The Persian Pickle Club (5 page)

“We call that a Peony,” I told her.

“That’s what I said, a Piney. Now, here’s my pride. It ain’t my work. Granny Grace, our neighbor lady, made this one.” Zepha unfolded a quilt made up of tiny triangles no bigger than my thumbnail, and they all met perfectly at the corners. Even Ella had never made a quilt like that. “People was always asking Granny Grace to sell it. Why, some woman offered her twenty-five dollars, but Granny wouldn’t take it. She wouldn’t sell a quilt that was made out of the dress Aunt Bessie drowned in. That was her youngest girl. Granny give it to me the night before me and Blue left home. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I never was so tickled with a thing in my life.” Zepha looked up at me. “I guess Granny Grace give it to me because it’s called Road to Californy.”

“Oh, isn’t that the best name! Will you let me copy it? Some-day when I’m good enough, I want to try it.”

Zepha was pleased and promised to draw it out herself if I brought her some paper. Then I said if she did that, I’d trade her the pattern for fabric scraps. It’s funny how quilting draws women together like nothing else.

After we’d eaten our ice cream and bid the Massies good night, we drove down the old road to the highway. “I’ve got an errand to run. You want me to take you home first?” Grover asked, fiddling with the radio dial in hopes of getting the weather.

“I guess I’ll go along for the ride. Did you offer him work?”

Grover chuckled. “I told him a dollar a day wasn’t much, but it was as good as anybody around here ever paid. Blue’ll mend fences, spread manure, do other chores. It won’t be for long.”

“What about Tom? He’d be glad to work for a dollar a day.”

Grover thought that over for a minute. “Tom’s got a place to live, and he doesn’t have a family to support. I’ll offer him work at harvest, when I need men, but I can’t ask my best friend to be my hired man.” I understood. I wouldn’t ask Rita to be the hired girl, either.

Grover and I rode out into the country. In the moonlight, it looked like the Kansas farmland Grover and I knew when we were growing up and there was plenty of water. I could almost smell lilacs and honeysuckle. We passed a fallow field that all of a sudden made me shiver, it was so dried up and ugly, and I slid over next to Grover to get warm. He put his arm around me, asking if I was cold, and I told him I was.

We drove toward Auburn and stopped at a house just this side of the river. Grover got out of the car and knocked at the back door, spoke with a man for a few minutes, then followed him into a shed. A few minutes later, Grover came back to the car and put a box into the back of the truck.

I waited until we were on the road again before I said, “Is it a good water pump?”

Grover put his arm around me and asked how come I was so smart. I turned the dial until I found Fred Waring’s Pennsylva-nians on the Topeka station, and we drove on through the dark without talking. I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until Old Bob jumped up on the car and Grover said softly, “Wake up, hon-eybunch. We’re home.”

I
‘d come to be Rita’s friend. Of course, I couldn’t say anything so silly to her. I told Rita I was there to get to know her better. It took me longer to come calling than I’d planned, what with the Massies moving in and, after that, me having to put up tomatoes and to dry peaches. Bottled tomatoes I like, but dried peaches are a waste of good time, since there’s nothing that tastes worse than dried peach pie, unless it’s a rail fence. Grover likes them, however, but then, Grover likes anything.

“That’s nice of you, dearie,” Mrs. Ritter said. “You girls go sit out where it’s cool.” Mrs. Ritter smelled like the blackberry jam that was cooking on the stove.

Rita smelled like a hired hand. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead, and sweat rings stained her dress under her arms. There were blackberry stains on her apron, which was really one of Mrs. Ritter’s and was big enough to go around Rita three or four times.

Agnes T. Ritter started to take off her apron, too, but Mrs. Ritter spoke up. “Agnes, would you help me with these dishes while we wait for the berries to cook?” Agnes T. Ritter sighed and retied her apron. She filled the teakettle from the pump on the sink and put it on the cookstove.

“Don’t spill the dishwater on the floor. Nettie says if you do that, you’ll marry a drunk,” I told her.

I guess it served me right for being mean, because Agnes T. Ritter said right back, “I hear you set up a squatter village on your place.”

“Agnes!” Mrs. Ritter said. “It’s not our business.”

“It is if we all get head lice,” she muttered.

I itched my head for fun and turned to Rita. “Let’s go sit under the trumpet vine and scratch chiggers.” I could see the red welts on Rita’s arms and knew she hadn’t waited for my invitation. She’d probably gotten them in the blackberry patch.

We walked across the yard, where Mrs. Ritter’s hollyhocks and morning glories were in full bloom despite the heat that wilted man, beast, and even Grover, and sat down on a wooden bench. It was as cool a place as you could find, being in the shade of the sod house that Tom’s grandfather had built when he moved onto the land, way back in the 1870s.

Now, the old place was a toolshed, but it was still pretty, because somebody had planted trumpet vines to hide the sod, and those orange flowers covered the house and hung down over us, blocking out the sun.

Rita wiggled back on the bench, then stood up fast and said, “Oh, hell. If it’s not the chiggers, it’s splinters.” She pulled a half-inch sliver out of the back of her leg and sat down again carefully and fanned her face with her hand. “I don’t know what’s worse, the cookstove or the heat out here.”

“Were you helping with the jam?” I asked.

“No, I was just heating water to rinse the dinner dishes. Agnes says we have to pour boiling water over everything. I forgot to do that yesterday, and she washed the dishes all over again after I’d dried them and even put them away. Agnes sure knows her onions about dirt. All she does is criticize, criticize, criticize. I wish she’d stop telling people about how I didn’t know the difference between salt and sugar. She’s brought that up ten times, and even if it had happened to someone else, I wouldn’t have thought it was funny. Why, a person who cooks every day could get them mixed up.” Rita pulled a trumpet flower off the vine and put the end in her mouth and sucked out the sweetness.

“What happened?”

Rita threw away the blossom and picked another. “1 made a cake, only I used a cup of salt and a pinch of sugar instead of the other way around.”

“Anybody could do that,” I said, even though it seemed pretty peculiar to me. “Shoot, I bet even Agnes T. Ritter could get them mixed up.”

“Why do you call her that?” Rita asked me, pretending the flower was a little horn and blowing through it. “Why do you always call her Agnes T. Ritter instead of just Agnes?”

The question made me blink. She’d been Agnes T. Ritter all her life, and I’d forgotten why, so I had to stop a minute to remember. “We started calling her that when we were kids. You know that baby rhyme, ‘Jack, be nimble, Jack, be quick?’ Well, one day Floyd said, ‘Agnes T. Ritter, Agnes T. Quick.’ And Agnes T. Ritter got so mad that it just naturally stuck.”

“I can tell she doesn’t like it. She frowned every time you called her that at the club meeting. She frowns a lot.” Rita seemed pleased about that. She peered through the end of the trumpet flower as if it were a spyglass. “How come you’re called Queenie Bean?”

“Because that’s my name.”

“Oh.” Rita scratched the back of her neck, and I could see a little red chigger bump. “Try not to scratch. It’s better if you don’t,” I told her. “Sometimes a little butter and salt mixed together help.”

Rita made a face.

“You don’t eat it,” I said quickly. “You rub it on the welt.” I didn’t tell her Grover used tobacco spit.

Rita stretched back, leaning her head against the dry wire grass of the soddy behind her, and that was when I realized she was pregnant. Seeing me look at her stomach, she said, “Six months. It seems like ages.”

I started counting backward, and Rita knew right off what I was doing. “December. We were married the end of December. I got pregnant the first month,” she said. “Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Everybody counts. Agnes even counted out loud.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me, too. I didn’t want a baby right off.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean the counting. I think you’re so lucky to have a baby.”

“You can have it,” Rita said. I must have looked shocked, because she added, “Queenie, it was a joke.” She didn’t sound like it was a joke, however.

Rita was quiet for a minute. A hummingbird stopped in midair and stuck its beak down the throat of an orange trumpet, then flew off.

“I like the green hummingbirds best. The red ones are mean,” I said, changing the subject. It wasn’t polite for me to talk about the baby if Rita didn’t want to.

But she changed it right back. “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, it’s nice to have a baby, only with things the way they are, it’s not a very good time. Sometimes I get awfully down in the dumps. Agnes said getting pregnant is all my fault. Maybe she doesn’t know it takes two to tango.”

“Agnes T. Ritter is sour cherries,” I said indignantly.

“Agnes is bad cheese.” Rita giggled.

“Agnes T. Ritter is stepping into fresh cow pie—in your bare feet.”

“Are cow pies what I think they are?” Rita asked. I nodded, and she laughed so hard, she bent over double and then sat up straight, as if she’d picked up another splinter.

“You all right?” I asked.

Rita put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a needle. “I forgot this was here,” she said. She took out a wadded-up quilt square and held it up for me to see. “It’s bum, isn’t it?” It was.

“You’ll learn. My first one was worse than that,” I told her, although that wasn’t true. I’d worked so hard on my first piece of patchwork that it had turned out to be almost perfect. But I wanted us to have more in common than being short and not liking Agnes T. Ritter, which was nothing special. Everybody didn’t like Agnes T. Ritter. Then I reminded myself Agnes T. Ritter was a member of the Persian Pickle Club, so I had to like her and be her friend.

“I don’t seem to get the hang of it,” Rita said. “I keep pricking my fingers.”

“Put rubbing alcohol on them. It’ll toughen them up.”

Rita ironed the patches with her hand, then put the thread hanging down from the back of the patch through the needle. The thread was dirty. “The needle’s as sticky as that awful fly-paper Mom hangs in the kitchen. Well, I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it,” Rita said, wadding up the patchwork and throwing it between us on the bench.

Instead of letting Rita know I was too dumb to get what she said about spinach, I picked up the quilting and said, “There’s nobody who can sew in this weather except Ella Crook.”

“She’s a funny one. I can’t exactly figure her out. She looks like she’d fall down if you blew on her, but she walked all the way up here for a visit in the awful sun yesterday and didn’t even work up a sweat. She hardly said two words when she got here, just handed Tom a plate of fudge and muttered something about remembering how much he liked it. I thought she didn’t like me, but Tom says she’s as shy as anybody he ever met. Is that so?”

“Yes. Even when you get to know her, she doesn’t say much.”

“How come she takes in sewing? She couldn’t make much money at it, what with everybody in such a pickle about money just now. Who can afford to send out sewing?”

“She’s alone, kind of a widow. She has to make do. We all help her out a little when we can.”

“Does she live with that busybody?”

“Mrs. Judd? No, but Mrs. Judd looks out for her. We all do.” I pressed my finger on the main seam of Rita’s sewing so that it lay flat. “It helps if you iron the seams open before you start the next row,” I said, changing the subject. “Do you have a thimble?”

“I can’t use one,” Rita said, and I could tell I had my work cut out for me in making Rita a quilter.

“What do you mean, ‘kind of a widow’? Where’s her husband?” Rita asked.

“Whose?”

“Ella Crook’s?”

With Ben Crook, it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, as Nettie put it. I wanted to change the subject again, but Rita was looking at me with such curiosity, I knew she wouldn’t let me. “Nobody knows,” I said. “If you don’t use a thimble, you’ll poke a hole in your finger.

“You mean she’s a grass widow?” Rita reached into her pocket and pulled out a thimble, putting it onto her middle finger.

“This one,” I said, taking the thimble from her and putting it on the correct finger of my right hand. “What’s a grass widow?”

“That’s when a woman’s married but her husband’s ditched her or something. Is that what happened?”

I shrugged. “I personally think it was hard times. Ben Crook thought the sun rose and set on Ella. He was the best husband in the world, but he lit out a year ago, and nobody’s seen or heard from him since. I try not to think about it. Farming isn’t easy for men these days.”

“I think it’s worse for the women,” Rita said. “I hate house-work. The only time I ever agreed with Agnes was when she said we ought to wear wrinkled clothes and not waste our time with those flatirons.” Rita looked down at her quilt square. “This goes so slow. It’s enough to put me into a blue funk.”

I’d never heard of a blue funk before, but I had an idea what it meant. “Why don’t you turn it into a baby quilt? It won’t take any time at all.”

“Why that’s a swell idea. You’re a true friend, Queenie.” She looked up as the screen door banged and Mrs. Ritter came out with a pitcher and two glasses.

“There’s the true friend,” I told Rita. Then I called, “Mrs. Ritter, I think I’d sell my soul for a glass of lemonade.”

Mrs. Ritter tried to frown, but it didn’t work because she was such a jolly woman. “My stars, don’t let Dad hear you blaspheme, dearie, and call me Sabra. You know we always use first names for members of the Persian Pickle Club.”

“Not for Mrs. Judd. I think God would strike me dead if I called her Septima,” I said, and Mrs. Ritter laughed.

She looked down at Rita’s little mess of sewing. “Don’t you think she’s getting the hang of it, Queenie? It’s nice, isn’t it?” Then she turned and went back to the house.

“This is real tasty,” I called, then told Rita, “She cares a lot about you. Lemons must cost ten cents each.”

“I’d trade lemonade any day for a real drink. Bourbon. Yum,” Rita said, adding, “Tell me about those women at your club.”

“At
our
club,” I corrected her, because whether she knew it or not, she was a member, too.

There wasn’t much to tell about us, because we were all pretty ordinary. Mrs. Judd was the richest, which anybody could tell from the Packard, even though it was old. The Judds owned the biggest farm in Wabaunsee County, and Prosper Judd was the president of the bank in Eskridge; Mrs. Judd had inherited it from her people. But rich didn’t always mean lucky. Their only child, Wilson, who was a few years ahead of me in school, caught infantile paralysis, and the members of the Persian Pickle Club had exercised his legs every day for a year so that he could walk again. Then he walked right out of Harveyville and never once wrote to his mother.

Ada June was every bit as nice as she was the day she was the hostess for Persian Pickle, I told Rita. Buck raised horses, but people weren’t buying horses anymore, and since the Zinns had more kids than nickels in their pockets, they were hard up. Still, it didn’t bother them much, and they were as happy a couple as I ever saw. I liked Ada June a lot, but she was almost forty. Opalina Dux was the one with white hair so long, she could sit on it, I explained. You could always tell where she’d been by the trail of hairpins. Sometimes, she was as crazy as the crazy quilts she worked on, carrying on conversations with her chickens. There was no harm in that, however. Most of us talked to chickens at one time or another. But Opalina brought them inside the house so she could talk to them while she did her work.

Nettie Burgett had a goiter, so she always wore a scarf around her neck, which made her look like her husband, Tyrone, who didn’t have a neck at all. Tyrone ran a numbers game at the billiard hall over in Blue Hill, leaving Nettie and Velma, who was the only Burgett kid still at home, to do most of the farming. He’d turned to gambling after the government got rid of Prohibition, and his bootleg business went to heck. Of course, being on the wrong side of the law didn’t keep him from being almost as righteous as Foster Olive. We all knew he was a trial to Nettie, although she never complained. We also knew he was years behind in his mortgage payments, and the Eskridge bank would have foreclosed if Mrs. Judd hadn’t told Prosper to let it ride for Nettie’s sake. Nettie’s daughter, Velma, never came to Pickle, so I skipped her.

I told Rita that Forest Ann was Tyrone’s sister, but you wouldn’t know it, because she was so much nicer than he was. In fact, Forest Ann kind of made up for Tyrone being such a dope. She and Nettie were more like sisters than sisters-in-law. When Nettie turned fifty, Tyrone didn’t give her so much as a pin, but Forest Ann drove her into Topeka to see
Captain Blood
at the picture show and have lunch at F. W. Woolworth’s, where they drank Nehis and ate weenies that were cooked on hot rollers in a glass case. Nettie said it was the best birthday she ever had.