A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (11 page)

Be two weeks ago tomorrow I finished all Ruby’s food. I looked down in that deep freeze all raw cold and empty and said, What’re you going to do now? I told Burr about it
and he told me, he said, “I told you you ought to’ve let me help you get some bean rows in, least a hill or two.” Then he told me I could walk across the field and take a meal with him whenever I wanted to, but I turned him down. I want to eat in my own damn house.

So I started out on cornflakes, and when I got sick of cornflakes I opened a can of soup, damn old watery-tasting soup. It won’t long before I said, Not only are you going to rot here, you’re going to starve too! I’d been used to a big meal. Cornflakes and soup won’t hold a man. I know how to cook, the getting-by kind of cooking a man’ll do, but that don’t mean I want to do it. And I cooked what Ruby’d froze according to how I thought I was supposed to, but that don’t mean it was always fit to eat. What I mean to say is, I was hungry for something good!

Then I thought of something. I said, Isn’t it some cooking shows Ruby used to sit here and watch off the public television? I found one in the afternoon, sat here with a pencil and paper like she would, and I watched and wrote, watched and wrote. Sounded good, garlicky chicken in some lemon juice. I must’ve been a idiot to think I could have something like that, but I went on to the store anyway.

Porter had some nice fresh chicken in, a lemon too, but that was about all he had except for my regular groceries. If you can’t boil it, fry it, or scoop it out of the can then he
generally won’t stock it. But I got to thinking about that garlic, how I like a good strong taste, and I said, Well, you won’t know if he has some hid somewhere if you don’t ask him, so I did. And did I evermore get hooted and hollered at. One somebody asked me if I was planning to hang some around my neck to keep the vampires off me. I and the boys have always been real tight but I told them every last one to go to hell and I meant it. I took my grocery bag and left.

What was I thinking to think a store that keeps bloodworms in the cooler with the chicken and cube steaks might stock something good as garlic? Then all I could taste was Ruby’s spaghetti sauce, and I wanted to take and pitch that damn chicken out in the highway. And it didn’t come out right either, right red raw in the middle, but I ate it anyway.

Come along about Thursday I said, It’s bound to be more than one way to skin this cat. Ruby used to say you just always had to believe you’d find as many answers as it was questions, and I had three big questions every day I needed a answer to, What’s for breakfast? What’s for lunch? What’s for supper? To hell with the snacks. Then I was talking to Burr and he said, “What you need is to get you somebody in there to help you out.” I told him he might be right, I could get used to having somebody to wait on me. When Ruby got so sick her sister-in-law came down here and
stayed a month with us, wouldn’t let neither I nor Ruby one touch a dirty dish, but Ruby tried, kept trying until she couldn’t try no more. But I said I bet Jimmy wouldn’t let go of Elsie to come and stay with me by myself, and Burr told me he had something in mind. I said, “Well, what?” And he just said, “Come on get in the truck and let’s take a ride.” So I did.

He said he was taking me out to the old Butler place, said it might still be one or two working-age women left out there who wouldn’t mind picking up a dollar or two. He said most of the tenants that farmed for the old lady Butler had about all moved to town when the old lady died and they brought in all the big machinery and what-not but he’d heard a few hung on out there. I said, “I know how it is, you stay somewhere so long and you feel like you want to leave and then somebody says you can leave and then you don’t feel like you can.” I could’ve left Henry Hoover when daddy died, found something to do in town, but I said, No, I ’bout as well stay.

But anyway, we rode on out there and I and Burr both looked at the homeplace and just had to shake our head. You ought to listen a minute about the Butler crowd because they’re really something to talk about. They’re most of them dead, except for the ones in town and the granddaughter and her husband that live on the place now and do a half-assed job farming it. The girl’s some kin to June’s
friend Ellen, but you couldn’t hold a gun to her and get her to claim them.

You ought to’ve seen what the Butler lady did to me one time. Used to I used to like to ride Ruby’s bicycle up and down the highway and pick up drink bottles, that was before everything was in a can. I’d ride all over hell and half of Georgia, and some days I’d start on home with that basket filled up so full that all that bicycle acted like it wanted to do was turn over. But I liked doing it. Found money. You can’t turn your nose up at found money. And anyway, one morning early I was riding along and I saw this big cream-colored car coming right towards me, and it kept coming and coming, and then it sort of eased over to my side of the road, and right before I turned into the ditch I saw that mean little woman all hunched up behind the steering wheel laughing like a hyena! I was afraid she might stop and get out and shoot me laying there with Ruby’s bicycle on top of me, but she just went on down the road. It shook me up fairly bad, and you can damn well better bet I stayed off that stretch of road until I heard that woman was dead in the ground.

Before she died though that place was something to see, big, big old white house. I remember riding by there on the way to the tobacco market one time, sitting in back in case the tarp wanted to fly off, and I remember seeing her out in front of the house standing over a colored man
while he painted the birdbath. I just had to wonder what it’d be like if I’d been born a rich somebody with money.

But it’s not so fine a place now, weeds up in the yard high as my hip, and that birdbath busted, laying on the ground, the whole business just gone to pure ruination, ruination time’ll do if you let it. Burr told me when we were out there, he said one time he had to go see the old lady about some hay and he got up in the yard and damned if she didn’t have a whole row of colored women lined up all the way down one side of the house cleaning the windows, one woman on a window, inside and out.

And I bet you not a window on that house has been touched since she died. I told Burr, I said, “Mine’s about that filthy,” and he told me just to hang on, he’d find me some help. He said if it didn’t work out he’d send June back to my house this weekend to give it a good going-through. I said I hated to ask June to have to come back in and mess in my mess, but you get in this shape and you can’t be too choicey.

Anyway, I and Burr drove all back through the old lady’s yard, all past the equipment shelters, past the irrigation pond, about dried up, and then coming around the curve I saw a big dried out field full of houses, old people, old cars. This is exactly what it was like, it was like somebody’d took a notion to decorate the place and said, “Here, here’s
some houses” and pitched some little shacks out over the field. Then he said, “Here, have some people” and threw out a handful or two of people the way you sling corn over chickens.

We pulled up in front of one of the houses and the screen door opened and the biggest, coal-blackest woman I’d ever seen stepped out. She came right over to my side of the truck, walking without bending her knees, more waddling than walking. Burr told me her name was Mavis Washington and she’d helped him barn tobacco a few times. He said she was a card.

Then listen. She said, “How you doing, Mr. Stanley? Who ya’ll looking fo’?” Burr told her I was looking for some housekeeping help, and did she know anybody who wanted to work.

She laughed and fanned herself with both her hands and she said, “It ain’t nobody likes to but we all does it.” Then she reached in her bosom, listen now, right in front of two white men she reached down in her bosom and started pulling out this white rag, something looking like a baby diaper, and she kept on pulling like it was a magic trick. Then when it was all out she wiped her face and neck all around and ran the rag up one arm. I thought, Good God.

While she was swabbing herself Burr said, “Well, what do you think? Think you might could help us?”

Then she crammed that rag back down there and without even looking up from her business she said, “What do it pay?”

I told her ten dollars a day, three days a week, a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, plus all the meals.

Then she leaned her head back the way they do when they have the spirit and she said, “Lawd, if ya’ll ain’t something!” Then she laughed. Then she said, “I reckon if I fixin’ to cook I fixin’ to eat it too!”

Burr laughed but I wondered what to do. See, when he asked if she might could help us, I thought she’d take it like, “Can you help us find somebody besides yourself?” But she took it the opposite and hired herself before I could think straight. A big woman pulling out of her bosom’ll throw you off.

Then I thought to myself, I bet that woman can make biscuits the kind you dream of. So I went on and told her she could start work soon as she was able, next day if she could. She asked me if I’d carry her back and forth or should her boys. I told her her boys.

Burr cranked the truck and I said for her to be there first thing bright and early to see how I had things set up and what-not. And then she started cramming her rag back down in that bosom and asking me how to get to my house. I told her how to look for it across Burr’s field and said it was a silver mailbox in front with Jack Stokes on it.

She just took off yelling, “Whew! You Blinking Jack?” I told her I was and she said, “Lawd, Lawd. Them days I was up to Mr. Stanley’s barn all I be hearing was, ‘Blinking Jack he say this, Blinking Jack he done that. Shame he ain’t here, always cutting up, being funny,’ and I say, ‘Where he is?’ and they say, ‘To the hills with his wife.’ I say, ‘Well, I sho’ would likes to meet somebody loves to laugh and carry on foolishness. Mavis do love to laugh.’” That kind of got away with me, then I thought to myself, Well, Mavis loves to laugh, I sure as hell hope Mavis loves to work.

So she got there the next morning, not early, I’d already had my cereal. I stood there at the front door and waited for her and I looked around my house and thought, I have a mess, a good woman comes to clean wants a mess, must crave a man’s mess. I held open the door and in she comes up the steps not bending those knees, like she’s wood. She grabbed the door and said, “My knees is killing me. It must be ’gwine rain.” She went on in and put this big old satchel down on the kitchen table and proceeded to take out all grades of mess and lay it all out over the table. She said, “I likes to be able to gets to my bidnis.” I stood watching her, wondering if I ought to’ve let her come here. Something was way, way off.

Then here comes her business out of the bag. It was first a sack of hard Christmas candy, then orange jelly slices. She looked at me, slid both of them across the table and
said to me, “I likes to have something sweets to suck on. You welcome to it.” I told her no thank you, and then she took out two all stretched-out-looking Ace bandages, lotion, two snuff cans, a white Bible, a big wad of rags like I told about, two tall grape drinks, and a round donut pillow. About that last thing, she laid it on the table and said, “This is for when I sits.”

I stood there fairly well amazed. Then she picked up her old stretched-out bandages and said, “I gots to wrap these knees fo’ I starts to pulling and stooping. They all swoll up.” Her legs! Whew! Looked like they’d pure blow up if you put a pin to them, big around as my whole head. I told her to go on back to the bathroom, and she went on back and directly I heard something sounded like the whole toilet stool was tearing off the wall. I took and went back there and got by the door and hollered, “What are you doing? Be careful with my toilet stool!” She said she was just doing her business and to go on.

She finally came out but she still had the bandages in her hand. She said to me, “You got a wobbly toilet. I can’t wrap on no wobbly toilet.” I told her it didn’t wobble ten minutes ago. Then she just said again, “You got you a wobbly toilet,” and she proceeded to sit down in Ruby’s chair. I could just see the whole thing buckle. Look what she did to the toilet! So I told her to find somewhere else to park it. She went over to my big old stuffed chair I
sit and watch the television in. It’s real low to the floor, and before she was halfway down I said, “You get down, you won’t get back up.” Last thing a man needs is a big woman stuck in his television chair. So she looked around for somewhere she could sit and not break or get swallowed in and I wanted to say, “It must be a whole lot of trouble being as large as you, can’t even sit down regular.” Then she spotted Ruby’s kitchen stool with the back to it and she said, “That looks just right.” Right soon as she said that I hung a pair of yellow pigtails on her and featured her like a big old black Goldilocks. It looked real odd to me.

It was nigh about noon when she finally got her knees fixed and all that mess on the table in order. I figured I’d leave for awhile. I figured she might not want to clean with me in the house. Ruby used to take the broom and act like she was sweeping me out the door. So I went on and helped Burr fix his transmission and then I went on back. I walked in the kitchen and said to myself, Lord God! Everything was just like I’d left it, dishes strung out hither to yon, grease and mess caked on the stove. And you want to know where Mavis was? She was sitting on the couch with her head slung all back, like if I didn’t think she was alive I’d have thought she was dead, holding onto the broom like she was paddling a boat. I poked her on the arm and told her to wake up. She liked to’ve jumped fifty feet. Then she
rubbed her eyes and told me, she said, “I went to sweeping and my knees just give out on me, sleeping when I suppose to be sweeping.” Then she laughed and laughed, wiping her eyes, and she told me, “Whew! Mavis do love to laugh! I finish it the next time.” I thought, What? I told her if she was so sore she shouldn’t have hired herself out, and she ought to look around, that she wouldn’t see any signs up saying I hire the handicapped. She just said my mouth was as bad as she’d heard it was, and then she laughed some more and got herself up off the couch.