“Same as I was last time you wanted to know.”
Dill is over six feet.
“You look like you growd.”
“I’m too old to grow any taller,” she says, hand in her pocket again, fiddling. “Only way I’m growing is out.” But Dill is as tall as she is lean. Nothing ladylike on her at all.
“I’ll tell you when the piglets get weaned,” Dill says. “Then you can come by and pick one out.”
“Sounds good to me,” I says.
“Billy getting married’ll shut a lot of folks’ mouths,” Dill says. She gets in her truck and goes, honking her horn at Laz as she passes him still coming down the road.
Laz shoulda been here by now. He musta stopped.
People been talking all right. June ain’t heard nothing but I know better. They been talking in the beauty shop and in the barbershop, when they get they dry goods, and when they go over to Atchity’s to order from Sears Roebuck. When they come by here to get gasoline, they catch a look if they’re lucky, and tuck away what they seed to gnaw over together in public places, or in they own homes, after the dinner dishes have been cleared away. Old biddies talk. Men talk. Fathers and mothers talk. Billy Beede and her baby-belly and no husband. Billy Beede and Billy Beede’s bad luck: father-she-ain’t-never-knowd run off and dead probably; mother run wild and dead certainly; young bastard girl child tooked in by dirt-poor filling-station-running childless churchless minister Uncle and one-legged crutch-hopping Aunt. Girl growd almost to womanhood, also growd as big as a house with no ring on her finger and no man in sight. Old biddies talk and feel a ripple of delight coming from the satisfaction that they think they seed it coming. Men feel a ripple too. Snipes, Snopes, Snaps? They can’t be sure but one of them seen Billy run across the road without looking for cars to jump into the fella’s arms. None of them cept Laz never gived Billy the time of day but now they all rippling when they think of her and wish they gals and they wives would run across the road towards them like that. They’ve all seen Snipes’ yellow car.
While the father and mother talk over dinner, their children, all born within the confines of marriage, hang around the doorjambs, standing just out of sight, listening. The good girls savor the details of Billy’s business (her swole belly, the housedresses she wears these days that fit tight around the middle). The good boys strain to overhear and savor what, if I was in the pulpit, I would call the intimacies of unmarried intercourse. Those good boys overhear the details with pleasure but hope not to hear their own names mentioned among the lists of possible fathers. Being forced to marry a Beede, for the most part, is pretty bad.
I get an idea that June should ride with Billy tomorrow and I’ll come up alone on Friday. I holler my plan into the house.
“Thanks, but Snipes wants just me to come tomorrow,” Billy hollers back.
Laz has come up in the yard. He’s laying between the two gas pumps with his hands acrosst his chest.
“Someone’s gonna drive up and run over your head, Laz,” I says.
He don’t move for a minute then he gets up and comes to sit on the porch. Laz has a steady way about him. He don’t walk too fast but he walks steady. Most days I wish he was the baby’s daddy. Some days I’m glad he ain’t.
“She gone yet?” he asks.
“She’ll leave on the six A.M. bus.”
He asks if he can tell her goodbye and walks inside, staying just a minute then coming back out.
“She’s got a pearl earring around her neck on a string,” he says.
“One of Willa Mae’s fakes,” I says.
“She says it’ll match her wedding dress,” Laz says.
“I guess it will,” I says.
“I could give her a ride,” Laz says. Texhoma is about four hundred miles to the north. Eight or nine hours drive.
“Billy,” I says, turning my head to holler through the office and into the trailer where June’s got her own hope chest open and is giving Billy things for her trip, “Laz says he’ll give you a ride.”
Me and Laz both sit there waiting for her to holler back.
“Good idea, Laz,” I says. “I didn’t want her showing up to Snipes’ people, getting off a bus.”
Billy hollers back, “I’d rather show up in a bus than in a hearse.”
Laz leans against the porch rail. “I’ll ask my father if I can drive the sedan,” he says, getting up to walk back home and ask even though we both know Israel Jackson ain’t gonna let Laz take the sedan nowheres.
A girl with a baby-belly and no husband makes folks sweat. Wives look sharp at they men, then, finding no fault related to the crime at hand, look even sharper at they sons. Men look at themselves and worry. They find relief in the facts of life: a lustful thought carries no spunk. Everybody looks in their doorways and nobody sees me standing there with my shotgun demanding justice. I wanted to know who I was after before I went shooting.
“Who the daddy?” I asked Billy. This was two months ago. If it had been Laz, he woulda taken responsibility already.
“No one you know,” she said.
“I’ll make him do right by you,” I said.
“Let it alone,” she said. “He loves me. It’ll be all right if you just let it alone.”
So I let it alone and I waited. Then I seen him come up in his yellow car and I seen her run across the road without looking.
I’ve always wondered what happens when you don’t got a mother. Without a mother you don’t get born. But after birth, what then? Over the past six years, watching Billy come up, I’ve had several different thoughts on the subject. Several things happen, and different people take them in different ways. Or maybe just one thing happens and it happens differently to each person it happens to. A mother helps a child learn the basics. Billy don’t know the basics. Basic: don’t go opening yr legs for a man who ain’t yr husband lest you wanna be called hot trash.
People will talk. Let them talk. I can bear it. I am a Beede. I am a Beede so I can bear the people talking. I can bear pumping gas for Sanderson, I can bear losing my church. June Flowers is a Beede by marriage, not birth, so what June Flowers can bear is another story. I guess what Billy do or don’t do, and what she get or don’t get, is no more than just part of the Plan.
Lots of buses pass by Lincoln but most don’t stop. Buses stop in Midland, two different ones at five A.M., one going east to Dallas and the other west all the way to Hollywood, California. An hour and a half after they go through, two more stop. One heading southeast towards Galveston and the other one, the one heading north, passes through Texhoma. The north one’s the one I need to get. There’s a old rattling bus that stops in front of Mr. Bub Atchity’s at six every morning, except for Sunday. It’ll get you to Midland in time for your connection. Miss that rattling bus and you gotta walk.
“Texhoma ain’t much bigger than Lincoln,” June says. She got one of her maps folded neatly to the spot.
Bub Atchity’s standing in the doorway of his store wearing his nightshirt under the white doctor’s coat that he puts on when he sells stuff like Scott’s Emulsion. Laz says it ain’t a doctor’s coat but a dentist’s, cause it has the buttons along the shoulder and it hangs just to his hip. Doctor or dentist’s coat Mr. Atchity’s wearing it over his nightshirt with his bare feet and legs poking out underneath. “I’m telling you it stops there,” Atchity says.
“June’s just making sure,” Uncle Teddy says. I stand between