Dumping wood ashes into the two-hole privy below the house—another of my childhood chores. Will had graduated to harnessing our team of horses to the plow, the spring-tooth harrow, the manure spreader, the seed drill, the cultivator, the mower, the wagon. But Will was a precocious boy, big for his age; he always worked hard. He liked it.
Splitting kindling wood for the kitchen stove, after I’d pumped two buckets of water. Hewer of wood and drawer of water—that was my role for years, until Paul grew big enough to do it in his turn.
Our half-Shawnee grandmother—Milly Cornflower Lightcap—was the daughter of a medicine man known to the whites as Doctor Jim (a condescending honorific) because of his healing arts and herbal lore. Doctor Jim never revealed his secret tribal name, not to any kin of ours; there was dangerous power in the name, easily lost. He lived alone in a one-room cabin in the woods, last of the Shawnee full bloods, and survived for eighty years by trapping, hunting, poaching, by odd jobs, charity and scavenging, and by his medical skills, much in demand locally. When he died he died alone, chanting (we presume) his personal death song, and lamenting the destruction and exile of his people. Never did go to Oklahoma. Never did join the cash nexus. Never did get baptized.
Grandmother Cornflower was half white by ancestry, her mother an indentured servant named Tillie Ostrander who’d run away from a family of Pennsylvania Dutch (Germans) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Tillie crossed over the mountains and allowed herself to become the third or fourth wife (he outlived them all) of Doctor Jim. It was tolerable then for a white man to take an Indian girl as wife—not honorable but tolerable—but for an all-white girl to bed down with an Indian, a buck savage, a male aborigine, a witch doctor, and to love him, stay with him, refuse to leave him even when her brothers came looking for her all the way from beyond the Allegheny Mountains—that was a shameful thing. A thing to be spoken of in whispers. A disgrace near as low—not quite—as Negro blood.
There was talk in Shawnee of lynching Doctor Jim, or at least running him out of the territory, packing him off to Oklahoma with the rest of his drunken, trashy, idle, defeated tribe—those shattered remnants from the Trail of Tears.
Nothing came of it. Doctor Jim defied his enemies, making it clear he would die fighting before he’d leave his homeland. The runaway girl stood with him, beside him, bore him a girl-child and died in the process. My grandfather Jacob Lightcap married the shaman’s daughter, the half-breed girl Cornflower. She was dark-skinned, with rich thick hair of mahogany brown. Her eyes were a bright gray-green, strange to see in the broad face with its high Mongolian cheekbones.
Grandmother Lightcap: Cornflower: I remember you from childhood: short, heavy-bodied, mother of six, your face wrinkled as a dried apple, your easy smile and the dazzling white false teeth you were so proud of, the round little granny glasses you wore about forty years before they became a brief fashion. Grandmaw, I remember your sweet and gentle voice, that voice so soft we had to really listen when you talked or we’d miss the tail on the fable, the moral pinned to the hinder end of your thousand and one stories. How the rabbit got his cottontail. How the toad got his warts. How the bear got his claws and the loon his necklace and the panther his scream and the owl his huge eyes…
She showed us, me and brother Will, her oaken chest full of treasures. The cream-colored doeskin dress, fringed and beaded, with high-top moccasins to match. The bearskin robe old Doctor Jim had dressed and cured and worn for thirty years. Her father’s calumet or ceremonial pipe, the bowl made of clay, the stem of wild cane. The shaman’s deerskin medicine pouch in which he carried his important herbal powders and such sacred objects as a set of bear claws, an eagle feather, a mountain lion’s tooth, the corn pollen, the native tobacco, a witch’s toe, three tiny copper bells and a copper medallion inlaid with turquoise and garnet—objects which had come from central Mexico centuries before, passed and bartered on from hand to hand, tribe to tribe, until finally reaching some Shawnee ancestor in the Appalachian hills, long ago.
Grandmaw gave the pouch to Will, since he was the older of us, obviously the more responsible. To be guarded with his life, she said, and passed on. I was seven years old when she died and so remember her only dimly but sweetly, an ancient gray-haired woman with the sweetest most beguiling voice, the most rich delightful laugh of any woman, any human, I’ve ever known.
She died; our father buried her beside her father, Doctor Jim, on the hillside at the edge of the red oaks near the spring and sunken ruins of the old man’s cabin. Cornflower was a Baptist Christian but only formally. Not spiritually. Like Doctor Jim she was buried where she wanted to be, in a corner of the earth that had sustained her woodland people for maybe—who knows?—one thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years.
Our father too always said he wanted to be planted there, among those moldering Indian bones, with a red oak for his monument. Unlike other members of the Lightcap clan he claimed pride, honor, glory in his redskin genesis. Even boasted of it sometimes, even in public, which embarrassed our aunts and uncles. They preferred to stress the Saxon side—that antique strain of hillbillies, bowmen, thieves, peasants, woodcutters and deer poachers stretching back into the murk and misery of medieval England. Those merry times of overlord and gibbet, of peasant and serfdom, of the rack and the wheel which followed the massacre of the English forests. When the trees were gone freedom disappeared. Soon after the time of the death of Robin Hood, betrayed—like Che Guevara—by a nun.
We come from lowly lineage, us Lightcaps, from the worst of a bad lot, escaped bondsmen and indenture-jumping servants, the scum of Europe, the riffraff and ruffians of the Old World. But we have learned to live with our heritage. “Your criticism is greatly appreciated,” says my Uncle Jack’s business card, “but fuck you all the same.” He deals in fertilizer.
Our mother was a Presbyterian. She’d be buried, if she ever consented to die, among her Holyoaks and Gatlins in the official compost pile, the rich good consecrated ground, of Jefferson Church. Her church. Hers—who else kept it going as much as she? Who else played the organ, supervised the children’s Sunday school and conducted the cracked old voices of her geriatric choir week after week, year after year? “You sound good,” I told her once, after she’d apologized for a performance, “you sound downright angelic.” “Well we should,” she said, “we’re all pretty near halfway to Heaven already.”
III
On cloudy October afternoons the boys followed their father down the furrows of the potato patch. Joe turned up the spuds with a plow hitched to a single bay mare, the old nag we called Bessie. Our father sang as he tramped over the clods, gripping the plow handles, the reins (seldom used) draped over his neck. He guided the horse mainly by cluck and call. “Haw!” for a turn to the left, “Gee!” for the right. And “Whoa…whoa there…” as he paused near the end of the row to look back at Will and Henry and Little Paul.
The boys stooped low above the sandy loam, dragging gunnysacks, resurrecting the potatoes—les pommes de terre, apples of the earth—rich brown solid nuggets of pleasure and nutrition, raw, fried, boiled or baked.
“Don’t miss any, boys,” says Joe, “dig down there. Get ’em out. That means you too, Henry. Mind now, every one you miss costs you a nickel.” The father watches for a minute, dark gaunt face half amused, half serious, then turns back to his plow, clucks at the horse. She steps ahead on ponderous shaggy feet, iron shoes crushing the weeds at field’s edge, turning right—Gee!—as Joe Lightcap turns the plow on its side to ease it around for the return row. The horse clomps into the dried-out drab-green potato plants straggling over the ground. Joe sets the plow, the share digs in, the moldboard rolls the damp earth elegantly up and aside. The buried tubers reveal themselves, ready to be gathered, stored, cooked, eaten.
The boys are well paid for their work, by 1930s values: ten cents a bushel. Every Saturday night, payday, after supper, by the light of a kerosene lamp hanging over the dining room table, Joe will teach his boys
the finer points of poker—stud, draw, lowball, anaconda, Montana Gouge—and win back most of the wages that he’s paid them. Not all; he’s a kindly, generous man.
Our mother did not approve of this weekly ceremony. Darning socks, she watched with scornful eyes as Joe raked in another pot. The washtub simmered on the cookstove: almost time for the boys’ weekly bath. She was eager to break up the game before Henry, the most careless player, lost everything he’d earned. Sunday school tomorrow morning. The game continued for another half hour before Lorraine interrupted. Joe had reduced Will’s earnings for the week to two dollars, Henry’s to fifty cents, Paul’s to one dollar.
“Joe,” says Lorraine much later, as they nestled together in bed, “you shouldn’t do that to the boys.”
“Why not?” he says, grinning in the dark. “Them boys got to learn to hang on to their pay. Besides, they love the game.”
“Poor little Henry. You took all his wages but fifty cents. That was mean.”
“He’s got to learn. Got to learn to stop trying to bluff too much, stop trying to fill inside straights, learn when to raise and when to fold. Anyhow he’d waste the money on soda pop and Little Big Books.”
“They worked hard for that money.”
“Will did. Will worked hard.” Joe listened to the sound of the old hemlock tree thrashing in the night wind, brushing against the clapboard siding under the eaves. “Henry don’t. Henry never worked hard in his life. That limb is still worryin’ the corner. Got to cut that thing off.”
Lorraine turned a little away from Joe. “In his life? Henry is ten years old. He’s a bright boy. Mrs. Lingenfelter says Henry’s I.Q. is one hundred ten. She says Henry’s the brightest pupil she’s ever had.
“You mean he ain’t dumb enough to be a farmer, Lorrie? Is that what you’re saying?” No answer. “I don’t believe in that I.Q. business anyway. I.Q.—what the hell does that mean? I quit? I’m queer? I think it’s a lot of happy horseshit, that I.Q. business.”
“Joe, don’t talk like that.” But now she was smiling in the dark. “If he studies hard and does well in high school, Mrs. Lingenfelter says Henry might go on to State Teachers’ College in Shawnee.”
“He’s so smart why can’t he play poker?”
“Joe, Joe…he’s still a little boy. He’s only a child.”
“Yeah? Well Will’s only twelve and he can do the work of a grown man.” The limb of the hemlock, seized by the wind, thumped against the outside wall. “Maybe I ought to saw down that whole tree before it comes through the attic roof some night.”
“They’re both good boys. But they’re different.”
“You mean Will’s a Lightcap and Henry’s a Holyoak. Ain’t that what you mean?”
“They’re both good boys. And yes, you’re right—Will is more like your family. And please don’t cut down our old tree. That tree is…part of the family. That tree looks like I feel, sometimes.”
“It’s old, Lorrie. Bark’s full of beetles. It’s fallin’ apart. It’s a danger. One of them widow-makers falls on a kid someday, then you’ll be sorry. Ain’t I right? What’s more there’s near as much brains in my side of the family as ever there was in yours. Just because we hain’t throwed off any bank clerks or schoolteachers yet don’t mean the Lightcaps ain’t as smart as anybody. Smarter’n most. Like my Daddy used to say, one man’s as good as the next—if not a damn sight better.”
“All right, Joe, all right. They’re both good boys. All I meant was Henry is—quicker.”
“You mean smarter. Maybe he is. But Will is doggeder. I mean that Will is a dogged son of a gun. I like that in a boy, that doggone doggedness. He lends a hand, grabs a root and hangs on. Like a badger. I sure do like that in a boy.”
“All right, Joe, you’re right. They’re both ours.”
“You mean shut up and go to sleep.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Goddamnit, Lorrie—” Joe felt his black temper rise, instantly. He choked it off, changed the subject. “Should cut that tree down.” The autumn wind brushed the shoulders of the farmhouse, prying at the clapboards, lifting at the eaves, trying the asphalt shingling on the roof; the wind pushed the big limb of the hemlock back and forth, bumping on the outer wall.
“I love that tree,” she said. “I love the sound of it touching the house. Please don’t cut it down.”
“Okay, honey. Just that big limb. I’ll leave the tree stand.” His huge rough hand caressed her bare shoulder. “Just for you, Lorrie.”
“Joe, please…” For he was turning upon her now, his powerful arms pinning her down, one hard thigh sprawled across her legs. “I’m not ready…” she said.
“We never was,” he said.
IV
I can see her, my five-foot four-inch one-hundred-pound mother, walking up the road under the autumn arcade of flaming sugar maple trees. She walks fast, briskly, with big strides for so small a body, head high and eyes up as she watches the blaze of October colors. She carries a light willow stick and swings it like a boy. She wears an old sweater, darned and patched, a man’s sweater that comes below her hips, an ankle-length homemade dress, a red bandana tied around her head.
She was a beautiful woman despite four babies and two miscarriages in the space of ten years (those ravished years of her youth); she had fine flaxen hair that fell to the small of her back when she let it down; we loved to watch as she washed her hair. She had bright hazel eyes, widely spaced—sign of intelligence—a thin fragile-looking little hen’s beak of a nose and a narrow but expressive mouth trembling most of the time on the verge of laughter. Or of grief.
She was about thirty years old then, a young woman. Fierce with energy, forever busy, always working at something, cleaning up, nursing a child, feeding chickens and gathering eggs, chopping at weeds in her garden with abrupt, harsh, angry strokes of the hoe. Each Monday she did the family wash (down in the cellar in winter, outside under the walkway in summer) with the sputtering gasoline-powered Maytag that the old man had found for her, somewhere, years before. One by one she guided each soaked garment through the hard rubber rollers of the wringer into the rinsing tub and back again into a basket. Paul and I would help her hang the damp things on the line.
In the evening after dark after she’s tucked us all in bed, our father out in the barn seeing to the stock one last time or down in the cellar fixing harness, sharpening tools, whittling another stretch board for the pelts of fox, muskrat, skunk, then—why then and then only—our mother, free at last for a little while to live a private life, would sit at her piano and play. Lying in our double-decker bunks under the sloping ceiling, half asleep but listening, trying to stay awake, we heard the soothing, lyric sound of nocturnes and sonatas by Chopin and Debussy, or perhaps a few tunes from the hymnbook, something not too rousing, appropriate for bedtime—What a Friend We Have in Jesus, The Old Rugged Cross, He Walked with Me, Take My Life and Let It Be, Amazing Grace, or Leaning on the Everlasting Arms…
Striding through the October wind. Women don’t stride, not small skinny frail-looking overworked overworried Appalachian farm women like Lorraine Holyoak-Lightcap. But our mother did. She strode over the reddish dirt of the road, the burned slag from the coke ovens of Deerlick, Blacklick, the coal-mining towns. She walked rapidly in the windwashed afternoon, switching her stick. She gazed at the red-gold leaves of oak, beech, elm, maple and poplar and hickory—chlorophyll withdrawn for the freezing times ahead, leaving behind in each veined leaf the flame-colored chemistry of fall—and stared up at the streamlined clouds in the silver blue of the sky.
What she longed for, I suppose, was something far away from the ramshackle farmhouse, the unpainted barn, the pigpen chickencoop outhouse toolshed springhouse wagonshed of Lightcap Hollow. Lorraine was the daughter of a professional schoolteacher; her brother was a cashier in a bank; her sisters lived in town in houses with hardwood floors, electricity, hot and cold running water, centralized heating, even refrigerators.
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sp; V
Inconsolable memories. Appalachian autumn. Rustle of wind through the dry corn, rattle of dead leaves beneath our feet, the frosty breath of morning, the sleepy stasis of Indian summer.
Mornings and at night we walked our trapline with flashlight and .22 rifle. Hoping for fox, silver fox (wealth!), but catching mostly only skunk and muskrat. Sometimes in early dawn we’d find a muskrat dead in our trap, half frozen into the ice. Or now and then, not often, one small furry foot with chewed-off stump clutched in the steel jaws. A cruel business, our mother kept reminding us. Will shrugged, I was embarrassed, the old man scoffed.
“Look, Lorrie,” Paw would growl, “they don’t hurt much. The trap grabs and holds ’em, that’s all. Those poor critters are gonna die anyhow, out there in the cold and dark. We’re just harvestin’ the surplus.”
“You don’t harvest living creatures,” Mother said. “What a disgusting word. You’re killing them for personal profit.”
“All right, all right. But we need the money and you know it.”
One evening Paw brought one of our Victor single-spring varmint traps up from the cellar. He was going to settle the cruelty argument with Mother once and for all. Carefully, while Mother watched, knitting, our old man squeezed the spring and spread the trap flat on the dinner table. He latched the bait pan to the release trigger and drew back. The trap was ready. “Okay, Lorrie, now watch this.” Paw clenched his big right hand into a fist and smashed it down on the pan. The trap sprang shut. Grinning, he held up his caught right hand and the trap, its tether chain dangling. “See?” he said. “See that, goddamnit? I told you, Lorrie, it hardly hurts a-tall. I hardly feel it. See?” Triumphantly he looked at me, at Will, at Paul. “Ain’t this what I been telling you boys all along?”
Impressed, we looked at Mother to see what she would say. Smiling her ironic smile, needles clicking in her fingers, she said, “You’re not finished, Joe.”