“Have you made pictures of the soldiers?” Henry asks the daguerreotypist.
“Many times,” the man says, in a salesman’s voice. “For the family, the sweetheart.”
Mary Jane smells old leaves, and the dusty, familiar scent heartens her. She’ll banish that portrait to the attic, that canny, false face. To whom will she and Henry give this image of themselves? Why are they having it made? They heard the man was in the area, and Henry summoned him. Her mother is dead, father dead. Her cousin Dan, with whom she traveled to the Peaks of Otter, died of diphtheria. And their parents, her aunt and uncle, went out West, Nebraska she believes, taking her cousin Ginny with them.
The pain returns, hand-shaped inside her, each finger probing, wandlike, jointed as the walking stick. Two of her cats chase across the verandah, too thin, must have worms; she must do something about that. In the distance, a train whistles. It’ll be stopping in every town to the south, as far as Blacksburg and into Carolina. She could send Beth a copy of the picture—here is my face, my husband—but Beth does not care. The daguerreotype will wind up in a drawer, and red-haired Fannie will lift it out and hold it to the light, working out for herself whether Henry was happier with Mary Jane.
What was it the boy, Burrell, said the night she found him sleeping on the bridge, the time she raged at him and stayed down there talking with him? He told her he had always wanted to be in a club, that the books he read as a child talked about clubs, and that as a guard, he felt he was in one. Somehow that made them laugh, and they kept on laughing, because it felt so good. She likes Burrell, likes the pictures he draws. She should get back to sketching, to keeping a diary, and she will, once she is well again.
She is suddenly convinced that she has bled all over the horsehair sofa, through her clothes. She might look down and find blood pooling on the floorboards, runnels of it about her feet, deltas of blood at the edge of the verandah. From the corner of her eye, she sees only clean boards, cats, and blowing leaves.
The men are talking about the war. Mary Jane is twenty-eight. The daguerreotype will show a childless couple, of indeterminate age, holding on. She couldn’t speak if she wanted to.
Bonnie’s mother does not know what to do. Bonnie has always been the sensible type, and now all this crying, blubbering, and crazy talk. Some nonsense about a swimming deer, a white squirrel. Bonnie’s mother puts the baby in its dresser drawer. Bonnie has never done this before, falling apart, not when that no-good left her nor even when one of the critters died that she was always bringing home, Lord, all them rabbits and hoptoads and such. Bonnie’s the only person could keep wild baby birds alive, feeding them off the tip of her finger, raised a baby crow that way and a little jay, that flew off by theirselves when they got grown.
Bonnie raises her apron to her face to catch her wet, messy sobs. Her mother hands her a cup of water, but Bonnie pushes it away. So her mother settles down opposite Bonnie at the table where they do all their eating and sewing and where Bonnie nurses the baby, and waits out Bonnie’s storm. Why, even on a crying jag, her daughter is pretty.
Deep in the mother’s heart burns a secret hope. Mr. Fenton’s wife is known to be sick. What if she dies, and he chooses Bonnie? Men always marry again. Women, well, she’s been better off since her husband died, Bonnie’s father, a drinking man who fell off his mule and broke his neck. This morning, after getting the potato candy in the stove, using up last year’s potatoes though she should have kept some back, she haphazardly cleaned her yard with a broken rake, and the idea came to her: Bonnie as Mr. Fenton’s new bride. Oh, she don’t wish Mrs. Fenton ill. Hasn’t never spoke to her, only glimpsed her, beautiful with that dark hair. Bonnie has visited with her on account of the bridge. It don’t do to be so sorrowful about losing one child. She herself lost a daughter before Bonnie and a son after.
Dreaming, she stopped in the middle of her overgrown yard, the rake having uncovered a rusty pot—in last summer’s dry spell, she’d stuck it out there to catch rainwater; if she scrubs it, it’ll be good as new—and she imagined Bonnie taking lunch to her husband at the mill, yes, a covered basket for Mr. Henry Fenton, Bonnie and the baby in the big house by the river. Oh, it’s sad about the Fentons’ little girl, but Bonnie’ll make Mr. Fenton forget all that. Bonnie can turn out babies one after another, children to farm the land and ride Mr. Fenton’s horses. Once he’s married to Bonnie, he won’t even remember his first wife’s face, the way Bonnie can’t hardly remember that boy who got the baby on her and then went off to Manassas. He’d a-married me, Bonnie says, but a mother knows that’s just talk.
So this won’t do, all this blubbering.
“It’s being a guard, gol-durnit,” Bonnie’s mother tells her. “That’s a man’s job.”
“No, it’s not,” Bonnie chokes out.
“Well, what is it, then?” her mother asks. Two women in wartime, poor as Job’s turkey, and the potato candy burned in the stove. She’d given up cleaning the yard and was chopping kindling when she smelled smoke and let the ax fly right out of her hands. The candy was black rocks, which she threw out on the grass. Not even the birds wanted it. She tried to eat some, but it was ashes. Back of her tongue, she still tastes it. That’s what hardship tastes like. Here she is getting old, trying to take care of this girl and this baby. And winter coming. Bonnie might end up like this forever, and her too, poor and crying and all the sugar gone. “Bonnie, what is the matter? Don’t do this way. You got a child to tend to, and I’m not so young anymore—”
Raising her head, Bonnie rubs her fist across her cheeks. There’s her baby in the drawer—her boy, asleep in a heap of rags—and her mother, whose biscuit face looks exactly as Bonnie suspects her own will look in twenty years. From her mother, she inherited hambone arms and restlessness. Neither of them can concentrate long enough to finish a prayer, unless they hurry to the amen. They break off in the middle of a conversation, their thoughts leading them to some chore that needs doing. A phrase bursts into Bonnie’s mind, words she heard a preacher say, storm petrel. Some kind of bird maybe? Storm petrel.
The dresser where the baby sleeps is warm from the sun, and the deer made it to the trees.
Mother and daughter regard each other. “I found that pot we lost,” her mother says.
Bonnie blows her nose and says, “I’m happy, is all.” She hugs her startled mother.
“Law, Bonnie.” Her mother squeezes Bonnie’s ample back, her thoughts already moving away, raking through her day the way she’d raked brush. Mr. Fenton probably wouldn’t marry Bonnie in a thousand years. She sighs. “I got to pay more mind when I’m cooking.”
Touring the mountains and the great Valley of Virginia with cousins, aunt, and uncle, Mary Jane at eighteen kept a journal, recording the places they visited: Charlottesville, Lexington, Natural Bridge, Buffalo Gap, Staunton, Weyer’s Cave. It was the great journey of her life, through the counties of Louisa, Albemarle, Nelson, Augusta, Rock-bridge, and corners of Botetourt and Bedford. In her diary, she described notable characters: a woman at a Waynesborough hotel who wore too much jewelry, all her thunder and lightning, Mary Jane’s uncle said; an old man gathering hay near the Peaks of Otter who thrust his pitchfork in the ground when they waved to him, as if that were his reply. The trip was one her aunt and uncle had always wanted to make. Having recovered from a recent stillbirth, the aunt was quiet, even when her children Dan and Ginny, Mary Jane’s cousins, told jokes and hugged her.
Her aunt was too old for babies, Mary Jane thought, with a son twelve and a daughter almost as old as Mary Jane.
Ridge after ridge of wavy blue land. Mary Jane sees it in her dreams. That day on the Peaks of Otter, they were struck dumb by the beauty of it, all five of them, out of breath from the ascent. Mary Jane’s arms were scratched from a fall in briers on the way up. Her aunt unpacked a picnic of deviled eggs, ham sandwiches, lemonade. There were no other hiking parties in sight and no sound except their voices and the wind. It was July, but the air was cool, the
n cold.
They had expected that, had been warned. Yet why had they all worn such thin clothes?
Ridge after ridge of beauty, oceans of mountaintops and forests. A blowing hollow, Mary Jane thought, wondering where that phrase came from. She and Dan and Ginny stood shivering with their arms around each other, leaning over the edge, far enough for the wind to take them away. Are there animals in all the woods? Dan asked. Do people live there? I can see a thousand miles. Is that California? His voice was a seashell pressed against her ear. He found a lizard among the rocks and declared he would take it home.
They stayed as late as they dared. These were not peaks to descend in the dark. When the uncle insisted it was time to leave, cousin Ginny cried and begged. It’s heaven, she said.
Mary Jane tried to draw what she saw, but her pictures did not come close. She did not write any more in her diary, after that day. It seems to her—as she is dying, on a December afternoon in 1861—that as they shouted to hear their echoes, they stood on a grassy spot mere inches wide, above the unfurling earth.
More than we can see, her uncle said, sweeping his wife’s windy hair from her face with his hands. Mary Jane saw that the baby-grief would never go out of her aunt’s eyes. Her uncle said, There are caves down there, and rivers, and cities in the valleys.
“I can’t see them,” said Dan, “and I want to.”
Mary Jane hugged Dan and Ginny, pretending they were her children, needing the warmth of them. Dan’s lizard escaped beneath a boulder. This is summer, Mary Jane thought. I will come back here every summer of my life.
She thought with excitement of Henry Fenton, who had asked to court her.
Oh, that was back when she believed she would live a long time.
Henry is with her now, beside her bed, and the doctor is in the room. She never expected to die on a beautiful day, with the trees such colors. She wants to look at the trees again and at Henry’s face, but she has time, hasn’t she, to close her eyes?
It was hard to climb the Peaks of Otter, but she was strong, falling only once.
Henry holds her hands to his face and cries, his tears hot on her skin, while she scrambles up and up.
“Echo!” she called from the Peaks of Otter, and the mountains answered, “Oh, oh, oh.”
Her aunt gazed into the sky—not a bird, only blue—with her husband holding back her hair.
A Summer Place
Rich people. Bonnie Hazlitt will never understand them. Their money could set them free, but seems to Bonnie they’ve got less mind on them than her canaries do. A canary’ll fly out a door, into the world, and good luck trying to catch it. Bonnie has chased many a one out in the woods and down to the river. You never get them back.
Rich people could walk out their door. The men know that. That’s men for you. They feel free whether they’re rich or poor. But women? Naw, Bonnie’s mother used to say. Women don’t know a open door from a hole in the ground. Bonnie misses her mother, dead ten years. At least her Ma went quick. So many old folks suffer with broke hips or such. Her Ma went out fast as a slap.
Her mother’d be proud that Bonnie has kept on going. Her mother might’ve cured Bonnie’s sneezes, too. The sneezes take Bonnie by surprise, exploding out of her head ten and fifteen times in a row, startling her canaries so they beat their wings against their wire cages. The spasms stop just long enough for Bonnie to catch her breath, and then her lungs seize up and she heaves forth another series of huh-chews. Her voice grows thick, and her nose runs and itches, yet she suffers no fever.
“It’s probably the birds, Bonnie,” Dr. Thorpe says, when he and his wife come to buy a canary. “You’ve become allergic.”
“No,” Bonnie cries. Who is she without Bonnie’s Beauties? The sign on the front door tells the world that she and her birds are together and proud of it.
The doctor’s wife pokes a finger into a cage. Got a big green ring on that finger, Bonnie sees—a emerald? “That little one,” Mrs. Thorpe says. “What a sweet voice. How much?”
Bonnie sneezes too hard to name a price. Dr. Thorpe laughs, takes out his wallet, and holds up several bills. Bonnie nods, and he lays the money on the windowsill. Mrs. Thorpe brought a hatbox with air holes punched into it. The doctor reaches into the cage, cups the chosen bird in his hand, and places it inside.
Mrs. Thorpe claps the top on the box. She says to her husband, “The birds are her livelihood. What would you have her do?”
Bonnie manages to say, “It’s just the dust from the road, and flowers.” It’s June, after all, with wildflowers and weeds.
“Birds aren’t the best thing for a person’s health,” Dr. Thorpe says, with a warning gaze over his spectacles at his wife. “You can get psittacosis.”
Bonnie tucks the word away, liking it. Sitta—but another sneeze doubles her over and drives the word out of her head.
Dr. Thorpe says, “Flush out your nose and throat with warm salt water, Bonnie. Work down your flock, here. Sometimes allergies pass.” He and his wife are on the way to the door when he adds, “We’ve got new neighbors. Family named Scott from up North, with four children, bought the Sperry farm for a summer place.”
“Do they need any birds?” Bonnie chokes out, her nose streaming. Never miss a chance to ask for business is the motto she lives by. Learned it long ago from Henry Fenton. Her mother used to hope Henry would marry Bonnie. Never happened. Maybe if she’d been prettier, or if Henry’s heart hadn’t been so broke by his first wife dying and them losing that child. Bonnie’s thoughts drift, and by the time she realizes she’s alone with her canaries, the doctor’s carriage is far down the road.
The birds regard Bonnie with cocked heads. She swears they get a kick out of people. She says, “Ain’t allergic to you-all,” and sneezes again.
But she suspects Dr. Thorpe spoke the truth. She recalls a phase of being allergic to fruits with pits in the middle, like cherries and plums. Her lips used to swell and itch, and once after eating peaches, she had trouble breathing. She’d just started going out walking with her first beau, Louie, and they ate the peaches and lay down under the tree, and when the breathing trouble started, she thought it was because of what they’d done together. It scared Louie. He buttoned his shirt, half-dragged her back to her house, and took off like a jackrabbit. He came back though, a few days later. The memory is pleasant.
A breeze blows through the window and scatters the doctor’s money. Bonnie picks it up, her thoughts far back. Peaches, and itchy lips, and her breath all tight in her chest, and next thing she knew a baby on the way. War broke out, and Louie got killed at Manassas. The baby came right on time, big healthy boy, grown up now and sending money from wherever he is—Mexico, these days. One day when Louie Junior was little, she forgot and ate a peach, and nothing happened. She thinks having a baby cured her. Louie Junior always was her favorite, though there was two more after him, a girl and another boy. Louie Junior’s been gone for years. When he was sixteen, he got in a fight over a woman so old she had grandchildren.
Bonnie shakes her head and asks the birds, “Why’d he want her?”
The men that fathered her babies, well, Bonnie remembers Louie the best. Is it because he was her first? The other two were kin to each other some way, cousins, and she was married to one of them. He died of the halfway sickness, she thinks of it, an illness that struck him on one side so his mouth hung open and he could only move one arm and one leg.
“What was that word the doctor said?” she asks the birds. “Sitta…?”
Bright eyes. A sticky shifting of feet on perches.
“I need a belly laugh,” she snaps. “Won’t get it from you-all, though.”
She ought to be able to remember her men better, especially the one she was married to, but they were like rainstorms, powerful in the happening, then soon forgotten. If she tries hard, she might remember her married name. It slips through her mind, but she grabs it long enough to say out loud, “Newcomb.” Yes. She was Bonnie Newcomb long enough
to have her third child, Clyde Newcomb, born with his daddy and mama married and both in the house, and she could still call herself Bonnie Newcomb, if she wanted to. But she wasn’t married to Mr. Newcomb for very long, and ever since he was dead, people still called her Bonnie Hazlitt, her old name.
So here she is, forty-six years old, got grandbabies herself. Her daughter Sue brung over her newest last week, saying, “Ma, meet Benjamin, I named him after the president.” Sue not married and don’t even act embarrassed about it. Benjamin Harrison Hazlitt. Bonnie never thinks about the president but has to admit it’s a good name.
A sneeze balls up in her chest and bursts out through her face so hard her teeth snap. Another sneeze and another, and her birds tweet and flail their wings. She blames the doctor’s wife for the sneezes, somehow, and never mind why. Blames her mother, too. Oh, life would have been so fine if Henry Fenton had married her. The sneezes take over her body so she feels she’s almost drowning, could it be a evil spirit got hold of her? Jerking and writhing, like colored people are said to do in church?
Sunshine and dust and tiny feathers: suddenly it makes sense. Dr. Thorpe is right. It’s the birds. Well, she can put them outside during the day. That’s the answer. Put them outside and bring them back in at night.
She grabs the cages and marches them out to the yard, stacking them one atop another. Warm, sweet weather. They’ll be fine. She’s pouring water into the little basins in each cage when a stranger pulls up in her yard, just as if she’d sent for him. She knows it’s the northern man Dr. Thorpe was talking about.
She’s white, and Yankees would rather hire white than black. She knows that much. “Hello,” the man calls. “Do you like children?” is all he asks. Seems like a nice man, just distracted. “I’m Thaddeus Scott,” he says. Good-looking, seems in a hurry to settle things.
Horse People Page 3
