Shifting the baby, Sister Ida threw an arm around Dolly’s waist, embraced her, actually, and said, as though they were the oldest friends, “I knew I could count on you, Dolly. Kids,” she lifted the baby like a baton, “tell Dolly we never said a word against her!”
The children shook their heads, mumbled, and Dolly seemed touched. “We can’t leave town, I kept telling them,” said Sister Ida, and launched into the tale of her predicament. I wished that I could have a picture of them together, Dolly, formal, as out of fashion as her old face-veil, and Sister Ida with her fruity lips, fun-loving figure. “It’s a matter of cash; they took it all. I ought to have them arrested, that puke-faced Buster and what’s-his-name, the Sheriff: thinks he’s King Kong.” She caught her breath; her cheeks were like a raspberry patch. “The plain truth is, we’re stranded. Even if we’d ever heard of you, it’s not our policy to speak ill of anyone. Oh I know that was just the excuse; but I figured you could straighten it out and …”
“I’m hardly the person—dear me,” said Dolly.
“But what would you do? with a half gallon of gas, maybe not that, fifteen mouths and a dollar ten? We’d be better off in jail.”
Then, “I have a friend,” Dolly announced proudly, “a brilliant man, he’ll know an answer,” and I could tell by the pleased conviction of her voice that she believed this one hundred per cent. “Collin, you scoot ahead and let the Judge know to expect company for dinner.”
Licketysplit across the field with the grass whipping my legs: couldn’t wait to see the Judge’s face. It was not a disappointment. “Lordylaw!” he said, raring back, rocking forward; “Sixteen people,” and, observing the meager stew simmering on the fire, struck his head. For Riley’s benefit I tried to make out it was none of my doing, Dolly’s meeting Sister Ida; but he just stood there skinning me with his eyes: it could have led to bitter words if the Judge hadn’t sent us scurrying.
He fanned up his fire, Riley fetched more water, and into the stew we tossed sardines, hotdogs, green bay-leaves, in fact whatever lay at hand, including an entire box of Saltines which the Judge claimed would help thicken it: a few stuffs got mixed in by mistake—coffee grounds, for instance. Having reached that overwrought hilarious state achieved by cooks at family reunions, we had the gall to stand back and congratulate ourselves: Riley gave me a forgiving, comradely punch, and as the first of the children appeared the Judge scared them with the vigor of his welcome.
None of them would advance until the whole herd had assembled. Whereupon Dolly, apprehensive as a woman exhibiting the results of an afternoon at an auction, brought them forward to be introduced. The children made a rollcall of their names: Beth, Laurel, Sam, Lillie, Ida, Cleo, Kate, Homer, Harry—here the melody broke because one small girl refused to give her name. She said it was a secret. Sister Ida agreed that if she thought it a secret, then so it should remain.
“They’re all so fretful,” she said, favorably affecting the Judge with her smoky voice and grasslike eyelashes. He prolonged their handshake and overdid his smile, which struck me as peculiar conduct in a man who, not three hours before, had asked a woman to marry him, and I hoped that if Dolly noticed it would give her pause.
But she was saying, “Why certain they’re fretful: hungry as they can be,” and the Judge, with a hearty clap and a boastful nod towards the stew, promised he’d fix that soon enough. In the meantime, he thought it would be a good idea if the children went to the creek and washed their hands. Sister Ida vowed they’d wash more than that. They needed to, I’ll tell you.
There was trouble with the little girl who wanted her name a secret; she wouldn’t go, not unless her papa rode her piggyback. “You are too my papa,” she told Riley, who did not contradict her. He lifted her onto his shoulders, and she was tickled to death. All the way to the creek she acted the cut-up, and when, with her hands thrust over his eyes, Riley stumbled blindly into a bullis vine, she ripped the air with in-heaven shrieks. He said he’d had enough of that and down you go. “Please: I’ll whisper you my name.” Later on I remembered to ask him what the name had been. It was Texaco Gasoline; because those were such pretty words.
The creek is nowhere more than knee-deep; glossy beds of moss green the banks, and in the spring snowy dew-drops and dwarf violets flourish there like floral crumbs for the new bees whose hives hang in the waterbays. Sister Ida chose a place on the bank from which she could supervise the bathing. “No cheating now—I want to see a lot of commotion.” We did. Suddenly girls old enough to be married were trotting around and not a stitch on; boys, too, big and little all in there together naked as jaybirds.
It was as well that Dolly had stayed behind with the Judge; and I wished Riley had not come either, for he was embarrassing in his embarrassment. Seriously, though, it’s only now, seeing the kind of man he turned out to be, that I understand the paradox of his primness: he wanted so to be respectable that the defections of others somehow seemed to him backsliding on his own part.
Those famous landscapes of youth and woodland water—in after years how often, trailing through the cold rooms of museums, I stopped before such a picture, stood long haunted moments having it recall that gone scene, not as it was, a band of goose-fleshed children dabbling in an autumn creek, but as the painting presented it, husky youths and wading water-diamonded girls; and I’ve wondered then, wonder now, how they fared, where they went in this world, that extraordinary family.
“Beth, give your hair a douse. Stop splashing Laurel, I mean you Buck, you quit that. All you kids get behind your ears, mercy knows when you’ll have the chance again.” But presently Sister Ida relaxed and left the children at liberty. “On such a day as this …” she sank against the moss; with the full light of her eyes she looked at Riley, “There is something: the mouth, the same jug ears—cigarette, dear?” she said, impervious to his distaste for her.
A smoothing expression suggested for a moment the girl she had been. “On such a day as this …
“… but in a sorrier place, no trees to speak of, a house in a wheatfield and all alone like a scarecrow. I’m not complaining: there was mama and papa and my sister Geraldine, and we were sufficient, had plenty of pets and a piano and good voices every one of us.
Not that it was easy, what with all the heavy work and only the one man to do it. Papa was a sickly man besides. Hired hands were hard to come by, nobody liked it way out there for long: one old fellow we thought a heap of, but then he got drunk and tried to burn down the house. Geraldine was going on sixteen, a year older than me, and nice to look at, both of us were that, when she got it into her head to marry a man who’d run the place with papa.
But where we were there wasn’t much to choose from. Mama gave us our schooling, what of it we had, and the closest town was ten miles. That was the town of Youfry, called after a family; the slogan was You Won’t Fry In Youfry: because it was up a mountain and well-to-do people went there in the summer. So the summer I’m thinking of Geraldine got waitress work at the Lookout Hotel in Youfry. I used to hitch a ride in on Saturdays and stay the night with her.
This was the first either of us had ever been away from home. Geraldine didn’t care about it particular, town life, but as for me I looked toward those Saturdays like each of them was Christmas and my birthday rolled into one. There was a dancing pavilion, it didn’t cost a cent, the music was free and the colored lights. I’d help Geraldine with her work so we could go there all the sooner; we’d run hand in hand down the street, and I used to start dancing before I got my breath—never had to wait for a partner, there were five boys to every girl, and we were the prettiest girls anyway.
I wasn’t boy-crazy especially, it was the dancing—sometimes everyone would stand still to watch me waltz, and I never got more than a glimpse of my partners, they changed so fast. Boys would follow us to the hotel, then call under our window Come out! Come out! and sing, so silly they were—Geraldine almost lost her job. Well we’d lie awake considering the night in a practical way.
She was not romantic, my sister; what concerned her was which of our beaux was surest to make things easier out home. It was Dan Rainey she decided on. He was older than the others, twenty-five, a man, not handsome in the face, he had jug ears and freckles and not much chin, but Dan Rainey, oh he was smart in his own steady way and strong enough to lift a keg of nails. End
