One More River (11 page)

The maid stood behind them at the sink as she washed the breakfast dishes.

Yes, Miss Beadie. I’m hearin’ it all.

Then imagine, Sara Kate, the divine phrases she must have used to soften the blow! A good girl would have to, wouldn’t she? Or die of shame and guilt along the road. . . .

Mickey Moe did not interrupt. He needed a place for Laura Anne to stay the night while he organized their trip. He thought maybe if Mama had her fill of insults and insinuations, she’d calm down, and he could plead their case. But she went on and on.

. . .There’s other explanations, of course, Mama said when she ran out of ways to imply that Laura Anne was a common slut. She could be a madwoman. What do you think, Sara Kate? She seem hatter mad to you?

Well, now, I don’t know, as . . .

Don’t bother finishing if you aren’t going to agree. I wasn’t really asking a question. I was adding it all up aloud and invoking your name the way I would use chalk on a board. And my tally looks as if two and two are not three as you were about to claim but four. The poor child very definitely has a certain glint in her eye. . . .

At last, as an act of kindness or because her head was starting to hurt from listening to Beadie’s harangue or even because she felt insulted herself, Sara Kate turned around. In full view of Mickey Moe, who was facing her, but not visible to Beadie Sassaport Levy, who was not, she raised a dish of very fine china high in the air and brought it down hard against the countertop in a loud, satisfying smash. The sound of pieces of porcelain hitting the floor effectively ended all speech-making.

Good gracious, girl, Beadie said. Is this why my store of china keeps dwindlin’?

I don’t know how that happened, Miss Beadie. It slipped outta my hand like a haint pushed it from above out of my grasp.

She crouched on the floor gathering shards.

Haints. My, oh my, now I’ve got to listen to haint stories the rest of the day, I suppose. Wait, girl. Don’t you go throwin’ that away, lay those pieces here, and we’ll see if we can’t glue that thing.

Mickey Moe took their preoccupation as an avenue of escape. He tippy-toed upstairs and rapped twice on Eudora Jean’s bedroom door. His sister answered promptly. With a finger held up to her closed lips, she let him in with a wink and a nod, leaving him alone with Laura Anne as she shut the door behind her to stand watch without. The lovers kissed long and hard, then pulled away from each other.

Sweetheart, I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, Mickey Moe began, but this was not a wise idea, was it? I mean, the whole purpose of my quest is to find a way to make my family wholesome in your family’s eyes. Even if I can talk Mama into harboring you here—which is doubtful no matter how kindly you thought she treated you this morning—how will your taking off from home to travel with me, unmarried as we are, accomplish that goal? And I don’t know where exactly my daddy’s trail will take me. Might be a host of locales dangerous for you to go. Look. I’m going to call your parents straightaway and tell them you’re on your way home. Tell them I was shocked to find you at my door and that I’m sending you home. Yes, that would do. Make me look the hero to them, I’m sure.

While he spoke, Laura Anne’s face fell. Her eyes welled up. She looked about to cry when suddenly she knit her brow and raised her chin.

Mickey Moe, do you have any idea what it took for me to follow you here? The struggle I went through, knowing I was closin’ a door on everything I’ve ever been? Mama’s good daughter, the responsible employee, the darlin’ of my daddy’s eye. Well, it was hard. Very hard. But I figured in the end that I would rather be a pariah in Greenville for the rest of my life than spend the same span of years the puppet of people who thought they knew my own heart better than I did myself, people who felt they could tell me where I could go, what I could do, and who I could marry. Haven’t you followed the news at all? Women all over are startin’ to stand up for themselves. Right next to the Negroes and the Chinese. My coming here puts me at the vanguard of a great and powerful movement that will change the world. If I have a pure desire, I ain’t lettin’ anybody else tell me how to satisfy it. Includin’ you. I am not behavin’ on simple romantic impulse, Mickey. This was a decision. Fully thought out and accounted for. I never expected your family to put me up or anything. I’m not a child. I’ve been working, you know, for a salary plus commission. I have my savings. You can boot me out of this house if you want, but I’ll find someplace to stay nearby. I’ll get a job around here if I have to. All I know is, I am at your side for the duration. Don’t you even think of gettin’ rid of me. You just try, and I’ll hound you from one end of the Mississippi to t’other through mud, bramble, concrete, and swamp. I swear this on my very soul.

Her passion rocked Mickey Moe. He felt a surge of desire that started at his toes and went all the way up to his hairline. He groaned and gathered her in his arms again. They petted at each other as much as they dared with his sister just outside. Eudora Jean heard everything, of course. She was duly impressed. On that day at that moment, Eudora Jean Levy began to question her life. Perhaps it was a little late, as the woman was thirty years of age, locked in a culture where youth and beauty determined a girl’s worth until she married, when charm, charitable instinct, and accomplishment at domestic duties confirmed her status. By the time Eudora Jean’s liberation was fulfilled, the least anyone might say about her was that she made up for lost time. With a vengeance. And in a manner not even the boldly loving Laura Anne Needleman would consider. Some people said, that’s her daddy’s blood comin’ out. Of course, by that time, everyone guessed just how common that blood was.

Mickey Moe realized that Laura Anne frightened him a little. Here was a woman outside his experience, a woman of vision with the resolve to achieve things. He had no idea what those things were and that was the scary part. But her passion filled up his heart, and he wanted more than anything to give her whatever she needed to be whomever she chose.

This was a revelation. He knew the Negroes and other minorities were clamoring for rights they might have trouble handling. He was one of those boys who thought change should come for the colored folk. The way the men got blamed for every little thing that went missing or broke, the way their women had to be careful not to catch the wrong white man’s eye was downright sinful, but the Negroes could get themselves burned up in the process of everybody’s adjustment if change came too quickly. There were boys about, those Hicks in the southeast part of town for example, and their cousins, the Turners, who cheered like apes on a picnic whenever ugly news hit the papers or the TV about civil rights organizers gone missing or some poor old Negro found floatin’ in the river whupped and naked. By contrast, he hadn’t heard a whisper about any movement afoot to free women of their bonds. He wasn’t aware they had any. Womanhood looked to him like a free ride, at least until the babies came or there was a household to run. He knew plenty of females who worked alongside their men in shops and pasture, worked hard, too, and were good at what they did. To his mind, they were good at what they did because the responsibility and the worry didn’t lay heavy on their shoulders, which freed up their energies to help them focus on the task at hand. Now, there were obviously exceptions. His mama, for example, learned as a young widow to take charge, because her daddy was feeble, her brothers mostly off at war. There was no choice for her. She learned to grip her domain in a stranglehold, so you either did what Mama wanted or you choked to death. He’d escaped her fearsome ways in large part because he was the man of the house, but not his sisters. After schooling them in every nuance of domestic management, she’d picked out husbands for Sophie and Rachel Marie, threw the genders together, and dared them to defy her wisdom on the subject. They didn’t, although they did move out-of-state as soon as they could convince their husbands to do so and were seen only on the most important holidays. She chose to keep Eudora Jean to home as her companion, and look how that turned out. Never was a daughter so much under her mama’s thumb, thought Mickey Moe. That sister of mine is the complete opposite of my darlin’ Laura Anne, who can be intimidatin’, but who thrills me no end. She’s my belle, he thought as he nuzzled her neck, my very own belle. He decided right there while being stroked in a most pleasurable manner by the lady in question that his future bride could liberate herself to the limits of her imagination and he would not care, which was a provident decision.

As luck would have it, Beadie had her canasta club that afternoon. No event, not even the appearance on her doorstep of her baby boy’s deranged paramour, could forestall canasta club. Better luck, it was not her week to host the game. Aunt Lucille picked her up at twelve-thirty o’clock, so she was out of the house not long after Laura Anne went for her lie-down. Before she left, she instructed her daughter to keep an eye on the couple during her absence to preserve the household’s honor.

Not five minutes later, Eudora Jean found an urgent reason to leave, taking the maid with her. It was her first overt act of defiance in thirty years, and it felt good. She sped off in Mama’s car with Sara Kate installed in the front seat beside her. There was a smile on her face as broad as a moonbeam when that old man is at full on a clear night. She went to the hardware store and bought a plunger in case she needed proof of emergency. Since they’d need to feed Laura Anne later on, they drove next to the butcher where she obtained an extra cut of chicken breast and another of brisket and had the man pack the meat in lots of ice as she didn’t plan to go home directly. Instead, she took Sara Kate to the village to visit her people. Eudora Jean spent a good chunk of the afternoon drinking lemonade outside the shack of Annie Althea, the Negro dressmaker, while fanning herself with an out-of-date fashion magazine. There she chatted with the dressmaker’s help, young black girls every one, whenever they took a break from the heat inside. They talked about innocuous subjects, about the weather, which fabrics the trendsetters of Guilford were planning to use for fall, who had a new baby, and who had passed. Nonchalant, she inquired after old Bald Horace, asked was he still alive and where he might be living these days.

Oh, he’s mostly alright, she was told, with Mama Jo Baylin takin’ care of him over to her house.

It was the most fun Eudora Jean had in a dog’s age.

Meanwhile, Mickey Moe and Laura Anne made love for the first time in a bed. After the front- and backseats of his LTD and a blanket spread on the riverbank, such luxury was enough to send them straight to paradise. In a kind of dizzy euphoria, they drank the ambrosia of each other’s kisses and inhaled the incense of each other’s sweat, their expressions dazed yet solemn as the grave. It was a stroke of luck they heard the car pull up outside. Laura Anne quickly got into her underclothes and daytime shift. She made it to the hallway eons before he did, but that was alright. It looked as if she’d never even come near his room and had just risen from her nap in Eudora Jean’s.

After all their hurry, it was Eudora Jean who had returned home, not Mama as they feared.

O Mick, his sister said, I found out where Bald Horace is. She told him where to go while Laura Anne freshened up a little.

Sara Kate made the lovers sandwiches they could take with to eat on the ride to the village, as it was getting on in the afternoon and it wouldn’t be right to intrude on anyone’s home, black or white, too close to suppertime.

Don’t worry, Eudora Jean said. I’ll tell Mama you’re showin’ Laura Anne the town.

They set off.

When they turned down the dusty dirt road that led to the village, Laura Anne said, Now it’s startin’ to look like home around here. I’ve been wonderin’ where you all kept the colored folk. In Greenville, there’s more of them than there are of us. Can’t sleepwalk without runnin’ into one. Why there must be four of them to every one of us, and black homes mixed in with the white on every street. Daddy’s always jokin’, what we gonna do if they decide to revolt? But here in Guilford, I didn’t see more’n five or six in my walk over to your house and all of them were in the bus station.

He stopped the car in front of a battered mobile home, a 1957 Spartan Imperial with sheets of tin peaked over its roof to run off the rain. There was an expando porch at the rear. Tall herbs, their leaves feathered or spiked, sprouted from window boxes bolted through the main structure’s sides. Next to the front steps, there was a vegetable garden, green with spring growth under a chuppah’s worth of chicken wire as protection against night critters. There was a separate fenced-off area out the back where a pack of skinny dogs barked incessant welcome, and some thirty yards beyond that were the remains of the tar-paper shack Bald Horace lived in when Mickey Moe was a child. It looked blasted apart by a rogue tornado, scavenged, and left like a war memorial in a twisted heap. Mickey Moe ascended the cinder-block staircase with Laura Anne holding the hand he stuck behind him and knocked with the other.

A tiny black woman answered, barefoot, dressed in a loose housecoat of carnation pink. Small as she was, her hands and feet were long and knobby. Her face was set with hard, sharp features carved into taut skin like initials on the trunk of a tree, etched there by a bundle of time and troubles. She swung the door open, stepped back, and dropped her gaze to study her caller’s boots. This was a habit she’d lately acquired when white folk came by in case they were kluckers come to pay a nasty call. It was an invitation to misery to look kluckers in the eye.

Mama Jo, Mama Jo, her visitor said, look up, it’s me, Mickey Moe Levy, come to say hey to Bald Horace on a Tuesday afternoon.

The old woman raised her head to see if this was true, if this was himself come knocking. When she saw indeed it was, her face broke into an expression of relief, lighting up as if a handful of holiday sparklers had been set off all around her mean, dim doorway.

Oh Mr. Levy, how wonderful it is to see you. How kind it is of you to call. How fine you look, how grown-up, fit, and strong! She was in mid-praise of the wonder of his jaw, which had not softened to the naked eye, not at all at all and he was how old nowadays? Twenty-five? My, my, and him so polished, so mature lookin’ when he interrupted in an effort to get her to cease her rambling flattery.