by Dot Jackson
But I did not go back. I could not bear the destruction. I never saw Caney Forks again.
We had all kinds of anxieties and sadnesses that year. Pet had been away at school; she and Papa had decided between them that she would go to Philadelphia. Partly he wanted her to study there with somebody he knew. Partly he wanted her out of the reach of one of the most-eligibles, a big, soft, flushed and sweaty young man named Algernon Pinckney Templeton, Jr., who was known among the girls as Pinky.
Pet was not real nice to Pinky. She was barely pleasant enough of the time that he decided he would persist. Three summers he met her at the depot with roses. The last summer he pressed his suit to the point that Dr. Rehnwissel could have felled the burnt-out pillars of Valhalla with his fury. Pet teased the doctor about it. “Oh, Papa,” she said, “why do you worry about that old pig-track?” Papa worried about several things till it made him sick, that summer. He took to his chaise, at the cottage.
Pet was sitting by him, trying to feed him some ice cream when he heard the news on the radio that Hitler had marched into Poland. The old man raised his fist and swore a German oath and died. He would not be made The Enemy by politics again. My mother took on terribly for her customary three days, before she settled in before the mirror and chinked the few new mourning lines with powder and touched up her curls with brass and took up life, again, to the fullest.
Only after he was beyond telling did I realize how much that blessed, funny old man had enriched all our lives. Or how much I really loved him. But Pet had simply and openly adored him. He was the first great loss of her life. She was bereft. Pinky, who was not a bad fellow at all, was all sympathy, all patience. And always underfoot. Hugh deviled the life out of Pet about him. He would sing to her in a high, quavering voice, “Pinky Shaftoe’s fat and fair, Combing back his yel-low hair…”
I said at least if she married Pinky she would never, ever have to worm tobacco again. I doubted she ever told him about worming tobacco. Poor Pinky, he was caught up in the first registration for the draft. He was fatally healthy, not terribly employed and too available. He pondered earnestly about it, and went and volunteered. On his first furlough home, Pet married him.
The year the war started, Hugh was in his third year of college. He had made up his mind to study medicine. He went on and finished out that year, and in the spring, when school was out, he went and joined the Navy. And then he came and told me. Well, at that point, I would as soon he had come and whacked me with the sledgehammer. I cried and carried on and made the child feel terrible. I needed killing.
The matter was this: we’d had several years of strained calm in the house; Foots was not changed, he was just being wise. But lately he had developed an identifiable vice: he would get into the whiskey, and it would give him courage to be himself. He commenced again to indulge his tastes and run up bills. When he was drunk, or pretending to be, he would threaten us. I kept my door locked, and a stick by it. Pet, more than anybody, had been able to keep matters straight. Now she was with Pinky, at a base down in Mississippi. With Hugh out of reach I would have it alone.
Of course Hugh had already been gone a lot; he didn’t know a lot of what went on. I shouldn’t have laid it on him, either. But I did. And he sat very quiet, for a little bit. He looked like he would cry. Finally he said, “What do you stay here for? What do you owe him? Why did you ever come back here, when you had perfectly well got away?”
I just sat there and twisted my ring around. “Do you not remember,” Hugh said, “that you were a thousand times happier up there on Caney River, out grubbing with the hoe barefooted, than you ever have been here? Or than I certainly ever saw you here. I was certainly happier there. Do you remember the day you took us and put us on the train and sent us back here? You didn’t know how furious I was with you. I thought I would die. Why did you do it?”
I guess it was my last Mother-Knows-Better speech. “Because it was the right thing to do. At that time,” I said firmly.
“May I ask why?” he said. “How did he make you come back?”
“Your father had nothing to do with it,” I said. “All the whys are buried.”
We sat and looked out the window, at the gulls dipping and flapping. “I hope someday you will forgive me, Hugh,” I said. “You’re right. We were so lucky. I wonder all the time how things would have turned out for us, if I hadn’t ruined it.”
“You can always go home,” he said. “You can take Aunt Mit and Uncle Camp and go.”
“It’s changed,” I said. “There’s no more Coy Ray and Rose. No more Aunt Nam. No Caney Forks.”
“No Ben Aaron,” he said, very gently. He got up and came and put his arm around me. “But all the things he loved are right there.”
Not quite, I thought. “That’s right,” I said. I didn’t know how to tell him that the time to go would simply be the time to go. That the matter would take care of itself.
Hugh was gone and Pet was gone. Aunt Mit was getting old. She couldn’t half get up the stairs; she would groan, blessing Jesus, tears in her eyes. Aunt Mit was mortally afraid of woods and rats and snakes. Uncle Camp had got thinner and more stooped over. His hair was just a little cotton frizz around the back of his head. You had to talk to him very loud; “Muh eahs done gone, chile,” he said. His eyes were going, too. He had to quit driving.
Uncle Camp’s life, outside that house, was the Second Beulah Land Baptist Church. Sometime I would have to leave them, if they didn’t leave me, first. I could not ask them to go to this far country. It helped in that time that we were preoccupied with simple existence. We lived by the newspapers and the radio. We stood in line for the commonest things, like sugar and meat and shoes. We rolled bandages one day a week. Sometimes, on Sunday, we would have a dining room full of sailors.
Pinky’s mother died, she had been delicate for some while, and the Sunday after the funeral, when Pet and Pinky had gone back to Mississippi, we asked his father to dinner. He was a delightful man, even in mourning. He came almost every Sunday after; he was real family, in the most comfortable sort of way.
A.P. Templeton the elder was especially good for Louise. The war made her awfully nervous. She had bad dreams about foreign planes and bombs. Mr. Templeton was interested in planes; he took her walking in the evenings and pointed out things about them to her. She learned, as he had, to know them by sound. It was the strange ones that made her turn pale. And the thought of submarines coming up the river. Any little ripple that used to mean a school of mullet became a periscope, she was sure, ready to emerge. Mr. Templeton never said, “Oh, that’s dumb—what would it want with us?” He just held her elbow securely, and walked on calmly, while the dreaded thing swam by.
The only explosions that rocked our domicile came strictly from within. We got a young woman to come help Mit and me with the spring house cleaning. Mit told her (I didn’t) to go in and take down Foots’s curtains to be washed, and while she was up on a chair he threw a vase at her. It didn’t hit her, thank the Lord, but it broke the window. After that I tried to make sure he didn’t get any whiskey.
Not that I think whiskey had all that much to do with it. When the likker ran out, in the cupboard, I wouldn’t buy any more. I kept the money hid. I prevailed upon the storekeepers as best I could not to let him have any on credit. But then somehow he would get hold of some, time to time.
Late one afternoon there was the most horrendous to-do up in his room. The awfullest screeching and cussing and pounding, and a female yelling. Louise had a piano student in the music room. I ran upstairs as fast as I could go. Now this sounds like I am making it up but I declare it was so. Foots had Miss Lilah by the throat, pinned back against the wall, and he was beating her on the head with his patent leather dancing pump. He was hollering, “You stingy old bag, I wouldn’t drink that piss at a dog fight.” Her eyes were all bugged out and her tongue was sticking out. There was a bottle of some kind of pore-bucker whiskey rolling about on the floor. I grabbed it up and popped him
on the head, not hard enough, I’m sorry to say, to break either one. But he sank dramatically to the floor, clutching his skull. Having been delivered, Miss Lilah sort of spindled backwards, onto the bed.
“The very idea!” I yelled. “The very bare idea!” Well with the first breath she caught, Miss Lilah hopped up and went to the rescue of Hubert.
“You killed him!” she shrieked. The victim wanly fluttered his eyelids.
“Excellent,” I said. “Hooraw.”
“You KNEW he was sick!” she said, cradling the corpse.
“Shit,” I said. “Get up from there, Foots. Get up right now.” Very meekly he shook off the bonds of death and arose and sat in a chair. His mother was speechless. For a moment. The halting measures of the “Minuet in G” floated up the stairs.
“He’s not even crazy,” I said. “He’s the smartest trick around. He has learned to get by on meanness instead of work and decency.”
“Meanness!” she bellowed. “You vulgah hussy. You tell ME who has been mean in dis house? Whooo walked out an’ lef’ us wid hardly enough to eat? Who made us nearly beg fo’ evah penny?
“Whooo,” she said, glaring and running out her jaw, “Whooo shut dis po’ boy here out of her room—to keep him out of her bed—till he got so flustrated…he wets…his…paints!”
Foots just sat through all of this with downcast eyes, rubbing his head. All of a sudden I started to laugh. I laughed till I thought I would pop. I went over and picked up that patent leather shoe and threw it in his lap. “Please pardon the interruption,” I said. And I went out and closed the door.
I went down to the library and got The Reverend Sydney and took him to my room. I withdrew the deposits from his pages and divided them into three piles. One I returned to the Memoirs and put under my pillow. The others I put into envelopes. I went at once with one of them back into the alley, to Mit’s. Camp had been sick. He was sitting in a chair in the sun, with a quilt over his knees. His eyes looked sunken and dull. I went into the house with the envelope, and very quickly kissed Mit, and put it in her pocket, and when I said goodbye, as I had come to do, I was on my way out, where she couldn’t catch me. I went back by Camp. I took his thin old knobby hand and kissed his fingers. And then I ran back through the hedge, just wracked. I ran inside the garage and leaned on the wall and got it over with, as much as I ever would, before I went in the house.
Louise’s pupil was just gathering up her books and going out the door. “Louise, come up,” I said. “I have to talk with you quick.” She came along behind me, and we shut ourselves in. “I am leaving and I think you should come,” I said.
“Oh, thank God!” she said. “Go! Before you calm down!”
“Run pack your belongings,” I said. She beamed back this mysterious smile.
“I mustn’t,” she said. “But I’ll help you pack yours.”
“What do you mean you mustn’t?” I said. “You’re not married to them.”
“Go and don’t give me a minute’s thought,” she said. “I shan’t fare so badly.” She was more tickled than I had ever seen her. She helped me get a few things in a suitcase, just a few clothes, and a few pictures and a couple of books. I called a cab.
“If Hugh should call, tell him I have gone home,” I said. “I will write to Mama…I will write Pet…” I handed her the other envelope. She glanced at it absently, as we went to the door. “Oh, but I forgot—you’ll be there all alone!” she said, as I was getting in the cab. I threw her a kiss and was gone.
The farther away from Charleston the train rolled, the cleaner I felt, and the more weight rolled off of me. I let back my seat and half-slept. There’s no way to say the blissful anticipation I felt. Going home.
The lights of other trains flew by; we stopped at little towns and let soldiers off and took soldiers on. Two of them, I wondered who they were, got off in Red Bank with me, and helped me with my suitcase. There was a taxi out front, this time with the motor running. It was not Barz. I considered, and then I smiled and shook my head no, and took up my suitcase, and started up the road, in the dark.
32.
HOME
IT WAS ALMOST MORNING. JUST BEFORE THE LIGHT, I WALKED UP past Ollie Trotter’s; I recognized the sound of the little branch when I crossed the bridge beyond the store. I went striding along, swinging my suitcase, over the rise and down into the dip where the river runs.
The sky was getting pale and I could see the bridge ahead. I kept my eye out for the road; I didn’t know but what it was completely grown up and I would miss it. But no, there it was, clear ruts, like somebody still used it. I stopped there and put my suitcase down for a minute, breathing as raspy as a crosscut saw and got a good long smell of the morning, and the river damp. The cool of it tingled in my nose. The air was so still my ears were ringing.
A little panic fluttered through my mind. Desperately, I wanted the children with me. I wanted Louise. Why had Harmon deserted me, when he certainly knew someday I would need him? I can turn back to Red Bank, I thought, and stay in the hotel awhile, until I get someone to go up with me—God in heaven, what am I doing? There’s nothing but dead people up there. And then the little sigh of morning floated up over the grasses, and into the trees. It was a warm little breath; it wrapped itself around me. I picked up my suitcase and faced that dark hulk of mountain that lay between me and The Birches, and put my foot on the road.
I remember a bird waking in the brush beside the road; it said, “We miss you we miss you we miss you,” and others answered from up the slopes. It was reassuring. I saw the river, then, for the first time; I was afraid to look, but there it was, rolling, that cold gray-green of spring, and the mist rising, like spooks departing. It was deep and full and barely whispered.
The road left it and got steep. I pretty soon felt how many years it had been, since I walked up here. I had to stop and rest a lot. I will stop at Barz’s, I thought; he will be up, and I will sit with him a minute. He will have a pot of coffee. I kept watching for his turnoff. It was farther than I had ever thought, and then I almost missed it; weeds had grown up in it. The gate was fastened with a chain and a lock. Signs on it said POSTED: NO TRESPASSING. There was no sign of life. So I walked on.
A little way on up I stopped and watched the rim of the sun clear the ridge across the river. It was a new day; I caught my wind and got up speed. From the top of the ridge I looked across to Hogback and took up fairly trotting. It was easier going down. I remembered how it is that the road closes behind you there. The world closes behind you. All that I didn’t want to bring, I was leaving behind.
My feet made echoes on the planks of the bridge on Seven Mile Branch; this morning the branch was lively but perfectly benign. I saw that the orchard was grown up in brambles. The field had pretty badly gone to brush. Bird tracks criss-crossed the bare spots in the road. I came around the bend into a herd of deer and they sailed and scattered and startled me nearly into a faint. My heart was pounding. I walked along slowly, then, until I saw the chimneys, with creeper climbing all over them. I saw the house, with the sun in its face. The lilacs were bent down of their weight, around the porch. And I ran. I ran up and flung myself on the steps and of course commenced to wail. I was exhausted. The steps were warm and almost soft. The birds were singing, I had never heard so many. The bees were working the lilacs, they were humming, and humming, and they were a woman singing, in the lightest, sweetest voice. When I roused it was up in the day; my arm had gone to sleep. There was a bluebird feeding right beside me, in a white lilac bush. It turned its head and looked at me, like, what is that strange thing? And then it went on flitting and pecking.
It was like I had not been away. I reached behind the step and the key was there. I went up and put it in the lock, but when I touched the knob the door came open. It was like the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, inside. The furniture was there, as Rose had left it. Someone had covered it with sheets and quilts. There was a coat of fine dust on everything. I had no idea what time it was but
the sun was overhead. I wound Ive’s clock, and set the hands at noon. I opened the window by the sweet bubby bush and went on slowly through the house. It was dark and cool in the kitchen. Cole had left a stack of stovewood. A pail of cobs by the stove had all but gone to dust; the mice had worked on them. Daisy’s bonnet was a fragile tatter on the nail by the kitchen door. Nam’s hung on a nail above it. I opened the back door and heard the trickle of the spout, although it ran under years and years of leaves. The brush was so high I could barely see the barn. I had my work cut out for me. But I had all my life to do it.
It occurred to me I was half-starved, and there was nothing this side of Red Bank, unless I fished or rocked a rabbit. I went back in and went to the pantry room and found some matches. There were shelves of jars of things Rose had canned. I took one down and took it to the light, and wiped the dust off on my skirt. It was blackberries; they were sort of pallid. It had been at least eight years. They were not bad; they tasted pretty winey. Old blackberries will not kill you, I decided. I sat out on the porch and drank them out of the jar. While I sat there a deer came and drank at the runoff of the spout, paying me no mind.
I thought what I must do; I must get the scythe and clear paths, at first, to where I would need to go. Before much of anything I would have to go to Red Bank and bring back food. The prospect was horrendous. I was not the limber kid of thirty anymore. It would only take more time, though, and I had it. One thing I had now was time. I went in and knocked on the flue, to warn the mice, and fired up the stove. I rinsed the kettle and filled it at the spout, and put it on and went and picked some wintergreen and made a cup of tea. Then I gathered up my skirt and started off up the hill. Halfway up I stopped and looked back at the smoke coming out of the chimney. I was home.
As I went on up I was thinking, does Ben Aaron know I am Home? I called him—Ben Aaron…Ben Aaron…It was a silly thing to do but I couldn’t help it. It came back echoing from the hillside. Everything was grown up in saplings. There were little trees inside the wrought iron fence. The gate was nearly rusted down. It groaned when I opened it, and a rabbit ran right between my feet and I let out a yipe. There were stones that were broken and stones toppled. There was one that had not been there; a beautiful one with wild roses carved into it. It said, ROSANNAH WILCOX SUTHERLAND AUGUST 15, 1914–FEBRUARY 2, 1936 HOW SWEETLY BLOOMS OUR ROSE IN HEAVEN. The grass and brambles were so thick I didn’t see the one next to it, at first. It was a discreet little marker, just a little polished wedge of granite. It said on it, only, B.A.S. AT HOME.
