Sloan had looked at her like he could see through her—all the way to her soul—and he didn’t like what he saw. But then, if she’d been in his shoes, she might have also had second thoughts about some woman the ladies dragged into their home. She unzipped three plastic bags of elderberries and poured them into the pot that Betsy brought out from the cabinet.
“I thought Sloan would be an old gray-haired man,” she said.
“Why would you think that?” Betsy barely covered the elderberries with water and started smashing them with a potato masher.
“You said that he lives alone and does odd jobs,” Ginger answered. “Most guys his age have a job like in a factory or a business of some kind.”
“He’s a good man, that Sloan is, but . . . ,” Betsy said.
Connie butted into the conversation as she headed over to the pantry and brought out a fresh can of furniture polish. “But he went into the military right out of high school, and they sent him home more than two years ago.”
“What happened back then?” Kate asked as she opened the door and came up from the basement to join them.
“Sloan came home,” Connie said.
“That’s right.” Kate nodded. “His granny said that he didn’t do anything wrong, but there was some kind of trouble over there, and he’s been kinda like a hermit ever since. He don’t talk about the time he was in the army, but his granny said that it all happened when they sent him to Kuwait, or maybe it was Iran—one of those foreign places, anyway. We don’t get much into politics here at our place.”
“Why does your house have a name?” Ginger caught a whiff of alcohol and cinnamon mixed together when Kate walked past her to get a cup of coffee.
“It’s like this . . .” Kate sat down at the table and blew on her coffee. “Rooster hasn’t ever been very big, and it’s kind of out of the way, what with it being on a dead-end road that stops at the Cottonwood Cemetery. Way back there at the end of the Civil War, just south of us was a black community named Mission Valley.”
Connie poured herself a mug of coffee, added a heaping spoonful of sugar and a lot of whipping cream to it, and then sat down beside Kate. “Grandma Carson told me that it was named that because there was a Baptist church and a Methodist church, both of the missionary type, down in that area.”
Ginger didn’t want a history lesson. She only wanted to know how they came to name their home the Banty House. Something like the Sisters’ Mansion sounded more fitting to her than the name of a little male fighting chicken.
“So anyway, the Mission Valley community and both churches are gone now. The cemetery is still down there.” Betsy set the pot of elderberries off to the side, poured herself a cup of coffee, and joined them. “And it was all grown over. Folks that come to find their relatives had to walk through weeds and cockleburs and hope there weren’t no rattlesnakes hiding in all that until Sloan came home. He devotes a day a week to mowing and keeping the little graveyard looking decent.”
“Our family is buried there,” Kate went on. “Grandma and Mama, and there’s plots for each of us.”
Ginger wondered what all that had to do with the name of the house, but she’d learned through the years to be patient. The ladies seemed to be enjoying the reminiscing about the area. Maybe the cemetery itself had something to do with the name of the house.
“Anyway . . . ,” Connie sighed, “back then Rooster had a bank, a post office, and a general store. Our great-grandparents, Elizabeth and Rooster Carson, were instrumental in starting the town when they put in the general store and built this house. And yes, that was his real name—it’s right there on his tombstone. Rooster was his mama’s maiden name, so that’s where they got it, but from what we hear of his reputation, he was a short man with a real cocky attitude.”
Okay, Ginger thought, so we’ve narrowed down the topic from the whole area to a ghost town that only has half a dozen houses left and no businesses.
“They only had one child, our Grandma Carson, and she inherited this place when they died during that big flu epidemic back in 1919,” Betsy went on. “When Grandma Carson passed on about the time the Great Depression started in 1929, she left Mama this place. Y’all know something?” She drew her dark brows down in a frown. “We should get our house put on the historical registry. I’m going to have Sloan look into that.”
Kate pointed a finger at her. “You really want them fancy bitches from one of them historical societies knowin’ our business? Comin’ in here and checkin’ everything out to see if we’ve added on to the house. Goin’ down into my basement?”
“I guess not.” Betsy sighed.
Kate continued. “Mama and Grandma had a real nice seamstress business going here in Rooster. Folks down in Hondo didn’t have much to do with Grandma since she had Mama out of wedlock, and since—”
Connie butted in. “Might as well go on and spit it out. Mama was a quarter black. Folks back then called her a quadroon, when they weren’t callin’ her meaner stuff. That makes us an eighth black.”
“Some of my foster siblings were mixed race,” Ginger said. “I never thought much about the color of a person’s skin.”
“A person should look at the heart first.” Betsy pointed in Ginger’s direction. “Why don’t you get yourself a glass of milk from the refrigerator? And then sit down here with us. You don’t need to be drinkin’ caffeine in your condition, and milk will be good for the baby.”
“Thank you.” Ginger got a glass from the cabinet and filled it with milk. Then she sat down across from Connie.
“Folks today would call Mama mixed race,” Kate said. “Grandma never married, but the love of her life was a man whose mama was black and his daddy was white. His name was Malachi James and he was the preacher at one of those missionary churches that used to be here. Anyway, I guess it was a good thing that old Rooster was dead and gone by the time Grandma gave birth to our mother, or he might have shot her and the preacher both. Grandma said he was a hard man who thought he was above the black folks that did business with him at the store.”
“Havin’ a baby out of wedlock is not a killin’ offense,” Ginger said.
“It was back in the time when Mama was born,” Connie told her. “Lots has happened in this old world in the past hundred years.”
“After Grandma died,” Betsy said, “Mama tried to keep things afloat with her seamstress business. The hoity-toity folks in Hondo might not want to be her friend, but they sure loved her fine sewing skills. The Depression hit Texas right hard at that time, though, so no one had money for anything. Food and shelter took the place of fancy clothing to wear to church, and Mama’s business was going under fast. Taxes were due on the house and things were getting bad. Prohibition was still in effect, and . . .” Betsy stopped to take a sip of her coffee.
Connie picked up the story. “And Grandma had taught Mama how to make moonshine, just like her mama had taught her and so on and so on back down the line. It wasn’t legal, but word soon got out that folks could buy their liquor here, and the whole town had an interest in it being secret. The way Mama told us the story was that it didn’t quite keep the bills paid, town or no, so she hired six girls and turned the house into a brothel.”