Morning Glory (14 page)

 
"You know,"—Eleanor smiled at Will—"I sure like the sound of the hammer and saw around the place again."

 
"And I like the smell of spice cake bakin' while I work."

 
The following day they painted the entire porch—floor in brick red, and posts in white.

 
At the "New Porch Party" she served gingerbread and whipped cream. He ate enough for two men and she loved watching him. He put away three pieces, then rubbed his stomach and sighed. "That was mighty good gingerbread, ma'am." He never failed to show appreciation, though never wordily. "Fine dinner, ma'am," or "Much obliged for supper, ma'am." But his thanks made her efforts seem worthwhile and filled her with a sense of accomplishment she'd never known before.

 
He loved his sweets and couldn't seem to get enough of them. One day when she hadn't fixed dessert he looked let-down, but made no remarks. An hour after the
noon
meal she found a bucket of ripe quince sitting on the porch step.

 
The pie—she'd forgotten. She smiled at his reminder and glanced across the yard. He was nowhere to be seen as she picked up the bucket and headed inside and began to mix up a piecrust.

 
For Will Parker those first couple of weeks at Eleanor Dinsmore's place were unadulterated heaven. The work—why, hell—the work was a privilege, the idea that he could choose what he wanted to do each day. He could cut wood, patch porch floors, clean barns or wash mules. Anything he chose, and nobody said, "Boy, you supposed to be here? Boy, who tol' you to do that?" Madam was a pleasurable animal, reminded him of the days when he'd done wrangling and had had a horse of his own. He flat liked everything about Madam, from the hairs on her lumpy nose to her long, curved eyelashes. And at night now, he brought her into the barn and made his own bed beside her in one of the box stalls that were cleaned and smelled of sweet grass.

 
Then came morning, every one better than the last. Morning and Donald Wade trailing along, providing company and doting on every word Will said. The boy was turning out to be a real surprise. Some of the things that kid came up with! One day when he was holding the hammer for Will while Will stretched wire around the chicken pen, he stared at an orange hen and asked pensively, "Hey, Will, how come chickens ain't got lips?" Another day he and Will were digging through a bunch of junk, searching for hinges in a dark tool shed when a suspicious odor began tainting the air around them. Donald Wade straightened abruptly and said, "Oh-oh! One of us failed, didn't we?"

But Donald Wade was more than merely amusing. He was curious, bright, and worshiped the shadow Will cast. Will's little sidekick, following everywhere—"I'll help, Will!"—getting his head in the way, standing on the screwdriver, dropping the nails in the grass. But Will wouldn't have changed a minute of it. He found he liked teaching the boy. He learned how by watching Eleanor. Only Will taught different things. Men's things. The names of the tools, the proper way to hold them, how to put a rivet through leather, how to brace a screen door and make it stronger, how to trim a mule's hoof.

 
The work and Donald Wade were only part of what made his days blissful. The food—God, the food. All he had to do was walk up to the house and take it, cut a piece of spice cake from a pan or butter a bun. What he liked best was taking something sweet outside and eating it as he ambled back toward some half-finished project of his choice. Quince pie—damn, but that woman could make quince pie, could make anything, actually. But she had quince pie down to an art.

 
He was gaining weight. Already the waistband on his own jeans was tight, and it felt good to work in Glendon Dinsmore's roomy overalls. Odd, how she volunteered anything at all of her husband's without seeming to resent Will's using it—toothbrush, razor, clothes, even dropping the hems of the pants to accommodate Will's longer legs.

 
But his gratitude was extended for far more than creature comforts. She'd offered him trust, had given him pride again, and enthusiasm at the break of each new day. She'd shared her children who'd brought a new dimension of happiness into his life. She'd brought back his smile.

 
There was nothing he couldn't accomplish. Nothing he wouldn't try. He wanted to do it all at once.

 
As the days passed, the improvements he'd made began tallying up. The yard looked better, and the back porch. The eggs were easy to find since the hens were confined to the hen house and, slowly but surely, the woodpile was changing contours. As the place grew neater, so did Eleanor Dinsmore. She wore shoes and anklets now, and a clean apron and dress every morning with a bright hair ribbon to match. She washed her hair twice a week, and he'd been right about it. Clean, it took on a honey glow.

 
Sometimes when they'd meet in the kitchen, he'd look at her a second time and think,
You look pretty this morning, Mrs. Dinsmore
. But he could never say it, lest she think he was after something more than creature comforts. Truth to tell, it had been a long, long time, but always in the back of his mind lingered the fact that he'd spent time in prison, and what for. Because of it, he kept a careful distance.

 
Besides, he had a lot more to do before he'd proved he was worth keeping. He wanted to finish the plastering, give the house a coat of paint, improve the road, get rid of the junk cars, make the orchard produce again, and the bees ... The list seemed endless. But Will soon realized he didn't know how to do all that.

 
"Has Whitney got a library?" he asked one day in early September.

 
Eleanor glanced up from the collar she was turning. "In the town hall. Why?"

 
"I need to learn about apples and bees."

 
Will sensed her defiance even before she spoke.

 
"Bees?"

 
He fixed his eyes on her and let them speak for him. He'd learned by now it was the best way to deal with her when they disagreed.

 
"You know about libraries—how to use 'em, I mean?"

 
"In prison I read all I could. They had a library there."

 
"Oh." It was one of the rare times he'd mentioned prison, but he didn't elaborate. Instead, he went on questioning. "Did your husband have one of those veiled hats, and things to tend bees with?" He didn't know a lot, but he knew he'd need certain equipment.

 
"Somewhere."

 
"Think you could look around for me? See if you can find 'em?"

 
Fear flashed through her, followed quickly by obstinacy. "I don't want you messin' with those bees."

 
"I won't mess with 'em till I know what I'm doing."

 
"No!"

 
He didn't want to argue with her, and he understood her fear of the bees. But it made no sense to let the hives sit empty when honey could bring in cold, hard cash. The best way to soften her might be by being soft himself.

 
"I'd appreciate it if you'd look for them," he told her kindly, then pushed back from the dinner table and reached for his hat. "I'll be walkin' into town this afternoon to the library. If you'd like I can take whatever eggs you got and try to sell them there."

 
He took a bucket of warm water and the shaving gear down to the barn and came back half an hour later all spiffed up in his own freshly laundered jeans and shirt. When they met in the kitchen, her mouth still looked stubborn.

 
"I'm leaving now. How about those eggs?"

 
She refused to speak to him, but thumbed at the five dozen eggs sitting on the porch in a slatted wooden crate.

 
They were going to be heavy, but let him carry them, she thought stubbornly. If he wanted to go sellin' eggs to the creeps in town, and learning about bees, and getting all money-hungry, let him carry them!

 
She pretended not to watch him heft the crate, but her curiosity was aroused when he set it back down and disappeared around the back of the house. A minute later he returned pulling Donald Wade's wooden wagon. He loaded the egg crate on board only to discover the handle was too short for his tall frame. She watched, gratified when with his first steps his heels hooked on the front of the wagon. Five minutes later—still stubbornly silent—she watched him pull the wagon down the road by a length of stiff wire twisted to the handle.

 
Go on, then! Run to town and listen to every word they say! And come back with coins jingling in your pocket! And read up on bees and apples and anything else you want! But don't expect me to make it easy on you!

* * *

Gladys Beasley sat behind a pulpit-shaped desk, tamping the tops of the library cards in their recessed bin. They were already flat as a stove lid, but she tamped them anyway. And aligned the rubber stamp with the seam in the varnished wood. And centered her ink pen on its concave rest. And adjusted her nameplate—Gladys Beasley, Head Librarian—on the high desk ledge. And picked up a stack of magazines and centered her chair in the kneehole. Fussily. Unnecessarily.

 
Order was the greatest force in Gladys Beasley's life. Order and regimentation. She had run the Carnegie Municipal Library of Whitney, Georgia, for forty-one years, ever since Mr. Carnegie himself bad made its erection possible with an endowment to the town. Miss Beasley had ordered the initial tides even before the shelves themselves were installed, and had been working in the hallowed building ever since. During those forty-one years she had sent more than one feckless assistant borne in tears over a failure to align the spine of a book with the edge of a shelf.

 
She walked like a Hessian soldier, in brisk, no-nonsense steps on practical, black Cuban-heeled oxfords to which the shoemaker had added a special rubber heel which buffered her footfalls on the hardwood floors of her domain. If there was one thing that ired Gladys worse than slipshod shelving, it was cleats! Anyone who wore them in
her
library and expected to be allowed inside again had better choose different shoes next time!

 
She launched herself toward the magazine rack, imposing breasts carried like heavy artillery, her trunk held erect by the most expensive elastic and coutil girdle the Sears Roebuck catalogue had to offer—the one tactfully recommended for those "with excess flesh at the diaphragm." Her jersey dress—white squiggles on a background the color of something already digested—hung straight as a stovepipe from her bulbous hips to her club-shaped calves and made not so much as a rustle when she moved.

 
She replaced three
Saturday Evening Post
magazines, tamped the stack, aligned it with the edge of the shelf and marched along the row of tall fanlight windows, checking the wooden ribbing between the panes to be sure Levander Sprague, the custodian, hadn't shirked. Levander was getting old. His eyesight wasn't what it used to be, and lately she'd had to upbraid him for his careless dusting. Satisfied today, however, she returned to her duties at the central desk, located smack in front of double maple doors—closed—that led to wide interior steps at the bottom of which were the main doors of the building.

 
Overdue notices—bah!—there should be no such thing. Anyone who couldn't return a book on time should simply be disallowed the privilege of using the library again. That would put an end to the need for overdue notices, but quick. Gladys's mouth was puckered so tightly it all but disappeared as she penned addresses On the penny postcards.

 
She heard footfalls mounting the interior steps. A brass knob turned and a stranger stepped in, a tall, spare man dressed like a cowboy. He paused, letting his eyes scan the room, the desk, and her, then silently nodded and tipped his hat.

 
Gladys's prim mouth relaxed as she returned the nod. The genteel art of hat doffing had become nearly obsolete—what was the world coming to?

 
He took a long time perusing the place before moving. When he did, there were no cleats. He went directly, quietly, to the card catalogue, slid out the B's, flipped through the cards and studied them for some time. He closed the drawer soundlessly, then scanned the sunlit room before moving between the oak tables to nonfiction. There were library patrons who, ill at ease when alone in the vast room with Miss Beasley, found it necessary to whistle softly through their teeth while scanning the shelves. He didn't. He selected a book from the 600,s—Practical Science—moved on to select another and brought them straight to the checkout desk.

 
"Good afternoon," Gladys greeted in a discreet whisper.

 
"Afternoon, ma'am." Will touched his hat brim and followed her lead, speaking quietly.

 
"I see you found what you were looking for."

 
"Yes, ma'am. I'd like to check these out."

 
"Do you have a card?"

 
"No, ma'am, but I'd like to get one."

 
She moved with military precision, yanking a drawer open, finding a blank card, snapping it on the desktop off the edge of a tidily trimmed fingernail. The nail was virgin, Will was sure, never stained by polish. She closed the drawer with her girded torso, all the while holding her lips as if they were the mounting for a five-karat diamond. When she moved, her head snapped left and right, fanning the air with a smell resembling carnations and cloves. The light from one of the big windows glanced off her rimless glasses and caught the rows of uniform silver-blue ringlets between which the warp and woof of her skull shone pink. She dipped a pen in ink, then held it poised above the card.