for a week till she gets them properly seasoned again so that nothing sticks when she’s cooking.
Mother was a hard worker—“She had to be, with such a houseful of young’uns,” says Maidie—but she had no intention of killing herself to save a penny the way Daddy’s first wife had. She cooked and cleaned and washed and ironed and she would freeze and can any fruits and vegetables Daddy or the boys brought up to the house, but she never worked in the fields and she was never without household help. Not just us children, who had chores and responsibilities as a matter of course, but women she hired right out from under Daddy’s nose.
Aunt Essie had been his best looper when tobacco was still strung on sticks and cured in oil-fired barns. She could take from four handers, hour after hour, when most loopers couldn’t keep up with three. And she did it for sixty cents an hour, same as what the men got for priming the sticky green leaves out in the hot sun.
They say that the morning Mother offered Aunt Essie five dollars a day to come work with her in the house, Aunt Essie handed her string over to Daddy’s sister Ida, threw away her tar-gummy plastic apron, scoured her fingertips raw with a brush to get all the tar out from under her nails and said, “God willing, I’ve done and touched my last leaf of tobacco.”
They say Daddy came storming up to the house and tried to lure her back to the barn for seventy cents—a full ten cents an hour more than the men—and she and Mother just laughed at him.
After that, he tried not to brag on who worked hard “’cause just as sure as I do, Sue’ll hire ’em away from me.”
“’Cept for getting you to quit moonshining, it was the best day’s work
We hung our dishcloths up to dry. Maidie patted my cheek and told me not to be a stranger, then gathered up a second panful of stuffed peppers which she’d cooked for her and Cletus’s supper and went off down the path to their house.
It was only seven-thirty, still plenty of daylight as I walked back through the house, down the wide central hall that separates dining room on the left from back parlor on the right where Mother’s piano sits tuned and ready. She could flat tear up a keyboard. Although I pick a passable guitar, I never learned to play the piano with more than one finger. Happily, a couple of my nieces are good enough to keep up with Daddy’s fiddle and our guitars when the family gets together to play.
My old bedroom upstairs hasn’t changed from when I last lived here. Maidie keeps fresh sheets in the bottom dresser drawer in case I decide to spend the night at the last minute, and I’d changed into a spare pair of jeans before supper. Now I picked up the dress and high-heeled sandals I’d worn in court earlier today, slung my purse over my shoulder and went downstairs.
Daddy was sitting on the porch swing. Blue and Ladybelle lay sprawled nearby. The two hounds are seldom far from his side when he’s outdoors.
“Ain’t leaving now, are you, shug?” he asked.
My Firebird was parked at the foot of the steps, so I put my clothes on the backseat, then went and sat down beside him on the swing.
“I’m in no hurry. Just thought I’d run past and see how my house is coming before it gets too dark to see.”
Daddy wasn’t all that happy that I was building a house of my own even though he hadn’t blinked an eye when I asked him to deed me five acres out by the long pond where I could have a little privacy. He’d never ask, but I knew he wished I’d come back home, move into my old room upstairs, let him look after me as if I were still his precious baby girl.
Never gonna happen.
I haven’t lived at home since I stormed out after Mother died. I took a circuitous route through law school and eventually came back to Colleton County, but not to my father’s house. Instead I moved in with Mother’s sister Ozella. She and Uncle Ash have that big house and no children and we don’t rasp each other’s nerve endings.
Daddy and I get along just fine these days and I figure it’ll stay that way as long as we don’t try to live under the same roof.
“Annie Sue said she was going to start pulling wire this week,” I said. “Want to come along and check it out?”
He resettled his summer straw planter’s hat lower on his silver head. “Well, I was thinking maybe you and me could ride over to the Crocker burying ground first? I’m supposed to get up with Rudy Peacock. See if he can put a wing back on that angel.”
5
Summer or winter, riding with Daddy was always an adventure when I was growing up. I never knew if I was going to wind up in a heated discussion about politics under the shade of a chinaberry tree in somebody’s dusty backyard or if I’d be shivering in front of an improvised oil-drum fireplace while my brother Will auctioned off the household effects of someone recently deceased.
The boys love to tell how at least once every summer, usually just before barning time, Daddy’d load them all up in the back of the truck with old quilts and towels to soften the steel truck bed and a large ice chest full of soft drinks and fried chicken and they’d go spend the whole day down at White Lake. “We’d be on the road by first light and not get home till almost midnight, sunburned and wore plumb out.”
There are snapshots of the boys clowning on the clean white sand that forms the bottom and gives the crystal-clear lake its name, but none of me in my little pink-and-white-striped bathing suit.
“That’s ’cause we quit going before you were old enough to come,” says Seth. “Robert was already married to Ina Faye and Frank already joined the Navy.”
“So why’d y’all quit?”
Seth’s five brothers up from me and the one most tolerant of my questions of how things were back then, but
