The Truest Pleasure

by Robert Morgan

  We got married at the end of summer. It was the time for cane cutting, molasses making, a job I always hated but Tom seemed to relish. It was terrible work, stripping the cane while it stood in the field, going down every row and breaking your back. Then it had to be cut at the ground and carried to the mill. I don’t reckon there is any more boring job than feeding cane stalks bottom first to the rollers of a mill. You have to be careful not to get fingers caught; otherwise you could do it asleep. There is tens of thousands of stalks in a field and you push them in one by one while the horse goes turning the mill, leading hisself around. Yellow jackets get all crusted on the trough running down to the pan over the furnace.

  Now cane always seemed to be just big grass. You bust the stalks to get the juice and cook it. But really you’re fixing the sap from grass. I grant you that sorghum has a smoky dark taste that is special. And if you forget where it comes from it’s even better. But if they’re undercooked, molasses are green and look like juice squeezed out of crabgrass and taste that way too.

  Tom had learned to boil molasses at the Lewis place. I reckon it was work he took to from the first. He didn’t seem to mind stripping the rows of slender stalks, and carrying the stalks to a pile beside the mill. He cleaned off the mill and oiled the rollers where they had rusted since last year. He started at daylight when the field and pasture was covered with dew. By dinnertime the horse had wore a circle in the grass around the mill, and the horse was wore out too. But Tom didn’t even want to stop for dinner. He brushed away yellow jackets on the trough and when one fell in the sap he flicked it away.

  The worst job by far was standing over the steaming pan, skimming and stirring. Tom had piled a heap of stovewood by the furnace and he kept the fire roaring. With the dipper he scooped bits of trash and yellow jackets that had got in the syrup.

  Yellow jackets was worse that year than ever before. People said it was because of the drought. Their holes in the ground had not been flooded and all the young ones had hatched and gone looking for sweet things. Apples that fell in the orchard was tunneled and eat out by yellow jackets. Wherever you peeled apples and peaches there was jackets buzzing in your face. I got stung twice canning peaches. “Jassackets,” Pa called them and laughed. They buzzed around your lips and hands, and around your eyes. Maybe they liked the taste of tears. I didn’t see how we could make molasses, there was such swarms of them fogging around.

  Tom dug a hole to put the skimmings in. It was soon filled by dipperfuls of foam and trash scooped off the boiling pan. It’s hard to describe the color of molasses skimmings. They are like scum and slime, and sometimes kind of green and sometimes brown and almost pink. Yellow jackets crusted the hole and swarmed a yard high every time Tom come near it.

  “You watch out for jackets,” I said.

  But he didn’t answer. He was too busy skimming and stirring. The pan bubbled its sweet steam into the sky, and the steam mixed with the smoke of the furnace.

  “And don’t go and fall in,” I said as he leaned way over the middle of the long pan. What comes to the surface of boiling sorghum is partly dirt and flecks of crushed stalk. If the syrup is to be clear you’ve got to skim them off. A kind of shiny suds foams at the top and has to be dipped off.

  “Good molasses have the color of fresh coffee when you hold them up to the light,” Tom said.

  I scraped yellow jackets off the edge of the pan and throwed them in the hole with gobs of foam. Pa was feeding the mill and I helped at the furnace. Every time I scraped off a dozen jackets a hundred more appeared. I don’t know where they all come from. There was jackets everywhere. I got stung again, and the horse got stung. Pa got stung at the mill. The long sweetening was calling every yellow jacket for miles. Honeybees joined the feast too, and where you see one bee you’ll soon see a hundred.

  But so far Tom hadn’t been stung, even though he stood right over the pan. “Don’t fall in,” I said again.

  Tom was stirring the pan so the syrup would be evenly cooked. Juice run in the upper end and I figured the syrup in the middle, where the pan was hottest, cooked first. Tom reached the dipper into the middle and only got more foam. He reached in again.

  You know how it is when you go off balance and hardly know it until you hit something. I saw Tom’s feet start to slip on the gravel and his stand give way. He tried to brace hisself but overreached with the dipper. Maybe the skimmer full of syrup was too heavy, or maybe he was dizzy from the steam.

  I saw Tom falling, face down, right into the boiling molasses. The steam coming off the pan was thick as grease and he was pitching right through it toward the sap dark as licorice and root extracts. I don’t know if I screamed or not as he fell. It was his neck and face I thought about, how the hot syrup would scald them. He must have squeezed his eyes shut. What I don’t understand is how he got his elbows down in time to break the fall. I didn’t even have time to reach out and catch him.

  His elbows went into the boiling pan, and then his chest and armpits. It looked like he was drowning. This is what it is like to see a death, I thought. I will be a widow no sooner than I am married. His strong body will be burned to a blister, and I will never know my pleasure with him again.

  I jerked Tom by the waist. He jumped back at the same time, and I flung him on the grass with the sorghum smoking off his arms and chest like the hottest compress you could imagine.

  “Take it off,” I screamed. “Take your shirt off.” I tried to tear at the buttons, but the syrup burned my hands. It felt like he was covered with blistering slime.

  Then the yellow jackets found him. They started buzzing in his face, and it seemed every yellow jacket in the valley come at once. It looked like he was wearing a shirt of them humming and crawling on every inch of him. Some caught in his mustache.

  “Get the bucket,” he hollered, and pointed to the pail of water we used to rinse the dipper. I picked up the bucket and splashed it over his face and shoulders. That must have cooled off the syrup and drowned a few yellow jackets, but mostly it made them mad. They boiled up like they was spitting at his face and started to sting him. “Oh!” he hollered, and tried to get at the buttons on his shirt. But the buttons was all sticky.

  “Run away from them,” I yelled. I fanned at the yellow jackets with my apron. I tried to think of what else I could do.

  Tom started running across the pasture. I didn’t know where he was running to, but I followed. And then I saw he was heading toward the river. There was a little field beyond the fence, and then the swimming hole where Joe and Locke used to go after working in the corn patch.

  I followed Tom all the way to the river bank and saw him jump into the swimming hole. He dived in up to his neck, but the jackets kept hitting his face. He ducked into the cold water and stayed under a long time. I thought he wasn’t going to come back up. I must have screamed and started into the river. Suddenly he raised his head out of the water and I saw the stream was carrying away hundreds of yellow jackets.

  The water both hardened and melted the molasses a little. You could smell the smoky sweetness mixed with river water. Tom rubbed his face like he was washing it. I could see the red spots where the jackets had stung him on the neck.

  But the yellow jackets was gone. Maybe there was one or two buzzing around his head, but he didn’t even notice them. He acted dazed by the burns and stings. I reckon a bee sting always makes you shivery and cold. He shuddered in the icy water.

  “Come on out,” I said. I wanted to put tobacco juice or ragweed juice on the stings. He would need a drink from the jug to stir his blood. Nothing will stand up to venom like liquor.

  But Tom climbed up the far bank because it was closer. There was birches on that side hung with grape vines from their tops. A high bank rose where we used to climb and swing out on the vines when we was younguns. Tom pulled hisself up the bank with a vine. I reckon he wanted to get in the sun, away from the cold water, and far from the molasses furnace and yellow jackets.

  With the bu
rns and stings on Tom’s face and elbows and chest I wondered how we would manage our lovemaking. But when young people are in love they always find a way. We just went slow at first and took more care. And the care and limitations made it go even better. I felt I was bringing him back to health. We give a whole new meaning to the term “home remedies.”

  Another thing Tom liked to make was cider. He had never had his own apple trees before. Pa had set out two orchards right after the war, one on the top of the mountain and one on the hill above the house. In fall we had Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Winesaps, Ben Davis, and a tree of big Wolf Rivers for pies and sauce. We also had a plum tree and a pear tree.

  It took Tom less than a week to recover from the yellow jacket stings. Turned out the burns didn’t amount to much. I guess his shirt had protected him and he had jumped back so fast the only real burns was on his elbows. But the places there formed scabs and begun to heal. I think he was lucky. He never was the kind of man who could set around for long. The day after he was stung he moped on the porch and didn’t say anything when Pa and me went out to finish the molasses. The stings made him weak and the scratch marks on his side made him sore. He didn’t complain.

  I found Tom was the sort of man that had to be moving toward a goal or he couldn’t stand it. I reckon it was the way he felt in control of things. And he wouldn’t ever do anything else. He never did go hunting, and he never did drive stobs in the ground and play horseshoes. He liked to eat good, but he never did drink any liquor. Even Pa liked to take a drink from time to time, as I did myself, when it wouldn’t hurt anybody.

  Like I said, I found out early Tom liked the pleasures of the bed. He liked to sleep when he was tired, and he liked love things too. For somebody that didn’t have anything to say he liked loving a lot. I reckon all men do, and most women too, for that matter. I don’t have any way to compare him to anybody, but it occurred to me he did his talking through loving. Being with Tom was like taking part in a long conversation that could begin anywhere and might go this way and that, but was always surprising at some point. From what I’ve heard other women say about such things, including Florrie, I believe Tom was special. I believe he put his mind to loving the way he did to other work. Everything he did was careful and right, except for falling in the molasses. He worked his way along and most everything he touched turned out right. I even told Florrie how much I enjoyed Tom, which wasn’t like me. And I later wished I never had.

  Two weeks after he was burned Tom hitched up the wagon and drove to town to buy a cider mill. It cost him eight dollars, and took him another day to get it set up and oiled and working. Next he cut brush and shoveled the old road up the mountain so he could drive the wagon to the big orchard. It was the first time I could remember that we harvested all the apples. Usually we gathered some in sacks and carried them down the mountain. The rest got left for deer and birds and frost to turn to mush.

  Tom went into the grove and picked every single apple. He put the different kinds in separate sacks, and he picked every good apple out of the grass. When he was finished the yellow jackets and birds had only the rotten ones and those half busted.

  We wrapped the best apples in newspapers and put them in barrels in the cellar. All together we had more than twenty bushels, and Tom sold some at the village. But the apples he had picked up, those that had been stuck with straw or bruised, we washed for making cider. We worked every evening after he come in from the field, grinding fruit in the mill and squeezing juice out in the press. We sweated in the cool evenings, churning the apples into sweet smelling pieces, then screwing down the press to crush them. I loved to see the juice stream out the cracks of the press. You could smell every fresh spurt foaming gold and winky. I kept a pine limb to brush away yellow jackets.

  Apples don’t smell like anything else unless it’s flowers. The white flesh of an apple turning gold when it breaks open smells like the essence of earth. The sap is an extract of all the sun and wind and rain of the summer. Cider already tastes like a kind of liquor, even before it hardens.

  To keep the juice sweet Tom sealed the jugs with wax, and we set more than fifty gallons in the cellar. As I bent over, wiping pulp from the press board, my hair come partly undone and stuck to my neck. I had loosened my dress by a couple of buttons and could feel the sweat running between my breasts and under my armpits. I glanced up and saw Tom looking at my breasts. “Shame on you,” I said, and slapped his arm. His face was red when he was working, but it turned a little redder. I had put on some weight since the wedding and felt bigger and softer and rounder.

  Already that fall Tom had established a routine. He had trouble sleeping after four in the morning. He liked to go to bed early and get up early. When he rose he ground coffee on the back porch and had a cup before it got light. It was the only time he could set. Maybe it was his favorite time of day, as it was mine. He made a fire to boil coffee and he set there and thought. I’d have give anything to know what he thought about. Maybe he prayed, and maybe he thought about sacred things. But I think he planned what he would do that day, what had to be done, and what could be done that time of year. He was planning to improve the place, and he thought about roads and fences, terraces to firm up and gullies that had to be choked with brush. After stepping outside to relieve hisself he would set for half an hour. I believe he thought the fiber of the Peace family had wore out and he needed to get the place right again.

  After the cider making was done Tom built a new springhouse. The actual spring was three hundred yards around the hill, and Pa had bored out pumplogs to lead water down to the yard. But the pumplogs was rotting and leaking and we had never had a decent springhouse. Tom ordered pipe from town to replace the logs, and he dug a basin big as the spring itself and lined it with rocks. He cobbled the outlet that run along the pasture fence down to the branch. I had never seen anybody work as long or steady. Tom had not done masonry before, but he planned the wall with such care it looked like the sure work of a journeyman.

  Tom split big chestnut logs for the springhouse itself, and set those logs around the basin, under the hemlocks. When he put the cedar shingles on the building it was cool and dark inside. Water splashed out of the pipe and murmured in the overflow. On the hottest day it was cool in there, and Tom made a box to keep the milk and butter, eggs and cider. In winter it was warm under the low eaves, with the heat of the earth and springwater rising up. Nothing set there ever froze in even the coldest weather.

  Between the smokehouse and the springhouse Tom fixed a wash place for me. And he built a table for the tub and washboard. He strung up a clothesline along the path from the smokehouse.

  If Pa resented Tom taking charge of so much and doing so many new things around the place he didn’t let it show. Pa was past sixty, and liked to set on the porch in the sun and talk, or by the fire after dark. He always did like to talk more than anything, just like Locke and Florrie. He loved to tell about what he had read, and what he had seen in Virginia as a young soldier. He had growed chin whiskers and suddenly his face begun to show age. He read the paper, and he kept up with the war with Spain. He read to Tom and me accounts of Teddy and his Rough Riders. That Roosevelt was a Republican made him seem even more a hero. Pa had always been a Republican, ever since he voted for Lincoln, him and all our family. After the war he hadn’t changed to become a Democrat the way so many in the valley had.

  I reckon Pa had got less and less practical over the years. It seemed at times he was just drifting, talking about his months in the prison camp up North. I reckon he wasn’t interested in building up the place anymore, after his heart trouble started.

  That first winter Tom added two stalls and a feed room to the log barn. He snaked logs in from the hill, and with Joe’s help rolled them into place. It was a low barn, and the worst work was notching the logs and setting them in place. They bored holes in the logs and pegged them together. Tom built a fence around the barn, encircling the manure pile curing out front. Pa had kept th
e pile behind the barn, out of sight, but Tom pointed out that sun on the south side would dry the manure faster. And it would be easier to clean the stalls if the pile was closer and easier to reach with the wagon at spreading time. Enclosing the yard enabled him to put the roughage piles closer also. The stacks of corn tops rose above the barn roof. The cut ends stuck out into the weather, but the leafy tops inside stayed dry and sweet-smelling. Pulled a few at a time, the tops would last all winter, with only the butt ends blackened by the elements.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Whenever I mentioned going to the Pentecostal meetings Tom would stiffen up. At first I didn’t know how to tell when he was mad, because he didn’t say much. Everybody in my family would talk out their anger. But I come to recognize the way he would say even less, and not look you in the eye when he was mad. He would turn his head away, and sometimes his face would go red. And he wouldn’t hardly answer when you asked him a question.

  “Tom,” I said, “worship is one of the finest things people can do. People have a hunger for worship same as they do for food and loving.” I had heard Preacher Liner say something like that one time at a meeting and never forgot it.

  “I go to church,” he said. “I’ve always gone to church.”

  “But I prefer sometimes services where the Spirit moves, where the meeting is not dry and dead,” I said. But I did not know how to explain how I felt at revivals when I danced or spoke in tongues. It was hard to put the feeling into mere words. “Most churches go through the motions of worship, like some duty,” I said. “They have meetings like mournful chores to get through.”