by Pamela Morsi
The women’s quartet from the church, accompanied by Bullfrog Gluck on his fiddle, sang the hymn that Aunt Will had selected. Piney thought it might have been meant as a message for the pastor as the ladies soulfully sang, “I Shall Not Be Moved.”
Brother Chet obviously did not take the hint. When it came time for him to pray, the pastor pleaded with God for several moments to forgive Aunt Will for her stubbornness, selfishness and any crimes still unknown.
Piney was about to step up to the porch and sock the preacher in the nose when the big judge took a step forward and proclaimed a loud, “Amen! And thank you, Brother Chet.”
The crowd repeated the prayer ending, forcing the pastor to relinquish the floor.
“Aunt Will gave me no eulogy to read,” Judge Gluck began. “I believe she thought most of us know the accomplishments of her life and what they mean to us each in particular. But she has written out a statement that she calls the facts that she wanted you to hear.”
He let his gaze roam across the crowd, which Piney guessed totaled easily three hundred people.
The judge took a deep breath and began to read from the yellowing papers he held in his hand.
“I, Wilhelmina Weston, Willie to my friends, Aunt Will to my family, was born on this mountain on April 29, 1926, the oldest child of Paisley and Edith Farley Winsloe. I passed the sixth grade form in 1938 and took to wildcrafting shortly thereafter. I was wed for the first time in 1953 to Ichabod Trace and widowed by him in 1954. I married Arie Weston in 1964 and lived a happy life with him until his death October 12, 1975. Except for my work on this mountain, the rest of my life has been a secret.”
Judge Gluck paused, took a deep breath and shuffled to the next page.
“This serves as my dying declaration and my will for all purposes personal and legal. And I personally choose to have it read in public so there will be no need for gossip and no chance of question.”
The judge’s expression was firm.
“One. To the ex-wife of my grandnephew, Marcy Broody and her heirs, I leave the property known as Best Farm and the forty-six acres of land it sits upon. The rents she has paid on the place have been saved in an account at State Bank and will be returned to her by the executor of my will at earliest convenience.”
Marcy’s sharp intake of breath was accompanied by a stunned look.
“Two. I return to the Trace heirs, including the lineage of my first husband’s first and second wives, the total of all the property that I inherited upon his death. That property, some three hundred acres of forested highlands, are currently leased to the State of Arkansas as wilderness wildlife park. I make no apology for taking this land when I did or keeping it for my lifetime support. And I bear no regret in returning it to the heirs now. The stepchildren may have struck my name from the church roll, but they cannot deny me the home prepared for me in heaven.”
That statement started a rapidly increasing volume of murmurs in the crowd. So much so that the judge hushed them.
“May we have quiet, please!” he shouted.
The gathering behaved so thoroughly that Piney thought he might have been able to hear a pin drop.
“Finally.” The judge began again. “Three. All the rest of my estate and possessions, including land, money, livestock, contractual incomes and debts receivable, I leave to my only living blood descendant, my granddaughter, Jesse Marie Winsloe, the surviving offspring of McNees P. Winsloe, my natural child, born to me in this cabin on August 9, 1945, the physical manifestation of my abiding spiritual link with Granby Cyrus McNees, late of the mountain.”
Piney turned his glance to Jesse. Her mouth opened in shock, her skin pale, she held tightly to her mother’s hand and stared out into nothingness with disbelief.
44
The high school basketball team served as pallbearers, two leading the mule that pulled the skid and the others escorting the homemade coffin up, down and around the trails to the cemetery where it was to be buried.
Jesse had fully intended to follow along in the crowd with all of Aunt Will’s extended family. But she found herself urged alone into the lead, the position of the next of kin.
“Did you know?” she’d asked her mother.
Patsy had shaken her head. “Your father told me he was illegitimate and that mountain mores kept his mother from laying claim to him. I never suspected Aunt Will. She never seemed the type to be an unwed mother.”
Never suspected. Those words reverberated in Jesse’s head. How could she, herself, have never suspected? How could she have not known when every day, every gesture toward her, every moment together was more than the connection of some ragtag relation. From childhood the two people were linked in her mind. And when her father died, she had known instinctively that Aunt Will was her connection to him.
She wasn’t Aunt Will. Jesse tried to correct the kinship. She was Grandma Will. That term felt foreign and unfitting to the relationship they had. She wondered if her father had ever called her Mother, Ma, Mom, Mama? Maybe in private he might have, but to the world, all the world, it was Aunt Will. And that was the name that Jesse would use, as well.
The little cemetery was no manicured garden. The side of the hill was pocked with gravestones of all shapes, sizes and ages, tilting this way and that on the uneven ground.
The grave had been dug on the site that Aunt Will had selected. Jesse gazed into the open hole like a yawning cavern into eternity. Beside it the pile of excavated dirt was covered discreetly by an expanse of green cloth. But everyone knew that it was there. And that it would be used to permanently separate the living from the dead.
The teenage boys, many of them had perhaps never been to a funeral before, utilized ropes with steady hands and solemn expressions to lower the remains into the place provided.
As the crowd gathered around, Jesse realized that most of the people who’d been at the house had walked the long trail to the graveside. It took a long time for everyone to arrive at the place. Jesse glanced across the distance to see Piney. He was looking straight at her, wordlessly saying that he loved her, that he was with her and that it would all be fine.
Finally, Judge Gluck spoke. “Aunt Will has asked for a couple of Bible verses to be read by Brother Chet.”
The pastor, noticeably subdued, stepped to the head of the open grave.
“‘Ecclesiastes 8: 5-6. Those who are wise will find a time and a way to do what is right. Yes, there is a time and a way for everything, even as people’s troubles lie heavily upon them.’” Brother Chet paused a moment before flipping toward the back of his Bible to read the second passage marked. “‘John 13:34. So now I am giving you a new commandment. Love each other. Just as I have loved you, love each other.’”
“Amen!” Judge Gluck said and looked over to Jesse. “That’s all Aunt Will wanted. From here it’s up to you.”
Jesse nodded. She stared for a long moment into the grave before tossing in a clutch of store-bought blossoms that someone had handed her. She gathered up a handful of dirt and tossed it down, as well. Then she stepped back to let the other friends and family file by.
Viola Ramsgate squeezed her in a buxom bear hug and declared her “sure the bravest little thing, just like your grandmama.” Walter Lou encouraged her to have a decent cry and “let the devil take the hindpost.” Armon and Ava were there with the kids. Mary Lynn came with her sister, Bethany. Shorty and Lisa. Cathy and Tom. Bryan and Cherry. The prayer partners. The team parents. The teenagers.
One after another the people of the community, the people who had known Aunt Will, who had known Jesse’s dad, greeted her, hugged her, consoled her. Some were grizzled old men, like Monroe Broody who claimed to have lived his whole life on the far side of the hill. Some were new to these parts. Doc Mo introduced her to his daughter with a mouthful of braces and his son who hadn’t been able to keep his shirt clean.
The next moments were surprisingly light, strangely happy moments as person after person came to hug her, to remind h
er how much she meant to Aunt Will, to tell her stories they remembered about her father, even to speculate on why the secret had been kept so long. Slowly, slowly they all wandered back down the trail to their cars and their homes and their lives. Jesse finally stood on the side of the hill with only a few.
Twyla Gluck was regaling her with stories of the amazing baby of Lorelei Trace and how grateful she was that Aunt Will had encouraged her to be a help to the young mother.
“Now that we know…that we know she personally understood what it was like to have a child, well it all makes sense. But I would have never thought to do it.”
“And soon you’ll have your own child to raise,” Jesse said to her.
The woman’s eyes widened. “That…that’s what Aunt Will said.”
“It’s what she knew,” Jesse told her.
Tree and the pallbearers from the basketball team were all coatless now, shoveling the dirt from the great pile into the grave.
Her brothers were playing a game of tag among the gravestones. And her parents were standing arm-in-arm a little distance away in the Winsloe section where her father was buried.
Then finally Piney was there beside her. He wrapped his arms around her and she held tight in his embrace as she breathed in the scent of him, the feel of him, the oneness of being with him.
“Come here,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”
She nodded.
He held her hand as they walked back toward the grave, the dirt rounded high upon it, like a loaf of yeast bread perfected in the warmth.
Piney stepped aside and walked to the stone next to her, now covered with the heavy green tarp that had hidden the dirt. Piney pulled it off and cast it to the ground.
“This is why she chose this spot, instead of being with the Winsloes,” he said.
Jesse read the tombstone.
Granby C. McNees, March 12, 1925–December 20, 1944. Corporal, United States Army, 28th Infantry, Co B, 110th Battalion.
And beneath it the caption, Gone to Soldier.
45
Jesse Winsloe sat on an epithermal quartz uplift known by the locals as the Marrying Stone. After five long days spent sorting out deeds, lease contracts and tax papers from the old letters, family history and recipes for putrid salve, she needed to think about something else. That something else, the one thing she could count on her whole life long to engage her brain and entertain her thoughts, was rock. She had come down to the Marrying Stone to structure the puzzle of its geology.
The people on this mountain, as well as the natives here before them, identified this place with this glittery crag of rock. It was as if the stone were the place and both had always been here. Changeless. But the thing Jesse knew about rocks was that they were not tethered to a stationary existence. Those atop the ground could be transported by water or glacier, they could be blown away, one eroded speck after another. And those below ground could be misshaped, pushed and shuttled in one direction or another.
In the unseasonable warmth of a winter afternoon Jesse sat on the quartz uplift and pondered its origins as well as her own.
Long eons ago, in the timeline of life, or a blink of an eye in the age of this planet, a cavern beneath the surface of this ground opened up. Through that yawning expanse, water began to drip. It was not the clear mountain water that poured through surrounding streams. It was the briny, mineral-laden waters of hot springs and geysers. As heat and ores collided by gravity, chemical reactions occurred. Tiny recurrent reactions day by day, drip by drip, formed the silica that was the beautiful, magical, glasslike quartz.
If the powers in the earth had been wholly stable and one day had gone on just as the next, the quartz would have remained below ground. No human would have ever seen it, so no one would ever know that it was there. No one could have ever sat upon it and pondered eternity or the magnitude of the Almighty.
But that had not been so. The crust had shifted, a crack had formed and the quartz had been thrust up through it, ever after changing the environs of this place. Whether it had happened when the land had buckled to form these mountains or shaken open the hillside by quake to allow its emergence, Jesse might never know.
Accepting the world’s realities, even when you didn’t understand them, was a basic necessity of existence in Ozark life.
And she, like the quartz upthrust, was here now, forever changed and a part of this place, these people.
For an hour or longer, Jesse gazed out though the trees over the distance. All of the tightness and strain of the last week eased out of her. She had mourned her loss. And come to grips with her new reality. She might never truly understand Aunt Will’s motivation for keeping her secrets. But she loved and respected her enough to believe that she had her reasons.
Aunt Will was not merely loving and wise, a healer in her community. She was also that young girl who hid in the cabin to protect her family and allowed others to claim her child as their own.
That was a different time, in some ways a different world. But it was this place, this place that was now Jesse’s.
This lonely desolate piece of ancient limestone pushed to great height by plate tectonics and then worn by water and wind to its current beauty had made a family claim on her and she would not revoke it.
Jesse knew with no question of doubt that she wanted to live the rest of her life here on this mountain, among these people.
She didn’t know yet what that life would bring. Maybe a husband and children. Maybe a teaching job and a down-mountain lover. Perhaps she’d spend her days solving the riddle of the Marrying Stone and her evenings on a lonely hill with a flock of chickens to call her own. But it was what she wanted now and what she was determined to get for herself. It held both the connections to her past and the direction into her future.
Lost in thought, Jesse didn’t hear Piney approach until he was just below her. The mere sight of him was so welcome.
“How’d you know I was here?” she asked.
He didn’t answer immediately, but climbed up to sit beside her atop the stone.
“How could I not know you were here?” he answered, shaking his head with a rueful grin. “Someone noticed you from the road. You know how these folks are. There’s probably been a dozen calls to the clinic switchboard. Viola spread your whereabouts to every soul on the mountain and nobody was going to give me a moment’s peace if I didn’t show up here and try my luck.”
“Try your luck at what?”
“Convincing you to stay,” he answered. “Keeping you from rushing back to flatland country and leaving me brokenhearted.”
“Would you be brokenhearted?”
“I would,” he admitted easily. “And doomed, as well. Aunt Will didn’t leave the recipe for her lovesick poultice so there is no known cure.”
“We do still have our own therapy,” Jesse pointed out.
He gave her a flirty grin. “But I think that only works when I’m with you. I can’t be dosing myself with such a powerful medicine from just any naked woman I catch in my bathtub.”
“Maybe not,” she agreed.
She looked into his eyes, sparkling with humor and yet showing such depth of sincerity.
“So, are you up here thinking about whether you should go?”
Jesse shook her head. “Not at all,” she answered. “I’ve been thinking about geology.”
“Geology?” Piney nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit myself,” he admitted.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I was told that building a lasting foundation for a relationship is like the development of sedimentary rock. Slowly, slowly, layer by layer, in time and under pressure.”
He glanced up at her to see if Jesse recognized her own words. She did.
“The concern I have about it is the time that it takes,” Piney said. “I’m not opposed to taking time. But I can’t have the silt in those layers running back to Tulsa.”
Jesse smiled at him. “Sed
imentary rock is very strong, very stable. An excellent foundation for a lifetime.”
Piney nodded. “Slowly, slowly, layer by layer,” he repeated.
His sigh was so long-suffering, it was no fun teasing him.
“Of course,” she added. “Igneous rock is just as strong, just as stable, just as certain and sure.”
He looked at her questioningly. “Igneous rock?”
Jesse nodded. “That’s the kind that unexpectedly comes pouring out as hot lava from a mountain volcano.”
“Hot lava?”
“Doc Piney, haven’t you promised to make an honest woman of me?”
His eyes widened with surprise and elation. “I did. And I will. I always keep my promises.”
“Good,” Jesse answered. “I can almost hear the wedding bells.”
Piney rose to his feet and held out his hand. “To hell with bells! That may be what they do in Oklahoma, but around here we jump the Marrying Stone.”
Grabbing her hand, Piney declared, “Come on, Jesse, let’s get married.”
* * * * *
Reader’s Guide Questions
1. Do you see the mores of bygone eras lingering in behaviors today?
2. Aunt Will wanted to die at home. Sometimes that isn’t possible. What level of heroic efforts should friends and family go through to fulfill such a request?
3. Is Piney unrealistic to expect his son not to have high school sex?
4. Early in the story, Camryn believes that a forced marriage to Tree is her best option for the future. How would you have advised her?
5. Subsistence farming tends to be idealized in books and media. What do you think life would truly be like on Aunt Will’s farm?
6. Piney had one set of sexual rules for his son and a very different set for himself. Was age a reasonable factor for the difference or was he truly the hypocrite that he called himself?
