Chapter 5 Warrior
Warrior
Kate Shaw
Saturday morning at the schoolhouse, I’m reworking the final lesson plans but struggling, when in walks a welcome respite: Sadie Blue and her middle child Mary Harris.
“Figured you was here,” she says. “Loretty gone to be with Birdie, Baby Blue be with Granny Jolene, and me and Mary Harris bake a batch a scones with you in mind. We brung em with lemonade.”
Sadie is my oldest friend in Baines Creek.
On that first morning ten years back when she was seventeen and pregnant, she waited on the school steps with an offer to help and a hunger to read and a reprehensible husband as her albatross.
Those first months were a worrisome time till fate turned kind for the girl and salvation was delivered in a hunting accident.
“Scones will lift my spirit for certain. Hope you’ll join me.”
“Mind us interruptin?”
“I got time for you.”
I get jelly jars near the water bucket for the lemonade and pull two desks close to mine so we face each other.
Mary Harris unfolds the gingham cloth and with pride reveals three lopsided scones.
She places one before each of us and bows her head, mumbles a little prayer I can’t understand, and commences to eat in tiny bites around the burnt edges then the soft center.
Sadie declares, “Me and Buck gonna obey the law but we ain’t happy one bit.”
“I understand,” I say, and that concludes talk about last night’s tough topic that neither of us can change.
Mary Harris goes to the bookshelf for a coloring book of flowers and a tin can of broken crayons.
I look at Sadie with her hair going gray, and she looks back, understanding that our days sharing scones, lemonade, and talk are coming to an end.
“Ten years—” she says.
“Ten years,” I say.
“I ain’t sure I’d be here if it won’t for you saying I got possibility.” She fishes for a compliment that’s easy to give.
“I knew you were a warrior, Sadie Blue. Right from the start. And an awfully good mama,” I add, and she grins at the oxymoron. It was our first mind game she easily mastered.
“Where you gonna go?”
“When it’s over? I don’t know, but not knowing is okay.”
“What’s that place you go to in summer?”
“Ocracoke. On the other side of the state. It’s on an island.
” I reach for the globe that spins and point a pencil tip to this side of North Carolina and then the coast on the other against an expanse of blue.
A place Sadie Blue will likely never see.
For comfort’s sake, in my desk drawer I keep two black-and-white photographs, a vial of fine white sand, and a conch shell with pink innards.
“Did I ever show you a picture of my sister, Rachel?”
“You might’ve but I don’t recollect right off.”
I hand Sadie a photo of two tall women standing on the steps of a weathered bungalow shaded by stunted Southern live oaks. Rachel and I are in our thirties and are the same height and build. Our suntanned arms are casually thrown around each other’s shoulders. I say, “That’s me on the right.”
“Y’all sure look alike.”
“We do,” I say and hand her the second photograph.
“And here we are on the beach waiting out a storm with the churning ocean at our backs.” Our short hair is blown wild, and our shirts and shorts billow and we’re laughing carefree in a glorious moment.
Sadie’s seen pictures of the ocean and beaches in National Geographic magazines but not one with me in it.
She looks closer at the roiling water stilled by the snap of a camera yet powerful all the same.
“It’s scary, ain’t it? Water that wide.”
“The ocean can be scary, especially in a storm when the force of nature is unleashed. But it’s magnificent, too.
It’s nothing to be feared. It’s to be admired.
” I sweep scone crumbs off my desk and drop them in the basket.
“There’s a poem by Kahlil Gibran, a man born a hundred years ago in a land far across that ocean and beyond the horizon you see.
It’s a poem called “Fear,” and it begins, It is said that before entering the sea / a river trembles with fear.
/ She looks back at the path she has traveled / from the peaks of the mountains…
” I finish reciting the poem I know by heart, and Sadie is the usual attentive student and intuitive beyond her upbringing.
Even Mary Harris looks up from coloring, lured by magnetic words.
Sadie says, “So fear ain’t all bad.”
“It sure feels like it when you’re dealing with it. But no, it isn’t all bad. I guess you walk through it like you do any storm, and you’ll come out the other side changed. At least that’s the plan.”
Looking at the photo of Rachel and me on the steps of the beach house surrounded by gnarly oaks, she says, “You look different, Miz Kate.”
I laugh. “Of course I do. I was young and only mildly tested.”
“So that’s Rachel, your sister.”
“Yes.” I speak the lie easily and take back the precious photos.
I open Sadie’s palm and pour a thimbleful of sand from a vial I refill each year. She feels its fine grittiness that is the beach. I hold the shell to her ear. “That’s what the ocean waves sound like, crashing on the shore, breaking shells like this one into tiny pieces and turning them to sand.”
Holding tight to the sand in her palm, she takes the shell to her daughter. “Listen here, Mary Harris.” The girl has heard the ocean in my shell before, but she listens again. Sadie hands me the shell with great care but holds on to the sand.
“And your dog be called Rachel.”
“Yes. After my sister…who died seven years back.”
“It was a sickness that got her, won’t it?”
“It was a sickness that got her.”
I’m always private about my last summer with Rachel.
I don’t say to my oldest friend here that when I came to Baines Creek, banished for my criminal actions that got me fired, two years later my love was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It was the swift and virulent kind that showed no mercy.
That following summer we went to our beach house for the last time and stayed out of the sun under a beach umbrella or in the faded rocking chairs on the shady porch or in the hammock when she grew too weak to sit.
Early August of ’73, we left Ocracoke and took the ferry to the mainland, back to the hospital for medicine to make her dying easier.
I was with her till the end because we called ourselves sisters.
I put away the sand and the shell and the photographs in the drawer. We fall silent lost in thoughts until Sadie says, “I be a fool back when you come.”
“You were young.”
“And a fool,” she repeats. “My girls won’t be bringing home no Roy Tupkin, Miz Kate.
His kind won’t be getting his sorry self in our door or in them hearts.
” Her jaw is set tight as she looks at her six-year-old daughter on her knees coloring, her flaxen hair hanging over her eyes, her lips clinched in concentration.
“You and Buck will stand between your girls and anything harmful in this world. Your girls are protected. They’re safe from harm’s way,” I say carelessly.
Buck Dillard is Sadie’s second husband, a kind man who does the right thing. They are united in faith and family.
“You didn’t have anyone to protect you back then, Sadie. You weren’t prepared for the likes of Roy Tupkin’s cunning and greasy charm. You thought your love could change a bad man—”
“—love and my baby,” she adds. Then she nods over and over and whispers, “You know what I done that day, don’t chu?”
Mary Harris now colors outside the lines using mustard yellow and a streak of violet.
I know she’s talking about the dying day that came after she lost her first baby because Roy beat her. She went back to him after, and I wanted to steal her away but didn’t have the right. Three weeks later on Halloween, two hunters went into the woods and only one came out alive.
“What did you do?” I ask because Sadie wants to say.
She watches Mary Harris with an aching tenderness then raises hard eyes. “My blood runs through my chil’ren’s bodies, Miz Kate, and I knowd what they made of. My babies be warriors, too.”