The Well and the Mine (7 page)

Ella and Lois loved talking about boys, but I didn’t have any fondness for it. I didn’t like how they looked at me, how a group of them would holler when you walked by. Like suddenly you were on a stage but you didn’t know any lines to say. Aunt Celia lived with Grandma Moore, and I wondered if that wasn’t the better way to go about it. It seemed simpler.

Grandma Moore had separated from Grandpa Moore before I was born, leaving him in Fayette and moving here to a house Papa bought her. That was the first house she ever lived in that was her very own. And Grandpa Moore’s mother had divorced her husband and changed her name and all the kids’ names back to her maiden name. That’s why we were Moores. He must’ve done something awful to make her want to go out and not just erase him out of her life, but erase his name, too. Whatever he did, if he hadn’t have done it, we’d all be named Adams.

Nobody ever talked about what those men did, but that was two generations of women who’d picked up and moved along.

“Know whose baby that was yet?” asked Lois, her hair catching the sun where the trees thinned out.

“Uh-uh,” I said as I stepped over a log. “We haven’t heard anything. Have you?”

“Mama says must have been a no-account.”

I wondered if it was another woman who wanted to pick up and move along and that baby was only a weight holding her back. I didn’t have dreams like Tess—the pictures in my head of the woman and her baby came during the daylight. She liked these same woods. And liked how cool and damp the air was. And felt like it was the only place that was really hers.

“What’s the matter with Henry?” Lois asked.

“He’s nice-looking. Sweet on you for sure. Good manners,” added Ella.

“He makes me nervous,” I said, knowing that’d just make them hound me more.

“Shoot, everybody makes you nervous. You’d think lookin’ like Mary Pickford, you’d have sense enough to know you’re good as anybody.”

“I don’t look anything like Mary Pickford.” I popped a chinquapin in my mouth and took my time chewing. I looked like Papa’s other sister, who lived in Memphis and visited by train every spring. We had the same hair, same chin, and same Moore nose with a hump in the middle of it.

“Virgie Moore,” declared Ella, “you better learn to take a compliment. Somebody tells you that you look like you could be in a picture show, best just to say ‘thank you.’ Quit blushing and standing there like a stump.”

I looked to Lois for support; she shrugged.

I didn’t blush. But I didn’t like to feel like I was on display with everyone looking at me. With boys and most grown-ups, you ended up feeling like they were holding up some yardstick to you. I didn’t like being measured was all.

“I’m only sayin’ it because I have this—”

Ella interrupted me. “You do not have a hump in the middle of your nose, so don’t get started on that. We don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

Arguing with Ella was a waste of energy. So I stopped talking. Scanning the trees as we passed, I jerked to a stop. Tucked into the pulled-back bark of a pine tree, the cicada shell was almost invisible. Brown and crisp, slit down its back. I crunched through the weeds and leaves over to the tree, hiking up my navy skirt to avoid the brambles.

“Wait a second,” I said to Ella and Lois, barely loud enough for them to hear. They were a good twenty feet ahead of me then. But they stopped and backtracked, not looking at all surprised.

“Found you one?” asked Lois.

“Mmm-hmm.” I pried it off gently, not breaking the little leg husks. It stuck to my collar like it’d been waiting to get a nicer home than that dirty bark. I’d add it to the box under our bed at home. I liked to keep enough to wear them sometimes in winter. They kept real well if you were gentle with them. And I didn’t wear them out in public, of course. Just at home.

Ella looked disgusted. “I can’t believe you throw a fit if your hair musses, but you’ll wear a bug like it’s made of diamonds.”

“It’s not a bug. The bug’s gone. It makes its own sculpture of itself and leaves it behind.” I didn’t usually do my shell collecting with an audience. It seemed more serious—and a lot quieter—when I was alone.

“It’s skin,” said Ella, wrinkling her nose.

“I know,” I said. “But look how perfect it is.” It was my first memory of something that was not Mama or Papa or warm fire or dinner table. I’d been wandering around in the backyard, while Mama was hanging clothes on the line, and I came across a cicada shell, which, of course, looked just like the one I’d just found ten years later or so. They weren’t creative creatures. I stared at it until Mama pulled me away, and when she did, I pulled it off the tree. Crushed it in my hand with a grip not used to being gentle. I was horrified that I’d killed it, and Mama kept telling me it wasn’t alive to kill. But the next time I found one, I picked it up as gentle as if I were holding a butterfly by the wings.

Ella had plopped herself down on a stump, hands on her hips, just like her mama did when Ella sassed her. “If you’re not partial to Henry Harken, what about Tom Olsen?”

Tom lived next to Ella and Lois, and he served as our personal messenger service. When they had a message for me, he’d ride his bike over to our house, give me the note, then wait until I’d responded and carry it on back to the twins. He had pretty gray eyes with long lashes like a woman’s. I’d mostly noticed his eyes—I’d had time to look because he never looked straight at me, mainly looked over my shoulder or kicked his bicycle tires. But he was always smiling, showing his barely crooked teeth to the space over my shoulder. His eyes and crooked teeth seemed nicer to me than Henry Harken’s expensive clothes.

“What about Tom Olsen?” I said. I fingered the cicada lightly, checking if it was stuck good.

“Don’t you think he’s absolutely divine?”

“Ella…” She thought most boys were absolutely divine.

“Well, the first basketball game’s at the end of the month, and I’ll go with Hanson, ’course.” He’d been calling on her for six months—her parents weren’t as strict as Mama and Papa, so boys had been walking her home ever since she turned fourteen. “I want his cousin to take Lois, and Tom could take you. We could the six of us go together.”

“With the boys?”

“Yes,” she said patiently, hands still on her hips. “That’s what makes it six. With no boys, it’d be three.”

“Likely that’s the highest math she can do,” said Lois.

“I don’t think Papa would let me.”

“You could ask him,” pointed out Lois. “It’d just be as friends. And all six of us would be together the whole time.”

“Hanson’ll drive us. He’s got loan of a car while his brother’s working in Kentucky.”

I’d never ridden in a car with anybody but Papa. He got the first car in Carbon Hill, and the five years since then, he’d been carting everybody around. Relatives needing to go to the doctor, men riding to work with him, shopping trips to Birmingham. Sometimes he’d get woken up in the middle of the night to go get the doctor if somebody was having a baby. I think Mama’d ridden in the car twice other than going to church on Sundays—every time she was about to get to go somewhere, somebody squeezed in and took her place. And she’d stay there at home, smiling at us and waving from the porch as we left.

Leta
I WISHED THEY HADN’T’VE COME ON CANNING DAY. I
know word about the baby must’ve spread all over town before the sheriff even carried him off, but somehow the women all waited a week to drop by. And then all at once, like locusts.

Midway through the morning, with two pots boiling on the stove and the fire going strong, even with the windows open, my face was red with the heat. No matter how often I swiped at my forehead, I could feel the salty drops running down my cheeks and upper lip. My dress was wet under the arms. I was pouring more sugar into the pickles when I heard a shout at the front door.

“You home, Leta?”

“Come back to the kitchen!” I recognized the voice—Charlene Burch from down the hill. Small woman, big eyes, voice like train brakes squealing. She stepped into the kitchen, nose lifted.

“How many jars of pickles you done?”

“Six quarts so far. Second batch has another day to go. Just got sugar left.” I moved to the first bowl, the smell of vinegar sharp and strong, and carried it with both hands out to the back porch. I poured the vinegar off, then came back in and started to carry the second bowl out to do the same.

Charlene had set down at the table and was biting into a sliced pear from a bowl. It’d been soaking in sugar overnight, and she took tiny, mousy bites like it was a piece of chocolate. “Didn’t grow cucumbers this year,” she said. “Kids ain’t too fond of ’em.”

“The boys doin’ good?” I asked, calling over my shoulder as I stepped on the porch. “Jolie gettin’ on well at the high school?” Jolie was their oldest, a year ahead of Virgie.

“They’re all just fine. Our youngest is startin’ a paper route next week—bring in a little extra. Yours gettin’ on?”

“All right as rain.” I poured the sugar on the cucumbers, covered ’em with a towel. Water in the reservoir was hot enough to start on the preserves.

“Not upset by the poor baby?”

I filled up the pot halfway, ladling water slowly. “Not so’s you’d notice. Tess was real shook up at first.”

“She saw the woman—that’s what I heard at the post office.”

“Just shadows.”

“Who do you think would do it?”

“Can’t say.” I leaned over and pulled the sugared pears away from her.

“Think it might have been Lola? Lord knows she’s got plenty young’uns around.”

I sighed. “She’s a sweet woman. She’s got a good heart.”

“There’s somethin’ about her, though. Can’t ever tell what that one’s thinkin’. Or Eleanor Lucid—she’s never been quite right. Living like she does with no man or children around. Wouldn’t know what she might do.”

I stirred while she talked. Charlene never expected much talking back. She kept right on, and I never did understand where she thought Eleanor Lucid could’ve got her hands on a baby, touched in the head or not.

Anna Laurie Tyler came in when all the pear preserve jars were lined up on the back porch, lids off, cooling. I was starting the figs.

She looked near tears when she came through the door—she’d come up the back way like she did a few times a week. She was just a’staring at the well when I looked over.

She felt my eyes on her and looked up. “Up for company?”

“Come on in and set a spell,” I called back.

“So this is where he was. It’s a horror—just makes your blood run cold.”

She seemed to think it must’ve been a girl, Virgie’s age or so, not married. She named a few women’s daughters she thought were the most likely. I put her to work stirring figs while I started scalding more quart jars.

The Bingham sisters—married, though, so they weren’t really Binghams anymore—came after lunch. Didn’t even sit. They wanted to know if the baby had marks on him, if it looked like he’d been beat. Seemed they thought they’d heard a baby screaming too loudly at the neighbor’s place the week before.

“Not normal baby hollerin’—sounded different. I told Johnny it made shivers run down my spine,” one of them whispered. “Haven’t seen that baby in days and days.”

The next one had heard it was two babies. And the one after that thought his head had been missing. Those two helped me lay the paraffin over the preserves.

Celia stuck her head through the door before the girls and Jack were due home. “Got a porch full of preserves out here,” she called. “And looks like you’ve done gone and pickled yourself along with the cucumbers.”

I smiled to see her. My apron was splattered with vinegar and fruit juice, my hands flecked with wax. My head felt hot enough that I swore I could feel my brain swelling with the heat. I did feel unsteady, light-headed. “Get yourself in here, Celia.”

“You get yourself out here. Get some cool air on you.”

“I ain’t even started supper.”

“Won’t be startin’ nothin’ if you keel over into the stove.”

I took off my apron and followed her. The back porch wasn’t as social as the front—it looked out over the trees instead of the road. “Like some tea?” I asked, pausing at the door.

“Sure would,” she said, but grabbed hold of my arm and steered me outside. “Stay there.” She disappeared, then popped back with two glasses, walking over to the silver pitcher near the well. She pulled back the cloth covering it and poured the tea quickly, without spilling a drop.

“Need to drink you three or four of these,” she ordered. “Done sweat out all your fluids.” Her dark hair was sleek as ever, curls smooth and tidy tucked into a twist. I’d never seen Celia sweat, even though she could crank the Model T with one hand or snatch up a bale of hay like it was a toddler.

The tea tasted good. Sweet enough to cut through the layers of fumes and hot air stuck in my throat.

“Saw all the cluckin’ hens come through here,” she said. “Showin’ Christian concern?”

I smiled again, nearly chuckled. We were standing right by the well, and all I could think was how much I’d like to pour a bucket of water on my head. Or have a run down to the creek like one of the girls. “Mainly they was namin’ names. So horrified by it they just can’t quit talkin’ about it.”

Celia finished her tea and pulled out her snuff. It was an awful habit, but she’d done it for the eighteen years I’d known her. Got to where it seemed like another woman pulling out her sewing. She pulled her fingers back from her mouth and narrowed her eyes at me. “But you ain’t talkin’?”

“About it?” I breathed out, ran my fingers over my hair. “Don’t see no reason for it. It’s done. That baby’s in a better place.”

“What about his mama?”

I’d thought about that, but I’d ladled it into a jar and sealed it up tight. “Ain’t my concern. That’s for the sheriff.”

I’d got the preserves done—pear and fig—and pickles’d be done the next day. Enough to last through next spring, plus a jar or two for Albert’s brothers who were bound to come by looking for whatever they could get. Just had the beans left to do.

Tess
WE COULD GO OVER THE LIST ONLY IN OUR HEADS
during church—no pencils and paper—because you had to sit straight and pay attention the whole time or you’d get a pinch on your arm from Mama. If I was caught writing, Papa’d probably whip me when we got home. Virgie was too old for being whipped.