Fair and Tender Ladies

  I felt like I was with them but not with them, that morning. I felt like I had been gone for years, and then like I had never been gone at all. The air was clear and sweet up on Sugar Fork. Come on honey, Ethel said. She took my arm. I felt awful. I was wearing Ethel’s clothes.

  We crossed the creek on the steppingstones and started up to the yard. The rosybush was blooming by the steps. The yard had been swept clean. The breezeway and the porch were full of people, we could hear the low buzz of talking as we came. My sweet Bill was the first to see us, as him and Danny Ray came walking around the side of the house. Mama! he hollered. Looky here, it’s Mama. And he came running, all skinny flying flailing arms and legs, a boy like a windmill, he nearabout knocked me down. Mama, Mama, he said, hugging me. His strawcolored hair smelled good. Then Danny Ray was there, hugging me too. Where’d you go, Mama? they said. Where’ve you been? I hugged them and hugged them and then looked up at the house.

  All the talk had quit. Those on the porch and the breezeway stood like statues, looking down. It was Oakley and his mother and daddy, and Dreama, and Martha holding Maudy, and some several people that I didn’t know. Oakley looked at me with no expression atall on his face. Then he turned without a word and went back in the house.

  Come on, Ethel said grimly, and we walked on up the hill.

  Martha smiled at us shyly.

  Hidy Ivy, she said. We killed a snake in the house while you were gone.

  That’s good, I said. I couldn’t think what to say.

  Maudy started struggling to get down. Mama, Mama, Maudy said.

  Edith Fox has brought us a stack-cake, Martha said. It’s real good too. She put Maudy down and we all watched as Maudy clambered down the steps and ran to me. She was bigger, fatter.

  I got a new kitty, she said.

  Martha was smiling, holding onto the rail, but nobody else was. Dreama was staring so hard that she liked to of bored holes in my face, I could feel her eyes.

  The kitty’s name is Susie. Maudy can talk so good for her age.

  Dreama stood at the top of the steps like she was blocking them.

  Wait a minute now! Just a minute now! Victor took off the straw hat he always wears and started fanning his face with it. Hold on! he hollered. Will somebody kindly tell me just what in the hell is going on here? Why are you all up here, anyway? I know damn well this is not a welcoming committee for Ivy.

  Without moving her mouth, Dreama said, It is LuIda.

  What about LuIda? Victor was huffing and puffing, short of breath.

  LuIda is dead, said Dreama. We buried her this morning.

  Just out in the orchard, Bill said. Me and Danny Ray helped to dig the grave.

  Oh God oh God. I could hear, and yet not hear Ethel. I could not stand up.

  What—I think I said. What—

  Ray Fox Senior came down the porch steps then two at a time, and lifted me up. Oh Ivy honey, he said. I am glad to see you back.

  LuIda was sick to her stomach, Bill said, but not real sick.

  And she died? asked Ethel, old practical Ethel.

  I reckon it was her appendix, Ray Senior told us. That’s what they have all been saying. He led me up the steps and when we got to the top one, Dreama looked at me hard and started screaming and ran back in the house. Edith Fox went after her. Martha came over and hugged me, she had a big shy-looking boy follering at her heels that looked familiar. This here is Rufus Cook, Martha said, and then I knew who it was. It was Early Cook’s son, who had come to make the coffin. I’m sorry mam, Rufus Cook said.

  I pushed them all away and rushed through the breezeway to the back of the house but stopped dead when I saw the lilac. Granny’s voice sounded strong in my ear. Never let a lilac bush grow tall enough to shade a grave, or death will come to fill it.

  Up at the top of the orchard, right next to the treeline, I saw the pile of red dirt. I could not go up there. I sat down where I was on the back steps, and cried. I cried for a long time. I could hear people coming and going around me, car horns honking, somebody crying, somebody laughing down below, suddenly hushed. But they left me alone. They let me cry. Finally after a long time Oakley came up and stood behind me. I could feel him standing there. Then he said, Get up, Ivy, and take care of your children, and I did.

  I am still doing so. I will continue. I will not be writing any more letters for a while though, as my heart is too heavy, too full. But somehow I had to write this letter to you Silvaney, to set it all down. I am still in pain and sorrow, but I remain,

  Your sister,

  IVY ROWE.

  PART FIVE

  Letters from Sugar Fork

  August 2, 1942

  My dear Silvaney,

  It has been so long since last I wrote. Sometimes I think it is the longest time of my life and other times, it is the shortest, gone like the wink of an eye. Sometimes I think life is like that too, dreamed in a catnap. It don’t make sense to me. It was summer when I left here with Honey Breeding, and summer still when LuIda died and I came back. A part of me died with her. This is true, Silvaney. I can’t get it back. And now it is summer again and I can’t get over it. It don’t feel right to me for things to go on blooming like they always do, for the garden to come in, for me to make watermelon pickle and pickalily the same as always, or for the sun to rise or the rain to fall or the mist to hang over Bethel Mountain, or the days to go on like they do. It don’t seem possible.

  But Oakley is doing a lot of carpenter work now and Martha has got a boyfriend and we have got electricity and a radio. I can tick these things off on my hands. So time keeps on passing, all right. Ever since we got the radio, Oakley is crazy for baseball. You know he used to play some up at the mining camp where Franklin’s daddy cared more about baseball than he did about mining, so they said. Oakley played shortstop. Now he is crazy about Joe DiMaggio who is hitting good this year. Oakley listens to the radio all the time, he has got it right out on the porch where he whittles. We had it inside when we first got it last winter and I will never forget Pearl Harbor, they talked about nothing else all that day on the radio while we gathered up around it like we used to gather around the woodstove. Wouldn’t anybody leave the radio, that day. And now it is a war on, and the younger Rolette boy and one of Stoney Branham’s boys—the one Ethel used to have so much trouble with—are gone into the Army, and folks are all riled up. It seems so far away to me, farther than France. I can not immagine Japan where they drink tea and eat rice and have such smooth closed faces. They look so calm and so mysterious to me. Closer to home, four people have been killed already in the Harlan strike, and we have had no word from Violet nor R.T. in over a year, or if we did I don’t know it. I don’t know if they are okay or not. I have missed a lot, I feel like I’ve been caught out in a catnap.

  Silvaney, you will recall how smart I was when I was young. Well I am not that smart now! It has all got beyond me somehow. There is a war on and a big strike at Harlan right across the state line, but somehow I can not get past this little grave up here in the orchard on the hill. I can’t get over it. For I know LuIda’s dying is all my fault and if I had not run off with Honey Breeding it would not have happened, LuIda would be alive today, playing down at the creek with Maudy who I can see from here as I write. But little LuIda is pushing up grass, growing starflowers. I wish to God it was me instead.

  I can not even die now.

  Oakley said, Get up and take care of your children, and he is right. Today I am getting ready to can more shucky beans, we have put up a lot of beans already. But it is not right. I am canning beans but it is winter in my heart.

  I know this is my lot. I deserve it all!

  Geneva came over to visit right after I got back and said, Ivy, don’t be ridiculous. You are not the first woman in the world to run off with a man nor will you be the last. Sit up girl, Geneva said. And take your medicine. My medicine is nought but bitter gall. I told her so. Oh hush! Geneva said. It takes time, you will come around. You’ll see. But
I will not.

  I am a scandal, I told Geneva.

  Ivy, just hush your mouth, Geneva said, fanning herself. This was right after I done it all. May be you are a scandal right now, she went on, but folks are all so wrapped up in themselves that they will forget before you know it. It won’t be long. Nobody cares what you do. Not really. You’ll see. Nobody in the world is near as important as they think they are, you included.

  Then Geneva told me all about her new boyfriend, a man named Dr. Harvey T. Snow who had come to stay at the boardinghouse and never left. He won’t either, Geneva said. He is just crazy about me. Geneva said that Mr. Snow is a retired superintendent of schools from Petersburg, Va. who came to town to visit his married daughter Mrs. Cindy Shreve who would not speak to Geneva right then because of this situation. She will, though, Geneva said. She’ll come around. Geneva was rocking and fanning herself on the porch.

  I used to be a scandal myself, Geneva said. Now I’m an institution. She winked at me.

  Even sad as I was then, I had to laugh. Geneva is 70 if she’s a day, and still up to no good. There is something in me which admires this, and wants to ride hell for leather down the high road of life like Geneva does. But I am somehow lacking in gumption and pluck, or else it is that I have got to think about things too much finally. I can’t help it. You know I have always got to write my letters, and think about what’s happened, and what I’ve done.

  You worry too much, Ivy, Geneva said that day, rocking. Don’t think, she said. She went on rocking in the heat and appeared to doze. Her glasses on their rhinestone chain fell down off her nose to the wide shelf of her bosom and she slept, Geneva, looking in sleep like any little old grandmotherly woman in the world, which she certainly is not. But I was wide awake. And I could not quit thinking. I can’t help it—I guess I never could. I can’t help what I do, either. It’s like I’m pulled in two directions all the time.

  All of a sudden I remembered one time way way back when Revel was taking us someplace in the wagon, now this was not too long after Daddy died and before Revel had to leave here. We were going to town in the wagon and a mad dog came up and started barking and the mules tried to run off in opposite directions. We had to hang on for dear life! I remember Beulah’s screams, to this day. I remember how the mules’ breath hung white in the frosty air. Then finally Revel shot the dog, and that was that.

  But sometimes I feel I am caught in that wild bucking wagon yet, with no one here to shoot the dog.

  Geneva mumbled as she dozed, that day in August, and a little smile crept around her lips. I reckon she was dreaming of Dr. Harvey T. Snow, and a good thing it was too, as he died not two months later. He had a heart attack in the Post Office. Geneva mourned like the devil for about six weeks, but now she is back to normal. Well I do have to cook for all these people, she says, after all.

  And after all, Dr. Harvey T. Snow was not but a little dip, or a little hill, on the rolling field of Geneva’s long life, and though she mourned hard and well, she has given it up now and moved on. I reckon this is my problem or one of them—I can’t give up a thing! Nothing. I can’t forget. I can’t move on. I am having a heart attack all the time.

  Now Geneva is up to her same old tricks, making her famous vinegar pies, considering her options. Judge Brack still takes his meals there though he, too, is retired, and Doc Trout is dead. Mrs. Rose who came in to clean his office found him sitting straight up in his chair, dead as a post, last Febuary, with a coffee cup full of vodka still clutched in his hand. He was the only man around here that anybody ever heard of to drink vodka. Oakley says that is because you can’t tell it on a person’s breath, not like liquor. Well, he was sweet to me.

  The Reverend Sam Russell Sage is dead too, died in a hotel fire in San Francisco, California, four years back. Geneva just found it out. And good riddance! is what she said. She has got so much gumption. And it’s a funny thing how Little Geneva, Ludie’s child, takes after Big Geneva even though they are not blood related—she is as sassy as can be, and paints her nails red, and talks back to everybody. She is a handful.

  So is Danny Ray who can not sit still in a chair, he is restless like you and Babe were as kids. He is all the time in trouble, but smart. Miss McVey, the new teacher down at the school, says he is the brightest one she has ever seen but implores him to turn his talents to good not mischief. As it is, he spends a lot of time shining the windows with ammonia and newspapers, clipping the weeds, and doing whatever she can devise, for he finishes his lessons in no time flat. He is smarter than Joli they say, but Joli was so sweet and calm as a child, she is a different sort altogether. It always seemed like Joli had a soft warm glow around her.

  Now Maudy is real silly and keeps us laughing even Bill who is serious like his daddy, he is not much good at school. Bill likes to whittle too, and do carpenter work, he is really his daddy’s boy and takes after Oakley in every particular right down to the way he wears a hat.

  And as for Oakley—Silvaney, what can I say.

  You know that for a long time, Oakley’s face was turned away.

  Well, now he is paying attention.

  He is looking at me dead-on.

  I can’t tell what he’s thinking, though. I think he is waiting for something, but what it is, I couldn’t say. May be he could not say either. In any case, one thing about Oakley which has always been true, is that he has got all the time in the world. This is why he was the best trapper around here. He can wait for ever. He is patient beyond belief. I have seen him move up on a frog for instance so slow that neither the frog nor I could tell he was moving. I have seen him sit on the porch and whittle for a whole long rainy afternoon without hardly moving, or saying a word, turning out one little animal after another, squirrels, turtles, bears.

  In that way he is the flat out opposite of Honey Breeding who talked so much and acted so lively. Sometimes now when I think about Honey Breeding, it is almost like I made him up out of thin air because I needed him so bad. I can’t think of him as real, somehow. I know he came, and I know I went off with him, and LuIda died because of it. I remember those moments with Honey as flashes of light.

  And I am different now. I am changed in some way. It does not have a thing to do with Oakley either, and never did. I believe Oakley knows this. It has only to do with me.

  So I am trying. I keep the house up good and try to help Bill with his schoolwork and try to keep up with Danny Ray. Maudy gives me a deal of pleasure. I do not go up on Pilgrim Knob, nor up in the orchard by LuIda’s grave if I can help it. I can not look at the lilac. I keep busy. Martha and me are piecing a log cabin quilt and sometimes I help Ethel down in the store when Stoney feels too poorly to get out of bed. Victor has got a good job now at the Ration Board, so he is not at the store any more. On Saturdays and Sundays I go to church with Oakley sometimes, it is the only time I ever see a break in the lines of his face. For Oakley will get wrought up in church and holler out AMEN. Or he will close his eyes and bite his lips as if in prayer, swaying back and forth, it is clear then that he is carried away, and after church he is absent-minded in the truck going home, and seems thinner to me somehow, and purified. Sanctified, they say. Sometimes he goes up at the invitational, sometimes not. I have never gone yet, and now when they line it out loud, no one even looks my way. Either they all think I am saved already or else they have got used, to me sitting there like a bump on a log, the same way we have all got used to old Mister Justice who sits in the back and talks to himself all the time, or Annie Woods who runs through town now asking for Mickey her son who died in a wreck two years ago come October, or old Paregoric Lou who goes along the sidewalks of Majestic looking for pocket change to buy her paregoric with.

  Geneva was right. I am not a scandal now. The only one that still blames me is Dreama Fox.

  Other folks are all took up with the war, and the war effort. They are busy knitting sweaters and vests for the soldiers, and raising a garden. Even folks that have never baked a cake in their liv
es are fighting over sugar coupons.

  Life goes on, and I reckon now that I’ve got to live it.

  But sometimes I think I am the only one that remembers from one day to the next what happens, may be because I am writing it all to you. It is true that time softens things. I feel now as I write that I am better than I was, even if Oakley will always be circling around me, and watching, and waiting. I don’t know what he is waiting for. At least I am alive now, since I ran off with Honey, there is that, come what may. And I do have all these children to take care of.

  Sunday.

  This morning I got up early and set the coffee to boiling. I fried some sausage and made biskit, and cooked some hominy grits and eggs. Maudy sat in Martha’s lap to eat, and Oakley got some church music on the radio. It was that old time gospel hour out of Bristol. And then, for a minute while everybody was eating, I felt like church. I mean I think I felt the way you are supposed to feel in church, which I never do. The back door to the orchard stood open and sunlight fell in a long solid block into the kitchen, touching Maudy’s red curly hair. Little bits of dust went twirling in the sunlight which lay warm and restful on my new linoleum tablecloth which is all flowers, red and white roses entwined in circles that repeat and repeat and repeat. It is real pretty. Can I have some more eggs? Bill said. You can’t fill him up! Danny Ray was reading a book which he does all the time and I said, Don’t read at the table. He was reading, The Mayor of Casterbridge. Here’s some more biskits I said and took them out of the oven and Oakley said, These are real good, Ivy. The Blue Sky Boys on the radio were singing Look on the Sunny Side of Life. I got us all some more coffee and sat back down and all of a sudden I thought how funny it was to have everybody there at the same time, usually they are off and running in a million different directions especially the boys. Where is the honey? Oakley said because it is new honey, he has just robbed the bees, and I got up and got a piece of it still in the comb and put it on a blue plate. It is pale, pale yellow honey, the lightest sweetest kind. Oh that is good, said Martha, and the children were chewing the comb, they act like it is candy. Don’t reach, I said to Bill. Now you will just have to wash all over again, you are such a pig, Martha said to Maudy who had smeared it all over herself. Do piggy, Maudy said, and stretched out her fat little leg and wiggled her toes and Martha said This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed home, this little pig had roast beef, this little pig had none. Maudy was giggling, Oakley was staring out at the mountains the way he does, Danny Ray was reading The Mayor of Casterbridge. The gospel singers sang This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine on the radio. The sun felt warm on my forehead, like somebody’s hand. Bill was eating up all the sausage. I put some of the new honey on a biskit and ate it myself. It was smooth and sweet. This is the best honey yet I said to Oakley who said it was because we’d had so much rain. This little pig cried wee wee wee all the way home, Martha said, pulling Maudy’s least toe. Maudy started squealing and jumped out of Martha’s arms and ran around and round the table. Gotcha. Oakley grabbed her. I ate another biskit, may be I will get old and fat like all the women in Oakley’s family. Holding Maudy, Oakley was staring at me the way he does. It is clear to me now Silvaney that however much I may have wanted to die, I am stuck smack in the middle of this life.