Gap Creek

by Robert Morgan

  I wanted to reach out to him, but I knowed that wouldn’t do. I had never reached out to him before. I was sure he didn’t want me to do that. He wanted to be the one to reach out. If he was ready to love me he would reach out. There was nothing for me to do but wait for him to make up his mind. I had seen him do it so many times, just make up his mind all of a sudden that he wanted to be loving.

  I listened to the little clock ticking in the dark on the night-stand. It was the alarm clock we used to wake up at five-thirty or six. Its tick was fast as my heartbeat. Its tick made my ears itch. The tick tickled and prickled my skin.

  Hank turned over and put his hand on my hip. But what he said was not love words. He didn’t whisper that I was his honey or his sugar pudding. He didn’t whisper that he was sorry and that I was his sweetheart love. At first I didn’t even hear what he said, it was so different from what I expected, what I wanted to hear. You know how words can seem strange if they’re not what you’re waiting for.

  “I got fired today,” he said.

  He said it like he was almost too tired to say it. And he said it like he was explaining why he had got so mad about the jar of money too. I knowed that instantly. He was saying in his own way he was sorry he had hit me.

  “How come?” I said.

  “Cause all the bricks is made,” he said. “They’ve got bricks enough to build the cotton mill and they don’t need me for anything else.”

  I reached out and put a hand on his leg. I put my hand on his hip and raised my leg and put it on his. I could feel his sadness, in his words and in the loose way his body laid. He was heavy with sadness. He was slow and hot with sadness.

  I run my hand down his hip and his leg. I smoothed the hairs around his crotch and felt him get bigger. My excitement and his sadness made me bolder than I had ever been before. I stroked him until he was long and hard as iron. I heard his breath getting deeper. “You will get another job,” I said. But it seemed to me that didn’t matter. In the dark what mattered was we was together and naked. Wind shoved the side of the house, way down on Gap Creek in South Carolina. We would always find a way to live, a way to get back, as long as we could love. I was going to have a baby, and that was what mattered.

  I run my hand through the hair on Hank’s chest and pinched one of his nipples. I had not done that before. It was like everything I did was the right thing. When Hank pressed against me I felt the sparkle in my skin where he touched. The glow had centered in my belly where the baby was. It was a coal of fire. Mama had told me you shouldn’t love in the later months of a pregnancy, but it was too early to need to worry. I was free to do whatever I wanted, and what I wanted was to love Hank in our own bed in our own way. Our quarrel and the uncertainty of things made it even more important to love.

  As Hank rolled on top of me, it was like time slowed down and every second stretched out and strained to its limit. The dark got bigger, and everything in the dark got bigger. Hank’s shoulders and elbows and hands got bigger. The seconds groaned with bigness. Every inch of flesh was large and hurt, it felt so tender. Hank worked like he was climbing a hill against me. He crawled like he was climbing up a tree. He crawled faster, and then he slowed down. He slowed down again, and then he climbed farther. He pushed like he was galloping. He climbed like he was going to the top of the tallest mountain, and he was bringing everything he had to me.

  Now the strangest thing was I seen all kinds of things to eat in my mind. I must have been still hungry after not finishing supper. I seen bright strawberries, and carrots and tomatoes. I seen Red Delicious apples and shelled peas and boiled taters. I seen new potatoes in butter and sweet milk. I seen ripe pears so big you couldn’t hardly take a bite out of them. I seen grapes so ripe and tight they would bust on your tongue.

  “It’s going to be,” Hank said. But I didn’t know if he was talking about the baby or our love, or the wealth of love, which was more important than money.

  Hank hollered out and climbed faster. And then it was like he busted out inside me. It felt time turned inside out on the hot tongue that flicked inside me. And I felt my bones melting and my legs melting in the color that roared through me. But it was not a red flame or an orange flame. It was a blue flame that started at the back of my head and burned down my spine to my belly and out to the tips of my toes, as the blue turned to purple.

  When Hank rolled off me I was covered with sweat, and I was plumb wore out.

  Seven

  The day after I give away the jar of Mr. Pendergast’s money and the day after Hank lost his job at the cotton mill, it was like we had to start out all over again. The only reason we had come to Gap Creek, as far as I could tell, was the job building the mill at Lyman. Gap Creek wasn’t the kind of place you’d think of moving to unless you had a purpose or kinfolks there. And the fact that I had give away money that was not mine made me see how hard the world was, and how much I had to learn. And the fact that Hank had slapped me made me see how troubled our marriage and our lives was going to be.

  I was stiff the next morning from the strain of our quarrel and from worry. But I felt cleaned out by the force of our loving, like I had been stretched, both in my body and in my mind, and that left me stiff and a little sore, the way you feel from working too hard and using new muscles.

  Hank rose early but didn’t make a fire in the kitchen stove. By the time I got up the kitchen was still cold, and I had to start a fire and put on a pot to make coffee. The grass in the backyard was thick with frost. Hank brought in a bucket of milk steaming in the cold air. “Set that on the porch,” I said. “I’ll strain it later.”

  I guess he was embarrassed about our quarrel, for he didn’t even answer. He strained the milk through a piece of floursack and carried the pitcher out to the springhouse. I’d never seen him so quiet. I cooked grits and fried some eggs and pieces of shoulder meat. When we set down to eat I said, “Can’t you get a job at another cotton mill?”

  “Ain’t another mill in walking distance,” he said, “except Tiger-ville.”

  “Then get a job at Tigerville,” I said.

  “I’ve already tried,” Hank said.

  “We could move,” I said.

  “Move where?” Hank said.

  “Move closer to another cotton mill,” I said.

  “That’s for me to worry about, not you,” he snapped. He put his coffee cup down and looked angry at me. I froze inside. I was just trying to be helpful and cheerful. I didn’t say nothing else. I looked at my plate and eat my grits. I remembered what Ma Richards had said about Hank being spoiled, and about him quitting when things got hard. I saw that he got mean when he thought he wasn’t in charge. He would get scared and mean if he thought he wasn’t the boss. When he was angry it was better for me not to say nothing, even if I was mad too.

  The wind had died down during the night and I listened to the fire pop and mutter in the stove as I put some jelly on a biscuit.

  “They’re building a store in Pumpkintown,” Hank said. “But that’s nearly ten miles away.”

  I didn’t say a thing. I would just let him do the talking, if that made him feel better. I’d let him talk all he wanted to. It was having the last word that was so important to him. Since he was raised by Ma Richards it made sense he would feel that way. He paused like he expected me to say something. I didn’t.

  “There are houses going up here and there,” he said. “I could ask for work on one of those jobs.”

  I listened to wood settle in the stove, and a crow cawed somewhere on the ridge above the creek. A hen cackled in the chicken house.

  “We could go back to North Carolina,” I said.

  “Where would we live?” Hank said. “There’s no room on Painter Mountain, even if we wanted to live there. I don’t think we can live with your mama and all your sisters.”

  “We could find another house up there,” I said.

  “And what would we use to pay the rent?” Hank said.

  “Gap Creek is fine with m
e,” I said. Because he was worried, Hank wanted to pick another fuss. It was something he was used to. When you’re unhappy you find a way to get angry and make somebody else angry. But I wasn’t going to fall into that habit.

  “We might just stay here for a while,” he said.

  I got up and started gathering the dishes into the dishpan. I scraped the plates into the slop bucket and put the leftover biscuits and meat in the bread safe. “I’m not worried about staying here,” I said.

  “Nobody has asked us to leave,” Hank said.

  I THOUGHT HANK would probably go off looking for another job that day, but he didn’t. Instead he took Mr. Pendergast’s shotgun and a box of shells from Mr. Pendergast’s bedroom and put on his mackinaw coat and cap. “I’m going to get us a wild turkey,” he said. But he didn’t look happy about going hunting. His jaw was set in a grim way and he looked like he just wanted an excuse to get out of the house.

  “I ain’t seen any wild turkeys,” I said.

  “The wild turkeys is up the holler,” Hank said, “up the branch, way back toward Caesar’s Head.”

  AFTER HE WAS gone I cleaned up the kitchen. And then I decided to have a look around the place. With no money coming in from wages, I had to know what we had to last the winter. I would be eating for both me and the baby, and I had to see what there was to get us through till the spring, assuming we was allowed to stay in the house till spring. I didn’t have but thirty-six cents in my purse, and I didn’t know how much Hank had in his pockets. But whatever it was, we would soon run out of cash. I was not going to ask Mama to help us, unless there was no other way, and I was not going to ask Ma Richards for anything. But if there was enough stuff on Mr. Pendergast’s place, we might make it through the winter anyway, until the baby was born.

  I lit a lamp and took it down to the cellar. I doubted that Mr. Pendergast had done much canning on his own. But his wife must have at one time. I had seen those jars down there before.

  I held the lamp high over the jars and looked around the musty basement. There was old boards piled above the bank, and a dough board with mold on it. Mold growed white as baking soda on the beams. And then I seen the bin of taters. I had forgot the bin of taters. There was two bins actually, Irish taters and sweet taters. The spuds must have been dug in mud for they had dirt crusted on them. They was little taters, but there might have been two or three bushels of them. Only problem was some had already begun to get soft and wrinkled. The skin of the taters was puckered in places, like they had been dug a long time ago. I squeezed several and some was soft, but most wasn’t rotten. I’d have to pick through the pile and get rid of the rotten ones.

  The sweet taters looked cleaner, like they had been dug in dry dirt that crumbled off them. Sweet taters look more like roots than Irish taters; they look swelled up, like big blood vessels. Some was perfect as a football, but most was crooked and wrenched around. I picked through the sweet taters and found them hard and cold, like they had been dug that fall just before we moved to Gap Creek.

  There was a few old buckets and rusty hoes in the cellar, but I couldn’t find nothing else that could be eat. The basement looked like it had long been forgot, a place that was about to be buried under cobwebs and low sills and joists. I climbed back up the plank steps to daylight and blowed the lamp out. The fresh air tasted so good I breathed deep to get the cellar taste out of my mouth and nose.

  Next I inspected the corncrib. It was a regular old-time crib made of two-inch slats with wire mesh nailed to the inside. It was the kind of crib with slanted sides, bigger at the top than at the bottom. There was moss and lichens growing on the slats, showing how old it was. The door was a crawl-through door, more than waist high. I pulled out the peg that held the door and looked inside.

  A basket on the floor held some ears of shucked corn, and a bucket of shelled corn set beside it. It was the corn I used to feed the chickens. But most of the crib was filled up with a great heap of unshucked ears. I guess there was a wagon load of corn there, the shucks gray and weathered. Grains scattered on the floor had the hearts eat out by weevils, like beads that had been drilled through. I climbed in and took an ear and pulled the shuck back. Some of the grains had been hollowed out and some not. The corn must have been two or three years old, and some of it was not fit to use. But there was enough good corn to make some meal, five or six bushels anyway.

  There was strings of dried peppers hung on the back porch. But I wondered if there was anything else on the place to eat. Wasn’t anything in the woodshed but wood. I knowed what was in the spring-house. That left the old smokehouse where we had put the ham and shoulders and middles on the day of the hog killing. There was some jugs on the bottom shelves of the smokehouse I wanted to look at. I opened the door of the little building and let the sunlight fall on the floor where the ashes from hickory fires was heaped. The salted meat laid on the shelves, and the place smelled like salt and uncooked lard. The smell of salt made you think of cooked meat.

  The jugs on the lower shelves was heavy earthenware. I lifted one up and took it out into the sunlight. It was the kind of jug you think of as holding moonshine. I pulled the wooden stopper out and sniffed. It was the smell of sorghum, rich, maybe overcooked sorghum. I tilted the jug and a tongue of molasses licked out slow through the mouth. I dipped a finger in the dark syrup and brought it to my mouth. It was sorghum all right, with a golden redness inside. No blackstrap syrup, or cane syrup, but sorghum with its special smell. It was a little overcooked and thick, almost rubbery in the cold air. But the molasses could be warmed up, and they had the right flavor. There was four jugs of them. That would last through the winter, with syrup for biscuits and cornbread, as well as sweetening for cakes and gingerbread. There was molasses to be put on cornmeal mush in the morning, and on oatmeal.

  The only place I hadn’t been to was the barn loft. I knowed what was in the feed room on the ground floor, the barrels of crushing and dairy feed and cottonseed meal, the bag of shorts for the hog, the laying mash and oyster shells for the chickens, sweetfeed for the horse. The steps to the loft was outside the feed room, and as I climbed the steps I seen two dusty china eggs on the shelf by the harness. Old horse collars and plowlines, hames and trace chains, singletrees and doubletrees hung on nails. Mice scurried around the sacks and coils of rope as I climbed.

  The barn loft was a great room open to the rafters. The roof was held up by poles, and there was heaps of sweet, moldy hay in the center, near the hatch where forkfuls could be throwed down to the ground. Mice trickled along the eaves, as daylight sparkled through cracks. There was a pile of shucks in the corner, and grains of corn was scattered on the floor where ears must have been piled at one time.

  I looked to the side of the hay pile and seen something with a wick, like the tip of a giant candle. Stepping closer I seen it was the stem of a winter squash. There was maybe ten squashes there, acorn squash and winter squash. They was hard and cold. And then I seen the pumpkins. They wasn’t big pumpkins like you make jack-o’-lanterns from. They was sugar pie pumpkins, not much bigger than the squash. I counted seven of them.

  Standing beside the hay pile I smelled something sweeter than the hay. It was just a whiff, a trace. I looked around but couldn’t name the scent, except I was sure it wasn’t just the smell of old seasoned hay. I searched in the gloom and found the perfume come out of the straw. It was the scent of apples. I poked around in the edge of the hay pile until I touched something hard. There was round, hard things under the straw. I pulled the hay aside and seen the apples. They was spotted gold and orange apples. They was what Mama called “horse apples” except a little bigger than horse apples. They had been gathered from the tree at the side of the barn. Mr. Pendergast must have gathered them and hid them in the hay. The apples was sticky with natural wax on their skin, and they had hay dust stuck to them. But they was firm, fresh fruit. Must have been a peck or two of them, buried in the hay waiting to be made into pies in January or February, as long as the
y stayed cold. I picked up an apple and wiped it on my sleeve and bit it. The flesh was yellow, sweet and coppery, an old-timey taste. The firm flesh turned to juice as it was crushed.

  While I was eating the apple, I looked around the loft and seen a string of what looked like tinsel hung from the post on the left. Looking closer, I found they was beans, dried beans still in the pod and threaded together to stay dry. There was yards and yards of beans. They looked like bunch beans and cornfield beans that had been dried. They had dust on them, but they could be washed and boiled to make soup, to make soup beans.

  But the strangest thing I seen in the barn loft was this old basket, a split hickory basket, made like a saddle, with high ends and bulges on either side. It was the kind of basket you don’t hardly see anymore. Inside was all these little paper bags closed with clothespins. There must have been twenty of them. The bags looked wrinkled and reused many times. I was going to open a bag when I saw there was writing on the side of it. Somebody had wrote in pencil “Blue Lakes” on the brown paper. I opened the bag and found it was white bean seeds. Other bags said “Half-Runners” and “Barnes Mountain Beans,” “Big John Beans,” “Seay Beans,” “Brown Speckled Beans,” “Long White Greasy Beans,” “Edwards Beans,” “Goose Beans,” “Greasy Cut-Short Beans,” “Johnson County Beans,” “Lazy Wife Beans,” “Logan Giant,” “Nickel Beans,” and “Ora’s Speckled Beans.”

  It was a basket of old bean seed, sorted and labeled. Mr. Pendergast’s wife must have left them there. They was all ready to be planted. If I stayed till spring I would put them in the ground.

  WHEN I CLIMBED down from the barn loft I tried to think what else I might look for that could be eat. There was the cow and the horse and the dozen chickens. But there was no guineas and no sheep on the place. Maybe Mr. Pendergast had buried some cabbages. It would mean a lot to have fresh cabbages to eat in the winter. And if I had enough heads I could make sauerkraut.