by Lee Smith
By then it was late late afternoon and the sunlight fell through the golden dust to make a shining block in the air and a shining yellow square like a magic carpet on the old barn floor where Washington sat planing a long piece of wood. Yellow dust flew everywhere. A little wooden box sat on the straw beside him. Virgil was fitting two wide planks together up on the sawhorses.
What are you doing out here Missy? he said.
That is her coffin, isnt it? I asked him. Nobody told me, I said.
Dont nobody have to, Virgil said.
Junius held tight to my hand and looked all around the barn like he had never seen it before. He is four years old.
The time will come when it come, Virgil said. He reached into a deep pocket of his overalls. Here now Washington, see can you teach this here little white boy something.
Washington jumped up and Virgil gave him the leather bag full of marbles.
Washington whooped. Come on, he said, and got Junius other hand and led us both to a level spot just outside of the door in the shade of the big hickory tree. This ought to do us, Washington said, so we all sat down in the crackly leaves as it was November. Then he took a board and scraped off the leaves and made a round place in the dirt, then used the edge of the board to draw a big deep circle around it. All right now, Washington said. Then he put all the marbles down in the middle of the ring. They were mostly made from the agate and quartz on the hill, but one was sort of silver and one was greeny gold, and another blue as the sky.
Little Junius clapped his hands.
Now this how you do it, Washington told him. He picked up a white marble and held it cupped in his fingers with his thumb behind it. I picked up a clay marble and held it the same way. Junius reached over and got the blue one but he couldnt hold it in his little hand like we were doing so he started to cry.
Now thats all right, Washington said. You dont got to do that honey. Why looky here. You can just roll it. He showed little Junius how to roll it to hit the others and Junius got the hang of it right away.
As for me, I am just as good as a boy at everything.
So we sat there in the dirt playing marbles for the rest of the afternoon until the sun went down in a red ball of fire, and color spread across the whole big sky. I could smell leaves burning someplace. A little cold wind came up.
It got dark in the barn but Virgil kept on hammering. Its about time for supper now aint it? he called finely, and the minute he said it, I was just starving.
I pulled little Junius up by one hand and Washington pulled the other and like that we walked kicking leaves up the hill to the house where they were laying out little Junius mother in the bedroom and big Junius was beating his head bloody on the brick kitchen wall behind the house. We walked right past him into the kitchen.
I bet yall are hungry aint you? Liddy said. She set us all down at the table and gave us some chicken and dumplings out of the big black pot. We ate like wild animals as Fannie used to say. It was nice and warm in the kitchen with that big fire glowing. Here honey dont you want some more? Liddy asked and even little Junius ate another whole plateful. I dont know if he knew his mamma was dead or not.
That was seven months ago, and things around here have gone to hell in a handbasket ever since. Nora Gwyn and Mister Gwyn do not know the half of it. But they have come only to say good bye to Uncle Junius as they are moving to Tennessee where Mister Gwyn will be the headmaster at a new boys school, old sourpuss Presbyterian he has got a poker up his ass as Selena says.
Uncle Junius and Mister Gwyn and Nora Gwyn are sipping sherry wine in the parlor down below me as I write.
Now dont you want to know where I am? For you could never find me in a million years. This is my number one hiding place in all the world, a cubbyhole right in the heart of the house yet invisible and unknown to all. Come see. Nora Gwyn says you will be my friend and now you will be my guest, I have never had one before.
But first you will have to come out here to Agate Hill so you will be riding up from the Haw River on the road and then along our dusty lane with trees and fields on either side. The land will rise as you come up and up, yet so slowly that it will surprise you to turn and look back to see the countryside spread out like a dreamy quilt below you now, orchards and woods and overgrown fields with piled-up rock walls between them. White quartz rocks stand out in the fields. You can find agate and fools gold too at the very top of the rise behind the house where I often climb though I am not allowed to.
I love to sneak down the back stairs in the night time and run across the yard from tree to tree and up the rocky path to lie on the big flat rock which stays warm from the sun long into the night. I call it my Indian Rock. I love to lie there flat on my back and let the wind blow over me which is not like any other feeling ever felt by anybody else in the world I am sure of it, known only by me and now by you, my friend of this diary. Sometimes the moon is so bright it is nearly like day and casts shadows among the rocks. One time I fell asleep on my rock and slept there all night long until King Arthur started crowing in the dawn, THEN I had to skedaddle. Liddy and Old Bess both saw me from the kitchen door but they did not tell, they gave me a corn pone and sent me on my way.
I am like a ghost girl wafting through this ghost house seen by none. I truly think I would blow away save for this piece of fools gold I keep here in my pocket for good luck. Often I take it out and turn it this way and that in the sun just to see it shine. Mamma loved gold jewelry but I am not a thing like Mamma. I am NOT. I like rocks instead. All of her jewelry is gone to the Yankees now except for a few pieces which Selena has wheedled out of Uncle Junius. I have to say, it kills me to see Mammas jade ring from the Orient on the little finger of Selenas fat hand and the coral bead necklace around her neck, I wish it would choke her dead.
Anyway you will come up the lane past the falling down sawmill and the gin and the two big barns one empty now, and then you will ride into the grove of cedar trees where it is always dark and the soft needles rustling. It smells good in there too. When you come out you will be here at Agate Hill plantation which was never a real plantation at all in Mammas opinion, not even before the War, not such as Perdido which she left behind in South Carolina.
This house was once white of course but now the paint has peeled off leaving the old brown wood which I like better anyway. The top piazza is held up by plain square posts while the floor of the one below is made from great flat stones brought in long ago from the fields. The top piazza is another place I love for it is there I often sit rocking and reading or dreaming or watching a thunderstorm roll across the land with its lightning that stands like a tree in the sky and its corn wagons rolling. This is what Virgil calls the thunder.
Myself I love a thunderstorm better than anything. Sometimes I will run to the top of the hill to whirl around and around on my Indian Rock in the wind, it is like a dance I can not stop. The smell of the lightning goes into your nose and down your whole body. Old Bess says if you get hit by lightning yet live you will have special powers, well I could use some of those. So I dont care if I get hit or not. Many times I have got wet clear through and been scolded for it though lately nobody cares.
All around this house you will see out buildings such as the corn crib, the red carriage barn with its two stables, the pigpen, and the old blacksmith house which has fallen in, you cant hardly see it for the honeysuckle which has run all over it now. And watch out, you will fall into the icehouse hole if you are not careful, so stay out of there! The brick kitchen is right behind the house, with the four-room tenant house on back.
Negros still live in that row of cabins, some of them work here and some do not, but Uncle Junius hates to send any of them packing for where would they go? Not a one has got what they were promised, that we know of. Besides Virgil and Old Bess and Liddy and Washington there is Daddy Rex the old root doctor who is dying now, I reckon he cant cure himself. In addition there is always negros coming and going or staying awhile, and often they have m
ade off with our things such Aunt Fannies Mexican silver candle sticks won by her daddy in a poker game, and the worst, the curved saber my father carried in the War as he was Cavalry. I hate this for I would like to have it so much, I do not remember him anyway. But it is easy to steal from us as Uncle Junius leaves the house unlocked now since Fannie died, he says if anybody takes anything, why then they need it more than we do and they are welcome to it.
So the door is wide open.
Come on in.
This house is not really very big with only one parlor and a dining room and the middle room and Uncle Junius and Aunt Fannies bedroom down stairs, then a jumble of bedrooms up stairs fitted out with lots of feather beds and ticks that can be spread out on the floor for it was Uncle Junius and Aunt Fannies pride that they never turned any one away, such as Nora Gwyn and her poker ass husband who have stayed the night.
Come into the passage which goes clear through the house as you see. It is our sitting room in the summer, cool and breezy when they bring the chairs out, but freezing cold in the winter time. Then we must hurry through it. Take the narrow door to your left and climb up the wooden stairs.
Do not be afraid in this dark staircase for no one will bother you, no one is here.
But of ghosts we have these:
Alice Heart Petree, my mother, b. 1822, Charleston, South Carolina, d. New Years Eve, 1869, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
Charles William Petree, my little brother, b. 1865, Columbia, South Carolina, d. March 25, 1869, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
My baby sister never named so I know for sure she has not gone to Heaven if there is such a place, this breaks my heart. I see her sometimes in the high dim air up near the ceiling in the parlor before we light the lamps, and once I saw her fly through the trees in the woods among the rising fireflies, just at dusk. B. and d. summer 1866, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
Charles Pleasant Petree, my father, a soldier and a scholar. They say I take after him. If so it must be in spirit not flesh for see, here is his image made in camp on the eve of war. Does he not look dashing and daring with his long mustaches and this fancy hat? He looks like he is French, like he is going to a party. With him is Simon Black a friend of his youth then a scout attached to my fathers Company C, Sixth Regiment, South Carolina Cavalry. See how solemn they are staring into the camera as if into the awful future which has now come to pass. My father was b. Edgefield, South Carolina; 1823, d. March 20, 1865, at Bentonville, North Carolina, where he is buried in pieces.
Tennyson Polk Petree, my eldest brother, b. 1843, Perdido, South Carolina, named for a poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, d. May 5, 1863, at Chancellorsville, Virginia.
Henry Heart Petree, my other brother, not but seventeen upon his death, b. 1846, Perdido, South Carolina, d. July 1, 1863, Winchester, Virginia.
My beloved aunt Fannie Ogburn Hall, b. 1826, Four Oaks, North Carolina. d. October 30, 1871, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
Their son Lewis Polk Hall, b. 1838, Agate Hill, North Carolina. d. July 3, 1863, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
And their baby, Lewis Polk Hall, b. October 30, 1871, Agate Hill, North Carolina. d. October 30, 1871, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
And of the living we have these:
Uncle Junius
Spencer Wade Hall, Uncle Junius and Aunt Fannies son who walked home from the war Insane. He lives out at Four Oaks with Romulus. But Spence is nice and not dangerous, he bothers no one, working in the field with Rom. His moon face is scarred by grapeshot.
Little Junius, that I told you about.
And me.
This is all of us here at the present time. Now you know why I say, I live in a house of ghosts. It was not always so. Alive yet gone from us now, we have these:
George Jefferson Hall, known as Georgie, gone West to seek his Fortune, estranged from Uncle Junius.
And finally my beloved Julia and Rachel, Aunt Fannie and Uncle Junius eldest daughters, far too old to be my playmates of course but my dear friends. Julia is so pretty with curly yellow hair and a face that turns pink when she laughs, which is often, while Rachel is dainty and tidy as a little mouse, with mouse-brown hair. They are both teachers now. Julia is a governess in Wilmington, North Carolina, while Rachel is at the Jackson Orphans Asylum in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is very important and earns twenty-five dollars a month, it is so much money. She tried to send some of it home when Aunt Fannie was sick but Uncle Junius would not have it. And when Rachel asked to stay here after Aunt Fannies funeral he said NO for this is a sad place of sorrow and death. Live your life, he told her. Uncle Junius gets all broke down.
I remember the summer before they left, Rachel and Julia used to sit out on the upper piazza all day long doing Baltimore work, feather stitching and herringboning until it came full dark and they could not hardly see to take those tiny stitches required for the white clothes worn by Northern babys and children and even brides. They earned ten dollars a batch. I loved to sit out on the piazza with them, me and my doll Margaret who used to be their doll when they were little. They were trying to teach me to sew, and that very day I had bit my lip until it bled trying to thread the needle. I was supposed to be making a skirt for Margaret out of a little piece of beautiful yellow silk they had saved just for me. But it was hard going, and I was sorry when they commenced again after supper, for I had had enough sewing by then to last me a life time. Now it was getting dark in earnest. Oh look! How beautiful! cried Julia as the moonflowers opened one by one on the vines which wrap the piazza railing.
Then here came Uncle Junius, filling up the doorway. He is very tall.
Now now girls, thats enough, come inside the house now, you will ruin your eyes and then where will you be? he said.
Just one more minute please Papa, Julia said. I am almost done with this christening dress.
Yes Papa if we can just finish these pieces we are working on, we can send the whole batch off tomorrow with Mister Littlejohn, wouldnt that be wonderful? Rachel tied a knot then prepared to thread her needle anew though she was squinting in the dark.
Damnation girls, I said get on in the house now. Have you gone deaf as well as blind? Uncle Junius grabbed the white cloth up from Julias lap and dashed it down, the embroidery hoop striking against the floor.
Oh Papa you will ruin it all, cried Julia, whereupon Uncle Junius came forward and stomped on the white cloth with his boot while Julia tried to grab it, screaming out when he stomped on her hand in all the uproar.
Oh Papa now look what you have done, what if you have broken my hand? she wailed and even I understood what that would mean, that she could never earn the money then to finish school nor play her piano again. Rachel set up a wail beside her, and I cried too for I copied them in everything.
Oh my God. Oh God, Uncle Junius said, I am so sorry, forgive me my little girls.
Julia sobbed holding her hand in the bunch of snowy cloth she had gathered up onto her lap.
Why what do you think you are doing Sir? Go on now, go lie down, you poor thing, it will be all right. Suddenly there was Aunt Fannie leading him away now meek as a baby, but soon she was back with a lighted candle she placed on the table.
Come here Molly, she said, and I came and climbed into her lap where I loved to be most in the world. My own mamma did not have a lap. Aunt Fannie reached over and took Julias hand and kissed it and worked all her fingers back and forth.
Oh that hurts, Julia said.
But it will be fine, Fannie said. Nothing is broken. And we will wash this little christening dress tomorrow, it will be good as new. Now listen to me my darlings, she said, looking from one to the other including me with her sweet plump face all solemn for once and tears in her big brown eyes. You know that your father loves you, she said, and we all nodded, for you had to believe whatever Aunt Fannie said. But he hates to see you work at day labor. You may not understand that he is in dispair because he can not provide for you in the way he feels he should have been able to provide for his daughters— all t
hree— she said, smiling down at me. This War has just about killed him. Now come and give me a kiss, she said, so we drew closer in the candles glow. She kissed us one by one then stroked our hair. Now lets just sit out here awhile, she said. Its almost time for the moon to come up, and it is such a pretty night. It was. We set out there on the piazza in our little circle of light until the moon came up big and yellow over the Caney Creek mountains beyond the river.
That is a gibbus moon Aunt Fannie said. Look, you can see the dark side. Julia sang Beautiful Dreamer and Sweet By and By. We joined in on Good Night Ladies and I do not remember when I went to sleep or who carried me off to bed.
But now you are all most here. At the top of the steps you turn left and enter the sisters room where I sleep with little Junius for company. Now you must go into the long closet which is big enough for old trunks and dress forms and even a chest of drawers. At the very back is a long row of hooks for hanging dresses. If you push the green dress with the black ribbon trim aside, you will find another door, that little low door which you must push HARD and then WELCOME to my cubbyhole!
Ever since I found it three years ago I have been bringing things up here, this is why it is furnished so nicely, and all by me! I found this little red chair with the painted flowers on it by the side of the road, I imagine it had fell off of somebodys wagon. I carried it up here with my heart in my throat but no one said one thing about it. I call it my fairy tale chair. I stole the blue velvet cushion from Mama Marie, she has been looking for it ever since, and blaming her servant. I made my table from a plank and two ammunition boxes stood on end. This little white chair belonged to my little brother Willie.
Nora Gwyn gave me these pastel crayons, and Fannie the milk glass vase. These Aurora roses are from her garden all overgrown. She used to say, There is nothing like flowers to dress up a house and Flowers soothe the soul. So all together this is an elegant spot dont you think? As you see I have enough light coming through the cracks in the wall to read and write by, and here are my fairy lights that I use when its too dark to see, sweet gum balls that I float in lard in two of Fannies finger bowls, she thought the negros took them too but it was me. Here, see this really big chink next to the chimney, it is like a window giving out onto the back yard, so I can see everything that goes on out there. Everything! But nobody can see me.
