Pa and Cecile had been gone for hours. All we could do was wait to hear more news about Vonetta. How she looked. Was she in casts and bandages? Was she conscious? When could she come home?
When I couldn’t wait any longer, I did the one thing I was determined not to do. The one thing I dreaded since I knew we were headed south. I took the sheets off the clothesline and brought them inside for ironing.
Ma Charles’s irons didn’t have electric cords. They were her mother’s irons. One was a wedding present to Ma Charles when she married Henry Charles, and the other she inherited when my great-great-grandmother Livonia passed away.
I sat each iron on the stove and turned on the flames. Instead of the canned spray starch that Mrs. preferred when she did iron, I made the starch in a bowl, the way Big Ma had taught me when we first drove down south. Water, Argo, and a bit of crushed lavender. I took the older iron and flicked a few drops on its surface. The drops hissed metal and lavender and evaporated almost instantly. The iron was ready. I dipped my fingers in the bowl, swirled them around, and flung the drops of starchy water onto the sheet laid out on the ironing board. There was nothing left to do but press hard.
I wasn’t surprised to learn my great-aunt, like her sister, preferred her cotton sheets lightly starched and didn’t trust the feel of permanent press fabric. Why should she be any different than her sister?
Both irons were small, but they were heavy and had their own way of being moved across the cotton fabric. I learned to handle both and pressed until sweat coated my forehead, neck, and arms. I pressed and I prayed. It was only right that pressing went with prayer. That and being sorry. Every wrinkle was a patch of sorry to be smoothed and flattened. I gripped the old wooden handle and pressed until the heat waned. Then I switched irons. If ironing stiff white cloth in the heat hadn’t killed anyone who’d held the handles and pressed and prayed, then I could do what they’d done. I could iron until the cotton sheet was smooth.
Everyone had shown me what Big Ma called “a mercy” when I didn’t deserve one. In my heart I knew I wouldn’t have been so kind to Vonetta if her meanness had caused Fern to run off. I knew I would have made her feel worthless every minute that Fern was missing.
“Thought I smelled some oppression burning.” JimmyTrotter snuck up on me. His oppression began with a long vowel “o.” O-ppression. “White sheets?”
I could feel the smirk. There he was, grinning at me. Even that felt good because that was the JimmyTrotter I knew. “Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t let me stop you from oppressing.”
“Very funny.”
He bladed his finger across my forehead and flicked the sweat away. He wanted me to know how much I was sweating, as if I didn’t know already.
He stood there for a while, I guessed to needle me some more. Then he said, “You’re hard on Vonetta.”
I set the iron on an unlit pilot to cool. “I know,” I said.
“I had a brother. A twin.”
“I know.”
“I’d give anything . . .”
He couldn’t finish. I whispered, “I know.”