by Rilla Askew
I packed whatever I could find to pack and put it away in the wagon. I kept Jonaphrene with me working and threatened Little Jim Dee we would leave him if he didn’t stay close by. I’d told the children we were going on to Eye Tee any day now, any minute, and so they had that excitement in them and it carried all through the camp. Even Thomas was stirred up, though of course he was too little to understand Eye Tee, but he followed me around talking that language he talked all the time then, and he’d try to do whatever I was doing and I’d have to slap his hands to keep him from trying to help. I hoarded food from the woman Misely and lied to her and said the field peas were all gone, we’d used up the cornmeal, was there any potatoes left? and on and on such.
Oh, that was my sure secret preparation, how I worked on the woman Misely. I was always after her for more food, and I quit combing my hair and Jonaphrene’s and I never washed any of the children or even my own self, so she had to stay on me all the time. All along I told her about Uncle Fay and Aunt Jessie, and I told her lies about Aunt Jessie like she was a gracious and Christian woman, which was not in any way a true fact. Because I knew the woman Misely was weary near unto death of us, and I took Jonaphrene and Little Jim Dee in on my secret so that when she was around they were a hundred times worse. I knew she wanted to be shed of us, wanted that with her whole worn-out being, but would not just stop on her own from coming, though I did not understand why. So I told her Aunt Jessie was waiting for us—I drew my mouth down pitiful when I told it—poor Aunt Jessie standing at her door looking out from her new house in Eye Tee, wondering whatever happened to her dear little five nieces and nephews she loved so very much. Oh, I could see that working on the woman Misely, and I believed she would work on her husband and he would work on Papa and so we could all head out for Eye Tee. That was what I thought. The urgency was in me as bad as it ever was in Papa, and yes, Papa worked like a madman, but his work was useless, all Papa’s work went to no end. And as fierce as he worked on his too-big bed frames and chifforobes, that’s how fierce I worked—he could not hold me a light to go by—and me just a little girl, and sneaking besides. I did it all in secret, Papa nor no grown-up understood what I was doing. I have to admit I still carry pride in my heart over that.
Mama’s tin box had completely disappeared from my thoughts then. It just blinked out in those short gray days, and soon even the remembery of the memory of it did not enter my head. But it was always like that, Mama’s secret box, from the beginning till the end of it, a glinting fleet thing like a will-o’-the-wisp, like marshfire, that could appear and disappear of its own doing and would only just come when the weather was right. At that time, in those shrinking cold days of work and my pulse drumming, the weather in my spirit was in no way hospitable to Mama’s secret, because I had one thought in my mind only: that colored woman was witching my sister and I knew it and I could not see a thing in this world I could do about it except get us all every one down from those evil mountains and gone to Eye Tee, and I did not care that my mama had made up her mind to die rather than live there, because inside me the change had already come.
If I watched before for the colored woman coming up the track and along the water’s edge in her light headwrap and brown dress and blue knitted shawl held tightly closed with one fist showing at the throat line, now I watched for her every waking moment, even when it was not time, even at supper, when she was gone for the day and would not be back to feed the baby until morning. While I worked, furious, rushing hard to get the preparations done, I watched for her, my senses on the track rising from the pine woods and not on what I was doing, and when Thomas would come up and touch me, I’d jump nearly out of my skin and have to slap him. Even in my bed in the wagon, staring straight up into the darkness with the children breathing slow beside me, I watched for her, sick to my soul with loathing and dread. She had more power to make fear in me even than Indians, because I thought if she could witch my sister so and witch me in those moments, she could come as a ghost spirit in the night. Maybe she would come singing or humming round our wagon in the darkness and turn me and the children into—I didn’t know what. I could not name or put shape to what I was afraid she might do to us or make us become, but it was terrible, terrible, and it was dark, like her, and full of darkness more terrible than the vision I’d had in the lean-to.
I owned one kind of fear then, one kind primarily. I did not yet know the evils of the human heart, did not know you could cry and rail against God and have no more power than an insect over drouth or fever or blood kin turning against you. I did not know that your beloved could be snatched from you in the drawing of a breath, in the frigid new-moon darkness of a January night. Yes, I knew about Mama, but my mother’s death was too big, it was the guiding force of my existence, then and always, and I could no more see it than I could see gravity. I didn’t yet have the sense in me that death was the condition of all life, and so I did not fear it. And I did not much fear bears or panthers or cottonmouths, because I’d seen Papa kill too many, knew they were just blood and entrails that could be torn apart with a lead ball or a cartridge shell. What I feared above all in that time was this: the Devil, ghosts, haunts, robbers, Injins, the I-Will, niggers, soul-catchers, Satan’s Army, and witches.
I stood trembling, waiting in the real times when I knew she would come, my throat so tight I could not swallow because I had lain awake dreading and fearing her hollow humming all through the night, and each morning, each evening, I suffered a start when her rising and falling shoulders first appeared through the scraggling limbs at the path’s turn, because I could not reconcile the thin colored woman picking her way up the track toward me with the dark power I’d witnessed in the lean-to on that morning. Still, I never doubted. I would shove the little startled sense aside and keep my eyes upon her. If she made the lightest sidestep to avoid a tree root, I’d suck in my breath like she’d raised her arms to fly. When she came into the yard and made her way toward the lean-to, I’d watch her the way you’d watch a chicken snake crawling toward the coop and you without a hoe handy to kill it. At the same time I had all these other pulls pulling at me, the list I’d made up and carried in my head to get the work done, and that list getting longer instead of shorter so that I might at once be thinking about where I last saw Papa’s pickaxe and shovel, we’d need them for sure in Eye Tee, and quick as anything I’d tell myself I better send Jonaphrene hunting Jim Dee, I hadn’t heard him yelling in over an hour, and that would get me off thinking about what in the world was I going to do with Jonaphrene when it came time to comb her hair out, because it was a pure snarl from not being brushed and braided, and Jonaphrene’s hair so thick like Mama’s you could hardly get a brush through it anyhow and I might just have to cut it off and start over once we got to Eye Tee, then I’d begin to imagine how I might have to tie her down to make her let me do that, though of course, how it turned out, I never had to worry about that, and then here’d be Thomas trying to put the Dutch oven back on the fire, lifting that huge heavy black thing by the handle with both hands and stumbling toward the fire with it and me yelling from across the clearing, running, and him dropping it, scared, bawling, and our cornmeal mush, which would be all the breakfast and dinner both we’d have to our name, going splat yellow like vomit all over the brown oak leaves and pine cones on the floor of the clearing, and here that colored woman would just pick Lyda up like a laundry bundle from off the pallet and duck into the lean-to with my sister to cast her witchery upon her, and this all would happen so fast I just couldn’t hold it. I could not hold a rein on all I needed to hold a rein to.
But I never once quit trying. I had the idea I could throw my mind and quick hands like a spun web around all these parts, and draw the children and the work and the planning and maybe even the terrible darkness under my control. I just kept on, kept on, until at last the getting ready was done, or at least done to the degree that I cared about, because I knew we would not take Papa’s too-big furniture and I didn’t care re
ally about what was left in the lean-to that I could not yet pack and store in the wagon because then Papa would know what I was planning, or rather I did not care about any of it except Mama’s trunk, and I had my secret plan about that. Then there was nothing for me to do but wait, and you know waiting is the hardest task in the world for a child, though I had not the least notion in the world of myself as a child, but I was that, and the waiting was finally the worst part of that whole dread time, worse even than the nights in the wagon, staring up into the dark and listening for her. Because I had a new fear and it was of a different kind: I did not believe the preparation could stand still. I feared that if we did not leave soon, the little web I had spun would begin to fray itself in waiting and start to unravel.
I would think and think what I could do to force Papa, and if not force him then what could I do to go around him, and I would come back time and time again to the fact that even if I knew or could find out where was Eye Tee, even if me and the children could get there by just heading down along the fading track into the pine woods (and oh, they were terrible in my mind, those pine woods, and how they swallowed Uncle Fayette and Aunt Jessie, how they allowed to creep forth every morning, every evening, that black woman) and on down out of the mountains and west, even if I was willing to go off and leave Papa in order to save the children from witchery, the fact was, we could not walk to Eye Tee. There was one other truth I cared little to admit, and that truth was this: I might with the help of a feedbag full of shorts and a solid tree stump get old Sarn harnessed to the wagon, but that contentious pestle-tail mule Delia was never while she breathed going to allow me within ten feet of her. No human hand had ever touched her but Papa’s, and she meant to see to it that none ever did. I could not manage without Papa. And Papa would not come. I decided that this, too, was the work of that woman. It came to me that the colored woman had, sometime when I was not looking, witched Papa, witched Delia—witched all of us, to keep us there in those mountains. I pondered upon this, pondered it, until I knew what I had to do.
On the last morning we lived in those mountains, I went out early to catch that nigger woman down the hill where the little rocky track disappeared into the pine trees. I cannot now tell you what I thought I would do with her once I’d caught her. I knew only—and this not in words or understanding but just living drenched in the sense of it —that I feared her and dreaded her and felt her presence waking and sleeping and believed her to be the source of all my family’s trouble, and that I longed toward her the way you long to what you can never know or touch. May be that I thought I would finally know something of her. May be I intended to leave her caught there till she chewed her foot off like a trapped animal, or maybe I thought I would kill her. Sometimes I think I just meant to frighten her off. I don’t know what I thought; I know only that my going to the track on that morning had no more to do with me deciding to go than my coming on the journey with Mama and Papa had to do with me wanting to come. I had some notion in hand, doubtless, some plan or idea or talk I was going to talk, but what I made up in my young mind and told myself does not matter, because I was compelled to go hide behind a tree to catch that nigger as sure as I was compelled to boss Jonaphrene and slap Thomas and love my family beyond all reason or telling, not because they were the most important thing but because they were the only thing, the complete full rounded world to me, and I never had choice over it any more than I had choice over my dun eyes or big teeth or straight hair.
I set out early, before the night fog lifted, before anybody was up. In the cold bluegray dark I crawled out from the wagon. It was not yet quite light enough to see, or only light enough to make out lighter shapes in the night mist, but I told myself never mind over that, because the evening before, I’d put the traps handy by the near wheel at the back of the wagon and wrapped them in the last shred of pink blanket so they would not clink. I touched my hand along the rim of the wagonwheel to the ground and felt for them in the dark, and they were just as I’d left them. They clinked only a little, muffled in the blanket, when I pulled them up to myself and hugged them. I went slow and urgent, feeling with my pinched feet along the swept yard toward the track, thinking nothing except to make no noise, to not wake up Dan and Ringo on the other side of the wagon by the lean-to, and to get away from the yard before Papa came out. I had threatened Jonaphrene in the dark in the wagon to stay close to camp and keep an eye on the children and she’d better not say pea turkey to Papa or I’d snatch her baldheaded when I got back, and she’d mumbled and kicked at me and rolled over toward Thomas, and I never even knew if she heard me, but it was all coming to the end then and I didn’t really care.
The dawn birds were not yet even calling. My feet found the track sure enough, but as I left the yard and started along it, the fog closed in thicker so that no matter how wide I opened my eyes I could not see a hair’s breadth in front. For all my fear of Papa waking up and coming out of the lean-to and catching me—and I did not know what he would do then but I feared it—I had to ease along the track like a terrapin, holding the traps tight to my chest and trying to shush my own breathing. I heard rustling now and then off to the side in the underbrush, and I would think bear, I’d think coyote, wolf, panther, rabid coon, and still I went on, my eyes open and sightless as Grandma Billie’s, feeling the earth with my feet.
When I believed myself close to the place low on the mountain where the track ran into the pine woods, I stopped and waited a long time, waited what seemed like forever, and I began to think I had to have come far enough, and then I thought, No, maybe not, maybe not yet. I had to be sure, and so I waited. The little rustles and skitters kept up here and there in the distance, in the murky darkness, and I was afraid. I feared the colored woman, that she would come floating in the fogbound air like a banshee, feared Ringo, that he would wake up and start howling and so wake up Papa. I feared a snake crawling over my feet, or an owl swooping down upon me, or a she-bear who would scent me and come for me as that one had come for Papa on the day Mama died. Above all I feared that the woman would come as she always came, picking her way along the track in her light headwrap and dark shawl, and I would not be ready.
More than once I thought of turning and running in the thick mist back up the track to our yard. I don’t know what kept me there. I wish I did know. Maybe I just thought I had that job to do, I believe that’s how I looked at it, and a job in front of you left no choice but to get it done. What I had to do was to hold still and wait for the light to break enough so that even in that fog on the mountain I could see where I was. In time—I don’t know how long: same as distance and sound and space in that murkiness, time was distorted—but in time the fog began to lighten, and by this I do not mean that it got thinner but that it began to turn white. Sun was rising, and my heart lifted with the whitening, but it was not what I could see but what I heard that made me know I had not gone down the mountain far enough. I heard a dog scratching, his foot hitting the dirt thuthuthuthuthut, his ears flapping when he shook his head. I heard the wssssk of Papa’s suspenders as he slid them up over his shirt. I had not gone far at all, only fifteen or twenty yards down the track maybe, and my heart, beating so fast already, beat even faster. Hurrying, so that the dogs might not smell me and start in to baying, but with all stealth and quietude so those old hound dogs might not hear me, I rushed down the mountain on the faint two-lane track.
I hid myself the good way I knew how from hunting with Papa, blended myself up close to an old pignut hickory and held still like a piece of the mountain, waiting patient and stony as you’d wait for a deer. I had that feeling, you know, that excitement, that breath-holding, keen-eared anticipation, and the blood pounding and the smell of mist and dead leaves and earth and fresh pine, but my hands felt too empty. I wished then I had Papa’s muzzle loader. I believe to this day if I’d had Papa’s gun with me I would have shot that woman when she first came out from between the trees and it all would’ve been different, but for some reason I never t
hought of Papa’s gun when I set out to catch her but only the bear trap. The other trap, the smaller one Papa used for muskrats and beavers, I took only because I saw it on the ground next to the bear trap when I was sneaking it away from Papa’s tools, but it was a good thing I took it, because no matter what strength and force I put to the bear trap, I could not pry the jaws open, though I tried till I sweated in the cool white fog and grew faint from the blood swelling behind my eyes. So I set the beaver trap, which took as much strength as I had anyhow, hurrying, the jaws big around as my thigh, and I covered it up with oak leaves on the pathway and moved back through the gauze and hid. The small clump of leaves was hardly visible, but I felt it, hot and cold, burning in the white mist like it belonged to me, and I watched that place on the track.
When it came to be full light, the fog thinned some and fell back gray. I could hear Little Jim Dee above the trickling sound of the water, yelling that rebel yell he’d made up or heard along the way in Tennessee someplace, and once I thought I heard Papa’s voice calling me, but I shut my ears to it and it didn’t last long, and then it was just the crows and jaybirds and water in the early morning, not so very cold on that morning but just damp and gray like always, and I could not see down the creekbed very far. The shag bark of that old hickory was rough at my breastbone, even through Mama’s thick wool shawl. My toes ached from where they were curled under against themselves, but I would not move to try to ease it but only chastened myself for going barefoot all summer and letting my feet get too big. Hold still, Hold still, Hold still, I told myself over and over in my mind like a song. I bit down on the inside of my jaw to stop the ache in my toes from getting so bad as to make me shuffle in the dry fallen hickory. I knew how to wait quiet for quarry. That was one kind of waiting I could do. I’d learned that patience from Papa. You could never be a good hunter if you didn’t know that.
