A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Sweet Baby Jenny JOYCE HARRINGTON

Inever had a mother, leastways not one that I can remember. I must have had one sometime, ’cause as far as I can tell I didn’t hatch out from no egg. And even chicks get to snuggle up under the hen for a little space before she kicks them out of the nest. But I didn’t have no hen to snuggle up to, or to peck me upside the head if I did something wrong.

Not that I would ever do anything wrong. Leastways not if I knowed it was wrong. There are lots of things that go on that are pure puzzlement to me, and I can’t tell the right from the wrong of it. For instance, I recollect when Ace — that’s my biggest big brother and the one who taken care of us all after Pop went away — I recollect when he used to work driving a beer truck round to all the stores in town and the root cellar used to be full of six-packs all the time.

I said to him one day, “Ace, how come if you got the cellar full of beer, I can’t have the cellar full of Coke-Cola? I don’t like beer.”

Guess I was about nine or ten years old at the time and never could get my fill of Coke-Cola.

Well, Ace, he just laughed and said, “Sweet Baby Jenny”—that’s what they all called me even after I was well growed up—“Sweet Baby Jenny, if I drove a Coke-Cola truck you could float away to heaven on an ocean of it. Now, just drink your beer and learn to like it.”

I wasn’t ever dumb, even though I didn’t do so good in school, so it didn’t take much figuring to catch onto the fact that Ace was delivering almost as much beer to the root cellar as he was to Big Jumbo’s Superette down on Main Street. So it didn’t seem fair when I got caught in the five-and-dime with a lipstick in my pocket for him to come barreling down and given me hellfire and damnation in front of that suet-faced manager. I just stood there looking at him with pig-stickers in my eyes until we got out to the truck and I said to him, “What’s the difference between one teensy-weensy lipstick and a cellar full of beer?”

He says to me, grinning, “Is that a riddle?”

And I says, “No, I would surely like to know.”

And he says, “The difference, Sweet Baby Jenny, is that you got caught.”

Now I ask you.

It was different, though, when he got caught. Then he cussed and swore and kicked the porch till it like to fallen off the house all the while the boys from the beer company was hauling that beer up from the root cellar and stowing it back on the truck. When they drove away, I says to him, sweet as molasses, “Ace, honey, why you carrying on so?”

And he says, “Dammit, Jenny, they taken away my beer. I don’t give a hoot about the job, it was a jackass job anyway, but I worked hard for that beer and they didn’t ought to taken it away.”

“But, Ace,” I says, hanging onto his hand and swinging it like a jumping rope, “ain’t it true you stolen that beer and you got caught and you had to give it back just like I did with that lipstick?”

Well, he flung me away from him till I fetched up against the old washing machine that was resting in the yard waiting for somebody to fix it, and he yelled, “I ain’t stolen anything and don’t you ever say I did! That beer was what they call a fringe benefit, only they didn’t know they was givin’ it. They don’t even pay me enough to keep you in pigtail ribbons and have beer money besides. I only taken what I deserve.”

Well, he was right on one score. I didn’t have anything you could rightfully call a hair ribbon, and I kept my braids tied up with the strings off of Deucy’s old Bull Durham pouches.

Deucy, you maybe guessed, is my second-biggest big brother and a shiftless lazy skunk even though some people think he’s handsome and should be a movie star. Ace’s name in the family Bible is Arthur, and Deucy is written down as Dennis. Then there’s Earl, Wesley, and Pembrook. And then there’s me, Jennet Maybelle. That’s the last name on the birth page. Over on the death side the last name written in is Flora Janine Taggert. It’s written in black spiky letters like the pen was stabbing at the page, and the date is just about a month or so after my name was written on the birth page. I know that’s my mother, although no one ever told me.

And no one ever told me how she died. As for Pop, there ain’t no page in the Bible for people who just up and go away.

Deucy plays guitar and sings and thinks he’s Conway Twitty.

Says he’s gonna go to Nashville and come back driving a leopardskin Cadillac. I’d surely like to see that, though I don’t guess I ever will.

That Deucy’s too lazy to get up off the porch swing to fetch himself a drink of water. It’s always, “Sweet Baby Jenny, get me this and get me that.” Only thing he’s not too lazy for is to boost himself up to the supper table.

That don’t keep the girls from flocking round, bringing him presents and smirking like the pig that et the baby’s diaper. They all hope and pray that they’re gonna be the one to go to Nashville with him and ride back in that Cadillac. And he don’t trouble to relieve their minds on the subject. You ought to hear that porch swing creak in the dark of night. They are just so dumb.

Now, Earl and Wesley, they try. They ain’t too good-looking, though they do have the Taggert black hair and the Taggert nose. I remember Pop saying he was part Cherokee and all his sons showed it. But while Ace and Deucy came out looking like Indian chiefs, Earl is crosseyed and Wesley broke his nose falling out of a buckeye tree and lost most of his hair to the scarlet fever. So they try. They are always going into business together.

Once they went into the egg business and we had the whole place full of chickens running around. They said they would sell their eggs cheaper than anyone around and make a fortune and we’d all go off to California and live in a big hotel with a swimming pool and waiters bringing hamburgers every time we snapped our fingers.

Well, people bought the eggs all right, but what Earl and Wesley kind of forgot about was that 200 chickens eat up a lot of chicken feed and they never could figure out how to get ahead of the bill at the feed store. I could have told them how to do it was raise the price of the eggs and make them out to be something special so everyone would feel they had to have Taggert’s Country-Fresh eggs no matter what they cost. But Earl and Wesley just shoved me aside and said, “Sweet Baby Jenny, you are just a girl and don’t understand bidness. Now go on out and feed them chickens and gather up them eggs and let’s have some of your good old peach cobbler for supper. Being in bidness sure does make a man hungry.”

Well, pretty soon the feed store cut off their credit and there wasn’t nothing left to feed the chickens, so we had to eat as many of them as we could before they all starved to death and that was the end of the egg business. Earl and Wesley, being both tenderhearted and brought down by gloom, couldn’t bring themselves to kill a single chicken. I like to wrung my arm off wringing those chicken necks.

I used to like fried chicken, but I don’t any more.

Pembrook, he’s the smart one. He don’t steal, sing, or go into business. He’s off at the state college studying how to be a lawyer.

He’s the only one used to talk to me and I miss him. I was always planning to ask him what happened to our mother, how she died, and why Pop ran off like he did. But I just never got up the nerve.

Pembrook writes me letters a couple times a month, telling what it’s like up there at the college. It sure sounds fine. He’s always going on at me how I should go back to school and finish up and come to the college and learn how to be somebody. Well, I’d kind of like that, but who’d look after the boys? Reason why I didn’t do so good in school was I never had no time for studying, what with looking after the boys like I was their mother instead of Sweet Baby Jenny like they call me. Only Pembrook never called me that.

Another thing I always meant to ask Pembrook and never did is how come I come out looking like a canary in a cuckoo-bird’s nest.

Pembrook looks more or less just like the other boys, though he keeps his black hair real clean and he wears big eyeglasses on top of his sharp Taggert nose. His eyes are dark brown like theirs, and he weathers up nice and tan in the summer sun. But in summer my freckles just get more so while the part in between the freckles gets red. And my hair, which is mud-yellow most of the time, gets brighter and brighter and kinks up in tight little curls unless I keep it braided up. And never mind my eyes. They’re not a bit like the boys’. Greeny-blue or bluey-green depending on the weather. As for my nose, it couldn’t be less Taggert if it was a pump handle.

Small and turned-up and ugly.

Could be I taken after my mother, though I don’t know that for a fact ’cause I never set eyes on her nor saw any picture of her.

Pembrook says I’m pretty but that’s just because he likes me.

Pembrook says I look a lot like Miss Claudia Carpenter who is regarded as the prettiest girl in two counties, but I never saw her to make the comparison. She’s the daughter of the town’s one and only bank president. She’s a year or so older than me, and she don’t stick around much. Got sent away to school and always taking trips here and there. Can’t be much fun, never being home in your own home place. Pembrook told me our mother used to help out at the Carpenter household, at parties and such or when their regular maid got sick. Maybe I could get such a job and put aside a little money, just in case I ever decide to do what Pembrook says.

One thing I do remember about Pop before he went away. He used to tell me stories. He used to sit himself down in his big maroon armchair and he would sit me down on his lap and he would say,

“Now, listen. This here’s a story about a bad little girl.” The stories were always different but they were all about a girl named Bad Penny. She was ugly and mean and spiteful and nobody liked her.

She was always making trouble and in the end she always got punished. Sometimes she got et up by the pigs and sometimes she got drowned in the creek. Once she got cut up in little bits by the disc harrow. And another time she fell into the granary and suffocated in the wheat. But she always came back, as mean and nasty as ever, and that’s why she was called Bad Penny.

After the story Pop would take me up to my room and put me to bed.

I liked the stories, even though they scared me some. I knew pigs didn’t eat little girls, but I was always pretty careful around the pigpen. We don’t keep pigs any more, but we had a few then and I used to carry the slops out to them.

Well, things got so bad after Ace robbed the gas station down at the crossroads and got recognized by Junior Mulligan who just happened to be having his pickup truck filled up with gas at the time and never did like Ace since the time they two went hunting together and Ace claimed it was his deer and knocked Junior into Dead Man’s Gully and broken his leg. So off Junior went to the police and they come and drug Ace out of the Red Rooster Cafe where he was treating everyone to beer and hard-boiled eggs.

It was sad and lonesome around the place without Ace to stir things up, and quiet with Deucy’s guitar in hock and him not able to sing a blessed note through mourning for it. Earl and Wesley tried selling insurance round about, but nobody we knew could buy any and the folks we didn’t know wouldn’t. So it was up to me.

I harked back to my idea of going as a maid like Pembrook had told me our mother had done. I didn’t mind working in someone else’s house, though Deucy said it was undignified and not befitting a Taggert. Far as I could see, Deucy thought any kind of work was undignified except maybe wearing out the porch swing. So one morning I washed my whole body including my hair, and cut my toenails so I could put shoes on, and got out one of our mother’s dresses from the wardrobe in the attic, and made ready to go see Mrs. Carpenter. The dress fit me right well, though it was a little long and looked a bit peculiar with my high-top lace-up sneakers but that was all I had, so it would have to do.

I walked into town, fanning the skirt of the dress around me and blowing down the front of it from time to time so the sweat would not make stains on the green-and-white polkadots. I got to the Carpenter house before the sun got halfway up the sky, about the time Deucy would be rolling out of bed and yelling his head off for coffee. This was one morning he’d just have to find his own breakfast. I stood for a while with my hand on the iron gate looking up at the house. It was a big one, shining white like a wedding cake, and there must have been about two dozen windows on the front of it alone. It set back from the street on what looked like an acre of the greenest grass I ever saw sloping up to a row of prickly bushes that trimmed the porch.

I’d seen it before, times Ace used to take me riding in the beer truck and tell me how all he needed was to rob the bank and then we’d be living in this part of town alongside the rich folks. But I never really took a good close look, ’cause I thought he was joking.

Now I looked until I got to shaking and wondering if I ought to march right up to the front door or sneak around to the back. I stood there so long I felt like my feet had taken root to the pavement, and if I could only get loose I’d run home and stay there forever.

But then I thought about how there was less than a half a pound of coffee left and just enough flour for one more batch of biscuits, and I pulled open that iron gate and set my face toward the big front door. It felt like an hour that I was walking up that path with my feet feeling like big old river rafts and my hair jumping out of the braids that I’d combed and plaited so neat. But I got up on the porch and put my finger on the door-bell and heard it ding-donging away inside. I waited. But the door stayed closed.

It was a pretty door, painted white like the rest of the house, and I studied every panel of it and the big brass doorknob and the letter box beside it while I waited. I wondered if I should ring the bell again. Maybe no one was home. Maybe I’d come all this way for nothing. They probably wouldn’t want me to be their maid even if they were home. The green-and-white dress was sagging down around my shinbones and my sneakers were covered with road dust. Maybe I’d just go home and wait until I got a better idea.

I turned away and started down the porch steps, and then I heard the door open behind me and a sharp voice like a blue-jay’s said,

“Yes?”

I looked back and saw a tall skinny woman staring at me with a frown betwixt her eyes that made me shiver in spite of the heat.

“Miz Carpenter?” I said.

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Carpenter,” she said. “Who are you? What do you want? I’m very busy.”

My throat got choked and I couldn’t swallow, so when I said, “I come to be your maid,” I thought maybe she couldn’t hear me, ’cause I couldn’t hear me myself.

“What?” she said. “Speak up. What’s this about a maid?”

“I come to be it,” I said. “If you’ll have me.”

“Well, sakes alive!” she said, showing all her yellow teeth. “If you aren’t the answer to a prayer! Where did you spring from, and who told you to come here? Well, never mind all that. Come in the house and let’s get started. You look strong. I just hope you’re willing.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and quick as a wink she drug me through the house and into the kitchen and right up to the sink where there was more dishes than I’d ever seen in my life and all of them dirty.

“Just start right in,” she said. “The dishwasher’s right there. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Now I’d seen dishwashing machines in the Sears Roebuck wish book, but I’d never been right up close to one. I knew what it was supposed to do. I just wasn’t too sure what I was supposed to do.

And I didn’t trust anything very much except my own two hands.

So I started getting those dishes as clean as I could before I put them in the machine, just in case we had a misunderstanding. They were the prettiest dishes I ever did see, even when they was all crusted with dried-up gravy.

Mrs. Carpenter came back in a few minutes carrying a pair of black shoes and a white dress. She plopped herself down on a kitchen chair and smiled at me. “What’s your name, child?”

“Jennet Maybelle.”

She didn’t let me get the Taggert part in, but went right on talking.

“Well, I’ll call you Jenny. That Marcelline quit on me last night right in the middle of a dinner party, and I was just about to start calling around when you walked in the door. I’ll pay you five dollars a day plus meals and uniform, but you have to pay for anything you break, so be careful with those dishes. Each plate cost twenty dollars.”

I put down the plate I was holding and tried to think what it could be made of. It didn’t look to be solid gold. Our plates at home were old and cracked and been around as long as I could remember. I didn’t know what they cost. When one got broke we just threw it down in the creek bed behind the house along with all the other trash.

Mrs. Carpenter was still talking. “Now you can’t be wearing those sneakers around the house, so I brought you an old pair of Claudia’s shoes. Maybe they’ll fit. And this uniform might be a little big for you, you’re a skinny little thing, but we can cinch it in with a belt.”

I didn’t think much of her calling me skinny when she so closely resembled a beanpole herself. But I didn’t say anything. The shoes looked nice with just a little bit of a high heel and shiny black, and the uniform dress was starched and clean.

She stopped talking for a minute and started looking me over real close. Then, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? I could swear your face is familiar. Where do you come from?”

I pointed in the direction of home and said, “Out Clinch Valley Road.” I was going to tell her how my mother had once worked as a maid for her, but she didn’t give me a chance. She jumped up, left the shoes on the floor and the dress on the chair, and shook her head.

“I don’t know anyone out that way. You can change your clothes in the maid’s room back there.” She waved her hand at a door on the other side of the kitchen. “And when you finish the dishes you’ll find me upstairs. I’ll show you how to do the bedrooms.”

The day wore on. I didn’t break any dishes and figured out on my own which button to push to start the machine. It sure gave me a start when it began churning and spattering behind its closed door, and I prayed it wouldn’t go breaking any of those twenty-dollar plates and blaming it on me. Mrs. Carpenter showed me all over that house and told me what I was to do. At noon, she showed me what to make for lunch. We both ate the same thing, cold roast beef left over from the night before and some potato salad, but she ate hers in the dining room and I ate mine in the kitchen.

I drank two glasses of ice-cold milk and could have drunk some more, but I didn’t want to seem greedy. In the afternoon she set me to washing windows. It wasn’t hard work, I worked harder at home, and it was a treat to be looking out at the roses in the back and all that green grass in the front while I polished those windows till they looked like they weren’t there at all.

Along about four o’clock she hauled me back to the kitchen and told me what Mr. Carpenter wanted for his dinner. “He’s very partial to fried chicken, but nobody seems able to make it to his satisfaction.

I know I can’t. And he has the most outrageous sweet tooth. I don’t eat dessert myself, but he won’t leave the table without it.”

Well. I set to work cooking up my specialties. I’d had lots of experience with chicken, and my peach cobbler was just about perfect, if I say so myself. Mrs. Carpenter left the kitchen to take a nap after telling me that Mr. Carpenter expected to sit down to his meal at 6:30 sharp.

At 6:30 sharp I brought in a platter of fried chicken and Mr. Carpenter whipped his napkin into his lap and dug in. He didn’t even look at me, but I looked at him. He was a freckly sandy man with gold-rimmed glasses and a tight collar. He still had all his hair, but it was fading out to a kind of pinkish yellowish fuzz.

His eyes were blue, or maybe green, it was hard to tell behind his glasses, and his nose turned up at the end like a hoe blade.

I’d fixed up a mess of greens to go with the chicken and he dug into those, too, dribbling the pot liquor down his chin and swabbing it away with his fine napkin. Mrs. Carpenter pecked at her food and watched to see how he was liking his.

When I brought in the peach cobbler he leaned back in his chair and sighed. “That’s the best meal I’ve had in years, Marcelline.”

“This isn’t Marcelline,” said Mrs. Carpenter. “Marcelline quit last night. This is Jenny.”

He looked at me then. First through his glasses and then without his glasses. And then he polished his glasses on his napkin and put them back on and tried again. “Ah, ha!” he said. “Jenny. Well. Very nice.” And he got up from the table and left the room without even tasting my peach cobbler.

Mrs. Carpenter was after him like a shot. “Paul! Paul!” she hollered. “What about your dessert?”

It didn’t matter to me. Peach cobbler is best while it’s hot, but it’s just as good the next day. I carried it back out to the kitchen, finished cleaning up, and got back into my going-home clothes. I did hope that Mrs. Carpenter would pay me my five dollars so I would have something to show, to Deucy and Earl and Wesley, so I hung around for a bit.

But it wasn’t Mrs. Carpenter who came into the kitchen. It was him. He stood in the doorway, pulling at his ear and looking at me as if he wished me off the face of the earth. Then he sloped into the kitchen and came right up to me where I was standing with my back against the refrigerator and took my chin in his hand. He held my face up so I had to look at him unless I closed my eyes, which I did for half a minute, but I opened them again because I was beginning to get scared. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and took the collar of my dress between his fingers and felt of it softly. At last he spoke.

“You’re a Taggert, aren’t you, girl?”

“Yes, I am. I’m Jennet Maybelle Taggert.” I spoke up proudly because I’d learned in the little bit of time I’d spent in school that lots of folks thought Taggerts was trash and the only way to deal with that was not to be ashamed.

Then he said something I didn’t understand. “Am I never to be rid of Taggerts? Will Taggerts hound me to my grave?”

“You look pretty healthy to me,” I said, adding “sir” so he wouldn’t think I was being pert.

He didn’t say anything to that, but took his wallet out of his pocket and opened it up. I thought he was going to pay me my five dollars, so I got ready to say thank you and good night, but he pulled out a photograph and handed it to me.

“Who do you think that is?” he asked me.

Well, I looked but I didn’t know who it was. The photograph was in colour and it showed a girl about my age with yellow curling hair and a big smile. She was wearing a real pretty dress, all blue and ruffly, like she was going to a party or a dance. I handed the picture back to him.

“She’s real pretty, but I don’t know who she is.”

“She’s my daughter, Claudia.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I said again, “She’s real pretty.”

“No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s a spoiled brat. She thinks she’s the most beautiful female creature that ever trod the earth. But she’s useless, vain, and unlovable. And it’s all my fault.”

I didn’t know why he was telling me all this, but it was making me fidgety and anyway I had to get home to get supper for the boys.

They’d be pretty upset that I was so late. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll be getting along.”

“Don’t go.” He grabbed my arm and hauled me over to where there was a mirror hanging on the wall and made me stand in front of it. “Look there,” he said. “Who do you see?”

“Well, that’s just me.” I tried to pull away from him, but he held on tight.

“That’s a pretty young woman,” he said. “That’s what a young woman is supposed to be, decent and clean and modest. I wish you were my daughter, Jenny Taggert, instead of that hellion who won’t stay home where she belongs and behaves so no man in his right mind would marry her. How would you like that? Would you like to live here and be my girl?”

Well, I felt my neck getting hot, ’cause Ace had told me that when a man starts paying compliments there’s only one thing he’s after, and I’d sure heard enough of Deucy speaking sugar words to his ladies on the porch swing.

“Excuse me, Mr. Carpenter,” I said, “but I got to be gettin’ home and would you please pay me my five dollars so I can carry home some supper to those boys?” I know that was bold, but he was making me nervous and it just came out that way.

He let go of me and pulled out his wallet again. “Is that what Clemmie’s paying you? Five dollars? Well, it’s not enough. Here and here and here.”

The bills came leaping out of his wallet and he stuffed them into my hands. When I looked, I saw I had three ten-dollar bills. Not only that, he started hauling out the leftover chicken that I had put away and shoving it into a paper sack.

“Take the peach cobbler, too,” he said, “and anything else you’d like. Take it all.”

“Now I can’t do that. What would Miz Carpenter say?”

“I’ll tell her I ate it for a midnight snack.” He laughed then, but it wasn’t a happy-sounding laugh. It sounded like something was breaking inside him.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and skedaddled out the back door before he could think up some new craziness that would get me into trouble.

His voice came after me. “You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you?”

“Sure thing,” I called back. But I wasn’t so sure I would.

All the way home I pondered on Mr. Carpenter and his strange ways. But I just plain couldn’t figure it out. All I could think was that having so much money had addled his mind and I thanked God that we was poor and couldn’t afford to be crazy.

I put it all out of my mind, though, when I reached the dirt road that led up to our place. The moon was just clearing the top of the big old lilac bush at the edge of the property, and its kindly light smoothened away some of the ugliness you could see in daylight.

The house looked welcoming with lights shining from its windows, and there in the dooryard was Pembrook’s dinky little car. I ran up the porch and busted into the house, shouting his name.

They was all gathered in the kitchen and I could see from their dark Taggert faces that I had interrupted an argument. But I didn’t care. I set the Carpenter food down on the table and said, “Here’s supper, boys. Dig in.” Deucy and Earl and Wesley did just that, not even bothering with plates but snatching up that chicken in their fingers.

Then I sat down and took off my left sneaker and pulled out the money. “There and there and there,” I said, as I counted the bills out on the table. Deucy’s eyes bugged out, and Earl and Wesley shouted, “Whoopee!” as best they could with their mouths full of drumstick meat.

Pembrook looked miserable.

“Where’d you get all that, Jenny?” he asked.

“I went as a maid,” I told him.

“Where did you go as a maid?”

“To Miz Carpenter.”

“And she gave you all that?”

I was about to lie and say she did, but I was never very good at lying. It makes my nose run. “No. He did.”

“You’re not to go there any more,” said Pembrook.

Well, I’d just about decided that for myself, but I wasn’t about to have Pembrook, much as I dearly love him, telling me what not to do. “I will if I want to,” I said. “And when did you get home, and how long you staying for?”

“Forever, if I have to, to keep you out of trouble.”

“That’s pretty nice trouble,” piped up Deucy. “Thirty dollars for a day’s work and all this food. You ought to have some, Pem.”

“Shut up, you idiot!”

I had never seen Pembrook so angry. Taggert blood boils easy, but until this minute Pembrook had always managed to keep his temper under control. He turned back to me, his eyes glittering and mean, like a chicken hawk about to pounce.

“You are not to go back to the Carpenter house, not ever again.

You are to put it right out of your mind. And tomorrow I am going to mail that money back. And that’s the end of it.”

I only said one thing. “Why?”

“Never mind why.”

Well, that did it. I had worked hard for that money. Whether it was five dollars or thirty dollars, it was mine. The first money I had ever earned. And Pembrook had no right to take it away from me.

I had done nothing wrong, as far as I could see, and it wasn’t fair for him to punish me. I reared back in my chair, looked him square in the eye, and opened my mouth.

“Pembrook Taggert, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am no longer Sweet Baby Jenny. I am a woman growed and able to make up my own mind about things. You can’t stand there and give me orders and tell me to never mind why. I took it from Pop and I took it from Ace and I been taking it from these three, while you’ve been off at your college learning your way out of this mess. I ain’t gonna take it no more.”

The hard bitterness faded from his eyes and he took my two hands in his.

“You’re right, Jenny,” he said. “There are things you ought to know. Come out to the porch swing and I’ll tell you.”

“Don’t make it a long story,” Deucy called after us. “Ardith Potter’s comin’ over tonight and we got things to discuss.”

But it was a long story that Pembrook told me. One that went back through the years to the time before I was born. All the boys knew it, but Pop had sworn them on the Bible never to tell me. It accounted for all the things I’d wondered about and never had the gumption to ask. If I had asked, they wouldn’t have told me, although Pembrook said he was mighty tempted from time to time because it was my life and I had a right to know.

He told me that Pop wasn’t my true father, that Mr. Carpenter was. He told me that about a month after I was born, our mother had told Pop the truth and packed her bag and said she was running off with Mr. Carpenter to have a better life than scratching around on a poor old dirt farm. He told me that Pop had choked the life out of her right there in the bedroom with me looking on with my blind baby eyes from the cradle beside the bed. And then Pop had gone to Mr. Carpenter and told him the whole thing and got him to hush it up because the scandal wouldn’t have done anybody any good.

They gave out that our mother had died of childbirth fever.

The tears were rolling down my face, but I managed to ask, “How could you keep on living here, after he did that?”

“Well,” said Pembrook, “Ace was the oldest and he wasn’t but twelve. We had nowhere else to go. And he was our father.”

“What happened then?” I asked. “Why did Pop run off?”

“He didn’t,” said Pembrook. “He lies buried under Mr. Carpenter’s rose garden.”

He went on to tell me how the years went by and Pop took up drinking and the farm went even further downhill until it was just a wasteland. Then one day Pop got it into his head that Mr. Carpenter ought to be paying money to take care of his child, meaning me. He went up to the Carpenter house, full of liquor and hate, and demanded a thousand dollars. Pembrook and Ace tagged along behind and listened outside the window of a room that was full of books and a big desk and a hunting rifle on the wall over the fireplace.

“I seen that room,” I told him. “Miz Carpenter calls it his study.”

Pembrook nodded. “That’s where Pop got it.”

He said how he and Ace heard them arguing in the room, and Mr. Carpenter shouted that it was blackmail and he wouldn’t stand for it, and then there was a lot of scuffling around, with Pop shouting that he would kill Mr. Carpenter for ruining his life. And finally there was a shot. Just the one shot, but it was enough.

They peeked over the window sill and saw Pop lying on the rug bleeding his life out, and Mr. Carpenter standing there like a statue with the rifle in his hands.

They were about to run away home, but Mr. Carpenter saw them and made them come into the house and help him carry Pop out to the rose garden. The three of them dug up the roses and put Pop in the ground and planted the roses back on top of him. Then Mr.

Carpenter told them to get on home and keep their mouths shut or he’d have the marshal come and chuck us all off the farm and into reform school.

And they did, until this minute.

“I guess,” said Pembrook, “I guess that’s why Ace is so wild, but that’s not the way to fix it up. That’s why I’m studying to be a lawyer.

One of these days I’ll know how to take care of Mr. Carpenter legally and make it stick. So that’s why I don’t want you going back there, Jenny. You’re likely to spoil my plan, and I it isn’t good for him to be reminded that you exist. I need to get him off guard when I’m ready.”

I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and said, “Thank you, Pembrook, for telling me. Now I understand.”

“And you won’t go back.”

“I’m going to bed.”

And I did. But I didn’t sleep. I lay there pondering over the things that Pembrook had told me, trying to find the right and the wrong of it. Our mother was maybe wrong for pleasuring herself with Mr.

Carpenter, but if she hadn’t I wouldn’t be here. Pop was wrong for taking life away from our mother, but she gave him cause in his eyes. Mr. Carpenter was wrong for shooting Pop, but the Taggert blood was up and Pop probably attacked him first. Hardest of all to think about was me being Mr. Carpenter’s daughter. If it was true and he knew it, how could he have let me live all these hard years as Sweet Baby Jenny Taggert while that other girl, that Claudia, had everything her heart desired and then some?

Just before dawn I decided what to do. The boys, even Pembrook, were all sound asleep. I got up quiet as a mouse and dressed in our mother’s green-and-white polkadot dress and my high-top sneakers and snuck out to the barn. The barn used to be a busy place, but it was still and empty that morning. No more cows to bellow for me to come and milk them, no horses to gaze sad-eyed after an apple or a carrot. Way in the back, behind the piles of rotten harness, in a dark corner draped over with cobwebs, I found what I was looking for.

It was a can of stuff that Pop used to put down to kill the rats that infested the barn and ate their way through the winter fodder. There wasn’t much left in the can, and what there was looked dry and caked. Maybe it was so old it wouldn’t even work any more. But I scooped some out with a teaspoon and put it into one of Deucy’s Bull Durham pouches and set off down the road.

I kept up a good pace because I wanted to get there before Mr.

Carpenter went off to the bank, and before the boys woke up and came after me in Pembrook’s car. The morning was fresh and cool, and I didn’t sweat one bit.

When I got to the Carpenter house, the milkman was just driving away. I went around to the back, picked up the two quarts of milk, and knocked at the back door. Mrs. Carpenter opened up. She looked sleepy-eyed but pleased to see me.

“Why, Jenny,” she said, “you’re here bright and early. Come in.

Come in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I came to make breakfast.”

“Well, that’s wonderful. Mr. Carpenter is shaving. He’ll be down in a few minutes. He likes two four-minute eggs, I never can get them right, two slices of toast, and lots of strong black coffee. And now that you’re here, I think I’ll go back to bed and get a little more beauty sleep.” She giggled like a silly girl, waved at me, and pranced out.

I put the milk away and started in making the coffee. There was an electric coffee pot, but my coffee is good because I make it the old-fashioned way. I boiled up some water and when it was bubbling away, I threw in the ground coffee, lots of it, to make it nice and strong. Then I turned the fire down to keep it hot while it brewed, and I cracked an egg so I could have an eggshell to throw in to make it clear. And I emptied out the stuff that was in the tobacco pouch right into the pot.

When I heard his footsteps on the stairs I put on another pot to boil up water for his eggs. He came into the kitchen smiling and smelling sweet.

“Well, Jenny,” he said. “You came back. I’m glad, because you and I are going to get along just fine. You’ll be happy here. I’ll see to that.”

I got out a cup and saucer.

“I been hearing things, Mr. Carpenter,” I said. “Things I never dreamed of.”

He frowned. “What things have you been hearing, Jenny?”

I poured coffee into the cup.

“I hear that you’re my daddy.”

He sank down into a kitchen chair. “Yes,” he said, “that’s true enough.”

I put the cup and saucer on the counter to let it cool off a bit so it wouldn’t be too hot for him to take a nice big swallow.

“I hear that you shot our Pop and buried him in your rose garden.

They’re mighty pretty roses you got out there.”

He held his head in his two hands. “They swore never to tell you.

Those boys swore.”

“Pembrook told me because he’s afraid I’ll come to some harm in your house.” I set the cup and saucer on the table in front of him.

“Oh, Jenny, sweet baby Jenny, I would never harm you. If anything, I’d like to make up for all those years I tried to put you out of my mind. I’d like you to come and live here and be my daughter and let me give you all the things you should have had.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not a baby any more.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a fine lovely woman, just like your mother was. God, how I loved that woman! She was the only wonderful thing that ever happened in my whole life. I wanted to take her away with me. We were all set to go. We could have gone to some other town or to a big city where no one knew us. We’d have taken you along. And we’d have been happy. Instead, she died.”

“Pop killed her. Because of you.”

“You know that, too.” He sighed. “Yes. He killed her and I killed him, and I’ve been living out my days in an agony of remorse.

There’s no one I can talk to. Clemmie doesn’t know any of this.

Sometimes I wish I were dead.”

“Drink your coffee.”

The water for his eggs was boiling. Gently I rolled the two eggs into the pot and stuck two slices of bread into the toaster. He left the table and came to where I was working.

“Jenny.” He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around to face him. “What can I do to make it up to you? I’ll do anything in my power, and believe me that’s a lot. You name it. It’s yours.”

I thought a minute. Would it be right or wrong to take from this man? I was having my usual trouble figuring out the difference between the two. Would it be right or wrong to let him drink the coffee?

Then I said, “Could you put Pembrook through law school?”

“Consider it done.”

“And Earl and Wesley, can you find jobs for them? They’re good workers, only down on their luck.”

“Tell them to come to the bank.”

“And what about Deucy? Would you get him a new guitar and a ticket to Nashville? He sings real fine.”

“Not only that. I know Johnny Cash personally. We’ll work something out.”

“Now this one’s hard. Can you get Ace out of jail and set him on a straight path?”

“The warden is Clemmie’s cousin. And I own a ranch in Wyoming. He can go there and work off his wildness. But what about you, Jenny. What can I do for you?”

I shrugged. “Oh, I guess I’ll just live here for a while. I can help Mrs. Carpenter and sort of keep an eye on things.”

He hugged me and planted a big kiss on my cheek. “That’s my girl,” he said. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say. You’ll never regret it. Mmm, that coffee smells good.”

He was heading back to the table and his coffee cup. But I got there first and swiped it out from under his nose.

“That’s coffee’s cold,” I said. “Come to think of it, the whole batch is bitter. I tasted it before you came down. I’ll make some fresh.”

I poured all the coffee down the drain and dished him up his eggs and toast. We drank the fresh coffee together, and he went off to his bank.

And that’s the way it is now. Pembrook’s way is better, and he’s studying real hard. He’ll graduate sooner now that he doesn’t have to work his way through. Earl and Wesley really like being bank tellers, and Deucy has his leopardskin Cadillac and all the girls he can handle, although he says he misses the porch swing. Ace sent a photograph of himself on a horse wearing a big old cowboy hat. He looks funny but he says he’s doing fine.

And me? Every day while the roses are blooming I cut some and put them in the house. Mrs. Carpenter just loves them. I’m waiting.

Someday us Taggerts are gonna dig up that rose garden.