What Happens When You Don't Play Ball Page 3
“You ever been fishing in that river, Grannie?”
“When I was a child, I used to go with my Uncle Jeff to the Big Eddy.”
“Me and my biggest boy’s been a bunch of times, the one got killed in a car wreck.”
“I’m sorry to hear…”
“Car hit a tree, cut his head clean off. Been four years and eight months and me and the old lady ain’t overed it to yet. Sometimes I come in and she’s setting crying in front of the TV and…”
Miss Faye watches out the window the tiny town of Statenville pass, a convenience store on the left with a tall box ad for Pepsi, an old tin garage with broken windows, the crossing of Highway 129 and 84, and on her right the low red brick courthouse where there used to be a two-story white courthouse. She had gone there one summer morning with her grandmother when she was about seven, after her mother died. The reason for which she can remember clearer than how she ended up in this cab with this talking fool. Her Uncle Jack, same age as her, had accidentally shot a man and had to go to trial. Just seven and he had to go to trial. Of course, Grandmother got him off. Then she bought him a pistol to defend himself against the family of the man he shot, and hired a tutor to come out to the house because she was afraid for Uncle Jack to go to school.
Stinker is still talking. Monica, Princess Di, Jerry Springer—first names, all.
“Go back,” she says. “Turn around.”
“Yes ma’am,” he says, U-turning on the highway in front of a string of plain frame houses.
The meter is ticking, the woman on the radio is talking.
Miss Faye is almost certain she has glimpsed the old jail down a gravel side road next to the Methodist Church.
“Now,” she says to Stinker, “take a right at that church.”
“Right,” says Stinker and cuts the cab right as if thinking out loud. Gravel spins up to the straddle of the cab. “You got folks here?”
It is the old jail. The top floor has collapsed onto the bottom floor, a rubble of white brick in bullous and honeysuckle vines. “Stop here,” she orders as they get to the curve in front of the jail.
She cranks the window down to look. “My uncle Jeff was in that very jail for shooting a man owned him ten dollars,” she says. “Guard carved him a hickory key to open the cell and he got out one night. Walked all the way through the woods to get to his grandmother’s place over round Fargo. Took pneumonia and died, bless his heart.”
Stinker sits still and silent for about thirty seconds, as if paying his respects to the dead, then says, “Grannie, we better get going if we gone get you to Fargo by sundown.”
She seems spellbound, as if by the ticking of the meter. “My sweet Uncle Jeff, had the prettiest black curly hair. I slept in the same bed with him till I was fourteen or so.” She sighs. “Grandmother dared the law to come inside the house while he was hiding out right after he shot that man; so all summer when she wanted to go to her mother’s house near Fargo, she would hide Uncle Jim in an empty gum barrel and ride right through Statenville.”
“I thought you said he went to jail.”
“That was later. Later, he gave up, knew my grandmother would get him out.”
“I had a old uncle went to jail,” says Stinker. “Ain’t no shame in that.”
She sits back, cranks up the window. “I’m not ashamed. Uncle Jeff had his reasons. All my uncles were the sweetest old things.”
“Yes, ma ‘am. You ready?” He puts the car in gear and hits the gas.
“People today’s always in a hurry. One thing I can’t get used to is how everybody’s in a hurry.”
He brakes, eyeing her in the mirror. “Grannie, I just meant…”
“Drive slow,” she says.
On the long lonesome stretch from Statenville to Fargo, she sits watching the pines fan by in rows, reminiscing about going with her grandmother to Fargo in a surrey, while Stinker talks. He is now telling her about his high blood pressure, which somehow leads into talking about how he started driving this cab after the service station he was working at closed.
Though she feels sad and low, and a little afraid about leaving the hospital without being dismissed, she is glad to be out and doing something daring for once in her life. Not going anywhere, really, just out for a ride and it is not her fault that this Stinker fellow mistook her for somebody else. She would have explained why she was sitting there in front of the hospital, would have told that she was not his fare, if he’d only listened. And of course, she will pay him when they get back. The meter ticks, accusingly. How much will the trip cost? Where is she going? What will happen when he learns she’s not going anywhere? What happens when you don’t play ball?
She feels grateful to this talking fool for rescuing her, accidental as the rescue was, and tests her feelings to see if she even likes him a little bit for his eagerness and patience with her. No, not yet. But if he only would shut up.
Suddenly she feels courageous, spirited, like her Grandmother, Doll, who never played by the rules but always won.
“Slow down,” she says to Stinker, and watches the pines to see if they fan slower. They do.
Her grandmother had men and women both eating out of her hand. Four husbands bowing down to her. After the first one died, Doll took over his turpentine and cattle business and held on to the money for his sons. Raised three children of her own, and three not her own, and died having never played ball.
She feels like talking. She is seldom indulged by her family, what little of it is left, and she is paying for this ride. She feels like telling Stinker about her baby cousin, Zillie, crawling through a floor board left unnailed in case of fire and her going out in the freezing cold and catching pneumonia and dying. The night before Miss Faye had dreamed that she saw her grandmother walking up the lane with Zillie in a long white gown, dead in her arms. She feels like telling about her Uncle Jack driving her all the way to Moultrie to see a fortune teller who turned out to be an abortionist, and how Uncle Jack got drunk on the way back and let her drive for the first time. And what about that government agent who made everybody round up their cattle to dip for ticks and then went missing. So many stories she wants to tell and not all that uninteresting, in her estimation.
But Stinker is still talking. “She was the onliest one got invited back to his trailer after the sing.”
“Who?”
“Rosie. My old lady.”
“Whose trailer? Where?”
“Ferlin Husky’s. Time he come to sing in Valdosta.” Stinker sits forward, feeling in his back pocket. “Had her picture took with him.” He is driving with one hand, flipping through the pictures in his brown billfold with the other. No traffic on the road, only pine woods and barrow pits and wide ditches of greening grass and weeds in the slanting sun.
“That’s Rosie with Ferlin Husky.” He passes back the picture and hooks both arms on the steering wheel. “She’s a looker, ain’t she? Boy, you oughta seen her when she was young.”
He talks on while Miss Faye looks at the picture. At the grinning fellow with a guitar strapped and hanging to one side, and on the other, a smiling woman with short brown hair and shingled bangs. She is wearing a red shirtwaist dress with white lace down the front and a crutch in place of a left leg.
Miss Faye passes the picture over the seat to him. He stands it on the dash behind the steering wheel. “Tom’s Creek,” he says. “Almost to Fargo.” Then somehow switches to talk of snakes. His Uncle Ben got caught by a gator in the Okefenoak, he says out of nowhere, but he wrestled him down. Sold the hide for twenty bucks!
“That’s really something,” she says.
“Ain’t it though?”
&n
bsp; “Take that road to the right at the fire tower up there,” she says.
“Grannie, you sure?” He doesn’t have to slow down much, turns in and stops. “Ain’t none of my business, but they ain’t nothing to see down this road as I know of.”
“My great-grandmother Baxter’s house was out this way.”
“Yes ‘um, but how long ago was that?”
“Drive slow.”
He drives, passing the tower rising through palmettos and pines, and on along the narrow gravel road with close-growing pines that throw stripes of sun and shade.
While Stinker tells about his grannie’s old house and the pitcher pump he put down so she wouldn’t have to “tote” water to the house, Miss Faye keeps her eyes on the west side of the road, looking for the site of her great grandmother’s house. Especially in brakes of broomsage between plots of plantation pine. No, she doesn’t expect to find the house still standing; she’s just looking, one last time.
“Grandmother did love her mother,” she says, interrupting Stinker’s story. “Wasn’t a man born on God’s green earth could come between them. Loved these woods too. My granddaddy built her three houses, trying to keep her on the homeplace near the Florida line, but when Grandmother took a notion to see her mother, she’d have one of the hired hands get out her surrey, and we’d head out. Her no bigger than a minute in her fancy brocade dresses. Driving that surrey.”
“Hoo-whee! Y’all must have been rich folks.”
“When Grandmother died she was buried right next to her mother. Had a joint tombstone, mother and daughter. That’s how close they were.” The trick she has learned is just to butt in and link words the way Stinker does.
“That’s how come you can afford this cab to Fargo, huh?”
“Why? What do you mean?” She has to check another clearing.
“Well, Grannie, to tell you the truth, I wadn’t for sure and certain you’d pay me. I mean and you with no pocketbook or nothing.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yessum, it crossed my mind, you might be running out on your bill at the hospital.” He laughed. “Not that I’d blame you or nothing, the way they overcharge people. I got me an on-going account with them folks. Doctor bill eat me up after the old lady’s hysterectomy. But cancer ain’t come back since they took her leg off.” He draws a fast cross on his chest. “Still, I lay it to the Lord healed her. Took her to a preacher over round Waycross could just lay his hand on your eyes if you was blind and next thing you’d be seeing. He could get you walking good as me, Grannie, I ain’t lying.”
Miss Faye sits straight and high and leans into the right window, staring out at the broomsage plot. At an old brick well shortened by decay. “Stop. Stop the cab, Stinker.” She isn’t used to interrupting, isn’t used to saying Stinker, and the strange combination jolts her.
He stops the cab.
“Back up,” she says, looking around as he reverses the car with one hairy arm on the seat back.
“Now, turn down that ramp,” she says.
He does and the dry flaxen broomsage ticks beneath the car like the meter on the dash.
“That’s the well,” she says. “My great-grandmother’s well. I’ve drawn many a bucket of water out of that well.”
He sits quiet, looking with her at the well, at the setting sun streaking through the backdrop of pines. He cuts the engine of the car. Crickets sing in the grass. The wind has died down and the woods grow still. Whisper-still.
“Ain’t no tellings what-all is buried on this old place,” he says and lifts his cap as if airing his brain.
“Money?”
“Yeah,” Stinker says and opens the door. “Used to, people’d bury their money in old jars, coffee cans, I’ve heard tell.”
“You’re right, Stinker,” she says. “One evening my grandmother and I watched my granddaddy go out to the north pasture and bury a fruit jar of cash after he’d sold cows. After he died, we started burying our money too. Digging up what we needed, along and along. Lived on that money till way out during The Depression.”
At last he is listening to her, can’t take his eyes off her.
“We’d go out of a moonlight night, just me and Grandmother, and I would look up at the stars and locate the spot to dig by stepping off the points on the Dipper handle. Grandmother called it my Indian instincts, but I was born knowing things, divining the future and the past.”
Stinker gets out, closes the door, takes off his cap and scratches in his shingled mop of brown hair. “You want to get out, Grannie?” he says.
She feels struck dumb by this moment of uninterrupted grace and peace. By the sudden reality of time. Not sundown time, but era. She sits watching Stinker kicking through the broomsage with his fingers slid in his back pockets. Looking down, looking for treasures.
She wonders, if she put her mind to it, how long she could make him stay, maybe even have him drive her over to her grandmother's old farm place on the Florida line. She could point him in the direction of the family cemetery and have him sniffing up the gold her granddaddy buried. Wouldn't be the first time a fool went looking for gold there. Fools' Gold! She laughs to herself, watching Stinker still kicking around in the broomsage, resetting his cap.
Then she spies his wife's picture in the wallet behind the steering wheel, and beyond it, the after-light of the sun through the pines. Suddenly she doesn't think Stinker is stupid and useless and she doesn't pity his wife. She envies them for simply living and not anazlyzing every word and act that comes their way. As amusing and self-gratifying as Stinker's lack of self-knowledge might be to smarter people, he is plenty smart for feeling he is just as important and has just as much right as anybody else.
He looks at Miss Faye sitting, peering out the window at him and lifts one hand as if in greeting. Then he turns, staring off at the woods, maybe glad to be free of his duties for a day. Slowly, he kicks his way through the blond grass back toward the cab. Already in talking mode, back to his old self. "You bout ready to go, Grannie?"
She's ready.
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