Forgiving Effie Beck, page 1
Also by Karen Casey Fitzjerrell
THE DIVIDING SEASON
Winner of the EPIC Award for Historical Fiction
Praise for The Dividing Season:
“...a rare and beautiful book for which other words only begin to describe: exquisitely lyrical, rich in history and emotion, poignant, and intelligently written.”
— Arletta Dawdy, author of Huachuca Woman
“...the author word-paints masterful images - painstaking research is very apparent...”
— Susan Clayton Luton
“...characters are richly drawn and the plot takes just enough unexpected turns to keep interest without stretching the story’s credibility.”
— LaDene Morton, author of What Lies West
“...the author manages the reins of both action and introspection skillfully...”
— Judith Austin Mills, author of How Far Tomorrow
“Fitzjerrell...writes with compassion, heart and quiet humor. I loved the book.”
—Mary E. Trimble, author of TUBOB
Forgiving Effie Beck
Karen Casey Fitzjerrell
Copyright 2013 Karen Casey Fitzjerrell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
Inquiries should be addressed to:
kcfitzjerrell@gmail.com
First Edition 2013
Library of Congress Control Number
2013939965
Fitzjerrell, Karen Casey
forgiving effie beck / Karen Casey Fitzjerrell
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-9847768-1-8 Print
ISBN 978-0-9847768-7-0 Ebook
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
For Cole and Neva
Author’s Note
During the editing process of this book it was brought to my attention that I use several unfamiliar words not listed in most of today’s dictionaries. Rather than delete perfectly good words used freely during The Depression Era or interrupt the story with explanations, I include definitions here:
Hoopie
It’s my opinion that the difficulty in finding a definition or description of a “hoopie” stems from the fact that hoopie was a derogatory term used to refer to ne’er-do-wells, dirty people, bums (especially in the North Eastern part of America) and so it’s been more or less swept out of use. To the best of my limited knowledge, in Central and South Texas it was never considered a derogatory remark, but rather a simple reference to a motor vehicle.
I found this single description in Urban Dictionary online, where it’s listed as number seven.
“- A homemade vehicle for back road use. They are usually built using an old car or truck frame with the drivetrain parts intact. They are very minimal and are used for off road purposes as they have very few parts that can be damaged by collisions with trees, rocks, and other obstructions.”
Rural settings are the only place you will ever see one of these creations because they are strictly illegal for use on any highway. To get an idea of what a hoopie looks like, think of the Beverly Hillbilly's truck (actually an Oldsmobile Touring Car) without any kind of body. It is said that seeing a hoopie can bring good luck.
Black Draught (pronounced draw) - A saline aperient used as a purgative in the 19th and 20th centuries. A laxative.
Blue John - Blue John refers to what is left after skimming cream from whole milk. True farmhouse skimmed milk has a blue cast.
Prologue
There I was. Old, half blind, stretched out in wet grass giggling like a drunk.
I laughed at myself for ending up that way, and for living such a long time without getting any smarter than when I was a child hoeing red dirt and listening to cicadas bleat like sheep in the tree tops.
But then thunder boomed and crackled again and I felt the ground shudder. My laughing stopped. I sucked rain water from grass and spread my arms hoping to take on the strength of the storm. I’d only planned to rest for a while, catch my breath.
Now, when the sun dips and the sky turns pink and orange and the green jay gripes at the owl, I come up from my resting spot near the spring and go to the rock fence. There I listen to the breathing town.
I’ve resigned myself to this fuzzy existence on the crooked line between them and me. Them, of course, being Cooperville citizens. The Breathers, I call them, including the little seed I gave up so long ago. I’ve been purified by sorrow, you see, and I hunger to move on, but I have an itch that holds me here. An unfinished task.
This is rawboned country with few places for afflicted hearts to hide. During those last hours, I saw how wrong I’d been, how wrong we all had been. You can go back and try to make things right. You can change your mind and barrel head-on through uncertainties that might hold you back.
The Breathers are like wreckage caught in an eddy at river’s edge, swirling in a never-ending circle of self-deceit. They put their backs to the door of blessedness like humped, eyeless creatures and tell themselves there’s no hope for escape, no chance of change, no way to put things right. They believe they are comfortably cocooned by their secrets.
I should know. I was one of them. Now, here I sit weeping, watching, listening. E.B.
Forgiving Effie Beck
PART I
Bony women, blank-faced children, the absence of hope, the thump of despair. Mike Lemay could not clear the images and thoughts from his mind. They called it the Depression. If it didn’t kill you, it altered you, carved holes in your self-respect, made you think about death, clean and quick.
Riding between oil barrels in the back of a truck traveling west through a sleepy little valley, Mike thought he heard cicadas above the whine of truck tires. He had hitched rides halfway across the country, walked much of it, counted each inch, foot, mile he put between himself and the greasy stench of human misery. He’d thought a lot about sorrow and hope the whole way, how both drifted on air thick with heat.
He was sorry for leaving his sobbing mother behind even though he had long since reached the age when a man should leave his mother. She was frail and Texas was a long way from North Carolina, and he’d made her worry, would she ever see him again. The only thread of hope he had – that he dared not bank on too much because he couldn’t endure another disappointment – was an honest-to-God decent job. This, after a year of cleaning slop from street gutters for a dime a day.
Mike had been hired to work as an interviewer for the Federal Writer’s Project, a government program that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. But anyone with dog sense knew the United States Government, like God, could take away what was given with ease and no warning. So he kept a tight rein on hope.
The oil barrels shifted when the truck rattled over a bridge. Mike pushed one of his tattered suitcases between the barrels and tried to get comfortable. But images of embittered people forced to endure paralyzing indignities, armies of men standing in line for a bit of bread and the odor of unclean bodies stayed with him. He had been one of them, suffered the same humiliation.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
The greatest shame was the one he brought on himself. He asked the FWP coordinator who hired him if he could have an assignment somewhere west of the Mississippi and south of the Oklahoma dust storms. Somewhere far from the filth and rot of cities and the drought devastation in the country’s mid-section.
He knew it would break his mother’s heart and split up the little bit of family he had left. Of course, he had every intention of sending his pay home to her and his younger brother, James, who had a pregnant wife and no sign of work on the horizon.
Mike tried to make them understand that the one thing that had held him together, the bond of family, could no longer do the trick. He was like a sand castle at high tide, getting washed clean away by shifting hard times. After all, he told himself, James had his wife. His mother had James. And now he, Mike Lemay, had a job. Still, the guilt he harbored for leaving his family overshadowed any enthusiasm he had for the opportunity of work.
The truck stopped in a choking cloud of dust and the driver pointed to a road that angled south off the highway. “Hey buddy! I think that’s the road that’ll take you where you need to go.”
Mike threw his suitcases down and jumped off the truck. He tipped his fedora to the driver as he drove away. Across the road a bird chirped incessantly. It was perched high up in a dead tree, nothing but twisted twigs sticking out against a pale sky.
Down the road, the direction the truck driver had pointed, Mike heard an engine hum faint and far away. He moved his cases to the side of the road and walked off into tall weeds to relieve himself. When he came back, a wavy blue speck appeared around a bend where the road disappeared into a thicket of vegetation and massive trees. The bird jumped to a twig higher up in the dead tree and raised its song an octave. Mike put out his thumb and waited until a rusty blue pickup rolled, slow as syrup in snow, to a stop in front of him. A sun-parched man wearing a straw hat leaned his head out of the window.
“Where you headed?”
“Cooperville.”
“By dern, you’re in luck. I’m headed that way my own self. Hop in. I’m starved for talk.”
Mike hefted his cases on top of some wooden crates in the back of the truck and climbed into the cab.
“Name’s Clyde Cheevers.”
Clyde Cheevers drove with his head pushed forward like he was hunkering in a wind. His silver hair stuck out stiff as straw from under his hat. His knobby brown hands were nicked and scabbed. He glanced in his rear view mirror. “Them cases look like a pretty good load. You peddling?”
Mike considered Clyde’s question. Where he’d come from, a man didn’t ask another’s business. More often than not, the answers were foul and hateful, fronts used to disguise the useless feeling of being out of work. “No. Does it matter?” Mike said.
“Why no. I was just trying to be pleasant is all.”
Mike clinched his jaw muscles. He’d been alone with his cynicism too long maybe, and it showed. “I’m a FWP interviewer.”
“Come again? Don’t you mean WPA?”
“Federal Writers’ Project. It’s a national work relief project like the WPA. I’m supposed to stay in this area for a time, get to know the people, then write about their experiences.”
Clyde chuckled. “Now that ought to make for interesting reading.”
“Life histories, they’re calling it. Interviewers all over the country will eventually compile the transcriptions into a series of volumes.”
“Been at it long?”
“No. I worked – my whole family worked – in a North Carolina mill after we lost our farm in the Crash.”
Mike let his gaze sweep north. The countryside swelled and then dropped away like a gentle green sea and in the west, hills were the color of bruises. His mind rolled back to the day his family packed to leave their farm. His small wiry father, jaws locked, lips pressed in a tight line, boarded up the windows and doors on the farmhouse. Odd that Mike remembered glancing over at his dad and noticing dirt caked under his fingernails.
His dad had always known what to do to take care of the family, had clear views of the rightness of a matter and acted on his judgments with determination, or some said, pigheadedness. “If your heart is aimed to do right, then don’t be afraid to be responsible,” he would say.
When his dad finished boarding up the farmhouse, he stood for the longest time in the yawning silence, gazing at the front door. James, his brother, waited in the back of a pickup truck heaped with mattresses, boxed dishes, and a few chairs, while his mother sat on the running board with her forehead cupped in her hand. Then his dad raised the hammer high overhead and hurled it against the house with all his red-faced might.
Six months later he was dead. Withered and wilted away, Mike often thought, like an uprooted oak separated from its sustenance.
Nothing was certain after that. Their lives fell apart like a plodding avalanche, if anyone could imagine such a thing.
Clyde Cheever’s old pickup labored down the dusty road snail slow. “Did one of them strikes put y’all out of your mill work?” Clyde asked. “By dern, it’s a shame what’s happening to this country. But, you’ll get along fine, son. We’re kind’a off from the worst of it way out here. Things is bad, don’t get me wrong, but you’ll do all right.”
Mike gave Clyde a quick side-glance and wondered if the man had any idea how bad he needed to hear those words. “Do you live in Cooperville?”
“Me? Nawh. I live east of here near Pole Cat Creek, town about ten miles east of Cooperville.” Clyde geared down to a crawl as he approached a dirt path leading to a dilapidated house set far back from the road.
“Miss Effie Beck’s place,” Clyde said. He tapped the horn a couple of times before he rolled forward to the mailbox, opened it and grabbed a cloth-wrapped bundle. A small figure appeared shadow-like in the doorway of the leaning house and a thin arm waved at Clyde. He waved back then handed Mike the bundle and said, “Cake.” He wrestled with the gear shift. “The old woman runs her place alone. I helped her worm her cattle a while back. This is how she pays me even when I tell her there’s no need to. Help yourself.”
Mike bit into a piece of the cake that had been sliced into thick slabs. His heart shuddered in his chest and nearly shut off the flow of air to his lungs. It was ginger cake, just like back home. He wanted to cry like a little child. Instead he swallowed hard, thumbed over his shoulder and asked, “What’s in your crates back there?”
“Cucumbers. Taking ’em to the pickle factory in Cooperville. I got a place between here and Pole Cat Creek. I farm mostly cotton and cucumber, anything I can sell, which is not much these days.”
Mike noticed a bright metal star pinned on Clyde’s shirt pocket. “Are you sheriff?”
“No. Fella by the name of Neal Lackland holds that distinction. I’m a Ranger. I take it you heard of the Texas Rangers?” Clyde propped his arm on the window and accelerated enough to stir a breeze in the cab of the pickup. “You picked a good time to visit our county. Folks’ll be gettin’ ready for the Pickle Festival. Give you a chance to see how we celebrate in these parts.”
“Pickle Festival?” Mike couldn’t help but chuckle.
Clyde shrugged in agreement to the corny humor of the name. “Thing is,” he said, “you might have trouble finding a place to stay. The WPA has a crew out putting in a new bridge across the Medina River, so the boardinghouse is probably full.”
“Is there a hotel in town?”
“Burned down ’bout five years ago. Fella that owned it couldn’t afford to repair it so he just walked off toward the highway and hadn’t nobody seen him since. There’s a widow woman, though, rents a room on occasion. Name’s Cora Mae Travis. You ask around. Anybody can tell you where she lives.”
Mike held the cake up so Clyde could get a piece. “No thanks, but you go on and have another.” After eating a second slice, Mike folded the cloth back over the cake and set it on the seat between them.
Clyde turned onto yet another dirt road that sloped to a valley with a pretty clear water stream running through it. “The Medina River,” Clyde said. “On up a ways, Cooperville Spring Creek empties into it. We’ll be coming into town the back way since I had to stop by Miss Effie’s place.”
Low rocky cliffs rose first on the right then on the left of the road that followed the river’s twisted path through hills. At times, the river valley was wide and flat and then it narrowed with high rock walls on either side. Occasionally, between the hills or around a clump of trees, Mike glimpsed cattle grazing in apple-green pastures. “This country is different from what I expected,” he said.
“Cactus, tumbleweeds and cowboys with six-shooters?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you’ll see plenty such as that, but there’s more too, as you can see.”
Clyde inched the truck across a wooden bridge. “Cooperville Spring Creek,” he said, then turned left when the road ended at Main Street. Six blocks later he stopped in front of the boardinghouse on the east side of town. Mike got out and pulled his suitcases off the back of Clyde’s truck. A sharp sour odor turned his stomach. He dragged his cases around to Clyde’s window. “What’s that smell?”
“Why, that’s the pickle factory a few blocks that-a-way. You’ll get used to it. Now, if you’re ever in Pole Cat, be sure to look me up, hear?”
Mike tipped his hat. “Will do. Appreciate the ride.”
As Clyde predicted, the boardinghouse was full. But Mike counted it a mixed blessing. He wholeheartedly disagreed with Clyde about getting used to the heavy vinegar odor that stung his nose and eyes. The lady at the boardinghouse gave him directions to Cora Mae Travis’s place and wished him luck.
Mike didn’t count on Luck, wanted to tell the lady so, but didn’t. Anyone could see that these days Luck was as thin as blue-john milk. When he stepped back out into the sunshine, something about the way his shadow fell across the cracked sidewalk made him pause, as if he’d walked through a gauze curtain into a broad open space in another dimension. With a suitcase in each hand, Mike took a few steps and then stalled. He looked up and down the street, hesitant, but for the life of him, he couldn’t determine why.
