Rubies from Burma Read online

  Praise for Rubies from Burma

  “In Rubies from Burma we meet Mae Lee Willis, a child in the rural South of the 1940s, and watch her grow up in the shadow of her beautiful older sister, Ava. Ava marries handsome Duke, but the war intervenes, and he goes off to fight in Burma. Duke returns emotionally damaged, and when their marriage begins a downward spiral, it’s up to Mae Lee to help mend the broken family in this engrossing family saga.”

  Anne Webster, Author of A History of Nursing

  “Anne Lovett’s unique story is a masterpiece of lush writing, telling of a young girl’s growing-up years at a time in history when innocence was not so rare. Scenes of life on a Georgia farm of the 1940s and ’50s will stay in your mind and heart as you come to understand Mae Lee and her family.”

  Judith Keim, author of The Beach House Hotel series and other books

  “As a fellow member of a writing group, I listened with interest to the development of Rubies in Burma: to the range of imagination behind it and the scary pivots of its plot and the lovely turning of tones in movement and relationship. I am glad to discover that it is now being published. Cheers to Anne Lovett!”

  Barbara Knott, award-winning author of two chapbooks of poetry and host of online literary/art journal The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

  “Rubies from Burma tells the WWII coming of age story of Mae Lee Willis, in the hateful shadow of her beautiful older sister, Ava. Much of the novel focuses on Mae Lee’s gawky stage, her voice, and the South Georgia setting reminiscent of Carson McCullers’s A Member of the Wedding. As she matures the voice changes subtly to match events. The talent shown in Anne Lovett’s debut novel makes her an author to watch. I can’t wait to read her next story.”

  Louise Richardson, writer and past president of Sisters in Crime, Georgia Chapter

  “Anne Lovett makes an impressive debut with an appealingly spunky young heroine. Mae Lee has the odds stacked against her in rural Georgia. But she creates her own opportunities for love and growth in order to discover that true love is as rare and precious as rubies.”

  Sarah Parsonson, PhD, former Dean, Atlanta Art Institute

  WORDS OF PASSION • ATLANTA

  RUBIES FROM BURMA

  Copyright © 2016 by Anne Lovett.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Published by Words of Passion, Atlanta, GA 30097.

  Editorial: Nanette Littlestone

  Interior Design: Peter Hildebrandt

  ISBN: 978-0-9960709-6-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919448

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to those who have journeyed with me on this adventure. My first readers, including Anna Montford Shepard, Annette and Peter Mayfield, Judy Keim, Betty Hamrick, Mary Louise Crosby, and the Midtown Writers’ Group: Linda Clopton, Anne Webster, Diane Thomas, Bill Osher, David Darracott, Fred Willard, Gene Wright, and Jim Taylor. Thanks to later members for their support and encouragement: Barbara Knott, Joshilyn Jackson, Atticus Connell, Jim Harmon, Sandi Curry, Jill Patrick, Eric Allstrom, Matt Johnson, Steve Archer, and Brent Taylor.

  Thanks also to Terry Kay for sage advice, to Rosemary Daniell for her careful manuscript comments, and to my Zona Rosa friends for their support. Thanks to Kent Nelson and Ann Kempner Fisher for their teaching. Thanks to Chris Tilghman who saw this tale in its first incarnation as a short story and saw its potential. And of course, thanks to the judges of the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association contest, whose comments gave me the encouragement I needed.

  Sisters in Crime provided support and education, and my friends from Georgia Romance Writers, especially Haywood Smith, have been so helpful and inspiring.

  And of course, thanks to my great editor, Nanette Littlestone, for her expertise, to Peter Hildebrandt for layout, to Clarissa Yao for the fabulous cover. Thanks to Jerry Richardson for his great photography and Louise Richardson for friendship and willingness to help.

  Thanks to my late parents, and my brothers, who were and are always at my back. And of course, to my husband, to my children, and to their father, who believed. Hugs and kisses.

  For all who fought, and for those who loved them

  Chapter One

  1944

  I am looking through a lace curtain at a dead man’s feet. I am ten years old, the mist is rising on a fall morning in 1944 in Sawyer, Georgia, and I am standing on a front porch painted gray with white trim.

  The smell of wood smoke and wet leaves and wild olive clings to the mist; a dog barks in the distance, the phone inside is ringing and ringing. I know the person on the other end of the line is Ava. Ava is nineteen and too beautiful for words, as I am not.

  A car pulls up behind me and stops. My father gets out.

  Before my father takes me away, I see a rosary inside, on the floor. It’s the silver rosary of red beads and crystal I will be given later—much later—to keep.

  It was Hardy Pritchard’s feet I was looking at, and he had the bad luck to be beautiful too. A lawyer should never be beautiful. Clients cannot trust him, though they want very much to, so he did not have enough of them. Even though he was thirty-five and married, he did odd jobs for his daddy such as collect rents, which is why he was standing in the July heat on our porch one Saturday morning three years earlier.

  July 1941

  Momma was inside lying on the bed with a cold cloth across her face. I could hear the radio crackling with Glenn Miller music and Hardy Pritchard was saying to me, Where’s your daddy? and when I told him he was out he said that I ought to get Momma up to pay the rent, the rent was late, and why was it late.

  And I was looking at how beautiful Hardy Pritchard was. Even a little girl can appreciate things like that, even if she doesn’t know quite why. He had blond hair streaked by the sun, and blue eyes that were deep and sleepy and a shirt that was full of muscles and blond hairs on his tanned arms. He smelled like tobacco and sweat and Old Spice and had a straw fedora pushed back on his head.

  But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking in the window at the far end of the porch, the window of the bedroom Ava and I shared in our house next to the railroad tracks. She had been standing before the mirror in her white cotton underpants and a bra which was stitched like a bulls-eye, fixing her hair because she had a date. I saw the blinds come down with a whap and then Ava appeared at the door in a pink housecoat.

  The July flies filled the air with the racketing and the mimosa tree was wafting sweet smells from its powderpuffs and Ava and Hardy Pritchard looked at each other like they had never laid eyes on one another before which was ridiculous. She turned a little pink and his eyes got a little bigger.

  Mr. Pritchard, she said.

  Ava Willis, he said, my how you’ve grown. His eyes were on the front of the pink housecoat which stood out like a billowing sail.

  If you can’t be more original than that, get off my porch, she said.

  Is that any way to talk to the rent man? he said.

  How would you like me to talk? she said.

  Well, now. Honey talk.

  Sorry, that’s not my beeswax.

  He grinned, slow and snaky. What I would really like, he said, is a glass of tea.

  She looked at him then with her head tilted like she was measuring things up. Come on in, she said. Her voice was making honey now, rich and thick.

  I stayed out sitting on the porch in the swing, and before I knew it here came another car stirring up the dust on the road and it stopped and a man got out and walked up. This man wore a uniform, and he was not beautiful but tall
and rugged and strong-looking, with dark hair cut short and caterpillar eyebrows and gray eyes cool like a well.

  You must be Mae Lee, he said. I’m Dulany Radford.

  Loo-tenant Duke Radford? I asked, because that was how they had been talking about him.

  He nodded and my heart started beating fast because he told me to tell Ava he was here and I thought about Ava and Hardy Pritchard drinking tea in the kitchen. I ran inside and when I got there they were standing up with glasses in their hands, still looking at one another, and Ava turned to me and looked at me like I was a roach that showed up out of the woodwork.

  Your date is here, I said.

  Duke Radford, she said to Hardy Pritchard in that careless way she had, and shrugged.

  You is in high cotton, said Hardy Pritchard in a voice like a colored person.

  Higher than yours? She raised one eyebrow and had a tiny little smile.

  Ain’t no man got higher cotton than mine, he said.

  I have to go, she said. I have to dress.

  How about the rent?

  Come back later, she said, when Chap’s home.

  I’d like to come when he’s not home, he said. Why do you call him Chap anyhow? Is he your stepdaddy? But she was already heading down the hall and pretended like she didn’t hear him. I guess he thought little girls like me were deaf, dumb, and blind.

  Hardy Pritchard was right behind me as I marched to the door. I said over my shoulder, Chap is our real daddy. I opened the door wide. He saw Loo-tenant Duke Radford and said, Hey Duke, you ain’t goin’ to war.

  The hell you say. How about you, pretty boy?

  Hardy Pritchard’s fists clenched up. I’m a married man.

  You could have fooled me.

  I don’t have to take this, Radford. He balled up his fist.

  Right here in front of this sweet chile?

  I’ll fix your clock later, he said. You and me got a date with destiny. He clattered down the front steps and out to his car. It roared away, spinning dust.

  Arrogant bastard, said Duke. Sorry, honey, you weren’t supposed to hear.

  My daddy Chap says stuff like that, I said.

  In front of you? He frowned.

  I like to listen in where nobody can see me.

  A fly on the wall, he said.

  I see you are having such a good conversation with my sister, but ain’t we going to the movies? Ava clip-clopped into the living room, wearing a slinky blouse with big sleeves and a yellow skirt and open-toed shoes with the high heels.

  Don’t say ain’t, I said.

  Miss Priss. You are such a pill.

  I love you too.

  Good-bye, Mae Lee, said Duke, and they walked out on the porch, down the steps, down the walkway to the street and he opened the car door for her, a Buick convertible, and then drove off. Clouding up that dust again.

  I went back to see Momma and she was just stirring from her nap. Sweat was on her forehead and there was a fan turning back and forth, blowing the dotted-swiss curtains.

  Ava get off? she said, her hand to her forehead.

  I scuffled my toe on the rag rug. Yes, ma’am.

  Come on, we need to get started on that corn.

  Elmo Conable had brought us some Country Gentleman that morning when he came to pick up Chap and it was still in the paper sack in the kitchen. I followed Momma into the kitchen, almost tripping on the cracks in the blue linoleum floor and sat down at the table. She piled the corn in front of me and told me to put the shucks in the sack.

  She spotted the two glasses by the sink. You are supposed to use the jelly glasses, Mae Lee.

  It wasn’t me, I said. Ava gave some tea to Hardy Pritchard who was coming for the rent.

  Momma bit her lip. Hardy Pritchard was in here with Ava?

  He said he was coming back later, I told her, but I didn’t tell her the part about he wanted to come while Chap wasn’t home.

  I finished my pile of corn and Momma put it on to boil. She had already cooked the butterbeans with a ham hock and they smelled real good. She had sliced ham and fresh tomatoes from the garden. She told me I could go outside to play till Chap got home.

  I went outside where Chap had built us a barbecue pit. It had an iron cover and that’s where I made my mud pies. I stirred up some dirt and mixed it with water out of the faucet, using Momma’s watering can. Then I added some chinaberries for flavor and patted the pies out on the hot iron sheet. I thought about God patting dust into clay and clay into people. Does he care when they dry and crack, and blow away, or get drowned by the rain?

  I had just made the last pie when Elmo Conable’s pickup truck came rumbling in our driveway and stopped behind Chap’s car, which was in front of the garage. The garage had double doors and was locked with a padlock hanging from a chain. That was where Chap kept his project.

  Chap got out and grinned at me, and I knew he and Elmo had had a good day. His clothes were dirty and his black hair curled down over his shiny forehead. He held out his arms and I ran into them.

  Hardy Pritchard came by, I said.

  He held me out by the shoulders and frowned. Did he, now.

  He said he’d come back later, I said.

  Elmo got out of his side and came around, said, Hi, there, little lady. He was a giant of a man with hair bleached white from the sun. They walked toward the house. Son of a bitch, Chap said to Elmo. I told him I’d have it Monday.

  I hosed the mud off my hands and feet and dried them with some of the old towels Momma kept on the back porch, then slipped through the kitchen door and went back to my room to change. When I got back to the kitchen Chap was scrubbing his hands at the sink with Lifebuoy.

  Elmo was sitting at the table and Momma put a plate of ham in front of him. Mabel not cooking tonight? she said.

  She went to see her cousin, Elmo said. Them girls could talk from here to Sunday without stopping for breath. I wish they was quiet like you, Gwen.

  Oh, how you do go on, Elmo, said Momma but I could see she was pleased. She opened the icebox and got out two bottles of beer and set them on the table. Chap popped the tops with a church key and took a long swallow of his before he sat.

  Where’s Ava? he said.

  Got a date, Momma said into the pot she was dishing butterbeans out of.

  Oh? One of them Braxtons?

  Dulany Radford, she said, and set the butterbeans and corn in front of the men. I put out the potato salad and the slab of butter and a stack of light bread and a jar of green tomato pickles and the glasses of tea.

  Y’all go ahead, she said. Return thanks, Chap.

  Ain’t you eatin’, honey?

  I want to show Mae Lee the moon coming up, she said.

  Chap said thank you to the Lord for the food, but nothing at all about Duke Radford which was more scary than if he had. Elmo kept shaking pepper over his food till it looked plumb dirty. Momma fixed our plates and we went out to the back porch and sat in the rockers there and the moon came up just like she said above the garage, even though it was still daylight.

  O inconstant moon, she said.

  What does that mean? I asked.

  It’s just a line from a play, she said. Romeo and Juliet.

  What’s it about?

  She was quiet for a minute. About a boy and girl who loved each other a whole lot.

  And they got married?

  They died.

  Why?

  A misunderstanding.

  I don’t like that story, I said. I like happy endings.

  Sometimes happy endings don’t teach you what you need to know, she said.

  I had a feeling she wasn’t telling me everything. We took our plates back to the kitchen. Chap and Elmo had already cleared the table and had the radio on and the cards out and a bottle of whiskey.

  They drank out of jelly glasses and Momma and Chap and Elmo played there under the low-hanging light, a circle of them in the warm dark night, and Momma was more happy and laughing than I had seen her in a long ti
me.

  They sent me off to bed but I lay there in the dark hall and listened to them talking about Church Hill and Rosavelt and my eyes got heavy. Somebody picked me up and carried me to bed.

  Hardy Pritchard, I heard somebody say. He could ruin that girl.

  I didn’t understand what they meant. I didn’t think Ava would let anybody do anything to her she didn’t want.

  Chapter Two

  That night I snuggled down into the warm sheets smelling of sun and grass. Boards creaked, a faucet squealed, the radio sang faint and tinny, and I could hear an old hooty owl. I woke to voices outside and stripes of moonlight on my quilt. Somewhere down the street where the colored people lived a guitar picked out sad and bluesy notes.

  I pulled myself up over to the open window, and out by the car Ava and Duke Radford were kissing. The smell of the honeysuckle drifted in, and the racketing of the katydids and the July flies was loud, loud, loud. The moon lit up the sky above the chinaberry trees.

  Ava smiled at him, then turned and hurried into the house.

  I heard Momma scrape a chair in the living room, then her voice and Ava’s hushed and excited.

  Did you like kissing him? I asked Ava when she came in and started peeling off her clothes in the moonlit dark.

  You’re supposed to be asleep, she said.

  I would like kissing him, I said, better than stupid Hardy Pritchard.

  I never kissed Hardy Pritchard, she said. It was dark but I could feel sharp eyes on me.

  But you wanted to.

  You don’t know anything, you little fool.

  I want to marry him when I grow up, I said all of a sudden.

  But you think he’s stupid, Ava said, pulling the brush through her hair.

  I didn’t mean Hardy Pritchard, I said.