Chapter Four

“I tell you, Mae, that boy a country Negro, and you ain’t never gon’ be able to take the country out of him.” Ruby huffed around the clothespin held in her mouth as she and Mae hung the sheets to take advantage of the late-spring sun’s warmth. She smiled, relishing the intimacy of their friendship. “Y’all been here most three months now, and I swear he going out the world backward.”

“Shame on you, Miss Ruby. He ain’t that bad. And you shouldn’t be talking about a body when they ain’t here to defend theyself.”

Ruby harrumphed again, more loudly this time, before continuing her diatribe against Clyde. “Horse shit! You listen here, gal, and stop making excuses. Truth be truth, and you knows it.” She clipped the sheet to the clothesline and bent to pick up another, giving Mae a penetrating glare as she straightened up. “Look at you. You done started talking more proper-like and you can get around on the buses and trains anywhere you wants to go. You all been here the same bit of time, but you different as night and day. He ain’t even trying to fit with the rest of the good folks around here, not like you do.” Silence filled the space between them, and she hesitated, wondering if she had gone too far.

“It ain’t the same, me and him. I mean, he ain’t had the same schooling I had. I was gon’ to be a teacher before I married Clyde.” Mae sighed as she bent to pull another sheet from the basket that rested between them, her face veiled with a sadness that shadowed her eyes for the briefest moment before she continued.

“So, you telling me you stopped going to school to marry him?” Ruby asked, her eyebrows climbing upward, skepticism sweeping her features.

Mae shook her head, the memories once again firing and popping through her mind as she sucked in a deep breath, then forced a smile that deepened her dimples. “Naw, ma’m, it wasn’t him.”

She stopped, her eyes hardening and sweeping past her memories of Clyde and resting elsewhere. She bit and chewed her words before spitting them out. “That was my own self’s peoples what did that. If Clyde hadn’t come when he did and took me away from all that mess, well, it would have been a sorry life for me, and well . . .” She paused, looking up at the cloudless blue sky, and inhaled deeply, a smile breaking across her face—“Then I wouldn’t never have made it to Chicago. I wouldn’t be living here, and you and me wouldn’t be friends, Miss Ruby.”

Ruby stopped, a damp sheet clutched against her chest, then grinned. “Girl, you is a natural mess. What I’m gon’ do with you?”

The utter darkness Amos had left, staining her soul, receded a step further as a bright aura blazed around Mae. Ruby shook her head and searched for her snuff can. “I ain’t never gon’ understand you and him together. But if you likes it, I loves it.”

“You just cain’t see him like I do,” Mae said, seeing the doubtful look on Ruby’s face. “I know, I know. He ain’t no good-looking man, and his legs ain’t right, but they stronger than they was. He do pretty good, long as he don’t push hisself too hard, and they start paining him, make him limp bad.” She hesitated, stared into the distance, and then chuckled. “But it be something about him what strike my heart kind of pitiful about the way they treated him back home. He ain’t deserve that. Nobody do.”

Mae pulled the clothesline down so she could stare at Ruby over it, her words moving up and down the scale with her emotions. Everybody got a story, Ruby thought, and she could feel Mae’s story straining and wanting to be told.

Both women dropped the sheets they held into the basket, and Mae approached the other side of the clothesline. Together, they backed up and fell heavily into the two cane-bottomed chairs on the porch, pulled by the weight of their stories. Mae fanned her hand absently in front of her face, stirring a slight breeze as she gathered her thoughts, then spoke.

“That first day I seen him in the woods, he had this look, you know, how a dog look what’s been beat all the time. That be him. Shoot, I’m ashamed to admits it, but him coming up on me like he did, not making no sound, did scare me. I near pissed my britches seeing him standing over me. He got them big old hands, them long arms, and Lord Jesus, it be something about his eyes and the way they looks at you.” Her face paled with remembering, her eyes growing large as they stared into the past.

“Anybody with some sense would have start screaming and running. But he look more scared than me. Seem like he was the one ready to run off.” Her mouth twisted at the incongruity as she conjured the scene into reality. Ruby leaned forward, scooting to the end of her chair as Mae continued.

Mae had that faraway look Ruby often saw when she was reminiscing about Clyde. “Like I said, I think I scared him more than he scared me. And there he was, come to save me. I just didn’t know it yet.”

“I bet you didn’t.” Ruby controlled an involuntary shudder as she tried to picture Clyde as either afraid or a savior.

“I had done heard about him a few times since we moved to Delhi,” Mae continued, ignoring Ruby’s response, “but I hadn’t never actual laid eyes on him until that day. And, Lord . . . Well, I gots to tell the truth and shame the devil, Miss Ruby. I understands why folks said some of what they did. He look like somebody you don’t wants to get on the bad side of. I mean, he ain’t never been like that with me, but it . . .” She paused, sorting through her words to find the ones to convey her meaning. “Sometimes, it’s like something come up in him. A dark feeling come over him, and I can sees it.”

Mae lifted her hand, whipping back and forth through the air as if to wipe the harshness of her words away. She continued her recollection of their meeting, the wonder in his eyes as he looked at the wet tip of his finger and then back at her, how gentle his touch was, contradicting the look and size of him. She picked up the threads of the story. “He wipes at my tears, and I wasn’t scared like I should have been. Well, I might have shrunk up a little. But he was so tender, like I was a flower he was touching what he don’t wants to crush. Made me stop crying, and we just sit there, looking at each other, breathing each other’s air.”

Mae’s eyes blinked rapidly, and Ruby watched her expression change. Her mouth became a straight, hard line, and her eyes sparkled with anger. “Next thing I know, his head jerk around, and he up on his feet.” Mae sucked her tongue in disgust and continued. “Then this other time, when we was up in the woods, Fannie come. I swear that man could hear his momma calling from the grave. I didn’t hear her at first, but Lord have mercy, when she got close enough, I could hear her hollering his name like she was coming to fight Satan hisself. Clyde took off running. I should have knowed then she was trouble.”

Mae paused in her retelling, reaching through the tangles of her memories and separating Fannie from Clyde in her mind. Her face hardened as anger threaded itself into her narrative.

“Fannie Henry ain’t never had no use for me. But me, I thinks me and Clyde done saved each other. He save me from my daddy and Verna. I save him from his mama.”

Ruby stared at Mae, her thoughts stewing as a flood of tumultuous emotion blossomed beneath the surface. She’d convinced herself years ago, when her own child bled out into the toilet in big clumps of blood that looked like raw liver, that any maternal feelings died with her child. Amos had beaten it out of her, along with any yearning she had for happiness.

Mae could easily have been that child. Hope fluttered within her empty womb as she bent her body forward, rocking back and forth protectively. Her features softened as she listened, and Mae continued, each word filling the space.

She sighed, consumed with a desire to comfort her. What would it feel like to let her fingers stroke her skin and feel the silkiness of her hair? Would they be as soft as they looked? Shaking herself, Ruby coughed.

“So, how you say you and his mama get along?” she asked, pushing back to the subject of Clyde’s mother. Mae’s eyes narrowed, and Ruby moved forward, almost falling off the edge of her seat in her eagerness to have the story continue.

Mae’s tone changed abruptly, the lightness and humor gone from her voice. “His mama, Miss Fannie, hate my guts,” Mae spewed, venom hissing between each word. “She think I done used some bad juju on Clyde to take him away.”

Ruby sat up straight, eyes large and round as she stared up at Mae, first dumbfounded, then angry. It was anathema to hate Mae. In the months since she had met her, she’d not known Mae to fail to offer help or have an unkind word to say about anyone until now.

Indignation rang in Ruby’s voice when she spoke again. “What you mean?” she asked, swallowing her angry thoughts, afraid that any stray words would cause Mae to stop talking.

Now that she had started, nothing would silence the runaway train of her words as Mae poured out the vitriol that lay like rot in the roots of her relationship with her husband. “I mean, she hate me. She ain’t never want me with Clyde. Seem like she ain’t want him with nobody but her.”

Mae paused, folding her arms beneath her breasts, her mouth fixed in a hard, straight line, the expression out of place on her usually placid face. Mae’s hands squeezed her upper arms repeatedly.

“I should have followed my first mind about her when he start telling me about her. Yep. God knows, I should have. But nah, dumb old me, I kept going back to the woods to see Clyde again.”

Acidic bitterness churned in Mae’s stomach, then splashed up to burn her throat. “And that there be the problem between us. Miss Fannie cain’t stand him loving me. She cain’t take not being the woman in his life. But he ain’t her boy no more. He my man.” She released her hold on her arms, the print of her fingers leaving a red stain behind.

“Miss Ruby, I ain’t never met nobody like his mama, Miss Fannie, or them sisters of hers. They swears the Lord done picked them out special, and his wisdom and salvation is only for them. When she found out Clyde done been with me, she say I done been the ruination of his life. She say I’m gon’ end up just like all Jezebels, shit on the ground.”

Ruby wished in that instant that the woman, Fannie, was there with them now. She’d claw the ugliness from her throat, ensuring the woman could never say another hurtful thing to Mae again.

Ruby released the breath she was holding and rolled her eyes heavenward. “I ain’t never been able to abide by no holy rollers. The Lord don’t got no special picks.” Ruby lifted her snuff can from beside her chair and spat the taste of Fannie into it with the brown stream of tobacco juice. “Come on with it. I know you got some more to tell. What else she be like?”

Both women leaned in conspiratorially. “Well, you ain’t gon’ believe this, but when I met Clyde, he was still sleeping in the same bed with his mama.” She stopped to let the words fall on Ruby, whose mouth hung open in disbelief.

“Sure enough? Girl, no!” Her mouth continued to open and close, waiting for more words to convey her doubt and disbelief. “Ain’t you say he more than twenty years old?”

“Yes, ma’m! He was living with his mama between Rayville and Delhi, just him and her in a house back up in the woods. It wasn’t too bad, three rooms and a little kitchen with a pump inside and a stove.” Her hand flew to her mouth, and her head twisted from side to side, searching for hidden eavesdroppers before she continued. “Didn’t have but one big bed, and I heard from some gossiping folks Clyde was still sleeping with her. Now you know that ain’t natural. What kind of woman be sleeping with her grown son?”

Ruby made a choking sound of incredulity as Mae continued, the words spilling forth, a river damned up for too long.

“Uh-huh. When I ask Clyde about it, he act like it wasn’t nothing wrong with it. He say they always done slept in the same bed ever since his daddy and the rest of his brothers left. Afore that, far as he can recollect, even when his daddy was with them, he been sleeping with her since he was borned.”

She stopped, pausing to gather her words. “Clyde say, ‘Mae, ain’t nothing wrong with it.’ And that be the first time him and me ever got into it. The first time he got mad with me. Say I was listening to them heathens in town, the ones what hated him. Say I’m just like them. That the first time I seen that mad look on him. We didn’t talk for a spell, and Fannie was strutting around happy as Christmas.”

Mae had made her way to lean on the porch railing, the story seeming to drain the energy from her body. “But Clyde come back to me and ask me to marry with him. I puts my foot down. Say if you want to be with me, then you got to get your own self’s bed until us gets married.”

“He went and bought hisself a cot that day and start sleeping on it.” A satisfied smile spread across her face, deepening the dimples in each cheek. “Then we start seeing each other regular again. Miss Fannie just about bust a gut. I swear the woman going to lose her mind when he tells her he was going to marry me.” Her head shook in denial of the remembered reality.

“That old cow come to my daddy’s house, cussing me and mine. But my muhdeah was there. And, Miss Ruby, she done already warned Miss Fannie before not to come around me no more. Don’t nobody mess with my muhdeah.” Laughter bubbled up in her throat at the recollection of Fannie yelling outside the house, face gone purple in an apoplectic fit, and Muhdeah cussing the air blue. “She got her straight real quick and run her straight back into them woods, waving the wood ax the whole time. Muhdeah don’t take kindly to nobody hollering at her children or grandchildren but her.” She watched as Ruby bent forward, guffawing loudly and stomping her foot.

“Don’t laugh, Miss Ruby,” she demanded, then chuckled and gave Ruby a moment to collect herself. Eventually, the older woman subdued herself, the sight of Mae’s face flushed red, embarrassment coloring her cheeks, sobering her.

Ruby scooted back into her chair until her back rested against the wicker, the wet laundry bunched on her lap and forgotten, both fascinated and appalled by the tale. Looking into Ruby’s face, Mae stopped talking abruptly, her face going a deeper red with the realization of what she had revealed.

“There I go, running off at the mouth again, telling all my business,” she said, her open palm attempting to rub the embarrassment from her face while moving to snatch another sheet from the basket. Glancing upward, she noticed how the sun had moved across the sky during their conversation. “Anyway, she the main reason why we here. We had to get far as we could from his mama. You know the Bible say, ‘leave and cleave,’ but I guess, holy as she is, she don’t read that part.” Her face closed, her chin jutting forward, and her eyes glittering. “I be his family now.”

Taking a deep breath, Mae cut off her words, stuffing them back where she stored them. Pulling up a smile that remained only on her lips, she lifted the basket onto her hip.

“It getting late, Miss Ruby. I best be getting Clyde’s dinner on.” Her right hand picked nervously at the few sheets on the bottom of the basket that she would need to rewash. “I’m gon’ see you tomorrow. And you can tells me all about your husband. You said he was a good man too, right?”

Ruby cleared her throat and gazed at Mae for a long, awkward moment. Her truth pressed at the base of her throat, scratching to get out. She swallowed it back down. Turning her eyes to the floor beneath her, she felt the bitter taste of deceit on her tongue.

“I need to be getting on inside before these here flies eat me for they dinner.” She avoided Mae’s eyes as she stood, stretching her arms upward, startled by how knotted her muscles had become sitting in the chair. “Oh, you be baking any more of that banana bread? Girl, you put your foot in it!” She laughed as she followed Mae inside. “Or you done sold it all?”

“I sees what I can do.” Mae laughed, speaking over her shoulder before escaping inside.