by James Still
And she paused, yearning to turn back. She said to herself, “Let me hear a heifer bawl or a cowbell, and I will. I’ll go fast.” The wind moaned bitterly, drafting from the ridge into the pasture. A spring freezing among the rocks mumbled, “Gutty, gutty, gutty.” She was thirsty but couldn’t find it. She discovered a rabbit’s bed in a tuft of grass, a handful of pills steaming beside it. The iron ground bore no tracks.
Up and up she clambered, hands on knees, now paying the trails no mind. She came to the pasture fence and attempted to mount. Her hands could not grasp, her feet would not obey. She slipped, and where she fell she rested. She drew her skirts over her leaden feet. She shut her eyes and the warmth of the lids burned. She heard the baby say, “Gub.”
The baby said, “Gub,” and she smiled. She heard her father ask again, “You know what ‘gub’ means? Means, get a move on, you slowpokes, and feed me.”
She must not tarry. Searching along the panels she found a rail out of catch and she squeezed into the hole. Her dress tore, a foot became bare. She recovered the shoe. The string was frozen stiff.
A stretch of sassafras and locust and sumac began the other side of the fence. She shielded her face with her arms and compelled her legs. Sometimes she had to crawl. Bind-vines hindered, sawbriers punished her garments. She dodged and twisted and wriggled a passage. The thicket gave onto a fairly level bench, clean as a barn lot, where the wind blew in fits and rushes. Beyond it the ground ascended steeply to the top.
Dusk lay among the trees when she reached the crest of the ridge. Bending against the wind she ran across the bit of plateau to where the ridge fell away north. No light broke the darkness below, no dog barked. And there was no path going down. She called amid the thresh of boughs: “Aunt Clissa! Uncle Barlow! It’s Nezzie.”
Her voice sounded unfamiliar. She cupped her hands about her mouth: “Nezzie a-calling!” Her tongue was dry and felt a great weariness. Her head dizzied. She leaned against a tree and stamped her icy feet. Tears threatened, but she did not weep. “Be a little woman,” her father had said.
A thought stirred in her mind. She must keep moving. She must find the way while there was light enough, and quickly, for the wind could not be long endured. As she hurried the narrow flat the cold found the rents in the linsey coat and pierced her bonnet. Her ears twinged, her teeth rattled together. She stopped time and again and called. The wind answered, skittering the fallen leaves and making moan the trees. Dusk thickened. Not a star showed. And presently the flat ended against a wall of rock.
How thirsty she was, how hungry. In her head she saw Aunt Clissa’s table—biscuits smoking, ham fussing in grease, apple cake rising. She heard Uncle Barlow’s invitation: “Battle out your faces and stick your heels under the table; keep your sleeves out of the gravy and eat till you split.” Then she saw the saucer of water she had left the diddles in the brooder. Her thirst was larger than her hunger.
She cowered by the wall of rock and her knees buckled. She sank to the ground and huddled there, working at the bow of her bonnet strings. Loosening the strings she chafed her ears. And she heard her father say: “A master boy, this little ’un is. Aye, he’s going somewhere in the world, I’d bet my thumb.”
Mam’s sharp voice replied, “Young ’uns don’t climb much above their raising. He’ll follow his pappy in the log woods, my opinion.”
“If that be the case, when he comes sixteen I’ll say, ‘Here,’ and reach him the broadax. He’ll make chips fly bigger’n bucket lids.”
“Nowadays young ’uns won’t tip hard work. Have to be prized out of bed mornings. He’ll not differ.”
“I figure he’ll do better in life than hoist an ax. A master boy, smart as a wasper. Make his living and not raise a sweat. He’ll amount to something, I tell you.”
Nezzie glimpsed the baby, its grave eyes staring. They fetched her up. She would go and spend the night in the brooder and be home the moment of its return. And she would drink the water in the diddles’ saucer. She retraced her steps, walking stiffly as upon johnny-walkers, holding her hands before her. The ground had vanished, the trees more recollected than seen. Overhead the boughs groaned in windy torment.
Yet she did not start down directly, for the pitch of the slope was too fearful. She tramped the flat, going back the way she had come, and farther still. She went calling and listening. No spark broke the gloom. The dogs were mute. She was chilled to the bone when she squatted at the edge of the flat and ventured to descend. She fell in a moment, fell and rolled as a ball rolls. A clump of bushes checked her.
From there to the bench she progressed backward like a crawdabber, lowering herself by elbows and knees, sparing her hands and feet. She traveled with many a pause to thresh her arms and legs and rub her ears. It seemed forever. When she reached the bench snow was spitting.
She plodded across the bench and it had the width of the world. She walked with eyes tight to shun the sting of snowflakes. She went on, sustained by her father’s voice:
“Let this chub grow up and he’ll be somebody. Old woman, you can paint yore toenails and hang ’em over the banisters, for there’ll be hired girls to do the work. Aye, he’ll see we’re tuk care of.”
“He’ll grow to manhood, and be gone. That’s about the size of it. Nowadays . . .”
Sitting on a tuft she blew her nose upon her dress tail. Then she eased herself upon the ground with her head downhill. She began squirming left and right, gaining a few inches at each effort. She wallowed a way through briery canes, stands of sumac, thorny locusts. She bumped against rocks. Her coat snagged, her breath came in gasps. When snow started falling in earnest she was barely aware of it. And after a long struggle she pressed upon the rail fence. She groped the length of two panels in search of a hole before her strength failed.
Crouched against the fence she drew herself small into her coat. She pulled the ruffle of her bonnet close about her neck and strove against sleep. The night must be waited out. “Tomorrow,” she told herself, “Pap will blow the fox horn and come for me. He will ride me on his head as he did upon an occasion.” In her mind she saw the horn above the mantelpiece, polished and brass-tipped; she saw herself perched on her father’s head like a topknot.
“What, now, is Pap doing?” She fancied him sitting by the hearth in her grandfather’s house. “What is Grandpaw up to?” He was stretched gaunt and pale on a featherbed, his eyes keen with tricks. Once he had made a trap of his shaky hands, and had urged, “Nez’, stick a finger in and feed the squirrel.” In had gone her finger and got pinched. “’T’was the squirrel bit you,” he had laughed. And seeing her grandfather she thought of his years, and she thought suddenly of the baby growing old, time perishing its cheeks, hands withering and palsying. The hateful wisdom caught at her heart and choked her throat. She clenched her jaws, trying to forget. She thought of the water in the diddles’ saucer. She dozed.
“Nezzie Hargis!”
She started, eyes wide to the dark.
“I’ll bring you a pretty. . . . Just name a thing you want.”
She trembled and her teeth chattered. She saw herself sitting the baby on her lap. It lay with its fair head against her breast.
“Name a thing . . . something your heart is set on.”
Her memory danced. She heard her father singing to quiet the baby’s fret. “Up, little horse, let’s hie to mill.” She roved in vision, beyond her father, beyond the baby, to one whose countenance was seen as through a mist. It was her mother’s face, cherished as a good dream is cherished—she who had held her in the warm, safe nest of her arms. Nezzie slept at last, laboring in sleep toward waking.
She waked to morning and her sight reached dimly across the snow. An ax hewed somewhere, the sound coming to her ears without meaning. She lifted an arm and glimpsed the gray of her hand and the bloodless fingers; she drew herself up by the fence and nodded to free her bonnet of snow. She felt no pain, only languor and thirst. The gap was three panels distant and she hobbled towar
d it. She fell. Lying on the ground she crammed snow into her mouth. Then she arose and passed under the bars, hardly needing to tilt her head.
Nezzie came down the slope. She lost a shoe and walked hippity-hop, one shoe on, one shoe off. The pasture was as feathery as a pillow. A bush plucked her bonnet, snatching it away; the bush wore the bonnet on a limb. Nezzie laughed. She was laughing when the cows climbed by, heads wreathed in a fog of breath, and when a fox horn blew afar. Her drowsiness increased. It grew until it could no longer be borne. She parted a clump of broomsage and crept inside. She clasped her knees, rounding the grass with her body. It was like a rabbit’s bed. It was a nest.
A Master Time
Wick Jarrett brought the invitation of his eldest son, Ulysses. “He’s wanting you to come enjoy a hog-kill at his place next Thursday,” Wick said. “Hit’s to be a quiet affair, a picked crowd, mostly young married folks. No old heads like me—none except Aunt Besh Lipscomb, but she won’t hinder. ’Lysses and Eldora will treat you clever. You’ll have a master time.”
Thursday fell on the eve of Old Christmas, in January, a day of bitter wind. I set off in early afternoon for Ulysses’s homeseat on Upper Logan Creek, walking the ridge to shun the mud of the valley road. By the time I reached the knob overtowering the Jarrett farm my hands and ears were numb, my feet dead weights. A sheep dog barked as I picked my way down and Ulysses opened the door and called, “Hurry in to the fire.” I knocked my shoes at the doorsteps. “Come on in,” Ulysses welcomed. “Dirt won’t hurt our floors.”
A chair awaited me. Before the living-room hearth sat Ulysses’s cousins, Pless and Leander Jarrett, his brothers-in-law, Dow Owen and John Kingry, a neighbor, Will Harrod, and the aged midwife, Aunt Besh Lipscomb, who had lived with Ulysses and Eldora since the birth of their child. From the kitchen came sounds of women’s voices.
“Crowd to the fire and thaw,” Ulysses said, “and pull off your jacket.”
“Be you a stranger?” Aunt Besh asked.
“Now, no,” Ulysses answered in my stead. “He lives over and across the mountain.”
“He’s got a tongue,” Aunt Besh reproved. And she questioned, “Was I the granny-doctor who fotched you?”
Ulysses teased, “Why, don’t you remember?”
Aunt Besh said, “I can’t recollect the whole push.”
The fellows chuckled under their breaths, laughing quietly so as not to disturb the baby sleeping on a bed in the corner.
The heat watered my eyes. My hands and feet began to ache.
“You’re frozen totally,” Aunt Besh declared. “Pull off your shoes and socks and warm your feet. Don’t be ashamed in front of an old granny.”
“Granny-doctors have seen the world and everything in it,” Ulysses said.
“Hush,” Aunt Besh cried, and as I unlaced my shoes she said, “’Lysses, he needs a dram to warm his blood.”
Ulysses shrugged. “Where’d I get it?”
“A medicine dram. Want him to catch a death cold?”
“I ought to of got a jug for the occasion,” Ulysses said. “We’re all subject to take colds. I forgot it plumb.”
“I’d vow there’s a drap somewhere.”
“This is apt to be the driest hog-kill ever was,” Ulysses said.
“Humph,” Aunt Besh scoffed.
I had my shoes on again when the wives gathered at the fire. Eldora took up the baby, scolding Ulysses. “You’d let it freeze. Its little nose is ice.” And Ulysses said, “We men, we might as well allow the petticoats to hug the coals a spell. Let’s get some air.” We followed him through the front door, and on around to the back yard. The wind tugged at us. We pulled our hats down until the brims bent our ears.
Ulysses led us into the smokehouse. “Look sharp,” he said, “and see what there is to see.” We noted the baskets of Irish and sweet potatoes, cushaws and winter squash, the shelves loaded with conserved vegetables and fruits. “Anybody give out of table stuff,” he went on, “come here and get a turn.” Will Harrod glanced about impatiently, and Dow Owen uncovered a barrel. Ulysses said, “Dow, if you want to crack walnuts, the barrel is full.” Pless and Leander Jarrett took seat on a meatbox and grinned.
“Ah, ’Lysses,” Will Harrod groaned, “quit your stalling.”
“Well, s’r,” Ulysses said, “I’ve got some sugar-top here, but it’s bad, my opinion. I hate to poison folks.” The bunch livened. Pless and Leander, knowing where to search, jumped off the saltbox and raised the lid; they lifted a churn by the ears. Will said, “Say we drink and die.” Ulysses cocked his head uncertainly at me. I said, “Go ahead, you fellows.”
A gourd dipper was passed hand to hand, and Will, on taking a swallow, yelled joyously. Ulysses cautioned, “Don’t rouse Aunt Besh. We’d never hear the last.” The gourd was eased from Dow Owen’s grasp, Ulysses reminding, “A job of work’s to do. We’ll taste lightly right now.” A jar of pickled pears was opened to straighten breaths.
We returned to the fire and the wives laughed accusingly, “Uh-huh” and “Ah-ha.” Leander’s wife clapped a hand on his shoulder, drew him near, and sniffed. She charged, “The sorry stuff and don’t deny it.”
“Pear juice,” Leander swore. “Upon my honor.”
“You’ve butchered the swine quick,” Aunt Besh said scornfully. No attention was paid to her and she jerked Ulysses’s coattail. “Are ye killing the hogs or not?”
“Can’t move a peg until the women are ready,” Ulysses answered.
“It’s you men who are piddling,” one of the women reported. “We’ve had the pots boiling an hour.”
Eldora spoke, “Who’ll mind the baby? I won’t leave it untended.”
Aunt Besh said, “Don’t leave me to watchdog it.”
Pless’s wife volunteered to stay. She was the youngest of the wives, sixteen at most.
“Aunt Besh,” Ulysses petted, “you just set and poke the fire.”
“Go kill the hogs,” Aunt Besh shrilled.
“She’s the queen,” Ulysses told us.
“Go, go.”
Ulysses got his rifle. “John,” he said, “you come help.” And they made off.
There being two hogs for slaughter we waited until the second shot before rushing toward the barn, men through the front entrance, women the rear. The hogs lay on straw, weighing between 350 to 400 pounds. The wind raced, flagging the blazes beneath three iron pots. An occasional flake of snow fell. We men scalded the carcasses in a barrel; we scraped the bristles free with knives while the women dabbled hot water to keep the hair from setting. The scraping done, gambrels were caught underneath tendons of the hind legs and the animals hefted to pole tripods; they were singed, shaved, and washed, and the toes and dewclaws removed. Ulysses and John served as butchers, and as they labored John questioned:
“Want the lights saved?”
“Yes, s’r,” Ulysses replied.
“Heart-lump?”
“Yip.”
“The particulars?”
“Nay-o.”
“Sweetbreads?”
“Fling them away and Aunt Besh will rack us. The single part she will eat.”
Will Harrod laid a claim: “The bladders are mine. I’ll make balloons.”
The sheepdog and a gang of cats dined well on refuse.
The wind checked and snow fell thicker. The women hurried indoors, carrying fresh meat to add to the supper they had been preparing nearly the day long. Ulysses and John hustled their jobs, the rest of us transporting hams, loins, shoulders, and bacon strips to the smokehouse. No hog-kill tricks were pulled. Nobody had a bloody hand wiped across his face; none dropped a wad of hog’s hair inside another’s breeches.
John complained to Ulysses, “The fellers are heading toward the smokehouse faster’n they’re coming back.”
“We’ll join ’em in a minute,” Ulysses said.
When I entered the living room Aunt Besh asked, “Got the slaughtering done finally?” And seeing I was alone she inquired, “Where are
the others?”
“They’ll come pretty soon,” I said, removing my hat and jacket and brushing the snow onto the hearth. “We put by the sweetbreads,” I added.
Aunt Besh gazed at me. Pless’s wife clasped the baby and lowered her face. Aunt Besh said, “Son, speak while ’Lysses hain’t here to drown you out. Was I the granny-doctor who fotched you into the world?”
“Aunty,” Pless’s wife entreated, “don’t embarrass the company.”
“Daren’t I ope my mouth?” Aunt Besh blurted.
I said, “Who the granny was, I never learned.”
“Unless you were born amongst the furrin I’m liable to ’a’ fotched you. I acted granny to everybody in this house, nigh everybody on Logan Creek.”
Pless’s wife blushed. She stirred in her chair, ready to flee.
“There’s a way o’ telling,” Aunt Besh went on. “I can tell whether I tied the knot.”
Up sprang Pless’s wife, clutching the infant. She ran into the kitchen.
“I wasn’t born on Logan,” I explained.
“Upon my word and honor!” Aunt Besh cried. “Are ye a heathen?”
Eldora brought the child back to the fire, and she came laughing. The husbands tramped in, Dow walking unsteadily, for he had made bold with the churn dipper. Will dandled two balloons. Hearing mirth in the kitchen John asked, “What has put the women in such good humor?”
Aunt Besh watched as a chair was shoved under Dow, and she began to wheeze and gasp. Presently Ulysses queried, “What’s the trouble, Aunt Besh?”
“My asthma’s bothering,” she said. “The cold is the fault.”
“Why, it’s tempering,” Ulysses remarked. “It’s boiling snow, but the wind’s stilling.”
“My blood is icy, no matter.”
“I’ll wrap you in a quilt.”
“No.”
“I’ll punch the fire.”
“Devil,” Aunt Besh blurted, “can’t you understand the simplest fact?”
Eldora scolded, “’Lysses stop plaguing and go make a cup of ginger stew to ease her.”
