Billie Standish Was Here (2 page)

She laughed again and my cheeks started burning. “Well, lands, child, nobody told you put one foot in front of the other this mornin' if you wanted to walk, either, did they?”

I was ashamed for speaking up and a little mad—two more reasons not to do it very often. “Well,” I said, “am I supposed to know
why
, too?”

She looked sorry then. “No, I suppose not. I forget you're just a child, you've grown so.” She moved her hoe handle so she could lean on it with both hands. “Your folks ain't said nothin' at all?”

I shook my head.

Miss Lydia took that in, then nodded. “People's afraid the levee's gonna break. Think it's gonna be '51 all over again.” She wasn't looking at me anymore.

“Well, is it?” My heart started thumping. “I mean, why are we still here? Why are you?”

Miss Lydia smiled just a small smile. “You're right, somebody should've told you.” She looked to the south, toward the river. “Well, your daddy 'n' me seem to have better memories than most. And we recall it took a full twenny-four hours after the levee broke in '51 for the water to get to town. That's a whole lotta time if you make every bit of it count. I reckon he figures his time right now is better spent sandbaggin' levees unless he's just
gotta
get you all out. And me, well . . .” She snorted and her face knotted up. “You know my boy Curtis is back livin' with me, don't you?”

I nodded.

“Even a man who won't take out the garbage can usually find time to be a hero,” she went on. “I expect I'll have help if I need it.”

I tried to sort it all out even as it was still sinking in. I had supposed Mama and Daddy were in the field every day like always, not shoring up levees against the river. I don't ask questions when they come in too tired to do much more than grunt hello at me, but the truth was I hadn't even considered what all that rain pounding the house added up to. Stupid.

I felt like I needed some little redemption in her eyes, so I said, “Hey, I'm gonna walk up and get the mail
in a while. Want me to bring you yours?”

Miss Lydia gave me a good look at her false teeth then. “Why, that'd be right nice of you.” I'd only gotten a couple of steps toward home when she yelled. I turned around. “Bring it by about noon and we'll have some dinner together.”

I would have rather gone to church in shoes two sizes too small. I could sit on the fringe of a conversation and nod once in a while, but I didn't know how to make chitchat with anybody—and
especially
somebody who could remember when God was a boy. “Oh no, Miss Lydia, you don't need to—”

“Don't need to. Want to.” She looked up and down the street. “Just you 'n' me, you know. Curtis is in the city most of the time, even now that he's back. May as well keep a little company.”

I nodded, then ran home—gravel, bare feet, and all. I shut the door to my room and sat on the bed to think. There had been a note from Daddy on the kitchen table a few mornings that summer, telling me the Corps of Engineers would be calling later and to write down a message when they did. But he hadn't volunteered what the numbers in those messages meant, and of course I hadn't asked.

I thought about Daddy and Miss Lydia calculating how much twenty-four hours could buy and wondered
when they had talked. I couldn't remember the last time Daddy had said anything directly to me. Sometimes he seemed surprised to notice me at all—like he'd forgotten again that it wasn't just him and Mama.

I lay back on the bed, adding up the inventory of everything below doorknob level in our house and picturing it all piled in the bed of a grain truck. It wouldn't take that long to load. So why was everybody else gone? They had to know something.

Unless Daddy was the only soldier in the parade marching to the right drummer. He never had trouble believing that. If all the other farmers were planting soybeans fence post to fence post, he'd decide to put in winter wheat and follow it with hay. If everybody else was rushing to get the corn in when it was still a little damp, he'd take a chance on the weather and leave it in the field till it was dry.

One time I looked up at a V of geese flying and saw one straggler off to the side, determined to go it alone even if he had to flap twice as hard. That was Daddy. Every gaggle I've seen fly over since has made me think of him.

Thing is, he's usually right. Or at least far enough into the gray area that you couldn't call him wrong. About the time he's selling that hay crop, a hailstorm comes along and wipes out everyone else's beans. He ends up getting
five cents a bushel more for his corn than all those who picked theirs wet. It's hard to say how much is smart and how much is luck, but I've never known anybody to change Daddy's mind once it was made up, so there was no point thinking about it. If he had decided we'd wait out the rain, I knew we would.

Then that comment Miss Lydia had made about a man finding time to be a hero came back to me. Talking about her son Curtis. He'd for sure be the one who wouldn't take out the garbage.

When you hang around like a shadow, you know people mainly by what you overhear. That's how I knew Curtis. And what I'd heard was that Curtis couldn't find his ass with both hands. If it was on fire. And he had a map. Wink Sweeney said one time that Curtis was mainly a smart aleck, but without the smart part.

Curtis had been back since the middle of May. He was in his early forties and, if what I'd heard was true, he turned up at Miss Lydia's door every five or ten years and stayed till she put him out a few months later. Somebody said he showed up whenever he got out of jail, but that seemed doubtful. He'd have had to commit crimes on another planet for nobody in Cumberland to come forward with any particulars.

This time he had a job in Kansas City working at the Ford plant. I'd heard folks talking about it one day when
I stopped in for a Coke at the store attached to the grain elevator. The lunch counter in there served up more news and gossip than it did sandwiches.

Daddy was having coffee with the men that day and offered his opinion that Curtis wouldn't last six months at Ford.

Dolores Swank was wiping the counter with a rag and told Daddy to give Curtis a break, you couldn't expect him to be “right” after that accident killed the only girlfriend he ever had. But when Daddy shot back with the reminder that Curtis had been ass-over-teakettle drunk and driving the car when that girl got killed, nobody said another word.

I'd never devoted Lydia Jenkins a whole lot of thought before and I tried to gather together everything I knew about her. Evidently Daddy respected her enough to compare notes on the weather. That was something.

I decided she most likely hadn't been raised in Cumberland. When I thought about it, people were just a little too polite to Miss Lydia for her to be a native. They “yes, ma'ammed” and “no, ma'ammed” her, something you don't hear all the time.

But some of that could be because she was mother to Curtis too. Nobody in our neck of the woods would dare point a finger at the family tree of any bad apple—lest one of his own turn rotten somewhere down the road.
But farm folk do tend to act like bad luck might be contagious, and one way to gain a little distance is with an extra layer of sugar coating. Curtis was probably worth a whole lot of “ma'ams.”

The more I thought, though, the more sure I was the Jenkinses came from elsewhere. Mama had never mentioned any of Curtis's wrongdoings growing up and that meant they hadn't gone to school together. She could recite a catalog of every misstep her schoolmates had ever made and was never shy about doing it.

I knew Miss Lydia's husband had passed sometime in the last ten years and she had a green thumb with the gladioli.

That was about it. Not more than a sketch and a guess or two. I'd just have to try and make it through lunch without doing anything too stupid.

At ten to noon I locked the house again and walked up to the little shack that had been our post office as long as I could remember. Lewis McEntire barely looked up when I started twirling the combination on our box. He just grunted when I asked for Miss Lydia's mail, and already had his nose back in somebody's new
Reader's Digest
when he slid her bundle under the grate at the window.

It was kind of like at home when I wasn't looking in the mirror. Like I wasn't really there.

B
  ut I sure was accounted for at Miss Lydia's. I could hear her singing “Little Red Wing” while I wiped my feet at the back step, and when she threw open the door it was like a party started. She had fried a chicken and made potatoes with milk gravy and she pointed me toward a paring knife and a pyramid of tomatoes while she took up the food. And she kept on singing.

Then she took the platter of tomatoes from me and said it looked pretty as a picture. That started my ears to burn because I knew Mama would have complained that the slices were ragged and I didn't peel them. Funny how she could criticize me even when she wasn't there.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd sat down to a table. I ate alone in front of the TV before my folks got home at night, then went to my room after I told them hello and reheated what I'd cooked.

Miss Lydia sat across from me and, after we'd exhausted just about everything that could be said about the weather, she started telling stories about people in town. I only knew them as grown-ups, but she knew a lot of the boneheaded things they'd done when they were kids. And her stories sounded funny, not mean. She wasn't looking to cut anybody down.

She told me one she said she'd heard from my Grandma Standish—how my dad and a bunch had it up to play a prank on Mr. McCombs one Halloween, but somebody tipped the mean old so-and-so off. So when Daddy stepped foot on his front porch, the old man's voice rang out in the dark: “Okay, men, shoot to kill.”

I was taking a drink when she said that Daddy nearly shit his drawers, and I laughed so hard lemonade came out my nose. But she didn't get mad. She just handed me a paper towel and laughed along with me. I wasn't used to anything like it.

I wasn't used to talking so much, either, but once my lid popped open the words just seemed to spill out. Like when Miss Lydia motioned me to dab at the corner of my mouth and I explained that was a scar and didn't wipe off. She asked how I got it and, without even thinking, I told the whole story—how we were all driving to church one Sunday when I was five and I asked when I was going to have a baby sister or brother. How Mama
reached over the seat to backhand me and her ring caught, just at the corner of my mouth.

Miss Lydia looked as shocked by my question as Mama had been. But all she said was, “It cut deep enough to leave that scar?”

I told her, “Oh, no. But it got kinda infected and that made it worse.”

I had said too much, judging by the way she was staring at her lap. And I wanted so bad for her to still like me. “I was just a little kid then,” I told her. “I know better now than to ask grown-ups about their personal business like that.”

She looked up and said, “Yes, I suspect you do.” Then she asked if I had seen Ed Sullivan Sunday evening, and I was pretty sure everything was still okay between us.

While I was drying the dishes after lunch, she stopped with her hands in the soapsuds and turned to me like she'd just had a big idea. The way things turned out, I guess she had.

“How'd you like to earn a little pin money?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“Seems to me it wouldn't hurt to get the house a little bit ready, just in case the river's got different ideas than your daddy does. And I got too much junk settin' around anyway. How about helpin' me wrap up some of my
knickknacks and haul 'em upstairs in boxes?”

Miss Lydia had one of the few two-story houses in town. That little fact seemed quite a bit more important now, with the river flexing its muscles six short miles away.

“Uh-huh,” I said, “sounds pretty smart to me.”

“No need to tell your daddy, of course,” she said and she winked. “I don't suppose even with the two of us we could move the furniture . . . .”

“Couldn't Curtis do that for you?”

Miss Lydia shot me a look that would've made a big dog tuck his tail. I dropped the glass I was drying and my face went hot while I stuttered how sorry I was.

“So am I,” she said. We knelt down together to pick up the big pieces, then she went for the broom and handed it to me. When she emptied the dustpan into the wastebasket, she started humming “Red Wing” again. Something had happened, but I didn't understand what.

She came back to the sink smiling at me and brushed the hair out of my eyes just like Mama used to do when I was little and cute. We didn't talk anymore until after we had finished the dishes and started wrapping and packing her stuff.