by Dot Jackson
“What is it?” I said, pouting.
“Trailin’ arbutie,” she said. “Mama used it.” It smelt sweet. I chewed. Tasted…weedy. I had to drink water to get rid of the taste. Rose went in the house and I heard her stirring around in the kitchen. She came out and filled the water bucket and I heard her and the kids washing dishes. She brought out some hot “arbutie” tea; she had put honey in it so it wasn’t so bad. Before she left to tend her own house, she had cooked food to last all day.
In an hour or less, I began to get easy. By the next day I was really all right. It was a good thing; there was so much that had to be thought through with a clear mind. I wondered whether Ben Aaron might know I had been sick. If by chance he did, he paid no attention. I did go up to the Forks and spent a day with Nam, made it a point to go around to the stores for little things. Nowhere did I see Ben Aaron. Nam said she thought he was on a round of the furniture plants. She didn’t really know, she said. He had been strange. She hadn’t seen him.
Coy Ray came down and put in the tobacco seed in the beds. I thought about telling him not to bother, we were leaving. But instead I stayed inside and didn’t talk. The days were getting warmer. Everything was budding and greening.
I remember all too plainly the torment of that spring. On the one hand I was tempted to go to the Forks and sit on my cousin’s doorstep till he came in. Or out. What would I say to him? I would say, “I will do anything in the world if you will just have me.” Or, I would say, “You have treated me absolutely wicked. I would not have you on a Christmas tree unless you were hanging from the top limb, by a good stout rope.” I thought about that a lot.
And on the other hand, I knew. I knew what I had to do was get my kids and myself out of here, as quickly and quietly as I could. I would have to give it up. I remember leaning on the porch post in the evening, watching the shadows fall on the road. It was so beautiful. “Der Mai ist kommen,” I thought to myself. But I knew quite well that it just was not so.
Coy Ray plowed the cornfield, and the garden, and he went to the Forks for the seed. School turned out early so the kids could all help at home. They went as wild as bucks in May, anyway; it was no use to keep them. Mine were so happy I didn’t know what to say to them. Rose had brought down a bunch of guinea eggs and a little hen to set, and they hatched out the prettiest little diddles, they ran like spiders. The Wilcoxes had a jackass colt they were breaking to ride. Hugh was crazy about it. I weighed in my mind every way I could tell them we were leaving.
One morning when the lilacs were just out I dragged out of bed, for I was not feeling very good. I came downstairs, and when I went to make up bread for breakfast there were bugs in what was left of the flour. We were about out of sugar. I knew I would have to go to town. It seemed like it was awfully warm for that time of year; the heat from the stove made my head swim. I fussed at the kids for bringing in eggs out of the fence rows. The ones I was cooking smelt like they had stayed in a nest way too long.
I left the kids to do the chores and took the mule and rode up to the Forks. It would have been as close to go down to Red Bank but I fooled myself that I wanted to go see Nam a little bit. I figured on it half-heartedly on the way up. I rode up to Tatum’s. And when I went in the store, who should be leaning on the counter with a drink bottle in his hand but my cousin Ben Aaron Steele. I could feel the blood all leave my head. My knees got weak as water. I had to lean back on the door frame to keep from falling down. He raised up, like somebody had put a coal in his pocket, and stared at me, struck dumb as I was.
He looked bad; he looked hollow in the cheeks, and weary about the eyes. He had fallen away a noticeable lot, in that six or seven weeks. He left it to Grover to speak to me first, before he found his voice. “Well, howd-do, Miss Cousin,” he said, at last.
“Howd-do sir,” I said weakly. There was this silence. “What can I get ye t’day?” Grover said. And I told him what all I needed, measuring the money with my fingers in my pocket. And Grover went about to gather up the stuff. We just stood there looking at one another. “Have you been doing well?” said my Cousin Ben Aaron politely.
“Very well,” I said. I knew I looked like death warmed over. I fought with myself. What I wanted was to fall on him; I wanted him to just hold me and let whatever had gone wrong be forgotten. But my feet had taken root. Grover laid the stuff up on the counter, and rang up what I owed, and shakily, I paid.
“You got a load, there, Cousin,” Ben Aaron said. “You think you can get home with it?”
“Oh, yeah, I think maybe so,” I said. I felt him not looking away. I didn’t breathe, wondering what he was wanting to say. And he said, then, “Well, I could have one of the boys drive that stuff down to you, this evenin’ sometime.”
I can’t tell what I felt right then. It was a fury like I never felt against any human being ever in my life. The bare nekkid rotten despisable idea. I didn’t even say, no thank you. I seized up the flour sack from the counter, and slung it over my shoulder, and poor old Grover, not knowing what was going on at all, followed meekly behind me with the rest of it in his arms, and he put the sugar over the mule’s back, and then the flour, and handed me up, and the little bag of stuff, and I found my voice to thank him and rode off as fast as we could plod. Oh, I was so mad. I was so hurt. And so sick. Oh, Lord.
I got up as far as Boney Creek before I got off to puke. And I liked to have never got back on. I had a while to think about things, on the way home. I had a while to put things together. Dark thoughts came from all sides, like vultures. It was the blackest pit I ever was in, when I had to throw up in the chamber pot the next morning, before I was hardly out of bed. I told the kids I had eaten something that didn’t set right with me.
After about a week of that Pet got real uneasy. I heard her tell Rose she thought they should get Aunt Nam. Or Ans. And Rose said maybe, later on, but she was sure it would work itself out. I had felt Rose looking at me. The blanker her face, the more I knew the wheels were grinding. I was too distraught to care. But she was so kind. She cooked and brought things. She taught the kids to help more than I had ever been able to. She went to the Forks and brought back a bottle of camphor, from the drugstore. When I smelled it, to please her, my daddy lay dead on the steps in front of me again. But I gritted my teeth and said it made me feel better. And later on, it did.
We went ahead and put the garden in; I did not know what else to do. By the time we put the tobacco in the field, in June, I was able to stoop over without losing my breakfast. I was glad of that; Coy Ray was there most every day and he would not have long been fooled. It was getting to be summer, and I still didn’t know what in the world to do. Except pretend things were all right. Nam came down and we canned cherries and made strawberry jam. I didn’t want to; I didn’t want anything to do with any of it. I was not hungry and that I guess was a good thing; when my clothes should have been getting tight they hung on me like sacks.
All I wanted to do was sleep. Sometimes I wished I could sleep and not wake up. But when the house was still at night I would lie awake and think. All kinds of awful things can go through your mind when you are alone, in that kind of plight. Some grisly thing about knitting needles came back to haunt me. Something that had been whispered behind their hands by the ladies on the piazza one time. I did not know then what they meant that some poor girl did with a knitting needle—or was it a crochet hook? All that was plain was that she had died disgraced.
I didn’t know much more, at thirty years old, about what she really did with it. But it was hideous to imagine. Quinine did not sound quite so bad. Miss Lilah had actually suggested that I ought to take quinine, to get rid of Hugh. Can you imagine? Foots took quinine for his ugly spells. It didn’t do him any good. I didn’t think it would do me any either. The colored people believed in turpentine. Camp’s sister Lizzie told Mit one time, in the kitchen, that she had sat three mornings on a slop jar of steaming turpentine. Lizzie had a baby every spring. She must have had a dozen babies th
at smelt like turpentine.
All of this was just so many dark birds flying through my head on long dark nights. None of it was of any consequence at all. No way on earth was I going to do this baby any harm, even if I knew exactly how. It was, after all, Ben Aaron Steele’s baby. I could lie there and stew over how despicably he had treated me. And how I hated him. And I would think, this baby will have eyes like his, and hands like his, and a dimple in its chin. It will be the most beautiful baby in this world, even with a nose as long as ours.
One night after we had hoed in the field about all day I was so tired I thought I would die, when I hit the bed. I lay there and thought, well, maybe if I would just die of overwork or anything at all, it would solve things. The children were going to have to go back to Charleston anyway. It would be better if I died before I disgraced them. I thought after I rested a while I might get up and go to the Narrows. I closed my eyes and could see the foam. I could hear the water, when I listened. And while I was so still, there, very quietly, like a little wren stirring in its nest, there was this fluttering in my belly. And it was like every other thought, and every sound and feeling stopped. In a minute it fluttered again. I put my hand down on it and felt it, it was more like a little trembling. It was alive. It was mine. Nothing could take it away.
We worked like horses, all of us. We had planted two acres more in tobacco than we had the year before and we had to keep the weeds out of it, and the worms off of it, and we had to top it. None of us liked to squash tobacco worms so Coy Ray fixed us each a can with some kerosene in it to drown them in, even though he said it was wasteful. Every morning we went out with our cans to harvest worms. Pet swore she could hear a tobacco worm chewing a hundred feet away.
She was less hurt, by far, than Hugh, when I finally talked to them about going back to Charleston. Cole was going to start school at Shiloh when the crops were laid by, along in August. We had to settle something. We sat down on the steps one evening, and I told them, as matter-of-factly as I could. First I said we would all go back. But I knew that was not so; it would not work out quite that way.
“I will stay here till the crops are all in and we sell the tobacco,” I said. But they should go and get enrolled in school.
“What will you do with my guineas?” Pet said. Rose would take them back, I said. And she began to talk at once, then, about seeing her friends she had missed. And going to the candy shop, and the picture show and things. Hugh sat too still, with his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands.
“Sofa is running us off,” he said, in a quavery voice. I could see the tears making channels in the dirt down his arms. No, I said. Sofa had really done nothing. It was just time to go. I said it calm, and dry-eyed. And somehow they knew, by that, how very bad it was.
That night I sat down and wrote to Louise. “The children have done wonderfully well here,” I said. “But they need to be in a better school. Would you get in touch with Miss Murchie…?” I felt low as a dog writing something like that. There was never a better teacher on earth than Cole Sutherland. Or anybody who cared more about children. I lied a frightful lie. But I had to tell her something.
The next day we went up to the Forks and I put the letter in the mail. We went on to Nam’s, then. We had seen her very little; for one thing we had been so busy. It was along late in the morning. You could smell the kraut and backbones cooking, before she opened the front door. Well, she hugged us and shooed us through the house and back to the kitchen.
“Aaron, you want some lemonade? The children are here,” she said. Ben Aaron was up on a ladder in the kitchen, putting in a new stove pipe. The old one had burnt through and caught the ceiling afire, Nam said. He looked down at us, and smiled wanly, with the sweat streaming. I thought I would faint.
“No’m,” he said. “Lemme get through.” He went on working. Lacking her stove, for the moment, Nam had a fire in the kitchen fireplace and her pot of kraut hung over it, on a crane. It being the end of July, it was mightily hot. We took our lemonade and went to the porch. She had a basket of June apples out there that somebody had brought. The kids took some and went to the livery to feed the horses. Nam and I sat and rocked. She talked, and I squirmed like a worm in hot ashes. She peered at me and frowned and puckered up her mouth. “You lookin’ mighty gant,” she said. “What’s the matter with ye?”
Nothing, only tired, I said. “Talk about gant, Ben Aaron looks dreadful,” I said.
“Don’t know what ’tis,” she said. “I reckon that ol’ hen done set on ’im about somethin’. She’ll lay into him ever’ now and then and he’ll hunker about like a suck-egg dog. I’ll swanny it makes me sick.”
“How long has he been like this?” I said.
“How long since you seen him?”
I could have given her hours and minutes. “Two months,” I said. She stopped in mid-rock. I couldn’t look at her; I was watching a hummingbird in the hollyhocks. “He looked bad then too,” I said.
“Two months?” she said. She was stunned immobile. “They law…What got the matter?”
“I thought you’d be relieved,” I said. The hummer was right at the banister, whirring his little wings. He glittered in the sun like a little green jewel.
“Was it her?” she said. If the words had bitten Sophia they would have killed her instantly.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “No, I think it was him. I think he had too much to lose. I don’t know.” I was going to say of course it was best, but I lost the breath to speak.
“Well. Well, I’m glad you come to it before trouble got in somebody’s britches,” she said. “You know what was bound to come, the way it was a-goin’.” I knew very well, by her face, that she was not glad. Nobody understood pain better than Panama McAllister.
“Yes, indeed, I am relieved,” she declared, rocking again with vigor. “I thought we were a-goin’ to have to give you up. Now if he’ll stay away from down there…”
“I’m sending the children home next month,” I said.
“You don’t mean you’re sendin’ ’em off to stay?” she said. She looked like I had hit her. “You don’t mean you’re fixin’ to go?”
“I don’t quite know,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. And I wouldn’t have got to say it anyway. We heard Pet hollering, “Come on, sissy, you’re not killed,” before she and Hugh turned the corner, running. He was holding both hands over his nose. Tears were streaming through his fingers, but he was making no sound. He was being a man. Well of course I was scared out of my wits. However much she scolded, Pet was mortified.
“I don’t think it got him in the eye,” she said. “He put his dumb nose right into a wasper’s nest.” Nam jumped up yelling, “Lord have mercy get the Antiphlogistine!” And she trotted off to get it herself. Right in the middle of all this up drives Vicie Hambright, in her new Chevrolet coupe, ’course she didn’t live but about two blocks away, but she would back out of her driveway and across the road to take Os his dinner at the feed store. And Vicie had Granny—that was what everybody called the dear old soul—sitting beside her and she got out and helped Granny out, Granny being poorly, and nearly blind. We settled them on the porch for the moment. Vicie had brought Aunt Nam a peck of red plums off her tree. Nothing would do, then, but that she and Granny stay, of course, for dinner. I finally escaped to the kitchen.
Ben Aaron had Hugh at the sink with a cold rag on his nose. I went and caught his arm. I don’t know what I was going to say to him, right there over Hugh. When I opened my mouth I couldn’t say anything at all. And Nam came in to make up her cornbread, and Vicie came right behind her, after a drink of water.
Cousin Ben Aaron handed Hugh the rag and eased away from me. “Keep it cool and maybe it won’t swell,” he said. “I’ve got to go.” He went. Nam hollered after him, “Don’t you want your dinner?” But he was out the door and gone.
It was a case of “have to”; we stayed till dinner was over, and the dishes were washed. And then we took off for h
ome. Hugh’s nose hurt. I was half-killed. I never would forget it.
The next week, we packed their few belongings, and I went with the kids to Red Bank, to the depot. I never forgot their faces, either, looking out of the window of that train, as it pulled away. I didn’t know what the circumstances would be, when I would see them again. I wondered really whether I would ever see them. It was a time beyond description. It was the depths.
There was the thing of being alone in this place. I had never been alone at night, not anywhere. That first night, I can’t believe what I did. It got so still, when the sun was going down. I went down to the lot and caught up a box of biddies and brought ’em and put by my bed. Just some live something. They whispered and pitted around, in the night, and it was nice. I would have gone up to Nam’s. But I was getting conscious of how I looked. I was going on five full months, at that point. I had made a couple of floppy cotton dresses but they would not cover me up forever.
Being so skinny was beginning to work against me. When I saw myself in my shimmy in the mirror I looked like a picked chicken with a lemon in its craw. For all the dwelling on it that I did, I had not the vaguest workable idea of what I was going to do, when I had to do something. Which would be soon.
I just went on doing what had to be done about the place, sort of oblivious. Sort of in a paralysis of fright. One side of my mind nagged me that I ought to go see Ben Aaron; I was sure he had no idea I was in this fix. And the other side said what would he do if he knew? What would he say? It would be easier if I didn’t see him. And I didn’t. As for the staying alone, it got easier. In a few days I got to where I could sleep without the chickens.
And then one evening, a couple of men from the sheriff’s office in Red Bank came riding up in an old car driving along real slow, looking all about. They said a man that had a habit of breaking in on women had got away from the county jail. They had got him for killing a woman down the county someplace. They had him figured to come up the river, looking for some isolated place to hide out.
