by James Still
During the short winter days the sun was feeble and pale, shining without heat. Frost lay thick in the mornings, and crusts of hard earth rose in the night on little toadstools of ice. Footsteps upon the ground rang metal-clear, and there was a pattern of furred feet where the rabbits came down out of the barren fields into the yard. My possum rolled himself into a gray ball in his pen, refusing to eat the potatoes I brought him, and then one morning I found him dead. His rusty, hairless tail was frozen as still as a stickweed. The mare grew gaunt in her stall, and there was not a wisp of straw left underfoot. I gleaned the loft of every fodder blade, and the crib of shucks. I filled the manger with cobs, but she did not gnaw upon them, choosing instead to nibble the rotting poplar logs on the wall. I led her down to Lean Neck every day, breaking a hole in the ice near the bank. After a few days she would not drink, and I began to take a bucket of water to the barn. I fed her a little corn—as much as I dared—out of our nubbin pile in the shed-room.
The cold increased and the whole valley was drawn as tight as a drum. The breaking of a bough in the wood shattered the air, the sound dropping like a plummet down the hills, striking against the icy ridges. In the evenings I took an old quilt out to the barn and covered Poppet. I dug frozen chunks of coal out of a pile beside the smokehouse for the fire, and when it seemed there was not going to be enough to last the winter through I went out on the mountain beyond the beech grove and picked up small lumps where the coal bloomed darkly under the ledge. The fire was fed from my pickings until snow fell, covering all trace of the brittle veins.
There were days when Grandma was too sick to get out of bed. I baked potatoes, fried thick slices of side meat, and cooked a corn pone in a skillet on the fire. We used the coffee grounds until there was no strength in them. When the meal gave out I shelled off some corn and ran it through the coffee grinder. It came out coarse and lumpy, but it made good bread.
As Grandma got better she would sit up in bed with a pile of pillows at her back. She slept only at night. During the day she was busy listening and counting. She knew how many knots there were in the ceiling planks. She could look at a knot a long time, and then tell you a man who had a face like it. Most of them were old folks, dead before my time, but there they were. There was one knot that looked like Uncle Jolly. Grandma used to look at it by the hour. “I’m afeared I’ll have to piddle my days out looking at this knot,” she would say.
One day she counted the stitches in the piece-quilt on her bed. They ran to a count I had never heard. “I learnt to figure,” Grandma said, “but I never learnt to read writing. My man could read afore he died, and he done all the reading and I done the figuring. We always worked our learning like a team of horses.” We had no calendar, but Grandma worked out the number of days until Uncle Jolly would get out of the penitentiary. “It’s nigh on to six hundred and fifty-five,” she said when the counting was done. The time had not seemed so long before. Now it stretched along an endless road of days.
There were hours of talk about Uncle Jolly. Grandma said he had held no old grudge against Pate Horn. Grandpa used to log with Pate before he died. Uncle Toll had married one of Pate’s daughters. It had been the dam he built across Troublesome Creek that Uncle Jolly hadn’t liked. The fish couldn’t jump it, and none could get up into Lean Neck to spawn. He sent Pate word to open up one end of the dam until the spawning season was over. Pate didn’t move a peg. Uncle Jolly went down one day and set off two sticks of dynamite under the left bank, blowing out three logs. He went down, with daylight burning, to blow that dam up.
“Jolly ought not to done it,” Grandma said. “It looks like the Lord is trying my patience in my last days when I’m weak and porely.”
Sometimes she would tell about the things Uncle Jolly had done as a boy. “Once he got a hollow log and tied a strip o’ dried bull’s hide over it,” she said. “Then he got a hickory limb and sawed on it. It sounded like a passel o’ wildcats tearing each other’s eyeballs out. Cattle all over the country jumped the rails and tuk down the hollows. The horses and mules kicked barn doors down and lit out. Oh he never meant no harm. It was just boy-mischief.”
Near the middle of December the mare stopped eating the nubbins of corn I took her. She would mull her nose in the bucket of water without drinking, and roll her moist eyes at me.
I opened her stall door and let her wander out into the midday sunlight. She did not go far, lifting her leaden hoofs through the snow, and turning from the wind. Presently she went back into the stall and stayed there with her head drooped and her eyes half closed. One morning I went out and found her stretched upon the ground. Her nose was thinly sheeted with ice. She was dead. I latched the stall door and did not go back to the barn again that winter.
January was a bell in Lean Neck Valley. The ring of an axe was a mile wide, and all passage over the spewed-up earth was lifted on the frosty air and sounded against fields of ice. Icicles as large as a man’s body hung from limestone cliffs. Grandma listened to the little sounds when her work was done. She was better now. At times when the wind was not so keen she cooked on the stove instead of the fireplace, but it was hard to keep warm in the drafty kitchen.
One Sunday Grandma heard a nag’s hoofs on the path to the house. It was Uncle Toll from Troublesome Creek. He brought a letter from Uncle Jolly and he read it to us. His face was dull with worry. Uncle Jolly was coming home. There had been a fire in the prison. “Mommy, do you reckon he broke jail during that fire?” he asked. “He ain’t nigh started his spell.”
“Jolly is liable to do anything he sets his mind to,” Grandma said. “He always had his mind sot on looking after his ol’ Mommy. I reckon he’d do anything to get out.” And now there was no joy in his coming. There was nothing to do but wait, and those three days before he came seemed longer than any count Grandma ever made.
Suddenly he was there one morning, hollering to us from the yard. There was Uncle Jolly. He had slipped up on us, and even Grandma had not heard him come. He stood there before the door, his eyes bright as a thrush’s. He had on a black suit, and a black hat with the crown pinched up sitting at an angle on his head. We sat looking at him, awed and not moving. He jumped into the room and grabbed me up in his arms, pitching me headlong toward the ceiling and bumping my head against the rafters. It hurt a little. He jerked Grandma out of her chair and swung her over the floor. She was laughing and crying together. “For God’s sake, Jolly,” she said, “don’t crack your ol’ Mommy’s ribs.”
Then he was all over the house, prying and looking. He opened up the meat box and sniffed into it. He thumped the pork shoulder we had been saving. “Ripe as a melon,” he said. “It smells like kingdom come.” He reached elbow-deep into his pocket and drew out a knife. It was a big one. With a single blade open, it was nearly a foot long. There was a blue racer carved on one side with a forked tongue. “I made that in the workshop,” he said. “They never knowed I was making it.” He swung it through the air, striking toward me. Plunk it went into the pork shoulder. Uncle Jolly was devilish like that. Grandma was already sifting out meal, and he cut off a half-dozen slices of meat to fry.
Uncle Jolly found the corn in the shed-room. He picked up one of the runted ears and pinched a grain. “Is this all you raised?” he asked. “We got some mighty pretty cushaws,” Grandma said. “The sweet taters done right well, too.”
“The mare will starve on this corn,” Jolly said. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy ol’ Poppet a sack of sweet feed mixed with molasses and bran. I reckon her teeth is wore down to the gum.”
He began to gather up some ears to take to the barn.
“Just you wait, son,” Grandma called. “Just you wait till we get dinner over.” Grandma looked hard at me. I didn’t say a word.
When we sat down to the table, Uncle Jolly began to eat with both hands. “I ain’t had a fittin meal since I left Lean Neck,” he said. He loaded his plate with shucky beans and a slice of meat, talking as he ate. “I sta
yed at Luce’s house last night,” he said. “Luce and Rilla’s got another girl-child born three weeks ago.”
Grandma laid her fork down and stirred in her chair. “Is Rilla getting along tolerable?” she asked.
“Rilla is up and doing,” Uncle Jolly said. “They named the baby after you, Mommy. They named it Lonie.”
Grandma blinked and made a little clicking noise with her teeth. “It’s good to have grandchildren growing up honoring and respecting their ol’ folks,” she said.
“Oh Uncle Jolly,” I begged, “tell us about the jail fire and how you got out.” Uncle Jolly swallowed, the raw lump of his Adam’s apple jumping in his throat. “It was the biggest fire ever was,” he said. “It caught the woodshop and tool sheds, and it was eating fast. It might o’ got the jailhouse if I hadn’t stayed there and fit it with a waterspout. Everybody else run around like a chicken with its head pinched off. Then the Governor heard how I fit the fire and never run, and he give me a pardon. He sent me word to go home.”
Grandma settled in her chair. “It was dangerous, son,” she said. “It might o’ burned up the jail. Whoever sot that fire ought to be whipped with oxhide. Some folks is everly destroying and putting nothing back. Who lit that fire, son?”
Uncle Jolly’s mouth was too full to answer. He dropped his eyes and swallowed. “I sot it, Mommy,” he said. He took another slice of meat, and heaped more beans on his plate. Grandma sat quiet and watching, her blue-veined hands clasped in her lap. Her face was sad, but her eyes were bright with wonder.
“You know what I done coming up Troublesome Creek this morning?” Uncle Jolly asked suddenly. “I pulled another log out of Pate Horn’s mill dam. There’s a good-sized hole now. The perch will be swarming into Lean Neck this spring.”
The Egg Tree
The hail of early June shredded the growing blades of corn, and a windstorm breaking over Little Angus Creek in July flattened the sloping field; but the hardy stalks rose in the hot sun, and the fat ears fruited and ripened. With the mines closed at Blackjack all winter and spring, Father had rented a farm on the hills rising from the mouth of Flaxpatch on Little Angus. We moved there during a March freeze, and the baby died that week of croup. When the sap lifted in sassafras and sourwood, Father sprouted the bush-grown patches, and ploughed deep. With corn breaking through the furrows, and the garden seeded, he left us to tend the crop, going over in Breathitt County to split rock in Brack Hogan’s quarry.
There was good seasoning in the ground. Shucks bulged on heavy corn ears. Garden furrows were cracked where potatoes pushed the earth outward in their growing. Weeds plagued the corn, and Mother took us to the fields. We were there at daylight, chopping at horsemint and crab grass with blunt hoes. Sister Euly could trash us all with a corn row. She was a beanpole, thin and quick like Mother. Fletch had grown during the summer, and his face was round as a butterball. He dug too deep, often missing the weeds and cutting the corn. Mother let him take the short rows. He slept during hot afternoons at the field’s edge, deep in a patch of tansy with bees worrying the dusty blossoms over his head.
“It’s a sight to have such a passel o’ victuals after livin’ tight as a tow-wad,” Mother said. We pickled a barrel of firm corn ears. Tomatoes ripened faster than they could be canned. The old apple trees in the bottom were burdened. We peeled and sulphured three bushels of McIntoshes. Fall beans were strung and hung with peppers and onions on the porch. The cushaws were a wonder to see, bloated with yellow flesh. The crooked-neck gourds on the lot fence grew too large for water dippers. They were just right for martin poles.
“If we stay on here I’m goin’ to have me a mess o’ martins livin’ in them gourds,” I told Mother.
“If your Poppy is a-mind to, we’ll jist settle down awhile,” Mother said. “It’s a sight the rations we’ve got.”
With the crops laid by, we cleaned up a patch of ground on the Point around the baby’s grave. Mother took up a bucket of white sand from the Flaxpatch sand bar, patting it on the mound with her hands. “We’re goin’ to have a funeralizin’ for the baby in September,” she said. “Your Poppy will be agin’ it, but we’re goin’ to, whether or no. I’ve already spoke for Brother Sim Manley. He’s comin’ all the way from Troublesome Creek. I reckon we’ve got plenty to feed everybody.”
There was nothing more to do in the garden and the fields, and during this first rest since spring, Mother began to grieve over the baby. Euly told us that she cried in the night, and slept with its gown under her pillow. We spoke quietly, and there was no noise in the house. The jarflies on the windows and the katydids outside sang above our words. With Mother suddenly on edge, and likely to cry at a word, we played all day on the hills. Euly ran the coves like a young fox, coming in before supper with a poke of chestnuts and chinquapins. She often made her dinner of pawpaws, smelling sickly sweet of them. I found her playhouse once in a haw patch. There were eight poppets made from corncobs sitting on rock chairs, eating giblets of cress from mud dishes. I skittered away, Euly never knowing I had been there.
Fletch followed me everywhere. Sometimes I hid, wanting to play by myself, and talk things out loud, but he would call until his voice hoarsened and trembled. Then I was ashamed not to answer, and I’d pretend I had just come into hollering distance. He would come running, dodging through the weeds like a puppy. There was no getting away from Fletch.
One day me and Fletch came in from the buckeye patch with our pockets loaded. Mother and Euly were working around a dead willow in the yard, stringing the twigless branches with eggshells Mother had been saving. The eggs had been broken carefully at each end, letting the whites and yolks run out. The little tree was about five feet high, and the lean branches were already nearly covered with shells.
“I allus did want me an egg tree,” Mother said. “I hear tell it’s healthy to have one growin’ in the yard. And I figger it’ll be right brightenin’ to the house with all the folks that’s comin’ to the funeralizin’. My dommers ought to lay nigh enough to kiver the last branch afore the time comes. Eggshells hain’t a grain o’ good except to prettify with.”
August lay heavy on the fields when Father came home for three days. Blooming whitetop covered the pasture before the house, and spindling stickweeds shook out their purple bonnets. Father came just before dark, and the pretty-by-nights were open and pert by the doorsill. He trudged into the yard without seeing the egg tree, or the blossoms beside the steps. He walked up on the porch, and we saw his nose was red, and his eyes watery. Mother caught him by the arm.
“It’s this damned hay fever,” Father said. “Ever’ bloom on the face o’ the earth is givin’ off dust. Sometimes hit nigh chokes me black in the face.”
He sniffled, blew his nose, and went inside with Mother. His angry voice suddenly filled the house. Mother brought out an armload of yellowrods, stick-weed blooms, and farewell-to-summer that Euly had stuck around in fruit jars.
Father’s face darkened when Mother told him about the funeralizing for the baby. “I’ve already sent on word to Preacher Sim Manley,” she said.
Father groaned. “It’s onreckonin’ what a woman’ll think about with her man off tryin’ to make a livin’,” he said. “Little Green wasn’t nigh eight months old, and thar hain’t any use of a big funeral.”
“We’ve got plenty to feed everybody,” Mother said. “I ain’t ashamed o’ what we got. We’ve done right proud this year. I’m jist gittin’ one preacher, and it’s goin’ to be a one-day funeral.”
“Thar hain’t no use askin’ anybody except our kin,” Father said. “It’ll look like we’re tryin’ to put on the dog.”
“Everybody that’s a-mind to come is asked,” Mother said. “I hain’t tryin’ to put a peck measure over the word o’ God.”
Father got up and lighted the lamp on the mantel. “We’ll feed right good down at Blackjack this winter,” he said. “I hear tell the mines is goin’ to open the middle o’ October. I’m goin’ back to Brack Hogan’s quarry
for another two weeks and then I’m quittin’. I’m longin’ to git me a pick and stick it in a coal vein. I can’t draw a good clean breath o’ air outside a mine this time o’ year. It’s like a horse tryin’ to breathe with his nose in a meal poke.”
“I was jist reckonin’ we’d stay on here another crap,” Mother said. “The mines is everly openin’ and closin’. The baby is buried here, too. And I never favored bringin’ up children in a coal camp. They’ve got enough meanness in their blood without humorin’ it. We done right good crappin’ this year. We raised a passel o’ victuals.”
“Thar’s goin’ to be good times agin in Blackjack,” Father said. “I hear they’re goin’ to pay nigh fifty cents a ton for coal loadin’. And they’re goin’ to build some new company houses, and I got my word in for one.”
Mother’s face was pale in the lamplight. “I reckon it’s my egg tree I’m hatin’ to leave,” she said. “I allus did want me one.”
“It’s fresh news to me you got one,” Father said. “I hain’t seed one since afore I married and was traipsin’ ’round on Buckhorn Creek. I wisht all the timber was egg trees. They don’t give off a grain o’ dust. This Little Angus hollow is dusty as a pea threshin’. It nigh makes a fellow sneeze his lungs out.”
“I’m a-mind to stay on here,” Mother said, her voice chilled and tight. “It’s the nighest heaven I’ve been on this earth.”
Fall came in the almanac, and the sourwood bushes were like fire on the mountains. Leaves hung bright and jaundiced on the maples. Red foxes came down the hills, prowling around our chicken house, and the hens squalled in the night. Quin Adams’s hounds hunted the ridges, their bellies thin as saw blades. Their voices came bellowing down to us in the dark hours. Once, waking suddenly, I heard a fox bark in defeat somewhere in the cove beyond Flaxpatch.
