The Painted Table(18)

Saffee skirts around the cartons, lightly touches Joann’s arm, and looks inquiringly into the drawn face and red eyes. Joann has two modes; Saffee dislikes them both. The first is hurry and scurry—washing, straightening, folding, peeling, stitching as if prodded and timed. Now Joann occupies her other mode, marked by an unwavering stare into some middle distance. When there, is she in a silent, vacant universe, or a cacophony more frenzied and peopled than the first? No one knows; she goes there unaccompanied.

“Mommy . . . Mommy, why are you so sad?”

Joann sinks into a chair. Her whispered words drift without direction. “We were under that table . . . hoping to stay alive.”

Saffee doesn’t ask what she means.

Suddenly, Joann tips her head back and gives a loud, hooting laugh. Her young daughter senses its inappropriateness and draws back, startled.

“They say . . .” Joann’s eyes are again fixed, her voice low, but the words tumble fast. “. . . there were curses spoken around this table. They say Pa stood cursing”—she spits out the word—“cursing over each girl as Mother, lying in their bed, gave birth to one girl after another. He said he needed farmworkers, not seven girls!”

Saffee doesn’t move.

Suddenly, Joann rises and shakes her upper body as if to cast off something distasteful, something that clings.

“I don’t think I packed all the towels from the upstairs bathroom cupboard,” she says. “I’ll go see.”

She disappears up the stairway and calls over her shoulder, “Saffee, look around for another empty box and bring it up.”

Later, emotionally exhausted by the events of the day, Joann goes to bed early. In her midnight dream . . .

She rushes to her place of refuge, her head and shoulder bump and scrape against a table leg. She cries out in pain. Her mother is there, with her, under the table, soothing her, cooing. Above, Maxine yells, “You clumsy girl! What are you trying to do? Knock over the kerosene lamp? Burn down the house? It’s all your fault, Joann! It’s your fault!” Flames encroach. She is in her mother’s arms . . .





CHAPTER ELEVEN



REMODELED





Joann’s spirits lift once the family completes their move to Miller’s Ford and Nels is out of town only two nights a week. For the first time in her life she becomes slightly acquainted with a few neighbors, and she and the carriers, Saffee and April, walk uptown once a week to buy groceries. Each trip is an occasion that requires special attire and grooming for all three. The family joins the First Methodist Church, demanding more attention to appearance, never forgetting white gloves.

Most important, in Nels’s opinion, is that Joann has something to do that she thoroughly enjoys—remodel the old house. Her mood sobers noticeably, however, the day Nels assembles the Norway table, as they have come to call it.

“Your grandfather was a real craftsman,” Nels remarks as he fits the puzzle-like pieces together without nails or glue.

Joann’s appraisal is different. “It’s ugly,” she says. “I’ll need to cover it.”

Ignoring the remark, Nels places four of six chairs around it. They are old chairs of traditional style he bought at a yard sale. Joann looks at them with disinterest. In contrast to the table, anyone who knows furniture would say that the chairs have no “presence.” Nels planned to put two of them in the basement, but when it is obvious, even to him, that four look lost around such a large table, he adds the others. Now that Joann seems to have come alive again, perhaps they might even have guests.




“Mom? What are you making?” Joann holds up white sheeting that she has sewn together into sections.

“It’s a playhouse,” she tells Saffee, pointing to the doorway and two green-shuttered windows. Each window has a cross of framing in the center to create four “panes.” A row of tulips has begun to “grow” along the bottom edge.

“Oh! Mom!” Saffee dashes back to the bedroom. “April! Wake up! You won’t believe what Mommy made us!”

Yesterday April had cajoled Joann into a short game of hide-and-seek. April hid under the Norway table. “You can’t find me, Mommy! You can’t see me!”

Of course Joann did see April, and remembered another girl. A girl with her own face, looking out from behind a barricade of heavy benches. She, too, was hiding and, like April, others knew she was there, but she wasn’t playing.

“Whatcha doin’ under there, Joann? Think I can’t see you? You’re crazy, Joann, crazy.”

She thinks about nights in her childhood, under the same table, when she had sensed a light touch on her arm, or her hair, sometimes her legs. She would jerk to wakefulness, hear a scuttling away in the dark, and the creak of the ladder to the brothers’ loft. Or did she dream it?