Christy

by Catherine Marshall

A square of white cambric, cut in a curious design as if with a first-­grader’s scissors, was now laid over Tom’s face for the trip to the cemetery. Then the lid of the coffin was nailed on lightly. Usually the coffins were pulled on a sled or slung onto poles carried over the shoulders of several men, but we had loaned the new harvester wagon for today. All of us walked behind the wagon in a solemn procession.

  How fervently I wished that I did not have to witness the interment. But there was no way to escape it. If I slipped out of the procession, I would be certain to be missed.

  Finally we came in sight of the cemetery. None of the graves had headstones back in the Cove, for there was not the money here for that. There were only piles of stones at the head of the graves, sometimes with a tin can holding wildflowers stuck in the rocks. There were so many tiny graves of babies and young children. And the hole, the hideous hole with its freshly turned earth. Mountain superstition said that all graves had to be dug due east and west, with the face of the dead to the east. I did not know why, unless it was some sort of symbolism that the dead should face the rising of the sun.

  The coffin was carefully lifted off the wagon and set by the grave. Then came a sound that I shall remember as long as I live—the screeching of the long nails as they were drawn out of the poplar wood.

  The lid was lifted off, the cambric square removed so that the family could have a last look at Tom’s face. One of his hands had slipped during the trip to the cemetery and had to be placed back on his chest. To me, the most awful custom of all was that each member of the family, even every child, was supposed to come forward in turn and kiss the lips of the dead person. Toot had to be lifted up to reach his father’s face, I could not look at that, so I turned the other way and concentrated on the top of a magnificent hemlock on the hill opposite.

  Suddenly, behind me, someone started a dirge in a loud wailing voice. Soft moans began. Soon they became screams. A cousin of Opal’s keeled over in a faint, then another woman, one whom I did not know. What ­puzzled me about this performance was that the emotion could not be make-­believe. I marveled that these highlanders, so reticent on other occasions, could exhibit so much emotion now.

  Opal threw herself on the coffin. “Tom, Tom, darlin’. I can’t let them put you in that ground. Tom—Tom, speak to me—Tom, I can’t let you go. Tom, this can’t be all!”

  David stepped forward to pull Opal off and to support her. Speaking so loudly that he was shouting, he tried to drown out the dirge,

  “I am the Resurrection and the Life.

  He that believeth in Me, though he were dead yet shall he live . . .

  In My Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you. If it were not so, I would have told you . . .”

  The dirge and the shouting were now a rising crescendo so that we could scarcely hear David’s voice, though it had such resonance that usually it carried above any sound.

  David signaled with his free hand. There was the sound of the coffin lid being nailed on, securely this time, then a soft thud as a group of men gently lowered it into the earth. Then the clods of earth falling, falling. Opal turned the other way, sobbing. She would not look. Another brief prayer—and then it was over.

  In my heart I knew that I should go back to the McHone cabin and share Toot’s corn-shuck bed for one more night. It was this night when Opal was going to need me most. But I was a coward. Still sounding in my ears was the screech of those nails being drawn out of the poplar wood. I slipped away, fled back to my room at the mission house.

  Tom’s murder cast gloom over the Cove. Immediately, incendiary feelings quieted down and there was a lull in all blockading. Perhaps Miss Alice’s words at the funeral had had some effect; perhaps the highlanders were frightened at the results of their own passions.

  Bird’s-Eye and Nathan were still at large and had not, so far as we knew, returned to their homes. Lundy had crept back to school but would not speak of his father. Day by day, the boy looked more and more unkempt and wild-eyed.

  Uncle Bogg McHone and David were both plunged into a deep trough of discouragement—oddly, more than Opal. She was still riding the crest of a wave of combined numbness and victory that I confess I did not understand at all. But for Uncle Bogg there was no victory. In his peculiar way, he had loved Tom above all his family. Now the old man would have to care for his ailing daughter-in-law and be responsible for Tom’s children. With the killings striking into his immediate family for the first time, suddenly the county squire was seeing them in a new light. This might be one good result from Tom’s death: The shoe was on the squire’s foot now and the shoe pinched; the toothache was in the squire’s mouth and he did not find the pain to his liking.

  David’s discouragement was of a different order. There was a sense in which he felt responsible for Tom’s death. Perhaps, he lashed himself, if he had not pressed so relentlessly against the moonshining, Tom might still be alive.

  Miss Alice was so concerned about David that she postponed her regular monthly trip to Cataleechie to stay close at hand. I watched her use conversations at mealtimes and every opening she saw to try to get through to David. “You know, David, we’re out to win people, not war with them.”

  A favorite Quaker word often on her lips was “reconciliation”—reconciliation between man and God, between man and man. Her view was that we at the mission had laid on us an infinitely larger task than finding and hacking up stills: that was, creating an atmosphere in which men’s hearts could be changed so that they would want a better way of life than “followin’ stillin’ ” represented. “Clean up a pigsty,” she commented one evening, “and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again. Preach the gospel, David, teach it, preach to the hearts of men. That’s your business. Then the fruits, including the reforms in other areas, will follow as fruits. But it’s no good tying apples onto a tree. Soon they’ll be rotting apples.”

  David did not agree with this. “You weren’t at the Holt Working to hear, Miss Alice, but that’s exactly what Bird’s-Eye hurled at me: ‘Preacher, keep your religion inside a cupboard in the church house. Don’t you dare take it beyond the church door.’ You say, ‘Preach and teach.’ Sure. Fine. I have been. I intend to. But what’s wrong with preaching the gospel and cleaning up the pigsty at the same time? Why should I put on blinkers to walk by the pigsty? Besides, I don’t agree that if I preach and do nothing else, men’s hearts are automatically going to be changed and then they’re automatically going to want to do the right thing. No, ma’am! Not by a long shot!”

  Miss Alice smiled at his vehemence, then patiently, quietly reasoned out her concept from yet another angle. “David, I hate blockade-running and murders as much as you do. It hurts to think that because back in February, Tom McHone decided to try blockading for some quick cash, Opal will never again hear his footfall crossing the yard or mounting the steps. And the McHone children—how could either of us ever forget their stricken faces? So, David, your aim and mine are the same. The only question is, what’s the surest and quickest way of arriving at that same end?”

  “But Miss Alice,” David countered, “isn’t this ‘religion-in-the-cupboard philosophy’ the very reason that good church members could carry on the slave trade, operate sweat shops and underwrite child labor, reap a golden harvest from shameful slum dwellings they own themselves? They shut their eyes to the evils around them. You’re virtually asking me to shut my eyes to the blockading. The ministry has had enough of winking and blinking. So help me, I will not be a part of it!”

  “The question at issue, David, is how to get rid of the evil in men. Attacking corruption in the environment won’t do it. That’s like cutting weeds in a field. In a fortnight the weeds will be grown again. And attacking the men themselves won’t work either. Whatever separates men from love can’t be of God.”

  Though David was stubborn, at last humbly, he asked the question Miss Alice must have been w
anting him to ask, “Well then, how can we deal with evil?”

  “By demonstrating to people a way that’s more powerful than evil. And that’s good news! Let’s get on with living and teaching and preaching that good news with all the verve and enthusiasm we have.”

  “Then,” David said, “if that’s the technique, why aren’t people changed more drastically by today’s preaching?”

  “Could be because we don’t often have the courage to give the good news to people straight. Most of us are still talking religious theory that we haven’t begun living, and talking in wornout clichés at that. A watered-down message is as futile as applying rose water to a cancer. When your heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people—especially the rip-snorting sinners—so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results. One of two things will happen. Either there’ll be persecutions, or the fire will leap from your heart to catch and blaze in the depths of other men’s beings. I’ve watched the process over and over. And then when the blaze starts, the reforms will follow as surely as the flower follows the bud, or the fruit comes after the blossom on the tree.”

  “It’s too slow a way.”

  “No, David, it isn’t too slow a way. The other is no way at all.”

  Actually, though David was not ready to admit it to Miss Alice, her thoughts had made an impression on him. He and I talked about the two ideas that were eating at us both: “Love God, love people! If the love of Jesus is ablaze in your heart, if you love even the old reprobate sinners enough . . .” David and I agreed that we did not yet have that kind of love. Nor could we manufacture love in ourselves.

  The second enigma followed the first. David suspected that he did not yet know how to preach or what to preach so that people’s hearts would be ignited and changed. I wondered how many preachers did know? And in that case, what could they do except fall back on building programs, creating more church organizations, appointing more committees, calling more meetings, plunging into (what was that new term?) “social service work”—all of the busy-busy church activities for which Miss Alice had a delightful tag: “digging worms instead of fishing.”

  Two nights after that David asked me, “Anywhere you and I could talk?”

  “If you mean without an audience,” I answered, “outdoors is the only place I can think of.”

  Outside it was foggy with not many stars to be seen. Even the mountains were blotted out by the swirling mists. David began abruptly. “Christy, I’ve been thinking—you know, I’m not a bit sure that I belong in the ministry.”

  “David! How can you say that! You’re just discouraged, that’s all.”

  “No, this isn’t just a mood, Christy. Remember you asked me why I came to Cutter Gap? Well, that started me thinking. Why am I in the ministry at all?”

  “David, you’ve been through so much lately. This just isn’t the right time to think of things like that. It’s bound to be colored by all that’s happened.”

  “No, that isn’t it. You see, entering seminary wasn’t entirely my choice. It was too much my mother’s and sisters’ decision. Mother’s always been determined that one of her three sons would be a preacher. My two older brothers went into business. That left me. So from the time I was a little boy, it was assumed that I would be a preacher. I let myself be stampeded, that’s all. That’s not a good enough reason.”

  Somehow I was not too surprised at this news that his mother and sisters had pressured his choices, but I could not say that. “Well, no, of course it isn’t a good enough reason.” I was groping my way. “But David, sometimes—just occasionally—a mother’s choice might be the one a son would make if left to himself.”

  “Maybe. One chance in a million. So you’re on their side too.”

  “Of course not! I’m not taking anybody’s side.”

  David had been holding the fingers of my right hand as we walked along. He said nothing for a moment, only his fingers tightened on my hand. “But I do want you to take somebody’s side—mine,” he said.

  “But David, you yourself don’t know which side you’re on. You’ve just said so. So all I can do is try to help you find answers—and wait.”

  “It’s come to me recently, Christy, how much I need you. I’m going to need you always. Do you know that? In the ministry, out of the ministry, no matter what I’ll be doing, I’ll need you. I’m asking you to marry me, Christy. And this isn’t any sudden impulse idea either.”

  I stood in the road staring at him, not knowing what to say, too astonished to say anything.

  In the silence, he leaned over and kissed me lightly, gently. But then he pulled me to him and kissed me harder full on the mouth.

  “It’s all right, Christy. Speech isn’t necessary between you and me. Anyway, I don’t want you to give me an answer tonight because it might be ‘No.’ ”

  I was awake into the small hours of the morning, excited and yet puzzled about David’s proposal. How often I had dreamed of that tender moment in my future! In my mind it had always been in a romantic setting like a rose garden or a summerhouse, and I would be dressed in white, perhaps with a flower in my hair. And the man would be dashing and so tender, and he would speak beautiful words. There would be nothing prosaic about his proposal. What was it Miss Alice had said to me the other day? “Christy, thee is inclined to think of the poetry side of things, not the prose side.” Lying there, remembering my daydream pictures, I smiled to think how well Miss Alice understood me.

  David’s proposal had been so different from the imagined one. As we had walked back to the mission house, I had expected him to kiss me good-night, but he had not. He had only given me an intense look followed by the usual, “Have a good sleep, Christy.” Then from the other side of the screen door I had stood in the darkened hall watching his broad back disappear over the hill in the swirling mist. What was there in this man that I could not yet understand?

  There was something tentative and indefinite in his approach to life. He had asked me to marry him and yet, it had been a strange half-commitment of himself. It reminded me of David’s attitude about the moonshining. He had preached that thundering sermon against it, yet there had been a certain lack of follow-through in actions.

  Yet David was seven years older than I, old enough to begin to know what he wanted out of life. But he did not seem to know. He had come to the Cove at the suggestion of his seminary. Tonight he had told me that he had entered the ministry because his mother and sisters had expected it. So naturally, he was puzzled about where he belonged. Was that the reason he could not commit himself fully to anything?

  “Christy, be on my side,” he had said. But he had no side—yet. Perhaps part of the feeling of destiny that had driven me to the Cove was not only for myself but to help David too. Was my future bound up with David’s? That was what I had to find out.

  Though Fairlight Spencer’s formal reading lessons were finished, I was still seeing her once or twice a week. Miss Alice encouraged this, though she and I both guessed that some of the women in the Cove might be jealous of my singling out Fairlight.

  At first Fairlight had difficulty believing that I enjoyed her for herself and not because I thought it my duty to help her or from some other motive.

  She admired me extravagantly, beyond any deserving. And if I—the girl from “yan”—cared about her enough to single her out to spend long hours with her, well then, perhaps that secret person on the inside, who from shyness and deprivation had kept herself so covertly hidden all these years, was a woman worth knowing. This gave Fairlight the courage gradually to let her true self out of prison.

  Having tasted freedom, she was certain that the world of knowledge and beauty was hers for the taking. And because she gave me full credit for laying the world at her feet, she could not find enough ways to express her gratitude. Sometimes it would be a bunch of wild flowers on my desk at school. A homemade basket lined with galax leaves and filled with wild
berries or fresh eggs might be left at the mission door for me. On occasion it would be a jar of wild blackberry jelly or a honeycomb or a poem she had laboriously copied out. Once I unfolded a scrap of paper to find written on it:

  I love you for what you are making of me.

  I love you for what I am when I am with you.

  On another day she left me a tiny basket lined with moss containing portions of three robin’s egg shells. I got the message: Fairlight wanted me to share her enjoyment of that delicate robin’s-egg blue color against the green.

  Now she was able to identify with her children in their schoolwork. She cajoled Zady or Clara or John into reading their lessons aloud while she was cooking or sewing or sweeping the floor. Though the children teased her about this and sometimes mildly protested, they humored her because, secretly, they were proud that their mother had learned so quickly.

  Since school would soon be dismissed for the long summer-autumn holiday, I was tapering off lesson assignments. This gave more time for Fairlight and me to take a few hours off to explore the woods and mountains. She did not hesitate to leave her children during daylight hours. They were surprisingly self-sufficient, accustomed to roaming and playing by themselves, and the older girls could be trusted to take care of the “Least’un.”

  Fairlight would cut three fresh whistles from the willow trees along the creek, leave one with Lulu, the eight-year-old, one with the youngest, and one with whichever older child had been elected “keeper” for the day. “Here y’are, Clara. One for you, Lulu—stop your bawlin’. I’m afixin’ one for you too.”

  At that point Lulu would already have the whistle to her mouth, tooting shrilly. “Purtiest whistle you ever made, Maw.”

  “Mainly so. Now Clara, when you cain’t spy Lulu or the Least’un, I’m countin’ on you to blow the whistle hard and go after ’em in a hip and a hurry. Hear me?”

  “Yes. Shorely, Maw. Where ye started, Maw? You goin’ fishin’ today?”