Jodi

DUST AND ALL THAT

I used to feel right sorry for lettuce when I was coming up. You could pickle them winter beets and keep ’em all purple and juicy. And you could throw broccoli in the freezer and keep it all green and crunchy. But poor lettuce. You cain’t do one dern thing to save it.

Me and that lettuce, we was the same. ’Cause I was different too. When other youngens was having tea parties with their dolls, I was puttin’ together carburetors with Slick Sal and Hard-Time Tony at Al’s Body Shop. Momma, she was always serving time for swigging a few and then sneaking Aqua Net or Pond’s in her purse. I never had no polished toes or braided hair. I changed oil and rotated tires. And thank the good Lord up above, really. I weren’t the kind of girl from the kind of family where people get to talkin’ ’bout going to college or bright futures or any of that other hog slop. I was from the kind of family where people got all worked up like you had cured cancer if you got outta high school.

Mrs. Petty, the fancy, thin high school guidance counselor who told me that she put rubber bands through the buttonholes in her pants to make them fit all the way through her pregnancy—good advice once I was pregnant—had called me to her office one day and said, “Jodi, I think you’ve got a lot of potential. I think if you’d take the SAT one of these Saturday mornings we might get you a college scholarship.”

“I work down at the garage Saturday mornings,” I had said, looking down at my grease-stained fingernails.

Mrs. Petty, she pinched up her pink-lipsticked mouth and said, “Surely you could take a morning off.” She waited, but I didn’t say nothing. “Or maybe we could find another surrounding school that’s offering the test in the evenings.”

You knew by her look that she couldn’t understand where I was coming from any more than I understood her pretty blond children and sweet, faithful, sober husband in one of them white houses up on the hill. I ain’t never thought about leaving Kinston or college or nothing else. Nobody ever told me I was worth something or could do nothin’. So I weren’t gonna jump up and hug her neck and say, “Wow! I could go away to a college where won’t nobody understand or accept me for free?”

Plus, there weren’t nobody to take care of Daddy if I weren’t home. And I was a darn sight better than Momma at caregiving even if I was only seventeen. Lucky for me, the garage where Daddy worked ’fore he took to bed, where I was working on Saturday mornings, had an opening for me full time. Spark plugs and changing batteries and replacing fan belts—them things I knew. College and other fancy mess was for rich girls.

I was doing right good ’til I started showing up at work drunk. Al called me right there in his office and said, “I’d try to keep you out of respect for your daddy, darlin’, but it ain’t safe to operate heavy machinery when you’re sauced.” I nodded and hung my head, but by that point, I didn’t care ’bout nothing but my next drink. So I sure as hell wasn’t worried ’bout keeping my job. “Get yourself cleaned up and you always got a job with me,” Al had said.

And Al, he’s a man as good as his word. Once I quit smelling like Jack, my job was all mine again. The thing is, them greasy, hard-living, missing-teethed men didn’t get all hot and bothered over an addiction. But they couldn’t near look at me when they found out I was pregnant. Al bit down on the toothpick hanging outta his mouth and said, “How the hell you gonna fit underneath a car when you look like you swallowed a watermelon?”

“Al, your damn belly’s twice as big as mine’ll ever hope to be.” I smiled like my grandmomma taught me, crossin’ my fingers and toes.

He laughed, but no dice. “Honey, you’re better to look at than all these other jackasses around here, but I can’t see having some knocked-up chick running around my garage. It seems like it’d look irresponsible, be bad for business.”

I got canned the day after I decided for sure I’s gonna have you. I found an old tube a’ Momma’s red lipstick crammed between my car seats, bought a newspaper, and circled anything I could right near understand. I got interviews for being a fry chef, Walmart greeter, store clerk, bakery manager, dry cleaner, Laundromat attendant, housekeeper, yard mower, and coffee maker.

Turns out, I ain’t got one real skill apart from mending cars. ’Course, I could plant an old leather shoe and make it grow into something beautiful and cook it up into something right near delicious. Grandma, she’d made sure of that.

I was just laying in my bed in the trailer, looking up at the ceiling, turnin’ my eyes down every few minutes at how my belly was just bowing out the tiniest bit, like a crescent moon half sneaking out of the sky. I didn’t want ’em to, but them tears escaped down my cheeks, thinking about my grandma, all them days I spent on an old upturned bucket rolling out biscuits or putting up all them sweet peas she loved so much.

I closed my eyes, and I was five years old again, the warm near-spring wind blowing, the tall grass of that field tickling my bare feet and pushing that long, unkempt hair right in my face so I could get a whiff a’ that smell from Momma smoking right beside me on the couch.

Grandma, looking back, she was too old to be kneeling over that plot of dirt like she was, getting her hands all dirty kneading down in the earth. But she motioned to me, the wind catching her short silver hair too. “Come here, darlin’,” she’d said. “Let me show you somethin’.”

I kneeled right down beside her, and she handed me a seed. One round, perfect, smooth seed. I’ll never forget how it felt in my fingers, how it gave energy to my whole body. I looked up at her, her eyes too blue and glowin’ for somebody who’d lived hard on this farm, those deep lines in her face that hadn’t ever seen so much as a stitch of makeup. I smiled. And she smiled a knowing smile right back.

“That love of the land, that living right near it and on it and in it, that understandin’ how it all works, it’s in your blood, Jodi. No matter what happens in your life, no matter how much people let you down, you can count on the land. It won’t never let you down.”

The sun was starting to set as I pushed that single seed into the straight row of fresh, tilled dirt. And I don’t know how I knew, I’s so little. But it was like when you wake up and it’s still dark and the birds ain’t chirping but you just know that if you look out your window the sun is gonna be risin’. I just knew that that little seed was gonna take hold and grow up tall and make me feel like God remembered me out here in the sticks after all.

That was the first year I helped Grandma plant them little dirt rows. And I did it every year after that too. Every year for eleven more years, me and Grandma planted seeds until we was worked right to the quick. The day that last crop was ready to harvest, not a month before Daddy got the pancreatic cancer, I found Grandma, laid up over them sweet peas, deader than a doornail. I just sat there with her a long time, hummed her a lullaby with my arms around her. Me and Daddy had her cremated and scattered her all around that field. Felt like the right thing to do for somebody that loved the land like my grandma. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust and all that.

Grandma, she’s the only real momma I ever had, only one in my whole life ’sides Daddy who ever cared about me or thought I was worth teaching something. The only thing that made losing her even tolerable was that she didn’t have to watch Daddy, that boy she loved so much, suffer so.

’Course, the worst part a’ all of it, the worst one a’ them deaths, was letting go a’ that field, the only place on God’s green earth that my little-girl dreams could run wild and free, the only place I knew I’s worth something and could make something beautiful grow.

I sighed long and low, swallowing them tears away, putting my hands on my little sprout. “Grandma,” I said out loud, my stomach growling, saying it knew right good I hadn’t had nothing fitting to eat in near about a week. “I cain’t very well make a living offa talking to them plants the way we used to. So what in the hell am I gonna do?”

I don’t know if it was Grandma or God or that hungry ache in my stomach that made the answer seem right clear. But I knew what I had to do. Daddy woulda whooped me good if he thought I was one of them people standing in line for a handout, living off the government. But my daddy, he weren’t never at a real dead end like me. When every dag dern door was slamming hard and fast in my face, that check was the window God opened.