I told her it was my Grandpa Blakeslee’s favorite. “He always said el-lum tree, like it had two syllables, so naturally I said el-lum, too. Then a botany professor over at the university set me straight.”
A mockingbird lit on a high branch and commenced his song. She watched him for a minute, then lowered her gaze and smiled at me. “It wasn’t a bad ride,” she said, taking off her hat. “Bumpy, but not scary. Well, Mr. Tweedy, thank you.” But she made no move to go. Her black hair glinted blue in a dapple of sunlight. A breeze stirred a loose wisp of hair across a seed that had dried on her cheek. She smelled like warm watermelon.
“You know somethin’?” I said. “Watermelon is very becomin’—to you, I mean. I don’t think it would improve me any.”
She smiled again. “Maybe you don’t need improving.”
“The U.S. Army says I do.”
“What do you mean?”
“They won’t let me join up unless I get fat. I’m six-foot-one and weigh about fifty pounds, which...”
She laughed. “Nobody’s that skinny.”
“Well, I guess a hundred pounds.”
“That can’t be. I weigh a hundred and twelve myself and I’m just five-three, and...oh, you’re teasing!”
“Actually, a hundred and twenty-five according to the scales they use at Papa’s store to weigh out cow feed and guano. Still, that doesn’t suit the Army. Like I told the recruitin’ officer, if I was a hog, it’d make sense to fatten me up for slaughter. But as a soldier boy, the thinner I get, the harder I’ll be to hit.” I meant to sound light-hearted, but I couldn’t laugh. My hands tightened on the handlebars. “Last week in Atlanta I saw a fraternity brother. He was in Army uniform with a corporal’s stripes. I hadn’t laid eyes on him in a year and we were good friends at the university, but I crossed the street hopin’ he wouldn’t see me.”
I hadn’t meant to say all that. Miss Klein looked embarrassed for me. After an awkward silence, she said, “I really must go in, Mr. Tweedy.”
I pretended not to hear her. Leaning back from the handlebars, I let my hands drop to my knees. “Over in Athens they say my work is important to the war.”
“Then you must have a very responsible position.”
“I’m what they call a county agent.”
“A what?”
“The School of Agriculture thought it up two years ago, just before I graduated. They made me county agent for Clarke County.” Miss Klein leaned forward, her hand on the handle of the sidecar’s little door, but I kept talking. “I tell farmers how to farm.”
She turned towards me again. “You’re a farmer?”
“No, this is a salaried job. But it’s the biggest joke I ever got into. Farmers aren’t exactly thrilled over havin’ a fool college boy claimin’ to know better than they do. When the professor hired me, I said, ‘Sir, even the hired hands will see I don’t know what I’m doin’.’ He said, ‘If somebody has a problem you can’t solve, don’t admit it. Stall till you can find out what to do.’” I paused. “But you aren’t interested in all this, Miss Klein. I better let you...”
“Oh, but I really am interested, Mr. Tweedy. I was born on a farm. My daddy was a farmer. My brother is, and...”
Surprised, I said, “I bet you miss it, don’t you? The farm, I mean. And the quiet, and the smell of fresh-cut hay and fresh-turned soil, and watchin’ newborn lambs and calves frolic, and...”
“I don’t miss any of that.” Miss Klein shook her head. “I don’t miss drawing well water, either. I will never ever live out in the country again. A man trying to make a decent living on the land? That’s a lot bigger joke than what you do, Mr. Tweedy. Farming is nothing but hard work and high hopes, debt and disappointment.”
“But I’ll know all the new methods. Farmin’ is a gamble, all right. Still, that’s what keeps it excitin’.”
“I hate excitement. That’s just another word for worry.”
“Farmin’ lets a man work outdoors. I couldn’t stand bein’ cooped up in a store or office the rest of my life. Right now, though, I just want to enlist. Bein’ a county agent won’t mean pea-turkey to the fightin’ men, the ones over here, or over there either.” I itched to pluck that watermelon seed off her cheek. “Want me to give you a for-instance, Miss Klein? Yesterday I was out in the county advisin’ an old fool named Duck Lassiter how to get one row of cotton picked. How’s that go’n hep beat the Kaiser?”
She looked puzzled. “One row?”
“Old Duck plowed his field in a spiral, like a snail shell, and bragged that it was go’n be the world’s longest goldurn cotton row. His field hands hoed it, and they slopped the stalks with arsenic and molasses to kill the boll weevils, but they don’t want to pick the cotton.” I laughed. “Cotton pickers like to take a row apiece and move down a field together. If they have to space themselves out, that’s lonesome pickin’. And it’ll be heavy totin’ and a lot of wasted time if they have to cut across the spiral to get to the cotton wagon. I told Duck he’d have to make a road across the spiral, but he said that’d mess up his row.”
Miss Klein was really laughing. She didn’t notice a yellow jacket closing in on her scent.
“Now tomorrow evenin’, I’ll be talkin’ to a dozen or so farmers about crop rotation, which just might hep feed my frat brother. If the war lasts long enough.” I couldn’t resist any longer. I plucked the seed off her cheek and held it out to her. “A souvenir,” I said.
Her smile was rueful. “I don’t think I want it.”
“Then I do,” said I, and put it in my shirt pocket.
At that moment, Miss Klein stood up, frantic, waving off the yellow jackets with her hat. Right quick I helped her out of the sidecar and followed her up the back steps. After Miss Klein dodged inside the screen door, I asked if I could take her to church the next Sunday night. “By then,” I said through the screen, “I can tell you if I figured out how to get the world’s longest row of cotton picked without messin’ it up.”
She hesitated. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tweedy. I’m going over to Jefferson Saturday. It’ll be late when I get back Sunday. I’ll...uh, I will be visiting my sweetheart’s family”
She hesitated again, then blurted out, “I’ll be meeting them for the first time, Mr. Tweedy, and I’m scared to death!”
Her perfume of watermelon drifted through the screen, and two yellow jackets crawled across it, looking for a way to get to her—like me. Trying to sound casual, I said, “You go’n marry this feller?”
“I’m...not sure.” My spirits rose. She kind of smiled. “He did ask me one time if I could cook. That seemed encouraging.”
“Can you? Cook?”
“I told him I could make real good mayonnaise and divinity candy. I don’t think he was impressed.”
“I am. Nothin’ in the world better than divinity candy dipped in mayonnaise.”
She half-laughed, traced her right index finger down the screen. “I just wish I knew where I stand with him. He writes me love letters and recites love sonnets, and he wants me to meet his family, and last time he was in Mitchellville, just before he left he said, ‘If I asked you to marry me, would you?’ He said it like teasing. There’s only one answer to a sideways question like that. I said, ‘Well, I might.’ That made him mad, Mr. Tweedy! Heavens, did he expect me to say ‘Oh, goody!’ or beg him ‘Please, ask me’? Now his mother has invited me to a family dinner party, and I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Am I being auditioned for a place in the family, or am I just invited because Hugh wants me there? I don’t know how I’m supposed to act.”
“You could practice on my folks,” I offered. “I’ll take you over home for supper tonight.”
She laughed. A nervous little laugh. “I guess I just never have liked meeting people I don’t know.”
“You sound like my Grandpa Blakeslee. He used to say he didn’t like to go anywhere he hadn’t been. You really want to marry this feller, don’t you?” A stupid question, but she answered it.
<
br /> “I think I do. I feel so proud when I’m with him, Mr. Tweedy. Before him, I never even met anybody who went to Harvard. He remembers every name and date in history. He can quote whole acts of Shakespeare. And he...he actually enjoys me! When I said that to my Sister Maggie—that he seems to enjoy me—she said, ‘Why wouldn’t he? He does all the talking.’”
“He sounds like a friend of mine,” I said. “Pink Predmore. Old Pink went to Harvard. Went there a nice feller, came out a snob with a silly accent.”
Her reply was defensive. “Hugh isn’t like that. He’s...” She cut off the subject. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. And it’s inconsiderate of me to keep you standing there talking through a screen door.”
“I like talkin’ through screen doors. But I expect you need to wash off, Miss Klein, and I got to go by home and see my sister. She’s leavin’ tomorrow for college.” I had turned and was headed down the steps when I remembered something. “You want to hear Sampson’s secret?”
“Why, Mr. Tweedy! You wouldn’t tell a child’s secret!”
“He said to. Said tell you he was aimin’ at Loma with that watermelon. You met Loma, Miz Williams. She’s his half-sister and my aunt, and neither one of us is crazy about her. He felt bad bout hittin’ you, but I think he felt worse bout missin’ her. You sure did shut Aunt Loma up, Miss Klein.”
“What?”
“About those German ancestors, how they came over in the seventeen-hundreds.”
“Would she be impressed if I told her one of them got a land grant from the King of England?”
“Yeah, that would impress Loma.”
She laughed. “But then I’d have to un-impress her by admitting he couldn’t write, and that he lost his land in a wrestling match.”
“I think even Loma would rather have a German wrastler in the family than somebody like our Cudn Hortense, the wife of a Blakeslee cousin. She’s traced her ancestry back to British royalty. Claims her parlor furniture came from Lord Baltimore, and she’s got ribbons tied across the chair arms so nobody can sit in them. Cudn Hortense looks down on anybody whose name isn’t English or French.”
Miss Klein sighed. “There are a mighty lot of folks like her, Mr. Tweedy. With a four-year-college degree I thought it would be easy to get a teaching job, but three towns turned me down. One school superintendent claimed the places were all filled, but a friend of mine who teaches there said they still had two openings. She thought the problem was my German name.” Miss Klein was staring down at her hands. “Mama used to be so proud of our being German, because Germans are said to be smart. Since the war started, she never mentions it.”
I wanted to see her laugh again. “They tell it on my Cudn’T.D. how last year he refused to go to his daughter’s weddin’. Said, ‘I cain’t bear to see Ethel git marrit to a man from Texas named Ertzberger.’ His wife, Cudn Huldah, said, ‘T.D., how could you forgit that you marrit a Holtzkaemper!’ He said things were way different back then.
“Well, Miss Klein, I better get on over home. Like I said, my little sister’s leavin’ for college in the mornin’. I’ll be seein’ you soon, I hope?”
4
MY SISTER, Mary Toy, was nineteen and a senior at Cox College in College Park, Georgia, near Atlanta. When I got home I found her in her room, packing for school. She’d come home early from the watermelon cutting.
Mama hadn’t gone at all, despite Papa being president of the school board. She was in the kitchen, reaching into the warming oven above the big iron cookstove, taking out bowls of fried chicken, black-eyed peas, string beans, and a sweet potato soufflé. Mama never cooked at night on Sundays except maybe to slice tomatoes, since Queenie always cooked enough dinner to have it for supper. Still, there was always a rush to get it on the table early on account of Sunday night preaching.
“I cain’t go to church with y’all tonight, Mama,” I said. Lifting the thin linen cloth that kept flies off the bread, I picked up a cornstick. “I’ll have to get on back to Athens. After dark it’s slow goin’ on a motorsickle.”
“But you’ll stay to supper, won’t you, Will?” Mama didn’t say it like an invite. More like an urgent plea. I realized she’d been crying.
“What’s the matter, Mama?”
“I’ve got one of my sick headaches,” she said, and burst into new tears. “Son, Loma’s go’n go back to New York Wednesday mornin’, and she’s takin’...Will, she’s takin’ poor li’l...” When she got hold of herself, she looked towards the breakfast room door to be sure nobody was coming, and said in a low voice, “Will, the Yankee that Loma’s engaged to, he’s got a name so foreign I cain’t pronounce it. And he’s old! Will, what she came home for, she’s go’n take Campbell Junior back up North with her!”
Campbell Junior had been staying with Mama and Papa for two years, ever since Aunt Loma set out on what she called her career. “Well,” I reminded Mama, “you been sayin’ the boy ought to be with his mother.”
“But he’s not go’n be with her! Will, that man she’s engaged to? He’s go’n pay for Campbell Junior at one of those military schools for rich boys. A boardin’ school that’s a hundred miles or more from New York City!”
“Good Lord! Loma don’t know upside down from sideways! Campbell Junior cain’t even hold his own with the boys here in Cold Sassy. Him in military school? He’s never had a gun in his hands. Cain’t stand thinkin’ bout a bird or rabbit gettin’ shot. Him in military school?”
Mama took it up. “They’ll make fun of him for bein’ fat and they’ll mock his Southern accent, and...and I don’t know what all.” She looked around again at the door. Lowering her voice still more, she said, “If you ast me, he’ll die on the vine up there, or cry his eyes out, one. He’s bright as a penny and makes good marks but...”
“But he don’t know beans bout bein’ a boy.”
“He’s such a little gentleman. They’ll make fun of his manners.”
Campbell Junior wasn’t a little gentleman. He was a little lady. That was the trouble. He’d grown up around too many women. Papa treated him like his own, but Papa was always at the store or at a church meeting.
“Will, stay to supper and talk Lorna out of it,” Mama begged. “Campbell Junior is petrified.”
I knew that anything I said would just make Aunt Lorna more determined. “I’ll try to come back Tuesday, Mama, and talk to him.” I pulled out my pocket watch. “I really cain’t stay long now, but since supper’s ready I’ll eat with y’all.”
Mama splashed some water on her face, blew her nose, told me to bring the sweet potato soufflé, and picked up the platter of fried chicken. “What with the shame of his daddy shootin’ himself dead and all,” she muttered, “that poor boy’s had more’n his share already.”
***
The family gathered, and we hadn’t sat down at the table good before Aunt Lorna said in her put-on Northern accent, “You must have felt like a white knight this afternoon, Will, rescuing that poor maiden from those great big old mean yellow jackets.”
Loma always did know how to get my goat. When she was twelve and I was six, she decided to make me call her Aunt Loma. Mama, Papa, Granny, and even Grandpa had backed her up. They said she was a young lady now and I must show her proper respect.
Ever since I got grown, and especially after she got to be thirty, she’d been trying to make me go back to calling her just Loma. I could feel sorry for any woman worrying about getting old, even Aunt Loma. So I knew how to get back at her. Whenever I felt hateful, I’d stick my face in hers and say, “Ain’t you my Aint Loma?”
That night around the supper table I said, “What I want to know, Aint Loma, is about this rich old Yankee you go’n marry. What’s his name, and just how old is he? And how rich?”
“That’s how rich!” Reaching across the table, Aunt Loma made a fist of her left hand and wagged that big old diamond ring at me.
Campbell Junior interrupted. “Cudn Will, I don’t want to go up North,” he whined, and
bit glumly into a drumstick. I was his last hope. “Tell Mama I ain’t go’n go to no military school.”
“You’ll like it once you get there,” his mother said, not unkindly. “But you might as well quit saying ‘ain’t’ right now. And start cutting up your chicken. New York people don’t say ‘ain’t’ and they don’t eat chicken with their fingers.”
“Not even fried chicken?”
“They don’t have fried chicken. They flour it and brown it and then steam it awhile. That’s what they call fried chicken.”
Campbell Junior stared at her, unbelieving, and slowly lowered the drumstick to his plate.
“Never mind,” Loma said. “Honey, you’re going to have a daddy.”
“I don’t want a daddy. Uncle Hoyt is my daddy.”
Smiling very sweetly at him, Loma said in exaggerated Southern, “Honey chile, you just go’n love Mr. Vitch.”
“Mr. Vitch?” Papa repeated.
“The man I’m going to marry.” She rattled off a twenty-syllable last name that I couldn’t understand then and never could remember later. “Our friends call him Vitch. But when it’s just us, I call him Mr. Rich Vitch. He likes that.”
“Is he a Bolshevik?” asked Papa.
“Don’t be silly, Brother Hoyt. Rich men aren’t Bolsheviks.”
“With a name like that he could be anything,” said Papa.
Campbell Junior just sat there pushing his black-eyed peas into a mound with his fork and a cornstick.
“How,” I asked, “did this man Itch make his money?”
Loma’s face flushed. “I said Vitch. Vitch. I think he made it in the steel business. Or maybe coal. I’m not sure. But he told me he’s doubled his money in the stock market.”
I felt ornery enough to want to rake her a little. “You haven’t said how old he is.”
Loma hedged. “Wasn’t Pa fifty-nine when he married Miss Love? I’d say Mr. Vitch is a little older than that. Maybe two or three years older.”
I started to ask if it was more like five years or ten or maybe twenty, but I chanced to look over at Mama. She couldn’t stand it when conversation got tense at the table—or anywhere else, for that matter.