Delilah Greathouse pushed the curtains back so that she and Cornelius Jefferson could look out the kitchen window. Not that there was much to see, just a few patches of grass, a picket fence with half the pickets missing, and two muddy plots that got the sun all day, where Cornelius put in her vegetable garden.
“Seems like it’s been rainin’ for at least forty days,” she said. “Must be about time for old Noah to show up on the ark.”
Cornelius was looking out the window, too. He didn’t answer.
The Eldercare lady from Meals on Wheels had just delivered their midday meals. Delilah pulled back the foil that covered hers. “Umm. Got us some meat loaf and mashed potatoes today.” It was one of her favorites. “Gravy, too.”
Cornelius bowed his head. “Gracious Lord, we give you thanks for the food we are about to receive for the nourishment of our bodies. Amen.”
“Got some applesauce and canned pears. You want my green peas?”
When Cornelius didn’t answer this time she reached across the table and rapped his knuckles with a spoon. “Turn your hearing aid up!”
“You been runnin’ off at the mouth again, old woman?” he teased.
“You want these green peas or not?” She pushed the foil container toward him. While he scooped them out, she added, “Garden’s got to get planted soon as the rain clears up. And we >got to talk about what you’re gonna plant. Them Santa tomatoes we put in last year wasn’t what I expected.”
“Sure wasn’t,” Cornelius agreed. “I thought they’d be big, fat, and got them bunches of little grape-looking things instead.”
Delilah stood up and reached for her cane. “With them and the cherry tomatoes you put in I didn’t hardly have enough good-sized tomatoes for canning,” she added as she reached the stove. “Water’s hot.” She poured some from the pan into two cups. “Got your choice today, coffee or tea.”
“Tea,” he said. She took a tea bag, too. This was a five-week month. No reason to run out of coffee before they got their Social Security checks again. She put a spoonful of sugar in each cup.
She and Cornelius were neighbors better than sixty years. He lived right next door. Now his wife and her husband were both dead. All they had was each other. “1 though maybe I’d make some corn bread and some pinto beans with a little smoked meat for supper.”
“Be nice to have some greens with it,” Cornelius suggested.
“Maybe.” That sounded good to her, too. She tended to hoard what she canned so it would last from one summer to the next. Greens always tasted so good though when you sopped up the pot liquor with corn bread. “Maybe,” she said again.
Cornelius smiled, knowing that meant yes.
“Garden’s going in late this year, what with all this rain,” she reminded him.
“Remember when we’d have weather like this and there’d be ponds in the fields, Lila?”
“Ain’t no more fields, at least none that you can see from this window. All the land what’s left is over by the school.”
Cornelius chuckled. “Them bullfrogs would go to croakin’ and the kids would be catchin’ them pollywogs. Mothers be hol- lerin’ when they tried to bring ’em home.”
“And everyone on the face of the earth was trackin’ in mud.”
“Shame about that woman what drowned in the river,” Cornelius said.
Delilah knew he was talking about something else because she was getting cranky. Wasn’t no good, old days, no matter how hard he tried to get her to think so. In spite of herself, she asked, “What woman?”
“If you came over and watched the evenin’ news with me, Lila, you’d know.”
“Ain’t nothin’ on that television worth watchin’ no more. Them talkin’ books they bring me from the library and my radio suit me just fine.”
“Interestin’ though,” Cornelius went on, “her being an actress and all, and a colored one at that.”
“Not that pretty one what used to be on the show about them folks what lived in the projects in Chicago?”
“No, wasn’t her.”
When he didn’t add anything else, Delilah said, “Well, who was it then? What they bringin’ a colored actress here for anyway?”
“Can’t say why. Her name was Savannah Payne-Jones. Pretty name. Can’t say I ever heard of her though. They didn’t show no picture.”
“How old?” Delilah asked.
“Newswoman said forty-three.”
“Oh.” That was way too young to be her daughter, Tamar. “Might of been a picture in the News-Times.” Not that he could see good enough to read the paper, or she could see any better. Needed eyeglasses, both of them. “Old Helen still gettin’ the newspaper?”
“Now, Lila, Tamar left home the summer of forty-four. We both know you ain’t gonna be reading nothin’ about her in the newspaper or hearin’ nothin’ about her on the news, not after all these years. Wartimes them was when she left, Lila. Schools here was still separate for coloreds. Besides, wasn’t nothin’ here for her to do even if she did get a high school diploma. She didn’t want to do hair and there wasn’t much else for her back then, lessin’ she was somebody’s cook or maid.”
Delilah stared out the window, blinking fast so she wouldn’t cry.
“Now you listen here, Lila Greathouse. You didn’t try to do >nothin’ more for your daughter than your mama did for you. You wasn’t but fifteen when you married a man twice your age. You and your mama both wanted the same thing, woman. For your only child to be safe, to be taken care of. Only difference was that your mama knew she was dying.”
“Asher was something, wasn’t he, Cornelius.” Asher had been Cornelius’s boarder, not his son. “Handsome man, that Asher.” And not but two years younger than she was. Someone she might have married if Mama hadn’t died when she did. Was that why she wanted Tamar to marry him? Because she couldn’t? Or was Cornelius right? Did she just want Tamar to be safe with someone who could take care of her? “Asher was a fine young man,” she said, more to herself than to Cornelius. “He was going to make something of himself, start his own business. He was saving to buy a home for him and Tamar.”
“So he said, Lila, so he said. I never did see no pay stub nor no bankbook. Asher could have been doin’ anything way off in Michigan. All we know is what he wrote and told us.”
“And Tamar sure did write to him. For a long time I thought Tamar would at least send me a postcard,” Delilah admitted. “Maybe even a letter.”
“Most likely got herself one of them factory jobs somewhere, same as Asher got himself work in that car factory in Flint. Jobs where they work you all day, pay you as little as they can get away with, and you come home tired and get up even more tired the next mornin’.”
Cornelius had worked for the Newsome family for years; hard work, carrying, moving, lifting, digging, gardening. He put on their new roof by himself and built that garage as well. Then he hurt his back real bad chopping wood. Newsome Senior let him go with one week’s pay and hired two men to replace him.
“Lila, you know and I know that Tamar and Asher didn’t come back because there wasn’t nothin’ here for them to come back to.”
Nothin’ but us, Delilah thought, but the words would have stuck in her throat if she tried to say them out loud.
“What did any of us have here in Bullfrog Bog, woman? Wipe the dust from your feet,’ the Bible says. They did.”
“The Bible also says, ’Honor your father and mother and you will have length of days.’”
Cornelius cocked his head to one side and looked at her. He broke out in a grin. “You quoting the Bible to me, Lila?” Then his face got serious. “I think that after all this time both Tamar and Asher have gone home to the Lord, else we would have heard from them by now.”
Delilah wanted to cover her ears every time he said something like that. Asher wrote Tamar while he was in Flint. Almost every day there was a letter in the mailbox from him. After Tamar was gone she read them letters. Time she was done reading she knew why Tamar had to go. Now she tried to ignore what Cornelius had said about them both being dead and busied herself clearing the table.
“Ain’t like we was the only ones, Lila. Look at Mr. Newsome, Lord rest his soul.”
“Lord rest his soul indeed! Lord keep his soul in hell for what he did to you!”
“His son took off almost the same Tamar and Asher did. That’s about as close as you can come to hell without dying. I don’t know that anyone’s ever heard from his boy either.”
Cornelius was a Christian man, too quick to turn the other cheek. She had worked for the Newsomes, too. Soon as she couldn’t carry them baskets of wet laundry up them stairs and hang ’em outside to dry, she was let go, too. And there was no week’s pay neither. A pretty, young light-skinned girl took her place. Could have been Tamar if she hadn’t already left town.
“Newsome’s son come from money, Cornelius, and he was white, and he was a man. Newsome Senior knew just where he was. He just couldn’t talk him into comin’ home.”
Tears stung her eyes. Tamar would be but seventy-two now, born like she was when Delilah wasn’t but fifteen. “All I ever wanted for her was for her own good.”
“That’s what most folks want for their children. Trick is, lettin’ them find it themselves.” Cornelius came over to where she was standing. “Here, woman. Let me wash them dishes.” He patted her shoulder. “Come on now, Lila. Ain’t nothin’ much happened like we wanted it to since we been born. We got to be grateful for what we have left, not what He’s taken from us.”
Wasn’t nothin’ left, Lila thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. All what she had ever been given was taken from her the day Tamar ran away. “You’re always going to be a preacher’s son, ain’t you, Cornelius?”
He gave her hand a pat, then a squeeze. She snatched her hand away but, in spite of herself, she felt comforted. Wasn’t nobody left but Cornelius.
Delilah walked over to the window. Days like this, when there wasn’t no sun shining, no flowers blooming, no birds singing, and there sure never would be no more bullfrogs croaking, she felt like she’d be better off dead than living, but she wouldn’t scandalize poor Cornelius by saying so.