[Section opener]
Birdie
July 1933
Chapter 4
I was standing with Mama and Meemaw beside the train tracks when Mama handed me a little
pillow. The train was to take me to Oxford to see my sister for several reasons, all of which were
awful. On the front of the little pillow Mama had stitched HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS in blood-
colored thread.
“Give that to Frances and tell her to please write us back,” Mama said.
I took the thing from her and said I would, but I reminded her, “Let the record show I still
don’t want to do this.”
The Footely train stop wasn’t a station or even a platform, it was one of those situations
where you stood in the weeds and waved your arms and prayed the train slowed down long
enough to let you on. We’d feel the train coming before we saw it, hear it before we felt it.
Sound, I’d read, moved faster in the Delta’s alluvial soil than most other places. Mamas,
meemaws, and time itself moved slower. Who knew better than me, twenty-four years old and
still living at home?
“Probably best not to ask Frances right out the gate,” Meemaw said. “Give her a day or
two to get over the surprise visit.” She bent her thin frame forward to peer down the tracks,
defying gravity. Even at eighty, she hardly fell over. I’d had a proper grandmother who’d died
gently at seventy-five on ironed bedsheets with her hair done and had never spoken a cross word,
40
and I still had a tiny, fierce, smart-mouthed one and that was Meemaw. “Your sister’n be a real
pain in the ass, case you forgot,” she said.
“Now, Mama, that is your youngest grandchild you’re speaking of,” my own mama said.
“Well it’s true, Doris, and you know it, too,” Meemaw said. “I’s you, Birdie, I’d pretend
you’re there to surprise her early for her birthday in a few weeks. She’ll eat that up.” Meemaw’d
insisted on coming here with us today. She liked to be in on the action.
“Maybe the two of you ought to go up there and ask Frances and I’ll stay home,” I said,
though I didn’t really mean it. I was excited to see a place other than Footely, and I did miss my
little sister. But I was aware I tended to miss her more when she was gone than I enjoyed her
company when she was here.
“Shoot, I ain’t going up there and asking her that,” Meemaw said. “Nothing worse than
showing up somewhere uninvited. And who knows, maybe Frances’ll introduce you to some
nice, eligible young men.”
“Mama, hush, she doesn’t need us nurturing high expectations.”
“Well she ain’t getting any younger,” Meemaw said. “See can you meet one with some
money. Try and indicate we’re right well-off ourselves—”
“No. Birdie, you’re not to lie to anybody about our f’nances,” my mama said.
“I ain’t saying lie. Just indicate a little.” Meemaw pulled a handkerchief out of her blue
handbag and swabbed her neck on all sides. The heat was damp, nearly unbreathable, even at
eight in the morning. “By the way, you see any drinking or gambling on the train, write and tell
me about it,” she said and, lower, “I put something in your bag there, case there’s trouble.”
“Lord, what is it, Meemaw?” I wailed. Knowing her, there could be a stick of dynamite in
there. She’d been raised in West Texas in a time when you were as worried you’d get scalped by
41
a Comanche Indian as get held up on a train. Granddaddy had lured her to Mississippi, where his
cotton family had brought up my mama gentler, with manners and schooling and riding
sidesaddle on the banks of the Mississippi River. Mama was more like my sister, Frances. But
Meemaw still held tight to her Wild West side, and I was more like her.
“You’ll see. I hear it coming now, get ready.”
A second later, I saw the glimmering nose of the train barreling toward us and I picked
my suitcase up and tucked the HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS pillow up under my arm. Course
what Mama hadn’t stitched on that pillow was home is also where the guilt is and the endless
chores, the knowing it’s your job to look after your mama and meemaw for the rest of your
twenty-four-year-old life. Home is where the other sister up and left since evidently that is not
where her heart is or ever was. But Mama’d kept it short and simple. Anyway it was a very small
pillow.
***
My trip to Oxford was planned only two days before this.
I was out back unclipping clothes off the clothesline as fast as I could before I lost a pint
of blood to the mosquitoes. Just beyond our sheets and nightgowns and a girdle resembling a
legless, headless Meemaw lay our twenty-five acres of wooded land. By some maps it was
considered the Mississippi Delta, the most fertile soil in America, and by others it was not, but it
didn’t matter because Daddy hadn’t been a cotton farmer. He’d worked on the Mississippi River
with the Corps of Engineers, designing water dams and channels and levees. Come fall, our plot
was usually surrounded by other people’s cotton, and I’d sneeze my way through September. But
I wouldn’t be sneezing this year. This year the cotton fields around us sat fallow, covered in
horseweed and thistle, because the government was desperately paying folks not to grow cotton
42
to keep the price from bottoming out. Looking around me that day, I felt it in my bones: There
was something wrong with the world if the Delta wasn’t smothered in green cotton by July.
I’d made it as far as the girdle when Mama hollered from the porch. “Come on inside,
Birdie. We need to have a talk.” And so, grumbling, I toted the half-full basket back up to our
house, I’d just do the rest in the dark, because even though I was a grown woman, I still did what
my mama told me to, and she still did what her mama told her to, and sometimes I thought if
people didn’t die, that cycle might never, ever stop.
Our house was sturdy, comfortable, and paid for. Two white stories with a deep back
porch, though the paint was starting to peel. The old hammock that nobody lay in anymore still
hung at one end of the porch. A few years ago me and Frances had sewn six Gingham Girl flour
sacks together and lain, feet in faces, listening to Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour on the radio. The
roof leaked and the furnace damper still stuck, but we didn’t have the money to fix such things,
so we’d learned to jiggle the lever on the contraption and lean to the left when rain dripped from
the kitchen ceiling, because living in a house was like living with your mother and meemaw:
You learned to put up with each other’s ways.
Two years ago, my sister, Frances, left Footely to attend a finishing school outside
Memphis. A year in, she got engaged to a man we didn’t know and didn’t even invite us to her
own wedding. Just sent us a little printed cream-colored card: We are pleased to announce the
marriage of Frances Begonia Calhoun to Roderick Beauregard Tartt. In my opinion, she might
as well’ve sent us a middle finger in an envelope and, recently, her letters had grown scarce. If
she did write us, she mostly just yapped about their big fancy house called Idlewilde, with a
private telephone line and her vice president banker husband, which would’ve mortified our
43
daddy. Daddy detested banks and, worse, bankers. Frances’s only complaint about her new life
was they had to live with his “witch for a mother.”
I set the basket down on the back porch and followed Mama into Meemaw’s room, where
Meemaw was already propped up in bed. Her little room was sparse—bed, small dresser,
fireplace that I’d take the summer door off of come October.
“Come sit,” Meemaw said, patting the bed beside her and sliding her King James over,
open to Judges. Meemaw always enjoyed the bloodier stories of the Bible.
Mama eased down in the rocking chair in the corner. A widow of two years, she had U-
shaped bags hanging under her eyes. She’d gotten so thin, she looked more apron than woman
lately. The year Daddy died was the year Mama had started to get old.
Mama tilted her head and smiled at me. I was immediately suspicious. “What would you
think about taking the train up to Oxford to see your sister, Birdie?” she asked.
“I’d think why spend money on a train ticket to see somebody who won’t even write us
back.” I leaned back on Meemaw’s headboard with the cupids painted on it. I used to tell Frances
those cupids would bite her if she got too close, that they favored the blood of pretty little girls. It
was not that I was jealous, exactly; I just thought there ought to be a price for being the prettier
sister.
“Please, Bird, can’t you just go on up there and see that she’s alright?”
Six weeks ago, Frances’d stopped answering our letters altogether. So Mama’d asked me
to drive the thirty-two miles to Port Gibson and send her a telegram asking was she alright, but
she still didn’t write us back. So I sent another asking would she call us on the telephone please.
The call should be on Monday, June 26, at two o’clock at the Foote, which was actually Footely
Farm & Mercantile, the store where I worked. Earlier that year, Mr. Parkins had paid to have
44
telephone wires strung from Lord Knows Where, though it mostly just sat there since it cost a
fortune to use. So on Monday, June 26, Mr. Parkins set the black contraption on the counter next
to the jar of pickled eggs while me, Mama, and Meemaw stood waiting on the thing to ring. Of
course every individual that walked in the store wanted to know who it was calling and what it
would cost them. According to the booklet, Oxford to Footely would run Frances three dollars
and thirty-five cents for the first three minutes and sixty cents thereafter, money she’d made clear
she could easily spare. But hard as Meemaw stared the machine down, no call came in, which
made Mama worry even more.
Maybe I shouldn’t blame Mama for worrying. We were on a two-year run of Bad Things
Happening. It had started with Daddy’s heart attack, which killed him, and a few months later
Meemaw broke her hip, followed by our water pipes bursting from a freeze, and then the truck
ceased trucking, which had cost more than Meemaw to fix. We were growing perilously broke.
On top of that we were behind on our property taxes, though that was more of a distant worry.
Even when the newspaper reported that almost a quarter of the real property in the state had
been seized for back taxes owed last spring. But, I don’t know, I found a deceptive comfort
knowing that just about everybody in America was having a hard time. Except for the real rich,
most folks around here were living on scrip and store credit and their own backyard gardens.
Anyway, a few afternoons later, when the long-distance rates were low, I picked up the
telephone receiver myself and ordered up a call on store credit. When it came through, a colored
woman answered, “Miz Tartt residence,” and she told me, “No, ma’am, Miss Frances ain’t
home.” When I asked was Frances all right, she paused and said, “Yessum, she seem same as
always.” So I asked her to give Frances the message: We would be obliged if you would call, at
such-and-so time. Guess if she called.
45
“She’s probably just busy, Mama,” I said now, on Meemaw’s bed. “You know how
Frances likes to act like she’s so busy.”
From her rocking chair, Mama let out one of her ten-pound sighs. “I’m still worried sick
about her, Bird.” And she couldn’t resist adding, “And us.”
“That’s why I don’t need to be taking any days off at the store, Mama. We can’t afford it
right now.”
All Mr. Parkins paid me for working at the Foote was three dollars a week, and twenty-
five of those cents were in store credit. Even fifteen-year-old John Morton made more than me,
and he got paid all in cash—and he only worked four days out of seven. I worked Tuesdays
through Saturdays, though I usually went in on Mondays too. And Sundays after church service
even though it was closed. And I stayed late most evenings. The store needed to be open—it was
the only store for twenty miles and carried to farm families mostly, everything from shoestrings
to flour to funeral coffins. My job was to keep Mr. Parkins’s books and ring folks up, including
tending to the ladies’ counter, which was a glass case hidden behind a green curtain. In it was a
display of ladies’ white underpants, cotton stockings (Mr. Parkins’s wife thought rayon too racy),
Lysol Disinfectant with Douche, Baldwin’s Female Pills for Change of Life, and more recently
Kotex Sanitary Napkins with Belt. My face turned a shade of tomato soup whenever the sales
drummer came by to ask did we need more of those. The answer was almost always “no” since
Warren County women did not truck with such newfangled ideas. There were also a few lipstick
tubes in a color called Devil’s Delight, which I secretly tried on a few years ago. I thought it
didn’t look half bad on me, like I’d actually traveled outside the state before, but when I got
home, of course Frances had to choke on a laugh. “Oh Birdie, why even go to the trouble—” I’d
wiped it off before she could finish that rude sentence. In two years I hadn’t moved a tube of it.
46
Despite the low pay, I enjoyed working and I understood numbers—I’d gotten that from
Daddy, the civil engineer. I hoped that, maybe one day, I’d run my own little business, selling
something other than funeral coffins and change of life pills. But the other benefit to working at
the Foote was it got me away from the population of my own house for a while.
When I wasn’t at work, I had to listen to Mama worrying all the time. If The Delta
Dispatch said the price of canned peaches had gone up so much as a penny, she’d say, “Well
that’s it, Bird, that’s the end of us,” like she’d just read her own obituary. I named it Doris’s
Daily Doom and Gloom Report, and indeed times were getting harder. The Dispatch reported
even former Governor Bilbo had lost his farm. You could see the decline everywhere, from the
number of pennies in the church plate to folks’ thin faces at the Foote to the state of the shoes-
for-sale rack. By 1933, those shoes had grown a dust thick as fur. But if I’d learned anything
working at the store, it was that my family was luckier than most, even with Bad Things
Happening. On top of my pay, every spring a blue envelope arrived bearing a two-hundred-dollar
actuarial annuity check from Daddy’s time in the service. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
We’d received the last one not four months ago. Even so, after getting the truck fixed and
Meemaw’s hospital bills, we were already down to about thirty-five dollars and would have to
make do until another one came next spring. We still kept our money in Daddy’s billfold in his
pants pocket in the closet.
For a minute, we were all quiet as we worried at various degrees, except for the soft
accordion wheeze of Meemaw. I knew that after eighteen years, she still missed her late husband,
Thomas. And Mama missed her husband, Samuel, and I missed my daddy. We were three
women who missed their men, but we’d managed to get by, at least so far.
47
Meemaw broke the silence. “Doris wants you to go up there and ask Frances for some
money.”
“What?” I looked at Mama. “Come on, we’re not that bad off.”
Mama looked down at her lap, kneading her apron, rolling it like biscuit dough. “The
Tates lost their house this afternoon. For back taxes owed.”
“You’re kidding.” The Tates? “But they’re so rich. And so rude.” Did rich, rude people
really lose their houses? I thought that only happened to nice, poor people. I guess word hadn’t
made it up the road to the store yet, but it would by tomorrow morning. The Tates had owned an
enormous white antebellum home with seven or eight hundred acres next to ours. Frances adored
their little snot of a daughter. They were probably the richest people for fifty miles.
“You know we’re behind on ours too, Bird, coming up on two years now. The county
keeps writing, warning us—”
“But we’re sending them . . . we’ll send them some when Daddy’s next check comes in
March.” By the end of this year, we’d owe a little over forty-three dollars in property taxes. But I
was a bookkeeper, for God’s sake; I wasn’t going to pay out all our money and leave us broke.
And just about everybody was in the same situation. Poor Mr. Parkins hadn’t made money in
years for all the credit he’d given—we owed him twelve dollars ourselves. “There’s nothing we
can do about it right now.”
“There’s one thing we can do,” Meemaw said. Innocent, aiming it at the window. “We
could ask Frances and her husband to give us some to get by on.”
“Meemaw, we’ve never even met the man.”
Meemaw patted my hand. “I said we, but I really meant you.”
48
