by Silas House
The fiddler from Free Creek set on the porch and played music for us, as we knowed Esme would have appreciated such a thing. She always liked the fiddle best of all. Serena told him to play “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and her voice flowed into the house. That was a strange choice of song to sing at a laying-out, but her voice was so beautiful. Bugs were bad already, so we built a gnat fire out of rags on the yard, and its thin blue smoke drifted up to move about the porch. The burning fabric smelled green and bitter.
I moved amongst the people, but I was numb to any touch. I was there, but I was not there. I felt like a vapor that drifted through the house. I eat a little bit, but never tasted a thing. I can’t remember any words that come out of my mouth. I smiled, thanked everbody when they had to go, did all the things I was meant to do, but I was off somewhere else. I can’t remember who took care of Birdie, or how I dressed myself or combed out my hair or anything else. I was a ghost.
I think it was not grief or guilt that stunned me so. It was surprise. Surprise to finally realize what had happened that night. The bigness of it was all at once laid upon my body like a pile of rocks. The thought of hiding him, of leaving him up there on that mountain beneath them cliffs. This was the worst thing of all to me, this lie that was right up there on the mountainside. And I knowed that Esme had died because she had worried herself so over Aaron.
Everyone was gone before I even realized it. One minute there was a great, loud house full of people; then there was nothing but the night sounds, the occasional sound of Aidia tidying the kitchen, the creak of the floorboards when Saul moved about the house. When I saw that everyone was gone and that the night sky was the sort of blue-black that can only mean it is far past midnight, I was setting on the porch steps with my arms wrapped about my knees. I finally awoke when Saul sat down on the step next to me and took my hand. We sat there in silence for a long time, and I knowed that we would sit there until daylight.
“I appreciate you being so good to her,” Saul said, and he put his hand on the underside of my arm. His hand was hot. “It wasn’t big of me, to run off and leave all that on you.”
“A woman ought to tend to the dead,” I said. “I wanted to do it.”
He held on to my arm tightly. We both held our heads high and looked out at the blackness. The creek sounded more quiet than it usually was, but the crickets and peepers sounded much louder. I could tell it would rain tomorrow. My daddy taught me how to listen to the crickets. They sounded different when a storm was on its way. Tonight their song was sharp and made up of short notes, like clipped little bits of melody.
“They’s something I should have told you earlier,” I said. “Esme didn’t want to be buried by your daddy.”
He turned and looked at me like I was talking out of my head.
“She told me on her deathbed.”
Saul looked out at the night again. The muscle in his jaw flinched, and I felt the need to put my hands on his face, but I didn’t move.
“People talk out of their minds when they are dying,” he said. “You said yourself that she thought Aaron was in the room, that she talked to my dead baby sister.”
“She knowed exactly what she was saying, Saul. I don’t have a doubt about it. There was things happened, things you don’t know about, and she don’t want to be buried by him.”
He rose to his feet and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his dungarees. He leaned against the porch post and thought for a long moment. “I’ve already dug the grave. Spent all day on it,” he said. “What do you know about my people that I don’t?”
“Me and Esme talked all the time, Saul,” I said. “I should have told you before you dug the grave, but I was just so tired.”
“Once you’re gone, you don’t know where you at noway,” he said in a tight voice that sounded like he was trying to convince himself of this as he spoke it.
“I promised her that I wouldn’t let you lay her beside him. I can’t lie to her.”
“People will notice it. It’ll leave a bad mark on my mother and daddy’s marriage.”
I got up and stood very close to him. “Who cares what they say? They talked about you marrying an Indian, didn’t they? They said that I was a witch. That never bothered you.” I said this with a smile on my face, hoping to humor him a little. He usually liked it when I spoke of our courtship, of the way we had met. But he never flinched, and held his mouth sourly.
So I raised my voice a little. I took hold of his arm and said, “Well, you can help me do right by her or not, but I won’t break a promise I made to somebody on their deathbed. Especially not to Esme.”
“She’s my mother,” he spat.
“I was the one tended to her, and I was the one promised it to her. There are things you don’t know, Saul. She didn’t want to be buried by your daddy, and that’s all there is to it.”
I went into the house and took the clock off of the mantle. The pendulum knocked against the wood and the glass, sounds I had not heard since Esme had took the clock down to show to me, way back when I first come to God’s Creek. She had give me the gift of time, and I didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse. I walked down the holler toward our house, cradling the clock in my arms like a newborn.
LATER THAT NIGHT, I went back up to Esme’s and didn’t fall asleep until sometime after the sun rose. Aidia woke me up not more than two hours later. I come awake just by knowing that she was looking at me. She stood over me, seeming much taller than she really was. She wore an apron, and the smells of breakfast leaked out of its fabric.
“I’ve cooked,” she said without one change of expression. “You need to eat something.”
I put a hand to my brow to block the light that fell in the window in big squares. Aidia had pushed the glass up, and the smell of true morning washed in. The air was cool and it seemed to clean out the room. I was in the chair across from Esme’s coffin. The scent of camphor nearly took my breath.
Aidia stood over me, her mouth pinched up like she was holding back a great mouthful of spit. I looked from her to Esme’s form on the bed, and then back to her again.
Finally she spoke. “I know you’re mad at me. For not helping you lay out Esme. But I just couldn’t do it.” She looked off, like she couldn’t bear to look at me no more. “I watched my mama die. My daddy and my brothers—they just went about their business like it wasn’t happening. But I tended her. I was just a little child, Vine. And I cooked for her, fed her. She was so sick that soon as I would put it in her mouth, she would throw it right back up. Soup would just run right down her chin, and then I’d have to clean it off her neck and titties. When she cried out in pain, I was the one held her.”
Aidia’s shoulders started to tremble, and her lip did as well. I put both my arms out without saying a word. I just held my hands still in the air—offering them to her—and she sat right down in my lap. She put one arm around my back and put her face against my chest. She felt so little to me. She was the kind of person you wanted to take care of but also shake some sense into. She cried hard against me. Our grief come together there in that stuffed chair until it was something so big it threatened to overtake the room.
Aidia calmed herself. I could feel her back straightening, although she did not move. “And when she died, I cleaned her up. I was eleven year old,” she said. “I fixed her good as I could do. Put flowers on her eyes. Daddy was out in the fields, working. I walked out there and told him, and he didn’t even put down his scythe. ‘Least she ain’t suffering,’ he said. Didn’t even offer to put his arm around me or nothing. I went back to the house and crawled in the bed with her and fell asleep there with her. I was so tired. I felt like I hadn’t slept in ages, and having her there by me—having her laying beside me and knowing I didn’t have to tend to her—it was the most comforting thing. It was the best rest I had ever had in my life. But when Daddy come in and found me that way, he jerked me up so hard it hurt my arm, and just pulled a quilt up over her.”
“A child shouldn’t have to live through that,” I said.
Aidia looked up at me. “Why do people do such evil things to one another, Vine?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
For a long time, Aidia just set there with me. There was nothing but the sound of our own breathing. I could see out the window as Saul brought Birdie up the road. She had stayed the night at Serena’s, and he had walked to get her. He was carrying a shovel in one hand and had Birdie on his shoulders, and she was smiling.
“I hated it over Esme dying, too,” Aidia said softly. “You know I did, don’t you? I thought a lot of that old woman, even if she didn’t like me.”
“I know it,” I said. I ran my hand over Aidia’s hair, which was as cool and black as deep water.
I heard Saul and Birdie come into the house. “Go on in there to Mommy,” Saul said, and Birdie ran back into the room. She jumped up into the chair with me and Aidia.
“Where you heading?” I hollered out.
“To dig Mama’s grave where she wanted it,” he said, and walked away, leaving the door wide open.
Twenty-six
My tree thrived. Its heart-shaped leaves were as big as hands, so green and full of life that they sometimes looked blue in the approaching dusk. The limbs fanned out in a shape so perfect it looked like it had been shaped by binding. I imagined the roots pushed deep into the ground, curling about rocks that laid beneath the rich soil. Pods of seeds hung from the branches like flattened green beans. The redbud tree stood in the yard like a guardian, its trunk straight and knowing. It seemed to watch over us. Every time I swept the yard, I paused by the tree and run my fingers over its leaves, down its knotty branches.
I leaned near the tree and whispered, “Live, little tree. Grow big and stay here with me on this creek.”
I had been thinking a lot about Aidia asking me why people did evil to one another. I turned the question around and around in my mind, like an endless whispering that would not hush until I realized the answer.
I couldn’t figure out why people were the way they were. Why my people had been run off their land and marched west. Why that man forced my own family to leave Redbud Camp. Why Aaron’s mother had laid him down on the ground, turned around, and walked away forever. Why we had just lived through a world war. And I couldn’t understand what meanness in me had allowed me to leave Aaron’s body up on that mountain without so much as a clod of dirt throwed on his body. I wondered if we were put on this earth only to destroy every beautiful thing, to make chaos. Or were we meant to overcome this? Did bad things happen so that goodness could show through in people? The way Esme had loved a baby that wasn’t hers, and the way my people had not let their spirits be broke, and the amazing fact that Aidia could still let out a beautiful laugh in spite of her suffering. And the kindness I found in rough-talking people like Serena, the safeness of setting close to Saul. There was so much good in the world that surely evil could not overtake it.
To think on it all was too much to bear. If people thought much about such things, they would go crazy as bess-bugs.
To keep myself from losing my mind, I did what many people would have thought was madness anyway: I talked to the redbud tree, willing it to live.
I had woke up that morning with the thought of going over to Redbud Camp. But there had been too much to do. Now it was evening, and Saul would be home from the mill before long, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to go back there and see it again.
I wrote Saul a note: “Went to Redbud. Be back by dark. There is ham and biscuits in the sideboard to tide you. We will have a late supper.”
I walked across the road and stood on the bank, looking down at Birdie and Luke working on Luke’s dam. The morning’s rain had beat white flowers off a brier bush upstream, and now they were all gathered on the pool behind the dam like bits of cut paper. Birdie was wading through them as she packed a rock to the dam, and the surface of flowers parted in the wake of her legs.
“Birdie,” I hollered, and held a hand to my forehead. Sunlight glinted off the water into my eyes. “Come on, baby. We’re going somewhere.”
“Where to?” Birdie said. “I want to play.”
“Come on, now. You all can work on the dam tomorrow.”
Birdie climbed the bank. The hem of her dress was soaked.
“Luke, you need to go on home, now. Serena won’t want you playing down here and me gone,” I said. “Come on.”
I took my horse out of the pen and hefted both the children up onto its back. I led it out of the holler, aware of the birdcall on all sides of us. The horse made a racket clomping across the wooden bridge, and its noise seemed to break up some sort of spell. Birds flew away with much noise.
I led the horse on down the main road until we got to the mouth of Free Creek and Serena’s house. I took Luke off the horse and helloed the house. Serena come out onto the porch with a cigarette in one hand and a spoon in the other.
“It’s bout time you got home, Luke Sizemore. Supper’s on the table,” Serena hollered, and he run up the yard.
“We headed up Redbud,” I said.
Serena stepped down and stood close to me. Her clothes smelled of fried chicken. “Don’t go up there. You’ll just get into it with that man, Vine.”
“I want to see it. It’s been long enough. I want to see what my home looks like now.”
Serena shook her head. “Wait and take me or Saul with you.”
I pulled myself up onto the horse and clucked my tongue. “I’m going now.”
Serena stood in the yard and watched us get farther away. “Awful late to be setting out!” she called, but I just waved.
BY THE TIME we got to Redbud, Birdie had got so used to the rhythm of the horse that she had just about gone to sleep. I shook her shoulder and kissed the top of her head, then got off the horse and put my arms out to let Birdie down.
We stood at the confluence of Redbud Creek and the Black Banks River. The sound of the waterfall was not as loud as I remembered it, but it was still a wild, powerful thing there in the middle of the peaceful woods. The water fell in such a fury that a little mist rose from it, dampening our faces.
I squatted down next to Birdie and put my hand in the small of her back. “This is where your daddy asked me to marry him,” I said.
Birdie smiled at this. “Was he pretty then?”
I laughed and put my hand atop Birdie’s head. “Pretty as he is now.”
We eased up the thin path toward Redbud Camp. It looked like no one come down to the confluence anymore, as the trail was overgrown by weeds and wildflowers. Ironweed stood purple and thick. No one had trod them down all summer long. Perhaps the fools had not even discovered the falls. And maybe they just didn’t have the sense to appreciate them. We come through the trees, and the remains of Redbud Camp was slowly revealed to me. It existed no more. The shape of the land was the same: rises and flats, bottoms and hills, the cleft where Redbud Mountain met River Mountain. But it was as if houses had never stood here. There was no sign of the paths we had used, the squares of white dust where our chickens had scratched, the patches of garden. It was the worst feeling, to look upon the place of my childhood and realize that it had been swept away like sand at the swing of broomstraw. There was no mark of the people who had lived here. Of the families. Of my family. I strained to hear the ghosts of their laughter, hoped to find the imprint of their lives here on the air, but it was gone.
The trail up the mountain had been widened out, and many of the trees atop its crest cut down. I could see the roofline of the big house up there. It had dormer windows that looked out over the valley. I wondered if the man who lived there had children. Did they play along the creek down here and find remnants of my own life here? Maybe they happened upon a lost ball, a jack catching sunlight in the grass. I hoped that none of them ventured up on the cliff. I didn’t want anybody in my spot, where I had spent many hours looking down upon the world.
I left
the horse at the edge of the woods and walked out into the field, which was overgrown with goldenrod and daisies. The road was the only cleared spot now. It amazed me how fast the earth took back its space, how easily weeds could rid a place of people. But I found our old houseseat. There were four gnarled locusts, one at each corner. I stood in the middle and could feel my family’s spirit there. The ground held a memory of them.
“This is where our house set,” I said, but Birdie paid little attention. She was picking daisies. “I spent many a day right here. The porch was here,” I said, moving to the front. “In the mornings, Mama would brush out my hair. During the day, we’d work here. Breaking beans, churning butter. And in the gloaming, Daddy would tell us stories. Everbody on the creek would gather.”
I heard the sound of an engine coughing to life atop the mountain, and I turned fast. I could see a curl of dust breaking apart on the mountain, but I made no move to leave. I bent and looked at some rocks that must have been part of our chimney. They were warm to my touch.
I watched Birdie, who was getting closer to the creek as she picked the flowers. She had a handful now and had put one behind each ear. “Will you make me a daisy chain?” she asked.
“Be careful by that creek,” I said. “Snakes live here.”
The sound of the car engine was closer, but I didn’t turn to look up the road. It was still far up the mountain, but the motor’s purr echoed to me on the cliffs dotting the hillsides. I walked through the weeds and found our front step hidden by a mess of burr bushes. I don’t know how I had missed it when I was standing in the middle of our house’s old space. I set down on it, a big square rock that Daddy had dragged out of the creek. I could see him doing it. All the hard work he had put into this place, only to have it stole from him. I put my face in my hands and fought back tears. I pictured all the steps Mama and Daddy had taken onto this rock, all the times I had skipped across it, in a hurry to get somewhere without realizing the straightedged beauty of it.
