Her Own Place (5 page)

The next morning, Mae Lee's daddy changed the locks, and said flat out, “Get yourself dressed, young lady, we're going down to lawyer Gaines's office to see about getting you a divorce. He'll know where you have to go and what you have to
do to make it legal. You don't need the likes of one of them Barneses trailing in and out for the rest of your life.”

Mae Lee gave herself six months to get over her husband. Six months to grieve inwardly and be sad. After that it was finished.

Even with the help from Hooker Jones and his wife Maycie, keeping the farm going wasn't easy for Mae Lee. Hooker's wife was in poor health. And, although she rarely complained, so was Mae Lee's mama. She had kidney trouble. Yet she was always there, helping out on the farm and with the grandchildren.

“The farm is too much for you,” Mae Lee's mama would moan. “You need help. To be married. Besides,” she'd add, “you've got the hip set for more babies.” Then she would hint. “I don't reckon you'd fuss too much if Howard Jamison would drop by for a few minutes or so Sunday. It's been a while since that wife of his died. He'd make some lucky woman a mighty good husband.”

Then her mama would look at her hard. “You need to start wearing your straw hat more and protect your smooth, light skin and get some rest. A man's not going to want some woman that's worn herself to a frazzle. As soon as we
get caught up with our hoeing. I'll come and help you out with yours.”

Every time her mama had come to help, however, there had always been someone there to pull her away. On one occasion, after it had rained for days and the grass was about to take over Mae Lee's cotton crop and poor Maycie was sick, her mama left off her own hoeing and came over to help.

Just then, who drove up in her fine car but Liddie Granger, Church's wife. “Don't look up, Mama,” Mae Lee urged, but her mama had already stood her hoe up and was walking over to the car.

Liddie Granger leaned over and rolled down the car window on the passenger side. Mae Lee could hear a baby crying. Liddie sounded as if she was crying too, “Vergie, Vergie, my baby is crying and I can't get him to stop. My mama is away. Oh, Vergie, please help me. I don't know what to do. I really don't.”

Vergie looked over her shoulder at her daughter leaning on her hoe. “Go on, Mama,” waved Mae Lee.

Vergie took off her shoes, knocked them together several times to shake off the soft dirt, and got into Liddie Granger's car. Mae Lee watched them leave with the crying baby. What a pair they made, Liddie Granger with every strand of hair in place, face powder on, and her mama barefoot, in old field clothes and a frizzed straw hat.

“If my baby was sick I don't think I'd take time to put all that stuff on my face,” she thought, but shrugged it off. “She probably already had it on.”

Mae Lee's daddy always said he'd never think too hard of the young Grangers. After all, they sold her the land she
owned, something very few white landowners in Rising Ridge would do. He made her promise to hold on to it.

Watching the car disappear down the road, Mae Lee was jealous of the fine life Liddie Granger lived, terribly jealous. Liddie was so rich. In her jealousy she had forgotten all about her own children, happily playing in the shade from the trees at the edge of the woods. Mae Lee never ever carried her children into the cotton fields, because her mama always said, “If small children play up and down the cotton rows while their parents work, they will grow up to be cotton pickers. And if they pry open a green cotton boll with a boll weevil inside, they will have a short, tragic life.” Her mama always spoke of her regrets over letting her play in the cotton fields while she worked. But Vergie Hudson had made sure Mae Lee would be so afraid of the boll weevil inside a green, unopened cotton boll, that she'd never pry one open.

It had been fine for her mama to tell her when she returned that Mrs. Granger's baby was all right. She'd gotten it to sleep. But when her mama kept on talking, Mae Lee hoed furiously. “Mama, I don't want to hear about the new things in that house, the presents her husband bought her, the good supper Lula Jane is cooking for her tonight,” she said. “Why couldn't she take care of the baby?”

“Lula Jane don't know nothing about no children, look at how she messed up with hers. When it comes to mothering she is as bad as some cuckoo birds. Well anyway, as I was saying—” “Mama,” she cut her short. “I don't believe I want to hear any more.”

“Oh, good, then,” her mama grinned, waving a crisp five
dollar bill in her hand. “I thought you wanted to hear how I was planning on splitting what I made on that little short trip.”

Mae Lee threw her hoe down and chased her mama up and down the cotton rows.

The two women sat down at the edge of the field to rest. Vergie Hudson pulled sprouting grass from around the cotton plants on nearby rows. Her face grew serious. She looked across the field at Hooker and her husband plowing the land he loved so much. She listened to him calling out “gee,” “haw” to the mules. She pulled a crumpled letter from her shirt pocket. “Your granddaddy's going down fast,” she said. “Mama wrote and asked if I could come down and help out for a while. It'll be hard on your daddy for me to pull up and go down to the Low Country right in the middle of the farm season, but I'm going to have to go. You know, Mae Lee, that your grandma is in no better shape than your grandpa.” Vergie had stopped short of saying that due to her own poor health it would be hard on her as well.

Mae Lee stood up and reached for her mama's hand. “I'll take care of Daddy,” she promised. “You go and get Grandpa and Grandma ready to come to Rising Ridge so we both can take care of them.”

The year was 1955. A troubling fear swept into the farmhouses, fanning out like a plague of bees, each family imagining their own stings. It was the year that Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. Mae Lee wept for him, just a young boy murdered in cold blood.

There was also a home problem she had to face. Her mama's
eyes had brimmed with tears when she told her that the day they'd feared had indeed finally come. She and Mae Lee's daddy had decided they were going to have to leave Rising Ridge and move to Low Country South Carolina to take care of her mama's aged sick parents, rather than the other way around. Her grandmother, a diabetic, was rapidly losing her eyesight, but she was still caring for her grandfather who had suffered a stroke. Vergie's efforts to get her parents to move to Up Country and live with her had failed. Her mother stubbornly refused to move. “We won't be taken from our home, not while we can lift a finger to hold on to the doorknob.” And the children had to look out for the parents, even if it meant moving away to the Low Country. “Mae Lee, we will have to leave as soon as the fall harvest is finished,” her mama said. “Your daddy's already made arrangements for Hooker Jones to farm his land on the halves. Hooker and his wife claim with you helping out so much, the three of you can run both farms. You and your children can move into our house, so they can live in yours.”

Mae Lee and her parents finished the fall harvest early. The last bale of cotton was ginned two days before the November eleventh Veterans Day parade, a big event in Rising Ridge. Since most of the crops were harvested there was always a Christmas float included in the parade to get people in the buying spirit, with a Santa Claus tossing candies and small gifts into the crowds. On the day of the parade, dressed in warm mittens and tasseled knit caps, and under the watchful eyes of their mama and grandparents, Mae Lee's children eagerly scampered about gathering the goodies. Inside one of
the stores, Mae Lee and her mama showed the children the pretty dolls and toys. The children wanted them all.

Before they left, Mae Lee's parents put all the Christmas presents they bought for the children under lock and key in the big chifforobe in their front company room. Mae Lee's mama reminded her over and over that she wouldn't be with her this time, so she mustn't forget to wrap the things they'd bought in the child's personal clothes. That way, even though they didn't have name tags, fancy wrappings, and bows, the children could tell which presents were theirs even before they could read. Vergie Hudson had already put the baseball she bought for Taylor in one of his socks, and wrapped a baby doll in Annie Ruth's little pink dress. She reminded her daughter of some of the good hiding places she used to search out on Christmas morning when she was a little girl. For Mae Lee's children, Christmas was like an Easter egg hunt.

A couple of days later Mae Lee's mama and daddy packed up the few things they were taking with them, and with help from a few neighbors, moved Mae Lee and her children from the little house she'd bought, back into the house where she had been born and grown up.

Mae Lee looked about the rooms, now crowded with her furniture as well as her mama's. She loved the new things her mama had. A Kelvinator, and an electric cooking stove and oil circulator to replace the potbellied wood-burning stove that had been in the kitchen. She step-measured enough space in a corner for Taylor's little bed, then measured with an outspread arm how much cretonne material it would take to run a drawstring curtain across. Poor little Taylor would still have
to sleep in the kitchen, she thought. She looked at the nice front and back porches, but it was having a larger bedroom for her daughters that pleased her most.

It was late in the day before her parents were ready for departure. They hated to leave fully as much as she hated to see them go. Her mama reminded Mae Lee once again that her cousin Warren would always be there for her to go to in case of need. “Remember, Warren is a porter on the Southerner,” she said, as if Mae Lee didn't know that very well, “so he can hold true to his promise that there'll always be food and a place at his table for you and my grandchildren. Warren will see that the family sticks together.”

Her parents urged their grandchildren to be good, and showered them with candy, little gifts, hugs and kisses, which seemed to take away their sadness. Mae Lee fought to hold back tears. For her, there was no comfort.

Outside, before he climbed into his truck, her daddy put his hands on her shoulders. She dropped her head. “I'll do my best to keep things going until you all get back, Daddy,” she said softly.

“Oh, you'll keep things going, Mae Lee. Just remember you are not going to be alone,” he said. “You'll have help.”

After they waved good-bye, Mae Lee's children went back inside the house, but she stayed out alone under the dreary fall sky. She thought of her daddy's parting words, “You'll have help.” She wondered if some surprise awaited her, if there was something her daddy knew that she didn't. Maybe her husband was going to come back home. Perhaps her daddy felt that it might no longer matter to her what people might say
if she took him back. She had been a grass widow too long, faced too many lonely nights alone in her marriage bed.

The feelings and desires for her husband that she thought were dead and buried were briefly very much alive, she realized, springing back like drought-parched corn coming back to life after soaking rains.

She felt the evening chill, and turned to go inside.

It was early on a cold winter day when Mae Lee's cousin Warren came by. Mae Lee had already started cooking. “It's too cold to do anything but eat,” she said.

“And keep warm,” her cousin added. “I brought you some kerosene.”

Warren spent the day hauling wood for her fireplace and fixing up the chicken coop. He put a new wick in the kerosene heater that she used to keep the chicks warm, and fussed at her for ordering baby chicks during the winter months. “Your hens will start hatching their eggs come spring,” he argued.

“Yes,” she agreed, “and my chicks will be plump young fryers by spring.”

Her cousin shook his head. “You work too hard for a woman, Mae Lee.” He glanced out the window. “I see Hooker heading out to feed the mules. They're getting pretty old for farming, Mae Lee. Especially Maude. Hooker said she barely finishes eating her bundle of corn fodder at night.”

“I know,” Mae Lee said. “Old Molly's started to limp. Since Daddy left she hasn't been shoed right. Both mules are going down. First it was Starlight, and now the mules. I guess I'll just have to let go of the mules.” She turned to face her cousin.
“There's talk that a lot of farmers are buying new tractors, Warren. I wonder what they'll do with their old ones?” Mae Lee asked.

“Either trade them in or sell them,” Warren answered. “That's a mighty big step to take, Mae Lee. I know your daddy will understand if you don't farm the land for a year or two. They'll probably be back sooner than that anyway.”

Mae Lee wasn't listening. “If I scrape up what I've saved back and take the money Mama's going to send for the children's new Easter clothes, I might can make a down payment on a used tractor.”

Warren got up to add kerosene to the oil circulator. “You'd better hold on to that money, Mae Lee. With little children in the house it never pays to take out the last piece of money you have in your shoe. Besides,” he added, “you never want to be forced to have to buy your seed and fertilizer for spring planting on time. Come fall, Mr. Kingsford can charge you whatever he wants to. Remember, with Hooker Jones working the land on the halves, you've got to put up all the money up front—to buy all the supplies.”

Mae Lee pursed her lips. “Seems like the landowner puts up too much,” she said softly.

Warren inserted a funnel into the heater tank and poured kerosene in. “The sharecropper carries a full load. He puts in all the labor and still pays half the expenses at harvest time.”

“And gets half the profits,” Mae Lee added quickly.

Since he had a few days off from his job, Warren promised Mae Lee he would ask Church Granger if he knew of a used tractor in good condition for sale. And to spare her
from having to go to her parents while they were dealing with sickness, he would loan her what he could spare for a down payment on a tractor.