Jolene

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Stuff what the rich folks order from Sears Roebuck,” he replied promptly. “And stuff fer the gen’ral store. Sometimes stuff fer the Company store. Mail. All manner’o this an’ that, ’cause there ain’t no railhead. It’s ’nuff thet I gits trips ever’ three days or so. An’ iffen I ain’t haulin’ t’ Soddy, I’m doin’ bits’a haulin’ ’round Cleveland, where I live. Thet’s where we’re a-goin’.”

  “I thunk Aunt Jinny lived in Ducktown—” she said dubiously.

  “She do, but I’m on’y takin’ y’all as far as Cleveland. They’s wagoners yore aunt knows good thet haul copper ingots from the Burra Burra mine in Ducktown to Cleveland regular, an’ one of ’em’s gonna take y’all to Miz Jinny.”

  Another stranger! She grew a little anxious at that, but reminded herself that her aunt had a fearsome reputation, and was apparently a very good judge of character. Jeb had been wonderfully kind.

  “Happens I know th’ feller m’self,” Jeb continued, as if sensing her apprehension. “He’s a good, Godly man, is Caleb Strong. Won’t carry a whip, much less use one on ’is mules. They say y’all could ask him to carry a leddy stark naked with a pot of gold from Ducktown t’Cleveland an’ when he got t’Cleveland, wouldn’t be a coin missin’ or a flyspeck on th’ gal. An’ I b’lieve ’em.”

  Well, if Jeb vouched for the man, that made her feel much easier.

  The thick woods hid all sorts of things . . . and before long, she began to wonder if she hadn’t been too quick in dismissing the incident with the firewood and all the shining eyes in the darkness.

  Because she started getting glimpses of things out of the corner of her eye that were definitely not songbirds and rabbits. She thought she saw faces peering at her from the trees above, or the bushes and weeds below. But she couldn’t be sure, because when she turned her head to look, whatever she had thought she had seen wasn’t there anymore; it had whisked away out of sight, leaving behind only a little bit of movement in the leaves or grass to show where it had been. If it had been there at all.

  But Jeb didn’t seem to notice anything, and he was quick enough to point out a doe with a fawn at the edge of a meadow, a gray fox whisking out of sight, and a badger peering at them suspiciously from under a bush.

  But mebbe he’s seein’ ’em too, but he don’t want ter scare me. He knew she was a town girl, after all.

  And last night, absolutely nothing had happened to her, despite all those eyes staring at her.

  Pastor allus says iffen y’all is Godly, ain’t nothin’ kin happen to you from hants an’ spirits an’ suchlike. And Aunt Jinny lived in woods like these, and she never came to no harm.

  “Mistuh Jeb? Where y’all live in Cleveland? What kinda town is it? Is it like Soddy?” she asked, as she thought she spied something not unlike a doll made out of sticks with an acorn cap on its head, whisking under the bushes.

  He guffawed. “Bless yore heart, no! It’s away bigger! Even Daisy’s bigger nor Soddy!” He proceeded to regale her with a description of something she could scarcely wrap her mind around—a town where the main streets were all paved, and there were so many buildings that were two and even three stories tall that there were “too many to count.” What he described sounded like a traveler’s tale. Houses with water that came from pipes inside, not pumped, hauled up from a well, or carried from a crick—and lit at night by gas that was brighter than dozens of candles. Privies inside the houses, with all the waste being magically carried away somewhere. Not just one store, or two, but dozens, an “opera house” and a “trolly” (whatever those were). And factories! She suspected Ma would have been a lot happier if Pa had gotten a job in one instead of in the mine. And a railway station! And he said there were almost two thousand people living there! The very idea made her head spin.

  “But I ain’t livin’ in Cleveland,” he added, with a laugh. “An’ the fancified stuff’s fer the well-off. So don’t ’spect no inside privies, nor gas-lights, and jest a pump at the kitchen sink.”

  Quite frankly, a pump of your very own at the sink sounded like unimaginable luxury to her.

  “It useta be a farmhouse, but the city growed up to it an’ the fields got sold off, so it’s got the barn fer Daisy, an’ we got a garden an’ a pig an’ some chickens, but not much else,” he continued. Which sounded like heaven to her.

  The woods abruptly changed to farms again, and she stopped seeing things out of the corner of her eye. And oddly, rather than feeling comforted, she felt a little disappointed. The things weren’t offering her any harm, and she really wished she had been able to get real glimpses of them so she could have made up her mind if there actually were things there, or it was just her overactive imagination.

  Not so much in the way of hills on this side of Soddy Crick, so it was easy to see Cleveland long before they got near it. She gaped at the spires of what must be churches by the crosses on top, the tall chimneys and buildings that were, as he had promised, two and even three stories tall!

  But the nearer they got, the more she began to feel that all-too-familiar weakness. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been back home, but—did this mean that her sudden improvement had only been temporary? If she couldn’t get well, completely well, Ma would never let her come home to be a burden again. The thought cast a bit of a gray pall over the otherwise beautiful, sun-filled morning.

  But her growing weakness didn’t seem to have the old symptom of nausea attached, at least.

  They didn’t actually go into the part of town where the streets had been paved with bricks, although in the distance she could see the place where dirt gave way to brick, and marveled all over again. If you never left that part of town, think how easy it would be to keep the hem of your dress clean! No dragging it in the dirt and mud, no laborious scrubbing away at it with a brush and bucket of water before you went to bed!

  Jeb’s house was at least three rooms bigger than Pa’s, maybe more. And the barn was near as nice as the house, all neatened and painted up with red lead paint. He didn’t even have to guide Daisy; she knew her way and knew a rest in a stall with hay and water was waiting for her. She picked up her pace right smart, her ears up, her head bobbing. Jeb’s kids must have been watching for him, because the wagon got swarmed by them before Daisy even came to a halt. Jeb laughed, and shouted out orders. Somehow the mule got led into the barn, unharnessed, and put in her stall before either of them were ready to climb out of the wagon.

  Jeb lifted her down, got her bundle from the back, and handed it to her. By this time the swarm of kids resolved itself into a mere three: a boy her age or a little older, a girl about ten, and a boy about six. The boys didn’t interest her much, but the little girl’s neat white pinafore over a gingham dress that clearly was not sewn from flour sacks inspired her with a surge of envy. Ma had never had a dress that wasn’t made from flour sacks, at least not in Anna’s memory. And Anna had never had a dress that hadn’t been cut down from one of Ma’s that couldn’t be patched together no more.

  “This’s Anna,” Jeb said to his kids, with a stern look. “She’s Miz Jinny’s kin. Anna, this’s Hal, Sue, an’ Bobby.”

  “The witch?” the older boy blurted, his eyes gone big and round. “She’s kin t’the witch of Lonesome Holler?”

  “We don’ call her a witch, boy,” Jeb corrected. “She’s a Root Woman. An iffen it weren’t fer her potions, you’d likely be under sod right now.” He glared at the boy, who dropped his eyes to his bare toes and scuffed them in the straw on the barn floor.

  “Is she a-stayin’?” asked the girl, eyeing Anna with interest.

  “On’y overnight. Then she goes to Miz Jinny, her aunt. She’s stayin’ in the barn, an’ you are a-gonna go to bed at bedtime and no sneakin’ out an’ larkin’ about in the hay.” The oldest boy came in for a glare that made him and Anna blush, likely because they both knew that “larkin’ about” did not mean games and giggles as th
e younger children thought. I’d never! Anna thought indignantly—but then, from the fact that Jeb had glared at his son and his son only, there might be a bit of history there she was better off not knowing.

  “Now come on in, Anna, and we’ll all have lunch,” Jeb continued, in a much less stern tone. “Y’all can meet my wife, an’ give her a hand with the washin’-up.”

  Well it was clear she was not going to be set in the corner as a guest. Not that she had expected to do anything but earn her keep. At least she was still feeling good enough she could.

  She was more than a bit apprehensive about Missus Sawyer, having spent the night unchaperoned in the presence of her husband and all, but she need not have been. Missus Sawyer, a round dumpling of a woman with a merry face and brown braids wound around and around her head, was waiting at the back door. “You mus’ be Anna!” she said, with welcome and enthusiasm. “I hope my Jeb didn’ wear yore ear out with his jawin’!” Before Anna could answer, she had taken Anna’s shoulders in her hands and held her out at arm’s length, examining her closely. “Lawsy, you’re hardly bigger nor a ladybug! Y’all better come on in an’ set right down t’ some vittles afore the wind blows y’all away! Come wash up, an’ we’ll et.” And she didn’t give Anna any choice about it; she hustled Anna into the house with a shooing motion, as if she were chasing hens, crowded her in with the rest to wash her hands and face at the pump, and pulled out a ladder-back chair for her at the gingham oilcloth–covered table.

  The kitchen was a bit warm, given that the iron stove was right there, but Anna didn’t mind. Compared to the kitchen part of the Jones house it was downright opulent. A nice bucket of coal and stack of firewood beside the stove, a sink with a pump under the window, a counter purpose-built next to it for working on, three pantry cupboards and a dresser with china displayed on it, a rag rug under the round table and six matching chairs, and food stored literally everywhere, including sausages and hams hanging from the rafters.

  “We et th’ big meals at breakfus’ an’ dinner,” Missus Sawyer said, as the rest took their places around the table. “Supper’s naught but some soup an’ bread. So mind y’all et hearty now.”

  Anna was doing her very best not to look shocked at the sheer amount of food on the table, but it was very difficult not to gape. Hot biscuits with butter and jelly in little bowls. A bowl of pickles. A dutch oven full of stew, and not just the thin, soup-like stuff her Ma made, but with a thick, brown gravy. Fried squash—a heaping platter of it. Roasting ears. And pie! A glorious pie with dark juice bubbled up through the slits in the crust!

  She wondered how much she would be allowed to take. Better be cautious. Just a little of each . . . .

  But Missus Sawyer forestalled her by taking her plate, heaping it with stew and squash, adding a roasting ear, and topping it with two biscuits before setting it back down in front of her. “Now y’all et all that,” she cautioned. “There’s no wastin’ in this house.”

  She waited, of course, until the whole family clasped hands and bowed heads; she did the same, and Missus Sawyer said a much, much longer prayer than her husband did, slipping in a few admonitions to her offspring along the way and adding gratitude that her husband was home safe, and a little coda at the end well-wishing Anna on her journey that made Anna blush. Then they could eat.

  The stew was rabbit—she would have recognized the bones, but Hal piped up when his father asked what was in the stew. “I got me two rabbits in the garden, Pa!” he said proudly. “Jest like y’all showed me t’do.”

  “Wall! Thet’s fine!” Jeb said with enthusiasm. “That’ll larn ’em! Et our garden, get et yore own self!” He laughed heartily over that, and Hal beamed proudly.

  It occurred to Anna halfway through this meal that she had eaten more food in the last two days than she normally did in a week—and better food than she had seen since the children’s Christmas Party at the Methodist Chapel. The jelly, deep red and shining in its bowl, was exceedingly tempting, but she wanted to have some of that pie—so she ate carefully, using the tender, flaky biscuits to sop up the gravy from the stew so Missus Sawyer wouldn’t think she was wasting anything. Biscuits didn’t happen very often in the Jones house, because they required lard and baking powder as well as flour and salt, and bread only required the starter, flour, and salt.

  “Ev’body got room for pie?” Missus Sawyer asked rhetorically, when the plates were all clean (and Hal and Jeb had had second helpings of everything). Without waiting for an answer, she cut the pie and began serving pieces around the table.

  By this point, Anna was nearly in a trance of pleasure. The food had gone a long way toward mitigating the slightly sick feeling she’d had when they neared Cleveland. But oh! That pie! It was blackberry, and while the fresh blackberries she and Jeb had picked and shared had been delicious, the pie was just so much more!

  “Lemme he’p y’all with the dishes,” she said as soon as she had finished, licking the last of the sweet berry-juice she had scraped up off her plate from her fork. If she’d been alone, she would have licked that plate clean—but, no. Manners.

  “Lawsy, no, I got a better chore for y’all,” Missus Sawyer corrected. “Them blackberries ain’t a-goin’ ter last ferever. I want all four of y’all t’fill me them baskets by th’ door.” She pointed with her chin at a pile of empty baskets. “The more blackberries I gets, the more jelly I kin put up.”

  She hadn’t even gotten all of the words out of her mouth before her own children were scrambling for the baskets and out the door. Anna got the last basket, the largest of all, and went hurtling after them, afraid they had forgotten that she was a stranger to these parts and didn’t know where the blackberries were.

  She was right; she had to run to catch up with them, and that persistent weakness did not make it easy. She was panting and had a stitch in her side by the time she did.

  But it was worth it; they led her down little lanes between fields of tobacco until they came to a stretch that was entirely hedged in blackberry bushes. There were several other children out here already, but the fruit was so thick that it hadn’t been picked over. Anna gratefully settled herself down in the weeds and set to picking in earnest.

  When she glanced over at the other children, it appeared that for most of them, far more fruit was going into mouths than into baskets. How the Sawyers could manage that, after that enormous dinner, she had no idea. It was very like a magic trick.

  As for her—this was easy work, sitting in the shade of the hedge and moving over little by little as she cleared each section of hedge of its ripe berries. Eventually Hal sauntered over to her, swinging his half-empty basket, and looked down at her full one, an expression of admiration on his face. “Say, Anna Jones,” he declared. “Y’all are the best picker I done ever seed! I’ll jest take thet basket fer y’all, ’cause I knowed it’s gosh-darned heavy, an’ leave this ’un—”

  “Y’all kin leave yore basket, Hal Sawyer,” she retorted. “But y’all’re leavin’ mine too! I didn’ pick them berries so’s y’all could et half!”

  He flushed, caught.

  “Y’all go he’p Sue,” she continued. “Mebbe ’tween y’all, thet basket’ll git fillt.”

  Shamefaced, he went away with his proverbial tail between his legs to help his little sister—and cram berries into his mouth.

  By the time she had filled his basket as well as her own, the sun was westering and the Sawyers were ready to trudge back. That basket she had filled was mortal heavy—and bigger than Hal’s—so she let him take it for her on the solemn pledge that he wouldn’t eat any berries out of it on the way home. It was probably an easy promise for him to make, seeing how many he’d already eaten.

  Missus Sawyer greeted them and their bounty with pleasure and enthusiasm, stowed the baskets under the sink, and directed them to wash their hands again. Then it was grace around the table, and cold bread, butter and jelly, and t
he remains of the stew, thinned down, bones strained out, to make a fine soup. Nothing like the thin cabbage-and-onion soups Ma made, that gave you wind without satisfying your hunger.

  But then, it was very clear that though Jeb Sawyer and his family were quite modest about it, they were a lot richer than the Jones family was, and Missus Sawyer had pretty well cottoned to that fact. Anna tried to be cheerful about that, but it seemed to her that Missus Sawyer regarded her with pity. And pity is not a comfortable thing to endure when it’s directed at you. After dinner, she helped with the dishes, then joined the others on the front porch where Missus Sawyer read to them—not from the Bible, as Anna would have expected, but from a book of very strange stories indeed. German Popular Tales and Household Stories, it said on the worn cover of the book. Hal obviously considered himself too old for this stuff, and made a great show of carving something with a penknife he was clearly very proud of, but Anna could tell he was listening anyway. The stories were fascinating—and horrifying. Girls drowned by their jealous sisters, their bodies dismembered and turned into harps—a brother and sister from a family as poor as her own, sent off into the wilderness by their mother for spilling the milk that was to be their supper and taken prisoner by a child-eating witch—a naughty little girl who stumbled upon a house owned by three bears—though the fact that the bears had a house and furnishings did make it clear that this tale, at least, was completely made up.

  The others were obviously familiar with these tales and the youngest two clamored for this or that favorite. Anna was torn between enchantment at the ones that were obviously imaginary and terror at the ones that actually could have happened. And she wasn’t entirely certain she was going to sleep without nightmares tonight.

  As the sun touched the western horizon, the sound of crickets filled the air, and lightning bugs began to appear in the bushes, Missus Sawyer closed the book with a decided snap. “Time fer bed,” she said. “Thet means all y’all. Yore Pa has ta be up in mornin’ early t’ look fer work, an’ we decided y’all’s old enough to he’p him now, Hal, so bed fer y’all.”