The Wilful Daughter (7 page)

The men standing near them didn’t cover their laughter. The women passing grinned. The trio had no words for the things, true though they were, that Bira had said about them and in front of mere working people loudly enough, louder than Bira’s normal church mouse voice, for the whole block to hear.

“
Well, I guess everything is all right and you have nothing to fear at the ball this year. Good day, ladies.”

Bira had paid for the entire wardrobe of the girl, not as charity, but as a birthday present. ”Whenever that is or was,” she told the mother. And she made sure that, at the Cotillion, Fawn and the girl would be introduced together. After that she refused to go back to the avenue.

Word got back to the Blacksmith of his wife’s actions on Auburn Avenue through all the working class people who found the wealthy Blacksmith’s wife down to earth. So he paid extra for Lanney to come to the house and fit and measure and sometimes mend and sew things that Bira didn’t have time to do.

The first time Willie had looked at her he had quickly turned away. But she had said, “Mr. Brown, come back. I’m just waiting to finish fitting Jewel and Fawn. How are you today?”

He fell in love with her immediately as she sat before him with her thick kinky hair pulled back into a severe bun and her simple clothes, not nearly as fancy as those she made. He talked to her and she to him as if old friends. And each time she came he sketched her without her knowledge. But not in the clothes that she wore. No, they were not good enough for his Lanney. He drew her in ball gowns, in silks and satins dresses like a queen.

One day he boldly showed them to her.

She smiled her appreciation. “They are beautiful. You actually think I look like this? This beautiful? I am nothing beside the beauty of your sisters.”

“
No,” he had told her. “My sisters are beautiful. But when I paint you, I see how kindness and charm and inner strength can show up on a canvas when mere looks can easily fade.”

Lanney had kissed him, kissed him hard. Then she left. The days dragged by slowly until her next visit when he kissed her back and struggled not to touch her.

But Lanney had understood, she felt him struggle. That changed everything between them.

She came to the house on a day she knew Willie would be alone for a long while: the sisters teaching or in school and the mother visiting a sick friend. She claimed, at the front door, that she was there to measure but when he said no one was at home she feigned embarrassment. He didn’t want to turn her away and asked her in for some tea.

“
I’ll make it.” She knew her way about the place and led him to the kitchen. The water never made it to the stove to boil.

When he kissed her she suggested that he touch her in places he had never dreamed of touching a woman. Only men with legs had the privilege of getting a woman. But Lanney was completely naked before he knew what happened.

“
I want to paint you this way,” he told her. He had never seen a woman’s body undressed. He breathed strangely as she had helped him to his bed. Once his breath was regular and he could kiss her and touch her again she made love to him.

It was the first of many times.

The moments he knew were short but they felt like an eternity of pleasure and each time she stood to dress and go, he grabbed his crutches and went straight to a blank canvas to paint her, his beautiful Lanney. Tall and dark like a tree, full breasts with tiny, black nipples jutting out at him. A small patch of hair in the place that had given him so much pleasure. All something he had never seen before she entered his life. Brother painted a nude.

No one questioned him painting, locked in his tiny cell for hours. It was what Brother did. And no one noticed what he had done until one morning when mama came in to awaken him and saw the nude on the easel. She asked him when he painted it. She asked him why he painted it. Then she asked how he painted it. “What did that woman do to you?” For the only time in his life that he could remember, his mother was angry at him. She was talking loudly to him in a strained voice. “This woman is luring you with false promises.”

“
Mother, I want to marry her. I want to be her. . .”

“
Marry her? You would marry a woman who would trick you this way? She’s trying to get pregnant, Willie, don’t you see?”

“
She loves me!”

‘
She pities you!” Bira shouted and the Blacksmith arrived and saw the painting. He called it vile and contemptible. He would not hear Brother’s pleas that this woman made him happy, that she loved him until Bira said: “She used to tell me she felt so sorry for you and wished there was something she could do to make you happy for a little while. A little while brother. If she marries you she’ll leave you. Son, its just pity.”

His father had destroyed the painting. Willie had reached for it but had fallen as the big man tore the still wet canvas to shreds. As he watched the colors of his love go into the kitchen fire he took heart in the sketches that he had hidden beneath his bed. Willie did not come out of his room the rest of the day and papa, he heard from his sisters, gave Lanney money to go north and far, far away.

He had never been able to ask if she loved him or pitied him so he dreamed about her now so he could go back to sleep. He covered the ugliness of his legs and closed his eyes. Soon he was dancing with Lanney’s naked body.

It was June who woke him before dawn. He smelled coffee brewing and felt the swift peck on his cheek. “Get up, sleepy head. We need to cut some more wood for the stove.”

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes like a child he tried to forget his dreams, tried to forget June slipping into the house with his help only a few hours earlier. He was tired and his arms sore but he would never let his family down. He had to chop some wood.

Pulling on his pants, forgetting his shoes, he reached for his crutches and headed for the kitchen. Papa was in the bathroom humming as he relieved himself. Mama stood in the middle of the kitchen at the big table cutting onions and potatoes. Jewel was rolling out biscuits.

“
Morning, Brother.” Jewel smiled at him a touch of flour on her check.

“
Morning, Jewel.” He slipped next to her and kissed her cheek taking the time to brush the flour away. She giggled a little. Jewel was twenty-five and needed to be married he thought. She would make someone a good wife. Fawn was coming in from the porch with a huge slab of bacon. She dropped it on the table.

“
I see June beat you up this morning, Brother. Getting lazy in your old age?” she laughed. That’s when mama turned to look at him.

“
Brother, you feeling all right?” With a look of concern she came to him and touched his face.

“
Fine mama,” he said giving her a kiss. “Just oversleep a little around here and everybody thinks you’ve aged fifty years.” They smiled at each other and he headed out the door to the porch.

Slinging the crutches over his shoulders he grabbed the rope and got in the wooden box he used to go to the back yard. Carefully he lowered himself down to where June was crudely and slowly cutting the wood for the stove. Her hair was in a braid down her back and she had put on an apron over her gown, for modesty’s sake. Something she seldom remembered to do.

“
Let me do that.” Willie took the ax with one powerful arm and began splintering as he leaned on his crutches, surer and faster than she had when she stood on two steady feet and used two small hands. “Who’s this Piano Man, June?”

“
You remembered!” she grinned then whispered: “Keep your voice down. Papa will meet him soon enough.”

Willie stopped the ax mid air. He held it posed and felt the tightness in his muscles. A pain entered his chest but it wasn’t his heart. It was worry. “June, how are you gonna manage that?”

“
He’s coming here tonight to introduce himself to papa.” Willie lowered the ax quickly. Splinters flew and June jumped back. “Watch it, Willie. You want to put my eye out?”

“
Better than having papa knock your head off. He’s not gonna let you court a piano playing man.” He kept at his work, a slight stream of sweat coming down his face. “You sneak out and stay out all night. You sell paintings I give you to buy dresses they’ll never see. You hang out with ruffians like Ross. You’re heading for nothing but trouble. And papa? Papa’s gonna kill you. Besides ain’t nobody getting married until Minnelsa does. Papa’s said.”

June gathered the wood and put it into the box. Working hard she pulled on the rope to raise it to the porch then turned to her brother. “Papa may have his rules but I’m not gonna be an old maid like the rest of them. I want to get out of this place with a fine, handsome man. Not some old geezer like Minnelsa’s gonna marry.”

“
She would have married. . .” Willie started.

“
Not likely. Papa wasn’t about to let her marry that man. John Woods may not have had money, but he wanted to be a writer, a dreamer just like Minnelsa. Always in books and writing her love letters and poems. They were a match made in heaven. But not in papa’s eyes.”

The box landed at the top of the stairs.

“
Papa has standards. He wants what’s best for his family.” Willie leaned on the ax.

“
Humph,” she shrugged. “If he did he would have let you go to Florida with that white man that wanted to help you with your painting. Papa’s got his rules and they’re stupid rules.” She ran up the steps and emptied the box then lowered it. Once it was landed at the bottom she ran back down the steps and helped him into the box as his taut muscular arms pulled him up the rope that pulled his box up the side of the stairs.

“
Somebody’s got to break the rules around here, Willie. Might as well be me.”

She helped a little, she always did. Willie never went up and down in that box unless she was in the yard waiting for him or at the top of the stairs. She wasn’t strong enough to make a difference on the rope but it was important to him that she was there, always there for him. And if she wanted to get this Piano Man, he’d have to be there for her.

Once on the porch he whispered to her: “I need to meet him first. So you better tell me about him. Maybe something about him papa’s not gonna like.’

She kissed him and helped him out of the box. “Wonderful. But I already know papa’s gonna love him. He reads Shakespeare, he’s played in New York and he’s played all over Europe.”

“
Then why did he come here?”

“
June, I need some more wood!” The call came from Fawn in the kitchen.

June gathered as much as her tiny arms could carry: “I don’t know. Maybe he got tired of living in the north. I don’t care. I just want him. Maybe the next time he travels he’ll take me with him.” She ran into the house happily. As he slowly came in he heard the sounds of morning more clearly: Minnelsa fussing at June because she scattered the chickens, mama telling June to wash her hands, Fawn complaining that June was stealing the bacon, and Jewel wondering why June had to steal biscuit dough. He washed his hands. If June left the place would be dull for him. She was the life of a house full of sad lonely women. But she would have to go to be happy.

Willie knew when June went, he would certainly die.

CHAPTER FOUR

Not much got past the Blacksmith. No one ever thought to call him ignorant. No one ever noticed that his ears perked when the women started to gossip, or that his attention was more alerted when someone said strangers were about. He handled the white folks well, kept clean records for customers with questions, and darkened the church door every Sunday surrounded by his family, including his crippled son. Not much got past him.

Except June.

Everybody in the neighborhood who knew that June spent many summer nights at places like Emma’s with Ross, the mortician’s son from the family at the end of the block. They all wanted to tell him, but nobody dared. Besides, she wasn’t their child, she wasn’t their business. When it came to the Blacksmith’s daughters they all had one clear memory flash past them. It was the memory of what happened in ‘16 that stayed with them.

Everyone knew the Blacksmith had very high standards for the gentlemen who wanted to keep company with his daughters. Every father has high hopes for his children, and with daughters, especially educated daughters of a land owning father, the hopes and standards were higher. There were families in Atlanta who would have gladly allowed their sons to come and call. But most of them could not pass the stringent tests the Blacksmith had designed for the future husbands of his girls. Hence all these years they remained single and alone.

Men tried. All types of men. They would come to call just after dinner. They would sit in the parlor with one of the five daughters and chat about the weather, chat about the latest dances, the doctor’s new car or the mortician’s shiny black hearse. They would laugh easily about the toils of youth then ease closer to the daughter of their choice, perhaps for a secret, perhaps for a kiss.

Then the Blacksmith would enter from his evening stroll with his wife or from the sitting room where he and his son had been reading aloud to each other in their deep brassy voices. The young man sitting nervously in the parlor would pull on his starched collar and then prepare to be asked a litany of questions that had to be answered in just the right way.

There was the “What book have you read lately?” question that the Blacksmith posed to those he knew could not read or whose literacy he questioned.