The Day of Small Things

by Vicki Lane

  He tells me that he decided to walk down the branch to see if the store might be open for he was of a mind to buy some meal and side meat if they had it. The rats had been at the meal in the kitchen bin and we’d not had bread all this while.

  “The store was open,” he says, “and there was several fellows setting by the fire and jawing. When I come in, one of them knowed me for I had done some work for him last year. He hollered out to ask what I was doing over this way.”

  Luther goes to peeling one of the oranges and my mouth begins to water at the sharp sweet smell. Brother used to get me an orange for Christmas.

  “What did you tell him?” I ask, feeling that all the rest of my life is hanging on the next words he speaks.

  He pulls the orange apart in sections and puts one to my lips.

  “Well,” says he, “I remembered what you said, about the note you left, saying you was gone to your brother’s. So I told those fellers that we met by chance on the train, both of us coming back to Marshall County, and we found that we agreed so well that we got off and got married in Asheville.”

  I bite into the orange section and the taste of it is like joy in my mouth.

  “So this is what we do—we give out that you’ve been at your brother’s all this time, and you and me go into town and get married tomorrow or as soon as we can.”

  I throw my arms around him and kiss him with my orange-tasting mouth while he goes on talking.

  “You’ll likely heir this place, you and your brothers and sisters, and we’ll stay here till I can fix us a new house down by the road. You’ve been away from folks too long.”

  He kisses me gentle-like and says, “All that other, we’ll forget all about it and start new.”

  I kiss him back hard, my eyes a-swim with tears. He goes to building up the fire, still full of what all he heard at the store—that some say there is like to be another great war overseas, that there is to be a clinic with a doctor in Dewell Hill, that the old feed mill in Ransom caught fire but got put out in time.

  “And the High Sheriff—that one everyone hated so bad because he helped foreclose all them farms—they said he got run over by a train a few weeks back of this—killed outright, they said, and good riddance to him.”

  Chapter 32

  Burying Least

  Dark Holler, 1939

  When I learned that High Sheriff Hudson was dead, I felt like a great burden had been lifted from me. Now, I thought, there is no need to tell Luther about what happened that night by the river. I have told him about staying at Odessa and Inez’s house, and about Mr. Aaron who made sure that we would find each other again. But now Luther just looks at me with a question in his eyes when I talk about that night and the black car and the black man.

  For him, the story that is real is the story he told the people at the store, that we met on the train. When I remind him of the full moon nights up in the burying ground, he looks puzzled and scratches his head. “Well now, Birdie, if that’s how you remember it …” he will say and go to tickling and teasing of me.

  It stayed bitter cold through the end of December and it isn’t till the first week of January in the new year of nineteen and thirty-nine that the weather moderates and we can go into Asheville and stand up before the magistrate.

  There is some trouble about my age and me not having any paper to say who I am, but Luther talks to the feller real low, and when they shake hands, I see the edge of some bills sticking out between their palms before the magistrate puts his hand in his pocket and motions to me to come up to him and get married.

  We walk all around the town for we have a good bit of time before the train to Ransom goes, and we eat lunch at the S & W Cafeteria, where you can get more different things to eat than I had knowed there was. You go down a long table with all the different things there in big pans and you point at what you want. I get a piece of white meat chicken and some corn and some beans and a fancy glass that has two kinds of Jell-O in it, both red and yellow, with stiff whipped cream on top. I reckon this is the way that rich people, queens and such, eat every day.

  There is a black man dressed up fancy who carries our trays to a table and pulls out my chair for me to sit in. He seems very nice and I ask him does he know a feller named Rafe but he just shakes his head.

  I have a ring too. Before we went to the magistrate, we went to Finkelstein’s pawnshop and Luther bought me a little gold band that has leaves on it. Even while I am eating, I keep looking at my ring.

  It has been a long day. I was worried both times we had to pass through the depot at Gudger’s Stand that someone might see me and take me for Redbird Ray, but I kept my hat pulled down and my scarf up around my face against the cold and neither time did I see a familiar face. Another time it will be easier still, I think, as me and Luther walk across the bridge on our way back to Dark Holler.

  There is a full moon rising up above the mountain and the air is not so cold as it was. I had slept most of the way back, my head on Luther’s shoulder, rousing now and again to look at the gold band on my finger. Luther was dozing too and he had asked the conductor to be sure not to let us miss our stop.

  Now, though it is late, I feel wide awake. Walking in the moonlight with my husband—my husband!—is as fine a thing as I can imagine. It is hardly cold at all, the weather acting like springtime to match the feeling in my heart.

  “Luther,” I say, catching at his hand, “let’s take the road by the river and go home by way of the burying ground. I want to tell Granny Beck about us getting married.”

  “Little Bird, you are a sight on earth,” he says. “Whoever heard of a bride spending her wedding night in a graveyard?”

  But, like me, Luther is giddy with the moonlight and he gives in directly.

  “Well,” he says, “I reckon it’ll be nice to follow the river. I like to watch the way the light plays on it. But I can see I am going to be one henpecked husband.”

  By the time we are climbing the path up to the burying ground, the moon is riding high. I make my way straight to Granny Beck’s grave with its circle of five smooth stones and flatten out my palms on the earth above her heart. “Hey, Granny Beck,” I whisper. “I’m back.”

  I tell her what all has happened but not out loud for Luther is setting on a nearby stone, rolling a smoke. He sets there patient, smoking his cigarette, and when I have told her all about it and felt the warmth of her happiness and love, I rise up and go to set beside him.

  He puts his arm around me and we set there a minute without speaking. Then he says, “I been studying on things, Little Bird. All this that’s gone before, what you told me about your mama. And then the things that granny of yours taught you—Injun charms and spells.”

  I start to speak but he lays a finger against my lips. “Now, all that is part of why folks called you quare. And you living up in the holler, you and your mama keeping solitary, well, it didn’t much matter what you did. And I ain’t saying a word against your granny for I know how much she meant to you. But we are going to go to live down on the road, amongst folks, and it seems to me that, along with forgetting about when you was living at that bawdy house, it might be as well for you to forget all them witch things your granny taught you. It don’t square with scripture, Little Bird.”

  He kisses me sweet and gentle. “Will you make me that promise—for a wedding gift?”

  And so I promise.

  And in time to come I will gather up my few memories of Redbird Ray—a bracelet and a fancy pair of rhinestone hair combs—along with the first bits of writing that Granny Beck showed me, some with the words to the spells, and Luther will dig a hole up at the burying ground under the big oak and we will bury my past there—the quare girl and the dancing girl.

  In later years, when he is making markers for my angels, I take a fancy to have a marker for them girls. He shakes his head, not understanding the need I feel, but wishing to lighten my sorrow, he does like I ask and fashions the marker. On the side that is burie
d is the name Redbird and on the side looking at the sky, it says Least.

  From a diary

  Today me and Luther put an end to those girls. All that was left of them is under the big oak at the yon side of the burying ground. Birdie, says Luther, it’s the only way, and you must give yor solum promiss never to speak those names agin nor talk of them other things. And he give me this book to write in and said that I must burn the old ones. We got all our life ahead says he—a fine new begining and when you got a mess a young uns about the place youll fergit all this hateful bizniss. Then he showed me these words on his Bible and told me to copie them in this new book, to always remember.

  BLESSED IS THE MAN THAT WALKETH NOT IN THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY, NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS, NOR SITTETH IN THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL.

  BUT HIS DELIGHT IS IN THE LAW OF THE LORD, AND IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE DAY AND NIGHT.

  AND HE SHALL BE LIKE A TREE PLANTED BY THE RIVERS OF WATER, THAT BRINGETH FORTH HIS FRUIT IN HIS SEASON; HIS LEAF ALSO SHALL NOT WITHER; AND WHATSOEVER HE DOETH SHALL PROSPER.

  PART III

  Miss Birdie

  Ridley Branch, May 2007

  Chapter 33

  Looking Back

  Tuesday, May 1, 2007

  (Birdie)

  I like the sound of that—a tree by the rivers of water bringing forth fruit. And I’ll not …

  I hold the little cardboard-backed book in my hands, feeling the covers wore soft with age and handling, and them times all come rushing back. Not but seventeen years of age, new-married and new-born into a different life, when I wrote them words.

  Closing my eyes, I can see the girl I was back then, feet twisted round the legs of the kitchen chair, head bent over the page, the tip of my tongue caught betwixt my teeth, and my dark hair—“like the river by night” he called it that first time—slipping out from the pins and falling across my face. I see that girl push the hair back behind her ears and go on with her writing, printing careful as can be with her shiny yellow-painted pencil in this very book.

  My printing was getting better by then, not like in them other books where it run all crooked like the words was trying to jump off the page. I surely weren’t no hand to spell either—back in those days. Considering what my schooling was, it ain’t no wonder. But it had come to where the pencil didn’t feel all thick and clumsy in my fingers no more and I remember how I fairly marveled to see the letters springing up so quick—marching neat and straight along the thin blue lines of each page.

  Reading these words wrote so long ago, it seems like hardly no time at all has passed; seems like iffen I was to look up, I’d see Luther, setting there across the table from me, his finger lining along the verses of the Bible chapter he’s studying. In my mind I see the glow from the oil lamp, spreading soft across the pages of our books and touching Luther’s hair with copper light.

  Back then his hair was the deep dark brown of a horse chestnut, and he kept it shining clean, the prettiest hair I ever saw. Remembering back, seems like I can smell the lamp oil and hear the fluttering of the flame and the lonesome night sounds just beyond the window.

  Remembering so clear the writing of these words, the careful forming of each letter the way I had learned them—the swoop of the small f with the little dash crossing to slow it down, the round open mouth the O makes, old hissing coppersnake S, fork-in-the-road Y, and big-bottom B—it seems I am right there, back in that time and place, and I could raise my head up from this selfsame copybook and just feast my eyes upon him—Luther, young and handsome and kind as he was—and afore long he would feel my gaze and a smile would start to come across his lips. He would fight down that smile and go on studying his Bible and I would go on studying him.

  He was my Bible and I read the way his thick dark eyelashes brushed down like a moth’s wing on his sun-touched cheeks, the fine straight line of his nose, the softness of his lips, the set of his ears, so neat and close against his head, and the place there at his throat, where he’d undone his old blue work shirt in the evening heat to show that soft hollow where I could see the pulsing of his heart’s blood. I’d watch him close, not saying a word, and at last he would look up with them fine dark eyes of hisn and say, “Well, Miss Birdie, reckon we best go to bed.”

  But the pages of my copybook is all yellow and brickle with age. And when I see my hand, the pointer finger, tracing along the page, just like Luther used to do, hit ain’t the fine smooth hand that wrote these words, nor the hand that traced every part of Luther’s body, hard and smooth and soft and rough, till I had learned it all by heart. No, this here’s an old woman’s hand, the joints all gnarled and swole and the skin as wrinkled and spotted as any toad frog’s.

  “A tree by the water, bringing forth fruit …” The girl what wrote them words is turned into an old, old woman, long past the three-score-and-ten mark. And the fruit that she bore, that’s gone, and Luther’s gone too, these twenty years. But I had Luther and I had Cletus and I had my angels. And, though tempted and tried, I have kept to my promise.

  Hit weren’t easy. But I read through this book ever year, just to put me in mind of those times and my vow. Those times … and the times before … and the Threefold Law and its bitter workings.

  Now I’ve gone and lost my place. I’m right bad to wander off in memories, good and bad alike. I reckon it’s natural when you get to my age … where was I now?

  Here ’tis … bringing forth fruit and I’ll not be sorry to ferget that poor crazy girl and what she done—but … And there’s the place where I scribbled out what I wrote—my head so full of them dark deeds that just wanted to spill out but even then, young as I was, I could bridle my hand, if not my thoughts.

  There, I like to brok my solum promis alredy. So insted Ill write of the fine new house Luther is naming to build for us down near the road where the sun shines all day and ther aint all these old dark hemlocks that cries ever time the night wind stirs. Luther has already cut and hauled the timber for the house—

  It’s that very house I’m setting in as I read the words and I am wandering somewheres betwixt then and now and all the years between when the hateful old telephone sets in to ringing. I lay the book on top of the others I have there on the kitchen table, push back my chair, and stand up. At first I feel a little swimmie-headed, but after I steady myself, I make for the phone. I have been so far back in them long-ago times that it surprises me to find that I’m an old, old woman with arthritis that just now won’t hardly let me go no faster than a snail pace.

  “No, Dor’thy, I tell you I can’t do it. I made a solemn promise and I’ve held to it, all these years. You know I have—even when Cletus …”

  I close my eyes and pray for help, remembering the battle fought and the temptation overcome. Me and Dorothy has never even spoke of this though I had suspicioned she knew …

  Then I take a deep breath, steady my voice, and try to speak firm and convicted. “Dor’thy, outside of that, I’ll help you any way I can. Tell me, does the young un want to go back to live with her?”

  Dorothy just goes on yammering—louder and faster to where I can’t get a word in edgewise. All I can do is listen and nod my head and listen some more.

  They ain’t no use trying to stop her—when Dorothy’s got a bug in her bonnet, all a body can do is to let her run on till she gives out. She is a lot like her mama, who was Luther’s aunt, and a more determined somebody there never was. But good-hearted too, like all of Luther’s family.

  I recollect how when at last me and Luther got married and went to tell his kin, the womenfolk questioned and worried at me like a dog with a bone till they could place who I was and how I come to be all alone in the world. There’s many a family would have bowed up and made a girl like me feel unwelcome but that wasn’t the way of the Gentrys.

  “You be a good wife to my boy,” I mind old lady Gentry saying, “and we’ll every one of us be family to you.”

  And she kissed me on the cheek and gave me a gre
at old book that had been her daddy’s. It was called The Royal Path of Life and she said that if I would read it, along with my Bible and heed its lessons, I would do just fine.

  I blink and in that blink of an eye the years pile back on me. I am not a new-made bride, standing in Luther’s mama’s house with a heavy green-backed book in my hands; I am an old woman and a widow, standing in my own living room and holding the phone with Dorothy’s voice buzzing in my ear.

  But I can still smell the snuff on the old lady’s breath and feel the prickle of stiff hairs around her thin dry lips when she kissed me.

  “… worried sick. There’s got to be some way … Birdie, are you listening to me?”

  Dorothy has pretty well run out of things to say and at last I can get in a word.

  “Dor’thy,” I say, “you and me both know Prin ain’t a fit mother. But if the Social Services lady ain’t going to … Now, don’t take on so.… We’ll find us a way.… I’ll think on it and pray on it too.… Yes, I’m naming to go up to the cemetery this evening long about one—soon’s I have my bite of dinner. I’m a-goin’ to pick up all them ol’ wore-out flower arrangements and such and make the place look nice afore Bernice’s boy comes to mow and weed round the stones.… Naw, they ain’t no need fer you to come.…”

  When we have both said our say, I hang up the phone and try to think what to do. Not what I could do—drawing spells, warning dreams, ill wishes, and suchlike. Though Dorothy has turned my thoughts that way, I stomp them down like I was putting out the beginnings of a brushfire.

  Then I see the Bible, setting on its doily right by the telephone. I pick it up and lay it on my lap and I spread my hands on the thin black leather cover before I make my prayer. “I can’t do it without You help me, Lord.… In Thy holy name, I ask it.”