by Dot Jackson
We were sitting in the kitchen, wiping our noses, when the clock in the parlor bonged four. “Mercy!” Nam said. She trotted off and got some paper and a pencil and sat down and began making some kind of list. Then she went and called the children, they had found the way into the cellar, under the back steps, and they came forth musty as the grave, and she folded the note and put it in Hugh’s shirt pocket and pointed them off toward the store. As soon as they were out the gate, she cranked the telephone.
“Pearly, ring Jasper,” she said. “Jasper, I reck’n you’ve put up Ben Aaron’s mules? Well hitch up a buggy directly and go down to Tatum’s and pick up my childern. Little boy and little girl. They’ve got a load they’ll never carry.”
She hung up and cranked again. “Pearly, now I want Grover…Grover, that’s my childern comin’ yonder, I forgot to write give ’em a cold Co-coler. No, one apiece. And now you make sure they’s lean in that meat, wadn’ none atall on them hog breasties you sent over here last time. If I want lard, I’ll say lard…Yeah, put it all on my book…”
Come to find out, some while later, the store belonged to Ben Aaron, too; it had first been McAllister’s, and Tatum had bought it. And Ben Aaron had bought it back. It served as the commissary for the sawmill, as the house of haute couture and haberdashery and the larder for the town of Caney Forks.
“Do you know I’ve not been down to The Birches in years?” Nam said. “I used to go right often and look after the graves. But it got to be so sad, that ol’ house just a-standin’ there like it was a-waitin’ for the wind to take it down.
“Honey,” she said, “it’s such a blessin’ you’ve come home. No Steele knows what to do with itself away from here.”
“Why did Mackey leave?” I asked. That, right then, was the second most pressing question on my mind. The first I had no heart to bring up again.
“That must have been one thing you were too little for him to talk to you about,” she said. “Did Aaron tell you anything about his sister Lucy?”
“Ben Aaron has told me as little as he could get by with about anything,” I said.
Nam rocked and swung her foot. “Aaron’s kind of flummoxed right now I ’spect,” she said. “He’ll come around. I tell you, the thing about this tribe that makes us a little quare to other folks is how we have generally married with our cousins. You see, Garland and Ive and Dave Steele, they were cousins of ours, they were brothers and married us McAllister sisters, we were Ariana, Savannah and Panama but never got called anything other than Arie, Daisy and Nam. This has gone on always, far back as I know anything about us. I don’t know why that is, it just suited us to marry who we married. ’Course along the line some went outside, there was a few…
“But all Mack’s life, from the time they were tee-tiny, he had his eye on Lucy Steele, Arie and Dave’s little girl. Oh, you should’ve seen her, you’d know why. She was the prettiest one ever was of us. Hair like light honey, the biggest eyes. Had eyes the color of Aaron’s; you know I don’t know what you call that. Have you looked at his eyes?”
I thought about it. Hmm. What would you call the color of fallen leaves, under little shallow water, in the sun? Or river pebbles. Several colors; they changed with the light. I had noticed. An eagle’s eyes were the same color; I saw that when Bird here came to live with me.
“I reckon brown,” I said.
“Lucy was tall too and long in her bones,” Nam said. “Looked a lot like Aaron, ’course she was way many years, twenty-three years, I guess, the oldest. The two little middle babies died, then long after they’d quit looking for another one, Aaron come along.
“It just seemed like to ever’body that Lucy and Mack would marry. He thought so. Till he put the notion to her.” Nam got up and went to the window. “Thought I heard the buggy,” she said.
“What did Lucy say?”
“Said no.” Nam was not believing it, to that day.
“Did she give him any reason why?”
“Said, ‘Look at this family. Look at the feebleminded ones, poor old Uncle Pink a-settin’ out on the back porch day in, day out, fishin’ in a bucket. The women would set him out there in his chair ever’ decent mornin’, fetch him his pole and string, and ever’ now and then they’d look out and say, “Pink, darlin’, are ye ketchin’ anything today?”
“‘Think about Aunt Liza, settin’ astraddle of the comb of the roof in the middle of the night, a-screechin’ like a peacock. Think about Cud’n Vick, down there tryin’ to poke her youngun through a chink in the bridge. And all the little babies that live just long enough to cry.’
“About then, Lucy started to wail and cry,” Nam said. “She screamed at him, ‘I love you, Mack Steele, but before God I won’t marry you, for this has got to stop.’ They were settin’ out here on the porch, I remember it like yesterday,” Nam said. “She flung down the steps and leaned on the gate and sobbed. Mack went out there and put his arms around her but she shrugged him off. He just stood there a little bit and watched her cry, and then he sort of sagged and went out by her, and got on his horse. We never saw him again.”
I cried into my sleeve till it was soaked. “What happened to her?” I said.
Nam blew and sniffed. “Oh, a couple of years after he was gone, she married a Gillespie boy. Nice fellow, not our kin. She tried to have a baby; it was real big, and she was made too slim. Just couldn’t. She’s a-lying down at The Birches, with that baby in her arms. They took it after she was gone. But it was dead.
“And then,” Nam said, sighing, “Ben Aaron done what it was he done. Went way up the branch to find him that woman. Lord, I don’t know what for; we had cluckin’ old hens aplenty here close around home. And I’ll swannie, I don’t know how anything could of come of Lucy and Mack that would of touched that match, for pure disaster.”
10.
SETTLING IN
“I HEAR JASPER A-COMIN’,” NAM SAID, LEAVING ME SUSPENDED ON the edge of my chair. She went out on the porch and hollered at him. “Leave it all in there,” she said. “Drive on down in the lot and put the buggy in the shed. You can turn the horse out, I’m a-gonna need it in the mornin’ early.
“What we’ll do,” she said to me, “we’ll get up soon in the mornin’ and we’ll go down and get you set up to keep house. I reck’n the mice won’t spile our meat and meal and stuff over just one night in the shed.”
The kids straggled in with a bag of peppermint sticks and chocolate drops from the free hand of Grover Tatum (Aunt Nam said wryly not to worry, that it would show up on the ledger), and as the day wore out they clung around our skirts, tired and a little bit bewildered.
We washed that night in hot water, for the first time in nearly a week. And we slept in beds up off the floor, with clean smooth old sheets that smelled like those little bags of herbs old ladies put in their closets. A couple of times in the night Nam tipped in, in her old pink flannel gown and sleeping cap, and tucked the covers up around our chins.
In the morning, we went down to The Birches.
The buggy was piled up with sacks of meal and flour and sugar and cans of lard and coffee and packages of cured meat and soap, and the four of us sitting on them, and on one another. I was sorry for the horse. But Nam let him go pretty slow, and we talked about who used to live where, and what went with them.
She had kept going to the Presbyterian Church, she said as we passed it, even when she would be the only one there. And the preacher got to coming only once a month, then, and finally not at all. And even then, she said, she would go sit in her pew on Sunday morning, “Only me and the Lord.” And she kept the church house swept out, and everything in order.
“But I am done got old now,” she said. “I am too old to do it anymore. Things have to pass; it’ll tumble down someday. And I will, too.
“Oh, I go to church sometimes,” Nam said. “Sometimes I’ll go down on Beaverdam with the Baptists, they worry I’m not saved, but they’re as good to me as they can be. Sometimes I sit in with the Episco
pals but most times not.”
Well, I had been raised in the Episcopal church, I said. But that didn’t come from the Steeles. Who had brought it here?
“So-FIER!” Nam said.
We rode along a little way. “Tell me somethin’ about Sofier,” I said, finally.
“What you want me to tell you about ’er?” Nam said.
“Well, whatever,” I said.
She screwed up her mouth and cocked her head and considered.
“You won’t like ’er,” she said.
I sat there waiting for more, I felt sort of sorry for the woman, like the jury had convicted her before I got a chance to hear her case.
“Why won’t I like her?” I said, deciding I was going to like her, if it killed me.
“She’s pure outlandish,” Nam said. “Look at the daisies, a-startin’ to bud up. Bless their little hearts, you know they’ll be daisies of some description all summer long.” The subject of Sophia was hereby closed and bolted. “I remember when your granny was born, it was gettin’ on into cool weather. I was about five, didn’t know a thing about how babies come or any of that; Mama had six, ’course three of ’em died. I didn’t even know when Arie come, I was up then about eight years old, and I didn’t know where they come from.
“Mama went down to The Birches to have her babies, she’d go down when one was time to come and we’d not see her, then, till it was born. There was a good ol’ granny woman down on Long Branch that brought ’em all, ol’ Aunt Lillie Brock, and she’d come bring the baby and then stay a week or so. I guess that was one reason the babies would all come there.
“Lucy, one time, when she was in a brood and talkin’ dark, said our babies had to come there because it was so handy to the cemetery. I wonder now if she just always somehow knew. But when Poppa took me down after Daisy was born, he just said we were goin’ down to see Mama. He was all smiles, as happy as could be. We got there and he took me in the room where Mama was—I remember there was a big flowerpot of little purple-lookin’ flowers, they grow all over in the fall of the year—and he took this little bundle from Mama, and handed it to me to hold. I never will forget it, he said, ‘Look what we found down in the daisies!’
“I’ll not forget that little face, it looked for all the world like a little bud. She had the bluest eyes—blue from the day she was born. She looked at me like she knew the funniest thing there was, and she stayed happy like that, all of her life. They had ’er baptized Savannah. But she was always Daisy.”
“Did you never have any babies of your own?” I said.
“I had one,” she said.
After a little bit I said, “It died, didn’t it.”
And after a little bit, she said, “It died.”
And that, of course, was the prelude to a story.
“The last time Garland came home from the War Between the States I made him marry me,” she said. “He didn’t want to then; said, ‘Let’s wait till this ol’ war is over, and start out better. You know I might not get through this.’
“And I said, ‘I know, that is why I want us married.’ Daisy and Ive was havin’ a fit to get married, but Poppa said no, indeed. Daisy was just seventeen. But Garland and me, we went ahead. In less than a week, he had to leave again.
“Well, it was about five months, and we got word that Garland was in a hospital up in Petersburg, with his arm shot off. I said right then I was a-goin’ after him. There wadn’t an able-bodied man left in this part of the country to go with me. But Daisy said well, she was goin’ too. Ive was in the same company and she’d not had a word from him in months. She’d wore a regular trench in the front porch, a-walkin’ up and down.
“Now we were all down at The Birches, then, our house had burned and Poppa was somewhere in Virginia, fightin’ in a different company. Uncle Ham was old and crippled with a stroke and all the women had their hands full, just to keep the place goin’. There was nobody to help us. And nobody to stop us. We had nothin’ left but the poorest ol’ horses, the good ’uns was all gone to the war, you know.
“We left out one night, with two of them old bone-piles hitched to a wagon. Sneaked off. We left word sayin’ where we were goin’ and not to worry. We’d a been scared to death if we’d had a lick of sense, but we didn’t. We were goin’ by a map out of a geography book. Nowhere on it did it say 400 miles. And half that again, for the times we got lost. It didn’t say nothin’ about rain, either. Or there bein’ days without a store or a house or a clean spring of water. Somebody did tell us along the way that we’d better watch out for people that’d take our horses, there were lots of desperate folks in that time.
“So we went as much as we could at night, hid and slept days in the canebrakes and woods. We had a sack of corn dodgers and some apples. We had a gun but squirrels and rabbits had got mighty scarce. If a house looked friendly we’d stop sometimes and ask to be sure we were goin right. Sometimes people’d offer us a little somethin’ to eat; ’course we’d not ever ask.
“We’d tell ’em where we were a-goin’, and people were nice to us. Even one place a woman said well, her boy was in the Union Army and had been killed. She made us take some biscuits with us. I thought I couldn’t cry any more, I’d done run out of tears. But I cried ten miles after that place.
“Well, we wouldn’t have stopped at all except we had to be so careful not to kill the horses. We had been gone two weeks or more, and we commenced to see lots of soldiers. We’d ask ’em if they knew Garland and Ive, or even where the company was, and they would point us on toward Petersburg. Then one mornin’ we met Ike Tatum, from right here, walkin’ down the road with a bunch of men leadin’ some mules. He said, ‘Ive and Garland’s both in a little old church that’s been made a hospital.’ He pointed us exactly the way to go.”
By then we had come to the narrows. It was a noisy place, and it was one of those times, anyway, that Nam would have to gather up a voice to say what she was trying to say. Directly, then, she said, “I knew when I saw Garland he’d not make it. He was shot all to pieces. One arm gone was about the least of it. He kept tryin’ to talk to me, I put my ear right down on his mouth, and he said, ‘I kep’ on livin’ ‘cause I knew you’d come…’
“Ive was shot through the chest. When we got there the doctor was runnin’ a silk handkerchief clean through him, to get the maggots out. We never asked a soul, we just got some men to help us load ’em both in the wagon, and we started for home. We went by what we remembered, and by the sun, and the stars.
“Daisy was drivin’. I was holdin’ Garland’s head on my lap when he died. It was early one mornin’; I held him on all that day, I took off my bonnet and covered his face. And we started out the same way, the next day. I meant to bring him home. But it got warm, and Ive was so sick. We stopped on a little hill, lookin’ down on a river, it put me more in mind of The Birches than any place I saw. There was an old house down in the bottom. Daisy went down, and an old man came out. She told him about us, and he brought a shovel and helped us. He made us stay that night, I know he gave us some boiled potatoes but he had no salt; ’course we didn’t care.
“The next day then we left out again. Goin’ out of sight, I thanked God so much that Garland would lie on high ground. I was so thankful I’d made him marry me, and that he’d lived till I could get to ’im.
“We got home with Ive. He was a sorry lookin’ somethin’, Lord weren’t we all. Soon as he could stand alone, and Mama and Aunt Bet had got the lice off him, they let him marry Daisy…”
“You mean you had a baby, in the middle of all that?” I said.
“No, I had it about six weeks after we got back, I reck’n. What it was, we all took the dysentery, had nothin’ to doctor it with but blackberry wine. The rest of ’em got all right but me. And finally, that poor little baby came. It was an eight-months baby—you know they don’t live, lots of times. It was a tiny little girl. It never even breathed.”
It was one of those up on the hill, with a lamb on the
stone, she said. “We named it Elizabeth, for Aunt Bet, even though it was dead. Bet, you know, was Garland’s mother. And I knew I’d never have any more.”
Always, on that road, I would think of her. I would think, she went through that, and she lived to be old. There would be times I would have to think of it.
We could look down now on the back lot, and the back side of the house. It made me catch a quick breath. I don’t know what it was, just a feeling. The grass had been cut around the house. We went around to the back, in the buggy, and got down and carted that stuff into the kitchen. When we went through into the house we saw that somebody had brought down furniture. We had chairs and a table in the parlor, and a couple of bedsteads up in the sitting room, where we’d slept on the floor. The beds were made up, with counterpanes on them. There was a big old clock on the mantel, going tock-tock-tock.
We had a dining table, now. There was, as Nam would say, a flowerpot in the middle of it, a vase of flowers picked out of the field, sitting on a plate so as not to make a ring. There were doilies put about sort of at random, and pictures, sort of at random, here and there on the walls. It looked like somebody was playing house.
“Well, I see Rose was here,” Nam said. “Coy Ray’s goin’ to say, ‘Rose holp me,’ when the fact is Coy Ray help Rose, a little bit.”
“I can’t believe that child,” I said.
“She puts me in mind a lot of Lucy, so independent,” Nam said. “You know Cleone, her mother, was kin to us. Cleone’s grandma, Aunt Sallie McAllister, was Poppa’s sister. Cleone’s daddy, old Jake Shuman, owned a good bit of land over on the far side of the Wilcoxes’. Pretty high-type people. Died, her mama and daddy, right together in the typhoid epidemic. Ansel was off in medical school. Cleone was there with ’em by herself. Her hard times didn’t begin with Coy Ray Wilcox. But it didn’t take ’em many years to end there.”
We were washing the dishes out of the cupboard when somebody came pecking at the back door. I looked out and it was old Cud’n Barzilai Peek, that old man that ran from us on the road. He still had tobacco juice running down his beard.
