The bird just set there without making a sound. Its eye blinked. The eye reflected the firelight from inside, and seemed to shine like the eye of a moth that comes close up to light, like a little coal of fire. That bird was used to flying in flocks a mile wide and hundreds of miles long, and there it was setting by itself on the hitching post.
I closed the door quiet as I could, and the bird flapped off into the night.
The syrup had got too hot by the fire, and I had to set it off to cool. I thought most of the spirits must have boiled away so I poured in a little more likker to freshen it. This is all we know to treat sickness, I thought, the sweetness from flowers and the spirits from corn. Both things heated and stimulated the body. That must mean that milksick cooled off and numbed the body. And yet the fever was heating her little body too. I couldn’t follow out the truth of it. But it seemed sleeping might be the danger. If she kept on sleeping she might not wake up.
Your Grandpa was slumped in his chair and I shook him. “Wake up,” I said. “We’ve got to give Little Eller some more medicine.”
He jerked away and rolled his eyes for a second, like he didn’t know where he was. Then he got up and helped me lift Little Eller. I decided not to tell him about the pigeon. It wouldn’t do no good to scare him with portents. And besides, it did not seem completely real long as I was the only one that knowed about it.
“We could sponge her off with vinegar,” your Grandpa said.
After we tried to pour some more of the syrup in her mouth, and mostly spilled it on the bed, I filled a pan with warm water and poured in vinegar. The vinegar bit right into my nostrils when it was warmed by the water. I thought it might wake up Little Eller, like smelling salts. It would be a good thing if it did wake her up to fight the milksick better.
Your Grandpa rolled back the bedclothes and I lifted her gown and rubbed her body with the cloth soaked in vinegar and water. It felt like touching a stove her skin was so hot. Her little legs was like sticks that had come out of the fire. The vinegar dried almost as soon as I rubbed it on her skin.
“Roll her over on her belly,” I said. I knowed a lot of heat left the body through the back. I wiped the vinegar on her back, which was red as a sunburn. I rubbed her all over before we covered her up, but it didn’t seem like we had accomplished nothing. She was still hot, and mumbling like she was troubled.
“I’ve heard of doctors bleeding fever patients,” I said. “Reckon it would do any good?”
“Bleeding’s for older people,” your Grandpa said.
“I’ve heard of giving boneset tea to break a fever,” Realus said. “But this time of year you can’t get none.”
I watched him setting there looking puzzled and helpless. Doctoring was something we hadn’t hardly thought about when we headed off to the wilderness. We was young and thought we would always be healthy. I assumed they would always be doctors and midwives nearby. But I birthed all my children on my own. Realus had helped with the last three. And we had been lucky all was borned healthy.
I wondered if he was sorry he had brought me to the West. We had had a hard time, but mostly it was a good life. A big strong feller like him could have gone off anywhere he wanted. He could have gone further west, or he could have gone to the city of Charleston or Philadelphia. We had been a loving couple, and we had been hardworking. And we had turned that little clearing by the creek into a home place with fruit trees and grapes and bees. We had more than a dozen head of stock by then, counting the sheep. The next year we was going to add on to the house again.
It’s good people can’t read each other’s thoughts, because all kinds of things pass through a mind that has no right to be spoken. I’ll admit I’d had my doubts at times, and not just on the night the painter tried to get in, or when I was scared at the gold diggings. And it wasn’t the mystery of our place being so far from anybody else, and us never seeing anybody that bothered me most. No sir, it was that doubt that whispers to you in the middle of the night like a snake suggesting you’ve done everything wrong. A woman is bothered by the fear she’s not loved, even if they’s no reason to fear. I got a chill thinking Realus might be sorry he brung me to the Holsten, thinking he wished he’d gone off other ways. But at the same time I knowed they was nothing to it, and that we was happy.
“Maybe we should pray,” your Grandpa said.
“The sun sings,” Little Eller mumbled. She was way out of her head with the fever. I put my hand on her cheek, but they was still no sweat.
Me and your Grandpa got down on our knees by the bed and we didn’t say a word out loud. We didn’t need to. What we had to ask the Lord was clear. We had to put things in His hands. I’ve heard preachers talk of praying through on something and having assurance, and such as that. But me and Realus didn’t ask for anything like guarantees. We just asked for help.
When we finally got up, I went to the water bucket and got a dipper of water. I thought if I could make Little Eller drink some it might cool her off. Your Grandpa held her up and I tried to pour water in her mouth a dribble at a time. But most of the water run down the corners of her mouth. I didn’t see her swallow none.
I’d always heard people die between midnight and sunrise. Something about the small hours makes that the time the spirit leaves the body. If a sick person lives till sunrise, they’ll probably make it through another day. A fever will go down at sunrise. Your Grandpa hadn’t bought a clock yet, but we knowed it was past midnight. I prayed Little Eller would see the sunrise.
I set down by Little Eller and held her hand. She was hot as something out in the July sun. I watched her stir and mumble, and before I knowed it I must have dropped off to sleep. Because when I looked up next the fire had died down and the room was quiet. And it was like something had just left. Something had woke me up. Your Grandpa was asleep and the younguns was asleep.
Little Eller was still and not mumbling. But her lips had this black look, and her fingers had turned dark. I’ve heard milksick does that to folks at the last. I leaned over and tried to feel her breathing. They was no breath from her nostrils. She was still as stone, but her hand was warm in mine. I thought she couldn’t be dead because she was still warm. But she must have died at the instant I woke. When I felt her leaving, I woke up.
I thought that instant how little human life means in the big scope of things. A human being can be alive one second and gone the next, and everything else stays just the same. The shock of that froze me for a moment. Already her hand was turning cool. Her flesh that had been hot all night was cooler than mine.
When I woke up your Grandpa, we didn’t cry none. It was too bad to cry at first. We was just young folks, and we’d never had much to do with death. No sir, both Realus and me got busy. It was like we took orders to start doing things.
Little Eller was turning blue and all the fever color was draining out of her cheeks. Her body was limp as a sack. Your Grandpa carried her over to the table and I got some warm water and washed her. I’d always heard you washed a corpse so that’s what I done. I washed her off and then I rubbed her all over with camphor, for I’d seen people put camphor-soaked cloths over the face of a corpse. Then I put a clean gown on her.
I knowed if I stopped and set down I never would get going again. I had to keep moving. Her hair had got all tangled up and sticky from the spilled syrup. I put more warm water in the pan and washed her hair, pouring water from a cup over the hair.
“What are you doing?” Realus said when he come back. It was getting light out. He had gone to look for planks for a casket.
“I’m washing her hair,” I said.
“It don’t make no difference where her hair is washed or not.”
“It was sticky and all tangled up.”
Realus was distracted and tore up as I was. “It don’t make no difference,” he said.
“It makes a difference to me.”
I thought I would remember her always the way I last seen her. I washed her hair and dried it and tied
it in a ribbon.
Your Grandpa fretted till after sunrise about material for a casket. There wasn’t no sawmill around, so any boards had to be sawed out by him. The buildings was all made of logs, and only a few planks for benches and tables had been hewed out. He didn’t have nobody big enough to help out with the saw except me. He went out to the shed to look through the poles and planks there, and come back in and stood by the fire. Then he went out again to the woodpile and spring house. I’d never seen him in such a fret. Everybody has a different way of grieving, and that was his, to stomp and fuss about the lumber for the coffin.
They wasn’t nothing on the place fit to make a casket. With time he could have sawed down a wild cherry and hewed boards and polished the wood. But we had to bury Eller that day. We had to get it over with, or we couldn’t have stood it no longer.
What your Grandpa done finally was saw off a holler black gum log. He had cut it to make more bee gums. He sawed out a section about four feet long, and then he split it in two pieces. Them pieces he hollowed out with his ax like a cradle. And he smoothed the inside with the adz, and with a piece of glass.
When we laid Little Eller inside that casket in her white gown she looked like a bud inside a nutshell, a baby folded inside a little boat. Realus laid her in there, and I crossed her hands over her chest. I made all the younguns look at her before we pegged it shut. I wanted them to see her looking pretty and at peace, though her ears and lips was already black.
The thing I remember worst about that day was all the crows calling. They fussed and squawked at us from the trees. They circled and regathered down by the creek. I think they was waiting for us to plant corn so they could steal the seeds. I don’t know where so many crows come from all at once. The woods seemed to be full of the ugly things. That was the first year your Grandpa put a scarecrow out in the new ground where he planted corn. If he hadn’t made the scarecrow, they wouldn’t have been any seeds left to grow.
After Little Eller died, it was like some colors inside me had been bleached away. As time passed, I had the same feelings and lived in the same patterns I always had, but they wasn’t as vivid. Except that I loved my younguns even more, the ones left. I cherished them, and I started taking more time to enjoy them. Hard as we worked, I started taking more opportunities to play with the children.
That summer, after we buried Little Eller, we took long walks in the woods on Sundays, looking for wildflowers. I taught the younguns to recognize all the flowers I knowed. We even found a swamp azalea back in the woods, blooming after the flame azaleas had gone. And we found birdnests in the brush and learned to recognize the eggs without touching them. I was learning myself about herbs from a book Realus had got, and learning the younguns to pick doghobble and yarrow, and sassafras roots and yellow-root.
Some Sundays we took a picnic down to a rock that jutted into the creek beyond the new ground. Your Grandpa even joined us sometimes. I spread a cloth on the rock, and we eat hoecakes and jelly and chicken and hot roastnears. After we eat, the kids would play in the stream. I always did love the sound of water. I could relax there, and it helped the hurt I felt for Little Eller.
In the fall and early spring, when the woods was bare and you could look out from the mountainsides, and didn’t have to be afraid of snakes, and the air was cool, we took long walks back on the ridge. Your Grandpa said, “Don’t go away so far you’re liable to get lost.”
“We ain’t going to get lost,” I said.
“You might get lost or run into Indians,” he said. “I don’t want you to go too far from the house. I forbid you to go far from the clearing.” He sounded harsh and scared. Then he softened, as he always done when he knowed he had gone too far. “Besides, I can’t afford to pay no ransom; you might have to stay with the Indians and become a squaw.”
But we kept walking in the woods when the weather was good and I had time. One Sunday we found nearly thirty different flowers and the younguns gathered samples of each. Another time we collected butterflies, and praying mantises and walkingsticks. We collected rock crystals and arrowheads along the creek. We come to a place where the creek joined a river. We walked so far, we found a place we named Pulpit Rock because of the cliff that stuck up over the water. The children climbed on top and pretended to preach to the whole valley.
Another time we crossed over the ridge to the west and come to a real long holler. We followed the branch down to where it opened into a meadow that had lots of ripe strawberries. We all eat strawberries till I thought we was going to be sick. I’d heard too many fresh strawberries can poison a body, but they didn’t seem to hurt us.
In that same meadow we come on the remains of a campfire, and we knowed it must be Indians, because they was a broke arrow left in the grass, and pieces of parched corn scattered among the ashes. I knowed Indians lived on parched corn when they traveled. We started back home then, and crossed the ridge to our creek valley, but we didn’t see no Indians. When I told Realus he said, “It’s only the grace of God you didn’t get catched.”
Every time we went out on a long walk, we brought something back and put on Little Eller’s grave. We put all kinds of flowers on that mound, and pretty stones, and arrowheads. Your Grandpa had set up a smooth slab of rock at the head of the grave, and we made a circle of white rocks around the mound. He kept the weeds cut there. It was something he done for me. I’d go stand on the hill sometimes and look down at the house and the place we had cleared, all the way down to the new fields and the scarecrow he made out of some posts and his old clothes. The scarecrow leaned a little, and I used to think it seemed drunk. It was our drunk scarecrow, standing out there looking crucified in all kinds of weather, watching the corn patch. At times it seemed to be watching me wherever I went. I thought of saying to your Grandpa, take that thing down. It seems too spooky leaning there, with its clothes flapping, watching us all the time. But he would have laughed at me and said we had to keep the crows out of the corn.
One day in October, more than two years after Little Eller died, we decided to go looking for foxgrapes. I wanted to make some jelly, and I knowed they was ripe, for I could smell them in the evening after the sun was gone. In the breeze by the creek, you could smell the grapes ripening and starting to ferment.
We took our buckets and baskets and headed out after breakfast. Realus had built a footlog across the creek just above the bend, and we crossed there and climbed the other ridge. Realus had picked foxgrapes along the river over there before, and I knowed they must be a heavy growth that year. It was a warm day with the leaves drifting off the poplars and maples, a few at a time.
As we climbed up the slope, we could hear the cowbell Realus had got in the settlement and put on Old Daisy. It tinkled up the holler. Since the cows usually stayed together in the woods, he only put a bell on the oldest milker. It was a peaceful sound, but we couldn’t hear it anymore after we crossed the ridge.
The foxgrapes was as thick along the river bank as I had hoped they would be. The biggest problem was getting to them. Sometimes I let Wallace shinny up a birch tree and pick some high grapes. But his arms was too short to reach far. And I didn’t like him to be high over the water.
A few times I had to step out in the stream to reach a limb. One time I stood on some brush that give way, and I ended up in the water halfway to my knees. The younguns laughed at me. Lewis said, “Mama got her stockings wet, Mama got her stockings wet.” But we was having a good time. We had brought along some biscuits and honey and biscuits and ham for our dinner.
As it turned out, we didn’t need to worry about reaching the grapes in hard places, because the further up the river we went, the more foxgrapes we found. The air was full of that sweet grape smell where the sun was hitting the ripe bunches. Every grape you touched was tight and full of juice.
“Mama, here’s another vine,” Wallace called, and we’d follow another hundred yards up the stream to the next lavish of grapes hanging in easy reach. By the time we had picked mo
st of those, he would already have found another tree up ahead.
It was thrilling, but scary, because we didn’t look for snakes as careful as we should. And I kept hollering for Lewis to stay out of the branch, and for Willa to keep up, and keep away from brush where they might be a rattler. When you’re looking after children and working at the same time, you’re split in two.
We kept going further and further up that river. Miles I reckon. And the further we went, the faster we seemed to work. We filled a bucket and left it setting by the stream to pick up on the way back. It looked like we was going to fill every single bucket and basket we had. It would take days to cook down that many grapes into juice and then make jelly. But the grapes was so big and ripe, I didn’t want to go back without our buckets full.
“Look, here’s a fire,” Lewis called.
“What kind of fire?” I said, trying to reach the higher branches above a sandbar in the curve of the stream.
“It’s still warm,” Lewis said.
I put my bucket down and run over to where he was. They was a clearing above the river, covered with peavines and big weeds. At first I didn’t see Lewis. It was like he had disappeared. The vines was so thick, I was afraid of a snake. I called to Lewis and he answered, not more than a hundred feet away.
Sure enough, he had found what was left of a campfire. Some of the sticks still smoldered a little, so we knowed it had been left that morning. But I couldn’t tell if it was Indians or not. They wasn’t no parched corn or broke arrows. The vines and weeds had been knocked down where they slept around the fire, but that didn’t tell nothing. I reckon both Indians and whites sleep the same way, stretched out in their blankets. And we couldn’t tell which way they went neither, or the way they had come.
The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts Page 11
