Tammy out of Time Read online

She was already in the kitchen door, a tall, thin-faced old woman, quick-moving and quick-spoken. “So this is Tammy!” she cried. Her dress was curiously flowered and stiff; it looked iced or waxed. She kept her thin, high-beaked nose tilted as if to hold on her rimless glasses. Curled around her neck like a fur piece was a large black cat. “I’m Miss Renie, Pete’s great-aunt.” She put out her bony hand and advanced to meet Tammy, her black eyes dancing, her face lighting up.

  Tammy set the coffeepot down to shake hands. “Howdy,” she said. The cat drew back and said, “Hssst,” and fluffed himself.

  “Behave, Picasso. Stop clawing my batik.” She spoke her words in little bunches as if she were plucking them off a tree. “Do you like cats?”

  “I sure do. I had a little kitten once long ago, but it died.”

  “I have seven, besides Picasso. Have to keep them in the barn while Ena—that’s Mrs. B.—is here. She hates them.” Miss Renie bent over the stove sniffing with her thin bony nose. “Eggs? Bacon? You?”

  Tammy nodded.

  “Superb!” Her dress crackled as she whirled to a shelf and took down a plate. “Put it here. I love to eat but I hate cooking. Never pass the kitchen stove that I don’t kick it. I’d spit in the sink if it was sanitary. One more piece of bacon. Picasso adores it.” Suddenly she set the plate down on the top of the stove and bent closer to Tammy, blinking her quick black eyes. “What’s that you’ve got on your face?”

  Tammy lifted one hand to her cheek, wondering if she had a smudge like Ernie’s.

  “Paint?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Rub it off. It’s not for you. Here, take this dish towel. Osia can wash it.”

  Tammy lifted the cloth to her cheek with reluctance. “I...I thought it looked nice.”

  “Rub hard. That’s it. Don’t want to look like a tart, do you?”

  “A...a what?”

  “Call a spade a spade. Don’t tell me you don’t understand.”

  Tammy shook her head. “Not unless it’s a little pie.”

  “It’s a...a strange woman, that’s what it is.”

  “Oh—that lieth in wait at the corner and leadeth the young men astray? No, I didn’t want to look like one of those.” She scrubbed furiously.

  Miss Renie sighed. “It used to be easy to shock people. It was my one recreation for forty years. Nowadays they just go me one better. I may as well give up. I’m just too old.” She took up her plate again.

  “Don’t say you’re too old, Miss Renie. Grandpa says you don’t begin to live till you’re past seventy. Then’s when you’re free.”

  Miss Renie, heading for the door, plate in hand, looked back over her shoulder, peering around the cat. All she lacked was a broomstick. “Free?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” Tammy said, taking up Mrs. Brent’s plate and the coffeepot. “First, you have to mind your parents, then you have to set a good example for your children. But when you’re seventy you can do as you please. Also,” Tammy added, following her to the porch, “you are free of all desires of the flesh.”

  Miss Renie laughed. She stopped Professor Brent with a wave of her hand. “I’m already down, Joel.”

  Mrs. Brent said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Sin,” Miss Renie replied with relish. “I’m not as old as I thought I was. Still have a taste for it.” The cat leaped to the chair beside her and sat there like a human being, so Tammy, not wanting to disturb him, sat down on the top step.

  Mrs. Brent tried to take a bite of her toast and laid it down with a shake of her head. “I just can’t chew.”

  “Soak it,” Miss Renie said.

  “Is it your teeth?” Tammy asked with sympathy.

  Mrs. Brent looked at her a minute before she answered. “Yes.” It sounded like the cat’s hiss.

  “Grandpa had a time when he first got his store teeth.”

  Miss Renie chuckled. “Did he ever get so he could chew right?”

  “Aunt Renie, please, I’m trying to eat.”

  “And I’m only trying to be helpful. Go on, Tammy.”

  “He got onto it. Said it was just a trick, like spitting accurate or anything else you had to learn.” Tammy clasped her hands around her knees and rocked back and forth. Miss Renie made her feel easy, in spite of Professor and Mrs. Brent. “Grandma had all her teeth drawed the day she was twenty-four and never took them out except to wash them. That was how-come she could bite the burglar.”

  Miss Renie choked on her coffee. “How-came she had to bite the burglar—be quiet, Ena, I want to hear. Go on, Tammy.”

  “The burglar come creeping in the night, come right aboard the Ellen B. Grandma felt his hand go under her pillow. That’s what woke her. She turned her head real slow and bit him in the arm. He hollered like all-get-out and ran. Grandma said it just showed what you could do if you kept your head.”

  “And your teeth in your head.” Miss Renie laughed. “Did they catch the burglar?”

  “They did so. Picked up a man with a bite in his arm and sent for Grandma to come to town. But she said, shucks, she didn’t have time to go to town and see if her teeth fit: she was busy putting up blackberry juice. She put them in a paper bag and sent them in by Grandpa. They fit all right and the man got sent up for I don’t know how long, and——Oh, here comes Pete!”

  Tammy ran down the walk toward the gate. Pete was smiling, his dark hair was tousled and his shirt collar open. This was Pete as she knew him on the Ellen B., not the strange Pete in fine clothes as he was last night. But just before she reached him, she stopped and put out her hand with dignity.

  Pete asked how she was and how she had slept and they walked side by side along the brick walk between the sweet olive trees and across the wide bricked space where the walk opened into a little square with flowers on all sides.

  On the gallery Miss Renie was saying, “Why didn’t you walk right in on them? I would have.”

  “You!” Mrs. Brent said with indignation. “I have a sense of delicacy. Before breakfast, too.”

  “Don’t confuse the issue, Ena. It’s as moral before as after and personally I think you are hipped on the subject. Ought to be psychoanalyzed.”

  “If you please——” Professor Brent protested. Then they all looked around, coming out of their huddle, as Pete and Tammy mounted the steps.

  Tammy said, “Pete, you sit down and I’ll get your breakfast time your pa gets your chair under you.” She ran to the kitchen, glad she knew how Pete liked his eggs, glad she could show him how quickly she had learned her way about in such a strange and wonderful kitchen. When she came to the porch again with his plate and coffee, Mrs. Brent was speaking.

  “Unfeeling, I call it. Not a sign of proper grief——” She broke off at sight of Tammy and no one spoke for a minute.

  Tammy said, “I never knew such a stretched-out breakfast as you all have.” No one said anything so she added, “But I like it,” and sat down on the steps. They all looked at her with serious eyes.

  Then Pete said, “Tammy, I do want to hear about your grandfather. I wish you could have let me know.”

  “There wasn’t time, Pete, or anything anybody could do. It all happened so fast. Then I came right on here like he told me.”

  “He wasn’t sick long?”

  “Sick? He wasn’t sick at all. He’d been in the swamp all morning. And he wasn’t upset about it, Pete, though I was, of course. He said it was the Lord’s will and no need of kicking against the pricks.”

  “That must be a comfort to you.” Miss Renie slipped a bite of bacon to Picasso.

  “It is. And what’s more of a comfort is thinking he won’t be suffering any more with aches and pains in his joints. Maybe.”

  “Maybe!” Mrs. Brent said with a little nervous jump.

  “Well, we couldn’t be sure, but he thought the dry warm air might ease him.”

  Professor Brent said, “Fundamentalism, of an extraordinary sort.”

  “No, it’s the rheumatism Gra
ndpa has.”

  Pete laid down his knife and fork and spoke sharply. “Tammy, what are you talking about? Where did they take your grandfather?”

  “I don’t know exactly, Pete. He said he would write when he got settled.” They all looked so startled she knew something was wrong. Then Mrs. Brent’s words came back to her: “...no proper feeling, no grief.” She looked from one face to the other. “Did you think he was dead?”

  “Yes, Tammy,” Pete said. “You told me they came and took him away, so naturally——”

  Tammy laughed right out. “That would tickle Grandpa, for sure.”

  Miss Renie was the only one who laughed. “And if it isn’t the nether regions, do tell us where he is to be—in dry warm air?”

  “In...in jail.”

  There was silence for a moment, then Miss Renie choked. “Ena, your face——”

  “I see nothing amusing in the situation. It’s dreadful, shocking.”

  “Mother——” Pete began.

  Tammy stood quickly, serious now, too, her gray eyes flashing and her chin high. “Excuse me, Mrs. Brent, but it isn’t shocking. Grandpa wouldn’t do anything shocking. It was just a matter of personal freedom—and some fool law they made up in Jackson about corn liquor.”

  “Jail—corn liquor—what a position that puts me in—me, the corresponding secretary of the W. C.—and the Pilgrimage coming——Oh, my head!”

  “Wait a minute, Mother,” Pete said, “You don’t——”

  Tammy broke in. I “reckon you’re thinking you don’t want to have anybody round that’s kin to anybody in jail. So...so I’ll say thank you for the night’s lodging and the breakfast and I’ll get my bag and be going along.” She turned from them and went along the porch toward the back hall door and the passageway. She held herself proud and hoped they wouldn’t see the hurt and fury that was inside her.

  Pete came running after her. “Tammy, no! Wait——” He caught her, one arm around her shoulder, but she stiffened away from him. “It isn’t like that, Tammy, please. It’s quite all right for your Grandpa to be in jail—I mean, we were just startled, having thought he was dead. Of course you are going to stay. Come on, I want to show you the land and my tomatoes—and there’s Nan waiting to be milked. Truly, we want you.”

  Tammy let him turn her about and lead her back to the table. She stood there, facing them, looking from one to the other. “Is it true—that you want me to stay?”

  “Of course, child,” Miss Renie cried. “And when your grandfather gets out of jail, he’ll be welcome, too.” She turned on Mrs. Brent who had let out a little gasp at this. “The house is still mine, Ena, and so is the plantation, and it won’t be Pete’s till I die and I’m feeling very healthy indeed right now. I shall invite whom I please.”

  “I have never disputed your right to the house, Aunt Renie. It was only when you started selling off family heirlooms to buy such things as refrigerators, wholly out of key with the period of the house, that I was in duty bound to protest and——”

  “Let’s not go into that again.” Professor Brent’s deep voice drowned her out. He turned to Tammy. “We shall always be greatly in your debt, Tammy, and it is only right that you should stay here as long as you care to.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be just a...a debt——” Tammy began.

  “No indeed,” Miss Renie cried, “the place already has debts aplenty.”

  Pete said, “Mother——”

  “Yes, yes, you must stay, Tammy, of course. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Only I feel the responsibility of a young girl and her conduct more keenly than some others here seem to. Entertaining young men in the bedroom before breakfast—I cannot let that pass without a word no matter whose house this is.”

  “What do you mean?” Pete demanded.

  “Ernie with coffee, that’s all,” Miss Renie put in.

  Tammy turned from Mrs. Brent to Miss Renie. “I reckon you were right about the paint I had on my face. Seems like she has mistook me for the whore of Babylon or something. But if I was I’d have the decency to close the door, like Grandma said.”

  Mrs. Brent said, “Oh, my head—such language!”

  “It’s in the Bible, I believe,” Professor Brent said.

  “Not everything in the Bible is suitable for polite conversation and you know it, Joel.”

  “Isn’t it?” Tammy puzzled. Then she turned to Pete. “When I I was on the Ellen B., seemed like I had everything figured out, how it was. But out in the world...I...it’s all mixed up. I can’t make folks out.”

  “Who can?” Miss Renie cried. “But you’ll get onto it—mores’ the pity.”

  “Will I?” Tammy asked with a sigh. Then she said, “Pete, if you’ll get me a bucket or something, I reckon I’d better go milk Nan.”

  As they went down the path, she looked back toward the ell gallery. They were all in a kind of a huddle, leaning together, and she thought that if they weren’t Pete’s folks she’d be bound they was framing mischief, for sure.

  10.

  PETE took her past the kitchen garden to the field where his cold frames lay, open to the morning sun, their white covers thrown back like discarded shawls. The plants stood in orderly rows, thrusting up their tender leaves with trembling eagerness.

  “Look at them!” Tammy cried. “I never seen so many in all my days.” She bent over, resting her hands on her knees, studying the plants in the first cold frame. “Seems like they’re fair itching to grow for you, Pete.”

  “Hope so,” Pete said. “The fertilizer and all this just about cleaned me out. They’ve got to do well.”

  Tammy straightened up in time to catch the grim look on his face and a little shiver went through her. He mustn’t count on it so. Nothing was as uncertain as growing things. You couldn’t set your heart on them, you could only hope. To cover her dismay, she waved a hand at the green rows on the far side of the level field. “What’s all that, Pete?”

  Pete relaxed and smiled. “That’s my little gamble of the season—more tomato plants, some extra ones, set out much too soon, of course. I’m taking a chance on the weather, just to see. If they should survive, I’d be ahead of everybody and get the top price. And more than that, I’d take it as a sign that I——” He broke off and added, “It is the damnedest thing, how you have to depend on the weather. They need a little shower right now.”

  As they started back, Pete pointing the way toward the barnyard gate, Tammy looked up at the cloudless pale-blue sky. She hoped the Lord would keep it in mind, how the weather ought to be for Pete’s planting. Then she said, “Pete, I can’t figger it out, the way you talk poor, when you’ve got all this.” The sweep of her arm included field and barnyard and woods beyond and the house rising gray and chimneyed above the tall shrubs of the garden.

  Pete shook his head. “The land’s washed out, full of gullies, and it’s just hilly enough so that even if I had machinery——” He shook his head. “The day of the mule and the plow is over, I can see that. Most of the small farms with level fields are going into big combines that can have the best modern equipment. But it’s a tough time for the little man with a place like this.”

  Tammy stopped in her tracks. “Why, Pete! Ain’t nothing little about you. Or this place either. It’s so big it fair takes my breath away. There must be no end of ways to make money here. You got to just try out this and that.”

  “Well—” Pete smiled, holding the barnyard gate open for her—“I’m trying tomatoes.”

  Tammy looked back toward the field. “I hope you set them out in the dark of the moon.”

  “Come to think of it—” Pete laughed, as if the thought cheered him—“I believe I did.”

  In the barn lot, back of the carriage house, a few hens were scratching by the feed troughs. The cow had gone to pasture, Pete said, the mules to the field, but the smell of them lingered on the mild morning air. Nan stood there, looking lost and lonely and Tammy dropped down on her knees and gave her a hug because it seem
ed a long time since they had parted the night before.

  It was good to be milking again, familiar and restoring after all the excitement of new places and new people. They came crowding in upon her thoughts as she milked. She had widened her world in this brief space of time and, in widening it, had somehow diminished herself. It was going to be hard, she thought, to keep herself whole and all together in the midst of people who came trailing their strange, mixed-up lives around them, who came wrapped in their notions, concealed behind their manners. How could she ever get to know them truly or find her way among them without bewilderment? Only Pete—she was beginning to know him, now she saw him in the midst of his life. She felt her hope and her longing go out to him—just the way he was feeling about his tomatoes, and about as risky a business, too.

  The milk stream played on the bottom of the bucket and it filled slowly. Pete came back from somewhere in the barn, bringing a box for her to sit on, though she did very well just squatting. He sat on his heels and leaned back against the feed trough, looking far away toward the woods beyond the field. Since he was not noticing, Tammy could look at him all she would, satisfying the hunger she had had for the sight of him. Why should he have this dear familiarity to her? Maybe it was because she had nursed and tended his body, had watched his strength return after weakness, helped him take his first steps. He was her child to whom she had given life.

  Her eyes dwelt on the firm, bony line of his jaw, the shape of his head, the way his hair grew on his forehead. She thought she would never get tired of seeing Pete’s face, not even if it grew old and lined, his mouth sunk in with the loss of his teeth, his hair white, or gone, maybe, like Grandpa’s.

  Pete turned to her now. “Did you have any trouble finding the way here, Tammy?”

  Then she told him, first about how the men came for Grandpa, how Nan followed and then how long and wearisome was the way. “I didn’t have the least notion you lived in such a place as this, Pete. It made me afeard to come right in, amidst all those people, too. I felt strange to them and to the steps and the glass in the windows and the doorknob on the door and everything. That’s how-come I just sat down and leaned against the post and went to sleep.”