She nodded.
“She’s living up North?”
“I had to get her away,” she said, looking at her glass instead of at me. “She my oldest one,” she said. “Nineteen. The boys around here was after her from the time she was fourteen. Real pretty little girl, Sheena. I knew I had to get her out of here or she’d end up like me.” She ran her fingertip around the rim of the glass and I wasn’t sure what to say. “So I got relatives up there. Cousins and my brother. And they said send her on up. She done real good up there. Going into college,” she said proudly. “Got a scholarship. Not a full one, but pretty good. I miss her, though. I miss her so bad.”
“I bet you do,” I said.
“My cousins up there, they always after me, ‘Lita,’ they say, ‘why you stayin’ down in that pit Grace County when you could be up here a free woman? No KKK up here. No Jim Crow.’”
“Why do you?” I asked.
She leaned toward me. “Roots,” she said. “I got me some deep roots here. Right here on this land.”
“Mr. Gardiner told me how far back your family goes.”
“Oh yes, and I can’t leave, see? My brother could. He don’t care. But I can’t leave my folks buried in the cemetery here. I can’t leave what they broke their backs for. So I stay.”
“I understand,” I said. I reached for my purse. “Listen, I have something I thought you might like. You don’t need to take them, of course, but I just thought…” I pulled out a little package wrapped in tissue paper and unwrapped it to show her the five small frames I’d picked up at Woolworth’s. “When I saw the pictures of your children on the wall, I wondered if you might like to frame them.” She stared at the frames and I thought Charlotte might have been right about asking her first if she’d like them. Maybe I was insulting her in a way I couldn’t understand. But she looked up at me. “That’s right nice of you,” she said. “Do you think they’ll fit okay?”
“I do,” I said. “But I didn’t see a picture of Rodney. I brought the extra frame for when you get one of him.”
“I got one, but it’s a different size. Let’s see if they fit.”
She got to her feet and we walked into the living room. She pulled the picture of Eli from the wall and carefully peeled the tape from the corner while I opened the back of the frame. She slipped the picture on top of the glass and turned it over. Perfect fit. I watched the smile spread across her face. Together, we framed the other three photos and then she brought out a picture of Rodney sitting on some steps. We had to cut it down a bit to fit, and only when we’d finished framing it, did I recognize the steps as the ones leading up to the Gardiners’ front porch.
“I’ll get Eli to nail them up tonight.” Then she smiled at me. “You all right,” she said. “You real different from Miz Werkman.”
I didn’t know if that was good or bad or what to say.
“She’s smart and full of business,” she said, “and she sure knows how to get things done. You, though.” She nodded. “You a real human being.”
16
Ivy
I was nervous all day Monday while I looped the tobacco leaves over the sticks, waiting for Mr. Gardiner to come tell me I couldn’t work for him no more and to leave his son alone. I worked faster than ever before and the handers was having trouble keeping up with me. I wanted to do everything perfect. I wished I could talk to Henry Allen. I still didn’t know what happened to him after I ran home the night of the fire.
Every once in a while, I looked over at the south barn, which was pretty much gone now. One time when I looked, I saw a lady walking toward us on the path. I kept up with my looping, trying to think where I seen her before and remembered she was that social worker that came with Mrs. Werkman last week. Did Mr. Gardiner tell her about me and Henry Allen? Did he tell her to take me away someplace, like what happened to my mama?
“You messin’ up,” Daisy, the neighbor girl handing me the leaves, said. She pointed to the sloppy loop I’d just made, tobacco stems sticking up too high above the stick.
“Sorry.” I did that loop over, paying close attention to my hands and pretending I didn’t see the lady, but I knew she was coming, and she was coming for me.
Sure enough, I saw her shoes on the dirt next to where I stood. She wore clear galoshes over them saddle shoes some of the girls wore at school.
“Hi, Ivy,” she said.
I looked up, pretending I was surprised. “Hi,” I said, then looked right quick back at my flying fingers. I wanted to escape. Drop what I was doing and run and run and run.
“Hello, Mary Ella,” she said to my sister, who was handing leaves to another looper. Mary Ella looked clear through the lady like she wasn’t there. Sometimes I was jealous of how Mary Ella could get away with being so rude.
The lady turned back to me. “I’d like to speak to you for a little bit, Ivy,” she said.
“I got to work,” I said.
“Mr. Gardiner said it’s fine for me to take you away for an hour. Just an hour. He said he’ll still pay you for the time.”
Now I really didn’t believe a word coming out of her mouth. “Why would he pay me for not working?”
“Because he thinks it’s important that we have a chat. So, can someone take over what you’re doing here and you come with me?”
“I don’t want to go nowhere,” I said, looping another bunch of leaves.
“Anywhere you like,” she said. “You can take me to your favorite place.”
“I can loop for you,” Daisy said.
“I don’t have to go in your car?” I asked.
“No, no,” she said. “Just … somewhere around here where we can talk. I only want to get to know you better.”
I thought of the crick. Definitely my favorite place, but that belonged to me and Henry Allen. We was too far from it anyways.
“Okay,” I said. I handed the string to Daisy and walked back up the path with the lady. I couldn’t remember her name.
She was a mind reader. “I know we only met briefly the other day,” she said as we walked, “so you probably don’t remember my name. It’s Mrs. Forrester. And my, it’s hot!” She fanned her face with her hand. Here on the path through the field, right out in the sun, it was hot as blue blazes, but I was sweating from more than the heat, for sure. I didn’t dare steal a look at Henry Allen when we passed what was left of the south barn.
“When did this happen?” She pointed toward the barn.
“Don’t rightly know,” I muttered, keeping my eyes on the path. I had the feeling she knew exactly when it happened and why and was trying to trick me somehow.
“So,” she said, “where’s your favorite place to sit and talk?”
“I ain’t … I don’t have no favorite place to talk. We don’t do much sitting and talking around here.”
She laughed like that was funny. “Well, today we will. I have a big thermos of lemonade in my car. Let’s get that and take it someplace shady.”
I saw her car up on the lane. I pictured her pushing me into it when she opened the door to get the thermos that probably wasn’t even there. Then she’d drive me to the place where my mama was. The place they locked people up. I was sure Mr. Gardiner could make that happen.
“I don’t need no lemonade,” I said. We was almost to the car and I started hanging back.
“No?” She stopped walking. “Well, that’s fine. Where would you like to go?”
There was only one shady spot nearby, and that was under the tin roof on the side of the empty Christmas barn. I pointed toward it and we walked over there, neither of us saying a thing. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she knew.
“This is perfect!” she said when we reached the shade. She sat down on the ground, leaning against the barn, her legs folded under her skirt. I sat down, too, but not close enough that she could grab me.
“Mrs. Werkman broke her leg,” she said. “She and I’d been hoping we could visit you and your family a few more times togethe
r, but she won’t be coming back to work for a while, so I’m trying to get to know people better on my own. That’s why I wanted to talk to you today.”
“Did you talk to Nonnie, too?”
“No, I don’t think I’ll have time to get to your house this afternoon. So for now, it’s just you and me.”
“Did you talk to Mr. Gardiner?” I asked.
“I did.”
“What did he say?” I needed to know. Was this about me and Henry Allen or wasn’t it?
She shook her head. “Not much. He told me how long your family’s lived in your house. How you go way back. He told me he and your father were best friends when they were little boys.”
My heartbeat was starting to settle down. “I suppose they was,” I said.
She tipped her head like she was real curious. “What do you remember about your father and mother?” she asked. “I know you were quite small—just five, right?—when you … when your father died. Do you remember him?”
Nobody ever asked me that question. I asked Nonnie about him sometimes, but she’d just say he’s gone, no point in talking about it, and her eyes would get watery. I had to remind myself he was my daddy but he was also her son and the hurt of talking about him was too much for her, so I kept my questions to myself. Mary Ella said she saw the accident and she saw his spirit fly into the sky like an angel and that’s all she’d say, which was like saying nothing at all.
I was quiet so long, Mrs. Forrester leaned toward me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it too hard to talk about?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just that I ain’t never talked about it. Hard to know what to say.”
“Do you have any memories of him?”
I remembered Henry Allen talking about Daddy not so long ago. “He’d take us out in the pasture and play ball with us,” I said.
“Really? You and Mary Ella?”
“Everybody,” I said. “Me, Mary Ella, Henry Allen—that’s Mr. Gardiner’s son—and Eli, Devil, Avery, Sheena. Some other kids from … just around. I don’t remember who. But lots of them. I think they all liked him because he liked to play as much as we did.” I felt proud of my father, describing him like this. I could picture him. Throwing the ball. Swinging us around by our arms till we was dizzy, every kid begging for the next ride. I remembered him whupping Mary Ella once for breaking one of our windows, but I didn’t remember him ever hitting me. “When it rained, he played cards with us in the house, or once on the porch under the roof.” I’d forgotten that, sitting on the porch floor with him, dry and happy, listening to the rain that couldn’t touch us. My throat started to close up. I didn’t think I could talk. I looked down at the ground, hoping she couldn’t tell.
“It hurts to think about losing someone you love very much,” she said, “and it sounds like you really loved him.”
I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes. “Don’t do no good to remember things like this,” I said. “That’s what Nonnie says and maybe she’s right.” I looked at her. “What good’s it do?” I asked.
“Well, I think when we lose somebody, maybe we owe it to that person to remember them. To hold on to the good memories.”
I thought about that for a minute and liked what she said. Nobody wanted to be forgotten.
“My mama … it was like she wasn’t there, really. She was always sickly. And then she did such a shameful thing and they took her away for good. Do you know about that? What our mama did?”
“Tell me,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I could. “You said hold on to the good memories about a person, but what if there ain’t … aren’t any?”
She looked away from me like she wasn’t sure of the answer herself. “You don’t have any good memories of your mother?” she asked.
I thought and thought. “I can’t remember a single one,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and that made me want to cry again.
“I’ll tell you the thing she did, though,” I said. “The shameful thing. Mrs. Gardiner? Mr. Gardiner’s wife? She works in the store. And my mama went in there with a knife out of our kitchen and walked right up to Mrs. Gardiner and cut her cheek. Cut it bad. That’s why they took her away. I guess she was a terrible shameful person.”
“Do you know what ‘mental illness’ means, Ivy?”
“Crazy?”
“Crazy is kind of a … mean word for it. A word like that blames a person for being mentally ill. But your mother was mentally ill. That was something she couldn’t help, any more than you can help having blue eyes. Her mental illness made her dangerous, though, so they had to take her away to be sure she couldn’t hurt anyone else, but also to put her someplace where she could be taken care of.”
“We’re not allowed to see her.”
“Is that something you wish you could do?”
I shook my head. I was afraid of my mama. Afraid of how I’d feel around her. “I don’t know her,” I said. “Is that terrible, that I don’t want to see my own mama?”
She looked out over the field of tobacco in front of us, the green barn in the distance. “Feelings are never right or wrong,” she said after a moment. “They just are.”
I thought of how much I loved Henry Allen. It wasn’t wrong, no matter what Mr. Gardiner might think about it.
“I know what happened with William,” she said. “With Mary Ella putting the wrong lotion on him.”
“She almost kilt him.”
“I doubt that would have happened, though I guess it was really painful for him.”
“He’s still hurting from it. She feels right bad, but that don’t change what happened. Nurse Ann needs to come out a lot more to check on Baby William. Nonnie, too, because she don’t check her sugar right.”
“So you’d like Nurse Ann to check on Nonnie and William more often.”
“Yes. But not me,” I added quickly. The last thing I needed was to have Nurse Ann badgering me more about doing it.
“Why not you?”
I couldn’t look right at her, talking about this. I looked toward the green barn, but could only see the back of it. I couldn’t see none of the workers. “She brung me some things to use when you’re … you know, doing it with a boy.” I made little circles in the dirt on the ground with my fingertip, looking at them instead of her. “Mary Ella’s the one that needs them things. She stole some of what Nurse Ann brung me, so it’s her she should be talking to. I don’t know why she’s worried about me and not Mary Ella.”
“Who is Mary Ella’s boyfriend?” she asked.
“Who isn’t?” I said. “You seen her. They’re all after her. All the boys for miles and miles around. She’s like a barn cat in heat and they all know it.”
“Do you and Mary Ella get along?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. She’s my sister,” I said, like that explained everything. “I used to wish I looked like her. Awful pretty. But if that prettiness comes with being stupid, I don’t want it.” I looked up at her. “I worry about her,” I said. “She can’t take care of herself good. You going to have this talk with her, too?”
“I may.”
“She won’t answer nothing. She’s like one of them books with a lock and key.”
“Like a diary, huh?”
“Yes, ma’am. I never actually seen one of those.”
“Ivy…” She licked her lips. “You’re very pretty, too.”
“I am not.” I smiled and knew I was turning red like a fool.
“Yes you are. Not the way Mary Ella is. Very few girls are that beautiful. But you have a prettiness that’s all your own and that I’m sure boys are attracted to. Do you have a boyfriend?”
Did Mr. Gardiner tell her? Here I’d let her talk to me about all these other things and forgot I was supposed to be worried about him. “No,” I said.
She knotted her hands together and was rubbing them. “I want to be sure you’re able to finish school,” she said. “Not have to quit because of having a baby, like Mary Ella.
”
“I ain’t gonna have no baby,” I said. “You don’t got to worry about that.”
She nodded. “That’s good. I was concerned because one of your neighbors said she’s seen you out very late at night and she’s worried—”
“Who?” I asked. Was she talking about Mrs. Gardiner and the fire or somebody else?
“It doesn’t matter. The important thing to me is that you’re safe and not … getting in trouble.”
“I’m all right, ma’am,” I said. “You need to spend your worries on my sister, like I said. And you can tell that to Nurse Ann, too.”
“Okay,” she said. She changed her legs under her from one side to the other. “What concrete things do you need now? Your family?”
“Concrete?” What was she talking about? I thought of the cement stoop on our house.
“Things,” she said. “More clothing? Any furniture?”
“A window fan!” I said. I’d been asking for one of them two summers in a row now.
Mrs. Forrester smiled. “I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “Charlotte—Mrs. Werkman—didn’t seem to think so, but I promise I’ll try.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you have any concerns about me taking over from Mrs. Werkman?” she asked.
Yes, I thought, I had plenty. “She was sort of like a magician,” I said. “We’d tell her the things we needed and she’d get them for us, like magic … except the window fan.” I made dots around the circle I drew in the dirt. “She knew Nonnie had sugar problems before anybody else knew it,” I said. “She even knew Mary Ella had a bad appendix before she felt sick. You can die if you got a busted appendix, so maybe Mrs. Werkman saved her life.”
“You’ll miss her,” she said.
I nodded, but I was thinking how, in all the time I knew Mrs. Werkman, she never sat with me alone in the shade and asked me all these questions like I was a grown-up. Like what I thought mattered.
She never asked me one single question about my daddy.
17
Jane