Eli talked about wizard school (though the Holy Russians called it some fancier name than that). I hadn’t been in school of any sort since I was sixteen, and old to still be learning. I stayed quiet, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in what they were saying. I just couldn’t imagine myself doing any of those things.
Millie said she’d been to two years of teacher college before she’d left to marry Jerry. “And you?” she said to me.
“My mother taught our school,” I said. “I left when I was sixteen and started work. That’s what kids in Texoma do.”
“And you went right into shooting?”
“Yes. I was taken on by a gun crew pretty quick, because I was good and had the grit to do the job.”
“What sorts of jobs did you take? Typically?” Jerry said.
He was trying hard to make it sound like I was a normal person, which I’d always felt until I’d come to Dixie.
“Typically,” I said, savoring the word. “Well. We guarded farm people fleeing from Mexico to New America, most often. The Mexican government had taken their farms, and they wanted out. We guarded shipments that had to go from Texoma down to Mexico, and ones that had to come back up. We took up the bounty on some bandits, once or twice.”
“Took up the bounty?” Jerry asked.
“Tracked ’em down and shot ’em.”
He gave a decisive nod, to cover his startled reaction. “Someone has to do that,” he said. “Lots of action, then.”
My turn to nod.
“And you still work for this crew?”
“They are all dead, but me.”
Nothing to say after that.
“Who wants some pie?” Millie asked with a bright smile, maybe not as real as her previous ones. “It’s chess, my grandmother’s recipe.” She vanished to the back of the house, but after a moment—during which I thought I heard a dull noise—she pushed open the kitchen door enough to poke her head out. “Jerry, grab some plates and come help,” she said. “Excuse us just a minute, y’all.”
Jerry leaped up to stack some plates. He looked worried, to me.
When we were alone, I turned to Eli. “Sorry I made ’em so uneasy.”
“It was the questions. If they’d asked me what I did with my magic most often, it would have been just as awkward.”
I don’t know what I’d hoped for in socializing with the Fielders, but maybe it wasn’t this. I should have known.
Someone rang the front doorbell. My gun was in my hand before the chime had finished. I altered the way I sat on the couch so I could cover the door.
Jerry sped through the dining room, hurrying, looking unhappy. Millie appeared, her hip propped against the swinging door to the kitchen, a dish towel in her hands. She was frowning. Easy to see callers after dark were not the usual.
Millie said, “Lizbeth, could you give me a hand?”
I knew she wasn’t asking for help with the dishes. I tapped Eli on the shoulder to tell him I was taking the gun. Millie held the kitchen door so I could scoot through, purse under my arm. Then she went to the sink to run cold water, soaking a clean dish towel she’d snatched from a drawer.
Millie was not the only person in the Fielder kitchen. A girl, Negro and wearing a maid’s uniform, this time gray, sat hunched in the wooden chair, her hands over her face. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not, but she was doing plenty of trembling.
“I hit her,” she said. Then she said it again. “I hit her.” The girl didn’t seem to know how she felt about that. She sounded kind of numb.
“Oh, yeah? Who’d you hit?”
She uncovered her eyes and looked up at me, startled. She didn’t know I’d come into the room. “I hit Mrs. Moultry,” she said. “She pinched me again, and I slapped her.”
“I’ll bet she was some kind of surprised.”
“Lizbeth, can you go listen at the door and tell us what’s happening out there?” Millie had come around the table with the wrung-out towel, and the girl accepted it and put it to her face.
I tried to remember how much noise the kitchen door made—not much, I thought. I pushed it open very gently and listened to the men at the front door.
“My mother isn’t in her right mind anymore, Jerry. She’s getting worse. We saw her pinch Willa May,” a big man was rumbling. “Oh, I’m sure it hurt some. But Mama doesn’t know what she’s doing, and we hired Willa May to take care of her. Willa May hauled off and slapped Mama in the face, and then she ran out the back door.”
“I know you and Carolyn Ann are upset,” Jerry said in a soothing doctor voice. “Your mama wasn’t hurt, though?”
“Naw. She said some pretty awful things. You know Mama! But then she forgot about it.”
“So you don’t need me and my doctor bag at your house, I take it.” Jerry sounded friendly, like he was the man’s uncle.
“Naw, naw. We just want to know where Willa May is.”
I couldn’t get a feeling from this man on what he wanted to know for. He didn’t sound forgiving. But he didn’t sound like he wanted to string Willa May up from a tree, either.
“All right, Norman. I still don’t understand why you’re here.” The doctor echoed my thoughts.
“Occurred to me that Willa May might run straight down here. You treat those blacks, too. They like you. She might think she needs to hide somewhere.”
I heard that trace of darkness in Norman’s voice. He surely did not think Jerry doctoring on black people was something to admire. Norman sure wanted to know where Willa May was, but it wasn’t because he was worried about her welfare.
“It’s just been us and our company this evening,” Jerry said in a neutral voice. “The ladies were about to cut the pie, and me and Eli here are about to have a drink. You want to have a glass with us, Norman? Or some pie? Or both?”
“I’d sure like to do both those things some other time, ’specially since you and me need to have us a talk about my mother. But I better go home and see how Carolyn Ann is dealing with Mama. We got to have someone with her all the time, and Carolyn Ann ain’t up to it more than a couple of hours a day. It makes her nerves all frazzled. We need Willa May to get back to work.”
“Then we’ll have that drink some other time,” Jerry said. “See you later, Norman.”
“Have a good night. Give Millie my regards.”
The front door closed behind Norman.
“Your husband’s coming,” I said, turning to Millie.
“Good,” Millie said from the bottom of her heart.
I stepped away from the swinging door so I wouldn’t get hit in the face as Jerry and Eli entered. The kitchen seemed real crowded all of a sudden.
“Now, Willa May. Tell me what happened,” Jerry said. He was good at firm-but-nice.
“Miss Evvie pinched me for the hundredth time,” Willa May said. “It hurt. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t think at all. I slapped her.”
“Willa May, what do you imagine will happen now?”
Willa May had quit crying, if she ever had been. She did not seem curious about Eli and me. “I think I better not go back to Mr. Norman’s,” she said. “I think he’ll do something bad to me if I do, even if I cry and repent and say I’ll try again. I’m the third person he’s hired to stay with his mama. The others found good reasons to quit. I think Mr. Norman hired me because I was the only one who showed up to apply. I think he and Miss Carolyn Ann figured I had to stay because I wouldn’t find work anywhere if I left another job. So I think I’m done in Sally, ’specially since Carolyn Ann was a Ballard before she married. She musta told me that five times a day.”