The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

  Once I announced that I was married and going to live with Muir at the Powell house it was like things just moved of their own accord. I’d dreaded the moment so long and now that it was here it was like everything fell into place. Sharon helped me pack a few more things and was so excited she was shaking. I knowed she wished that it was her that had been married. I got my overnight case and my three pairs of shoes in a bag.

  Effie and Alvin said they’d drive us down to the Powell place. “What a relief,” Effie said. “I’m tired of keeping your secret.”

  To get to the Powell house you had to drive through two pastures, stopping to open and close the gate at every fence. Muir got out each time and opened and closed the gates. It was only as we approached the house that I remembered that Ginny Powell would be there. I don’t know why I’d thought only about Mama. We’d have to announce our marriage to Muir’s mama, and we would be living in her house. I can’t explain why I hadn’t thought much about that before. I swallowed with surprise and tried to think what I’d say to my new mother-in-law. Ginny was known as a great talker, opinionated and lively. She’d been a Pentecostal Holiness in the revivals that come through years ago.

  Ginny must have seen the car drive into the yard, for she opened the door before we got to the porch.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said.

  “Annie and me has got married,” Muir said.

  “I won’t say it’s a complete surprise,” Ginny said. She hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. She took the bags from my arms and led me into the parlor where a bright fire was burning in the fireplace and tinsel sparkled on the Christmas tree. The Powell house was bigger than our house and had better furniture too.

  “You just make yourselves at home,” Ginny said. “I’m so pleased that you and Muir are to start a family. You’ve got to live here, of course.”

  Ginny was opposite to Mama in every way. She spoke everwhat was on her mind and she moved quick. She loved to read and she loved to argue about scripture. She was tall and had black hair and black eyes, but now her hair had streaks of gray. “I’m just so happy,” she said, and clapped her hands.

  There was books and magazines and newspapers on the couch. She moved them to a table so there’d be room to set down in front of the fire.

  “I’ll reheat the Christmas ham,” she said.

  “I can help you,” I said.

  “You just sit down,” Ginny said. “I’ll fix supper for you two and then I’ll go up to Fay’s to spend the night.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” Muir said.

  Fay had got married to Lester two years before and she lived on the road by the church. She already had a little boy named Duane.

  “No,” Ginny said, “What you two need is to be alone. You don’t want to be bothered on your wedding night.” She said it in such a determined voice you didn’t want to argue with her. Ginny Powell was the kind of woman that knowed her own mind. The words wedding night made me shiver. But I’d got this far and there was no turning back. I set down and looked at the fire. I had been to the Powell house many times before, but now that I’d be staying here it appeared like a different place. The fire in the fireplace looked like some kind of gate leading to a road that wound far back into dark mountains.

  “Here is some mulled cider,” Ginny said, and give me a mug of steaming cider that smelled of cloves and other spices. I sipped the cider and wondered if I should volunteer again to help fix the supper. I didn’t know what was the polite thing.

  “Do you want me to gather eggs and feed the chickens?” I called to Ginny in the kitchen.

  “Already been done,” Ginny called back.

  “I’ll go water the horse,” Muir said.

  “Already done,”Ginny called.

  When the supper was ready Ginny said she was going to put on her coat and walk up to Fay’s house. “You’re not going to eat?” I said.

  “No, no, you two need to be on your own this night.” She looked at me and rushed over and kissed me on the cheek. “I am so happy for you,” she said. “I always thought you two would get together.”

  Then she was gone and there wasn’t nothing for us to do but set down and eat Christmas ham and sweet taters. There was biscuits and canned peas and apple pie. After we eat I heated water in the kettle on the cookstove and washed the dishes. The Powell kitchen was bigger than ours, and I had to look around to find where things was. Ginny was not neat as Mama, and to tell the truth I seen places that could have used a good scrubbing, especially under the counter, behind the bread safe, and below the table. I figured I’d have my work cut out for me to keep the place clean without offending my mother-in-law.

  Muir got a dry towel and wiped the dishes, and he showed me where to put them on the shelf. It come to me that a woman’s work is the same whether she’s married or unmarried, at one house or in another. But working for your own husband and your own family had a satisfaction, I would have to admit. Later we set by the fireplace and Muir read in the Bible. He had a pile of history books stacked beside the fireplace, and you could see that’s what he done when he was in the house. He read either the Bible or one of these history books. They was big thick books that would take a long time to read, books on the Civil War and George Washington and such.

  I told myself as bedtime approached that everything would happen as it happened. There was something inevitable about marriage. Once it was set in motion one thing followed another as it had to. I wondered if I really had any choice at all, even when I thought I did.

  “Are you sleepy?” Muir said. I said I was, though in fact I didn’t feel the least sleepy. He picked up a lamp and I followed him down the hall and into the farthest bedroom. It was cold so far from the fireplace and I shivered so hard it made my shoulder blades sore. When Muir set the lamp on the night stand I seen all the knives and trapper’s equipment on the wall and on the floor. There was rifles and shotguns on pegs on the walls, and boots on the floor, and a mackinaw coat hanging on a hanger. There was a red plaid hat and two large hunting knives, fishing tackle, a pair of binoculars. There was a pair of weblike things, which I guessed was snowshoes. But the floor was neat and the bed was carefully made.

  “This was Grandpa Peace’s room,” Muir said. “Him and me slept here when I was a boy.”

  “Is this the same bed?”

  “No, no. I made this bed myself from chestnut wood.” It was a beautiful big bed with high posts and a headboard carved in the shape of a flying eagle.

  Muir said he would go out, and he pointed to the pee pot in the corner of the room. When he was gone I started to get undressed and then remembered my nightgown was in the bag Mama had packed. It was in the living room. Instead of taking the lamp I felt my way down the hall and found the bag and brought it to the bedroom. By then I was shivering even more. I wondered why in a house this big they’d not made a fireplace in the far bedroom.

  There was an old trunk at the foot of the bed and I took off my clothes and folded them on that. My feet was ice, after I’d put on the gown and used the pee pot; then I pulled the quilts back and got into the big bed. The sheets was so cold they burned my back and shoulders. But the heavy covers settled around my belly and shoulders and I could feel the heat reflected from my body. I wondered if I should blow out the lamp; but if I did that Muir wouldn’t have no light when he come back.

  This is a night you’ll always remember, I said to myself. This is something that happens only once to a woman. I shuddered with the cold in my bones, but the sheets was already warming up. You will never be the same again, I thought. And then I laughed at myself, for I seen that every day we’re different from the day before. You’re acting silly, I said to myself.

  When Muir come in I could smell the cold on his clothes. He took off his shoes and blowed out the lamp, and then I could hear him slide off his pants and shirt. It sounded like he hung them on the bed post. And I thought: That’s what bedposts are for. When he got in on the other side of the bed i
t shook the mattress like an earthquake. Muir was a big man and he was all muscle, which is heavier than fat.

  I just laid there for a little bit, and then he put his big hand on my breast. Muir had the biggest hands with the longest fingers I ever seen. His hand was so big it could cover most of both my breasts. At that moment something occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before. I’d been thinking, as I guess most girls do, that a wedding night is when the man does things to you. It’s what girls whisper from the time they’re just beginning to grow up. But it come to me that a wedding night could also be things a woman done to a man. It could work both ways.

  I reached out and put my hand on one of his nipples. It was firm and good to the touch. He seemed to like that and I put my other hand on his other nipple. And then I run my hand through the hair on his chest. There was something about that that relieved me. I can’t describe it, except to say it was a surprise. All the time I’d thought it was just a question of what my husband would do to me, and that had scared me. But looked at this way it wasn’t as scary.

  He run his hands over me and I run my hands over him. You are a woman and not a little girl, I said to myself. Women and men have been doing this since the beginning of creation. It must be what people was meant to do. It must be why they have bodies shaped the way they are. I felt all over Muir’s body; he was so big and strong, he felt like a giant in the bed beside me. He seemed to like for me to touch him all over as he was touching me. I could see how excited he was. I thought, this is the way things have to be. It was like we didn’t have no choice.

  By the time Muir pushed up my gown and got on me it all seemed inevitable. I didn’t mind that it hurt a little. In fact you could say I almost welcomed the little pain, for the pain made the pleasure more real. And I thought if this is the worst you have to fear then you have nothing to fear. And something else I seen was that I had a greater effect on him than he had on me. A man gets so excited he just loses control of hisself.

  Now the thing was that while we was making love I was thinking how strong and quick Muir was and how close we was, and I knowed I would enjoy it even more in the future when I got used to it. But at the same time I thought how ordinary it was. It was not the strange thing I expected. It was like you remembered things from a former time, that you’d knowed it all along. I wondered if deep down you could remember the moment your parents created you or the moment when all your ancestors created the generations before you going back to the beginning.

  And I thought it must be the same in the future too. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren would do the same and seem to remember what we’d done to create them. But all the time I was so relieved I thought of other things too. I thought of bright washing on the line blowing in the wind and grass on the hillside rippling in the wind. I thought of the way wind presses through the gap in the mountain and the stories of pigeons that used to fly through the gaps by the millions. It was silly the way I thought of trout flashing in the river and butterflies bouncing in a breeze. And I thought of birds that circle all in a swarm before landing in a maple tree.

  Later, when it was over, Muir must have gone right off to sleep for next thing I heard was him snoring. I laid on his arm and thought about how things just went on the way they would. Didn’t seem to have much to do with our intentions. Everybody said the war was coming and if it happened they’d be drafting boys from all over. I wondered if they drafted preachers. Surely preachers wasn’t called on to fight. It would not make sense to order preachers to kill.

  And I thought about where we would live. Would we continue to live in the Powell house with Ginny, or would Ginny move in with Fay and her husband? But this was Ginny’s house. While Ginny was awful nice to me, I knowed she was a headstrong woman and a neglectful housekeeper. At some point we’d argue: I was sure of that. If Muir went off to war, I’d go back to live with Mama and Papa. Mama would need me to help her if Papa continued to work at Fort Bragg and Velmer and Troy was gone too. War would change everything, as the Depression had. I shivered, thinking of the bad things that might happen.

  As I laid there I heard a knock on the side of the house close by and then another not far away. And then a tap on the far end. It sounded like somebody was walking around the house hitting the boards. Was it somebody trying to scare us? I’d heard of shivarees where they tried to scare new marrieds with guns and throwing rocks on the roof. Old houses popped when the boards got cold and shrunk. And then something thumped in the attic like a heavy weight had fell. Was it mice or snakes up there? There was rattles and taps all through the house, like it was haunted.

  And then something screamed out on the pasture hill. Was it an owl or a wildcat? It sounded so close. And there was a screech, and a dog barked somewhere way off.

  Fifteen

  Now I know Ginny was a good woman. She may have been a better woman than me from some points of view. But she was a woman used to getting her way. And she was used to thinking she was always right. I don’t reckon any woman ever got along perfectly with her mother-in-law, especially if they had to live in the same house. A mother-in-law wants to be the boss in her own house, and a young wife has to find her place and learn to be a wife to her husband.

  Ginny read her Bible and religious magazines and talked about religion a lot, but I didn’t mind that so much. She could talk religion as much as she wanted to for all I was concerned. It was little things that irked me, like if I started to straighten up the living room she’d say, “Don’t you bother with that, Annie, I’ll do it later.” But of course she wouldn’t. She’d let the clutter of newspapers and magazines build up on the floor and leave coats and dirty clothes throwed over chairs and on the couch. She didn’t much want me to sweep, but she wouldn’t do it herself. If I took up a broom she’d say, “Put that down; you’re still on your honeymoon.”

  Though I was married now, I kept working in the cotton mill. Every morning I walked across the pastures to the church and caught a ride with Joyce Benson to the cotton mill. In the evening after work I always stopped at the house to see Mama before walking back across the pasture to the Powell house. If Mama needed something I could get it the next day at the store.

  The first quarrel I had with Ginny come when Muir announced he was going with Papa to work at Fort Bragg. He’d not been able to find work at home and when a church invited him to preach they sometimes paid him nothing at all. And even if they did pay it might be only two or three dollars. I told him I’d keep working at the cotton mill and he could keep preaching. But no local church had invited him to be its pastor. And no man likes for his wife to be making more money than he makes.

  With the war coming Muir thought he should do his part. Troy had joined up with the Air Corps, and Papa needed extra hands on the crew. Muir was thirty-six, too old to be drafted. And I don’t think he wanted to carry a gun and kill anybody either. The army was building barracks and other buildings as fast as they could get the lumber and concrete and somebody to throw them up. “It’s the least I can do,” Muir said. “I can help build barracks and I can preach sometimes on weekends.”

  I think he also wanted to help Papa out too. Papa had encouraged him and helped him build the church on the mountaintop. And Papa had encouraged him over the years when he was courting me. Velmer was going off to barber school. And now, when Papa needed more hands to hammer barracks together, Muir seen that was the way to help him and serve his country at the same time.

  But Ginny was not pleased at all when she learned that her son was going away to work at Fort Bragg. She’d always wanted him to be a preacher, and now that he was a preacher she insisted that he be nothing but a preacher. I don’t think she wanted him to go work with Papa either. It was too much like he was joining my family and leaving her.

  “I’m surprised you’d agree to that,” she said to Muir when he told her he was leaving for Fort Bragg.

  “I didn’t agree to anything,” Muir said. “I asked to go.”

  “And what abo
ut your ministry?” Ginny said. “You were called to preach.”

  “I can still preach on weekends if somebody invites me.”

  “No one will want a preacher that works faraway building army barracks.”

  “I think it’s my duty,” Muir said, “and my business. It’s my chance to serve the country.”

  “What about your duty to the Lord?” Ginny said.

  Now I know a wife ought to avoid quarreling with her mother-in-law at all costs. Once two women start fussing with each other there will be no end to it. Mama had told me many stories over the years about her arguments with Ma Richards. And, after all, I was living in Ginny’s house. But when she accused Muir of failing the Lord I just couldn’t keep quiet no more. I couldn’t stand the way she took advantage of him to make him do what she wanted.

  “He said he’d keep preaching on weekends,” I said.

  “He has no business being a weekend preacher,” Ginny said. “He should be holding revival meetings, even if it’s only in a tent or brush arbor. He should be making a name for himself. Besides, no church will want to give him the call to be pastor if he’s off building barracks all the way across the state.”

  “He said he wants to serve his country too,” I said. I could feel my blood rising and my tongue getting quicker.

  Ginny turned like she was going to speak to Muir and ignore me. But then she turned back to me. “You seem awfully anxious for him to be away all week,” she said.

  “I think he should do what he thinks is right,” I said. “It’s not a matter of what I want.”

  “Muir has always been ready to run off and follow his fancies,” Ginny said. “You don’t know him as well as I do. He drove all the way to Canada once to get away from home and then come straight back. He nearly drowned trying to trap muskrats in the Tar River at the other end of the state. The last thing he needs is a wife to encourage him in his whims and fancies.”