Flavors (11 page)

After Nellie Jane left, Maveen and I lolled there, silent and grieving, until suppertime. Trying to make sense of the carnage that lay just beyond the bedroom wall.

Mama consoled me that weekend. “They're just different,” she said of my grandparents. “They're good people. Things are different when you have to raise your own food. They don't earn weekly wages like Daddy and I do. We can just go out and buy what we need. But they can't. It's cruel to have to live that way. And,” she smiled sympathetically and gently pushed back my too-long bangs, “I understand how you feel, honey. You've got a real tender heart.” Then she sighed. “Too tender sometimes.”

I was just now getting back my appetite. I'd not eaten much for the past two days. I missed my little Flossie. Missed her warmth and velvety tongue licking my face – the
life
in her. We, Nellie Jane, Maveen, Clarence Henry and I, had buried her, along with the other five pitiful bodies, deep in the woods. The activity of collecting hoes and shovels from the barn, digging the small graves, wrapping the still bundles in burlap we'd found in the barn and burying them all with some modicum of dignity seemed to mystically begin our healing.

“Let's sing something,” Clarence Henry suggested, surprising us all.

We sang “Amazing Grace.” Then we recited the Lord's Prayer and even did the Pledge of Allegiance for good measure. We gathered some wildflowers from the meadow as a finishing touch to the earthen mounds, now covered with forest mulch and bordered with creek-smoothed stones. The fecund fragrance of that scene and the reverence for those little sacrificed lives remains with me even now.

“It was pretty,” I murmured today as Mama and I lingered at the dinner table. Daddy had gone out into our front yard with Little Joe to watch him ride his tricycle. Knowing the Melton clan's propensity for destroying anything mechanical, Daddy and Mama kept the trike at home for Little Joe's weekend enjoyment.

“What?” she asked, sipping her coffee.

“The graveyard. We're gonna get some big rocks and make six tombstones inside that plot of graves.”

“That's sweet, honey.”

Mama always understood.

How I missed living at home.

In my very own place.

Then, when I got back to the farm, I could not find Maveen.

“She's not here,” Nellie Jane grabbed my hand when I rushed to Maveen's room.

“Where is she?” An unrest seized me. A black, thick, sticky dread.

“This morning, she told Gene she was leaving till he got them a village house,” Nellie Jane whispered to me upon my arrival that Sunday evening, just before sundown.

“Where'd she go?” The words came out squeaky, weak.

“To her mama's.”

“I didn't see her.”

Nellie Jane pulled me outside and down to the barn where we could talk in private. We entered my favorite stall where a sweet-smelling hay-carpet welcomed us to sit.

“So she's gone,” I muttered inanely, feeling my heart sink out the bottom of my feet. How was I going to make it without Maveen? Nellie Jane looked at me with compassion, and I knew that she, too, would miss Maveen.

“What's Gene saying?” I asked, curious.

She shrugged. “He was mad at Maveen at first, but now he's moping around real bad. Ma tells him that he's actin' like an addled rooster. That she knew all along how flighty Maveen was. Gene don't like Ma to talk like that. He told her to quit bad-mouthing his wife.”

I stared at her, mouth open. “He said that to Grandma?”

Nellie Jane looked at me with her heart in her eyes. “He shoulda been that way ‘fore Maveen got a gut-full and left.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, releasing a long, ragged sigh, thinking how things can change so fast.

That week seemed the longest ever. By the weekend, I felt I would die from Maveen's absence. When Mama and Daddy finally collected my brother and me and drove us home, I asked permission and dashed across the street to Maveen's mother's house.

Maveen met me at the door and engulfed me in a bear hug and I realized she must have been watching for my arrival home. It made my heart float like a helium balloon. Made me feel really, really special and treasured. Because I knew her heart was breaking.

Later that evening, Mama and Daddy, perhaps seeing how happy I was to see Maveen and knowing she needed a diversion, asked her to babysit Little Joe and me and they would go out on a real date. This evening, the arrangement was extra-special poignant for me, after having pined all week for my friend.

We turned on the radio and tuned in a station that played pop songs, the kind of big band sounds that Maveen and I both liked. Tonight featured Cole Porter favorites. Ella Fitzgerald's “Let's Fall in Love” sent me into dreamy ecstasy as we pondered what we wanted to do with the evening.

Maveen's huge gray eyes looked deeper and sadder than I'd ever seen them, but she was doing her best to keep up her spirit for my sake. “You don't have to be happy,” I told her and hugged her again. “I know you're hurting over Gene.”

“Yeah.” She attempted a smile but came real short of it. Tears rushed to her eyes. “I miss ‘im, Sadie.” She snuffled and then thrust out her chin and forced a real smile. “But I'll live. Thing is to keep busy. Taking care o' Mama keeps me hopping all day. It's the nights that are the hardest.”

“We'll make these hours go by, fast and fun,” I said hopefully.

“Hey! I know,” she said, suddenly brightening. “Let's bake a cake.”

Little Joe, an early-to-bedder, was already fast asleep and tucked in. “I've got a cake recipe you'll love,” Maveen said, picking up steam a bit. “Especially the buttercream frosting.” She knew of my sweet-tooth and she was a wonderful cook. Learned from her mama. “And best of all, it's easy. You can do most of it. How about that?” She grinned at me, like
I dare you
.

“Huh. I can do it.” After all, I'd watched Nellie Jane and Grandma stir up desserts all summer, everything from Apple Cobbler to Strawberry-Chocolate Cake. And I knew that deep down, Maveen sensed how desperately I wanted to cook at Grandma's house. She, too, had been shut out of Grandma's inner sanctum. She also knew that the rejection dug in and resided someplace deep inside me.

We gathered the ingredients for a simple yellow scratch cake and the icing. Mama had most of the items and Maveen dashed across to her mother's house and plundered cabinets until she found the ones we lacked.

Soon, the strains of selections like Ella Fitzgerald singing “Night and Day” and Bing Crosby crooning
“
Don't Fence Me In” had Maveen and me warbling along with the lyrics
,
absolutely rhapsodized since we'd both seen the 1945 movie
Night and Day,
the story of Cole Porter's life, starring Cary Grant and Alexis Smith. Forever after, when I heard Porter tunes, I would picture a resplendent Cary Grant sitting at the piano, playing and singing. Never mind the gross discrepancies between the story's truth and fiction; I would ever more see Cary's arms held out to Alexis, standing on his own once more at movie's end, and her running into them with tears sparkling and flashing like Technicolor diamonds in her beautiful eyes.

Scraping the batter bowl and depositing the last drippings into one of three greased, floured pans, I licked the spoon clean and declared, “I love Cole Porter songs, Maveen.”

“Me, too,” she agreed and sighed as she rinsed out the bowl to use it to later mix butter, powdered sugar and rich cream for the buttercream frosting. She'd insisted I do all the actual mixing and baking. “That way, it's your cake. You can say you done it all by yourself.”

“I miss my pretty music when I'm not home,” I said as I washed the mixer blades. Mama had bought an electric mixer just this year. “I'm glad I don't have to do the old manual mixer anymore. I used to beat the egg whites for meringue for Mama. Took fore-ver. This is more fun.”

“Yeah,” Maveen agreed as she rinsed the blades and dried them. “I like Webb Pierce's ‘Satisfied Mind.' Some country music's okay. It's just that when that's all you ever hear, it gets kinda – old.”

“Gotta run pee,” Maveen said and dashed to the bathroom, located on the back porch. When she finished, she came in grinning. “At least I don't have to go to the barn privy now.”

I rolled my eyes as I arranged the measuring tools and told her about the peeping incident the week before, shocking Maveen completely. I felt somewhat vindicated at her response and support. I started measuring butter and confectioner's sugar as Porter's “I Get a Kick Out of You” struck up. Maveen and I both swooned and swayed with the catchy song, one that plucked at our heartstrings and pulled out the romantic in us.

We took time out for the layers to bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes.

Lounging on Mama's blue sofa, we propped bare feet up on the living room coffee table and chatted a while about Maveen's mama's health problems and how that now she was home, Maveen could look after her. We talked briefly about Gene and
how she knew that he loved her but that Grandma didn't like her and made it miserable for her to live there. So, Gene would either find out he could not live without Maveen or it would be over.

Tears pooled in her deep, soulful eyes. “I don't feel like I can live without ‘im,” she murmured brokenly. “But he's gotta choose, Sadie. I can't live there anymore. It'll kill me.”

“I know.” And I did. It didn't make it any easier for me, though, being there without her. Once I knew how her presence there gave me a sense of being, I could not un-know it.

“He'll come to you, Maveen,” I said, feeling in my heart that it would be so.

After that topic died, we simply sat and listened to the featured Porter music.

“I love that song Vaughn Monroe sings,” Maveen said, closing her eyes as Keely Smith oozed “What is This Thing Called Love
.
”

I stopped humming along long enough to comment. “The one Farmer Gray plays, ‘Ghost Riders In the Sky'?”

“Yeah. That's it. It's not really country, is it?”

“Nope. Neither is ‘Mockingbird Hill'
.
Not totally. Patti Page is mostly a pop singer. But Farmer Gray plays that song, too. So, over all, I'm not too bad off. It's when all I hear is bluegrass all day long that I get – sorta addle-brained, you know?”

The little timer went off, and I tried to figure out how to pull out the hot pans without scorching myself. After all, I wasn't exactly experienced. So Maveen guided me through the intricate process. We carefully turned the layers out on waxed papered plates to set into the refrigerator for a quick cool.

As they cooled, we sat quietly through several more tunes, some familiar, others not as much. But all lovely and Porter-y. We hummed along and sang with the ones we knew, comfortable
as two old shoes together, checking the cake layers periodically until they were ready to ice.