when she was ready to surprise her family with the new, made-up Hazel. The reaction was swift. Her brothers called her Little Miss Sow’s Ear. Her sisters called her worse. Her father made her go wash her face in the horse trough. She might have given up out of pure humiliation if not for the dark, brooding look she caught on her mother’s face. That’s when Hazel knew she was onto something good.
It wasn’t long before Hazel discovered there were other types of men in the world besides farmers and sons of farmers. There were men with routes—men who drove automobiles from farm to farm, never getting their hands dirty on any of them, who looked you directly in the eyes and weren’t afraid to laugh at nothing at all. These were men who talked for the same reason other people sang, for the pure, simple sound of it. They looked at her with smiling eyes and told her she belonged in California. Or Jackson, maybe.
Hazel thought nothing of skipping school to make day trips into Tupelo with the Watkins Flavoring man and into Corinth with the Standard Coffee man and into Iuka with the man who had the rolling store. Hazel would catch a ride from any man with a route who was going her way.
They would drop her off and she would spend the day at the soda fountain counter studying the fashions and poses of those picture-perfect women in the movie magazines. Poring over the color photographs, enveloped by the smells emanating from the cosmetics displays, she felt more at home than she ever did on the farm. She spent so much time at the Rexall in Tupelo, the druggist took a shine to her and offered her a job. She right away took her own room in town, the first she didn’t have to share with five siblings.
From all the romance stories she had been reading in the movie magazines, Hazel gathered that finding the right man and living off true love was the key to everlasting happiness. Yet she was not foolish enough to believe that just any man would do. You needed someone special, a man you could lay your best hopes on, one who would love you enough to see you got everything you wanted, even before you knew you wanted it yourself. If you had to ask, it didn’t count. What worried Hazel the most was the impermanence of good feelings in general. From what she could tell, they tended to melt away as surely as ice cream in the bottom of a Dixie cup. Was love going to be the same way? The magazines didn’t tell her that. When she asked her mother, Baby said, “Feelings come and go like morning dew on a pasture. They ain’t anything to build a future on.”
Hazel frowned, yet her mother went on. “Hazelene, there ain’t but two kind of men in the world. Them that take care of their own, and them that don’t. Now, the first kind of man will stay on out of duty. The other?” Her mother flicked her wrist as if she were shooing a noisome insect. “Why, as soon as there’s a dry spell, the other kind has jumped the fence and is looking for fresh dew. If you know what I mean.”
Hazel hadn’t been partial to the dewy part, but she did like the piece about a man taking care of his own. That sure sounded right enough. Hazel took her mother’s advice to heart, never forgetting her words, using them to measure all comers.
And there was a host of them. Men dropped by the drugstore all the time, flirting and asking her out. Their hungry eyes and grinning, greedy mouths frightened her, and she remembered what her mother had said. Hazel could tell that all they had an appetite for was the dewy part.
But the minute Floyd walked into the store, she began hoping he was the one she’d been waiting for. She wondered, is this how true love shows itself? Can a complete stranger walk into your life on a fine Indian summer afternoon while you are stacking tubes of lipstick, and then, just like that—in the twinkle of a mirrored eye and the flash of a toothy smile—all your hoping suddenly pays off, and life is never the same? Is that the way it’s supposed to work? Can something that happens so quickly be counted on to last a lifetime?
Chapter Two
THE VIEW FROM DELPHI
They had been dating a few weeks and were seated in their usual booth at Donna’s Dairy Bar. Hazel could tell something was on his mind by the way Floyd attacked his butter pecan as if it were a chore to be got out of the way.
Then he took a deep breath. “Ain’t no reason to go on doing something just ’cause it was done before us,” he firmly asserted. “There’s plenty of other ways for a man to make a living than farming. Don’t you agree, Hazel?”
Hazel was taken aback, not at what he said. It was the way he said it, as if he had rehearsed the words beforehand in a mirror, and now he was acting out his little speech just for her. While she studied him curiously, he tilted his head to the side and smiled the way he did when he wanted her to answer a certain way. The idea that her response was so important caused Hazel’s heart to pound like the drum in the homecoming parade. She said, “You right about that, Floyd. Why, they’s many a man who get themselves a good route and never look back.”
When Floyd’s face lit up, Hazel knew she had said the right thing.
“Selling! You reading my mind. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” He leaned in over the table and let her in on his secret. “You see, I read a book while I was off in the Pacific.” His tone was reverential. “It was called There’s No Future in Looking Back: The Science of Controlled Thinking. Writ by a preacher who ciphered out a hidden code in the Bible. The ‘knock and ye shall receive’ part. He went on to make a fortune selling soap door-to-door.”
“I swan.”
“I’ll let you read it one day, but it all comes down to this. You are what you think. And your mind can be trained like any other muscle. Say your leg or your arm muscle.”
Floyd’s eyes were shining, and he was speaking with such authority Hazel felt chill bumps on her arms.
“Hazel, an untrained mind spends all its time looking back on things it can’t do nothing about. This preacher says if you keep your mind focused on what you want and think positive thoughts, you bound to get what you after. He says it’s right from the Savior’s own mouth. To cut the tail off the dog, it’s changed my life.”
“Already?”
He smiled shyly. “Met you, didn’t I?”
“Floyd.”
“Plus, the other day I got a letter from this ol’ boy that was on my ship at Pearl Harbor. He said he could get me a job selling these mechanical cotton pickers to the big Delta planters.”
“The Delta? I heard of that.”
“Sure. That’s where all the money is. Clear on the other side of the state from here. Cotton as high as a man and stretching as far as the eye can see. All being handpicked by a million niggers.”
“A million? I swan.”
“As soon as I get Daddy’s crop put in, I’m buying my bus passage to Delphi, all the way over in Hopalachie County. You never gonna catch me looking at the south end of a mule again.”
“Nothing I hate worse than seeing a man married to a mule.” Then she blushed, afraid she might have mentioned marriage too soon, even if it was in reference to a mule.
“Hazel, you and me think the same.” Floyd reached for her hand. “When I go on out to the Delta, would you wait for me—till I got some money saved up?”
He grinned, but he didn’t need to coax. Floyd’s plan was so big with hope, Hazel believed she could live off the anticipation for years. By the time he sent for her, maybe she would be ready to give
