Chapter 10 #2
“Most these girls come from positively nothing. Dirt-poor homes with ten kids to feed, sometimes from ten different daddies. In a couple years most those big girls’ll be having one illegitimate baby after the next, just like their mamas.
” Her face bobbed like a puppet. “It’s better to focus on the little ones that are still adaptable. ”
My sister was simply repeating something she’d heard, I could tell. But Jesus. At least it meant she hadn’t come up with that herself.
She put Ella Jane down in the toddler room, and I followed her to where Garnett was standing in the hall. She was watching something or somebody through the first door on the left, the warped door, open now, on the dank-smelling side.
Frances was still talking. “Garnett’s the one who came up with the work program, it’s a wonderful opportunity for girls who haven’t gotten adopted by age twelve. She gets to go work down on the Gulf Coast where she’ll learn a valuable skill and go to school and attend church on Sundays.”
“What kind of work do they do?”
“Can. Canning things. Vegetables, I think. There’s two girls down there already. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”
“You said that already.”
The room Garnett was staring into was barely big enough to hold a double-sided desk with a chair on each side, a girl, and a wooden filing cabinet.
Like the upstairs and the attic room, this one also had moldy brown spots on the ceiling, and an even thicker scent of eau de wet dog.
At the desk, the girl was doodling something, with her cheek smushed against her other hand.
“How come she’s not up in school with the others?” I asked. A dusty bare bulb hung over the desk, and to add to the charm, the one window was boarded up, the boards nailed right into the window frame. The big girls’ room was bad, but this was, by far, the saddest room I’d seen.
“Unfortunately she was expelled. She’s what we call a bad apple,” Garnett said, still watching her. “I don’t have anywhere else to put her until she goes to the work program.”
“What happened to her parents?” I asked.
At this, the girl turned and looked at us. She’d been listening. She had long, thin blond hair and very blue eyes. Behind Garnett, Frances was shaking her head at me, mouthing, Don’t ask that.
Garnett walked in the little room. “I told you no doodling on the cards,” she said.
The girl set the pencil down, then adjusted it so it was perfectly perpendicular to the card, which I saw was perfectly aligned with a thick black Bible.
“Meg, this is Miss Birdie, Miss Frances’s sister.
She’ll be working on the books. Birdie, this is Meg. ”
I moved into the doorway. The bulb gave off an orange, dirty light. The mold speckling the ceiling was starting to come down the walls. From what I could tell, this room was directly underneath the big girls’ room upstairs. “I think that leak upstairs might’ve made its way down,” I said.
“I know it,” Garnett said, shaking her head.
“Believe you me, I know it. We had the roof patched up best we could, but that’s about all we can afford right now.
” She put her hand on my arm and looked at me.
I could see how much it concerned her. “I certainly don’t expect you to work in here.
I was assuming you’d rather take the work home.
There’s just not enough room to work in the lounge. ”
“Um.” The thought of sitting around Frances’s house all day with her mother-in-law, who was very nice, but … besides money, wasn’t the point of coming all this way to see my sister? “I’ll—manage in here,” I said. “It’ll be easier in case I have questions.”
The little girl sighed when I said this. She was smaller and frailer than the pair of child surgeons I’d seen upstairs.
“Only if you’re sure? There’s a lot to do, the last bookkeeper quit in March and the inspector will be here in ten days. I know he’ll want to see the books.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Garnett went and unlocked the file cabinet with a large key chain. She set stacks of envelopes and several ledgers and all sorts of little papers on the desk. “Meg, you’ll be quiet so as not to disturb Miss Birdie?” Garnett asked her.
The little girl, Meg, smiled up at her so sweetly it could not be genuine and said, “Yes, ma’am.” The way Garnett raised an eyebrow, I was pretty sure there was no love lost there either.
I went over and put my hand out to the girl. “Nice to meet you, Meg. I’m Birdie.”
“Don’t do that,” Garnett said low. “We don’t touch the big girls.”
The good news was the door to the office was too warped to shut completely, over here on the fertile side of the house, fungally speaking. The bad news was the office still smelled like we were sitting inside a smelly sock.
“I guess we’ll be working in here together,” I said to Meg, after Garnett and Frances had gone. Her hair grew straight and stringy down her back. She gazed at me, bored, and her eyes weren’t just blue, they were clear glass with a black prick in the center. I smiled at her. “How old are you?”
“Eleven,” she said. She did not smile back. On her side of the desk she readjusted her three yellow pencils, sharpened to weaponry.
“You’re right small for eleven. How’d you end up a—” It was a blunt question, but this was a blunt room. “Here.”
“Automobile.”
“Where’s your mama?” I asked, even though Frances had told me not to.
“She went to pick up curling fluid.”
I nodded. “And then what?”
She gave me a long blue stare that said, Just how stupid are you, lady? “She did not bother to come home after.”
“I’m sorry. What about your daddy, where’s he?”
She sighed again like Why are you even asking me this crap? “He died. In a war.” And then, “I did not tell you that to feel sorry for me.”
“Noted. You don’t talk much, do you?”
She tucked her hair behind her ears—the left stuck out more than the right—and picked up a pencil and started drawing again on one of the index cards.
She snuck a look up at me, I guess to see if I’d scold her.
When I didn’t, she said, “We’re not supposed to talk to you ladies.
” And then murmured, “You Oxford women are all alike anyway.”
“Good thing I’m from Footely. May I?”
I took one of the pencils she’d lined up.
She straightened the last one. Taking my reading glasses out of my pocketbook, I opened a ledger labeled 1933.
It was simple balance bookkeeping. Each pale blue line had a date, a name, an amount, and a category, which looked typical: Food, Electric, Clothing, and so on.
Every month or so paltry deposits were made at the Bank of Lafayette County, where Rory worked.
Where it got tricky was tackling all the unorganized receipts on papers of all sizes and unopened envelopes.
I got them all sorted by date, which went back to March 12, when evidently the former bookkeeper, Marcy Mayweather, had up and left this verdant room.
I did not for a moment wonder why. It was starting to get real balmy in here.
“Who’s that you’re drawing?” I asked. Over my glasses it looked like a lady dancing, her dress flared out around her. I got nothing from her. She simply turned the card over and started drawing something else.
After over an hour of this, the room had gotten downright hot, and when I looked up at the clock on the grimy wall—Oh my God.
I’d started at eight thirty and it was only nine o’clock?
I leaned back in my squeaky chair, blotting my forehead with a handkerchief, and really took a good look around.
I’d gotten somewhat used to the smell, but wasn’t anybody concerned that this little girl had been sitting in here surrounded by mold and mildew for, I didn’t know how many days?
Not to mention, I looked behind me at the boarded-up window.
“Did something chew its way out of here?” There was a hole in the baseboard underneath it.
And there was another one behind Meg’s chair.
The dang rats couldn’t even stand to be in this hot little room.
“Was this room this bad when the other bookkeeper worked here?”
“No, ma’am,” Meg said. “It has got a lot worse.”
Fifteen hours later at a quarter till noon, the little girl got up and left without a word, I reckon to go eat her lunch in the dining room. Frances came and collected me to eat with her in the lounge and asked me how it was coming along.
“Slow. Hot. I can’t promise if I’ll get it all done in time for the inspector.”
“But you’ll try, won’t you? If you could, Garnett’d be so happy with me,” Frances said.
“Well that’s what’s important here.” We served ourselves ham sandwiches and potato salad from a platter and sat on the sofa.
There were six or seven other ladies in here and it was crowded.
Garnett was right; there was no good place to work in here.
“I asked the little girl, Meg, where her parents had gone to—”
“Birdie, you’re not supposed to ask that.”
“Well I did. She said her mama went to the store to buy something and never came home. Isn’t that sad?”
“It’s awful,” Frances said. “Though nobody was all that surprised. I heard her mother was …” She raised her eyebrows.
“She was what?”
“Well, among other things, feebleminded. She wasn’t right in the head. Most these unwed mothers are, they have no morals, they’ll lay with whites, coloreds, Indians, you name it. The best thing is to get them looked after by the state and nip it in the bud.”
She had that puppet-on-a-string look again, which I hated.
“How do you know, have you met her mother?” I asked.
“No, but it must be true since I heard it from Garnett.”