Читать книгу Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League - Jonathan Odell - Страница 11

Chapter Four

THE WAY OF THE MULE

That morning up in Delphi, Hazel eased a plate down in front of Floyd. She took a step back.

Her husband stared silent and unblinking at his fried eggs, goopy with the uncooked whites shimmering in the morning light, the bacon in ashes, and the toast soggy with butter in the center and burnt black around the edges.

“You don’t have to eat it,” Hazel offered. “I’ll bury it in the backyard with last night’s supper.”

“No, honey,” he stammered, “there might be something here I can—”

“Just let me fix you anothern.” What she didn’t say was this was already her second halfhearted attempt this morning. The first had made her own stomach queasy, which was happening almost every time she cooked now.

Floyd managed a weak smile and pushed the plate away. “Don’t worry about it, sugar. Slept too late. I’m in a hurry.”

Her face clouded up. “On a Saturday? I thought you was going to take me driving today.” Hazel lived all week for their drives, just the two of them. She wouldn’t say so, but it took her back to those hope-filled days of catching rides with the route men.

“Can’t. Big customer out in the Delta.” He looked at her hopefully. “Maybe you can have something fixed for me by suppertime.”

She squeezed out a smile, yet inside Hazel bridled at the suggestion. Not that she would ever say it, but she couldn’t bear another minute in front of that stove. It was like somebody trying to hitch her up to a mule on plowing day. If she got good at it, she might never break out of her harness. She knew she should be ashamed of herself for thinking such thoughts. Floyd had saved her from all that.

Her husband casually turned away from her and cast his gaze out the window, staring off into space again. Look at him, she thought. Already he was a million miles away from this kitchen and his bumbling housewife. Maybe he thought her ineptness cute, proud of being able to afford a wife who couldn’t keep a house.

“Floyd? Sure I can’t fix you something?” she asked him. “Maybe some Cheerios or. . .Floyd!”

He beamed a surprised smile and rose up from the table to give Hazel a hug. “You sure are pretty. Takes my hunger for food clean away.”

She sighed in his arms. Exactly what she thought he would say. She remembered that day back in the hills when Hazel had asked her mother about “pretty.” “Forget about pretty,” she had told her daughter flatly. “Pretty can’t keep a husband. ’Cause pretty can’t cook and pretty can’t clean and pretty can’t raise children. And, girl, the biggest thing pretty can’t do is last.”

“Floyd, what kind of wife am I to send you off to work without a decent breakfast?” she said, waiting for him to ease her guilt a bit more.

“It don’t matter,” he assured her. “I love you anyway.”

She knew he would say that, too. There had been a lot of those “anyways” lately. Like when she got up the courage to use the washing machine and then cracked most of his buttons feeding his shirts through the wringer. As he held her, she asked, “Floyd, how many ‘anyways’ reckon you got left in you?”

“As many as the stars you got left in your eyes.”

With all her heart she wanted to believe him, that he loved her no matter what and that his love would be enough to get them through a lifetime of bad cooking. But it still left her wondering, what did he want from her?

Floyd must have been reading her mind. “We living in modern times. It’s nearly 1950 and you ain’t some farm wife who works herself into an ugly, wore-out nubbin of a woman. Anyhow, you don’t see any other white women around here doing for themselves. Just study on how to keep yourself the pretty and pampered wife of Delphi’s next rich man.”

“We going to be rich?” Hazel asked, again knowing what he would say next, word for word.

“If you can see it, you can be it,” Floyd said, reciting his favorite verse from the book of success sayings he kept by his side of the bed. “The way things are going, won’t be long before I can get you some regular colored help. It’s about time we took a step up.”

She smiled sadly. “Floyd, you stepping so high now, I get a nosebleed looking up at you.”

“Well, get used to it,” he said with a grin. “You know where I’m off to this morning?”

“Where to?” she asked. “Where you going without me?”

“To talk face-to-face with one of the biggest men in the Delta. You heard me tell about him. They call him the Senator. He asked me to come by this morning personal to look over his place. To get the lay of the land, so to speak.”

“That’s real nice, Floyd.” Her voice was resigned.

“He’s a real old-time planter. Lives down in the Delta amongst his tenants and the skeeters. Got him a mansion they call the Columns. Everybody swore he would be the last to buy mechanical cotton pickers to replace his hands with. Why, the first time I called on him he told me I was wasting my breath and his time. Remember what I told you I said to turn him around?”

“It’s just that if you and me could spend some time—”

“What got him was when I told him, ‘Senator, do you want to spend your time studying the mysterious habits of niggers, or do you want to make money?’ ” Floyd shook his head at himself for saying such a thing. “Then I told him, ‘Are you a planter or a dad-blamed anthropologist?’ You should have heard him laughing at that one.”

Again Hazel smiled weakly, ashamed to ask him what an anthropologist was, even though this was the third time she had heard the story. “Floyd, it’s only that I’ve been feeling—”

“You just wait,” he said. “If he sticks with me he’ll go from messing with six hundred niggers to only a handful of drivers. After the Senator buys in, everybody will get on board.”

Hazel noticed a sudden pang of sympathy for the displaced. Was her husband becoming that important, where he could get rid of a whole world of coloreds because they had outlived their usefulness? And the little circus girl all dressed in white? Would she be gone as well, before Hazel could figure out her riddle?

“Where they all going to go to?”

“Who?” Floyd asked.

“The niggers. You know, if nobody needs ’em no more, where they all going to go to?”

Floyd shrugged. “Oh. Somewhere, I reckon.” He said, “Ain’t no stopping us, Hazel. We done put the mule behind us for good.” He playfully patted her on the rear on his way to the door.

“Nope. You right about that,” she said, taking the frying pan to the sink to scrub. “Not a mule in sight nowhere.”

Floyd pushed open the screen and turned to say good-bye, then stood there for a long moment, staring at Hazel with a curious look on his face.

“What?” she yelped, afraid she had gone ugly in his eyes.

He rushed back to Hazel and laid the flat of his hand on her stomach. “If I’m not wrong, looks like you might better go see the doctor.”

Hazel’s heart sank. “You want me to go to the doctor ’cause I’m getting fat?”

He only grinned bigger.

Hazel thought for a moment and then her face burned. “You think I’m going to have a baby! That’s what you’re saying! Ain’t it?”

He gave her a few seconds and then asked carefully, “Well, what do you think, honey? You the one it’s happening to.”

She should have known. Her sister Onareen told her the only way not to get pregnant was to do it standing up, and she sure wasn’t going to suggest that to Floyd.

Hazel sat down, all of a sudden feeling woozy. Oh, Lord, she thought, the only thing worse than being pregnant would be Floyd knowing about it before me. “No, I can’t be preg—you got to be wrong about it.”

Floyd knelt down by Hazel and slipped his arm around her, placing his hand on her belly again. As if knowing her thoughts, he said, “Don’t worry. You gonna be a good mother. Remember that little saying I taught you, ‘If you can see it, you can be it.’ ”

Her smile was pained. Well, that was just it, Hazel was thinking, I can’t see it. How was a “good mother” supposed to look? Back in the hills where Hazel came from, there wasn’t talk about good ones or bad ones—only live ones and dead ones, sturdy ones and sickly ones, fertile ones and ones who had dried up early. Yet now with this good–bad difference, she was convinced she would end up being a naturally bad one. Another thing Floyd would have to love her anyway for.

She looked into his face. Floyd gazed at her with so much faith and hope, it made her heart ache. “I’m scared, Floyd. I don’t know how to care for a baby. I seen it done, but I ain’t never done it myself.”

“Oh, that ain’t no problem. We can ask some of the women from church to help. Maybe your sister Onareen can come stay.”

“Get Momma,” Hazel whimpered, for the first time in years finding a kind of comfort in that particular word. She couldn’t help saying it again. “Momma. I want my momma.” Hazel needed somebody who knew her, somebody who wouldn’t expect too much from her. Somebody who would be surprised at how far she had come.

“You sure? You know she don’t take to me since I stole you from the hills.”

“No, I want to show her how wrong she was about hoping. I want her to see how good you done. How good you been to me.”

Floyd blushed. “Well, then,” he said with a snappy nod of his head, “I’ll go fetch her when the time comes.”

She raised her eyes and looked into Floyd’s face again. He was so confident. The sense of dread returned.

Why should that be? she wondered. Why should her husband’s rock-hard certainty scare her so, making her feel so small and lost? What had happened to her own feelings of hope?

Hazel remembered the day Floyd had come home and found her crying, sitting by the new oven she was sure she had broken. Growing up, the only cookstoves she had ever seen burned wood. Floyd simply struck a match and lit it back up. And she knew it wasn’t just the oven. Somehow, it was as if the rush of Floyd’s success had blown out her own little pilot light.