SHERI REYNOLDS  |  Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow

Leona—40s, white
Gwendolyn—60s, white; Promise #2, #7
Little Pug—60s, white
Rubie—40s, black; Promise #3, #5
Orabelle—80s, black
Jack Flanagan—60s, white; Promise #1, #4, #6

*Alternative—one female actor can play Promises #2, 3, 5, and 7.

Setting

Outskirts of a small town in South Carolina. Summer. Recent past.

The play needs minimal scenery, with suggestions of spaces rather than full sets. Locations include Leona’s porch and Orabelle’s porch, a yard, a field, a kitchen/living area. Outdoor scenes might suggest green overgrown trees and plant-life, shady dirt roads, abandoned farm equipment. Indoor scenes could incorporate farm-house decor—box fans, fly-swatters, afghans thrown over rocking chairs.

Scene changes come quickly, with sections of the stage representing different places at the same time. Lights shift from one area to the other rather than blacking out.

Act One

(ORABELLE enters, pushing a wheelbarrow, humming to herself. She wears a motley assortment of clothes, mismatched patterns, colorful shoes. Offstage, a car-engine revs loudly.)

ORABELLE
Hey, slow that truck down! The road’s washed out around that curve.

(Offstage, brakes screech. A small roll of chicken-wire is thrown onto the stage, as if it bounced out the back of a truck.)

Can’t say I didn’t warn you.

(Orabelle picks up the chicken-wire, puts it in her wheelbarrow.)

And the moral of the story is: drive like hell, and you’ll get there faster!

(She laughs, holds the wire up to the audience, looks at them through it.)

Or maybe there ain’t no moral. Maybe I just needed a piece of chicken-wire today and didn’t know it.

(She flexes the wire, holds it open.)

Piece of chicken-wire like this, flimsy as it is, separates you from me. Wind can blow right through it, but there’s still no mistaking what’s on one side and what’s on the other.

(Orabelle places the wire around her wheelbarrow.)

RUBIE (offstage, calling out)
Granny? Hey, Granny!

(RUBIE enters.)

There you are! I told you to wait for me.

(Orabelle tosses the chicken-wire into her wheelbarrow.)

ORABELLE
I’m perfectly capable of taking my evening stroll without a chaperone.

RUBIE
You told me this morning you were coming with me to Leona’s! Don’t you remember? We missed her mama’s funeral. I thought you wanted to pay your respects.

ORABELLE
Far as I’m concerned, paying respects is something you do when people are alive.

(Rubie takes her arm.)

RUBIE
Just walk with me, Granny. Where else you gotta be?

(On the other side of the stage, LEONA sits in a rocking chair and studies a piece of paper. Rubie and Orabelle slowly move towards her.)

ORABELLE
It’ll be easier for Leona now that her mama’s passed. I heard at the Senior Center that Sadie’s mind was shot. Last time she went to the doctor, she wore Little Pug’s underdrawers, poor old thing!

RUBIE
I wonder if Leona’ll stay in that house with Little Pug and Gwendolyn now that her mama’s gone.

ORABELLE
Hard to say. But it’s good you going to see her, Sugar. I’m sure she could use a friend.

RUBIE
I don’t know if Leona considers me a friend anymore. I’ve only seen her a time or two since I moved back home, and then it seemed like she barely tolerated my company. I think she still holds a grudge that I left town in the first place.

ORABELLE
You got deployed. That’s the most acceptable kind of leaving.

RUBIE
There she sits. I expected she’d be on the porch on a night like this.

(Orabelle stops. Rubie turns back to her.)

You coming?

ORABELLE
Reckon I’ll visit with the squirrels a little. Catch up on what’s happening with the crickets. You go ahead and talk with your friend.

RUBIE
Suit yourself. Hey, Leona!

(Leona stashes the paper in her pocket and rises.)

LEONA (flatly)
Well, look what the cat dragged in.

(They greet one another, then settle in rocking chairs. LIGHTS SHIFT to Orabelle, who pokes at something in her wheelbarrow.)

ORABELLE
Hey, You! Yeah, you! Sit up and look around. You been sleeping all day.

(She motions out to the audience.)

You see all these fields? I spent my whole life in these fields, marching up and down the rows gathering tobacco.

(She points towards Leona and Rubie.)

You see that house? I worked there fifty years! I was in that house the night that gal’s mama was born. Then when Gwendolyn and Little Pug come along years later, I was the one who cut the cords and burned the bloody rags.

(She laughs and points in the other direction.)

See that barn, yonder? Them two girls were digging doodlebugs together ‘neath that barn shed ‘fore either one of ‘em could walk. What? You don’t know what a doodlebug is? Hop out here and I’ll show you how to dig a doodlebug.

(Orabelle offers her hand to the invisible thing in the wheelbarrow, then stoops and begins doodling on the ground. LIGHTS SHIFT to Leona and Rubie.)

LEONA
So . . . we’re broke—and I didn’t even know it.

RUBIE
How could you not know it? Didn’t you look at the bank statements?

LEONA
Never seen a one. Mama always handled the bills and kept the family files. When her mind started to go, Gwendolyn helped out some—

RUBIE
Lord, I can’t believe you’d trust Gwendolyn with it.

LEONA
I had to. She’s my aunt.

(Rubie makes a face.)

I didn’t trust her exactly. Just didn’t realize how bad Mama’s mind had got. I had so much on my plate—

ORABELLE (singing loudly)
Doodlebug doodlebug go so fast. Doodlebug doodlebug, run outta gas!

(Leona stands, peers out into the night.)

LEONA
What’s that?

RUBIE
Just Granny.

LEONA
I didn’t know Miss Orabelle was with you! We should invite her up on the porch.

RUBIE
Nah, she’s all right. You were telling me about your financial—

LEONA
Ruin!

(Pause.)

I knew we hadn’t farmed the land in a real long time, but I didn’t know the leases had all run out. And nobody’d renewed ‘em. Don’t know why I didn’t notice.

RUBIE
When I first moved back in with Granny, I saw that the fields weren’t planted. But I didn’t think much of it. So many farmers have moved on to other things—

LEONA
Then today, this come.

(She pulls the bill out of her pocket, shows Rubie.)

RUBIE
If dying gets any more expensive, we gonna have to live forever.

LEONA
We’re already in collections for some other debts. If we declare bankruptcy, they’ll take the house and farm both. Then I reckon I’ll be stuck in a homeless shelter with Gwendolyn and Little Pug. Can you imagine?

(Rubie shakes her head. Across the stage, Orabelle suddenly jumps up.)

ORABELLE (shouting)
Hey! Where you going?

(Orabelle runs to the wheelbarrow, peers inside it.)

Rubie, that little sucker’s run off again. I gotta find him.

(Leona looks puzzled.)

RUBIE
It’s okay, Granny. He’s hiding over here in these azaleas. He’s just teasing with you.

(Orabelle picks up a stick and goes to the bushes and whacks at them again and again. Leona gets up from her chair and hides behind it.)

ORABELLE
You get back in that wheelbarrow. Go on, now. Get! It’s too late for games this time of night.

(She heads back to the wheelbarrow, escorting an imaginary thing.)

LEONA
What does she see?

RUBIE
Just some promises.

(Pause.)

Granny keeps other people’s broken promises.

(They go over to the wheelbarrow and look inside.)

ORABELLE
He weren’t too hard to round up. He knows how to listen. He ain’t a bad feller.
(She pulls moss out of her wheelbarrow and acts like she’s rumpling someone’s hair, caressing the moss.)

LEONA (to Rubie)
Does she have Oldtimer’s Disease, too?

RUBIE
I don’t think so.

ORABELLE (noticing Leona)
Well, hey there, Honey-girl. I’m sure sorry about your mama.

(Orabelle takes Leona’s hand and holds it.)

LEONA (cautiously)
Good to see you again, Miss Orabelle.

ORABELLE
I know you gonna miss her. Your mama had a heart of gold. You ready to get her promise?

(Orabelle digs around in the wheelbarrow.)

LEONA
You got something of my mama’s? In there?

ORABELLE
Oh, yes. She left a promise with me—years and years ago. I got it right in here with the others, if I can just find it. Guess it’s part of your inheritance, ain’t it?

(Leona looks stricken. Orabelle stirs around. Things clatter.)

LEONA (to Rubie)
Is she crazy? You don’t see anything in there, do you? Just some flowers and tomatoes?

RUBIE
It’s too soon, Granny. You need to keep that promise a little bit longer.

ORABELLE
Oh—all right then.

(She starts pushing her wheelbarrow away. Rubie follows.)

LEONA (to Rubie)
Wait. Where does she get those . . . promises?

(Rubie and Orabelle both stop.)

RUBIE
They just find Granny. She don’t go looking for them.

LEONA
Miss Orabelle, do you remember much about my mama—when she was a girl? Before I was born?

ORABELLE
Oh yes, honey, and I was honored to keep the promise she made to your daddy, cause I know how much it meant to her.

LEONA
My Daddy? I didn’t—I don’t—

RUBIE
Now, Granny, hang on—

LEONA
Mama made a promise to my daddy?

RUBIE
I’m sorry, Leona. It’s late. We probably oughta—

(Leona fans her face with both hands. Orabelle turns her wheelbarrow around and heads back.)

LEONA
Lord, my head’s a’spinnin’ in a thousand ways—

ORABELLE
Grief’ll do that to you. But you needn’t worry ‘bout that promise. I been keeping it safe for a long time. It’s in good hands.

LEONA
Tell me more?

ORABELLE
Ain’t a whole lot more to tell. It’s just an ordinary old broke promise. Your mama promised your daddy her heart. Then she took it back. I got a hundred others just like it in this wheelbarrow. Sometimes on a hot night like this one, I throw ‘em a pool-party.

(Orabelle looks off towards the porch, puts her hand on her hip, stomps her foot.)

Looka there! He took off again. He’s yonder under the doorsteps.

RUBIE
It’s all right, Granny. He knows the way home. We need to let Leona rest.

LEONA
But wait—

ORABELLE
I reckon so, but I can’t hardly sleep unless all my promises are accounted for.

LEONA
Do you know if—

RUBIE
We gotta run, Leona. Granny’s tired, and I’m tired—And your mama’s promise is probably tired, too. I think we all need some sleep!

(They begin to leave.)

ORABELLE
Honey, if you see that promise, tell him to hurry on home. Supposed to rain before day.

RUBIE
We’ll talk soon, Leona.

(They exit. Leona stands there perplexed.)

LEONA
Well, I swear! You’re both crazy, both of you! Weren’t nothing in that wheelbarrow!

(Pause.)

You shouldn’t talk about my Mama, not when she’s just—gone!

(Leona hears something, stops, listens. She goes towards the doorsteps, peeks down.)

Is somebody there?

(She looks around nervously.)

Who’s there? Little Pug, is that you?

(Leona listens, looks over her shoulder, then hurries offstage as PROMISE #1 creeps out of the dark. He wears a mask made of moss. The promises should all wear masks made from things in Orabelle’s wheelbarrow: sticks, leaves, pinestraw.)

PROMISE #1 (hollering after her)
Wait! Don’t be afraid. I know how you feel cause I lost somebody I love not too long ago.

(Pause.)

And just before she died, I broke a promise.

(He shrugs, turns and addresses audience.)

We were married forty years, me and my wife. Loved to go fishing together. She was every bit as at home on the river as she was on land. She could maneuver our little boat into places only the trout knew about! Every Saturday we were out there. Sometimes after church on Sundays, too.

When she was near eat-up with the cancer, she still wanted to be out on the river. Didn’t have the strength by then to walk very far, but I’d carry her and put her in the boat. We’d float around and listen to the mudfish jump. One day she said, “Promise me that no matter how bad it gets, you won’t put me in a home.” And I told her I wasn’t about to put her in a home! I told her I could take care of her myself.

But taking care of her wasn’t the problem. The problem was watching her suffer. The family helped out, but Lord, it was a slow dying. Towards the end, everybody told me to put her in a nursing home. She was on morphine by then, in and out of consciousness, so I did it, but I made sure she was in a room with a window that opened. I promised her I’d take her on the water again soon as it warmed up. But she didn’t last that long.

Whenever I go fishing now, I drive all the way to the ocean.

(LIGHTS DIM. From offstage, Leona shines a flashlight out at Promise #1.)

LEONA
I don’t know who’s out there, but you better get away from here! This is private property.

(Promise #1 exits. Leona enters with flashlight.)

It’s gonna rain. Get on home . . . whoever you are.

(Leona drags rocking chairs offstage as LIGHTS SHIFT to GWENDOLYN. Dressed in a black tutu and pillbox hat, she runs around as if she’s chasing chickens. Squawks can be heard, and LITTLE PUG takes off after Gwendolyn, throwing feathers. Gwendolyn flicks her wrist in circles, like she’s wringing a chicken’s neck. Little Pug runs behind her, picking up feathers and throwing them again, frenzied.)

GWENDOLYN
I swear! Seems like a chicken’s neck gets longer and longer as you wring it.

(Leona enters.)

LEONA
These are Mama’s chickens, Gwendolyn. Quit killing ‘em.

GWENDOLYN
I’m gonna have me a chicken bog tonight.

LEONA
You don’t need but one hen for a chicken bog. You’ve already killed a dozen.

GWENDOLYN (lassoing)
Sometimes it seems like the head’s pulling outta the body, and sometimes it seems like the body’s flying away from the head. Ain’t that funny?

(Pause.)

That one over there—run her towards me.

(Little Pug makes a move like he’s running a chicken. Gwendolyn grabs it.)

LEONA
How many chickens you planning on killing?

GWENDOLYN
I’m gonna kill ‘em all. I hate a chicken.

(She spins and tosses a chicken to the ground.)

Ain’t it pathetic—how they flap their wings a time or two before they give up?

LEONA
You can’t kill ‘em all. Mama’ll turn over in her grave.

GWENDOLYN
Might turn over, but she can’t get out. I’m in charge now, and I hate a chicken.

(She turns to Little Pug.)

Run me that one over there.

(Little Pug races around, wild-eyed.)

LEONA
Please quit it, Gwen.

GWENDOLYN (mocking)
Please quit it, Gwen.

(She drops the hen and wipes her face.)

Chickens are stupid and ugly and shit-up the yard. I’m done with ‘em, Leona. We’ll kill ‘em off, and then Little Pug can keep that damned dog of his in the coop.

LITTLE PUG
Naw, now, Gwendolyn. Boy-Dog’s just a baby. He’s gotta sleep with me.

GWENDOLYN
You heard what I said.

LEONA
How can you do this so soon after Mama’s passing—and knowing how much she loved ‘em?

(Leona chokes. Little Pug crouches where he’s standing and begins to cry onto his knees.)

GWENDOLYN
Well, look at me, Leona. I’m still grieving her, too. I’m still in my funeral clothes. You been wearing your ordinary wardrobe for a week already! You know I loved your mama.

LITTLE PUG (child-like)
Me, too. I’m gonna miss her the most.

LEONA
I don’t know how we’ll survive without her.

(Gwendolyn goes to Leona and hugs her, with a chicken still in her clutches.)

GWENDOLYN
We’ll get by—or else we’ll die in a pile.

LEONA
Can’t we keep some of the chickens, just to remember her by?

(Gwendolyn considers this.)

GWENDOLYN
We got plenty of other things to remember her by.

(Pause.)

No, we don’t need these chickens. Your mama was a fool to love chickens in the first place. She was my sister, and I’ll always love her, but she was a fool just the same.

LITTLE PUG
Naw, now, Gwen. Sadie weren’t no fool. She was the smartest of the bunch.

(Little Pug sucks on the back of his hand.)

LEONA (distraught)
Don’t you talk about my mama that way! And don’t you kill another bird!

GWENDOLYN
I’ll talk about her however I want, and you can’t do nothing about it, can you?

(Little Pug runs off stage.)

It ain’t no surprise, you know, that Sadie loved birds. Her brain was about the same size, Leona, and I doubt yours is much bigger. I loved Sadie, but she was a lot like a chicken. ‘Specially like that red one over yonder with her back tail-feathers all snatched out. Kept teasing with the roosters, you know? That’s how you come along.

LEONA
Don’t say that.

GWENDOLYN
But Sadie didn’t mean no more to the roosters than that old red hen does. Just something to hop on and flap about.

LEONA
That’s not true. What happened to my daddy?

GWENDOLYN (immediately angry)
You ain’t got no daddy. You ain’t never had no daddy.

LEONA
Yes, I did. Miss Orabelle told me.

GWENDOLYN
When’d you talk to Orabelle? I thought she was dead.

LEONA (quieter)
I saw her yesterday. Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about my daddy!

GWENDOLYN
You gone believe an old nigger woman over me?

(She grabs another chicken.)

LEONA
Please, quit it.

(Gwendolyn wrings its neck, throws the bird at Leona, takes off running down another one.)

LEONA
Stop killing ‘em . . . or I’m gonna leave here and not never come back.

GWENDOLYN
Oh, no you won’t. Just cause Sadie’s dead don’t mean you can run off.

(Pause.)

Besides that, wouldn’t nobody else have you. We’re family. We’re blood. That’s all in the world you can depend on.

(Leona slumps down. Gwendolyn wipes her face and hollers out.)

Little Pug! Little Pug?

(Little Pug peeks out, clearly scared.)

LITTLE PUG
You need something, Gwendolyn?

GWENDOLYN (calmer)
Roll out Sadie’s wheelchair for me. She sure don’t need it no more, and my back’s sore from all this stooping.

(Gwendolyn takes Leona’s arm and yanks her up. She shows no signs of a weak back.)

I need you to scald these birds and pluck ‘em. Then Little Pug can help you clean ‘em, and we can freeze what we don’t need.

(Little Pug rolls out the wheelchair, parks it directly behind Gwendolyn. She drops into it and sighs.)

I’m gonna go watch my soap opera, cause my legs have done give out on me.

(Little Pug pushes her away. Leona begins cleaning the mess on the stage.)

GWENDOLYN (calling back)
You ain’t going nowhere, Leona. You hear me?

(Gwendolyn and Little Pug exit. Leona picks up feathers.)

LEONA (child-like)
You can’t tell me what to do! You’re not my Mama. I don’t have to listen to you!

(Little Pug returns with a battered hand-held vacuum and helps Leona clean up the feathers.

LIGHTS SHIFT to Orabelle who enters with a bushel basket of butterbeans. Rubie brings in a rocking chair and a pan. Orabelle scoops beans into her pan, sits, and begins shelling. Rubie pulls up a second rocker, also takes a pan of beans and begins shelling. Leona comes over with a fly swatter. Throughout the scene, she kills flies.)

LEONA
You sure you don’t want me to help you finish shelling?

ORABELLE
Oh, no, honey. I wanna hear this story! I had no idea they kept your daddy such a secret.

RUBIE
We’re almost done anyway. Just work on these blasted flies.

(Leona swats.)

LEONA
Well—for a while I figured he died in the war.

ORABELLE
Lots of people were dying in the war at that time. Makes sense you’d think that.

LEONA
I went looking in Mama’s jewelry box to see if she had his war-pins there. When I didn’t find any purple hearts, I told myself she kept his commendations in a private place.

ORABELLE
Did you ever ask her outright?

LEONA
One time at school, we had to draw our family tree, and I asked her then. I’d already done half my tree, but it looked lopsided, like the ones cut off by the electric company so the branches don’t touch the wires. So I asked Mama to help me fill out the other side.

RUBIE
What’d she do?

LEONA
Didn’t say a word. Gwendolyn said, “I told you this day would come,” and then Mama ran off and locked herself in the bathroom.

(Pause.)

Then at one point, I decided my daddy’d been a sea captain who’d gone down with his ship.

RUBIE
You wrote an essay about it. I remember.

ORABELLE
Well, I swannee—

LEONA
And I read it to the whole school at assembly on career day!

(Leona smacks a fly.)

When Mama found out, she gave me a whipping I’ll never forget. And she told me not to never mention my father again. So I shut up about it.

ORABELLE
And you kept all that confusion inside you, bless your heart.

LEONA
That’s why it surprised me so much the other day when you mentioned Mama’s broken promise, Miss Orabelle.

ORABELLE
I reckon it did.

(Pause.)

You know, your mama was supposed to marry your daddy, but that just didn’t work out. Your mama took care of the younger children, almost like they were her own. Little Pug was always sickly and never did walk right after he got over the polio. And Gwendolyn was prone to fits—screaming and kicking and biting and crying! Gwendolyn was mad at the world. When your mama got engaged, Gwendolyn said if Sadie left, she’d holler and never shut up. So Sadie stayed right there.

LEONA
That’s so sad.

ORABELLE
It’s sad, all right, but Sadie shoulda left.

LEONA
Sounds to me like she couldn’t leave!

ORABELLE
It woulda been hard, but you reckon her life coulda got any harder than the one she lived?

(Orabelle looks into Leona’s eyes.)

How are you getting along with Gwendolyn and Little Pug these days?

LEONA (unconvincing)
We’re all right. I’m just trying to be agreeable, for the time being, til I can figure out what to do next. It’s best not to get Gwendolyn riled up.

RUBIE
That’s for sure.

(Orabelle pushes away her beans and gets up.)

ORABELLE
You’re living out the consequence of your mama’s broken promise. But now, your heart’s the one hurting. You ready to get it, Sweetie? My wheelbarrow’s right outside.

LEONA
I’m not sure. Is it big?

ORABELLE
Huge.

(Leona looks surprised.)

Weighs a ton. You might need to come back one day with a trailer. Them promises, they get heavier and heavier, unless the one who breaks ‘em finds some way through the guilt.

(Orabelle gets her wheelbarrow from just offstage.)

LEONA
How do you push ‘em around in that wheelbarrow, then?

ORABELLE
They ain’t too heavy to me, cause they ain’t no relation. I reckon all my old promises gone and jumped in somebody else’s wheelbarrow.

LEONA
You got lots of promises you’re keeping?

ORABELLE
All shapes and sizes, from all over this county! Come look.

(They cross to the wheelbarrow. Orabelle reaches in and pulls out a leaf.)

ORABELLE
Now this one here, this is a child’s promise. Buy me a stereo and I’ll never cuss again.

LEONA (gullible)
I don’t see nothing but a leaf.

ORABELLE
Open your mind, child!

(Orabelle puts the leaf back in the wheelbarrow and pulls out a stick.)

And this one here, this is “I’ll guard it with my life.” This promise was made by a man from over the swamp who was looking after his friend’s chainsaw. He let somebody else borry it, and it broke all to pieces.

LEONA
That promise—it looks a lot like a twig.

ORABELLE
Don’t let that fool you. Things aren’t always what they seem.

RUBIE
Granny straightened me out a while back, Leona. Taught me to see beyond the obvious. You hang around her long enough and you’ll start doing it, too.

(Pause.)

But you know what bothers me? Some of these promises don’t sound serious enough for people to suffer the guilt all their lives. A girl who said she wouldn’t cuss and then did? How bad is that?

(Leona shakes her head.)

ORABELLE
Ain’t up to us to judge the weight of another’s promise.

(Orabelle reaches back into the wheelbarrow and pulls out a dried flower)

This one is “I’ll love you till I die.” That’s a serious turn-of-phrase, cause you just never know what love will do. But I tell you what—people say it all the time. “I’ll love you till I die!” Then some bigger love comes along and swallows up the littler love, and they can’t do nothing about it. If you ask me, we’d all be better off saying “I’ll love you long as I can.” ‘Course, that kinda love don’t make people feel too secure.

(Leona backs away from the wheelbarrow. She looks woozy.)

LEONA
Oh, Lordgod . . .

RUBIE
You all right?

LEONA
I just about saw that one. I just about saw it!

ORABELLE
That’s how it works. You start to see ‘em when they hit home. Did you tell somebody you’d love ‘em till you died and then quit loving ‘em?

LEONA
No, ma’am! I certainly did not! I just got dizzy cause I thought for a second I saw that promise!

ORABELLE
Well, don’t act so surprised, Darling. Did you think I was making this up?

(Pause.)

Maybe you saw it cause it’s a kindred promise—like your mama’s.

LEONA
It’s getting late. I should go. I told Little Pug I’d take him to the flea market.

ORABELLE
The flea market ain’t even open today, child.

(Pause.)

Maybe you saw that promise cause you so much like your mama, confusing love with responsibility just like she did.

LEONA
Really, I gotta go. I can take Little Pug to the dumpsters behind the dime store. You know how he loves to look for vacuum cleaner parts.

(Orabelle scowls.)

RUBIE
Let her go, Granny.

ORABELLE
She can go if she wants to, but there ain’t no need to make up stories about flea markets and dumpsters! I don’t think she likes my promises, Rubie.

LEONA
I do like your promises. But they make me kind of—sad.

ORABELLE
Sad? They shouldn’t make you sad. They should make you proud to be an American!

(Rubie rolls her eyes.)

Here in America, we’re free to break our promises! Sometimes it’s a real good thing!

(She digs around in her wheelbarrow.)

Who’ll explain it to her? Where’s the teacher? I know the teacher can make her understand!

(PROMISE #2 enters, looking uncomfortable.)

Go ahead. Tell ‘em what you did!

PROMISE #2
Well, my first year teaching, I had a third-grade class at Sunnybrook Elementary. Most of the students came from loving homes, but there was one girl who was a raggedy mess. Nobody combed her hair, and her clothes were stained and dirty. I never met her parents. I think they were on drugs. They never came to the PTA.

So one day when she had the croop and I had to keep her in at recess, I asked her to help me clean out the coat closet. There was a sweater in there with little bluebells embroidered all around the collar. I’d made it myself, but the arms shrunk up when I washed it. So I gave it to her and told her it was left over from the year before. She nearly coughed herself to death trying to thank me, and when I asked her how she got so sick, she said it was a secret.

I told her I could keep a secret. And she said, “Promise?” and I crossed my heart without even thinking about it. . . . Then she said that she’d sassed at her father, and he’d locked her out of the house in just her pajamas. She’d spent the night beneath the trailer, curled up on some blankets with the dog! I had to call social services, of course. They put her in foster care, and she didn’t come back to my class after that.

I went to visit her once, and she was wearing my sweater. She had her knees pulled up, and the sweater stretched over them. She wouldn’t talk to me at all. But those bluebells I’d embroidered around the collar, they just gaped at me—Seems like they accused me of unthinkable things.

ORABELLE
Oh, honey. You did the best you knew.

(She offers the promise her arm, and they begin their exit with the wheelbarrow.)

You did the best you knew!

(Rubie and Leona begin clearing the stage.)

LEONA
I always thought of broken promises as clear-cut. Like a man leaves his wife for another woman.

RUBIE
Yeah, but it’s not always that simple. Sometimes you think you’re doing right, when maybe you’re not—

(Rubie gets the pans and baskets of butterbeans and exits.)

LEONA
Like when you left here and broke your promise to open a flower shop with me? Rubie? Are you trying to apologize for that?

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Little Pug who examines a vacuum cleaner. He pushes it around, then turns it upside down and runs his hand over the rollers. Leona approaches.)

LEONA
Whatcha doing?

LITTLE PUG
Hey-oh there! Got me some work. Jack Flanagan dropped off his vacuum. Ain’t sucking right.

LEONA
What’s wrong with it?

LITTLE PUG
There’s a lot can go wrong with a vacuum. This one here is from his mobile home dealership. They vacuum every mobile home on the lot twice a week. So it might be plum wore out. Or it might have something to do with this little blue cord that’s all knotted up around the roller.

(Little Pug hands Leona the end of the blue cord and she tugs it.)

LEONA
Where’s Gwendolyn?

LITTLE PUG
Jack Flanagan’s pushing her around in the wheelchair.

LEONA
How come?

LITTLE PUG
Got no idea. Maybe they’re a’courtin’.

(The blue cord gives a bit and Leona stumbles. Little Pug giggles. Leona coils up the cord and begins pulling again.)

LEONA
Jack’s a married man.

LITTLE PUG
Well, I know that, but every time one of his commercials comes on the television, Gwendolyn cries and says she was supposed to be his wife. You never know. Jack Flanagan could be stepping out.

LEONA
Little Pug, do you remember Mama ever having a boyfriend?

LITTLE PUG
Yep.

LEONA
Did he come around a lot?

LITTLE PUG
All the time. Went hunting with Pop on Saturdays, too.

LEONA
Why didn’t you ever tell me?

LITTLE PUG
You never asked.

LEONA
Did he—love Mama?

LITTLE PUG
I don’t know if he loved her, but he bought her a blue French hen out of a catalogue. Come in a wooden crate and had the funniest looking beak you ever seen.

LEONA
You reckon he was my daddy?

LITTLE PUG
The blue hen? Nah.

LEONA
I mean the boyfriend.

LITTLE PUG
Could be.

(The blue cord finally comes free. Leona balls it up while Pug spins the roller on the vacuum.)

LEONA
How come they didn’t get married?

LITTLE PUG
Cause she didn’t need a husband.

(Laughter is heard from offstage.)

She had us.

(JACK FLANAGAN pushes Gwendolyn in from the side. He spins her in the wheelchair, zig zags her around.)

GWENDOLYN
Oh, me. Oh, Jack. You just tickle the stuffing out of me.

JACK FLANAGAN
Well, honey, it tickles me to tickle you! Now if you need me to drive you to the chiropractor again, all you have to do is call. You got my beeper number?

GWENDOLYN
It’s right here.

(She pats her bra.)

I always keep your card where I can reach it.

(Gwendolyn and Jack both notice Leona.)

JACK FLANAGAN
Hey there, Dollbaby. How you getting along?

LEONA (suspiciously)
All right.

GWENDOLYN
Jack, you want some cake? Leona can get you a piece.

(Leona scowls)

JACK FLANAGAN
Nah, I gotta get back to work. We got a shipment of brand new double-wides coming, and I gotta make space on the lot. Got some of the prettiest double-wides you ever seen—just loaded, some of ‘em with jacuzzi tubs.

GWENDOLYN
Oh, I love a jacuzzi tub.

(Leona rolls her eyes)

JACK FLANAGAN
One day when you’re out and about, stop by the lot and have Cynthia page me. I’ll give you a private tour.

(Jack winks.)

GWENDOLYN
Sounds fabulous.

JACK FLANAGAN
You think about my proposition now, Gwendolyn, and we’ll talk.

(Jack kisses Gwendolyn on the cheek.)

Thank you for checking that vacuum for me, Pug. I’ll stop back by in a day or two.

LITTLE PUG
Yep. all right.

(Jack exits. Little Pug removes the vacuum cleaner hose, peers inside it.)

LEONA
What kind of proposition is he talking about?

GWENDOLYN
A lady don’t have to share her private business.

LEONA
Come on. Tell us.

GWENDOLYN
Not about to!

LITTLE PUG
Did he put the moves on you, Gwen?

GWENDOLYN (laughing/snorting)
Ah, Pug. You know better than that. Jack Flanagan’s a gentleman from the get-go.

LITTLE PUG (mischieviously)
You reckon a gentleman gets hair-balls?

(Gwendolyn puts both hands over her mouth.)

GWENDOLYN
You bring out the devil in me, Little Pug. Let’s see what kinda clogs he’s got!

(She claps her hands, then addresses Leona.)

Get us a fresh Ziplock. I’d get one myself, but my legs are so weak.

LITTLE PUG
And bring back our prize-winners so we can compare ‘em!

(Leona hesitates. She’s about to say something, but doesn’t. She exits. Little Pug reaches into the hose, then gets a stick and pokes it in.)

GWENDOLYN
Be careful now. Don’t break it.

(Little Pug performs delicate surgery, his tongue stuck out the side of his mouth as he works. Leona returns, gives the bags to Gwendolyn.)

GWENDOLYN
Which ones did you bring?

(She reads like a first grader, broken.)

Clog from Buster Peavey’s Hoovervac, 1994. Lily Gresham’s cat-hair wedge, 2001.

LITTLE PUG
I just about got it.

(Leona holds open a bag, her face turned away. Little Pug pulls out the thick, matted clog and drops it in.)

GWENDOLYN
Woo-wee. It’s a beauty. Hand it here.

(She admires the hairball.)

That Jack Flanagan—his wife’s not much of a housekeeper, is she? You know, if it hadn’t been for you, Little Pug, I’d have married Jack Flanagan. But I couldn’t leave you. I knew my priorities.

LITTLE PUG
You ain’t never took care of me, Gwendolyn. And Jack Flanagan ain’t never had no use for you.

(Leona hands the bag to Gwendolyn and dusts her hands.)

GWENDOLYN
I’ll have you know Jack Flanagan was my first date. He took me to the Park ‘n Blow and ordered us a vanilla milkshake with two straws.

LITTLE PUG
That’s a flat-out lie. You ain’t never been on a date in your life.

GWENDOLYN
Shut up, Little Pug!

(Little Pug begins sucking the back of his hand. Leona helps him put the vacuum back together.)

GWENDOLYN
One time when we was teenagers, me and Jack played Mary and Joseph in the Christmas Pageant. Did you know that, Leona?

(Leona shakes her head.)

LITTLE PUG
You a’lyin again, Gwendolyn.

GWENDOLYN (through gritted teeth)
You startin to aggravate me. I’m warning you.

LITTLE PUG
Jack Flanagan didn’t like you. He made fun of you like everybody else.

(Gwendolyn jumps out of the wheelchair as if she’s going to attack Little Pug. Leona gets between them, holds up the front-plate of the vacuum like a shield.)

GWENDOLYN
I’m gonna beat him till he bleeds. I’m gonna kill him.

(Gwendolyn opens up the ziplock and dumps the hairball on the floor. Then she jumps on it and flattens it. Little Pug inhales rapidly.)

That’s what I think of your hairballs. You hear me? You ain’t nothing but a hairball yourself. A pathetic little wedge of trash!

(Little Pug takes his vacuum and darts off stage. Gwendolyn studies the mashed hairball.)

GWENDOLYN
Well looka there!

(Gwendolyn gets down on her knees, begins looking through the mess.)

LEONA
What is it?

GWENDOLYN
I don’t know. A little pink sparkly thing. Must be one of Jack’s granddaughter’s play-things. But it’d make a pretty ring, wouldn’t it?

(She holds it up for Leona to see. Then she licks the sparkly thing and sticks it to her finger. Leona winces. Gwendolyn walks back over to the wheelchair and sits down.)

I now pronounce you Man and Wife.

(She laughs and holds her finger out for Leona to admire.)

That’s how it should’ve been, Leona. That’s how it should’ve been.

(Gwendolyn show off her fake engagement ring to imaginary admirers as Leona pushes her offstage. Little Pug comes out and vacuums up the dirt. LIGHTS SHIFT to Orabelle and Rubie who set up a card table and some chairs. Leona joins them and they sit at the table playing Rummy.)

ORABELLE
Rummy on the board!

(She picks up the cards and makes a play.)

If I had a dollar for every time you threw out a card that plays, I’d be a rich woman. What’s got you so distracted, Leona?

LEONA
Yesterday we got seven calls from bill collectors! I keep telling Gwendolyn not to answer the phone, but she likes to talk to ‘em. ‘Course she denies that we owe ‘em any money.

(Leona shakes her head.)

I don’t know what to do with Gwendolyn. I’ve tried to stand up to her. Then I’ve tried to be nice to her. But nothing works. And she won’t even admit that we’re broke. I need to get a job.

ORABELLE
Maybe you could apply at that garden center over in Conway.

LEONA
It wouldn’t pay enough to help.

RUBIE
Might help a little.

(She draws.)

LEONA
If it wasn’t for somebody’s broken promise, I might be a wealthy flower shop owner right this minute.

RUBIE
I know you not gonna blame it on me that you don’t have a job!

LEONA
You were supposed to open a flower shop with me! Then you up and left on graduation night, hopped a Greyhound to Lord-knows where—

(Rubie discards.)

RUBIE
To bootcamp—And it wasn’t graduation night, either. It was two weeks after.

(to Orabelle)

You see! I told you she was still mad about that.

ORABELLE
Ah, Rubie, she reeled you right in! And you let her. You gotta do a better job of listening to what’s behind the words. Otherwise, you’ll always be a sucker.

(Leona and Rubie both look surprised. Leona draws, then discards quickly. Orabelle addresses her.)

And you gotta quit feeling so sorry for yourself.

LEONA
It was one of the biggest disappointments of my life.

RUBIE
It was a game, Leona. Just like this. I was eight years old when I told you I’d open a flower shop with you.

LEONA
It was more than a game to me. Remember those hollyberry wreaths we made? All the arrangements of daisies in Co-cola bottles?

(Orabelle draws, studies her card.)

You never even apologized.

RUBIE
There’s nothing to apologize for!

ORABELLE
Y’all quit acting like children.

(Orabelle lays out her cards.)

I’m out. I’m the Rummy-Queen again!

(to Leona)

If you need a job so bad, you oughta think about driving a school bus. I hear they’re hiring for the fall.

LEONA (pouty)
I could do that, I reckon—

(She gathers the cards, starts shuffling them.)

RUBIE
I could see you being a bus driver. You remember that day on the bus?

(Leona smiles, lays the cards back down.)

We had this substitute bus driver one time who wanted to segregate the bus, Granny. She had better sense than to try to divide it front and back, but she wanted to sit the white children on one side and the black children on the other.

LEONA
But Rubie’d already sat down with me. The driver told her to move, said the bus weren’t rolling until Rubie was on the other side.

ORABELLE
Seems like I do remember—

RUBIE
When I didn’t get up, she came huffing down that aisle like an old bull, and said, “Move over, chocolate-chip!”

LEONA
And Rubie said, “You can’t make me move! There’s laws against that now.”

RUBIE
And then I said, “I’m sitting with Leona. She’s my cousin.”

LEONA
I hate to admit it, but when you said you were my cousin, I felt the tater-tots I’d had for lunch rise up sour in my throat!

RUBIE
What else could you have felt? Look where we grew up. But you didn’t deny it or try to push me off the seat.

LEONA
I wouldn’t have never pushed you off the seat.

ORABELLE
Family ain’t just about blood. Family ain’t really about blood at all.

LEONA
That’s not what Gwendolyn says!

ORABELLE
You believe everything Gwendolyn says? You give her too much power, Leona. You a grown woman. Time you started acting like it.

(Leona nods, goes over and hugs Orabelle. LIGHTS DIM. They begin to exit, taking chairs with them. Orabelle cackles.)

ORABELLE (exiting)
I’ll whip you again!

(In dim-light, Gwendolyn enters, pushes her wheelchair to the table, then sets up a free-standing TV and a rug to make a family-room. She takes her seat in the wheelchair. LIGHTS COME UP on Leona standing by a table and arranging rollers by size. She combs Gwendolyn’s hair.)

GWENDOLYN
Owie!

LEONA
Sorry. I’ll go easier.

GWENDOLYN
You must think my head’s made of leather. I don’t see why I couldn’t just go to the beauty parlor. They don’t yank my head around like you do.

LEONA
We’re broke, Gwendolyn. The beauty parlor charges fifty dollars to do it, and I’m free.

GWENDOLYN
You exaggerate everything. We ain’t broke. I got a whole checkbook full of checks in there.

(She laughs.)

LEONA
I’m gonna give you the beauty shop experience right here. Fix you up so pretty!

GWENDOLYN
If it looks good, I might go to church tomorrow. Maybe Jack Flanagan’ll be there. You reckon they got a wheelchair ramp at the church?

LEONA
You know, I been studying the family files.

GWENDOLYN
I know you have, and I don’t like it a bit. You used to have more respect! You got no business looking at the files til me and Pug’s both dead, and that’s a long way off, Missy! Owie!

LEONA
We’re low on money, Gwendolyn. We need to sell some of this land.

GWENDOLYN
You don’t need to worry about that.

LEONA
I’m gonna get a job, too. I been looking in the papers.

GWENDOLYN
You got a job already. You gotta take care of us. You gave us your word, Leona.

LEONA
You’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself.

GWENDOLYN
What if something happened? I can’t get around, with these poor old twisted vertebrae. What if Little Pug’s dog dropped his mess in the floor and I drove my wheelchair through it. Who’d clean it up?

LEONA
The car insurance comes due next month. Only thing I can figure is that we can turn off the air conditioner. We might save enough on electric to cover the insurance.

GWENDOLYN
We ain’t turning off the AC, I’ll tell you that right now. You know what I hate the most? Hot toothpaste. I’d rather not brush my teeth at all than use hot toothpaste.

LEONA
We can put the toothpaste in the fridgedaire.

GWENDOLYN
My disability comes every month—and Little Pug’s disability.

LEONA
It’s not enough.

GWENDOLYN
You can fill out some new forms, and they’ll send us more money. Now that my legs don’t work, I oughta get more disability.

LEONA
It don’t work like that—

GWENDOLYN
I’ll figure it out. I got some ideas.

LEONA
Just listen to me. Tilt your chin down.

(She begins to roll the back of Gwendolyn’s head.)

We’ve got a total of fifty-eight acres right now.

GWENDOLYN
Sixty.

LEONA
No, I just looked at the files. This farm’s got forty-eight, and then the Junior Baskins farm’s got another ten.

(Gwendolyn undoes a roller.)

GWENDOLYN
You gotta redo this one. It’s pulling.

(Leona rolls it again.)

And check your math. The Junior Baskins farm’s got twelve acres.

LEONA
Granny sold two acres to Miss Orabelle back in ‘79, remember?

GWENDOLYN
That ought not count. Probably weren’t even legal.

(Leona jerks Gwendolyn’s head.)

Owie!

LEONA
It was perfectly legal.

GWENDOLYN
I bet you when she died and crossed the River Jordan, Jesus Christ himself was waiting to give her forty lashes for selling land to a nigger. You ‘member how mad he got when the Philistines gambled in his temple that time?

(Leona jerks her head again)

Owie!

LEONA
I’d hoped you’d changed your attitude by now.

GWENDOLYN
Ain’t nothing wrong with my attitude.

LEONA
Tilt your head down.

(Leona begins applying the permanent solution.)

I was thinking we might sell the ten acres on the Junior Baskins farm, and that’d give us money to get back on our feet. We could get three-thousand an acre. I’ve been looking in the newspapers at the real estate section.

GWENDOLYN
I’m gonna take that newspaper away from you. Hand me that rag.

(Leona passes a rag to Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn mops her face and neck.)

LEONA
The land does nobody no good just sitting there.

GWENDOLYN
Our family has always owned this land. We ain’t selling it.

LEONA
Well I hope these growed-up fields can comfort you when they cut off our lights and you can’t watch your soap operas.

GWENDOLYN
You’re just trying to terrorize me to get your way. They won’t cut off our lights, cause our family has a name. They know who we are.

LEONA
They don’t care who we are.

GWENDOLYN
Blasphemy!

(Leona tucks cotton around Gwendolyn’s hair line.)

LEONA
How ‘bout if we sold part of the Junior Baskins farm? Just a couple of acres.

GWENDOLYN
I told you no!

LEONA
I already got a buyer, Gwen, preapproved for financing. And if we sell some land, there might even be enough money for us to go on vacation.

(Little Pug runs in.)

LITTLE PUG
Disneyworld. Disneyworld. I want to stay in a motel with Daffy the Duck.

GWENDOLYN (considering)
I ain’t never stayed in a motel. Always wanted to.

LITTLE PUG
Come here, Boy-dog!

(He slaps at his thigh.)

LEONA
We could just sell a little bit—and none of the land we live on. So you wouldn’t really even know the difference.

GWENDOLYN
I reckon we don’t need all this land. The Junior Baskins is red-clay anyway. Who’d buy it?

LEONA
Rubie Drake.

GWENDOLYN
Rubie Drake? Are you shitting me, Leona? You pulling my leg? Didn’t you just hear me say what I thought of selling land to niggers? And to a lady faggot nigger at that!

LITTLE PUG
At Disneyworld, you get to shake the hands of the greatest cartoon characters ever walked the face of this earth. And that’s where Cinderella lives, Gwendolyn, in a castle in the clouds. And all them firecrackers going off every night in the sky!

GWENDOLYN
You expect me to sell land to a nigger woman who wears a uniform? I know you’ve lost your mind.

(Leona wraps Gwendolyn’s head in a plastic bag and pins it up.)

I can’t even take you seriously anymore. It’s a good thing me and Pug are still alive to keep you in line, ain’t it Pug?

(Leona pushes Gwendolyn to the living area, facing the TV. Little Pug sits down on the rug, begins playing tug-of-war with a dog toy.)

LEONA
Just think about it.

GWENDOLYN
You beat all I’ve ever seen, do you know that? I don’t know whether to slap you or to laugh in your face. Turn it to channel four.

LITTLE PUG
And Boy-Dog can stay at the Disneyworld Pet-Motel and play with Goofy and Bambi and the little skunk. Ain’t there a little skunk?

GWENDOLYN
If we go on vacation, we’ll have to leave your dog in the chicken-coop, Pug.

LITTLE PUG
Nah, now, Gwendolyn. Boy-Dog wants to ride on an airplane, too. Can we ride on an airplane, Leona?

LEONA
We might can, if we go ahead and sell the land.

LITTLE PUG (to Boy-Dog)
You can play with the little skunk.

GWENDOLYN
You can tell Rubie Drake to look elsewhere for land. She can buy land from somebody else, but she ain’t buying it from me.

(Leona crosses back to table and begins to clean up the permanent stuff and fold up rags. Gwendolyn addresses Little Pug.)

You keep that dog away from me, you hear?

LITTLE PUG
He ain’t bothering you!

GWENDOLYN (hollering back)
My head’s a’burning.

LEONA
Do you act like this at the beauty parlor? Just hang on.

GWENDOLYN
I can’t stand it! Wash this mess outta my hair.

(Leona checks her watch.)

LEONA
You don’t have but a few more minutes.

GWENDOLYN (shouting)
Get that dog away from me, damnit!

LITTLE PUG
He ain’t hurting nothing.

(A dog cries out. Leona runs to them.)

LEONA
What’d you do?

(Little Pug is on hands and knees, looking behind the TV.)

LITTLE PUG
She kicked his guts out. Why’d you kick his guts out, Gwendolyn?

GWENDOLYN
The little bastard deserved it. He was eating my Isotoner.

LITTLE PUG
Come here, Boy-Dog. Come here, little buddy.

GWENDOLYN
He bit me!

LEONA
He’s just teething.

GWENDOLYN
Don’t you mock me! If you’d felt them little needle teeth, you’d a’kicked him too.

LITTLE PUG
He’s hurt.

GWENDOLYN
He ain’t hurt. His pride might be hurt, but I ain’t hurt him.

(Leona goes over and examines the dog.)

He’s sleeping outside from now on. You hear me? Get him out of this house right this second!

LEONA
I’m not putting up with this anymore! It’s Little Pug’s house too, and he can keep his dog wherever he wants.

GWENDOLYN
Little Pug will do what I say. And so will you. You used to have more respect, before you started hanging out with the niggers. If I could make these legs walk, I’d kick you, Leona. I’d stomp you right through the floor.

LEONA
That’s some back problem you got. Them legs won’t work for you to walk to the kitchen, but when the dog plays with your bedroom-shoe, they’re strong enough to kick him across the room.

(Gwendolyn jumps up from her wheelchair. She and Leona stand face to face.)

You better be careful. Cause I’ll leave that permanent in til you don’t have a hair left in your head.

(Gwendolyn reaches up and touches the plastic on her head. Then she begins crying loudly.)

LITTLE PUG
I’ll take him out. Gwendolyn, do you hear me? I’ll take him out right now.

GWENDOLYN (shouting)
Get him out! I can’t stand that dog. I don’t never want to see him again.

(Leona wipes the spit off her face.)

LITTLE PUG
Don’t be upset, Gwendolyn. I’m gonna take him out right now.

LEONA (to Little Pug)
This ain’t about your dog, Pug. It’s about selling the land to Rubie.

GWENDOLYN (roaring)
I ain’t selling no land to Rubie and I don’t never want to hear another word about it.

LEONA
Quit that hollering!

GWENDOLYN
Don’t tell me what to do, you ugly little bastard.

(Gwendolyn puts her hands over her ears and begins to yell.)

LITTLE PUG
You don’t have to never see him again, Gwendolyn, I promise.

(Leona shoves Gwendolyn down into the wheelchair. Gwendolyn is surprised and stops screaming. Everything is silent except for a buzzer. Gwendolyn reaches up and touches the plastic bag on her head.)

GWENDOLYN (whimpering, child-like)
My hair. You gonna ruin my hair.

LITTLE PUG
Boy-Dog can sleep outside from now on.

LEONA (to Little Pug)
Run get her a nerve pill. They’re in the bathroom cabinet.

(Little Pug exits, grabbing the table as he goes. Leona pushes Gwendolyn’s wheelchair away.)

GWENDOLYN
You gonna burn my hair up.

LEONA
It’s all right. Let’s wash it out.

(They exit. LIGHTS SHIFT to Orabelle who is holding up things from her wheelbarrow and tending them. Leona enters, and Orabelle shows her several things—a rock, a bug, a shell.)

LEONA
No offense, Miss Orabelle, but this is depressing. Why do I have to keep hearing about all these promises? Is this supposed to make me feel better or worse? I can’t tell.

ORABELLE
There’s no desired outcome, Sugar. They’re just here to keep you company.

LEONA
But why?

ORABELLE
You mean you’re not ready to break your promise yet? I thought you’d come to leave it.

LEONA
I just came to see Rubie and tell her that Gwendolyn won’t sell her the land. I’m gonna have to think of some other way to keep us out of bankruptcy.

ORABELLE
Well, never mind then.

LEONA
Don’t look at me like that, Miss Orabelle. I haven’t broken any promise! When I agree to something, that means something to me. Back when I was in high school, I volunteered to be a bell-ringer for the Salvation Army at Christmas-time, and I’ve done it every year since. I don’t even know whether the Salvation Army is a good cause or not. I ring that bell anyway, because I said I would!

ORABELLE
Well, that’s pure silly, Leona. Sometimes promises have to be broke. Sometimes there’s a good reason.

LEONA (flustered)
You’re just saying that to defend Rubie—cause she broke her promise to me to stay here and help me open that flower shop!

(Orabelle shakes her head, fiddles with promises.)

She probably broke a promise to you, too, didn’t she? When she went away and left here, traveled all over the place for all them years and left you by yourself? You’re probably mad at her too.

ORABELLE
Now don’t go confusing your anger with mine! If Rubie’d stayed here, she would’ve been hell to live with, cause she wanted to roam. You can’t expect somebody to do for you before you let them do for their-ownself.

LEONA
They expected it of me! Mama and Gwendolyn and Little Pug—the whole lot of ‘em.

ORABELLE
Don’t fall back in that sad-sack rut, Leona! Promises change. They grow into new promises—or what do you call it? They evolve. You gotta be respectful, give’em room to develop. You ever seen a woman with her titties squished into a too-little bra? They just pop out around the edges. Can’t force ‘em into something that use to fit. I believe in bra-burning. Always have.

LEONA
You make it sound like breaking promises is a good thing.

ORABELLE
Ain’t no good or bad to it. And once you break a promise, it don’t just go away. You gotta live with a broken promise as surely as you live with one you keep.

(She points out into the audience.)

Look ayonder! That’s a new promise coming now.

(Leona peers out.)

LEONA
Where?

ORABELLE
Right there! See it? Oh, that one’s coming hard and fast.

(Orabelle takes Leona’s arm, prepares to run.)

Back up, Honey. That one’s gonna have a hard landing.

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Jack Flanagan and Gwendolyn. Jack wears a top-hat and tuxedo jacket. He tips his hat at Gwendolyn, bows.

On the other side of the stage, in the darkness, there’s a loud crash, like something heavy hitting the wheelbarrow, and a groan.

Jack and Gwendolyn both look in the direction of the wheelbarrow, shrug at each other, and then a waltz begins. Jack dances Gwendolyn around in her wheelchair, spinning her, moving her across the stage. Gwendolyn laughs, sighs. When the music ends, Jack faces Gwendolyn, bows again, and pulls papers from his pocket, which Gwendolyn signs on several pages. She holds her copies of the papers to her chest as Jack walks away. He has his copies rolled into a scroll, and he holds them up and shakes them victoriously. On the way offstage, he tosses his top-hat to the ground. Orabelle picks it up.

LIGHTS SHIFT to PROMISE #3, who stands behind Orabelle’s wheelbarrow.)

PROMISE #3
Never, never, never again! I swore I’d never let it happen again! I was done pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. I was done with painting my fingernails to look more ladylike, done with highlighting my hair. Done with bringing home my gay friends to stand in as my boyfriend so Mother could dream about my wedding. I was done with listening to my little cousins calling each other queers, and watching Papa do his droopy-arm pansy walk. I was done with church, where every description of Hell included murderers and homosexuals. Cause I’m not a murderer, do you get it? I’m not into bestiality or incest or porn or devil worship, and I’ve got better things to do than convert you or your children. Is that clear?

(Leona nods)

ORABELLE
Preach it, sister.

PROMISE #3
The deception is eating me alive. My mother would rather I married a hateful man than live with a loving woman. Can you believe that? Cause if it looks right, it IS right to her.

ORABELLE
But it ain’t right to you.

PROMISE #3
No ma’am.

ORABELLE
It’s a shame.

LEONA
Excuse me? Did you break some kind of promise?

PROMISE #3 (crumpling)
I lost my nerve.

(Pause.)

My nephew was playing the violin in church, and he asked me to come hear him. I couldn’t very well leave when the music was over, with my whole family sitting there, so I stayed through the sermon. As an illustration of the scriptures, the preacher told a story about how his son had been given a birthday present—a shirt made by some famous designer. The son really liked the shirt, but the preacher made him take it back to the store and exchange it because the designer’s a fag, and Christians don’t support that lifestyle or wear the clothes made my people who do.

You gotta understand, the gay-bashing wasn’t even the topic of the sermon. It was incidental—just an illustration of some bigger point. And I sat there with my family, sweaty and cold at the same time, and I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t stand up. I didn’t speak up. I didn’t even leave. I sat right there and watched that preacher and listened to my mother say, “Amen.”

(Promise #3 and Orabelle exit as LIGHTS SHIFT to Gwendolyn, who is now waltzing with her copies of the papers Jack gave her. She is no longer in her wheelchair, and she’s doing some impressive dance moves. Leona crosses over to her, and Gwendolyn grabs her arm and tries to dance, but Leona just stands still.)

GWENDOLYN
We going to Disneyworld after all. I’m sorry I called you a ugly little bastard. You ain’t really all that ugly. I was just mad.

LEONA
What’s that?

GWENDOLYN
The contract. I already signed it. I already got the check!

LEONA
What are you talking about?

GWENDOLYN
I sold the property to Jack, and we’re rich! I signed my name and Little Pug signed his name and Jack signed his name and the notary public put a stamp on it. Jack’s taking it to the courthouse now.

LEONA
Show me the contract.

GWENDOLYN
You can look at it later. You gotta take me to the bank to put the check in.

LEONA
Hand it here!

(Gwendolyn gives it to her and Leona begins to read.)

GWENDOLYN
See, you think you’re the only one who knows how to do business, but I know how to do business too. And you weren’t gonna get but thirty-thousand. I got eighty!

(Little Pug enters looking dejected, sucking on the back of his hand.)

LEONA (to Pug)
Did you sign your name?

LITTLE PUG
Yep.

GWENDOLYN (to Pug)
Did you do what I told you to?

LITTLE PUG
No, not yet. But—

GWENDOLYN
Go do it. And hurry up. We gotta get to the bank, and after that, we’re going to the travel agent. Do we have a travel agent?

LITTLE PUG
I can’t do it, Gwendolyn.

(Leona holds up the papers.)

LEONA
Little Pug, do you know what this means?

LITTLE PUG
Yep.

(He pulls his cap down hard over his eyes.)

GWENDOLYN
You wanna go to Disneyworld, don’t you?

LITTLE PUG
I reckon.

GWENDOLYN
Then go do it! And don’t come back in here again til you do!

(Little Pug exits. Leona sits down and continues to flip through the papers. She looks faint.)

LEONA
How did Jack Flanagan get this together so fast?

GWENDOLYN
He’s been wanting to buy the property for ages. That day he took me to the chiropractor we talked about it. I told him I wasn’t ready to sell, but he was welcome to draw up the paperwork and make me an offer. He got somebody to come out and take pictures. A survey, I believe they call it. Didn’t you see all the little orange flags?

LEONA
Rubie was gonna pay us thirty-thousand for the Junior Baskins Farm. That’s just ten acres. You sold Jack all the land—every bit of it—for eighty.

(Leona continues to read.)

GWENDOLYN
Eighty thousand dollars is a lot of money!

LEONA
Gwendolyn, you sold him the house! And all the out-buildings.

GWENDOLYN
Yeah, but flip on over—see there? He’s giving us a double-wide trailer with one of them jacuzzi baths for my back! Brand new. I’ve been living in this old drafty farm-house my whole life, and now I’m gonna have a double-wide that nobody’s ever lived in before.

LEONA
Where you gonna put that trailer?

GWENDOLYN
In the backyard, I reckon. Jack’ll move into this house, and then we’ll have his little grandchildren playing in the yard. It’ll be nice. We can have Thanksgiving together. Maybe his wife’ll throw a blood-clot. I hear her cholesterol’s out the roof.

LEONA
Jack’ll put the trailer somewhere else.

GWENDOLYN
No he won’t. We got lifetime rights to stay on the land. You think I’m a fool? I wouldn’t have signed his papers if he could get rid of me!

LEONA
This is bad, Gwendolyn. We gotta call a lawyer, get it annulled or something.

GWENDOLYN
We ain’t gotta do nothing! And don’t tell me it’s bad. How bad can it be when I got a check right here for eighty thousand dollars? You just jealous cause you didn’t make the deal yourself. You’re like a little girl sometimes, ain’t you? Scared to death. We’ll take care of you, Leona. Don’t worry. We’ll make sure it’s a three-bedroom trailer.

(Offstage there’s a gunshot. Then a short pause and another gunshot. Leona jumps up.)

LEONA
Where’s Little Pug?

(Another offstage gunshot.)

GWENDOLYN
I’m allergic to that dog. That’s what’s been wrong with my legs. Finally figured it out.

(Little Pug enters, head down, dragging a shotgun.)

LEONA
What have you done?

LITTLE PUG
Two times I missed. But then I didn’t.

(LIGHTS OUT.)

Act Two

(LIGHTS COME UP shadowy blue and ghostly on the wheelbarrow at center stage. The PROMISES can be offstage, or they can be onstage moving around the wheelbarrow, but they should be unidentifiable.)

PROMISE 1
Promises aren’t solitary. Promises come in batches. They come in families, they get passed along—

PROMISE 2
Like old silver.

PROMISE 3
They’re in the attic and in the cellar, in trunks with broken latches, tied up with ribbon, smeared and faded. Their wax seals crumble away to leave oily stains.

PROMISE 2
Promises at the courthouse and promises at the jailhouse. Promises framed and hung on the wall.

PROMISE 3
Like art.

PROMISE 1
A promise doesn’t only exist between consenting parties. Oh no! It has an energy, a presence that disperses. A blown dandelion, fluff flying everywhere—

PROMISE 2 (sneezing)
A-choo.

PROMISE 3
A promise is polite. A promise says “god-bless-you.”

PROMISE 1
Sometimes.

(Pause.)

Sometimes a promise is rude.

PROMISE 2
A promise doesn’t only dress in black and white. Or if it does, it wears a lime-green slip beneath.

PROMISE 1
A promise is imaginative. Theatrical. Fond of tightropes.

PROMISE 2
A promise will blow up on you. Ka-pow. Ka-pow.

PROMISE 3
Promises pass through prison bars. Promises pass along barrels of guns.

PROMISE 2
Promises push up through your throat like new flowers.

PROMISE 1
Promises cower beneath your tongue.

PROMISE 3
There are promises that break in one way or another. If you don’t break them, your daughter might have to.

PROMISE 2
Your mother, your cousin, your lover.

PROMISE 1
There are promises to be kept another day, another lifetime. Promises that crawl back from the grave, a skeletal inheritance—

PROMISE 3
Remember me?

(Promises exit. ORABELLE enters, approaches her wheelbarrow, and LIGHTS COME UP. Orabelle wears a chicken-wire hat. Her wheelbarrow is full of objects made of chicken-wire.)

ORABELLE
There’s a lot you can make out of chicken-wire besides a barrier.

(She tips her hat at the audience.)

Who needs a fence when you can have a sombrero?

(She sets the hat on the ground and does a little dance around it, then laughs and puts it back on her head. LEONA and RUBIE enter. Leona has pom-poms. Rubie holds a basketball. Orabelle hands them a figure she pulls out of the wheelbarrow and they take it across the stage and begin sticking orange crepe paper into the holes.)

When the children were in school, they used to make floats for the Homecoming Parade, and they always started with chicken-wire.

(Leona and Rubie continue to work. LITTLE PUG enters, sucking the back of his hand. He has a vacuum cleaner hose around his neck like a noose. He approaches Orabelle, reaches to tap her shoulder, but she doesn’t notice.)

People can be so thick-headed . . . thinking chicken-wire’s only good for building pens.

(Little Pug tugs at Orabelle’s skirt. She turns to him.)

Well, hello there, Pug.

(Little Pug pops his hand out of his mouth, making a loud sucking sound.)

LITTLE PUG
Miss Orabelle, you reckon you could spare me some of that wire?

ORABELLE
Why certainly, Son. It’s yours for the asking.

(She gives him a rolled up section of wire. Little Pug shuffles away to another part of the stage and begins unrolling it.)

ORABELLE
Poor feller. Shaping something with his own hands might do him good. Always does me good. . . . Not that there’s anything wrong with chicken-wire being used to make a chicken coop. I’ve had chickens all my life, and a coop protects ‘em from wild dogs and foxes. Sometimes it’s hard to know which side of the fence is better.

(Little Pug sits on the ground with the chicken-wire completely surrounding him. He fiddles half-heartedly with the vacuum cleaner hose.)

But chicken-wire can’t keep out a snake! A snake’ll crawl right in and run off a hen and eat her eggs one at a time till I get out there with my hoe to chop its old head off!

(Orabelle grabs a hoe out of her wheelbarrow and runs over to Little Pug.)

LITTLE PUG (flatly)
Go ahead. Chop me to pieces. I’d appreciate it if you would.

ORABELLE
Well, Lord have mercy, Pug! What are you doing locked up here in this coop?

LITTLE PUG
My dog died. I buried him in here. Just wanted to be near him. He was the sweetest old dog.

ORABELLE
That’s terrible news, Son. And I’m sorry I just about whacked you. I can’t see good as I used to.

LITTLE PUG
You can whack me.

ORABELLE
No, Baby. I thought that vacuum hose was a snake, and from way back there, you looked like you might be a chicken.

LITTLE PUG
Oh—well, you’re welcome to chop my old head off. Put me out of my misery.

ORABELLE
You poor thing. Don’t you understand that some miseries you just gotta go through?

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Leona and Rubie and their chicken-wire mascot.)

LEONA (as cheerleader)
Rah-rah, Ree! Kick ‘em in the knee!

(She laughs.)

I tried out for cheerleading three times in high school and never made the team. Can’t recall now why I even wanted to be a cheerleader—or if I wanted to. Just thought it was something you were supposed to do when you got to high school. Did you ever try out?

RUBIE
Are you kidding? Do you remember any black cheerleaders?

(Leona shrugs.)

Wasn’t a black girl on the cheerleading squad the whole time. Might not even be one now.

LEONA
Yes, there is. Last year Mama thought she was supposed to be crowned homecoming queen, so we went to the football jamboree. You should’ve seen me trying to keep her off the field at half-time. We sat right in front of the cheerleaders, and I saw a colored girl cheering. I know I did.

RUBIE
One outta how many?

LEONA
I don’t know. Why are you making such a big deal out of it?

RUBIE
Cause I want you to see that white people are treated different from black people. If you’d been good enough, you could’ve been a cheerleader. But no matter how high I jumped or how loud I hollered, I wouldn’t have made the team. That’s why I couldn’t stay around here and open a flower shop with you.

LEONA
You didn’t even want to be a cheerleader.

RUBIE
That’s beside the point.

LEONA
Why are you making me into the enemy? I’ve always been on your side.

RUBIE
But you won’t acknowledge the differences, Leona.

LEONA
I’m not a racist! You know that! And white girls don’t get to do everything colored girls do. A lot more colored girls are on the track team.

(Rubie dribbles her ball.)

RUBIE
And don’t forget about basketball. Or the band—cause we can sure play our horns!

LEONA
That’s not what I meant!

RUBIE
There were places where I wasn’t welcome. Or places where I was the token black.

LEONA
I don’t see that at all. Plenty of people welcomed you.

RUBIE
We didn’t have the same opportunities. There were things I couldn’t have done if I’d stayed.

LEONA
You could’ve opened a flower shop with me, like you promised. You think a daisy discriminates?

RUBIE
Don’t start that again—

LEONA
You had the same opportunities as me.

(She takes the tiger-mascot and holds it up.)

You were Tiger-born and Tiger-bred, same as me.

RUBIE
Wrong again. The Tiger was the mascot at the white school. Before the schools were integrated, we had a mascot, too. We were the Bears.

LEONA
Don’t you even say that I think a tiger is better than a bear, cause I don’t. We could’ve been the Bears for all I cared.

RUBIE
But we weren’t.

(Pause.)

The Bears went extinct, just like that. The Tigers didn’t. Not to mention that everybody was mad at us for being a Tiger. I had to get out of here. I had to go somewhere else, where people didn’t have the assumptions—

LEONA
You think a rose-bud has assumptions?

RUBIE
You never listen. The whole time I talk, you just plan what you’re gonna say back.

(Leona is stunned.)

You’re just like Gwendolyn! Manipulate the shit out of a person.

LEONA
That’s the meanest thing anybody’s ever said to me. I thought you cared about me!

RUBIE
There you go again. Poor little victim, always hurt by the world. Let me tell you something, Leona. You put yourself in the victim-role. Then you blame everybody else around you.

(Leona inhales sharply. As they stomp off in different directions, LIGHTS SHIFT to Little Pug in his self-made coop. He rocks from side to side, humming himself into a trance. Orabelle stands on the outside trying to get his attention, but he doesn’t acknowledge her.)

LITTLE PUG (sing-song, quietly)
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry—

ORABELLE
Hey, Pug! You quit that! You gotta pull yourself together.

LITTLE PUG
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry.

(Orabelle searches in her wheelbarrow.)

ORABELLE
I need a volunteer. Somebody’s gotta distract him! Where’s that politician? He’ll say anything!

LITTLE PUG
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry—

(PROMISE #4 enter, sticks a finger through the chicken-wire, and Pug shakes it.)

PROMISE #4
How do you do there, sir? Are you a registered voter? Do you attend your local town council meetings? Give feedback to your county supervisors?

(He waits for Pug to respond, but Pug just resumes his rocking, humming.)

Yes, well, some years back, you elected me to be your mayor, and I vowed at that time to put the needs of the people of this community first. I believe government should have a friendly face.

(He gives a big grin to the audience, a big grin to Little Pug. Little Pug doesn’t acknowledge him.)

I believe the way to lead the people is to listen to the people, and so on and so forth.

LITTLE PUG (loudly)
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry—

ORABELLE
Come on, now! This ain’t a campaign speech.

PROMISE #4
When I was elected, I promised the people that I would lead through my example. I took a salary cut because the people of my constituency were paying higher taxes, and I wanted to demonstrate that we all must make sacrifices for the higher good. Then I came into hard times, had some “business associates” breathing down my neck, and so I gave myself a loan out of the town budget. I had every intention of paying it back, and—

LITTLE PUG (almost shouting his song)
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry-

(Promise #4 hurries off as LIGHTS SHIFT to Gwendolyn in a rocking chair, rocking maniacally. There’s an empty rocker beside her. Leona enters.)

GWENDOLYN (hysterical)
Where you been? One of the worst traumas of my life, and you missed it!

LEONA
What happened?

GWENDOLYN
I was just sitting here minding my business when the mobile homes started rolling in, one behind the other, and not even new ones! Used ones! Not even double-wides. They came right down the driveway, hooked to big old trucks with hairy men inside them, and you weren’t even here!

LEONA
Sorry.

(Leona sits down.)

GWENDOLYN
I went out there and asked the the first driver what he was doing, and you know what he said to me? He said, “I’m parking my load. Who the hell are you?” Well, I told him to mind his language, cause I’m the daughter of the late Arthur Langford Harris, and he said, “You better get that house packed up ‘cause they gone demolish it next week.”

(Leona gasps.)

Naturally, I started crying. And you were nowhere in sight! I called up Jack Flanagan, and then I beeped him on his beeper. I beeped him forty-leven-dozen times, but he didn’t come.

LEONA
He mighta changed his beeper number.

GWENDOLYN
I’ll wring his neck if he changed it!

(Gwendolyn looks at Leona closely.)

Well, my god, you’ve been crying, too, haven’t you? Your face is so swoll, it looks like you’ve spent the afternoon drowning.

(Leona looks away. Gwendolyn chuckles.)

What’s the matter?

LEONA
My feelings are just so tender—Sometimes I miss Mama so bad.

(Leona buries her face into her hands.)

GWENDOLYN
I do, too, honey. I do, too.

(Gwendolyn breaks down and cries loudly. Leona lifts her face and looks over at Gwendolyn, who suddenly stops crying, sniffs hard.)

Nothing wrong with a good cry. A good cry is balm for your soul. Let me get us a cucumber before our eyes swell shut. Looks like you needed a cucumber a while back.

(Gwendolyn picks up a cucumber, slices four slabs, gives two to Leona and puts two over her own eyes. The rest of this exchange is done with their heads tilted back and cucumbers over their eyes.)

They’re setting up them trailers right in Sadie’s garden. Right on top of her squash. I don’t even like squash, but it breaks my heart to think of Sadie’s squash rotting underneath them trailers.

LEONA
I wish I had a chance to talk to her one last time. There’s so much I want to ask her.

GWENDOLYN
If Sadie could talk to me now, she’d give me a tongue-lashing—and one that I probably deserve. I’ve sold the family land out of my passion for Jack Flanagan. I never told nobody that before, Leona. I wouldn’t tell you if you didn’t have your eyes closed.

(Gwendolyn lifts the cucumber slices from her eyes and peeks to be sure Leona’s eyes are shut.)

And I’ll never admit it if you repeat it.

LEONA
Nobody for me to tell.

GWENDOLYN
You were right. Jack Flanagan ain’t moving into this house with his family. We gonna have trash for neighbors. They gonna rent these trailers out to migrant workers.

(They rock in silence, with cucumber slices over their eyes. Gwendolyn peeks again.)

Well, don’t you have anything to say? What are we gonna do with seventy-five migrant families in the yard?

LEONA
We’ll get trick-or-treaters. Ain’t never had trick-or-treaters.

GWENDOLYN
When did you start looking on the sunny side? Ain’t you worried about the tomato pickers and their snotty little children running around here and blathering in some language that ought not even be allowed in these our United States?

LEONA
I don’t know. I used to feel like the world didn’t give me what I deserved. But maybe it does. Maybe we need some migrant workers in the yard.

GWENDOLYN
Well, I swear. That beats all—You wouldn’t court a wet-back, would you, Leona? I don’t think that’s a very Christian thing to do.

(Pause.)

Jack could put our new trailer anywhere on this land. Anywhere he pleases. You don’t reckon he’ll put us in the swamp, do you?

LEONA
I got no idea.

GWENDOLYN
See there, it’s starting to thunder. Weatherman said it’s gonna rain all week. I hope the mud swallows up all Jack Flanagan’s used trailers. Maybe lightning’ll strike him.

LEONA
Reckon I ought to take Little Pug a raincoat? He won’t come in from the coop.

GWENDOLYN
Hell no. Don’t indulge him. Sooner he gets wet and cold, sooner he’ll come inside.

(They exit. LIGHTS SHIFT to Orabelle and PROMISE #5 at the chicken coop with Little Pug. They huddle beneath umbrellas.)

ORABELLE
See here, Pug. I’ve brought somebody to see you.

(As Promise #5 begins to speak, Leona joins them, but stands back.)

PROMISE #5
I’ve felt just as sad as you do, Mister Little Pug. I can look at your face and tell that you’re suffering, too. All my life I promised myself that I wouldn’t work at the grocery store. Seems like people who work at the grocery store just get stuck there forever, scanning pickles and beets, stocking pantyhose and bacon. I want more from my life. So I promised myself I’d get a higher class job—even making xeroxes for a lawyer or answering the phone. But this summer, I had to go to work, and the grocery store was the only place hiring. I can’t hardly stand myself! And when I put on that pink shirt with the Pork City logo, it makes me wanna hide my face!

LEONA
That was a stupid promise for you to make.

(Little Pug perks up. Everybody’s surprised.)

ORABELLE
Why, Leona! What’s got into you?

LEONA
It’d be different if she was forty and still working in the grocery store, but how old are you?

PROMISE #5
Sixteen.

LEONA
That’s what I thought.

(Pause.)

See here, Miss Orabelle, I heard you when you said not to judge the weight of another’s promise, but don’t you think there are some promises that shouldn’t have been made in the first place?

ORABELLE
Well, now . . . all kinds of broke promises are welcome in my wheelbarrow. I try not to discriminate.

LEONA
Sometimes you need to discriminate! It’s not always bad to discriminate! She’s a teenager. Why should a shift at the grocery store be beneath her?

PROMISE #5
I was just trying to help Mister Little Pug.

LEONA
Breaking that promise is probably the best thing you ever done.

(Promise #5 exits as LIGHTS SHIFT to Gwendolyn in her rocker, talking on the phone.)

GWENDOLYN
Jack Flanagan, you pick up that phone! Your big-trucks have tore up the grass all over the yard, and there’s mudpuddles in all the tire-tracks. If somebody slips and falls, I’ll sue the socks off you. And my poor baby brother is so stricken with grief that he won’t even come out of the chicken-coop. He’s gonna catch pneumonia, and when he does, I’m sending you the hospital bill. Do you hear me, Jack Flanagan?

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Leona and Orabelle, now wearing raincoats, standing with Little Pug. Leona has a small folded tarp beneath her arm.)

LEONA
Talk to me, Little Pug. Please talk to me.

(Leona shakes the chicken-wire, but Pug just rocks himself and doesn’t seem to notice.)

Oh, Miss Orabelle, he’s spent three days in the pouring rain. I think he’s lost his mind.

(She gives Orabelle one corner of the tarp. They open it up and shake it out.)

ORABELLE
Just cause his mind don’t work like yours don’t mean he’s lost it.

LEONA
He won’t acknowledge me, won’t come in. And I know he’s gotta be chafed from sitting in the mud like that. He’s gonna get a ringworm!

(They stretch the tarp over the coop, adjust it.)

ORABELLE
There’s remedies for ringworm when the time comes.

(Orabelle pulls a bungee cord out of her pocket and hooks the tarp to the wire.)

LEONA
We gotta move, and I’m too distressed to pack. Gwendolyn just sits around and sobs, and with Little Pug out here . . . I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I wish I was more like Rubie and could just leave when things get tough!

ORABELLE
You think it’s easier to go than to stay?

LEONA
Absolutely.

ORABELLE
Well, tell me this. Where would you go—if you could go anywhere on God’s green earth?

LEONA
I don’t know.

ORABELLE
Hawaii? Alabama? Timbuktu?

(Leona shrugs.)

Just make a decision, dear. What did you want when you were younger? Did you want to join the military like Rubie did? Did you want to see the Grand Canyon?

LEONA
I just wanted to stay here and open my flower-shop.

ORABELLE
What stopped you?

LEONA
You know what stopped me!

ORABELLE
I’m forgetful. Tell me again.

LEONA
Well, first, Rubie left. And then I had to take care of Mama—and now Gwendolyn and Little Pug. You can’t put your dreams before your responsibilities, Miss Orabelle!

ORABELLE
Sounds to me like you’ve used your responsibilities as excuses for not doing anything else with your life. Ain’t you ever heard of a home-health nurse? And they got a senior center not ten miles up the road.

LEONA
I can’t take Gwendolyn to the senior center. She might get mad and beat up a veteran!

ORABELLE
You’ve been an old lazy-butt, Leona. That’s the only reason in the world you don’t have that flower shop.

(Little Pug giggles, then resumes his rocking.)

Your Mama would’ve agreed with me. She wouldn’t want you living the same life she did.

LEONA
How can you say that? Calling me a lazy-butt! That pisses me off, Miss Orabelle!

ORABELLE
Being pissed off is better than feeling sorry for yourself, Sugar.

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Gwendolyn, who is stuffing clothes into a bag as she talks on the phone.)

GWENDOLYN
Quit a’lying to me. I know he’s there somewhere. Put Jack on the phone!

(Pause.)

I ain’t living in a migrant camp. I’m a Harris. My family name means something.

(Pause.)

How many bedrooms does it have? Cause he promised me a three bedroom trailer, with a jacuzzi tub. I got it in writing, so don’t think you can scam me.

(Gwendolyn exits, taking chairs and props with her as LIGHTS SHIFT to Leona, Orabelle and PROMISE #6—all dressed in rain-gear. Little Pug remains in his chicken-wire enclosure.)

PROMISE #6
I never actually made a promise at all. I never took a vow or signed an oath, or anything of that sort. Just tried to be a good neighbor. My neighbor was an elderly lady who spent most of her time on her porch. I lived across the street from her for seven years, and I helped her get her groceries in, rolled her trash can to the curb, fixed the hose on her washing machine when it blew out. The truth was, she drove me crazy. Meddled in my business and called me on the phone three times a day. I couldn’t even sit on my own porch without having to get into a conversation. Sometimes I’d go over and speak to her first, then settle in to read a paperback, and before I could get through a chapter, she’d be calling, “Billy, can you come take a look at the filter on my fishpond?” She aggravated the stuffing out of me—but she was my friend. She tried to microwave me little frozen barbeque sandwiches every time I stopped by.

When she found out I was putting my house on the market, she broke right down and cried. Tried to run off the realtor when he put the sign in the yard. So of course, I told her I’d stop by regularly and we could visit just like old times. I’ve been moved from that house three years next month. Haven’t even driven down the street since—cause I know if she’s sitting on the porch, she’ll wave me down and give me hell. But part of me’s scared if I drive by, her rocking chair will be empty. I couldn’t stand that.

LITTLE PUG (quietly)
That’s just like me.

LEONA
Hey, he said something. What’d you say, Little Pug?

LITTLE PUG
Me and that feller there have something in common.

(He pops his hand back into his mouth, begins sucking hard.)

ORABELLE
How’s he like you, Son?

LITTLE PUG
I didn’t never tell Boy-dog I wouldn’t shoot him. Weren’t no reason to say such a thing.

PROMISE #6
No, you were like me and my neighbor. You’d made yourself into somebody your dog could depend on.

LITTLE PUG
I didn’t take no oath, but that don’t matter.

PROMISE #6
Cause you still got a responsibility once you make yourself into somebody a friend can count on. My poor old neighbor would’ve been better off if I’d never took her trash out a single time. Then she wouldn’t have expected me to be reliable.

LEONA
Wait a minute, now. Just hold on. You still helped your neighbor out. That doesn’t change. And before Little Pug killed Boy-dog, he let him drink the milk outta his cereal bowl every morning!

LITTLE PUG
I shouldn’ta done it. The little feller was wagging his tail when I shot ’im.

ORABELLE
That’s heartbreaking, Pug.

LITTLE PUG
But Gwendolyn was allergic.

LEONA
She was not. She just said that to get her way.

LITTLE PUG
I never made an oath to Gwendolyn neither, but she’s family. She depended on me. I owed her too.

LEONA
You didn’t owe her your dog’s life!

ORABELLE
Implied promises break just as surely as sworn vows. Sometime the implied ones hurt the worst.

(Little Pug nods, cries.)

LITTLE PUG
I had two-ply promises. I broke one, and I kept one.

ORABELLE
Sometimes if your promises contradict one another, you gotta break one to keep the other.

LEONA
But what if he broke the wrong promise? What if he shoulda broke the promise to Gwendolyn and kept the promise to Boy-Dog?

LITTLE PUG
You think I broke ‘em backwards, Leona?

LEONA
I don’t know. But Mama broke the wrong one, didn’t she, Miss Orabelle? She broke the one to herself and kept the one to the family. And look where that got her!

LITTLE PUG
Where’d it get her? You think I broke the wrong one?

(Leona opens the coop up and gets into the pen with Pug. She hugs him. Leona exits as LIGHTS SHIFT to Rubie who is looking out into the audience, straining to see.)

RUBIE
Granny! Hey, Granny. Look what’s coming down the road yonder.

(Orabelle runs up. Peers out into the audience.)

ORABELLE
Who is that? I don’t know nobody drives a little orange pickup with flashing lights. Do you?

RUBIE
That’s a wide-load coming behind it. See? I knew you wouldn’t wanna miss it.

ORABELLE (to audience)
And I didn’t, neither! I got my wheelbarrow and set off to the edge of the yard. None of the promises had seen anything like it. That trailer was cut slick in two, just like somebody’d took the scissors to it. They’d covered the openings with plastic, but you could still see in. The kitchen sink was in one half, and the stove was in the other! And them fellers drove the two trailer halves right out into the middle of the next field, over on the Junior Baskins property.

(JACK FLANAGAN enters, wearing a hard hat, and a whistle around his neck. He blows his whistle two quick times.)

JACK FLANAGAN
Right over there, boys. Steady. Steady. Whoa!

ORABELLE
They put it square in the middle of that old red clay field.

RUBIE (to Jack)
Why don’t you back it on up the hill so they’ll have some shade? Might help ‘em with their electric bill.

JACK
What business is it of yours, I’d like to know?

RUBIE
Ain’t none of my business, but it seems like you’d try to make ‘em comfortable. You got ten acres to choose from, and you gonna stick ‘em out in the middle of the field?

JACK
Can’t grow nothing on it, no way.

RUBIE
If you move it back a little, they’ll be up on the hill instead of in this mud-puddle. Why in the world would you set their trailer down where the drainage is this bad? No way they’ll be able to grow shrubs here, or azaleas.

JACK
I ain’t worried about their bushes! Gwendolyn didn’t want to be near the Mexicans, so I’m putting her here. You don’t have no Mexican in you, do you?

RUBIE
Before you seal and underpin that thing, why don’t you at least see if it suits them?

JACK
I’m gonna have a talk with your landlord, Miss. Who’s your landlord?

(They exit as LIGHTS SHIFT to Little Pug, Gwendolyn, and Leona. Little Pug remains inside his chicken coop. Gwendolyn has suitcases in her hands.)

GWENDOLYN
Get out of there right now! You gotta pack up your stuff. Jack’s setting up our double-wide right this minute, and if you don’t pack it up, all your stuff’s gonna get left behind.

LITTLE PUG
None of it don’t matter to me no more.

(Gwendolyn kicks at the chicken-wire.)

GWENDOLYN
Move it!

LEONA
What about your vacuum cleaners? Don’t they matter? And what about your hair balls? It’d be a shame to lose your collection.

LITTLE PUG
You can have my vacuum cleaners. And Gwendolyn can have my hair balls.

(Gwendolyn throws a valise.)

LEONA (to Gwendolyn)
Quit that!

(to Pug)

Don’t you want to pick out your bedroom in the new trailer?

LITTLE PUG
I ain’t particular.

(Gwendolyn kicks the chicken-wire from all sides. Little Pug winces.)

LEONA
Stop it! You’re hurting him.

GWENDOLYN
I ain’t hurting him. He’s hurting me. He’s trying to keep me from getting the only thing in the world I want. I got a new double-wide waiting for me, and Pug just wants to interfere with my happiness, like he’s always done.

LITTLE PUG
I ain’t interfering with your nothing.

GWENDOLYN
If Daddy was here, you know what he’d say, Pug?

LITTLE PUG
Shut up.

GWENDOLYN
You know what he’d call you? If he could see you right now, sitting here in your filth, crying over a dead dog?

LITTLE PUG
Naw, now, Gwendolyn. Shut up.

GWENDOLYN
He’d call you a little shit-ass. You always been a disappointment. That’s the only thing we’ve ever been able to count on you for.

LEONA
That’s enough, Gwendolyn.

(Little Pug convulses, rocks himself.)

LITTLE PUG
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry—

GWENDOLYN
It’s the truth. When he was a little boy, Daddy gave Pug a rifle, and Pug was scared to shoot it. Daddy wanted to make him a man. Told him to go out hunting and not to come back till he’d shot the heart out of a deer.

LITTLE PUG
I didn’t want to kill no deer. I sat out in the woods a long time, and the woods is full of deer-hearts. There’s deer-hearts under the huckleberry bushes, still a’beatin’.

(Little Pug trembles and sucks his hand.)

GWENDOLYN
When Pug come back, he told Daddy the deers had all run off to Canada, and Daddy beat him until he messed his britches. You remember that, Pug?

(Little Pug rocks himself, sucks his hand.)

GWENDOLYN
And you cried. Remember how you cried? You musta knew back then you wouldn’t never be no man. And you still just as sissy and weak now as you were back then.

(to Leona)

Daddy finally let Pug come back in the house when he brought home some birds he’d killed with that gun. Course everybody knew that Sadie’d killed ‘em for him. I think that damned dog is the first thing in the world Pug’s ever shot. Maybe you gonna be a man after all, in your old age, Pug. Why don’t you act like a man and come out of that chicken coop?

LITTLE PUG
I ain’t ready to be a man yet.

LEONA
It’s okay, Little Pug.

GWENDOLYN
I can’t stand neither one of you. You’re both pathetic. The sorry little shit-ass and the sorry little bastard. You make quite a team.

(Little Pug rocks and hums.)

LEONA
You’re not helping things. Go on back to the house.

LITTLE PUG
I’m sor-ry, I’m sor-ry—

GWENDOLYN
Y’all are just dead-set on ruining my life in one place or the other. Here or there. Don’t really matter. I wish I was up in heaven with Daddy and Mama and Sadie. I wish I didn’t have to deal with no more shit-asses and no more bastards. This life is too full of shit-asses and bastards. That’s what I think!

(They exit as LIGHTS SHIFT to Rubie and Orabelle, planting flowers around the new trailer. Orabelle’s wheelbarrow is full of flowers.)

RUBIE
They might ever one die, but they’ll be pretty for a day or two.

ORABELLE
I know where you can get some real nice plastic flowers, and I hear that plastic flowers thrive just fine in old red clay soil.

(She cackles. Leona enters. When she sees them, she puts her hands over her heart.)

ORABELLE
Well, hey there, Sweetie. I thought you liked yellow flowers. But if you want us to go back and get the purple ones, we’ll do it.

LEONA
Yellow’s fine. Or purple . . .

RUBIE
So I hear we gonna be neighbors.

LEONA
For a time, I reckon. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you better, Rubie. I’m sorry for guilt-tripping you all your life. I sure don’t want to do to you what Gwendolyn does—

RUBIE
It’s all right.

(Pause.)

I’m sorry too. Not cause I didn’t open the flower shop—cause I don’t love flowers the way you do. But I’m sorry you were so sad about it.

LEONA
I missed you all them years!

(Rubie nods.)

You could’ve called me. Or sent a card.

RUBIE
I wish I had. I’ll try to be a better friend from now on—

ORABELLE
Now that you’re next-door neighbors, you can make up for lost time.

(Leona shakes her head.)

LEONA
I don’t think I can stand to live here—

ORABELLE
Ain’t that bad, now. We try not to play the music too loud after eleven.

LEONA
Oh, Miss Orabelle, it’s not about you. It’s just that—

ORABELLE
Well, I’ll bedogged. You’ve finally brought that promise.

LEONA
I can’t keep on living with Gwendolyn and Little Pug.

ORABELLE
Let me make some room in this wheelbarrow.

(Orabelle puts the plants on the ground.)

LEONA
My life’s not mine. It’s never been mine.

RUBIE
Only thing that makes living next door to Gwendolyn tolerable is knowing you’ll be here too. But it don’t sound like you gonna be staying long.

LEONA
No longer than I have to. I got that job driving a school-bus, but it won’t start for a while. If I find something better before—

ORABELLE
Well congratulations! Let’s have a party!

LEONA
Don’t feel much like celebrating. We gotta be out of the house tomorrow. Jack Flanagan’s sending some workers with a ton-truck to move our boxes, and I can’t even get my stuff together. Seems like I’m in some kind of stupor or something.

ORABELLE
Oh no, Honey. You coming outta your stupor!

RUBIE
You don’t have to figure everything out at one time. Just take it piece by piece.

(Leona nods.)

Think of it like walking in the fog. Just cause you can’t see where you’re heading don’t mean the ground’s not there.

LEONA
I feel like such a failure—

RUBIE
Seems to me you oughta be proud.

ORABELLE
Everybody breaks promises, Baby.

LEONA
Even you?

ORABELLE
Specially me! How you think I became caretaker of all these promises in the first place? I’ve broke as many as the next feller, but there’s one in particular that haunts me. Many years ago, we were under the barn shed, stringing tobacco, when out of the blue, your granddaddy asked me if I really believed a colored woman’s vote ought to count the same as a white man’s. I reached right down, grabbed up another armload of leaves and laid them on that stringer like nothing had happened. And I said, “No Sir, Mister Arthur. Hard to believe they let a colored woman vote at all.” Never missed a beat.

(Pause.)

But all that afternoon my answer curdled in my heart. And all that night, I tossed and turned, thinking over what I’d said.

LEONA
I guess you broke a promise to yourself?

ORABELLE
Not just to myself, Sweetheart. To my children and their children.

(Pause.)

That promise hurt your granddaddy, believe it or not. Cause then he didn’t have any reason to doubt his old backwards beliefs. So it hurt you—cause you grew up with a granddaddy who thought a colored woman’s vote ought not count. It hurt Rubie—cause I didn’t do my part to change the world she grew up in either. You see how this works?

LEONA
I think so. But Lord, that’s a lot of pressure. If every choice is a kind of promise, how do you stand it?

ORABELLE
You try to think about how things will play out down the road. Then sometimes you mess up anyway. The mistakes just grow you into the person you’re meant to become.

LEONA
I hope the person I’m meant to become has more nerve than I do—and maybe more money.

(They laugh.)

Seems like I oughta put something in that wheelbarrow now, don’t it?

(She kicks off her flip-flops and throws them in the wheelbarrow.)

There!

RUBIE
Why don’t me and Granny come help you pack?

LEONA
I’d sure appreciate it.

(They begin crossing the stage towards Pug’s coop.)

Whenever I try to pack, I get so hot-headed! I keep picturing myself cutting all the sleeves off Little Pug’s shirts and tying them to the branches of a tree, just to watch ‘em fly. Now why you reckon I want to tear up his shirts and not Gwendolyn’s?

RUBIE
You can’t help getting mad at people who need you to defend ‘em all the time. We’ll help you with Little Pug’s stuff.

LEONA
They gonna bulldoze his chicken coop. Might be already done it. I hope he gets out the way.

ORABELLE
We got a real nice coop he can use—course he’ll have to share it with the chickens.

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Little Pug’s abandoned chicken-coop. Leona, Orabelle, and Rubie arrive.)

LEONA
He’s gone. Do you see him anywhere?

RUBIE
Old Pug’s done flew the coop! That’s a good sign, Leona. Maybe he’s packing his own shirts.

ORABELLE
What’s that there?

(Orabelle points to the ground inside the coop.)

LEONA
That’s where he buried Boy-dog. That’s—You don’t reckon he dug him up?

(They peer into the hole. Offstage, a gunshot rings out, then another.)

RUBIE
What’s that?

(Offstage there’s another gunshot.)

LEONA
Was that coming from the house?

(Pause.)

Little Pug? Gwendolyn?

(Little Pug enters, dragging his feet, carrying a shotgun and a box.)

LITTLE PUG
Two times I missed, but then I didn’t.

(Leona approaches Pug, takes the gun.)

LEONA
What have you done?

LITTLE PUG
She was just so tired of the shit-asses and bastards. She wanted to be up in heaven with Daddy and Mama and Sadie.

(Pause.)

And she was allergic to Boy-dog.

(He opens up the box to show them. Rubie backs away, waving her hand in front of her nose.)

I started packing, Leona.

(Orabelle takes the box from Little Pug and walks it over to her wheelbarrow, placing it inside. Rubie and Leona take up the chicken-wire, put it around Little Pug, and lead him offstage.)

ORABELLE
They buried Gwendolyn in the family plot right next to Sadie. Leona went ahead and ordered a double-wide tombstone, put Gwendolyn’s name on one side and Pug’s name on the other, so that when he dies, won’t be nothing left to do but fill in the date. Jack Flanagan thought he could reclaim that mobile home and sell it for new, but Gwendolyn and Pug both owned that trailer, and Leona didn’t let him forget it

(LIGHTS SHIFT to Leona and Jack. Leona is showing him out of her house.)

JACK
I gotta tell you, I’m surprised at you, wanting to hold onto this double-wide. Must be a constant reminder of the pain.

(Jack tries to put his arm around Leona. She slaps it away.)

LEONA
Pug’s not dead, Jack. He still has rights. And when he dies, the trailer belongs to me. The land belongs to you, but the trailer belongs to me.

JACK
Come on, now, Dollbaby. Wouldn’t you rather have a little condo by the beach, somewhere you can sit in the sun and read romances? Start life anew?

LEONA
You’ve overstayed your welcome.

JACK
What happened to you, Leona? You used to be so sweet and nice. Now you’ve turned into an old bitch.

(Leona shrugs. Jack exits. LIGHTS SHIFT to Orabelle.)

ORABELLE
Little Pug may yet get out of the state hospital. When it came out in court how Jack Flanagan swindled the Harrises, how Gwendolyn talked Little Pug into signing over his part of the property, and how Little Pug mourned it, spending night after night in the chicken coop, the judge was lenient.

LITTLE PUG (offstage, high-pitched and laughing)
Being pissed off is better than feeling sorry for yourself, Sugar!

ORABELLE
Experts testified that Pug was feeble-minded, and when it came right down to it, everybody on the jury thought Gwendolyn needed killing anyway.

(Leona steps out front.)

LEONA
But I don’t think that. I might have wished it a time or two, but I’d take it back if I could.

ORABELLE
On the surface, you might even think that Leona got her wish. With Gwendolyn and Little Pug both gone, she didn’t have nobody left to take care of, except herself.

LEONA
It’s harder than I thought. I’m not sure yet how to do it. But I’m gonna learn.

ORABELLE
She inherited some money when Gwendolyn died. Forty-thousand buckaroonies. So if she ever gets tired of driving her school bus and decides to open a flower shop, she’s got the means.

(Orabelle gets a card-table from offstage, sets it up at center.)

LEONA
I always thought I couldn’t afford a flower shop. And I sure didn’t have the time to run one! Now I’ve got money and time both, but I see that there’s something else you gotta have—

(Rubie enters with an armload of flowers and a vase. She puts them down on the table.)

RUBIE
Imagination. You gotta be able to picture yourself—in a little brick building, with a courtyard out the side, ivy stretching along the walls and flowers of every kind. Can you see it?

(Orabelle gets a fold-up chair from offstage, positions it behind the table.)

LEONA
Not yet.

(Leona steps closer and looks at the flowers as Rubie gestures.)

RUBIE
And inside, a refrigerated case spans the whole wall long—just full of fresh cut roses and daisies and gladiolas in their tubs. And you’re in there, Leona, making an arrangement.

(Rubie pulls out the chair and Leona sits.)

You’re adding in some greenery, and now a tiger-lily right in the middle. Can you see it?

LEONA
Not yet. Can you?

RUBIE
Well, sure. Just close your eyes and imagine.

(Leona closes her eyes. Rubie puts flowers into her hands, guides her in arranging them. As Leona gets the hang of it, Rubie exits. Orabelle pushes her wheelbarrow up front as Leona continues to shape the arrangement.)

ORABELLE
A promise is kinda like a flower arrangement, you know? When you first put the flowers together, they look and smell like heaven! But you can’t foresee that the tiger-lily’s gonna drop all its petals before the rosebud even opens. You might have to pull that lily out in a day or two.

LEONA
But I like the lily.

ORABELLE
And it’s fine for today. Tomorrow—check it again.

(Leona nods.)

LEONA
The more I think about it, the more it seems like you can justify anything at all.

(She removes the central flower from the arrangement.)

You can keep a promise, or you can break one, and you can make yourself believe you did the right thing—or the wrong thing. The more I learn about the nature of promises, the more confused I get.

(Orabelle nods.)

Why do we even bother making promises, Miss Orabelle?

(Leona rises. She pops the stem from the flower and sticks it behind her ear.)

ORABELLE
You want me to give you an answer, but there’s no one answer. And no one to decide in the end whether what you do is wrong or right. There’s just the tiger-lily and the rosebud and this day—

(A school bell rings, startling them both.)

LEONA
I reckon it’s time for me to get moving.

(She goes over to Orabelle’s wheelbarrow and takes out her shoes and puts them on.)

That school bus won’t drive itself.

(Orabelle picks up the flower arrangement from the table.)

ORABELLE
Don’t forget your flowers.

(She hands them to Leona.)

LEONA
Wonder if this vase will fit on the dashboard of my bus?

ORABELLE
If you drive slow, you can use it as a hood ornament. Wouldn’t that tickle the bees and the birds!

(As Leona heads offstage, PROMISE #7 enters, in a hurry. They both stop. Leona pulls out a flower and gives it to Promise #7. Promise #7 accepts it, then runs to Orabelle’s wheelbarrow and collapses dramatically into it.)

ORABELLE
Well, hey there, Baby. Make yourself at home.

(LIGHTS OUT)