Clover Read online

  Miss Kenyon is almost in Sara Kate’s face. “The first thing you people usually do in life is write a book. So I’m sure you’ve joined all the other white Southern women writers. Eager to grab at the chance to say all the things you would love to say, but afraid to say.

  “You want to know how I feel about what most of your kind write? I think, if it’s in your mind to write, it’s in your head to say.” She is stepping on Sara Kate’s toes. Her face is as red as a beet.

  Miss Kenyon’s shopping cart was in the hot sun. Her ice cream was melting. She didn’t care. Nothing could stop her. It was like a play on TV.

  “If you ever write like the others, even in fiction, that our houses are dirty, our black men are shiftless, and dare use the word nigger, you’d better be prepared to leave Round Hill, South Carolina.”

  I don’t believe Sara Kate knew how to get Miss Kenyon told off. Gaten must have figured she needed looking after. I guess that’s why he married her. He would have counted on me to help her out. I couldn’t let Gaten down. “Come on, Sara Kate,” I said, “we got to get home.”

  No matter how hard I try, I cannot get this book thing out of my head. Maybe Sara Kate is writing a book about the people in Round Hill. Maybe Daniel found it, and sneaked it out when he couldn’t get me to do it.

  I think of the way Sara Kate was looking around Miss Katie’s house. She sure can’t write that the house stinks. As soon as Miss Katie opens her door the smell of air fresheners and scented potpourri hits you. She spends days on end stuffing the strong-scented leaves, wood shavings, and dried flowers into little Ziplock plastic pouches. She gets paid two or three cents a bag. She said she made might near a hundred dollars one month.

  Yep, Miss Katie’s got junk. But at least you won’t see roaches flying and jumping all over the place like bull frogs. I reckon not. Miss Katie’s got roach powder in every crack and Ball mason jar lid she can find.

  I think now of that day Sara Kate sat there flipping through all Miss Katie’s Vanity Fair and Forbes magazines. Maybe Miss Kenyon was right about Sara Kate marrying my daddy to get into our lives and show us up. Miss Kenyon said we would provide the fodder she needed.

  Now if Sara Kate needs a dirty house to write about, she ought to go to Skip Howe’s house. Skip is one of my classmates. He is white and lives in one of the dirtiest houses I’ve ever seen in my whole life.

  When Skip got hurt real bad cutting grass, the teacher picked me to take a fruit basket to him. Talk was that Skip’s real hurt was not so much from what the lawn mower did, as what his daddy did to him for borrowing Tom Jenkins’s lawn mower. Skip’s daddy has been missing ever since the accident. They say his daddy liked to killed him. His mama hushed the whole thing up.

  Skip had no business going over to old stingy Tom Jenkins and borrowing his lawn mower in the first place. He knew he didn’t know how to use a power lawn mower. To begin with, there is not enough grass to waste your spit on in the red clay yard jammed with old wheelless cars, auto tires, rims, beer cans, and chickens. Nothing can grow. You wonder why they would even want to cut a spot of grass no bigger than a minute. Folks say, Jenkins had no business loaning people as poor as the Howes anything.

  Poor Skip. He didn’t know not to pull grass out of a lawn mower while it was still running.

  I had to pick my steps around dog mess all over the yard, then dodge chicken mess on the front porch. On top of all the dirt inside, Skip’s mama was smoking. Smoking and coughing. The fingers on her trembling hand were stained yellow as gold.

  The skin on her has so many lines, it looks like chicken scratching. “Them some right pretty things you wearing honey,” she said, adding, “especially them shoes.” I do have on a pretty dress for a change. I said, “Thank you.” I look down at my shoes. My aunt Ruby Helen sent me the dress and shoes.

  I guess they do seem kind of fancy for Round Hill. One thing is for sure, Gaten would have never spent that kind of money on clothes. He claimed his money was always tied up in his peaches. “Can’t ever guarantee a peach crop, baby,” he always said. “Farming is a card game. You’re playing dirty pool, but you never get to hold a trump card.” Or he might have said ace, I can’t remember. I do know he did say, “The weather can call its hand anytime. And in a second, the game is over.”

  Skip’s mama was dressed in dirty pink cutoffs and a sleeveless turquoise polyester blouse. A yellow plastic headband held her hair back. She didn’t have a tooth in her mouth. Skip was sick, yet he was dirty as he could be. Talk about poor, they are some kind of poor.

  I’m not sure Skip knows it, though. He seemed happy enough snuggled in an old couch with springs popping out everywhere. An old spread with foam rubber backing was shedding all over the place. He grinned as he read all the names signed on his get-well card.

  Skip answered for me when his mama offered food. “Aw, Ma, she don’t want nothing to eat.” He knew good and well I was not about to eat a bite in that house.

  Skip’s mama brought him a big plate of pinto beans and white biscuits. She brushed a few strands of bright red hair off his forehead. Skip had a really neat baseball cap turned sideways on his head. That’s the style. Like everything they had, it was secondhand.

  His mama tried to get him to take off his cap to say his blessing and eat. But he wouldn’t do it. His old hateful daddy must have torn up his head. I will bet you anything that even as poor as Skip is, he had some kind of new haircut hid under that cap. I reckon, if you don’t have a penny to your name, you still want to look in style. Poor Skip was some kind of ashamed when a big fat roach crawled right into his pinto beans.

  Gaten always told me never to look down when someone spoke to me. But I had to look down then. I sure couldn’t look at Skip. I was so sorry and ashamed for poor Skip, I could have died. I didn’t care if he was white.

  There was a smell in that house that was more than a smell of dirt. It wasn’t Skip’s hand and arm, all closed up in dirty bandages, either. After Mrs. Howe told me she was eaten up with cancer, the smell filled the room. It swallowed up the smell of everything. Even the loud-smelling pinto beans. It was the smell of death.

  I told them I had to go, and split.

  Gaten had our supper ready when I got out of the tub. We had skillet cornbread, hot dogs, and beans. Gaten loved him some cornbread. The beans seemed to move on my plate. I couldn’t eat a bite. I told Gaten about the roaches and the cancer. He only said, “Now, now, Clover, let’s not get carried away.” I think of how I could fool Sara Kate into going down to their house to borrow a cup of sugar.

  I think of the look that would come over Sara Kate’s face if she walked into that house and Skip’s mama said, “Have a seat.” And I smile.

  9

  Whenever I look towards Miss Katie’s house now, the first thing I think of is the big prize she won. A boat.

  I hope it won’t be like the diamond wristwatch she got as a big prize. A black plastic thing with a diamond the size of a speck of sand staring out at you like a piece of broken glass.

  The big envelope in our mailbox announcing You May Be A 10 Million Dollar Winner is for Miss Katie. The mailman wouldn’t keep putting her mail in our box if she stopped making glue out of honey and egg whites. She uses it to glue on all those faded, rain-washed stamps she finds. Her mailbox is so loaded with ants, the mailman hates to stick his hand in it.

  “I think you ought to take this mail to Miss Katie,” I tell Sara Kate when she hands it to me to take. “It will give you a chance to visit. You always said you were going to on account of how good she’s been to us since Gaten died. It would be good if you get to know folks in Round Hill better, anyway.”

  I didn’t tell Sara Kate that people were starting talk that she was a stuck-up nasty white so-and-so.

  I think to myself that just maybe if Sara Kate goes with me, Miss Katie might show us the boat.

  It’s almost 12:30 P.M. I can tell without even looking at a clock. Through the still, hot and dry air, the theme song from
“The Young and the Restless” blares out. Plunk—plunk. It seems like everybody in our section is hard of hearing.

  A speeding dump truck with two wheels on the hard surfaced road, two on the dirt, rounds the curve. Sara Kate and I part. One on one side, one on the other. The sandy grit stings our faces.

  Miss Katie is in her front yard. Her print dress is pulled and puffed up behind by cockleburs. Her white fluffy hair hangs in two plaits. Miss Katie looks as old as her house.

  She dry spits specks of tobacco from her tongue and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. But when she starts to talk, tiny pieces of tobacco fly out like greasy blackberry seeds. “Excuse my yard,” she says. “Too hot for somebody my age to keep things up like Clover’s daddy used to keep up his place. It’s still kept up so good you’d think white folks lived there.” She looks at Sara Kate, gives a sick grin and drops her head. Embarrassed!

  Sara Kate turns her usual pinkish red. I look down at my feet and kick the ground. I don’t know what I’d do with myself sometimes if I didn’t have my feet.

  Miss Katie waves us in, out of the sun. “A heat stroke can slip up on a person before they know it.” She moves slowly, every move studied, thought out, like an old woman. Miss Katie is old. She eases into a rocking chair and fans with a cardboard fan. It has a picture of a little black girl on it. Her hair is fixed like little girls in old TV movies. It’s a funeral home fan.

  Miss Katie tells us to sit down. But there are no empty chairs. She starts gathering up stuff. There is more magazines and sweepstakes mail than you can shake a stick at. Every letter shows her getting closer and closer to millions of dollars. Every stamp that ordered another magazine changed the prize to even more millions. At least that’s what Miss Katie was led to believe.

  Gaten once said, “If Miss Katie saved the money she spent on magazines trying to win the sweepstakes, she’d be pretty well-off for an old lady.” But my daddy couldn’t tell Miss Katie nothing. Nobody can.

  Propped on a table crowded with whatnots, artificial flowers, and faded starched crocheted doilies that stand up is a big blue-bordered notice from American Family Publishers that reads in bold print, THE NIGHT WHEN MRS. KATIE LEE BROWN WON THE WHOLE TEN MILLION DOLLARS!

  Sara Kate’s eyes search the rooms. Rooms filled with as much stuff as a Sears & Roebuck catalog. There are store bought ready made brooms everywhere. They are neatly placed beside homemade ones, made from wild broomstraw gathered from open uncultivated farm land. The sprigs of straw are tightly tied together with strings of brightly colored print cloth.

  Sara Kate tilts her head to one side like a rooster eyeing a crawling caterpillar. She studies the straw brooms. I imagine, like me, she’s thinking, what on earth would Miss Katie need brooms for? There is no place to sweep. The only place you can even see the floor is in the narrow path that leads from one room to the other. A needle threader in the path shines like a brand new nickel.

  Miss Katie tells her how close we are to the end of the world. Someone stole a shovel and hoe right off her front porch. She can’t bring stuff like that inside, because she says it’s bad luck.

  Miss Katie catches me eyeing some pretty towels. “They right pretty, ain’t they, Clover,” she says, flashing a wide toothless grin. She brags that the teeth she ordered years and years ago from an almanac are still as good as new. They ought to be. She never wears them. They say nearly every Sunday she cries out in church, “Oh Lord, I come off and left my teeth.”

  I guess Miss Katie will stop giving me a couple dollars to cut her grass. She says she’s started ordering a batch of fancy hand towels from Fingerhut, in case she has to hand someone a little something. She orders more stuff. She’ll send something she gets in the mail back for a free gift. Usually it’s some old flower. She never reads far enough to see that if she doesn’t send the plant back after so many days, then they bill her and keep sending flowers. So Miss Katie’s plants keep coming and she keeps paying.

  “The Young and the Restless” is still on TV. “I just have that old thing on,” Miss Katie says. “I don’t watch that trash. It ain’t fit for no Christian.” All the time, though, she is stealing quick looks. Moving her head so we don’t block her view. She peeps like a crow checking out a watermelon patch. On television, an emergency broadcast signal sounds. . . . “This is an emergency test,” the announcer says, “a test of the emergency broadcast system. . . . This concludes the test,” he says at the end. Miss Katie shakes her head. “One day, it will be for real,” she whispers.

  A shaft of sunlight cuts a path across the room where Sara Kate is sitting. Miss Katie wants her to move out of the hot sun, but there is no place for her to go. The sun has zapped the wind’s energy. It’s as still as the painted pictures hanging on the torn wallpapered walls. A small, squeaking electric fan pushes sheets of hot air into the corners of the room.

  Miss Katie’s house never changes much, not even at Christmas. She just sets out little baskets of fruits, nuts, and candy on chairs or on her bed. She can’t decorate. There’s no place to add a single thing.

  Miss Katie knocks a big bundle of S&H green stamp books to the floor and sets off a mouse trap. Kah blam! She peeps from under her hooded eyes, “There ain’t a rat in this house.” Sara Kate is scared to death. “I keep a trap set all the time,” she explains. “Some old rat may sneak in here with his nasty self. But he sure won’t live long enough to sneak around. They may crawl in, but they don’t crawl out.”

  Miss Katie sure picked a good time to offer us something to eat. Hands that carry out bleeding rats now bring us big plates of fried pies and carrot cake loaded with thick confectioners sugar icing. She spreads a yellow napkin over my lap and plops the plate down on it.

  “It’s just a little something,” she says. “I know how chaps are. They always want a bite of something sweet.” She turned to Sara Kate. “I’ll let you help yourself. I’m so glad you’re here. Maybe for once Clover will eat something here. Always wants to carry it home. That’s not polite, is it, Miss Sara Kate?”

  Sara Kate’s eyes are glued on those greasy pies. Sara Kate don’t eat nobody’s greasy stuff.

  I pick up my pie and look at Sara Kate. She reaches for my plate. “Oh no, young lady, you’re going to have to save this for supper.” She turned to Miss Katie. “Clover won’t eat anything but sweets if she’s allowed. Is it all right if I take it home for dessert tonight?”

  Miss Katie grins, “Why sure, Miss Sara Kate. Clover is blessed to have a mama like you.” Her smile faded. “Her daddy would have been so proud of you. Real proud.”

  “I’m clean out of new tin foil,” she said, smoothing out an old wrinkled piece. I don’t say nothing but I know why she is all out of tin foil. She keeps using it all up wrapping them five-dollar bills in it to send to those TV preachers.

  “You must come and eat with me sometimes,” Miss Katie is saying. “I had my preacher and his wife over a few months back. I made the best barbecued pig feet and tails. They said it was the best something to eat they’d had in a long time.”

  Sara Kate doesn’t say she knows about pig feet. She’d watched Baby Joe eat plate after plate of them at the family gathering before she married Gaten. I still believe it was the sight of all that grease that made her sick.

  Miss Katie shows Sara Kate a pickup notice she got for a television. She comes back to our house to use the phone. I dial the 1-800 phone number for her. She speaks really strong. “I don’t have no way to get down there for my TV,” she says. “You see, I don’t have no car to get way down near Hilton Head, South Carolina. I have a hard time just finding somebody to carry me to the store. I don’t reckon you could send it to me, could you?”

  We don’t know what they said to her. But she said, “Well, thank you anyhow for picking me as the winner.”

  Poor Miss Katie is really sad. She digs in her apron pocket for some change and tries and tries to pay Sara Kate for a toll-free call.

  I think Miss Katie knows she was fooled this
time. She seems tired and slowly rocks her body in a straight chair that does not move. Her arms are folded, her mouth chewing away at nothing but empty space. She swallows the empty air. Her lips quietly smack, like a box turtle eating lettuce.

  Sara Kate is hurting, too. She sucks in her breath, short and quick. Her body makes little jerks like a child trying to stop crying. If she is not careful and keeps on holding all that hurt in, she’s going to start working her mouth, licking her lips and making them quiet sounds like an old woman again.

  We stayed around Miss Katie a long, long time. And she didn’t breathe word one about her boat. What they all say is true. “Miss Katie sure won’t talk about her boat.”

  If you think the diamond wristwatch she won was bad, you should have been there the day the UPS truck delivered the boat. It was a really big package. They say it will blow up into a big boat like a life raft. I know Miss Katie didn’t expect that. The boat wouldn’t have been so bad but she had to pay a big delivery charge on top of all the money she sent to them every time she sent back the easy puzzles she solved.

  I might be wrong but I believe if Miss Katie had put all that money together she could have bought her a real boat to fish in.

  They say when two people live together, they start to look alike. Well, Sara Kate and I have been living together for a long time and there is no way we will ever look alike.

  But in strange little ways, we are starting to kind of act alike. Things like the way she helped me out with the fried pies at Miss Katie’s house. And little by little, a part of me is slowly beginning to change towards Sara Kate. Even the picture of her face that shed no tears at my daddy’s funeral looks different in my mind now. Maybe it’s because now I know it wasn’t that Sara Kate didn’t cry because she didn’t care. She didn’t because she couldn’t.

  The truth is, and it’s not just because Daniel says so, Sara Kate is strange. Mighty strange sometimes. Like the time I brought her some peaches. “Oh, Clover, you’re so good. I love peaches.” She just carried on till I said, “You know something, Sara Kate, it wouldn’t hurt you one bit to come up to that peach shed for some peaches.”