One night when we set down to supper I found myself looking at Tom more than I had in a long time. Usually we avoided noticing each other. I didn’t say anything to him, but I kept looking at his strong shoulders and neck. And he seemed to be looking at me more than usual. Every time my eyes caught his he turned away, or I glanced away. We hadn’t talked, except about things that didn’t matter, for months. His face was reddened from the wind, and it seemed to get redder while he set at the table.
Later he set by the fire while Pa read the paper. Tom hardly ever looked at the newspaper hisself. Sometimes he would skim the headlines or study an article on farm prices in one of the papers we took. But after a day of work and a big supper it was hard for him to get concerned with what was happening far away.
“If they is anything important you-all will tell me,” he once said. And I reckon it was true. If there was news about Cuba or the Philippines, we talked about it. When the president was shot Pa heard it at the store and come back and told us long before we saw it in the Greenville paper which always come a day late.
“Now if they was a paper that would tell what the weather is to be tomorrow . . .” he once said.
I saw Tom lift the shoes he had took off and place them by the hearth. He did that every night because he thought the last heat from the fire helped dry them out. Since the fire died down in the night they would be cold by morning, but I guess it was the natural place for him to put his shoes. They always smelled a little. Some nights I set them away while I rocked Jewel. But before I went to bed I put the shoes back on the hearth.
I took a lamp to the bedroom and started brushing my hair in front of the mirror. Jewel was asleep. I stood before the dresser and made slow strokes through my long hair. The door was partly open, and Tom had to pass the door to reach the ladder to the loft. I unbuttoned the top of my gown two or three buttons.
As Tom passed he paused to look in. He was usually not up that late. I did not turn but looked back at him. He is my husband, I thought. He is my husband. We are one flesh. It is our worship to be fruitful and multiply. All the harsh things built up between us begun to melt away. There was nothing to keep me from him. He started through the doorway and I went to him. He closed the door and started unbuttoning my gown. I dropped the brush and blowed out the lamp. It was like that night was our true honeymoon.
As I laid with Tom in the dark I kept thinking of passages from The Song of Solomon. I had been reading them in the Bible the day before. As I rolled and turned I heard in my mind, “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.”
And later as we loved I heard a voice say, “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.” And I felt I was right, and in the right place, even as I did at the revival services. And I thought how the thrill of loving was almost the same as communion with the Spirit and the thrill of solitude by the river, but I didn’t understand how it could be. It was a mystery.
Our second child, a boy, was born in 1902. I named him Moody after the great evangelist. I was afraid Tom would protest, but he didn’t. He was agreeable to most everything I suggested. It was like we had made a completely new beginning. It was as if we did everything for the first time, doing it right and better. We begun to discover what was really good about each other.
That year I was too busy with the children and with housework to go to revival meetings. And as I said earlier, the spirit of the meetings appeared to have left the community. Joe and Pa liked to talk about the Holiness services when they got together, and about the preachers whose books and pamphlets they was reading. And sometimes I joined in when Tom wasn’t around. But as we worked or talked around the fire we sounded like elderly veterans of the spiritual awakening. We got sentimental about gone times and past glories. The last revival had been little more than a year before, but it felt like something in history.
“Preacher De Haan says if you’re baptized with fire you can’t fall from grace,” Pa said. “At his meeting in Atlanta seven hundred people had the baptism of fire.”
“That’s the s-s-s-same as sanctified,” Joe said.
“Them with the baptism are the same as saints, De Haan says.”
“Nobody is a saint,” I said. “At least I never met one.”
Tom and me without saying it decided to let bygones be bygones. I reckon as long as we just talked about meetings it didn’t matter. I didn’t say anything to him about it. I felt a girl again, falling in love again, but wiser and more alert.
Through the late summer, while I was nursing the baby, and in the harvest months when we had extra dollars from the sale of cider and molasses, firewood and apples, our life together was better than it had ever been. I saw how ignorant I had been before. In our first year everything had been new and awkward. I didn’t know how awkward I had been until I looked back on it.
That fall we reached a whole new stage in our loving. Our routines was at once habits and explorations. It was like we took long walks in bed while Jewel and the baby slept. Before, lovemaking had been something our flesh did, only slightly connected to us as people. Now we met, at least at times, as the people we truly was. Tom was strong and steady, his mind always on the goal, on the long work to be done. I was the distracted one, passionate and withdrawn by turns, you might say wild sometimes, too excited to think or remember later.
But more than the fullness of the new way we give ourselves, it was the alertness to moods and intentions of each other that made a difference. It was like we had been give an extra sense for knowing what the other felt. We knowed how to do the right things, even when we wouldn’t have guessed it beforehand. It was as if we was in a new dispensation.
Christmas that year was the best I had ever seen. A week before Christmas we climbed up on the pasture hill, beyond the Sunset Rock, and gathered turkey’s paw and holly to place over the mantel. Tom took Pa’s gun and shot down mistletoe from a tree by the river. We cut a cedar along the fence above the spring and I trimmed it with chains of colored paper and popcorn. The house was filled with the smell of cedar and pine limbs on the mantel with the holly. Pine makes me think of the spices and perfumes of the Wise Men, of angels in the starry night. At Christmas it’s like this troubled world becomes a part of eternity. Candles and carols and smells have a hush and thrill. The house smells of cinnamon and nutmeg. I won’t forget that Christmas.
“We never did hardly celebrate Christmas at home,” Tom said. “We didn’t have no money and I reckon Ma didn’t feel like celebrating after the war when Pa didn’t come back.” It was the most he ever talked about his family. If you asked, he would never answer questions.
CHAPTER NINE
The day after New Year’s there was to be a pounding for the Brights down on the Turnpike. They was a large family that had moved into the community a few years before. They always seemed starved and sickly. They was the kind of people that just can’t make a go of it. No matter what they try or who helps them their luck never gets any better. In the fall they had caught typhoid fever, three of the children, and the mother, who had died.
The preacher had told the congregation the straits the Brights was in. And it was agreed that one Sunday afternoon in January the members of the church would gather at their house for a pounding. Everybody was to bring a pound of something: coffee, sugar, tea, butter. Tom was going to bring a gallon of molasses. He was taking it hisself since he didn’t want me and the children where they had had typhoid. But I told him if he was going I was going too, and taking three pints of foxgrape jelly also. He went out to hitch up without saying any more, and when he was done I come out with a basket on one arm and a box in the other.
“What’s all that?” Tom said.
“These people are in need and I want to help,” I said.
The basket held several jars of preserves and jelly, a cake, a canister of coffee, and two dozen eggs. In the box I had packed sheets and
pillowcases, and some clothes I hadn’t wore in a long time for the oldest girl. Tom glanced in the box.
“We can’t give them everything,” he said. “They’re not kin.”
“They need it more than we do,” I said.
“It will look like we’re putting on airs,” he said.
“I’ll take it in the back door so nobody will see,” I said.
“I’m not going,” Tom said. “I won’t look like a rich fool.”
He stomped into the house and never come out. I waited a few minutes, and went to get Pa to drive me. Tom set by the fire holding Jewel. He was so mad he just looked into the flames.
But that was only the beginning of his fury. Next day Florrie told him I had give fifteen dollars of his money to the Brights. It was like Florrie to tell him that. Though she was my sister she never had anything good to say about me. Sometimes we could be friendly and work together like we did as girls. But mostly she didn’t approve of me. She didn’t approve of going to revivals, and she didn’t approve of Joe and Lily either.
But Florrie was wrong about the money. Ten of the dollars I give was mine, and five of it was Pa’s. I had saved the dollars by selling eggs before I was married, and from selling a calf to Jimmy Jenkins. I kept my money in the bottom of my jewelry case and Tom didn’t know a thing about it. And I decided I wouldn’t tell him. If he wanted to act so stingy and listen to Florrie behind my back he didn’t deserve to know the truth of it.
Now the strange thing was that Tom could be as generous as anybody if he was asked in the right way. There is a giving spirit in everybody if they will let it out. People enjoy helping others. There is nothing more thrilling than giving to another human being, because when we give we conquer our fear. To share makes us feel strong and part of the community.
What I mean is I saw Ida Jenkins come to Tom in the field. We was digging taters in October. Everybody knowed what a hard time Ida had after Jimmy died of smallpox. I was raking taters out and cleaning them, and Tom was loading baskets on the wagon.
Ida walked up on the rough clods, squinting in the sun. She always did have a kind of squint, and as she got older it seemed worse. “Tom,” she said, “will you sell me a peck of taters?”
Tom was straining to lift a basket onto the wagon and his face was red. “No,” he said. “I won’t sell you a peck of taters.”
I stood up to rebuke him. A smile broke out on his face.
“But I will give you a bushel,” he said.
And I could tell how much Tom enjoyed that. He felt good about hisself. It made him feel happy and secure to give away taters to somebody that needed them.
The anger over what I give the Brights was only the beginning of Tom’s fury. He made his pallet up in the loft, and he didn’t hardly speak when he was in the house. Mostly he stayed away. Even in cold weather he worked in the barn or toolshed, or he gathered pine needles in the thickets for cowbedding. He acted like I had gone crazy and he couldn’t trust me. He acted like I wanted to steal his money, to hurt him where he was most tender.
The first weeks of the new year was cold and silent, except for Moody’s crying. Pa didn’t talk much when Tom was around. And Joe and Lily didn’t come over often. When Florrie visited she talked a streak, but I didn’t have much to say to her. Sometimes she stopped at the barn and talked to Tom a long time before she come in. By late February it was clear I was expecting again.
That spring Joe started holding small prayer meetings, and I attended those right up to the time of my laying-in. It was not a happy pregnancy. During the first two I was contented. It was like I had a mysterious joy. During the third one I thought mostly about spite. I thought if I could hurt Tom by giving, I might as well give away more. I couldn’t seem to think about anything happy. I didn’t even enjoy reading during those months.
A traveling preacher, a faith healer, come through and stayed with Joe and Lily. But because of the cold weather he was never able to hold services. I walked across the hill for the little prayer meetings they had. His name was Worley and he was from around Pickens. It was obvious he had little more than the clothes he wore, and they was threadbare. If he couldn’t have services he had no way of collecting money. I made him two shirts, and some handkerchiefs. If I had had material I would have tailored him a suit. But I give him money instead. I handed him ten dollars from my savings under the jewelry. Pa had give it to me at Christmas, but I never let Tom know how much I had.
Of course Florrie went and told Tom, as I knowed she would. I don’t reckon it was more than two days before he found out. Lily had told Florrie, and she must have come special to tattle to Tom. And that seemed like the worst insult to Tom. I can’t say but what I meant it partly for an insult. With two children already, and a third one coming, I guess he was worried, as all men worry about their duty. It was winter and he had the place to look after, and who knowed what hard times might be ahead?
“You want to give what we have to any religious trash that comes through,” he said. He spoke almost with his teeth together, hissing his words. “You will be the ruination of us,” he said.
“You are already ruined by greed,” I said.
We took to going to church separate. I went with Pa and the children almost till I was due. Tom had been sleeping on the pallet since the first of the year, and he got up long before I did. Weekdays he was in the fields before I even woke. Sundays he milked and got dressed and went to service on his own.
Tom had less and less to do with Pa, and Joe too. When we was first married him and his brother-in-law had always worked together at fodder-pulling time or when there was a shed to be built. Joe was the strongest man around, and though he stuttered when excited or among strangers, he was always a talker, just like Pa, with a loud voice, lots of laughing. He liked to read too, religious tracts and pamphlets, magazines and history books, and he talked about what he had read as he worked. He knowed the history of the community and the family better than anybody else.
The more Joe talked the harder he worked, and Tom never seemed to mind his talk. Joe went on and on about Darwin and evolution, while he dug holes for posts or sawed a pine log. Only somebody strong as Joe had the breath to work and talk at full speed.
“People don’t come from no monkeys,” he would say as he pulled the crosscut saw.
“No sir,” Tom would say, and pull it back.
“If we are descended from monkeys how come we ain’t got tails?” Joe said and pulled again.
Tom would grunt; he didn’t need to answer.
“I heard Darwin caught a disease in the tropics,” Joe said. “His mind was never right after that.” He pulled again, working up a sweat and pulling faster. Tom had to strain to keep up.
“Now I’ve seen people that looked like monkeys,” Joe said.
“Me too,” Tom said.
“And I’ve seen them that acted like monkeys,” Joe said, as he pulled the saw back. They was getting far down in the log and it was pinching. The saw was hard to pull.
“Put a block under it,” Tom said.
Joe shoved a section of cut wood under the log to prop it up. “M-m-maybe apes is descended from people,” he said. “Maybe they was people that didn’t go to church or help other people out. They didn’t b-b-believe in nothing, and eventually they just growed hair and tails and went to live in the trees. Maybe apes is d-d-descended from politicians.” Joe busted out laughing just as the saw cut through and the end of the log rolled away.
Early on a Sunday morning I could sometimes hear Joe praying in the thicket on the hill. His voice would carry in the quiet, though you could only catch a word here and there. His voice would rise to a holler, then die away again. It was the way he prayed at church and at meetings. And he prayed so long the preacher almost never called on him. Joe had always wanted to preach, and he liked to take over prayer meetings and talk until it was time to go. Some said they didn’t mind, that he knowed more and had more to say than other people. But Preacher Jolly didn’t agre
e, and never called on him. Florrie said he talked so much at church and in the field because he never got a chance to say a word at home. Lily was a nonstop gossip. When Joe went out to pray or work all his bottled-up feelings and thoughts was ready to be let out, no matter where he was or who he was with.
But after Joe and Lily kept Preacher Worley, and I give the preacher money, Tom appeared to blame Joe. He didn’t ask Joe to work with him anymore. I don’t reckon they had words about it. But I rarely saw them working together. If Joe come over to help Pa, Tom was always busy someplace else. Tom had a way of disappearing, of just not being around when he didn’t want to be.
One day in June I felt the pains start. Tom was thinning cane at the upper end of the bottom, and I sent Pa to tell him to go after Hilda Waters, the midwife. I had thought it would be at least another month. I kept walking around the kitchen because it helped a little if I was standing up.
It must have took Tom an hour to bring back Hilda. It seemed an eternity. I told myself I would not lay down till Hilda come. I thought if I could just stay on my feet the pain wouldn’t get bad. I had heard Indian women walked up and down the river bank before they give birth, and they didn’t need any help.
I kept thinking of the Sunset Rock, wishing I could walk there. I hadn’t been on the west side of the hill in weeks. If I could go there and look up the valley to the cool mountains I would feel better. I got my bonnet and put on my shoes.
“Where you going?” Pa said. He was on the porch watching Jewel and Moody play in the sand.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said.
“You stay here,” he said. He almost never did give an order, but I guess he was scared.
“Tell Hilda and Tom I went out the trail above the barn.”
“Can I come?” Jewel said. She run up and grabbed my hand.
“You stay here,” I said.
The sun was so bright it blinded me. I reckon June sun is the brightest there is. It was like the air was full of lit white dust. Everything looked on fire. The weeds was green fires, and the air white clear flames. The mountains was far blue flames.
The Truest Pleasure Page 12
