A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Well, pretty soon the feed store cut off their credit and there wasn’t nothing left to feed the chickens, so we had to eat as many of them as we could before they all starved to death and that was the end of the egg business. Earl and Wesley, being both tenderhearted and brought down by gloom, couldn’t bring themselves to kill a single chicken. I like to wrung my arm off wringing those chicken necks.

I used to like fried chicken, but I don’t any more.

Pembrook, he’s the smart one. He don’t steal, sing, or go into business. He’s off at the state college studying how to be a lawyer.

He’s the only one used to talk to me and I miss him. I was always planning to ask him what happened to our mother, how she died, and why Pop ran off like he did. But I just never got up the nerve.

Pembrook writes me letters a couple times a month, telling what it’s like up there at the college. It sure sounds fine. He’s always going on at me how I should go back to school and finish up and come to the college and learn how to be somebody. Well, I’d kind of like that, but who’d look after the boys? Reason why I didn’t do so good in school was I never had no time for studying, what with looking after the boys like I was their mother instead of Sweet Baby Jenny like they call me. Only Pembrook never called me that.

Another thing I always meant to ask Pembrook and never did is how come I come out looking like a canary in a cuckoo-bird’s nest.

Pembrook looks more or less just like the other boys, though he keeps his black hair real clean and he wears big eyeglasses on top of his sharp Taggert nose. His eyes are dark brown like theirs, and he weathers up nice and tan in the summer sun. But in summer my freckles just get more so while the part in between the freckles gets red. And my hair, which is mud-yellow most of the time, gets brighter and brighter and kinks up in tight little curls unless I keep it braided up. And never mind my eyes. They’re not a bit like the boys’. Greeny-blue or bluey-green depending on the weather. As for my nose, it couldn’t be less Taggert if it was a pump handle.

Small and turned-up and ugly.

Could be I taken after my mother, though I don’t know that for a fact ’cause I never set eyes on her nor saw any picture of her.

Pembrook says I’m pretty but that’s just because he likes me.

Pembrook says I look a lot like Miss Claudia Carpenter who is regarded as the prettiest girl in two counties, but I never saw her to make the comparison. She’s the daughter of the town’s one and only bank president. She’s a year or so older than me, and she don’t stick around much. Got sent away to school and always taking trips here and there. Can’t be much fun, never being home in your own home place. Pembrook told me our mother used to help out at the Carpenter household, at parties and such or when their regular maid got sick. Maybe I could get such a job and put aside a little money, just in case I ever decide to do what Pembrook says.

One thing I do remember about Pop before he went away. He used to tell me stories. He used to sit himself down in his big maroon armchair and he would sit me down on his lap and he would say,

“Now, listen. This here’s a story about a bad little girl.” The stories were always different but they were all about a girl named Bad Penny. She was ugly and mean and spiteful and nobody liked her.

She was always making trouble and in the end she always got punished. Sometimes she got et up by the pigs and sometimes she got drowned in the creek. Once she got cut up in little bits by the disc harrow. And another time she fell into the granary and suffocated in the wheat. But she always came back, as mean and nasty as ever, and that’s why she was called Bad Penny.

After the story Pop would take me up to my room and put me to bed.

I liked the stories, even though they scared me some. I knew pigs didn’t eat little girls, but I was always pretty careful around the pigpen. We don’t keep pigs any more, but we had a few then and I used to carry the slops out to them.

Well, things got so bad after Ace robbed the gas station down at the crossroads and got recognized by Junior Mulligan who just happened to be having his pickup truck filled up with gas at the time and never did like Ace since the time they two went hunting together and Ace claimed it was his deer and knocked Junior into Dead Man’s Gully and broken his leg. So off Junior went to the police and they come and drug Ace out of the Red Rooster Cafe where he was treating everyone to beer and hard-boiled eggs.

It was sad and lonesome around the place without Ace to stir things up, and quiet with Deucy’s guitar in hock and him not able to sing a blessed note through mourning for it. Earl and Wesley tried selling insurance round about, but nobody we knew could buy any and the folks we didn’t know wouldn’t. So it was up to me.

I harked back to my idea of going as a maid like Pembrook had told me our mother had done. I didn’t mind working in someone else’s house, though Deucy said it was undignified and not befitting a Taggert. Far as I could see, Deucy thought any kind of work was undignified except maybe wearing out the porch swing. So one morning I washed my whole body including my hair, and cut my toenails so I could put shoes on, and got out one of our mother’s dresses from the wardrobe in the attic, and made ready to go see Mrs. Carpenter. The dress fit me right well, though it was a little long and looked a bit peculiar with my high-top lace-up sneakers but that was all I had, so it would have to do.

I walked into town, fanning the skirt of the dress around me and blowing down the front of it from time to time so the sweat would not make stains on the green-and-white polkadots. I got to the Carpenter house before the sun got halfway up the sky, about the time Deucy would be rolling out of bed and yelling his head off for coffee. This was one morning he’d just have to find his own breakfast. I stood for a while with my hand on the iron gate looking up at the house. It was a big one, shining white like a wedding cake, and there must have been about two dozen windows on the front of it alone. It set back from the street on what looked like an acre of the greenest grass I ever saw sloping up to a row of prickly bushes that trimmed the porch.

I’d seen it before, times Ace used to take me riding in the beer truck and tell me how all he needed was to rob the bank and then we’d be living in this part of town alongside the rich folks. But I never really took a good close look, ’cause I thought he was joking.

Now I looked until I got to shaking and wondering if I ought to march right up to the front door or sneak around to the back. I stood there so long I felt like my feet had taken root to the pavement, and if I could only get loose I’d run home and stay there forever.

But then I thought about how there was less than a half a pound of coffee left and just enough flour for one more batch of biscuits, and I pulled open that iron gate and set my face toward the big front door. It felt like an hour that I was walking up that path with my feet feeling like big old river rafts and my hair jumping out of the braids that I’d combed and plaited so neat. But I got up on the porch and put my finger on the door-bell and heard it ding-donging away inside. I waited. But the door stayed closed.

It was a pretty door, painted white like the rest of the house, and I studied every panel of it and the big brass doorknob and the letter box beside it while I waited. I wondered if I should ring the bell again. Maybe no one was home. Maybe I’d come all this way for nothing. They probably wouldn’t want me to be their maid even if they were home. The green-and-white dress was sagging down around my shinbones and my sneakers were covered with road dust. Maybe I’d just go home and wait until I got a better idea.

I turned away and started down the porch steps, and then I heard the door open behind me and a sharp voice like a blue-jay’s said,

“Yes?”

I looked back and saw a tall skinny woman staring at me with a frown betwixt her eyes that made me shiver in spite of the heat.

“Miz Carpenter?” I said.

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Carpenter,” she said. “Who are you? What do you want? I’m very busy.”

My throat got choked and I couldn’t swallow, so when I said, “I come to be your maid,” I thought maybe she couldn’t hear me, ’cause I couldn’t hear me myself.

“What?” she said. “Speak up. What’s this about a maid?”

“I come to be it,” I said. “If you’ll have me.”

“Well, sakes alive!” she said, showing all her yellow teeth. “If you aren’t the answer to a prayer! Where did you spring from, and who told you to come here? Well, never mind all that. Come in the house and let’s get started. You look strong. I just hope you’re willing.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and quick as a wink she drug me through the house and into the kitchen and right up to the sink where there was more dishes than I’d ever seen in my life and all of them dirty.

“Just start right in,” she said. “The dishwasher’s right there. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”