When Saturday come, I was as nervous as on the first day of school. Not because of Mrs. Whitener. I thought she’d be patient with me. And of course I liked Jean. But what about the customers? Every time I’d been in that place, there was a group of men sitting around playing cards or talking about soybean crops. Would they be watching every move I made?
Lucky for me, the men weren’t at the store when I got there.
The first thing Mrs. Whitener did was give me a stool. “There,” she said. “Sit as much as you like. And keep your crutches close by in case you need them.”
She helped me with the first three or four customers, taking money and giving them change. After that, I was on my own. “You’re a natural storekeeper,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take the day off and let you run this place.”
Before she was done talking, a man come in and bought himself a Coca-Cola and a pack of peanuts. He poured the peanuts in his drink and sat down by the woodstove to enjoy it. Then one at a time the others started coming.
They didn’t stay all day, of course. One would sit and chew the fat with a couple of others and then he’d finally stand up and make some excuse to leave. One man said, “I ’spect if I don’t get home soon the old lady will be putting extra pepper on my eggs in the morning.” But it wasn’t long before another one took his place.
Mrs. Whitener went out the back door a few times and over to her house next to the store. “Have to check on my clan. Be back in a minute,” she’d say.
It wasn’t like things was busy in the store. Mrs. Whitener had a sewing machine in the corner and even sat down and worked on a shirt she was making for one of her boys. It was hard telling why she needed me.
Sometimes the men would sit for a long time without talking. They’d stare at the jars of mayonnaise on the shelf or scrape the toes of their work boots along the cracks in the cement floor. I got to wondering what was going on inside their heads.
Just before eleven o’clock a man named Clarence looked out the window. “Lord help us. Here comes Otis,” he said.
He meant Otis Hickey. I’d known about Otis all my life on account of he walked wherever he wanted to go and sometimes my daddy would give him a lift. Otis’s right eye had been destroyed in the war, so now he had a glass one. When he turned his eyes from side to side, they didn’t move together like most people’s eyes do.
But even before the war, people called him a strange bird.
Otis lived with his mother in a little gray house that you could hardly see for all the trash sitting in the yard. He collected junk that other people would use or sell—old cars, wood cookstoves, and other things he sold to people. He was the only reason my momma had a Frigidaire instead of an icebox. Why, we even had a refrigerator before Peggy Sue’s family did! All on account of Otis getting it from some rich people. When I went with my daddy to get that refrigerator I even thought I seen a bathtub hiding in the weeds.
During the war the government begged for metal to build more ships and bomber planes. But according to Clarence, Otis never turned his in. Clarence said some people felt it was their patriotic duty to go clean up the place. But Otis’s mother met them at the door. “No sirree,” she said. “Otis makes his living fixing and selling that stuff and you better leave it there for when he comes home.”
Otis come into the store. He stood there for a minute while his eyes adjusted to the darkness and then he headed for the counter.
“Good morning, Otis,” said Mrs. Whitener. “Do you know Ann Fay Honeycutt? She’s my new employee.”
He give me a nod and his good eye twitched a little. “We’ve met,” he said.
“Otis will have one of those dills,” said Mrs. Whitener. She tapped the gallon jar of giant pickles sitting on the counter. So I took off the lid, fished one out with the tongs that she kept on the counter, and wrapped it in wax paper.
Mrs. Whitener asked Otis how his mother’s arthritis was doing.
He took a bite of his pickle, lifted his hat, and scratched his head like he was thinking how to answer her. After a moment he said, “She has her good days and her bad days, she does.” He chewed on his pickle for a while, and then he said to anyone who would listen, “I reckon you seen in the paper where them Nazis are being tried for their war crimes. It’s about time they get what’s coming to them.”
Well, that got the men by the stove to talking. Most of them agreed with Otis, whether they’d seen war crimes firsthand or not. I learned that Otis had helped to liberate Poland and seen a concentration camp up close and personal. “You would not believe the size of them prisoners,” he said. “They looked like they wasn’t nothing but one bone apiece. Like a fence rail with empty eyes.”
The men didn’t mind Otis talking about the war as long as he was bad-mouthing the Nazis and the meanness they done to people in Poland. But then he made the mistake of telling a story about one of his buddies getting blown apart. And just like that, Clarence told him to shut it up.
He was done with his pickle by then, so he shrugged and crumpled the wax paper in his fist. “Guess I’ll be getting a wiggle on,” he said. Then he went out the door.
It got quiet for a while, which made me wonder what each of them men was seeing in their minds. After a bit, Clarence picked up the tin can sitting by the woodstove. He spit a stream of black snuff into it. “I declare, Ruth, I don’t know why you let that crazy man darken your door,” he said.
Mrs. Whitener was sewing on a button by this time. She pulled a long thread through the buttonhole and pointed her needle at Clarence. “As far as I’m concerned, Otis Hickey’s two cents is worth just as much as yours.”
I had a feeling she was talking about something besides the money Otis spent on a dill pickle. One thing for sure—there wasn’t any doubt about who run that store. People come in there with all sorts of opinions. And gossip. But if Ruth Whitener didn’t agree with someone’s viewpoint, she was quick to say so.
Just before one o’clock a man named Frank Huffman come in, set up a small table, and pulled out some rook cards. Before long, two more men had joined him. But of course they needed a fourth player. “Ruth, are you going to play?” asked Frank. “Or does little Miss Honeycutt want to be my partner?”
Mrs. Whitener laughed. “Good idea! Go ahead, Ann Fay.”
Was she serious? Did she want me to play while I was on the job?
“You deserve a break.”
She meant it. I shook my head. “I don’t want to play.” But the truth was, I didn’t know much about playing rook. When me and Peggy Sue and Junior got together we always played rummy.
“Deal me a hand,” said Mrs. Whitener. She sat up to the table, and next thing I knew she was bidding on how many points she could take.
I picked up a copy of the Hickory Daily Record that was under the counter. I read the funny papers first and then I moved on to what was happening in the real world.
I seen an article called HANDICAPPED GET ATTENTION. It was about how President Truman had proclaimed this week “Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” The article said that the war had wounded lots of people who could do a good job in spite of their handicap.
It seemed like an easy thing to say, at least if you were talking about a soldier who come home with a bad arm. But what if something was wrong on the inside? If it was just a weak arm that was wrong with my daddy, he’d find a way to work. But whatever was ailing him wasn’t something you could see.
And because I couldn’t see it, sometimes I got real impatient. I’d get the biggest urge to tell him to snap out of it! But I would never talk to my daddy like that.
The newspaper article didn’t say anything about people being handicapped by polio. But after our epidemic I knew there were plenty of us around too. And I started wondering if maybe that’s why Mrs. Whitener had hired me.
Was she feeling sorry for me on account of polio? Or having pity on my whole family because Daddy wasn’t working?
I got to thinking maybe I didn’t want the job after all. For one thing I didn’t care much for being pitied. And for another I was starting to feel sorry for myself. Especially when I remembered that I could be at the movies with Peggy Sue just then.
But of course Junior would probably be there too. I didn’t know which bothered me worse—the idea of Junior tagging along or him and Peggy Sue going without me.