Nothing Better To Do - a novel in stories - Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

"Whatcha doin', Miss Hyacinth?" House's ballpoint was poised above his memo book, as if he were sure something momentous would be forthcoming.

The tiny mulatto woman had just dismounted and was walking her shiny bicycle. It was an old-fashioned Schwinn, complete with chrome fenders and fat whitewall tires. Hyacinth, herself, was decked out in white tennis shoes, bobby-sox, a long pink and white flare skirt and a powder blue sweater. Her silver hair was in a bun. She was eighty-one years old, or at least that's what she would admit to. She rode her bike about a mile from the home to Towne Square every day that the weather would allow.

"I'm ridin' my bike, you damn fool. Cain't you see that fer yerself? I heard you got smart all of a sudden... Heh!"

Before the sudden emergence of his intelligence, House of Pain had often spent his days sitting in front of Dot's Market, when the yellow jackets that liked the garbage cans right next to the bench weren't too bothersome, that is. Once he got smart, however, he had been too busy for such idleness. Now that Gar Findaly was letting him free-lance on his own time, he was taking advantage of a rare afternoon away from the linotype room to do some more investigative reporting.

"Do you ride your bike every day?" He was thinking about doing a human interest piece on this very visible figure about town. Folks didn't really know much about her.

"You know I do. You've been settin' out here enough times to know that without askin'!"

"Would you mind telling me your full name?" He was taking it all down.

"Hyacinth Haynes. Whatchoo doin', House. I heard you been workin' over to the paper. You ain't gonna write nuthin' 'bout me, are ya?" She engaged her kick-stand and sat on the bench next to House. She was just amused enough that someone would take interest in her, that she had decided to play along.

"Where'd you live when you were a young 'un?"

"Out by the town limits on Dayton-Serena Road. Course't didn't have a name back then. Folks just called it the road outta town headin' west or the road to Dayton. Wasn't but one in that direction in them days. My daddy had a house on five acres of land. We grew our own vegetables and raised some pigs and cows. That's how it was in the old days."

Her grandfather, an escaped slave from Alabama, had come to Serena along the underground railroad. He'd found work harvesting corn and decided to stay for planting season. He never did leave. Eventually, he'd married a Shawnee woman and they'd had eight children. Her father had been the youngest of the brood and had benefited from the labors of his older brothers and sisters. He was the only one to graduate from high school. He worked in the hardware store, eventually bought his own truck and had a hauling business on the side. In this way, he was able to save enough money to buy the land on the edge of town, where, with the help of his brothers, he built the house where Hyacinth was born.

Hyacinth's mother was a white woman. She had been widowed during the First World War and was raising two girls on her own. She married Hyacinth's father and they had but one child, another girl. Hyacinth was pampered and treated like a little doll by her mother and her half-sisters, thus the habitual finery. Hyacinth never married. She had been engaged to a handsome white man, a descendant of the owner of the hardware store, but he was lost in the Second World War. From the moment she learned of his death, it was as if she had been frozen in time.

House pulled all of this out of her and much more. He took it all down, careful not to leave out one detail. When he got done writing the piece, it would end up being the saga of the family of a runaway slave, with all the drama of the escape and flight, the romance of meeting and settling down with the Indian woman, the inspiration of the fortitude and hard work to overcome poverty and prejudice, and then the same for the next generation and the one after that.

Two-and-a-half hours passed on the bench in front of Dot's. When they were finished, Hyacinth was exhausted and House's memo book was filled.

"I gots to take me a nap," Hyacinth told him, as she mounted her Schwinn and headed across the parking lot back in the direction of the Golden Age Home.

House sat for awhile, reviewing his notes. After a few minutes, George Sturges came out of the market with a half-gallon of strawberry ice cream and a plastic spoon. He joined House on the bench.

"What you doin', George?"

"What's it look like I'm doin', House? I'm about to eat this half-gallon of strawberry ice cream, same as I do every day. You got a problem with that?"

"You gonna be here for awhile?"

"You've watched me enough times to know how long it takes me."

"Don't let the bees chase you away or nothing like that. I'll be right back." House got up and hurried inside Dot's to buy another memo pad as if he were afraid a good story might get away from him.