Hattie

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dedicated to my husband, Clarence.

PROLOGUE

The last thing I remembered was looking at the picture and thinking, as I always did when I looked at it, I wish I could go there. The picture was one of those family portraits taken by a roving photographer in the early part of the twentieth century. The background was the side yard of their farmhouse.

Granddaddy had bought a bolt of cloth in Headland and brought it home saying to my Granny, Make you and the girls a dress.

When they were done, the photographer came along, as if on cue and froze them forever in time and space on a piece of cardboard. They posed that summer day in their new finery, all except Bessie, who chose to be immortalized in her sailor dress.

If the photograph had been in color, the redheads would have stood out strikingly. My Granddaddy, Aunt Jewel, and Mama all had red auburn hair. Those were the days before living color, however, so the sepia toned photo left much to the imagination.

My grandparents were seated side by side in press backed oak chairs from the kitchen. The four daughters stood behind them, Jewel, Georgia Mae, Bessie, and the twelve year-old Hattie, who was my future mother. She stood just between their chairs, her long red hair tied back with a huge black satin bow which showed at either side of her face. Her dress, black, also, was her Sunday best and did not reach her feet. What did not show in the photograph was that her bare toes were digging in the dry dusty earth.

The best dresses, hastily donned when the photographer arrived, were all that showed. Phil stood just behind my grandmother, taller, but younger than Mama by three years. Little Truman sat on Papa’s lap and looked intently at the photographer. As was the custom then, no one smiled.

I tried to imagine as much of the background as possible. I once visited the site as an adult with Mama. She described it to me as it had been then.

The unpainted farm house had rooms on either side of an open hallway, a dog trot. There were two rooms on one side, a great fire-room with a smaller room behind it. The large bedroom had been that of Jewel and Georgia Mae. Bessie and Mama had slept in the smaller one behind it.

The other side of the hall had four rooms: a fire-room where my grandparents slept, a small room next to it where the boys slept, and a dining room and kitchen with a fireplace. A porch ran across the front and another extended beyond the open hall down the long kitchen side of the house. The house had been much more crowded when Mama’s brothers lived at home, but as the older ones married and moved out, there was more room for everyone.

The clean swept yard was red sand and clay. Trees, huge oaks, grew all around and the girls had flower beds here and there with zinnias and four-o-clocks in bloom. The backyard had a wide spreading fig tree, some peach trees, and a towering pear tree. From the back porch you could look out across a vegetable garden enclosed in a weathered rail fence. The washhouse and the smoke house were off to one side. Down a worn path on the other side of the garden fence, stood the outhouse, all alone.

The barn was a weathered building, as old as the house. It stood down the slope towards Omussee Creek. Red chickens clucked and pecked around the back porch steps hunting table scraps which might have been poured out with the dish water. A hound dog lay asleep under the front porch steps where it was shady and cooler than the yard. A couple of honeybees were buzzing around an althea bushes’ pink blossoms.

I looked at that picture so often I could imagine what wasn’t in it almost as plainly as I could see what was. I wanted to go back there with that feisty twelve year-old Hattie, see her before any trouble marred that look; before womanhood took its toll.

Gazing into their faces, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I knew it was different, not just the picture. I stood alone in a field beside the house.

It was late at night. The moon, which was high, looked like a circle of ice frozen as hard as the water on which it shone in the pond to my left. I saw none of the green trees which marked the landscape in the picture. Only bare branches pointed skyward. It was icy winter here.

Suddenly the back door of the house swung open to reveal a lamplight tableau. The family was gathered around the long table. My grandparents hovered over a young man in uniform.

Mose! I whispered. He came home from France in 1918". The young girl who ran out the door had to be Hattie. She had a large coat thrown over her shoulders. Clutching it to her throat as she ran. Her red hair, blackened by the night streamed out behind her. Her bare feet and legs shone white in the moonlight.

As she neared me she looked up. She stopped. Her face blanched as white as her feet. I knew she saw me because her free hand joined the one clutching the coat to her throat. Her big yellow brown eyes looked into mine and she stood deathly still. I thought I heard her whisper low, A woman in white. Evidently this was some sort of omen to her.

She didn’t say another word. I couldn’t. I was all choked up. I just stood there, wonder and love filling me as I gazed at the features of my little girl mother who had long since died of age and the ravages of diabetes.

She didn’t run or back away. She wasn’t afraid, just surprised. I wondered if I would be able to communicate or if this were simply some kind of dream. She settled that.

Who are you, anyway, and what’re you doing out here in the field this late at night?

Who are you? I quietly countered, hoping not to have to reveal my identity. I knew she wouldn’t believe me, anyway.

My name’s Hattie. I’m going around this pond to Quintus’ house to tell him and Bertie Mose has come home from the war.

Is Mose your brother? I asked, although I knew the answer. She started walking and I walked beside her. She nodded. She looked a question at me. I feared it, but she only asked,

Why’re you wearing that garb?

I looked down at my white cut offs, and candies sneakers with a shoulder padded oversized shirt. How could I explain to her that this was how women in the twenty-first century would dress. Suddenly conscious of my clothes, I shivered. I remembered I had jumped from a summer day into the dead of winter of more than half a century ago.

Why aren’t you wearing shoes? I asked her in reply to her question. She looked down at her feet and said,

Shoot, I go barefooted all the time. My feet won’t freeze.

I couldn’t help noticing, though that she skirted around a low furrow where ice had spewed up the ground.

Besides, she added, I was in a hurry. Mose has been gone to the war two years and he just got back tonight. When I go get Quintus and Bertie and the baby we’re all gonna sit down and listen to him tell about killing the Germans.

George and Sally Lou already got here, you know. Mose stopped there on the way home to let them know he was back. Mama’s been sick for six weeks and couldn’t get out of bed. Dr. Byrd said if Mose didn’t get home soon, she would die.

Well, tonight when Mose knocked on the door and called Mama, her feet hit the floor. She hugged and hugged him. Then she built a fire in the stove and started cooking. She fried ham, baked biscuits, she opened jars of peas, butterbeans and peaches. She baked some sweet potatoes. She would have baked a cake but Mose begged her not to because he was too full. He said the cake could wait until tomorrow.

By this time we had reached the back doorsteps of another farmhouse. I paused at the bottom.

Aren’t you coming in? She asked as she stood looking down at me from the top step. There came a thoughtful expression to her face…

Seems like I know you from somewhere, she said. Then she was gone, knocking on the door and slipping inside to carry out her mission. Perhaps, also, she would tell them about the Woman in White.

Once again, I was sitting at my kitchen table, staring at the photograph, wondering what just transpired. I looked at them pictured there. There was young Hattie, just as I had seen her tonight. I felt tears starting in my eyes.

Before she got sick in 1970 I asked Mama,

Why don’t you write down all the wonderful things you’ve shared with me? It will be something to pass down to the children. They can read it and know what life was like for you back there in the twenties when you came of age.

Well, she agreed. It will give me something to do and they might like to read it someday. I bought her a notebook and I noticed she added something to it from time to time.

After she died I couldn’t bear to look at the notebook for a long time. Besides, I knew all the stories by heart how she and Uncle Phil put the tacks in somebody’s chair, how the horses backed the buggy off the Long Bridge into Omussee Creek when the Woman appeared, how Uncle Mose told of killing the German soldier in self-defense. She related other stories of the Woman in White such as the night Dr. Byrd swore she walked up the hill with him.

Mama was always the family chronicler. She knew who begat whom and when. She preserved much of their family history by memorizing it and re-telling it to the younger ones.

One day I picked up the notebook and read the familiar words written in her unique hand. It was like being there with her, growing up in the first part of the century, learning Woody Guthrie’s songs, learning to dance the Charleston.

While reading her words I got out the picture and began to study her face. Day after day I looked at it and read the journal.

If time travel were possible, I thought, that’s where I’d go. Now, it seemed, I’d achieved that. If this happening were only a dream,