Anna gave Petey a big ole smile. She said, “Your dad’s still looking.”
Petey ran back into the woods, in the direction her daddy had gone, and hollered, whistled, hollered-whistled until she heard him holler and whistle back. They met halfway and she told him Hill was a stupid idiot and had fallen asleep like a wild animal in the woods. Her daddy threw back his head and laughed. Petey laughed, too.
“He must have been some wore out not to hear all our ruckus,” Daddy said.
“I guess that’s for true,” Petey answered.
Daddy and Petey went back to the cabin, and there Daddy swept Hill up on his shoulders, calling him a wild little heathen. Hill laughed, happy as a lost-then-found lamb that he wasn’t in trouble. Petey saw how little Hill still was, as if he’d never grow much more than he already was, but then Petey noticed how his pants and shirts were smaller, as if he’d grown since they’d come back to North Carolina like tourists and not-like-tourists all at the same time.
As the 1966 Ford Country Squire with its magic tailgate sped back to Fort Worth, Petey thought of when she was first leaving home, when the mountains disappeared. Back then, she’d not known what her life would be like, where she’d live, how she could stand it. Those things weren’t mysterious anymore. It didn’t make the toothache in her body go all the way away, but her bones didn’t feel out of joint and her head didn’t hurt, and her stomach didn’t fuss at her so much. When the land grew flat again, Petey closed her eyes and remembered the feel of the creek on her bared toes and ankles.
When everyone was back in their half-houses, which still smelled of sugar sweet to welcome them all home, when everyone, even Hill, was fast asleep, she sneaked out onto Hill’s tree limb and climbed onto his branch to sit. Up in the break in the tree limbs and leaves, she gazed at the stars and thought how there weren’t so many as North Carolina stars, but the moon was as big and bright in Fort Worth as in Haywood County. The moon smiled down on her with its cool light that warmed her in Fort Worth just as it did in Haywood County. She really wasn’t so far from home. The moon shone over both places the same, and she could shine in both places the same. Petey smiled. She went back into her half-house, to her lilac room, and snuggled into her sweet white iron bed. In a little while, the moon shone on her face and Petey closed her eyes, opened them. The moon was still there.
Chapter 11
Petey took the apple cakes from the oven, set them down, and wiped her hands on her apron. “Momma, they’re done.”
“Good. Go put up the closed sign. It’s already past closing time.”
Petey went to the door, turned the sign to the bakery to show “Closed” to any customers come too late. She looked out to the street. Coming up a cloud. Petey liked the rain, sometimes.
“Did you call Anna?” Momma asked. She put the cakes on the racks to cool.
“Yes. They’re leaving for Paris early tomorrow.” Petey turned from the window and began helping Momma clean up the bakery. Their bakery. Petey still liked the sound of those words.
“Well, good thing they get to go before she gets too big with that child.” Momma smiled.
Petey nodded, wrapped up a pie Daddy asked to have for his poker party. He’d never played poker with a cigar in his mouth before until he’d began working at the bakery. He’d said he had to find some way to be a man, and playing poker with cigars in his mouth and cussing and maybe drinking a whisky made him feel manly, especially after he’d been decorating cakes all day, something he was good at, much to his surprise and embarrassment in front of his buddies. Momma would laugh; tell him, “No one would ever think you aren’t anything but a big strong man, even when you’re making little cute flower petals.” Then she’d poke his arm, tease him, laugh again.
When the bakery was cleaned and everything put away, Petey and Momma took off their aprons to go into the washing machine. Their clean aprons for the next day hung on the rack, alongside Daddy’s, Anna’s, and even Hill’s. Though Hill’s mostly stayed hanging on the peg. He had better things to do, he said. Momma wouldn’t let him come in anyway unless he took a long scrubbing shower from tip-to-toe and changed into clothes she kept in the bakery, ones that she would be sure didn’t have animal hair, and no telling what all, on them. She said he must be sleeping with his animals.
Hill had a way with the animals. Thought like them. Understood them. He especially liked to save dogs no one thought could be helped. And Petey knew he did sleep with them. She’d come by early in the morning and had caught him curled up with them in the barn, his long hair in his face, and she was filled with love and tenderness for her brother. His bare feet twitched and his eyelids moved back and forth in his dreams. The wolf had watched her, its yellow eyes in protective warning.
The wolf Hill had found half-dead in the woods. And that wolf would hardly leave Hill’s side and didn’t let anyone pet him but Hill, and if the wolf was feeling generous, Petey. Sometimes Joey came to visit Hill, and Petey was filled with wonder over the big burly football player in the place of the little snotty-nosed blonde-headed kid who’d barely said a word and had always been such a good friend to Hill—his only real human friend that wasn’t family.
Momma and Petey headed out to Petey’s still good-enough used Subaru. Unless Momma had something planned and needed her car, Petey usually picked up Momma on her way in. She lived farther away than Momma did; her parents lived close to town. Petey smiled, remembering how Momma’d bought her first two used cars in Fort Worth, and then when they’d moved back to the mountains six years ago, one last used car, until finally, last week, Momma’d bought her first new car, a sparkling new 1982 Subaru Sedan she was so proud of. Daddy’s 1966 Ford Country Squire had been traded in on a Ford truck he still had—he would always be a Ford man.
Momma took Daddy’s pie and sat in the passenger side. They drove along talking here and there, sometimes thinking their own thoughts. She dropped off Momma at her house, and then Petey headed to her home, passing by the old place on the highway that still had the black barn. Someone else lived there she’d found out, a relative to the first owners. Didn’t matter; she’d found her place three years ago, set back in the woods, in a little cove, with the creek running, and the wind falling over the ridgetops, cooling her sweetly in the summer.
She passed where Angela used to live before she moved to Oregon with her boyfriend who became a husband. They wrote each other, as they’d always done. In their visits, even while she was sick, Angela was still beautiful, would always be that way. The breast cancer didn’t take that away from her. She was Lovely. During those days, sometimes in her letters, Petey had accidentally written “beast cancer” leaving out that R.
Petey turned up into her driveway, parked in her garage. She walked up her wooden stairs and went straight to the kitchen where she made herself a snack of cheese and pumpernickel bread to take to sit on the porch. She retrieved her pad and pen from the side table and started a letter:
Dear Mary, how are you and David? The kids? I can’t wait for your visit next month. It’s a perfect time to come with everything blooming out and smelling sweet. Momma’s bakery is doing well. I guess I should say our bakery, but I still think of it as Momma’s. Anna and Stephen’s child will arrive in six months. They’re going to Paris and then they’ll settle in with that baby. Anna said she is looking forward to being a momma now that she has her travel bug satisfied. Stephen says he’s been ready to settle in for a family since day one. They tease and toss around. He says it took him five years to get her to be officially engaged, another five to get her to marry him, and finally, three years to make a complete family. Stephen asked when I’ll get married. I don’t reckon I ever will. I like knowing I can do what I want when I want to. Ole Barry Burke comes round sometimes asking me to marry him, but I just laugh and say no. I’m a bride of this mountain. He says he won’t give up. Well, let him keep on trying if he wants to, maybe one
day I’ll give it a second thought. Hurry up time so it can hurry up and be time for your visit!
Got to go now. Love, Petey.
Petey put the letter into an envelope, licked it, and addressed it to Fort Worth. She ate her snack. The creek sang to her. The distant mountains rose up. The moon would soon shine on her face, just as it had in the flatland, and as it had and would forever more at her home, in her sweet sweet mountains.
Augusta Trobaugh
Resurrection
The whole summer, Papa can’t think about anything except my big brother, Danny, and how he is starting high school in the fall and trying out for the football team. Papa’s been waiting almost all Danny’s life for this, and early on, he brings home a big box of frozen steaks from the Piggly-Wiggly store down in Louisville and tells Mama to cook one up for Danny—rare—every single night, so he can get beefed up for the tryouts. The rest of us go on having okra and tomatoes and butterbeans and fried chicken and corn bread, like always. But Danny has to eat a steak on top of everything else.
Mama fixes the steak every evening, just like Papa says for her to do, but she goes around wiping her face on her apron almost all the time. Maybe the smoke from all those steaks bothers her eyes. Or maybe she doesn’t like to think of Danny playing football. Not one little bit.
Grandmama pays no attention to the football excitement, because she never cares about anything except her evangelist programs on television and getting her tomatoes put up before they go bad.
I’m only in sixth grade in the fall, so I don’t have to worry about getting ready to play football. Not yet, anyway. And maybe not ever, because Papa says he doesn’t hold out much hope for me. I’m kind of small for my age, and what I do best is stick my nose in a book. I’ll probably grow up to be a sissy, like Papa says.
But I don’t mind, because I couldn’t eat a whole steak every night to save my life, and I’d sure hate to be the cause of Mama’s eyes hurting her all the time.
So no one pays much attention to me that summer, and that’s O.K. I suppose. Mostly, I just like to be by myself anyway, but the only thing I do mind is that I don’t get to go to the library a single time, because it’s all the way down in Louisville. Nineteen miles and too far to walk.
So that whole summer, Mama cooks and wipes her eyes, Danny eats and eats, Papa slaps him on the shoulder—hard—all the time and says “That’s my boy!” I read every book I have three or four times, and Grandmama sits all day long in front of the TV, hollering at the preachers and clutching her pocketbook in her lap. She’s trying to make up her mind about which one of the evangelists she’s going to send her social security check to, and even though Papa says to Mama in a loud voice that it wouldn’t hurt for Grandmama to buy a loaf of bread or a pound of hamburger once in awhile, Grandmama doesn’t pay attention to anything he says. She doesn’t even speak to him. Ever. Or Mama or Danny either.
I’m the only one she ever says anything to, and it’s always the same thing: “Boy, have you found Jesus yet?”
“No, ma’am.” That’s what I always answer, but what I really want to say is, “Why? Is Jesus lost or something?”
But I don’t.
Of course.
Because I know what she really means is this: have I found Jesus and gotten myself born again at the Baptist church we go to over in Zebina, and the answer to that is always no.
From the picture of Jesus I’ve seen hanging in the hallway between the two Sunday School rooms, He’s not someone I’m really interested in trying to find. Looks too pale and sissy-like. Just like me.
But when Grandmama asks me that same question late in August, it gets me to thinking about the church and the baptismal pool and the old robing house at the edge of the creek, and I don’t have a thing left to read, and there’s nothing else to do anyway. Besides, it’s one place I can go where there’s no one talking about football or asking me if I’ve found Jesus.
So maybe—just maybe—I could pretend to look for Him after all, because it would be fun to prowl through the woods behind the church and walk a long way down along the creek, so I would be like Stanley looking for Dr. Livingstone, only it’ll be Jesus I find. And not that pale, sad-looking man in the Sunday School picture, but someone big and strong—like the giant in the Brawny Paper Towel commercial, and when I find Him, I’ll get Him to make Papa leave Danny alone and my Mama stop crying, and maybe even go ahead and take my Grandmama to Heaven. Right away.
The next morning, I get up before daylight and put on my clothes and tip-toe into the kitchen to make some sandwiches to take, because I mean to stay away all day long. But Grandmama is already up, even that early, sitting in the dark living room with the blue-white light from the television set flickering over her face and the granny square afghan that’s folded across the back of the couch. I try to sneak past, but without even taking her eyes off the television set, she yells at me, “You found Jesus yet, boy?”
“No, ma’am,” I say and rush into the kitchen, throw together the sandwiches, wrap them in waxed paper, and stuff them into my shirt—and the whole time, she’s firing words at me about sin! and hell! and redemption! and grace!
She’s still yelling when I push open the screen door on the back porch—hard—and run past the bloody steak bones piled in the top of the trashcan.
It’s a long walk, but there’s something nice-scary and mysterious about the road in the soft light, especially in places where the kudzu is like big, green-elephant clumps on the fences or climbs up into the very tops of dead trees, so that already I am Stanley looking for Dr. Livingstone, walking among a herd of grazing kudzu-elephants while kudzu-great apes huddle silently in the tops of the trees.
I walk for a long time.
The sun is up and very hot, and gnats are singing in my ears when I finally come to the end of the road, where the church stands, square and white-washed on the hill, and with the cemetery nudging up behind it.
Just beyond all those silent stones and fresh-cut grass is what folks around here call the Todey plot. The Todeys are mean-dog folks who live just over the creek. They don’t mingle with anybody except other Todeys and don’t even send their children to school. Ever. But nobody messes around with the Todeys, and even the truant officer won’t go over there because they’d just as soon shoot you as look at you. Everybody knows that.
A long time ago, there used to be a lot of trouble about the Todeys sneaking into the church cemetery at night and burying their dead in other folks’ family plots. Of course, no one knew anything about it until they went to have a grave dug and would find a surprise-Todey already buried there.
That caused a lot of trouble, because they couldn’t just throw the remains over in the bushes, so finally, they took to planting them on the other side of a thicket. And not in the church cemetery.
I asked Mama one time why Todeys couldn’t bury their people in the cemetery, like everybody else did, and she said it was because the church cemetery was a holy place and the Todeys were certainly not holy people. And besides, they didn’t own any of the plots, but just piled their passed-away folks into places where only good, up-standing Christians were supposed to go. She wouldn’t say more, but Grandmama muttered about in-breeding and such as that. I had to look it up in the dictionary to find out what it meant. But I wasn’t surprised. Everybody knew all about the Todeys anyway.
But a few years ago, when old Miss Allie Jenkins passed away, the Todeys bought a piece of her land—right next to the cemetery—off her son, who lives in Atlanta and didn’t know any better, and they moved all their dead folks from where they’d been buried behind the thicket and into what everybody now calls the Todey plot. And more. They put up a chain link fence with rolls of barbed wire on top and a gate with a real padlock and painted the fence and the barbed wire a dazzling white—Of all things! Mama said when she saw that. Then they went to one of those concrete yard
-statue places on the other side of Thomson and came back with their pickup truck loaded down with concrete angels—ten or twelve of them—and a big, old, six-foot-tall statue of Mary—Jesus’ Mama.
They set all those statues up in the dark of night, because even the Todeys wouldn’t have dared to put them up during the daytime, when someone cleaning graves in the real cemetery might have seen them. And on another night they put down bright green squares of fake grass on the ground in between all the graves.
But the worst thing of all was that once they got all that carpeting and the angel statues and the big concrete Mary in place, they painted yellow hair on all the statues and too-bright, neon-blue eyes without any eyelids on them and coal-black eyebrows and big, thick eyelashes. And red paint for rouge on their cheeks. So there they all stood, moldy-white and yellow and blue and black and red against the dark shade of the cedar trees, and that painted-up concrete Mary had one thick hand pressed to her chest, like she had indigestion or something and the other hand was held out so it looked like she was waiting for somebody to give her some Tums. That’s what Papa said. But Mama said there wasn’t a thing funny about it, that the only thing to do is ignore the whole thing. Pretend it isn’t even there.
That’s sure pretty hard to do. Still, I try, for Mama’s sake, even though that morning she is in the house far behind me. So I turn my face away from the Todey plot and go down the hill toward the old baptismal pool. It was what they used before the church got that clear-plastic see-through baptizing tub that’s installed behind the altar. At the old pool, icy-cold water pours out of an iron pipe stuck in the side of the hill, spills into the pool, and runs out the other end through a little space in the rocks. Then it flows under what’s called a robing house and into a shallow branch that empties into a bog just this side of Brushy Creek. The robing house stands up on stilt-legs and it isn’t an honest-to-goodness house of course, but just a one-room shack where people who get baptized could change into dry clothes afterward without having to walk all the way back up the hill with their wet clothes clinging to them. It has a tin roof that afternoon rain sounds nice on and big windows with no screens and is always cool, even on the hottest day. No one uses it any more. Except for me. I like to pretend that it’s my house and mine alone, and that I have all the books I could ever read in it. And a dog that loves me.
The Firefly Dance Page 13
