Publisher's Note: Bards and Sages is the publisher of Mrs. Sadler's upcoming novella, Foot Ways. The first chapter is reproduced here with permission from the author. We hope you enjoy it.
Author info: Native North Carolinian and former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler won an Extraordinary Undergraduate Teaching Award, a civil rights award, the Distinguished Women of North Carolina Award for Education, and the Barringer Award for Exceptional Service from the North Carolina Society of Historians. Her academic publications include five books and some sixty-eight articles. Now a full-time creative writer of poetry, fiction, and plays, she has a full-length poetry collection forthcoming. She won a Silver Medal in 2005 in the the Pinter Prize for Drama, and in 2006 wom the Abroad Writers Contest/Fellowship (France).
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1. Polly Junior (Mary Flora Glory Marchant)
It was Mr. Rufe who named me "Polly Junior." Which was one reason I didn't like him. One. He appeared at odd times, mostly spring, as far back as I can remember. My father referred to him as "that perfect case of human driftwood." Whenever he'd say, "It's about time for that perfect case of human driftwood to show up," my mother, "Polly Senior," as she was called by Mr. Rufe, would give a little sniff and hike her "humpbacked whale cold shoulder" high, high, high.
I wondered how Daddy knew Mr. Rufe was coming, but, somehow, I got the message that I dare not ask him.
I was born knowing what a "cold shoulder" was, but Daddy was the one who made it personal. I loved Daddy's way with words, and "humpbacked whale cold shoulder" has always seemed to me a classic example. He didn't talk a great deal, but, when he did, he made it count.
I loved Momma, too, of course, but she never did have Daddy's way with words. For one thing, she talked too much. I knew she was always after my good when she piled them on, but there were so many of them that I guess they seemed cheap somehow. Daddy never complained, but I could tell he felt the same way about it. He'd just hunker down over his coffee or iced tea and eat. The more Momma talked, the faster he ate.
I have always tried to be fair, from what both Daddy and Momma taught me, but mainly because my Aunt Florence, who lived across the road from us, never was. Fair, I mean, by my lights at least. So, I have to admit that I may have been prejudiced against Mr. Rufe because Momma always put him up in my playhouse. Daddy objected, but Momma would say, "Samuel Wesley, Mr. Rufe will be given hospitality in The Playroom, or he will be given hospitality in our spare bedroom. You decide."
Daddy almost always agreed with whatever followed Momma's addressing him as "Samuel Wesley" instead of his regular "Sam."
I am proud to say, though, that Daddy did not give in totally gracefully. I heard him mutter every time, as plain as the nose on my face, "That man does not pee gold and silver irregardless of what the women in this community may think!" Oh, I thought that was the finest sentiment and longed to share it, but I knew better than to use the pee word. I had been taught to say I had to "piddle" as early back as I could remember. And even that was filled with danger. Because there came the time Aunt Florence described one of the neighbor women as "nothing but a piddler. Why that woman piddles the day away. Which makes it little wonder her husband hasn't got a pot to you-know-what in." Why didn't she say piddle in if she didn't want to use the regular word, pot to piss in? I tried to put it to her, but she just went screaming off to find Momma with her hands up in the air as she went. I found out the difference between piddle and piddle, not to mention p---, which I was not allowed to say ever again, the hard way.
I also wanted to ask what a "spare room" was for, if not for the likes of Mr. Rufe, but, somehow, I got the message that I dare not ask Momma or Daddy. Early on, I gained a reputation for being "Sam and Miss Polly's right smart girl-child." I thought it was to distinguish me from my sister Abigail, who was seven years older and never around because she lived way off in Lumberton with my four-times-widowed grandmother who had gone blind and refused to be put in a "home." That was, for the longest kind of time, entirely confusing to me. The way they used the word home in connection with Grandma Woodie.
When I began to get my hands around that word, I started thinking of my playhouse as a kind of home away from home. When I was not in tall cotton, so to speak, with one or both of my parents or wanted to get away before Aunt Florence arrived to deliver her latest lecture or just wanted to be alone to think out something, I went to the playhouse. Aunt Florence was always saying I shouldn't be allowed to be so solitary. "Why, with Dear Abigail way off at her Grandmother Woodie's," Aunt Florence would say ("Good riddance!" I wanted to shout.), "our little Mary might just as well be an only child. Do you ever make her play with other children, Polly? Does she ever have the opportunity to learn to share, which she will need to make her way in this cruel world?"
"Well, Florence," Momma would say, "I am not sure that sharing will be our Mary's ticket through the thickets of the world. Besides, Mary makes her own opportunities. Which just may be more important, you know."
I should explain. My real name is "Mary," plus a lot worse. Mary Flora Glory Wesley Marchant. Momma named me that because her own name, Polly, is a "diminutive" of Mary; because I was supposed to be her "Final Glory" and keep her in "Flowers" or Flora; and because my father is Samuel Wesley Marchant. I don't know exactly how it all got put together, but some old man who was a doctor and a friend of hers told her that she should have been named Mary. For its "formality" and because it fitted her. I never asked her too close about it because I found out early on about the Virgin Mary and Mary the Mother of Jesus, James, and Mark, who was all right, and Mary Magdalene, who was and wasn't all right. It was not a matter I could easily talk on with my mother. With Daddy, yes, though I don't recall ever quite getting around to it.
To tell the truth, I think Daddy built me the playhouse because he would of liked to have one to get away to but couldn't because he was an adult. He was a quiet man, as I have indicated. He could manage Momma all right, but not Momma and Aunt Florence together.
So, I benefited. He built on this big room next to the garage, which was not the kind of thing we have as garages now but a big shed with two stalls for cars. Only when I was real little, we didn't have but one car, so the other opening was apt to be occupied by a tractor or the pick-up truck, whichever one was not in use at the moment.
He "weather-proofed" it, too, which nobody but nobody had ever heard tell of for a child's playhouse, and a lot of the neighbors came by and hung around watching while it was being built. Daddy put in a row of sweet little windows up at the top on the side that didn't join the garage. Later on, when the REA, the Rural Electrification Authority people, brought us electricity out into the country, he put a hanging bulb in the playhouse. Before that, I wasn't allowed to be in there after dark because I would have to have a candle or an oil lamp or lantern or something, and it would be too dangerous. I had shelves just about the whole way round and could display most of my toys. My best toys stayed in trunks. I had a small table where I could serve a real meal and a day bed to take a nap on. Momma made me a matching bedspread and curtains. There was a small oil heater for winter. Which didn't make much sense to me because it ought to be as dangerous as a lamp, oughtn't it? But I never put that question to either of my parents, and Aunt Florence, for once, didn't get to the prickly heart of the matter.
I loved that playhouse. It had a little picket fence and a gate with a dainty little bell. I rigged the bell myself, so as to tell if anybody was approaching. What was the good of having a playhouse if it wasn't your castle the way Daddy was always saying "My home is a castle" when Aunt Florence would lecture him about making more of himself. I thought it was funny that Aunt Florence never noticed he said my instead of a man's and a instead of my. Not "A man's home is his castle." but "My home is a castle." I thought a lot about what that meant. Daddy was careful with words, and I knew he had something important in mind when he put the castle words together that certain way.
If I was in my playhouse, nobody could get at me without me knowing they were coming. Except, of course, when the honey got switched with the vinegar. I mean, Mr. Rufe would show up, and I'd be Little Nell out in the snow without so much as a "by your leave." Many's the time I thought about removing the bell while he was there so he could be sneaked up on.
What it was, too, I think now, is that Mr. Rufe tried too hard with me. He seemed to know that he didn't make my heart pittety-pat the way he did all the other women and daughters in the neighborhood. Even my full tomboy best friend Pook Adams would put on a dress for that man, and we fell out every spring for the duration of Mr. Rufe's descent upon the community. I was only what Daddy called a quasi-tomboy because I did not aim to miss out on anything that was out there. If I had not kept Pook up on what was going on in the regular girls' world, she would of been up a creek without a paddle for certain. Finally, we agreed, without taking an oath or anything, just to cool it for the time Mr. Rufe was around and then try to get back together when he'd walked out of our lives for another year. It was easier for me. I knew what was about to happen from the time Pook appeared in a dress until she showed up outside our back door in her overalls. We didn't discuss what had gone on in-between. But I think Pook Adams's selling out to Mr. Rufe put a damper on my trusting the opposite sex or my own sex for years and years. I have never fully grown out of it. I admit to being a careful person. "Prickly" was what Aunt Florence always labeled me. I can hear her now. "Polly, your Mary is like a little old prickly cactus, and you and Samuel Wesley have not done one thing to dull her points. Not so much as one iota have you turned to tame her. It is such a pity. Such a very great pity. You mark my words, she will have troubles aplenty walking the paths of this world. Women in particular are not allowed to be prickly in this world. When a child runs with dogs, she gets fleas."
Daddy would always bust out laughing when Aunt Florence reached that point. So did I, but I wasn't sure I knew what he was laughing about exactly. When I asked him one time, he said something about Aunt Florence being "so confounded literal-minded when she wouldn't know the difference between literal and not-literal if it prickled her." I wasn't too sure what he meant, but I liked the sentiment.
But speaking of dogs, I did like Mr. Rufe's companion and played with him when Mr. Rufe was otherwise occupied. This was the brindled dog "Doodlebug," who walked alongside Mr. Rufe by a many-colored rope tied to his master's belt. I overheard Momma sniff and tell Daddy that the Widow Bander had plaited it for him to bait her hook. I didn't understand the reference at the time but knew I mustn't ask for more. I thought to myself that Momma would have gotten further linking it with Joseph's coat of many colors. For one reason, Mr. Rufe was powerful fond of the Bible.
Now I prided myself on being a dog person and had never met one I couldn't train, but I have to admit, in the interest of fairness, I never had a dog as smart as Doodlebug. The only thing wrong with him was his owner, and I didn't have the mean heart to hold that against a dog.
Everybody seemed to know it was time for Mr. Rufe to arrive, with the appearance of what Aunt Florence referred to as "the First Breath of Spring," which was a flowering bush no matter how much Aunt Florence hated for people to "generalize" about the plant world, though it was not such in that context. The housewives would be all a-flutter to get his quarters ready. Mostly, he'd stay two or three days at a place, then move on to the next house. Ours was always the longest. I'm not making that up. It didn't just seem long. Mr. Rufe stayed a good week at our house out in my playhouse. All the ladies fought to keep him as long as possible, their hospitality being judged by the length of his stay. I did my bit, along with Daddy and, I suspected, other fathers and sons, to shorten his visit with us.
The day would come when we'd hear this noise out on the road. I'd always think of "The Night Before Christmas's" line about "Out on the lawn there arose such a clatter." Only Mr. Rufe wasn't Santa Claus in my book. His noise would climb out of the dust he made banging his long cane walking pole down on the ground. He'd be singing "The Bear Went over the Mountain" in his loud, booming voice and playing on a fiddle. When he'd get to "to see what he could see," which was why the dumb bear went over the mountain, Doodlebug would bounce up and down and let out these sharp, piercing yips. Mr. Rufe claimed he'd taught the dog to "accompany," but I thought Doodlebug had just reached the point where his ears hurt so bad, he had to do something in retaliation.
I would say to Daddy, as we stood in the front yard watching Momma and the other women and daughters running to meet that old man, "Daddy, where does Mr. Rufe stay the rest of the year?"
Daddy would move one of his work shoes out in front of him and slide its foot back and forth and back and forth across the ground as if he was studying on my question, though I asked it every time Mr. Rufe appeared. Finally, he'd say, "Well, Mary, I think he must be in hibernation." Which I thought was just so clever though realizing that it didn't take me far.
Well, Mr. Rufe would come hustling up surrounded by a gaggle of females. Momma would be holding his fiddle like it was a piece of the Virgin Mary's coattail. He came to us first, ours being the first house in the neighborhood because he always came out of the west. If it had been anybody else, I would have been very pleased by that. But Mr. Rufe, to his credit, never assumed any airs of the Old West. Perhaps he did not realize that I would have been hard put to turn a deaf ear to them.
Doodlebug would be walking slowly and sedately behind the gaggle, occasionally getting jerked a bit as one of the ladies stumbled over his plaited rope. I would slip around the side of the mob and pet him, and we would talk after our fashion while the procession moved toward our big front porch, where Momma led Mr. Rufe to the swing, the place of honor. I'd sit on the steps with Doodlebug, pet him, and listen to the foolishness. If it was still good work hours, Daddy would nod in Mr. Rufe's direction and go on back to his business. After a time, Momma would send me in the house to fetch the lemonade and the gingerbread cookies she had standing by. I resented this, too, for it seemed heartless to me to waste good gingerbread cookies on Mr. Rufe and the assorted females on our porch. It was the one time of the year when the Gingerbread Man went to Mr. Rufe and not to me. Grandma Woodie had always held him for me exclusively and told me it was a mark of the highest favor. Naturally, I resented Momma for bestowing it on Mr. Rufe and him for receiving it without as much as a look of apology in my direction.
Well, sooner or later, the ladies would have to collect their daughters and go home to fix supper for their menfolk, and I knew I was in for it.
It never failed. Once Mr. Rufe had stood at the edge of the porch waving all the visiting females out of our yard, he'd turn to me.
"Well, Miss Polly Junior, Doodlebug won't thrive without a hug. AND NEITHER WILL I!"
He'd come for me then, and I'd have to stand up and take it because Momma would be looking on and glaring hard at me. So I'd rise up and move slowly up the steps until I was beside him, though standing as tall and unyielding as I could be. I made him do the hugging. He'd pick me up off the porch, move back from the steps, and swing me around. When I was very, very little, I may have liked that, but not then. I still do not care to be pushed, pulled, jostled, and otherwise invaded. Especially by the male of the species.
When Mr. Rufe would finally set me down, pat me on the head, and turn back to conversing with Momma, I'd run down the steps and bend down to pick up Doodlebug in my arms and hug him. I made it quite obvious that I was the hugger this time. But I couldn't get a rise out of Mr. Rufe. He would point toward Doodlebug sitting at the bottom of the steps, take up his fiddle again, throw back his head, and start that bear back over the mountain all over again. Which is what I wished Mr. Rufe would do. With him "accompanying" the bear.
Then Doodlebug would cock his ear like that dog listening to the voice of his master in the picture on Grandma Woodie's old Victrola. I loved that dog, too. Grandma Woodie told me his name was Nipper and that he was originally from England like her relations. He started as a painting, she said, but became the trademark of the Victor Talking Machine Co. Daddy filled me in from there and said Nipper eventually became the symbol of the Radio Corporation of America, alias RCA. Well, Doodlebug would be a symbol in his own right, if it was up to me. He would sit up as though he was begging, and at last, at a signal from Mr. Rufe, begin to dance round and round in a ring. Mr. Rufe would sing faster and louder, and Doodlebug would go round and round faster and faster until he collapsed, drunk, I guess, and stretch full-out, his nose edging straight ahead, his tongue hanging out between his teeth, his sides pumping fit to kill.
It was Mr. Rufe I wanted to kill right then, though. I'd look at him hard and go down to comfort Doodlebug. I'd whisper to Doodlebug just to wait until tomorrow and I'd do the "Doodlebug Ditty" for him to dance by. This was a secret between Doodlebug and me. You see, long before I knew Doodlebug the Dog (or Mr. Rufe), I knew about the magic of doodlebugs. I loved Big-D Doodlebug, but little-d doodlebugs had come into my life first. They were one of Grandma Woodie's specialties.
What you do, see, is put a twig carefully down just in the center of the perfect top of the cone of the doodlebug's hole and stir just so, as if you were witchin' for water, I thought it must be, real gentle. And when you had your stick going just right, you had to chant, ever so soft-like,
Doodlebug, doodlebug, come get your supper!
Doodlebug, doodlebug, join us for a cuppa!
Then you stopped, took away your twig, and watched and waited. When or if the dirt at the bottom of the hole began to squirm-Grandma Woodie called it "workin' the dirt"-you closed your eyes real tight and made a wish. You didn't have to give the doodlebug a cup of tea. I personally thought Grandma Woodie put that in, not because of the rhyme, but because she wouldn't be caught dead without a "cuppa" in her hand. Grandma Woodie's folks were British way back, and she said we must drink tea to honor them. Tea, hot tea, I mean, was the one area she and Momma found some agreement on.
I prided myself, as indicated, on dog training, but I have to admit that Doodlebug's was accidental-like. He was with me one day when the doodlebugs distracted me. There was this great long sandy spot between our house and the grape vine that ran its length, and they liked the sand. I guess they could make their holes easier in it. I'd keep an eye out for them working their holes and sometimes went by if I was feeling low about something. So it could have been that I went to visit the doodlebug holes because Mr. Rufe was among us. Doodlebug (the dog, I mean) would have gone with me, I like to think, because he didn't truly like Mr. Rufe any more than I did. Anyhow, there I was doing my doodlebugging.
Doodlebug, doodlebug, come get your supper!
Doodlebug, doodlebug, join us for a cuppa!
And suddenly Doodlebug was dancing to the doodlebug ditty as pretty as you please. He was in full swing, much faster, with more turning than when Mr. Rufe sang even in full swing. I soon realized that only the doodlebug ditty could make Doodlebug truly fleet. To the doodlebug ditty, Doodlebug kept perfect beat. Which was more than I could say, though I loved that dog, about his performance for Mr. Rufe's singing.
I think Doodlebug improved me, too. I've never been much of a singer. Aunt Florence said my voice was too deep for a little girl. Which for sure made me make it deeper whenever I thought about it and whenever I was around her. Anyhow, when I sang the doodlebug ditty, because singing was how I thought about it after Doodlebug seemed to like it, Doodlebug danced a very pretty little dance. He was quite careful, too, to dance at the edge of the doodlebug "preserve," as Daddy called it, another example of Daddy's word wit, I thought, so as not to hurt the doodlebugs or himself. He was a small dog and might have found a doodlebug hole as much poison as horses in the Old West found prairie dog holes. Which made me wonder if prairie dogs were related to regular dogs. I never did decide. Well, it got to the point that Doodlebug and me didn't have to be among the doodlebugs to do our routine, only I didn't let anybody know that for the longest time.
Now, when Mr. Rufe couldn't get at me one way, he tried another. I was, as Daddy put it, a "prodigious reader." Momma and Daddy never went anywhere on grownups' business without bringing home a book for me and some "doll accessory," early on, or "beauty aid" for Abigail, which they mailed to her after she went to live with Grandma Woodie. A lot of mine were "boys' books" like the Hardy Boys and the Tom Swift series. Which I had gotten to like from sneak-reading the entire series by Mr. Richard Harding Davis left behind by one of Grandma Woodie's husbands. I don't know which, but I didn't know but one of them, the last, and it wasn't him, so it doesn't really matter. Momma and Aunt Florence weren't too happy about my preferred reading habits, one of the few things they agreed on, but Daddy stuck by my likes and rights.
He said, "I'll be damned if my Mary will perish in the desert of femininity. Mary is athirst for things higher, and be damned if I won't see that she will have them, too, should it be in my power. It is the least a father can do." I thought those were the finest words that could be said. As fine as any in Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, which was what Momma brought home to me one time. And I purely loved every word in that garden, not a weed among them, only they weren't personal unto me, and Daddy's words were.
Aunt Florence, whose sniff of unhappiness was more pronounced than Momma's, would SNIFF big at Daddy's declaration of war and say, her words precise with a lot of space in-between them, "Now, Samuel Wesley, it would be far, far better for our Mary to be athirst after righteousness."
I always hoped Momma would notice how similar she and Aunt Florence were when it came to using "Samuel Wesley" as a whip. But she never seemed to.
Mr. Rufe's trump card with me, after the brindled dog Doodlebug, was my love of reading. "Playing his trump card" being Daddy's description of someone's cackling when he's about to get his way in not always the right way. The neighborhood men gathered at somebody's house once a week at night to play cards, mostly "Set-Back," and there was right much cackling going on, though I did not tell Momma and her lady friends of such. I got to play when one of the men couldn't come or had to leave early. I wasn't about to tell any tales that would upset my card-playing cart.
Usually the second day after Mr. Rufe arrived and had had time to notice that my own humpbacked whale cold shoulder was flying high, he'd fetch his old dirty white canvas bag and pull out an Uncle Wiggley storybook wrapped in that green cellophane that was always on my Easter baskets when the Easter Bunny left them in the middle of the floor of our front "company" bedroom. The company bedroom Mr. Rufe never got to stay in because he was "ensconced," a word I just loved, if not Mr. Rufe's acting it out, in my playhouse. Where he found such, I never would give him the satisfaction of being curious about, but they were always crispy-new and had that new-book smell that is like no other in the whole world. They had it even though they were not books in the hardback sense of now or even in size. Daddy said they were most likely made out of some kind of pulp stuff left over from the war period. They were about the size of notebook paper, and the covers weren't much as covers go. Kind of heavy paper. Still, Mr. Rufe's Uncle Wiggley's were the one thing that could lure me. They were the carrot before this little donkey, but Mr. Rufe was still the big jackass in our barnyard. To me. And to Daddy, or so I thought. It struck me way back then as a child that Mr. Rufe had a way of knowing just what bait to use for just what person. Only, he never seemed to go after males at all. As if he didn't care to waste his time on useless projects. Mr. Rufe was a mystery I just couldn't get around. I knew my giving in for a weakness and was ashamed of myself, but I'd always give in. Momma and Daddy never brought home any Uncle Wiggley's, and we lived way out in the country and didn't have access to a library.
Momma aided and abetted Mr. Rufe. I don't know why, but she just couldn't stand it that I didn't like him and was always pushing and pulling at me about it. She hated me not liking Mr. Rufe more than me not liking dresses and dolls. When the Uncle Wiggley book appeared, she'd say, "Now Polly"-then she stop and smile all as sweet as molasses at Mr. Rufe and go on-"Now Polly Junior"-stressing that Junior for all she was worth-"you just go on off up to the living room and let Mr. Rufe read Uncle Wiggley to you while I fix supper."
Number One, Momma never called me "Polly" and certainly not "Polly Junior" except when that old Mr. Rufe was around and about.
Number Two, I did not need anybody reading to me, as my own mother very well knew. I was reading before I went off to the first grade. Neither Momma or Daddy had read to me since I was five years old and suddenly opened up on The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Just wham, bam, thank you, ma'am started reading.
I was too old for Uncle Wiggley anyhow, but I'll be dogged if I was going to miss what could be one I hadn't read, and Uncle Rufe never did, in my entire experience of him, bring out the same book twice. I don't know to this day how many Uncle Wiggley stories there were or who wrote them or why. I came to swear off Uncle Wiggley for all time. (I do like to know why somebody wrote something whenever it is knowable. I expect you do, too.) But at that time, I had a reputation to live up to at school, where I was a "fount of wisdom." And, yes, Aunt Florence thought it would be much better for me to be a "fount of blessings."
So, off I'd go to the living room with Mr. Rufe, and he'd make me sit beside him on our scratchy couch to hear him read.
If it had just been reading I was subjected to, it wouldn't of been so bad.
But always, before he'd even let me get a look inside his latest Uncle Wiggley, I had to listen to Mr. Rufe's Bible mumbo-jumbo, a phrase I inherited from Daddy about what all preachers "fell heir to" and we "fell ear to," especially during the annual revival.
Mr. Rufe would kneel down on the floor before me and take one of my feet in his hands and recite what I refer to as the "feet passage" from the Song of Solomon. But it wasn't a strict "reading." He mixed it all up. Grandma Woodie had read the King James with me from cover to cover, and I knew what was what. As soon as I heard this particular part of what Daddy called Mr. Rufe's "blathering," I knew it was all mixed up. I went right to the Bible after I climbed into bed that night and copied it all out. I was known for my prodigious memory, too, though I admit that I might of gotten some of it out of order. But not as much as Mr. Rufe got the King James Bible out of order to begin with!
Momma always made me take off my shoes when I went into the living room to practice the piano or read or do anything there when we weren't having company. Naturally, not counting Mr. Rufe as company, I removed my shoes prior to going in for his reading. Sometimes, of course, I was barefoot because, as I have pointed out, he usually came with spring, the only bad thing to do so, in my opinion, and it would be warm and all the kids I knew were going barefoot at least when their mothers couldn't see them. If I had on socks, Mr. Rufe would remove both of them when he knelt before me. I thought that was plain down silly because he never messed but with one foot. So why would he need to take off both socks?
Anyhow, when I was barefoot, he would hold the sole of my foot in one hand and rub the top of it with his other big old hand. I noticed right off that his hands were soft. Big like a man's ought to be but soft. Fat, too, not just big. It was further evidence that he wasn't quite the right sort of a man. Daddy's hands were rough from all the farm work he did while Momma minded the house and garden. They were real man's hands. I didn't like for Mr. Rufe to touch me with his old cottony hands. They were pink, too, which was another crime against manhood in my book. But I knew if I didn't just put up with it, Momma would be mad, so I'd sit there, and he'd stroke my foot and say his mixed-up Bible words over it.
"How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter!"
Stroke, stroke.
"Hear me now, for I am come into my garden."
Stroke, stroke.
"In that garden is the lily among the thorns."
Stroke, stroke.
I hated that stuff. My sister Abigail might be a "lily among thorns," but not me! I'd sooner be a toad. A thorn among lilies! And I'd forget about old Mr. Rufe down there on the floor mumbo-jumboing over my foot and imagine all the kinds of toads and frogs I could think of and pretend I was turned into one but was not going to stand for being kissed by anybody. Just let him try!
"Who is this coming up from the wilderness?"
Stroke, stroke
I reckoned Mr. Rufe ought to know the answer to that one.
"We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts."
Stroke, stroke.
It was not a thing I thought Mr. Rufe ought to be pointing out.
"The smell of thy nose is like apples."
Stroke, stroke.
Is that not dumb? Even if it is in the Bible?
At first, I'd feel kind of spooky. Sort of tingly down the back of my neck and in other places that I didn't like to think about. Then Mr. Rufe's big voice would cut back until I just about couldn't hear it, and I'd feel tired and about ready to doze off.
Ah, yes, sleep but let your heart waketh, little sister, for I have come leaping down from the mountains, skipping down from the hills! Do not be the little fox that spoils the vines and the pomegranates, but feed among the lilies with me. Let me kiss you with the kisses of my mouth, for they are sweeter than wine. Let me be the mandrake among the lilies and among the sheaves of wheat.
Mr. Rufe would kiss the top of my foot then, but so gently, like a butterfly landing. I didn't mind. At that moment, when he kissed the top of my foot, I was as close to liking him as I ever would be. I would think about that and wonder at it and think it was a weakness in me. He could buy me with Doodlebug. He could buy me with Uncle Wiggley. He could buy me with a kiss upon my foot. Or almost. And then I would rouse up, thinking about the difference between grownups saying, "Kiss my foot!" and Mr. Rufe after me with "kissing my foot." And when I thought about the differences, I knew he couldn't catch me because thinking about them was all I needed to break his spell. And I would say to myself, but really to him, to old Mr. Rufe, "Yes, sirree, you just kiss my foot!"
I think Mr. Rufe waited for my eyelids to droop, as Aunt Florence was always saying Daddy's did in Church, and then he'd bellow out, "Well now, Miss Polly Junior, let's see what Uncle Wiggley is doing." He'd leave my socks on the floor where he'd dropped them and sit beside me on the couch and read until he was through the book.
Sometimes before he had finished, Momma would tiptoe to the living room door and say, ever so softly and sweetly, "Supper's ready when you are, Mr. Rufe."
Mr. Rufe would close that book with a bang or as much of one as he could get out of the limp paper that formed Uncle Wiggley's rabbit hole, and hop over to her, extending an arm to walk her back to the dining room. We always ate in the dining room when Mr. Rufe was visiting, even for breakfast. When it was just the three of us-Momma, Daddy, and me, the way it ought to be-we ate at the small table in the kitchen. But six could eat at it easy. There wasn't any reason, other than Momma's putting on the dog, why the four of us, and Doodlebug, too, if he'd been allowed to, couldn't sit down at that kitchen table. He was a real dog for putting on the dog with, for heaven's sake.
The other thing I got from all that was to ponder the meaning of "mandrakes" and of drinking "the juice of my pomegranate." We had pomegranates, but they were little budly things on a big spindly bush. I was one happy person when I found a reference to them in a mythology book that some of Grandma Woodie's relations had used in school and left behind at "the family place" where we lived. But they worried at me for the longest times. Those pomegranates. And the mandrakes, too, which were supposed to "give a smell."
Daddy was no help at all on either one. I asked him first because he had always seemed to me a lot better at the word game, as I have indicated, than Momma. I knew enough not to say it full out as "the juice of my pomegranate" to either one of them. It just didn't sound quite right. You know how words and phrases give off a kind of tang without you even having to know what they mean, either separate or all together or in any mix, I guess. Well, I somehow knew that neither one of my parents were going to bump up against "the juice of my pomegranate," biblical or not, and let it float off as if they'd run into a balloon. Daddy said he honestly didn't know about pomegranates or mandrakes and didn't much think he had ever heard of "the latter." I was not disappointed, for he'd at least lived up to the honesty I'd always found in him. And that is no small thing. I believe that, if I had asked my father straight out about the nature of Santa Claus, he would have told me. I didn't want to be told, so I didn't ask. But, a dollar to a doughnut, which was another thing adults said that I didn't understand and they couldn't explain, he would have laid it all out if I had forced the issue. He was that honest. I believed in Santa Claus, and therefore he existed. It occurred to me right then that, maybe if I a-different-kind-of-believed in Mr. Rufe, he would exist for me the way he existed for Momma and all the other females I knew. It was not going to happen.
The surprise in the pomegranates and mandrakes quest was Momma. She got the pomegranate mixed up with the golden apples of Thrace, which were in my mythology book, too. But the interesting thing was that she knew about mythology. You see, we didn't talk about it because Grandma Woodie had told me Momma was embarrassed about it, but Momma wasn't real educated. She'd had to drop out of school when her mother died and she was just a little girl. I mean, she didn't sound dumb or anything like that, and she was hell-bent on me being the best in the school. But she just sort of pulled back in any situation where education would be noticed. She would just kind of shrink up into herself. Still, she was a Grade Mother every year and went to PTA and supported Abigail and me in every way. Abigail was not much for books, so Momma didn't have to worry about her anyway. But now here she was knowing something about mythology, which was not exactly the cup of tea of the most educated. So I decided to give her a shot at the mandrakes.
Which is when I discovered that I had not been fair to Momma.
"Come with me, Mary," she said.
I followed her to her and Daddy's room and her old hope chest that she had promised would be mine some day. And yes, I had wondered why me and not Abigail, who was far more likely to need it.
She opened it up and burrowed down into it. Funny, as I watched her do that, I realized that it had never once crossed my mind to go through Momma's hope chest. There certainly wasn't anything else in the house I didn't know about. I didn't think so at least. I'd found the things Momma and Daddy used to keep from having any more babies a long time before I figured out what they were from overhearing Abigail and her friends gossiping. But I had ignored that hope chest because it wasn't interesting. Sort of like I'd assumed Momma wasn't all that interesting. There was a lesson in that, but I didn't have time to A-B-C it right then.
Momma brought out an old book. It had one of those ornate covers with raised gold letters. She opened it to where the navy blue ribbon marked the place and began to read.
Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot.
It was like magic, and Momma reading it was like a Fairy Princess. No, like a High Priestess. The High Priestess of Poetry. I was just about struck dumb. I did not want to know what it was or who wrote it. I wanted to revel in my mother having it and reading it to me.
When she stopped, she closed the book and handed it to me and said, "I always meant for you to have it. The time has come."
I hugged the book to me and ran out of the room. In a bold hand on the flyleaf, a Lawrence W. Miller had written, "Polly, always remember: You were a star that fell from the sky into my life. I shall be eternally grateful." Was he the kind man I had heard my mother speak of? Was he a "lover" of my mother before Daddy came along? Could he somehow relate to Mr. Rufe?
My mother and I never spoke of the book again. But she saw me reading it every night when she looked into my room to say good night. Perhaps that was enough.
It did cross my mind that, if I could ever run up on a man who could explain pomegranates and mandrakes and not just palaver over them the way Mr. Rufe did, I might change my mind about men. At least somewhat.
But who Mr. Rufe himself was I never did discover. In my nightmares, he was a satyr from the dark forests of Greece and Rome. Only more rabbit- than goat-figured, as if a goat demi-god and Uncle Wiggley had somehow married and merged. Later, when Jimmie Rodgers did that song about "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," it nearly drove me crazy to know if he was somehow related to Mr. Rufe or just religious or what? Then, when I came into my e e cummings period, I thought that the whole world must have a Mr. Rufe figure threatening the spring. That maybe, in some dark, dark time in the future, he would come in place of spring. He was there already imprinting cummings' spring. Why couldn't we see that he threatened and changed, the closer he came?
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
. . .
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
. . .
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
Oh, why couldn't my beautiful, smart mother see through Mr. Rufe?
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Release date June 2007 at Amazon.com and most retailers. Advance print copies are available directly from the publisher.
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