by Rilla Askew
“Reckon what she wants?” Jonaphrene whispered. Her eyes followed the woman’s back.
Mattie didn’t answer. She thought, She will kill me.
She knew the woman was an Indian. The muslin dress and Confederate blanket were like those she had seen on the pig trails coming into the Territory, and she thought not of the round face coming down in the darkness but of Indians dressed in white people’s clothing, walking the rutted wagontrails in groups of families, smoking in front of their cabins, the dried November cornstalks rustling in rows in their fields. The images blurred behind her eyes: blue humps of mountains rolling fast past the wagon, trails winding, twisting back on themselves, and yet always west, west into Eye Tee, and Papa driven in his mad way toward his brother, stopping to ask, again, and again, and the dark men with their black eyes and black mustaches pointing with their faces, talking low in their throats, and Lyda bawling in her lap and sometimes laughing, her mouth open, her little teeth white in her laughing mouth. She had to shut it! She had to cut the memory fast. She stuck her tongue into the side of her jaw and bit it. Jonaphrene made a small sound, a little whining sound, and shrugged her shoulder hard. Mattie loosened her hand again, and they waited, the two of them quite still, quite quiet, standing in the wind and cold sun.
They waited a long time before Jessie stepped out the back door onto the log porch below and called to them. Frowning, she looked all directions before she finally lifted her eyes and saw them. She motioned impatiently, great circular swoops with her arm, and the sisters started down the path along the ridge toward the house, the elder’s hand on the younger’s shoulder, the younger a half step in front and off a little to the side. The girl knew her aunt had sent for the woman. She thought it must be, at last, to kill her off like a crooked mule.
It took a moment for her eyes to adapt to the darkness inside the log house. The first thing she saw was a cleared space in the middle of the floor and the woman and Jessie standing in the center. Jessie was holding Thomas, and the boy was wriggling, pushing out at her with stiff arms, trying to get down. There was a smell in the room, a strange smell, like certain soft fungi that grow on dying branches, and on the hook above the fireplace was a small iron pot. The room was empty, the square open, and Mattie didn’t know what it meant, if the woman would wrestle her down in the open square of the room to ring her neck like a pullet in a barnyard. Then she saw her cousins lined up on the far wall by the fireplace. They’d been scrubbing the floor with wood ashes—each of them wore the mark of it: four pairs of hands, four foreheads, four aprons, smudged black with ashes—though they were not then on their knees scrubbing but standing in a sooty row against the wall, staring. The girl saw then that the empty space was only created by the eating table having been pushed back for the floor scrubbing, with the cane chairs stacked on top of it, and so the cleared place did not seem to her so strange. She breathed.
The cousins stared at the two sisters, completely silent, and it was this silence that broke into the girl’s shell and made her want to laugh. Jessie’s daughters were never silent, under no condition but sleeping, and in this they were not like their mother but like their father, who almost never, waking, shut up. Now the four of them not only stood silent, but the four identical smudged faces were joined in unison as their eyes swept back and forth from the short, round-faced woman to the two girls standing with their arms linked in the middle of the bare floor. Back the eight eyes would sweep to the top of the Choctaw woman’s head, back again to the sisters, and around again. For an instant, Mattie saw the silliness of it, the four ash-marked faces, rolling eyes. Later she would come to believe that it was just this—these four female cousins staring and sweeping their eyes in union, their mouths open, their tongues stopped—that tricked her into opening her left hand to receive the clay cup when the woman stepped forward and held it out. The cup was not Jessie’s, it was not one of her mother’s, but a rude hand-molded cup the same muddy color as the woman’s shawl. Mattie did not protest but took it when the woman handed it to her, thinking, My size. She is my size nearly. The woman went quickly past her and stood by the back door. Mattie turned to look. The woman made a move with her head, twisting her mouth a little, but Mattie didn’t know what she meant. She looked at her sister, but Jonaphrene was not looking at her. Her eyes were on the Indian woman.
Jessie said, “Drink it.”
Mattie looked at the woman again, and the woman moved her head again.
Jessie said, “Drink it, child! Hurry up.”
The girl held the smooth lip of the cup to her mouth, and it was warm, the liquid smelled of rot or musk and a little of the sharp tang of rust, and she believed surely it was poison. It was for her death, she understood that. She heard her sister’s breath suck in sharply. Her aunt said, “Oh, for the love of Pete, child!” Mattie could hear the disgust, the impatience and fear in her aunt’s voice, but it wasn’t that. It was the titter against the back wall, like the rustle of roosting birds ready to burst forth, startled, and fly in all directions. She knew the cousins would break out laughing, she could feel it coming, and so she drank the liquid down quickly, in defiance, though she believed it would kill her; she drank it warm and fast. She couldn’t close her throat on it. Bile rose, the whole of her intestines sliding, swelling into her throat, Jessie shouting, “Look out, look out now!” and her sister twisting away from her grip, crying, Thomas shrieking. The girl turned her face from the cup, the dark stink of the room spinning. She vomited loose and hot, splattering on the cold puncheon floor.
The woman came again the next morning, and yet again. Mattie did not know what hour she would come, and so when she went outside with her sister, she held her eyes west, knowing the woman would come, if not that hour then the next one, waiting each minute and watching in dread until at last she would see her walking, small, not along the road but straight across the land toward her. She didn’t know the woman’s name. She didn’t know the woman was part Creek and part Choctaw, nor even that such mattered. Her father had told her she must drink what the woman gave her; he said it would make her well, which the girl did not believe. She thought her father was deceived by his brother, who was deceived by Jessie, who hated the children in her fearful heart, because the girl believed she had seen the truth in her aunt on the night her father carried her downstairs.
But she drank the woman’s medicine anyway, allowed the woman to sing over her and smoke her, and she could not have said why, because it was not faith; it was not obedience. She believed she would die. She thought the woman would kill her, and it was not in any manner she had dreamed or heard of concerning Indians; it was not her legs hacked off, it was not being scalped or staked alive on a red-ant hill. The girl understood that she would never walk forward in a straight line to do what she must do and had been charged to do, and in her soul was the bleak rot of uselessness and despair, and so when the woman came, she drank what was given her to drink, did all the woman showed her to do, not because her father had told her to but because she did not care.
After the first morning, the woman did not go in the log house anymore but built a fire in a cleared place in the yard and hung the small iron pot above it; she would take peeled roots from the leather satchel she carried and put them in the kettle, and when the drink was darkly black, she would take it off the fire and kneel on the earth, facing east, and blow through a hollow reed into the bowl. After a while she would begin to sing, high and deep and complicated in her throat, and to the girl it sounded as if the woman’s tongue was a foot in the back her mouth. In time, the woman would pour the dark liquid into the clay cup, one-third full, and give it to Mattie, and when the girl had vomited she would give her another cup to drink which was not rotting but bitter, but it stayed in her stomach. The girl would drink the second cup, and the woman would carry the little iron kettle to the foot-deep hole she had dug in the yard the first day and put it in the bottom of the hole; she would lay a plank and a thin blanket across it and make Mattie lie
down over the kettle, her ears and throat over the kettle, and the woman would make smoke from smoldering cedar and blow the sweet smoke over the girl’s face and throat four times, and then she would let her get up. She would speak to her in that unfathomable tongue, and the girl did not understand her, but the woman would nod as if she did and turn and walk off to the west over the tree-stump-ridden land.
Four times the woman came, four mornings in succession. There was no change except that in the girl the hopelessness grew worse. And then on the fifth morning, after her father had gone out the door with his cold biscuit and no gloves on, before the others came down, in the gray before first light, she awoke, and she knew there was change.
She lay motionless for a long time, trying to find it or feel it within herself, but all she could sense was a lightness, a weight gone, until at last she rolled from the pallet. She stood up slowly, as she always stood, her hand to the stones, ready for the room to reel. The others were asleep, all the household, even her sister. Mattie walked her hands up the rock face of the fireplace and stood slowly. The floor did not fall away from her. The log walls held still.
A week later the girl left the house in the early morning just after her father. She watched him as he let himself out the front door into the cold predawn darkness, and then she slid silently from the pallet, carefully, so as not to waken the others, and crept past the cold cookstove to the back door. She hoisted the oak bar from the slot quietly, the weight of the wooden bar so dense the girl hardly could lift it, and she pushed with all her force, the leather hinges creaking, and went out the split-log door. She stood a moment in the darkness beneath the porch overhang, thinking nothing, waiting, her nostrils quivering as she read the air. Abruptly she turned her face to the northeast and stepped down off the porch.
Frost crunched in the crackling grass beneath her bare feet; her breath moved before her. The sun was not yet risen, but violet light eased east over the valley smoked gray with winter—and yet turning, the girl could feel the hoop turning—as she climbed directly, in a straight line, along the rise east of the log house toward Toms Mountain. The dark hulk of the barn grew bigger, the side of it flat and black in the not-yet-light, and the girl walked directly toward it as if she’d been bidden.
This was the first barn, the one that Fayette dredged up out of roughhewn within weeks of coming to Big Waddy Crossing and had never bothered to chink. The one Mattie had watched from the porch ledge on the day she’d first emerged from the log house. It sat where the land turns to rock and jumps up toward Toms Mountain, though perhaps no one but Fayette himself would have called it a barn; it was more a shed nearly: two log walls linked by a rough shingle roof. A person could stand a hundred yards down from it and fire a shot straight through to the shaggy foot of the mountain. Already Fayette had plans to build a grand new one of native sandstone on top of the ridge beside the path where the sisters walked. He had never intended the first barn to be anything but temporary, any more than he’d intended the log house to be home to his wife and sons forever, but the girl had no thought of that, or of anything, walking toward it in the cold dawn light, barefoot in her cousin’s nightgown with no bonnet on, her head sleek as a squirrel’s.
She climbed on the slant, and the side of the barn angled and turned toward her so that she could see the rough wedge of paler mountain sliding into view through the open mouth. Her breath would not come right. Her leg muscles trembled. But she went on, turned the corner to the back side or, rather, the east side of the barn, away from the house, and she saw then what she had come for. The wagon was aligned perpendicularly with the barn wall, a little off north and east toward the blackjacks, and hidden. It could not be seen unless a person climbed the rise, as the girl had done, and walked around to the back side of the shed barn to see it. The wagonsheet had been stripped from the overjet so that the bows stretched like ribs from a carcass laid open against the rose winter sky. The tongue lay flat upon the ground. The wheels were stopped with big rocks. The bed was entirely empty, but for the iron cookstove square in the center, peculiar, rusting beneath the hoops in the heart of the splintered wood.
The girl stood in the cold with the sky cracking light over the valley. She looked at it only; she didn’t move to touch it or smell it. She knew it was her father who had pulled out each pot and quilt and blanket. Her father who had peeled back the wagonsheet, as it was he who first laid it over the frame, as it was he who built the overjet and stretched the bows arcing. It was her father who had dragged the wagon by the tongue up the rough slope and hidden it behind his brother’s shabby barn, away from the eyes of his children. She knew it was her father’s hands that had stripped it, but she did not know why.
The sun slid above the world’s rim then, just east, so that the land at once bronzed and turned golden, the brittle ribs turning amber; so that even the gnarled blackjacks, toed down on the mountain, began to take on color, their shriveled brown leaves and black bark glowing orange in the sun’s light. The girl stood in the light a moment, expressionless, blinking a little in the brightness, and then she turned and went back to the house.
I did not comprehend that it was all gone—not just our clothes so that we had to wear the scent and feel of others, but all of it—every piece of our lives brought with us from Kentucky. I couldn’t comprehend anything except that our home, which was the wagon, which had been the wagon for a year and better—a tenth of my lifetime—had been stripped bare and left out to weather while I slept powerless in the red darkness and walked crazy and bounced wall-to-wall, while I paraded back and forth on the ridge with my hand on my sister. I made up my mind, staring at the iron cookstove hunkered alone in the bed of the wagon, that I would find the secret place of our belongings, wherever it was that Papa had hid them. I imagined our blankets and boxes, Mama’s featherbed, her trunk and the food bin and the black cast-iron Dutch oven, all stacked and stored in a neighbor’s barn, or in one of the roughcut buildings in town. I thought even that he might have put them in a dry cave somewhere, back deep in the Sans Bois hills. I had only to find where he’d hid them, and then catch up Sarn and that ornery gray Delia, lead the mules to where the wagon was hidden behind Fayette’s shed barn. I had my plan and my purpose, which was all I sought, all I looked for. I would not look at what was in front of me.
I would come upon Jonaphrene sometimes, sitting alone beside the well or along the path to the privy, with her bonnet off, touching her hand to the back of her head. She’d rub her palm down it, down it, with that terrible expression, and I would go to her and say, “Quit that!” and slap Lottie’s old bonnet back around her and tie it. I wouldn’t look at that face on her, because I did not want to see it. I didn’t want to know why we still wore the cousins’ hats and blouses too big for us, Lottie’s bonnet like an upside-down feedsack on Jonaphrene and Sarah’s swallowing me, and Jim Dee chasing after Fayette’s sons in one of Fowler’s old slouch hats tied down over his ears. When Jessie put Thomas out on the back porch, she wrapped his head in a diaper square and pinned it and covered it with one of Fayette’s old stretched-out wool socks, but I would not look at him. I wouldn’t look at Jonaphrene. She’d gaze up at me while I griped at her for sitting in the sun and wind with her head bare; she’d let me tie Lottie’s bonnet on her, never blinking, the look gone now—but quick as my back was turned she’d have that bonnet off again, rubbing her hand down the back of her head. So I laid it off onto grief for her hair. I thought, She will have to get used to it, and so I quit tying Lottie’s bonnet back on her. I told myself it was like a tooth gone, how you can’t keep your tongue out of the hole until the new tooth comes, and I said to myself, When her hair comes again, it will stop. But of course it did not.
The first time I saw that look on my sister—I don’t know the words for it: there are no words; it was not an expression, though that is the closest I can say it, but more a welling up, a rising—but when I saw it, even the first time, I turned my face away. It was at supper, in the time of t
he dark swirl in the beginning. Before Thula came. Before I could walk. The room was flickering. We were sitting by the hearth, as we did then, because we didn’t eat standing with the girl cousins, because I could not. Nothing was unusual, nothing any different than normal except that Jessie had us eating by firelight because she said she meant to save coal oil, at least that, she said, with five more mouths to feed and it not yet the shank of winter. Fayette was still at the table, drinking coffee, and Jim Dee and his boys with him; the girl cousins were near the cookstove with their plates beneath their mouths, and Jessie by the sideboard, churning butter. Papa was gone. I turned once, not thinking anything except how to hide from Jessie the slimy bit of squirrel I could not get down my throat, and I saw it: the side of my sister’s face lit in firelight, her small fine face, like Mama’s, only tiny, set in china.
She gazed straight ahead, her face pale, her eyes grave in the shade of their long, straight, black lashes, her brows an even slash across her forehead, and all that dark like coal marks on her pale face because she got the best from both of them, Mama’s hair and complexion and the dark gray-green color of Papa’s eyes. I watched this thing, this look, lifting up on the surface, rising, as a blush does, only white, pale white, and solemn, the look on her solemn and still beneath the jumping shadows. I don’t know how to describe it, even yet I cannot, because I could tell you sorrow or sadness and that is nothing like what it was, because you would just have to see her. You would have to watch how it rose up from inside her at nothing and covered her, caught and held her, and she was little then, she was just a little girl. She would gaze straight ahead, her face distant, as if she was listening, and she would be just so still and inward and full of something private and sorrowful, or lost maybe; you could not say what it was. I couldn’t. Or I didn’t want to. I saw it that first night, still powerless and unknowing, and I couldn’t abide it. I sopped some of my gravy onto her dish and told her, “Eat!” I wouldn’t look at her after that.
