no stopping us, Hazel. We done put the mule behind us for good.” He playfully patted her on the rear on his way to the door.
“Nope. You right about that,” she said, taking the frying pan to the sink to scrub. “Not a mule in sight nowhere.”
Floyd pushed open the screen and turned to say good-bye, then stood there for a long moment, staring at Hazel with a curious look on his face.
“What?” she yelped, afraid she had gone ugly in his eyes.
He rushed back to Hazel and laid the flat of his hand on her stomach. “If I’m not wrong, looks like you might better go see the doctor.”
Hazel’s heart sank. “You want me to go to the doctor ’cause I’m getting fat?”
He only grinned bigger.
Hazel thought for a moment and then her face burned. “You think I’m going to have a baby! That’s what you’re saying! Ain’t it?”
He gave her a few seconds and then asked carefully, “Well, what do you think, honey? You the one it’s happening to.”
She should have known. Her sister Onareen told her the only way not to get pregnant was to do it standing up, and she sure wasn’t going to suggest that to Floyd.
Hazel sat down, all of a sudden feeling woozy. Oh, Lord, she thought, the only thing worse than being pregnant would be Floyd knowing about it before me. “No, I can’t be preg—you got to be wrong about it.”
Floyd knelt down by Hazel and slipped his arm around her, placing his hand on her belly again. As if knowing her thoughts, he said, “Don’t worry. You gonna be a good mother. Remember that little saying I taught you, ‘If you can see it, you can be it.’ ”
Her smile was pained. Well, that was just it, Hazel was thinking, I can’t see it. How was a “good mother” supposed to look? Back in the hills where Hazel came from, there wasn’t talk about good ones or bad ones—only live ones and dead ones, sturdy ones and sickly ones, fertile ones and ones who had dried up early. Yet now with this good–bad difference, she was convinced she would end up being a naturally bad one. Another thing Floyd would have to love her anyway for.
She looked into his face. Floyd gazed at her with so much faith and hope, it made her heart ache. “I’m scared, Floyd. I don’t know how to care for a baby. I seen it done, but I ain’t never done it myself.”
“Oh, that ain’t no problem. We can ask some of the women from church to help. Maybe your sister Onareen can come stay.”
“Get Momma,” Hazel whimpered, for the first time in years finding a kind of comfort in that particular word. She couldn’t help saying it again. “Momma. I want my momma.” Hazel needed somebody who knew her, somebody who wouldn’t expect too much from her. Somebody who would be surprised at how far she had come.
“You sure? You know she don’t take to me since I stole you from the hills.”
“No, I want to show her how wrong she was about hoping. I want her to see how good you done. How good you been to me.”
Floyd blushed. “Well, then,” he said with a snappy nod of his head, “I’ll go fetch her when the time comes.”
She raised her eyes and looked into Floyd’s face again. He was so confident. The sense of dread returned.
Why should that be? she wondered. Why should her husband’s rock-hard certainty scare her so, making her feel so small and lost? What had happened to her own feelings of hope?
Hazel remembered the day Floyd had come home and found her crying, sitting by the new oven she was sure she had broken. Growing up, the only cookstoves she had ever seen burned wood. Floyd simply struck a match and lit it back up. And she knew it wasn’t just the oven. Somehow, it was as if the rush of Floyd’s success had blown out her own little pilot light.
Chapter Five
SNOWFLAKE BABY
Later in the day, Vida’s baby boy played on the parlor rug with his collection of wooden spools as she and her father, sitting on opposite sides of the room, worked hard to avoid each other’s eyes. Vida, on the sofa, stared down at the satin bows on the toes of her baby-doll shoes, and her father, in his armchair, studied his light-skinned grandson as the child stacked one spool on top of another, toppled them over, and began again.
They often found themselves embarrassed in each other’s presence, but it had not always been this way between them.
After his wife died birthing Willie, Levi had doted on Vida. He called Vida his Snowflake Baby. Not because her last name was Snow, which it was. And not because her skin was white, which it wasn’t. Vida had the same coffee-with-cream complexion as her father. Vida became his Snowflake Baby because he always dressed her in white.
For her eleventh birthday, Levi even sent to Memphis for a parasol of white satin, which he said would keep his Snowflake Baby from melting in the Delta sun. The day it arrived, Vida had excitedly snatched the package from the mail rider and torn away the brown paper wrapping. She twirled the pretty parasol over her head in the bright noonday sun. Her father had laughed with delight and proclaimed, “Now my Snowflake Baby can carry shade everwhere she goes.” He raised her up in his strong arms. “No sir! Nothing never going to hurt my Snowflake Baby.” Levi proudly pranced Vida around the yard, twirling her in half circles, while she giggled.
And then there were the music lessons. Vida was the only colored girl in all of Hopalachie County able to take piano. Her father had personally gone to Miss Josephine Folks, the white lady music teacher, and arranged it. That’s how important her father was. He could get things other colored people couldn’t even think about. Of course, Miss Josephine charged Levi a dollar a lesson, twice as much as her white students, and she insisted that Vida come only after last dark. That didn’t spoil it for Vida. She enthusiastically memorized choruses straight from the Broadman Hymnal to serenade her father when he picked her up in the Buick.
Except for one night when he didn’t. Her father was conferencing late with his deacons, and Vida had to walk the two miles to her house, alone in the dark. Yet she wasn’t scared. Vida had walked the road hundreds of times with Willie.
Mr. Bobber’s general store sat midway between Miss Josephine’s and Vida’s house, and when she passed, she saw the lights were still on. She had often gone inside the store by herself, but her father had solemnly warned her to never venture in there after dark, refusing to say more. Tonight she put the warning aside. With a robust Baptist refrain coursing through her blood, Vida marched right in to get herself an Orange Crush.
The screen door slapped behind her, and the music fled from Vida’s head. The light was dim, and smoke floated thick and eerie. From the back of the store came the sounds of laughter, yet not the free and easy laughter of daytime. This was hard and coarse.
Even the odors were different. No longer the clean bright scents of hoop cheese and mule feed and honey-cured hams and yard goods. The night smells were stale and rancid and clotted at the back of her throat when she tried to swallow.
Leaning with one arm against the counter, holding himself at a tipsy angle, stood the young white man, his dark eyes swimming drunkenly in pools shot with red. He smiled. It wasn’t at her. His sideways grin was meant for the squat man behind
