The Cotton Queen Read online

  Acee was up and in the shower before dawn. He tried to be quiet so I could sleep. I think I slept best when I could hear him getting ready for his day. He’d head for the hospital at first light to see Marley and the doctor before driving into work in McKinney.

  It was a strange existence. Each of us just living moment by moment, our moods completely dependent on the current crisis of our very small son.

  And he was our son. Acee had not offered more recriminations. From the first moment he’d held that small child in his arms, I knew he had loved him. People from church told us they were praying for a miracle, I knew that Acee’s devotion to Marley was nothing less.

  To be completely honest, during these weeks I also worried about Laney. I knew she was with Aunt Maxine and Uncle Warren. I knew that she’d be fine. She was just a little girl. She couldn’t understand what was happening and I was sure that she would be all wrapped up in playtime and school and other childhood concerns. Still, I needed her. I could look at her and know that I was a worthy person, a good mother, and it gave me strength to face little Marley and all his ills.

  Marley suffered what Dr. Richardson described as a mild stroke a few days after we arrived at Parkland. It was the first of many. A few weeks later he had a more serious one. Cerebrovascular accidents they were called. By any name, they were terrifying.

  Dr. Richardson shrugged. “Strokes are going to happen,” he said. “You’d better just be prepared for that. It’s congestive heart failure that will probably be your killer.”

  His tone was so matter-of-fact it chilled me to the bone.

  “Look, I don’t believe in giving parents false hope,” he said. “This baby is probably not going to make it. And if he does, well, he’ll be so damaged, he’ll be little more than a vegetable.”

  That night in the hotel, I could sense Acee’s concern and anxiety.

  “I just feel so sad about it,” he told me. “We’ve grown so attached to the little guy. I don’t know if I can bear to lose him. Why do things like this happen?”

  His question was rhetorical. My guilt was abject. I had been more concerned about being found out than about taking care of the child in my womb.

  I stood in the little closetlike bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror over the sink. My child was dying and I had only myself to blame. How had I gotten to this terrible place? I thought of Tom and my eyes welled with tears. I had begun to resent him, to be angry with him. If he hadn’t died, none of these terrible things would have happened. But he had died and it had all happened. It was still happening.

  What Burl had done to me was evil. I’d had no choice but to try to save myself, to save myself and Laney from what would have been an unforgiving and censuring world. I had been victimized. But did that give me the right to spread a blanket of lies over someone else’s world? How much deceit could one person cover over? Burl was evil. Acee had been nothing except good to me. He deserved far better than I was giving him. I vowed before God in that bathroom mirror that no matter what happened, I would devote my life to making a good life for my husband.

  When I went back into the room, Acee was seated in the desk chair, talking to his mother on the phone. As always, his report was upbeat, hopeful.

  “Marley was looking right at me today,” he said to her. “And I think he almost smiled.”

  Acee said nothing of Krikor’s Syndrome or the stroke that the baby had suffered. He spoke only reassurance and optimism.

  When he hung up the phone I walked up behind him and leaned over to wrap my arms around his neck. He patted me reassuringly.

  “Is your mother doing all right?”

  “Except for missing us and the baby, she’s fine,” he answered.

  “Acee, you always sound so cheerful when you talk to her,” I said. “Don’t you worry that she won’t be prepared if...if something goes wrong.”

  Acee pulled me around the chair and seated me on his lap. He kissed me sweetly, playfully, like we were just young lovers with no cares in the world beyond each other.

  “I’m serious here,” I told him. “From talking to you, your mother undoubtedly thinks that everything is going well.”

  “With a beautiful wife in my arms, how could it be otherwise.”

  “Acee.”

  He pulled back a little bit then and looked at me more soberly.

  “I don’t tell her all the bad news because it’s not necessary,” he said. “She knows the baby wouldn’t still be in the hospital if everything were fine. There is not any way for any of us to ‘prepare’ for some kind of tragedy. If things go badly with Marley, no amount of worrying beforehand will make it easier.”

  “You are a smart man, Acee Clifton,” I said. “And not just in books, but in feelings, too.”

  He smiled.

  “Smart enough to marry you,” he said.

  Marley stayed in the hospital for almost four months. One morning, the nurse waylaid us in the hallway and said that Dr. Richardson wanted to meet with us. We went to talk to him, not in the hospital nursery, but in a comfortable book-lined room on the hospital’s second floor. His familiar white coat was missing. The gray flannel suit made him seem like a stranger.

  “The baby arrested last night,” he said without introduction.

  Acee and I glanced at each other. I could see the fear in his eyes. I knew it mirrored my own.

  “What do you mean he arrested?” I asked.

  “Cardiac arrest,” Dr. Richardson answered.

  When I continued to stare at him questioningly, he gave me the answer more specifically.

  “The baby died,” he said. “He had a heart attack and he died.”

  “No,” I said, firmly.

  “Yes,” the doctor insisted.

  Immediately Acee rose to his feet. To me it seemed as if there ought to be something more to say, something more to discuss. My husband led me out of the room without a backward glance toward the physician.

  LANEY

  AFTER MY brother died, my mother didn’t seem that interested in me. I guess maybe she’d gotten used to not having me around or maybe I just started getting ugly. I was the first kid in second grade to lose a front tooth. And I was so tall. I was taller than all the girls in my class, even the boys. I was taller than Cheryl and Nicie.

  Ned Hoffman made a big deal about that. He started calling me Gargantua Girl. I didn’t know what it meant until I complained to Uncle Skipper. It seems that Gargantua was a huge monster in a movie. Cheryl and Nicie thought it was funny. I didn’t.

  My mother never commented one way or another. All she ever said to me was “Laney do this” and “Laney do that.” She was busy all the time. Actually the word busy doesn’t begin to describe how it was. My mother was a warrior. Dirt and disorder were the enemy and she was determined not just to get the best of them, but to eradicate both from the face of the earth. I was a foot soldier in this fight, a draftee. Of course, I was not alone. My mother hired maids and housekeepers, constantly. Her perfectionism either drove them away or she was forced to fire them. When our school was integrated in 1966 I was the only white girl who knew a lot of the black kids. I’d met so many of them when the moms worked in our house.

  Ultimately, of course, cleaning and decorating were not enough to make a life. Babs turned her attention out to the world at large and began to organize and beautify all of McKinney.

  For the most part, I was out of that battle. Or at least I stayed out of it as long as I could. As a little kid, I really couldn’t be called upon to fulfill civic responsibilities the way Babs did. But, of course, I was dragged into planting trees at the park for the Garden Club’s Arbor Day celebration. And I was her first conquest. But the Owl Club was her goal. The Owls were a bunch of rich old ladies who had meetings in each other’s homes and did things around town. I don’t mean they actually did things. It seemed like they got other people to do things and they paid for it. They had parties and galas, fashion shows and teas. Babs wanted to be part of that. There
was only one sticking point, you had to be invited. That shouldn’t have been a problem. Mrs. Clifton, Acee’s mother, was a big whoop-de-do in the Owls. But somehow her invitation to her daughter-in-law never materialized. And if her mother-in-law wouldn’t invite her, she could hardly ask someone else to do it.

  There were few other options for social climbing in McKinney. The Edel Weiss Society was the other ladies’ group, almost as prestigious as the Owls. But my aunt LaVeida, Nicie’s mom who’d wanted to adopt me, was in that group. So I’m sure Babs wouldn’t have been all that welcome.

  My mother whined and complained about the injustice of it all. Never to Acee, where it might have done some good. She complained to Aunt Maxine who had no help to offer and failed to see the value in what Babs sought.

  “You don’t need some club to do good works,” Aunt Maxine told her. “Get involved in the church auxiliary or the PTA. They’ll take anyone who wants to help.”

  “It’s not just about good works,” Babs insisted. “It’s about Acee taking his proper place in the community. It’s a wife’s duty to make sure that happens.”

  Aunt Maxine chuckled and shook her head. “In my day that wasn’t what women were talking about when they mentioned ‘a wife’s duty.’”

  My mother gave a startled gasp and glanced pointedly in my direction.

  “Laney, why don’t you go and play somewhere else,” she told me. “It’s so warm in here.”

  She and Aunt Maxine were in her kitchen. The place was steaming hot as they sterilized jars for the apple butter they were cooking.

  At her suggestion, I wandered off into cooler areas of the house. I felt perfectly at home in the twins’ room. It was smaller than my own and had none of the neat stuff I had in mine. But my room never had the safe, centered feeling that I got in Janey and Joley’s nest of yellow gingham and white eyelet.

  The boys’ room was uninhabited now, but far from empty. Renny was overseas in the Army. Pete was at North Texas State in Denton. The presence of both lingered in the Spartan room with the wagon-wheel bunk beds. Everything was in place except for a box that had been dragged from underneath the bed and left when someone’s attention had been distracted. I knelt down to see what was inside. The box was filled with letters, all the same size and blue color. The return address was unfamiliar. But what caught my eye was that they had obviously come through the mail, but they had no stamp in the upper right-hand corner where someone had written in rather sloppy penmanship the word Free.

  I opened one up to discover they were from Renny. When I’d stayed here with Aunt Maxine and Uncle Warren, they’d gotten many letters from my cousin. But these were different. I opened one and tried to read it. Although it was written in cursive, I could make most of it out. Like letters from him that I’d heard before, this one was filled with funny stories of people. The one I’d picked up was about a farmer and his reluctant water buffalo. But somehow the blue letters seemed different. There was a strange detachment to the incident that felt almost sad.

  “You have to give it to these gooks,” he wrote. “They work hard and make the most of what little they have. Not so different from folks back in Texas.”

  That seemed like a strange thing to say. People in Texas didn’t have water buffalos.

  “Still, you got to remember that they might be Cong. The women, the kids, any of them, all of them. You got to always be suspicious of everyone.”

  My brow furrowed thoughtfully. I was pretty sure that being suspicious wasn’t in Renny’s nature.

  That evening at home at the dinner table, my cousin’s name came up again.

  “How are Warren and Maxine doing?” Acee asked Babs.

  I wasn’t sure that she could even answer that question. From my observation she’d spent the entire visit talking about herself.

  “They’re doing all right,” Babs told him. “Of course, they are worried about Renny.”

  Acee shook his head, sorrowful.

  “That Vietnam is a bad business,” he said.

  My mother made a dismissing sound. “The only thing bad about it is those awful protestors,” she said. “They ought to not allow that. People ought to be made to keep their mouths shut.”

  “We’ve had pacifists in every war we’ve fought,” Acee said. “It’s their right to make their views known.”

  “But this is not a war,” Babs insisted. “This is a police action. And Renny and the other young men are only there as advisors.”

  Acee raised an eyebrow. “Well, it seems like the kind of advice they’re giving can get you killed.”

  After supper, it was my job to clear the table. Babs washed the dishes the way she did everything these days. With exacting attention to detail. My main concern was that I not be drawn into any big projects. Babs was quite capable of suddenly deciding that all the good silver had to be unearthed from the dining room and polished. Or that the wax buildup on the kitchen floor next to the mopboard was best dislodged with a toothpick.

  I hurried up to my room as soon as I could. During the school term I could always claim to have homework. In the summer, I’d say I was tired. Either excuse, I’d stay up late into the night reading or playing with my dollhouse.

  Babs would continue working, cleaning, decorating, organizing. I don’t remember ever catching her resting or idle. My memory of that time has her constantly busy.

  It wasn’t such a bad childhood, I suppose. I learned how to do things around the house and I developed a strong work ethic, almost against my will. I guess the bad lesson being taught was the idea that hard work was enough to keep real feelings at arm’s length.

  BABS

  THE YEAR AFTER Marley died is mostly a blur for me. I got up every morning. Ate meals. Did chores. Went to bed at night. I existed. Beyond that, I was not living. When they’d closed his little casket, barely bigger than a boot box, I vowed to leave everything I knew about him inside. I promised myself never to think about how he was conceived. Not to remember the day he was born. Not to writhe in agony about the months that he’d suffered. Marley was gone. No guilt, no dreams, no prayers were about to change that. I vowed not to think of him again. I vowed never to say to myself, he’d be three now, he’d be eleven, he’d be twenty-one. He would never be more than four months. He would never be more than a sick infant in a hospital crib.

  To keep my vows and my memories at bay, I plunged into near frantic activity. I had a new husband, a new house, a new name and a new position in the community. Added together, they filled my days.

  Acee began to pressure me about sex again only a few months after the funeral.

  “We could have another baby,” he told me. “Dr. Bridges said that’s often a very good way to get through the grief.”

  I wanted to give him another child. I wanted to give him his own child. But my problems in the bedroom had not gone away with time. On the contrary, they seemed to have worsened. Sometimes just a hug or a kiss would cause a small spasm of tightness in my intimate anatomy and with that, a rush of disgust and near panic. I didn’t want to be a sexual being. I felt safer just hanging back from personal contact.

  Because he had insisted and I had promised, I began looking into what kind of doctor I might see about my problem. From what I could determine, there was no such thing as a sex doctor. The cure suggested in magazines for people with sexual problems was psychoanalysis. Analysis was new, or at least it was new to me. The idea of a “talking cure” made sense on some level. But there was no analyst in McKinney. To take this therapy, I had to make weekly visits to Dallas.

  I tried several different therapists. I would spend a couple of months talking to someone and then switch to someone else. I don’t think that it was a complete waste of time. I learned a lot about myself. I have abandonment issues. I have low self-esteem. My view of human sexuality had been skewed—puritanical subtexts of a repressed culture. All of those things were good to know. But they didn’t really help me.

  Of course, that was not the fault of
the doctor or the cure. Although I was mostly candid about Laney and Tom, Acee and Marley, my childhood and my problems, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about what had happened with Burl. I couldn’t forget it. But I could resist bringing it into mind. I had never really talked about what had happened. I had told Acee that I’d been forced. But somehow those words cannot portray what was done to me. Not just physically, more than that. What was done to me darkened my soul. If I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with my husband, why would I tell it to some stranger? Some man who seemed nice, but who could easily be different. I would never let my guard down again.

  And my problem with going to therapy was much larger than being less than truthful to the expressionless doctor with the clipboard. In the months since moving back to McKinney I had developed a fear of Dallas.

  I suppose it had started when Kennedy was shot. I settled upon Dallas as the source of evil in the world. When Marley was in the hospital, familiarity did not make it easier. It actually got worse. I’d see a car or catch sight of someone from the corner of my eye and suddenly my heart would be in my throat, my pulse pounding.

  After the baby’s death, when I didn’t have to go there on a regular basis, I thought it was getting better. But as soon as I knew I was headed in that direction, I became jumpy. I’d be anxious even before I left the house just thinking about the highway. The drive made me so tense, you could have plucked my backbone like a bowstring. The closer I got to the city the more agitated I felt. Once in town, my stomach twisted into a knot of fear at every stoplight. Getting from the protection of the car into the doctor’s office was more terrifying to me than a moonless cemetery on Halloween night. Danger lurked in shadows everywhere. Burl could be just around the corner.

  In the very reasonable, most rational part of my brain, I could remember when Burl was just a next-door neighbor, an ordinary man, married to a friend. More and more he had taken on superhuman status in subconscious. He was the devil incarnate. He was my night terror, daylight or dark.