The Well and The Mine Read online

  “Masher,” Mama said. She walked back over, looking like she’d bolt any second, making a circle around him to collect her sewing. He just leaned back and grinned. Socks and threaded needle in hand, Mama stopped and turned toward us, looked down at Papa, and ran her hand through his hair. For just one second, she left her still fingers there, but then she moved them quick, glaring down at him until he got out of her chair.

  The next morning we headed out to the farm, walking instead of driving because it was bright and fine, even with the sun only beginning to peek out. The farm had sections of watermelon and corn, big chunks of land for them, but it was the cotton that was ripe for picking. Every plant had a very strict schedule.

  Once we were in front of the cotton, it was almost all we could see—rows and rows of it, with the plain wood house and the dirt yard where the Talberts lived stuck there like an afterthought. I saw two hats—both straw and wide-brimmed—moving down the rows. Papa must’ve, too, because he hollered, “We’ll start on the far rows,” and with that, Mr. and Mrs. Talbert popped out from the cotton. Short and stubby, Mrs. Talbert looked like a mushroom with that hat.

  “We’ll meet up with you somewhere near the middle,” yelled back Mr. Talbert. “Least I hope we do.”

  That was all we said to them. Papa took us to the other side of the cotton field. He took hold of the first plant and pulled a stalk toward us. It was a cloud on a stick, a little dirty, but soft looking and puffy. It would be like picking a pillow. Papa explained how to pull the fluff out of the prickly boll, prying it out in one twist. He popped it in Jack’s sack, saying that one was for free. He assigned me and Jack to opposite sides of the same row and told Virgie to take the next one with him. I wished I was on the row with Papa. But then as soon as I had time to be jealous, he and Virgie were both back on our row.

  “Take care and don’t get the brown part in with the cotton,” he said. “Shouldn’t be nothing but white when we take it to the gin.”

  I’d wasted my time worrying about Virgie getting to spend more time with Papa than I did—he was off down their row, tossing cotton in his sack, before any of us had even opened our sacks.

  “Y’all alright?” he called back. He picked so fast his hand was a blur.

  “Yessir,” we all said, even though none of us had picked any. I wrapped my finger around my first boll. It didn’t feel a bit like a pillow; it was tough and sticky, and it fought to keep its piece of fuzz.

  “Ouch,” said Jack next to me. “It bites.”

  We went a few more feet, stooped and slow, wedging our fingertips under the cotton puffs and trying to get more softness than sticker. The sun hadn’t cleared the tops of the rows, and my fingers already felt raw. I checked for blood and didn’t see any. I heard rustling from Virgie’s row, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Doin’ alright, Virgie?” I looked over, shoving the hair around my face back toward my ribbon.

  “Tryin’ to get the hang of it.”

  “My fingers hurt,” said Jack.

  “We’ve hardly gotten past where we started,” I said. I stood up all the way and tried to retie my ribbon. “And my hair’s already coming apart. Virgie…”

  She was knocking my hands away before I finished my sentence. She tied one tight pigtail, almost hurting my head. But I knew it would stay. “There,” she said. “And don’t look towards the end of the row. It only makes it go slower. Just look at one plant at a time. Then you’ll lose track.”

  We went on like that, awkward and fumbling, until I finally did see a drop of blood on a piece of cotton. My fingers were bright red, tender, and scratched in several places. I felt proud. I stuck the bloody cotton on the finger that was dripping and pulled the ribbon out of my hair to tie it around the cotton. I couldn’t do all that work and stain the cotton.

  The twigs and rocks cut into my knees even through my skirt, and my back ached.

  “Virgie,” I called over the cotton. “Did I tell you about that woman at the revival?”

  “Nuh-uh,” she said.

  I stood up, but I could hear her still rustling, so I tried to pick while I talked. “This woman nobody knows came down front and cried and cried and when me and Aunt Merilyn went down there, she said she’d sinned and God shouldn’t love her anymore.”

  “You went forward?”

  “No, not like to repent. Aunt Merilyn went to comfort her, and I went with her. But doesn’t that sound sort of odd to you? Her talkin’ about God not lovin’ her?”

  “Did you recognize her?”

  “Well, no. But she was sittin’ down and I couldn’t tell much about her with her all hunched over.” I wiped my forehead, and a little shower of sweat rained down.

  “Recognize her from what?” asked Jack, his sack of cotton forgotten. “From puttin’ that baby in our well?”

  “Hush, Jack,” I said. “You’re too little to talk about this.”

  “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are. Quit interruptin’.”

  “I want to know who did it,” he said.

  “You’ll end up with lots more cotton than Tess will since she’s busy runnin’ her mouth,” said Virgie.

  That made him smile, and he went back to picking.

  “We don’t know her?” asked Virgie.

  “Aunt Merilyn says she’s somebody’s sister from Brilliant.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense that she’d come to our well, then. Why would somebody we don’t know pick our well?”

  We thought on that for a while. A gnat flew in my eye and I dug it out tangled in a little ball of sleep.

  “She was passin’ by?” said Jack. Neither of us answered him, but I couldn’t think of a better answer.

  “It can’t be her,” Virgie finally said. “That woman could have been upset at yellin’ at her little ones or havin’ some bad thought about her neighbor. Could be anything.”

  I couldn’t argue with her, and I knew part of me just didn’t want to let go of the notion that the Well Woman wasn’t somebody we nodded at every day. Soon I stopped thinking about it and didn’t have nothing but cotton on my mind and in my hands and even in my mouth. The sun shone midmorning, and I still couldn’t seem to lose track of time. I’d never seen a slower-moving sun. We weren’t talking, only picking and stooping and tossing. I knew Negroes used to sing in the fields while they picked cotton. I couldn’t figure out why they’d do that. I didn’t feel a bit like singing. The back of my dress was wet with sweat. Jack’s hands were bleeding, I’d noticed. Virgie hadn’t seen. He had cotton wrapped around them as a bandage.

  I stood and stretched, arching backward. Jack threw down his sack then, looking very serious. “I don’t think I’m much cut out for cotton picking,” he said.

  “Baby,” I said.

  He looked at his sack like he wanted to pick it up again, then stuck out his tongue at me. “You keep on going, then, smarty. You won’t have any fingers left.”

  I looked at him and looked at my fingers. I’d have loved to prove him wrong, but then he’d get to sit and relax and cool off while I kept sweating and bleeding, and that didn’t seem fair at all.

  “I don’t care for it myself,” I announced.

  Virgie was just a shadow and a hat from the other side of the cotton. (She didn’t want to get sun on her face, but I wouldn’t let Mama put a hat on me. She said if I wanted to be ugly and wrinkled by high school, she wouldn’t stop me. Then it was too late to say I’d changed my mind.) “I don’t like it much, either,” said Virgie soon enough.

  We stood looking at one another for all of ten seconds, picked up our sacks, and went to find Papa to tell him that we were through with picking. He didn’t seem surprised. And since he didn’t mind none, we plopped ourselves down under a pecan tree, comparing bloody fingers and feeling like nobody ever deserved a nice warm patch of grass more than we did. We went on and took out the biscuits Mama had packed for us, figuring it was close enough to lunchtime. Papa used to make the best sausage, and I misse
d it. Empty biscuits weren’t the same. He had a smokehouse set up against the barn, and the sausage came from it. I knew there was more to it, that you took pig parts and stuffed them in another pig part, but I didn’t care to hear about it once Papa started explaining it.

  We’d all taken just a bite or two when we looked up and saw a strange boy and girl standing in front of us. We didn’t even see them coming. Neither of them was wearing shoes, but it was a nice day, and I didn’t care for shoes myself.

  “Those sausage?” asked the boy. Not even a “hello.”

  “Yep,” said me and Jack at the same time.

  “You belong to Mr. Moore?” the girl asked.

  “He’s our father,” Virgie said. It was written plain across her face that she thought it was a rude question.

  “We live here,” said the boy.

  About then I saw they had sacks like ours, only stuffed full of cotton.

  “You been pickin’ cotton, too?” I said. “We did it for the first time just now.”

  They looked at us like we were simpleminded when I showed them my fingers and Jack stuck his out, too. Their fingers were calloused and tough like Papa’s, and they were much browner than us, even Jack, who was brown as a nut. But even being that brown, something was off with their color. They had circles under their eyes like Papa when he’d worked double shifts and come up tired and short on sunlight. And their hair wasn’t blond or black or brown, but like it hadn’t been painted with any color at all.

  “You never picked before?” the girl asked. I noticed then that her dress was made from a bleached-out flour sack same as our dish towels. “We always help Mama and Daddy.”

  “The Talberts?” asked Virgie.

  They nodded, and the boy wrinkled his forehead at our cotton sacks.

  “You might get a dollar for all that,” he said, not looking too sure about it. “Maybe less. Ain’t got but a few pounds in there.”

  “We can both pick three dollars a day,” said the girl.

  Pretty soon they stopped looking at our sacks, though, and went back to looking at our biscuits.

  “You eatin’ lunch already?” asked the girl. “We don’t stop for lunch. Work from can to can’t.”

  She shook her head at us when we didn’t say anything. “When you can see to when you can’t. Light to dark.”

  We each only had one biscuit, but we should have halved them and shared, really. We didn’t. And even though I felt guilty about them not having any lunch, mainly I wanted them to go away so I wouldn’t have to taste the guilt along with the biscuit. And it went away real fast—as soon as those children got out of sight. They turned around and walked back to the cotton rows and didn’t even say “nice to meet you.” None of us said anything about them. We swallowed our last bites and licked our fingers, alright with tasting a little blood and dirt and cotton if it meant getting those last crumbs. I dabbed at the crumbs on my skirt with my wet finger, and Virgie swept hers into the grass. Then the guilt came back up like heartburn.

  I’d never had somebody ask me for food. People came to the door often enough, but really they were there for Mama and Papa. They decided who got a few eggs or a plate of beans or a whole chicken. It had been like that as long as I could remember, with people coming to the door, and you for certain gave them something.

  Me and Virgie and Jack were supposed to be the kind of people who helped out. But we didn’t give those Talbert children nothing. That pained me, not just from the guilt, but because it took something so simple and confused it. I hated that, even though I wasn’t supposed to hate.

  Ever since that baby died, pieces didn’t fit together as well as they used to. Some things were convoluted before, of course. Papa was the strongest man in the world, so of course nothing could hurt him, but he was cracked all over from the mines. God was good, but he might decide to send you to hell. Getting baptized in the river cleaned your soul, but I still had to take a bath on Saturday nights even if I’d just been swimming.

  But usually I tried to ignore it when the pieces didn’t come together quite right, even when something big and heavy poked at the edge of my mind and tried to shove its way in. Especially then. When I went over to Missy Summerfield’s house for lunch one day—Mama said I could—I found out they had more than a maid. They had a polished table nearly as wide as our kitchen with a red-and-white china bowl full of oranges in the middle. Seven oranges, so many of them that they might mold before the Summerfields got around to eating them all, and somehow I didn’t think they would miss the oranges even if that did happen. We only got an orange in our Christmas stocking.

  I’d also been over there on Sunday afternoons when Missy’s older sister had boys calling, and Missy would have me upstairs while she powdered her sister’s back so she’d stay clean and sweet-smelling during a whole afternoon of beaus. I was fascinated by that powder drifting through the air when Missy patted the puff against her sister’s back.

  The other thing that I liked about Missy’s—and that I’d figured out on a visit before I saw that bowl of oranges—was that they had chicken or pork chops or some thick slab of meat with every meal. So I never minded being asked to dinner. Everybody got served by the maid, a thin Negro woman with a white kerchief on her head who said “Miss Missy” when she was talking to Missy. That struck me as funny. The day of the oranges, I thought they must live the best lives in the world. I was thinking about asking for an orange for dessert when the maid asked me if I’d like a slice of fresh tomato. I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Missy corrected me right in front of the maid: “Don’t say ‘ma’am’ to her. We don’t do that.”

  Papa always told us to say “ma’am” to any grown woman, and I thought it was right rude not to. But I knew Missy’s parents had told her that being a Negro cancelled out being a grown-up. So one of us had parents that told us wrong, and of course I knew it must be the Summerfields but I figured she felt just as sure it was mine. After that I tried to stay away from the maid when I was visiting Missy because I never figured out whether I would still call her ma’am or not. That was the easiest way, but something pushed at me, nagging me that there was more to it. I ignored the push.

  Some other big, heavy thought shoved at me after those Talbert children left, or maybe a bunch of thoughts stuck together. A picture in my head of Lola Lowe’s bunch of children eating just blackberries and bread. Whatever it was, it was too big to fit in my head. We told Papa about the children when he came over an hour or so later for his own sausage and biscuit, and I realized I didn’t even know their names. Just called them those Talbert children, and that seemed almost as bad as hogging my biscuit.

  But Papa wasn’t mad at us for not giving them any. “I’ll bring them somethin’ special,” he said. “Don’t you worry about it no more.”

  And sure enough, we had enough for breakfast the next morning, but he’d given them the rest of that sausage. I wasn’t even sorry not to have more of it, and the not-feeling-sorry made me feel more Christian, like I might still be good after all.

  Albert I’D BEEN THINKING ABOUT THOSE BOYS IN SCOTTSBORO. Back in March, nine Negro boys were headed from Chattanooga to Memphis, and they ended up with two white girls in a railroad car. Two white girls in men’s clothes. The girls said the Negroes raped them, and wasn’t long after they got hauled to jail at Scottsboro that eight out of the nine of them got sentenced to die. Jury only held off on a twelve-year-old, and that wasn’t from lack of trying. I’d heard the colored fellows at Galloway talk about it, about how those girls were selling their bodies but just embarrassed to be caught with colored men. Most of us white men—me included—figured the girls were honest, and the boys weren’t fit to live.

  I’d always thought that all that mattered was how a body treated people. Colored man, white man, polka-dotted man, I was gone treat them fair and kind. And that was that. Laws and such didn’t concern me—they was only fences and cords arranged just so, and I couldn’t see why it mattered where they wer
e set up. I’d even mostly fall into wherever the cords pointed me. Because inside them, I was acting right.

  Tess and those biscuits. She hadn’t acted at all, hadn’t shared with those poor Talberts. But she’d thought on it, felt guilty about it, known she should do something different. It made me wonder about the difference between doing and thinking. I’d never have figured Jonah to work out a problem I couldn’t, to see inside that woman’s head so clear. Now Bill, him being so successful, him I would’ve thought to have all kinds of insight. I’d never have considered it being the other way around. It shook me up to keep hearing Jonah’s words in my head over and over when I was trying to make sense of that woman and her baby.

  Long as I didn’t do nobody ill, separate lines and separate churches and separate lives didn’t matter much. Probably mattered to those Scottsboro boys, all wrapped up in those cords I didn’t care about. And me, I was feeling tangled up a tad myself.

  Leta HARD TO BELIEVE DROPPINGS HAD ANYTHING TO DO with a rose. On a fall day with a strong wind, the petals would fall in dainty red designs, and I’d have to snatch them up before I spread the manure. Sometimes Tess would see me with the wheelbarrow down at the animal pens, and she’d hurry out and scoop up the petals, wanting to dry them or toss them in the air. She loved them. I wasn’t so attached, but if I left them on the ground, it’d allow for black-spot fungus. So I saved the petals from the shovelfuls of horse manure—the best kind of manure. I’d fertilize the roses good at the start of warm weather and at the end of it, carting a wheelbarrowful and spreading it thick, then chopping it into the soil.

  I picked off the dead flowers, looked them over for traces of brown on the stem. Bugs and rot got to them easier if anything dead stayed around. Didn’t want to overprune them—roses could go rotten from too much attention just like children could. Usually I’d fit them in wherever I had a hole in my day, a quick check for dead leaves, maybe give them a can of water. But on fertilizing days, I’d spoil myself a bit along with my roses. Most everything I did had to be done in a hurry, but this I didn’t rush. I laid out the shovelfuls dead even, smoothed them out like I was making a layer cake. I looked at every bloom, every stem to check for disease or bugs. I leaned in to breathe in the rose air. They were all red but for one dark pink one. I let Virgie talk me into that one.