Southern Discomfort

For the last fifteen minutes, women from two of the local churches had been spreading food on a table constructed of saw benches and planks. Every whiff of fried chicken and hot cornbread made my mouth water.

A clerk from the quick-stop down the street came up to invite us to use their facilities if the two portable toilets weren't enough, but most of us just lined up at the hose pipe to wash off the morning's grime and sweat, then headed for the food.

Lu stood at the head of the table. Beside her were BeeBee Powell and her two children, who'd been working hard all morning, too. On the other side was a sweaty white girl in green cotton running shorts, a pink T-shirt, and an even pinker nose. She didn't look a day older than Annie Sue and her friends.

'For those who haven't met her yet,' said Lu, 'I'd like to introduce the Reverend Veronica Norton. Ronnie?'

The young woman wiped her hands on the seat of her shorts, then opened a Bible, and with an impish grin, read the last three verses of the book of Proverbs. It's from the passage that begins 'Who can find a virtuous woman?'—the one most preachers will read at an elderly matron's funeral when he doesn't really know the least little thing about her except that she'd been somebody's wife and mother. This was the first time I'd heard it read with a spin.

'Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.' In the Reverend Norton's voice, the final words sounded down-right subversive: 'Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her own works praise her in the gates.'

I wasn't the only woman who turned and looked proudfully at the house rising behind us, strong and clean, soon to shelter the young mother who stood among us with her two children.

Lu next called on an elderly black deaconess who gave thanks for the food, both spiritually and temporally, and we fell to. My paper plate was soon loaded with chicken, butterbeans, two thick meaty slices of vine-ripened tomatoes, and a dollop of zucchini casserole, and I carried it over to a stack of plywood shaded from the midday sun by a huge elm tree that was actually growing in the next yard over. Somebody's black-and-white hound was lying in the cool dirt beside the lumber. He looked up at me with a hopeful air and I gave him a bit of crisp chicken skin. Annie Sue, Cindy and a third girl soon joined us, sitting cross-legged on the broad sheets of plywood like day campers on a boat pier.

'Y'all know my Aunt Deb'rah, don't you?' Annie Sue asked.

Cindy McGee I had already recognized. The other, a strawberry blonde who'd been with her Thursday night, looked familiar but I couldn't put a name to her and said so.

'That's because you couldn't come to our spring concert,' said Annie Sue. 'She and Cindy and me made up a trio, but you had a fund-raiser or something that night.'

'I'm Paige Byrd,' the girl said shyly. 'I think we probably met at my father's funeral.'

'Oh. Right,' I said, feeling like a clod. 'Sorry.'

I vaguely knew that Annie Sue and Cindy had begun running around with Judge Byrd's daughter when they made the senior high school chorus last fall. And I must have seen her at his wake—even though I disliked Perry Byrd personally, I'd still gone to pay my respects to the family—but she had never fully registered.

'That's because she was a total mess,' Annie Sue told me later. 'Fat and frumpy. She's lost at least ten pounds since the funeral and Cindy and me, we made her cut her hair and get a rinse and start wearing bright colors. Can you believe it? Everything in her closet practically was beige. She just flat-out disappeared into the woodwork before.'

Now that I knew who she was, I could see the likeness to her father. Perry Byrd had been a redhead with broad flat cheekbones and wide brow, and his daughter had inherited both his bone structure and his coloring. She seemed to have escaped his prejudices though, if helping to build a house for a needy single black woman meant anything.

She wiped her fingers on her napkins and held out her hand like a well-mannered old lady. 'I'm pleased to meet you again, Judge Knott,' she said awkwardly. 'I've been wanting to ever since Annie Sue told me you were going to be appointed.'

'Why, thank you, Paige. I guess it must be hard for you and your family to see someone else in his place, but —'

'No,' she said firmly, as if this were something she and Annie Sue had already discussed. 'I was really glad when I heard it was you going to get his seat. I think there ought to be more women on the bench.'

'Hear, Hear!' said Cindy, tapping her hammer on plywood to underline her enthusiasm.

Paige turned beet red and there was a moment of self-conscious silence before Cindy, who was the prettiest of the three and who seemed to be the leader, leaned over and bossily took a buttered biscuit out of Paige's hand.

'You want to put back every pound?' she said sternly, handing the biscuit to the hound, who didn't really need it either, but was willing to oblige. 'If you're going to get in that new bathing suit—'

'Doesn't matter whether I can or can't,' said Paige. 'My mother doesn't want me to go with y'all.'

'What?'

Annie Sue stirred uneasily. 'My dad won't let me either.'

Cindy sat back, looking scornful. 'And y'all are just gonna let them tell you what you can do every minute?'

'Easy for you,' said Annie Sue. 'Now that your dad's gone, you can talk your mother into anything.'

That seemed like a callous remark to me, what with Ralph McGee not in his grave a month and Perry Byrd barely a week earlier, but only Paige seemed to notice.

'I could probably talk her into it later,' she said quietly.

'Just not now. She thinks it wouldn't look right this soon after.'

'Where are y'all wanting to go?' I asked.