Lenora nods. It takes some getting used to, the transition from thinking of her mother-in-law as first Mrs. Tademy, and then Miss Amy, and now Mama Amy. Sometimes Lenora still can’t believe she is married. The transition from one family unit to another only a few months prior hasn’t been as traumatic as she feared, not yet anyway, aided no doubt by the fact that she knows Jackson Tademy’s household almost as well as her own. Because the two families are so close, Smiths and Tademys, because her father, Noby, and her new father-in-law, Jackson, are lifelong friends, more like brothers than neighbors, Lenora feels as though she has grown up with the Jackson Tademy farmhouse as her second home. The Tademy children are as much an assumption in her life as her position embedded within the middle of the pack of her twelve brothers and sisters, from L’il Hansom to Martha Geneva, twenty-five years apart.
“You aching to read one of those books?” Amy asks. She comes closer to Lenora.
“No, ma’am,” says Lenora quickly.
“It’s all right if you are,” says Amy.
Lenora shakes her head violently.
“I knows how you feel. Jackson think more of those books than he do some people,” says Amy. “Sometimes I’m tempted to hold them myself, just to see if I can figure out what kind of magic they got, see if it rub off. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Jackson put more store in his private books, his library, than anything else.” She pronounces library carefully, an exotic word become familiar.
Lenora nods.
“Why don’t we say from here on, when we split what need doing around here, you the one carry book duty,” Amy says. “All that being careful and reaching hurt my back. You got more patience for the work than me.”
Lenora has seen Amy embroider tiny stitches on a pillowcase, interweaving the different-colored threads in an intricate pattern, or crochet complicated doilies for the sofa to protect the furniture from head oil. Almost every day, Amy sits motionless at the bayou for hours, waiting for the fish to bite. If there is one thing she doesn’t lack, it is patience.
“Yes, Mama Amy,” Lenora says. “That be fine.”
Amy pulls out her scaling knife and takes the fish bucket to the front porch. “Come help, Lenora,” she says. “I got a full day in the kitchen today. We got a important guest coming.”
Lenora follows and waits. Amy motions her to sit and pushes the bucket toward Lenora with her foot. She passes her the knife. “Must be you curious who coming to pay us a call,” says Amy.
Lenora nods, takes a medium-size catfish from the bucket, and makes the first long cut.
“My son don’t marry no chatterbox,” says Amy, “so I go ahead and tell you. Jackson’s mama gonna come live with us. She been like a mama to me too, took me in when my real mama die. Jackson and me brought up in the same house, in Sam and Polly Tademy house down on Bayou Darrow. You know that, I expect? Sam die when you such a baby, you too little to remember him, but Polly Tademy familiar.”
Lenora nods.
“Well, Polly getting on in years, and now we got the chance to pay back some of what she done for us, we bringing her here to live. Since Jackson add on the second story, and all the boys but Nathan-Green move out, we got more than enough space. That room at the back just right for her.”
Lenora likes Polly Tademy, an old woman who speaks her mind. She concentrates on the task in front of her, and before long, all the morning’s fish are scaled and gutted.
“Mama Amy?”
“Yes?”
“Papa Jackson ever gonna open the colored school again?”
Amy sighs and leans back in her chair. “If I got anything at all to do with it, the answer be yes. But truth told, only so much a wife able to carry out with a Tademy man.”
Lenora married late. Nathan-Green was twenty-eight, and Lenora twenty-one, and compared to the others in their families and in the community, both were leave-behinds in the quest to start their own lives with spouses and children. Lenora Smith and Nathan-Green Tademy each thought of the other as the best they could do. They came together more as a result of proximity and the closeness of the two families than any overwhelming pull toward each other, although they were connected by certain similarities of personality—a reflexive willingness to accept rather than grab or shape whatever life extended to them. Left behind, and with the slightly sour taint of being left over after a lifetime of growing up together, Nathan-Green finally began to court Lenora, taking his time in the easygoing pursuit. Although he showed no signs of interest in any other girl, or of faithlessness, it took Lenora’s panicked announcement that she was expecting his child to bring him—to his credit, not unwillingly—to the marriage table. They called in a preacher and wed within the week, in the front room of Noby Smith’s house, Lenora wearing her Sunday dress. She gathered her scanty belongings, including an extra housedress, a nightgown, a set of undergarments, one for summer and one for winter, her Sunday hat and pair of white gloves, a hairbrush given her by her mother, Emma, on her wedding day, a laying hen donated by Noby to her new farm home, and she moved with her new husband into Jackson Tademy’s house. One day she was nothing more than a middle child, distinguishable only as the daughter of the iceman, a visible and coveted occupation, and the very next day she claimed her position as a married woman.
Much had been made of her sister Gertrude’s marriage at sixteen to Nathan-Green’s brother Andrew six years prior, by everyone’s judgment a golden couple full of plans and ambition, a match that held promise for not only the families involved but the community as well. Lenora faded into the background, found it impossible to be visible alongside Gertrude, rigid and exacting in her view of so many things, and vigilant about defining and keeping everyone in the appropriate place. Lenora’s older sister demanded attention and, as a result, more often than not received her due. It hadn’t been easy growing up in the Smith household in Gertrude’s shadow. Lenora and Nathan-Green had that in common too, an inability to command center stage, growing up in houses where one sibling so clearly outshone all of the others. Lenora was comfortable behind the scenes, never resentful of Gertrude’s domination.
Nathan-Green and Lenora get on well enough. Nathan-Green never mentions her long stretches of silence, or the fact that she so seldom exchanges words with him beyond the basics necessary for everyday living together. She is sure he actually prefers the scarcity of communication and their fixed roles, and a stoic, silent wife who never complains.
Although Nathan-Green signaled his participation in the community by the taking of a wife, he is not particularly proficient in the active upkeep of a marriage, not in the way of her parents, Noby and Emma, or Jackson and Amy, whom Lenora admires for their true fondness for each other, still evident after all these years. Nathan-Green isn’t mean to Lenora, doesn’t beat or berate her as she knows some husbands in The Bottom do their wives. He seems mostly indifferent. She is an assumption in his life, a fulfillment of expectation, the signpost of a milestone encountered and mastered, an examination passed. Lenora performs her wifely duties, and when Nathan-Green ventures out beyond the boundaries of the farm, for a friendly game of dominoes or to a church social, he leaves her home. Her silence makes her complicit, as if she accepts the wisdom and justice of being ignored, and in truth, although she is lonely, her expectations are low in terms of her own happiness. Lenora understands all of this, even so early in their marriage, the same way she knows it will be her children and not her husband who will eventually shape her days and define her domain. The first one stirring now in her belly was quick to catch, and she assumes there will be many more.
There is a part of her that longs for what Jackson and Amy have together. But Lenora is no Amy. She can’t speak up in Amy’s sweet way, she doesn’t inspire the protective qualities to blossom in her husband the way that Amy does, without artifice or guile; and Nathan-Green, with his dreamy demeanor and tendency to accept whatever is dished up, much like Lenora, is very far removed from having the determination, ambition, or cleverness
of his father.
Lenora observes Jackson and Amy at every opportunity, committing their little personal rituals to memory, replaying them in her mind while she darns Nathan-Green’s socks or beats together the cornmeal and cow’s milk for corn bread. At the end of each day, when the sun finally drops and darkness starts to fall, Amy sits on the porch swatting at flies, waiting with what seems to be infinite patience, supper prepared and ready to warm again on the back of the stove. When Jackson returns to the farmhouse, leading the mule or the ox, there is a private moment that passes between the settled married couple, a reassuring quickening and glance as each drinks in the existence of the other. They don’t touch or speak, and before Jackson passes the porch on his way to the shed, Amy pushes up from her rocking chair to go inside and dish up his supper.
Already Lenora’s father-in-law talks about setting Nathan-Green up on a plot of land, a piece of the south field for him to build on and cultivate as his own, as he did with Andrew shortly after he married. Most brides live for the day they can have their own place, when they no longer have to suffer the cramped quarters and constrictive rules implicit in living under a mother-in-law’s roof. But not Lenora. She wishes she could go on living with Jackson and Amy forever.
Chapter
28
1915
T he wakening morning sheds the gray of night, and a crimson lick of sun fires the sky and pushes the temperature to over 80 degrees, a mere hint of what the rest of the day will bring. Horse hooves echo in the silence, a steady clip-clopping breaking the sluggish stillness of morning. Three white children, somewhere between the ages of six and nine, two boys and a girl, burst through the front screen door of a recently whitewashed house not far from the center of Colfax, running pell-mell toward the buckboard wagon outfitted in back like a house on wheels, pulled by a dapple-gray mare.
“Here come the iceman! The iceman here.” The children run around the wagon like puppies, all eagerness and little control.
Noby is in a foul mood, a mood he can’t show his customers or the children of his customers. He makes his movements deliberate and small, both to conserve his strength in the face of the inevitable heat buildup, as well as to keep himself in check. He has been up transferring the heavy blocks of ice from the icehouse since four-thirty this morning, stewing all the while as he planned a strategy for the confrontation with his brother later in the day. Every time he thinks of David, he tastes red at the back of his throat.
It is helpful to see the children almost dance around his wagon, unable to contain their excitement. For this delivery, at least, he can relax a bit. It is the stops when no one is around and he must go into a white person’s house alone to deliver the ice that make him uneasy. It occurs only infrequently, but anything can happen, any accusation made, and it will be his word against a white’s. He knows his customers, has serviced most of them for over four years, and they are used to him, but there is always the possibility they will say they left the quarter for the ice on top of the icebox when they didn’t, or that he never made the delivery at all, or worse. Noby sets the wagon’s wheel brake, throws the iron weight from under the raised seat to the road, and climbs down. He ties the reins to the weight to keep the mare from wandering off and fixes the feedbag over her snout.
He preferred the old arrangement with Fletcher, when Noby only made deliveries and Fletcher himself collected the money, but the inefficiency of recircling the route an extra time bothered both of them, a colossal waste of hours when they both know Noby is capable of delivering and trustworthy in collecting.
As if the day isn’t already like the inside of a boiler, Noby wears a long leather apron that goes from his neck to his boots, and a leather pad over one of his shoulders to bear the heft and chill of the ice block. Noby climbs on the back of the wagon and takes the long, shiny ice pick from his apron. He hacks at the block of ice, chipping away until he has the perfect size to fit through the door of the icebox. Except for the butcher shop and the apothecary, Noby doesn’t rely on the diamond-shaped cardboard ICE cards left out in the windows of each home, specifying how much ice to leave, twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred pounds. Experienced, he knows the exact block size to cut for each of his customers. He pulls out his tongs, snapping each side securely onto the sides of the ice, and hoists the heavy block to his shoulder.
Noby balances his load and kicks a few shards of ice with the toe of his boot to the end of the wagon for the waiting children. They stay out of his way until after he jumps down from the back of the wagon. Noby doesn’t have to say anything. It is understood that as soon as he is in the house, the children can rush to the back of the wagon and pick out the biggest pieces of shaved ice to suck on.
Noby enters through the back, nearest the kitchen and the icebox. The icebox is dingy white and stands up on legs high enough from the floor for the water pan to slide underneath.
The delivery doesn’t take long, but by the time he comes back outside, the three children have moved to the front steps, ice pieces in hand and cooling the insides of their cheeks. They watch Noby with large eyes, content. He puts the tongs back in their holder, takes the feedbag off the horse, pulls the iron weight back in the wagon, and climbs up. A sharp snap of the reins and a few clicking sounds get the old horse moving, jerking the wagon forward, on their way to the next delivery.
Before turning the bend, Noby glances back one last time. The oldest boy is already busy, shoveling the steaming pile of road apples left behind by the mare and storing them to dry, to be used later to spread in the garden for fertilizer.
It has taken years of proving himself, and harassment from others around Colfax who wanted work as steady as ice delivery, but Noby is the one who landed the job. He has a regular route, and Jim Fletcher pays cash money each and every month for a job normally given to a white man. The work requires a strong back and a pleasant disposition, but Noby also has to project that he won’t tolerate disrespect, not from the children who follow him around all morning hoping to steal shavings to pop into their mouths, or older men who would steal a cube of the precious ice if they could get away with it. The constant damp and cold, even on the hottest days of summer, first in the icehouse and then sliding the blocks onto the wagon for the deliveries, have stiffened up Noby’s hands, turning them a strange mottled color somewhere between the caramel brown of his face and a bleached-out color closer to that of the sodden sawdust in which he packs the ice. It is worth the discoloration, and the circulation-deprived pins and needles he often feels in his arms, and the muscle strains of his lower back. He is fortunate to have the job, and he knows it.
Fletcher tried him out as a delivery man in an emergency, years ago, when the regular man didn’t shown up, a victim of the bottle the night before. Before that Noby worked in the icehouse, chipping and sawing, hauling and storing, stacking and packing, always stunningly numb and cold while everyone else roasted outside. In the beginning, Fletcher made his own rounds once a month to collect the money from the people on the route, complaining when a customer couldn’t pay out for an entire month of deliveries. Even when Noby had nothing to do with reconciliation of accounts, he kept his own books, although he didn’t know to call it that. Once he finished reading the weekly Colfax Chronicle, he jotted his records in the margins, maneuvering the close-scrawled figures around the newsprint by date, name, and amount of ice delivered. He subscribed to the newspaper for one dollar a year, a weakness and indulgence made easier by the ongoing demand for the ice work, especially when he became the permanent delivery man. There are sixteen ongoing, good-paying customers, most clustered in Colfax—the apothecary, several commissaries, and a butcher shop—but he delivers as well to private residences as far away as Selma. Most individual families do without ice, cannot afford twenty-five cents for a delivery, but there are a few well off enough to have iceboxes. If they empty the big pan underneath to catch the dripping water twice a day, a single clump of ice, a hundred pounds or so, can last for at least half a week,
sometimes all week long.
Once Fletcher made him the permanent iceman, Noby devised his own scheme for covering the rounds. He starts early in the morning, before the sun can dwindle his merchandise, comes all the way back to the icehouse several times during the day, unlike the previous delivery man, who allowed much of Fletcher’s profits to melt away out of the wagon. Noby divides his delivery territory into grids and takes out only as much ice on any single trip as will keep under the blanket in the beating sun.
Noby goes out on his ice rounds every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Not only does his constant exposure covering the length and breadth of Colfax increase his reputation for dependability, it gives him first access to other odd jobs that come up around the parish and even beyond. Above all, the iceman job is respectable, and he does better than many of his friends and neighbors, but that can’t compensate for the inescapable fact that he no longer owns a single piece of property.
By early afternoon the last of Noby’s ice is gone, the wagon filled with the soggy sawdust that is all that remains at the end of his delivery cycle. Noby swings wide to make his way back home; most of his customers live far from The Bottom.
“Just one more stop before resting, girl,” he says to the mare.
Noby finds it helps to talk to his horse, his daily companion; to work out his moods with the faithful beast. The little mare is tired, and so is he. He points her toward The Bottom, for David’s farm. Her ears prick back and she picks up her pace, knowing they head in the direction of home.
He pulls up to an expanse of land along Bayou Darrow, planted out in corn and cotton, not an extravagant homestead but certainly a respectable one. Noby goes straight for the house, a small four-room cabin with a sleeping porch attached to the back and a raised porch at the front. David’s wife is on the front porch, sitting in a rocker, shelling peas in a bucket on her aproned lap.
“Hello, Miz Susanna,” Noby says to his brother’s wife. He doesn’t get down from the wagon and tries to keep his voice casual. “Mighty hot today.”