The Path Was Steep (23 page)

“I can’t buy a battery,” he said.

“I could charge your battery,” the man said. “Only costs fifty cents.”

“Charge away,” David said. “Do you have a dry place where we could wait?”

“Man, it will take all night.”

There was dead silence. We couldn’t all sleep in the car. I thought wildly of walking the four miles to Dolomite, to sleep with Thelma and George. But the girls would never make it. Providence was still looking out for us, for just then Hap yelled, “Tandy Seales, what are you doing here?”

A man who had been passing stopped. “Hap, what are you doing in Bessemer?”

“Looking for a place to sleep.”

“Honest?” Tandy asked. “In trouble?”

David looked at me, then eyed my purse. I knew its contents to the penny. Knew there wasn’t enough to buy a new battery. None of us owned a watch or anything to pawn.

Hap explained about the battery and about the state of our finances. “Ain’t none of us got enough left for even one hotel room.”

“Mom and Dad ain’t at home,” Tandy said. “There is plenty of bed room. I will be home sometime tonight. I’ll sleep on the sofa. You all use the beds.” He grinned an elfish grin, his face so friendly you would have trusted him with your life, as he reached in his pocket, took out a key, and gave it to Hap.

“Man, you mean it?” Hap laughed.

“Of course I mean it. See you later.” Tandy hurried up the street and out of sight.

“But to go into a stranger’s home and . . .” David began.

“Man, they are not strangers to us. Best neighbors we ever had.”

“I’m sleepy and cold and hungry,” Sharon began to cry.

“I’m sleepy and cold and hungry, too,” Davene howled.

“Are you sure it will be all right?” David asked.

“All we have to do is get there. Me and you can push and let Sue start the motor again.”

Mining muscles were called into use again, and we were off. Policemen had business on other streets or stayed out of the rain. No one stopped us as we drove by street light to find the Seales’ home. Vic and Hap, like homing pigeons, knew the way. We arrived, parked before a bungalow, and ran up the steps out of the rain. The key fitted, and we were in a plain, five-room house. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room.

“Better bring in our groceries; somebody might steal them,” Hap said, and he and David made trips and managed to bring in bags and boxes safely. Vic made a fire in the kitchen stove, found a percolator, and made coffee as I undressed the girls down to their petticoats, fed them sandwiches, and put them to bed. Davene could sleep with Hap and Vic, Sharon with David and me.

In spite of strong coffee, I yawned and yawned again.

“Might as well go to bed,” Hap yawned, too. “Tandy may not be home before daylight.” They had chosen the back bedroom, and we were to sleep in the front.

I fell asleep instantly, then roused as there was a fumbling at the door. “David,” I shook him, and thought, What if the Seales have come home early? What would they think of strangers in their bed?

David snored. The shuffling and thumping at the door grew louder. Then a voice: “Get the hell off this porch!” It was Hap’s friend and our host. David heard this, woke, and sat up in bed.

In his current state, Tandy must have forgotten that he’d sent strangers to his home to sleep. There was a click as the overhead light in our room came on. He turned, saw me in bed, and stared. I had the cover up to my eyes and stared back at him.

“We found your place,” David said, just in time, and saved the day—or what was left of the night.

“See you did.” Tandy reached up cautiously, as if he might damage the cord, and turned off the light. Then he marched into the living room, closed the door, made undressing noises, and flung his shoes against a wall.

There was little sleep for yours truly the rest of the night. When I dozed, I dreamed of footsteps on the porch and guns being flourished. Other times, I dreamed that all of us had been arrested. The charge: breaking and entering, and we were carted off to jail. Those were not the most pleasant hours I ever spent.

A steady downpour awakened us the next morning, and a cold, wet wind blew around the house and through cracks in the doors. Hap built a fire in the kitchen stove. The men and children huddled near as Vic and I hunted through our groceries for bacon and eggs and bread. We breakfasted, washed dishes, and began to load groceries into the car. A bag or so, still damp, burst, but we found boxes and stored the overflow in them. On our last trip, Tandy, pouring the last of the coffee, said, “Think I’ll go home with you.”

Thunderbolt, as always, made room for one more. Vic and the girls entered the car. I sat under the wheel, the men pushed, and I steered down a small hill. The car roared and emitted smoke. Wet, laughing, congratulating each other, the car, and even me, they found seats among the groceries. David slid into the driver’s seat, and we bowled along towards Bibb County.

For some reason the whole thing seemed hilarious, and we laughed and talked as we roared southward. The windshield wiper was a hand-operated gadget; you turned a button inside the car to make it swish back and forth, so I bent to operate it every minute or so. David, Davene, and I, and the groceries piled at our feet and beside us, were comparatively dry. Those in the back had no such good fortune. Rain poured on them through cracks and holes in the curtains. Vic held Sharon on her lap. Boxes of groceries were heaped between Hap and Vic, and Tandy perched somehow half on the seat.

Water for the radiator was no problem. David stopped at rivulets along the roadside to dip muddy bucketfuls and pour into the steaming vent. We left Jefferson, crossed a corner of Tuscaloosa County, then entered Bibb and came to the “Y” which was named for the shape of the road as it forked to go to West Blocton and on to Piper. A large, sagging old dance hall stood at a corner of the Y. In the golden twenties, this place had been known for fun and frolic, had seen raids and bottles of contraband whiskey thrown in all directions. Deserted for three years, showing signs of decay as deserted places do, the old dance hall stared with forlorn, paneless windows as we stopped.

“Maybe there is an empty bucket in there, and I can help Dave,” Hap said. David stopped and Hap ran to the place. Tandy hopped out of the car, found a can, and dipped water for the radiator from an overflowing ditch. But Hap had found greater treasure.

“Now we can keep out the rain,” he laughed and hugged a dusty quilt to keep it from getting wet. What was an old quilt doing in a deserted dance hall? Sometimes children were brought to dances and parked in corners on such while their parents danced. Someone, evidently, had been too giddy to remember this one and had left it for a wet, chilly group of people to find.

“You are not going to use that?” I asked, horrified.

“Better than rain in the face.”

“But no telling who used it?”

“People, like everybody else.”

I watched, fascinated, as Hap pulled the quilt over them all. Spatters of rain dampened cheeks as we headed toward West Blocton, but they seemed warm and happy under their log-cabin quilt.

We made it home. The sun came out, and wet leaves glistened as if made of green-gold. Thunderbolt expired in a last snort. Tired, dirty, and damp in spite of the possibly vermin-infested quilt, we staggered from the car to unload groceries.

We’d stopped to let the Hendons and Tandy take themselves and their groceries out of the car. Very happy to be safely at home after spending the night in a strange home and sleeping in a strange bed, we brought in loads of groceries, then went to the bedroom. “David,” I backed out and stopped him, “there is someone in our bed.”

A head full of dark hair raised. “Where have you been all night?” Lucile asked. Ezra had made a trip to Birmingham. Lucile had packed her clothes, gone with him, and caught the bus to Piper.

I forgot that I had ever been tired. We built a fire in the stove, heated water, and almost scalded Sharon against possible vermin from the quilt. And we talked and talked. Then Lucile took a card from her purse. “Who is Herbert Allen?” she asked. The card read, “My name is Herbert Allen. Who the hell are you?” He had been on the train with her. She didn’t speak, of course, but kept the card.

Herbert, we explained, was the mine foreman’s son. Mr. Allen was foreman at No. One mine, Mr. William Hayes at No. Two. In Piper, any bossing job put one in the upper echelon socially. Even the store clerks—they were white-collar men—at salaries of perhaps $50 monthly, along with their wives, thought themselves on a slightly higher social scale.

Herbert learned that Lucile was visiting us, so did other young men, and the living room sofa was seldom unoccupied on evenings. Bud Harris, Billy Harrison, and others, like bees, were attracted by Lucile’s dark hair, fair skin, and hazel eyes.

Billy Harrison suddenly became very buddy with David and planned a night on the river, going in his car. We took the log-cabin quilt for cover. On Monday after our grocery trip, Lucile and I had built a fire under the boiling pot, lifted the quilt with a stick, and put it in the pot. Vic had refused to take it home with her. “Burn it,” she told me. But Lucile had a better idea. She shaved a bar of Octagon soap into the pot, and we threw the quilt in. It came out faded but boiled, then rinsed, and very clean. Someone had put a great deal of work into this quilt. A log-cabin design, the stitches were small and even.

We raked pine straw to make a big, fat bed for the girls and covered it with a blanket and a quilt. Snuggled under it, they slept. David and Billy put out trot lines and checked the lines hourly. Their catch was one small catfish and an eel. For breakfast, we had white meat, fried potatoes, and a few bites of catfish. David and Billy wallowed eel around in their mouths, chewed, and managed to swallow a bite or so.

As the girls slept that night, we sat around the fire. The night wind was sweet and the April air soft. We sang old songs while fireflies danced the night away. Fish, though they didn’t bite, leaped in the nearby river. A herd of cows, attracted by our singing, came to stand near the fire. When the singing stopped, the cows left, to sleep no doubt under nearby trees in case the entertainment started again.

Lucile, from past visits, was under the spell of Piper. When her visit ended, Thelma came as soon as school was out. She had resisted Piper’s spell in the past and thought I was half-crazy to enjoy living so far from what she considered civilization. But June, on the road to Piper, was too much for her. “Sue, that road is the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” she exclaimed over and over, her enchanted eyes still viewing it in memory. “It was like heaven, all the green overhead, and the sun shining through the leaves, and the rocks and flowers and ripple of water.”

The old road wound through the laurel-gorged ledges on one side and a small creek called Little Ugly on the other. A few pink blossoms still hung on the laurel. There were dark, fern-decorated rocks, oaks, maples, hickories, and vines and blooming plants climbing the steep hill to the right. Trees from both sides made a canopy for the road, meeting overhead. On the left, Little Ugly foamed over rocks and boulders, and sun shone on the giant poplars, sycamores, and other trees that met over the road.

Little Ugly was possibly named for its many turns and the rocks that bedded the stream. Water rippled cheerfully over, under, and around the rocks and made small waterfalls here and there with white spray and the sound of far-off bells. The road followed the winding stream, then veered sharply to the left to cross a bridge over the creek where it flowed into the Cahaba River. The road then followed the river for a mile, to turn right and cross a high bridge. Beginning in May, Cahaba lilies blossomed in incredible whiteness.

Thelma had seen the lilies and the great trees and everything. After crossing the river, you climbed up and up and around and up again, with trees, flowers, rocks, and red banks on either side, all the way to Piper.

“You see?” It was I now who had invented the road and Bibb County and Piper on those rolling hills above the river.

“Yes, I see why you love it here,” Thelma said, and smiled that dreamy smile that came to all when the enchantment of our Camelot hit them. “I always thought you a little crazy. But if I ever lived here, I’d never want to leave, either.”

Clarence came for a visit. Ambitious to be a newspaper man, he interviewed the Witcher brothers. They were hermits living between Piper and Coleanor. They drove a team of oxen and never shaved or took a bath. Through one of FDR’s programs for polio victims, Clarence had a job with the
Birmingham Post
newspaper.

The lovely days passed, and summer wore its way into autumn. More and more new laws came from Washington. Piper men began to meet, to talk; the old call “United we stand, divided we fall” was on every tongue. “If we don’t unite, the operators will have us over a barrel for the rest of our lives,” they said. Somehow, the men and their wives managed to hate the company and yet love individuals. Mr. Randle, the superintendent, was affectionately known by his first name, Percy—but only behind his back. Times were more formal then. First-name basis for an employer was not practiced.

“What did Percy say?” was usually asked when a man had been called to the office. What he had said was usually known by anyone within a quarter of a mile. Mr. Randle had a tremendous voice. A favorite tale among the miners was that once, when trying to talk over the noisy telephone from the office to No. Two mine about a mile away, Mr. Randle, exasperated, finally stuck his head out the window and shouted the message.

There had been too much love for too long a time for the miners to hate Mr. Randle. You were supposed to hate anyone in authority, but we never did. Mrs. Randle was one of the most perfect ladies I have ever known, always kind and courteous, and she won my undying love by opening her library to me and letting me read the stacks of magazines she had been saving for years. Though members of the “Royal Family,” the Randle family was well-loved. Wilcox, their son, was “just like his mother,” always friendly and courteous and kind. The girls, Rosalyn and Anne, too, were beautiful, but so sweet and friendly, we didn’t feel jealousy or hatred for them.