A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (6 page)

Sometimes I don’t know why I think things, but I thought for damn sure he’d have sat in Lawyer Peele’s office and said to him, “Well, I’ve got this one tenant been with my family long as I can remember, worked hard, never showed up drunk, never asked to borrow money, good man. I think I might let him have that piece he’s been living on since he was born.” And I thought if it didn’t happen like that then he’d at least remember standing beside me in that field, and both of us boys, and seeing his daddy’s tractor kill my daddy, kill him right out here in this field next to my house. Oh but hell no, neither thing counted.

Ruby’d tell me, “Try not to be bitter. Lonnie didn’t know all you’ve been thinking.” After she’d talk to me I’d feel better, and then her calming me down would wear off and I’d have to get out of the house and go out to the animal shelter and sit out there until I was so drunk I couldn’t see straight, much less think.

See, it was I and daddy and Lonnie and his daddy, Henry, and all these farmers from up and down the road all standing at the edge of the field looking at Henry’s new tractor. Nobody’d ever seen one except in the
Progressive Farmer,
and sure as hell couldn’t afford one. But you can bet if it was big and new Henry’d beg, borrow, or steal for it. And there it was, big, red, and somebody said, “Show us what it’ll do.” Henry told daddy to hop up there and take it down a row. He’d been on it all morning so I didn’t think anything of it. But what did bother me was Henry. See, he could’ve driven it himself, but what he was doing was he was letting daddy do it so he could stand there with all his buddies and see everything they were seeing, not just the new tractor, but the field and the tractor and a man he could say this and that to and order to manage both things for him. He was one white man that loved to watch another one work.

So daddy took the tractor down a row and Henry stood by us with his arms crossed and Lonnie stood next to him with his arms crossed just like his daddy’s. And then daddy got to the other end and started to make a turn and I remember thinking, He’s too close to the ditch, too close. Then the whole business turned over nice and easy like it was the most natural thing in this world for that tractor to fold over in that drainage ditch. We all ran down there but it wasn’t a thing we could do, but I can still feel my arms ache for how hard I pulled at that tractor. Somebody pulled me away and told me, he said, “Only somebody mightier than us all could lift it,” meaning God, and I felt like screaming right out in that field, “Is this how You
treat the ones that love You?” My daddy might’ve been a sonofabitch sometimes, but he did evermore love the Lord.

But Lonnie didn’t make things square and here I sit, old as the hills I farmed since I could hold a plow line, sitting here by myself, too. Land and children, they’re the only things in this world that’ll carry on for you, and here I am, going to my grave without either one.

I
’ve heard television evangelists say the Lord will return when you least expect him. I think I was afraid that same prophesy might’ve applied to John Woodrow those nights he didn’t come home. I said to myself. About the time I get used to him being gone, when I’ve calmed down, returned the pistol, that’ll be when he comes in, slobbering all over me, wanting to kiss and make up. Or either that’ll be when the screen door blows open like almighty hell breaking loose and he’ll come in pulling that dazed young girl behind him. And if and when push came to shove I saw myself pulling that pistol from under my pillow and saying, “So what do you think about little Miss Vanderbilt now?”

I remember I slept with my clothes on the three nights he was missing, and each morning before I went to the
Hoovers I’d change and take a little spit-bath, the kind mama would’ve only allowed if I was sick. It took me right many mornings of those baths to get past feeling guilty, like mama was standing in the door looking at me, holding a towel and some lavender soap, pointing the way to the tub. I can’t remember exactly when it was but I can remember looking at my face in John Woodrow’s old cracked up shaving mirror and saying out loud, “I’m doing the best I can.” Lord, we will tell ourselves anything to get by. The best I could’ve done would’ve been to slip away while John Woodrow had slipped away, but planning, thinking about going home and facing mama and daddy became something I could only bear to think about right before I fell asleep at night, when your judgment’s not good, that in-between time when you can make anything work as you’d please.

That third day I went to work was the day I met Jack. I was waiting under the big tree in the backyard, waiting for somebody, either Tiny Fran or her mother, to come out and tell me to come on in, you didn’t dare just go up and knock on the door, be it front door or back door, and I saw a skinny man with his dungarees all hung down around his hips, swerving, trying to manage a tall load of manure, headed across the yard towards me.

He was forty then, but he looked ten years older. All that time out in the sun had dried and pulled his skin. He says
he’s never minded it, that he’s not what he calls a town man, trying to stay young and fresh despite the odds. He’s always said it’s fine for women to trick time with lotions and what-not because a trick pulled off just right, he says, is really something to look at, smell of, touch. I know he’s referring to me. I know I’m every bit of his experience.

But he pushed his wheelbarrow right up to me that day like approaching young women waiting under pecan trees was something he did every day, like it was something he regularly did on the way from the chicken house to the garden. I wasn’t afraid at all by the way he looked at me, not like the way I felt when I’d stand up from picking and see the crew chief staring. Jack’s look was more like what happens when I’m walking from here to the store and the sun catches something on the side of the road just right, and I wonder if it’s a dime or a piece of jewelry, but then I know nobody out here has any jewelry to lose, so I pick the dime up, rub the dirt off, look at it hard, hard as I’d look if it’d been a brooch, just because I’d found it, and finding anything of value is unusual, be it a dime or a man with clay-red skin or a young woman resting under a pecan tree.

And this is the first thing my husband ever said to me. He said, “This is something. You smoking a cigarette and it ninety-some-odd degrees out here.” He can burn right through to the heart of a thing. But I’d about had it with
men and their opinions of me so I told him it was my business how hot I was. Then he set the load down and said to me, “Well, if it’s your business, I reckon it’s your business.” I just smoked my cigarette and watched him. I thought he was sure to say something else just as curious.

He stood there and watched me too, and then he wanted to know who I was, what I was doing under Lonnie’s tree, how long I’d been there, if I was with the migrants, and if I was married. He got all those questions out before I could think up answers to any. I told him the truth to everything except the migrant question. I said I was travelling with them doing research. I think he knew I was lying, but he didn’t say anything, and he never has.

After I answered the question about being married, he wanted to know who to, and I told him, and that was a dead giveaway. But I didn’t back down. I just hoped he wouldn’t ask me anything else. I said, “I’m married to John Woodrow. He’s one of the workers, but see, I met him at the beginning of my research. He’s a great help with my work.” The more I talked, the deeper in I got. When I stopped he thought for a minute and said, “John Woodrow. He’s that one they found cut up last night.”

You can’t imagine what was going through my head. I told him to tell me everything he knew. He said it might upset me, but I told him to please go on and tell me. So he told me Lonnie had gotten a call late the night before
from the sheriff, and that he’d had to get up and go to town, to the hospital and the jailhouse. Apparently, what happened was John Woodrow left that girl and her baby somewhere and got up with some of his drinking buddies, the sorriest of the sorriest, as Jack would call them, and they all went to a pool hall in town, and one thing led to another and they all got in a drunk fight with some other sorriness and when all was said and done, one was in jail, one was missing, and John Woodrow was in the hospital. The sheriff figured they were migrants, and he knew Lonnie had just gotten a new crew in, so he called him, and sure enough, they were his. He said word wasn’t out yet, that the crew chief probably didn’t know, more than likely wouldn’t care. He said Lonnie wouldn’t have cared except that it aggravated him to have to get up and go to town in the middle of the night.

Jack also told me I should come to his house if I needed him for anything, and he pointed it out to me across the field. When he said “needed” and “anything” I knew he meant food, money, somewhere to rest awhile. And then he told me his name, his whole name the way he enjoys saying it, “stokes the fire, stokes the stove, stokes the fiery furnace of hell!”

Tiny Fran interrupted us, calling me inside to find her blessed crackers, and at first I thought she might have something nasty to say about John Woodrow being hurt,
but then I realized she wouldn’t associate me with the mess at all, if her daddy’d even mentioned it in the house. I didn’t have a last name there. I was either just Ruby or “that girl.” So I decided to use that time of nobody knowing to rest in and gather up what strength I’d need when everything came at me, when all those workers would turn their petty curiosity on me. I just turned it all off. All I’d ever heard from John Woodrow was how ignorant I was, so I said, Fine, I’m ignorant of the fix he’s in.

I knew if he was able to speak he was cursing me to anybody who’d listen, cursing that daddy’s girl he’d married and thinks she’s too good to come help the man who took her away from all that and tried to make a hard-working, honest-to-God, common, everyday woman out of her, “Put some meat on them bones!” My ears rang for hearing him say that. And all I could’ve said back to him was, “That’s exactly what happened, nail on the head. Bleed, John Woodrow, bleed.”

Word of his injury soon travelled up one tobacco row and down the next, and by the time the workers came up into the yard that afternoon it seemed like every one of them knew exactly how many stitches he’d had, how deep the cuts were, and how his lung was punctured in such-and-such a place. Walking to the house after work, a woman who’d never spoken to me before came up and patted my arm and said, “I hear your man got cut real
bad, might not make it.” She waited for me to touch her back or maybe break down, but I didn’t. I was so ticked off all I could say to her was, “That’s what they tell me.” She snapped her hand off me and told me it seemed like a woman would stand by her man, irregardless, and it seemed like that woman would be especially true after something like this, irregardless. I guess she meant regardless of the fact that he was a known bastard. But she broke stride with me and fell in with her friends, and I could hear her tell them how insensitive I was and with John Woodrow “laid up in the hospital, cut up and about to hardly make it.” Then one of the women said that was a shame, and she proceeded to tell them about how her sister nursed her husband after a bad wreck last year. She said the man’s face was sliced this way and that and his wife stayed right by him, feeding him through a straw, picking glass slivers from his lips. The woman told the story like it was a privilege for the man’s wife to pick at his lips. And I know they also thought I’d be doing the wifely thing to sit by John Woodrow and swab his wounds just because, all because he was my man. I’d nurse Jack all day and all night, but that’s a different story.

And while they walked on I slipped back and crossed a wide ditch and stood on the edge of the wheat field, wondering if I should wade across to Jack’s house. But I didn’t go. I just stayed on the edge there and looked at his house,
this house. I had no idea it’d be my house five months from then. And after a long time of purely standing and staring, wondering about my whole big mess, I crossed back over the ditch and went home. When I got there I found the pistol and put it at the bottom of my bag, way down under where my lingerie had been. I’d never see those nice things again, but I still hear the pistol.

That night after I’d eaten supper Jack came to see me. I remember him standing at the screen door, and I could smell him. He smelled like soap, a sweet soap. And he said, “I hate to be the one to have to tell you, but your husband passed a little while ago.” He paused a minute, and then he said, “It was the lungs. They wouldn’t stay up is what Lonnie told me.” And the very next thought I had was how I was alone, not John Woodrow’s dead, ding-dong John Woodrow’s dead. I was glad to have Jack stay there with me while I cried everything out of my system.

Sometimes I think the smart thing to have done then would’ve been to pack right up and go home, fast as I could, call daddy and have him come for me. But I couldn’t. I hadn’t just stayed out all night and was nervous about walking into breakfast. This wasn’t anything like that, like knowing that everything would blow over by lunch and by dinnertime you’d be one of them again, forgiven, everything back in its place, including you. Where was my place there? I wasn’t a son, not a boy who could
come home and fall into plowing or mowing a field and earn his way back into his home. I was a daughter who’d mainly watched men work a farm from a kitchen window.

When mama and daddy died and everything passed to Paul and Jimmy and me, I let them divide my part between them. It wasn’t so much that they’d worked the place and I hadn’t, they’d known the value of it. They’d always known what we had there. Before I did it though, I talked it over with Jack and told him if he really wanted me to I could keep my land and we could move there together and work it. Then he’d have something. He’s always wanted something. But he told me he couldn’t take it, he appreciated the offer but he couldn’t take a strange place. I should’ve known better than to offer it. He wanted, still wants land, but not any land will do. He’d hoped for this place but I’m afraid that hope died with Lonnie.