can help my mom fix lunch, if you like.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Dane cocked an eyebrow at her in a silent goodbye, and then she and Red turned to climb the flagstone walk. Leaving behind the din of the chainsaw, she felt as if her ears had gone numb. “You really think this will take until lunchtime?” she asked Red.

“Oh, longer than that,” he said. “We’re lucky if we’re done before dark.”

She supposed that was just as well. She would have more time to reassemble her composure in front of Dane. By evening she’d be a whole different person, self-possessed and mature.

They arrived at the porch steps, but instead of leaving her there, Red came to a stop. “Say,” he said. “I was wondering. You want a ride to the wedding?”

“I’m not sure I’m going to the wedding,” Abby said.

She had about decided not to, in fact. The invitation (on paper so thick it had required two postage stamps) had come as a surprise; she and Merrick weren’t close. Besides, Dane wasn’t invited. Merrick barely knew Dane. So Abby had been meaning for weeks now to send her regrets.

But Red said, “You aren’t going? Mom was counting on it.”

Abby wrinkled her forehead.

“I was, too,” he told her. “Because who else will I know in that crowd?”

She said, “Don’t you have to be an usher or something?”

“It never even came up,” he said.

“Well, thank you, Red. You’re nice to offer. I’ll let you know if I decide to go, okay?”

He hesitated a moment, as if there were more he wanted to say, but then he smiled at her and split off toward the rear of the house.

Crossing the porch in three long strides, tall and craggy as Abraham Lincoln and dressed not all that differently from Lincoln, Junior
Whitshank inclined his head a quarter-inch in Abby’s direction and then swiftly descended the steps. “Morning, young lady,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Whitshank.”

“Merrick’s not up yet, I don’t believe.”

“Well, I was looking for Mrs. Whitshank.”

“Mrs. Whitshank is in the kitchen.”

“Thanks.”

Mr. Whitshank veered off the flagstone walk toward where the men were working. Abby, gazing after him, wondered where on earth he bought his shirts. They were white, always, and unfashionably high in the collar, so that a tall band of white encased his skinny neck. She often had the feeling that he might be modeling himself after some ideal—some illustrious figure from his past that he had admired. But his narrow black trousers looked empty in the seat, and the Y of his suspenders accentuated the weary, burdened posture of an ordinary laboring man.

“Mitch here yet?” she heard him call, and a murmur of answers rose above the buzz of the chainsaw like bees humming in a log.

Abby climbed the steps, crossed the porch, opened the screen door, and tootled, “Yoo-hoo!” It was something Linnie Whitshank would have done. Automatically, Abby seemed to have switched to Mrs. Whitshank’s language and to her tone of voice—thin and fluty.

“Back here!” Mrs. Whitshank called from the kitchen.

Abby loved the Whitshanks’ house. Even on a hot July day it was cool and dim, with the ceiling fan revolving high above the center hall and another fan gently stirring in the dining room. A folded tablecloth had been placed at one end of the table with a clutch of silverware resting on top, waiting to be distributed. She continued through to the kitchen, where Mrs. Whitshank stood at the sink rinsing okra pods. Mrs. Whitshank was slight and frail-looking, but an incongruously deep, low bosom filled out the top of her gingham housedress. Her pale hair hung limply almost to her shoulders. It was a young girl’s hairstyle, and her face when she turned to
Abby seemed young as well—unlined and plain and guileless. “Hey, there!” she said, and Abby said, “Hi.”

“Don’t you look pretty today!”

“I came to see how I could help,” Abby said.

“Oh, honey, you don’t want to spoil those nice clothes. Just sit and keep me company.”

Abby pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and settled on it. She had learned not to argue with Mrs. Whitshank, who was a force of nature when it came to cooking and would only find Abby a hindrance.

“How’s that tree coming along?” Mrs. Whitshank asked her.

“They’re starting to cut up the branches now.”

“Did you ever hear of such a thing? Bringing down a whole poplar for the sake of a photograph.”

“Photy-graph,” she pronounced it. She had a country way of talking, and unlike her husband, she made no attempt to alter it.

“Dane says the tree was already dying, according to Mr. Whitshank,” Abby said.

“Oh, sometimes Junior will just get this sort of
vision
about how he wants things to be,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. She shut off the faucet and wiped her hands on her apron. “He’s already bought frames for the photos, isn’t that something? Two big frames, wooden. I asked him, I said, ‘You going to hang those over the mantel?’ He said, ‘Linnie Mae.’ ” She made her voice go deep and gruff. “Said, ‘People don’t hang family photos in their living rooms.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ Did you know that?”

“My mom’s got photos all
over
the living room,” Abby said.

“Well, then. See there?”

Mrs. Whitshank took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and poured some into a bowl. “I’m fixing okra and sliced tomatoes,” she told Abby. “And fried chicken, with some of my biscuits. Oh, later on you might help with the biscuits, now that you know how. And peach cobbler for dessert.”

“That sounds delicious.”

“Did Red tell you he would give you a ride to the wedding?”

“He did,” Abby said, “but I’m not sure yet if I’m going.”

She felt embarrassed now about waiting so long to make up her mind. If her mother had known, she would have been horrified. But all Mrs. Whitshank said was, “Oh, I wish you would! I need someone to prop me up.”

Abby laughed.

“Merrick had me buy this yellow dress at Hutzler’s,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “It makes me look like I’ve got the jaundice, but Merrick was real set on it. She’s like her daddy; she takes these notions.” She was spooning cornmeal into a second bowl.

Abby said, “I’m just afraid I wouldn’t know anybody. Merrick’s crowd is all older than me.”

“Well, I won’t know them, either,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “It’ll be her college friends, mostly—not many from around here.”

“Who all in your family is coming?” Abby asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, grandparents? Aunts and uncles?”

“Oh, we don’t have any of those,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

She didn’t sound very regretful about it. Abby waited for her to elaborate, but she was measuring out salt now.

“Well, I told Red I appreciate the offer,” Abby said finally. “It’s good to know I’ve got a ride if I need one.”

Really she should just say yes and be done with it. She wasn’t sure what was stopping her. It was only half a Saturday, a tiny chunk of her life.

The Saturday after she spent the night with Dane.
If
she spent the night.

She imagined how he might say, “Aw, you don’t want to leave me all by myself, the morning after we …”

After we …

She looked down at her skirt and smoothed it across her knees.

“How’s your job going?”
Mrs. Whitshank asked her. “You still liking those little colored kids?”

“Oh, I’m loving them.”

“I hate to think of you going down into that neighborhood, though,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

“It’s not a bad neighborhood.”

“It’s a
poor
neighborhood, isn’t it? The people there are poor as dirt, and they’d as lief rob you as look at you. I swear, Abby, sometimes you don’t show good sense when it comes to knowing who to be scared of.”

“I could never be scared of those people!”

Mrs. Whitshank shook her head and dumped the colander of okra onto a cutting board.

“Oh, what a world, what a world,” Abby said.

“How’s that, honey?”

“That’s what the wicked witch says in
The Wizard of Oz
. Did you know that? They’re showing a revival downtown and I went to see it last night with Dane. The witch says, ‘I’m melting! Melting! Oh, what a world, what a world,’ she says.”

“I remember the part about ‘I’m melting,’ ” Mrs. Whitshank said. “I took Red and Merrick to see that movie when they were little bitty things.”

“Yes, well, and then she talks about ‘what a world.’ I told Dane afterward, I said, ‘I never heard that before! I had no idea she said that!’ ”

“Me neither,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “In a way, it sounds kind of pitiful.”

“Exactly,” Abby said. “All at once I started feeling sorry for her, you know? I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.”

“Oh, Abby, Lord preserve you,” Mrs. Whitshank said with a gentle laugh.

Loud, sharp heels clopped down the stairs and through the front hall. The clops crossed the dining room and Merrick appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing a red satin kimono and red mules topped with puffs of red feathers. Giant metal curlers encased her head like some sort of spaceman’s helmet. “Gawd, what time is it?” she asked. She pulled out a chair and sat down next to Abby and took a pack of Kents from her sleeve.

“Good morning, Merrick,” Abby said.

“Morning. Is that okra? Ick.”

“It’s for lunch,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. “We’ve got all those men out front who are going to need feeding.”

“Only Mom believes it’s impolite to make your workmen bring their own sandwiches,” Merrick told Abby. “Abby Dalton, are you wearing
hose
? Aren’t you melting?”

“I’m melting!” Abby wailed in a wicked-witch voice, and Mrs. Whitshank laughed but Merrick just looked annoyed. She lit a cigarette and let out a long whoosh of smoke. “I had the most awful dream,” she said. “I dreamed I was driving a little too fast on this winding mountain road and I missed a curve. I thought, ‘Oh-oh, this is going to be bad.’ You know that moment when you realize it’s just got to, got to happen. I went sailing over the edge of a cliff, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut and braced for the shock. But the funny thing was, I kept sailing. I never landed.”

Abby said, “That’s a terrible dream!” but Mrs. Whitshank went on placidly slicing okra.

“I thought, ‘Oh, now I get it,’ ” Merrick said. “ ‘I must already be dead.’ And then I woke up.”

“Was the car a convertible?” Mrs. Whitshank asked.

Merrick paused, with her cigarette suspended halfway to her mouth. She said, “Pardon?”

“The car in your dream. Was it a convertible?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”

“If you dream you’re in a convertible it means you’re about to make a serious error in judgment,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

Merrick sent Abby a look of exaggerated astonishment. “I wonder what error you could possibly be thinking of,” she said.

“But if the car is
not
a convertible, it would signify you’re going to get some sort of promotion.”

“Well, what a coincidence, I dreamed about a convertible,” Merrick said. “And the whole world knows you’re dead set against this wedding, so don’t waste your breath, Linnie Mae.”

Merrick often addressed her mother as “Linnie Mae.” The twisted sound of the name in her mouth somehow managed to imply all of her mother’s shortcomings—her twangy voice, her feed-sack-looking dresses, her backwoods pronunciations like “supposably” and “eck cetera” and “desk-es.” Abby felt bad for Mrs. Whitshank, but Mrs. Whitshank herself didn’t appear to take offense. “I’m just saying,” she said mildly, and she slid a handful of okra spokes into the bowl of milk.