Chapter 37 #3
The thought of Picador, who’d changed Rory’s diapers and was so gentle with Mrs. Tartt’s medicine …
I imagined her looking at me and asking, Why you did this to sweet Miss Viktoria?
They using her room? “Forget it,” I said.
“We’ll just do the sheets ourselves.” If those were the consequences, I didn’t need to sleep. Ever.
Charlie threw some chunks of Fels-Naptha soap into the steaming water. “Fine, we won’t tell them. If we don’t get some sleep, we won’t be able to stand up tomorrow night, much less think.”
“Alright, I’ll walk down there when it’s light out—but you promise we won’t tell them? We’ll get them out the door before they find out?”
Charlie looked at me square on, like Meg had those first days: like I was a little stupid and a lot naive, but she’d have to put up with it. “If you say so.”
“’Scuse me, could you tell me where Miss Picador lives?”
It was only a few minutes past dawn when I got to Freedmen Town and the grocery store, where I was fairly known now, wasn’t open yet.
The woman I’d asked stood up very straight on her front porch and looked me over.
“We just need some help out at the Tartts’,” I said which I should’ve led with.
She nodded, though not looking entirely trusting. “That the young Mrs. Tartt askin’?”
“Lord no, I’m Birdie, her sister.” She might never tell me where Picador lived if she thought I was Frances. She said to go up yonder, past Bird’s Blacksmith and take a left at Threkeld’s, and it was about another mile or so. She told me what Picador’s house looked like.
Soon, the gravel road turned to dirt, or mud rather, but at least it was still cool out.
I’d slept maybe two hours, but my head was clear enough, and I got to thinking again of the many reasons I didn’t want Picador to know what we were doing.
She was Meemaw’s age, for God’s sake. It’d be an insult, and a terrible position to put her in with Mrs. Tartt.
Mostly, I didn’t want to implicate them in our crime.
If the place got busted, especially with Witch Garnett right down the road, what would happen to the nice ladies simply doing the wash?
I didn’t know. But we needed them and they needed the work.
After a while, the houses grew a lot farther apart.
Single-story farmhouses, with better paint jobs and several with automobiles parked out front.
Folks were already up this Friday morning, drinking coffee on their porches, rocking babies.
A wagon full of yellow squash rattled past me, headed in the direction of the square.
After about ten minutes, I knew I’d reached Picador’s house, by the description the woman had given me.
It was small, white, typical, and covered in fall flowers, yellow black-eyed Susans, orange chrysanthemums, purple verbena, and aster, a flourish of reds and yellows and pinks, and along the right side was a wall of four-foot sunflowers as tall as Picador, and on past those looked like a garden of lettuces and squashes.
Confederate jasmine covered a split-rail fence that separated her yard from the road.
I thought about Picador frowning at the derelict state of Mrs. Tartt’s yard, but Mrs. Tartt had insisted that Rory’d take care of it. It seemed like years ago.
I spotted Picador walking through the side yard with a basket.
She had on a pale calico dress and a blue scarf over her hair and she looked like, well, herself.
And by that I meant more like her and less like a stiff white uniform waiting on somebody else.
Her eyes narrowed on a weed she snatched up and dropped in her basket.
I remembered what Polly’d said, how she’d never had this kind of time for herself.
I hated the thought of bringing her into our world.
She looked up, basket on her hip, and frowned at me. “Miss Birdie. What you doing out here?” She waved me closer. “Is Miss Viktoria alright? She sick?”
“She’s fine, nothing’s wrong.” I opened the wooden gate. “I just came by to see if you could come help out at the house.”
“Lawd a mercy, you ’bout scare me to death.”
I followed her up a gravel path. The porch was covered in tin cans full of bouquets of the fall flowers from her yard. We sat on the steps.
“’Scuse me if I don’t invite you in, my grandbaby in there asleep. She move too fast fo Picador this time a the mawning.” She laughed, though I doubted she’d ever be completely relaxed around me. I didn’t make those rules. “How’s Miss Viktoria doing?”
“She and Frances went down to Jackson to look for Rory. They’re staying with Mrs. Tartt’s sister.”
“She must be sick to death worrying. But Mr. Rory gone do the right thing. He ain’t gone do his mama thataway long,” she said. Picador was probably the last person in town who still thought highly of Rory.
“We took some boarders in at the house to make her a little money. We sure could use your and Polly’s help.”
Picador’s eyebrows went up. Like with Polly, I’d been worried that word had gotten out via Mr. Binny and his brothers. “They strangers living up in Miss Viktoria’s house?” she asked.
“Just ladies,” I said. “Six of them.” I swallowed. I needed to tell her this next part. “They run a little dance business, a dance club, in Mrs. Tartt’s backyard. So if you come out and see the dance floor set up, that’s what that is.”
Her nostrils widened. Picador might be only four foot tall but she called it like she saw it, which was more or less right straight into your soul. Maybe Charlie was right, she would know instantly.
“They running a who?”
“A … dime-a-dance club. Where you pay a dime. To dance.” I had to clear my throat; it felt like it was squeezing closed.
“And Miss Viktoria done approve that?” she asked, blinking wide at me. “In Mr. Henry’s backyart?”
“It helps that she’s outta town. So she doesn’t have to see it.”
“I would think so.” She scanned the row of sunflowers, thinking it over. Then she turned to me. “You got that fool Mr. Binny playing out there with his three fool brothers?”
“Yes ma’am.” How had she heard about that?
She tapped her foot on the wooden step. “I heard that ole stiff been playing somewhere around town but I sho didn’t know it was out Miss Viktoria’s house.” She made a gravelly sound. “What y’all need done, just the regular?”
“Sheets.” That was all I could get out. “We could use you this morning if you and Polly can make it, and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention the boarders or the dance club to anybody. I think it would embarrass Mrs. Tartt.”
“We always real careful with the Tartts’ goin’-ons,” Picador said. “All these years, we don’t talk to nobody ’bout they business.”
I stopped by the PO before I went home, and Mrs. Nutt handed me a few envelopes, all notices from the stubbornest of bill collectors.
I waited, hoping, and sure enough, “Here’s your outta-town mail,” she said and handed me a letter from Jack.
It was the first letter I’d had from him since he’d left Monday.
I splurged on a taxi home and tore it open on the ride.
Dear Birdie, I miss you terribly and I’ve only been gone one day.
Last night, I took Sam to supper at the Emporium.
I’d swear he’s grown another two inches since I saw him a few weeks ago and at this rate, he’ll be my size soon.
He told me he has a girlfriend and that she’s “swell” and it was all I could do not to say, “Me too, son.” I know it will take some time to get him to trust me again but he said if his mother’s agreeable maybe he and I could get together a few nights a week.
It was his idea and that meant the world to me.
Now, back to you: please write and tell me everything that’s happened to you since I left yesterday. And if there’s nothing to tell, I don’t care, I still want to hear it. I dream of that day in my apartment when you undid my buttons. All yours, J
My cheeks and neck flushed as I read that word girlfriend, and I thought about his warm hand on my back.
I read the letter a second time and had started on a third when the taxi driver turned around and said, “Want me to carry you to the doe, ma’am?
” He smiled, and I laughed and got out and paid him the quarter through his window, tipping him a nickel.
Exhausted, I plodded up the brick walk but I did wonder, did he know what this place was?
Had he driven some boys here last night?
If he didn’t know yet, I bet he would soon.
Two hours. That was all it took. Actually one hour, fifty-two minutes, for what I’d said could not under any circumstances happen to happen, and what did Charlie say about it?
“Told you so.”
She said it just like that, with a little know-it-all shrug, and then went on about her business, mending a dang bedsheet.
When I’d gotten home it hit me just how tired I really was, but I went in the kitchen and started slicing up fatback for a big batch of fresh butter beans.
Around nine, the screen door popped shut and Picador and Polly walked in.
I listened for any moving around upstairs. Nothing. Everyone was still asleep.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” I said.
They were both in their white uniforms, pressed and clean.
Polly’s hair was pulled back in a bun, tight around her smooth oval face.
They set their bags down in the pantry like usual, and then Polly stopped cold in her tracks.
She was staring through the swinging door to the dining room, which was propped open.
“Law, they done took everthing but the paint off the walls,” Picador said. Picador had seen the house after Rory had ransacked it, but neither had seen it since Mr. Fauster had taken the furniture and Mrs. Tartt’s heart with it.
Polly shook her head and pulled the swinging door shut the way Mrs. Tartt liked it.