“Well, that’s just me.” I tried to pull away from him, but he held on tight.
“That’s a pretty young woman,” he said. “That’s what a young woman is supposed to be, decent and clean and modest. I wish you were my daughter, Jenny Taggert, instead of that hellion who won’t stay home where she belongs and behaves so no man in his right mind would marry her. How would you like that? Would you like to live here and be my girl?”
Well, I felt my neck getting hot, ’cause Ace had told me that when a man starts paying compliments there’s only one thing he’s after, and I’d sure heard enough of Deucy speaking sugar words to his ladies on the porch swing.
“Excuse me, Mr. Carpenter,” I said, “but I got to be gettin’ home and would you please pay me my five dollars so I can carry home some supper to those boys?” I know that was bold, but he was making me nervous and it just came out that way.
He let go of me and pulled out his wallet again. “Is that what Clemmie’s paying you? Five dollars? Well, it’s not enough. Here and here and here.”
The bills came leaping out of his wallet and he stuffed them into my hands. When I looked, I saw I had three ten-dollar bills. Not only that, he started hauling out the leftover chicken that I had put away and shoving it into a paper sack.
“Take the peach cobbler, too,” he said, “and anything else you’d like. Take it all.”
“Now I can’t do that. What would Miz Carpenter say?”
“I’ll tell her I ate it for a midnight snack.” He laughed then, but it wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh. It sounded like something was breaking inside him.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, and skedaddled out the back door before he could think up some new craziness that would get me into trouble.
His voice came after me. “You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you?”
“Sure thing,” I called back. But I wasn’t so sure I would.
All the way home I pondered on Mr. Carpenter and his strange ways. But I just plain couldn’t figure it out. All I could think was that having so much money had addled his mind and I thanked God that we was poor and couldn’t afford to be crazy.
I put it all out of my mind, though, when I reached the dirt road that led up to our place. The moon was just clearing the top of the big old lilac bush at the edge of the property, and its kindly light smoothened away some of the ugliness you could see in daylight.
The house looked welcoming with lights shining from its windows, and there in the dooryard was Pembrook’s dinky little car. I ran up the porch and busted into the house, shouting his name.
They was all gathered in the kitchen and I could see from their dark Taggert faces that I had interrupted an argument. But I didn’t care. I set the Carpenter food down on the table and said, “Here’s supper, boys. Dig in.” Deucy and Earl and Wesley did just that, not even bothering with plates but snatching up that chicken in their fingers.
Then I sat down and took off my left sneaker and pulled out the money. “There and there and there,” I said, as I counted the bills out on the table. Deucy’s eyes bugged out, and Earl and Wesley shouted, “Whoopee!” as best they could with their mouths full of drumstick meat.
Pembrook looked miserable.
“Where’d you get all that, Jenny?” he asked.
“I went as a maid,” I told him.
“Where did you go as a maid?”
“To Miz Carpenter.”
“And she gave you all that?”
I was about to lie and say she did, but I was never very good at lying. It makes my nose run. “No. He did.”
“You’re not to go there any more,” said Pembrook.
Well, I’d just about decided that for myself, but I wasn’t about to have Pembrook, much as I dearly love him, telling me what not to do. “I will if I want to,” I said. “And when did you get home, and how long you staying for?”
“Forever, if I have to, to keep you out of trouble.”
“That’s pretty nice trouble,” piped up Deucy. “Thirty dollars for a day’s work and all this food. You ought to have some, Pem.”
“Shut up, you idiot!”
I had never seen Pembrook so angry. Taggert blood boils easy, but until this minute Pembrook had always managed to keep his temper under control. He turned back to me, his eyes glittering and mean, like a chicken hawk about to pounce.
“You are not to go back to the Carpenter house, not ever again.
You are to put it right out of your mind. And tomorrow I am going to mail that money back. And that’s the end of it.”
I only said one thing. “Why?”
“Never mind why.”
Well, that did it. I had worked hard for that money. Whether it was five dollars or thirty dollars, it was mine. The first money I had ever earned. And Pembrook had no right to take it away from me.
I had done nothing wrong, as far as I could see, and it wasn’t fair for him to punish me. I reared back in my chair, looked him square in the eye, and opened my mouth.
“Pembrook Taggert, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am no longer Sweet Baby Jenny. I am a woman growed and able to make up my own mind about things. You can’t stand there and give me orders and tell me to never mind why. I took it from Pop and I took it from Ace and I been taking it from these three, while you’ve been off at your college learning your way out of this mess. I ain’t gonna take it no more.”
The hard bitterness faded from his eyes and he took my two hands in his.
“You’re right, Jenny,” he said. “There are things you ought to know. Come out to the porch swing and I’ll tell you.”
“Don’t make it a long story,” Deucy called after us. “Ardith Potter’s comin’ over tonight and we got things to discuss.”
But it was a long story that Pembrook told me. One that went back through the years to the time before I was born. All the boys knew it, but Pop had sworn them on the Bible never to tell me. It accounted for all the things I’d wondered about and never had the gumption to ask. If I had asked, they wouldn’t have told me, although Pembrook said he was mighty tempted from time to time because it was my life and I had a right to know.
He told me that Pop wasn’t my true father, that Mr. Carpenter was. He told me that about a month after I was born, our mother had told Pop the truth and packed her bag and said she was running off with Mr. Carpenter to have a better life than scratching around on a poor old dirt farm. He told me that Pop had choked the life out of her right there in the bedroom with me looking on with my blind baby eyes from the cradle beside the bed. And then Pop had gone to Mr. Carpenter and told him the whole thing and got him to hush it up because the scandal wouldn’t have done anybody any good.
They gave out that our mother had died of childbirth fever.
The tears were rolling down my face, but I managed to ask, “How could you keep on living here, after he did that?”
“Well,” said Pembrook, “Ace was the oldest and he wasn’t but twelve. We had nowhere else to go. And he was our father.”
“What happened then?” I asked. “Why did Pop run off?”
“He didn’t,” said Pembrook. “He lies buried under Mr. Carpenter’s rose garden.”
He went on to tell me how the years went by and Pop took up drinking and the farm went even further downhill until it was just a wasteland. Then one day Pop got it into his head that Mr. Carpenter ought to be paying money to take care of his child, meaning me. He went up to the Carpenter house, full of liquor and hate, and demanded a thousand dollars. Pembrook and Ace tagged along behind and listened outside the window of a room that was full of books and a big desk and a hunting rifle on the wall over the fireplace.
“I seen that room,” I told him. “Miz Carpenter calls it his study.”
