One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  ‘It’s a stout burden for any woman to carry,’ Sue Burrell added, looking all sorrowful.

  I knew Momma meant well but her telling the others made it harder. What those women meant to be pity seemed to me little more than gloating. That was a hard-hearted way to think about other folks and in the deepest part of me I knew it wasn’t just the other women I’d turned hard-hearted toward. I stood up with the others and mouthed the old hymns like I always did but those words stirred me no more now than they would a barn rat. He’d given a passel of young ones to every other woman in that church but allowed me never a one, though I’d prayed hard morning and night now for a year. How could He give my momma nine and my sister not yet eighteen two and leave me fallow as a December corn field. If I was being punished for what happened to Matthew, that was wrong. How could something I did at twelve, something that was more accident than meanness, be grudged against me for the rest of my life? Not a sparrow falls from sky without His knowledge, the Bible claimed. Don’t that include children that fall from a loft, I told myself.

  ‘Don’t you go and see that old woman,’ Momma said, but I did go, on a January morning when snow laid on the path that followed the river upstream, the river getting faster and skinny, beech trees and rocks looming on each side of the trail as the gorge got narrower like a giant book that’s slow getting shut. Or maybe more like a steel leg-hold trap, I thought, looking up at the big rocks that jagged out over me like teeth. The land got dark and shadowy because the sun couldn’t get in without it was full noon, clumps of mistletoe the only color in the trees. I’d once heard my granddaddy claim the Cherokees had stayed clear of this place, wouldn’t even hunt here.

  It was easy enough to figure why the few folks who’d lived here called this part of the gorge The Dismal, because you couldn’t help but feel that way as you passed through. I walked by the old Chapman place that was now nothing but a stone chimney. It looked like a tombstone there all by itself with no cabin to surround it.

  Where Wolf Creek poured into the river I saw Luke Murphree’s place. His house still stood but the boards was gray and wormy, the tin roof brown like November leaves. Grandma had told me how Luke’s property had bumped up against Widow Glendower’s land and he’d not bothered to fence his cattle in. They’d been bad to wander onto the old woman’s place and eat her apples and trample her beans.

  Then one May the cattle started getting sick. Daddy allowed it was from eating the leaves of a cherry tree Luke had felled. Others said blackleg. But Luke swore his cattle had been hexed. Whatever it was six cows died that May, and soon enough after Luke and his family followed the Chapmans out of the hollow. No one else moved in.

  Nor likely to, Grandma had said.

  Glendower was up here by herself now, for she had no kin as far as anyone on the river knew. There had been many another story about her I’d heard growing up. How once Lindsey Kilgore saw her rise out of a trout pool he’d been fishing, her body forming itself out of the water. And Janey Suttles saw her in a graveyard, the grave flowers turning brown and wilting like as if frost-bit wherever her shadow fell.

  I’d heard all such tales from Grandma, on a winter night when me and the other young ones huddled up near the fireplace. Wind had been whipping through the gorge and the limbs of the big beech scratching the tin roof like something trying to get in. Grandma had told us the ways of witches and the signs of them, everything of what they could do to you and you to them.

  We kids was so scared we wouldn’t head up the stairs to bed without Daddy going first. Daddy scoffed and told us Granny was just pulling our leg, that there wasn’t no such thing as witches, that Widow Glendower was a harmless old soul who’d learned to doctor with roots and leaves and tree bark back when folks had to tend to their own selves when they got sick.

  ‘That old woman has helped many another person when they wasn’t no one else to doctor them and now some of them same people call her a witch,’ Daddy said as he tucked the quilts around us.

  But after he’d snuffed the lamp and went downstairs I couldn’t help wondering why if he argued there was no such thing as witches he’d nailed a horseshoe upside down above the front door the first day he and Momma had moved into this house. And why he’d never had a notion to take it down.

  The trail followed the creek deeper into the hollow. Beech trees got thicker, snuffing out more of what little light dribbled in. Soon rocks big as haystacks skinnied the trail. I kept my eyes up. Some of the old folks claimed there was still a few panthers around and this seemed as likely a spot to find one as any. All of everything was quiet, even the creek as it flowed under a skimming of ice. A part of me wanted to point my feet in the other direction, follow Wolf Creek back down to the river and on home. I kept hoofing up the path. I wanted a baby and Widow Glendower was near the last hope I had of getting one.

  I had no reckoning of how far up the creek she lived but after I passed the big rocks the woods opened up. I saw smoke and then the chimney and then the cabin itself. A black dog big as a calf wiggled out from under the porch and barked as I stepped across the walk-log. Then it disappeared back under the cabin. Widow Glendower opened the door and came out on the porch.

  ‘Who be you?’ she asked. Her voice was raspy, like her throat had dotted over with rust from not being used.

  ‘Amy,’ I said, and almost spoke Boone instead of Holcombe. ‘Amy Holcombe,’ Widow Glendower said, saying it slow and thoughtful-like.

  ‘I was a Boone before I married. My Daddy’s Randall Boone.’

  ‘From over near Tamassee?’

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  ‘And Lillie Boone is your grandma.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ I said. ‘Me and my husband Billy live down the river now. Our land borders Sarah Winchester’s place.’

  ‘I know Sarah,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘I cured her of the thrush a while back. I caught her young ones too. That youngest boy, he come late. He was so husky he near killed his momma before I got him into the world. He back from soldiering yet?’

  ‘He’s been back for a couple of months now,’ I said.

  ‘Step closer, girl,’ Widow Glendower said.

  I walked up to the first step. She wore a gingham dress wrinkly as her face, a black shawl on her bony shoulders. Her backbone bowed and made her lean a ways over herself. She reminded me of something with that stooped body and the black shawl hanging down from her shoulders. Hanging like wings, I thought. Then I knew what it was she favored.

  We passed no words for a minute as she studied over me. I studied over her as well, her eyes gray and hard-seeming as granite tombstones, her skin paled white as a mushroom stem, white as the fish I once saw in a cave, fish that had swam in the dark so long they’d lost all their color and even their eyes. Her hair was white as her face, long and tangly like it hadn’t been combed in years. To make people fancy you a witch you could do no better, I thought.

  My thoughts must have showed plain as the mistletoe I’d seen in the trees.

  ‘You ain’t feared of me, are you?’ she asked.

  I didn’t rightly know how to answer, for either way seemed wrong.

  She smiled then, and I saw for all her years she still had teeth. They wasn’t black and gnarly but white and not a one missing. It seemed a warm smile and I remembered what Daddy had said about her helping the sick when there’d been no one else.

  ‘You been listening to slack talk if you are, girl, listening to folks what will say the worst of anyone who keeps to theirselves. What they claiming me for, a witch?’

  ‘I never believed such,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘You wouldn’t. You seem a girl with more smarts than to believe a silly something like that.’

  She tightened the shawl around her neck.

  ‘It’s too cold to stand here and visit. You come inside.’

  She turned and stepped through the door, not looking back to see if I followed.

  I walked into a front room dour like a root
cellar, the only light yellow hearth-flames that licked the bottom of a copper kettle.

  ‘Set your body down,’ she said and nodded at a split-cane chair by the hearth. She leaned into the fire and lifted the kettle, then stepped into the other room.

  My eyes started to find their way in the dark. I looked around the room. There wasn’t much of anything besides another split-cane chair on the other side of the hearth. No clock ticked on the fireboard and there wasn’t a lamp or a single picture or a Bible. A trunk made of ash wood laid in the far corner, its top painted blue like as if someone had started a job they hadn’t troubled to finish.

  Widow Glendower came back in the room with two tin cups in her hand.

  ‘Here,’ she said as she reached me a cup. ‘Most folks can’t hazard how often a time something warm can cure what ails a body.’

  I laid the cup on my lap, my hands holding it steady. The coffee looked the color of the river after spring rains.

  ‘Taste of it,’ Widow Glendower said, raising her cup to her lips.

  I raised mine as well and felt the steam of it on my face. I took a sip and felt it slide down my throat and warm all over where the cold had crept into me. I couldn’t help but shut my eyes a minute and savor that comforting.

  ‘So what fetches you to my door?’ Widow Glendower asked. I didn’t dawdle with my words. I’d already walked too far and lived with it too long not to take the short path.

  ‘Doctor Wilkins, he says me and Billy can’t have a young one. I gave myself a thought you might could help us.’

  Widow Glendower leveled her gray eyes on mine. They was old eyes but clear and steady. I reckoned they could still see most everything they wanted to.

  ‘I know a few things no town-doctor knows,’ she said. ‘Is it you or your man got the problem?’

  ‘It’s Billy.’

  Widow Glendower looked into the fire.

  ‘There’s things that might could help,’ she said. ‘But let’s drink our coffee first.’

  So we sipped our coffee and stared at the fire, neither me or her offering up a word till we finished. That’s the devil’s tongue reaching up out of hell, my Grandma had said of hearth-flames when I was growing up. I wasn’t wanting to mull on such a thing now.

  Widow Glendower laid our empty cups on the fire-board. She walked into the back room and got a poke, then went over to the trunk. She talked at herself while she grabbled around inside, stopping to put some one thing or another in the poke.

  ‘There’s bloodroot and mandrake root, some sang too,’ she said, handing me the poke. ‘Brew up a tea with them for your man.’

  ‘What if that ain’t the thing for to make it take?’

  ‘Come planting time wait for a waxing moon. Take every stitch of clothes off and lay down with him in a field that’s fresh seeded. I reckon you exact what I mean by laying down with him.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ I said, and I felt my face blush up red as a moonseed berry.

  I knew it to be getting darksome soon. I needed to be headed back home but I wanted something more certain sure than roots and laying down in fields.

  ‘I’ve heard it told you know what hasn’t yet been,’ I said.

  Widow Glendower stared at the flames like she was reading them.

  ‘I’ve saw things that come to pass, things that someday will. I’ve saw a time when the dead will raise from their graves, a time the river will drown this whole valley.’

  She looked at me and smiled.

  ‘But you ain’t wanting to ponder such things as that right now. You want to know if you’ll birth a young one.’

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  ‘I believe you will.’

  Widow Glendower got up from her chair.

  ‘You best be getting toward home, girl. There’s little enough light left to get you there.’

  I reached my hand around my dress pocket till I fished out a dollar.

  ‘I brung this for to pay with,’ I said.

  Widow Glendower shook her head.

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ she said. ‘You buy that baby of yours a play-pretty with that dollar.’

  ‘Well, I thank you,’ I said and left her there on the porch.

  I stepped pretty lively the way back down to the river for that old woman had gave me a pail-full of hope when I’d had but a dry well before. It was the shank of evening. The sky was gray and sleety looking but the world somehow seemed brighter. I took more notice at the liveness you could find if you kept your eyes searching for it, not just the mistletoe in the big oaks but a hemlock or white pine deep off in the woods, the Christmas ferns and hairy-cat moss on Wolf Creek’s banks and the ground pine poking out from dead leaves.

  I was halfway home when it happened. A shadow came over me and then a shiver so deep down in my bones it could be but one thing. I looked up. No cloud passed overhead, not even a hawk or crow, and I knew somebody had crossed over my grave. Don’t go to dwelling on death, think about new life, I told myself. I tightened the shawl around my neck and walked on.

  It was coming dark when I passed near the Winchesters’ house. Through the window I could see Holland and his momma eating their supper. I’d passed words with Mrs. Winchester a few times but never a word with Holland.

  ‘It’s best to stay clear of Holland Winchester,’ Billy had said soon as Holland got back from the war. ‘He’s never been nothing but trouble.’

  So I had, making sure I did my house chores when he worked next to our land. But as I did my sweeping and such I’d peek a look at him through the curtains. He was a big-muscled man, a man many another wouldn’t want to cross words with, but he wasn’t as rough-looking as I’d of thought to hear how others spoke of him. There was some handsome in his features and I wondered why some girl hadn’t made him a husband. But then I reckoned Holland wasn’t a settling-down kind of man.

  ‘Where you been off to?’ Billy fretted when I stepped through the door. ‘A plate of food ought not be asking too much after I’ve been in the fields all day.’

  I told him where I’d been and the why.

  ‘Had to make sure that old woman hadn’t missed the gossip about me not able to seed you,’ Billy said all spiteful-like. ‘Afraid there might be a soul in Jocassee didn’t know.’

  ‘She maybe can help us, Billy,’ I said. ‘She gave me roots to make a tea.’

  ‘I ain’t seeing how some yarbing could make a difference, especially from what Doctor Wilkins told us,’ Billy said.

  ‘It wouldn’t likely hurt us to try,’ I said. ‘You could at least hear me out.’

  There was some moody in my voice too. It was like our words was clouds gathering up for a storm.

  ‘It’ll do no good. I’m certain sure of that,’ Billy said.

  Yet he listened and that argued much as anything that he was as wanting of a baby as I was. I showed him the roots and he drank the tea I made from them each morning and night with no fuss. When spring came we laid down naked under the waxing moon.

  Those nights Billy tried to plant his seed in me I watched the moon round up and swell like I hoped my belly would. I wished on that moon like it had been a shooting star or the luckiest rabbit’s foot. There in that field with the dirt and dew cold on our skin me and Billy clinged and shivered against one another like we was caught in a flood and holding on each other to keep from getting swept away. It seemed things had gotten about that despairing for us. If they hadn’t we wouldn’t have been in that field doing what we was doing.

  Come the turn of the calendar when it was near my time of the month, me and Billy got more silent than usual around each other, not just our words but things like dropping a piece of firewood in the hearth or slamming the door. We walked soft like we had us a sleeping baby already. Me and Billy somehow notioned if we was quiet and careful enough it would help that new life take root. But the curse came each month anyway and that’s what it was, a curse. A curse on me and Billy, a curse on our marriage.

  Each time my blood flowed
it seemed it was our hearts’ blood that was flowing, like our hearts that had once swelled so full of love for one another was shriveling like tomatoes in a drought. We went on about our lives, Billy out in the fields, me doing what needed to be done around the house and barn. There’d been a time when we’d get lonesome for one another and make up a reason for him to come back to the house or me to join him in the field.

  ‘Would it be much bother to help me fetch some water?’ I’d ask.

  Or maybe Billy would call me out to the field.

  ‘Look here,’ he’d say, and show me a garnet or arrowhead. But we kept our distance most all the day now. For the first time since me and Billy had lived here that farm was a lonesome place. When we sat down for supper the food always seemed cold and leftover though I’d just spooned it off the stove. We’d be wore down from the day’s work but it wasn’t that good tired you get when you reckon your work realizes some good for another besides yourself.

  It was April when I walked back up Wolf Creek. All around me the land smelled bright and newborn. Dogwood blossoms brighted up the woods and beard tongue and trout lilies made the path like the prettiest necklace. Red birds and robins sang from branches next to their nests. New life looked to be everywhere but in my belly.

  The dog didn’t bark this time, just sat on its haunches like it remembered me, then sauntered into the woods. Smoke curled out of the chimney but when I knocked on the door there wasn’t no answer. I sat down on the porch and waited, smelling the primroses that bloomed next to the steps.

  Widow Glendower finally came back, toting a poke bulged out with what I figured to be roots. When I stood up her eyes fell full on my belly. She stepped closer and rubbed the flat of her hand where her eyes had been looking.

  ‘So it didn’t take,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice that made me wonder if she ever thought it would. She shuffled past me with the poke still in her hand.

  ‘Come in the house,’ she said, so I followed her. She laid the poke beside the ash wood chest and told me to have a sit in the same split-cane chair I had last time. Widow Glendower took the copper kettle from the hearth and went into the back room. She came back directly with the same tin cups as last time.