by Dot Jackson
“What in the Lord’s name did you want with it? Don’t you have enough?” I said.
“Didn’t want it, in p’tickler,” he said, blowing a puff of smoke from his pipe. “Thought I might as well. It was up for grabs. Coy’d done lost every cent he had. Tom Joe Brock walked off with his black game rooster. He lost a fine old bedstead, the one Cleone died in; ol’ Perley Ramsay won that off of ’im, but never took it. He was the only one so tender-hearted. Rest of us took.”
“Ben Aaron!” I said. I was thoroughly appalled.
But he puffed his pipe and narrowed his eyes and looked straight ahead. “Yeah, pore ol’ Coy,” he said, “the best he could do was a pair o’ jacks. I had me three aces and a joker, and a deuce ’at was wild. Hotdam, what a hand…”
So folks really did each other such a way. “You were lucky not to get shot,” I said. I was stunned nearly hoarse.
“Aww, Coy was mad,” he said. “He flung cards and whiskey all over, ever’ stick that wadn’t nailed down he flung it against the wall. Rest of ’em left—some folks is scared of him when he gets hot, but I just set him out.
“Finally he wore down. Said, ‘Well, I reck’n I better get out in somebody’s woods and put my younguns up a brush arbor. I guess even as lowdown a bastard as you are you’d not turn us out before mornin’.’”
The corner of Ben Aaron’s mouth crinkled around his pipe, smug, you know. It galled me that he was really proud of himself.
“Well, did you turn ’em out before day?” I said. I know I sounded sanctimonious.
“Where’d you get the idea I was so low-down?” he said. “Coy tell you that too? I never did turn ’em out, not to this day, nor tomorrow, and not fifty years from now. I told Coy, I said, ‘See that you go down to the courthouse in the morning and make me a deed. Beyond that,’ I said, ‘you can forget this ever passed. Let your younguns be. Say nothing. Do nothing. You’re at home as you ever was.’ And, by noon the next day, I had the deed in my hand. Coy didn’t exactly love my soul. But that was nothing new.”
“How much of it is there?” I said.
“Oh, a little better than a hundred acres.”
“And a house? For a hand of cards?”
“Listen, Mary Sen,” Ben Aaron said, “there used to be five times that much land, oh, more than that. Reck’n where it went? It was sold, piecemeal, to pay some Wilcox out of a scrape. My daddy bought a lot of it. Coy’s awful bad to gamble. Thing is, he can’t stand to lose. He’ll just keep on.
“Think about this,” he said, being very earnest. “I wadn’ the only one playing cards with him that night. What if Os Hambright had drawn that hand that I had? His WIFE—that Baptist, card-hatin’, church-goin’, rump-sprung old heifer—would’ve had Coy out by morning. And his younguns in the road.”
“What did your wife say about it?” I said.
“My wife? Why would I tell her?”
There is a place where, as you go around the last bend coming down to meet the river, you can look out over the whole countryside, Red Bank and everywhere. We could hear steam shovels working down on the highway. We could see the low water bridge.
“This is where you made your bad mistake, my dear,” Ben Aaron said.
“That’s so,” I said. I was feeling wretched and confused.
We came to the turn and I looked back on the road we had come down. It was not much more than a trail. Bushes grew between the ruts, undisturbed. I wondered how I had ever taken that for the way I was supposed to go.
We passed a bunch of oxen dragging in ties for the new bridge. Ben Aaron stopped and talked with the man who was driving them. Business. Ben Aaron’s timbers. Ben Aaron’s steers. Ben Aaron’s man. I sat with my hands folded in my lap. The sun was cooking my nose. I was miserable.
He clucked at the mules and we went on toward town. “Anything special you want from the city?” he said.
“No sir. Nothing but I want to send a telegram,” I said.
I could feel him looking at me but I looked over the mules’ heads, making my neck long and stiff.
“Anything you need to buy?” he said, sort of plaintively.
“No. You certainly shouldn’t have made this trip if it was just for me.”
“Oh,” he said, “I come down every few days anyway. Always got business here, you know. It only crossed my mind that you might want to come along. Might want to get away little bit.”
He pulled in at Ollie Trotter’s, and we got down and went in. Ben Aaron sauntered back to the feed department where Ollie was weighing out seed for somebody.
“Well, glory be. Twic’t in one week, when I ain’t seen you once a y’ar,” Ollie declared, upon seeing Ben Aaron. He raised up and squinted at me, then. “Thank the Lord y’uns got together,” he said. He said he’d not slept a wink the night of our first encounter. The river had come way up over the bridge that night, he said. But in a couple of days, the word had drifted down that we had landed at The Birches.
“You know what I thought she said?” said Ollie to Ben Aaron. “Thought she said she was your granddaughter.”
Ben Aaron reached a long arm and pulled me to him and sank his fingers firmly in my shoulder. He was grinning, showing teeth clenched around that eternal nasty pipe.
“She could pass for my daughter, I’ll own ’er that,” he said.
He bought seed corn and tobacco plants. He bought at least five pounds of candy, divided in two sacks, and two big bags of those awful, stamped vanilla cookies.
“Where is the telegraph office from here?” I said.
“Do me a favor,” he whispered. “Pick out Rose a pretty dress, and tell her it come from you.”
I went and looked over what was on the rack. Not just for one that would do, but for something better. I must say Ollie had no eye for fashion. What was there was pretty ugly. I went back and said that quietly, and coolly, to Ben Aaron.
He rubbed his chin and looked down. “Would you know how to make her one?” he said. “The child’s near nekkid as a jaybird.” It sounded humble, like he was asking something very big.
“I’ll see what they’ve got for goods,” I said. I went and looked among the bolts of calico and sheeting and linty widow-black. And there was a bolt of thin white cotton, printed with blue forget-me-nots. I wasn’t sure of the size for a pattern. The truth was I couldn’t sew worth a doodle; all I knew I learned from Mit and she wasn’t exactly a Parisian dressmaker. But I would make this up for Rose, if I had to make it on her. I got some new thread and needles, but I knew full well somewhere in that house Daisy had a sewing box and I would find it.
While Mistress Ollie measured out the cloth, still as chatty as a pine stump, Ben Aaron shopped further. He came up with a straw hat with an enormous brim and a pink ribbon around the crown. When we carried the stuff out to the wagon he planted that hat on my head.
“You dang near blistered in that sun,” he said.
He drove us up the street to the cafe for a sandwich. And then he turned the mules toward the mountain and popped the reins. “We got to get these plants home to the shade,” he said.
On the way back, and I know he remembered it, there were some old wild rose bushes trailing down the bank. There was one open bloom; he stopped and picked it, and stuck it in the ribbon of that hat.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry for what?” I said.
“Sorry you think I’m a common sonofabitch,” he said.
I had not let him see me look at him since he made me mad. I right then considered the bushes and the rocks. Actually, I thought, he was a splendid, ruthless, enigmatic sonofabitch.
“I could never think you common,” I said. “You are my cousin.”
12.
THE FIDDLER
BY THE TIME THAT WE HAD GOT ALL THAT STUFF IN THE GROUND, the corn sowed and all those rows and rows of tobacco planted, I had kind of worked off my mad.
I sat down by the lamp one night and wrote a letter to Louise. The more I wrote, the more fanciful it got; I t
old her where we were, that we were having a wonderful visit and it was doing us a lot of good. I said the children were outdoors a lot, enjoying this big farm, and the people were so good to us, and all was bliss in the Elysian fields (I was not sure what that meant but it sounded good) and not to worry. I told her to give Foots my regards.
Coy Ray was down here working more every morning, a lot of times with Rose and the little boys helping, and I got him to take the letter up to Tatum’s store; that was where the post office was. I felt like a load of guilt had been lifted. I had declared our whereabouts.
When I would think back on that journey to Red Bank, though, that dreary day with Ben Aaron, it would make me a little uneasy. I could not feel completely justified in being here; there was something wrong with it. And it had nothing to do with being a runaway wife.
After he had left that day I had not seen Ben Aaron, and that began to bother me too. I had acted righteous. I had pried into his business. I had hurt him. And he had been so good to us. Oh, I was sorry. It lay on my mind like a wet rug, every night. I felt sorrier every day.
Coy Ray came one morning, then, and plowed another place, one that would be separate from the cornfield and the tobacco. He fixed me this nice little garden out close to the barn, where I could plant what we wanted to eat, and it would be easy to run back and forth from the house.
He had gone home with the mules and I was out there planting seeds. I couldn’t find a hoe anyplace, I had forgot to ask if Coy Ray could leave me one, so I had me a stick and I went along and gouged little trenches, and I was barefooted, and I was poking the beans down in that cool brown dirt with my toes. The children were at the river with Coy Ray’s crowd. I had the happy thought that I would run down there too, directly, and wade till my feet came clean.
But I heard an old truck straining, coming over the mountain. So I ran up to the spout, combing my hair with my fingers, and I kicked around in the runoff and splashed my face and dried it on the hem of my dress, and ran around the house to meet Ben Aaron. I had an idea it was him. He.
Well, he pulled up by the porch and hollered, “Am I supposed to know somebody named M.S. Steele?”
I could have danced a jig. “You got it!” I yelled. “Uncle Camp sent the box!”
“Somebody sure sent you a mess of somethin’,” he said. “What in God’s creation is it? The missionary barrel? A house and lot?”
“It’s clothes and stuff I didn’t have time to get together when we, uh, decided to leave,” I said.
He could give out the warmest, softest looks sometimes. Almost under his breath he said, “On the run, were you Cousin?”
I looked down at my toes and he just went on, “Hey, you ain’t been here two weeks and here you are pore and barefooted like us—mind, you’ll get the hookworms. Did you not read about that in school? We’ve all got ’em, you know, we dist lie up in the shucks and drink whiskey for it, ’course never get well.”
“That’s why you don’t weigh but two hundred pounds,” I said.
“Maybe a little more,” he said. “I ain’t THAT wormy.”
He hauled out the crate like it was a match box and put it up on the porch. “Now I reckon you want me to open it,” he said.
“You just want to see what’s in it,” I said. And I really did too. I told him I didn’t have the vaguest notion—really—what it might be. I told him how I had gone to Aunt Mit and Uncle Camp in the middle of the night and asked them to, uh, collect some things without being seen, stuff they thought we would need, and how Aunt Mit had blazed her eyes and said, “What you mean, us steal, you bad girl—what if Ol’ Miss ketch us?” But I knew Camp understood, he was grinning, and I knew they would help us. And I told how I had left them a shipping tag, made out to me, at Red Bank.
“Lord, Ben Aaron,” I said, “What blind faith! What if we’d never found this place?”
He cut his eye at me and laughed, “Hmp, Hmp,” around his pipe.
He went off and got the hammer and came back and pried up the slats. When he got the top loose there was a layer of newspaper, first, and I folded it up to look at later. I wanted to see who had got married and who had died and what was happening to Maggie and Jiggs in the funny papers.
There was a lot of tissue paper, then, and a sheet, and then a layer of hats. Oh, my. Hats with crowns stuffed with paper, some of them with their big flowers wrapped in old silk stockings. I put on one I had loved. It was a pale green straw, with silk leaves around the brim. “Now this costume Madame Serrec recommends for the spring cow-patty promenade,” I said. I showed him how one should tip among the cow-patties, holding up the hem of one’s skirt.
And Ben Aaron got tickled. And I couldn’t get him away from that stuff, then, and he kept pulling things out. There were a couple of evening dresses, and a pair of silk evening slippers, and when he brought up some frilly teddies, he laughed so big the racket bounced across the cove and back.
“I do declare, Cousin, I am going to have to red up the hog lot and get you some real fine pigs so you’ll have someplace nice to go in the evenin’s,” he said.
“You are a coarse, mean person,” I said. “Aunt Mittie thought I was coming to stay with quality folks.”
Thank goodness they had sent nearly all the wearable clothes the children had. I had not even thought of their coats, when we left, but we sure needed them before we even got here. And here they were. And then, here was Mama’s family Bible, and Grandma Twyning’s crocheted bedspread. And some old silver goblets that had been put away for Pet. There was no doubt that Aunt Mit had given us up for gone.
Under all this, wrapped up in a blanket, there was this peculiar box.
“What is that?” I said. It looked for the world like a little long coffin. But somehow it was familiar.
Ben Aaron turned awfully somber. He lifted up that box like it was crystal and ran his hand along the top. He squatted down and set it on the floor of the porch, and undid the little brass latches and raised the lid. There was something wrapped in an old red rag. I knew that rag, and that box. Mackey’s fiddle.
There was a piece of brown paper stuck in one of its holes. Ben Aaron handed it over to me, it had some laborious printing on it:
“This blong to Mr. Steele. Miss Nat she give it to me wen he die but I never plays it. Aunt Mit say love. Camp.”
I handed him the note back. It was one of those times when I could say nothing; I would have choked. There was a bird singing in the lilacs, and we could hear the children laughing and playing down on the river. I swallowed, and said, “It was Mackey’s.”
There was no way to put into words what I was thinking. I was thinking, here is the precious thing, the tangible link that I can hold in my hand. It left this house with my father. It was his comfort in that foreign country; it was his tie with his people. Now it had come home again. I blessed Camp in my heart; it had come home, through me. It was like Ivan McAllister Steele, himself, had been able to come and say, yes, this is my child—this is her home. It is right to take her in.
Ben Aaron picked up the fiddle by its neck and blew on it, and fine dust flew out into the sun. He smoothed his fingers over it and he took out his handkerchief and gently rubbed its back till the whorls of the maple wood picked up the light and glowed.
The strings were slack. One was gone, along with its peg. I wondered if maybe Mackey had been working on it, before he died. The bridge was loose in the case; Ben Aaron set it back under the strings, and turned a peg slowly, and whanged the string with his finger, and went to the next, turning and plucking, and the next, then back to the first, a little at a time, listening, coaxing, pressing, praying, it looked like, and cocking his ear for a decent pitch.
One of the pegs kept slipping back and its string would whang down. It was too old and dry to hold. So he took it out and undid it from its string, and he laid down his pipe and popped the peg into his mouth.
There was a nub of old rosin in the case, as dry and hard as stone. He reached in his pants p
ocket and fished out his knife, and scraped that rosin to a powder in the palm of his hand, and went to work on the bow. He tightened the frog, and trimmed the straggly hairs, and ran the bow across his palm and worked in the rosin. And then he took that spitty peg, and rosined it, and stuck it back and tightened the string, and it held.
All this went on in silence; this was a religious rite. He tuned the thing again, G—(no D)—A—E, G-A-E, till it suited him, and he stuck his pipe back in the corner of his mouth, and re-lit it, and took up the bow and drew a lick across the strings. Awful. The thing screeched and howled and squalled like something alive, like something dragged screaming back into the light, after twenty years of dark and peaceful sleep.
Ben Aaron took off his hat, then, and settled himself back, with a satisfied look, against a porch pillar, and he dangled one long leg down the steps and fastened his eyes upon the hill, and he began to play. I would see him later on playing with the chin-rest down under his collar-bone, sort of unconcerned, while people danced. But not now. He rested his cheek on this fiddle’s own face. And he played.
He played with no visible effort, with the smallest motion. I had wondered about those strong polished fingers; now I knew what they were for.
“Do you know this?” he said.
I felt small and humble. “Yessir,” I said. “Mackey used to play it.”
It was “Fisher’s Reel,” and it was sublime. Paganini could have squeezed no more flying notes into a measure than my cousin Ben Aaron on only three strings.
One tune slid into another, he would stop and tune and pick up in another direction. He bowed and plucked and the fiddle danced and barked and cackled and crooned; it had a hundred voices and sometimes they talked two at a time. “You know ‘Paddy on the Turnpike?’” he said, and I guess I did, but never like this.
It raised my hair. I got goosebumps. I squatted there by him, afraid if I drew a long breath it would go away. Lord, he could play. There was a quality about it that was beyond this nice man sitting here; it was more than just loose and running and rejoicing, it was cocky, and powerful, and tireless, merciless, I thought. It would wear you out and lift you up and make you move, until you died of joy. It was seductive.
