To watch somebody fall in love helps us see the world in a new and better light. Most days are just for work and waiting, getting along from hour to hour. But love puts everything in a new brightness and sets the world at a new angle. People in love may look the same, but if you watch them they seem different too, willing to take risks, see things they hadn’t noticed before.
Troy took us walking down along the river. We took off our shoes and waded across below the shoals, and he helped Sharon climb up on the rocks. Sharon couldn’t take her eyes off him. I never seen a girl so happy. She held up her dress and the water splashed her lean brown legs. The roar of the shoals sounded like the buzz in the blood of lovers.
“Next time you come I’ll bring the canoe down to the river and we’ll go for a ride,” Troy said.
“I’d love that,” Sharon said.
Old Pat come running through the river and jumped up on the rock and shook water on all of us. “Don’t do that,” Troy said.
“She must be a Methodist, sprinkling us,” Sharon said, and laughed.
I’d hoped that Old Pat wouldn’t be so friendly to Sharon. She usually only liked members of the family. But Sharon could see how much Troy liked his dog, and she went out of her way to make friends with Old Pat. She petted her and talked baby talk to her. She wiped the flung water off her arms and legs. It annoyed me a little to see how she worked to make Troy like her. But she was my friend too, and my guest, and there was nothing to do but be nice to her. There was a slot where most of the river poured between two rocks. Troy took a run and jumped across from one rock to the other. I’d seen him do it before, but nobody else could do it. Sharon gasped and clapped her hands when he landed on the other side, like she’d seen a god perform a miracle.
“How do you do that?” she called. Troy took another run and jumped back across the roaring chute.
As we started back up the hill Troy helped her across a boulder and held on to her hand until he seen me looking. But then he put his hand on her back to help her across a log.
That evening at supper Papa said he was going to take a job at Fort Bragg building a barracks for the army. He said Fort Bragg was near Fayetteville, North Carolina. Papa hadn’t had a real building job for years. He’d done little jobs for neighbors, sometimes for people in Flat Rock, repairing chicken houses, fixing a leak in a roof. But he’d had no steady work since he built houses on the lake. Him and Mama had lived on the money I give them and the money Troy had sent from the CCC. The only money Velmer had made was from selling muskrat hides and a little ginseng.
“How long will this job last?” Mama said.
“Could last a long time,” Papa said. “They’re building dozens of barracks.”
“How come, when times are so bad?” Sharon said.
“Because they know a war is coming,” Velmer said. “Roosevelt is getting ready for war.”
“I hope not,” Sharon said.
“There’ll be work for all of us there,” Papa said. “We can all go down and work as long as we want to.”
“When will you come home?” Mama said.
“Every weekend,” Papa said. “I’ll drive my truck down there and back.”
The way Papa talked you could see the Depression was coming to an end. There was new work to be had, but it was different from what we expected. It was not jobs at home, but way off somewhere, and the jobs had to do with the army and with the war everybody said was coming. It was good news and bad news at once, the way so many things are.
“That’s a long way to go for work,”Mama said.
“This work could last for years,” Papa said.
Early the next morning Troy drove Sharon and me back to town. He got out of the truck and hugged Sharon before we went into the store with our bags. Old Pat yelped from the back of the truck.
“Thank you for such a nice weekend,” Sharon said with a big grin on her face.
“You’re welcome,” I said, and headed for the cosmetics counter.
Thirteen
I never did have any extra money back then in the 1920s like other younguns did. Papa was paying for the place and paying doctor bills from the typhoid and paying for the new well and pump. Only money I had for months at a time was what I got catching rabbits in a rabbit gum and selling them down at the cotton-mill store. The store sold them to mill workers for their dinner. Me and Troy would carry a rabbit gum out into the field along in November after frost had killed the goldenrod and asters and other weeds. A rabbit gum was just a hollow log of black gum fixed up with a sliding door and a stick trigger. You put a piece of apple in the back and when a rabbit hit the stick trigger inside, the door fell and trapped him. If you skinned and gutted a rabbit, you could usually get a quarter for it.
When big boys started noticing me and I started noticing them, I didn’t have no money for fancy clothes or jewelry. And Mama said it was wrong to wear lipstick or paint your face. Effie had some face powder and lipstick and I slipped into the bedroom and tried them. But I seen I didn’t need any makeup. Whatever it was about me that attracted boys it didn’t have nothing to do with makeup. My skin was soft and smooth and my hair was blond and naturally wavy. And my figure was beginning to fill out in the right way.
But to tell the truth, as I said before, I never did know what it was about me that attracted the boys. Sometimes I think it was the fact that I never did care nothing about them. I liked to flirt with them, but I never was crazy about boys the way other girls was. I remember my friend Grace would come to church just to hear a boy, Raleigh, sing. He was an awfully good singer. And she’d say, “Ain’t he pretty; he’s just so pretty.” And she followed him from church to church wherever he was singing at revival meetings and prayer meetings, homecomings and singing schools. And when she was just fifteen she caught him and married him. They started out with nothing and had to hew cross ties just to make a living, him chopping out one with an axe while she chopped out another. And every weekend she’d go around with him wherever he was singing.
But I was never like that at all. I wouldn’t hardly pay attention to the boys that was interested in me. And the more I ignored them the more they seemed determined to go out with me. I can’t explain it except to say boys seem to want what is hardest to get. The boys would line up at the door of the church at night after service to ask if they could walk me home. It was the custom at the time to ask a girl if they could walk her home after church. They’d stand on the steps of the church pushing and elbowing each other to see who would be first. I remember Blake there every night, holding a big barn lantern and saying, “Walk you home, Miss Annie?” The one time I let him walk me home he held my arm so tight it got numb, and he couldn’t think of nothing to say. Blake never was much of a talker. I reckon I never did walk with him again.
Now the one that bothered me the most was Muir. I’m ashamed to tell it now, but one night when Muir come up to the door of the church holding a lantern and asked if he could walk me home, it made me mad. I don’t know why I done it, but before I even thought about it I kicked him in the leg. Everybody seen it, and some people gasped and some giggled. I know it was a terrible thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself. It just happened, like that.
The girls all laughed at me, and the boys laughed at Muir. Poor fellow. I couldn’t explain why I done it, why he bothered me so. He was silly just like all the other boys, and he was crazy about me. But to this day I have trouble explaining why I kicked him there in front of all the other people on the steps of the church. Except sometimes when I’m honest with myself I think it was because even then I liked him and didn’t want to admit it. I was attracted to him and was afraid. The other boys didn’t mean nothing to me and had no power over me. I liked their attention, but I was afraid of boys and wouldn’t let them reach me inside, where I really felt things. It riled me that I was attracted to Muir, with his odd ways and book reading and bashfulness. It was a weakness I didn’t want to have, and it made me mad and I kicked him.
From the time I was young Mama acted like she didn’t want me to ever marry. And I didn’t want to get married either. I told myself I’d never marry. What was the use of it? And I think Mama had had such a hard time herself, going back to the days on Gap Creek, and all the years since, paying for the place, dealing with typhoid, and Papa’s quarreling, that she didn’t want to see me tied to a husband.
Thrilling as it was to see how I could attract the attention of men and boys, there was something silly about it too. For it made me feel icky to be in the sights of mean and evil people. One time when I was walking home from school, from the store where the bus let us off, the boys went on ahead of me cause I stopped to talk with my friend Lorrie. Lorrie had a dime for candy and we stood just outside the door of the store eating Milky Way bars and talking about the school play. And next thing I knowed the boys had gone on ahead and it looked like rain. Lorrie went the other way and I hurried on down the highway and up the dirt road that followed the river. I hadn’t felt any drops yet, but the sky looked like it was serious.
I’d got above Florrie’s house where she had all the beds of thrift on the bank and a kind of rock garden too when this big old truck come snorting and blustering along and stopped. I guess it was a kind of dump truck, painted brown. This man leaned out the window and said, “You better get in because it’s about to start raining.”
I was so surprised I just stood there, like I didn’t have a bit of sense. The truck rattled and smoked out of its tailpipe this awful burnt oil smell.
“You don’t want to get wet, girl,” the man said, grinning like I was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
“I can’t,” I said, trying to think of a good excuse why I couldn’t ride with him.
“You sure can,” he said, and laughed. He was wearing a dirty yellow cap, the kind they give away in feed stores.
“No I can’t,” I said.
“I ain’t going to let you get wet,” he said. “You go ahead and get in.”
There was a threat in his voice, like he didn’t want me to feel I had a choice. I’d never felt so caught and helpless. I wished Velmer and Troy had not gone on ahead of me. I looked up the road, but they was out of sight. The big dirty truck trembled and idled and give off its bad breath. It seemed to fill up the whole road. I wished a car would come along, or another truck.
“Am I gone have to get out of here and put you in?” the man said. He lit a cigarette with a lighter and blowed smoke out the truck window. I felt the skin tighten over my forehead. I was so embarrassed and confused. I’d always promised myself I’d never let any man get me all flustered. And here I was embarrassed and scared.
“I ain’t going to get in that truck,” I said, and started walking on the shoulder of the road. But the big truck moved right along with me, its wheels crunching on the gravel.
“I’m going to give you a ride,” the man said. “I’m not gone let you get all wet and take pneumony.” You could tell from his voice he could be mean toward women. That kind of man just thinks girls are to be teased and pushed around. Good men are a little bit shy around women because they don’t understand them, and because they want to impress them and be admired.
“You can’t get away from me, little girl,” the man said. He wasn’t grinning no more. There was something hard and ugly in his voice. I tried to think how I could run away. The truck was between me and the bank along the edge of Florrie’s yard. There was a fence on my side of the road, below the road. I could crawl through the fence and run through the pasture toward the river. But if the man jumped out of the truck and run after me there wouldn’t be nobody to stop him. If I run on up the road he could follow me, but I might be able to catch up with Velmer and Troy.
Just then I looked down the road toward the highway and seen a Model T coming. I looked up at the man in the truck and said, “I’m just waiting here for my daddy and here he comes now.” I pointed down the road to the Model T.
The man must have seen the car in his mirror for he slammed the truck into gear with a great grinding noise and jerked ahead and kept going, leaving a cloud of stinky smoke. The Model T passed me and the first drops of rain fell. I was so shook up I was trembling and out of breath. But I was also relieved and didn’t hardly feel the rain.
And then it occurred to me that the truck driver might come back and see me still walking along the road, cause I still couldn’t see Velmer and Troy ahead. When the road reached the end of Meetinghouse Mountain at the bend, I jumped down the bank and crossed the little creek and started climbing up the mountain. It was raining hard by now and the water was streaming from every leaf and limb. I had to fight my way up through the laurel thicket into the woods on top of the ridge. I walked along the comb of the mountain with rain hitting my face and then slid down in the leaves and rocks on the steep side above our orchard.
When I got to the house my hair was pasted to my head and my dress stuck to my shoulders and legs and was muddy where I’d slid down on my butt. My shoes squished with every step I took. When I stepped into the kitchen Mama was fixing to start supper. She seen me and gasped, “What happened to you?” I told her I’d walked across the mountain and about the man in the dump truck, and she hollered to Velmer that was setting by the fire drying out, “Don’t you never leave her to walk home by herself.”
“She wouldn’t come on; she just kept talking to Lorrie,” Velmer said.
When Papa come home from work and Mama told him about the man in the truck Papa was so mad I thought he was going to take off his belt and whip Velmer even though Velmer was near grown. He told Velmer to never let me out of his sight again while walking on the road. And he told me to stay with the boys always when I was coming home from school. He said I’d come close to real trouble that time and it was a miracle I’d got away.
After that every time I seen a dump truck on the road it scared me. And I stayed close to Velmer and Troy or everwho was walking with me.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT cars was exciting. There’s something about an automobile that stirs your heart. Maybe it’s the speed or the sleek lines. Seeing a roadster passing a wagon or buggy on the road you feel that power, that soaring into the future. A car makes you feel that the world is moving ahead toward the wonderful, and you are moving ahead with it.
I don’t even know why I dated Moody Powell again, after that time at the Homecoming at Cedar Springs, unless it was to get back at Muir. Moody had the Model T that he owned with Muir, and it was Moody that you seen driving it all the time. People said Moody was in the liquor business down on Gap Creek and in Chestnut Springs. I guess he must have been. But when he asked me to go riding with him again I didn’t say no.
I reckon I was mad at Muir again. Maybe I was trying to get back at him. Maybe I was just mean. I never did care nothing about Moody Powell at all. But I was mad at Muir for no other reason than I was afraid I liked him. I can see that now. I didn’t want to be in the power of no man or boy. So I mostly went out with boys I didn’t care nothing about. I went out with Moody because I knowed it made Muir mad, and when him and Moody had a fight it tickled me to hear about the fight. Moody never had nothing to say. He wasn’t at all like Muir and he didn’t read books. I don’t reckon Moody ever read the newspaper.
But what cured me of going out with Moody forever was one Sunday afternoon when we went driving with Lorrie and Woodrow. It was a pretty fall day and we drove all the way up to Brevard with the top of the car down. Moody had a mason jar of corn liquor under the seat and him and Woodrow had took several swigs from it. You know that straightaway on the road up to Brevard across the bottomlands of the French Broad River, where you can see all the Pisgah range spread out ahead? Moody was driving too fast and my scarf was flapping in the wind and we was laughing when this police car come up behind us with its light flashing on top and Moody said, “Ah shit!”
Moody pulled over to the side of the road and the cop come up and stepped on the running board. “Let me see your driver’s license,” he said.
Moody reached into the glove compartment and fished out a card and give it to the officer. It must have been Muir’s license because the policeman said, “Muir Powell, would you step out of the car.” They both kept their driver’s licenses in the glove compartment. The rest of us didn’t say nothing; we just set there as Moody got out and stood beside the road as other cars passed by.
“Let me see you walk along the white line,” the policeman said to Moody. Moody tried to walk straight ahead, but I seen he leaned a little this way and then that way and then stepped off the line. It’s hard to walk in a straight line when somebody is watching you. I tried not to look at Moody or the policeman. I looked straight ahead. Lorrie and Woodrow giggled in the backseat. “Lordy, Lordy,” Lorrie said. I just hoped nobody we knowed passed by on the Brevard Road and seen us. They’d tell everybody at church.
The policeman told Moody he couldn’t drive no more. He was too drunk to drive. He said Woodrow would have to drive the car home. And he wrote Moody a ticket for driving under the influence. So me and Moody got in the backseat and Lorrie and Woodrow got in the front seat. But the funny thing was Woodrow was much drunker than Moody was. Woodrow had set in the backseat with Lorrie and took two drinks from the mason jar for every one Moody took.
I was scared I’d never get home that afternoon. I said to myself that if I did get home safe I’d never go out with Moody again. I’d done it again just to spite Muir, and I felt double silly and stupid and I had learned my lesson.
The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover Page 19
