Ugly Ways (19 page)

"And what that mean?"

"It means ... it means you head up that division at the mine. You're the supervisor of that section." Annie Ruth wondered where this conversation was coming from and where it was going. The only thing that stood out in her mind about her father and his job was the ruckus Mudear had put up when she found out Poppa was bringing home chunks of kaolin for the girls because they liked the taste of it. Annie Ruth had only been about eight when she heard Mudear telling Poppa what an ignorant country Negro he was for passing those stupid country dirt-eating customs along to his children.

"Actually bringing that filthy white dirt home from your job for your own daughters to eat! Damn, a man ain't got no sense!"

Talking with her father this way about his job felt as if they were both negotiating strange and dangerous new territory without a map, feeling their way along without knowing where any of the pitfalls were, the quicksand traps, the slippery spots, the unmarked caverns. She couldn't remember a conversation with him that was not about money or business that had gone on this long.

Discussing his work at the chalk mines reminded Annie Ruth of her flight earlier that evening into Mulberry. Right outside of town, while she was trying to keep her mind off of the cat she had seen on the first leg of the trip, she had looked out the window and noticed for the first time, she thought, the very plant where her father worked.

Against the gray overcast day, the mining site with its plumes of ghostly chalky smoke spewing from a number of stacks and vast white pits chiseled in the earth surrounded by huge pools of aqua water shaped like triangles, squares, and diamonds rimmed in the powdery white clay looked like a movie set. White dust covered the cars in the parking lot, the company's sign, the buildings' roofs, everything.

"You know, at the mines I got one of the best records for showing up for work. The least absenteeism, they call it. I get a award every year for that, not missing any days."

"Really?"

"Annie Ruth, I worked like a dog out there."

She was taken aback by his bluntness. "I can imagine it was hard work, Poppa."

"Naw, girl, I'm not just talking about how hard the labor was, I'm talking about how hard I worked."

"I'm sorry. I don't think I'm following you." Annie Ruth was beginning to feel as if she were back at work conducting an interview, a difficult one.

"I didn't let one weekday pass 'out my being at that place punching that time clock and hauling and cutting and grading that limestone," he said after a while.

"That's how you got such a good record." Annie Ruth could hear herself talking to him like he was an idiot, but she couldn't do any better. This conversing with her father was so new and strange to her that she didn't know what to say.

Mudear had had the knack for being able to talk with Poppa where he didn't have to make much of a contribution. Annie Ruth could see Mudear now sitting in her favorite recliner or stretched out on the big chair and ottoman on the porch talking a mile a minute about something she had seen on television about the legal system or something she had discovered on her own about horticulture in the experimental garden along the eastern side of the house. Poppa wouldn't even have to say a polite "Ummm" anymore. Over the years, he had learned how to pace his silences just so that his
not
saying anything in a certain way, certain nuanced silences, adequately held up his side of the conversation.

"Shoot, Annie Ruth, the record itself didn't mean nothing to me. That's not why I worked like a dog out there at those white people's mines. I worked like that not just to keep a roof over ya'll's head but to give you girls and your mother a little better. To put you and Emily through college so you wouldn't have to work like I did, work like a dog, to make a daily living. That's why I didn't never show up at ya'll's graduation exercises. I was working some overtime. Woulda sent Betty to college, too, but when I tried to talk to Mudear about it, she said Betty didn't have no interest in higher learning. And by then, she had already started making a few dollars doing hair."

Poppa kept looking down at his fingernails and then back at Annie Ruth as if to see if she was listening. Annie Ruth had an interested look on her face because she was. But she was having a hard time not looking confused, too.

"I know both ya'll got scholarship, I was proud of that, told the mens down at work 'bout it, but it was still so expensive. Your mother didn't seem to realize how expensive it all was. But then, you know how Mudear was."

He just sort of let that hang in the air. And Annie Ruth just murmured, "Ummm," and took a sip of her tepid coffee.

"Not that I'm trying to throw up to you what I did for ya'll. Not at all. I was just doing what a man s'posed to do for his family, a real man. And God knows you girls have been more generous than any children I know with your mother and me. Shoot, you all spoiled Mudear rotten. I guess we all did.

"Your mother knew it, too. Whenever I'd say anything about how good you girls were or try to brag on you, she'd shut me up. Say, 'Don't be telling me about my girls. Shoot, they the hand I fan with.' That's what she say, 'They the hand I fan with.'"

There was another pause, so Annie Ruth said, "Well, Poppa..."

"She didn't know the price of nothing, whether it was the cost of a college education or the price of a bottle of shampoo. It's sort of funny 'bout that. 'Cause she always played me so cheap. Always played me so cheap. Everything I did or bought or earned, she played so cheap.

"You girls, too, played me cheap. I guess she taught you that."

Annie Ruth was close to shocked. Not only had she rarely heard her father talk so much to anyone, especially his family. But she had never heard him utter a word against Mudear.

He was almost as surprised as Annie Ruth at his candor. But his talking about Mudear seemed to embolden him. He continued to speak as if he were throwing himself into an ice-cold pond.

"Do you remember when you were about five or so and you got real sick? Sick with the whooping cough?" he asked.

Annie Ruth shook her head. "No, Poppa. I didn't even know I ever had whooping cough."

"Well, you did," Poppa said, seeming to brace his spine against the straight back of the chair. "And your sister was sick, too. Emily had meningitis real bad. For a while, we didn't know if she was gonna make it or not."

"Now that you mention it, Poppa, I do remember Betty talking about us being real sick once."

"Well, you were. The doctor kept coming and there was so much medicine to get. And the doctor had to keep coming to see 'bout ya'll. I never been so crazy in all my life. I remember I felt like any minute I might lose my mind."

"'Cause we were so sick, Poppa?" Annie Ruth was truly touched by her father's show of concern. She and her sisters had figured that Mudear was right all the times she had told them that Poppa didn't give any more of a damn about them than a stranger in the street would, like any man would.

"Well, yeah, because ya'll were sick. You girls and Mudear was just about all the family I really ever had to call my own, my very own. And the thought of losing any of you ... losing any of you ... especially to lose ya'll because of my stupidness and pride."

He hung his head in shame over his coffee cup.

As soon as Poppa had mentioned the memory of that cold winter day without heat or lights to Annie Ruth, he had regretted it. How can I ever get this child to understand something that I'm still trying thirty-some-odd years later to figure out myself? he thought.

He had run the events leading up to that cold day over and over in his mind like a reel of tape perpetually set on
PLAY.

It was in the Lovejoys' twelfth year of marriage that he had gotten his first promotion, something that didn't happen very often to a colored man at the chalk mines. That spring, he was so full of himself, he didn't think his feet stank. He finally felt that the folks who thought he was just a plodder had been taught an exquisite lesson. Word gets around, so Poppa wasn't a bit surprised to get a late-night telephone call from Mudear's people who lived in New York City. Poppa extravagantly, grandly, foolishly sent the money—$250—to Mudear's aunt's husband in the North for jail bail. Even Mudear gently tried to tell him her people up north couldn't be trusted. But he felt duty bound to show all those Negroes up "nawt" that a colored man in the South could take care of himself, his family, and even his people who were stupid enough to migrate north just when things were starting to get better down in Georgia.

It was a mistake that he could never forgive himself for.

The summer of that year passed without concern for the repayment of the $250. Poppa was having too good a time reminding Mudear where her family, most of whom had moved north unlike his stupid country people, had to come when they needed something. As the fall came, however, money was not quite so free for him and he began to wonder aloud when those trifling northern Negroes were gonna pay what they owed. By the time it started dropping down near freezing at night, Poppa was near panic. For the first time in his married life, he had overextended himself. One night, he had even set up the regulars at the bar at The Place. Now, he
needed
his money.

But he couldn't get anybody to even take his calls up north. "He ain't here" was all he got. And he needed his money. He had been able to keep up the mortgage payments on his little two-bedroom house in East Mulberry. There were groceries in the house and the water was still on. But by the time the white man with the hard hat and tool belt came to turn off the gas and electric, Poppa had no money, expected none for another month, and had nowhere else to get any.

That's when Annie Ruth, the baby, started making that croup-ing sound at night.

"Look like we just 'bout gon' lose your father," Poppa heard Mudear inform the girls one day after they had all recovered and the lights and gas had been back on awhile.

Ernest did feel as if he wanted to die. He could hardly make himself eat every day and he had dropped so much weight from his already slender frame that even his buddies down at The Place noticed it. But something in his face kept all of them from saying anything. They sensed this was not something open to casual questions or comments. As if someone had pulled down his pants in public, and he looked small and withered.

He kept going to work every day because besides still being the breadwinner, the man of the house, he told himself, work was the only place he could go just then that did not remind him of his stupid, prideful mistake. He could go every day to the kaolin mines and dig and haul in the dry white powdery pits until he was so tired he didn't have the strength to think during the day.

Lord, where would we be now if I had had enough sense to tell them folks we ain't got it to spare or even if I had sent half of what I sent. Hell, if I'd sent a tenth of what I sent, it would 'a been more than they had. And I wouldn't of been left hanging, strapped the way I was.

He couldn't get it out of his mind. Again and again, he remembered getting the money from the bank, counting it over and over just to give himself the satisfaction of ownership, going to the Western Union office on Poplar Street. Waiting in line, waiting his turn in line. The way the white man's tissue-thin hair stood up on the crown of his head. The feel of the orange pencil in his hand as he signed the receipt for the money he sent up north.

Forever afterward, he hated all things northern.

"Don't let your pride get your ass in trouble. I knew better than to send those low-down, worthless northern Negroes my money. But I couldn't help it. I wanted to show them all. They always treated me like..."

"Treated you like what, Poppa?" Annie Ruth asked. She was beginning to get interested. The conversation with her father was almost like the ones she and her sisters had shared with Mudear when they were growing up and the woman felt like having them around.

Mudear would urgently call one of the girls to her side. Then, when she arrived to see what emergency Mudear had run into, she would be greeted with the question, "Daughter, tell me now, what does this woman on TV look like?"

It was not a casual question. It was test material. The Lovejoy girl would look at the screen, screw up her face squinting one eye, and appraise the target and say, "She looks like a blond Nancy Wilson."

Mudear would give her delicious rich laugh and clap her hands at her daughter's insight and perception and say, "Girl, you know you can call it!" And with that bit of praise, mother and daughter would return to their routines.

When Poppa realized that he was sitting at his kitchen table talking to Annie Ruth in the middle of the night, he had no idea what he had just thought and what he had actually said. Annie Ruth leaned forward the way he had seen her do when she was interviewing someone on television. Annie Ruth could always make it seem that for that moment you were the most important person in the world.

"What happened, Poppa, with the gas and electric?" Annie Ruth wanted to know. "What happened? How did you pay the bill, Poppa?"

When he didn't answer, she continued, "With Emily and me sick, I guess you had to do something mighty quick to get it turned back on, huh, Poppa?"

Two or three times in as many seconds, it seemed that Poppa was about to open his mouth and answer his youngest daughter, but just looking at her reminded him of Mudear. He couldn't chance seeing Annie Ruth look at him with wicked disdain the way Mudear did.

Annie Ruth thought he was going to cry.

Instead, he dropped his hands to his lap, leaned forward from the waist, and brought his head down so hard on the table he rattled their cups of Sanka and cream. Then, he slowly brought his head up again and upset the cup and saucer before him. The cup and saucer flipped over against his chest and fell down into his lap, leaving the front of his pajama top and bottom soaking wet and stained. But he didn't seem to notice. Poppa just kept banging his head on the tabletop and moaning a bit.