by Dot Jackson
Finally, without looking at me, he said, “Sen, you are the victim of a terrible fraud, my dear.”
“You never told me you loved me,” I said, teasing.
“I’ve not told you the truth about a lot of things,” he said. He blew a long slow puff of smoke. “I’ve not told you the truth about this place,” he said. “I didn’t have the guts.”
“Guts never appealed to me all that much,” I said. “I kind of like legs.”
He wouldn’t be amused. “I made you think we own it. It’s not so.”
“Daisy owns it,” I said. “You didn’t have to tell me that. It don’t bother me.”
“Daisy owns it, all right,” he said. “But she ain’t got a deed that would ever hold up in court.”
“What do you mean, then?” I said. He was beginning to make me real uneasy. “If it’s not ours then whose is it?”
He heaved a deep sigh. “Sophier’s,” he said.
Sophier’s. I could see old Sofa again, big as life, waving her pink-gloved hand over “one of my favorite properties.” And all this time I thought she was just blowing. “Sophier’s,” I said.
He looked at the ceiling. “And her sister’s…”
“How? In the name of God will you tell me how?” I said.
The house creaked in the wind, like it was cringing. He sat down and draped a corner of the quilt across him, modestly. One by one he inspected his fingers. “I think I told you once…” he started out, and stopped to clear his throat. “I think I told you we were just a jump ahead of the wolves, up at the mill, when your ma put this place up for sale,” he said.
“Yes, you did,” I said. “And I asked you where you got the money. You never told me what magic trick you turned. I bet you never did this one with a deck of cards.” I was getting loud. I felt hysterical. I was crushed.
“Did I ever tell you I was Pure-Peter John?” he yelled back. “You’re absolutely right. I sold my ass. Now. You go look out that door yonder and come back and tell me how low I am. Go up on the hill and tell it to my mamma and daddy. Tell it to Daisy and Ive.”
“Tell ’em what?” I said. “Tell ’em, ‘Folks, your very bones now belong to Sophier Orpington, whom you so dearly loved when she lived on your place?’”
He flung a chunk on the fire and sparks flew out all over the hearth. We sat there sulking, not touching, not even looking at each other, like two lumps of pain. Directly he maybe got over wanting to hit me. He sighed, finally, and commenced again.
“As I said, I had not two nickels to rub together in my pocket. And nowhere to get ’em. And maybe a day or two, or a week, to make that offer good, if your mother decided to call my hand. I had a bid ready to go off to Orpington Industries, they owned several furniture and veneer plants up north and I had sold to ’em before and I was trying to sell ’em again. I was not real crazy about the old man Orpington; he was a braggy old bastard. But he seemed to like to do business with me. When I’d go up there he’d always take me home with him.
“He had these two big old overstuffed gals. They had sat looking out the bay winder for Prince Charming so long that their fannies had taken root in the davenport.
“But to make it short, nothing worked. The night I was to leave up there they invited me to supper. While the old man and I were talking in the library, and I was getting nowhere, and feeling like absolute shit, I could hear Sophier and Patience in the next room havin’ a hair-pull fight. One of ’em screeched at the top of her voice, ‘You ugly toad, he’s asking Papa for ME!’
“And I said then, to the old man, ‘Before I leave I’d like to talk to you about a loan. There’s a place for sale that I know about, big house and a boundary of virgin timber. It will make a nice home for your daughter…’
“I never asked Sophier to marry me at all. I never even said which one. The old man called Sophier in, and congratulated us from the bottom of his heart, and Patience flammed the wall with her fists and wailed. Sophier, you see, was the oldest one; Sophier was older than God.
“I left there in a half an hour’s time with a loan in my hand and a ring through my nose for the rest of my life.” He hushed and put his head in his hands and sat still for a while. Finally he said, “Sen, can you believe I did that?”
I didn’t know what to answer him. I moved over and put my arm around him and held him to me.
“Now, in a little while I brought Sophier on down here,” he said. “She was insulted at this place right off and let me know it. But I put every waking hour nearly into that mill. We started shipping lumber out of here. We hustled like hell. I got out and went to the plants and we got lumber moving. The old man did bring one outfit to Virginia and we had a good contract from them. We moved day and night; I put on men that hadn’t worked in years and we skinned the big stuff off the mountains with steers all day and we’d use some of the same help to run the mill at night.
“Soph’s old daddy sold me some equipment, ’course on a credit; I bought a steam tractor for road work. And that big old thing that scared you so bad, we’d run it in the deep snow, Lord, nothin’ kept us out of the woods. We made money. Sophie helped herself and had her a house built, you know, to her own tastes. I kept out of that except to hand out money. It kept her occupied. And I paid her daddy on the dot. Ever’ three months I made a big payment on what I owed him.
“And then, come the summer of 1916, the river wiped us out. It came out all over the town. It got all the lumber we had sawed. Took the log piles. Took the sheds, and all the machinery it didn’t take it buried in the mud. It took a locomotive and washed it way downstream. I stood up there on the hill, where Ans and Myrtle live now, and I watched it go. I thanked God we had enough money in the bank at Red Bank to meet the payroll a few more weeks at least. But there was not a stick of lumber much bigger than your thumb to meet the orders we already had.
“Well, we went to work on it. We cleaned dead fish and chickens out of the kiln house, that was most of what we had left. I set out to borrow what I could but ever’body in the mountains nearly was ruined and borrowing.
“It didn’t make it any better,” he said in a smaller voice, “that Sophier and I were at cross purposes lots of the time. She is…watchful, you might say. She had it in mind that I needed to be watched. I know good and well, because of that, she engineered the next that happened.”
“Something bad,” I said.
“Worse,” he said. “The second payment I missed the old man sent me a notice of foreclosure. And there wasn’t one damn thing I could do. Every cent that came in had to go for new machinery and the payrolls. I had borrowed every dime that Aunt Nam had. There wasn’t a thing on earth I could do but let him have it.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s a wonder he didn’t sell it to a stranger just for spite.”
“Well, he didn’t because he had a heart attack a few weeks after that, and he lay an invalid, with Sophier hoverin’ over ’im, till finally he had another one and died. And Sophier came home fannin’ a deed to The Birches. Now, he never left it just to her. He figured—she figured—I would switch around and get ahold of it, if it was just in her name. No. He left it to her and that raspin’ old wall-eyed sister of hers—jointly. It give ’em somethin’ to get along over, for a change.”
“Would they sell it?” I said.
“Lord no. They’ll not sell it to anybody. For they know I’ll go right behind ’em and buy it back, even at twice the price. And they’ll surely not sell it to me. You ought to know I’ve tried. Ever since we got out from under the flood we’ve made money here hand over fist. Most of what’s in our bank here’s mine. And of course Sophier’s too, though. What would she gain to sell this place to me? She’s got me like a snake in the fork of a stick.”
He was the picture of resigned despair, sitting there looking into the fire. I wanted so bad to gather him up and somehow make it all right. Any notion I might have had about staying on here was dead and cold, but it was not my plight that broke my heart, it was
his.
“What are we going to do?” I said. He seemed to be studying.
Finally he said, “About what?”
“About you and me,” I said. I was a little bit astonished. He studied some more. “Oh, I don’ know,” he said. “I don’ know. What is there to do?”
“We can leave here,” I said. “We can just go away. We can go someplace far away and start all over.”
“Leave here?” he said, like he hadn’t heard right. “What would go with it?”
“Let Sophier have it. Let her worry about it,” I said. “After all,” I said, sort of mean, “it’s HERS.”
He didn’t answer that, he just sat there blank and glum. “Look,” I said, “Sophia has got one thing in the world that I can’t live without. And that’s you.”
He gave me this older-and-wiser sweetbody look. “I think you are wrong, my dear. On one count and possibly two,” he said. I was trying to figure that out when he went on. “Now, of course we could leave here. But you’ll have to tell me where we will go, and what we will do. Oh, I could sign on as a logger somewhere. If I could find a camp besides my own that’s working, anywhere in the country. For that matter we could find a place we liked and go on the county. You ready to go on the county and get some welfare?” He smirked and reached over and patted my leg. “You’re already supportin’ one sorry man right now, little sister. Don’t tell me you’re tryin’ for two.”
“I would give you anything I had on this earth,” I said, “and I’d think I was lucky if you’d take it.”
“I know it,” he said. “But you’ve got the kids to think about, too. And I’ve got mine…” The memory of him spooning food for that girl and wiping dribbles rose up and smote me. I remembered something Nam had told me, too. She said he dressed Celestine all the time, when she was little; that he had taught her to dress herself, somewhat, while her mother insisted she was hopelessly helpless. That he still read to her every night, at bedtime.
“There is something else,” Ben Aaron said, considering his fingers. “There are about two hundred men up there at the Forks that are living off that mill. And most of ’em have families. The whole town lives off that mill. How long, my love, do you think that thing would run, this day and time, if I were gone?”
I felt terribly cold and forlorn. I pulled the quilt around me and talked down into it. “I don’t care,” I said in the smallest voice. I can see his face now. It was tender and loving and absolutely tragic. It has haunted me ever after.
“Oh, YES you care,” he said. “You wait and see how much you care.” He reached over then, and pulled away the quilt, and looked at me again, the longest time. His eyes were shimmering. And finally he said, “Beautiful,” under his breath. And he reached for his shirt then, and started to put it on. And I could not bear it. I held out my arms to him, and brought him down again. And it was different, it was like a solemn ritual, of some kind, and I was not sure if the damp his face left on mine was sweat or tears. I thought how strange, for I was so happy; I would never get tired of him, there would never be enough of him, and if I could not have him rightly—which of course I could not—then I would simply have him wrongly. I had found it could be done. Lightning had not struck. By dang I would have him every day.
I could only guess, and I suppose be thankful, that at that tenderest moment he was not so carried away as I was. For all of a sudden he untangled himself. Vaguely, I think I heard Cy neigh a time or two, but it meant nothing to me. Ben Aaron hopped up like he was shot out of a gun. He practically jumped into his britches and crammed his underwear as an afterthought into the front of his shirt. The front door was creaking open when he threw my clothes down on me and bundled me like a package in the quilt. He was the picture of composure when the kids walked in the room.
“Your mother has been swimming in the river,” he said, before Pet could open her mouth. “Go get some kindling and get a fire in the stove, and get the teapot on,” he said. “I’m coming out to cut some wood.” It was a firm and direct and purposeful speech. They put down their sweaters and their books and made speed to do as they were told. Rose had stopped by with them. She lingered, for a minute, in the doorway. Rose could put on a look like when you throw a coverlet over an unmade bed. Her face was totally blank. But there was plenty behind it.
“Florine Todd got sick at dinnertime today,” she said, expressionless. “Mr. Sutherland turned school out. He had to take her home.” I could feel her eyes seeing everything that had happened in that room. But then she was gone, back to the kitchen.
“Get on your clothes,” Ben Aaron said, under his breath. He jerked on his boots, and he bent down and kissed me, quickly. And in the door he turned back and gave me one last soft look, and he was gone.
I could hear the axe flailing away at the woodpile. I heard him talking to Hugh; I heard him say goodbye to the kids at the side of the house, and the muffled clumping of hooves. I had my dress on. The rest I would hide in the quilt. We had made a pretty bad mess of that quilt. If I could wash it, privately, somehow, right now the stains would come out, I thought. If they dried they might never. I ran my hand over the splotches, and folded it up, and put it away. Hugh came in with a load of firewood and went back to get some pieces for the stove. I sat still, in front of the fire. It seemed like the prudent thing to do.
Shortly Pet and Rose came in with a cup of tea. Dutifully I started to tell them about chasing the pig, and meeting the boar, and getting in the river. And happily Pet, especially, was not near so impressed with my mishap as she was with Florine Todd’s.
“Myrtle Mae said Florine was having a baby,” she said, still in awe. “We were going in to get our lunch buckets and she was right in front of me and she started to wet the floor. Do you wet the floor when you have a baby?” she asked Rose.
“You wet the floor sometimes if you’re just sick,” Rose said kindly.
“Well, Myrtle Mae said she saw her in the privy the other day and she had her stomach all wrapped ’round and ’round with rags.” So there was a topic that was a handy distraction, although it was horribly sad. Cole Sutherland came down that evening, still shaking, and told me very privately that he had delivered a baby, a stillborn little boy, on the floor in the school house just minutes after the kids had started home. The mother, who was fourteen, had gone through months of agony wrapped in rags.
But I admit I thought of something else, in the night. I kept an ear to the road. Were I Ben Aaron Steele, I thought, I would come in the night and take what was so blissfully given. Once, sometime, I thought I heard somebody coming. I listened, not breathing, until the quiet put me back to sleep. In the morning, when I went out to the lot, the pig was in her pen. She was a quiet, serious pig, either sulking or penitent. I don’t know. There were big rocks jammed in her exit under the fence, and the prints of horse-hooves in the mud.
26.
RAPIDS
ALL DAY THAT NEXT DAY I KEPT MY EAR COCKED. YOU CAN’T believe the things that will sound like a horse coming, when you want that horse to come. And then I thought maybe it will not be a horse next time, maybe it will be the wagon. Maybe an old truck. I was good for not one thing all that day. I just sighed out to the hog lot and dawdled to the woodpile and the spout.
Along in the afternoon there was a rumbling up on the ridge. I knew it was a truck. I ran up and brushed at my hair and flipped on some powder and got down the stairs just in time to meet Bat Dung; he came to the door to let me know he was putting some bags of guano in the barn.
That evening I sat out on the banister at the side of the porch and watched the sun go down, in the cold. The kids thought I was odd. And in the night, once they were gone to bed, I went out several times and stood, and looked off into the dark, and listened. And the hoofbeats that stopped my breath were nothing but my teeth chattering.
The next day it was a Saturday. I remember it by how awful I felt. I hadn’t hardly got to sleep; I had troubles that got me up in the night. And by day I was just mis
erable and I didn’t know what to do. Well, I was sitting out on the edge of the back porch in the sun, all doubled up, and Rose came riding up across the field with a jug of milk. She got down and looked at me and didn’t say a word, and I didn’t say one either, and she came and sat down by me and put her hand on my forehead.
“Little bit warm,” she said. “You got the sore throat?” No, I said. I told her the problem. I could feel that intent look, the look that could see all things. I couldn’t look back; I studied the moss in the cracks of the old rock steps.
“You got the gravels,” she said finally. She said it with no doubt, like she expected me to have the gravels. Honeymoon piss-itis. Oh, God, it was awful.
She went in the house and got the bucket and dipper. “You sit right here and drink water,” she said. “That’s what you do for the gravels. You drown ’em. If it was summer I’d fix ye some corn silk tea.”
“I think maybe I ought to get Ans, if I can,” I said. The idea of going over the ridge to the Forks gave me another chill. Rose got up and got the mule bridle in her hand. “We’ll get him if we’ve got to get him,” she said. There was something dubious about the way she said it—it was like her Uncle Ans would be the last resort. I felt so rotten she annoyed me. If you felt as rotten as I do you would holler for a doctor, I thought. I felt too rotten to say that. Or anything. Anyway she was getting on the mule and going off. Leaving me.
“I’ll be back directly,” she said. “We’ll dig up somethin’. Now, you drink.” I drank, resentful, and ran groaning to the privy. Several times. But here she came back, soon, with a bundle of some kind of vine; she washed the woods-dirt from it at the spout, broke off a piece, little pink flowers and all, and ordered, “Chew it.”
