Walking Through Shadows (9 page)

It was around five months later, after that day in the barn, when Walter and his bride showed up at our house. God knows I’d have done anything in this world to be fair to Walter; he had lost his wife and suffered plenty. Lil’ Bit was his son; he had every right to ask for him back, but it went down hard and bitter for all of us.

Rowena, of course, took it hardest. It was like she was ghost-walking that morning they came for him. She wandered around the house, in and out of rooms, standing in front of the stove when there wasn’t anything to stir. I did what I could. Held her and rocked her in my arms all that night, but she wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t say Lil’ Bit’s name. Annette was sad, but she was young and kids bounce back from worse things than this is what I told myself.

The day after Walter left with Lil’ Bit sitting on the new wife’s lap, I was set to take down the crib in the middle room, but Rowena wouldn’t have it. She hung onto that baby bed like it was a life raft in a room full of raging water. I reckoned she thought as long as we kept it there that maybe Lil’ Bit would come home. Then the next day, Rowena took to her bed and just flat gave up. I told her we would go to Chicago to visit them; I said I’d get her a new set of china; I read the Bible to her; then I called her mama. But even Mama Bancroft couldn’t get her out of that bed. She left the house shaking her head and wiping her eyes with that fancy little lace-edged handkerchief she keeps in her sleeve.

It was Sheila who brought Rowena back. I never did understand exactly how she did what she did, but one night I walked into the front room to find her dancing to some old ragtime music on the Victrola. Annette and Sheila were high-kicking along with her, and I thought it beat all I’d seen since Darby had delivered twin Jersey calves in the back pasture. I didn’t know how we could ever pay Sheila back for helping out like she did, but she didn’t want any thanks.

The opportunity to return a favor came when I began looking for a bull to breed with the two Ayrshires I had bought back in the fall. Roger Moak over in Tylertown said he had a registered Ayrshire, but I took one look at the old bull and knew the papers were doctored. He wasn’t fit for old Patch, our sorriest cow. Then I read in the Farmer’s Journal that there was a breeder over in Louisiana who had the finest Ayrshire bulls in the country. That man turned out to be Doug Patterson, the fellow who had sold me my cows at the Jackson State Fair. When I telephoned him, he remembered me, and I arranged to take both of my heifers over there for a visit. Stoney was hot to go on the trip. He hadn’t been out of Mississippi but once for a ball game in Alabama one of his brothers was playing in, and he hadn’t ever stayed in a roadside cabin neither. I needed a hand all right, but I had figured on taking Shorty or Digger. I told Stoney no and I thought that was the end of it.

The next afternoon after I got back to the dairy from the milk run, Sheila was waiting for me in the barn. She was all lit up about something, smiling, moving fast around the barn like a little hummingbird going from one chore to another. “What’s got you humming?” I asked her.

She giggled. “Might be you.”

“What’s this about?” I stood watching her swish the broom around like a dance partner.

“It’s a secret,” she said. “Can’t tell yet.”

More foolish nonsense is what I thought. “Well, let’s get going on these bottles,” I said lifting a crate to the table beside the sink.

“No. Not yet, Mr. Lloyd. Uh, you is needed up to the house. That’s right. Miss Rowena, she said you best come up there quick.”

I straightened up from the load and wiped my forehead. “Oh Lord,” I said. “I’ll bet her mama’s hit another tree with her old Buick.”

Rowena told me earlier in the day that her mother was picking her up and they were going shopping in Zebulon. “Why can’t you pick her up?” was my reaction. Rowena’s mama was a terrible driver. The worst I’ve ever seen. She hadn’t learned to drive until she was in her fifties, and, like a lot of the older folks in the community, she couldn’t break the habit of pulling close up to trees and posts like she had done when she drove a buggy and needed a hitching post. Her eyesight wasn’t the best, and her spectacles didn’t help with her distance judging. “I don’t like you to ride with her,” I said.

But Rowena was determined. “I can’t go hurting her feelings telling her you think she’s a danger to her own family.” She set her flowered Sunday hat square on her head, and I knew there was no talking her out of it. “Anyway, she hasn’t had a mishap in over a month,” she said over her shoulder as she sailed out of the house.

Before I went in the house I looked for Mama Bancroft’s banged-up Buick in the driveway, but there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. I was worried the damage might be so bad she couldn’t drive home. I went in the house and called out for Rowena, who answered me from the front room. “In here, hurry, Lloyd.” I dreaded the sight. She must’ve been hurt bad this time; she might be lying on the couch in a leg cast maybe, maybe worse. The old lady didn’t make it, or she made it and was gonna be moving in with us for round-the-clock care. I squeezed my eyes shut once and then quickly opened them. I was prepared for whatever this afternoon would bring.

“Hi,” Rowena said, unbandaged, alone, pretty in her clover-colored dress spread out on the couch.

“Where’s your mama?”

Rowena patted the cushion beside her. “Gone home. Come sit.”

I eased down beside her. “She have a wreck?”

Rowena smiled. “No. She had a little trouble parking, but we got that worked out.” She kissed my cheek. “Ask me where we parked.”

I was relieved, but aggravation was setting in now. She was acting more like Sheila or Annette than herself. “Rowena, I got more chores to do. I don’t have time to play a guessing game.”

Rowena kept her smile. “Okay, you can go in a minute, but you’ve got to hear what I have to say first.”

I stood up. “Say it then. Time’s a-wasting.”

She took both of my hands in hers and looked up at me. “Lloyd, I went to Dr. Brock’s office. I thought I might be and I am! Lloyd, we’re going to have a baby.”

I was stunned, struck dumb as a fence post. The thought ran through my head that she might be crazy, having some kind of hallucination, and I wished for the first time that her mama hadn’t gone home early. “A real baby?”

“Uh huh. Middle of February. Or thereabouts. Doctor said I’m fit as a fiddle, too.”

I looked at her stomach, couldn’t see any sign of it. “You’re sure?”

Rowena stood up and put her hands around the back of my neck. She jiggled my head back and forth. “Get it through to your brain, Lloyd. You’re going to be a daddy to another child.”

I believed her then. “It’s a miracle,” I said.

She kissed me all over my face, cheeks, chin, nose, eyelids. “Exactly,” she said breathless with her efforts. “We’re having a miracle baby.”

I hated to leave her, but there was still work to be done, so I left her and went back to the barn. Sheila was nearly finished with the scrubbing when I walked in. She turned and grinned as wide as her lips would stretch. “Congratulations, Mr. Lloyd.”

I was a little disappointed that she had been told before me, but I didn’t let that show. “Thank you, Sheila. We’re both real real happy. It’s a true miracle.”

Sheila disagreed. “No, it were just everyday magic. Ever since Lil’ Bit left, I’ve been telling Miss Rowena y’all need another young’n to put in that crib, and that I knowed how to get one.”

Here comes more foolishness, I thought, but I leaned back against the table to listen. “And how’s that?”

“Well, the best way is to tie a magic cord around the, uh, the daddy-to-be’s, uh, private.”

I laughed at that in spite of myself. “Oh, Sheila!”

She looked down at the floor. “It’s true, but Miss Rowena said she knowed you’d never let her do that. Stoney won’t let me neither, so then I come to the next plan, which was already part set up with the crib still in the room.”

I thought how Rowena had hung on to that baby bed, insisting she couldn’t allow me to take it up to the attic with the high chair and playpen I’d stored. Surely, she hadn’t believed Sheila’s silliness.

As if reading my mind, she said, “I didn’t tell Miss Rowena, but four times when I come to the house, I snuck in the room and tied the magic cord around the legs of the bed, one on each leg. And, of course, I didn’t know for certain that would do the trick, like I said, it’s better if’n the string goes on the man, but it works on cribs too. We know that for sure now.”

Oh, ignorance, Sheila is thy name, is what I said to myself. “If you’re right, I guess we owe you a big favor” is what I said instead.

Sheila twisted her hair around and sucked on a strand before she spoke. “Well, there is a favor I would like; it ain’t for me so much as for Stoney.”

“And what would it be?”

“Stoney, he’s a-wantin’ to go on that trip over to Louisiana bad. Said you was taking Digger instead of him. So what I’d like is for him to get to go with you. He’s wild to travel the world, Mr. Lloyd, and he ain’t got started on none of it yet.”

I gave in right off. I knew she’d had nothing to do with Rowena’s pregnancy, but she had been her savior after Walter had taken our son. And in a way, she had helped us conceive the baby because, after Sheila left on that night of the girls’ dancing, we got into bed and Rowena showed me just how recovered she was.

So a couple of weeks later, Stoney and me lit out in the truck pulling the trailer and headed for Louisiana. It turned out to be a good trip in that both Ayrshires were impregnated, and the fees weren’t as high as I had thought. Stoney did pretty near what I told him to most of the time, and I have to admit I enjoyed having the boy along. As we drove northwest along the pine-scented highways, we talked about the war in Europe, speculating on whether we’d get into it. I said I thought we would; Stoney was hoping I was right. He wanted to kill himself some krauts, he said. I told him that my daddy was in the Great War and he didn’t think much of it. Bad food, sleeping on the cold ground, your buddies getting blown to bits right beside you. Daddy said he prayed every night to come home with just one limb missing; that would be something to be grateful for. And his prayers were answered; he came home after he lost an ear when a sailing bullet shaved it clean off.

Mostly, we talked about the dairy business, hunting, and fishing. We were heading west into the setting sun, and I was squinting against the glare when Stoney brought up the subject of women. “Mr. Cotton, you remember your first time with a gal?”

I laughed. “I reckon any man who hasn’t lost his mind remembers that.”

“No. What I meant to ask was when you first done it with your wife, or someone else who hadn’t done it before, a virgin, well, how did you know for sure that you was her first?”

I saw where he was headed, and I thought about Sheila in the barn that day, her smelling of sex after her papa’s visit. I considered before I spoke. “It’s hard to know for sure. Some women bleed a lot, some hardly at all. I reckon it’s a good thing we don’t hold shivarees anymore because the old maids used to check the bride’s sheets after the party, and I’ve heard tell of young girls getting accused of not being pure just because they didn’t bleed.”

Stoney’s arm was propped on the open window with his elbow sticking out into the warm wind. He leaned farther out and let the air flow over his head as if to cool it down. He turned back to me. “Sheila didn’t bleed none.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, Stoney. Rowena told me Leda broke her cherry horseback riding.” I had known better when she told that whopper, but I passed it on now to where it might do some good.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that old tale.” He mimicked a high-pitched woman’s voice, “Oh, I fell on a monkey bar when I was just a little girl, I was riding a boy’s bike and hit myself on it.”

Stoney wasn’t quite as dumb as I thought. I grinned. “Well, thing is, we can’t prove whether they’re lying or not. Just no way to tell for sure.”

“I think Sheila’s papa got hers.” His voice was quiet, filled with hurt, and I was taken aback.

“She tell you that?”

“No. She don’t like to talk about her papa. That’s one reason I think it’s true.”

I saw a sign for Sinclair gas ahead and decided it was a good time to stop and end this conversation. I stuck my arm out my window to signal a turn. “He’s a mean man. Hard as nails. He beat her. We all know that. As to the other, well, best to bury that thought. She loves you; she’s happy now.”

“Yeah. She loves me more’n anybody could believe. As to being happy, I don’t think Sheila knows how not to be. She can take the smallest thing and make a real big deal outa it, make you think something real ordinary is special. Magic, she calls it.”

I smiled over the wheel and cut the engine. “She does that,” I said. “She thinks her magic cord is why Rowena is pregnant.”

Stoney frowned. “Yeah, she tried to tie that cord on me on our wedding night. I don’t want no kids, and no magic cord, witchcraft, voodoo, praying or nothing else gonna change my mind on that.”

I figured he would change his mind; Sheila would find a way to turn him around, but I got out of the truck and said, “They got a restroom if you’re needing to use it.”

On the way home from Louisiana, we stopped at a roadhouse next to some cabins called The Cottonfield. We’d got a late start that morning, and I decided we would spend the night on the road. I checked the Ayrshires, shoveled them some grain in the trailer and then joined Stoney inside the bar. The place was a dump, sawhorse tables, a few rickety chairs; the floor was so filthy I couldn’t tell whether it was pine or oak. The bartender was a woman, and I hadn’t ever ordered a drink from a woman. I reckon Stoney hadn’t either because when she came over to our table and said, “What’ll you have?” he answered, “Can you pour us a drink?” She laughed and said she guessed she could since she owned the place.

We joked awhile about my name being Cotton and us planning on staying at “my” cabins next door. Peggy, that was the gal’s name, sat down with us and said she owned that too, but I was welcome to a discount on a room since my name was Cotton. She was nice to me, but all the while she talked, she kept her eyes on Stoney. She was old enough to be his mama, and when he kept on calling her “Ma’am,” she finally started looking interested in me.

Two fellows came in, locals I guessed, since Peggy called them by name. The one she called Wallace was over six feet and skinny. His jeans, slung low on his hips, looked like they might slide plumb off. The other one, Eugene, was about the same height, but a lot heavier. They were brothers, I knew, because they both had noses and chins that stuck far out on square faces. Neither of them took off their hats, so I couldn’t read their eyes as they passed by us to a far table and ordered their beers.

Stoney and me had consumed a considerable amount by then, and when I looked over at Stoney, I saw that he wasn’t seeing too clear by the way he held his head back trying to focus on my face. I let him order another drink on me though. If he passed out, I could sling him on my shoulder and throw him in the truck to sleep it off, and then I’d have the motel room to myself. Peggy raised her eyebrows when she brought the drink, but smiled at me and pressed her tit into my arm as she set the glass on the table. I touched her arm with my fingers and slid them up to the sleeve of her dress. She didn’t pull away. Just then the brothers yelled for her to get her butt over to their table; didn’t she care nothing about saving thirsty men from dying, they shouted, and she whirled around and was gone.

When Peggy delivered the drinks to the other table, Stoney started singing a cowboy song. On the morning when we had left the dairy, he had come down toting his guitar along with his gear, and I told him there wasn’t room for it. Sheila had taken it from him and said she was gonna put it beside her in bed to keep his spot warm. So now Stoney’s fingers strummed the air, and he moved them so precise like, I could nearly see a real guitar in his hands.

The brother named Wallace talked real loud, saying to his brother, “Eugene, that boy can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

Stoney raised his voice and sang out more.

“That goddamned racket has got to stop,” Wallace said and stood up. Before I knew it, the two of them were standing at our table. The brother leaned up close to Stoney. “I said shut up the noise.”

Stoney stopped singing then. He smiled at the two men. “What you got against a Tex Ritter song?” he asked.

The big one, Eugene, answered. “What you got against us?”

Peggy came over then, shaking her head at them. She grabbed Wallace’s forearm. “Wallace. Eugene. I told you last time you was in here there’d be no more fighting. You broke two chairs, and,” she swept her arm out, “I ain’t got but eight left.”

Wallace shook her off so hard, she fell up against Stoney’s chair. I saw the danger in Stoney’s eyes; just like my bull Franklin gets before he charges. I said shit shit shit to myself. Last thing I wanted was to get into a fight with these fellows.

Stoney was up so fast, his chair went over. “Apologize for pushing this lady,” he said in a low voice.

Eugene laughed. “Peggy ain’t no lady. She’s a whore. You can have her all night for a dollar.”

I heard myself saying, “You told us you owned this place. And the cabins.”

She grinned, but still her face took on a deeper color. I think she said something like, “Well, I am the manager,” but I’m not sure as right then Stoney’s fist shot past her ear and landed on Eugene’s jaw.

God knows I’ve seen a lot of fighting in my time from schoolyard fracases to serious fisticuffs over poker pots and family disputes, but I’d never witnessed such as I did that night. I never threw a punch, didn’t need to. Stoney had them both on the floor before I could get up from my chair and around the table. He would have killed them; I’m sure of it. After Peggy and I finally got him off them, he staggered around the room like he didn’t know where he was. I turned around and saw Eugene getting up, holding his eye that had nearly been gouged out of its socket. Walter was bleeding from a chunk of chin that was hanging off his face caused by Stoney’s teeth, and he was already on his knees, ready to come after his assailant. I grabbed Stoney’s arm and dragged him toward the door. We made it to the truck before they came running out to the parking lot, and I scratched out, leaving them in a cloud of dust.

We didn’t say anything for about ten miles. Stoney had a few bruises and one deep cut on his cheek. Finally, I slowed and pulled off on the shoulder. “You okay? You hurt bad anywhere?”

Stoney raised his arms and looked at his torn shirt sleeve. “This were my best work shirt,” he said. “Sheila’s gonna be mad as a wet hen.” He squawked like a chicken and giggled. I say giggle, like a girl would, because that’s how he sounded. I guessed he was still drunk and so I pulled back on the road and headed on south toward home. In less than five minutes, he was out cold.

I drove on through the night, suddenly more alert and sharp-minded than I’d been in a long time. First my mind turned onto that Peggy. She was a liar, getting me worked up with her tits pushing on me, and all the while planning on charging me for it. I’ve never paid for it, and I sure wouldn’t have started shelling out for it on this night. She wasn’t much anyhow. Couldn’t hold a candle to Rowena. Then Rowena’s face came looking up at me in the windshield. I saw her with her eyes a-shining like stars, honest to god, they were that bright on the glass. Right then and there I got an ache for her. I was so damn lucky that Stoney had started that fight. I was going home to my little love pure as a white lamb, and I was glad of it. It was the being away from home that had made me think crazy. Rowena was all I’d ever want for the rest of my life, and I’d treat myself like a lame horse and shoot myself in the head if I ever hurt her again.

There wasn’t any traffic this time of night, and I looked off into the dark woods as I drove on. Every so often a house light winked out of the dark, but most of the light came from the moon that slid in and out of view as I crested hills and coasted toward bottomlands. It seemed like I was the only man left on the earth after some great catastrophe. I shivered in my aloneness and looked over at Stoney slumped against the window. He looked like a child sleeping there, like innocence itself. It was hard to believe he was the man who had whipped two people so bad less than an hour before. I was reminded of one of our yard dogs. Stew was the name Annette gave him. He was a mutt, came to us in a rainstorm, barking from underneath the house, till I threatened to shoot him. Annette had dragged him out next morning, cleaned him up and fed him some leftover stew, the reason for his name. He had turned out to be a good cattle dog, helping herd like he’d been trained for it. He hung out at the barn and made us all laugh because he acted like one of the cats when we milked. Stew would line up with them beside a milk stool and wait for Digger or Shorty to turn a teat out and squirt milk into his mouth. Then he got rabies. I don’t know where or how, but one morning I noticed he wasn’t around, and as the day went on and he didn’t show up, I figured he’d got himself killed by a car or some animal in the woods. Then the next day, just as I was coming up to the house for supper, there he was in the drive, foam dripping from his mouth, a wild look in his eyes. He growled and staggered toward me. I knew he’d attack me any minute, and slowly I backed up to the barn and lifted my shotgun off the wall. Then I heard the guineas screaming. He was in their pen and had killed two already and was now lunging toward the fence where one was trying to fly up to safety. I was calm though, took a quick bead and shot him behind his left ear. I remember standing over Stew’s bloody fur, thinking how quick things can turn from good to bad. That was the way it was now with Stoney. Looking back over at his hands crossed on his chest, I remembered how those fingers picking the pretend guitar one moment had curled so quickly into fists smashing flesh and bone the next.

I figured then that those hands could also have caused the bruises Sheila told us came from run-ins with doors and tools and such. She hadn’t blamed her papa and she wouldn’t tell on her husband, but I was sure she needed protecting from both of them. I told myself it wasn’t my worry, not my duty to see after her. I knew Rowena would say it was. She’d quote the parable about the Good Samaritan or some other verse in the Bible that instructs us to become busybodies in the name of Christianity. Well, she could read the whole Sermon on the Mount to me, but I made up my mind that night, I wasn’t getting involved. It was between the two of them; it’s not right for a man to speak up for another’s wife. I had nearly slipped up already, been taken in by her bruises. I felt my face heat up thinking about that day in the barn. I remembered the softness of her hump when I held her against me, the scent of her hair when I lifted her bangs to kiss her forehead. No, I wasn’t going to allow such as that to happen again. Sheila Barnes might be persuasive, she could try to cast spells and use magic charms, but like Stoney said about them having a baby, none of her foolishness was gonna work on me.

The boy slept all the way home. It was dawn when I turned onto Carterdale Road, and as the sun’s early pink light washed over Stoney’s face, his lids fluttered and opened. He stretched like a cat and looked out of the window. “We nearly home already?”

“Yep, you had a good sleep,” I said.

He wrinkled his forehead, remembering how things had been before he’d passed out. He grinned. “I bested ’em both back there, huh?”

“You did that,” I said. “You were drunk as a skunk, too; you went at them like a mad dog.”

“Yeah, hooch can make you faster, not slow like folks say.”

We were passing the turnoff for Flowerdale Road, and I lifted my hand to Mr. Brister, who sat high in his black truck waiting to pull out toward Zebulon. “Drink slowed the other two though, and if they’d been sober, you might be dead now. They were big men.”

Stoney jabbed his fist in the air. “Boom, bang, I got one. I got to tell Hugh how surprised that biggest one was when I bit his chin.”

My place came into view, and I slowed to enjoy the quarter-mile ride up to our drive. The cattle were coming through the gate to the back pasture, milked and fed, ready to saunter across the green field. I filled up inside at the sight. If the dairy kept on prospering, I’d buy more Ayrshires, more land. My son, if that was to be the outcome of Rowena’s pregnancy, would have a legacy that would be the envy of the county. Rowena would fix me a hot breakfast, sausage, eggs, grits, biscuits with syrup. Before I took my seat at the head of the table, I would take her in my arms, hold her sweet-smelling hair against my face. I wouldn’t think of last night again. That woman, the whiskey, the fighting, all of that was behind me, a bad memory that I rubbed out of my head like clotted cream from the bottom of a bottle. I smiled then, thinking of the little verse Annette memorized for Sunday school. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”

That night lying beside me in our soft bed, Rowena turned to me and said, “Lloyd, don’t tell this, but Sheila thinks she might be expecting a baby too.”

“Does Stoney know yet?”

“No. She says she wants to wait until she’s sure, but she’s so happy, I don’t think she’ll be able to keep it a secret long.”

I thought about Stoney’s vow, remembered his eyes darkening when he said he wasn’t having any children. I remembered the defiant tone of his voice when he said Sheila’s magic would never change his mind. Then I looked over at Rowena’s face glowing in the moonlight that slanted across our bed and decided to keep counsel with myself. I pulled her into my arms. “There’s a lot to be happy about around here these days,” I said. She snuggled against me, and when I reached for the ribbon on her night dress, she moved in even closer.