On Snowden Mountain

by Jeri Watts

  Turkey, hot and juicy, thickened the air. Buttery sweet potatoes, earthy pumpkin pies. My nose tickled with delight.

  “Russell, run home and get your mama,” Aunt Pearl said. “Mr. Pritchard will wait to slice that bird.”

  I peeked into the living room and saw Mr. Pritchard standing by the fireplace, holding a glass of cider in one hand, a carving knife in the other. He waved the knife, then carried it to the dining room. When he came back into the room, I noticed his vest, the buttons sparkling like diamonds, his brilliant red bow tie, and his shoes, spiffy and shining. Miss Spencer was seated at one end of the sofa in the living room, with Mama placed beside her. Both of them wore their Sunday best, although Mama’s dress, the corduroy shift she’d bought with a matching blouse, hung loosely on her, like a sack. Everyone looked flushed, even Mama, there beside the blazing fire, but I knew most of the flushes were not just from the heat; they were from laughing and camaraderie and joy. A peek in the dining room amazed me. The table gleamed like an ornament on a Christmas tree, sparkling with genuine crystal, heavy silver, and delicate china.

  “Take off your coat, and prepare two more places, child,” Aunt Pearl urged me. “We’ve always room for our neighbors.”

  I shrugged out of my coat and let the warmth of the house invade my cold bones. I set places with the lovely willow plates, surrounded them with the sturdy silver. I lit the candles on the table, the tapers held in clever miniature porcelain turkeys. I stood behind my chair, traced the willow on my plate, as I listened to Mr. Pritchard tease Aunt Pearl about the strength of her cider. After a spell of time, I heard Aunt Pearl greet Russell and his mother, and then, in a flurry, we sat.

  Aunt Pearl, opposite Mr. Pritchard at the head of the table, reached out firmly and took my hand in her right and Mama’s in her left. Easily, without hesitation or awkwardness, everyone else at the table joined hands, a circle of friends united. My aunt spoke in her strong voice. “Most heavenly Father, we thank you for this food we are to receive. It is a blessing in this time of want. And we thank you for the family and friends who are gathered to eat of it. We each have much to be thankful for. Our prayers ask that you will look out for those who aren’t among us and return them safely to us for our next Thanksgiving. Amen.”

  Mr. Pritchard carved the turkey and presided over the meal, family style, although how we found room for all of it on the table, I will never know. Corn pudding, yams, yeast rolls, turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce (and, yes, I did think briefly of Moselle Toms), green beans, mashed potatoes, homemade pickles and jellies, golden apple butter . . . We ate and ate, and then all of that was cleared away, and there was pumpkin pie, coconut cake, sweet-potato pie, brown-sugar pie, whipped cream. I didn’t worry once about the willow providing shade — I covered the entire plate and ate until the shapes and designs appeared beneath my disappearing food.

  Food spilled off Mr. Pritchard’s plate even more than it did from mine. He didn’t exactly talk with his mouth full, but he always seemed to be talking. “Lord, Pearl, but this is the finest meal I’ve et in a long time. Why, the yeast rolls alone are manna sent from above.”

  “Hush, John Pritchard!” Aunt Pearl blushed and held her napkin in front of her face. “You go on.”

  “I mean it. Who agrees this is a meal fit for a king?”

  We all nodded. A hearty and vaguely familiar “Oh, yes” from my left. I glanced and noticed how Russell’s mama had gotten my mama to heap her plate and kept her occupied with stories so she ate and listened and looked almost a part of us again.

  I looked closer. Mama wasn’t so thin as she’d been, when her wrists were a whisper of flesh and her shoulders a shiver of skin. She’d arranged her hair carefully, instead of the tangled mess that usually sat atop her head. Her eyes didn’t look through us but at us. Whether it was Mrs. Armentrout’s potions or her visiting or just her gentle talking, Mama was getting better.

  I looked at Russell and smiled.

  We cleared the table, Russell and I, amid the groans of the overstuffed adults. I washed, he dried, and we listened to the voices from the living room. Aunt Pearl and Mr. Pritchard and Miss Spencer, their words full and boisterous, talking of days growing up; Mrs. Armentrout’s and Mama’s quiet murmurs from beside the fire.

  “I ain’t never had so much to eat in my whole entire life,” Russell said.

  “Me neither. And, Russell, the talking.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “It was just so nice to hear talking at the table. Sitting in the middle of stories and jokes and laughing. It was like . . . home again.” I walked out the back door he held open and pitched the dirty dishwater. “Let’s look at your book some more.”

  I put on a kettle for tea and pulled the book from a drawer, smoothing it on the table. “I’ve been thinking about what’s missing from this book, Russell.” I pointed to the completed pages. “You don’t have any skunks. You have to put in skunks.”

  Russell smiled. “Well . . .”

  The door flew open, and a blast of cold wrapped around my legs. “What in the hell is going on?”

  Rooster Armentrout.

  I SCURRIED from my spot as Moselle Toms’s voice scattered around the room. “Now, I figured they’d be around, and look-a here — there’s your boy. I told you, Rooster, didn’t I?” But Rooster Armentrout wasn’t listening to her, nor was he trying to catch me with his fierce glare. It was Russell. It was Russell he was after. My friend sat at the table, snared by the surprise of his father as sure as a skunk caught in a trap. He didn’t raise a hand, didn’t turn his head, didn’t scramble as I did for the safety of the other room.

  Mr. Pritchard met me at the kitchen doorway, his vest flying open and his hands pulling me behind him. I peeked around his burly frame when he blocked the door and felt Aunt Pearl’s strong fingers close on my shoulders.

  I closed my eyes and smelled an odor I knew from before, a cloud of liquor clinging to my nostrils. And the hollow feeling was there, but it began to fill with fear.

  Rooster Armentrout flung a backhanded blow that caught Russell square on his jaw. He went down hard, and while he was down, Rooster slammed his hairy hand atop the book sitting open on the table.

  “And this? Is this what you been doing instead of working? This?”

  “Pa, wait. I . . .”

  “I said no schooling.”

  Rooster Armentrout strode quickly to the stove, where the water had just begun to whistle. He shoved aside the kettle, spilling hot water wildly, the whistle fading like a Fourth of July rocket that’s fizzled in the night. Quickly, he pitched the pages into the flame, and they caught and . . . Russell’s book was no more.

  I inhaled with a gasp and realized I couldn’t get the “no” that I wanted to scream to even come out of my mouth in a whisper. Aunt Pearl’s fingers bit into my shoulders, but no words came from her either.

  We watched the fire until the last page curled, the deer pictured there disappearing into the creeping blackness of the flame. The sharp smell of burning and the thick smell of sorrow filled the kitchen. I began to cry.

  “Git home. Now.” Mr. Armentrout pointed to Russell, and then his flinty gaze locked on his wife, who pushed mutely past those of us blocking the door.

  Mrs. Armentrout was halfway out when Russell’s soft voice answered his father. “No.”

  Russell stood, his lanky arms dangling dead at his sides, his shoulders down like a whipped puppy. But he raised his head then and looked his father straight in the eye. “No.”

  “Godammit, when I say move, boy, you’d best get your ass to move. Now, I said git home.” Rooster Armentrout lifted his hand, and I could feel myself shrinking back, modeling for Russell what he ought to do, must do; Russell stepped forward and grabbed that lifted hand in a steel grip of his own. It made a sound like a cracking whip, and again I felt my body pull back a bit. “It won’t go on, Pa. It can’t. I ain’t going to let this go on. I won’t be coming home.”

  Mr. Armentrout’s hand fe
ll from Russell’s grasp, and his eyes smoldered like the ruined pages of Russell’s book. The terrible look on his face withered me from my place behind Mr. Pritchard. But Russell didn’t back down.

  Finally, Rooster Armentrout took his wife’s arm roughly and, as they headed out and up their mountain, the sky opened and the first heavy snowflakes fell.

  I sat by the small window in my room, watching the snow, my feet and legs wrapped in the warmth of the drunkard’s path quilt. A soft tap sounded.

  Aunt Pearl’s head peeked in. “Your mama’s resting now. It’s all right.”

  I nodded. “I thought she’d be okay.”

  “And you?” Aunt Pearl swept into the room, tidying the clothes I’d thrown off and abandoned on the floor.

  “Why did she bring him here? Why didn’t she just take a nap when she said she would?”

  Aunt Pearl rubbed her nose with her wrist. “Met him when she went out to tell Rucker to do something, no doubt.

  “Ellen, I’m positive she meant no harm. She likes to cause mischief — has ever since she was fifteen and she knocked over an apple display at MacIntosh’s store with calamitous, though attentive, results. But not even Moselle Toms would deliberately start the trouble we saw today. Surely you saw her face when Rooster smacked his boy. Watching her edge out of the kitchen with that mix of fear and revulsion and shame — I felt pure sorry for her.”

  I felt nothing of the kind. “What will happen to Russell?” I asked. “He can’t stay with Mr. Pritchard forever.”

  Aunt Pearl sank onto the bed, her fingers no longer able to pretend at the folding of my dress. “Perhaps not. But he’ll find something. Someone here will help him through this. We all will. As we should have helped him before.”

  I turned my head back to look out the window, to take in the view of the collecting snow, the mountain turned white and frosted with a thick layer of quiet. I wondered how it looked and felt to Russell’s hibernating animals, the raccoons he liked and the playful woodchucks. And the skunks.

  Aunt Pearl’s voice was hushed. “You said as how Martha didn’t tell you things. You said you didn’t know about your family. Is that so, child?”

  I nodded.

  A heavy sigh filled the space between us. “Oh, my dear, then I am so sorry. You must be filled with questions. I never thought, I mean, I thought your daddy . . . Well, I guess I should get some things straight for you.”

  She smoothed my dress, still clutched in her fingers, the soft blue corduroy spreading beneath her palms. “I spent the first years of my life — just as you did — in Baltimore. As did your mother. We didn’t always live here.” I nodded. “Oh, yes, Baltimore. A city of wonder and charm. And distinctive sad memories for me.

  “I was a bit younger than you when it hit my own mother — if I’m remembering right.” She waved a hand and looked off, searching her memory. “It was long ago and, to be honest, it seems sometimes like it was always.

  “Anyway, it packed a wallop then — the sadness, the depression, the overwhelming emptiness that now possesses your mother. I imagine there were hints of it before that, but I never noticed. I was the kind of girl who spent most of her time with friends, visiting and running and playing stickball in the streets. I was quite a tomboy.” She smiled. “And I clung to childhood. It seemed . . . safer . . . than growing up. When I think back on it, I suppose I must have had an idea of something being wrong, wanting to keep life simple the way it is in childhood; I never invited friends to my house, and, as I got older, I tried to stay away as much as possible. Things weren’t right at my house. Just as you, perhaps, had an idea of something wrong too?”

  I nodded slowly, aware again of the occasional angry days and the more frequent empty ones, the days I’d talked about with Russell.

  Aunt Pearl pursed her lips and went on with her tale. “I came home one day — I must have been ten or so — and found Martha looking at a book about dresses by the fading fire and my mother holed up in her room. There was no dinner made, no care being paid to any of the family. Father came home from work — he owned a prosperous bookstore — and that was the beginning of the end of Baltimore.”

  I turned from the window and looked at my aunt Pearl. She told her story without a lot of emotion, without a lot of fanfare. But her words were laced with sadness all the same.

  “Mother never got out of bed after that. Never. A few years passed, years when Father and I went about life much as we always had. Actually, I suppose that isn’t true. I changed. I had to. I took on the shopping, the planning of meals, making money stretch to feed us, to pay for medicines I heard about. But Father plunged on with life as it had been. It didn’t work. He couldn’t handle the way people talked, couldn’t handle the shame of . . . mental problems in his house. He decided Mother would get well if we came here, to Virginia. He had people from Snowden, a great-uncle, and so, when I was only thirteen, he sold the business and packed up our lives and we came here.”

  My mind easily imagined that — I knew what it was to flee an old life. I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to my books; I wondered if Aunt Pearl got to say goodbye to her friends. Or whether she still had friends to say goodbye to?

  “Father found a niche here for himself. He was more educated than most folks around Snowden; he automatically became the schoolteacher. It was quite a change for us.” She smiled. “You’re probably thinking about money, but we never hurt for that. I saw to that. It’s true that schoolteachers don’t make a lot of money, but it didn’t matter much, because I have quite a head for numbers, and I took what he’d made from his bookstore, a tidy sum, and invested it in the paper plant and a few other businesses I’d taken notice of in Baltimore, even if I was only a ‘slip of a girl’ when we left. Folks didn’t take me seriously at first, being only a woman, and a girl to boot, but that worked out well, actually. We’ve done all right. The fact that men don’t really see women as potential money managers works well when you have money. I wouldn’t say we’re rich but” — she nodded slowly — “we’re all right. Money still comes regularly, even with the war. Came through the Depression, although that was tight, I must admit.” Aunt Pearl held her chin up.

  “It was the other things that were hard. Mother never got better. She went in her bedroom, the empty room across the hall, and she never came out. Lived in there for . . . oh, so many years. Years. I went in one morning, as I did every morning, to change her linens, to carry her breakfast, to try to convince her life was good. And she was dead.

  “Of course, she’d been dead long before. Dead to the world that surrounded her, dead to her husband, dead to me. She just survived in her shell of a body until it withered. Because after that day in Baltimore, she was never truly alive among us.”

  Aunt Pearl pulled my corduroy dress to her face and lowered her head, burying her mouth and nose in it. She closed her eyes and I waited to see tears fall, but none came. She sighed into the soft fabric, and I pulled my quilt from around me and went and knelt beside her.

  She raised her head and smiled at me. “Even before Mother passed, Martha’d started showing signs of it, the flashes of frustrated anger, the low times, the lack of appetite. I thought it would help her to get away. I thought if I could get her out of here, out of this house of sorrow, she’d heal.

  “I took her to Baltimore, back where we began life — happier times for her, I thought. I left Father with Mother, told him I needed to care for Martha, to make sure she’d be spared all of that . . . sad. I found a boarding school, thought it would help her to be there among lively girls, silly girls whose only worries were what to wear and what boy was looking at them. She liked it fine and she wrote us letters that were filled with silly. She seemed to perk right up. I had come on home, and we felt it was the right thing.

  “Then she met your daddy. I won’t say I didn’t think that was a mistake. She’d just finished school, and he met her at a picture show. She was there with a friend, and she wrote us that she came out and it was raining. The o
ther girl ducked back in to try to call for a taxi, and there he was, a shoe salesman (not that he told her that right away), her knight in shining armor, a man with an umbrella in the pouring rain. Lord, but Martha fell for him hard. She’d sing when she heard from him, dance when she went out on a date, and seemed to turn inside herself if he didn’t call when she expected. All for an umbrella.” Aunt Pearl shook her head.

  “Maybe that isn’t normal, but what did I know then? I thought everyone in love was like that, those crazy ups and downs. I’d never been in love, so it seemed possible. Now, well, now I know love doesn’t have to be like that.” Her face softened and she looked out the window. She sighed, went on, “Yes, you feel happiness when he’s near or will be. Yes, you feel different when he’s away. But it isn’t as if you stop living when he’s gone; you exist without the man you love.”

  I thought of Mr. Pritchard, perched at the head of the table, slicing that turkey with ease. I knew then that he would be in this house, of this house, one day. Perhaps one day soon. I realized how much I had missed around me, focused as I had been on Mama, Russell, and myself.

  “I made a special trip to Baltimore. I talked long and hard about her with your daddy. I warned him. Can’t anyone say I wasn’t fair. But he had to have her. And it seemed to do her good. She blossomed with him, it seemed to me.

  “Well, Mother was failing by then, so I returned to Snowden. It wasn’t much longer for my mother. And the years had taken a toll on Father; he passed the very next year. I received occasional letters from your daddy, telling me of Martha’s down times. Your father, I have to be fair, seems to be different since he went to this awful war. He always tried with my sister, I knew, but I felt he was so inept with the down times.” She sighed deeply. “Much like my own father. He rode the good times well, but the hard times were a horse he could not master. He would write to me then with doubts and fears of what he could do for her; Martha never wrote herself. I tried to get her to, but it seemed she did better without any reminders of her life in Snowden.” Aunt Pearl swallowed. “Contact between your father and me settled to a trickle. But” — she put her hand out, covered mine, and pulled it into her lap — “he let me know of your arrival.” She smiled a little. “He even had me visit once, though that didn’t turn out well at all, especially for your mother.”