A Parchment of Leaves

by Silas House

  I laid so close to Birdie that I could hear her breathing, too. When he finally moved again, running his hand up my thigh, I couldn’t help but to cry out. “No!” I squalled, and when I did, Birdie stirred.

  He raised his head and held it over my face, staring me in the eye. “Vine,” he said, but it was not me he was talking to. He spoke as if his mouth were full of bile.

  Birdie moved again, reached out onto the pallet, feeling for me there. “Mommy?” she said, and by her voice I knowed that she was still asleep. He leaned up then, like he had not even known Birdie was in the room. He looked around crazily for her, although she laid there across from us. She moved once again, rolled over, and he slid over me, his nakedness right against my belly. He leaned down, his face very close to hers. I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being so close to her, maybe even touching her.

  I saw all of this in my head and I knowed right then what I had to do.

  I shoved my way out from under him. I don’t know how. I used everything I had in me and got out. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the knife off the table, and I could feel him right behind me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him. He walked toward me with his hands held out palm up. His breath come out in a big shudder and he grabbed me again.

  I spun around quick and sunk the knife into his neck hard, so hard that I felt the tip hit something solid and ungiving. He fell against the kitchen table, and the chairs rattled around him as he stretched out on the floor. He just laid down, like all the bones in his body had forgot how to work together.

  I stood there, looking down at him. Blood come out in big, thin bubbles. It seeped out onto the floor slowly, spreading like dye on fabric. Aaron’s left hand moved, rubbing around in a circle.

  Everything else was froze. My hand felt numb from having held the knife.

  I couldn’t watch him anymore. I knowed he was dying, and there was not one thing I could do to change that now. I looked away, looked at anything but him.

  There was nothing but the sound of it, anyway.

  I kept my eyes on the wall, trying not to listen to the tapering off of his breathing, the sound of his blood spreading out on the floor, his hand stroking the rag rug. He did this for a long time, until his hand slowly come to rest, little by little. I stood there until there were no more sounds.

  When I could make myself move again, I went to the fireplace and sunk down on the floor next to the pallet. I gathered Birdie up in my arms and rocked her, thankful she hadn’t awoke. She was a sound sleeper. I put my face into her neck, warm and damp, and breathed in her scent. She smelled of sweet milk and the Ivory soap I had bathed her in, not more than two hours ago. Just two hours ago I had been bathing my baby and listening to the crack of the fire. Now I run my hands over her back and her legs and her face. I sat there a long time, holding her. Afraid I might never get to again.

  The fire licked against the rocks and was hot on my back. Outside, there was the silence only coldness has—big, covering everything. They was a throbbing in my wrist and in my back, where I had hit the floor. I listened to Birdie breathe and worked my own air until we were in rhythm. This made the silence bearable.

  Everything run through my mind. I settled on the one thing that made the most sense for me at the time.

  Seventeen

  I wrapped Birdie up in the quilt that had warmed by the fire, covering her face and all. I grabbed my mackinaw and put it on, throwed a scarf around my neck. When I got outside, it was so cold that the air went right through the coat. I tucked my chin into my neck as I run down the road. Cold air whistled into the collar of my coat. Birdie wiggled around under the quilt, and I slowed down to pat her back and coo into her ear. I knowed that I would have to walk to keep from waking her up. I didn’t want her to awake and I was terrified that she would. Even though she slept like the dead, the air was cold enough to raise anybody.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered. “Mommy’s got you.”

  My footsteps sounded loud on the hard-packed road, and the icy wind roared in my ears. Already my face felt numb. There was no moon and I couldn’t have seen anything even if I had looked up, so I just kept my head down. I knowed the way good enough to make it out of God’s Creek. Even when I slowed to a steady trot, my footsteps still seemed to crack on the still of night. It was the only sound.

  It was as if the creek had stopped running, as if no dogs were barking in America Spurlock’s yard. Everything was still and stopped and silent.

  It was only a short piece down the main road until I got to the mouth of Free Creek. I run across the footbridge, and then I was in Serena’s yard. I stopped for a minute at the porch steps and heard the whinnying and shuffling around of the horse in Serena’s lot. The guineas stirred and babbled. Serena would know someone was about. There was a dim light burning in the window, so I knowed she was still up. She had had a long delivery that day and I had doubted she would even be home yet. But she was, and even though I needed her in a desperate sort of way, now I wasn’t for certain I could face her.

  I couldn’t stand out there all night, though. I stepped up on the porch and let myself in. Serena was bent at the oven, taking out a pan of her birthing towels. She didn’t seem a bit shocked that somebody had walked into her house near midnight. She looked back only long enough to catch a glimpse of my shape in the doorway.

  Serena turned and said, “I didn’t think that Jenkins girl would ever have that youngun.” She put the pan of towels on the table and then looked up real quick, like it had just now registered to her that it was late for me to be calling on her. And then she seen the look on my face and that I was wearing my gown under my mackinaw, and maybe the mark on my face where he had hit me, too.

  “Lord God, Vine, what’s wrong? What’s wrong with Birdie?”

  “Take her,” I said. “It’s not the baby, what’s wrong.” As I handed Birdie over, a funny thought come to me. It is strange what you will think of in bad times. I realized that Birdie wasn’t a baby at all anymore. Her long legs dangled over the crook of Serena’s arm. “Is Luke up?”

  Serena shook her head. “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell it,” I said. My voice was hoarse as if from screaming. “I can’t make my mouth move for it.”

  Serena hurried back through the house and laid Birdie on her bed. I could see her back there, untucking the quilt from Birdie’s face. She grabbed another quilt from the footboard and spread that one out over Birdie, too.

  When she got back to the front room, Serena took me by the shoulders.

  “Vine, tell me.”

  “He come in on me. He pushed me down on the floor. He got my skirt up. He … he pulled his britches down. And then he went toward Birdie, and I didn’t know what he was going to do and I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Serena wrapped her arms around me. “Oh God, Vine,” she whispered, her mouth against my ear.

  “I killed him, Serena,” I said. “I stabbed him in the neck.”

  “You didn’t have no other choice,” Serena said. I couldn’t look at her.

  “Nobody can know it.”

  “Hush, now,” Serena said. She tried to pull me toward a chair, but I couldn’t move. She smoothed the hair back out of my eyes and put her hands on either side of my face. “We’ll fix it.”

  “Hain’t no fixing it,” I said. I thought of that boy who had killed the bootlegger. They had barely given him a trial before they strung him up. “They’d hang a Cherokee for such.”

  “No, no,” Serena said. “Not no woman.”

  “It’s done. Everything is done now.”

  “We’ll go to the law.”

  “No,” I said loud.

  I looked down at my hands. I thought of the first time I had ever seen Aaron. I was holding beans in my hand that day. I could see the beans now, so white they nearly glowed, the garden flat and ready to swallow seeds. I had been planting beans when Saul had run out of the mountain, packing Aa
ron. I could remember everything about it, every birdcall, the warmth of the spring breeze. I had dropped the beans and run out to the road.

  “You need to let me look at you,” Serena said.

  “No,” I said again. “What done it was him going for Birdie. I didn’t know what he was going to do. And I laid hands on the knife …” My voice just trailed away, although I had more to say.

  Serena set down at the kitchen table and grabbed her tin. She rolled a cigarette. The tobacco crackled as she sucked on it. She thought a long while. “Let me take care of it, Vine. You just set down here.”

  I turned and put my hand on the doorknob. “Don’t speak of this again, Serena. Just take care of my baby.”

  Eighteen

  I packed him up that mountain.

  I laid him across my arms and carried him. You can do a lot when you are in a fix. You can do more than you know. At least I didn’t have to look at him, for it was so dark that I couldn’t have seen my hand in front of my face. But his smell covered me over. I thought, I won’t never be able to wash it off of me. I didn’t think about carrying him. Didn’t think about a dead man in my arms. He was nothing to me now. I imagined I was carrying an armload of firewood. I just carried him, my knees buckling.

  I didn’t know God’s Mountain good. This was the one across the creek, the one with cliffs and laurel hells where we never went. It would have been easier to have took him up Free Mountain, but I could not bear the thought of this. I would have never been able to take Birdie up there again. This way at least the creek was between us. This way nobody would find him. Nobody ever went up this mountain.

  I got halfway up the mountain and just couldn’t go no farther. I just let myself fold down with him across my lap. I heaved him off of me and let my hand slide out easy from under his head.

  I don’t know how long I set there, looking around at the blackness. Listening but hearing nothing except my own breath. The trees was bare limbed, and when I looked up, the sky was big and black, speckled with just a few stars, dim but pulsing. I looked at them, taking big gulps of air and knowing that there most certainly was a God, and He was looking at me. I wondered what He thought about it. I wondered what else He expected me to do. And then I doubted God, for I could not understand how He could have let this happen to me. I felt like screaming out. He was watching, though. I was sure of this much. I had doubted God before, and maybe that is why this had happened to me. I had doubted God, when proof of Him was all about me. He lived in the trees and the rocks. He passed through the trees as a soft wind; my mother had pointed that out to me many a time. And so this was His way of proving Himself, of showing me that He was sure there.

  I felt like I was part of that mountain. I thought I might never be able to get up again, that roots would shoot up out of the ground and curl about my ankles and wrists. But I did. I got up and began to feel around on the ground. It was all blackness there, and everything was in the shadow of the thick cedars. There were cliffs on either side of me. I could smell the sulphur dripping from their edges.

  This was rocky ground, and everywhere I felt, there was nothing but cold hardness. I felt along the ground until I come to one of the big cliffs. I walked right under it and found a round hole that dripping water had bore out. And finally my hands sunk in moss and wet dirt. I scooped it out with my hands, thankful for the day’s rain. The soil come out in loud sucking sounds. When I could go no further with my hands, I found a flat rock and dug with that. It must have took me hours. I didn’t get far before I hit rock again. His grave would be no more than three foot deep.

  I rolled his heavy body into the hole. This was the worst part. But I didn’t know what else to do. It was started now, and I couldn’t very well drag him back off that mountain and call the law. I was certain they would put me in jail, or hang me. I told myself that I was doing this so Birdie would not be without a mother. He was dead now, and nothing would change that. There was no going back. Even so, I cried all the while and I feared it would echo out across the holler.

  I packed rocks for what seemed ages, piling them over him, trying to lay them down easy on him. My hands were raw.

  When it was done, I stood for a minute and looked down on my work, but I couldn’t see. I thought I would have to come back in the morning to make sure I had put on enough rocks to cover him, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I’d never be able to set foot on that mountain.

  I could feel animal eyes upon me. They can see things that people can’t, and I knew that they stood very still, watching, sniffing the air and its scent of blood, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Gray light was showing at the horizon. It would be daylight before long, and the world would be a changed place.

  I walked back off the mountain slowly, dreading to see my little house. Dreading holding my baby again. For the first time in many hours, I thought of all my people down there on God’s Creek. Birdie, and Esme and Aidia and Matracia Star. They were all asleep, warm and safe. They all slept in the cold night with their quilts pulled up to their chins. In the morning, when they awoke, their bedcovers would smell of them when rolled back, and winter sunlight would be on their windows. And I didn’t know how I would face them.

  Nineteen

  I scrubbed the floors and the walls. I cleaned everything in the house, even though there was only the one puddle of blood in the kitchen.

  I burned my clothes in the grate and put on water so I could wash myself in front of the fireplace. It was strange being naked there in the front room after what had happened. I scrubbed myself with lye soap until my skin felt raw, then washed again with the cake of Ivory soap I used to bath Birdie. The water was pink in the dishpan. I was bleeding a little bit between my legs. I could not bear to open the door to dash the water out, but I thought the blood might stain the enamel. So I eased the door open and poured the water out real slow. I didn’t want to hear the splash of it on the ground. When sunlight finally touched the windows, I got in bed and pulled the covers up over my face. I felt like I had been up two or three days.

  I stayed in bed for nigh a week, although I had never laid for more than one night before. I never could stand to be in the bed. Even when I was bad-off sick, I would always set up in a chair as much as possible. But this time was different. I was wore out and I didn’t want to move. I just wanted to lay there for the rest of my life.

  They were all down there, eventually, of course. I would not talk to any of them, but I hollered at Esme when she demanded that the curtains be opened for sunlight. I was not myself.

  I felt Serena’s hand on my forehead. “She’s burning up. A bad fever,” Serena lied, then put a cool washcloth on my face, as if to make her story more believable.

  “But how did her hands get in such a shape? And her face—all bruised like that?” Aidia said.

  “She passed out and hit her face on the hearth,” Serena said. “When she brought Birdie to my house, she was so sick that she could barely walk. It took all she could do to get the baby to me.”

  “I can’t understand her taking Birdie all the way to your house if she was that sick,” Esme said. “Don’t make no sense. Looks like she would have come to me.”

  Serena didn’t miss a beat. “I know it. She was out of her head with fever,” she said. “It’s a wonder she had the place of mind to take Birdie anywhere.”

  “I’ll stay and tend to her,” Aidia said. Her voice was very kind. She took hold of my hand and stroked my fingers. I come up out of my daze long enough to pull my hand away.

  “Fever makes one hateful,” Esme said. She was at the stove, making potato soup. The smell of onions and potatoes and black pepper filled the room, and I could sense the scent as it curled itself around the door frames of my house, sinking into the fabric of my bedclothes and curtains. The thought of eating made me so sick that I leaned over the edge of the bed to vomit on the floor.

  “Shouldn’t we bring a doctor to her?” Aidia asked. I didn’t open my eyes, but I could
picture Aidia’s childish face, her hands wringing each other.

  “They won’t do no more for her than I am, except charge her a war price,” Serena said.

  I raised up in the bed, on my elbows, and looked about the room. I couldn’t figure out where my baby was. I was not used to sleeping without her, and the bed felt empty and large.

  “Birdie!” I hollered. “Where’s my baby?”

  “You can’t see the baby, honey,” Aidia said. “She might catch it.”

  “I want her!” I said. My throat was raw, as if I had eaten handfuls of sandy rocks.

  “Serena and Esme is taking good care of her, now,” Aidia said.

  Occasionally I was aware of Aidia crying. When I made my eyes open, I saw her setting at the kitchen table, tears streaming down while she made biscuits. Sometimes I heard them all whispering in the corners of the room.

  “He’s gone for good this time,” Aidia said, her voice breaking. “He’s never been gone this long.”

  There wasn’t a bit of pity in Serena’s voice. She spoke to Aidia the way she might have spoken to a man who was in the way at a birthing. “He’ll come directly. If I was you, I’d be glad the son of a bitch was gone.”

  “It’s different,” Aidia said, “—to be left like that. It shames me.”

  “He’ll come staggering down the holler one of these evenings. Un-telling where he’s been. Look at how long he stayed gone that time he went to Virginia,” Serena said in her even way. “Hell, he went off and married you that time. None of us knowed where he was at for four or five months.”

  “Esme blames me, over him leaving,” Aidia said. She had stopped crying and was trying to calm her voice. She spoke slow. “I know she does.”

  “No, she blames herself.”

  Mostly I slept. I fell into black, dreamless sleeps and did not move. I wished for dreams, but none would come to me. I laid in the bed like a corpse and stirred only when some unexplainable thing nudged me awake. I would look around for a moment, let my eyes flutter closed again, and go back to sleep. I fancied I might never get up.