Comfort Read online

  “But where did you find him?”

  “Someone in town was giving puppies away. Ann Fay, you get to name him.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ida. “Why does she get to pick a name? I want to call him Pete.”

  “Yeah,” said Ellie. “We need another Pete.”

  The girls were crowding around my chair trying to put pieces of biscuit into the puppy’s mouth.

  Pete was our dog that followed my brother to the polio hospital. But just like Bobby, he died there. I’ll always believe he knew the minute Bobby died. And that he just give up on living himself.

  “No,” I said. “We got to come up with something more original.”

  “How about Blackie?” asked Ellie.

  “Or Midnight?” asked Ida.

  “Nah,” I said. “That’s boring.” Then I noticed that the dog’s front paws were white like he was wearing a pair of shoes. “I know,” I said. “Let’s call him Mr. Shoes.”

  “Yeah!” said Ida. And Ellie agreed. So that’s what we called him.

  The girls wanted to teach Mr. Shoes to do tricks, so they started giving him all kinds of commands—sit, roll over, stand, lay, bark!

  “Hey,” said Daddy. “Take it easy. How would you like me ordering you to do all them things at the same time?” Then he took charge of the training. “Sit!” said Daddy. If Mr. Shoes sat back on his haunches, Daddy give him a piece of biscuit and scratched him behind the ears.

  At supper Ida brought an extra chair to the table so Mr. Shoes could eat with the rest of us. But of course Momma wouldn’t hear of it. “No dogs at the table,” she said. “And after supper, no playing with him until your homework is finished.”

  Later, after I finally give up fighting the girls to play with Mr. Shoes, Daddy and I huddled on the porch and watched the stars come out over Bakers Mountain.

  That’s when he come up with the second surprise of the day. “Ann Fay,” he said, “how would you like a job?”

  “A job?”

  “I was in Whitener’s Store today. Ruth Whitener was asking about you. Said she could use some help in there.”

  Whitener’s was just a little country store where people could stop in and buy a drink on the way home from work. Or pick up some light bread or maybe get a baloney sandwich if they didn’t feel like cooking. Before the war Daddy used to sit around the potbelly stove in there and play rook with the other men. But not anymore. Now he’d just buy his cigarettes and leave again.

  “But Daddy,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense. Ruth Whitener has six children of her own. Why would she need me?”

  Daddy shrugged. “Maybe she likes you, Ann Fay. She said if you help out she’ll pay you in food. Day-old light bread and whatever else she can spare.”

  I thought about that—how it would help put food on the table while Daddy wasn’t working. Maybe I should take the job. But I still couldn’t understand why Mrs. Whitener would hire me—unless she was feeling sorry for us.

  Maybe someone was talking.

  It was probably her daughter Jean. She was the one who carried my books every day. And when Rob Walker knocked me down at school, Jean was the one who give me her handkerchief to wipe the blood off my skinned-up elbow. Maybe she went home and told her momma.

  And then again, there was Junior Bledsoe. He liked to talk. He could’ve told Mrs. Whitener that Daddy wasn’t working. Ruth Whitener had a reputation for being bighearted. People said if someone couldn’t pay his bill, she would often let it go. I had a feeling her wanting to hire me had something to do with that soft spot of hers.

  “Ruth says if you want the job, all you gotta do is show up on Saturday morning.”

  It hit me all of a sudden that if I took a Saturday job it would mean giving up going to the movies with Peggy Sue. But then we hadn’t been going every week anyway. And it seemed like more often than not, Peggy Sue dragged Junior along with us.

  I thought about Daddy and how he hadn’t got a job yet. And about my momma getting impatient with him. She was standing at the front door right that minute, listening. I looked up and seen the light from the living room behind her. And her face looking gray through the screen on the door.

  I thought how I could make her eyes light up just a tiny bit by bringing home groceries from Whitener’s Store each week. It wouldn’t be much. But right now it was better than nothing. I could feel that Momma wanted me to take the job. It looked like I was going to have to be the man of the house all over again.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”

  10

  Otis Hickey

  October 1945

  When Saturday come, I was as nervous as on the first day of school. Not because of Mrs. Whitener. I thought she’d be patient with me. And of course I liked Jean. But what about the customers? Every time I’d been in that place, there was a group of men sitting around playing cards or talking about soybean crops. Would they be watching every move I made?

  Lucky for me, the men weren’t at the store when I got there.

  The first thing Mrs. Whitener did was give me a stool. “There,” she said. “Sit as much as you like. And keep your crutches close by in case you need them.”

  She helped me with the first three or four customers, taking money and giving them change. After that, I was on my own. “You’re a natural storekeeper,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take the day off and let you run this place.”

  Before she was done talking, a man come in and bought himself a Coca-Cola and a pack of peanuts. He poured the peanuts in his drink and sat down by the woodstove to enjoy it. Then one at a time the others started coming.

  They didn’t stay all day, of course. One would sit and chew the fat with a couple of others and then he’d finally stand up and make some excuse to leave. One man said, “I ’spect if I don’t get home soon the old lady will be putting extra pepper on my eggs in the morning.” But it wasn’t long before another one took his place.

  Mrs. Whitener went out the back door a few times and over to her house next to the store. “Have to check on my clan. Be back in a minute,” she’d say.

  It wasn’t like things was busy in the store. Mrs. Whitener had a sewing machine in the corner and even sat down and worked on a shirt she was making for one of her boys. It was hard telling why she needed me.

  Sometimes the men would sit for a long time without talking. They’d stare at the jars of mayonnaise on the shelf or scrape the toes of their work boots along the cracks in the cement floor. I got to wondering what was going on inside their heads.

  Just before eleven o’clock a man named Clarence looked out the window. “Lord help us. Here comes Otis,” he said.

  He meant Otis Hickey. I’d known about Otis all my life on account of he walked wherever he wanted to go and sometimes my daddy would give him a lift. Otis’s right eye had been destroyed in the war, so now he had a glass one. When he turned his eyes from side to side, they didn’t move together like most people’s eyes do.

  But even before the war, people called him a strange bird.

  Otis lived with his mother in a little gray house that you could hardly see for all the trash sitting in the yard. He collected junk that other people would use or sell—old cars, wood cookstoves, and other things he sold to people. He was the only reason my momma had a Frigidaire instead of an icebox. Why, we even had a refrigerator before Peggy Sue’s family did! All on account of Otis getting it from some rich people. When I went with my daddy to get that refrigerator I even thought I seen a bathtub hiding in the weeds.

  During the war the government begged for metal to build more ships and bomber planes. But according to Clarence, Otis never turned his in. Clarence said some people felt it was their patriotic duty to go clean up the place. But Otis’s mother met them at the door. “No sirree,” she said. “Otis makes his living fixing and selling that stuff and you better leave it there for when he comes home.”

  Otis come into the store. He stood there for a minute while his eyes ad
justed to the darkness and then he headed for the counter.

  “Good morning, Otis,” said Mrs. Whitener. “Do you know Ann Fay Honeycutt? She’s my new employee.”

  He give me a nod and his good eye twitched a little. “We’ve met,” he said.

  “Otis will have one of those dills,” said Mrs. Whitener. She tapped the gallon jar of giant pickles sitting on the counter. So I took off the lid, fished one out with the tongs that she kept on the counter, and wrapped it in wax paper.

  Mrs. Whitener asked Otis how his mother’s arthritis was doing.

  He took a bite of his pickle, lifted his hat, and scratched his head like he was thinking how to answer her. After a moment he said, “She has her good days and her bad days, she does.” He chewed on his pickle for a while, and then he said to anyone who would listen, “I reckon you seen in the paper where them Nazis are being tried for their war crimes. It’s about time they get what’s coming to them.”

  Well, that got the men by the stove to talking. Most of them agreed with Otis, whether they’d seen war crimes firsthand or not. I learned that Otis had helped to liberate Poland and seen a concentration camp up close and personal. “You would not believe the size of them prisoners,” he said. “They looked like they wasn’t nothing but one bone apiece. Like a fence rail with empty eyes.”

  The men didn’t mind Otis talking about the war as long as he was bad-mouthing the Nazis and the meanness they done to people in Poland. But then he made the mistake of telling a story about one of his buddies getting blown apart. And just like that, Clarence told him to shut it up.

  He was done with his pickle by then, so he shrugged and crumpled the wax paper in his fist. “Guess I’ll be getting a wiggle on,” he said. Then he went out the door.

  It got quiet for a while, which made me wonder what each of them men was seeing in their minds. After a bit, Clarence picked up the tin can sitting by the woodstove. He spit a stream of black snuff into it. “I declare, Ruth, I don’t know why you let that crazy man darken your door,” he said.

  Mrs. Whitener was sewing on a button by this time. She pulled a long thread through the buttonhole and pointed her needle at Clarence. “As far as I’m concerned, Otis Hickey’s two cents is worth just as much as yours.”

  I had a feeling she was talking about something besides the money Otis spent on a dill pickle. One thing for sure—there wasn’t any doubt about who run that store. People come in there with all sorts of opinions. And gossip. But if Ruth Whitener didn’t agree with someone’s viewpoint, she was quick to say so.

  Just before one o’clock a man named Frank Huffman come in, set up a small table, and pulled out some rook cards. Before long, two more men had joined him. But of course they needed a fourth player. “Ruth, are you going to play?” asked Frank. “Or does little Miss Honeycutt want to be my partner?”

  Mrs. Whitener laughed. “Good idea! Go ahead, Ann Fay.”

  Was she serious? Did she want me to play while I was on the job?

  “You deserve a break.”

  She meant it. I shook my head. “I don’t want to play.” But the truth was, I didn’t know much about playing rook. When me and Peggy Sue and Junior got together we always played rummy.

  “Deal me a hand,” said Mrs. Whitener. She sat up to the table, and next thing I knew she was bidding on how many points she could take.

  I picked up a copy of the Hickory Daily Record that was under the counter. I read the funny papers first and then I moved on to what was happening in the real world.

  I seen an article called HANDICAPPED GET ATTENTION. It was about how President Truman had proclaimed this week “Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” The article said that the war had wounded lots of people who could do a good job in spite of their handicap.

  It seemed like an easy thing to say, at least if you were talking about a soldier who come home with a bad arm. But what if something was wrong on the inside? If it was just a weak arm that was wrong with my daddy, he’d find a way to work. But whatever was ailing him wasn’t something you could see.

  And because I couldn’t see it, sometimes I got real impatient. I’d get the biggest urge to tell him to snap out of it! But I would never talk to my daddy like that.

  The newspaper article didn’t say anything about people being handicapped by polio. But after our epidemic I knew there were plenty of us around too. And I started wondering if maybe that’s why Mrs. Whitener had hired me.

  Was she feeling sorry for me on account of polio? Or having pity on my whole family because Daddy wasn’t working?

  I got to thinking maybe I didn’t want the job after all. For one thing I didn’t care much for being pitied. And for another I was starting to feel sorry for myself. Especially when I remembered that I could be at the movies with Peggy Sue just then.

  But of course Junior would probably be there too. I didn’t know which bothered me worse—the idea of Junior tagging along or him and Peggy Sue going without me.

  11

  The Car

  November 1945

  Because of my job at the store, I didn’t get to the movies with Peggy Sue and Junior even once during October. Junior got a second job helping some mechanic fix cars. So that meant Peggy Sue wouldn’t be able to take him to the movies either. “I suppose I’ll have to get Melinda to go the picture show with me,” she said. “Since you and Junior deserted me.”

  I thought how strange it was that Junior could work two jobs and my daddy couldn’t do one. Momma asked Daddy wouldn’t he, at least, take advantage of the GI Bill and go back to school. One day she pulled out the papers he’d brought home from the American Legion office and reminded him that veterans could get expenses paid for college or special training.

  But my daddy had quit school after ninth grade and he wasn’t likely to go back. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “I’m not educated enough for you? Just when did you get so highfalutin?”

  Momma put the GI papers on the table then and started scrubbing the Frigidaire. Next thing I knew she was taking everything out and wiping it down. Daddy went outside, letting the screen door slam behind him. If one of us young’uns had done that, he would’ve made us come back and shut it real quiet.

  And lately, he probably wouldn’t have been too nice about it either.

  Of course the whole point of veterans going back to school was job training. But apparently Daddy wasn’t worried about any of us starving or Momma not being able to pay the light bill. He seemed to think we could live off the small amount of money the government give to unemployed veterans. Even that wouldn’t last forever, but Momma had quit bringing it up.

  Every Saturday when Daddy brought me home from my store job, I turned my pay over to Momma. The bread and canned goods always put some of the shine back into her eyes. She’d give me a quick hug and say, “Ann Fay, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  I knew she was actually telling Daddy that he should be the one working. And that made me feel guilty for the distance my job was putting between them. For some reason it seemed like keeping peace in the family was my responsibility. If it looked like Momma and Daddy were fixing to argue, I would change the subject. If the girls was bothering him, I’d make them go outside. It was getting colder, though, and I started wondering how we’d get through the winter if we was stuck in the house with each other.

  One Saturday evening it was unusually warm for November, so me and Daddy was sitting on the porch shelling parched peanuts. We heard a car coming down the road. I didn’t recognize it, and I could see Daddy didn’t either. But the driver was waving out the window. Then he got closer and I realized that it was Junior Bledsoe—grinning like a lovesick fool.

  The twins were running circles in the yard with Mr. Shoes chasing after one and then the other. The minute Junior came to a stop those girls were on the running board of that car, bombarding him with questions and begging for a ride.

  “Course I’ll take you for a ride.” Junior tried to shake the girls o
ff, but they followed him to the porch. “Good evening, Leroy,” he said.

  “Evening,” said Daddy eyeballing the car. “That yours?”

  “I bought it off a man in Startown. He got himself a brand-new Chevrolet with a chatterbox in it. This one doesn’t have a radio.” Junior looked at me. “Wanna go for a ride?”

  I looked at Daddy and he nodded. The twins hightailed it to the car, racing to get to the front seat. Daddy lifted me off the porch, and Junior made the girls get in the back so I could sit up front.

  We headed out the dirt road with him just a-grinning. “So are you proud of me, Ann Fay?”

  “Maybe I am,” I said. “But as much as you like to talk, I can’t figure how you been saving up for this and never said a word about it.”

  “Well, see there! You don’t know me like you thought you did.” Junior took us to the Hinkle sisters’ house, pulled into their driveway, and tooted his horn. In a few minutes the two of them come out, Miss Pauline first and then her sister looking just like her—same dark-rimmed glasses and hair pulled up into a bun. Only difference was Miss Dinah was shorter.

  “Is it yours?” asked Miss Pauline.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Junior. “And it’s paid for, too.”

  “Well, am I ever so proud of you! You have sure grown into a fine young man. And to think, I was there when you were born.”

  “Wanna go for a ride?”

  Miss Pauline looked at Miss Dinah, and the two of them nodded. Next thing I knew, Junior had hopped out and leaned the back of his seat forward so they could climb in with Ida and Ellie. And Mr. Shoes, of course.

  Miss Dinah fell right in love with our dog. But Miss Pauline? She made Ellie sit between her and Miss Dinah so he couldn’t lick her elbows. When Mr. Shoes tried to make friends with her, she swatted her hand to keep him in his place.