Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Lucy Crawford was happy in her marriage. She thought the house was fine and comfortable. Her flower garden filled with color every spring and summer. She got on well with her mother-in-law, Selena, who admired the way she quilted. Onslow and Hiram liked her cooking and her quiet smile, and the way she worked steadily all day long, never seeming to hurry, but never stopping either.

  Lucy Crawford Tucker’s first child was a daughter, Mattie. Her last child was a daughter, Nancy. In between were four boys: Caleb, Buck, Samuel, and Charles.

  Charles was born in his parents’ bed in the house his grandfather built, on November 2, 1902. His sister Mattie washed him and wrapped him in a blanket because the weather had a touch of early chill to it. His grandmother poured a cup of scuppernong wine for his mother—the sweet red alcohol would strengthen her blood. His brother Samuel, who was five, put on his cap and trotted off to give the news to the men out in the fields. And that evening, his grandmother Selena, who still kept her beautiful governess’s handwriting, entered the name Charles in the family Bible.

  Charles remembered his mother—close-set blue eyes and thin blond hair pulled to a knot at her neck. He remembered her hands, long and strong with big knuckles and thick nails, always chapped, always moving, always doing something in kitchen or garden or barn. Pushing wood into the stove for more boiling water, scrubbing and scalding and cleaning. She had them all take baths on Saturday, whether they were going to church or not. (She herself didn’t go very often. A childhood spent listening to her father’s sermons had lessened her liking for services.) She brought her husband his strop and razor and held the mirror for him while he sat in the tub in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  Charles was his mother’s favorite. She kept him with her, even after Nancy, the last child, was born, holding his hand, singing to him, having him follow her step by step through all the chores. Onslow grumbled that a boy’s place was in the fields with his father and his brothers. She paid no attention. “I need him here,” she said, “now that Mattie is gone.”

  Mattie, the oldest, was living with Mr. and Mrs. Eli Smith in Logansport. Lucy had arranged it, wanting something more for her daughter than a repetition of her own childhood. Mr. Smith owned the feed store and was a deacon of the church. Mrs. Smith had taught school before she married. Mattie, the granddaughter of a minister and a governess, was happy with them. She helped in the house (they had no children), ran errands, brought Mr. Smith his dinner each noon, swept out the store twice a day, and went to school regularly. (Logansport even had a high school.) Mrs. Smith saw that she did her homework every evening on the dining room table under the big kerosene lamp.

  “Now that Mattie is gone,” Lucy repeated to Hiram, “Charles must help me. I have your parents to care for.”

  By this time Selena’s mind was so confused that she talked and laughed with invisible people and called her son, Hiram, by the name of her long-dead first husband, Seth Andrews. Onslow could still walk across the earth with the long set strides of a farmer, but he seemed not to want to. He spent good days in the shade of the apple tree in the yard, rainy ones in the corner of the kitchen, hunched inside the straps of his overalls, so thin that his shoulder blades stuck out like wings behind.

  Charles helped his mother day after day, season after season. Scald the pans, strain the milk, make the butter and the cheese, clean the springhouse. Plant the kitchen garden, water it during droughts, bucket by bucket from the well. Climb trees for apples and peaches, pick tomatoes and beans, collards and mustard, onions and turnips and potatoes. Sort them and store them. Potatoes and turnips into the root cellar. Apples to the attic, spreading them in a single layer on a floor cloth. String the field peas, still in their husks, on long threads and hang them from the rafters over the apples. “I feel much relieved,” his mother said, “to have another year put by.”

  After that, in the free and easy weeks of late fall, they picked the wild persimmons that grew in the woodlot on the far side of the pasture—small bright orange balls, pulpy flesh sweet as honey on the tongue. They never ventured very far, never beyond that woodlot. His mother wasn’t happy away from her house. Like a yo-yo on an invisible string she was pulled back to the enclosing fences and tin-roofed shelter.

  In the early mornings she had him shake up the coals in the range so she could set the breakfast pies to bake. (As they worked they chewed bits of raw fatback, the oily saltiness comforting to the tongue.) He peeled the potatoes and chopped the onions for the thick heavy stews (squirrel, or deer, or rabbit, or quail, or dove) they ate every night for supper. He made the biscuits and the cornbread. “I think you do that best,” she said to him.

  His father and the older boys came home long after dark. They washed at the pump on the back porch, combed their hair with their fingers, kicked off their mucky boots. Sometimes they were too tired to be hungry, and eating was just a chore for them, like any other chore, something that had to be done in preparation for the coming day. Afterward, they sat hunched in their chairs at the table, resting but not sleeping, eyes wide open, breathing softly and slowly, empty of motion and sound, solid and enduring and earth tired.

  Charles and his mother washed the dishes and scoured the pans, scrubbed off the top of the table, emptied the dishwater into the yard, and banked the fire for the night.

  The next day it was all to do again.

  Every spring they made soap. “I like to do this,” Charles said. “I like this.” All around the earth was beginning to stir, birds in the trees, seeds underground. He could almost hear the rustle of leaves as they unfolded themselves from the winter-bare branches.

  He got the soap boiler and set it up in the yard. He filled the ash barrel with good hardwood ash and poured buckets of fresh water into the top, collecting the lye water that dripped from the bottom drain. All winter long they had saved every bit of grease, and now his mother put it to boil with the lye water, stirring carefully and steadily with a heavy stick that had been whittled clean of bark, watching the heavy plopping bubbles rise sluggishly to the surface. She made bar soap first. “Just a little batch or it don’t harden,” she said, carefully pouring it into a shallow pan of chipped white-and-blue enamel. With an old bread knife, Charles cut it into square pieces.

  Now and then she stopped work to rub the back of his neck, just the way she would have rubbed a cat or a puppy.

  They made only two pans of bar soap. All the rest was liquid. They poured the thick brown stuff, still hot and smelling sharp and harsh and clean, into a hollowed-out log set on a low trestle under the shelter of the porch roof. They fitted a plank across the top, to keep out prying varmints. Whenever his mother needed soap, she dipped it up in a dried calabash gourd.

  Every winter, he went to school. After most of the year’s work was done, after slaughtering time, when the smokehouses dribbled their slow thin smell into the cold air, when field work was over and his father and his brothers spent all day in the barn seeing to the cattle and repairing a season’s worth of broken tack and harness and rigging, his mother sent him to school.

  School was in Winslow Junction, three miles away. His mother wanted him to ride one of the mules, but his father refused. Winter was a time of rest for the animals, a time for them to grow fat and lazy in barn and feedlot, scratching rounded sides and flanks against trees and fences, snorting in bad-tempered contentment.

  So Charles walked. Across his father’s fields, through a scrubby woodlot, cut over years before and gone to scraggly bird-sown bushes and small trees. Past the Widow Ratcliff s house—she watched for him and waved—and the Mount Olive Baptist Church. Along a razorback ridge with granite boulders higher than his head. Down one last slope to the school building. It took him more than an hour, because the ground was hard with frost and slippery with ice. Once he saw a dead dog in the baptistry behind the church. It had fallen through the ice, got caught in a tangle of myrtle and willow, and drowned.

  Winter was also the time for weddings. His sister Mattie mar
ried George Varnado, a railroad conductor from Bakersfield, an older man, a childless widower. They were married at the Smith house, where Mattie had lived for nearly five years. All the family went, dressed in their best clothes. Charles scarcely recognized his sister in her dark green silk dress and small veiled hat. The front parlor was cold with the damp of January; he shivered and couldn’t seem to stop. His shoes were much too small; he tried curling his toes under, then he tried standing back on his heels. His brother Caleb gave him a slap on the ear and told him to stand straight. After the ceremony, after the coffee and the cookies, they all walked in a solemn serious group to the railroad station—Mr. and Mrs. George Varnado were going to Atlanta for their honeymoon. Charles’s feet hurt so badly that tears streamed down his face, and people thought he was sad to see his sister leave.

  The family drove home, all together in the big wagon with two mules between the shafts. The animals were surly and restless; all mules hated cold. When the early winter dark closed in around them, his brother Caleb lit the lantern and hung it out. The yellow spot jolted and swung against the empty night. Like a star, Charles thought, a star they had made themselves. His father and his grandfather and Caleb sat on the box, shoulders jammed together, faint kerosene light outlining the edges of their hats. His grandmother, mumbling and singsonging to herself, and his mother, with the baby Nancy close under her shawl, and all the other children rode in the bed of the wagon, huddled out of the wind, wrapped in blankets. The deep ruts of the road held a dull film of ice. Charles could hear the iron wheels crunch through it. In the warmth of his blanket he noticed a faint spicy summer odor: his mother always put sweet shrub blossoms between the layers of good clothes when she stored them away in the big chest in her bedroom. He fixed his eyes on the swinging lantern, their star, sniffed the sweet leftover smells of summer, and listened to the sounds all around him: the small continuous rubbing of the planks of the wagons’s bed, the creaking of the axles shifting and shuddering over uneven ground, occasional deep loud groans from the mules, his father’s steady cheerful whistling, and his mother’s wordless singing to the baby.

  Lucy Crawford Tucker died one August morning in her flower garden, among the tall blooming cosmos. Charles found her stretched full length on the sandy red earth. She seemed asleep, the bright flowers and feathery stalks for her pillow, but her eyes were open, dulling and filming with the no color of death. The baby Nancy sat next to her, legs stuck straight out, crying silently, steadily. The tears left shiny traces across her fat cheeks, silvery like snails’ tracks.

  Lucy Tucker was buried in the cemetery of Elliott’s Ridge, with a granite marker that said LOVING WIFE AND MOTHER. All her family came from Webster County. Her father, the preacher, led the prayers and the mourning.

  Charles went on, doing all the things his mother had taught him, Nancy always with him. (At the funeral she’d shoved her hand into his, forcefully, like a kitten butting its mother.) They kept the vegetable garden, tended the cows and chickens. Nancy hunted for eggs and carried them in her basket, not cracking a single shell. The Widow Ratcliff came to do the canning; the pantry shelves filled against the winter. Caleb took a load of corn to the mill for grinding into meal. The hogs fattened. The calves took almost all of the milk now and thrived.

  He did not touch his mother’s flower garden. It shrivelled and browned, seeds falling to the ground, ungathered.

  One morning, a year later, he woke very early, long before anyone else, heart racing with fear, feet twitching. The walls of the house seemed to bend over him, pressing on him. He snatched Nancy from her pallet, ran out, through the yard, around the vegetable garden, past the corncribs, into the woodlots. He felt better there, so he put Nancy down, panting. When they had rested, the two of them went for a long walk up into the ridges and watched the sky turn light with morning. For the first time he did not fix breakfast for his father and his brothers.

  After that morning he was afraid to fall asleep, knowing what could happen in his dreams. He was afraid of the house, of the cheerful kitchen. He and Nancy stayed outside all day long, wandering, catnapping in corners of fields and woods. He still fed the chickens and turned out the cows, but he no longer tended the garden; vegetables wilted in their rows. Sometimes he forgot the milking, and the animals howled their misery. He stopped cooking altogether. His father and his brothers cursed and shouted, so he and Nancy waited in hiding until the men fixed supper for themselves and were too tired to do more than grumble.

  Mattie came. She bustled through the house, talking loudly, angrily, the small feather on her veiled hat shaking furiously. Her father and her brothers nodded silent agreement, looking embarrassed and relieved. “You are coming to live with me,” she told Nancy and Charles. “Starting right this very minute, we are going to Bakersfield.”

  George Varnado met them at the train station, still wearing his conductor’s dark uniform and cap. He shook hands with Charles and kissed Mattie and Nancy. And he smiled at the peaceful contentment in his young wife’s face. She had been lonely, with him away so much and no baby of her own to care for.

  George Varnado’s house was larger than any Charles had ever seen: two stories tall, tin-roofed porches all around, ferns hanging at the corners, geraniums lining the railings. They sat down to supper on the porch, where the evening breeze was cool with the threat of changing seasons but still smelled of honeysuckle and rose. Nancy fell asleep on the porch swing. Mattie and her husband spoke quietly together, long comfortable silences between their words. Charles ate hungrily; he’d had nothing all day. The soft white cheese in his bowl tasted exactly like his mother’s. So did the bread and butter.

  He thought of his mother now with puzzled wonderment. He remembered her lying dead, remembered the streak of red clay on her outstretched hand, the greenish tinge of her skin—the colors and shapes were bright and clear but not real anymore, more like pictures in a school reader.

  The moonflowers on the porch trellis shrivelled and dropped to the boards with small soft thuds. Mr. Varnado took out a cigar. In the match flare Charles read the name on the box: HENRY GEORGE. His sister stacked the plates and carried them away. The screen door opened and closed quietly, a kettle whistled, and the sink pump made soft sucking stroking sounds. Mr. Varnado tipped his chair back, balanced himself against the porch rail. The tiny red point of the cigar hung in the air. In the sky over the trees two stars appeared, one pale, one glistening blue. Someone walked whistling down the street. In a nearby house a baby cried, sound high and clear, as if filtered through crystal.

  In the morning, Charles stood at the window of his room (small room, he could almost touch both walls with his outstretched arms), the first he had ever had all to himself. He saw a kitchen garden where a black man hoed the neat straight rows, a washhouse and a brick-surfaced drying yard crisscrossed by clotheslines, a tall shingled cistern raised off the ground on stilts, a poultry yard, and a small barn, doors standing open. Beyond, the land sloped away to a swampy stretch of tangled brush and willow, and a small pigpen.

  Charles listened to the unfamiliar noises all around him: barking howling whining dogs, the steady unhurried clop of hooves on the street, the creak of traces and wagon wheels, the shouted games of children. Mattie called him downstairs to breakfast. She kept on calling until he found his way through the unfamiliar halls and rooms.

  Mattie took him and Nancy into the washhouse. She had fired up the copper boiler. “I usually only do this on wash day,” she explained, “but it is going to take a lot of hot water to get you two clean.” She cut their hair very short, fine-tooth combed it, and then rubbed coal tar into their scalps. She soaked them one by one in the tin washtub and scrubbed at them with a bar of yellow-brown soap. “Now you can get dressed.”

  He had never seen these clothes before.

  Mattie chuckled at his astonishment. “The people at church, they got these things together for you, so you could look respectable when you go to school and not be a shame to me and Mr. Varn
ado.”

  So he began his new life—in a strange house, in a strange town, dressed in other people’s clothes. Some of them, the jacket, the corduroy shirt, the wool knickers, still smelled of other people’s bodies. Charles Tucker walked into an unfamiliar world, enclosed in other people’s wrappings.

  For the first few weeks, he did not go to school. “You look just too pitiful,” Mattie said to him, “thin little twitching thing that you are. People’ll be saying Mr. Varnado can’t feed his family.…Anyway, the school won’t take you with Indian Fire sores all over your face. You got to stay home till they dry up.”

  Every morning after milking—Mattie did that herself, singing, her voice muffled by the animal’s flank—they strained the milk and put it away to settle and separate. (When there was enough cream, she would churn.) Then they drove the three beasts to the pasture lot Mr. Varnado owned on the lower slopes of Tower Hill. There would be plenty of grass there well into the winter.

  The first time they went, he and Mattie, and Nancy tagging behind, they climbed to the very top of the hill. “That’s where you live,” Mattie said. Bakersfield was spread out below them, a jumble of houses and yards and brick buildings and steepled churches, streets crowded with wagons and people, railroad lines running in all directions like snarls of wool. “Look at it now,” Mattie said. “But don’t you dare come back here and stand gawking when you bring the cows out by yourself. There won’t be any time for wasting like that. You’ll have to hurry to get to school.”