Chapter 5 #2
It was after that doctor visit that Daddy started asking me to help him fix things around the house.
He was patient, with the mathematical mind of an engineer.
He taught me how to replace rotten porch boards and tighten a leaky sink, repair the clothes agitator, change the oil in the truck; then came spark plugs, bulbs, and necessary fluids.
Never turning into the expert he was, I did learn my way around a Model T Ford carburetor.
I didn’t catch on right at first why he was teaching me these things.
I thought it was because he didn’t have any boys and somebody had to look after things while he was on the river.
“Gimme a hand, Bird,” he’d say, and an hour or two later I’d know how to change the tires on the Ford.
Frances was clearly not interested in any of these things, but of course she still asked him why he was teaching me and not her.
He smiled but didn’t say what I later learned he was thinking: You won’t need to know, you’ll have a husband to do these things for you.
A few months later, Mama admitted, weeping, that the doctor’d told her I couldn’t bear children.
I simply don’t remember losing any sleep over this.
Just past Vicksburg, the train ran alongside a dusty yellow highway.
I saw people, groups of three or four at first, then ten, then dozens of them moving along on foot or in wagons stacked with trunks and chairs and tables.
They were colored folks mostly, though some were white and I realized they must be sharecroppers who’d been run off the land, because of the government program that was paying owners not to grow cotton.
I felt sick for them. They stared straight ahead, moving along the highway in what looked like dead silence.
The children looked strangely old, like wrinkled old men and women, and when the road pulled closer, I saw they’d smeared mud up their arms and on their faces to keep the sun off.
Where in the world were they all going? I wondered.
What would they do when they got there? Then the road pulled away and I couldn’t see them anymore.
I was so grateful right then that we had what we did.
I’d inherited my sanguine outlook from my daddy.
I had a job, we had his annuity, surely everything’ll work out.
But the thought of asking Frances for money felt like groveling.
It tasted bitter, like grounds in the bottom of a coffee cup.
How I wished I could prove her wrong for leaving us.
“MathildaTate says if you’re not engaged by the time you’re twenty, there’s a 99 percent chance you’ll turn out an old maid.
” I was nineteen and change by then. I’d graduated class of 1926, and was taking a correspondence course called Basics of Bookkeeping.
That was right around the first time I heard Frances say, “One day, I’m gonna get out of this place for good. ”
And God love her, she did. After Frances graduated, she talked Mama, and therefore Daddy, into sending her to Miss Pickering’s Finishing School, two hundred fifty miles north of us in Memphis, Tennessee.
Frances nearly wet her ironed underpants, she was so excited to leave Footely.
She’d be taking courses entitled Etiquette of Courtship, Managing Marriage Proposals, and something called Comportment.
But two weeks before she was to leave, Daddy had a heart attack on the river and died.
I cannot describe that week. Mama’s sobs sounded like vomiting. Purging pain sounds so violent on some, but it shut me right up. A hot, thick thing lodged in my throat. Watching the man you called Daddy go in a hole and get covered with dirt does not go down easy.
I thought Frances would put off going to finishing school, at least until after Christmas.
After all, it seemed like pretty poor etiquette to leave mere weeks after your daddy’d died of a coronary.
But when I mentioned it, Frances threw a flying fit.
Said I was “selfish and jealous” of her, that just because I was “stuck here” didn’t mean she had to be.
Mama intervened, telling me to hush, that “of course you can still go, Frances, of course you can.” Frances must’ve graduated with honors because hardly a month after she finished the course, she got married, and did I mention she didn’t invite us to the durn wedding?
Whenever people asked me, “Why ain’t you married, Bird?
” I thought about telling them my fiancé died.
That he’d been a traveling salesman—I’d call him Johnny—who sold carpet cleaner and drove a Buick.
He’d died in a car crash over in Alabama, Buick and floor cleaner going up in sunset-colored flames.
I jumped awake to the porter bellowing, “Arriving Oxford Depot! Approaching the station!” The brakes screeched like catastrophe was imminent, and we jerked to a hard stop, the passengers all nodding together at the same time.
As if we’d discussed it and agreed on the same thing: Yep, your sister left soon as she got the chance.
Now you got to show up at her door uninvited and ask for a handout.