A Parchment of Leaves

by Silas House

  When Aidia went home to tend to Matracia Star, Serena peeled back the covers and tended to the tearing between my legs. I always woke up during this, but I laid very still, without speaking. I watched with my eyes half-open while Serena wrung out dishrags soaked with blood and vinegar and water. When she was done, Serena would sometimes lean down and kiss me on the forehead. I tried to make my dry lips move to ask her why she was so good to me, but I could not make the words come out. Serena kept her face close to mine and put a straight finger to my lips. “Shh,” she said.

  “HE’S DEAD. I know it,” Aidia said.

  I opened my eyes real slow. I had been laying there awake for a long while, listening to Aidia move about the room, making soup. I could hear it bubbling on the stove.

  I had not known that Aidia had come so close to me. When I slid my eyes open, Aidia was standing over my bed. Her eyes were red and her hair hung down on her shoulders in a wild mess, as if she had not combed it in days.

  I just looked at her.

  “I can feel it, Vine. I told Esme the same thing and she told me to shut my mouth,” Aidia said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “She said if anybody would know, it’d be her. But she’s wrong. I can feel it in my belly, just like how I knowed when I was carrying Matracia.”

  “Hush,” I said. My voice was a scratch on the air.

  “If he is dead, or if he at least don’t come back, I’ll have to leave here,” Aidia said. “I can’t live off of Esme. Not a dime of money coming in. I walked down to the mill yesterday, and Boss told me that Aaron might as well not darken his door again. Said no matter how bad he needed men working, he’d not have him back.”

  Aidia put her hands flat onto her face. I had the presence of mind to feel sorry for Aidia, but I also felt like taking her by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. It might have done her good to have her face slapped. I ached to tell her what I had done, but I knowed that I couldn’t. Aidia loved Aaron, despite all he had done. I pulled my hand from beneath the heavy covers and reached out and run my finger across Aidia’s forehead. Aidia grabbed hold of my hand and laid her cheek on it.

  “What am I going to do, Vine? He’s dead. But even if he ain’t, he’s gone,” she said. “Either way, I’m destroyed. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Hush,” I said again, and this time my true voice come out. It was the most comforting sound I had ever heard; it was as if I had been mute all of my life and only now had discovered what words sounded like.

  Twenty

  I could hear heavy shoes clomping around my bed. She rushed from one side of the room to the other, throwing back the curtains. I cracked my eyes open a little and seen that she was opening the windows. She slid them up, and fresh air poured in. Serena didn’t take time to savor it; she opened all of them as if it were a chore that had to be done every morning. I took it all in, though. The room was all at once filled with the sounds of outside: birdcall, the breeze on leaves, the splash of the creek, dogs barking far up in the head of the holler. It smelled so good, like all the smells I had ever loved: earth and water and the juice of trees.

  Then Serena appeared beside my bed, her fists on her hips. She looked down on me with hard eyes.

  “Look at this beautiful day,” she said, and reached down to grab hold of my chin. She directed my face to the windows, but I could not bear the new sunlight, even through my eyelids. I put a hand over my eyes. “It’s time to get up now. You’ve got a child to tend to. A life to live. You have to put this behind you and go on.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” I said, and Serena started at the sound of my voice. I had not said many words in such a long time. “I can’t.”

  “You by God will, too,” Serena said. She flopped down onto my bed heavily. She blew smoke onto my face and laughed loudly when I got a mouthful of it and set in to coughing. She sucked hard on the cigarette again and blowed out a thick line of smoke toward the window. “I know you’re stronger than this. Saul will be home before long, and you have to straighten up, now.”

  At that I raised up on my elbows. “Esme ain’t wrote to him about this, has she? I’m not ready to see him yet. I can’t bear it.”

  “No, you know better than that,” Serena said. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. Instead she gazed out the window. “She wouldn’t tell him if you was dying, to keep from worrying him. Once he realizes he ain’t had a letter from you in a week, he’ll be worried, though.”

  I scooted up on the bed and set with my back against the headboard. My legs ached from laying so long. I looked around the room and seen it all again, Aaron laying on the floor. I thought of how Aidia and Esme had traipsed all over the very spot where he had laid and died. How they were in there looking after me, making me soup and putting washrags on my forehead without a clue as to what had really happened. Having no idea that Aaron laid right up on that ridge.

  Serena flicked the cigarette butt out the window with one click of her thumb over her forefinger. She bent low, her stale breath puffing onto my face as she spoke. “Now, I want you to listen to me, Vine Sullivan. What happened was a bad thing. The worst thing ever was. But there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it now, and you’ve got no cause to feel guilty over it. You done what you had to. You killed him cause you had to. And you hid him cause you didn’t have no other choice. The law ain’t right sometimes.”

  She leaned even closer, almost whispering. “Nobody in this world knows it but me and you. If it’s up to me, it’ll stay that way. I’ll not breathe a word of it to a living soul, and you know that. But you have to get up. Today. Right now.”

  I just looked at her. Stillness was a habit easily gained. I had always been doing something, always running back and forth. But this ability to be still had come to me like something that I had been meant to do all my life. It is easy to be quiet, to not move. It is something that you can get used to without any effort at all.

  Serena got up quick and pulled a letter out of her apron. She throwed it onto the bed. “He’s wrote to you,” she said, and strode out of the house.

  I tore the envelope open.

  Dear Vine,

  I am afraid to say this for fear it won’t come true, but I reckon I will be coming home before long. I am figuring on New Year’s. This mountain is just about bald. We have felled almost ever tree on it and it looks like a place give over to the devil. I will close, as it is getting dark. We have to be tight with the coal oil and it is nigh dark. Kiss my baby girl for me and be watching for me. I will write Mama tomorrow, tell her.

  All my love,

  Saul Hagen Sullivan

  I put the paper to my face and tried to breathe him in, but there was only the mouthwatering scent of tangy ink. New Year’s, I thought. That was only a little more than two months away. I was happy for a brief minute, and then I realized that this meant I would have to face him. Only now did I feel like crying. I couldn’t even think of how I had betrayed him. I had to push it from my mind. For a little while longer I had to pretend that I had been sick all this time. I had to convince myself that I really had had a fever and before long I’d hear Aaron, strumming his banjo in the kitchen. It would be easy to think that it was all a nightmare.

  Serena was gone a good while and I couldn’t stand being alone, after reading that letter. Knowing that I would have to see him again. I set there and took in the silence of my little house. Outside, there was the sound of birds and life and the world, but in here there was nothing. Not even the click of a clock nor the creak of my bed. I realized all at once that the air moving through the windows was very cold. It was the fall of the year, after all. It was nigh wintertime. Even though the sky was bright as a day in April, the world was on the verge of ice.

  And then Serena come back in with Birdie on her hip. She brought her to me and set her astraddle my waist. I gathered her up and held her as tight as I could. I guess Birdie said something like “Mommy,” but I never heard a word. I held her to me and felt the breath moving in and out
of her body, the warmth of her spreading out over me.

  “See, Vine,” Serena said. “We’re alive.”

  IT WAS EASIER than I thought it would be. Some days I would go for a while without even thinking of Aaron. But I did grieve over it. It was like there was two halves of me. One part mourned over Aaron, in a strange way. He had been my brother-in-law, after all. We had once laughed and danced together. I used to delight in his stories. I remembered the way he played the banjo, and the smile he had when I first come to live on God’s Creek. The way he could cause Esme to laugh when nobody else could. But I had watched that man slip away long ago, and I guess I had been grieving over his passing for a while now.

  The thing was, it was like there was two Aarons. They was that boy I had listened to as he told me his big dreams. And then there was the Aaron who watched me and Serena as we walked the mountains, the Aaron who stood in the creek, the one who tried to strangle Aidia and come into my house without asking. That one, I still hated, and I could not make myself feel bad for having taken him out of this world. It wasn’t for me to say, but it seemed like the world was better without him.

  To live, I had to separate the two and focus on the Aaron I hated. And I did hate him, still. Terror does things to you. It hardens a part of you. I have heard people call others hard-hearted, but it’s not your heart that turns to stone when something awful happens. It’s your gut, where all real feelings come from. That was froze up inside me and I didn’t long to thaw it.

  The worst part was the lie. I knowed that I would have to lie for the rest of my life, and that was a hard thing for me to accept. I had never told a big lie before that. I had never had a reason. But every time I was in the presence of Esme or Aidia, I was lying. Sometimes we would be eating and Esme would drop her fork onto her plate and shudder, as if cold air had passed through her chest. She would say, “If only I knowed where my boy was. If I knowed that he had food in his belly and a warm place to lay down.” Each time something like this happened, I felt heavy with guilt.

  When you have a child, you have to put things aside, though. You have to live for them, if not for yourself. I was aware of this. I knowed that I could not let myself die inside, so I struggled through and made a way for myself. Most important, I tried to find a way to get joy into my life. I had to have it there for Birdie’s sake. She would have knowed if I was miserable, even if I smiled until my jaws ached. I couldn’t just fake being all right; I really had to be.

  So the rest of that year, I made a way for the possibility of joy. I looked for it anywhere I could find it. I got up early and left Birdie in the bed while I stepped out onto the porch to see day come in.

  Daylight is the time God moves about the best. I’ve heard people say that they liked to watch the world come awake. But the world is always awake; sunlight just makes it seeable. In that moment when light hit the mountain, when the sun cracked through the sky big enough to make a noise if our ears could hear it, I would be aware again of all the things that had been going on throughout the night. Morning just made it easier to hear. Light takes away muteness.

  I would stand there, froze to death, but the cold made me see that I was alive, that I could feel everything I was meant to. You have to seek out the promise of joy, no matter your circumstances.

  When you concentrate on the morning like that, it makes everything else clear for the rest of the day. In the daytime, I was all right. I could see and hear and feel and smell. But at night, I laid in bed for hours. I imagined Aaron’s face in the dark corners of the room. I heard the strums of his banjo in every creak of the house. I pulled the covers up to my neck, pulled Birdie closer to me. I laid there thinking of what I would do. Planning on ways to fool Saul, I might as well say.

  Every morning I was renewed, though. Air and light healed me, over and over. I got to where I depended on it. When I was feeling my worst, I would step out into the yard and put my hands on the branches of the little redbud. It made me feel like I was saying a prayer, to do this. I know that sounds like foolishness, but that little tree was like an altar for me. I stood there in the cold of early winter, wishing for the redbud to bear leaves so that I might put my face against them.

  Aidia found me that way one morning. I had my eyes closed and was standing very near the redbud. I was not praying, but I was aware of God. I was so sure of His presence there that it amazed me to think I had once doubted His existence.

  “I never seen a woman love a tree so much,” Aidia said to announce herself. She was standing at the edge of my yard, swallowed up in her mackinaw. She had her hands pushed far down in the pockets.

  I took my hands away quickly and hid them in the folds of my skirt, as if I had been caught doing something wrong. “I brung this little redbud with me from my home place, back where my people lived,” I said.

  She took a step closer, smiling widely. She was amused by me, I seen. “Back home—in Tennessee—we always called them Judas trees. You ever heard that?”

  “No. They was always redbuds to us,” I said, and walked on up to the porch. She followed me into the house. “Why would people call them a Judas tree?”

  “Because in the spring they get them purple buds on them, I reckon,” Aidia said. She shed her coat and laid it across a chair. “And they call it after Judas. Purple for the jealousy of Christ.”

  “I thought envy was green,” I said, and poured us both a cup of coffee.

  “Maybe it’s the color for betrayal. Judas hung himself from a redbud, I reckon, after the betrayal. I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. She laughed at herself. I had not heard her laughter in a long while.

  Being with Aidia helped me more than anything. She was like me—she put on her best face in daytime, but I knowed that she grieved every night of her life, waiting in that little, drafty house Aaron had just throwed together on the side of the mountain. Waiting to hear Aaron step up on the porch, waiting for a postcard he might send her. But really waiting for somebody to confirm her gut notion that he was dead. I was waiting, too, but I don’t know what for. Waiting for the New Year, when everything important to me would come back: Saul and the promise of spring. Spring would bring leaves, flowers, katydids. Maybe I was waiting to get caught, too. At any rate, we waited together. Seemed we spent every minute together. Sometimes her and Matracia would even stay all night at our house.

  In a place where men had once made things so busy, now there was only women. Me and Birdie, Aidia and Matracia, Esme, and Serena, who was all the time up God’s Creek, too. There was Luke, of course, but he was just a little boy. Sometimes it seemed like we would do just fine without any men at all.

  Twenty-one

  There was an early snow the day we found out the war ended. Just a light dusting that didn’t amount to anything, but it seemed like a sign. The sky was a bright gray, and the sun showed itself like a silver ball hung there, so smudged you could look right into it. The snow drifted down and frosted the big rocks lining the creek, clung to thin tree branches. It stood like sugar in the yard. By noon it had melted away except where the sun could not reach; it striped the mountainside like white rows in a garden. The road turned to mud, and the yard was too wet to walk through. Even after it melted, the scent of winter had come in, solid and tough, letting us know what it had in store for us.

  We learned of the war’s end from some boys over on Buffalo Mountain. They’d heard the news in town, got drunk, and come back through, firing their pistols up into the air. America Spurlock lived out at the mouth of God’s Creek, and she could hear them coming from a long ways off. She always was nosy. She got her shotgun, went out to the edge of the road, and waited for them. They bowed their horses up when they seen her there. They took their hats off and started telling about the war ending as fast as they could, each of them taking a turn in sharing the news. And of course she run up the holler, squalling for everyone to come out and hear the news. She had a grandson over there and she was wild with the prospect of him coming home. She was so ex
cited that she paid no attention to the shining mud that caked her shoes and lined the hem of her skirt.

  Three days later I got a letter from Saul. I could not believe that the mail had traveled so fast all the way from Laurel County, but there it was in my box. It had been written the day the war ended. I tore it open.

  My darling,

  We got word of the war ending today and everybody was whooping and hollering. Hearing this news made me long for you all. Such happy news makes you want to be with people you love. There are still boys in the hospitals, though, so we’re still cutting down them trees for the turpentine. It is a hard thing to stay, especially with the war ended, but I try to think of all them who are hurt and still in misery, needing medicines. It won’t be much longer and I guess I can stand it because I know this is helping some mother’s son. We was awful lucky that none of our family had to go over there, as many a man will never cross that ocean again.

  Boss moved us off Wildcat Mountain, as we stripped it bare. We are cutting all the pines out of this little place called Sugar Camp. It is pretty country. So it will not be too much longer and at least now we know that the war is over, so that is one load off our shoulders. The price of everything is bound to fall again and the world will be back in shape. For one thing, I will be with you all and will be the happiest feller that ever drawed a breath. Please do not fret too much that I am not coming home right off the bat. Just think of all the men who will never come home.

  All my love,

  Saul Hagen Sullivan

  The letter should have made me happy, but it only made me mad. And guilty. I despised his goodness, talking about all them hurt boys. Being selfless enough to accept staying there right on. I had done everything wrong, had made the worst mistakes a woman can make, and still I could not find it in my heart to be as good as he was. I had thought very often of them men over there, but I hadn’t done a thing to help. It seemed like he was throwing it in my face. Look, the letter seemed to say, I am a good person. I am willing to stay here. What have you done to make things better for people? And I had to answer, Nothing.