The Sweet by and By (6 page)

We always started before the sun came up. Mother stormed into Callie’s and my room and woke us up at about five because we had to eat something and go with Daddy straight to the fields so he could start the morning out there before coming back at dinnertime and doing his preacher duties later in the day. I never liked to eat anything hot first thing in the morning and I still don’t, but there was no argu- ing with Mother. The smell of breakfast wafted through the house in no time. Mother made her biscuits in a big rectangular pan. Daddy wanted fresh ones at every meal, so she threw the leftovers out three times a day. She wouldn’t give them to Tally our retriever because she said that dog was already too fat to be as young as she was. I could have learned to put the biscuits in the oven by myself, but Mother always stopped me and took some buttermilk on her hands and patted them, all around the pan because it made the tops brown better.

She said to me, “Maggie, you can’t forget the buttermilk if you want them to be pretty.”

“What’s pretty about a biscuit?” I answered, and Mother’s face looked like I’d just told her that she was an ugly woman, suddenly sad and faraway. I understand that now. Whatever she was doing at any

moment was not only the most important thing she could possibly be doing but she did her best to enjoy it and couldn’t understand why other people might not feel the same. Most mornings I’d take a biscuit with some jelly on it for later on, once my stomach started growling. By the time the summer was over I was brown as a chestnut, just from being in the fields. Mother didn’t particularly like us to be so tanned because while we were farmers, she didn’t like the idea of us look- ing like field hands, especially as we got older. By the time she was thirteen, Callie was starting to look more like Mother in her body than like me. She left me behind with my f lat chest and bare feet. She brushed her hair, showed signs of small bumps of breasts, and started wearing underwear on top as well as bottom.

A mixture of heat, dry dirt, tobacco, and bugs at night sums up all of my summers as a girl. Once in a while there was swimming in the pond if Daddy agreed to watch us because Mother was deathly afraid of water. More than once she warned my father, “Reuben you know exactly how I feel about those girls in that pond and yet you choose to let them swim in it. Lord have mercy on you if anything ever happens to one of them, I swear.”

“You ought not take the Lord’s name in vain, Sallie,” Daddy an- swered.

“It’s not in vain, I mean every word of it.”

That was usually the end of it. We’d go to the pond with Daddy anyway, but what Mother said had definitely made an impression be- cause anytime one of us put her head underwater, Daddy squirmed around on the bank until he saw us come up again, even if it was only a few seconds.

I have no doubt our parents had as many fights as anybody else, but the only other time I remember was when Daddy brought home a caramel-colored pony. I don’t know where he got it, maybe I did at the time, but it seems like somebody gave it to him because they couldn’t take care of it anymore and Daddy being the preacher, people

gave him things lots of times. He was a pretty pony, but I didn’t like to go around him because he made a snorting sound through his nostrils which sounded hateful to me. Callie on the other hand wasn’t afraid at all and was ready to ride him first thing even though she had never done it before. That’s where Mother stepped in and declared that no child of hers was getting on a strange pony that we didn’t know and so help her if Daddy let one of us, he better plan on sleeping on a church pew because the only way he would step into the house was over her body lying dead in the doorway. Daddy did not challenge her. He ran the house and made every important decision as far as I could tell, but on the rare occasion that Mother put her foot down, he understood that the battle was not worth the casualties and simply moved on. Callie did not ride the pony, and within a couple weeks the pony was living somewhere else.

Every fall, I couldn’t wait to go back to school. It was all I thought about the whole month of August. By the time I was fourteen there was no one else left in my grade. Farm children, if they went to school at all, only stayed long enough to learn how to write their names and read a little, then went back to work for their families. Daddy had taught me to read before I ever started school, mainly because I was always curious and asking questions when I saw him studying and writing notes for his sermons. I don’t think he ever wrote out a whole sermon, if he did I never saw it, but he always made notes to help him think about what he was going to say, which is more than I can say for some preachers I have heard since. If I asked him, he would stop what he was doing and let me sit on his lap, and we would sound out words together from the Bible. I know now that he picked easy ones because there are still some Bible words I couldn’t sound out if I had to, names of places, and people and rivers. I read anything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t a lot because there wasn’t any such thing as a library. The only books I got were presents now and then and the ones our teacher, Mrs. Eloise Grimes, would let me borrow. Her

husband got killed by lightning in a bad storm and she never married again, but she had family up in Richmond and she went to see them about twice a year, which was a lot of traveling back then. She always brought back books. I think my eyes would be better now if I hadn’t stayed up many a night squinting by a kerosene lamp. Callie only went to school because Daddy made her but had already stopped by the time she was my age. She could read as good as anybody, but she didn’t care two cents about it.

Callie grew into as pretty a girl as ever lived. She had long light brown hair, almost blond, sometimes she braided it and other times wore it up on her head. To have spent her life on a farm, her skin was as pale creamy as a dogwood blossom, almost white. I myself had skin the color of ruddy earth, and hair to match. Some people still say I’ve got good color, I guess that means they can tell I’m alive. Callie’s skin was so unusual people talked about it at church when she was dressed up or if we went into town. Callie was looking to get married if she could find someone she would have, and there were plenty of boys that took an interest in her. She wanted her own house and a bunch of children to go with it. At the end of the summer, picky as she was, after many a picnic and Sunday afternoon visit, she had decided on who it would be, Lawrence Adams, the son of Sanford Adams the banker. Lawrence hadn’t asked her to marry him, but I could tell it was coming once he felt comfortable that she would say yes.

Ninth grade would be my last school year according to Mrs. Grimes. She said I had already done all the work and there wasn’t anyone else at my level. After a few hot days, leftovers from summer, the leaves started to change. I loved seeing a patch of fiery red or shiny yellow in the middle of a thick bunch of pines. The greatest change was about to come in a way that my family would never get over.

I had been back in school for only about a month, and I was read- ing on my bed before supper. Callie came running into our room, wild-eyed, scared to death. She had dirt on her face and one sleeve of

her dress was torn so her shoulder showed through, scraped and bleed- ing. “Callie?” I said, sitting up.

She threw her arms around me, “I didn’t do anything, this is Dad- dy’s farm. I can go wherever I want to, can’t I?”

“Ardor Lee,” I said. It came to me like daylight. “I didn’t do anything,” she cried.

“Wait for me. I’m going to get Daddy.” Mother was digging in her vegetable garden by the henhouse and shouted at me when I ran past her to the barn where Daddy always was at the end of the day before supper. When Mother saw us running together back to the house, she dropped her hoe on the ground and ran too.

The sheriff told Mother and Daddy they had been to every farm around, and that nobody had seen him. Ardor Lee’s house still had ev- erything that belonged to him in it, like he had gone to the outhouse and planned to be back any minute. Daddy said he wanted that shack burned to the ground, and he hired a man and his son to come haul off anything that wouldn’t burn. Callie stayed in our bedroom and wouldn’t come out; I wasn’t allowed to go in either. Mother made me a pallet on the living room f loor to sleep on, and every morning she got whatever clothes I needed and brought them to me.

I never saw my father look so sad, it was a sadness that would stay on his face for the rest of his life, in lines across his forehead and sunken eyes. He didn’t preach that Sunday or the next. Nothing had to be explained to the congregation. What they didn’t know they figured out. Weeks passed and I had the feeling that our life was different but didn’t know how, it was like we were caught in a place where nothing happens except waiting, and everyone sucks in their breath and holds it, feeling like they might explode. Ardor Lee was gone.

In the middle of a November morning while I was at school, Mother found Callie lying at the foot of her bed. She had swallowed most of a bottle of poison. They did not let me see her, they thought the way she looked would be too upsetting for me, even after the undertaker got

her ready to be buried. Daddy insisted on preaching his own daugh- ter’s funeral, even though Mother tried to get him to reconsider. I thought it might be the only thing that would ever make it real to him. Seeing the faces of the people in church told me they weren’t listening to him, but feeling sorry, amazed that he could stand in front of them and talk about the love of God with what his own family had been through. We buried Callie when the leaves were all gone, and not a cloud was overhead, only plain blue sky going on forever. After the funeral, Mother went to bed for a month. She didn’t speak to anybody, including Daddy, and didn’t eat one morsel that I ever saw. Daddy went in every evening and sat with her by the light of a lamp. Sometimes he held her hand and read to her from the Psalms, then he’d leave her and come back into the living room to ask me about my schoolwork, and we would talk for a few minutes before both of us went to bed. There wasn’t anything else to do once it was dark.

Mother’s grief was a well that dried up so slowly that it eventually became useless to her, meaning that it had run its course and no longer had a purpose. With one of the first frosts of winter on the ground, she got up, bathed and dressed, went to the kitchen, and started cook- ing collards, the most pungent of greens. The whole house smelled horrible for days. The end of her sadness came because she willed it. She had taken a part of her heart and boxed it up for storage, sealed against damage or further wear, like a cherished bridal gown. The contents were still there, still took up space, but she would never open it again.

I miss my sister. I miss her in the summer. There aren’t any more tobacco fields, at least none I can see. Farmers can’t make a living. The same fields I worked and played in are shiny neighborhoods with twenty or more houses on what amounts to no more than a postage stamp of land. I can’t catch up with all the change. I don’t want to catch up. When August comes, hot as it ever was, I would give any- thing to be hiding from Callie, sitting in the dirt, digging my bare

feet in deep enough to find a place that’s cool and damp, eating candy as fast as I can so I won’t have any left when she finds me, hearing her rustling through rows of tall tobacco, mad as a wet hen, looking for me. I can feel my heart speeding up as she gets closer. I don’t move, don’t breathe, I keep chewing. I can’t wait to be found.

ch a p t e r f i v e

Lorraine

I

get to church early when I can. April knows I like to have some time to myself before the service starts, so she don’t make me late when she’s home from school. If you’da told me I’d have a daughter in college one day, I would have said you’d lost your mind. Where was I gon find enough money for anybody to go to college and me working as a LPN? But the good Lord provides, because she didn’t need my money or anybody else’s. She got herself a scholarship and is sittin up there on her own in Raleigh at Shaw University. Says she’s gon be a doctor. I want to tell her, “Being a doctor is a long ways off, child,” but I don’t. I don’t want her to feel like whatever it’s good to want is always gon be slightly out of reach. It don’t matter that I’m tryin to pro- tect her from being disappointed. Too many people think that way, and where in the world has it gotten them? So I want to say right here in the house of God, why not? Why not a doctor? Why not anything? If God ain’t a God of “why nots” then I say why bother? And I don’t think that’s taking His name in vain, I think it’s tellin the truth about what people need. We’re all people last

time I looked.

The choir’s in front now, behind the pulpit. I look over at April and she’s staring straight ahead. She loves a good choir. She always says the music is her favorite part of church. Mine too a lot of times, but I do like a good preacher when you can find

one. They’re harder to come by than they used to be, seems like. I didn’t notice ’til now that April and I have both got on yellow. Hers is brighter than mine. I must look like a big old sunf lower beside the first daffodil of spring.

Our God is a migh-ty God!

The choir sings the word “mighty” so short and loud it feels like something punching you in the stomach. That’s what “mighty” ought to sound like, powerful. Like it takes your breath away, which is ex- actly what I expect would happen if we could get that close to God, which we can’t. Thank God. I am in my usual place; all the regulars go to their own places. We’re in a pew on the right-hand side of the sanctuary, about halfway back. I crane my neck to both sides to look around. Everybody in here looks real good, as good as they can, and it makes me feel good to look at em. All these women in dresses and hats, some with a pair of gloves on and a nice pocketbook in their laps so ladylike. Old men sitting dignified, and little two- or three-year- old boys in coats and ties. I feel so proud I sit up straight and adjust my hat to make sure it’s on right. I’ve always believed in dressing to go to church, April can tell you. Workin at the rest home, I’ve been to too many churches and too many funerals with people wearing anything they want. My Mama taught me that when we dress up for church we set our hearts on things above, things greater than we can see. She said, “We’re singing ‘Glory Be to the Father’ and at least we can try to look like we mean it.” I love the word “glory” because as soon as you say it, you know it’s bigger than you are. It sounds exactly like what it’s s’posed to mean. Glory. You can’t say it in a whisper even if you wanted to, you’ve got to shout it out. I think it makes people hold their shoulders different when they hear that word. It don’t describe anything of this earth.