by Vicki Lane
“Like a dream it must have been, and that was all he ever could tell of the time he and the baby Rebekah stayed with the Little People.”
“How long were they there, Granny?” I can feel every hair on my arms standing up, and when I hug myself to keep from shivering, I can feel the goose bumps.
“Now, that’s the quarest part of all,” Granny says, her voice low and wondering, like it always is at this part of the story. “John Goingsnake always told that it was first light when he crawled into that cave with the baby on his back and the two of them curled up and went to sleep and that he woke up when he heared a rooster crow. First the rooster and then he heared a child crying and looked to see where his little Rebekah was.
“She weren’t there by him and the blanket that had wrapped her was gone. John Goingsnake couldn’t see nothing but the dirt floor and some shiny brown laurel leaves. And outside the crying went on and on.
“John Goingsnake grabbed the pack he’d laid his head on and the blanket he’d had around him and pulled them along with him as he crawled to the opening of the cave. His joints was as stiff as an old, old man’s and his head felt like it was stuffed full of moss.
“When the daylight hit his eyes, it fair dazzled him and he blinked a time or two. There, standing in the middle of the clearing, was a little girl who looked to be about seven or eight years of age. She was naked as a jaybird, but around her shoulders was a gray blanket with a blue stripe. It was just like the one he’d wrapped around the baby when they lay down in the cave except that this one was wore most to a rag, with big holes and rips in it. And around the girl’s neck was the same leather thong with the same little leather bag his own baby had worn.
“ ‘Who are you?’ John Goingsnake called out, and his voice sounded strange to him, all rusty and creaking.
“The little girl looked at him and her crying stopped. ‘Edoda,’ she said—that’s Cherokee for ‘papa’—Edoda, I thought you’d gone away too!’ And she ran to him and wrapped her little arms around him.
“Now John Goingsnake was as bumfuzzled as ever a man was. He stood there looking at this little girl who was calling him papa—this little girl who had the face of his dead wife—and he tried to make sense of what had happened. He picked up the little girl and held her to him while he turned in a slow circle to look all around. But there weren’t nothing to see except right in the center of the clearing’s mossy floor was a little ring of bare dirt, like the moss had been wore away by people doing a stomp dance. He didn’t see no sign of the baby he’d carried to this place nor sign of the soldiers who’d been following him.
“Just then there was a loud cock-a-doodle-doo and a tall speckled rooster come strutting out of the laurels. He walked right up to John Goingsnake and kindly bowed before him, wiping his beak on the moss at the man’s feet. The speckled rooster crowed once again then turned and paced slow and deliberate back to the laurels.
“The little girl squirmed out of John Goingsnake’s arms, saying ‘Edoda! It’s the guide! They said they’d be a guide!’ and without another word, she fell to her hands and knees and began to crawl, following the rooster into the laurel hell.
“John Goingsnake always said that she moved like a fox, winding and twisting through those close-knit laurels. It was all he could do to keep her in sight as he fought his way through the crookedy branches that caught in his hair and snagged his shirt, tearing it easy as if the stout homespun cloth was handkerchief muslin. He reached up to pull a hank of his hair loose from a laurel twig and was surprised to find his hair was so long.
“That was when he saw it. Right there beside him was a soldier’s coat, hanging from a branch like someone had put it there to air. It was all dirty and faded and the brass buttons that he remembered glittering in the morning light was tarnished and dull. John Goingsnake reached out to take one, thinking that a token from his enemy would be strong medicine for him. He pulled at the button and pulled again till it snapped off.
“ ‘Maybe I’ll get them all,’ thinks John Goingsnake and reaches for the next and gives a mighty tug.
“With that, the whole front of the coat fell open and a rib cage and two skeleton arms slid out of the coat and rattled to the mossy ground like a pile of dry sticks.
“John couldn’t hardly get his breath. There he was on his hands and knees with those old dry bones falling all around him. ‘Aaah! Aaah!’ he said, and looking a little beyond, he saw some more bones scattered about and an old rusting musket. Off to one side, the empty eye sockets of a half-buried skull was watching him.
“ ‘AAAAAAH!’ John Goingsnake called out and took off on his hands and knees crawling after the rooster and the little girl.”
There is a creaking sound and I turn to see Mama coming up the porch steps.
“Are you both deaf and don’t neither one of you hear that cow bawling?” she hollers. “If Poll takes the masticks and goes dry, I’ll know who to blame.”
She reaches out and catches my ear and pulls me off the stool. “Get on with that milking right now,” she says. “You can take your whupping when that’s done.”
The barn is near dark but I manage just fine. Poll settles in with her pan of corn and for a mercy don’t dance about. And when the milk is squirting into the pail, psst psst psst, I tell Poll how the story come out, so’s not to leave John Goingsnake in that laurel hell.
I tell her how John Goingsnake caught up to the girl and the rooster just as they got to the edge of the laurels and looked down the mountain to a new-built cabin and stock corral. I tell how there was a man and woman and some children out digging taters and they looked up and seen the naked Injun girl and the long-haired Injun man behind her. I tell how the rooster weren’t nowhere to be seen but the man and woman was kind and took the two Injuns into their house and cared for them.
“Then, Poll,” I say as I untie her and turn her into the stall where her calf is waiting for his supper, “then John Goingsnake finally told the folks that he was a runaway from the march to the West and that if they had a mind to turn him in, they might as well go ahead and do it.”
Poll steps over the log sill into the dark stall. I can hear her calf snorting and snuffling as it sucks on her and I can hear Poll’s rough tongue working on the calf’s fur. I stand there breathing in the smells of the warm milk and the cow dookie and the sweet scent of the hay in the loft above.
“And, Poll, when those folks asked John Goingsnake how long it had been since he’d run away from that cruel Removal march and he said he didn’t rightly know—maybe a day or two—why, they looked at one another in wonder.
“ ‘My poor friend,’ said the kind man to John Goingsnake, ‘the last Removal march to come through these parts was in 1838—seven long years past. Where have you been all that time?’ ”
Page from textbook with handwritten notes
Thomas the Rhymer
Part First
Ancient
True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank;
A ferlie he spied wi’ his ee;
And there he saw a lady bright,
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.
Her skirt was o’ the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o’ the velvet fyne,
At ilka tett of her horse’s mane
Hang fifty siller bells and nine.
* * *
“Now, ye maun go wi me,” she said,
“True Thomas, ye maun go wi me,
And ye maun serve me seven years,
Thro weal or woe as may chance to be.”
She mounted on her milk-white steed,
She’s taen True Thomas up behind,
And aye wheneer her bride rung,
The steed flew swifter than the wind.
* * *
“And see not ye that bonny road,
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
“But, Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever ye may hear or see,
For, if you speak word in Elflyn land,
Ye’ll neer get back to your ain countrie. “
O they rade on, and farther on,
And they waded thro rivers aboon the knee,
And they saw neither sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of the sea.
It was mirk, mirk night, and there was nae stern light,
And they waded thro red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed an earth
Rins thro the springs o that countrie.
Syne they came on to a garden green,
And she pu’d an apple frae a tree:
“Take this for thy wages, True Thomas,
It will give the tongue that can never lie.”
* * *
He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,
And a pair of shoes of velvet green,
And till seven years were gane and past
True Thomas on earth was never seen.
Part Second
When seven years were come and gane,
The sun blink’d fair on pool and stream;
And Thomas lay on Huntlie bank,
Like one awaken’d from a dream.
* * *
Sir Walter Scott’s adaptation of a traditional Scots
ballad (1803)—story of mortal taken by faeries to
underworld common in many cultures—
Persephone—see also Keats “Belle Dame Sans
Merci”—pop quiz/essay Friday?
Chapter 13
The Yard Dog
Dark Holler, Summer 1935
(Least)
The yard dog has run off at last.
He never had no name and Mama always kept him chained to his box, there in the middle of a big patch of bare ground so that he would bark if anyone came up the road or if a strange dog was to come loafering. It was what he was there for, she said, and twice a day I would take him some cornbread and sour milk and he would eat it and then lay back down—in the shade if it was hot or in the sun if it was cool. That was all he did—that and drag his chain around so that couldn’t no grass ever grow around his box.
But when Granny Beck taught me to read and when I read in the Baby Ray book about Baby Ray’s little dog and how it was his friend, I thought maybe the yard dog could be my friend. So I saved out some scraps from my dinner, and when Mama had gone to town, I went to where he was and tried to toll him over to where I could pet him.
No matter how I tried, that old dog would get as far away from me as his chain would reach. Or he would go in his box and not come out till I was gone, not even to eat his supper. One time when he was in there, I went to the hole at the front to see could I make friends but he just growled, low and mean-sounding, and I was afraid to put my hand out to him.
Granny Beck told me it was no good. She said being chained up all his life like that, he’d learned not to trust no one and would bite me if I fooled with him.
“The poor critter don’t know nothing but his prison,” she said and began to tell me of Snap, a little white dog she had once had. She told me how smart and friendly Snap was and how he would sit up and beg and would go fetch a stick and lay down and roll over and oh! all kinds of tricks.
The more she talked about Snap, the sorrier I begun to feel for the yard dog and I wondered, was I to turn him loose what would happen. I knowed Mama wouldn’t hold with letting him loose but it seemed to me that he might be happier if he could go free now and again. So the next time Mama was gone, while the yard dog was sleeping I crept up and undid his chain where it was hitched to the box.
“Get up, you!” I said. “I’m turning you loose. You can run and play,” I told him and I tossed the chain towards him so he could see what I had done.
He lifted his head and looked at me, then very, very slowly he got up. He begun to walk all around his patch of dirt, just a-dragging that chain after him. He must of known that he was loose, that he could go anywhere he wanted, but he never did. He circled round a few more times and went into his box.
I went into the house where Granny Beck was by the woodstove working on another rug. When I told her what I had done and how the dog wouldn’t run and play, she shook her head real sad-like.
“He don’t know how to be free,” she said and then she frowned. “I thought he offered to bite if you come near him. How did you get the chain off him?”
“It’s still on him,” I said, poking some more billets into the woodstove. “I undone it at the box.”
“Oh, honey,” she cried, “you must run and fix it back. Don’t you see? If he did run off, that chain could be the death of him was it to catch on something deep in the woods. He’d die of thirst or starve to death. Go on now, hurry!”
So I did like she said and was glad to find him in his box. “Maybe you knowed you shouldn’t go off dragging that chain,” I told him as I hitched it back. “But I’ll find a way …”
It was a few days later when Granny Beck was teaching me all the uses of catnip that I had my idea.
“… colds, to break the fever, headaches, colic—oh, there’s a many a use for this,” said she, sniffing at the sprig I’d brung her from the garden. “Small wonder folks brought it with them from the old country.”
She put the tender leaves into her mouth and begun to chew them. “They taste of spring,” she said and closed her eyes, almost like she was praying.
For a moment Granny Beck was quiet and then she said, “You can make a poultice for a sore that’s slow healing and a strong tea from the leaves will help a body to sleep.”
I couldn’t make the tea right away for the plants were not yet big enough, but when summer came and the plants grew tall and bushy with their lavender-blue flowers just a-bobbing up and down as the bees lit on them, I took a knife and cut an armful of the strong-smelling branches.
When the tea was done, I put a little honey in a cup of it and took it to Mama. Granny Beck had said it might calm Mama’s nerves, but when I offered her the cupful, Mama just laughed a hateful, unhappy laugh like always.
“What do I want with that old Injun tea?” she asked and reached for her bottle of Cordelia Ledbetter. “This suits me fine; you take that cup to that old woman and let her drink it if she thinks it’s so good.”
That night, though, when I fed the yard dog, I mixed some of the strong catnip tea into his cornbread and milk. He sniffed at it like he knew it was different somehow but in the end he lapped it all up.
Later, when I could hear Mama snoring in her room, I crept outside and saw that the dog was snoring too. He didn’t stir as I came near, and even when I laid hands on his collar, he didn’t wake.
I had decided that the thing to do was to unbuckle his collar, take it off him, and buckle it back so it would look like he had slipped out of it. It was my hope that he would go run around a little, then come back and Mama would see that he didn’t have to stay chained up all the time. Or maybe, I thought, he would just run away to somewhere he wouldn’t have to be tied up ever.
I got up early, just before first light, and slipped outside to find out was he gone. When I peeked in his box and didn’t see him, I almost laughed out loud to think of him running free. The chain and empty collar was laying there and I decided I best stretch it out tight so it would seem that he had slipped out of his collar. I caught it up and was moving slow and careful to the edge of the dirt circle when I heard a kind of whimpering sound.
There, still inside the circle, was the yard dog, crouched down and all a-tremble. When he saw that I had his collar in my hand, he begun to crawl to me, unching along on his belly till he was at my feet. Then he just lay there, making tiny little crying sounds in his throat and I seen that he wanted his collar back on.
“So he let you touch him?” Granny Beck whispered when I had told her what happened.
“I don’t understand it,” I said, as I helped her out of bed and to the chamber pot, “the minute
I got the collar back on him, he growled at me and went back in his house.”
“He’s been on that chain all his life,” said she. “I reckon he can’t feature any other way to live.”
Mama never did know what I was about with the yard dog. Every night I would let him loose—after a while, he grew used to me and I didn’t have to use the catnip tea to make him sleep—and every morning I would find him still there, still laying in that old dirt circle, and I would put the collar back on. I began to grow aggravated at him for not seeing that he could be free and had almost made up my mind to give it up, when one morning I found him outside of the circle, sniffing at the grass.
I stayed just as quiet, hoping he would go on and take to the woods, but then he caught sight of me and went back and lay down, half in and half out of his box.
When I put the collar on him, I whispered to him of the woods and the mountaintop and all the things a free dog might do, but once more he just put his head between his front paws and heaved a big old sigh like he was wore out.
“It ain’t no use,” I told Granny Beck while Mama was up at the little house. “He’d just as soon stay tied up, I believe.”
She looked at me for the longest time without a word. Then she put her head on one side. “Tell me, Least, have you ever thought of going away from here?”
Just then Mama come back in the house, fussing because the bees was making a nest under the step stone at the back porch.
“I hate them things,” she said. “It seems likes there’s more and more every year. This evening, Least, when they’re all in their nest, I want you to dash some lamp oil down the hole and kill them, every one.”
I did like Mama said—poured the lamp oil down the hole. I had to for she would be expecting to smell it still in the morning. But I waited till she was dozing over her tonic and then I sung the Calling Song, telling the Little Things there was danger and they must go somewhere else. They come out one by one till there was a great cloud of them hanging in the air, humming and quivering just above my head.
