by Lee Smith
“Don’t get up,” I tell her, “and don’t go to the door. They’ll soon leave,” I say, but she rises and dresses, I pen these words I cannot restrain her of course “I have to go home and pack,” she says, “for the journey.” She pulls her black wool stockings carefully up to her waist. She takes off my shirt and folds it so carefully, laying it flat back on the bed-tick, crossing the sleeves, then folding the shoulders back then tucking up the tail, she pulls on her blue wool dress and does all the buttons one by one up the front of the dress. She has three dresses to her name, does Dory, and they are shouting now and making their way through the snow across the footbridge, across the creek: the snow is so bright (like sun). She bends forward now to lace on her shoes and her fine curly hair falls forward springing to either side of her neck, hiding her earrings, her face, but I see the pale white nape of her neck oh how warm we are here it is cold and icy out there but we need never leave my love you need not answer their cries yet she says she must pack to go, perhaps as she says, she must pack, Wall Johnson is a big man and his sons are big too they will break in the door or they think they will. “Tell me about the train,” she says, and I tell her about the train, and about Thomas who will meet us with the car at the Broad Street Station she has seen a Negro only once in all her life it’s so hard to write with the noise they make at the door they burst it open and she wonders if she should take her quilts from her hope chest of course I say if you hope it’s a little joke I am easy with my beloved.
And now here I am again! With a decent light, with a warm soft bed, with good hot food and violets dancing on my wall and the welcome attentions of Justine Poole . . .
I have been quite ill, and time has passed, and on the morrow I shall depart. It is none too soon! About the trip from Tug here to Black Rock in Aldous’s car, I quite frankly prefer not to think (that old muddled syntax again!). The Hibbitts woman, Rose, muttered that nonsense which seized hold of my mind in a peculiarly ruthless fashion, contributing in no small way to my fever and delirium. And yet what she said was so trite, really, was nothing that any reasonable man should credit: some wild information proceeding straight from her diseased brain, I’m sure (they say she runs through the hills baring her breasts to drummers!), to the effect that Hoot Owl Holler is haunted, and she recited those many deaths (quite chilling, in all truth, in kind as well as number: a horrible litany) and she said that Dory, too, was cursed, and that a “witch-woman” walks up and down Grassy Creek from Hoot Owl to Tug and over to Snowman Mountain, and I cannot now remember everything she said. I do recall—I shall never forget!—her countenance: the vehemence with which she spat her accursed words into my face, her rolling eyes, her red-pocked skin, her rotting teeth. “Shut up!” (I am told) I screamed. “Shut up!” and her mother, old Granny Hibbitts, restrained her at last and led her away. But the Hibbitts woman’s raving came at a crucial time: all during that fever, she occupied my mind, and in the strangest ways. I saw her face, I heard her words, and yet sometimes I saw instead Dory’s face, while I heard those accursed words, and stranger still, I would hear in the background the words of a hymn, and see before me a meeting in progress at my beloved little church—to which I can never now return!—and I would hear her laughing, until I began to fancy a woman’s dark shape here, in this room, by my bed, a dark shape from which I shrank as if from death itself. It agitates me now to pen these thoughts.
And yet they passed, or mostly passed, though I must confess that something of that dark shape still remains, and always shall! But the fever is gone, and in its wake has come a vast and curious lassitude. Of course I am still in love. I love Dory Cantrell. I write these words and know them to be true, but at this moment I cannot even conceive of the passion—nay, obsession!—which held me for so many months so tightly in its grip, of the abandon with which I coupled, on wet pine-straw or scratchy bed-tick or puncheon floor, with my mountain love. It grieves me so, that I shall not be here in the springtime. For we were always cold, or wet, or “cooped up,” as she said—always uncomfortable, and always in desperation—no time for leisurely love. No time for plans, for getting to know one another in any intellectual sense although I felt—I shall always feel—that no purer physical and spiritual union ever has or ever shall exist on earth. But ah! if only we could have had the spring.
And again these words recur, nay, echo, in my mind:Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasure prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies . . .
I so shake with sobs that I cannot write these words. For now it seems to me that it is she who speaks, calling out to me . . . I hear her soft sweet voice above the rush of Grassy Creek. The room spins, these violets dance . . .
And suddenly I am emboldened! The train leaves tomorrow night at eight o’clock sharp. And perhaps . . . perhaps those stories that I spun shall yet come true!
Granted, I have been quite ill. Granted, I have a weak constitution and a vivid imagination. Granted, granted, granted.
And yet suddenly I cannot grant that final admission, which Aldous has thrust so precipitously upon me while I have lain in this curious stupor day to day: that I must leave straightaway, and leave alone. He seems to imply that I have sown my wild oats, or something to that effect, and now that I’ve sufficiently recovered, I must go. And then of course there is the business of her brothers, still dangerously at large, and of Mr. Perkins’s misunderstanding my situation, and my summary dismissal from my post. Yet it comes to me now, exactly what I must do.
Why not take her too? Such a sturdy mountain flower will surely flourish wherever she takes root . . . and if my family disowns me, why then, family be damned!
I feel that I have “seen through a glass darkly, and now face to face . . .”
Why must I give her up? My own voice echoes in my ear, as I described that journey I thought we should never take. I have my imperfections, of course, and my recent actions have perhaps demonstrated a certain lack of judgment—oh, I have my limitations, as have we all—but why should I be so punished? For I have passed beyond believing in retribution, beyond morality as I have known it, beyond belief in any God but that mountain God who traffics not in words and acts but in the heart. I take my fate in my own hands. I will write to her this instant, and send the note by one of the loafers below.
The rhythm of this train is an ongoing clackety-clack, a ceaseless rhythm which goes in time to the thoughts which run through my head in circles and cycles and never shall cease, even as I shall never sleep, enervated as I am by this ceaseless racket and these wild thoughts.
God knows when last I slept.
I wrote and told her to come; it seemed my only hope of salvation in all the world.
I lay in bed all that night, it seemed, imagining it, but I confess I could see her in no setting other than the lovely wilderness of her birth, against no background other than these high mountains which are her home. A failure of the imagination perhaps, or a presentiment of the sort which has characterized my journey since first it began.
In the morning came a gentle knock on the door, and Mrs. Justine Poole entered with my breakfast tray. I gather Aldous has assured her of some extra recompense for this service, which she has seemed but too glad to perform.
“Why honey,” she said immediately, concern flooding her ruddy and good-natured face. “You had a real bad night, didn’t you? Justine can tell you did.” (Mrs. Poole has this annoying habit of referring to herself in the third person.)
I stammered something. In truth my nerves were so jangled that I welcomed her solicitude, and I suppose it showed on my face.
“You’re just all wro
ught up, aren’t you?” she said. “Well, Justine can set you straight.”
Mrs. Poole set my tray on the table and then—before I had a moment to protest or even to realize what she was up to, even though of course in retrospect the signs have been clear all along—she unbuttoned her housecoat (made of some quilted, rosy material, oh why do I care about that? why do I go on and on?) and let it fall in a puffy cloud about her feet. And there stood Mrs. Justine Poole herself in the altogether, or thereabouts—she kept on her grayish panties—puffy in all her white flesh, as honest as the day is long, before me.
“I’ll warm you up,” she said, and flinging back the yellow chenille bedspread, hopped heavily into the bed.
I do not know how I would have responded, nor what I should have done (of course one hopes one would have performed manfully), but the fact of the matter is that no sooner had she leaped into bed than the doorknob began to turn, squeaking and creaking as is its wont, and she stopped her amorous assault upon my person and quite literally “froze”—head up, blond curls askew, and fingers splayed across my chest. I remember my own sharp gulp of air, as all my bodily functions seemed to cease in that moment of gross suspense. It is an old glass doorknob with a beveled circumference. It turned ever so slowly, creaking . . .
It was Ora Mae.
She seemed to me wholly and totally strange in that sunlit morning room, that warm coffee-smelling room with its frosty panes of glass and all the cold outside, Mrs. Poole’s rosy robe in a comfortable heap on the pine-board floor and my own clothes in disarray, most of them packed in the two valises flung open on floor and table—and myself, of course, disporting with the buxom Justine Poole—Ora Mae stood in the doorway as dark-featured and still as the angel of death! or, to be more accurate, she stood as still as a great dark stone, as a piece of obsidian. Her thick black hair was pulled straight back from her hatchet-nosed face into the customary long braid (I presume, although in fact her hood hid most of her head: it’s a sin for a girl to cut her hair before marriage, they say, but that’s another story: oh why do I go on and on!) Over her shapeless long brown skirt and those ubiquitous black boots, she wore a sort of woolen pea-jacket (Navy issue), and did not lower its hood, so that her starkly dead-white face stood out in fearsome opposition to this frame. Have I ever described Ora Mae? Her eyes are large, black, and ringed with circles. Her black eyebrows are perfectly level; and her mouth is a thin level line. She has no color at all in her face. Hands thrust deep in her pockets, she silently stood and stared.
For the life of me, I could never have said a word.
Ora Mae, staring, suddenly seemed to me the embodiment of something timeless and mythical, something as old and uncompromising and unchanging and hard as these ancient mountains themselves. I viewed her over a heap of chenille bedspread, of course; in my immediate peripheral vision was a greenish star-shaped mole on the plump freckled shoulder of Justine Poole. And yet there by the door stood Ora Mae like a messenger from the timeless world of love, like a message in a bottle—no, not like that at all!
Ora Mae stood by the door.
And it came to me what I was doing, and I was flooded with longing for Dory, who leapt into my mind’s eye then in all her beauty and all her clean, fresh youth. Oh, how I wanted Dory!
Ora Mae looked at me directly.
“She ain’t comin’,” Ora Mae said.
“What?” I would have leaped in agitation from the bed had I not been restrained by Justine Poole.
“She ain’t comin’ now, and she ain’t comin’ later, and she ain’t never comin’, and she don’t want to see your face. She axed me to tell you that.” Ora Mae turned and left then, shutting the door carefully, silently, behind her, and yet I winced as though she had slammed it. My vision darkened and blurred: all the violets seemed to be running, running or sliding off the walls. Justine Poole was shaking me vigorously.
“Well, I swan!” she declared, using that expression I have never quite understood. Then she got out of bed and picked up her robe and put it back on, shaking herself like a dog emerging from water, settling herself. She patted her brassy curls and stared about the room, humming a little tune. When her perusal of the room brought her back to me, abruptly she ceased her humming. She looked at me for a long moment.
“Well, goddammit,” she said, in a voice as close to meditative as Justine Poole will ever get.
She left.
I left, too.
And so it is that I write these words in transit, as I pass back across Virginia the way I came. It seems years since I made this trip, and yet it has been a mere five months, though I feel that lifetimes and lifetimes have passed. It appears I am the only one awake in this whole car. The light is dim, nearly purple; the purple light and these shadows sway with the ongoing rhythm, that ceaseless clackety-clack.
Virginia rolls by me darkly, beyond the window. We pass through a tiny station at full speed. For a second, the stationmaster himself is visible on the lighted platform, hand raised in greeting, mouth frozen in a smile. Is this all there is, all there ever is? the moment of lighted clarity, and then the rushing dark?
And I am torn asunder by conflicting thoughts, each one as valid, it seems to me, as its opposite. I am a sinner, bound for hell; I am a saint, purified by love; I am only a fool. I shall regain my strength and then return to these mountains, I shall sweep her up and take her back to Richmond with me as my wife; I will come back here and marry her, we will raise a family, I shall do some sort of manual labor, leaving each day with my tools while she waits with her hair bound up in a bright blue scarf; I shall never marry, I shall become an artist, I will transform all of this into a novel. And meanwhile the train clacks on, bearing me back to Richmond, bearing me home, and yet ever and ever more clearly I see her again as I saw her first on the swinging bridge over Meeting House Branch, a girl so lovely as to take your breath away, and all the leaves of autumn swirling about her, red and orange and gold.
Part Three
LITTLE LUTHER WADE
I was out in the yard working on that old truck we got off of Giles Hogg when Daddy come back from town and come over there and told me what old man Rife had told him that morning. I’d been out there working on that truck since dinner nearabouts, and my hands had like to froze off. I had some gloves up at the house, but I didn’t give a damn. That whole winter I was a fool for work, it seemed like I couldn’t get enough, and I couldn’t do nothing else. I couldn’t sit in a chair. And I never played no music all that time. So I was under there working when Daddy come.
“Son!” Daddy hollered. “Get out from under that truck and mind what I’m telling you,” Daddy hollered out in the yard.
“I done heard you the first time,” I said.
“Then get out from under there,” Daddy said, “and get on up to the house.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I told him. “You go on.”
“What?” Daddy hollered. His hearing is going bad.
“You go on,” I hollered back. “I said I’ll be up there directly.”
I watched from under the truck where I could see his boots, which stayed right where they was for a while and then I could see he had done give up on me when he turned and left. I stayed under there for a while longer though, thinking things over, afore I come out myself. Thing was, I never knowed that Daddy knowed what I’d been projecting, until he said. So I was kindly surprised-like, that he knowed what I’d had in my mind, what I was fixing to do. Thing about Daddy is, he’s so old and all, and he acts like he can’t hear much, but I guess he hears what he wants to, like the rest of us. I guess he hears enough. Anyway I laid under there in the cold and I was sorry I wasn’t going to do it, at first, and then I was glad, I guess, even though I was sorry too. If ever a man needed killing, that was the feller, and now he had done got away. I stayed under there and thought about it, I stayed till my face worked right.
Then I got out and got my tools and went up to the house and they was all in there, Mama and D
addy and Earl was, anyway, and Earl’s little girl Blanche, and they was all acting like they was so goddamn busy, like they wasn’t nothing atall going on.
I put the tools in the box and got the keys to the other truck and told them I’d see them after while.
“Hit’s coming on for dark,” Mama said. “I saved you some supper,” she said next. “Why don’t you just stay home?” Mama’s the kind can drive you crazy without even trying.
“Let him be, Mary,” Daddy said, and then he tells me there’s a icy patch on the road at the Paw Paw Gap and to watch out for it.
“I ain’t goin that way,” I said. But seeing as how they already knew so goddamn much anyway, it looked like, I’d be damned if I’d give them any more satisfaction and say where I was going. I don’t reckon I knew myself, until I got ahold of those keys, and then it come to me. All I wanted to do was drive over to where I could see the spur line, coming from Claypool Hill, and see that train pass by. Iffen he was on it, and Aldous said he was going to put him on it, why then I wanted to see it pass. It was a long way and a crazy idea and I knew I had better get going.
“Mama says Dory is ruint,” Blanche said.
Blanche was holding the yarn up and Mama was winding a ball. I looked at Mama and she wouldn’t look back, and then Blanche said, “What’s ruint?”
