Bitter Tea
MOOSHUM FINISHED TALKING as the storm moved over us — the clouds low and black-bellied. In the yard, the sheets were thrashing wild, the overalls and Mooshum’s work shirts were ballooning out. Even my mother’s pastel underthings were flying straight back, wisps, and her bras corkscrewed around the wooden pins and line. She must have gone somewhere with Geraldine, leaving the baskets to tumble over empty.
I bolted forward as the first big drops splashed on my shoulders and began unpinning the clothes. The clothing flew from my hands, twisted off in the sharp wind. A circle-skirt wound me in its embrace. I was still caught in the story, and it took all of my concentration to struggle across the yard with my thoughts and that clothing into the quiet of the house.
My mother followed me into the kitchen, drenched. She had walked back from our uncle’s place in the rain, but it hadn’t put out her fire. Anyway, it was the kind of rain that passes quickly and leaves the air hot and clear right afterward, so she wasn’t inside for long, talking to Mooshum, before I saw her outside with the basket again, pinning up the same clothes that I’d just taken down. This time she was carefully hiding her underwear. Mooshum had gone out with Mama and he stood, hunched a bit, beside her, holding the clothespin bag. I thought that maybe she was giving him hell for telling us what had happened, about the hanged boy, but when she came back in the door holding Mooshum’s arm in hers, having left the basket outside again underneath the clothes, she only said, “I can’t persuade her, she has to see him, she cares for him. And she even knows about that woman doctor he was loving on the sly. You know who, you know damn well.”
I pretended like I was doing something else and not listening, but she was not in the least fooled. I wanted desperately to ask about the doctor.
“Oh, good. Evelina. I need you to peel potatoes.”
“Can we put our hair up tonight, like Geraldine’s?”
Mama gave me a sharp look, and I glanced away. I pulled up the ring on the square kitchen trapdoor rimmed with pounded tin and set into the linoleum. I gingerly let myself down the ladder into the cellar. She handed me a colander.
“I’ll shut you down there if you mention Geraldine right now,” she said.
I scrambled back up with the potatoes. While I was down there, though, I heard her say something about the judge to Mooshum, so I guessed this had to do with why she was so upset with Geraldine, only I got it wrong, entirely. I thought that Geraldine (surprisingly, for her!) had done something outside the law and would have to go before the judge, in court, pay some fine or go to jail. That’s what I thought.
THE NEXT DAY, Uncle Whitey and Shamengwa came over to the house. Uncle Whitey was teaching me how to hold my own in life and I was punching at his hands.
“You’re quick,” he said, “but not quick enough.”
I tried to duck my head before he touched my ear, but never could.
“Think like a snake,” he said. “Don’t think, react.”
But he could tell that I was a thinker and would never have lightning reflexes. Nor would Joseph.
“Boy, you’re hopeless,” said Uncle Whitey. He was a big, square man with an Indian Elvis face and a springy pompadour that he slicked back with hair oil out of a bright purple bottle. Sometimes he lived with us, sleeping on the couch.
“What’s going on with Aunt Geraldine?” I asked him.
“I could get killed for saying,” said Whitey. “It’s classified.”
“Let’s get some gloves,” said Joseph, “you come out back behind the sheds and they can talk all they want about Aunt Geraldine. Gossip is beneath us as men.”
“I’m with you,” said Whitey, and showed that inside his shirt he had a pint of Four Roses.
That left me with Shamengwa and Mooshum, and after I sat drinking water with them for a while I asked, because I knew they would not get mad at me, what Geraldine had done to make my mother so angry.
“Done?” said Mooshum, trying for once to look as if he didn’t know. “She’s not done nothing.”
“Yet,” said Shamengwa, his face still.
Shamengwa had brought his fiddle over, but he was only plucking and tuning it, frowning. He complained about the poor quality of the strings.
I asked what happened to the men who had lynched our people.
“You talked of that!” Shamengwa hissed through his teeth.
With a wary look at his brother, Mooshum turned to me. “The Buckendorfs got rich, fat, and never died out,” he said. “They prospered and took over things. Half the county. But they never should of. And Wildstrand. Nobody hauled him up on a murder charge. Sheriff Fells turned into a cripple and old Lungsford, out of disgust, he went back to the civilized world he called Minnesota. He moved to Breckenridge, where in 1928 they went and hung the sheriff. He could not escape it. I think he died out east.”
“And you,” I said, “how did you live? Can you live after being hung?”
“They were never going to hang him to death,” said Shamengwa.
“Why not?”
But Mooshum began to argue with his brother, saying things that made no sense to me. I saw the same thing as Holy Track, the doves are still up there. Their annoyance with each other grew, so I went away and turned all that I had heard over in my mind. Later on, someone drove up to the house, and I went out to see who it was. When I saw her, I ducked back in the door.
Aunt Harp had came over from Pluto to interview the two brothers for the local historical society’s newsletter. My mother usually arranged to be out whenever Aunt Harp visited. But if she couldn’t get away, Mama endured Neve because our father was still fond of his sister, even though she had kept their inheritance to herself with my other grandfather’s blessing. Old Murdo never forgave my father for not becoming a banker. My father thought about getting a lawyer and making his sister divide what was left, but he never did. He insisted that he just wanted a few old stamp albums that had belonged to Uncle Octave.
Still, it wasn’t that greed we held against Aunt Neve. She irritated and exhausted everyone around her with continual nave questions that she would ask, and without waiting, answer herself.
“What did the Indians use for firewood?” she asked that afternoon. It became one of her more famous questions. “I can’t believe I asked that!” She dissolved in self-appreciation.
Shamengwa wearily humored her, but Mooshum was delighted to have her near to work his charms on. He flirted with her outrageously, asking if she’d like to sit on his lap.
“You ever sit on a horse, in a saddle? Then you know there’s a horn you got to grab on to. I got one too…”