by Tony Earley
“If you were any more in love with her, we’d have to bury you.”
“Being in love never killed anybody.”
“You know that ain’t right. Being in love is like getting run over. Sometimes it kills you and sometimes it don’t.”
Jim turned away from Uncle Zeno and stared into the ditch winding by.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“All right, then. We won’t talk about it.”
“But she’s a good girl, Uncle Zeno. I think she’s about the best person I ever met.”
“I never said she wasn’t.”
“And I know she loves me, too, but Bucky Bucklaw has told everybody that she’s his girlfriend, even though she’s not, and since her granddaddy only has one arm and works for Bucky’s daddy, she can’t go out with me, or Mr. Bucklaw might run the whole bunch of them off, and then what would they do?”
“I don’t know.”
“And I hate Bucky’s guts. He’s a terrible baseball player, and I’m sick of him assuming everything in the world belongs to him just because his name is Bucklaw, and I wish he would just, well, die.”
“Jim!”
“But I do. I wish he would die and then I wish his sorry hide would burn in hell.”
“You stop it right there,” Uncle Zeno said. “That’s enough. I don’t ever want to hear you say that about anybody. I don’t care who it is.”
“But it’s not fair, what he’s doing to her.”
“I don’t care if it’s fair or not. Wishing somebody dead is a terrible thing, a sinful thing, and wishing they would burn in hell is even worse. I want you to be a better man than that.”
“But I’m not a better man than that.”
“You have to choose to be a good man,” Uncle Zeno said. “You have to choose every minute of every day. As soon as you don’t, you’re lost.”
Jim didn’t feel like listening to another one of Uncle Zeno’s lectures about life, so he tried to head it off. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll choose to be a good man.”
“All right, then.”
They rode in silence for a mile or so, but Jim was still angry. “What do y’all have against Chrissie?” he asked.
“I don’t know that we have anything against her,” Uncle Zeno said. “She might be the best girl to ever come down the mountain. You just need to remember that when you get tangled up with somebody, you get tangled up with their whole family.”
“What’s wrong with her family? I met her folks. They just seem poor, is all.”
“Oh, the McAbees are all right, I guess. Hard times just run ’em down after Nub got his arm cut off. It’s Injun Joe that worries me.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He ain’t worth killing, that’s what.”
“Now, how is what I said about Bucky different than what you just said about Chrissie’s daddy?”
“I never said I wanted to kill Injun Joe. I just said he wasn’t worth killing.”
“And that’s not sinful?”
Uncle Zeno stared resolutely ahead.
“Oh, come on, now,” Jim said. “Don’t be a hypocrite.”
“All right, then, daggummit, Doc, have it your way. It was sinful. I shouldn’t have said it. I’ll repent for it after while, but that’s between me and the Lord. Right now maybe I just want to enjoy it for a minute.”
“I think I know why you hate him so much.”
“You do, huh?”
“Chrissie told me that you and her mama almost got married.”
“Is that right?”
“And I met her mama that day I took Chrissie home. She said to tell you hello.”
“Well, wasn’t that nice of her.”
“And I bet y’all broke up because of Injun Joe.”
“And how do you figure this is any of your business?”
Jim shrugged. “If Chrissie can ever figure out how to get out from under the Bucklaws, I’m going to try to marry her, which would make her parents my in laws.”
“You know her daddy’s full-blooded, don’t you?”
“So?”
“So Chrissie’s half Cherokee.”
“What difference does that make?”
“I’m just doing the arithmetic. Your babies would be one-quarter Indian. Is that all right with you?”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Jim said. “They’d still be half Chrissie.”
“What if people talked?”
“Since when do we care about people talking? And surely you’re not saying that all Indians are bad.”
“I don’t know nothing about Indians. I don’t know if Injun Joe was trouble because he was an Indian, or if he was trouble because he was trouble, but he was already bad news the day he got off the train. I’ve only ever met one Indian, and he was a bad one. That’s all I’m saying.”
“That doesn’t mean Chrissie’s going to turn out bad,” Jim said.
“Sometimes the apple don’t fall far from the tree.”
“And sometimes it does.”
“You don’t look for apples in a peach orchard, Doc.”
“That doesn’t make a bit of sense, Uncle Zeno. Is she an apple or a peach? And you never told me if I was right about you and Chrissie’s mama.”
Uncle Zeno never took his eyes off the road. “If I tell you how it was this once, will you not ask me about it again?”
“Just this once,” Jim said. “That’ll do.”
“The first time I ever laid eyes on Nancy McAbee was at the brush arbor revival in 1916. They built the brush arbor up on the mountain because it was a little cooler than it was down here, and the revival lasted the better part of a week. It was always the second week in July, after everybody had laid their crops by, and people would come from all over. They’d load up in their wagons and head up the mountain and camp out and go to the meetings. They would have four or five preachers there at one time, so when one got wore out with preaching, somebody else could start in. There’d always be a bunch of people get saved or rededicated, and the preachers would take turns baptizing them in the creek, and you heard tell that sometimes when the weather was hot, people got rededicated just because the water was cold.
“That was the year Corrie and Allie and I sang. We had just won the Associational ribbon for the first time, and they asked us to come up and sing at the brush arbor. You should have heard Allie sing back then. He could sing alto pretty as any girl. He can still sing that high, but he won’t do it anymore because people made fun of him. Now he’ll only sing lead or tenor, as you know, and we don’t win the ribbon because there’s not enough space between his voice and mine, and you can tell him I said so. Anyway, we had a buckboard then with a hoop top on it, and we had a matched set of white mules named Caesar and Augustus, which you’ve heard tell about, and me and Mama and Daddy and your uncles and Cissy loaded the wagon and went up for the revival. Me and Corrie and Allie sang every morning and every evening at the start of the service.
“The first or second day of the meeting, I was up there singing, and I looked out in the pews and saw the prettiest little brown-headed girl I’d ever seen. You ever seen a chestnut-colored mare? Well, that’s the color Nancy’s hair was then. And you wouldn’t believe how fair her skin was. So instead of thinking about what I was singing, I was thinking about who that little girl was, and how I could get to know her. This was right after Nub had got his arm cut off at the sawmill. He still looked awful and he was so weak he could hardly get around and they hadn’t figured out yet how they were going to live and they came to the brush arbor to pray about it. At one of the services, I remember, we took up a love offering for them.
“One evening after supper, before they started the service, I was watering and brushing Caesar and Augustus down at the creek, and I looked up and saw Nancy standing on the other bank. All of a sudden she was just there. I didn’t even hear her come out of the laurel. When she saw me looking at her she said, ‘Where’d you get them white mules?’
“I said, ‘At the white mule store. Where’d you get them brown eyes?’
“And she said, ‘At the brown eye store.’
“After that I acted like I wasn’t going to say anything else. It was always my experience that girls liked you better if you pretended you didn’t care anything about them. So I didn’t even look at her. When she didn’t turn around and go back in the laurel, I knew I was in good shape. After a minute she said, ‘One of your brothers sings like a girl.’
“And I said, ‘That’d be Allie.’
“She said, ‘And he’s got a name like a girl, too.’
“I just kept brushing whatever mule it was I was brushing.
“Then she said, ‘What’s your other brother’s name?’
“And I said, ‘Corrie.’
“She said, ‘And that’s a girl’s name. Do you have a girl’s name, too?’
“I said, ‘My name’s Colleen. What’s yours?’ Colleen was my mother’s name, of course, but it was the first one I could think of.
“She thought about it a minute and said, ‘Bill.’
“And I said, ‘Bill, do you want to go walking with me after the service?’
“And she said, ‘Colleen, that sounds good.’
“The funny thing about the meeting at the brush arbor was that a whole lot more courting went on up there than you might think. Men who might get their gun and shoot at you if you showed up on a Sunday afternoon in the bright sunshine and asked to speak to their daughter, for some reason up on the mountain would let you go walking with that same daughter after the evening service and it pitch-black dark. I figure it was because back then the roads were bad, and the only people you ever saw were the same bunch who lived in your settlement that you went to school with during the week and church with on Sunday, and most of them were already your cousins, anyway. It was just hard to find somebody to go out with. So, at the brush arbor, while everybody did pay attention to the preaching and the singing and the Holy Spirit came down and people got anointed and baptized, like a regular revival, a lot of boys and girls were looking for somebody they could marry. That’s just how it worked. You might not believe it today, but back then boys and girls just couldn’t wait for the lay-by time so they could get up to the brush arbor. And when you didn’t have a girlfriend, you thought about the brush arbor all year long.
“That first evening, Nancy and I were holding hands before we got out of sight. I still remember how pretty it was. After you got away from the wagons a little bit, you could look back toward the camping ground and see all the campfires burning through the trees and the lanterns hanging up over the wagons, and you could hear the mules stomping around on their pickets and snuffling in their feed bags or cropping on the grass, and you could hear the water running in the creek. If you walked far enough down the trail, you’d come out in the bald, where you could see down in the valley. If you looked hard enough, you might see a lamp or two burning way off in the distance at some farmhouse or other, but mostly it was just dark and still and quiet and up overhead was the moon and the black sky and all the stars.”
“Did you kiss her?”
“Of course I kissed her. And after I kissed her, just that one time, I didn’t care anything about any of the other little girls I’d been courting down here. I’d liked all of them just fine before Nancy came along, but after I met up with Nancy, they just didn’t interest me none. We were going steady before the end of the revival. The only problem, of course, was that she lived up on the mountain, and I lived down here. I had to work six days a week, so Sunday was the only day I could see her. I’d get up before daylight and saddle Caesar and ride up the mountain and get there in time for preaching. Then I’d take dinner with her and her mama and daddy. Of course, I always made sure I had a ham with me, or a chicken, or a peck of potatoes, since I knew they couldn’t afford to feed me. Nub had got hurt at Rad Carson’s sawmill. They were running a load of ties one day the belt broke and snapped his arm off about six inches above the elbow. Radford felt awful about it, of course, and would’ve kept Nub on, doing something or other, but Nub felt like that was charity and went on his way. So, I made sure I carried food up there with me when I went to see Nancy. After dinner we would go walking, or sit by the fire if it was cold and pop popcorn or shell walnuts. Then I’d saddle up and ride down the mountain and get home after dark. It wasn’t so bad as long as the weather was warm, but when it turned off cold or it was raining, it was a pretty doggone miserable trip. And if you think that road’s bad now, you should have seen it then. During the week we wrote letters back and forth.”
“When did Injun Joe show up?”
“Hold on, now. Nobody at our house wants to talk about Injun Joe and Nancy McAbee. And I don’t want you talking about them to anybody else. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. Injun Joe. One day, around the time of the brush arbor meeting where I met Nancy, he just got off the train. Nobody around here had ever laid eyes on him before that. He was from somewhere or other up above Cherokee, and he said he’d gone to college down in Raleigh but he’d got in some kind of fight and somebody or other had stole his money. It was quite a tale, and I don’t know if there was any truth to it or not. He said he’d started out for home but didn’t have the fare to make it all the way back to Dillsboro. He only got as far as Aliceville. If he’d made it to New Carpenter, we never would have heard tell of him. When he got off the train, he didn’t have a dime to his name, and Daddy believed what he said and hired him.”
“Chrissie’s daddy used to work for us?”
“He didn’t work for us long. We took him on as a hand, that was the only job we had, but Injun Joe didn’t want to be a hand, he wanted to be the boss man. He’d only been here a day or two when he started coming up with ideas about how we could do this or that better than the way we’d been doing it for years.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, nothing, I don’t guess, initiative’s a good thing, but that’s not what we were paying him for. We were paying him to work in the field, not tell us how we ought to run our mill or our cotton gin or rotate our crops or what kind of bull we ought to get.”
“Were any of his ideas any good?”
“Sure, some of them were. I’ll grant him that. Injun Joe was as smart a man as I ever met. He just didn’t like his station in life. We noticed right off that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the other field hands. He wouldn’t even drink water out of the same jar they did. He always lined up to drink water out of our jar. And when dinnertime came, he wanted to come to the house and eat dinner with us. I’ve never seen anybody hate a black man as much as Injun Joe did.”
“Did you let him come to the house?”
“We didn’t quite know what to do, to be honest. None of us had ever met an Indian. When he came to the house, he didn’t go around the back, the way the field hands did. He just knocked right on the front door, which surprised us. Then when Cissy or whoever opened the door, he didn’t take his hat off. Mama thought that was awful forward.”
“Did he quit?”
“No, we let him go. One day out in the field, we were picking cotton, and he said Abraham’s son, Isaac, spit water on his shoe. Isaac’s the one that moved to Chicago. I don’t think you’ve ever met him. Now, Isaac might have spit on Joe, he had a temper on him, and maybe it was over the water jar, so I don’t know. And it might have been an accident. Isaac said he didn’t do it one way or the other. Whatever happened, Joe knocked Isaac down flat on his back and I fired him on the spot.”
“Did you fire Isaac?”
“No. Abraham’s people have been working here since slave times, and you give people who’ve worked for you that long the benefit of the doubt. Joe’s just lucky I was there and Abraham didn’t cut his throat.”
“If you fired Injun Joe, how did he wind up married to Nancy?”
“After I fired Joe, he hated me as much as he hated a field hand. I guess
he looked at me and saw everything he wanted but didn’t have any way of getting, and he saw that I had taken a black man’s part over his, in front of other black men. I always figured that he went after Nancy to get me back. But who knows? Nancy’d been down to visit and had stayed overnight with us, and Joe’d seen her, of course, and maybe seeing her for the first time had the same effect on him that it had on me. I don’t know. She was just the prettiest girl. After I fired him, he cleared his stuff out of the storeroom and took off. We figured he was going to walk back to Cherokee, but where he went was straight up the mountain. He worked for Rad Carson a while, but Radford didn’t need a foreman any more than we did, he needed somebody to stack lumber, so he caught on with Arthur Bucklaw, working in the fruit trees. Joe said he’d gone down to Raleigh to study forestry, and apparently he had a way with trees and already knew how to graft and prune, and it wasn’t long until he was Bucklaw’s right-hand man. A lot of those apple and peach trees you see now up on the Bucklaw place Injun Joe planted. The apples have done real well, of course, but more often than not, frost gets the peaches.”
“Back up,” Jim said. “Did Injun Joe start courting Nancy while she was still your girlfriend?”
“I don’t know if you could call it courting, exactly, he was way too smart for that, but he was always just . . . around. Nancy’d go down to the store on Saturday, and he’d be there. She’d be walking home from church with some of her girlfriends the Sundays I couldn’t make it, and he’d pass them on the road and tip his hat. She’d be sitting on the porch stringing beans with her mama, and he’d just happen to pass by and stop in the edge of the yard and talk for a while. If he found a bee tree, he’d bring them a comb of honey. It was all real innocent at first, nothing you could call him out on.”
“Did you ever get in a fight with him?”
“No, sir. I did not.”
“I might’ve had to fight him, if she’d been my girlfriend.”
“I don’t believe in fighting a man to keep him away from a woman. Either you can trust a woman or you can’t. If you can trust her, nothing anybody can say is going to turn her head, and if you can’t trust her, beating up every man who says howdy to her won’t do you a bit of good.”
