Brittle Innings

21

In Tenkiller, mama’d practically had to drive a steam shovel into my bedroom in the mornings to chase me out of bed and off to school. In Highbridge, though, I loved the morning, especially the early morning. I got up before Darius prowled through calling, “Rise and shine!” I woke to some strange internal chime, and I moved. Maybe I just wanted to scrub my face and pull on my clothes without Jumbo’s spooky yellow eyes tracking the whole business. Maybe I just wanted to escape the killer summer heat in the brief moments before the milk wagons clattered.

Anyway, on the Tuesday morning of our road trip to Opelika, I crept downstairs and smelled bacon frying, biscuits baking, oranges set out to be halved and squoze. Kizzy’d taken over the kitchen already. With her spoons, whisks, and wood-stoked ovens, she was scraping the last fresh edge off the morning. A small price to pay-the mean-as-a-rattler heat would stick its fangs into us by ten or eleven anyway. I sat on a stool next to Kizzy’s biscuit-making counter and claimed dibs on the first biscuit out.

“Don’t jes set, Mister Danny.” Kizzy mopped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Miss Giselle comes, you gon find yosef to work mighty quick.”

Phaugh. Kizzy liked me. Over the past weeks, we’d become good buddies. I helped her mornings, even before Darius came in from the carriage house or Miss Giselle from the bungalow. My dummyhood may’ve played a part in our friendship too. Kizzy used me as a tattletale-safe soundingboard. I didn’t echo. I absorbed.

With one flour-dusted oven mitt and a knotty black forearm, Kizzy fetched her first biscuit tray out and banged it down. “Go on. Burn yo greedy fingers gifting it.” I obeyed, right down to getting burned, but juggling that first biscuit made me happy. The sky hadn’t even begun to redden, and I had me an edible treasure.

“Eat it fast n do the jooz, or Miss Giselle’s gon have yo haid. Mine too.” Kizzy bustled in her easy way.

I broke the biscuit into crumbly halves and dawdled over it as long as I could, chewing and chewing.

“You think Miss Giselle’s a hard woman with a tart tongue. She do sometimes seem hard, but the mens in this house-even Darius, who can fill her with vinegar jes by walking by-they done become her chirren. She’s like that nussry-rhyme woman and her shoe. Don’t know what to do, cep feed em n boss em, to show how happy she is she got em.”

Happy, I thought. Miss Giselle happy? She didn’t much act it. She acted like Mister JayMac’d gone off to the employment bureau and invited a dozen hungry people to come home with him as guests.

“Got no womb chirren,” Kizzy said. “Not having none, being ever bairnless, it put her bitter. It slapt her ever-other-day mean. Under that burden, you need to know how happy she is for a houseful of ballplayers.”

While Kizzy talked, I halved the oranges and ground them on the fluted glass dunce cap of the juicer.

“When Miss Giselle looks yall dagger eyes and snaps her beak like a swamp tuttle,” Kizzy said, “it aint so much yall she’s mad at. It’s things, things in genl. And it don’t hep Mister JayMac don’t brim with husbandly loving-kindness like he should. It don’t hep none he sometimes-”

The outer porch door banged, and Kizzy cut off her spiel like a butcher chopping the end off a butt roast. A good thing. Miss Giselle herself swept in, her face on, her hair just so. A looker in spite of crow’s feet, a rumpled cotton dress, her beat-up work shoes.

“Kizzy, you got any people in Detroit?”

“Mawning, ma’am,” Kizzy said. “How you feeling today?”

“You had some kin who took off north once. Where did they eventually settle, Kizzy? Detroit?”

“ Chicago, ma’am. Some in Philadelphia.”

“The coloreds in Detroit have all gone crazy. Radio says it’s chaos there. A riot. Buildings and automobiles afire.”

“Mercy, but they aint any Lorrowses doing it,” Kizzy said, “less it’s a bunch I never met up with.”

“You’d think this war would be enough mayhem for anyone,” Miss Giselle said. “You wouldn’t imagine people would go out of their way to add to it with riots in their own cities. How would you feel if a policeman told you your own child was dead as a result? It must be terrible, learning a son in uniform has lost his life. How much worse to discover the bloodshed has occurred on American streets, at the hands of people with whom your child had no quarrel.”

“Folks bout everwhere prone to quarrel,” Kizzy said.

Miss Giselle cast an eye on Kizzy. “As you are prone to quarrel with me!”

“ Nome. Breakfuss aint done yet.”

“Tell me why your people’ve gone crazy this way. A few days ago it was Beaumont, Texas. Now it’s Detroit. Where’ll it be tomorrow? Have yall decided to work for Hitler and the Japanese on the inside!”

“Ma’am, it aint my people,” Kizzy said. “Par’s I know, never been no insanity atall in us Lorrowses.”

Miss Giselle paced between the sink cabinets and the long center counter. “Do you like working here, Kizzy?”

“I didn’t, I’d be gone. I got me my options.”

“Have you ever heard of the Eleanor Clubs? Do you know what they are? Do you belong to one? Do you intend to join one?” Miss Giselle grabbed a halved orange and ran her tongue around its inner peel. “I won’t fire you if you do. Or taint your references. But I regard the Eleanor Clubs as a treason on a par with the chaos taking place in Detroit.”

“When I got time to blong to a club?” Kizzy said. “Full Gospel Holdiness Church bout my only one.”

“You’ve never heard of the Eleanor Clubs?”

“Eleanor?” Kizzy said. “Mrs Roosevelt?”

“She may be the First Lady, but the rebellion she foments among poor women of color deluded into thinking they’re preyed upon by their bosses-well, that borders on apostasy.”

“Yessum,” Kizzy said.

“Do I prey upon you, Kizzy?” Miss Giselle said. “Do I exploit you any worse than the great and wonderful Mr Jordan McKissic does Yours Truly, his wife and galley slave?”

“I don’t blong to no Eleanor Club, Miss Giselle. I don’t even like clubs. Most of em’s got dues.”

“Or committees,” Miss Giselle said. She stopped pacing. She perched herself on the stool where I’d eaten Kizzy’s first biscuit of the morning. “So Mrs Dittrich’s girl Janet didn’t leave her at the urging of a local unit of the Eleanors?”

“Ma’am, Janet’s done gone to work fo Fomost Foge fo twelve dollahs a week. Missus Dittrich guv her three.”

“Is everything in our life money? Money or sex? What’s become of loyalty? devotion? faithfulness? I’d like to know.”

“Don’t know,” Kizzy said, “but peoples tell me it’s a free country and trains run both ways.”

You’d’ve thought Miss Giselle might have bristled at that-a remark so uppity-but she laughed. She got down from the stool, tied on a smudged gingham apron, and pitched in with the breakfast preparations. In the dining room, I laid the table. As I did, I could hear her and Kizzy babbling away, more like sisters than a hoity-toity employer and her downtrodden cook.

I was back in the kitchen when Darius straggled in from his apartment over the bus barn. He had an alarm clock out there, an old metal bonger that rattled him awake at six or so. But alarm clocks’d grown scarce by mid 1943, so many folks junked them during scrap drives and so few companies still made them. Which was why Darius had become a roving human alarm clock for McKissic House’s boarders.

“Rise and shine,” he mumbled, entering from the porch. “Flash them brushed-up ivories, folks.” Sleepy banter, but a kind of tucked-under grumbling too.

Miss Giselle’d treated Darius pretty well since we’d been back in Highbridge, but she turned on him now faster than a rabid birddog. “I’ll have no more of your rackety wake-ups around here,” she said. “I mean it, Darius. I’m sick of the noise and your idiot cheeriness.”

“I never meant em to be lullabyes.”

“Don’t do it anymore.”

Darius pulled in his chin. “Wake the boarders up?”

“Go shouting through the house like a fishmonger. I hate it. I wholeheartedly despise it.”

“How’d you like me to git everbody up?”

“Walk up the stairs. Knock on each door. Announce in a low and civil tone that it’s nearly time to eat. Understand?”

“Yessum. Simple directions in simple English. That’ll do it fo me awmost ever time.”

“Leave those biscuits alone!” Miss Giselle snapped. “And never mind your piddling little ritual this morning. Mr Boles here will do it for you today.”

“He can knock, ma’am, but he cain’t talk. I’d be pleased to truck upstairs with him to hep.”

“Then you’ll be damned before you’re pleased, Darius. I want you out of this house until Kizzy calls you back to eat. For now, Mr Boles must do the best he can with his knuckles and his youthful imagination. Out, please.”

Darius left, head up. Kizzy kept mum.

The use I put my imagination to was climbing to the third floor and waking Jumbo first. I scribbled him a note about what Miss Giselle wanted me to do, and he lumbered from room to room with me. I’d knock, and he’d say, “Breakfast. Rise and shine. Don’t compel us to come in after you.” No one stayed too long in bed after hearing him say that.

At breakfast itself, Mister JayMac put in an appearance. A show of solidarity with his players before a big road trip to Opelika and LaGrange. He didn’t sit at the head or foot of the table-Muscles and Jumbo had those spots-but squoze in between Vito Mariani and me like any other journeyman ’Bender.

Funny thing, though-Miss Giselle did him the V.I.P. honor of bringing him his own humongous platter, with three cigarlike sausages, a steaming dipper scoop of cheese grits, and a puffy cream-colored omelet, like the sort of pale-yellow cravat you’d rent from a tuxedo shop. At first I thought, Well, I guess a guy can take this I’m-just-a-regular-Joe stuff too far. Except Mister JayMac scowled when his wife put the platter in front of him, like he figured she meant to make him look bad-uppish and scornful-with such showboaty favoritism.

“What’d you put in this highfalutin aigg?” he asked before Miss Giselle could get back to the kitchen.

“Ham, diced bell pepper, tomato, onions, a dash of tabasco sauce.” Miss Giselle cocked her head. “Why?”

“The green’s bell peppers?”

“It is. Did you think I’d chopped the bitterest dandelion stems I could find into it?”

“ Nome, not really. Thing is, Darius don’t much care for bell peppers, honey.”

Miss Giselle crossed her arms. “But I made that for you, Jay.”

“Well, who ast you to? I eat what the boys eat, you know that. So take this masterpiece omelet to Darius. He can eat around the pesky damned peppers.”

Darius took breakfast at a junk counter on the screened-in porch-out of the kitchen, out of the dining room, out of the way. He was out there now, finishing up.

“He won’t want it,” Miss Giselle said. “He’s already eaten enough for three normal men.”

“Take it to him anyway. Let him decide. I can’t abide special treatment.”

“Well, I won’t take it to him, Jay, for I can’t abide abuse or humiliation. And I won’t abide them.”

For the next few seconds, all anyone could hear was forks scraping china and Muscles glugging back his juice.

“This food can’t go to waste,” Mister JayMac finally said. “Take it to Darius.”

Miss Giselle closed her eyes, hugged herself, and swayed, like a grieving mama at a funeral. Her posture-and her sudden silence-gave everybody an even bigger discomfort than her and Mister JayMac’s arguing had. So I pushed back my chair, picked up the ritzy breakfast, and headed for the kitchen with it-my stab at doing my blessed best as a peacemaker.

Behind me, I heard Jumbo say, “I’ll walk Miss Giselle back to your house, sir.”

“You do that,” Mister JayMac said.

On the screened porch, I set Mister JayMac’s breakfast in front of Darius, who’d already eaten several biscuits and a couple of fried sunny-side-uppers. He gave me a wary sidelong look, but pulled the plate to him and dug in. Just then, Jumbo ducked into view with Miss Giselle on his arm and Miss Giselle in some sort of glassy-eyed trance.

“An apt diversion,” Jumbo told me. “You cerebrate as well off the field as on.” He helped Miss Giselle down the rickety porch steps and through the dewy victory garden to the bungalow out back. They made an odd pair, those two. Of course, Jumbo and anybody made a freakish twosome.

I slouched back to the dining room.