Fat chance, I almost told her.
She maintained the house and garden, and when called on, she’d dust off her nursing skills to assist Doc at his office on Bridge Street. On the evenings she wasn’t at a Garden Club or St. Thomas’s Ladies Auxiliary meeting, she’d study the words of God and William Shakespeare. She also enjoyed singing along with show tunes on the hi-fi and wouldn’t miss the Gillette Friday Night Fights and the Kraft Television Theatre on our Sylvania set. If the weather was right, she’d sit on the back porch glider, listen to the crickets courting one another, and wait for Frankie’s mother to come over after she tucked the Maniachis’ house in for the night. When she and Dell let their hair down and drank cooking sherry out of jelly glasses, the girls and I would lie on the hideout floor, barely breathing, so we could hear them talking woman to woman, and we’d gotten an earful one night last summer.
They’d spent some time chatting about the price of beef and whether or not they approved of Elvis Presley before the conversation took a turn. Someone lay on a car horn, so we missed what Dell said, but Aunt Jane May answered, “Before they knew Sophia was born with a birth defect, some of the ladies in the Auxiliary were saying that she and Sally were part of a mob family and she was crippled when she got shot in the back during a bank robbery.”
That was news to us, and picturing jolly Sally and bashful Sophia wielding Tommy guns and yelling, “Hand over the money, you dirty rats!” to a bank teller had us rolling around on the hideout floor attempting to smother our giggles.
Sure that Dell’d react the same way we had to that ridiculous gossip, we waited to hear her tinkling laugh coming off the back porch, but you know, it went real quiet back there before she said, “If the truth ever comes out … God help us all, Jane May.”
The girls and I still weren’t sure what to make of that, so we chalked up Dell’s comment that night to the cooking sherry. She could go gloomy like that after one too many jarfuls. Frankie called it her Billie Holiday mood.
“This pork could sole a shoe,” Aunt Jane May said as she slapped the patties onto the white breakfast plates. “What took ya?”
“So sorry for keepin’ you waiting, Auntie,” Viv said, because after we performed the ceremony, my blood sisters considered her a relative, the same way I considered their families mine. “It’s Frankie’s fault.”
Looked like she wasn’t going to waste any time getting back at her for the witch dare, and, as the peacekeeper of our triumvirate, it behooved me to consider all options. I was almost certain the jump rope Viv’d stuck in her shorts before she climbed down from the hideout figured into whatever revenge she’d come up with, because I’d recently caught her fashioning nooses with it. When I asked her if she was planning on hanging anybody in particular, she had the gall to tell me, “For your information, Elizabeth, I’m working on my knot merit badge,” like I’d forgotten she’d been kicked out of Girl Scouts for eating what she was supposed to be delivering. (She had a sweet tooth a mile wide and was unable to resist those chocolate mint cookies.)
“Biz and I got up early to pray,” Viv further lied to Aunt Jane May, “but Frankie wouldn’t wake-up and—” She yowled. “She just kicked me under the table!”
Brandishing a wooden spoon, Aunt Jane May spun around. “This better not have been how y’all acted last night.” She inspected our faces, but we’d practiced looking guileless for many years and our hard work paid off. “And how many times do I have to tell you to sit right in those chairs? Mark my words, you’re going to end up lookin’ as hunched as Edith Dirks, bless her heart.”
Most of her lectures began with “Mark my words” and didn’t end with, “And they all lived happily ever after.” The second she’d turn her back, we’d smirk at her gruesome warnings the way know-it-all girls of that age do—but not always. Because she and my mother had grown up in a town that had about as much in common with Summit as Mars, there were times Aunt Jane May seemed as strange to us as the aliens that scared us at the movies.
In Little Wildwood, Louisiana, you could be both a Roman Catholic and a believer in voodoo—a burlap doll sat next to Aunt Jane May’s missal in the top drawer of her dresser. Folks wrestled alligators in swamps, and because we didn’t know what the main ingredient in hush puppies was and were too afraid to ask, we thought they ate shoes down there. It also wasn’t unusual in her neck of the woods for a baby to be born on the “right side of the blanket,” the way she’d been. She possessed “the gift,” or what some folks called “intuition” or “being on God’s wave length,” and knew things that she seemed to pluck out of thin air.
Steaming plates in hand, Aunt Jane May shouted, “Did you not hear me? Put some starch in those backbones!”
Only after we did would she set our breakfasts down and herself at the head of the table, because my father was already at his busy downtown office. When we finished saying grace, Aunt Jane May snapped open the red clutch purse she’d begun carrying around since the heat flared up, withdrew one of the large, white lace hankies she kept at the ready to dab the “sheen”—never sweat—off her brow, and began her daily lecture.
“Where I come from,” she said, “ya know what they like to say when it grows so fiercely and unexpectedly hot like this, girls?”
Like butter wouldn’t melt, Viv said, “What do they like to say, Auntie?”
“That Satan knows when there are young souls ripe for the pickin’ and in his excitement to gather them, he fled perdition so fast he left the door of the everlasting fires open behind him. So less’n you three are itchin’ to spend all eternity burning, I’m warning you to keep your eyes open for lurking evil and trouble of any kind.” She swiveled my way. “As always, I expect you to remember that you’re a Buchanan and keep these two in hand. Stay away from Broadhurst, don’t pester Audrey Cavanaugh, keep your noses out of other folks’ business, and,”—she paused to wet her lips— “I want you to quit visiting Earl Spooner’s Club. In fact, once the sun sets, I don’t want you ridin’ over the tracks at all.”
When the Northern Railroad came through Summit way back when, they must’ve been in a hurry, because the part of town she was forbidding us to visit looked like it’d been built on the fly and was aptly named. The sewer system in Mud Town was sub-par and the drainage almost nonexistent. The ground was always damp and smelled freshly turned, and when it rained too much, you could almost feel the place slipping off the face of the Earth. Property went for near nothing and was bought by “colored” families, many of whom were descendants of the men who’d come to town to lay the tracks, and they had every right to set roots, no matter what some of our neighbors thought.
Aunt Jane May wasn’t like those folks.
Whatever reason she had for not wanting us to go over to Mud Town after dark, it wasn’t because she was prejudiced. She spoke in glowing terms about the brown-skinned women who had tended to the Mathews sisters when they were growing up and her best friend, Dell, wore only white at night to avoid getting struck by a car.
As our mouthpiece, Viv should’ve been vehemently challenging Aunt Jane May’s new rules, but she was as dumbstruck as I was, so it was up to Frankie to say something and she didn’t disappoint.