by Davis Grubb
And so they went back to the river and sat by the skiff until the wild, Indian paintbox colors of a river sunset swarmed against the west and the day shut like a door in their faces and they were alone with a cool breeze soughing in from the silent, flowing stream. Yet John was reluctant to embark again in the skiff. He felt a physical need to spend a night on land, with floor boards and earth beneath. The river was too beguiling and treacherous in her female moods of gently passing shadows and strange voices floating crystal-sharp across the ripples and lights passing like fallen stars among the dark, distant trees. Pearl yawned and suddenly the moon rose round and full across the river in the bluffs.
Come on, Pearl, he sighed, rising and reaching for her hand.
Are we going home, John?
He remembered a barn he had seen in another farm up the river road: a gray frame building set back three hundred yards from the home of its owner, under the green umbrella of an enormous sycamore. Down in the farmhouse someone was playing a mouth harp and a girl was singing and the lamp in the kitchen window was a dusty orange glow and John yearned, for an instant, for the kindness of a room and the sound of a voice that was loving kin.
Are we going to stay in that big house, John?
Shhhhh! Hush, Pearl! Yes!
That’s a funny house.
It ain’t a house, Pearl. It’s a barn.
Pearl’s nose itched and burned at the smell of the big house. Inside it she heard the gentle nudge and stamp of the cows and turned to John aghast and quaking.
John! There’s big dogs!
Them’s cows, he said gently. They won’t hurt.
He found the ladder to the hayloft and showed Pearl how to climb it and presently they were settled in a great, prickling bed of sweet, fresh timothy with a fine broad window that surveyed the vast and silent bottomlands for miles on either side and beyond it the dark river. The moon swung high above the valley, lighting it almost to the brightness of dusk, making the river a shining ribbon of black glass and touching the spreading night meadows with the dust of its illumination.
Now, Pearl, warned John sternly, don’t go near that big door yonder. That’s where they put the hay in. If you was to fall out of there you’d kill yourself sure.
At his warning she shrank back and hugged him and they fell asleep thus, among the aromatic hay, while down in the meadows a whippoorwill cried and whooped its liquid laments and country yard dogs barked and quarreled in the faraway stillnesses. John had not been sleeping more than an instant until he heard it—faint yet distinct on the barely stirring air. He opened his eyes. The moon had not moved: it stood where it had been when his eyes had closed: half obscured by the beam and pulley which jutted over the aperture. Pearl had not heard, did not stir, asleep in untroubled conscience with her thumb between her pouting lips and the doll cuddled sweetly in the cradle of her arms. John half rose and stared off into the moonlit valley. Nothing moved, nothing stirred upon the ruts and dung clusters of the deserted barnyard, nor upon the far moonlit arena of the valley as far as his eyes could see. Yet as plain and clear as the song of the now-stilled field bird had been he had heard the faint, sweet rise of that unforgettable voice.
Leaning, leaning! Safe and secure from all alarms!
Leaning, leaning! Leaning on the everlasting arms!
John held his breath, harking, and then breathed it out quickly and breathed in again, holding it so that he could listen again, his eyes burning and straining through the dust of moonlight, ready to pick out the tiniest motion anywhere upon the vast, spreading tableland between the barn and the river. It was as clear and distinct now as if the tiny voice were in the mountain of hay at his elbow, and then suddenly in the distance John saw him on the road, emerging suddenly from behind a tall growth of redbud half a mile away: a man on a huge field horse, moving slowly and yet with a dreadful plodding deliberation up the feathery dust of the river road. The figure of the man and horse were as tiny as toys in that perspective and yet, even in those diminished proportions, John could make out each dreadful and evil line of those familiar shoulders. Now in a dozen farms on both sides of the river the hound dogs had come out to bark at the sound of the singing, and a tan beagle bitch emerged suddenly from beneath the porch of the farmhouse just below the barn and raced braying to the gate to herald the singer’s passing. But the singing did not stop and the figure, moving still in that infinitely sinister slowness, passed directly below the house and was obscured again by a tall growth of pawpaws and still the voice continued unabated while John huddled in the hay with thundering heart. And even long after he had passed, faded down the road, lost in the moonbeams of the lower farms, John could still hear the faint, sweet voice and he thought: Don’t he never sleep? Don’t he never find a barn and climb up in the hay and shut his eyes like other mortals do at night or does he just keep on hunting me and Pearl to the end of the world?
In the hour that followed the dogs fell silent and the moon moved an inch. The whippoorwill began his argument again, but more softly now, as if his own voice had been humbled and affrighted by a thing that had passed in the night, a darkness that had brushed his wings like the mower’s scythe.
At daybreak the children awoke and stole down to the barn door and when John had brushed all the straw from Pearl’s skirt he made her put on her brightest morning smile so that they might present themselves at the farmer’s kitchen for a bit of hot breakfast or at least a crust of biscuit and a dipper of cool water from the cistern. The gaunt young farmer’s wife cried and prayed over them until they were sticky and smothered with her ministrations and had, indeed, fled presently before she could begin to ply them with questions. She had set such a poor breakfast table that it was scarcely surprising that she had not asked them to stay for lunch. For it was Hard Times in the land and larders held precious little extra for roadside wanderers. And so with the edge gone from their hunger and with unaccountably cheerful hearts the children returned to the river and set off again in Ben Harper’s skiff. Pearl sat in the skiffs stern chuckling and playing with the doll Jenny while John whistled and fooled around with some lengths of leader, trying to unsnarl them and fastening them to some of Uncle Birdie’s old hooks in the hope of catching a catfish or two. At Marietta they rolled grandly past the bustling little landing and not a soul noticed them. The showboat Humpty Dumpty was docked there that day and the cheerful piping of the calliope skipped across the live water like bright, flat pebbles of sound. John stood up in the skiff like a pirate and admired the grand sight from afar and Pearl lifted dancing eyes from the scolding of her doll. Farther downstream after the river had turned and straightened again they drifted in silence past a panorama of unrolling shoreline, of sleepy farms and drowsing woodlands and the swelling bosom of rich bottomlands in the full cry of summer’s last harvest. The hay hands stood in the rippling grass and waved and hollered but in a moment their voices were gone and the unceasing river carried the children on into the sweet silences of the early morning. Still hungry, they had eaten the pork sandwiches in the greasy little paper poke the kindly farm woman had given them and now they dreamed, longing again for the home and solace that, to John at least, seemed never to have existed at all. On both sides of them the land unfolded like the leafing pages of a book and when John turned his eyes to the West Virginia shore he thought: I will be glad when it is dark because he is somewhere over on that shore, in one of those towns, along that winding road somewhere, and when it is dark he can’t see us. Because he is still hunting and there is only the river between us and those hands. And as the warmth of the morning sun filled the air he fell asleep again and Pearl slept, too, cradling the doll, and John dreamed that he was home in his old bed again and Ben Harper was down in the parlor playing his favorite roll on the Pianola and Willa was clapping her hands and humming because she did not know the words and it was a thousand years ago.
—
When he opened his eyes again all motion was gone. The sun stood high overhead at noon and there
were trees between it and his blinking eyes and on a root that jutted from the crumbling riverbank a redbird shrilled and scolded at him. A turtle, dusty and parched from the fields, labored scratching down the mudbank to the water, craning his wrinkled turkey neck toward the running stream. John thought: They make turtle soup but I’ll be derned if I know how and besides I wouldn’t know how to go about getting him open.
Pearl, awake before him, had wandered up into the grasses above the willows on the steep cliff that jutted from the meadow plateau and was gathering a bouquet of daisies. Each saw the woman at the fence at the same moment. Pearl’s hand froze with the nodding daisies in her fisted fingers and John scrambled the length of the skiff and lifted the heavy paddle threateningly.
You two youngsters git up here to me this instant!
John’s mouth, at the authority in this voice, fell agape and Pearl turned a frightened face to his.
Mind me now! I’ll fetch a willow switch and bring you up here jumpin’ directly!
John—half of a mind to run for Pearl and try to make it back to the skiff—merely stared. The woman was in her middle sixties, staunch and ruddy-faced and big-boned. She wore a man’s old hat on her head and a shapeless gray wool sweater hung over her shoulders.
Now she snorted like a fieldhand and came over the fence a-straddling and snatched a switch of willow as she came, scrambling down the bank with the alacrity of a boy. John could not make himself move. The woman had caught Pearl up in her stout embrace now and was making for John, her big shoes squishing through the mud, the switch rising to catch his calves when they were handy.
Now git on up there.
Pearl, opening her mouth, began to wail; her face wrinkling and scarlet with outrage.
Don’t you hurt her! cried John, quivering and standing his ground in the skiff bottom.
Hurt her nothin’! cried the old woman. Wash her is more like it! And you, too, mister! Now git on up there to my house and don’t set a foot inside till I’ve fetched the washtub for the both of ye.
And she herded them grimly before her up through the meadow like angry little lambs and when she was within earshot of the gray frame house she began to shout to its inhabitants.
Ruby! Mary! Clary!
Above the rows of tomato plants, over the top rail of her neat, white fence, three children’s faces appeared, bright as morning hollyhocks.
Yes, Miz Cooper! they cried in chorus.
Ruby—run fetch the washtub and fill it. Mary! Clary! Fetch a bar of laundry soap from the washhouse and the scrub brush, too.
And the faces disappeared and Miz Cooper shoved John and Pearl through her gate and then turned to survey them again, her lips pursed and working with anger.
Gracious! If you hain’t a sight to beat all! Where you from?
John could not find his tongue.
Where’s your folks? Speak up now.
He stared at the big, man’s shoes on her feet, crusted and heavy with garden mud.
Gracious! So I’ve got two more mouths to feed! All right. Git them clothes off now and throw ’em yonder in the grass. Ruby’ll wash ’em.
Neither child moved.
Mind me now! Mind!
John slowly began unbuttoning his little shirt and the old woman stooped and began tugging at Pearl’s knotted shoelaces. The oldest girl, Ruby, moved from the kitchen doorway, grinning with a flash of white teeth. She bore a washtub to the grass beside the pump and began filling it with gushing cold water. The strange children stood staring as John and Pearl took their clothes off. John listened to the sharp, nasal chant of the pump handle and stared at the washtub. He shivered at the prospect. And yet his heart was curiously warm within him with the unreasonable illusion that he had come home.
BOOK FOUR
A STRONG TREE WITH MANY BIRDS
“Oh, the gold! The precious, precious gold! The green miser’ll horde ye soon! Hish! Hish! God goes ’mong the worlds blackberrying!”
—MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
She was old and yet she was ageless—in the manner of such staunch country widows. Gaunt, plain-spoken, and hard of arm, she could stand up to three of the toughest, shrewdest cattle dealers in Pleasants County and get every penny she thought her hog was worth. Or if pork was off that year she would butcher and can her own sausage and smoke her own hams and have enough left over to present the preacher’s family with a nice meal of spareribs. In the summer she sent the children into the woodlands and brush filth with buckets for berries, and it was her old, wise hands that taught their young fingers how to pick them and schooled their eyes in the ways of berry-finding. She had a cow and she churned her own butter and sold it at New Economy wrapped in cool, damp swaths of immaculate muslin. She had chickens and their eggs went to market, too, in a bright yellow basket spread across with a napkin. From the fat of her butchered hog she made soap, standing in a drenching March rain beside her brawling iron kettle in the back yard till the task was done. Fifteen miles downriver at Parkersburg a waitress had short-changed her and that was a quarter of a century before and she had never gone to that town again.
Widowed a full forty years before, she had raised a son and seen him off into the world but she had soon grown lonely in the haunted stillness of the old home and so there had never been a time in the quarter of a century since that her house had not sheltered a child. And children were easy to come by in the river lands. Many a dark-haired farm girl lost her wits to an August moon and the mouth of a cunning lover and found herself, after he had gone away to work in Pittsburgh or Detroit, with the fruit of their ecstasy squalling and unwelcome in her poor mother’s kitchen. Once the child was weaned and toddling it was to Rachel Cooper’s door that he was carried, like as not, and there was never the bad word uttered for what he was: poor little wood’s colt. On Sundays his mother might come for a visit and a walk with him in the fields and at sundown he would be returned to Rachel’s bed and board, unprotesting. She fed her children till they were rosy and full, scrubbed them till they were red and squalling, spanked them when there was cause, and taught them the Lord’s tales on Sabbath mornings. That very summer she had packed her ugly cardboard suitcase and gone to Chillicothe to visit her own boy Ralph, who was forty-three now and doing well in real estate and married with a nice wife and four grown girls of his own. But the years had improved Ralph. Prosperity had given him a taste for Oriental rugs and expensive modernistic furniture and a big new Victrola and, truth to tell, he and his wife Clarice had been embarrassed by the old woman’s visit. She was really no one you would want to show off: that tough, ruddy old woman with the country smell still strong in her shawl and her hands all broken and red from laundry lye. She had stayed with them three days and fretted and growled at them for having so many forks at each place at supper and she chased the little Negro maid away from her bedroom each morning and made her bed herself. And when Ralph’s boss and his wife came to dinner unexpectedly that night she had sat afterward on a straight chair in the farthest corner and laughed at the wrong times and picked nervously at her fingers and acted such a perfect fool that she could have killed herself with self-reproach. She took the noon bus for home next day and had ridden out of the strange town furiously angry at something or someone in the world that had made her feel so coarse and out-of-date. Clarice had not liked the stone pitcher of maple sirup she had brought in her basket of gifts for them; nor the Mason jar of cucumber pickles, nor the green-tomato relish. Rachel felt certain that they had thrown these things away after she got on the Greyhound bus and rode away, waving her little handkerchief at them (the fancy one that she never used and always kept in her bureau drawer under the little cloth bag of dried rose petals)—mincing and smiling at them from the bus window; trying to act like a lady Ralph would be proud of calling his mother and then grumbling and quarreling with herself all the way home because she had even cared, because she had even tried to put on a show. And then when the big bus hissed to a stop at the crossroads she got out and thanked the
driver and stood alone in the river wind, in that country silence, and smelled her house down the road, smelled her little orchard and smelled her good black land, and that was when she felt the grand, old surge of comeback in her heart. Ralph was gone from her house—gone from her thoughts—and that was the way Life meant it to be, and then she heard the three little girls come screaming and shouting toward her across the field and she thought: Why, shoot! It don’t matter. I got a new harvest coming on. A new crop. I’m good for something in this old world and I know it, too.
They had a wild happy supper together that night. She sent home the neighbor woman who had stayed with the children in her absence and then she got busy fixing the things she knew they all liked. She even opened a jar of watermelon preserves, and the children knew that this was indeed special: this treat never appeared except at Thanksgiving or Christmastide. She had brought them each small presents from the Chillicothe five-and-ten and after supper everyone opened her gift and screamed and squealed with joy and kissed the old woman until her lips began to purse and pout with impatience and she shoved them gruffly away and shook her shoulders angrily lest they discover in her face all the love that was there.
There were three, the children: Mary, the youngest, child of a half-breed Cherokee harvest hand from Paden City and a waitress in the Empire Eats at New Economy. Mary was four, with raven-black hair as straight as a mare’s tail and eyes like dark little pools of stump water. Clara, eleven and thin as a rail, with the smile of one who had not been smiling long—a thin, aimless child with freckles like bits of butter floating in the churn, with crooked teeth and foolish rag-doll eyes. Ruby, thirteen and big and shapeless and stooped from being with the other smaller ones so much and trying always to be down there sharing their world with them, not missing a trick. Ruby was Rachel’s problem girl. She broke the Mason jars when Rachel set her to scalding them at canning time; she broke the warm, brown eggs when her big, wooden fingers gathered them from their cool, secret hiding places about the yard; she tripped on milk pails full and sent them splashing. And yet when her hands touched a little child she was transformed and her eyes shone until, like lamps, they illumined the pale, ugly flesh of her face. And so when old Rachel would go to prayer meetings on Wednesday she left the girl with the other two—little Mary and Clary. And when she returned she would find those two on the floor at the red, naked feet of the strange girl: reciting little bits of Psalms Rachel had taught them all by winter lamplight or playing cat’s cradle with a length of butcher’s twine.
