Chapter 12 #5
She didn’t find a job, of course. That part of her plan didn’t work out.
But her kitchen-sharing plan did. She and Cora Lee got to be friends, and they cooked together in the kitchen while they talked about whatever women talk about, and before long it just made more sense for Junior and Linnie to eat their meals with Cora Lee and her family.
Then when the weather turned warm the two women hatched a plot to buy fruits and vegetables from the farmers who rolled into Hampden on their wagons, and they’d spend all day canning, blasting the kitchen with heat; and later Linnie would be the brave one who went around hawking their products to the neighbors.
They didn’t make much money, but they made some.
And Junior actually did fix up a few things around the house, just because otherwise they would never have gotten done, but he didn’t charge anything or try to get a deal on the rent.
Even after times improved and Junior and Linnie moved into the house on Cotton Street, Linnie and Cora Lee stayed friends.
Well, Linnie was friends with everybody, it seemed to Junior.
Sometimes he wondered if those years of being an outcast had left her with an unnatural need to socialize.
He’d come in after work and find wall-to-wall women in the kitchen, and all their mingled young ones playing in the backyard.
“Don’t I get supper?” he would ask, and the women would scatter, rounding up their children on the way out.
But he wouldn’t say Linnie was lazy. Oh, no.
She and Cora still had their little canning business, and she answered the phone for Junior and saw to the billing and such as he began to have more customers.
She was better with the customers than he was, in fact, always willing to take time for a little small talk, and adept at smoothing over any problems or complaints.
By then he had his truck—used, but it was a good one—and he had a few men working for him, and he owned a fine collection of tools that he’d bought from other men here and there who were down on their luck.
These were really solid tools, the old-fashioned, beautifully made kind.
A saw, for instance, with an oiled wooden handle that was carved with the most delicate and precise etching of a rosemary branch.
It was true that the sweat that darkened the handle had not been his forebears’ sweat, but still he felt some personal pride in it.
He always took excellent care of his tools.
And he always went to lumberyards where he could choose his own lumber board by board.
“Now, fellows, I know anything you might take it into your heads to put over on me. Don’t give me anything with dead knots, don’t give me anything warped or moldy … ”
“What if I had been married?” he thought to ask Linnie years later. “What if you’d come up north and found me with a wife and six children?”
“Oh, Junior,” she said. “You would never do that.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well, for one thing, how would you get six children inside of just five years?”
“No, but, you know what I mean.”
She just smiled.
She acted older than he was, in some ways, and yet in other ways she seemed permanently thirteen—feisty and defiant, and stubbornly opinionated.
He was taken aback to see how easily she had severed all connection with her family.
It implied a level of bitterness that he had not suspected her capable of.
She showed no desire to shed her backwoods style of speech; she still said “holler” for “shout,” and “tuckered” for “tired,” and “treckly” for “directly.” She still insisted on calling him “Junie.” She had an irritating habit of ostentatiously chuckling to herself before she told him something funny, as if she were coaching him to chuckle.
She pressed too close to him when she wanted to persuade him of something.
She plucked at his sleeve with picky fingers while he was talking to other people.
Oh, the terrible, crushing, breath-stealing burden of people who think they own you!
And if Junior was the wild one, how come it was Linnie Mae who’d caused every single bit of trouble he’d found himself in since they’d met?
He was a sharp-boned, narrow-ribbed man, a man without an ounce of fat who had never had much interest in food, but sometimes when he came home from work in the late afternoon and Linnie was out back gabbing with her next-door neighbor he would stand in front of the refrigerator and eat all the leftover pork chops and then the wieners, the cold mashed potatoes, the cold peas and the boiled beets, foods he didn’t even like, as if he were starving, as if he had never gotten what he really wanted, and later Linnie would say, “Have you seen those peas I was saving? Where are those peas?” and he would stay stone silent.
She had to know. What did she think: little Merrick craved cold peas?
But she never said so. This made him feel both grateful and resentful.
Lord it over him, would she! She must really think she had his number!
At such moments he would run his mind back through that long-ago trip to the train station, this time doing it differently.
Down the dark streets, turn right past the station, turn right again onto Charles Street and drive back to the boardinghouse.
Let himself into his room and lock the door behind him. Drop onto his cot. Fall asleep alone.