by Dot Jackson
He looked relieved. “It did turn off a pretty day,” he said, “the clearest I b’lieve it’s been since you were here.”
We sipped politely on our tea. Directly, he said, “You got anything more you really have to do today?” He sounded like a little boy who knew where the Easter baskets were hid.
“No, not a solitary thing,” I said.
“Then you can go someplace with me,” he said.
I said I would have to get cleaned up; I had streaks of sweat running down my neck, and chicken-doo on the hem of my dress.
“No—not a soul will see us,” he said, “you don’t even need to put on shoes.”
So we went out; he had been leading an extra horse behind Cy, and he put me up on it, and we went off across the scrub field, going west, and picked up a little trail that headed nearly straight up Hogback, west of the bluffs.
“Grab you up a good handful of mane and hang on,” he said. I grabbed me two arms full of neck and clung for dear life. He let me go ahead and he followed. I dared to look back at him once; he had the reins sort of draped over one wrist and the other hand on Cy’s shoulder, patting him along. My horse just picked its way along, with no direction from me.
When we got to the ridge we were in a grove of hemlocks and the trail was soft and quiet under the horses’ feet. Ben Aaron went ahead, to the right, across the comb of the ridge. The sun came through the trees in slanting stripes of light and made light splotches on the ferns and the floor of the woods. We were climbing still, but gently.
And then we came out onto the bald, into the sun. He stopped and stared way off, saying nothing, like he was counting the hills to be sure nobody’d taken one. There was not a shred of fog, a breath of haze; the air sparkled. He moved on, then, still quiet. The trail was a worn, one-horse track over the moss and through the grasses on the rock.
We came to that stone pedestal that was the high point of the mountain, and from that side it sloped enough so that the track could go up it. Ben Aaron waited at the base till I came up beside him. “Lean over here and put your arms around my neck,” he said. And I did, and he lifted me over on Cy, in front of him, and looped my horse’s reins over a stob, and we rode on up. The top of the rock was not much more than one horse wide.
We were up there above the bushes, above the treetops. A hawk circled over the valley of the Caney Forks; we were looking down at him. We could plainly see the “forks,” where Big Caney and its west prong joined. Spirals of smoke and white steam rose just in front of the silver streak of river; the sawmill gave us perspective for the rest of the valley. Overhead the sky was deep blue, and the world was that green of new summer, rising and falling every way we looked.
We sat there absolutely silent, motionless. That was not deliberate, it was the effect (at least on me) of awe. I knew that this little trail he’d made alone. This rock was his. He was sharing the most precious thing he knew.
“All this you see,” he said, finally, starting over from the first time we were on this mountain, “all this…” and he stalled again.
“I thought you might like to see what I have gotten back,” he started over.
“Gotten back?”
“It was nearly all gone,” he said.
“Gone where?”
“To anybody that had a little money, or a little likker, or a good hand of cards,” he said. “To the tax collector, part of it. The horse trader, whoever come along. Just not much to you and me…not without a fight…”
“Who did it belong to?” I said.
“Hmmp,” he said, amused and a little pleased I didn’t know.
“From the top of this ridge north over Wolf Den—that’s the mountain there beyond the forks—that belonged to old Ivan McAllister. That was your great-great-granddaddy. He came in here in the 1780s and started a trading post.
“He found out then he could get a land grant of three thousand acres if he started an iron forge. He did that. He traded horses and furs and he built a store and bought up a few thousand acres more. Guess it didn’t cost anything hardly then. Sometime around 1790 or so he wrote his cousin Hamilton Steele in Philadelphia, and told him things were pretty good, to come on. Said he’d found just the right piece of land across the ridge from his own place, called it ‘a bonnie grove o’ birken’ or somethin’ like that. The letter’s still in the attic, I expect. Ought to be there in a little tin box.”
Well, Ben Aaron said, Ham Steele was a young man then. His folks had been shipbuilders, they had a boatworks on the River Clyde, somewhere near Glasgow in Scotland. Ham had sailed his own ship to America, brought a bunch of passengers, and all his belongings, and soon as he dropped anchor and unloaded he sold the ship. Then he waited in Philadelphia to hear from old Ive.
So he came south into the mountains with a little money. He came also with an extra wagon for his books and tools, and a “blue-black body servant, from Barbados,” Ben Aaron said, and a taste for things of the spirit, but not too much for work.
He bought about nine hundred acres, from this ridge south, east along the river and west to Shiloh, Ben Aaron said. He put him up a cabin, and went up to the forks and married Ive’s daughter Ariana. By the time they had a couple of children he had started his real house in The Birches.
“He and Ive had their fingers in all kinds of pies. They knew lumber, and began to cut timber. They ran the forge. They made brick. They had a tanyard, and dealt in hides. ’Course hired somebody else to do most all of the work. Ive built the town of Caney Forks and Ham went after land.”
They owned everything from the head of the valley down the river—on this side—to Red Bank. They bought west, across Shiloh, and north to Wolf Creek. They didn’t move east. Not at least in any big lumps. Over there the Wilcoxes grew like cuckleburrs, Ben Aaron said. And next to Wilcoxes’ an old German named Henry Shuman owned a thousand acres and couldn’t be moved with a crowbar.
There had been other families who had held to little pockets, against the avalanche of McAllister and Steele.
“Can you see that steeple, back over there, shinin’ in the sun?” Ben Aaron said, pointing over in the northwest corner of the valley. “That’s Beaverdam Baptist. That’s in what we call Harmon Field, over there. Ol’ Ive had one son, named Aaron, married Mallie Harmon. They turned out McAllisters for Ham and Arie’s children to marry. Now, Ive had one other girl besides Arie, she was a kind of a weak-minded gal, had to be looked after. It was always told that she was sittin’ out on the porch one day, crochetin’ a long chain of thread, and of Lije Peek come along, stopped to talk to her. He wadn’t what you’d call right bright, either. And the next thing her people knew, she was gone. Lije had took her off to get married. It was a terrible disgrace. ’Course they found her and got her home but she come up with a baby, Simmy Peek. That was Barzilai Peek’s granddaddy, case you wondered how he was kin to us.”
I had.
“There, over that way,” Ben Aaron said, pointing at some humpy hills that lay south and west of Harmon’s, “that’s the Tater Hill mountains. The gap between them is Gillespie Field.”
We sat very still. A little breeze rushed around us, cool, so sweet on us rooted to that rock in the sun. “My sister married a Gillespie,” Ben Aaron said.
“Nam told me,” I said. “The minute I knew where I was, here, I had to know why Mackey left. Nam told me.”
For the longest time, then, again, nothing passed. There was plenty more to say, but it had to come in its own time. “Down there on the Boney Creek they hanged a bushwhacker one time,” Ben Aaron volunteered cheerily.
“Oh, awful!” I said.
“Meant to leave ’im for the buzzards…”
“Hush!”
“…but Granddaddy Mack, Nam’s daddy, he was a Confederate captain you know, he went out and made ’em cut him down. Made ’em bury him, in a decent way. Said he’d not have such as that to blight this place.”
“Oh, don’t!”
“Don’t what?” he said.
&nb
sp; “Don’t blight this place.”
I shivered, and I remember the comfort of leaning back on his chest, with his arms around my waist. I remember he rested his chin on the crown of my head, and I couldn’t see him, but I imagined he was smiling.
“So it was all gone and you got it back,” I said.
“I don’t know if you know,” he said, “but we don’t come from the most provident line of people. My pa did love his likker. That was a common trait among ’em. The men. Your granddaddy Ive, he was a fine, gracious gentleman. Read Latin and Greek. Whittle and fiddle and read a little bit, that was a day’s work for him. Ol’ Ham Steele warmed over. Except Ben Ivan wasn’t near as sharp as Ham was, with money.”
He sucked his pipe and shuffled his thoughts. A few little white puffy clouds drifted over; we watched their shadows move across the valley.
“I worked in that sawmill from the time I was little. Before I ever went to school. When your daddy left, business started on the down-go in earnest. I knew about the debts that were run up and not paid, the land being sold off to strangers. The year I finished college my daddy died. I came home for the funeral and Ive just plain handed the mill over to me. The whole works. We were about to go under. The land at the Forks was down to about a thousand acres, with money owing. Ivan still held the birch cove intact, but that was Daisy’s doing. It was hers by birth as much as his—Ham Steele was HER granddaddy, too.
“Daisy would have died before…” he stopped for a long sigh, “Daisy was never going to give up The Birches. But everything else just dribbled away.”
“What did you do?” I said. I couldn’t imagine. Or wouldn’t let myself.
“It took a little time, and all kinds of ways, I’m not real proud to say,” he said benignly. “Nature and bad fortune helped me, time to time. The tax collector helped me a time or two. A heart of granite helped me. Sometimes the good Lord helped me, odd to say. And in the nastiest times, I simply helped myself…”
“You got it all?”
“And a little extra…”
I wanted to ask him how much of it there was. But I didn’t. “All this you see…” was all my mind could handle.
But then, like a cockroach swimming in the punchbowl, one of Sophier’s great lines of the morning came across that euphoric scene: “One of my favorite properties.”
I started to say something. I was about to say, “Oh, by the way, I had company this morning.” But I didn’t want to blight this place.
“I guess the younguns’ll wonder where you are,” Ben Aaron said, straightening up in the saddle.
“I guess we better go,” I said, with no heart in it. When we came down off the rock, he reached and took my horse’s reins off the limb, and knotted them, and threw them over its head, and clucked to it and it followed us along. “Steep goin’ down,” he said, “it’s as well you stay with me.”
It was another strange rite of kinship we had passed up there. I had been fascinated by Ben Aaron; I had admired him. I had been furious with him, and I had loved him. Somehow now I was kin to him, comfortably, intimately, in a way you can only feel and not describe. I felt more from him than the tenderness of something big for something little; I guess it was the joy of something that had been lost and given up now being found, and dark and lonely corners opened to the light.
He had lifted me off Cy and was about to go when I finally said it. “Oh, by the way, I had company this morning.”
“Did,” he said, biting down on his pipe. “I guess it was about time.”
I was afraid of what I could say. I couldn’t think of anything right.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“About what?” he said, mild and innocent.
And I was damned, whatever I was about to say. But then he went on. “About Celestine? Hmmp. Soph gets so much pleasure out of tellin’ that, would I rob her of it?”
I was right on the brink of tears. “Ben Aaron, how…?” I started out. But he gave me one of those firm, unblinking, Presbyterian elder looks, and moved down the steps, just out of reach.
“I meant to tell you when we were up on the ridge,” he said. “I meant to show you Shiloh Cove. When we get that camp goin’ we’re goin’ to have families in there. We’ll have to have a school. It’s goin’ to be a lot easier for your kids to go there than to try to go up to the Forks.”
“Oh, by the time school starts we’ll be gone back, I ’spect,” I said, with no conviction at all.
“Next time I’m by here, I’ll show you what’s over there. Ol’ Shiloh Church, been deserted, it’ll do all right for a school. I’ll show you how the kids’ll have to go,” he said.
It was like he hadn’t heard a word. Or just knew better.
16.
THE WAGES OF SIN
ONE OF THE THINGS THE KIDS DID EACH DAY, THEY WOULD TAKE the mule and the cow down to the grassy bottoms and let ’em graze. We didn’t have any serious fences, except around the barn lot. So the livestock had to be led out and tied and tended. After a fashion.
The mule had picked up some; it looked better and was holding up its head. Aunt Nam said the eats were none too good at Cud’n Barz’s place, for man or beast. Said she watched him feed the mules one time; “He give ’em each two ears o’ corn and a hand o’ fodder and said, ‘Now, eat till ye bust.’” The mule was improved; the cow I couldn’t tell much about, I mean what was fat and what was calf.
We had gotten up the nerve to ride the mule sometimes; we would bridle it and put a croaker sack on it and ride it, oh, as far as the river, maybe. We had saddles but that poor old thing could not have stood the extra weight. Pet and Hugh could ride it down to the pasture and lead the cow, and as long as the kids didn’t go out of sight they could stake ’em out, tie ’em to something, and go do as they pleased.
So I didn’t worry, that afternoon, when I got home and the children were nowhere to be seen. I made the fire in the stove to cook supper, and went out and brought in the wash. It wasn’t till the sun went down that I got uneasy and went out to call them.
I hollered and they didn’t answer. I went down to the barn and the mule and the cow were still gone so I figured they were still down on the branch. But I couldn’t figure how they’d gone too far to hear. The light was going. I called and called. Nothing answered but the absolute still—that is the scariest sound you will ever hear, if you’ve lost your children in the woods.
I thought then that maybe they’d gone up to Coy Ray’s. I walked up as far as the burying ground and called. Not that they could hear me, with the narrows between us. But I could see the smoke from Rose’s supper fire, rising in the dim. I knew that she would have realized how late it was, and would have sent them home.
The stars were coming out. The last birds were straggling in and making their little goodnight noises. Bats flitted and dipped over the field. No Pet and Hugh. I thought about Ben Aaron already home, sitting at the supper table with a big stuffed hen. Seven miles I would have to walk to get him to come and help me—if the Mistress Steele would let him come. I thought of Coy Ray and Rose, of course I would have gone for them first. I could wade the river and get up to their house, steep going though it was, in less than an hour. But it would be pitch black.
I was thinking whether to take time to get a lantern. I was seeing little bodies tumbling down the narrows, in the foam. Floating in the dark of the suck hole. Limp and crumpled at the bottom of some old well or mine-hole. It came to mind that I would have to tell Foots. The car was one thing. But the children? I called out in panic, one more time.
Way down the cove, a little voice came back. I ran down to the road, it was now just a lighter streak in the dark of night. Way off, I could make out a dark something coming. Two kids on the mule. I ran to meet them, being thankful every step, and kissed their dusty knees.
“Mama, we don’t know what to do,” Pet said. “Hugh has lost Miss Murchie.” (They had named the cow Miss Murchie for the headmistress at the Latin School. She was a ri
ght bovine lady, thick as a pudding, stolid and immovable, it was true.)
“We’ve been miles and we can’t find her.” Hugh was suffering as only Hugh could suffer, the sins of the world a dead weight on his tousled black crown.
“We’ll find her in the morning,” I said. “All I care about right now is here.” Miss Murchie had never been my great mottled hope, to begin with.
But a wrong had been done, and the righteous would not rest until the whole thing was reported.
“He tied her to a willow limb, it wasn’t hardly more than a leaf. And he went off to fish,” Pet said. Hugh sat convicted and condemned.
“If you saw that why didn’t you tie her better?” I said.
Pet was in all things a logical child. “It was his day to take care of the cow,” she said. “I had the cow yesterday.”
Well, I assured them, Miss Murchie would turn up. She had not come up on high living; she had camped out on many a less pleasant night than this one. And when it got light, when we had all rested from our crises, we would find her.
Later on, when we had blown out the light, I didn’t think about Miss Murchie. I did think of the terror that had just passed, and of the debt of piety that I owed because I had promised, and my children had come home. And that out of the way, I thought about Sophier. Soph-ya. And other things.
Uncle Camp used to practice his sermons in the kitchen, when I was little. He preached one Sunday a month at the Second Beulah Land Baptist Church. One that stuck in my mind (I guess because so often it applied), was about thinking bad thoughts.
I could see his face, the veins in his temples, the dark brown satin skin tight over the jaw and cheekbones. I could hear the rise and fall of the message as he embraced the imaginary flock with a grand gesture of the dishrag. “We all thinks wicked thoughts sometime…Bad thoughts be like duh buzzahd. He fly over yo’ head, an’ my head. I can’ mek ’im stop. But I don’ need fo’ ox ’im to make a nest in my hair!”
