“Frank would complain about the moon if it looked at him wrong. He makes good money at Toyota, and he likes everybody to know it.”
“So who’s still farming, just Lois and Big Rickie? And Herb? How can I live smack in the middle of you all and not know what’s what?”
“Well, because it’s not really settled, that’s why. About half the time Hannie-Mavis and Joel lease out their allotment to a big grower over to Roanoke, like Herb does. Then the next year, they won’t. But Lois and Big Rickie always do their own tobacco, four acres and some. You might not know it, but he and Joel’s got land leased all over the county running beef cattle, too. Big Rickie’s got farmer in his blood.”
Both women jumped at the sound of a crash and breaking glass from the porch. Lusa started for the door, but Jewel stopped her, holding up a pair of tongs. “You take the jars out of the canner and get the syrup boiling. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Lusa could hear Jewel scolding and both kids crying or whining on the porch. She tiptoed to look out the high window over the sink. “Jewel,” she called, “if it’s those jars of green beans, it’s a good riddance. They’ve been out there since I moved in.”
There was no answer, and from this angle she couldn’t see Jewel or the kids but could hear a smack and a wail. “That is no way to treat your little brother,” she heard. “You keep this up and you’re wearing a dress tomorrow. I mean it.”
Lusa frowned and turned to the stove. She measured equal parts sugar and hot water into the pot, hoping three quarts of syrup would be the right amount to cover five quarts of raw-pack cherries. She should put in something acidic to lower the pH, for the canning, but she didn’t have any lemon juice. Would vinegar work? She added one tablespoon, a wild guess, then took up the tongs to lift the sterilized jars from the water bath. She lined them up on the counter, a raft of widemouthed birds begging to be fed.
“It was the green beans,” Jewel sighed, coming inside. “I got all the glass. I told them to clean up the rest and throw it out by the creek, and then go play in the barn or something. I don’t care if it’s raining; they won’t melt.”
“That’s fine. Truly, I’m glad about the beans. I’ve been scared to eat them and scared to give them away. My luck, I’d kill somebody of botulism.”
Jewel reached under the sink to shake a dustpan of broken glass like wind chimes into the trash. “She’s going to be my death, if I don’t kill her first. Lowell’s a handful, but he’s just little. Crystal Gail’s something else. It’s time for her to be growing out of this stage, which she’s been going through since the day she was born. What?”
Lusa realized she must look comically confused. “Crystal?”
“Crys. Oh!” Jewel laughed, waved her hand. “You thought she was a boy. You and everybody else. When she started kindergarten, the teacher refused to let her go to the girls’ bathroom until I rushed down there with her birth certificate.”
“Oh.”
Jewel looked earnest. “Don’t think it’s because of Shel leaving, some child-of-divorce thing. She’s always been this way.”
“I don’t think anything about it, Jewel; I just didn’t realize.”
“You can’t imagine. It’s been going on since she was a baby. Her first word was no, and her second was dress. No dress. No dolls, no pretty hair bows. I gave in on that haircut because she was cutting it herself. I was afraid she’d poke her eyes out.”
Jewel looked so vulnerable, Lusa could practically see the veins through her skin. She wanted to hug her, to trust her completely. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m just glad you told me so I won’t keep using the wrong pronoun. I can’t believe I’ve known that child a year and nobody ever set me straight.”
“You and Cole only ever had eyes for each other, honey. You hardly came to family things anyway, and if you did, it wasn’t to look at my crazy mixed-up daughter.”
“Ouch,” Lusa said, burning her hand slightly on the rim of a jar. “She’s not crazy, don’t do that to yourself. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You would if you were her mother. You’d worry yourself sick. She’s about half the reason why Shel left. He blamed me—oh, Lord, did he blame me. He said I was making her a little homo by letting her wear jeans and cut her hair like that. And maybe he was right. But it wasn’t my idea. I’d like to have seen him try and get her into a dress. That’s what I told him: You try putting panty hose on a tomcat!”
Jewel and Lusa looked at each other and laughed.
“And anyway,” Jewel asked, a little shyly, “isn’t a homo a man?”
“Jewel, she’s just a tomboy. I was exactly like that at her age.”
“You were? But you’re so pretty. And you cook!”
Lusa felt awkwardly flattered, though she was also aware that this wasn’t the point. “You should have seen me. I skinned my knees and caught bugs and wanted to be a farmer when I grew up.”
“Careful what you wish for.”
“The syrup’s boiling.”
“Do you put a dash of vinegar in it, or not? Oh good, you did, I can smell it. Here, you hold the funnel over the jars and I’ll pour—where’s your ladle?”
Jewel knew exactly where the ladle was, and everything else in this kitchen. The question was a gift of respect. Lusa retrieved the ladle from its drawer and closed it with her hip, feeling acutely grateful.
“Crystal’s pretty. The name, I mean.”
Jewel shook her head. “It doesn’t look like her. She looks like Beaver Cleaver.”
Lusa smiled. “Meeseh maydel, shayneh dame,” she said, her grandfather’s promise—which had finally come true, for what it was worth.
“What?”
“‘Ugly ducklings grow up to be swans.’” Lusa felt frustrated again—this wasn’t really her wish, to promise that Crys would grow up straight and feminine, because maybe she wouldn’t. Her wish was to tell Jewel that the alternative would be fine, too. But Lusa couldn’t imagine having that conversation with Jewel. “Maybe it’s not really about trying to act like a boy,” she hazarded cautiously, “but just her way of trying to be herself.”
“Let’s don’t talk about it. Crys is just Crys. Tell me some gossip. Tell me why you’re mad at Big Rickie and Herb.”
Lusa poured four cups of cherries into each jar, then held the funnel steady over the mouth as Jewel covered them with boiling syrup. “I’m not mad, I don’t guess. I mean I am, but I shouldn’t be. I know they meant well.”
“Well, but what did they do?”
“They came up this morning to inform me that they’re going to set my tobacco on Saturday.”
“And?”
“And, I don’t want to grow tobacco.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“Oh, I’m being stupid, I guess. Farm economics, what do I know? But half the world’s starving, Jewel, we’re sitting on some of the richest dirt on this planet, and I’m going to grow drugs instead of food? I feel like a hypocrite. I nagged Cole to quit smoking every day of our marriage.”
“Well, honey, you didn’t ask the whole world to quit smoking. And by the way, they didn’t.”
“I know. It’s the only reliable crop around here you can earn enough from to live off a five-acre bottom, in a county that’s ninety-five percent too steep to plow. I know why every soul in this end of three states grows tobacco. Knowing full well the bottom’s going to drop out any day now.”
“They’re trapped.”
“They’re trapped.”
Jewel paused between jars and pointed the ladle toward the back window, the one that faced up Bitter Hollow toward the mountain. “You’ve got timber.”
Lusa shook her head. “I couldn’t log this hollow.”
“Well, but you could. That hollow goes up half a mile or more before you get to National Forest land. We used to think those woods went on forever.”
“I will not cut down those trees. I don’t care if there’s a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of lumber on the ba
ck of this farm, I’m not selling it. It’s what I love best about this place.”
“What, the trees?”
“The trees, the moths. The foxes, all the wild things that live up there. It’s Cole’s childhood up there, too. Along with yours and your sisters’.”
“That’s so. Cole loved it best of any of us.”
“Cole did? He always acts like—acted like—the woods and the briar patches of this world were enemy number one.”
“Well, farming. You know. You’ve got to do what it takes.”
“Yep. And around here that’s tobacco, I guess, if I want to keep this farm. I just wish I could be the one person to think of a door out of that trap.”
Jewel smiled. “You and Cole. He used to say that.”
“What?”
“That he’d be the first one in this county to make a killing off something besides tobacco.”
“When did he say that?”
“Oh, he was sixteen, maybe. Future Farmers of America and high school running-back star, what a combination. Much too interested in his good looks to smoke a cigarette, mind you, or grow plain old ordinary tobacco. He was going to set the world on fire. He tried red bell peppers one year and cucumbers the next, potatoes the next.”
“No. He never told me that.”
“I’m telling you. Right out here in Daddy’s bottom field. Every year, whatever it was, it failed, and he had to eat a little more of his pride. He grew up in those three years, from dreamer to farmer. Gave up his pipe dreams and started smoking.”
Lusa shook her head. “I can’t picture that. I know Cole was energetic, but I can’t picture that he was ever so—what? starry-eyed.” She laughed. “Plus, I figured he was born smoking. Like a fish, he was hooked.”
“No, I remember being shocked to see him smoking with the men at Mommy’s wake. So it was right around then, when Mommy died. The very next year, Daddy cleaned out the barn and signed the farm over to Cole, and then he died, too. Seemed like he could trust Cole to be a man finally. He’d be able to handle anything that came along, after the red bell peppers, the cucumbers, and the potatoes.”
Anything but a steering column through his rib cage, Lusa thought morbidly, recognizing how self-pity could push its nose into any conversation like a tiresome dog. It took so much energy to keep Cole outside her thoughts for a single minute. And yet people still said, “I didn’t want to remind you….”
“What could go wrong with potatoes?” Lusa forced herself to ask. “It seems like such a sure thing. Good yielder, easy to transport, and you could spread out the harvest.”
“It was the funniest thing. They said he could make a profit if he could get them down to the potato-chip factory in Knoxville. But then when he did, it didn’t work out. They liked the Idaho potatoes better. The ones that grow around here have too much sugar in them. It makes them slice ragged and burn around the edges.”
“Too much sugar?”
“That’s what they said. This bottomland’s too rich. I mean, they’re good potatoes, just not good for the market.”
“Jewel, my life sounds like a country song: ‘My roof’s a-caving in, my land’s too steep to plow, and my bottom’s got too much sugar.’”
“Your bottom!” Jewel startled Lusa by smacking her with a dish towel. “Let’s get your bottom to cleaning up this mess. You are not going to starve, Loretta Lynn.”
Jewel piled things up to carry to the sink while Lusa plunged her hands into soapy water so hot it prickled her skin. The hurt felt like a punishment that would clean the ache out of her chest. The rain was picking up again, starting to hammer a quiet roar on the tin roof, playing Zayda Landowski’s music. Yesterday was the anniversary of her wedding, which nobody had mentioned all day, but Zayda had regaled her all through the rainy night playing klezmer tunes on his clarinet—the Jewish wedding she never had. She and Cole had made a small ceremony of it in the Hunt Morgan garden in Lexington, outdoors, to sidestep the issue of religion. That had been fine with Cole. He wasn’t churchy like his sisters.
“Jewel, I want to tell you something. Just let me say this. I loved my husband.”
“Well, sure you did.”
In her mind’s eye Lusa pictured the lower field, back when he’d first set out to make it his own: a moving sea of leaves turning lightly in the breeze, the bobbing red bells of ripening peppers, a young man wading through them the way he would walk into a lake. Cole at nineteen. A man she never met.
“We never got a chance to hit our stride, maybe. You all still think I don’t really know who he was, but I did, I do. We talked a lot; he told me things. Just a few days before he died, he told me something amazing.”
Jewel looked up. “What? Can I ask?”
Lusa crossed her arms over her stomach, holding her breath, transported by the scent-memory of honeysuckle across a field. Like a moth, here I am, we’re here. She glanced over at Jewel. “I’m sorry, it won’t make any sense to you. It’s nothing I can say in words.”
“Well,” Jewel said, turning away. She was disappointed, Lusa could see. Now she thought Lusa was withholding something important, some piece of her brother that would help bring him back.
“Never mind. I’m sorry, Jewel, but really it’s nothing that matters now. Just that we were right for each other, for sure. Just like you and Shel were in the beginning. Even though everybody’s poisoned it now by taking a bad end and working backward.”
Jewel passed the sponge from one hand to the other while she studied Lusa. “Nobody’s saying you didn’t love him.”
“Nobody thinks they’re saying that.” She could feel Jewel’s scrutiny but couldn’t look up. She turned back to the sink and leaned in to the sticky preserve pot and scrubbed it hard to keep herself from crying or yelling. Her whole body pumped with the effort.
“My Lord, honey. What’s this about?”
“That thing about changing my name back, for instance. My husband’s hardly cold in the grave, and already I’ve run to the courthouse to erase his family name from the deed to your family farm? That’s for shit. What kind of meanspirited lie is that, and who made it up?”
Jewel hesitated. “Lois saw your signature on something at the funeral home.”
Loud Lois, she thought uncharitably, picturing that long face permanently puckered with worry that someone else was getting her share. “I always had the same name, before, during, and after Cole. Lusa Maluf Landowski. My mom’s Palestinian and my dad’s a Polish Jew, and never, before I came here, did I think that was anything to be ashamed of. I’ve had it since I was born. Not that I’ve ever heard anybody in your family say it. You talk about making somebody disappear? You think they put the vanishing act on Shel? Try living in a family that won’t learn your damn name!”
She and Jewel blinked at each other, shocked equally.
“Nobody meant any harm, honey. It’s just normal to take your husband’s name around here. We’re just regular country people, with country ways.”
“It never struck me as a regular thing to do, so we just didn’t. God, Jewel, did you all really believe I’d take his name and then throw it back, a week after he died? Some carpetbagger, erasing your family name and stealing your homeplace, is that how you see me?”
Jewel had her hand on her mouth, and tears were welling up in her eyes; they were back where they’d started. Lusa had raised her voice at this timid woman who was probably the nearest thing she had to a friend in the family or this county. Jewel shook her head and held out her arms to Lusa, who stepped awkwardly into her hug. Jewel’s body felt as bony and light as a bird’s underneath her apron, all feathers and heartbeat.
They clung to each other for a minute, rocking back and forth. “Don’t pay any attention to me,” Lusa said. “I’m losing my mind. There are ghosts here. There’s one in this kitchen that stirs up fights.”
Over Jewel’s shoulder she could look straight down the hall through the wavy antique glass in the front door to the outside, the yard and front past
ure. This rain would never end, she thought. She could see the fresh beginnings of yet another storm coming: the leaves of the tulip poplar down by the barn trembling and rotating on a hundred different axes, like a tree full of pinwheels. Beneath it Lowell and Crystal orbited the barnyard in their dark, soaked clothes, laughing and galloping on a pair of invisible horses, traveling in circles through the infinite downpour as if time for them had stopped, or not yet started.
{9}
Old Chestnuts
Garnett stood admiring the side of his barn. Over the course of a century the unpainted chestnut planks had weathered to a rich, mottled gray, interrupted only by the orange and lime-colored streaks of lichen that brightened the wood in long, vertical stripes where moisture drained from the galvanized tin roof.
He was haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts, by the great emptiness their extinction had left in the world, and so this was something Garnett did from time to time, like going to the cemetery to be with dead relatives: he admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honor and praise its color, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew. There was no other wood to compare with it. A man could only thank the Lord for having graced the earth with the American chestnut, that broad-crowned, majestic source of nuts and shade and durable lumber. Garnett could recall the days when chestnuts had grown so thick on the mountaintops of this county that in spring, when the canopies burst into flower, they appeared as snowcapped peaks. Families had lived through the winter on the gunnysacks of chestnuts stored in their root cellars, and hams from the hogs they’d fattened on chestnuts, and the money they’d earned sending chestnuts by the railroad car to Philadelphia and New York City, where people of other nationalities and religious persuasions roasted them for sale on street corners. He thought of cities as being populated with those sorts of people, the types to hunker over purchased coals, roasting nuts whose origins they could only guess at. Whereas Garnett liked to think of his own forebears as chestnut people. Of chestnut logs the Walkers had built their cabins, until they had sons and a sawmill to rip and plane the trees into board lumber from which they then built their houses and barns and finally an empire. It was lumber sales from Walker’s Mill that had purchased the land and earned his grandfather the right to name Zebulon Mountain. Starting with nothing but their wits and strong hands, the Walkers had lived well under the sheltering arms of the American chestnut until the slow devastation began to unfold in 1904, the year that brought down the chestnut blight. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
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