Clover Read online

  Sara Kate’s bedroom door is closed. It’s the room she and my daddy would have slept in. I stand outside for a few minutes trying to think up a way to tell her about getting poison in my eye. I clean forgot to tell her at suppertime. I’m only planning to tell her now because, now that I think about it, it’s my good eye that got the poison in it.

  I doubt if Sara Kate knows I don’t see all that good out of one of my eyes as it is. That is, when I don’t wear my eyeglasses. I hardly ever wear them. My glasses are hidden in Gaten’s bottom desk drawer. I never could stand to wear the things. Like I told Gaten, “One eye will see enough of everything I need to see.”

  I cannot believe Gaten would have told Sara Kate about my eye. I imagine, like me, he would have thought it was something she didn’t necessarily need to know.

  When I finally knock on Sara Kate’s door, there is no answer. I guess I did knock kind of soft. But I don’t go around knocking on people’s doors that much.

  Gaten closed his bedroom door if he was getting dressed or something. I’m almost sure he didn’t close it when he was ready to go to sleep. I kind of think he left it open so he could hear me if I was having a bad dream or something. He also had to know that ever since Grandpa died, I’ve been a little scared at night.

  I knock again and again. In my heart I know I am knocking too softly and I know why. I really don’t want her to hear me. As sure as shooting, if I tell her about my eye, she’ll rush me off to the hospital. Besides, my eye had stopped burning anyway. Even so, I still splashed cold water into it until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  The first thing Everleen wants to know the next day is how Sara Kate’s dinner turned out. I say it was awful, that the grits were plain nasty. “That’s not nice to say, Clover,” she fussed. I can tell she’s glad I didn’t say it was all that good. I can tell you, she wants to be tops in the cooking department.

  “You and Daniel, get outta the sun before you have a heat stroke, Clover,” she warned us. “Anytime you have them old cicadas singing so strong this early in the day, you know it’s gonna be a scorcher. They said on the evening news last night this is the hottest, driest summer we ever had in South Carolina . . .

  “You know it’s got to be bad here, when we make the big-time news . . . thank the Lord all them Northerners are trucking down hay, ‘cause if it gets any worse . . .”

  I move into the shade. Daniel and his daddy go to buy fuel oil. They’re tired of listening to Everleen.

  I think about Sara Kate. All alone in our quiet house. Thinking her quiet thoughts, writing quiet words. Daniel wants me to sneak out some of that writing. He thinks it might be stuff about us.

  Once or twice I started into Sara Kate’s room to slip the papers she’d written out. Each time something inside me stopped me. Maybe it was the hand of an angel. My grandpa used to pray for the angels to watch over me. I believe in angels.

  I’ve known for a long time to never, ever mess with Sara Kate’s drawings. Once I picked up some of the pretty little sketches on drawing paper, and forgot and left them out on the back door steps.

  We looked everywhere for the sketches. We even took everything out of her big zippered artist portfolio. It’s more like a briefcase for a giant. I just had a notion the sketches may have been there, but we never did find them. The white Federal Express truck came and left without them.

  Well, Sara Kate was really, really angry with me that time. And she didn’t mind letting me know it, either. “Clover,” she fussed, “those sketches were to be sent to a company who wants me to design a line of fancy wrapping paper. I spoke with a man from the company and promised him he’d have the sketches tomorrow. There is good money in that, Clover, and right now we can use it.”

  Her mad spell didn’t last too long. But, oh boy, let me tell you something, when a white woman gets mad, she gets mad.

  Sara Kate finally smiled and sucked in her breath when I said, “Well, Sara Kate, maybe the next day won’t be too late. If you had all them pretty flowers and things in your head in the first place you ought to be able to find them again. At least we can find your head. It’s not lost, that’s for sure.”

  I still can’t see how Sara Kate can stand so much sitting down all the time. If she isn’t drawing or painting, she’s writing. No wonder her hips are so flat.

  Anyway, I’ve left the papers alone for good. If Sara Kate is writing something bad about us, I don’t want to find out.

  A little girl about my age is screaming at her mama to hurry up and buy the peaches so they can go to McDonalds. She has blue, blue eyes and hair I guess they call blonde. It sure looks white to me, though.

  “Please wait, darling,” says her mama sweetly, “we’ll go as soon as I buy the peaches.”

  “I don’t like peaches,” the little girl screams. “I hate peaches.”

  I put a peck of peaches on the back seat of their car, one of them new Toyota jobs. The white-haired girl sticks her tongue out at me. I stick mine out right back at her. She makes a face as they drive away. All I can say is, if she does that to me at school, she’ll get her lights punched out. She’ll probably go to one of those private church schools they started setting up when the public schools started getting so many black principals.

  Gideon’s sister and her husband thought after they got high-paying jobs at Duke Power Company they would send their kids to one of those schools. But Everleen said the good old Baptists had no room for good old black Baptists. And to this day, there is not a single black there.

  About a half a mile up the road, the signal light on an old Buick blinks for a left turn. A line of cars and eighteen-wheeled trucks brake and screech behind the Buick, slowly snaking its way to the turnoff.

  “Lord, Lord,” Everleen groans, “Mary Martha is gonna get herself run clean over, crawling along that busy highway. A cooter could travel faster than that.”

  Mary Martha has to put both feet on the ground and hold onto the door frame in order to pull her fat body out of the car. She has the body of a woman, but her face is a girl’s face.

  “I don’t know why I’m buying peaches,” she complained. “I’m so tired of working in these poor white folks’ kitchens, I ain’t got the strength to make a pie.”

  “Huh,” Everleen grunts, “you and Miss Katie’s the only ones still doing it that I know of.”

  “I know, I know. But, Everleen, what else can I do? I’m too worn out to go into one of the mills to work. James Roy’s got a right good job, but we got not one, but four chaps to get ready for school. To tell you the truth, I need another little job.”

  Everleen tilts her head upwards and laughs about something that’s making her tickled before she says it. She’s really pretty when she laughs. She wears her long black hair pulled back off her dark-skinned face, and has the prettiest eyes you ever saw. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” she says about her dark skin color.

  Everleen is still laughing. “I hear tell Miss Sara Kate Hill is looking for somebody to clean her house. Like she’s some kind of rich white woman.”

  Mary Martha shakes her head. “Girl, I may be hard up, but I’d eat water and bread before I set foot in that woman’s house to clean. To this day I ain’t got over Gaten marrying her instead of Miss Kenyon. Seems like every time one of our fine girls have the chance for a good catch, some cracker comes along and messes it up. I’ll bet the new white principal who took Gaten’s place won’t marry one of our black teachers.”

  “He won’t marry a white one, either,” Everleen says. They both laugh.

  They wave at a passing car and moan, “Oh Lordy, Lord.” It’s Rooster Jones, breezing by in his brand new Pontiac.

  “I’m surprised he even waved with his fine self,” Mary Martha says. “Talk in town is, he’s started taking up with them trashy white gals with their long dirty hair, thin lips, and slim hips. They hang around the mill every night. He’ll lose the shirt off his back now.”

  “Girl, you are telling the Lord’s truth,�
�� says Everleen, shaking her head. “If our menfolk make a plug nickel, they get the hots for them. And Lordy me, if they can shoot a basketball, those girls trail behind them like a hound dog running a coon. And when they catch them, they cling to them tighter than a green cocklebur.”

  “Either that, or they wise up, get their teeth fixed, and get all gussied up, then marry some old man of their own race, in his eighties with more money than they can spend. They can then live so grand, they can make their born rich sisters look pitiful, pitiful.”

  Everleen may be kind to Sara Kate’s face, but she sure can’t stand her behind her back.

  They start talking about my daddy again. They must have forgotten that I was sitting right there all the time. They can’t know how much it hurts me to have them talk like that about my own daddy. I thought that all the talk about Sara Kate and Gaten would all be over by now. Before Gaten died, I had to listen to all the talk he and his brother did.

  People in Round Hill may not know it, but my daddy didn’t just up and marry the woman with no thought. It wasn’t even an easy thing for him to do. It gnawed at his gut. And my actions sure didn’t help, either. I would be so different now if I had the chance. It’s too late now. My daddy is dead.

  I happen to know my daddy thought long and hard before he married Sara Kate. Maybe if all these women knew what the man went through, they would stop talking so bad about him.

  I am only ten years old, but certainly old enough to know that my daddy had to make a choice. There is nothing else you can do, when you have people pulling at you from every side. One thing is for sure, you can’t go with everybody at the same time. So Gaten had to make a choice.

  I still think of the day he brought his lady to meet me. Gaten was nervous. More so than I had ever seen him. I may not know a lot of things, but I do know a lot about my daddy’s ways.

  The eyes of the woman by his side clocked his every move. She was waiting for him to tell me something. Gaten tried to, but he seemed as if he could not speak. His tongue seemed to press against his teeth. He stood mute before us. I suppose he wasn’t prepared for the way I treated his lady. I could tell, he really wanted me to take to her. He should have known you just can’t cram that kind of thing inside a person’s head and mind and make them like someone no matter what.

  I cannot understand why Gaten always seemed to think I needed extra help in being raised, anyway. All my life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve just had one person at a time. First it was my grandpa before he died. And then I had Gaten.

  When I was little I was alone with my grandpa most of the time. My uncle and aunt were in and out of the house every single day, but they didn’t live with us. My daddy came home almost every weekend.

  After I started going to school my daddy wanted to take me away to live with him. He was teaching school somewhere around Charleston, South Carolina. He claimed Grandpa had been too easy with me. Allowed me to pick up wrong habits. Gaten hated for me to spit and use coarse words.

  Grandpa didn’t teach me that kind of stuff. I learned it from my cousin Daniel. The one thing Gaten didn’t really like was, I missed a lot of days at school. It was true that Grandpa did not make me go to school all that much. He said it didn’t matter if I missed a few days here and there. I had the rest of my life to go to school.

  To this day I believe it was my aunt Everleen who put it into Gaten’s head to come and take me way down there to live with him.

  I started crying when Gaten called to say he was coming for me. School or no school, I couldn’t see how my daddy could begin to think of splitting up me and my grandpa. I couldn’t have gone and lived away from Aunt Everleen, anyway. Who in the world would have fixed my hair? I’ve always been tender-headed. I’ve never liked people fooling with my hair.

  I kind of believe my grandpa was crying also. He sucked-up real hard through his nose and wiped it with the back of his hand. I can never tell by his eyes if he is crying. He is getting kind of old and his eyes look watery all the time, anyway.

  At first, Grandpa had said to my daddy, “But son, she’s all I got. I just don’t think I am prepared to lose her right now.” In the end, though, all he said was, “I will have my baby girl ready and waiting when you come for her.”

  Breakfast was on the table when my daddy walked into the house. We had grits, ham and eggs, and red-eye gravy. Grandpa had spread butter and Aunt Everleen’s homemade blackberry jelly on hot biscuits as soon as he took them out of the oven.

  All the time we were eating breakfast, I didn’t raise my head to look at my daddy. Every now and then, I did cut my eyes up to glance at him. Each time he was looking dead at me. My aunt had really fixed me up. My hair was pulled into a pony tail with a big purple bow. It matched my new purple flowered dress, with puffed sleeves and a little white pique bib in front.

  I dug little ditches in my plate of hot grits and watched yellow melted butter run through like little streams of water.

  When Grandpa passed my daddy the hot biscuits for the umpteenth time, he tipped the Ball mason jar with the wildflowers I’d picked, and water spilled all over the red-checkered tablecloth.

  Grandpa blotted up the water with a dish towel. “You might know Clover picked these weeds, I mean flowers. The child is a spitting image of her departed mama. Even when there was snow on the ground, her mama found red berries or something to pick and put on this table. This house hasn’t been the same without her.”

  He could never stand to talk very much about my mama. He said he loved her like she was his own daughter. I guess he now felt he was about to lose me, too. He was sad and started to cry. Real tears streamed down into the lines and wrinkles of his brown leathery face.

  I sure never remembered seeing all those wrinkles in his face before. My daddy said, “Old age made them.” I guess day by day old age was using its hand to carefully draw them on. “Oh Lord, oh Lord,” he cried out, “help me, because I am weak. Send me your mercy to lean on.”

  Like lickety-split, I was by my grandpa’s side. I put my arms around his neck. “Don’t worry, Grandpa,” I said. “You will always have me to lean on, for as long as I live.”

  I hadn’t said more than two words to my daddy up to then. But now I was ready to lay some kind of fussing on him. “I’m mad now,” I fussed. “Really mad. You know for yourself that poor old Grandpa can’t bit more take care of himself than a newborn baby. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Gaten, to even think of taking the only help he’s got in this world away.” I just had to call my daddy Gaten, because for some reason the word daddy would not come out of my mouth.

  I didn’t know what my daddy was thinking. All I did know was, he looked at my grandpa—his own daddy—and he had to see what I saw. An old, feeble man. His eyes were even old. There was hardly any color left in them. It’s strange that I’d never paid any attention to his teeth before. They looked as though they had been sawed off. Years and years of chewing had sawed them down, the same way old age had brought his voice down. A voice not half as strong as it used to be.

  My daddy must have seen what I saw, because tears welled up in his eyes. Without a word, he walked into the hall, picked up my two packed suitcases, and the burlap sack that Grandpa packed for me. Only the Lord in the heavens knows what was in that sack. Anyhow, they stood waiting and ready near the front door. My daddy carried them back upstairs.

  A year later, my daddy was home for good. A principal’s job at the Round Hill Elementary School opened up, and my daddy got the job. The only problem for me was, it was my school. I guess that’s what turned me around for good from calling my father “Daddy.” I sure didn’t feel right calling him Mr. Hill. So I called him Gaten. Besides, that’s what everybody else in our family called him.

  Things sure can happen fast in a person’s life. Grandpa was dead and buried. And there was Gaten, all hurt and sad on account of a complete stranger, a woman named Sara Kate.

  Uncle Jim Ed and Gaten were sitting on the front porch, talking a
bout all they ever seem to talk about, the peach crop.

  “Speak of the devil . . .” Jim Ed laughs when Chase Porter drives up. They all laugh.

  “We were just talking about you, Chase, and wondering if you might have a spare spray machine belt. I had to stop short rounding a curve at full speed when I was spraying and the belt snapped.” Gaten looked at his brother. “Jim Ed had left our fuel can right in the middle of a row.”

  Chase grinned. “I wouldn’t have wanted to hear about what you said. I do have an extra belt, and come to think of it, I’m sending someone to Spartanburg tomorrow to get some parts. You can send for whatever you need if you want to.”

  “Well, that was perfect timing,” Gaten said when Chase left.

  “Speaking of timing,” Uncle Jim Ed said, “I have asked you three times if we are going to spray peaches in the morning. I have yet to get a straight answer from you.”

  “Yep, we’ve got to spray all right,” Gaten agreed. “I’ll fix up the spray machine with water, and have it ready.”

  Uncle Jim Ed got up to leave. “I’ll take care of the spray machine, big boy. It seems like you’ve got a lot on your mind today.”

  Gaten looked at the house. “The old home place is beginning to run down, Jim Ed. Needs painting. It’s turning gray. Even the flowers seem to be struggling to hold onto the little life left in them.”

  Jim Ed laughed. “At least it’s only the trimming that needs to be done. The old brick still looks pretty good. Remember the imitation brick siding that used to be on it? I was so glad when Papa agreed to take it off and put up real bricks.” He glanced at the flowers. “You would be struggling to hold onto life, too, if you were as old as some of these flowers. Mama said she set out those crape myrtle and rose bushes right after she was married. I guess the hollyhocks and verbenas have kept reseeding over the years. You and Miss Katie are the only ones who have them.” His face showed a trace of remembered sadness. He walked to a small bush. His hand gently touched the leaves. That same bush would later bloom forth with soft pink blossoms, clustered into little balls of petals that scatter and fall like silent snowflakes.