Along with the smells there was grasshoppers and beetles boiling up where I swept the blade. There was dust and bits of thistle, seeds and ripped leaves flying where the weed stalks leaned backward and fell. The air was filled with moths that had been sleeping under the leaves, little white and lavender butterflies stirred up by the mowing. Spiderwebs between stalks got tore and spiders jumped out of my way or scurried along the ground between cut stalks. There was spiders along every inch of ground under the weeds, big spiders and little, black spiders and yellow spiders, garden spiders and furry spiders. There was spiders that looked like black pearls. Some resembled boats running on their oars.
Hoppers and leaf mites shook loose from the disturbed weeds and boiled up like dust. Every stalk seemed to have a meal of white and yellow lice on it if you looked close. I swept the blade close to the ground, moving ahead in half circles with every sweep. I wanted the ground to look like it had been mowed with a razor.
The handles jolted almost out of my hands and the blade rung like a sword. I’d hit a rock the size of a grapefruit and seen the white cut the blade made on the weathered rock. Weeds had mashed green stains on the rock. It was a rock I’d mowed into before. I leaned over and picked up the rock and throwed it against the side of the hogpen. The pig snorted and lunged from one side of the pen to the other.
I will not be stopped, I said to myself. I will not be stopped from building something grand. I will not be stopped from serving the Lord in my own way. Where there is not a way I will make a way. I will not be trapped on Green River. A life without a mission has no meaning. I was drunk with sweat, and I was inspired by my labor.
I raised the blade and inspected the edge in the sunlight. The metal was stained green, and leaves and pieces of stalks stuck to the wet steel. All the brightness was covered with weed juice. There was a nick in the edge where the rock had bit a gap in the sharpness. I took the whetrock and begun to sharpen the blade all over again. I couldn’t whet out the nick, but I could sharpen around it. The rock had damaged a perfect blade. A few more nicks like that and the blade would be useless. The rock had stood in my way like Moody stood in my way and like my own foolishness stood in my way. The lack of money stood in the way of my going away from Green River. I sharpened the blade like I was punishing steel. The steel felt soft and fat under the grained stone. I rasped the sides until the blade sparkled. I sharpened the nick until it was thin as a razor.
My fury made the sunlight brighter and the weeds more vivid. I could see every weed stalk; every leaf and stick of trash stood out. I seen every separate fly over the hogpen and the silvery grain of the weathered boards. I seen the chalky white butterflies whispering away and grasshoppers clicking and flinging theirselves from weed to weed like giant fleas. My anger made the air shine, and I felt the heat coming up from the weeds and moist ground. The steams and vapors from the ground rose into my face. The weeds had molten gold in their veins that burned my skin.
The big weeds was like everything else that stood in my way. I launched into the stalks, swinging harder and faster. I meant to quell the whole bank of weeds. I meant to quell the whole field. The weeds rose up at me and mocked me and resisted me. The weeds was stampeding into their lushness. The weeds rose in waves higher and higher, about to wash over and bury me in a great flood that would drown every path and clearing, every field and road. Weeds tossed out arms and vines of morning glories caught on bushes and trees. Briars raked everything that passed, catching rabbit fur and fox fur. Big canes of blackberry briars shot up like fountains, crawling with chiggers, and swirled around in bins, washing away in currents over the other weeds.
I’ll churn things up and make them alive, I thought.
A foam and a froth of flowers, a swirl of petals and pollen, honeydew and honeybees, tangles and locked arms, tied the vegetation in knots and caught the blade in wads and clots of fiber. I swung the blade harder and harder, cutting weed stalks big as sticks and juicy saplings. I cut skunk cabbage and catbriars and little thorn trees that had volunteered. I cut pine seedlings and mowed rank on rank of hogweed and queen of the meadow. The weeds was taller than I was. I was mowing in their shadow. I felt like a swordsman fighting a whole army. I slashed and slashed with my blade wider than a cavalry saber. I swung farther and deeper into the advancing line.
Something hit me on the cheek hard as a bullet. I turned and seen it was a hornet. Another come at me and I ducked. And then I seen the nest stuck like a loaf of gray paper between two big weed stalks. The paper was crumpled and looked like a brain ripped open. I swung the blade and cut the nest in two. And then I raised the scythe and slammed the end down, crushing the nest like a paper melon. Another hornet drove a spike into my forehead. I seen the nest was filled with hornets and grubs, like a pod full of seeds. I turned and jumped away, pulling the mowing blade after me.
When I turned to look back, hornets was boiling up around the broke nest. They rose in a black fizz, and the pig squealed like it had been stung, and lunged against the side of the pen. The nest was hard to see because it was right at the edge of the wall of weeds where I had stopped mowing. I hurried to the shed beside the corncrib and got a tin can of coal oil from a jug of lamp fuel. Then I checked my pocket to make sure I had matches. The scent of kerosene was like smelling salts in the hot air. Go careful, I said to myself. Go slow because you are stung and riled up. A hornet shot past my cheek as I tossed the kerosene on the paper of the nest.
Standing far back as I could, I struck a match and tossed it. But soon as the match hit the weeds it went out. I lit another one and pitched it slower. This time the flame flickered and started to spread across the stubble. With a whoosh the fire climbed up into the biggest piece of the nest.
The flame leapt higher into the uncut weeds, but in the bright sunlight I couldn’t hardly see it. Smoke filled the pulsing air. And along with the hum and roar of the hornets I heard a crackling. At first I thought it was the weed stalks popping, or the joints of the stalks. But there was a crack, and I seen a hornet circle in the flame and fall away. There was a snap, and a hiss like a drop of grease hitting a hot pan. The hornets raged faster and more frantic. They was so angry they wouldn’t leave the ruins of the nest. They flung at the fire and attacked the flames. As they touched the fire they busted like popcorn. Splat! And ssss! I wished I had another can of fuel to throw and burn them up.
But I was quick ashamed of myself. That is what anger will get you into, I said. Anger will destroy, or make you destroy. Anger will make you roar and crack open like the nest of hornets. Anger will turn you into a fool.
The fire smoldered out in the green weeds as soon as the kerosene was burned up.
I backed away and took up the mowing blade and whetrock that was so hot in the sun they almost burned my hands. It was late morning and I had maybe half an acre to mow before dinnertime. Below the hogpen there was big weeds crowding along the edge of the cornfield all the way to the river. Most of the weeds appeared to be in flower, reaching out to show their blossoms to the sun. I put the whetrock in my pocket and turned backward, facing the hogpen. I mowed backward like somebody rowing.
I felt I was swimming in sweat. The sweat flowed over me, trickling and licking. The sweat was carrying all the poisons and anger out of me. The sweat was washing me from the inside. Sweat was a baptism from within, bleeding out the fester of rage. The sweat was cleansing me of the resentment for all that stood in my way.
I was soaked in sweat by the time I reached the end of the field and quit for dinner. I felt wrapped in sweat as I walked to the house. I was so wet, I thought I might go swimming. But I knowed that was a bad idea, to plunge into the river when you was red-hot. Instead, I stopped by the springhouse and dashed water on my face and arms and on the back of my neck. That cooled me off some, and I listened to water from the pipe murmur like it was quoting Scripture.
Four
Ginny
THE FIRST TIME I knowed Moody was in the liquor business was when he was about s
ixteen. Tom had never had nothing to do with liquor, and Papa had only took a drink from time to time when he felt peaked. I liked to take a dram myself to settle my nerves but never had done no drinking in front of the younguns.
Moody kept going down to U. G.’s store in the afternoon instead of working on the place, and he come back later and later. Sometimes he come back after the rest of us was in bed. And in the morning he’d look washed out, like he had worked all night instead of sleeping.
“Moody, why do you lay out so late?” I said to him.
“Coon hunting with Wheeler,” he said.
Back then, it was true that him and his friends Drayton and Wheeler used to hunt coons on moonlit nights. Wheeler had some old coonhounds that roamed around the mountains half the night while the boys set by a fire and listened. And they sometimes cooked a chicken they had stole from somebody’s henhouse.
“You can’t be coon hunting every night,” I said. Moody looked so wore out and acted so irritable I was afraid he was sick. He was always skinny but had fell off a few pounds too.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with hunting,” he said.
“How can you help Muir in the fields if you’re always wore out?” I said.
Over the past few months Moody had worked less and less and Muir had done more and more. It was Muir that pulled the fodder and chopped the wood and made the molasses to sell at the cotton mill. Me and Muir done the milking and boiled the sorghum, so I let Muir, who was only thirteen, keep half the money he got from selling syrup. That made Moody mad.
“Why don’t I get no molasses money?” Moody snapped.
The next time I went out to the smokehouse where we kept the jugs of molasses, I seen one had fell off the shelf and broke. The sorghum had spilled out over the dirt in a tongue of glistening brown. I didn’t think it fell off the shelf by itself, but I didn’t say nothing.
THE NEXT TIME U. G. come by to bring a bag of shorts I’d ordered for the hog, I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “You’re getting more work out of Moody these days than I am.”
“He ain’t working for me,” U. G. said. I knowed that; I just wanted him to talk about Moody.
“I wish I knowed where he went at night,” I said. “He’s only sixteen.”
“I wish I didn’t know,” U. G. said. U. G. was about seven years older than Moody, and he had always been like a son to me. He was short and strong, built like a pony. He wore silver-rimmed glasses that flashed in the sun.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Don’t want to be no tattletale,” U. G. said.
“I’m his mama,” I said. “I have a right to know what’s happening to my boy.”
U. G. looked at the ground and shook his head. He drug his toe across the dirt of the yard like he was drawing a line. “Ain’t none of my business,” he said.
“What kind of meanness has Moody got into?” I said. My stomach felt so sour I thought I was going to throw up.
“I think he’s working for Peg Early,” U. G. said.
“What is he doing for Peg Early?” I said. But in my heart I already knowed. Peg Early was the biggest bootlegger down in Chestnut Springs. Her husband had been in the liquor business for years and years, and when he died Peg took over herself and made it even bigger. There was all kinds of rumors about Peg Early, that she paid off the police, including the federal revenuers, that she run houses of ill repute in Chestnut Springs, as well as cockfights and gambling joints. Rumor was that anybody that crossed her would disappear. A shudder passed through me down to my toes. It was also said that Peg Early went regular to church and give a lot of money to the North Fork Baptist.
“What would Peg Early want with a boy like Moody?” I said.
U. G. said Peg used boys to carry liquor across the state line at night. She would pay them two dollars for every five gallons they lugged from Possum Holler across the gap into North Carolina. All they had to do was leave it in a thicket before daylight, and Peg would be there in her roadster to pay them. I asked why she wouldn’t carry the liquor up the mountain in a truck.
“No reason to take the risk,” U. G. said. “She’s covered on every front. She has at least two dozen men working for her.”
I was so alarmed I couldn’t sleep after U. G. told me that. I had lost my husband, and I had lost my pa, and I had lost my older girl, Jewel, to the 1918 flu, and here my oldest son was getting hisself into trouble, bad trouble. My family had never lived outside the law. I felt like something had slipped loose down in my guts. I had to think what to do. If I throwed it up to him, what U. G. had said, Moody would just deny everything. That’s the way he was. Moody would never own up to his doings. I’d have to try another way.
“I want you to stay home tonight,” I said to Moody the next day.
“Ain’t no little youngun,” Moody said.
“You need more sleep,” I said. “You’ll get sick at this rate.”
“You want me to get down on my knees and say my prayers?” Moody said and laughed.
“You will stunt your growth,” I said. Moody was poor as a whippoorwill. He had never put on no weight.
That evening Moody was gone same as usual. He didn’t pay a bit of attention to me. He was too big to whip, and I was afraid he was too big and too angry to control. What is a mama to do with a big boy that don’t mind her? My pa had never had such trouble with his boys.
Nothing I had done before seemed to be of any help. Everything I had learned from raising younguns appeared to be useless. It was my job to look after Moody and to keep him out of trouble. Everything I done or said seemed to make it worse.
One morning when Moody got up I seen he had a black eye and a cut on his cheek. He looked so tired he was bent over. He wouldn’t look at me straight. “You have been hurt,” I said.
“Run into a tree,” Moody said.
“You have been in a fight,” Muir said.
“Shut up,” Moody said, and shoved Muir back against the kitchen wall.
“Stop that,” I said. “Let me put some camphor on that,” I said to Moody.
But Moody wouldn’t let me touch the black eye or the cut. He jerked away from me and slipped out the back door.
One night soon after that Moody didn’t come home at all. He didn’t appear at the breakfast table, and when I asked Muir where Moody was, Muir said he hadn’t seen him. I can still remember the raw pain that sliced through me. I couldn’t go ahead with my work that day, and I didn’t know where to look for him. I got my bonnet from the nail by the door. “I’m going to the store,” I said.
“Can I go?” Fay said. Fay looked more like Moody than anybody else in the family.
“You stay here,” I said.
It always made me a little nervous to go to U. G.’s store by myself. Maybe it was because Hicks Summey and Charlie and Blaine and others was always setting around the store and playing checkers. The store was a man’s place. I always felt they was staring at me when I went in there. Some women knowed how to joke with the men and carry on at the store, but I never did. Florrie could talk to the men there by the stove as easy as in her own kitchen.
When I got to the store U. G. was weighing ginseng for old Broadus Carter. It was as pretty an October day as you’ll ever see, but dark in the store, and smelling of coffee and leather from the harnesses U. G. sold. U. G. put the roots that looked like a man’s private parts in a pan on the scale, and he moved the weight down the markings on the arm. He slid the weight a little, then pushed it back a little. “Can’t give you but nine dollars,” he said to Broadus.
“That is prime sang,” Broadus said. “You know that is prime.”
“It’s garden growed,” U. G. said.
“I dug it myself backside of Pinnacle,” Broadus said.
“It’s garden growed,” U. G. said and held up a root that was wrinkled and withered.
“Maybe some of it is garden growed,” Broadus said.
U. G. counted out a five and four ones into Broadus’s hand.
“I’m looking for Moody,” I said soon as Broadus left.
U. G. looked at Hicks Summey and then back at me. “He was here yesterday evening,” Hicks said. Hicks was always hanging around U. G.’s store, and he looked like he had had a drink.
“He never come home last night,” I said. I felt an awful chill in my bones, even though it was a mild fall day. I shivered and my voice shook.
U. G. said Moody had left the store before dark with Wheeler and Drayton.
“Where did he go?” I said.
U. G. looked at the ginseng he had bought, and he looked at the men setting by the stove. It was ten o’clock in the morning and I knowed he had a lot of work to do. U. G. was one of the hardest-working men I knowed. He worked as hard as my husband Tom had.
“I’m worried sick,” I said.
U. G. took a key out of his pocket and opened a tin box. There was shelves and compartments in the box and he placed the ginseng Broadus had brought him in one of the trays. “I might know where Moody is,” U. G. said.
U. G. asked Hicks and Charlie and Blaine to leave, and then he locked up the store. He was so dedicated to business I knowed it pained him to do that. It pained me to ask him to help, but I didn’t have no choice.
We got into U. G.’s pickup truck and drove south on the highway. We crossed the river and drove up into the flats of the Lewis place. The highway turned sharp downward at the state line, dropping down into the gloom of Possum Holler and the sickening curves of the Winding Stairs. I had a shudder of dread when I thought of Dark Corner and Chestnut Springs. Ever since Pa had took me to the Indian doctor down there when I was seventeen, I thought it was a place of fearful goings-on.
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