by Lee Smith
They don’t need me, I realized suddenly.
I experienced the most profound sense of loss, followed quickly by a deep relief. For the longer I looked at this little family scene, the more uncomfortable I felt—uncomfortable about R.C.’s hand on Lucie’s breast, about Pancake’s little penis, now curled like a caterpillar, about Lucie’s big belly, full of another baby, about her slack, flushed, dreaming face. “Wake up!” I wanted to scream at her. “Watch out!” for just beyond the warm circle of firelight, the darkness, full of danger and desire, seemed to wait malevolently, patiently, for them all.
I began to cry. Without a word, I turned and went to my own bed in the other side of the house, where I lay awake far into the night. At some point the words of that old tune ran through my mind:I never will marry,
I’ll be no man’s wife,
I intend to live single
All the days of my life.
Two months later, the necessary arrangements having been made by Miss Covington, I departed for the Boston City Hospital Training School, where I earned my nursing degree and remained to assist in the training of others. I found I really liked the orderly life at the training school. In addition, I found time to “catch up” on my regular education, attending many lectures, concerts, plays, etc. I have found the world beyond Grassy Branch to be wide beyond my imagining. Boston was much to my liking. But three years ago, I moved here to the Nurses Settlement in New York City after I found it necessary to reject the marriage proposal of Dr. Richard Llewellyn, a brilliant surgeon. I simply was not able to marry him: frankly, his physical advances produced the strangest, most unpleasant sensations—light-headedness, nausea, shortness of breath. I did not want to hurt his feelings, of course. So I told him simply that I could not marry him because I did not love him. Now, I wonder whether that was true. In any case I have never married, nor—except in a few unexpected moments of random, piercing sadness—have I wished to do so. For family life still seems to me somehow clotted, messy, tangled—as opposed to the life I live now, this room which is my own and nobody else’s, neat as a pin, which I share with nobody.
I have returned to Grassy Branch from time to time, of course, ever more conscious of the widening gap between myself and my family. (It is only at this instant, in the very moment of writing this account, that I am able to see myself as even vaguely the same person I was then: only now am I able to do this.)
Ever since Durwood married that woman, I have been even less comfortable at home, though they built their own house “down the road apiece,” as Lucie says. I always felt that woman was not quite wholesome, not to mention her so-called child! Also, Daddy has continued to grow more remote than ever—on my last visit home, he reminded me of one of those large life-size dummies we use to demonstrate various techniques to our girls.
But it was Sally’s death last year which cut me to the quick. Of course I deal with death daily, and Sally had a weak heart ever since she was a baby, so you may think it should not have affected me so drastically—but I confess I have been unable to return to Virginia since they buried her. I’ve a new little niece I haven’t even seen: Alice, Durwood and Tampa’s little girl. Yet somehow I haven’t had the energy for the visit, I haven’t the stomach for it—the babies, the mess, the sheer work of feeding and clothing so many, the cooking, the eating—I don’t know. It wears me out to think of it. Far better to take a child who is sick and help it to get better, then send it home, far better than raising it up only to die and break your heart. So on the whole, I prefer a more professional involvement with the human race. I prefer situations I can at least hope to control: a bone to set, an arm to bandage, a cut to stitch up, a set of instruments to sterilize. I have not Miss Covington’s capacity for emotional attachment, perhaps regrettably.
And yet, on the eve of departure, I find myself buffeted by a great storm of just the emotions I have so long sought to avoid! I believe it has something to do with a newsreel Caroline and I saw last night at the cinema—Belgian soldiers marching bravely, row on row. It filled my heart to bursting. I began to sniffle then, and have not stopped. Or perhaps it is simply the writing of this account which has transported me back in time and place to Grassy Branch, to the little girl who lived there then with her old father and her little sister, trying to be good. Her heart was often filled to bursting, too. What has become of her? I believe this is the question I’ve been asking as I’ve written my way back through the years, and now the answer comes to me, for I see that we are one after all, she and I, a life as continuous as anybody’s, as that marching file, row on row, up the avenue and out of sight. The soldiers are so young, so earnest. It is glorious.
3
Not the Marrying Kind
R.C. Talking
I knowed she was trouble from the minute I laid eyes on her. Durwood don’t have the sense God gave a jaybird, never did. He don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain. The only kind of sense Durwood’s got is the kind of sense that allows a man to play a good game of poker, judge a horse, or figger out a song. He couldn’t make a living if he had to—he couldn’t make a living atall if it wasn’t for Daddy or me. He’d be up shit creek and that’s the truth.
And women—hellfire! Durwood wouldn’t know a good woman if he tripped over one. He wouldn’t think of going out looking for one, neither. He’s too damn lazy. He just lays around and lets them pick him. Anybody that wants Durwood can have him, if they work at it hard enough. He’s easy that way. Now this didn’t use to worry me none, for the ones that picked him dropped him fast enough, once they figgered him out. Durwood had his fancy lady friends all over—Knoxville, Bristol, Holly Springs, you name it—and I reckon they was glad to see him come, and I reckon they was glad to see him go. It wasn’t no skin off my back whatever Durwood did when he was away from here. I had done my own share of helling around, too, I’ll grant you. I ain’t the man to throw stones.
But after Mamma called me back to Grassy Branch and I give over to God, I have tried to walk the straight and narrow from that day forth. And God has blessed me for it, giving me Lucie, the sweetest woman on this green earth, and Pancake and John, my little sons, besides.
Old Durwood, he’d come and he’d go. We was used to it. He usually had him some big deal he was working on, or so he said. I knowed he was mostly gambling and drinking and womanizing, but it wasn’t no skin off my back as I said. I’ve got my work cut out for me, what with the farm and Daddy and all. But I did think we had got it kindly figgered out between us, Durwood and me, and that he wouldn’t bring none of his trash back home.
So I was kindly discomfited, you might say, when he come over to Grassy Branch bringing Tampa Rainette. They walked right up to the field where I was hoeing corn, and I quit hoeing to watch them walk up there. I could see trouble coming in the way she walked.
“I’d like for you to meet my wife Tampa,” says Durwood, proud as punch. “This here is R.C.,” he says.
“Howdy,” I says. I looked at her good. She did not look like the marrying kind. In fact she looked like she might of been a fancy woman, and I could tell from the way she was biting her lip and fidgeting around that she was worried somebody was going to catch on to her.
“Tampa,” I said. “Where’d you get that name?”
“Florida,” she said, looking at me. She didn’t say nothing else about her name. She just stared at me real bold, then dropped her eyes and then raised them and stared at me again. She had big dark eyes with thick black eyelashes and little painted-on eyebrows that swooped up like wings. She had the kind of eyes a man could fall into, all right. She had a heart-shaped face with sharp little features and a rosebud Kewpie-doll mouth. I looked at her good and kept looking at her. She was about ten years older than Durwood, I judged. I wondered if he knowed it.
“You reckon to like farming?” I asked her.
“I reckon I’ll like it fine,” she said.
I doubted it.
“We’ll go on to the house, then,” Durwo
od said. They walked off down the field and through the orchard, him with his arm around her waist. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, it was plain to see.
At first, they stayed up at the house with us, them plus her daughter Virginia that she had brung along, which cramped us up and throwed us up in each other’s faces all the time. Lucie liked Tampa all right, but I didn’t trust her. I couldn’t figger out why she would of picked Durwood out of all the men she must of had her pick of, and I damn sure couldn’t figger out why she had married him. Tampa Rainette was a mystery to me. Likewise that daughter of hers, that whiny little Virginia, who didn’t do nothing at first but cry and throw up. Sally tried to be real nice to Virginia, but nothing doing. And Sally is real sweet.
It was Lucie that figgered it out. “Why, she’s going to have a baby,” Lucie said all of a sudden one day when we were standing on the porch watching Virginia and her mamma walk down the road. “You wait and see.”
“That little girl?” I said, for Virginia seemed real young to me. I didn’t know how old she was, for Tampa was so closemouthed about everything, with me anyway. I guess she wasn’t so close-mouthed with Durwood, though. You could hear the two of them over there in the other side of the house talking and giggling way up into the night. I wouldn’t put nothing past Tampa Rainette. It made me real nervous. I couldn’t wait for them to get that old cabin down the road fixed up and get out of here. But all this time, Durwood looked like the cat that ate the mouse. He went around grinning like a fool, everbody remarked on it. I reckon he didn’t need no sleep. Living on love, I thought. I sat down and wrote a song about it, but I didn’t show it to nobody right then. “Living on Love,” I called it.
After they had been up there with us a day or so, I had to go into town to see a man about something, and when I come back it was after supper and I heerd them all singing, from the road. They sounded good, too. That Tampa—for it must be Tampa, I figured—had one of them real high hopeless shaking kind of voices, that went good with Lucie’s lower one. Tampa Rainette knew what she was doing, for sure, and I wondered just where she had been singing previous, and for who. Not that I figured she was likely to say. Hers was a voice you don’t hardly hear in a lifetime, though. Hers was a voice that said she had been places, and seen things, and done things past the telling.
All right, I thought. All right.
I went in there and got my banjo off the wall and joined them. Lucie’s face was flushed, you could tell she was having the time of her life. They sounded real good together, and that’s when it hit me—a sister act. But I didn’t say nothing yet.
“Do ‘White Linen’ for R.C.,” Durwood told Tampa. “Go on, do it. I bet he don’t know that one.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“She does this one real good,” he said.
Tampa was playing her own guitar and I noticed how unusual she had it tuned. We were open-tuning up to that point, Lucie and Durwood and me.
As soon as Tampa started singing that song, I knew we had got aholt of something big. “One morning, one morning, one morning in May, I spied this young lady all wrapped in white linen,” she began. Tampa Rainette’s voice would break your heart. She sang it straight through to the end. “My poor head is aching, my sad heart is breaking, my body’s salivated, and I’m bound to die.”
“Where did you larn that?” I asked her when she was done.
“Why, I don’t rightly remember,” she says real sweet.
“I reckon you’ve been a lot of places,” I says.
“R.C., be nice,” Lucie says to me.
“Well, that’s a real pretty song,” I said. I went out on the porch to smoke me a cigarette. I was all wrought up. I know I get too wrought up, I can’t do nothing about it though, I have been like that since a child. Just high-strung, I reckon.
Tampa Rainette followed me out there.
“You got another smoke?” she asked me.
Now this surprised me, as women don’t smoke around here, not unlessen it is one of them old granny women with a little pipe. So I give her a cigarette and helt the match for her to light it. She took a deep drag on it.
“You don’t like me, do you, R.C.?” she said, blowing out smoke.
“I don’t hardly know you,” I said.
I felt something else catch and flare up between us. Be careful , I says to myself. I turned and walked to the edge of the porch, studying the sky. I could still hear Lucie and Durwood and them in the house. But Tampa Rainette come up behind me, real close. She rubbed her breasts acrost my back in a way that I wouldn’t hardly call accidental.
“You don’t have to do that, nor nothing like it,” I said, for all of a sudden I thought about that woman I had left laying in the bed up in West Virginia. “You don’t have to do nothing to stay here,” I said. “As long as Durwood wants you, you’re welcome. Don’t pay no attention to me. I’m half crazy, anybody will tell you that,” I said without turning around. I could tell she was crying, which surprised me. “Besides,” I said, trying to make a little joke of it, to lighten her up some, “Lucie has done told me to be nice.”
Tampa Rainette started laughing, and I felt like we had come to an understanding. “Nice,” she said. “Oh, hell,” she said. “Who knows who’s nice?”
4
Alice Bailey
First Daddy said he wouldn’t let us go up there, but Freda started whining and crying and all, and then Mamma said, “Oh, take them then, for God’s sake, Durwood,” as she had a migraine headache.
“If you are going with me,” Daddy said as we started off that evening, “I don’t want to hear no whining, nor no muley-mouthing, nor nothing like it, from either one of you girls. I don’t want to hear nobody say, ‘Daddy, I’m so tired.’ Nor do I want to hear nothing spoke about nobody taking a little sip.”
“Yes sir,” I say, and Daddy says, “All right, then,” and so we set off, walking along by Grassy Branch where it was fast coming on for night already, dark shadders laying out behind everything, lightning bugs rising.
We stopped for Daddy to light the lantern, and then I got to carry it. Daddy was carrying a old quilt and Freda was carrying a sack of cold pork biscuits. We walked along the creek and then we tuck off on this path that went up by old man Isom Daughtry’s cane patch, and kept on going up into the trees. It wasn’t too hard walking, for Daddy went first, and he’d stop right frequent to take a little drink, so we could catch our breath then and look around. Me and Freda held hands. It was scary up there in them big trees. We never played up on Cemetery Mountain, me nor the others, not even Robert Floyd who is so wild. We never said nothing about it, but we never went up there neither. And then there we were with Daddy, and it dark besides. I swung the lantern side to side, looking around real careful-like, for it seemed to me that I could see faces behind them trees, awful old scary hant-faces, keeping just beyond the light. But I knowed better than to say nothing to Daddy about it.
Daddy put the cap back on the jar and we went on, me still looking real careful to one side and then the other, for I felt those hants was trying to reach out and grab me, I felt like they might of wanted me to come and be their little girl. I said a prayer in my head. I was real glad when we come out of the trees and got on a real road.
I seen first one lantern, then another. Then another, all of them swinging along, just like I was swinging mine. It was like being in a big parade of fairy-lights, moving slow up the mountain. As we went on, I looked back, and I saw more and more lanterns coming. I felt like I was part of something then. I felt big—I’ve always been real little for my age—and I walked bigger.
Before long we got up there to a grassy bald where it appeared that the road ended, and I could tell this was where we were coming to, for it was a lot of people up there already, and lanterns, and talking and laughing.
It was Uncle R.C. who had the first radio in that part of the county, and he had it rigged up to run off a car battery. He had got this idea, he was telling everybody, because they
had like to got trampled in their house by all the folks coming over to hear that new show out of Nashville on it. Everybody on Grassy Branch knew Uncle R.C., who was all the time coming up with crazy ideas. He was not ever mean, and it seemed like he was not hardly working either; he had all the time in the world to set down in the road with you and talk about what makes clouds or tell you about the brownies that live in the woods and come out only at night. Mamma said he made that up, but I don’t know.
Uncle R.C. was talking a mile a minute that night, all excited about this contraption he had rigged up. Daddy peered at it for a while and then bade us put the quilt down and get on it, so he would know where we was at, and then he went off with some of his buddies. I ate a biscuit and laid back on the quilt and looked up at the stars, which was real big up there over the mountain, and before long the radio come on sure enough, all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, and you could hear them talking and singing real loud just like they was here. I couldn’t get over it.
At nine o’clock the Grand Ole Opry come on, and Daddy come back and set down on the quilt real heavy-like, and everybody was listening to the Opry. This was the first time I heard a radio. But we was to go up there some several more times that summer, until R.C. got tired of rigging it up thataway, and by then we had got our own radio anyway. Mamma was not about to climb up any mountain to listen to a radio, as she said.
But listening to the radio in our house was nothing like listening to it on that grassy bald, laying out on a quit looking up at the stars and eating biscuits. I felt like I was all alone in the world, and also like I was a part of something big, all at the same time. I felt like I was a part of my family too, and a part of that music they loved so. See, they always left us behind when they went off someplace to sing. I didn’t hardly know Mamma at all.
Me and Freda got so tickled listening to the radio that night, to Sarie and Sadie, who were funny as could be. I couldn’t get over this one Opry member that Judge Hay called the Harmonica Wizard, he could make that harmonica sound ever bit like a train coming around a bend, and then passing right by you, and then going off in the distance again. Some of them up there on the bald said that the Harmonica Wizard was a nigger, but I don’t know about that. I ain’t never seen a nigger. We listened to Uncle Jimmy Thompson, who was real old and claimed he could fiddle the bugs off a tater vine. He tickled everybody by saying he wanted to have a fiddling contest with some champeen he got to talking about. “Let him come to Tennessee, and I’ll lie with him like a bulldog,” Uncle Jimmy said. We heard Sam and Kirk McGee, Obed Pickard and the Pickard Family, and Dr. Humphrey Bate and his Possum Hunters, who were real funny. The Solemn Ole Judge was funny too. And it was just fine to be laying out there under the stars and watch the moon come up, big and beautiful, over the top of the mountain. I reckon everybody’s favorite singer was Uncle Dave Macon, who could sing up a storm, every now and then hollering out “Ding dong!” or “Kill yo’ self!” which got us all to laughing. But even Daddy allowed, “He can frail that banjo for sure.”
