The Well and the Mine (26 page)

We’d been waiting for that. Lou Ellen never got to sit still for long.

“Nah,” I said. “We’ll sit here for a little bit and then come on out later.”

She sat there a moment, head cocked, purely confused but not knowing how to ask us about it in front of her aunt. “You sure?” she said.

“We’re sure,” answered Virgie.

Lou Ellen sort of backed out of the room slowly, like she was giving us time to change our minds. I couldn’t blame her—I wouldn’t know what to make of one of our friends coming over and visiting with Aunt Celia instead of us. Well, maybe I could, but Aunt Celia was a whole lot more fun than Aunt Lou seemed to be.

Finally Lou Ellen had thump-thumped down the front steps, and Virgie and me and Aunt Lou sat facing one another in the middle of the Talberts’ dark sitting room. Aunt Lou’d made coffee, but she didn’t think to offer us anything to drink. We didn’t mind.

We’d had a little while with only the clinking of Aunt Lou’s spoon against her cup when Virgie said, “So do you like Carbon Hill so far, Miss Lou?”

“’S’alright.”

“We’re glad you moved. I’m sure Lou Ellen’s glad to have you around.”

When Aunt Lou didn’t say anything, Virgie glared at me like I wasn’t pulling my weight. So I said, “Bet you’re a help to everybody. I sure would like to have my aunt Celia or aunt Merilyn around more.”

She didn’t answer that, neither. Matter of fact, she didn’t even look at us, hadn’t hardly looked at us since we came in. Hadn’t smiled, hadn’t yawned or sneezed or licked her lips. She had a plain, pale face, but it was worth looking at just because it seemed frozen. She glanced out the window toward the fields every now and then, but mainly she stared down at her lap, her shoulders slumped a little and her knees not quite together so that her pink-flowered dress stretched tight across her legs. Mama told us we should always sit with our ankles crossed, but since that was so uncomfortable, I didn’t blame Aunt Lou for being more relaxed.

“I guess you heard about the baby that was put in our well,” Virgie said.

I was glad she quit dawdling. We’d decided before we got there that she’d bring up the subject and just see what Aunt Lou had to say about it. We thought we’d be able to tell if she knew anything about it.

Aunt Lou kept on stirring her coffee. There wasn’t even any steam coming off it.

“Of course, Chief Taylor knows that the baby was…that he wasn’t alive by the time he was put in there,” Virgie added. “So it wasn’t a crime. What the woman did. There wasn’t anything illegal about it.”

Nothing. Her stony face didn’t budge.

“But we sure wish we knew who it was,” Virgie kept on. “Tess’s had awful nightmares about it, and we’ve all been thinking on it for months now. We’d like for the baby to have a name, to make our peace with it, you know.”

Still nothing. I didn’t think she would ever take a sip.

“Did you put that baby in our well?” I asked.

Virgie kicked my foot, but Aunt Lou finally looked at us, really looked at us. She didn’t seem offended at all.

“Hmm?” she said, forehead all crinkled up. She had a little voice for such a big woman. More like a girl’s voice, high and thin.

“The baby,” I said real slow. “Did you put him in our well?” When Virgie rolled her eyes at me, I added, “Ma’am.”

“You came down front at the revival,” she said to me. “With the nice woman.”

“Yes’m, I did see you at that Baptist revival. You were real upset. Like you had somethin’ big on your mind.”

She started stirring that stupid coffee again, like it was more interesting than being accused of putting a baby in the well.

“So you were upset at the revival, Miss Lou?” asked Virgie, sweet as pie.

The coffee spoon stopped moving, and that childish voice piped up again. “I wanted to ask for forgiveness. Same as everybody else who felt the call.”

“It’s okay if you put the baby in.” I kept my voice soft and low, like when we tried to get a colt to come eat a carrot. “We’re not mad. We just want to know.”

“Wouldn’t put my little George in a well,” she said.

“Who’s George?” I asked.

“I ain’t told nobody.”

“We won’t tell,” said me and Virgie at the same time.

Aunt Lou looked toward the door, then toward the kitchen. Then she covered her belly with the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee. I’d seen women carrying babies do that same thing.

“Don’t matter now. It’s eatin’ me alive—might be good to get it out of me,” she said, hand still on her belly. Patting and circling.

We sat forward on our seats just as she heaved herself out of hers. She grunted a little as she pushed off the rocking chair, then she walked behind the chair and stood with her hands resting on the back. She fiddled with a little tear in the cane, flicking it back and forth with her finger until I wanted to scream. My mouth got dry with the waiting.

“My George was a secret,” she finally said.

Then nothing. More flicking of the cane.

“A secret?” Virgie asked.

“Really?” I asked, encouraging and friendly and not-shocked-at-all-sounding.

“Didn’t know I was carryin’ him for the longest,” she started again. “But I was livin’ alone then, so it didn’t much matter when I started gettin’ big. Nobody noticed. Delivered him myself—I’d watched women cut the cord before.”

She stopped and cocked her head at me and Virgie, making a little “huh” like she hadn’t noticed us before. “Feels good to have the words out of my head,” she said. “Nobody never asked me about it. Anyhow, I took care of him that first month or two, nobody ever seein’ hide nor hair of him. I aimed to say I found him on my doorstep whenever he got big enough that he couldn’t be a secret no more. And then one morning he was dead in his crib. House was lonely then, full of him, so I came here.”

She wasn’t married, so she shouldn’t have had a baby at all, but I didn’t bring that up. She’d left out the end of her story, which was more important.

“But you didn’t put him in our well?” asked Virgie, sounding almost disappointed. “It really is alright if you did it.”

“Why would I want to put him in a well?” she asked, and she did look puzzled, finally setting her cup down on the floor and smoothing her hands over her dress. She took a deep breath and stood up, walking to the window. “What I did was baptize him.”

Virgie and me looked at each other. Her mouth wasn’t quite closed. When Aunt Lou didn’t explain, I waved at Virgie to say something, and she waved at me.

Finally Virgie said, “Did you baptize him while he was alive?”

I thought that was a nice way of putting it.

Aunt Lou shook her head. All we could see of her was her back and the knot of her hair. “Some people do that, you know. Baptize babies. He wasn’t old enough to accept Christ: that’s what a baptism should be. But then he died, and I got to thinking that bein’ baptized as a baby would be better than not being born again in Christ at all. I had him all ready to bury when I thought of that. Didn’t have no church to take him to. But God touched me, showed me the way. For what is a church but godly people?” She used a preacher’s voice to ask the question. We didn’t answer, and she went on. “I knew where godly people lived—my niece showed me. And godly people have a baptismal font where we are reborn clean and pure. With everlasting life.” She turned and held out one hand palm-up, her chin high. “The ground is for death—water is for life.”

She took two steps toward us and leaned down, looking over her shoulder real quick. “A baptism, that’s what he needed.”

As happy as we were on the one hand to have her admit to everything—or at least admit to it in her own cloudy way—we were getting nervous, too. I was glad when she backed away from us and sat back in her chair, her face as empty and calm as when we’d first started talking to her. She didn’t seem to have much else to say.

“Thank you for telling us,” Virgie said.

When she didn’t respond in any fashion, we weren’t sure what to add. We thanked her again, told her we hoped she’d be alright and to let us know if we could do anything for her, but with her still as a stump, pretty soon we wished her goodbye. We walked as fast as we could and still be polite, only slowing down when we were on the main road. I didn’t even find Lou Ellen to say goodbye.

“What’re we gone do?” I asked Virgie.

“Nothin’.”

I couldn’t believe that. “We got to do somethin’!”

“You want to tell on her?” asked Virgie.

“We can’t just not say anything.”

“She’s not quite right, Tess. Maybe it’s just missing the baby. But whatever it is, she didn’t do any real harm. And everybody’d talk about her and look at her and treat her like dirt if they knew. And what good would it do? Leave it be.”

Leta
“I ASKED JONAH IF HE WANTED TO COME FOR SUPPER.”
I couldn’t believe those words had come out of Albert’s mouth. I was already hot from standing over the boiling turnips, and I felt almost dizzy when I turned my back to the stove and faced him instead. I looked at him until he started talking again.

“He said it wouldn’t be right.”

“Well, thank goodness one of you had some sense.”

“I thought you liked Jonah.”

“I do, of course.”

And I did. Jonah was a hard worker, helpful to Albert. Polite. He always offered to carry things for me if he happened by while I was hauling laundry or feed. But there was a reason Negroes lived in one part of town and we lived in another. They were different, inside and out. And we were all better off as long as we remembered that.

“It just isn’t done,” I told him.

“Why isn’t it done?”

I wanted to grab him by his shoulders and shake him once, hard, like I could Jack when he got too difficult and words didn’t come close to sayin’ how wrong he was. After all we’d been through with Jack, with all those extra hours Albert had spent belowground, things were finally falling back into place. Jack’s casts would come off soon. The circles under Albert’s eyes weren’t as dark as they had been. Even the talk about that dead baby had died down. We didn’t need any more uproar.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Albert, it just isn’t. You know that as well as I do. Yes, Jonah is a nice man, and that wife of his seems perfectly nice herself. But there ain’t no reason to go stirrin’ up everybody, makin’ people talk and carry on, just ’cause you get it into your head to go invite a Negro for supper.”

“I just don’t think we ought to treat him different.”

“So now you’re for mixin’ races?”

“No, I’m for havin’ Jonah for supper.”

I heard the water boil over and hiss against the metal, so I turned back and took the pot off the open eye. I looked in on the cornbread, which was beginning to brown. Albert was between me and the jar of beets. I wanted to put them in a bowl—it looked nicer on the table.

“Pass me that, please,” I said, pointing to the jar.

He did, never taking his eyes off me. “How do you know anything about him, Leta-ree? Or any Negroes. You ever talked to them? I’m the one standin’ next to ’em all day.”

Sometimes when I didn’t answer back, Albert would burn out like a fire starved of air. I stirred the turnips even though they didn’t need it, feeling sweat on my throat. I didn’t mind the heat of the stove, really. It was familiar, regular as breakfast, dinner, and supper. I scooted closer. With my face burning, my breath harder to come by, I could almost block out Albert.

“I just want to have the man for supper, Leta. Does it have to be more than that?”

“Yes, Albert. It does and you know it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Like I said, he won’t come anyways.”

I felt my shoulders relax some.

“He said he’d come for a cup of coffee instead.”

I didn’t turn around, only waited until I heard him walk out. He was my husband, and I wasn’t going to tell him who could or couldn’t come to his house. But for the first time since I met him, I didn’t know what to say to him. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand him liking Jonah. I wasn’t like some who thought Negroes were something less than human. I knew they were people. But there was a pattern to how things were done, rules we followed. Not following meant not knowing what might happen.

I’d kept quiet about the truck that hit Jack, made my peace with Albert’s way of thinking on it. Left it in his hands. Let the anger run out of me while I stared awake at the ceiling, listening to Jack breathe. Put it all out of my head and focused on putting things back together like they was. But Albert wasn’t back like he used to be, even though everything was still in his hands. All of us were in his hands, and my own hands didn’t feel like they could do anything but set the table and cut up the turnips.

Tess
“MAMA, I KNOW WHO PUT THE BABY IN THE WELL.”

“You do?” She asked it sort of singsong like I’d said a bird started talking English to me on the way to school.

“I really do. It was Mrs. Talbert’s sister, the one that came to live with them from Brilliant.”

She set her dish cloth down and pulled out a chair. The table was shining, still damp. The dishes were all put away. One little bowl of turnips was still setting out, and she’d been reaching for it before she decided to sit down. “What would make you say such a thing?” she asked me.

“She said she did.”

“She said she put her dead baby in our well?”

She hadn’t used those exact words. “She said she’d baptized him but he—”

“You can’t go around accusin’ a woman of such things.”

Her chair scraped on the floor when she pushed it out, dishrag back in hand.

“But Mama…”

She was tucking a cloth around the turnips, and I couldn’t tell for sure if she was talking to me. “Everybody tryin’ to turn things upside down around here. Goin’ against common sense.”

“I’m not imaginin’ this, Mama.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Mama never yelled, but she closed in on herself when she was madder than she could stand. It didn’t happen much, but I knew what it meant when her voice got small and tight. “Talk like that has no place in this house, Tess. No place at all. When I say you don’t talk about somethin’, you don’t. And that’s the last thing I’ll say about that.”