by Wiley Cash
I opened the bedroom door real quiet and looked in and saw Julie sitting up in the bed and leaning her back against some pillows. When I walked inside the room, the air coming in the open windows hit me in the face and I almost hollered out for it being so cold in there after leaving the warmth of the fire.
“I had Ben open them up,” she said. “I can’t get cooled off.”
She lay back against them pillows and tried to smile at me. Her face was wet with sweat, and her hair and gown were soaked clean through.
“Good Lord, child,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m getting on all right,” she said. “I don’t think it’ll be long now. I’m glad you’re here.” I pulled my coat tight around me and walked toward the bed.
“I’m glad I could come,” I said.
I helped her shimmy down to the bottom of the bed and hollered for Ben to find some more pillows to prop her up. He brought me a little chair, and I sat down at the foot there.
“How far apart are they?” I asked her.
“They’re right on top of each other,” she said.
I lifted up her gown and took a look, and that’s when I seen that boy’s head crowning inside that sac. “I figure to know why,” I said. “Y’all about to have you a baby here in no time flat.”
Ben went up there and took her hand, and she started in to pushing and breathing. I watched that little boy’s head come through, and I could see then he was going to be born with the caul, and sure enough, he was.
“This boy’s born for good luck,” I said. “Looky here.” I held him in my arms and lifted that little hood from his eyes, and that’s when he opened them up and blinked and looked up at me. Ben was standing right over my shoulder when he did it, and I could hear him breathing and it was so cold in there I could see his breath coming out of his mouth like smoke. I could hear Julie crying softly from up on the bed. “He’s got blue eyes just like his daddy,” I said. Ben reached down to take him out of my arms, but I stopped him.
“Not just yet,” I said. “There’s still work to do. Take that piece of string and cut it in two.” He pulled his knife out of his pocket and cut it. “Now tie one piece around the cord right here. Make sure you get it good and tight.” I motioned to the baby’s belly and watched Ben tie a knot. “Do the same on the other end,” I told him. After he’d done it I told him to get them scissors out of that boiling water and come back in the bedroom. He went in the kitchen and came back with them scissors wrapped in a towel. He looked down at the cord, and then he looked at me.
“All right, Daddy,” I told him. “Go ahead.”
BEN CLOSED THE WINDOWS, AND THE ROOM GOT TO FEELING ALMOST comfortable with the heat coming in from the fireplace in the front room. I’d pulled the chair up alongside the bed, and I sat watching Julie feed the baby. He was making little grunting noises like babies do when they’re nursing. I could see that Julie’s face looked worried.
“Why hasn’t he started crying yet?” she asked.
“You got yourself a content little boy,” I told her. “I wouldn’t get to complaining about him being too quiet just yet.”
“Something ain’t right,” she said.
“He’s fine,” I told her. “He’s a good, strong boy. He’s hungry, that’s all. Just let him eat. There’s plenty of time for crying.” I looked over at Ben where he was standing with his arms folded at the foot of the bed. He was watching Julie. “He’s a good, strong boy,” I said again. But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t so.
After delivering the afterbirth I took it into the front room to talk with Ben about what he needed to do next.
“You can use that same pot you boiled the scissors in,” I told him. “It don’t matter, but you need to boil this here into a tea and feed it to Julie and the baby. It’ll be good for them. They’re slap wore out, and they need every bit of help they can get. After you get done with it you need to dig a little hole and bury it out in the yard.”
Ben just stood there staring at the afterbirth where I held it wrapped in that towel. His eyes looked like he wanted to say something to me, but he seemed like he couldn’t figure out how to put the words together.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. He looked up at me.
“What is it that you don’t know?” I asked.
“I don’t think we’re in for that,” he said. “We’re trying to have us a Christian family, Miss Lyle. I don’t think we’re in for all that old-timey stuff. It don’t seem right.”
“Don’t seem right?” I said. “Did I not slap your behind hard enough on the day you were born? Let me tell you that it don’t matter what ‘seems,’ it matters what ‘is.’ And if I was you I’d get to digging a hole out there in that snow while I had me a pot of water boiling on the stove.”
“That ain’t our way,” he said.
“Well, I ain’t going to try and change your mind,” I told him. “But you called me up here to deliver your baby, and I done that the best I could. If you don’t want to take my advice, then you don’t have to. But like I said, I done the best I could. It’s up to you now. Ain’t going to be nobody up here but y’all, and you need to start thinking about what’s best for your family.”
“I am,” he said. “And I appreciate you coming up here, and I hope I can repay your kindness sometime.”
We stood there looking at each other for a minute, and then I tossed that towel onto the kitchen counter and went back in to check on Julie. Her eyes were closed, and she was holding the baby in her arms. They both looked to be sleeping. I took my coat off the back of the chair and closed the door softly and walked back into the front room.
“Call down to Gerty’s, if you would.”
“I will,” said Ben. “Let me get some warm clothes on, and I’ll walk down with you. Ain’t no sense in you going back down alone.”
“I can go back just the way I came,” I told him. “But I’d appreciate you calling Gerty’s boy.”
I set off down that mountain and got about halfway when I looked up to see something coming toward me in the snow, and I slowed down and thought about stepping into the woods until whatever it was had passed me by. But when it got closer I could see it was Doc Winthrop on the back of his old mule coming up the mountain to help Julie. I could’ve passed by without him even knowing it. He would’ve got himself all the way up that mountain before he realized that he’d seen him a ghost floating down Gunter in a snowstorm. But I couldn’t help saying something to him, even if he was just a drunk country doctor toting a bag of broken old instruments up a mountain in the snow. I waited until we got abreast of each other and I could hear him moaning real quiet and see the smoky breath of his old mule.
“Save that poor beast the trouble, you old sot,” I told him. “Ain’t no reason for you to go no farther.”
I heard him pull on those reins, and that mule came to a dead stop right there in the snow. I kept on walking.
“Shit,” I heard him say.
JULIE AND BEN NAMED THAT LITTLE BOY CHRISTOPHER, BUT ONLY Julie and the folks at church ever called him that. Ben always called him “Stump,” and so did just about everybody else who knew him. Julie hated that nickname like it was poisonous, and she always called him Christopher. I never once heard her call him anything else.
But she did tell me that he’d been given that nickname one afternoon when a man from the state had come out to the house to chart Ben’s burley. This wasn’t too long after they’d moved off the mountain to Mr. Gant’s house down in the holler and Ben had took to growing tobacco. I reckon he ended up a right good farmer and a downright state swindler after he got to learning that with a big smile and a few extra dollars them agents wouldn’t give him any problems about his overage. But Lord knows that wasn’t always so when he first started out.
Julie’s story went that this agent had had him the pleasure of jerking up several rows of that burley while Ben just stood there and watched, and now the dusty roots of those plants peeked out from the tailg
ate of his state truck. He stood by the back fender and charted Ben’s patches on his clipboard, and then he just crossed his arms and waited while Ben looked that chart over and read all that paperwork just as slow and careful as he could.
Now, Julie was a beautiful girl, just a fair little thing with her white skin and that blond hair—the kind of girl that’s got her admirers and probably don’t even know it for all her sweetness. Maybe she caught this man’s eye and made him turn his attention from where Ben was looking over the paperwork to where Julie’d bent to her knees in the flower bed to get at the clumps of weeds and bullgrass by the porch. Or maybe that man noticed the little boy that stood right there beside her in the flower bed with just the tips of his little fingers dusting her shoulder like it was something that needed cleaning. I don’t know what got him looking, but I figure he looked long enough to see that the boy’s deep blue eyes were fixed on the field he and Ben had just risen from on their way back up to the house.
“Hey, fella,” that man said like he expected the little boy’s head to turn toward him or his eyes to light on him where he stood by the truck. Of course Christopher didn’t move. “Hey, little man,” that agent said even louder. Now, I’ve seen some folks get flat-out embarrassed when little ones don’t pay them no mind. It ain’t a strange thing to feel that way, and I reckon this man wasn’t no different.
“That’s a quiet boy,” that agent said to Ben. Julie said she stopped pulling up the weeds and turned her head to see Ben and the agent standing in the driveway behind her. The setting sun was just beyond them, and she could only see their outlines against all that light. The man turned toward her. She could barely make out his face in the glare. “You got yourself a soft-spoken boy there,” he told her. “A deep thinker. Any little boy who can stand like a stump in a cleared field is a deep thinker.”
He laughed to himself like he was hoping that Ben and Julie would laugh with him, but Ben had finished reading and signing all that paperwork and he just handed over the clipboard and the pen to the agent.
“He’s a mute,” Ben said. “He hasn’t said a word a day in his life.”
The agent put the clipboard under his arm and dropped the pen into his breast pocket. “Now, I didn’t mean to say—” he began.
“What-all burley you took from me better get gone,” Ben said. “I don’t want to hear nothing about it taking root somewhere up the road.” He stood there and looked at the agent, and then he walked past him and crossed the yard toward the barn.
The man looked to Julie where she was still hunkered down in the flower bed. She took her bandana from the pocket of her dress and wiped the sweat off her forehead. I reckon she probably even smiled at him in an unassuming way that made him even sorrier for saying such a thing about her son.
“I swear I didn’t mean nothing by it,” the man said. He looked from Julie to the little boy whose eyes had been fixed on the field, but he saw that Christopher’s gaze had turned and set itself on the path his father had cut across the yard toward the shadow of the barn.
That child was touched, and I just don’t know what else you could call it. He never cried once as a baby, and by the time he was three years old those two kids knew he wasn’t ever going to speak. He’d hum sometimes or maybe even grunt when he wanted something, but that was about it. He was quiet, all right, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t peaceful. He could spend all day sitting still on the porch steps with just his eyes creeping around the yard to take measure of the things resting just out of line with your own gaze: the tree line, the ridge, an earthworm inching itself along through the dirt. I used to sit with him when he was just a little bitty thing, and sometimes I got to believing that I could feel his eyes on me. When I did, I’d whip my head around right quick to try and catch him staring, but I never could. I’d find him instead just sitting there with his eyes locked on a black spread of birds moving in silhouette against a bright sky or else watching the edge of the breeze rustle the dried leaves on the oaks crowding the ridge behind their little house.
It wouldn’t have really mattered one bit if Doc Winthrop had made it up to Ben and Julie’s house on time because there wasn’t no amount of doctoring by a drunk old country doctor or root working by a half-froze old woman that would’ve helped that boy a bit. I knew that much the very minute I laid eyes on him the very night he was born. But I can tell you that Ben refusing to even think about listening to me set me off, and I thought about it my whole walk down the mountain in that driving snow. You show me a woman who calls herself a Christian up in these parts, and I’ll show you a woman who knows how to heal. It ain’t un-Christian to make do when you’re poor, I can promise you that. You just show me a Christian woman up here, and I’ll show you a woman who knows what to pick and where to find it. If you don’t know how to heal yourself, then you don’t know how to live when times are hard. My great-aunt taught me that the best way she knew how, and never once had anybody told me they weren’t going to do what was best for them. Not until Ben did that very thing the night his boy was born.
You can find just about everything you’ll ever need out there in those woods if you’re willing to look hard enough, and if you’re poor, you’ll look right hard. Wild ginger calms the whooping cough and it’s jewelweed for the poison ivy, and if you’re going courting you’d best bring your bergamot for your breath and some strong, fine-looking teeth. And me, I find a good pokeweed liniment staves off the rheumatism during a chilly, rainy fall.
Now, I can’t say that boiling a tea or praying or healing would have helped that boy none, but I can tell you it wouldn’t have hurt him a lick to try, especially if you knew what you were doing and how to do it. But I can tell you there’s stuff out there that’ll kill you just as quick as you can eat it, and you’ve got to know what to look out for.
When I was a little girl, my great-aunt told me a story about a band of Confederate outliers who took to starving in the mountains north of Madison. Most of my people were Union, and couldn’t none of them have cared less about the war until it crept like a black cloud over the rim of the eastern hills. When it found them, they grew bitter quick at being forced to fight a war that wasn’t their own.
She told me the story of those outliers one day while we tended the laundry on the porch of her cabin. I’d spent the afternoon watching her hands dive in and out of a wooden basin filled with soapy water while she rubbed her raw knuckles across the aluminum washing board. I remember thinking that by now the knuckles on more delicate hands would’ve took to bleeding, and I’d heard stories of women having to rewash baskets of laundry after finding their own blood warmed by the sun in brown smears across drying sheets.
After she’d wrung that water from each piece of laundry, she’d fold it into the basket in my arms until I couldn’t hardly carry it down the steps into the yard, where I pinned the underclothes and dresses to tight lines running between two black locust posts. I’ve got some clear memories of walking the rows of billowing sheets while the image of the porch and the outline of my great-aunt’s body stood stamped upon the sunlight. Her soft voice carried down the steps and trailed out into the yard, where it disappeared between the folds of white cotton.
“Those Confederates were starving, Addie.”
I stepped from between the sheets and dragged the basket through the high grass and up to the porch. I stood by her waist and listened and waited for her to pile the heaps of wet clothes into the basket.
“They must’ve been wandering the hills for days and didn’t know no better than to eat that jimson fruit. That stuff can make you crazy until you almost want to die.
“This was back when they used to carry all the baccer into Hot Springs to cart it down the turnpike to the Asheville market. I was in town with my daddy and his crop the day those boys came down from the hills, shooting up everything and carrying on like nothing you’ve ever seen. I remember that wildness in their eyes, and my daddy told me it was jimson sure enough. He said nothing else could make a man
act like that.
“By the time those soldiers were done, they’d shot some folks in town, and the folks they didn’t kill had killed all but one of them soldiers. The one who’d survived was a boy from Gastonia who’d caught a bullet in his thigh. Folks said he’d been the only one of them Confederates without a gun, said he didn’t even look old enough to handle a rifle. He was about out of his head by the time all the shooting stopped. Some folks in town took him in and cared for him and kept him safe and hid away.
“A few days later a posse of Confederate home guard rolled through looking for those outliers who’d shot up the town, and a few days after that a band of Union came through looking for rebels. But folks kept that boy hid. They weren’t going to give him up, no matter who was looking for him. When news came from Raleigh that North Carolina had withdrawn her troops and the war was over and done, they took that boy out to the middle of town and strung him up. They hung him. Just like that.
“I saw that boy’s face when they done it. I think I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.” She quit her washing, and I watched her wet hand lift a big old grasshopper from the rim of the basin. She tossed it into the air, and I saw its wings open and catch the breeze before it disappeared.
“Why’d they kill him if they thought he was innocent?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “he was someplace he shouldn’t have been, and sometimes that’s enough.” And now, when I think about what happened to Christopher inside that church, I think the same thing.
FOURTEEN
IF SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE WANTED TO, AFTER CHRISTOPHER was born, they could’ve just stood by and watched Julie and Ben grow apart from each other real slow. It was like a tree had sprung up between them, a tree that was just too thick to throw their arms around. Julie had always been a strong Christian woman, and she got herself believing that her little boy’s being touched was a gift from God. But Ben wasn’t no mystic about it, and I reckon he saw his own quietness in that little boy, and he loved him all the more because of it. He figured silence marked Christopher as being his son in a way their blood never could.
