The Well and the Mine (19 page)

“Somebody’s supposed to be finishin’ the churnin’,” said Aunt Merilyn before Naomi even opened her mouth.

“Who?” Naomi answered right back, eyebrows all furrowed together even as her mouth turned up at the corners.

“Same person that’s gone have to cook her own supper if she don’t get busy churnin’,” said Aunt Merilyn, poking Naomi in the side as she passed. They both giggled. Aunt Merilyn and her girls were all sassy and full of opinions, teasing each other all the time and entertaining each other something crazy. Tess was sort of more like them, really.

Naomi pulled out the chair next to me and slid the churn between her knees, pushing her skirt down and tucking it under her thighs. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said, sincere. “I lost track of time.”

“Well, help yourself to some of those tea cakes.” Aunt Merilyn never seemed bothered enough by anything that she didn’t want you to have some of her tea cakes.

“Hi, Virgie,” Naomi said, grinning at me. “How’s everything with y’all?”

“Pretty good.”

Naomi propped her book on the table, opened it, and unfolded the corner of a page. Once the book was situated, she grabbed the wooden paddle of the churn with one hand and started lifting and lowering it. She didn’t start reading, though; instead she looked at me like I was the first page.

“I won’t be rude and read it while you’re here,” she said. Even without smiling, she always looked like she’d just heard a joke. “I just like to have it ready.”

“That girl don’t never go nowhere without carryin’ a story with her,” said Aunt Merilyn, finally at the basin washing her dishes. In water turned cold, I was sure.

Naomi was still staring a hole through me, but she seemed to be working hard at the churning, the paddle moving steadily and the cream sloshing inside. “So you’re seein’ Tom Olsen?” she asked.

“Are you really?” asked Aunt Merilyn. “Leta didn’t mention any such thing.”

“I’m not really,” I said. “We went to the basketball game with a group of friends.”

“I thought Henry Harken was sweet on you,” Aunt Merilyn said. Then she added, “Churn.”

Naomi had stopped churning. She was always doing that, especially when she was reading. I’d come into the house before to find her caught up in her book, her hand still around the paddle, but completely still. Sometimes she wouldn’t even have heard the front door open. Eventually Aunt Merilyn would walk by, tap her on the shoulder, and say, “Churn.” Then Naomi’s arm would get to working again.

“No, ma’am,” I said, figuring to keep it as simple as possible. “I don’t think Henry’s sweet on me.”

“Everybody’s sweet on Virgie,” Naomi said, churning.

“They are not,” I said to Aunt Merilyn. And to Naomi, “You’re trying to embarrass me.”

She just smiled. “Maybe.”

“Well, they should be,” said Aunt Merilyn, turning to me and getting excited enough that she started talking with her hands even though they were wet. A spray of droplets shot through the air. “And you have all the fun you can leadin’ them around by the nose. No boy’s more fun than a lovesick one.”

I’d never heard Mama talk like that. “They’re not lovesick,” I said. “And how is that fun?”

“You know how you train a tomato vine to follow the stake?” asked Aunt Merilyn. “Well, you’re the stake, honey.”

Naomi, who didn’t seemed shocked at all, reached for a tea cake. “She’s big on talkin’ about how they’re tomato vines.”

“Churn,” said Aunt Merilyn.

Naomi frowned but lay down her book and held the cookie with one hand while she churned with the other.

“Does she talk like that around Uncle Bill?” I asked softly to Naomi.

“Shoot, you tell Papa about him bein’ a tomato all the time, don’t you, Mama?”

Aunt Merilyn shrugged.

“And he doesn’t mind?” I asked.

“Oh, he usually tells me at least the tomato vine produces something. But the stake only sits around doin’ nothin’ until it rots.”

“And you tell him…” Naomi trailed off and Aunt Merilyn finished, “That it’s a lot easier to stomp a tomato flat.”

Then they bent over giggling again. I laughed too, still trying to imagine the picture in my head of Uncle Bill and Aunt Merilyn talking about love and tomatoes. Mama and Aunt Merilyn looked so much alike, and even our houses were built similar, but once you walked through their door, it was a different thing altogether. I sat there and thought about all of them circled around the piano, the whole family making one smart remark after another, turning the conversation into a game of checkers with everybody trying to queen each other.

I stayed around alternating the churning with Naomi until the cream had turned to butter and was ready to be spooned into the mold. That was the best part.

The butter mold, shaped like a miniature churn, pressed a daisy design in the top of the butter. Mama and Aunt Merilyn had the same one, and I loved making the smooth, round slabs of butter. I turned the wooden mold upside down, pulling the plunger all the way up so Naomi could spoon in globs of butter with her wooden spoon. She packed in spoonful after spoonful, scraping the spoon on the edge of the mold so it was full to the brim. Then I turned it right-side-up on a plate and eased the plunger down, pressing the butter out with a satisfying sucking sound. It looked so cool and delicious there, like a custard or some shell-less pie—I and most everybody else had snuck a mouthful of it as soon as we were tall enough to reach the tabletop. I’d walked in the kitchen once when Tess was small and in the middle of the table sat the butter pretty as you please…with three little mouth holes bitten out of it. Tess was the only one I knew who kept on eating after the first bite.

“You should come to church with me Sunday,” said Naomi as she took over the mold. I started spooning. “You’d like the minister.”

“Which one?” I asked. Uncle Bill was a Baptist and Aunt Merilyn was a Methodist. Both those churches only met two Sundays a month, so they just swapped out. But Aunt Merilyn ended up making casseroles and pies for two congregations’ worth of sick people.

“Methodist this coming time,” Naomi said. “But this is a young one coming up from Birmingham-Southern.”

That was a Methodist college. “You sayin’ you like him?”

“He’s a minister—’course I like him.”

But I thought I’d heard something else in her tone. And she wasn’t looking me straight in the eye, which, for Naomi, was fairly unusual. I thought I saw the chance to get in some teasing of my own, which, for me, was fairly unusual.

“But do you like him as maybe more than a minister?” Before she could answer, I added, “To go to a dance with?”

She and her little sister could go to dances—the Methodists and Baptists didn’t know it was wrong. I’d never had much desire to go anyway because all the little kids went up to the gymnasium where they held dances and pressed their noses to the windows and came back telling everybody who was dancing with who and how close they were standing and where their hands were. No, thank you, I didn’t need to learn to dance.

“He’s a good five years older than me,” she said.

“He’s twenty? Twenty-one? That’s not too much of a difference.”

She shook her curls, and I worried some hair would fall in the butter. Mama made us brush ourselves off and tie our hair back before we set foot in the kitchen. Aunt Merilyn didn’t care so much.

“All I’m sayin’ is you should hear him preach. He’ll for sure make you laugh, and the time flies by.” She pressed out a perfect white circle and admired it. “You’d think a minister would be boring, but…” She stopped talking suddenly.

“You’re dreamin’ of marryin’ him,” I said, surprising myself, but taken aback by the look on her face.

She didn’t answer right away. “He probably thinks I’m a little sister or something. Probably not the kind of woman he’d marry.” She sounded wistful.

“You’re gone dance with the preacher and date the preacher and marry the preacher,” I said, singsong, giddy from butter making.

“Am not,” she said, focusing way too hard on making another mold.

“You ready to get married?” She was only in her first year of high school, and she hated stockings even worse than I did. It seemed like you should make your peace with stockings before thinking about promising yourself to a boy for the rest of your life.

“Not now, of course. But someday.” She waved the mold toward me. “More butter.”

I thought about the basketball game, which I’d dreaded and had ended up not minding so much at all. I’d dreaded the walks with boys, too, and those were sort of nice. I still dreaded marrying some boy and spending all day washing and cooking and tending children and waving from the porch while everybody else drove off.

“It don’t scare you to think of it?” I asked.

“Scare me?”

“Being a wife. Forever. And havin’ kids. And not just being plain old Naomi anymore.”

“It seems fun, doesn’t it?” she said. “Havin’ a family of your own?”

“Mold,” said Aunt Merilyn as she walked by without looking down.

“I was!” said Naomi. “You can’t be remindin’ me when I’m already doin’ it!”

Tess
THE PART OF COTTON PICKING THAT WE DID LIKE
and that didn’t make us bleed was when our porch got covered in white. After great sacks of cotton were picked and baled, Papa and Mr. Talbert hitched up Horse and hauled the bales to our house in the wagon. It collected on one side of the porch, getting higher and higher every day, finally spilling over into the middle of the porch until we had to cram the rocking chairs in one corner. The whole porch would become a big bed, soft and springy, sucking you down deep inside it. It was a white playground, catching in your hair, rubbing against your skin. Jack and me loved to climb on it, leap on it, run and do belly flops on it.

I was going to ask the Talbert kids if they wanted to come jump on our cotton.

“But they wasn’t even nice,” Jack said. He was nearly running to keep up with me, his bare feet kicking up dirt behind him. Since he was a boy, he was allowed to take his shoes off after he got in from school.

“They just didn’t know us good,” I told him.

“I don’t like them.” He stopped then, hands on his hips, daring me.

“Oh, don’t be a pest, Jack. You said you’d come. We’ll get them, then we’ll come back and I’ll boost you on the cotton as much as you want.” His special favorite was when I laced my hands together, then he stepped in them and I hoisted him into the bales.

“As much as I want,” he repeated.

“Yes,” I huffed. We started back to walking.

“Still don’t understand why you’re stuck on those ugly Talberts,” he mumbled, but soft enough that I could ignore him.

So I did. Then I managed to collect a whole handful of crab apples along the way without him noticing. I waited until we passed the last of the crab apple trees, then I pelted him with them all at once. Right in the back of the head. It made him yelp.

But by then we were just at the edge of the Talberts’ place, and there wasn’t much he could do but yank at my hair real quick. The boy and girl were outside the house, watching us walk up the road. The boy was sitting on the porch steps, whittling a block of wood that was still mostly a block. The girl was sweeping off the porch—not aiming for her brother, which seemed like a real waste to me—the whirls of dust flying over the sides to the yard below. The broom handle came up past her head.

“Mr. Moore ain’t here,” said the girl, with the straw still scraping against the porch floor.

“I wasn’t lookin’ for Papa,” I said. “I don’t think we got introduced proper last week. I’m Tess.”

“Lou Ellen,” she said, not smiling, but resting the broom.

“And this is—”

“I’m Jack,” he interrupted before I could finish.

“This is Eddie.” Lou Ellen waved her hand toward her brother, but he didn’t look up from his shavings.

Lou Ellen and Eddie, I said inside my head. Lou Ellen and Eddie. I tried to pay attention to Lou Ellen’s face while I got the feel for her name—she had a pushed-up knob of a nose and it was pink and peeling, even as suntanned as she was. I liked her nose.

“Listen,” I said. “We got all the cotton piled up on our porch—they’re takin’ it to the gin tomorrow. We thought you might like to jump on it with us. You and your brother both.” They were quiet a little too long, so I threw in, “Last day for it.”

“Jump in the cotton?” asked the boy, not only looking at us, but putting his stick down.

Not the boy. Eddie. He was close enough that I could see the wide gap between his two front teeth. I could’ve stuck a pencil in there.

“Sure,” Jack said. “You ain’t never done it?”

It was clear by their faces that they hadn’t. All that picking, and they hadn’t ever gotten to the good part. It was like raking leaves and not getting to jump in them. “See,” I said, very patiently, “the bales pile up on the porch, higher than me.” I held up my hand cotton-high. “You can climb on it, jump on it, roll around in it. It’s like playing in the clouds.”

“It’s real fun,” said Jack. “Real fun.” He seemed a little more kindly toward the Talberts now that he realized what they’d been missing.

“And your parents don’t mind none?” asked Lou Ellen.

“Shoot, no,” he said.

“We do it all the time.”

“And it’s taller than you are?” Eddie asked.

“Yep,” I said. “And all the prickly parts are out.”

I tried to think of what else I could say about the specialness of it, but I must have said enough. Lou Ellen leaned the broom against the wall. “Let me go ask Mama,” she said as she nearly ran in the house, looking back over her shoulder like she wasn’t sure we’d stay put.

They did get permission, so the four of us hightailed it back to our place and didn’t stop until we got to the top of our steps (which meant Jack didn’t have a chance to stop and pick any crab apples to get me back).

“Now what?” Lou Ellen asked. “We just jump?”

“No, it’s more than that,” I said. “You have to do the story.”

“The story?”

“You do it, Tess,” said Jack. “You’re the best at it.”

That seemed like it might be easiest. Lou Ellen and her brother obviously weren’t going to be any help. “Okay,” I said, “before you jump on the cotton, you have to decide who you are and what you’re doin’.”