Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction (13 page)

He grins but says nothing, only pulls my chair out like a gentleman would, sits in his own and proceeds to eat with the gusto of a hound dog. I think of that because Uncle Joe has three such beasts outside whose constant barking reminds me.

“Ever body calls me TJ,” he finally says as he sops up the melted butter with his biscuit. “Just remember that.”

I’m eating fast too, I suddenly realize, both of us seeming to want to get this part over with. My stuffed belly is making me sleepier. “Why?” I finally care enough to ask.

“I knew you’d ask that.”

How does he know that?

“Because my full name is William Thomas Jackson the Third. That’s a mouthful.” He wipes his mouth, full and red now.

I sip my iced tea, wishing I can be more alert but my eyes feel heavy-lidded after such a big supper. “Then I shall call you William,” I drawl slowly.

“Why?”

“I knew you’d ask me that.”

He snorts softly, giving me his best part, a leisurely lopsided grin. His eyes come alive, blue, green, it’s hard to tell, with tiny speckles of gray. I smile dimly, trying to soak in his rays but I need darkness and sleep to restore me before I can appreciate the sun.

I stifle a yawn during his story of who’s who in Pickerville and Savannah, not able to concentrate or comprehend or care, and he pauses and leans back in his chair, looking at me quizzically.

“Sorry,” I say, knowing I’ve taken this trip as far as it can go today, “but I’ve had little sleep in the last two days, took me that long to drive from Annan New York, so if you’d excuse me …” I stand clumsily, my napkin dropping to the floor. I don’t bother picking it up. I only want to pick up my bed sheet and crawl under. I look at him for mercy.

His lips thin in disapproval - poor Southern hospitality on my part I suppose - but he manages to smile again. He bends, his head disappearing under the tablecloth and I flinch as fingers squeeze my ankle. He comes up waving the napkin as a surrender flag and I smile in spite of his advance.

“Get your rest because tomorrow night we’ll be dancing our shoe leather off. We’ve got a local band that is hot to trot to play for soldiers, sailors, and sots like me who haven’t signed up yet.” He grins a lop-sided one with a wink on the same side.

As he chucks my chin and walks away, I can easily imagine him as a poster boy for Uncle Sam. He has that I-want-you look. What he wants though I’m not quite sure.

As I run bath water for a long soak the next morning, Clary comes knocking.

“I thought I heard you up,” she says, walking past me. With her customary one arm extended with a limp wrist, as if on the ready to grab something, she hurries over to the bookshelf. On the second shelf she moves books to the left and right and behind there I see a small door. “You were too pooped yesterday so I waited til you was rested to show you this.” She opens the door and I see it’s a safe with a book inside. She pulls this out and hands it to me. “I found this in my cleaning frenzy before you arrived. It’s your daddy’s.”

The book is actually a brown leather-bound journal. Inside, in small, neat handwriting better than mine, in vivid blue ink with little scrolls at the end of some words, is Papa’s talking. His own words! For the first time I believe he really existed. I run my fingers over the surface of the page, feeling each indentation from his ink pen, goose bumps rising on my arms in feeling his proof of presence in his marks on these pages. I look down at the wood plank flooring, see dents there in the dark stain and wonder if he’d made those, too.

He was here. Ate here, slept here – could I have been conceived here? I’ll never know.

Never have I felt so close to him, yet suddenly do I recognize how very little I know of him. Mama rarely spoke of him and only if I questioned her. When I did, her expression would visibly fall, like a curtain coming down, her eyelids at half-mast. Small, cryptic answers and then she would raise the curtain with a smile and bring on more work for the both of us. That taught me to stop asking questions and told me enough to understand why she never remarried.

I touch his pages again. Papa must have been something. I strip, not even knowing when Clary left, and sink slowly into the hot water and open the journal to page one.

July 10
^th
, 1921. I’m writing this from my childhood home, in my childhood bedroom, so many memories, yet all are boxed in here and summed up in my pondering by the window, for there is where I spend so much of my
time. No difference today. I sit here now watching with sympathy the lawn’s great weeping willow tree droop wearily to the ground in the summer heat, no strength to so much as move in the breeze. I feel as one with this life form, our roots digging ever deeper in the rich Georgian soil, searching for something to quench our insatiable thirst, yet this search is contradictory in only taking me down deeper, where I can never again move on from here as the wind and a good news story would take me.

The only difference is my room is nowadays shared with my new wife, my dear Bess, restless, ready to move on, her roots are not here, I’m not sure they are anywhere, even in her hometown of Annan, New York. Still a suffragist at heart, wanting to right the world of women. Cady, ah Cady, my first wife, my first love, a true love, is smiling from heaven at my wise choice. Sickly with consumption, yet she marched right on up to God.

I am supposed to be happy. Bess has told me so. She tells me she is supposed to be happy too but cannot be unless I am. I have an idea: I’ll plant another weeping willow tree out here with her name on it and perhaps then she’ll grow roots here and we’ll both be happy where we are.

My poor Bess; she knows so little but knows enough to know she knows little. I’ve kept much from her; don’t know why really. She’s not a weak woman, but tall, erect, chin up as if expecting the worst, yet those lovely ink-blue eyes hopeful for the best, like the sea looking for the sun on a cloudy day. I’m afraid I’m her sun, storm on the horizon.

Her firm footsteps can be heard now, one stair at a time, sure and steady and rising to me. It is my wish that I’ll always be here at her summit, but it doesn’t look good.

More to come.

I close the journal and close my weak eyes and listen to the many bubbles around me, whispering secrets I wish I knew. For some strange reason I feel myself on the cusp of something and I envision that I’m standing in the wings and I’ll soon step out and do my part, but I’m frightened and don’t know my lines. I breathe in deeply and out slowly and, yes, I hear it, over and over in the little pops of bubbles,
Papa, Papa
. Yes, that’s it, Papa will tell me what to say. I decide to read one entry a day, wanting to savor and absorb Papa’s
words and imagine his presence as he’s writing that day’s events, when he and Mama lived here twenty-two years ago.

I read his entry again until my eyes begin to water, and then I rise to a new place.

After breakfast in the kitchen with Clary, I’m summoned to Uncle Joe’s bedroom. He’s a crackerjack, is all I’m saying right here.

“Alright, girl, here’s what you’re going to do.” He partially lifts himself on his pillows and clears his throat in an important-announcement way.

“It’s Katy.”

“What?” He looks at me like I’ve interrupted him.

“My name is Katy, not ‘girl’.”

“Well, I beg your pardon, missy,” he says, but without sincerity. As a matter of fact, I detect some sarcasm. “Look. If you and I are going to get along, I suggest you not start with those high-and-mighty airs of your mama’s. Do you understand me?”

“Uncle Joe, I assure you I’m quite different from my mama, but she
is
my mama, and would you want your mama talked about in a bad way? I don’t think so. And all I’m asking for is that you call me by my given name, Katy. It’s a pretty name and Mama named me Katydid because katydids was all she heard every night while she lived down here with Papa. Now what’s so high and mighty about that?” I run out of breath, my cheeks burning from being so outspoken but really, I’m not accustomed to taking orders from a man and I’m having trouble liking this one, kin or not.

He narrows his eyes at me. “Well, now, did she really?” But it isn’t really a question, so I keep my mouth shut. I am smart enough, though, to give him a tight smile.

“Alright. Now we know what your Mama
did,
let’s see what
you
katydid, diddle-do, Miss Cat and her fiddle.” He cackles at himself, more like a cough, and weakly slaps his leg.

I sigh and simply nod, wishing now I hadn’t told him about the ‘did’ part. I’d heard enough jokes in school and now just went by the name, Katy. (“Katy did, didn’t you Katydid?” “Katy
did
that mess …” and so forth. Really not so funny, is it?)

“I want you to dress up pretty tonight for TJ and behave yourself like a proper lady should.”

“How’d you know he asked—”

“That boy’s got money in his family, a cotton plantation that makes mine look like a hobby farm, so you be real good to him and show him what the Pickering’s are made of. I don’t know how people act up North but down here we don’t take to poor white trash so I hope you’ve had a good upbringing.”

What better opportunity than to call Mama right after this meeting, my hand cupped over the mouthpiece in the living room, believing by this point that Uncle Joe had listening devices in all the lamps.

“Mama, what in the world have you gotten me into?” I murmur into the phone. I laugh lightly to let her know it’s nothing serious but to let her know it’s something.

She’s quiet for a moment. “Katy,” she finally says, “he’s still bedfast, isn’t he?”

“Oh yes, but that doesn’t keep his mouth from motoring.”

I hear her sigh as if relieved. “The doctor says it won’t be long, or else I wouldn’t have sent you down there. If he ever becomes well enough to step away from his bed unassisted, you call me. Do you understand?”

“Sort of.” Mama’s obscure explanation as usual.

“You being there makes sense, Katy, for your future. He simply requests that he spend some time with his only niece, his only close kin, before he dies. In so doing, you inherit the plantation. It’s not a bad arrangement, not when you look at what’s on the horizon.”

I’m not so sure it’s that simple, and that horizon looks kind of cloudy to me but I readily agree, wanting to sound grown-up and less worrisome to her. It’s time I grew up, past time really. So, I say nothing about William Thomas Jackson the Third or about Papa’s
journal. Instead I do the usual: I fill in her blanks with my rambling. I blather on and on about my road trip and the flat tire and the night’s sleep in the car, making it all sound so carefree and easy. And she does her usual: Listens. I can almost picture her head tilted into the telephone receiver, her expression focused, her hands handling paper, writing notes, opening mail, stuffing the cubicles of the messy roll-top desk. So, I should be prepared for her final statement.

“You have an appointment Monday with Ellen Whitman. I have her address here for somewhere in downtown Savannah.”

I groan in spite of myself. “Mama,” I whine, sounding like I used to when she told me to go to bed.

“Yes?” I can hear the chatter of women along with the clatter of dishes in the background. The Lighthouse sounds busier than usual, but then post-holidays and all that that entails, sends women bruised and crying to Mama’s haven. I feel ashamed of myself.

“I’ll go talk to her,” I say. “But a birth control clinic is a long ways off,” I add. My goodness, I have to have some control in my life.