it costs him half his plantation.” Furman spit over the railing. “Boy, howdy, are you a lucky shit.”
“Yeah, well,” Billy Dean said. “Everything’s got its price.”
Furman put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. She ain’t that ugly. Anyway, you and Hertha’s young’uns probably take after our side of the family. Brister blood always wins out when it comes to looks.”
“Seems to,” Billy Dean said under his breath, staring down the road.
Chapter Four
THE WAY OF THE MULE
That morning up in Delphi, Hazel eased a plate down in front of Floyd. She took a step back.
Her husband stared silent and unblinking at his fried eggs, goopy with the uncooked whites shimmering in the morning light, the bacon in ashes, and the toast soggy with butter in the center and burnt black around the edges.
“You don’t have to eat it,” Hazel offered. “I’ll bury it in the backyard with last night’s supper.”
“No, honey,” he stammered, “there might be something here I can—”
“Just let me fix you anothern.” What she didn’t say was this was already her second halfhearted attempt this morning. The first had made her own stomach queasy, which was happening almost every time she cooked now.
Floyd managed a weak smile and pushed the plate away. “Don’t worry about it, sugar. Slept too late. I’m in a hurry.”
Her face clouded up. “On a Saturday? I thought you was going to take me driving today.” Hazel lived all week for their drives, just the two of them. She wouldn’t say so, but it took her back to those hope-filled days of catching rides with the route men.
“Can’t. Big customer out in the Delta.” He looked at her hopefully. “Maybe you can have something fixed for me by suppertime.”
She squeezed out a smile, yet inside Hazel bridled at the suggestion. Not that she would ever say it, but she couldn’t bear another minute in front of that stove. It was like somebody trying to hitch her up to a mule on plowing day. If she got good at it, she might never break out of her harness. She knew she should be ashamed of herself for thinking such thoughts. Floyd had saved her from all that.
Her husband casually turned away from her and cast his gaze out the window, staring off into space again. Look at him, she thought. Already he was a million miles away from this kitchen and his bumbling housewife. Maybe he thought her ineptness cute, proud of being able to afford a wife who couldn’t keep a house.
“Floyd? Sure I can’t fix you something?” she asked him. “Maybe some Cheerios or. . .Floyd!”
He beamed a surprised smile and rose up from the table to give Hazel a hug. “You sure are pretty. Takes my hunger for food clean away.”
She sighed in his arms. Exactly what she thought he would say. She remembered that day back in the hills when Hazel had asked her mother about “pretty.” “Forget about pretty,” she had told her daughter flatly. “Pretty can’t keep a husband. ’Cause pretty can’t cook and pretty can’t clean and pretty can’t raise children. And, girl, the biggest thing pretty can’t do is last.”
“Floyd, what kind of wife am I to send you off to work without a decent breakfast?” she said, waiting for him to ease her guilt a bit more.
“It don’t matter,” he assured her. “I love you anyway.”
She knew he would say that, too. There had been a lot of those “anyways” lately. Like when she got up the courage to use the washing machine and then cracked most of his buttons feeding his shirts through the wringer. As he held her, she asked, “Floyd, how many ‘anyways’ reckon you got left in you?”
“As many as the stars you got left in your eyes.”
With all her heart she wanted to believe him, that he loved her no matter what and that his love would be enough to get them through a lifetime of bad cooking. But it still left her wondering, what did he want from her?
Floyd must have been reading her mind. “We living in modern times. It’s nearly 1950 and you ain’t some farm wife who works herself into an ugly, wore-out nubbin of a woman. Anyhow, you don’t see any other white women around here doing for themselves. Just study on how to keep yourself the pretty and pampered wife of Delphi’s next rich man.”
“We going to be rich?” Hazel asked, again knowing what he would say next, word for word.
“If you can see it, you can be it,” Floyd said, reciting his favorite verse from the book of success sayings he kept by his side of the bed. “The way things are going, won’t be long before I can get you some regular colored help. It’s about time we took a step up.”
She smiled sadly. “Floyd, you stepping so high now, I get a nosebleed looking up at you.”
“Well, get used to it,” he said with a grin. “You know where I’m off to this morning?”
“Where to?” she asked. “Where you going without me?”
“To talk face-to-face with one of the biggest men in the Delta. You heard me tell about him. They call him the Senator. He asked me to come by this morning personal to look over his place. To get the lay of the land, so to speak.”
“That’s real nice, Floyd.” Her voice was resigned.
“He’s a real old-time planter. Lives down in the Delta amongst his tenants and the skeeters. Got him a mansion they call the Columns. Everybody swore he would be the last to buy mechanical cotton pickers to replace his hands with. Why, the first time I called on him he told me I was wasting my breath and his time. Remember what I told you I said to turn him around?”
“It’s just that if you and me could spend some time—”
“What got him was when I told him, ‘Senator, do you want to spend your time studying the mysterious habits of niggers, or do you want to make money?’ ” Floyd shook his head at himself for saying such a thing. “Then I told him, ‘Are you a planter or a dad-blamed anthropologist?’ You should have heard him laughing at that one.”
Again Hazel smiled weakly, ashamed to ask him what an anthropologist was, even though this was the third time she had heard the story. “Floyd, it’s only that I’ve been feeling—”
“You just wait,” he said. “If he sticks with me he’ll go from messing with six hundred niggers to only a handful of drivers. After the Senator buys in, everybody will get on board.”
Hazel noticed a sudden pang of sympathy for the displaced. Was her husband becoming that important, where he could get rid of a whole world of coloreds because they had outlived their usefulness? And the little circus girl all dressed in white? Would she be gone as well, before Hazel could figure out her riddle?
“Where they all going to go to?”
“Who?” Floyd asked.
“The niggers. You know, if nobody
