“She wanted us to have it.”
“Why?”
“She likes me, I figger. We had a nice visit. We had a tea party.”
“You had a what?”
“A tea party. I ain’t never been to no tea party before and it was right nice.”
Booker thought about this and then said, “I heard about her, that Mrs. Tengle. Met her husband. He’s got his hands full. She’s a might tetched.”
“She didn’t seem tetched to me a’tall, Booker. She seemed refined.”
“Well, don’t you go takin’ no more of her money. Not that you’re gonna get much of a chance anyways. We’s heading out tonight. Couple of the fellas said there’s better chance for work farther north.”
“Are the Tengles comin’ too, do you reckon?”
Booker shook his head. “Tengle, he says they’ll stay here a mite longer. He’s still got stuff of his wife’s he can sell. She’s got family things worth a bunch of money.”
“I hope she don’t have to sell her tea set.”
The two started back to their tent. It was little more than tarpaulin stretched down to the ground in lean-to fashion from the raised side of the back of their truck — a 1926 Hudson Super-Six sedan conversion. The children were waiting for them next to the tent. Each was barefoot, the two boys dressed in torn shirts and patched blue jeans held up by single suspenders. The girl wore a faded plaid school-day dress with a trace of what had once been a frilly white collar.
“We’s hungry,” said Oren, the oldest boy and spokesman for the trio.
“I’ll boil up the rest of them potatoes,” said Lois to her husband. “Oh, I almost forgot—” She pulled the crumbling pieces of shortcake from her pocket and divided them among the children.
Booker chuckled a little to himself.
‘What’s got you so tickled?” asked Lois, handing the water bucket to her son Les. “You take that down to the creek and hurry right back, y’hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Booker reached over and kissed his wife on the forehead. “You goin’ to tea parties and all. Woulda never believed it.”
“I couldn’t rightly believe it neither. But it was nice, Booker. It was so very, very nice.”
1937 DEPILATED IN OHIO
Dewey and Florence Hurd adopted the girl from nuns when she was three. Joanna was the illegitimate daughter of a woman who had worked in Chillicothe in one of the town’s shoe factories. Joanna’s mother fell on hard times at war’s end and began to sell her body and dissipate herself. She eventually left Ross County under a cloud of shame and disgrace, and ended her life in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles in 1930, an empty morphine-injecting Pravaz at her side.
Joanna had been grateful that the Hurds, who had no children, had taken her in and brought her to live as their daughter in their simple cream-colored century-old rectangular stone house, which stood embowered by white oaks and black walnuts on the Cincinnati Pike west of Chillicothe. The house and surrounding farm were situated in the valley of Paint Creek, within easy walking distance of hills thickly wooded by hickories and beeches and ashes. It was during all those solitary sylvan rambles that Joanna grew into the shy young woman of sixteen she had this year become. And it is to these woods that Joanna fled when her adoptive father and mother flung their angry barbs at one another in each new chapter of that all-too-familiar tale of protracted marital discord to which the girl was daily witness — evidence of a rocky union that would not be dissolved, for neither husband nor wife could afford to live without the other in a devil’s pact of prolonged mutual destruction.
Dewey Hurd had been an English professor at an Indiana college when he inherited the farm from his uncle and decided to have a go at the agrarian life. Florence had once worked as a children’s advocate in New York City, loving every child that she discovered hungry or ill-clad or homeless or unloved, though once a child — in this case, her own adopted daughter Joanna — was rescued from the dire vise of societal neglect, it was nothing for her to show (as it was with her husband) that side of herself that was not compassionate, but grasping and snide and brutally competitive, as evidenced by participation in a marriage that was nothing if not a daily rivalry of biting wit.
At times Joanna felt that her two parents were competing for her exclusive endorsement. At other times, she was the invisible child, hardly noticed when it came time for an exchange of the harsh, bitter words and sly machinations that defined and defiled the marriage.
Aside from the metaphorical storm of hymeneal strife that blew in regular gusts through the simple stone house beneath the oaks and the walnuts, the weather in its truer meteorological sense had been especially unkind to Ross County, Ohio, over the past three years. In 1935 a flood had left the corn crop and the garden choked out by rampant Johnson grass. The winter of 1935–36 had sent temperatures plummeting to twenty-two below, killing the winter wheat and rye. The drought that arrived the following summer was one of the worst on record, and when it was over, all that was left for the Hurds was a harvest of scarcely a single bushel of corn nubbins and a field of defiant wild cornflowers. Sometimes Joanna thought of herself as the cornflower surviving in the midst of the ugly landscape that was her tempestuous family.
For Joanna was very pretty indeed. She had beautiful long, tawny hair that she allowed to cascade luxuriously down her back. But where was the defiance, the filial insurgence?
In those moments in which mother and daughter found temporary tranquility in the company of one another, putting up vegetables in the cellar, for example, or making a pie, or together gathering the eggs in the henhouse, all was well and good, and Joanna felt only love for her second mother. Likewise, there were times that left Joanna alone with her father and there was commensurate tenderness and quiet bliss between these two as well. The morning in late April on which the sheep-shearer was to come for his annual visit was not, however, to be counted among those times. In fact, the morning brought one of the worst rows between her parents that Joanna had ever witnessed.
Mr. Hurd had risen earlier than usual to get the milking and other morning chores out of the way. He had looked in on his small flock of eighteen ewes, which he’d penned together at dusk the night before so that they would be ready for shearing when Mr. Talbot arrived. It had rained in the night and the upper doors of the shed had been left open and several of the sheep were now wet. Who had opened the doors?
Mrs. Hurd confessed. It was too stuffy in the cramped shed, she said, and she didn’t think that close confinement would be too healthful for the animals, whose fleeces had grown uncomfortably thick over the previous hard winter.
“It’s quite apparent to me that it’s only the wool you care about — having enough to sell to the Cooperative,” Florence railed from her new electric range, which she was still struggling to learn to use. “But if those sheep should all drop dead from heat exhaustion, where will you get your wool to sell then?”
“I’ll have to ask Talbot to return on some other day,” Dewey muttered in reply as he pushed his plate of ham and badly charred biscuits away. “Or else we’ll have to write off the fleeces of all those ewes who took an unexpected shower last night thanks to your thoughtlessness.”
“Why can’t you simply dry the drabbled fleeces on the floor of the corn crib after they’ve been sheared? Didn’t you have to do that a couple of years ago — the time that you left the upper doors open?”
“I’ll do what I have to do. And I’ll do it without breakfast. You burned the biscuits again. When are you going to learn how to use that new stove you forced me to buy? The stove we could hardly afford?”