The Well and the Mine (11 page)

“His name’s Franklin, Frankie we call him.” Mrs. Lowe tipped him down so we could see his face better. “Ain’t he a big, jolly one? Only four months.”

He was big, but awfully quiet. I couldn’t remember Jack ever being quiet. When he wasn’t crying, he’d coo and gurgle and make silly sputters. But Mrs. Lowe only smiled at her boy—she had a chipped front tooth, I noticed—and didn’t seem to mind him keeping to himself. I guessed she appreciated a quiet one.

“Can I hold him?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, already holding him out to me. I eased one arm under his back, cupping his head like Mama told me, and scooped him toward my chest. Then I wasn’t sure what to do with him. “Would he like me to sit or stand?” I asked Mrs. Lowe.

“Don’t matter,” she said. “Just rock him a bit side to side.”

So I did, walking and bobbing around the room. I hadn’t held Mrs. Stanton’s baby or Mrs. Torrence’s when we stopped by their places—we went to those two first because they were closest to school. (For those first two visits, I’d felt sick to my stomach all the way there. At least by the time we got to Lola Lowe, I’d gotten over the nausea of practicing a good hello.) Mrs. Stanton was even out on the porch rocking her George, so that time we only waved hello and walked close enough to ooh and ahh a little at how precious he was, even though he was frowning and wrinkled. We didn’t stay more than five minutes at either place, and we didn’t have to go inside. This was a more sociable visit, which really meant it took more work.

“He’s good,” I said.

“Yep. Not colicky or nothin’. Sweet as pie.”

I sat down again and swayed back and forth in my chair. Frankie seemed equally happy. Tess stood behind me and stroked his peach-fuzz head.

“Your mama doin’ alright?” asked Mrs. Lowe.

“Yes’m,” Tess answered.

“Did you know we went to school together in Townley?”

“No, ma’am,” we both answered. Mama had never mentioned knowing Lola Lowe when she was a girl. But Mama didn’t talk much about being a girl herself.

“Met her when I was about your age,” she said, nodding to Tess. I figured then that she didn’t know our names, but it was too late to tell them to her. “She had the longest braids I’d ever seen.”

“Our hair won’t grow that long,” said Tess. “It gets to our shoulders and just stops growing.”

Mrs. Lowe went on like Tess hadn’t spoken. “She was a real pretty girl. Real sweet, too. One of the few girls I thought highly of in school. ’Course, she went on to high school and nearly finished, and I left after grammar school to help my mama. Married my first husband not a year later.”

She must’ve been barely older than me when she married.

“But your mama brought me a pound cake when I got married. Nobody else brought me nothin’. Thought real highly of her. Tell her I said hello.”

A girl barely able to stay on her feet wearing nothing but a rag of some sort pinned around her bottom wobbled over to Mrs. Lowe. Pee was leaking down her leg, dripping on the floor. Her face was all screwed up and she was starting to whimper.

“Lord have mercy!” said her mother, scooping her up, but holding her away from her body. She snatched a stained sheet—probably a clean one—off a stack of laundry in the corner and lay it across the table where we were sitting. When she started to unfasten the baby’s diaper, I scooted back my chair and turned to face the other way. That pee’d run right through the sheet onto the dinner table.

I watched Mrs. Lowe wrestle a cloth around the baby’s bottom, digging for safety pins in the pocket of her used-to-be-flowered dress, and I didn’t see an ounce of temper in her face. She looked as calm and mild as she had since we walked in, never mind the peeing or the staining or the crying. I’d been thinking she was the most likely of the women on the list because she had the least money and the most children. So she’d be stretched thinnest, I’d figured. She kept herself apart from the other women—maybe not by design, but she did it just the same. Of course from the minute we laid eyes on the baby I knew I’d been wrong, but I was beginning to feel ashamed of myself for even thinking it. My tongue felt thick and my temperature’d shot up like when the teacher called on me in class or when I’d walked home with Henry Harken. I told myself I was being bashful and silly like Ella said, but the feeling just sunk deeper. My stomach curled up in a ball as I sat there watching the baby in my lap eat his fist.

It would have been easier for me to understand—and for get about—the baby in the well if it had been Mrs. Lowe that put him there. I’d have known that having kids didn’t make you lose your mind—just having a houseful of them. And it wouldn’t be as if a woman who’d sat in our kitchen sipping tea had done it. Lola Lowe was barely a real person to me. At least until I walked into her house and saw her smile at her children. I started to see the problem with my plan—I was going to get to know all these women if I talked to them long enough. And then they’d all be real.

A yellow-haired boy with hair down to his eyebrows put both hands on my knee. Snot ran thick and yellow from his nose; smudges had dried on his cheeks. I had a handkerchief in my pocket, and I jostled the baby around a little so I could pull out the little square and hand it to him. (Mama always said a lady should never be without a handkerchief.) He looked at it like I’d handed him purple galoshes, so I wiped his nose for him, then gave him the cloth.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He mumbled and drug his sleeve across his nose so that I couldn’t understand him. “What was it?” I asked again.

“Mark.”

“After the apostle,” his mother called, looking over her shoulder.

“I’m Virgie.”

He stared at me. I pointed at Tess. “That’s my sister, Tess.”

“How old are you?” asked Tess.

He looked at his mother. “Six,” she answered.

One year younger than Jack, and he wasn’t half my brother’s size. He looked like he was barely out of diapers. “Can you hold up six fingers?” I asked, holding up six of my own behind the baby’s back.

“Six,” he said. “I’m six.” He didn’t let go of the handkerchief I’d given him, didn’t move his fingers at all. “Apples,” he added, pointing at the basket. “I like apples.”

“He likes everything,” Mrs. Lowe said, talking out one side of her mouth with a safety pin in her teeth. “Don’t have a picky kid in the bunch.”

“What’re we havin’ for supper, Mama?” Mark asked, flapping the handkerchief. He didn’t really seem too curious. His nose was running again.

“Blackberries and bread.”

His expression didn’t change.

“I love blackberries,” Tess said.

“They’re better in pies,” Mark said.

“I like ’em plain,” she said.

“I used to.”

I’d heard Papa and Mama both say about one person or another who couldn’t find work that they’d starve if it wasn’t for blackberries and bread, and why didn’t Mama bring them by some real food.

The little girl on the table started howling then, probably not liking the cold air on her wet rear end, and the baby in my arms seemed to catch her bad mood. He screwed up his face and mewled, so I stood up and started pacing. The door opened then and Ellen walked in, looking surprised to see me and Tess. She tugged at her one dress, and I saw the thoughts flash across her face as clear as if they’d been spelled out in a bubble over her head like in Little Orphan Annie. She realized how we were seeing this—her mother changing a diaper on the kitchen table, her brother with dried snot on his face, our basket of apples the only food we could see in the place. The stove wasn’t lit, and I knew they had no firewood or coal to burn in it. It was one thing to be poor as Job’s turkey, but it was something else to have somebody from the outside stick themselves in the middle of it. She said hello without looking us in the face, held out her arms for her baby brother, and crossed the room as soon as I handed him to her. We only stayed another few minutes, but Ellen never met our eyes once.

We didn’t really talk on the way home. I felt dirty and sad and glad that I’d left that boy my handkerchief.

Tess
IT WOULD’VE MADE MORE SENSE TO THINK THAT LOLA
Lowe had a cradle full of eggs and that that houseful of children had hatched out in one bundle. To think of each of those ten big-eyed, all-knees-and-elbows kids tucked in her belly made me ache. It was much nicer to think of them packed safely inside an egg, plenty to eat and a warm body keeping them snug.

“Why would somebody have so many kids?” I asked Virgie. We’d sat down on the porch steps when we got home, and nobody had noticed us yet. I was trying to get a sulfur butterfly to land on my finger, but he wasn’t having any of it.

She shrugged, hands crossed in her lap.

So I kept talking. “’Cause I don’t know why you’d have ’em if you can’t feed ’em.”

“I don’t think she planned on not feedin’ ’em,” she said. The stupid butterfly landed on her shoulder. She didn’t notice, and I didn’t tell her.

“I bet they haven’t had anybody call on them in ages,” I said. “Bet they was glad to see us.”

“Hush up, Tess.”

“What?”

She jerked to her feet. “Can’t you ever just sit and not talk? You’re givin’ me a pain in my head!”

She’d yelled. That took me aback. Virgie never lost her temper—she clammed up cold and hard and far away. Even that one time when I dipped my finger in ashes and drew big eyebrows and a mustache on her while she slept, she only flung herself out of bed and stomped off without a word. But she was almost shaking this time.

“I was only talkin’. Don’t take my head off,” I said.

“So quit talkin’.”

“You quit listenin’.”

“You’re such a baby.”

“You’re a nag.”

“I said quit talkin’.”

“You can keep on sayin’ it all you want!”

She sighed and stalked off toward the woods, and happy as I was to get in the last word, I was still confused. And that won out. “What’s the matter with you?” I yelled after her just as she reached the edge of the yard.

She stopped but didn’t turn around. “I don’t think it was such a nice thing we did today,” she said.

I dreamed a dream more sound than picture that night. Mrs. Lowe’s baby Frankie was screaming underwater, but instead of a voice, he had a stream of bubbles pouring out of his mouth. I was only up to my knees in the water, and I reached down and plugged my finger in his mouth. He smiled and smiled, sucking away, and I didn’t make any move to pull him out of the water.

Leta
THE GIRLS WERE SO QUIET AT SUPPER. I COULD’VE
sworn they liked biscuits and gravy. But they ate slow like they were having to stuff it down. I hadn’t beat all the lumps out of the gravy, and the biscuits didn’t rise as much as I’d have liked. My sister Merilyn made such fluffy biscuits, more air than dough, and mine never seemed to be that light. And they might have gotten a little too brown on the bottom.

“Somethin’ wrong, Tess?” I asked. She was always more likely to open up than Virgie.

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t like your biscuits?”

“I do. They’re real good.” She shoveled half a biscuit in her mouth to show me.

“Think they’re alright, Papa?” I looked over at Albert, who’d finished his plate and was reaching for another biscuit.

“What’s that?” he said, clearly thinking about nothing other than where the gravy spoon had gotten to. I pulled it from under a cloth and handed it to him.

“I said the girls are mighty quiet.”

“Prob’bly too busy eatin’ to talk,” he said. “Best biscuits in the world, Leta-ree. Ain’t no finer cook anywhere than your mama. Y’all remember that.”

5 Jonah

Jack
SOMETIMES I WAS ALLOWED TO GO CAMPING WITH
boys from school. Not overnight—not until I was ten or twelve—but long enough to roast marshmallows and sit around the fire.

There was a group of us, and Paul Kelly was always the center of it. A big boy, three years older than me, he could shoot any squirrel or bird he aimed at, and he always built the fire. I’d seen him wrestle high school boys and beat them. Once he ate a roach on a dare.

One night he bet he could hold his breath for the time it took him to get the fire going. And he did—it was only seconds before sparks from his flint caught on the little pile of leaves and twigs. He never even turned red. Paul Kelly. He was the one who always talked about niggers. I’d heard the word at school, but not like Paul said it. He said he hated them. Must’ve said it twenty times with that fire lighting up his face.

It would be dark and still and with that fire shining on him and him built up in my mind already, he seemed like John the Baptist (who ate locusts himself) or some other prophet who could call down all sorts of things from heaven.

In church we learned about Cain and Abel. Abel tended the flocks and Cain worked the soil, and the Lord preferred Abel’s offerings of fat firstborn animal sacrifices to Cain’s offerings of vegetables. (Even as a teenager, Tess would keep on about that pas sage all the way home from church—“Do you think God would like squash? Do you think Cain got in all that trouble just because God was allergic to green beans or some such?” And eventually Papa would tell her to hush because she was being sacrilegious, and he’d try to keep his mouth from twitching. But Cain was jealous that the Lord favored Abel, and he killed his brother. The Lord heard Abel’s blood cry out to him from the ground, and he cursed Cain to wander ceaselessly across the earth. And to make sure that Cain wasn’t killed before he got in a life’s worth of wandering, God put the Mark of Cain on him.

So the Sunday school teacher, a mousy man with a woman’s hands, told us that’s how colored people got made—God put the mark of the cursed on them. The mark of the criminal. Sentenced to never find peace and be no good. I had the Bible to back up Paul Kelly’s fondness for “nigger,” and it gave the word a kind of righteousness. There was ugliness to it, too, I didn’t miss that, but church was full of ugly things—blood and crucifixion and thorns and swords and ears lopped off—that were part of God’s perfect plan.

Tess
THE COLORED MAN BANGED ON THE DOOR WHEN WE
were all asleep. Our bed was in the front room, and Virgie and I both sat up from the shock of the noise. Then she threw a blanket around her shoulders and went to the door, even though she wasn’t allowed. I hopped up, too, and peeked around the door way. I heard Papa getting out of bed as Virgie called out, “Who’s there?”

“Virgil, ma’am. I work for your daddy.” He did—I remembered him coming by before. Sometimes the colored men came by for Papa to get them out of jail, because the police were always arresting them for gambling or vagrancy if they were walking around wrong. Police would get money out of their supervisors if they wanted those Negroes to show up for work the next day.

Virgie opened the door, and Papa showed up with his shirt just half buttoned over his undershirt. “Somethin’ happen, Virgil?”

“Yessir, Mr. Moore. Jonah’s done got hisself put in jail.” He seemed careful not to look at Virgie or me, even though we were right in line with the door.

“Jonah?” Papa seemed surprised, and it took me a second to realize Jonah was Mr. Benton. “What for?”

“Said he was drunk and disorderly.”

“Jonah?” Papa said again, quiet-like. He went back to Mama and said something to her, then came back carrying his boots. “I’m comin’, Virgil. Just wait right there.”

Virgil stood on the porch, turning away from the house, while Papa leaned against the wall and started to pull on his boots. He stopped when he saw Jack come shuffling out, wiping his eyes. The moonlight from the doorway fell on him and made his nightshirt shine. Jack frowned at Virgil and said, “Why’s a nigger at the door, Pop? I hate niggers.”

Before I could blink, Papa hauled off and whacked Jack so hard on the backside that I could hear the breath gush out of Jack’s mouth. Then he snatched him up by the arms and pulled him off the floor, to eye level. Jack was so stunned he didn’t move—didn’t even cry.

“Where’d you learn to talk like that?” Papa asked, hard, like a stranger.

Jack didn’t say nothing.

“Don’t you be talking about hatin’ people,” Papa said with a shake that snapped Jack’s chin. “God don’t allow for hatin’ people.”

Jack was closemouthed, still, and watery-eyed, and his bare feet hung in the air without even a twitch. Mama’d come to stand next to me at the bedroom door; her forehead was crinkled up, but she wasn’t saying nothing. Papa looked at her, then set Jack down real gentle on the floor, lifting his fingers and looking where he’d left red marks on Jack’s arms. He looked like he might be sorry, but he didn’t say so. Instead he nodded toward Virgil.

“Tell Mr. Virgil you’re sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Virgil,” said Jack, dark in Papa’s shadow.

“Thank you, sir,” said Virgil to Jack, sounding solemn and uncomfortable and confused all at once.

Papa patted Jack’s head, met Mama’s eyes for one second, then shoved his feet in his boots and went out to Virgil. “Be back before long,” he said over his shoulder.

When the door closed, Mama came and knelt by Jack, who’d started sniffling and wiping at his eyes. She smoothed his hair and hugged him. “Now, don’t cry, son. You’re a good boy and your papa ain’t mad at you. But you know better than to talk hateful like that. That ain’t the kind of boy we raised you to be.”

Sometimes Mama did that—soothed over the hurt then made it sting even more. I’d never seen her mad at any of us, but disappointing her was worse than a dozen slaps from Papa, even with a belt. And sure enough, Jack had a steady stream of tears running down his face by the time she stopped talking. Mama picked him up, groaning a little at his weight, and carried him back to his pallet. She’d tuck him in, kiss his forehead, make sure he didn’t cry himself to sleep. To me and Virgie she said, “Go on back to bed, girls. Only a few hours ’til daylight.”

“Papa didn’t get much sleep,” said Virgie, still looking at the door, her forehead wrinkling up.

My sister, even when she’s in heaven with her own puffy cloud, will find something to worry over.

Mama looked back at the door, too, rolling her shoulders a little after plopping Jack down. I watched her and Virgie watch the door for a little while, and when I yawned, I tried to make it quiet. It seemed like if anybody ever spoke, it might be something worth hearing.

Mama’s face was in the shadows, so I couldn’t see her expression.

“Your papa’ll be alright,” she said. “Takes more than missing a few hours of sleep to hurt him. But,” and then she got quiet like she was talking to herself, which meant we shouldn’t really hear it but she couldn’t help saying it, “I’d think he’d get tired of running over and bailing those people out all the time.”

Me and Virgie didn’t say anything. We climbed into bed, tussling over who had more covers, and finally settled down.

“She doesn’t want him helpin’ Mr. Benton,” I whispered to Virgie. She swatted at my face because I’d said it too close to her ear, which tickled her a little and annoyed her a lot.

“She just doesn’t want him tired out,” she said. She never could stand the thought of Mama and Papa disagreeing.

“You think she minded him whippin’ Jack?” I asked, staying a little farther from her ear.

She turned over fast enough that her elbow caught me in the side. “He said ‘hate,’” she said, like that was that. And I guess it was.

“Do you think the woman was a colored woman?” I whispered next. She knew who I was talking about.

“Why do you think that?” she whispered back.

“More likely, ain’t it? Mama says they’re different from us, don’t have the same morals.” She said the Negro men lived with more than one wife, sometimes with whole families in different camps. Sometimes when Virgie and Jack and I passed near Nigger Town, kids would holler at us, and I’d holler back and call ’em chocolate drops, and then we’d all run. Nobody hollered if there were adults with us. Somehow it would make it easier to think it wasn’t so much a woman that did it as a colored woman. Then nothing much would have changed after all. It’d be meanness already set off to the side and held apart like the Negroes in their little piece of town.

Virgie was quiet for a bit. “Papa says everybody’s the same covered in coal—can’t tell black from white. And he likes Mr. Benton.”

I thought for a minute, and Virgie started sniggering. “And in all the commotion over getting him out of the well, don’t you think somebody would’ve mentioned if the baby was colored?”

She thought she was so smart. And I wasn’t exactly sure how that worked, to tell the truth. I knew pigs had pigs and hens had chickens, but then again, sometimes the mama might be speckled when the baby wasn’t…or just the opposite. The cat we kept in the barn had a beautiful smoke-colored kitten in her litter one year, making all the everyday brown ones look lots less cute. The Hudsons had a pretty gray tomcat.

“Well, the daddy could be white, couldn’t he?” I finally whispered.

She didn’t answer that.

“And that’d be a good reason to kill a baby.”

“Time for sleepin’, not talkin’,” said Mama from her bed. And we shut up.

Virgie
TO PAPA, GOOD WAS SOMETHING YOU COULD HOLD IN
your hand. Hard and solid like coal rock. You could weigh it, measure it, see its beginning and end. You were never to hate anyone. You were to call all grown-ups “ma’am” and “sir” when you answered them. You were to help Mama without her asking. You were never to disobey Papa or Mama. If you went by those rules, you were good. If not, well, I didn’t know about that. None of us did really, even though Jack and Tess might get whipped for sassing Papa every now and then. I’d hear him talk about men who left their families—just picked up and took off without a word. Or there were women who wouldn’t take in their husband’s mama when she got too old and feeble to look after herself. These were unforgivable things.

There was something comforting to that, knowing what he wanted, what he expected, and knowing what would disappoint him. But it meant lots of times there was no point in talking to him, because he knew his own mind so well that he didn’t need to know yours.

And there were more unforgivable things for Papa himself. There was an old colored man, Old Romy, who’d come to the door every so often and say he was hungry. He used to work with Papa in the mines when Papa was young. Every time Old Romy came by, Papa would go get him a chicken and wring its neck, even if we hadn’t eaten chicken for weeks. Nobody could come to the door asking for food but that Papa would see that they got some. Nobody could ask for anything, really, that Papa wouldn’t give it to them. Right after everybody’d lost their jobs and businesses, our cousin came to the door asking for a gold pocket watch that belonged to Papa’s father. That cousin said he was going to take a mess of jewelry to Birmingham to sell it, and he’d take that watch for Papa and bring us back the money he got. Papa gave it to him, thinking we could use a refrigerator or new shoes and clothes more than we needed a watch. The cousin never came back—he moved to Tennessee with all the money he got from the kinfolks’ jewelry. Papa wasn’t even mad about it. “You’re here to be givin’, not takin’,” he’d say.

He never would take anything. All in all, he held himself to a different measuring stick than he did everybody else.

Mama never seemed to concern herself with good and bad unless it happened under our roof. She didn’t care for whining, but still and all, if we were determined to claim being tired or sickly, she’d do the work herself with no more than a “Well, sit yourself down then.” I’d never heard Mama say she was tired or sore or frustrated, even though she kept on working after Papa was rocking and smoking. One time I saw a bright red blister across the top of her hand, pulled tight like the skin would burst any minute. I asked her about it and she said she had bumped her hand against a skillet the day before. I thought back over all those hours that I hadn’t noticed it, that she hadn’t favored her hand or flinched from the fire or even said “ouch.”

Sometimes it seemed like instead of the coal Papa and Mama had been put in the furnace, only instead of burning, they’d hardened and toughened to something that wouldn’t budge.

Albert
WE TOOK THE CAR. VIRGIL SAID HE HADN’T BEEN IN
one before and since it was dark I let him set up front. Dropped him off a few blocks from his house on my way to the jail.

It wasn’t the first time I’d come at this time of night, and it always seemed strange to me that such a nothing kind of building could turn somebody’s life upside down. It was just a stone box, with a couple of steps leading up to the door, three windows down one side, none in the front or back. Flat roof. I pulled up right by the door—wasn’t no other car around. The police chief walked to work.

“Should’ve brought you some coffee, Ted,” I said, stepping in after he answered my knock. “Ain’t your deputy usually pullin’ nights?”

He sat at the desk, an over-big contraption that made him look like a boy in short pants behind it. Ted Taylor wasn’t a bad man, but not a particularly good one, neither. He knew I’d pay to get Jonah out, just like he knew Jonah hadn’t done nothing wrong. Likely he hadn’t said “sir” enough when Ted asked him where he was headed.

“My sorry deputy’s sick with the flu,” he said. “I been here the past few nights.”

I could see Jonah sitting straight-backed in his cell, looking more ready for a church service than jail time. He didn’t speak to me, didn’t smile even. Barely nodded. I did the same, giving my attention to the sheriff. “Wife and kids makin’ it alright?”

“Well as can be expected. My oldest went to look for work in Tupelo. Your’n?”