By the time I’d eat the candy bars the rain had slacked, and as I pushed off into the river a wind sprung out of the north. The clouds was churning high above, at different heights, moving at different speeds. As I rowed, the wind begun to chop up the water, splashing me with spray off the oars. In the wind my wet clothes felt full of holes. I had to stop and try to start a fire soon. If I didn’t I might take pneumony. But the thought of looking for something dry enough to burn on the muddy banks made me keep rowing. My hands was getting numb on the oars.
By the time I reached Tarboro that afternoon I had a bad chill. I was trembly and almost too weak to guide the boat to shore. The wind had swung hard and straight out of the north and I couldn’t stop myself from shaking. I watched two black men in a lumberyard on the shore shifting around a pile of planks.
Then the bow struck something hard underwater, either a rock or a log. The boat almost turned over, and it took in the top of a wave. I dug the oars in deep, trying to balance the boat. But the current was too fast, and it spun me around again. The town with its bridge and lumberyard and the backs of stores whirled by me. The river had got higher and faster. I was already even with the town and passing it.
My left hand was so numb the oar slipped out of it, and as I lunged to catch the shaft I almost fell out of the boat. Water sloshed from end to end over my feet and through my traps, pushing the suitcase around. I wondered if there was shoals ahead that made the river faster. I grabbed the other oar with both hands and tried to paddle closer to shore. But the blade was too heavy and too narrow to get any grip on the water. I drug the oar behind like a tiller to at least make the boat point ahead and not rock so bad.
Already the town had gone whirling by, and I was no closer to the bank than before. Waves leapt up like paws trying to turn the boat over. The boat tilted so bad it felt like I was looking down at the lashing water one second and up at it the next. I thought of Mama standing by the kitchen counter, quietly kneading bread. She didn’t even know what had happened to me. Lord, I prayed, it looks like I won’t get out of this river alive.
I thought, I could be home setting by the fire. And I heard myself laughing at myself. The wind burned my face like ether and the little boat rocked on the whitecaps as waves twisted it around from one side to the other. I shoved the oar in deeper and deeper. There was six inches of water in the boat, but I couldn’t bail and paddle at the same time. The boat rode low in the water. I was going downstream fast as a stampede.
Lord, I prayed, I don’t want to die in this filthy river. If it’s your will for me to die, I know that I will. But if you spare me I’ll go back to Green River and help Mama on the place.
The boat spun around in the raging tide and I stabbed at the waves with the oar. I thrust the oar down like it was a pole to find bottom. The boat tilted and plunged and I seen the water was coming up to get me. I leaned back and then bent low to keep from falling out.
I drove the oar into the ugly water one more time and finally found the bottom. I pushed hard as I could to pole to shore. The boat swung this way and it swung that way, but finally I wrestled it into the shallows and run the prow into the mud and weeds. I figured I must be a mile below the town. I was so wore out I was shaking, and it seemed an astonishment I was still alive at all.
I clawed my way up the bank to see where I was. I was in the yard of a tobacco barn. Two men come out the door and looked at me like somebody that had rose from a grave. I tried to speak, but my teeth chattered so bad it was hard to explain my situation.
“Do you think I could leave my boat here while I go back to the station?” I finally said.
“Don’t hear nobody saying no,” one of the men said.
“Will you keep an eye on my things?” I said.
“Somebody might tote them away even with my eye on them,” the other man said.
“I’ll trust you all,” I said and tried to grin. I got the suitcase and the shotgun out of the boat. Everything was covered with mud.
“You look like you fell in the river,” one of the men said.
“I come close,” I said, “mighty close.”
I carried the shotgun and suitcase to the road and looked toward the town. Couldn’t see where the train station was at first, but as I got closer I seen the tracks and just followed them. And then I could hear the pant of an engine beyond the tobacco sheds. As I walked along, my boots squished they was so full of water. People turned to look at me. I knowed I looked wet and dirty, and when I passed a store window I didn’t even recognize myself at first. My hat was ruined by the rain and my face was black with a beard and campfire smoke. My clothes was wrinkled and muddy. I looked worser than a tramp, but there was nothing I could do about it. I walked right into the station carrying the suitcase and the broke-down shotgun.
THE SKY WAS completely clear by the time the train pulled out of Tarboro near dark. My hands shook from the chill and the moving of the train. From the window I could watch the tobacco fields and pine woods and the river in the distance go by, gold in the late sun. But however gold the river might appear at a distance, I could still smell the mud and filthy water on the suitcase and my boots. The stink of the river and its silt seemed to have soaked into my skin and under my nails. I would never forget the rancid grease smell of the river. The Tar River smelled like the muck around the slop chute of a hogpen.
As I set on the train my bones begun to warm up. I could still smell the brown river water and greasy silt somewhere in the back of my head. The train slowed and stopped in Heartsease and I looked out to see the country store where I had bought my dinner, but it was too dark to tell one building from another. I blowed my nose again and again. Mama or Fay would be milking out at the log barn, or throwing corn to the chickens. It was still light that far to the west.
I hadn’t hardly noticed the man and woman on the seat in front of me, until their voices rose so loud that other people in the car begun to look toward them. The man was a skinny little feller with a week’s growth of beard. The woman was heavy and had her hair pulled tight in a ball on top of her head. Her lips didn’t look like they had smiled in years.
“I just want to know where it is!” the woman hollered. She looked hard at the man beside her.
“I told you,” the man said. He looked around like he wished nobody was listening.
She turned away and stared out the window. We was on the stretch between Rocky Mount and Raleigh, and the train was picking up speed.
“It’s the onliest dollar I had,” the woman yelled.
“I told you,” the man said. He took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling fingers.
“You told me shit!” the woman said.
“Couldn’t help it,” the man said.
The train passed a siding where a locomotive and several flatcars loaded with pulpwood waited on a spur. A water tank shot by.
“You couldn’t help it,” the woman mocked and made a face. He looked away from her and around the car. “Bought yourself a drink,” the woman said. “That’s what you done. You can’t shit me.”
“I told you already,” the man said, not looking at her.
Suddenly the woman screamed and begun beating the side of the man’s head with her fists. He tried to dodge and his cigarette was knocked to the floor. “Ain’t nothing to eat!” the woman shouted. She grabbed a purse from her lap and swung it at the man’s face.
The man fended her off with his elbow, then turned and shoved her back with the heel of his palm in her face. The woman’s head slammed against the window. “You pissant!” she hollered.
I seen the conductor coming down the aisle. Everybody in the whole car was watching to see what he would do. I knowed that anybody misbehaving on a train could be throwed off. The conductor could stop the train and put them off beside the track if he wanted to. Conductors could do whatever they felt like.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my damp folded bills. I took a one and put the rest back in my pocket. As the conducto
r got closer I leaned forward and tapped the man on the shoulder. “Is this your money?” I said.
The man wheeled around, startled. “What?” he said.
“I found this behind your seat,” I said. “Is it yours?”
The woman grabbed the bill out of my hand before the man could answer.
“What is this?” the conductor said. He prodded the man on the shoulder with the ticket puncher. “What’s going on here?” The conductor’s belly was so big his coat wouldn’t button over his belt buckle.
“Ain’t nothing,” the man said.
“What was you all hollering about?” the conductor said.
“We was just talking,” the man said. He rubbed the back of his neck with a scarred hand.
“They lost a dollar and I found it,” I said.
The conductor glared at me, at my beard, my dirty clothes. “Don’t allow no trash to fight on this train,” he said.
“We was looking for something,” the woman said. She stared down at her lap.
“Did you find it?” the conductor said.
“Yeah,” the man said, “we found it.”
The conductor looked at the man and then at the woman, and then he looked at me. The man stared straight ahead and the woman looked at her purse. The conductor stepped forward and ground out the smoking cigarette on the floor. “Any more trouble and you all are off,” he said.
Fourteen
Muir
THAT WINTER AFTER I got back from the Tar River I laid low and worked on the place, like I’d promised the Lord I would. I split rails and built a new fence for Mama around the orchard. Mama frowned and encouraged me by turns, and Moody ribbed me, but I never did tell them I’d nearly drownded on the Tar River. I figured nobody needed to know that. I worked on the road above the spring, and I trapped a little. I couldn’t think of any other way to make money. Since I had left my traps on the Tar River, I had to buy new ones from U. G. on credit.
But it was a bad winter and I caught almost nothing in my traps. In February I had to take my pelts to U. G. He was playing checkers by the stove in the back of his store when I brought him the measly pile of furs I had. I still owed him for the traps and a box of shotgun shells I’d got the winter before that. I was ashamed to ask him for more credit.
“What say, Muir?” U. G. said. He glanced up from the checkerboard. He was playing with old Hicks Summey, who claimed he was the champion checkers player in the valley. Hicks liked to take a drink, and he liked to set at the store and play checkers.
“Not much, U. G.,” I said and laid my little bundle of furs on the counter.
“Mink didn’t run to your traps?” U. G. said.
“It was a poor season,” I said.
“Fur ain’t worth nothing anyway,” U. G. said. “There’s too much fur from Canada coming on the market.”
I owed U. G. about twenty dollars, and I hadn’t saved but five from the molasses money.
U. G. jumped his checkers over several squares on the board and picked up some pieces. “Let’s take a look at them skins,” he said. U. G. walked behind the counter and inspected each pelt I’d brought and run his fingers through the fur. “Can’t give you but eighty-five cents,” he said.
“That’s not even enough to pay what I owe you,” I said. “Ain’t got but five dollars to my name.” I took out the five-dollar bill.
U. G. looked at the furs and he looked at the bill.
“Wish I could pay you off,” I said.
U. G. stared at me so the electric light reflected off his glasses. “You look like a store clerk to me,” he said. “You can count and you’re honest. You can work off your debt, dollar a day.”
It was the last thing I expected. I never had seen myself clerking in a store. But I seen working was better than owing money to U. G. And it was better than staying home and fussing all the time with Moody. Abraham Lincoln had started out as a store clerk. And if I saved my money I could buy a ticket to get away from Green River again for good, if I wanted to.
“Here, let me get you an apron,” U. G. said.
“Are you going to play checkers or not?” Hicks hollered from the stove.
“Do I have to wear an apron?” I said.
“Apron’ll save your good clothes,” U. G. said. “Besides, an apron will make people trust you. Trick of the trade.”
SATURDAYS WAS ALWAYS the busiest days at U. G.’s store. Beginning at seven o’clock in the morning people from all over the valley and ridges up the river started stopping by in wagons and buggies, on foot, and some in cars. They brought baskets of eggs and cakes of butter wrapped in waxed paper. Sometimes they brought crates of young fryers, or old hens that had stopped laying, to trade for bolts of cloth or flour and coffee. Most people with their own cars and trucks drove on to town where their eggs and produce brought a better price and the goods they bought was a little cheaper.
As I stood behind the counter I dreaded for Annie to come into the store and see me working there. And I dreaded to see Moody too, for I didn’t want him to bother me and rile me while I was working in public.
U. G. trusted me to do everything except weigh up ginseng. He weighed ginseng hisself on his delicate little scales. “Wild sang is worth twice what cultivated sang is,” he said.
“How can you tell the difference?” I said.
“You don’t need to,” U. G. said.
“What’ll I do if somebody brings some in?” I said.
“Tell them to wait for me,” U. G. said. “Dug ginseng is hard and firm when it dries, and smooth as a seed. But sang growed in a patch dries faster and wrinkles more. Don’t have the potency of the wild.”
While U. G. played checkers, and when the store was quiet, I took a pencil and drawed on a sheet of brown wrapping paper. I drawed houses and castles and churches. I drawed steeples five and six stories high. I drawed stone walls and pointed windows.
“What are you scribbling there, Muir?” Blaine said.
“Drawing me a map to Canada,” I said.
“Thought you’d already been up north,” Blaine said.
“Might go again,” I said, “when I have the money.”
U. G. LET ME take care of about everything besides ginseng. I sold pocketknives and penknives and hunting knives out of a case in front of the counter. I sold candy bars and chewing gum to boys and girls that come in with pennies and nickels. Because he was down on the highway U. G. had electricity, and I sold cups of ice cream out of the freezer. I sold dripping Co-Colas from the cooler in the corner. There was cookies in the big clear jar on the counter, and strings of licorice, and pickles in a crock of brine.
I sold sausages too, and boiled eggs from a jar. But most of the sausage I sold was the little cans of Vienna sausage on the shelf beside the sardines. I sold soda crackers and wedges of cheese off the wheel. I sold canned salmon and sometimes canned beef. I sold taters out of bushel baskets, both sweet and Irish.
From kegs in the back of the store I scooped up nails of all pennies and weighed them. I sold hammers and hoes and shovels, picks and mattocks, scythes and swing blades. I sold pliers and wire cutters, hedge clippers and carpenter levels and saws. In the dark space in the back of the store there was sacks of dairy feed and laying mash, shorts for hogs and cottonseed meal. I liked the smell of molasses in dairy feed. I sold bags of crushed oyster shells for chickens and scratch feed for little chicks. There was oats for horses and mixes of sweet feed.
It was early spring, and U. G. had brought in a supply of seeds and fertilizer. I sold bags of guano and ammonium nitrate and nitrate of soda, 5-10-10 and 10-10-10. There was bags of bean seed and corn seed, sweet corn and field corn, pole beans and bunch beans. There was tobacco seed and squash seed, pumpkin seed and seed potatoes. There was flower seeds in little envelopes with pictures painted on them, and bulbs for dahlias and glads.
Now, there was a case behind the counter where U. G. kept medicines for sale: bottles of castor oil, Doan’s kidney pills, Black Draught laxative. There w
as medicines for worms, bottles of cough syrup and soothing syrups, boric acid for sore eyes, and peroxide for cuts, along with Mercurochrome and bismuth of violet for dressing cuts. U. G. sold rubbing alcohol and camphor, iodine and mineral oil, witch hazel and wart medicine. There was oil of cloves for toothache and ointments for piles and aching muscles.
But the things I enjoyed selling most was fishhooks and trout flies, fishing lines and coils of gut leader. U. G. sold little tin boxes of sinkers and corks for lake fishing. And there was also boxes of red and green shotgun shells, 12, 16, and 20 gauge. There was boxes of rifle cartridges, rimfire and center-fire. I sold ammo for .32-, .38-, and .45-caliber pistols.
Locked in a special case was rifles and shotguns and pistols, some new and some traded. U. G. served as a kind of pawnbroker for the valley, taking rifles and shotguns for groceries, sometimes loaning money outright on the security of a watch or a pistol.
U. G. sold watches too, both men’s and women’s, as well as alarm clocks. He sold steel traps and coils of barbed wire, clotheslines and binder’s twine. He sold tater diggers and pitchforks, turning plows and cultivators. He even had in stock a hillside plow that could be turned either right or left. He sold horse collars and trace chains, singletrees and leather harness. He sold bridles and plowlines and halters for bulls.
There was bottles of bluing and a dozen kinds of soap and washing powders on the shelves. There was bleach and lye and disinfectant. There was sewing machine oil and neat’s-foot oil, cottonseed oil and coal oil in a barrel out back. We sold scissors and thread and needles, thimbles and crochet hooks. We sold pinking shears and cloth off big rolls.
But the strangest thing I sold in U. G.’s store was kept in a chest of drawers in the back of the building. There was boxes wrapped in tissue paper where the shiny fittings for coffins was packed. If somebody making a coffin needed brass handles and hinges and corners, they come to the store. We sold shiny brass screws also, and nameplates for nailing onto the lid. In the attic of the shed behind the store U. G. even had a few factory-made coffins, but I didn’t find out about them until Aunt Alice Herrin died on the mountain and they wanted to bury her in a hurry because the weather was hot and she had gangrene.
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