“Nobody knows,” she said distinctly.
Ansel wheeled around, fighting off Joan’s and James’s hands, and shouted, “What’s that?”
Mrs. Pike didn’t answer.
“Let’s go,” James said.
“I just want to tell you,” Ansel shouted toward the kitchen, “I know better than you can imagine, Mrs. Pike. You’re just sorry now you weren’t nicer to her, but I know how it feels to really miss someone. I remember—”
Both James and Joan stopped then, looking first at Ansel and then back toward the kitchen. But all they heard was the creaking of a chair, as if Mrs. Pike had changed positions. And that seemed to show Ansel what they had been trying to tell him all along: that Mrs. Pike wasn’t listening right now, and that nothing he could say would do her any good or any harm. So he shrugged and let himself be led the rest of the way out. When Joan stepped back a pace, indicating that he should go first and that she was staying in the house, he nodded good-bye to her gravely.
“One thing I’d like to make clear, Joan,” he said. He was facing her squarely, acting very formal and dignified. “I do know,” he told her.
“All right,” Joan said absentmindedly.
“I remember how it feels. My memory’s excellent.”
“I believe you.”
“Clutters my mind at night, it’s so excellent.” James pulled him gently.
“When I want to sleep, it does. Clutters my mind.”
“All right, Ansel,” James said.
He led him on out to the porch. When he passed Joan she could smell the smoky, outdoors smell of James’s and he bent closer to her and said, “If you need anything, I want you to tell me.”
“I will.”
“And when you can get away, come over and see us.”
“I will.”
She stood in the doorway with her hand on Simon’s shoulder and watched after them—Ansel tall and thin and leaning against James, who was solider and could bear his weight. She heard Ansel say, “Right through my temples it is, James. A sort of spindle of dizzy-feeling, right through my temples.”
James said, “We’ll lie you down. You feel tired?”
“Naw. I was thinking—”
“You sure now,” James said.
“Huh?”
“I want you to tell me.”
“Tell you what?” Ansel asked.
But James didn’t answer that. And Joan, listening with a frown because it was so strange to her, felt suddenly lost and uncertain. She retreated into the parlor again, letting the screen door swing slowly shut behind her. But there was no one to listen to what was bothering her. Only Mrs. Pike, staring at the wall in the kitchen, and Simon beside her with his funny new haircut.
5
“Now, I can have my ideas,” said Missouri, “and you can have yours. Mind what you’re doing there, Miss Joan. First off, I don’t believe in sitting. I have never believed in sitting. Minute a person sits his mind gives way. Will you watch what you’re doing?”
Joan sighed and handed her the next bunch of tobacco leaves. It was Monday afternoon, late in the day but hot, and even here under the shade of the pecan trees she could feel the sweat trickling down between her shoulder blades. Beside her stood three other women—two handing to Mrs. Hall, who was the fastest tobacco-tier in the county, and the other helping Joan do the handing to Missouri. Missouri was huge and black, and every move she made was a wide slow arc, but she could tie nearly as fast as Mrs. Hall. She stood at the end of her rod with her broad bare feet spraddle-toed in the dust, and first she yanked a handful of leaves from her daughter Lily and then from Joan, wrapping each handful to the rod with one sure circling of the twine so that the leaves hung points-down and swinging. If Joan or Lily was too slow with the next hanging she would click her tongue and stand there disgusted, holding the twine taut in her fingers, and when the leaves were ready she would take them with an extra hard yank and bind them so hard that the twine cut into the stems. Now it was Joan who was slow (they were down to the last of this tableload, and she was having trouble finding a full handing of leaves) and Missouri made her clicking sound and shifted her weight to the other foot.
“What it is,” she called down the table to Mrs. Hall, “I bind across the stick. You bind on the same side, and I declare I don’t see how. With Miss Joan on the left, I take her leaves and bind them on the right, and backwards from that with Lily. You follow my meaning?”
“Yes, and I think it’s just as inefficient,” Mrs. Hall said. She stopped her tying to brush a piece of wispy blond hair off her face. “That’s three inches wasted motion every bunch you tie, Missouri.”
“Ha. Fast as I move, who cares about three inches.”
“It adds up. You see if it don’t.”
“Ha.”
She yanked Joan’s bunch from her and lashed it to the rod. That finished up the stick; it looked now like one long chain of hanging green leaves, with the rod itself hidden from sight by the thick stems that stuck up on either side. “You!” she said without looking, and Jimmy Terry raised himself from the side of the barn and set down his Coke bottle. By the time he had ambled over to Missouri she had lifted the stick from its notched stand and stood making faces because of the weight of it, holding it very carefully so as not to crush the leaves. “Watch it, now,” she said, and thrust it at him, and he started back to the drying-barn while she bent to take another rod and lay it in the notches. “I was saying something,” she said. She tied the white twine around the end farthest from her and then snapped it off at a length of five feet or so, while Mrs. Hall stopped tying to watch her. (Mrs. Hall spent every day of every tobacco season trying to figure out how Missouri snapped off her twine ahead of time without measuring it.) “I was talking about sitting,” Missouri said, grandly ignoring Mrs. Hall. “This table is bare, Lord; when they going to bring us more? Now, when you sit, your blood sort of sits along with you. It don’t go rushing around your brain no more. Consequently, it takes that much more time to get rid of some sad idea in your mind. The process is slowed considerable. Whereas if you hurry your blood up some … There is a sizable amount of people could benefit from what I know. I could just go on and on about it. But do you get what I mean up to now?”
“Well, so far,” Joan said.
“Good. Now, what started me on that—well, I do say. Took you long enough.”
She was looking off toward the dirt driveway, where the men were just coming with the mule. Behind the mule was a huge wooden sled piled high with tobacco leaves, and it must have been heavy because the mule was objecting. He had stopped trying and began to amuse himself by blowing through his nose at the flies circling his head, and when Mr. Terry slapped his back he only switched his tail and gave an extra hard wheeze through his nose. Mr. Terry pulled out a bandanna and wiped his face.
“You stop that and bring him here,” Missouri commanded. “We’re out of leaves and getting paid for standing here with our arms folded.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want that,” Mr. Terry said, but he went on wiping his face with his back to the mule. He was an easygoing man; it was a wonder to the whole countryside how he ever got his tobacco in. Behind the sled was James Green, filling in for the day because Mr. Pike was at home with his wife, and he wasn’t doing anything about the mule either. His face was dark from the sun and glistening, and his hair hung in a wet mop over his forehead. When he saw Joan he grinned and waved, but he didn’t look as if he gave a hang whether that mule ever moved, so Missouri heaved a huge sigh and laid down her twine.
“I never,” she said, and circled the long picnic table where the women were standing and headed for the mule. “Jefferson, you no-good, you,” she told the mule, “you going to keep us waiting all day?”
“That’s not Jefferson,” Mr. Terry said. “That’s my brother Kerr’s mule, Man O’War. He’s only a distant cousin to Jefferson.”
“I don’t care who he is.” She reached up and grabbed the mule by one long ear, as if h
e were a little boy, and pulled in the direction of the table. The mule followed, sighing sadly. “In the end, it’s the women that work,” Missouri told him. “Stand still now, you hear?”
“I wish it was Jefferson,” said Mr. Terry. “He was some good mule, old Jefferson.”
“He sick?” Missouri asked.
“Nah. Dead.”
“That’s why this one is doddering around so, then. They know, them mules.”
“Mr. Graves shot him down,” Mr. Terry said. He and James were both at work now, lifting armloads of leaves from the sled and carrying them over to the table. “He says he has the right, because Jefferson kicked his boy.”
“Nah, that ain’t so. Only if Jefferson killed the boy, outright. Takes more than that to kill Sonny Graves. Sonny ain’t dead, is he?”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, you go on and sue then. Go on and do it.”
“Well,” Mr. Terry said. He took the mule and turned him around, and when he slapped him this time the mule headed back toward the fields with the empty sled skittering behind him. “We’ll let Saul take care of him,” Mr. Terry told James. To the women at the table he called, “That was the last load, there. Me and the men are going to cut out and have a beer up at the house.”
“Don’t you give Lem more than one,” Missouri said.
“You know how he gets.”
“Well.”
He headed toward the house, wiping his face again with the bandanna, and James turned and said, “You yell when you’re ready to go, Joan.”
“All right,” Joan said.
When the men had left there was a different feeling in the air, blanker and stiller. The smell of sweat and mule and hot sun had drifted away, and for a minute the women just stood looking after them with their faces expressionless. Then Missouri said, “Well,” and she and Mrs. Hall took their places at their rods again and the others turned to the new heap of leaves on the table.
“That James stays out in the sun much more, he’s going to change races,” Missouri said to Joan.
“I guess he might,” Joan said.
“He’s a good man. Though a bit too quiet—don’t let things show through.”
“No.”
Missouri waited, still without going back to her work. Finally she said, “Just where is he from?”
The others looked up. Joan said, “Oh … from around here he says.”
“Well, so are we all,” said Missouri. “But what town?”
“He doesn’t talk much about it.”
“That’s kind of peculiar,” Mrs. Hall called. “You ever asked him?”
“He’s not wanted or nothing, is he?” said Missouri.
“No.”
“You never know. I’d been married two and a half years before I found out Lem had been married before. Mad? I tell you—”
“If I were you I’d ask him,” Mrs. Hall said.
“Well, I did,” said Joan. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “He told me where he was from but it was just an ordinary town, like Larksville—”
“Then why don’t he say so?”
“Well, you know Ansel,” Joan said.
“There’s an odd one.”
“He doesn’t like for James to talk about it. He’s afraid James’ll send him back.”
“Good thing if he did,” said Mrs. Hall. “You ever been invited to meet their family?”
“Well, no.”
“They had some kind of falling-out,” Missouri’s daughter Lily said. Everyone looked at her, and she said, “Well, that’s what Maisie Hammond said.”
“Maisie Hammond don’t know beans,” Missouri said. “Haven’t you learned not to listen to gossip?”
“If I was you, Joan,” said Mrs. Hall, “I’d just march right up and ask him. I’d say, ‘James, will you take me to meet your family?’ Just like that, I’d ask.”
“No,” Joan said.
They went on watching her, waiting for her to say more, but she didn’t. She concentrated on grouping the leaves together by the stems, a small cluster at a time, so that they lay flat against each other, and then she held them out to Missouri and waited patiently until Missouri gave up and started tying again. Each time Missouri took the leaves from her there was a funny numb feeling in Joan’s fingertips, from the leaves sliding across layers and layers of thick tobacco gum on her skin. Tobacco gum covered her hands and forearms, and it had worked in between the straps of her sandals so that there was black gum on the soles of her feet. Tonight when she walked barefoot through the house she would leave little black tracks behind her. She rubbed the tip of her nose against a clean spot on the back of her hand, and Missouri clicked her tongue at her to tell her to hurry. “I want to get home,” she told Joan, and Joan swooped down on another bunch of leaves and handed them to her. In her sleep she would see tables full of tobacco leaves, stack upon stack of yellow-green leaves with their fine sticky coating of fuzz and their rough surfaces that reminded her of old grained leather on book covers. Whenever she told her aunt about that, about dreaming every night of mules and leaves and drying barns, her aunt thought she was complaining and said, “Nobody asked you to do it. I even told you, I said it right out, I didn’t want you doing it. Secretaries don’t work tobacco, honey.” But then Joan only laughed and said she liked seeing leaves in her sleep. “There’s lots worse I could dream of,” she said, and Mrs. Pike had to agree.
Missouri had started talking again, now that she saw Joan wasn’t going to answer any more questions. “Let’s get back to sitting,” she said. “What led me to speak of it was, your working and all so soon after that, uh, tragedy occurred. Now, honey, don’t you mind Mrs. Pike. I know her, she feels like even James shouldn’t of come. Feels like it shows disrespect. But look at it head-on and—”
“Well, not disrespect,” Mrs. Hall called across. “Not that, exactly. But I see Lou’s point. I wouldn’t have come today, Joan. I don’t mind telling you.”
“What would I do at home?” Joan asked. “Sit?”
“Exactly what led me to my discussion,” said Missouri. “What sitting does, is—”
“You could have stayed around and helped out,” Mrs. Hall said. “Made tea and things. A person needs company at a time like this. And James there, why, he is very close to being Janie’s cousin-in-law, or once removed, or whatever you call it—”
Once again they all looked at Joan, but she went on grouping leaves and they sighed and turned back to the table.
“Anyway,” said Mrs. Hall, “with his own brother on the verge of—”
“Well, this is sort of pointless,” Joan said. “You just think one way, and me another. I don’t think she wants any more than her own husband there, and that’s what she’s got. And Simon too, if she wants him.”
“Ain’t that a funny thing,” Lily said suddenly. “Up to last week, it was Janie Rose she never paid no attention to—”
“You hush,” Missouri said. “This is Miss Joan’s relatives we’re talking about.”
“Well, I know that. Now, won’t it Simon she used to brag on all the time? Won’t it Simon that was spoiled so rotten he—”
“Hush.”
“My feet are killing me,” said Mrs. Hall.
Her second hander, the pale one named Josephine, looked down at Mrs. Hall’s feet and gave one of them a gentle kick with the toe of her sneaker. “With me it’s sneakers or barefoot,” she said. “What you wearing leather shoes for?”
“Because I’m older than you. I have to look decent.” She snapped off her twine and turned to the barn. “Boy!” she called.
“Will you look?” said Missouri. “She’s a stick and a half ahead of me, and you two are poking along. Hurry it up, Lily.”
Lily handed her the next bunch and then stretched, raising her thin black arms an enormous length above her head. To show her disapproval Missouri jerked her string with a twanging sound, and one of Lily’s leaves fell out of its bunch on the stick and landed in the dust. “Oh, Lord,??
? Missouri said. She handed her string to Joan and bent to pick up the leaf, holding the small of her back with one hand. A pink slip strap slid down over her shoulder. “Four hours ago it was four o’clock,” she said when she retrieved the leaf. “Now it’s four thirty. When’ll it ever be five?”
“Won’t help you if it is,” called Mrs. Hall, “so long as you’ve still got leaves on your table.”
“Well, I can’t help it if they loaded the most leaves on me.” She pulled her strap up again and took the end of the twine away from Joan. “I was saying something,” she said. “I have that fidgety feeling, like I wasn’t finished.”
“Sitting,” Joan reminded her.
“Sitting? Oh, sitting. My lord, how long I been on that? Well, anyway.” She snapped her fingers at Lily, who was gazing open-mouthed at a pecan tree, and Lily jumped and handed her another bunch of leaves. “Originally,” Missouri said, “I was getting around to a remedy for Mrs. Pike. Well, now I’ve gotten to it. Mrs. Pike is going to have to start working again.”
“Working?” Lily said. “I didn’t know Mrs. Pike worked.”
“Will you hush?” Missouri switched the twine to her left hand and reached across to slap Lily’s arm. “I don’t know where you spend all your time, Lily,” she said. She took up the twine in her right hand again and snatched Joan’s leaves from her. “Well, it so happens she does work. She’s a seamstress. Teen-iney stitches and a Singer for her machine work. Miss Joan can tell you. Most of it’s altering things, but she makes things from scratch also. Reason you might not know,” she told Lily, “is she does it at home. Works in. A lot of right important people go there. Mrs. Lawrence, the judge’s wife, does—saw her drive up to the door once. Do you see what I’m getting at, Miss Joan?”
“Well, yes,” said Joan. “You’re saying this would snap her out of it. But being a seamstress is like working in a beauty shop—you have to carry on a conversation. And Aunt Lou just isn’t capable right now.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Hall. “Why, she just don’t have the heart to do that. Will you look at you people?”
“I got the answer,” Mrs. Hall’s first hander called. “I don’t see why you are all worrying.” She kept on handing as she spoke, thrusting precisely neat bunches at Mrs. Hall with lightning speed. “It’s like when you’ve been sick,” she said. “They have to walk you around by the elbow a while. Well, Mrs. Pike needs to be walked around too, only in the talking sense. Joan here only works every other day; she can spare the time. She can greet the customers and tell them the news and all, so’s they won’t even notice how quiet Mrs. Pike is. Then by and by Mrs. Pike’ll start to get interested in what Joan is talking about. She’ll begin uncurling and saying a few words herself. That’s why she was such a favorite before, Mrs. Pike was; she could talk up a storm.”