Knee-Deep in Wonder by April Reynolds Page B

Queen Ester turned ragged. Quickly she outgrew the dresses specially ordered, and Liberty’s night songs turned to clever explanations. “I was gone buy you a new dress, baby. But you look so sweet in them old ones. Like the little bit you was when everything was just right. And they ain’t too tight, is they?”
    â€œNo, ma’am.” Queen Ester snuggled deeper into her arms.
    â€œYou ain’t just saying that, is you?” Liberty pulled back slightly to get a better look at her child’s face. Winter air rushed between them and bit hard into Queen Ester’s bare stomach.
    â€œNo, ma’am, I ain’t just saying that,” Queen Ester said, hoping that Liberty would pull her close again.
    â€œAll right. All right then. You know, when I was your age, I was damn near six feet.”
    â€œYou wasn’t.”
    â€œOh, yes, ma’am, I was.” Liberty could feel beneath her chin her daughter’s lips jut out with pouting. “Naw, I was just teasing. I was a little bit just like you. But then I grow right on up.” The cold had vanished, and creeping warmth now made it impossible to fight sleep. Queen Ester yawned. “Like I’m gone grow on up, Mama?”
    â€œNot while I’m watching. You can be a little bit for as long as we want. You ain’t got to make a way. That’s for me to do.”
    But those two dollars wouldn’t go very far and she knew it. Worse, Sweets’s money had spoiled Liberty, made her proud. Despite having lived in Lafayette County for eleven years, Liberty and Queen Ester were almost strangers. Ignorant of her neighbors’ intricate trading system, Liberty didn’t know she could get two baskets of tomatoes from Carol Lee for a bolt of fabric. Poo-Poo fixed generators and anything else slightly electrical if you agreed to take in his laundry for a month. She could have gotten her roof retarred by Minyas and his boys if she gave them rhubarb pies anytime they asked.
    Liberty was just as ignorant of Lafayette’s history. A hundred years had passed before the people of Lafayette County realized they had forgotten to lay down sidewalks. The calm stitching of cement and stone that meant a place had really decided to settle never came to Lafayette, and the county’s lapse gave it the air of being an accident. There were things in its favor. It had the wanting. Any man who could walk ten miles without falling down wanted enough to get a car. (Disgusted with himself for loving the Model T—by 1933, the unbreakable metal owned by every farmer and sawmill boss was on its way out—a man would also dream of a Chadwick, which was rumored to run at 110 miles per hour.) But he still couldn’t figure out—or, rather, no one told him—how to get electricity or a toilet into his house.
    The county also had the strength. Hacking and hacking away under the yoke of the sawmills (which took seventy-three years to get to Lafayette and then the companies just upped and went, taking the money and all that went with it), the people prayed for post offices and courthouses, doorknobs and curtains, all of which never came. Still, they chopped at the oaks and the pines and watched the trains leave with logs and broken men.
    Liberty didn’t know that in 1901 there had been more folks congregating at the sawmill quarters than at the churches. Years later, when the goldenseals refused to grow anywhere but the cemeteries and the violets sprang stupefied between the railroad tracks, the newly arrived, looking creased in their store-bought khakis, asked themselves if this was all there was: the ripe smell of dying dogtooth violets and the sawmills that at a distance had the awful air of a plantation that ran on wood instead of cotton. But no one was there to answer, because by then the old had vanished, fleeing to Texas or returning whence they came.
    Had Liberty known all this, Lafayette’s history and thus its