“Where’s your mama?” Gram asked.
“Coming.”
“Well, her meal’s getting cold. Sit down, Joanne. Sit down, Ben Joe. Tessie, you got to hurry now. What happened to your napkin?”
“It’s on the screen porch.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be. No, don’t go get it. More important to get your meal down you hot — stave off germs that way. Ben Joe, honey, aren’t you tired to pieces?”
“Not any more I’m not.”
“Well, you have a big helping of these here beans. Carol just threw her bib on the floor, Joanne.”
She put another scoop of beans on Ben Joe’s plate, shaking the spoon vigorously. Seeing her hands, so much older than the rest of her, reminded Ben Joe of the old man from the train. He said, “Gram, did you ever know a man named Dower?”
“Dower.” She sat down at her own place, smoothing the front of her apron across her lap. “Lord yes, I did. There was a whole leap of Dowers here at one time, though most have died out or moved on. There was the good Dowers and there was the bad Dowers. The good ones were very great friends of the family once. I near about lived at their house when I was a teeny-iney girl. They’re all dead now, I reckon. But the bad ones are living here yet. Wouldn’t you know. No relation to the good ones, of course. Living off the county and letting chickens in the kitchen. That kind just hangs on and hangs on. I don’t know why. They’re so spindly-legged and pasty-faced, but they keep on long after stronger men’s in their graves.”
She stopped to take a breath. Ben Joe’s mother came into the kitchen and pulled up a chair for herself. Carol threw her bib on the floor again and said, “Carrot.”
“We’re going to have to tie a double knot in your bib from now on,” Ben Joe’s mother told her. She took a raw carrot from the plate on the table and handed it to her. “Gram, what are those little things in the dish over there?”
“Smoked oysters. And that child shouldn’t have a carrot.”
“Smoked oysters?”
“That’s what I said. Won’t have this grocery rut of Jenny’s one day longer. My mind’s made up. Ellen, take that carrot away from her.”
“Why? She’s got teeth.”
“But it’s a big thick carrot.”
“Well, we can’t mollycoddle her. The rest of the girls had carrots at her age.”
“Not while I was around,” Gram said. “She’ll choke on it.”
Joanne looked up anxiously and Gram nodded to her.
“On the little pieces of it. She’ll choke. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Ellen Hawkes.
Joanne reached over and took the carrot away, replacing it with a soda cracker immediately so that Carol didn’t have time to start crying. Ben Joe’s mother turned back to her meal, resigned. Neither she nor Gram paid much attention to these quibbling arguments of theirs; they were used to them. Gram said Ellen Hawkes was coldhearted and Ellen Hawkes said Gram was soft-cored. The rest of the family was as used to the feud as they were. They went on eating now, cheerfully, and Carol began gnawing at her cracker.
“The reason I asked about the Dowers,” Ben Joe said, “is that I met an old man from the train by that name. He said he was born right here in Sandhill.”
“That’s funny. Good Dower or bad Dower?”
“Well, Gram. I doubt if he’d have said.”
“If he was a bad Dower he would have. He would have said he was a good Dower.”
Joanne laughed.
“He said there was a street named for his father,” Ben Joe said. “I remember that much. He said that when he was here, Main and Dower were the only real streets in town.”
Gram looked up, interested now. “That’s so,” she said. “It’s true, that’s so.”
Carol spilled her milk. It trickled off the high-chair tray and into her lap, and when she felt the coldness of it she squealed.
“I’ll get a rag,” said Tessie.
She started for the sink, but her mother reached around and grabbed her back by the sash. “You sit right there, young lady. You have to be at school in fifteen minutes.”
“It won’t take long, Mama.”
But Joanne was already up, reaching for paper towels and then lifting Carol out of her high chair to sponge her off. “There, there,” she was saying, although Carol was only squealing for the joy of hearing her own voice now and had started pulling out all the bobby pins from Joanne’s hair.
“He went off to help his uncle make bed sheets in Connecticut!” Ben Joe shouted above the uproar.
His mother stopped chewing and stared at him.
“Mr. Dower, I’m talking about. And then his family moved away because his mother’s ankle bones started hurting—”
“Ben Joe,” his mother said, “if all of you children would cast your minds back to when you were small and I told you never, on any account, to speak to those strange-looking people you seem to keep meeting up with—”
“How old was he when he began in bed sheets?” Gram asked.
“Eighteen, he told me.”
“My Lord in heaven!” She laid her fork on the table and stared at him. “Why, that couldn’t be anyone but Jamie Dower. Jamie Dower, I’ll be. My Lord in heaven.”
“Was he a good Dower?”
“Good as they come. Shoot, yes. He was six years older’n me, but you’d never believe the crush I had on him. That was the reason I practically lived at the Dowers’—following him around all the time. I thought he was Adam, back then.”
“Adam?” Tessie said. “How was he dressed?”
Her mother pushed her plate closer to her. “Eat your beans, Tessie. Stop that dawdling.”
“Where was he going to?” Gram asked.
“Well, um — the home for the aged, is what he told me.”
“The home for the aged.” She shook her head. “My, my, who’d have believed it? He was a real handsome boy, you know — kind of tall for back then, though nothing to compare with some of those basketball players you see around nowadays. Real fond of stylish clothes, too. What would we have thought, I wonder, had someone told us back then where Jamie Dower would end up?”
“Tessie,” said Ellen Hawkes, “I give you to the count of five to drink that milk up. What’s that on your front? Beans?”
“Nothing,” said Tessie. She finished the last of her milk and wiped the white mustache off her upper lip with the back of her hand.
“That’s a funny-looking nothing.”
“Well, anyway, I gotta go. Good-by, Mama. Good-by, everybody.”
She vanished out the kitchen door, grabbing her jacket as she went. Her mother stared after her and shook her head. “You practically have to drag her to school,” she said. “Sometimes I think the brains just sort of dribbled away toward the end in this family.”
“She’s plenty bright,” said Gram.
“Well, maybe. But not like Joanne and Ben Joe were — not like them.”
“Rubbish,” said Gram. She began reaching for the plates and scraping them while she sat at her place. “Too much emphasis on brains in this family. What good’s it do? Joanne quit after one year of college and the others, excepting Ben Joe, never went. And Ben Joe — look at him. He just kept trying to figure out what that all-fired mind of his was given him for, and first he thought it was for science and then for art and then for philosophy and now what’s he got? Just a mishmash, is all. Just nothing. Won’t read a thing now but murder mysteries.”
“Neither one of you knows what you’re talking about,” Ben Joe said cheerfully. He had been through all this before; he listened with only half an ear, tipping back in his chair and watching his grandmother scrape plates. “And pooh, what do the girls want to go to college for? I say they’re smart choosing not to—”