“The District Attorney thinks it’s going to take some time in jail for you to get the message and I’m afraid I agree with her this time,” he told them.
Based on the number of each boy’s previous convictions, A.K. was going to be spending the next three weekends in jail. The Bagwell boy would do four weekends and Charles Starling got five. That meant they would report to the jail at six P.M. on Friday evenings and get out at five P.M. on Sunday.
I’d warned Andrew that this was what would probably happen, although Luther had actually gone a little easier than I’d expected.
Andrew nodded grimly as he heard the sentence pronounced and I foresaw a rough July for A.K. Andrew would keep him humping in the fields all week, then jail for the weekends.
Luther also sentenced them each to twenty-four hours of community service, “and that’s not counting the time it takes for you three to clean up the Crocker family’s cemetery. You can thank Mrs. Avery that I’m not giving you the full forty-five days of active time.”
Starling looked indifferent, but Bagwell and A.K. shot Mrs. Avery shamefaced smiles.
Luther adjourned court and as I started to join my family, who had headed out the rear door, Mrs. Avery stopped me.
“I wasn’t speaking up for that trashy Starling boy, Deborah—he always was a problem—and I never taught your nephew. I only meant Raymond.”
“I understand, Mrs. Avery, but they were equally guilty. Judge Parker couldn’t punish one much more severely than the others.”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, her small head shaking from side to side in disapproval. “I really don’t see why not when Raymond’s such a nice boy, and that Charles Starling’s a wicked influence.”
“Nevertheless—”
“The day he quit school, he broke the antenna on my car and put a big long scratch right across the trunk. I know it was he even though Sheriff Poole couldn’t prove it. And all because he flunked my English class and couldn’t stay on the baseball team. As if it were my fault he wouldn’t do his work. And now here’s more willful vandalism. They really ought to send him to prison for a whole year. Give Raymond a chance to be with better boys.” She pursed her lips. “And I have to say I’m surprised and disappointed in your nephew.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “Maybe this will be a wake-up call for all of them.”
“You mark my words, Deborah. This little slap on the wrist Charles Starling got will be like water off a duck’s back. He’s going to cause a lot more trouble for those boys before he’s finished. You wait and see.”
✡ ✡ ✡
Out in the rear hallway, Charles Starling had lit up a cigarette. “They all stick together, don’t they?”
A hank of yellow hair fell across his rabbity face and short angry streams of smoke jetted from his nostrils.
“How come that nigger gets a suspended sentence and I get five weekends of jail time?” he snarled at Ed Whitbread. “Hey man, chill,” said A.K.
Andrew put a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said sharply.
Thankfully, Daddy didn’t seem to have heard it.
I sometimes think back to that afternoon and wonder if it would have made any difference if I’d listened harder, taken more seriously all I saw and heard.
“Probably not,” the pragmatist says comfortingly.
“You can’t know that,” says the stern preacher. “Arthur Hunt might still be alive you’d paid more attention.”
4
Church is a hospital for sinners,
Not a museum for saints.
—Bear Creek United Christian
Out at the farm that evening I asked Maidie, “How come you don’t make Daddy buy a dishwasher?”
She gave the glass she was drying a critical squint and then slid it back into the hot soapy water for me to rewash.
“I don’t need no dishwasher,” she said. “Not for the few little dishes Mr. Kezzie messes up.”
“Oh, come on, Maidie. Daddy’s not the only person you cook for, and you know it. Some of the boys or their kids are over here almost every day.”
“For dinner maybe,” she agreed, referring to the midday meal. “But not for supper. You and Mr. Reid, y’all the first in nearly a month and most times if it’s some of the family, the womenfolks shoo me out and clean up the kitchen theirselves.”
“They better,” I said.
Not that Maidie’s any Aunt Jemima who’d let them take advantage of her. She knows perfectly well how hard it’d be to find somebody to fill her shoes should she decide to leave, which, God willing, won’t happen anytime soon.
She came to the farm more than thirty years ago, a shy and lanky teenager Mother had hired to help out temporarily while the woman I called Aunt Essie was up in Philadelphia helping her first grandchild get born. Aunt Essie found a widowed policeman up there and Maidie found Cletus Holt right here and both women settled where they landed. Aunt Essie was a generation older than Mother and died a few years after she did, but Maidie’s only got about fifteen years on me. She got over being shy about the third day and time has amply padded her once-lanky frame till she’s an imposing figure, but she won’t sit if there’s work to be done and her hands are never empty and idle.
I rinsed the glass and stood it in the drain rack and this time it passed her inspection.
Daddy’d asked me to drive him home from court and once Reid heard that Maidie was making stuffed peppers, he’d wangled an invitation to come for early supper, too.
It was a summer supper right out of the garden that Daddy tends with Maidie’s husband Cletus: sweet bell peppers stuffed with a moist hamburger and sausage mixture, tender new butter beans sprinkled with diced onions, fried okra, meaty tomatoes that really had ripened on the vines, and thin wedges of crispy hot cornbread.
Reid ate as if it was the first home-cooked meal he’d had since he and Karen got divorced. (Since he can’t cook and most of his girlfriends don’t, he’s become shameless about scrounging meals.) He was appreciative enough to answer Daddy’s every question about A.K.’s situation, but his appreciation didn’t extend to helping with the dishes. Shortly after we rose from the table and Daddy went out to the porch for a cigarette, he took off.
Except for the principle of it, I didn’t really mind. Washing dishes with Maidie is always a comfortable task, one conducive to gossip and confidences about all the big and small things going on around, the farm. It’s one of the ways I keep up with the changing community. As a child, I used to stand on a little stool with Mother’s apron tied around my neck to help them wash dishes, scrape carrots or make biscuits. In those years, I had no trouble bouncing back and forth between the rough and tumble of my big brothers outdoors and the soft voices of women working together in a kitchen.
Maidie’s also one of my windows on the black community, just as my family is one of hers to the white community.
Desegregation’s been a real mixed bag down here. Took away some of the old sore spots, brought in a bunch of new ones. No more separate drinking fountains as when my brothers were little. No more separate entrances to movie theaters or separate seating at bus and train stations, no more “No Coloreds” signs on restaurant doors. We go to school together, we swim at the same public pools and beaches, we work side by side on assembly lines or in offices now as frequently as we have always worked side by side in the fields.