Gods in Alabama (6 page)

I burst into tears.

“Oh, honey,” she said, but I just shook my head at her. I dropped the sweaters on the floor and put my hands over my face and sobbed into them. I realized this was not sane behavior, and tried my best to tamp it back down, but braying sobs kept welling up and bursting out of my mouth. She came over and put an arm around me; I pulled away from her immediately, then gulped and tried again to squelch myself.

“Do you know why folks cry?” she said to me conversationally while I scrubbed violently at my streaming eyes. I shrugged. I didn’t much care.

“God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.” She put her arm around me again. I let it stay there, and then I threw my arms around her soft middle and wailed and snuffled on her sloping shoulder. I gave myself up to it, letting a huge hurricane of pent-up weeping come storming out into the Wal-Mart ladies’ department.

“Oh, honey,” she said again. “You’re going to be just fine. And you go ahead and get that green if that’s what you want.”

She was a minister’s widow and a good Baptist. That day she dragged me home with her and fed me on real cherry cobbler, the kind with the pastry you make by cutting butter into flour for half an hour. She talked to me about pastry recipes and the Lord and invited me to visit her church on Sunday. I felt like I owed her for the cobbler and the kindness, so I went.

It was an all-black Baptist church in a decent blue-collar neighborhood. Everyone at that church was so familiar. It was like visiting home. Sure, I got odd looks the first time I showed up. I felt like my skin was glowing with an incandescent white otherness.

I could feel the congregation peppering me with sideways glances. But I didn’t feel any malice in their gazes. Every person I met and spoke with was soon relaxed and chatting with me about  the weather or their children or Jesus. I was just as easy with them. It didn’t hurt that I was firmly wedged under the shelter-ing wing of Mrs. Burroughs. Her husband had been the minister at that church up until his death, and she was universally beloved there.

Later, sitting in American History 101, I realized why I felt so at home at the church. After the industrial revolution came the great migration, as black sharecroppers traveled up to Chicago for better-paying factory jobs and a shot at a new life. But they were all southerners. They formed their own communities, and the culture survived. The people at Mrs. Burroughs’s church spoke with long liquid vowels and blurred consonants, cooked everything in lard, moved with a languorous grace that implied it was 100 degrees outside. They could have been my relatives. Without them, especially Burr’s mother, I never would have survived my first year up north.

I met Burr when he moved back to Chicago. Mrs. Burroughs had two older girls, both married to military men and gone. Burr was her baby, the first in his family to go to college, much less law school, although his father had been to a two-year Baptist semi-nary.

If anyone could show me a back door to Burr now, it was his mama. I hit nine for an outside line and dialed. She didn’t seem at all surprised that it was me when she picked up the phone.

“I guess you talked to Burr,” I said.

“He showed up this morning at breakfast, wanting my sugar toast,” Mrs. Burroughs said against a background of glass on glass and running water—no doubt the remains of the sugar toast were being scraped away as we spoke. “He was like a bear with the sor-est head you ever saw. I poked around, and when the sore spot seemed to be you, I started waiting for the phone to ring. Took you an hour longer than I bet myself.”

I told her all about the fight, leaving out the sex parts. She was his mama and a preacher’s wife, after all. But I told her he had given me an ultimatum and walked out, and now he wouldn’t even talk to me to see if I was going to knuckle under. Not that I would.

Mrs. Burroughs made “mmm-hmm” noises at me and sloshed water around while I spilled my guts. I could picture her standing over the sink in her kitchen with the faded tea-rose wallpaper.

Pictures of Burr and his sisters hung on the walls around the table and lined the windowsill in standing frames. On a decorative shelf beside the fridge, a ceramic mug shaped like a frog stood among bronzed baby shoes. Burr had made that frog at camp when he was about twelve.

When I wound down, she said, “Lena, you know I care for you pretty deep, but you also have to know you aren’t the girl I would pick out for my son to love. I don’t know if any girl would measure up good enough for a son in his mama’s eyes. But if it was left to me, and I had to pick someone, it sure wouldn’t be a tiny half-crazy white girl from Alabama, no matter how much I like her as a person.” The kindness in her warm voice took some of the sting out of her words.

“But it isn’t up to me to make that pick,” Mrs. Burroughs went on. “My boy loves you. I think he loves you in a real way he can’t walk out on unchanged. I don’t think losing you is going to change him for the better, or make him happy. So if you want him like he wants you, I’m not getting in the way of that. But you better know this: If I help you find a way back to him and then you end up breaking his heart, I don’t see how I could be anything but done with you. I wouldn’t forgive that, even if it put me into hell.”

I could hear a little laughter in her voice, but underneath the laughter was absolute conviction. All at once it was as if I were talking to Aunt Florence. The softness and the accent were wrong, but I recognized the steel behind her joking tone. I had no doubt that Mrs. Burroughs meant it.

“I’m not going to break his heart,” I said.

She released a loud breath into the phone, and then she said,

“Then I’ll tell you two things. The first is, you have to give him something he wants. Right now I think he’s feeling that everything flows in one direction, from him to you. He’s thinking you don’t care about him the way he cares for you. So you need to yield some. But the second thing I am telling you is, you better make him bend, too. You don’t ever let a man say ‘My way or nothing’ to you. Not even a good man. Not even my son. And you never say ‘My way or nothing’ to him. You don’t take your sweetheart’s love and use it on him. You can do that to your mama, but not your sweetheart.” I smiled at that.

She went on, “He’s wrong by doing that with you. But you’re wrong to put him in a place where he feels so poor he thinks he has to say that. You both need to bend, but I think this time it has to start with you. And that’s all I can say to you without breaking confidence. Now, don’t you make me sorry I helped you.”

“I won’t,” I said, and I was as sincere as I had ever been in my life.

I had to hurry to Stevenson Hall to teach my afternoon world literature class. I jogged across the quad, toting my heavy leather carryall. Stevenson was a squat two-story stone building with long slitted windows. My class met on the first floor, just inside the gunmetal-gray front doors.

It was the last class of the semester, and all I had to do was take roll and accept the final papers. Some of the students had come by early and left them on the desk at the front. I collected the rest and then wasted a few minutes organizing the stack of folders into my bag and erasing notes left on the blackboard by an earlier class. By the time I was finished, the building was quiet around me. Most of the other classes had not met for the entire period, and there was a good half hour before the next classes in Stevenson were scheduled to begin.

I walked out into the hall, and Rose Mae Lolley was there waiting for me. I froze in the doorway.

She was dressed like a student again, in ratty, fringed jean shorts and a red tank top. She had on scuffed yellow-brown boots and was lounging against the wall with one leg crossed over the other. “Hey, Arlene,” she said.

My voice sounded high to me, wavering as I answered her.

“How did you find me?”

“They gave me your course schedule up in the English department.”

“No,” I said. “I mean how did you know I worked here, or my address. How did you even know to look in Chicago?”

“Oh, that,” she said. “I talked to Bud.”

“Bud Freeman?” I said. “My cousin Clarice’s husband?”

She nodded. I pulled myself together and turned and walked away from her without saying anything else, heading out the front doors of Stevenson and across the quad, angling towards the faculty lot.

Rose Mae boosted herself off the wall and came after me. I sped up, lengthening my stride so that she was dogtrotting as she caught up with me, her little pointy boobies jouncing in her tank top.

“Hold up, Arlene, I just need to ask you a couple of questions, and then I swear I won’t bother you anymore.”

I ignored her and broke into a jog, heading across the green.

“Stop for a second,” Rose said, keeping pace half a step behind me. “I called Clarice, but she wasn’t home, and I ended up talking to Bud. He told me you talked to Jim Beverly the night Jim wrecked his Jeep.”

I stopped so fast, Rose Mae barreled into me. She bounced off me, and we stood facing each other. Her boots had short heels on them, and we were exactly eye to eye. All I had to do was lie. All I had to do was say “Bud is mistaken. I never saw Jim Beverly that night,” and look into her eyes with total sincerity and a bit of mild confusion, as if I was wondering why Bud would think such a thing. But I had years and years of not telling a single lie behind me, and I blew it. My gaze faltered and my eyes dropped, and I knew if I said it now, it would sound like the lie it was, and she would not believe me.

“I didn’t talk to him,” I said, which was the truth. But it came out wrong, with the emphasis on the word “talk,” and she picked up on it immediately.

“But you saw him?” she asked. I didn’t answer, and she grabbed my arm, trying to make me look at her. She said urgently,

“Where was he? What was he doing?”

I ripped my arm out of her grasp and backed up a step. “I don’t know,” I said, but that wasn’t exactly the truth. Out of sheer force of habit, I found myself adding, “There’s nothing I can tell you about this.”

She took a step towards me, the end points of her hair swinging fiercely, and she said, “I don’t believe you. I know you saw him.”

All around us, kids were streaming back and forth like ants, oblivious to the drama unfolding in front of them. If they could ignore Rose as she stalked me across the commons, maybe I could, too. I realized this wasn’t a mature or even a rational response, but who said I had to be rational? The question calmed me, because asking it showed me the solution. All I had to do was ask myself “What would Mama do?”

I looked around. We were almost at the center of the quad, and four stone benches backed up against a square flower bed. A hot-dog vendor stood with his cart by the farthest of the benches, and a short line of students was grabbing a late lunch. A few strides to my left was a stand of four oak trees.

I released the handle of my satchel and dropped it to the ground by the closest bench. I left it where it had fallen and walked to the trees, Rose Mae following. I went to the second-largest tree. It had a thick trunk, but a few of its branches were low enough for me to reach.

I jumped to give myself momentum as I grabbed a low, thick branch and hoisted myself up. My loafers slipped on the trunk, and I let them drop off my feet, using my bare toes to get purchase on the bark. I got one foot up on the branch and pushed, reaching for higher branches.

“Arlene?” Rose Mae said. “What are you doing?”

The answer seemed too obvious to say out loud, so I ignored her and kept working my way up the tree. Inside, I was remark-ably calm and peaceful. I peeked down. A couple of students had joined Rose Mae at the foot of the tree, watching me shinny up through the branches.

“Arlene, this is ridiculous,” Rose Mae called. “Get down here.”

I kept climbing around and around the trunk, following the thickest branches I could find. About twenty feet up, I realized the branches were getting too slender to safely hold me. I scouted for a comfortable fork and then wedged myself in it. A few more students had stopped, and one was pointing up at me.

Rose was still at the foot of the tree, yapping like an angry poo-dle. “You can’t stay up there in that tree forever. You have to come down and talk to me.”

I thought she might very well be wrong.

“If you don’t get down here,” Rose said desperately, “I am going to take your shoes!”

A tall, weedy-looking blonde from my world lit class was standing at the base of the tree with a friend, looking up at me.

“You are not taking her shoes,” she said incredulously to Rose, and she picked up my loafers and held them to her chest. She noticed my satchel on the ground a few feet away, and she and her friend hurried to stand over it.

I settled into the fork and looked out over the campus. I had a good view. A couple of the students who had stopped to watch me climb drifted off and were replaced by different ones. I quit looking down or listening, just closed my eyes and concentrated on the breeze hitting my face. The next time I looked down, Rose Mae Lolley had gone.

I backed and shinnied carefully down. My student dragged my satchel over and met me as I dropped to the ground. I took my shoes from her and slipped them back on.

“Thanks, Maria,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to let her take our papers!” she said, outraged.

“Who was that?”

I shrugged and said, “It’s not important,” in a steady voice, but when I bent to pick up my satchel, my knees wobbled a bit on me, and Maria leaped forward to grab my arm and steady me.

She helped me over to the bench, and I sat down heavily, thinking hard. The little crowd of students was leaving, except one group of three who stood in a clot, blatantly staring at me like I was TV.

“Get out of here, you vultures,” I said irritably and flapped my hand at them. I put my head down, breathing hard, and when I looked up, they were dispersing.

Maria sat down beside me, her fingers tapping nervously against her freckled stork legs. At last she said, “Want some of my Fruitopia?”

I nodded and she dug a violently green drink out of her back-pack. I took it gratefully and gulped down about half of it. It tasted like liquid sugar.