Knee-Deep in Wonder (11 page)

“I'm big and strong. Know how to sew and cook. I keep a clean house. Ain't got no bad habits. And I ain't one for talking bout other folks' business. And I don't need much either. Just enough to see bout me and mine.”

“How many mine?” His voice was suddenly brisk. Not mean, just hurried, as if something had wildly burnt behind the door and needed his attention quickly.

“Just one. I got a little girl.”

“Well, now—” Mr. Jameson began.

“It don't look like it, but I can keep out of folks' ways till they need me and lend a hand real quick.”

“Miss Liberty—”

“I know how to can fruit and such…”

“Miss Liberty—”

“I can launder…”

“Miss Liberty—”

“Excuse me for cutting you, but I know how to—”

“Miss Liberty, I ain't got enough work around here to keep me busy most the day. Depression done snatched away most of my customers. Fact of the matter is, you was the only one left that come by regular.” He pursed his lips together in thought and moved his hands over the length of the register table. “Maybe Mr. Carthers got work for you out at his place.”

She snorted. “My place damn near big as his.”

“Sure it is. But then, he ain't come in here asking me for work.” She pushed back from the counter and Mr. Jameson saw her sudden repugnance.

“I ain't never coming back in here.”

Liberty raced toward the door, her face still showing her disgust. She wasn't angry, just appalled, and not at Mr. Jameson but at herself for being so unsuspecting. Old doubts resurfaced. Thought I ran past being this innocent. Told Queen Ester so year ago. But he was being so nice and I made nice with him. Just when I think I know what's around the corner, he push his lips out at me, like I just threw something dead on the counter. Maybe I ain't innocent no more, just stupid.

Her arm flew out ready to yank the doorknob, but the door slid open of its own accord. She stumbled, tripping over the door saddle into a tiny woman who caught Liberty around the waist. For a moment she held Liberty's entire weight in her arms, belying her own short stature. “You all right there?” She set Liberty on her feet.

“Almost had a real spill,” Liberty panted out, straightening her clothes back into place. She looked at the woman for the first time. Dark chocolate, without a scar in sight, she was better than pretty, to Liberty she was beautiful. “Thank you for catching me up like that.”

“Any time.” The woman smiled, revealing dimples.

“Well. Morning,” Liberty said, moving away, but the woman grabbed her wrist.

“You looking for work?”

Liberty stiffened at the question. “Who told you that?”

“Heard you asking in the store.” She still held Liberty's wrist, though she felt her grow rigid.

“You listening in?”

“Well, you wasn't talking like it was some kind of secret.” Then she let go before Liberty could decide whether or not to wrench her wrist free. “I'm Mable. Mable Pickett.”

“Liberty Strickland.” She couldn't think what else to say. Despite her anger, Liberty laughed, suddenly charmed by Mable's boldness, strength, and dimples. Her laughter rose for a moment more and then subsided into a soft chuckle. Now she was giggling at her own stupidity. “And yeah, I need work.”

*   *   *

They became friends. During the next few weeks, while she tried to think of work Liberty could do, Mable told the story of her entire life. About Curlene, her best girlfriend, who was also from Virginia, who knew Mable had to leave her house because her daddy thought she was too pretty, and when her mama finally found out she told Mable to “gone on.” Curlene, who Mable had convinced to buy the same Sears catalog number 782 blue dress; Curlene, who Mable cried all the way onto the train with her. Once in Lafayette, Curlene took a husband for nine years until he was knifed up north in a dance hall near Little Rock, while Mable played house with her John-John till he decided to quit the sawmill and Mable all in one go. Then Curlene couldn't take it anymore and, before Mable could get to her, to remind her friend of the dress they shared, her friend was gone.

So then Mable had no Curlene and no John-John. Though it hurt that Curlene had left, the thought of John-John made Mable sick at the stomach. Not only did he quit her right after pulling her skirt over her head, but in two weeks every bill collector south of Stamps and north of Walker Creek was knocking at her door, and after the third visit the car, a Model T, the only promise John-John had ever kept, was gone too. Six months later with even the curtains taken, Mable decided she had learned her lesson with men. But then she met Downtown, and sooner than she could have imagined there she was behind Bo Web's café, her stockings tangled around her ankles.

She told Liberty about the whole naming business. How after he had his way with her, he wanted to know her name and she wouldn't hand it over, because she wasn't sure, despite sharing a basket of chicken in Bo Web's backyard, if she wanted to get that personal. What else was a person besides what they called themselves? she said. She laughed, telling Liberty all the stunts he had pulled and the carrying on he did for two months. Coming from the store where he worked to catch her washing dishes, doing a seam or hem, or hanging clothes on the line. He'd take her in his arms and breathe his one question into her collar. “You ready yet?” He waited on her to say what was simple, what most people said almost in passing: “My name is…”

He tried. Casually walking behind her with his hands in his pockets, he followed her when she left the store where she did errands. On her rounds of folks making small talk, he'd turn to the people she'd spoken with and say, “That lady, yeah, the one in the yellow dress”—or green shirt or pink scarf—“what's her name?” But they all knew who he was. They had seen him walking out of Mable's house buckling his belt; they had heard about the chicken basket and the grass—Bo Web's wife didn't hang around the back of the house for nothing—so they thought his question was some lover's game. Loving a game or two themselves, they made fun with him when they had the time.

“That gal?”

“Yeah.”

“Can't say I rightly know.” Or, worse yet, they gave him names that weren't Mable's.

“That gal?”

“Yeah.”

“She sho got a leaning toward them smart colors.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, sometimes she answer to Sweet Girl, then Pretty Girl, and I even seen a time or two when she turn around at Baby Girl. I suppose any one of them can get you somewhere.”

After six months, he stopped asking, tired of hearing his question hover in the air and then drop, still loving the way she murmured “Downtown” after Bo Web's and fried chicken. Mable liked that he always said thank you when she put toast or coffee down in front of him, and how he listened to all the gossip and stories she brought to his house, something John-John never did—when Mable tried to talk John-John would just spit in the sink and walk out the door. She didn't understand that about John-John, because Mable could tell a story or piece of gossip like nobody's business.

It was Mable who heard everything, the trivial and triumphant. So when Cookie wanted to know what Poo-Poo was doing with his spare time, she went to Mable and asked. Instead of telling Cookie that Poo-Poo was working off a debt to Mr. Carthers on account of Mr. Carthers got Poo-Poo's cousin out of jail, Mable just said, It's not what you think, and left it at that. When Banky told her he and his woman were thinking about having another baby, even though the first child, Banky Two, lived with Banky One's mother, Mable had the sense to tell everyone she could get her hands on and shame him into thinking of someone else besides himself.

“Yeah, well, not everybody got time to think about holding and telling gossip,” Liberty said.

“Girl, don't tell me.”

“Mable, what am I gone do?” They sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee.

“I heard the sawmill quarters need somebody to launder.”

Liberty sipped her coffee and thought for a moment. “What I'm gone do with Queen Ester?”

“Cookie take in kids sometimes.”

Liberty wrinkled her nose. “She can't be under nobody's care but mine, Mable.”

You and that girl, Mable thought. Queen Ester napped upstairs while they had their afternoon coffee. Though her daughter was fourteen years old, Liberty still made the girl take a nap during the day.

“Maybe when Sweets get back—”

“Sweets ain't coming back,” Mable said, cutting her off. She settled herself in her chair. “What we need to do is figure out what you good at.”

“Cooking, cleaning, keeping house. Just like everybody else.”

“Yeah…” Mable trailed off. Suddenly she smiled. “Cept you got this house.”

“So?”

“So? So we can start an eating place. Folks can stop in for pie and such.”

“Listen to you. Ain't nobody gone come way out here.”

“Look who you talking to.”

*   *   *

As good as her word, Mable somehow got tables, chairs, and customers within the first six months. And the work made Liberty practical. With cooking and cleaning up for as many as twenty people, who had time to kiss some child under the chin? No longer did she go through the effort of putting Queen Ester to bed only to wake her again with a good-night song. Now rhubarb and lemon pies were made for the flow of paying customers and extra money bought more supplies, not church shoes. To Queen Ester, Liberty's new responsibilities felt like negligence, so she spent more time than she should have thinking of ways to remind Liberty of their blissful years together. She couldn't remember the last time her mother called to her, “Down to eat, child,” for her dinner. Too scared to throw a tantrum, she turned sullen, secretive, waiting to emerge out of dark corners, wanting her mother to wear again her eager playful smile. Liberty, strict, sometimes even mean, didn't help. “Girl, you come out of that dark. Hear me?”

“Just looking, Mama.”

“Looking at what?”

“You.”

“You ain't got to be in the dark to see me.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Queen Ester said nothing more, watching her mother through lowered lashes. But she continued to watch her mother from the crook of the hallways.

Except for Queen Ester's queer ways, which Liberty was too busy to think about, things at the house had turned around. When she went to buy supplies, people said hello as if they meant it. Over the next four years she made friends: Monroe, Wilde, and Mable. She spent nights now smoking cigarettes and playing cards on her porch. Thursdays, Monroe always managed to hustle up a pint of whiskey to pass around while they choked on adult laughter. Except for Queen Ester, and me and mine not being three, things are good now, Liberty would think. Too good.

*   *   *

Maybe they were, since soon after that, Monroe killed Wilde over a game of dominoes with a knife or a razor or something sharp enough to take a life. Mable made her way over to Liberty's to tell her. It was Thursday, and Liberty was expecting them all. Mable approached the path that Liberty's customers had worn from the road to the café. Mable smiled, thinking about that path, because of the worrying she and Liberty had done while they planned the café over how folks would find a house a wilderness away. She trotted down the footpath until she stood in the swept yard that enclosed the house, her feet marking and breaking the intricate pattern of circles made in the dust before dawn by Queen Ester. Mable set her hand on the doorknob and pushed open the door. “We don't have no eggs,” Liberty said, and before Mable could remember what she came for she took up her part in a conversation they had had every week since the café opened.

“You say that every Thursday. How you expect somebody to eat hash without some eggs stirred up in them? Liberty, sometime you don't make no sense.”

“Mable, I would still have some eggs left over if you wouldn't come in every day asking for eggs to go with your hash. You need to be thankful for what you receive the rest of the week.”

“I be thankful if you get me some eggs on Thursday.”

“Lord as my witness, you getting as bad as Wilde, coming in here asking for roast turkey like it's Thanksgiving every day.”

Then Mable remembered and the light talk, which because of its Thursday-after-Thursday litany didn't even take up space in the mind, stopped. Breaking into Liberty's smile, Mable said, “Monroe done killed Wilde.”

It was midday; she had been on her feet all morning, and Liberty was tired. But before she could think how to mourn and run the café at the same time, her customers flared up with the news of Wilde and Monroe, pressing her for information.

“What that Mable just say?”

“Mable say Monroe killed Wilde,” Liberty said quietly.

“Probably over some woman. Ain't that the way it always is?” Porch said to Banky.

“Me myself, I make it my business never to get tied up with women and dominoes. Lord knows you die quick that way.”

Liberty watched her customers weave together a tale. Their voices rose and grew sharp until, finally having a story that made sense, they smiled, nodded, and said Monroe had killed Wilde over a woman, more than likely that Annabelle who lived in Bradley, the one Wilde went to see every now and again. And somehow Monroe found out about it. Then he got jealous of Wilde or the other way around, but it didn't matter because the outcome was the same.

“Wilde's poor mama. She got to be in a bad way. Wilde was young.”

“Wilde's mama? What about Wilde? You get a little piece of tail and see what happens, what I say,” Banky said.

“I say shut it. All of you.” Mable came through the door, food on a plate, steaming. She sat down in an empty chair, the plate balancing on her knee. Liberty pushed away from the bar, calmly lifted the plate from Mable's knee, and placed the hash in front of Porch. “So what the story on Monroe and Wilde?”