by Dot Jackson
If I had dreamed at all that night, it would have been of buzzards circling and roosting in my hair. I lay there with my eyes closed, trying to put things together in my mind. There was a picture of Ben Aaron on my eyelids. It was as he would sit up there on that rock, on that old horse, looking out over all this that he loved. And then there was Sophia, preening and poking out of her Baltimore dress, lording it over us.
I could not put that pair together. I couldn’t believe that Heaven had done that, either. It made me shudder. I thought about things I had no right to think of, and I couldn’t help it. I thought about those butter-churn legs with the flat black hairs, next to him in bed. Oh God—did he TOUCH her? Did she flop those pasty bumpers over him at night? Certainly they had Done It, at least once. That child was the image of her father. I said to myself, now, that’s none of your business. But hot water welled up in my gullet and I had to get up and spit.
Finally, I was so tired, and it seemed like I had just dozed off. And I heard this racket. I thought first I was dreaming it. Maybe somebody was snoring. It did it again, and then I was awake. It was terrifying.
I lay there listening, too scared to move. Thank the Lord it was outside. I thought, Are the doors locked? Of course they were not—who would ever bother us? And it did it again—it went MaaaoooooOOOOO…MaaaaoooooOOOOOoo.
We had heard some awful screams in the woods one night, just a few days after we got here. We had huddled together wondering if we should go help whoever was being killed. But Coy Ray came, before good daylight, and he laughed when I told him. Said, “Awww, it’s dist a ol’ panther a-yowlin’. No harm to it. Dist keep your younguns in, of a night…”
This was nothing like that at all. This was a BIG something. I had never doubted for a minute that spirits had this place, but I’d never thought of them as anything but good. The thing hollered again, louder. It had a deep, fog-horn kind of voice.
Miss Murchie. I had never heard a cow trying to calve before. I leaned over and turned up the lamp wick and felt around for a match. All the shadows that light made didn’t do my feelings a lot of good. I crept out of bed and went to the window and listened. It was Miss Murchie, somewhere down in the bottom. And she was in terrible distress.
I woke Pet and Hugh and told them to get their shoes on quick, and I went to the kitchen to get the lantern, and we went trailing off into the night. Every time that moan would roll across the field, all our feet would want to turn around. But we followed the sound. I didn’t know whatever we would do, when we found her.
We were going down into the birch grove. An awful likelihood occurred to me. “Did you all look in that thicket around the suck hole?” I said.
“No,” Hugh said. “We didn’t want to…”
“I don’t blame you one particle,” I said.
The nearer we got, going through the vines and spider webs and dew, the weaker the wailing got. We got into the bog, over our ankles. The lantern shined on water that was coffee black by day. You could hear the hole that drained it going slooop…slooop…
The light went almost nowhere. I thought for a second I was back in bed, having a nightmare. There was a long lull between groans and we stood still, not knowing which way to slop. And then there was just panting, the whistling of breath from somewhere in the tangle of laurels and dog-hobble bushes. And finally, the lantern light glinted back from an eye.
Miss Murchie was down on her knees in the thicket. Her eyes were rolled back from suffering. Her bony sides heaved with her struggles for wind. Her back legs were spraddled out in the muck. She had slipped away, going deeper in the thicket as they hunted her. She had found a private place to have her calf, all right, but then she couldn’t do it.
I gave Pet the lantern and got Hugh to help me try to push her over on her side. It probably was wrong to do that but I knew her front legs had to be aching. We counted and shoved and our feet slipped in the mud. We couldn’t budge her. Her tongue lolled, she gave a feeble grunt and lifted her tail. A dainty hoof showed in the mess. Then the joint of a leg. It was a little hind leg. She was calving backwards. My insides ached for her.
Then of her own, she rolled over on her side. “We’ve got to get some help,” I said. That meant somebody was going to have to stay, and somebody would go. Somebody would have a light, and somebody none. I thought we might break some bows and make a fire. But we were too much in the wet. And so inept. If we let the lantern go out, we’d be in a mess.
“Who’s going to get Coy Ray?” I said.
“I will,” Hugh said, in a quavery little voice. “It’s my fault.”
But while I tried to make him know that this was by nature the way things sometimes go, Miss Murchie heaved, and gurgled up a mass of bloody bubbles. A great shudder went over her, and she lay still.
Hugh squatted and rubbed her head, with tears falling on her. “She was just too old,” I said.
But there was that little leg, sticking out of the cooling corpse. I never wanted less to put my hands anywhere, but I had Pet hold the lantern down close, and I ran my fingers up along that leg, and found the back, and the other leg, and clutched and pulled. I could feel the poor little joints giving. Then we had two bloody legs free, and a tail. Half a dead cow lay relaxing on that little body trapped inside.
The legs were limp. I could feel no life in them. I was lying on my belly, at the cow’s behind. I tugged but I had no leverage. I couldn’t bring the body.
“Let me try,” Hugh said. He needed to feel like he’d done the best he could. I moved and let him, but his hands kept slipping.
“It’s dead,” I said. “It may have been dead for a while.” And at that point of despair, the lantern died, and nothing but the orange sparks on the wick glowed in the dark. We were in complete blackness.
We stayed still until our eyes got a little more adjusted to it. Things went plop in the water, now and then. The night bugs droned, and the river talked, as if to reassure us. Finally I told the kids to take hold of my gown and when they thought they could, to lead me out. And they did. When we came out of the woods we could see the dark shape of the house, up the hill, and the glow of lamplight from the front room window.
We stopped at the runoff and washed and washed. I told the kids to leave everything but their underwear on the back porch. I had Pet throw me out a big apron and I stripped off my nightgown and washed again at the spout, before I wrapped myself up and came inside. But all night I knew I could smell cow, and dying, on my hands.
When we slept it was the sleep of the dead. As soon as they woke up the next day I sent the children after Coy Ray. The buzzards were circling, for a fact, and I didn’t know what to do. Coy Ray was gone, of course, but the kids left word with Rose, and she said not to worry, she would keep us in milk as long as we needed.
And afterwhile, Coy Ray came with the two biggest boys and a pair of mules. I don’t know what they did. I never asked. It was just that they knew how to do it, and for that I felt humble and blessed.
17.
THROUGH THE GLASS DARKLY
THERE WERE NOT MANY FOLKS UP HERE HAD TELEPHONES, IN THAT time. I think they didn’t need ’em. The wires could not have carried the word to Aunt Nam that Sophier had been here a bit faster than the mountain news service.
I cannot tell you what it did for my spirit, as the undertakers were down there disposing of Miss Murchie, to hear Nam’s buggy coming like the wind. I ran out to meet her and fell on her neck.
“If you didn’t come I was coming to you, as soon as I could get up and creep,” I said. And I told her about our adventures of the night before.
“I would of been here at day this mornin’ but pore ol’ Miss Nannie Brock was taken right about four o’clock and they wanted me to stay and dress ’er,” Nam said. It had been a cheerful morning for us both.
That news disposed of, we proceeded to vital matters.
“Sophier was here,” she said.
“How’d you know? Ben Aaron tell you?”
“I smelt the singed feathers all the way to the Forks,” she said.
“What you mean?”
“I hear you give ’er as good as you got,” she said.
“Did Ben Aaron tell you that?” I said. “I never said a word to him, except that she was here.”
She smirked and rocked and swung her foot. “I’ve got other connections,” she said.
“Well I never said anything unkind to her, I don’t think I did,” I said. “Except—I didn’t let her run me off.”
Aunt Nam popped her hands, “And that’s exactly what she meant to do. Billy Shuman, Ansel’s boy, he’s the one drives for ’er, if he can’t get out of it. ’Course he got ever’ word, comin’ and goin’. Said she come down here fully intendin’ to put y’uns on the road. And you never paid ’er a bit of attention in the world. Said you never even acted upset. Said she rared and carried on to that pore afflicted girl, all the way home, about Aaron’s deadbeat relations.”
I could still see Billy Shuman, Ansel’s boy, sitting up behind those horses, hardly able to contain himself. “Wha’d you have to give him to make him tell you all that?” I said.
She turned around and faced me, holding on to the arms of her rocker like she couldn’t believe her ears. “Why, he’s our KIN,” she said.
“You and Ben Aaron are my kin,” I said, a little bit puzzled, “and there’s a whole sight you’ve not told me.”
She laughed and raised her eyebrows, looking wise. “All dead men will float up sometime,” she said. “Now tell ME something. Are you still tryin’ to like Miss Sophier?”
“No, I am not,” I said. “I don’t think I can stand her.”
“Why, what in the world?”
“She talked ugly to me about Ben Aaron.”
“I can hear it—don’t tell me. He went off and left her and that youngun was born in that plight and it was all his fault.”
“Does she tell that all over?” I said.
“Wherever one or more are gathered together,” Nam said.
“How in the world does Ben Aaron tolerate that?”
“Humph,” she said. “Humph. I reck’n he just considers the source.”
“Said it happened right here in this house.”
Nam sat there rocking, picking at a thread in the front of her skirt. “Lots of things happened to Sophier right here in this house,” she said, a little bit subdued.
“Yes, it did,” she went on, directly. “Things went wrong for Sophier right from the start. Right from the day Ben Aaron brought ’er here. First thing, she wanted ’im to carry ’er over the threshold. Lord do! Well he was goin’ to do the best he could. Unlocked the door, opened it, heisted ’er up…” Nam went through the motions of Ben Aaron raising Sophier, down to his straining neck, and strutted jaw, and red face, “and just as he got ’er all gathered up the door shut in ’is face and he couldn’t get it open to save his life. Put ’er down finally and pushed and rattled and shoved. Wouldn’t open. Gave up on it and went around to the back, come through and opened it from inside, and let Sophier in…”
I couldn’t help but think it was not much romantic of Ben Aaron to tell that kind of thing about his lovely bride. But then Nam said, “She quarreled about these old fireplaces too, all the time. Said they were filthy. Said no matter where she sat the smoke came in her face. Ben Aaron was listenin’ at ’er go on about that one time. I’ll never forget the devilish look on his face, nor how she clucked and preened, when he said, ‘Well, my love, smoke follers beauty.’
“She worried him so about the floors bein’ humpy till he had new joists put under these two rooms, here, on the river side. Old ones was whole dressed logs this big, solid as the day they were laid. But her chair kep’ a-turnin’ over even with that done.
“She claimed the mice had plain took over, even made nesties in ’er shoes. Her last go-round though was with the privy.”
“They did have a privy?” I said. I had wondered why there wasn’t one, with all the niceties around.
“Haw, they had one. Matter of fact they had two, a men’s and a ladies’. Men’s was up in the hemlocks, ’course way below the spring. Tree fell on it, after nobody was here. Sophier burned the ladies’.”
“What?”
“She burnt it. She allus used a chamber pot, ’course, in the house. Or did when they was somebody here to wait on ’er and empty it. Well, but one day she was down in the garden, must of been a-lookin’ for Ben Aaron, for she never worked out there, as anybody knew of. And she had to go to the toilet. Set down on the seat and a yeller-jacket popped ’er. Well, maybe it was several. You know they like to nest in the hole.
“She yowled for Ben Aaron to come a-runnin’ but he was a good ways off, somewhere. ’Fore he could get there she had gone in the house and got coal oil and a rag, goin’ to burn out the yellerjackets. ’Course she set the outhouse on fire, burnt it to the ground.”
Right after that, Nam said, they moved up to the Forks, anyway.
“But she really had a baby here? What did she mean, it ‘nearly drowned?’”
Aunt Nam drew up a good breath. “Oh, law, she had it here,” she said. “And, it nearly drowned. She had it in the slop jar.”
“No!”
“She had it in the slop jar. Cleone was here then, doin’ all the work. Sophier went on about how she craved some kraut. And Cleone fixed it. A pot of pork chops and kraut. Sophier eat about the whole thing. Cleone had made a couple of green apple pies, it was that time, and Sophier eat one of them, too. She took a fearsome case o’ the trots, and here that baby came.”
“Was that Rose’s mother that was here?” I said. “Was that the ‘ignorant servant girl?’”
“Did she really say that? Did that heifer say that about Cleone? Lord have mercy,” Nam said. She rocked and puffed and then she said, “Servant girl my foot. Cleone was our cousin. Her mama and daddy had one of the nicest places around here. Old Jake Shuman place, over across the river there. House is since burned down, but they lived nice. Back about 1912, there come a typhoid epidemic through here. People died with it, ones that didn’t die laid helpless for months sometimes, fell away to just weak bones, hair fell out; whole houses would smell like rats. Where typhoid was, you could smell it.
“Cleone’s mama and daddy died of it. She was eighteen or so, not married yet. So she was there to wait on ’em. Cleone never got the typhoid herself, but by the time they died she was down to a rag. Ans was off in medical school; by the time she got word to him and he got home, it was nearly over. Ben Aaron’d go up there and he’p ’er when he could, they’d always been close. Finally when her folks were gone he brought ’er here. He didn’t want ’er stayin’ in that old house alone.
“Well, ’course you can imagine what happened…”
I could imagine all kinds of things. So many I just kept rocking and said nothing.
“Cleone was here not even a week when Sophier made a housemaid out of ’er. Soon as Ben Aaron had to go somewhere and leave the two of ’em alone. Sophier’s always had to have a maid you know; never could keep one. Had a woman here from the start, to clean and cook. Then she brought in this poor little French woman, don’t know where she got ’er. Always wanted a French maid to dress ’er up and rat up ’er hair, the like of that.
“That’n didn’t last long though I tell you. That gal and Aaron’d sit at the kitchen table, a-talkin’ French.”
“What?” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said, sort of cool. “Did you think he went off to school to learn saw-millin’? He spent six months in France, in the big war, talkin’ French to people for some high-muckety officer, some friend of his at school. Was sent for, just to do it.”
I thought about the worn little books of French poetry on the attic shelves. They were so old they surely belonged to someone before Ben Aaron’s time. Someone, I figured, had read them to him, and planted yet another wild, unlikely seed.
“Anyway,” Nam went on, “you know it never worked, that woman b
ein’ here. Sophier couldn’t understand what they were a-sayin’. Next thing anybody knew that French gal was off to the depot with ’er suitcase in ’er hand. By the time Ben Aaron brought Cleone home, the housekeeper had walked off too. Wouldn’t anybody stay, the life was so hateful. And on top of her meanness, Sophier was beginnin’ to get big. So it fell to Cleone.”
“Even delivering the baby?”
“Oh, it brought itself. Cleone got the blame. No, Ben Aaron got the blame. Of course, he was off scoutin’ timber somewhere, gone two or three days. They weren’t lookin’ for the baby for five or six weeks; he was goin’ to bring Sophier up to the Forks and move ’er in with me. We could get the doctor in a few minutes, there. He’d have been glad for ’er to go home to her own folks to have it; that’s what she planned, at first, to go home at about six months. But then for some reason she changed ’er mind…
“Well, it came the way it did. And when we looked at it, we all knew somethin’ was wrong. I tell you, I don’t think it had a thing to do with where that baby was born, or anything else that happened. Except she was born too hard and too early. Makes me sick right now the way that nastiness gets talked about, right in front of that sweet youngun. Like she’s some kind o’ show-freak. When the truth is she’s got a way yonder better brain than her ol’ mammy.”
“Did they never get a doctor?”
“Oh, law, we got ol’ Doctor Bryson from up at the Forks to sit by Sophier, her a-moanin’ and a-groanin’ about her own self. I stayed with her while Ben Aaron and Cleone took the baby to a specialist in Asheville. He told ’em about somebody else in Atlanta and they took her there a couple of times. Finally Ben Aaron hired a nurse to come stay, I b’lieve she was from Asheville. Worked in the hospital. She was here a week or two, next thing Ben Aaron come home and found ’er all packed up waitin’ for a ride to town.
“The only soul that would stay was Cleone. I don’t know what on earth they’d a done without her. I don’t know what ’twas, but Sophier couldn’t get ’er goat. Cleone just ignored ’er and went about ’er business. Did the cookin’, cleaned up, washed, waited on that wench and tended that little baby. Just doin’ the way she figured kin-people ought to do, I guess.”
