Jolene Page 2

  And of course, there was another factor in her wanting to send Anna to that particular place. Other folks don’t have Aunt Jinny. She knew that was what Ma was thinking. That Jinny would have a better chance at making Anna better if the old lady got her hands directly on Anna. And even if Jinny couldn’t make her well, at least Anna would be out of the way and Ma could concentrate on saving Pa from the Miner’s Cough. And she knew Ma would fight anything, be it beast, man, or sickness, that got between her and her Lew.

  “Girl belongs with her kin,” Pa said, after he finished coughing. “Not gallivantin’ around the hollers with a wild woman. She kin stay right here.”

  “You allus say that,” Ma said crossly. “I dunno why you allus say that. There ain’t no good reason to keep her here. It ain’t as if you give the girl two hoots and a holler.”

  Tears stung Anna’s eyes at that awful truth. Because it was true. Pa didn’t give a pin about her, because she weren’t the son he wanted. Maybe if she’d been strong, tall, and beautiful, like Sally Macray, with boys after her and willin’ to do just about any favor to her Pa if he’d give ’em leave to court her, he’d have given her some heed—but small, weak, and plain meant she was barely earning her keep in the household, she had no prospects of getting married and being off Pa’s hands, and she knew it. And so did Ma.

  “Girl belongs with her kin, givin’ her ma help, like God intended,” Lew repeated, once the coughing fit had subsided. “And not with the likes of Jinny. Not with some crowin’ hen what lives all by her lonesome with no man jack to see she cleaves to Godly ways.”

  Ma snorted in that way that meant yore a fine one to talk, Llewellyn Jones, with yore whisky and yore chaw, and the way y’all used ter stay up nights with yore friends, a-drinkin’ and a-yarnin’ afore y’all took sick. Thet’s prolly why, even with me a-prayin’ on my knees every Sunday, Jesus don’t heal y’all. But she didn’t say nothin’; that wasn’t her way. She’d just wait for you to get all uncomfortable and change the subject back to what she wanted to talk about.

  But then Pa went too far. “And who knows what she’s up to with them potions. She’s probably a witch!”

  “Wall, yore quick enough to drink them potions, an’ even quicker to take the money what comes from ’em!” Ma retorted. “An’ I know what I know, and I know thet Anna ain’t never gonna come ’round right here, but Jinny can make her right once she gets the gal under her roof. And Jinny herself invited her!” she added in triumph, and there was a crackle of paper—presumably Ma flourishing Aunt Jinny’s latest letter, which had come with the last batch of potions. Ma wrote to Jinny every time she returned the basket with orders for more potions, and Aunt Jinny allus wrote back when she sent the potions. They used soot-ink and brown paper the fatback came wrapped in, one writing on one side, the other returning on the blank side, grease-stains and all. “It’s right here! She says she wants Anna to come now, right now, while it’s summer and easy travel! And she got it all arranged in advance. It ain’t gonna cost us nothin’—Jinny’s a-takin’ care of all of that. So Anna’s goin’ to her, and there’s an end to it! And one less mouth to feed won’t come amiss, neither.”

  Well Ma almost never went agin Pa’s wishes, but he knew better than to keep palaverin’ when she did. So he shut his mouth, and there was the clatter of cookery for a moment or two, twice as loud as normal ’cause Ma was still mad. And then Ma made as much of a stompin’ noise as she ever did, which weren’t much, and stomped out to the porch where Anna sat on the stoop.

  “Y’all done with them peas?” she asked.

  Anna held back her tears with an effort. “Yes, Ma,” Anna replied, and held the two bowls up to her, the one with the shelled peas and the other with the pods. You didn’t throw away nothin’ in the Jones house. Ma would make a soup out of the pods and that’d be what she and Ma ate for lunch, with cornbread, while Pa took a hunk of cornbread and some cold bacon and pickled slaw in his lunch bucket. Pa needed the extra food, and every scrap of meat they got went to him; every miner needed as much food and water as could be packed into their lunch buckets to keep up their strength. So Pa got a big breakfast, as big as Ma could manage, and a big lunch, and the lion’s share of what she made for supper. And Anna and Ma got the ends of everything, like thin soup made from pea-pods, and plain grits with just salt, and poke salad and potlikker from the greens. Pea-pod soup and a little bit of cornbread wouldn’t satisfy most folks, but Anna never had much appetite anyway, and the taste was all right. Better’n cabbage soup, which was all she got come winter.

  “Come inside and read yore Bible until supper,” Ma ordered, which probably meant she was to show Pa she was a Godly girl, and Aunt Jinny wasn’t gonna corrupt her no matter how much of a Jezebel Aunt Jinny was. Although Anna couldn’t imagine how anyone who lived alone in the woods could be a Jezebel in the first place. Nor how, if she lived all by herself and was doing all the things you needed to do to keep body and soul together and making all them potions, she could ever find the time to be a Jezebel. Anna had a hazy idea of what it took to be the kind of woman that one could call a Jezebel, and it required an awful lot of time to make yourself pretty. It probably needed servants too, because you couldn’t stay lookin’ pretty if you was out weedin’ the garden or choppin’ wood.

  Ma stared at her hard, which made her scramble to her feet, flushing painfully, aware that she had been wool-gathering again. She trotted into the house, obediently got the Bible she’d been given at Sunday School as a prize for memorizing the longest passage, and sat down with it on a little stool near the window, opening it at random, which you were supposed to do if you needed guidance. Which right now, she surely did. Because it seemed like Ma had arranged it, and Pa wasn’t going to fight it anymore, and she was being sent off to Aunt Jinny. She wasn’t sure if she wanted that or not.

  But the first thing her eyes lit on when she let the pages fall open was a page of “begats,” which was no help at all.

  Supper, which was cornbread, peas and carrots from the garden biled up together, and cabbage from the garden fried with a little fatback grease to give it more flavor, and a mess of poke salad, was extremely uncomfortable. Finally, Pa cleared his throat, and she alerted to him like a coon dog catching a scent. “Your Aunt Jinny done said y’all’s to come to her,” he said shortly. “Yore Ma thinks she can set y’all up. Y’all can come home when you’re stronger.”

  And that was that. He went back to his food. Anna looked to Ma. Ma looked faintly triumphant. “We’ll pack up yore things ternight and y’all’ll leave in the mornin’,” she said. “The feller what brought the potions today will take y’all part-way, and another feller will get y’all the rest of the way. Jinny got it all arranged.”

  Anna just sat there, stunned. She hadn’t even got her mind wrapped around the idea that she was being sent away—and now Ma said it would be tomorrow?

  “Finish yore supper,” Ma said, sharply, as she continued to sit there with her fork in her numb hand. Mechanically, she obeyed, mashing peas and soft carrots with her fork and somehow getting them into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed, but it tasted like ashes.

  She didn’t remember getting up to clear the plates like she always did, but somehow found herself drying while Ma washed, and Pa sat next to the cold fireplace in the one good chair. Ma was telling her how this was a grand thing, how Jinny would make her well again, and repeating herself a lot, and Anna May just let it all wash over her like rain she couldn’t get out of. Eventually Ma gave up, and sent her off to bed.

  Like the other houses, this was a two-room “shotgun” house: bedroom in the back, kitchen and living area in the front. Anna plodded numbly into the bedroom, pulled off her dress and folded it neatly, leaving it on a stool. Then she washed up at the basin, pulled the narrow little trundle out from under Pa and Ma’s cast-iron bed, and crawled into it in her chemise and knickers. She was old enough for a corset . . . but like so many t
hings, they couldn’t afford one. Ma still used the corset she’d got married in.

  Ma was still talking, but now that Anna wasn’t there, she was saying different things. “Jinny was right. Anna bein’ so puny wouldn’t hev happened if we’d’a lived anywheres else.”

  Pa snorted. “So I shoulda been a farmer like yore Pa? I ain’t got any idea of what end of a plow to hold. I’m a miner like my Pa was, and his Pa was in Wales, an’ that’s what I know. Where else is a miner supposed to work but a mine? Mining’s a good, honest living, and it’d been no better at the Burra Burra mine. No better pay, an’ ye cain’t even grow a blade’a grass there, let alone a garden.”

  “It woulda been closer to Jinny. Close ’nuff we coulda lived with her. We wouldn’t owe nothin’ to the Company,” Ma countered. “We coulda saved the rent money we’s spendin’ now. ’Tween me an’ Jinny, we’d hev a garden wuth hevin’.”

  “Fancy me and Jinny livin’ under the same roof! And her always lookin’ crosswise at me, like I cain’t provide for my own damn family!” Now Anna knew that her father was angry, because he never swore unless he was really angry. “Y’all didn’t have no complaints when I brung you here!”

  “That was afore—”

  “And this is now. I’m givin’ in ’bout Anna, even though I think it’s a load of heathen trash, like Jinny’s witchy potions, because it’s plain the girl ain’t no help to y’all no more, but I’ll be damned if I sit here with you naggin’ at me and let y’all tell me what a man should do to provi—” And that was when Pa broke into a fit of coughing, and Ma rushed to get him a drink of one of those potions and said soothing words, and apologized, and begged him to forgive her.

  Anna would have loved to have heard Pa say “Anna’s staying,” rather than “It’s plain the girl ain’t no help no more.” But . . . that hadn’t happened. And wouldn’t happen. Pa had made up his mind, and when he did that, there was no changing it. And it appeared that her fate had been sealed. Her chest felt so tight now she could scarcely breathe, and her eyes burned.

  She knelt and said her evening prayers, quick as quick, then pulled the quilt over her head as she had as a child to block out the rest of the world and pretend she was somewhere else, like King Solomon’s Palace, or with the Pharaoh’s daughter, because it would have been lovely to take care of little Baby Moses. Not that she had many ideas what those places looked like, but that was part of the fun of trying to imagine it. There had been a picture in her Bible of Pharaoh’s daughter finding Moses in the bulrushes, in which the Pharaoh’s daughter was wearing what looked like nothing more than a bit of cloth wrapped around her and tied at the waist, with a strange round collar-like necklace and a kind of scarf over her head, draped in stiff folds, but that didn’t give her any ideas about how the Pharaoh lived. As for King Solomon, there had been two pictures. All the one picture showed was a couple of big pillars and a throne with Solomon on it, draped in what looked like a lot of shawls, on top of what looked like a sort of loose bag-garment. And the other showed Solomon and a different Pharaoh’s daughter in the same get-ups, promenading in front of a bunch of girls playin’ harps and tambourines and dancin’, and all of them done up in the same sort of outfits.

  The clothes seemed odd. But the pictures of Jesus and the Disciples and Mary all showed the same baggy things, and the Pastor called those things “robes,” and the Bible talked about “robes,” so that was probably what they all wore when they weren’t wading into the Nile after babies.

  There was nothing to hint in the pictures about what the Palaces looked like. But there would be lots of gold, surely. And flowers, masses and masses of huge flowers. And the robes would probably be soft, like the best cloth at the Company store, and in beautiful colors, and with all kinds of fancy trim on them. There would be soft pillows everywhere, all made of velvet, and beds and chairs like clouds. And clear, clean skies without a hint of soot. And lots and lots of sweets to eat. Sweets were the one thing that she could work up a shade of appetite for.

  She fell into the old daydream, of being the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, a queen in her own right and equal to Israel’s king. She’d be wrapped in a white robe with the middle pulled in tight with a wide gold belt to show how small her waist was, and there’d be gold trim on all the hems, and she’d have little gold slippers. And a big necklace of gold and pearls around her neck and gold bracelets on her arms. She imagined herself into that outfit, looking as tall and pretty as Sally, with her hair covered by one of the draped headdresses Pharaoh’s daughter had on in the picture. She imagined herself going through a big crowd of people, with those girls playing harps and tambourines and dancing in front of and behind her, walking on a carpet of flowers they threw down in front of her. With a whole town full of servants coming behind the dancing girls, and Solomon on his throne like in the picture, staring at her with all his eyes, because she was so beautiful. She imagined him coming down and handing her up the stairs his own self, and putting her in his golden throne with the velvet cushion on it, and little servant boys offering her trays of sweets.

  The sweets were where her imagination really had to stretch, because the only time she ever saw anything sweet to eat was at the Methodist Independence Day Picnic and the Christmas Party for the miners’ children. So, gingerbread, probably. Peppermints and jaw-breakers and butterscotch to suck. Pie. Pretty squares of white-flour bread spread with honey and jam, bowls of strawberries and cherries and peaches—she’d never seen a fig or a pomegranate, but she guessed they were some kind of berry and apple, so she imagined a big, juicy raspberry the size of her thumb and an apple the color of gold. And nuts dipped in honey and rolled in sugar. She’d seen other sweets in the Company store, in the jars of candy behind the counter, so she imagined all of them too, though she didn’t know what they tasted like. And she imagined Solomon at her feet, looking up at her the way Ma looked at Pa.

  And it worked to make her unhappiness go away, because just as she was imagining herself biting into a peach so sweet it made her tongue curl up with delight, she fell asleep.

  She woke with Ma shaking her shoulder. It was just come sun-up. Thin light came in through the tiny window over Ma and Pa’s bed. She could tell by the silence in the house that Pa was already gone to the mine. And that hurt, hurt more than she expected, that he didn’t even wake her to say goodbye. Her chest went tight again.

  “Jeb’ll be here in a right minute,” Ma was saying. “I got yore things all bundled up in my old shawl. Get dressed and get some breakfast into yore belly or it’ll be a long pull till lunch.”

  She scrambled out of bed into morning air so cold and damp it made her shake, made a quick wash at the basin full of even colder water, and pulled on her dress and apron as Ma stood there impatiently tapping her foot. Ma didn’t even let her do her own hair; as soon as she took it out of its braids, Ma snatched the brush out of her hand and brushed it so roughly it brought tears to her eyes, then braided it in the two braids she hated, because it made her look like a child. As soon as she was decent, Ma all but shoved her into the kitchen, and plunked her down at the table, where there was a bowl of grits and a hunk of cornbread waiting for her, with some potlikker from the greens on the back of the stove to sop up with the cornbread. Ma didn’t even go back to the bedroom to pour out the wash-water or to make up the trundle; she just stood there, as if to make sure Anna ate quickly. It was much more than she usually ate, but with Ma staring daggers at her, she obediently took up her spoon and did her best. The grits had some bacon fat in them from cooking Pa’s lunch, which was a surprise. Usually all she ever got in her grits was salt. Maybe Ma was feeling a mite sorry for sending her off like this.

  Or maybe not, given how Ma was staring at her.

  When she’d gotten down as much as she could, Ma snatched the uneaten cornbread from the table, put it in a square of clean rag with another couple of pieces of cornbread, and tied it all up. And just at that moment, ou
t there on the quiet street, she heard hoofbeats and the creak of a wooden wagon.

  “There, that’ll be Jeb Sawyer,” Ma said. “Come on! No keepin’ him waitin’!” She picked up a bundle from the floor and shoved it into Anna’s right hand, and stuck the packet of cornbread into her left, and chivvied her out the door.

  There was just a sliver of sun above the horizon, the damp air made her shiver, and in someone’s backyard a rooster crowed. There was a buckboard wagon with a black mule in the traces right outside the front door, with a weather-beaten man just getting down off the seat, a man with grizzled hair under a battered straw hat, wearing red longjohns with the sleeves rolled up, under a pair of faded jeans overalls. The man looked surprised to see that she was ready to go, but didn’t say anything other than “Mornin’, Missus Jones.”

  “Mornin’, Jebediah,” Ma replied. “I wasn’t gonna make y’all wait around, I know y’all got a long way to go, and this’s a kindness.”

  “I’m a-bein’ paid for my pains, Missus Jones,” the man reminded her mildly, and turned to Anna. He had kindly-looking brown eyes, and his face crinkled up when he smiled encouragingly at her. He took her bundles from her and stowed them under the wagon seat, then handed her up, climbing in and taking his seat beside her. He picked up the mule’s reins, but waited for Ma to say something to Anna.

  “Y’all obey yore Aunt Jinny and read yore Bible,” was all Ma said.

  “Yes, Ma,” Anna said, ducking her head.

  “Don’t be no trouble. Aunt Jinny’ll have y’all right fixed up, but y’all gotta do ev’rthin’ she says, and do it exactly as she says, an’ no argumentin’ about it.” Ma looked as stern at her as the Pastor when he was preachin’ hellfire.

  “Yes, Ma,” Anna repeated, shrinking in on herself, and feeling as low as a snake’s belly.

  “And don’t you pay no heed to what yore Pa said about her. Jinny’s a Godly woman, for all she’s a strange one with strange ways. Never no finagling with Jinny. But she does things as she likes and she don’t cotton to no man comin’ into her life and a-bossin’ her around, and she and yore Pa got sideways of each other from the minute they met. She’s done forgave him, but he ain’t never gonna forgive no woman for bein’ uppity to ’im.” Ma softened just a little bit at that. “So you mind yore manners and don’t pick up Jinny’s ways.”