The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 19

“ W here’s the milk?” Frances asked.

“Inside the cow. So why don’t you go out and milk her?” The pail was actually full, but I was afraid it would curdle in the roasting-hot kitchen so I’d set it in the old brick springhouse to cool. “She needs to be milked twice a day now to make sure she doesn’t go dry.”

“We’re almost out of sugar too,” Frances said. She pressed the sleeve of her nightgown to her forehead.

“And butter,” I said. I poked at the fire in the kitchen hearth, sweat dripping off my chin. With the electric lights had gone the icebox, the electric fans, the hot water, and the water pump, but the gas stove was by far the hardest. Cooking over the fireplace in August was a devil’s hell. By the time I’d made the first pot of coffee at six in the morning, I looked like I had a sunburn.

“Throw one of those Sears, Roebucks on,” I said. Nothing burned like a Sears, Roebuck. Frances checked the date on one, put it back in the pile, and found an older one, as if later today she might sit down and order something. She threw it on and the fire blazed, flames licking the bottom of the water kettle hanging on the old kettle hook in the chimney. Then she fanned the back door to pump fresh air into the kitchen. When I saw steam, I moved the boiling kettle to the brick hearth and set a tray of biscuits on the old iron grate I’d found in the barn.

Good Lord, how did people live like this? This was Wednesday. It’d only been three days. Footely was looking downright luxurious compared to this. Today, I’d be missing yet another train home.

This past Monday, after I’d helped Frances carry the Neilson’s boxes to town and said goodbye to the snow-white coat, the nicest thing I’d ever almost owned, I went to the powerhouse. I’d barely set the Tartts’ overdue bill on the counter with five dollars when the fellow started shaking his head. His shirt was tucked in tight; he had perfect comb marks running through his dark hair. I feared what we had here was a rule follower.

“Please, sir. We’ll pay the rest soon if you’ll just turn the electricity back on,” I begged. I fanned the five singles out so it’d look like more. This man had the power to make our lives livable, literally.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t be making exceptions for everybody comes in here.” He didn’t smile exactly, but he raised an eyebrow like he was about to tell me something educational. “It’s only a few lucky households like the Mr. Rory Tartts to even know lights in the home. Two percent in the state is what they’re saying.” And then he did smile, and I could almost smell the dislike he had for Rory Tartt. I think what he wasn’t saying outright was, Rory Tartt’s just like the other 98 percent now. And I do not feel sorry for him.

I told him he’d see me soon if he still had a job. Not productive, or nice, but satisfying for about fifteen seconds. When I offered the same five dollars to the man over at Cox Gas, he was much nicer and apologized to Mrs. Tartt but said it’d take at least a week for the truck to get out there with more fuel. Maybe it was just an excuse but at least he was kind about it.

Thank God Charlie was here to help. Every morning, we hauled buckets of water upstairs for everybody to pour in the toilets to force them to flush. It sort of worked. After Frances carried one, she’d mysteriously disappear. The kitchen sink ran all right, though there was only tepid water. There’d be no warm baths for a while. In ninety-five-degree heat, I doubted I’d miss them. Then it was a search for more firewood and kindling to cook the food. Luckily, the Tartts were rich in old catalogues, but the vat of kerosene for the lanterns was already looking pitifully low.

Three days it had been going on and. Every. Dang. Time Frances walked into a dark room, she still hit the button on the wall. Then she’d go limp, like the lights’d been cut off all over again.

“You people are terrible at being poor,” I said to nobody.

I didn’t know what we were waiting on, only that I didn’t have time to figure it out. Despite all our discomfort, I was worried Mrs. Tartt didn’t understand just how bad things were—which was my fault because I hadn’t told her the options yet. A few times, I found her staring out at the backyard for hours, surely daydreaming of better days. Then this morning, while I was watching the cornbread burn on the bottom so it’d cook in the dang center since you had to choose, Mrs. Tartt came into the kitchen with a brass picture frame.

“Charlie, here’s that photograph of the party I told you about,” she said. “That’s me in the long dress I showed you.” I could hear in her voice how hungry she was for the old days. “That man over by the orchestra pinched my bottom right before this photograph was taken. Good thing Henry didn’t see that.”

“He had good taste,” Charlie said, studying it. “Do you have more pictures? I’d really like to see how it changed over the years.”

“Well, I’m sure I do. Let me go look see.”

When Mrs. Tartt had left the kitchen, I mouthed Thank you to Charlie. I guess it was time to tell them the options.

After I’d finished making cornbread and had set it out to cool, I splashed water on my face in the kitchen sink, took a deep breath and called up the back stairs, “Frances, Mrs. Tartt, I need you to come down to the dining room.”

Frances came in first. “What is it? I’m fixing to take my curlers out.” Her head looked even smaller with the blue curlers squeezing her scalp.

I asked her to sit down.

When Mrs. Tartt padded in, she’d covered her hair with a pink scarf and fuzzy tufts escaped the edges. “Charlie and I were trying to figure out how to wind the grandfather clock,” she said.

I sat at the head of the table in Rory’s chair, with Mrs. Tartt on my right and Frances on my left. I scooted up to the edge of my chair and set the bank letter on the table.

“I better get my cheaters on to see,” Mrs. Tartt said.

I motioned her to stay. “Mrs. Tartt, do you remember when Mr. Allison said you were behind on your mortgage payments?”

She inhaled deeply and nodded, she remembered.

“I talked to somebody from the bank. You owe two thousand seven hundred fifty-four dollars and if it’s not paid by September 15, the bank is going to seize your house.”

“ My house?” She actually laughed. “Poppycock. Mr. Allison wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s true, Mrs. Tartt.”

She picked up the letter and stared at it as if it were in Chinese. “But … they can’t. A Tartt has lived in this house since it was built in 1847. Idlewilde’s older than Ammadelle.”

“Birdie, you’re scaring her,” Frances said. “You don’t know everything. Rory might’ve arranged something, or—”

“ Rory did this, Franny,” I said. “He left you with a mortgage and bills and now we don’t even know where he is . ”

Frances crossed her arms and stared me down. “Why do you get to decide everything? This isn’t even your house, you just take over everything and accuse Rory when he might be out there doing something—he might be selling everything to bring the money back to pay the …”

While she prattled on, I stared at the white bowl of purple figs Charlie’d picked from the tree in the yard. I could hear her in the kitchen, running the faucet. I chose the biggest, purplest fig, bit it in half, and examined the red capillaries inside. So human-looking, figs.

When Frances finally wound down, I said, “Mrs. Tartt, I know I’ve asked you this before, but is there any family or anybody that could help you out?”

She swallowed and shook her pink-scarfed head. “The closest family I’ve got is my widow sister Lulu in Jackson, and she asked us for money last Christmas. Course Rory said no, but I sent her some of my dividend anyway. And I’ve got cousins across hither and yon, but they don’t have anything either.” Her voice was rising, climbing a set of stairs. “What are you saying, Birdie, that we’ll end up like the Percys?” Her eyes widened; an alarm was going off in her head. “Sheriff Porter had to remove them from their own home!”

“It’s alright, Mrs. Tartt. You still have options. You have two, in fact.”

She waited, listening, mouth open. Frances still had her arms crossed at me.

“If you could find somebody to buy your house at a fair price—”

Mrs. Tartt sucked in a breath. “I am not selling my home,” she said.

“Mrs. Tartt, please think it through. What do you plan to live on? We can’t even pay the light bill, you need your medicine. Even if we can get more time, that mortgage is not going away.”

She watched me carefully. “What’s my other option? You said there were two.”

“You could try and sell everything in the house and hope it’s enough to cover the mortgage, but you’d still need something to live on.”

“You mean sell … the furniture ?” Frances looked down at the table. Finally she seemed afraid. It seemed cruel that this came as a relief. “The table and chairs we’re sitting on?”

“Well, of course it’d bring enough, it’d be more than enough, but—” Mrs. Tartt pulled her lips back in a grimace. “Are those really my only choices?”

This was over my head. I didn’t know for sure. I only knew what Jack had said, what this piece of paper said, what the lawyer in Jackson had told her over the telephone. “You’re lucky you still have this house to sell, Mrs. Tartt.”

“Mr. Allison and the lawyer said the same thing, that I ought to sell the house.” She shook her head, rolling things over in her mouth. “But I’m not doing it, I won’t. This is where my family has lived and died. I’d rather sell my things.” She nodded at herself. “I can find a few things to pick out.”

“I think you should do it soon. Very soon. On September 15, if most of the mortgage isn’t paid, they’re not just gonna take the house, they’re gonna take everything in it too.”

“ Oh my God, ” Frances said.

But Mrs. Tartt stood up. “It’s alright, Frances.” She set a hand on the table to steady herself. “I’ll make some calls.”

The day had started out so civilized. When it was over, I wondered how it all had happened so fast. Just the day before, as we prepared for Mr. Fauster’s visit, Mrs. Tartt had listed all the reasons why she couldn’t possibly part with this or that. “These little nesting tables were made from a cypress tree in my mother’s yard.” “Henry bought me this carousel menagerie in Paris on our wedding anniversary.” I’d urged her to pick out a few more, and then a few more, “just to be safe.” In all, she’d selected about forty pieces, which she’d said were bound to bring three thousand dollars, maybe even closer to four. At ten o’clock Thursday morning, Mrs. Tartt opened the door. She’d dressed herself in crisp blue seersucker, her pearls, and sensible white shoes, ready for a perky game of tennis court.

“What a beautiful and special home you have here, ma’am,” Mr. Fauster said, his hat pressed to his chest. He was a short, fat, middle-aged man with a wide smile. He’d brought a truck, and some colored men waited outside. He complimented the dentil molding and high ceilings, the wide oak floors. The entire house smelled like lemon oil. Frances had swept and mopped while I’d polished and Charlie’d cut the grass. When Mrs. Tartt had called for the appointment, she’d told him she was just doing some “redecorating.” As she showed him the pieces for sale, he listened patiently to the dull stories she had about each one.

For three dozen large pieces of furniture, four paintings, a mirror, two Persian rugs, and a set of Italian marble figurines, he said, “Give you two hundred dollars for the lot.”

“What?” Mrs. Tartt nearly fainted. So did I.

Smiling but not so nicely now, Mr. Fauster said, “Times’ve changed, ladies, case you hadn’t noticed.”

The next few passes of the house were like pulling teeth. “But this clock carries perfect time!” “But Roosevelt loved this chair!” By one o’clock, we were only at six hundred dollars. I whispered that this was not the time to be sentimental about who had sat on something. Things started to go faster—the pair of huge mirrors, carpets in the library, the tête-à-tête, tables, lamps, marble busts, paintings, sideboards, the gun cabinet empty of its guns—and we were only at eleven hundred dollars. She pulled the trigger on the grandfather clock, the guest bedroom set, everything worth anything in the library.

I couldn’t really remember the rest except as bursts of panic and numbers, hurrying to empty cabinets and drawers before the moving men simply dumped them out on the floor. “Fourteen hundred fifty”—tallboys, wardrobes, tester beds, chests of drawers. “Seventeen hundred”—their dressing tables while I swept powders and perfumes into a box, the dining room set, the chairs, what was left of the silver closet and china and crystal; Mrs. Tartt’s strand of pearls and the earrings she’d worn shopping on the last day she’d been rich. Dust swirled everywhere and I sneezed over and over. The front yard looked like a rummage sale. Mr. Fauster sent for three more trucks.

By four o’clock, Mrs. Tartt looked eighty if she looked a day. Her smart seersucker dress had a long black smear on it as if she’d been walked over. A rug was literally slid out from under her feet. The floors were filthy under the carpets. Mr. Fauster had no interest in the wired lights or the washer wringer or the stove or the electric icebox or the old gas one in the cellar.

“You’ll hold our things for us, won’t you?” Mrs. Tartt’d asked. “So we can buy them back when we’re on our feet?”

He’d smiled as he lied. “Of course.”

“He is a crook,” Charlie said to me and fixed him a glass of water, spitting in it first, and waited to watch him drink it all down at once.

I took Mrs. Tartt into the empty parlor. “We’re still two hundred twenty-five short.”

“What is there even left to …” She’d looked at her swollen pink hand. “Oh my … alright. Let me sit down.” But there was nowhere to sit. “I can do it—it’s just, it’s stuck.”

Charlie brought her some Crisco, and I went to find Frances. When I told her what Mrs. Tartt was doing, she covered her left hand to protect it from me. “But Rory gave me …” Her eyes filled with tears, and I watched her heart shatter into pieces. In only a week and a half, she’d lost her husband, her things, her comfortable life. “I’m so sorry, Franny.”

“Do I have to? Think how bad it’ll look when people see me not wearing it!”

I hugged her tight and whispered in her ear, “But think how much worse it’d look if you kept it and Mrs. Tartt gave up hers.”

She cried and nodded. She wasn’t about to let people think she was less a victim than Mrs. Tartt was.

“If people ever find out about this, I swear I’ll shoot myself,” Frances said.

“Well, good luck,” I said. “Rory took all the guns.”

“Then I’ll just slit my wrists,” she said.

“Please do it outside so you don’t bloody up the last sofa.”

When the ring was off, I hugged her again. She felt thin and empty.

“Now, Birdie, I want you to make sure Pic and Polly get their pay out of this money,” Mrs. Tartt said. “They need their pay, you hear me?”

We were still a little over two hundred dollars short at the end of the day but I promised her I’d pay them.

When the trucks rolled off, but for our mattresses, the kitchen table and chairs, a portrait of Henry Tartt, and the odd piece here and there, the old suitcase of a house stood empty. Mrs. Tartt looked shattered.

At dusk, Charlie came into the kitchen and washed her hands while I smothered the fire. She lit two of the red lanterns. The light was almost gone outside; we were down to just a heavy blue haze. “I got the parlor pretty cleaned up and moved what I could in there,” she said. We’d asked the men to move an old faded red sofa down from the attic into the parlor. It sat but it was lumpy.

While I cooked supper, Charlie set the kitchen table with Picador’s tin utensils and some blue-and-white china, pretty but chipped and cheap.

“Why we eating in—” Frances stopped in the doorway and shook her head as if to clear it out. She was exhausted, we were all exhausted. “That smells good, I’m starving.”

“Thank you and I agree.” I’d skillet-fried okra and green tomatoes in cornmeal along with the meaty side of the salt pork and boiled fresh butter beans for something that wouldn’t give us all the diabetes. I was finally getting the hang of cooking over the fire.

Mrs. Tartt, in her white nightgown, was arranging a jelly jar of blue salvia Charlie’d cut from the yard.

“Supper’s ready, let’s eat,” I said and served the blue-and-white plates from the hearth, passing them back to Charlie. At the fourth plate, she hesitated; it was hard to believe she hadn’t yet eaten with us at the table.

Mrs. Tartt said, “Sit down, everyone .” She nodded to Charlie. “I’ll say the blessing.” The four of us bowed our heads. “Heavenly Father, please bless this food to our use and us to thy service. Thank you that I still have my house. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.”

Amen. As we said it, a cool breeze slipped through the screen door, the likes of which we hadn’t felt in months.

“First thing tomorrow, I am going to the bank to get us more time,” I said. “And then I am going to get the electricity turned back on.”

The whole room exhaled. “And I’m getting my hair done,” Frances said.

I patted her hand and shook my head no. She didn’t even argue.

After the ladies limped up to bed, I told Charlie, “Leave ’em. I guarantee those dirty dishes will be right where we left them tomorrow.” I followed her out on the back porch— oh, the cool air. When we sank down on the top step, Charlie pulled a gold-and-white box out of her dress pocket.

“Looks like Mr. Fauster misplaced his expensive cigarettes,” she said. They were Chesterfields, pre-rolled, not even opened yet.

It was a dark night with only a fingernail of moon. I’d never had a cigarette of my own before. I’d never had one with a convicted criminal either. I guess there’s a first for everything. Charlie lit mine, then hers, using the long box of kitchen matches, the flare bright and tall, and I leaned my back against the porch post.

Staring out at the shadowy backyard, Charlie said, “I am terrified of that woman, but I’d risk going back to jail to try and get Meg. I absolutely would.” This came out of nowhere. I knew Meg was always on her mind.

“I’m just glad she’s out of that place and somewhere safe.” I didn’t know this, but I hoped. “I’ll figure something out, soon as my head clears.”

“Would you?” she asked, still staring straight ahead. “Risk going to jail for somebody in your family?”

“Depends on who.” But then, because it was true, I said, “Of course I would.”