III
A Pair of Boots
LATE AFTERNOON, A flurry of people coming to rap on the back door to the kitchen and dropping off cakes and pies, Lord knows where they come from, must have had them just waiting for Miss Birdie to die, and then a little later come hams and casseroles and extra coffee percolators, the big kind like little upright tanks, and plates of fried chicken and bowls of potato salad and big pitchers of ice tea. And for a while Creasie stayed in the middle of it all, shuffling here and there in her bare, dry, flattened feet, handing this and that, being handed, and then it got so crowded she had to get away and sit down.
She sat in her chair in the pantry sequestered from the buzz and clatter of the chattering, munching mourners, drinking a cup of coffee, and except for the little turn of her bent wrist that moved the cup to her lips, and the little pooch-out of her lips she’d make to meet the cup, and the slurping sound that came thereof, she was silent and still. And she wasn’t thinking about all these white people milling around at all but about old Oscar the electric colored dummy Mr. Earl had owned when she was just a girl working for them early on. She was wishing she had asked Miss Birdie one more time about the dummy before she passed, but it wasn’t something she could explain too easily because Miss Birdie would’ve never understood about Frank, because she couldn’t have sensed the spiritual warp and weave that connected Frank and the dummy Oscar in her young and terrified mind at the time, and so now had her half hoping for some strange miracle that would make the world more alive than she’d come to fear it was, with just us flatfoots moping around day to day.
After the baby potion hadn’t taken, just before Frank left, she’d stayed away from the ravine for two years. With Frank gone, she tried to resign herself to this fate, this life that was to be hers forever, as far as she could tell. She stayed her Sundays even in the cabin, sitting on her porch, took up dipping snuff herself, went to town sometimes when Mr. Earl would go in to check on his inventory, riding in the backseat of one of his new cars, closing her eyes so she wouldn’t be scared half to death by the way he would speed.
The hardest times were when Mr. Earl would go to get his father, Mr. Junius, on Fridays and bring him over for the weekend. Old Mrs. Urquhart had died and they felt sorry for him. Creasie didn’t. She wished him dead. She wished him pain and suffering. She wished she could administer such an end, herself.
He’d gotten older, fatter, balder, paler. No meaner-looking than before, really, still with his pale, pig eyes, thin lips, pointy head, foul mouth. Wandering from the guest room in the back in his suspender pants and T-shirt and house slippers, seemed stiffer, like age finally catching up to him all of a sudden, wouldn’t be catching no girls alone in a shed no more, now. Couldn’t bend his neck good, but would watch Creasie with those pale pig eyes when she had to pass him in the den or the living room, or bring a plate of food to the table when they ate.
Just a little simmer inside her, began to grow, till she was so angry it was into a boil. Hatred for that old white man. Hatred for what he’d done to her. He looked like some big boil himself, full of ugly, full of poison. That was what made her think of Vish again. She sat out on her porch Sundays, when she didn’t have to go over to the house, and watched them load him in the car to take him back to his empty home in Alabama. And finally one Saturday night before she went home to the cabin she said to Mr. Earl that if he was going into town for inventory the next morning she’d like to get a ride to the ravine.
The old man rode along, sitting up front with Mr. Earl, Creasie rode in the back. She sat just behind the driver’s seat, and though the old man couldn’t turn his head to look back at her she could see his eyes cutting left trying to. Once he turned his shoulders and glanced at her, and she was looking at him. He scowled and turned back to face forward. Said not a word when Mr. Earl dropped her off, said he’d be back by around five that afternoon.
She carried a large bag with her, a tote bag, and stuffed in the bottom of it beneath some old clothes Miss Birdie had given her was her real gift for Aunt Vish.
It was early November. She made her way down the trail, still leaved but thinning, trees looking puny but arcing up scary and their colors darkening away from October bright. But morning sun sleeving through them fuzzy yellow and cheerful enough, though it was hard for this to warm her heart, bent on a purpose.
Vish was sitting on her porch in her rocking chair, saw her walking up and kept rocking, working her lip on the snuff. Didn’t look a bit different, old woman was ageless. Time passed just through her, moving on, leaving her toughened and unmoved, she’d beaten it, looked like. Wearing a colorless old dress, a yellowed old piece of sackcloth looked like wrapped around her head, so she looked like some kind of black Arab, rocking and watching her. Creasie reached into the tote bag, pulled out the paper sack, and set it down beside Vish’s old dusty bare feet, there like the roots of a blackened cypress pulled up and dried hard in the dry air. Toenails like black bark chips on burnt sticks.
— What’s that, now? Vish said.
She didn’t say anything, just stood there. Vish stopped her rocking, looked down at the sack, then leaned forward to reach it, pulled the top open and peeked inside. She leaned over farther, fished into the sack, and pulled out the pair of lace-up shoes, a pair of low dress boots.
— They bout your size, I figure, Creasie said.
She’d seen Miss Birdie wearing them and then didn’t see them for a long time and had heard her say they didn’t feel right on her feet, didn’t like the heel, which was kind of high, about a two-inch heel. And they sat in the back of her closet long enough to be forgotten and then the last afternoon before they were going to take Mr. Junius home, while they were having their coffee after dinner, Creasie found them in there and tossed them out the bedroom window, sneaked over and picked them up late that night after they’d gone to bed, and took them back to the cabin.
Vish set the boots in front of her chair beside her feet and looked at them, working her mouth. She leaned over and spat off the porch, looked at the shoes again. She took the sole of one foot and rubbed it against one old withered bare shank, then did the same with the other. Angled them into the boots and pushed down into them. She lifted her feet and plocked them in the boots down on the porch boards a couple of times.
— Lace them for me, she said.
Creasie got down on her hands and knees in front of Vish and laced up the boots.
— Help me up.
She helped Vish stand up. Vish looked out over the tops of the trees and Creasie could see her flexing her old feet and stiff toes inside the soft leather boots. She bent her knees just the slightest bit and stood back up, then sat down in the chair.
— What you want, now?
She told her. And after a minute Vish said to help her up again. She went inside the cabin, stayed for a long time it seemed like, her new boots clopping on the pine floors, then finally came back out and handed Creasie a little pouch, just a piece of old fabric tied into a pouch with a piece of black thread.