“I’m seventeen and going on,” she said. Her fingers moved over the covers of the name book. Then her eyes flashed and she shot her words at him. “And even if I do say the damnedest, I’ve got my name in a book. Not everybody has that.”
Pete propped himself up on one elbow. “I didn’t mean I didn’t like what you said, Tammy. I do like it. I like it very much.”
“Do you?” was all she said. She opened the book. “It’s nice to turn the pages and come on yourself. Only sometimes it gives you a funny feeling. Like you was past and over and done with and put down and recorded. It gives you a start.”
Pete dropped back on the pillow. “I’ll say it does. I came on my name that way one time. I was down—as one of the missing.”
Tammy leaned forward, her bare toes curling on the footrest of the chair. “Was that...when you couldn’t get enough air?”
His face made a startled question.
“You talked, when you was out of your head. What did you keep knocking somebody out for?”
“Good Lord, did I go through with all that?”
Tammy nodded. “Wh-what was it?”
“We couldn’t get off the bottom...submarine. I had to knock a man out because he wouldn’t keep still.”
Tammy drew a long breath. “It would be awful not to have air free and easy to come by. Even the children of Israel had free air when they come through the Red Sea on dry land.” She waited for him to tell her more, but he was silent. Maybe he had talked too long. She would give him some soup and then let him rest. Another time they could talk. Time opened out before her, rich and wonderful.
4.
THE weather couldn’t seem to make up its mind. Spring had gone to its head and unsettled it. One day there was blue sky with high white clouds blowing, light as milkweed down, then up from the south and the Gulf of Mexico came a darkness in the middle of the day. Lightning sprang from one cloud to another, nimbler than a squirrel, faster than a splinter cat, quicker than any human thing, excepting maybe a thought in a man’s mind.
Today the rain came down as if it had forgotten how to stop. It cooled off the air to shivery coolness, it curtained the windows with silver streaks and played music on the roof of the Ellen B. It made the kitchen, with the wood fire going in the stove, a snug little square, safe and shut off from all the world. It made the three human beings there draw closer together in their talk.
Pete was able to be up and around. He liked Grandma’s chair, said he’d a notion to make one like it himself sometime. A real native craft, he called it with admiration in his tone. He sat in it now, whittling on a cedar chain Grandpa’d told him how to cut. His long, bony fingers were wise at carving, and he said he’d done a lot of it, only he’d never made a cedar chain and he was bound to learn how to cut the links without a seam. Tammy sat on a box by the table, sewing some flour sacks together to make a pillow cover. Grandpa was over by the stove talking as if he’d been hungering to talk. Pete kept asking him about old times and listening with a homesick look on his face, as if he wished he had been living in those days. Why, if he’d been living then, he’d be dead now—so what was the sense in that?
“Yes,” grandpa said, “I picked up the Ellen B. cheap in ‘31. Tammy’s little ma left a mite of insurance money and it looked like a good kind of open-air life for the child she left us to raise. Besides, it gave us a way to live.”
“Did you preach a good many years before that?” Pete asked.
“Nigh on to forty year. Been all over the state about and some time in Louisiana. Never got much for it in the way of money because I don’t hold with sects and creeds. But I preached the Word. That give me satisfaction above all earthly dignities. I reckon I was too free-spoken and independent to get anywheres with it—a man’s got to play politics to get anywheres nowadays, even in the church. Politics is aruining the country.”
Tammy bent over her sewing to hide her pride. Grandpa could talk men-talk as good as the next one, about corruption in high places and how somebody ought to do something about it. It was a wonder, how much he knew. But he liked best to talk about his preaching and it was not long before he worked round to that again.
“Yessir, I’ve preached a good sermon in my time. I’m one of them that early seen the coming of the scientific age, and how man has sot himself up to reason out and put down in figgers and such what the Lord’s already made plain in His Word so that a wayfaring man though a fool could understand. But modern man’s given up faith and hope and he’s all for reason and knowledge, so I’m humoring him along, seeing he’s bent on taking the long way round.”
“Grandpa,” Tammy said, “are you going to preach every bit of that sermon at Pete?”
They both laughed and Pete said, “Go ahead, it is very interesting to me—and that’s more than I can say of a lot of sermons I’ve heard.”
“Well, I don’t aim to be preaching. But fact is, I been reconciling science and religion ever since I seen a incubator for hatching out chickens without having hens set on the eggs. Right now I’m working on a sermon about Sodom and Gomorrah and the atom bomb. I figger the Lord had a bomb with the kind of rays that would turn you to salt if they hit you in the face and that’s what happened to Lot’s wife. First sermon I ever preached was about the earth’s being round. Got me into a peck of trouble, too.”
“How was that?” Pete asked.
“Well, there was some of the bretheren who said the earth couldn’t be round because the Bible told how four angels stood on the four corners of the earth—and so it does tell. But that’s where I say you got to use common sense. You’d be surprised how many people don’t believe in common sense.”
“You wouldn’t think there was anybody that much behind the times, even in those days,” Pete said.
“Well, it was in one of them parts that’s back’ards to this day, and most of them belonged to the Cover-to-Cover believers.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a kind of sect believes every word in the Bible, cover to cover. They just said, ‘The earth ain’t round, brother,’ and they never let me preach there again.”
Pete said, “Out in the Pacific where I’ve been the last three years, it’s easy to see the world’s round.”
Tammy looked up with eagerness. “What does it look like there, Pete?” And after that she kept on asking him questions till she knew about the islands and what grew on them and what kind of fish swam in the waters. She was glad she had studied her mamma’s geography book because now she knew what he meant when he spoke of Australia and Honolulu and strange places like that. It was educating to hear him.
“You didn’t do like some of the boys and get you a wife off in those heathen places, did you?” Grandpa asked.
Pete shook his head.
“Got a girl home, I reckon.”
“Well,” Pete said slowly, “nothing’s settled between us. She doesn’t care much for the country; thinks I ought to keep off the land, get a job in town. I’ve been thinking it over.”
Tammy dropped her sewing. “You got land?”
“Too much—we’re land poor.”
“Land poor! How can you be poor if you have land?”
“It’s worn out.”
Grandpa said, “All the land in this country’s worn out. But you don’t starve on the land. It’s like the river that way.”
“Goshamighty!” Tammy said. “If I had land I’d raise everything there is in the world.”
“It’s not so simple as that,” Pete said. “Things aren’t as they were back in slavery times, or even the way they were fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet it seems to me that on the land there is a measure of security, as you say—in an insecure world. One would have the feeling of being something more than just a consumer, one would be producing something.”
“That’s sound.” Grandpa nodded. “That’s good sense.”
“Only—it’s a hard life, away from town and excitement. The place is terribly run-down and shabby. It’s
too much to ask anybody to...to share such a life.”
“Meaning a girl?” Tammy asked.
“Meaning a girl,” Pete said.
“You wouldn’t be thinking about a girl named Barbara, would you?”
Pete’s knife slipped and he looked to see if he had made a miscut before he lifted startled eyes to Tammy. “What do you know about—?”
“You talked when you were out of your head. Seemed like you were arguing with this Barbara all day and all night.”
“That’s about what we do,” Pete admitted.
“You couldn’t take up with anybody of that name,” Tammy said.
“Why not?”
“You know what it means?”
“What?”
“Barbarian. That’s what the book says. I’d be afeard to——”
Grandpa chuckled. “I wouldn’t set too much store by what a ladies’ book like that says, honey.”
Tammy turned her head away so her hair curtained her face from them. Grandpa ought not to be saying that, making her sound like a silly child, shaming her like that. She tied a hard knot and snapped the thread with a jerk.
But Pete answered her as if Grandpa had not spoken. “No, Tammy, she’s no barbarian; she’s more modern than anybody I know. She just wants to have things nice—clothes, conveniences, a decent car, the things you see advertised everywhere and that other people have. That’s only natural.”
“Well, hell’s bells,” Tammy said, “for all you know that’s some new kind of barbarian ain’t been discovered yet. I bet it is.”
Then Grandpa asked him how he found things out West, and after a minute Tammy slipped out to stand under the tin roof of the porch where the rain couldn’t reach her and nobody could see how mad she was, thinking about that Barbara, and her not being satisfied with a chance to get Pete and land besides. Goshamighty, she had more sense than that, herself. “I just naturally hate that Barbara. Sight unseen, I hate her,” she whispered into the noise of the rain, knowing it was sinful and ungodly to hate, and trying to take it back. But the words had been spoken and they stayed hanging in the air. The rain could not wash them away. She stood watching the rain fall into the river, each drop striking a shower of sparks from the surface. “Some people!” she said. “Some people look like they have to have everything!” Then she went in and started cooking dinner.
There were other days when the sun shone and the new green leaves spread themselves to its warmth. Then Pete followed Tammy ashore to watch her milking Nan, or to see her digging in the little salad patch, wire-enclosed against the chickens and the rabbits and wild things. He sat on top of the chicken coop, smoking the corncob pipe Grandpa had made him, and it seemed as if he was trying to find out everything in the world about her, studying, trying to make her out, asking her what she remembered about other places they had lived, asking her what books she had read. Seemed he was turning her over in his mind the way she was turning over the ground for planting here on the little ledge of the bluff where Grandpa had cleared off the trees to make a garden space. It gave her a new feeling, as if the warmth of the sun had entered into her. Now she knew how the growing things felt when spring set them stirring and unfolding. This was how the earth awoke.
“You’re kind of early with your turnips,” Pete said.
“The bluff keeps the cold off. I planted long afore regular plantingtime this year because winter went early. In another week I’ll be thinning out for greens and pot licker. You’ll like that. Do you good.”
“I’d like it all right. But I’ll have to be shoving off soon. My folks’ll be looking for me about now. They never expect to hear from me when I’m away because they know I’m no letter writer, but they look for me to turn up when I say I’m going to.”
Tammy stood still, one hand holding tight to the hoe handle and the other feeling for the cedar chain Pete had finished and put around her neck, saying he’d made it for her. She had been dreading to hear him speak of going, though she knew it was bound to be, with the coming of his strength and good weather.
“Besides,” Pete went on, “my tomatoes will be ready to come out of the hotbeds by the time I get back. I’ve got a good man looking after things for me, but there’s nothing like seeing to it yourself. It’s going to be an early season and I mean to clean up on my tomatoes.”
Tammy swallowed down the choking in her throat. Pete’s life—it really was all away from here, inland, far from her. His time on the Ellen B. was just a small time, set apart out of the whole which was unbeknownst to her. “How does the road run to take you home?” For if she knew that, then he wouldn’t be just gone off, into space, into the wholly strange, leaving her with nothing but the cedar chain and what she kept hidden, deep in her heart.
Pete leaned over and took up a little stick. He drew a map on the ground and Tammy came out of the salad patch to sit on her heels and see how it went. He made a Y of the roads and another Y going off of that and curving round. Then he drew a little square. “That’s the house, set back from the road. Brenton Hall is its name. There are two beech trees at the gate and the road goes in like this with live oaks on each side.”
Tammy studied the map till she knew it by heart. The lines he had drawn made a tying-up and a linking between the Ellen B. and Pete’s home, so it did not seem so far away. “There must be more than two rooms to your house,” she said, remembering how he’d said his aunt lived there and that his father and mother came for vacations and for the Pilgrimage time.
“There’s room enough. I want to keep up the old place, and the old tradition. It’s all been neglected so long—no money for repairs....” He fell silent.
Tammy sat back on her heels, looking up at him. “Looks like it ought to satisfy you, just having it. Ever since I was big enough to want anything I been wanting a house that stands on solid ground with space enough for planting and time for staying to pick what was planted—not going off to another mooring before the beans were big enough to eat, the way Grandpa always used to do.” She was silent, thinking how she’d like a man in the house with her, sitting across from her at the fireplace, if it was a house that had a fire on the hearth. She’d like a man like Pete, and she’d have a raft of children, all the house would hold.
“What do you think about, Tammy, looking at me so?” Pete broke in on her thoughts.
Tammy turned her head, looking down at the map he had drawn. “How do you mean—so?”
“Like something out of the woods, wild and young and—and wise. Like a woods owl, maybe.” His voice had a twinkle in it, a kind of condescension such as one uses with a child.
Tammy stood up with dignity, the way she rose with a bucket of water on her head, and for once, remembering how Grandpa said she spoke too free sometimes, she said only, “It wouldn’t be seemly, I reckon, to tell you what I was thinking.”
Pete laughed. “Seemly,” he repeated. “I thought that word was buried with Queen Victoria. You know, Tammy, you say you’re seventeen, but sometimes I think you’re ageless.”
She went back to the salad patch and her hoeing. “I’m not ageless. I’ve got an age and it’s going on eighteen. It’s old enough.” She shot him a quick glance, tossing back her hair. He was leaning against the hackberry trunk now, staring up into the pale-green leaves as if he was figuring out the kind of lacy pattern they made against the sky.
“Old enough for what?” he asked, humoring her the way Grandpa did sometimes.
“To know what’s what,” she said and began to hoe fast and furiously. After a minute she said, “Grandpa’s going to fix it so’s I can go to school and catch up on learning.”
Pete still leaned against the tree trunk. Now the teasing tone was gone from his voice. “You’ve already learned a lot, Tammy—a lot they skipped in my school.”
Tammy stood still, leaning on the hoe handle, feeling herself fill up and brim over with pleasure. After that, a humbleness came over her. “Not books,” she said. “Excepting the Bible. Grandpa taught me that.
And Grandma taught me common sense real quick because she knew she was going to die and she couldn’t take her time to it.” Tammy drew a long breath and added, “I just know about living and dying and getting borned—that’s all I know. I don’t know about loving, excepting the Bible kind of loving your neighbor and the Lord thy God. But I figger I could learn.” She gave him a quick look to see how he took that.
Pete smiled his slow, twisted smile and his eyes were bright. Was it just with laughter, was it with thinking how a man would go about teaching a girl such a thing? Tammy could not tell which it was. When she looked back again, his face had sobered. “Out here on the river with only the woods and the water,” he said, “I could almost believe there’s nothing more than living and dying and getting born—and loving. But, actually it is much more complicated than that. People, custom, money—the whole setup.”
Tammy hoed in silence for a while. If Pete would only stop thinking so much about things, he wouldn’t worry. She would have to know more than she did, to understand his worrying. “I need book learning,” she said aloud.
“You could read books and catch up with things.”
“Could I, Pete?”
“Sure you could.”
“Would I learn all the worrisome things, too?”
“Perhaps.”
Everything Pete said she saved up and pondered and treasured. She made a collection of scenes and small moments. Like the time he went into her room, stepping around her pallet laid on the floor so Grandpa could have the bed. He looked through the books she had on top of the packing cases, stood on end to hold her clothes. “How about this?” he asked, taking up the volume of Shakespeare that had lost its back.
“Can’t make head nor tail of it.”
Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he read her some aloud and, goshamighty, who could have known it had a sound like that to it, a kind of music to the words! Pete told her how a play was played on a stage, and then she saw it was an act, like Eddy’s and Gladys’ act, only different. She would read Hamlet after Pete left, and make sense of it if it killed her.
Tammy out of Time Page 4
