5. “You’ve been hanging around with the girls again. I can hear it in the way you talk.”
One year, I purchased a yellow scarf for my dad for Christmas, as a kind of commemoration of what he had seen during the war. I pictured him wearing it with his herringbone “Going to the City” winter coat. There was no doubt in my mind that he would get the connection with the Japanese pilot; I guess I was a kid with strange ideas of what might make a father smile. As Big George opened the box, I prepared for a moment of glory, but he wound up giving the scarf to Preach Burton, the minister of what was then known as the colored church, along with a polka-dotted costume vest he purchased one year for a New Year’s Eve barbershop quartet. Daddy said that yellow was an effeminate color, but I didn’t think so.
. . .
In our backyard there is a bent-over clothesline and the wrought-iron chairs on the patio are rusty, in need of paint. No one has sat upon them for a decade. We never use the backyard, once filled with the trees my father planted and tended—willow, oak, crape myrtle, maple, hawthorn, flowering crab—some now bare with spindly limbs, the victims of this or that. My mother just shakes her head at the lost ones—when she actually lets herself look. When most people die, she says it is a “blessing.” But the trees are a different story. Even my mother grieves openly for my father’s trees.
Now a hired man, who talks way too much, waters and cares for the yard, which Big George gradually expanded year after year, mowing farther until it stretched almost all the way down to the forest.
“You can always tell me anything.” That is what my father often said to me when I was a kid. But I never did.
6
GEORGE: “That casserole I made Saturday is much better today.”
BETTY: “Maybe I’ll try some more around Friday.”
The late-morning sunlight filters through the old carnival glass vases and heavy tinted bowls on the sill of the bay window in the living room. The objects from auctions that adorn this room are, to my mother, worth only their value and represent her shrewdness, her skill at acquisition. When she holds them up to inspect them, she does not imagine, as I do, the others who once picked them up, though she handles anything that belonged to my grandmothers with extreme care. She has some fine and costly things, but it is a pair of small Chinese figurines, two children, boy and girl, meant to sit on a shelf dangling their legs, that are her favorites. “Don’t ever break these,” she has told me. Only recently have I discovered that my father bought them in Chicago for twenty dollars. It is these little slips that pass so quickly, almost unnoticed, that occasionally show her feelings, that make them seem as fragile as the figurines. Her emotions are her most delicate possessions, rarely taken out, even for company. When a hint of them breaks through, I want to coax them forth, but she is just too reticent.
“I love them too,” I said to her yesterday, glancing at the Chinese children.
“Oh, they’re nothing,” she said, changing her tone of voice and posture. “They’re worthless.”
I am pleased she never purchased antique dolls. Few things irk me more than an antique doll, publicly displayed. Particularly off-putting are those perched in small rockers in bonnets.
I wager that down the street, Edna Mae Johnson, still uncomfortable in her new teeth, is bent over her embroidery in her crazy, messed-up house, squinting at her tiny stitches as she stands back to admire the small flowers that blossom over the cloth.
Betty will not get out of bed. When I ask if she is thirsty, she just shakes her head. She is agitated, and when she gets this way I can’t focus on much else. Her state of mind affects everything in the house, me especially. I take it in and pace around the house. I want to do a good job here; it is important to me. I want to do right by her.
. . .
When I set the trash out earlier, a neighbor informed me that the game warden has released bobcats in the forests nearby to help control deer. He saw a bobcat a few nights back in the parking lot of the high school’s vocational agriculture center. The building was, until fifteen years or so ago, a garment factory where the women workers on break gathered outside the door, smoke from their cigarettes rising around them.
Where do the women work now, after their divorces, or when their husbands die, or when bad luck strikes, or the harvest is squat? Not here. They drive to Columbia or other towns nearby to work in hospitals or clean the houses of doctors from India and Pakistan. The country roads are full of headlights at night as they often work odd hours.