“We didn’t even get the lights on in Footely until ’27, Franny. Remember when the Tates
ran the power line out to us?”
Still, no one said anything to this.
“Jesus didn’t have electricity either,” I said softly, sort of joking.
Mrs. Tartt nodded, her hand holding the biscuit trembling. “I suppose if he could do it for
thirty-three years, we can do it till tomorrow,” she said.
Chapter 18
“Where’s the milk?” Frances asked.
“Inside the cow. So why don’t you go out and milk her?” The pail was actually full, but I
was afraid it would curdle in the roasting-hot kitchen so I’d set it in the old brick springhouse to
cool. “She needs to be milked twice a day now to make sure she doesn’t go dry.”
“We’re almost out of sugar too,” Frances said. She pressed the sleeve of her nightgown to
her forehead.
“And butter,” I said. I poked at the fire in the kitchen hearth, sweat dripping off my chin.
With the electric lights had gone the icebox, the electric fans, the hot water, and the water pump,
but the gas stove was by far the hardest. Cooking over the fireplace in August was a devil’s hell.
By the time I’d made the first pot of coffee at six in the morning, I looked like I had a sunburn.
“Throw one of those Sears, Roebucks on,” I said. Nothing burned like a Sears, Roebuck.
Frances checked the date on one, put it back in the pile, and found an older one, as if later today
she might sit down and order something. She threw it on and the fire blazed, flames licking the
bottom of the water kettle hanging on the old kettle hook in the chimney. Then she fanned the
302
back door to pump fresh air into the kitchen. When I saw steam, I moved the boiling kettle to the
brick hearth and set a tray of biscuits on the old iron grate I’d found in the barn.
Good Lord, how did people live like this? This was Wednesday. It’d only been three
days. Footely was looking downright luxurious compared to this. Today, I’d be missing yet
another train home.
This past Monday, after I’d helped Frances carry the Neilson’s boxes to town and said
goodbye to the snow-white coat, the nicest thing I’d ever almost owned, I went to the
Powerhouse. I’d barely set the Tartt’s overdue bill on the counter with five dollars when the
fellow started shaking his head. His shirt was tucked in tight; he had perfect comb marks running
through his dark hair. I feared what we had here was a rule follower.
“Please, sir. We’ll pay the rest soon if you’ll just turn the electricity back on,” I begged.
A lie. I fanned the five singles out so it’d look like more. This man had the power to make our
lives livable, literally.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t be making exceptions for everybody comes in here.” He didn’t
smile exactly, but he raised an eyebrow like he was about to tell me something educational. “It’s
only a few lucky households like the Mr. Rory Tartts to even know lights in the home. Two
percent in the state is what they’re saying.” And then he did smile, and I could almost smell the
dislike he had for Rory Tartt. I think what he wasn’t saying outright was, Rory Tartt’s just like
the other 98 percent now. And I do not feel sorry for him.
I told him he’d see me soon if he still had a job. Not productive, or nice, but satisfying for
about fifteen seconds. When I offered the same five dollars to the man over at Cox Gas, he was
much nicer and apologized to Mrs. Tartt but said it’d take at least a week for the truck to get out
there with more fuel. Maybe it was just an excuse but at least he was kind about it.
303
Thank God Charlie was here to help. Every morning, we hauled buckets of water upstairs
for everybody to pour in the toilets to force them to flush. It sort of worked. After Frances carried
one, she’d mysteriously disappear. The kitchen sink ran all right, though there was only tepid
water. There’d be no warm baths for a while. In ninety-five-degree heat, I doubted I’d miss them.
Then it was a search for more firewood and kindling to cook the food. Luckily, the Tartts were
rich in old catalogues, but the vat of kerosene for the lanterns was already looking pitifully low.
Three days it had been going on and. Every. Dang. Time Frances walked into a dark
room, she still hit the button on the wall. Then she’d go limp, like the lights’d been cut off all
over again.
“You people are terrible at being poor,” I said to nobody.
I didn’t know what we were waiting on, only that I didn’t have time to figure it out.
Despite all our discomfort, I was worried Mrs. Tartt didn’t understand just how bad things
were—which was my fault because I hadn’t told her the options yet. A few times, I found her
staring out at the backyard for hours, surely daydreaming of better days. Then this morning,
while I was watching the cornbread burn on the bottom so it’d cook in the dang center since you
had to choose, Mrs. Tartt came into the kitchen with a brass picture frame.
“Charlie, here’s that photograph of the party I told you about,” she said. “That’s me in the
long dress I showed you.” I could hear in her voice how hungry she was for the old days. “That
man over by the orchestra pinched my bottom right before this photograph was taken. Good
thing Henry didn’t see that.”
“He had good taste,” Charlie said, studying it. “Do you have more pictures? I’d really
like to see how it changed over the years.”
“Well, I’m sure I do. Let me go look see.”
304
When Mrs. Tartt had left the kitchen, I mouthed, Thank you, to Charlie. It was time to tell
them the options.
***
When I finished making cornbread and had set it out to cool, I splashed water on my face in the
kitchen sink, took a deep breath and called up the back stairs, “Frances, Mrs. Tartt, I need you to
come down to the dining room.”
Frances came in first. “What is it? I’m fixing to take my curlers out.” Her head looked
even smaller with the blue curlers squeezing her scalp.
I asked her to sit down.
When Mrs. Tartt padded in, she’d covered her hair with a pink scarf and fuzzy tufts
escaped the edges. “Charlie and I were trying to figure out how to wind the grandfather clock,”
she said.
I sat at the head of the table in Rory’s chair, with Mrs. Tartt on my right and Frances on
my left. I scooted up to the edge of my chair and set the bank letter on the table.
“I better get my cheaters on to see,” Mrs. Tartt said.
I motioned her to stay. “Mrs. Tartt, do you remember when Mr. Allison said you were
behind on your mortgage payments?”
She inhaled deeply and nodded, she remembered.
“I talked to somebody from the bank. You owe two thousand seven hundred fifty-four
dollars and if it’s not paid by September 15, the bank is going to seize your house.”
“My house?” She actually laughed. “Poppycock. Mr. Allison wouldn’t do that.”
“It’s true, Mrs. Tartt.”
305
She picked up the letter and stared at it as if it were in Chinese. “But . . . they can’t. A
Tartt has lived in this house since it was built in 1847. Idlewilde’s older than Ammadelle.”
“Birdie, you’re scaring her,” Frances said. “You don’t know everything. Rory might’ve
arranged something, or—”
“Rory did this, Franny,” I said. “He left you with a mortgage and bills and now we don’t
even know where he is.”
Frances crossed her arms and stared me down. “Why do you get to decide everything?
This isn’t even your house, you just take over everything and accuse Rory when he might be out
there doing something—he might be selling everything to bring the money back to pay the . . .”
While she prattled on, I stared at the white bowl of purple figs Charlie’d picked from the
tree in the yard. I could hear her in the kitchen, running the faucet. I chose the biggest, purplest
fig, bit it in half, and examined the red capillaries inside. So human-looking, figs.
When Frances finally wound down, I said, “Mrs. Tartt, I know I’ve asked you this before,
but is there any family or anybody that could help you out?”
She swallowed and shook her pink-scarfed head. “The closest family I’ve got is my
widow sister Lulu in Jackson, and she asked us for money last Christmas. Course Rory said no,
but I sent her some of my dividend anyway. And I’ve got cousins across hither and yon, but they
don’t have anything either.” Her voice was rising, climbing a set of stairs. “What are you saying,
Birdie, that we’ll end up like the Percys?” Her eyes widened; an alarm was going off in her head.
“Sheriff Porter had to remove them from their own home!”
“It’s alright, Mrs. Tartt. You still have options. You have two options, in fact.”
She waited, listening, mouth open. Frances still had her arms crossed at me.
“If you could find somebody to buy your house at a fair price—”
306
Mrs. Tartt sucked in a breath. “I am not selling my home,” she said.
“Mrs. Tartt, please think it through. What do you plan to live on? We can’t even pay the
light bill, you need your medicine. Even if we can get more time, that mortgage is not going
away.”
She watched me carefully. “What’s my other option? You said there were two.”
“You could try and sell everything in the house and hope it’s enough to cover the
mortgage, but you’d still need something to live on.”
“You mean sell . . . the furniture?” Frances looked down at the table. Finally she seemed
afraid. It seemed cruel that this came as a relief. “The table and chairs we’re sitting on?”
“Well, of course it’d bring enough, it’d be more than enough, but—” Mrs. Tartt pulled
her lips back in a grimace. “Are those really my only choices?”
This was over my head. I didn’t know for sure. I only knew what Jack had said, what this
piece of paper said, what the lawyer in Jackson had told her over the telephone. “You’re lucky
you still have this house to sell, Mrs. Tartt.”
“Mr. Allison and the lawyer said the same thing, that I ought to sell the house.” She
shook her head, rolling things over in her mouth. “But I’m not doing it, I won’t. This is where
my family has lived and died. I’d rather sell my things.” She nodded at herself. “I can find a few
things to pick out.”
“I think you should do it soon. Very soon. On September 15, if most of the mortgage isn’t
paid, they’re not just gonna take the house, they’re gonna take everything in it too.”
“Oh my God,” Frances said.
But Mrs. Tartt stood up. “It’s alright, Frances.” She set a hand on the table to steady
herself. “I’ll make some calls.”
307
***
The day had started out so civilized. When it was over, I wondered how it all had happened so
fast. Just the day before, as we prepared for Mr. Fauster’s visit, Mrs. Tartt had listed all the
reasons why she couldn’t possibly part with this or that. “These little nesting tables were made
from a cypress tree in my mother’s yard.” “Henry bought me this carousel menagerie in Paris on
our wedding anniversary.” I’d urged her to pick out a few more, a few more, “just to be safe.” In
all, she’d selected about forty pieces, which she’d said were bound to bring three thousand
dollars, maybe even closer to four. At ten o’clock Thursday morning, Mrs. Tartt opened the door.
She’d dressed herself in crisp blue seersucker, her pearls, and sensible white shoes, ready for a
perky game of tennis court.
“What a beautiful and special home you have here, ma’am,” Mr. Fauster said, his hat
pressed to his chest. He was a short, fat, middle-aged man, with a wide smile. He’d brought a
truck, and some colored men waited outside. He complimented the dentil molding and high
ceilings, the wide oak floors. The entire house smelled like lemon oil. Frances had swept and
mopped while I’d polished and Charlie’d cut the grass. When Mrs. Tartt had called for the
appointment, she’d told him she was just doing some “redecorating.” As she showed him the
pieces for sale, he listened patiently to the dull stories she had about each one.
For three dozen large pieces of furniture, four paintings, a mirror, two Persian rugs, and a
set of Italian marble figurines, he said, “Give you two hundred dollars for the lot.”
“What?” Mrs. Tartt nearly fainted. So did I.
Smiling but not so nicely now, Mr. Fauster said, “Times’ve changed, ladies, case you
hadn’t noticed.”
308
The next few passes of the house were like pulling teeth. “But this clock carries perfect
time!” “But Roosevelt loved this chair!” By one o’clock, we were only at six hundred dollars. I
whispered that this was not the time to be sentimental about who had sat on something. Things
started to go faster—the pair of huge mirrors, carpets in the library, the tête-à-tête, tables, lamps,
marble busts, paintings, sideboards, the gun cabinet empty of its guns—and we were only at
eleven hundred dollars. She pulled the trigger on the grandfather clock, the guest bedroom set,
everything worth anything in the library.
I couldn’t really remember the rest except as bursts of panic and numbers, hurrying to
empty cabinets and drawers before the colored men simply dumped them out on the floor.
“Fourteen hundred fifty”—tallboys, wardrobes, tester beds, chests of drawers. “Seventeen
hundred”—their dressing tables while I swept powders and perfumes into a box, the dining room
set, the chairs, what was left of the silver closet and china and crystal; Mrs. Tartt’s strand of
pearls and the earrings she’d worn shopping on the last day she’d been rich. Dust swirled
everywhere and I sneezed over and over. The front yard looked like a rummage sale. Mr. Fauster
sent for three more trucks.
By four o’clock, Mrs. Tartt looked eighty if she looked a day. Her smart seersucker dress
had a long black smear on it as if she’d been walked over. A rug was literally slid out from under
her feet. The floors were filthy under the carpets. Mr. Fauster had no interest in the wired lights
or the washer wringer or the stove or the electric icebox or the old gas one in the cellar.
“You’ll hold our things for us, won’t you?” Mrs. Tartt’d asked. “So we can buy them
back when we’re on our feet?”
He’d smiled as he lied. “Of course.”
309
“He is a crook,” Charlie said to me and fixed him a glass of water, spitting in it first, and
waited to watch him drink it all down at once.
I took Mrs. Tartt into the empty parlor. “We’re still two hundred twenty-five short.”
“What is there even left to . . .” She’d looked at her swollen pink hand. “Oh my . . .
alright. Let me sit down.” But there was nowhere to sit. “I can do it—it’s just, it’s stuck.”
Charlie brought her some Crisco, and I went to find Frances. When I told her what Mrs.
Tartt was doing, she covered her left hand to protect it from me. “But Rory gave me . . .” Her
eyes filled with tears, and I watched her heart shatter into pieces. In only a week and a half, she’d
lost her husband, her things, her comfortable life. “I’m so sorry, Franny.”
“Do I have to? Think how bad it’ll look when people see me not wearing it!”
I hugged her tight and whispered in her ear, “But think how much worse it’d look if you
kept it and Mrs. Tartt gave up hers.”
She cried and nodded. She wasn’t about to let people think she was less a victim than
Mrs. Tartt was.
“If people ever find out about this, I swear I’ll shoot myself,” Frances said.
“Well, good luck,” I said. “Rory took all the guns.”
“Then I’ll just slit my wrists,” she said.
“Please do it outside so you don’t bloody up the last sofa.”
When the ring was off, I hugged her again. She felt thin and empty.
“Now, Birdie, I want you to make sure Pic and Polly get their pay out of this money,”
Mrs. Tartt said. “They need their pay, you hear me?”
We were still a little over two hundred dollars short at the end of the day but I promised
her I’d pay them.
310
When the trucks rolled off, but for our mattresses, the kitchen table and chairs, a portrait
of Henry Tartt, and the odd piece here and there, the old suitcase of a house stood empty. Mrs.
Tartt looked shattered.
At dusk, Charlie came into the kitchen and washed her hands while I smothered the fire.
She lit two of the red lanterns. The light was almost gone outside; we were down to just a heavy
blue haze. “I got the parlor pretty cleaned up and moved what I could in there,” she said. We’d
asked the colored men to move an old faded red sofa down from the attic into the parlor. It sat
but it was lumpy.
While I cooked supper, Charlie set the kitchen table with Picador’s tin utensils and some
blue-and-white china, pretty but chipped and cheap.
“Why we eating in—” Frances stopped in the doorway and shook her head as if to clear it
out. She was exhausted, we were all exhausted. “That smells good, I’m starving.”
“Thank you and I agree.” I’d skillet-fried okra and green tomatoes in cornmeal along
with the meaty side of the salt pork and boiled fresh butter beans for something that wouldn’t
give us all the diabetes. I was finally getting the hang of cooking over the fire.
Mrs. Tartt, in her white nightgown, was arranging a jelly jar of blue salvia Charlie’d cut
from the yard.
“Supper’s ready, let’s eat,” I said and served the blue-and-white plates from the hearth,
passing them back to Charlie. At the fourth plate, she hesitated; it was hard to believe she hadn’t
yet eaten with us at the table.
Mrs. Tartt said, “Sit down, everyone.” She nodded to Charlie. “I’ll say the blessing.” The
four of us bowed our heads. “Heavenly Father, please bless this food to our use and us to thy
service. Thank you that I still have my house. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.”
311
Amen. As we said it, a cool breeze slipped through the screen door, the likes of which we
hadn’t felt in months.
“First thing tomorrow, I am going to the bank to get us more time,” I said. “And then I
am going to get the electricity turned back on.”
The whole room exhaled. “And I’m getting my hair done,” Frances said.
I patted her hand and shook my head no. She didn’t even argue.
After the ladies limped up to bed, I told Charlie, “Leave ’em. I guarantee those dirty
dishes will be right where we left them tomorrow.” I followed her out on the back porch—oh,
the cool air. When we sank down on the top step, Charlie pulled a gold-and-white box out of her
dress pocket.
“Looks like Mr. Fauster misplaced his expensive cigarettes,” she said. They were
Chesterfields, pre-rolled, not even opened yet.
It was a dark night with only a fingernail of moon. I’d never had a cigarette of my own
before. I’d never had one with a convicted criminal either. I guess, there’s a first time for
everything. Charlie lit mine, then hers, using the long box of kitchen matches, the flare bright and
tall, and I leaned my back against the porch post.
Staring out at the shadowy backyard, Charlie said, “I am terrified of that woman, but I’d
risk going back to jail to try and get Meg. I absolutely would.” This came out of nowhere. I knew
Meg was always on her mind.
“I’m just glad she’s out of that place and somewhere safe.” I didn’t know this, but I
hoped. “I’ll figure something out, soon as my head clears.”
“Would you?” she asked, still staring straight ahead. “Risk going to jail for somebody in
your family?”
312
“Depends on who.” But then, because it was true, I said, “Of course I would.”
313
