Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You

  I always loved to be here in the room when she was fixing her hair. The way she kept it long and brushed it slow and careful entranced me. One hundred strokes. It was thick and heavy and sweet-smelling when she oiled it with that balm. I could pick it up with my right hand and pour it into my left, pour it back and forth like spilling coins or water. One hundred strokes. I wanted her to show me how, but we fought and struggled with my own hair and it didn’t do. She told me at last it was too fine and dry, that I’d have to wear short hair, and I felt like it was a lifetime sentence against me to know I’d never have the hair my mama had.

  Trudging up this cruel road with my head bowed down, I see that some of the rocks are silvery and some are burning blue and some are red. There’s no water anywhere. I think there’s a kind of sky overhead that never has rained since the world began. Yet there are shadows just out of the edge of my eyesight and in these shadows there are spirits—I don’t know what kind. Maybe they are some I used to know when I was young. Maybe they are stranger-spirits just as lost as I am. I don’t know if I’ll meet them to speak to or even see them, but I am not afraid. It’s just that the way along is so hot and dry and stony.

  Sometimes I would sneak in alone and take the combs out of that box that brother Luden sent and try to put them in my hair. Mama did that so neatly, like slipping a knife into ginger-bread. Inserting the combs. But out of my fine dry hair they fell to the floor and clattered. Then I would stare at myself for long and long in the mirror. If I didn’t have my mother’s hair, would I have any of her looks at all? I thought she was a proud beauty with her cheekbones and her firm chin and the way she carried herself so straight with her shoulders back. As straight as the red line down a sheet of Blue Horse paper. And the way she had of looking at you direct but gentle, too. Never mean, but not easy on anybody, either. I never had good looks, but she taught me not to mind.

  Now it does seem like the shadows are crowding to the edge of this path. But they are not cool shadows. They are as hot as the light, or hotter. And nowhere anywhere is there any “water.”

  “All right. We’ll need to raise you up a little so you’ll be able to drink. Can you do that? Can you raise your head and I’ll put my arm around your shoulder? Here’s the glass. Can you see it? Now there. Just a little sip at first. Take your time.”

  It is not shadows, but a rain cloud. It has started to shower a little in this hot place. The refreshment is so good, I can’t tell you. It makes the way easier, a lot easier.

  “Easy now. Take your time.”

  Only a gentle shower is all that is needed here. If it was to rain too hard, it would come a sudden flood in this creek bed. The climb is so steep, the waters would rush down angry and I would sweep away. O Cora, that’s enough.

  “Is that enough water? Have you had enough to drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ll get my arm out from under you and you lie back now. Here, let me set this glass down.”

  I am wanting to say thank you, but now I feel more tired than ever before. I can tell, too, that this rocky climb before me is going to get worse. Still, I need to say thanks.

  “Is there something else you want? What is it, Mama? I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

  “Mmm.” There. I’ve said it now, I think.

  “That’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. It won’t be long before the doctor is here.”

  There are spirits in these shadows, but none of them is Jesus. I will know Jesus not in shadow but in light. A light different from the burning kind and not golden, either, not that. Different from any other kind of light, sweeter and deeper.

  “Let me smooth out your pillow a little for you.”

  It seems cooler than it was before. In 1900 they told me it was not the twentieth century yet. That it wouldn’t start till 1901. One day in July 1900 I went down by Sugarbush Branch to sit in the shade and cool off and I made up a song about it. There’s a new age a-coming was how it started and there were a lot of different verses I made up on the spot. Now whenever I feel that same shade of cool I felt that day by Sugarbush, some of the lines of my song come back into my head. I never sang that song to anybody. I thought now and then I would sing it for Holme Barcroft the first time he came here and maybe even let him take down the words the way he was always doing with the old songs, but I didn’t. I couldn’t figure a way to get him off by himself with me without everybody knowing about it and believing the worst of me. I was never one to sing my songs in front of people, my own songs I made, and I was never one to go off alone with a man, however much I felt about him. It grieved me to give up my music, but Daddy wouldn’t have it. I hung up my fiddle and my bow. There. That’s the line of an old song. The older the song, the more heart’s truth in it—that’s the way I always felt.

  She is resting some easier now. That little sip of water did her good. But I wish we were somewhere else. I wish she would have agreed to go over to Bracecoro to the county hospital. But nothing will suit her except to die here in her own house in her own bed.

  My voice was sweet and true but had no ring. When we were girls together, always singing, Samantha Barefoot would make me take the harmony part. Because they’ll never hear a note of the melody if I’m braying the harmony as loud as a gall-sore mule, she said. It was the truth she had a voice you could hear a mountaintop away. She had that old-timey drone that would cut through the air like throwing an ax. It’s the old Irish way of singing, somebody told me. We sounded silky together, though, and might have made something of our music. Because I was a better fiddler than her, and everybody knew. People told him, Ward Purgason, you ought to let that gal follow her music, but my daddy said no ever and ever. It would make me flighty, he said, and turn my head. It grieved me to put away my bow and hang my fiddle on the wall and it made Samantha sad, too, because she’d brooded fancy plans for us to be doing big in the music world. Years later when Cora heard about it, she got mad at her grandaddy, and him dead by then longer than I remember.

  Die. I hate that word. I wish it had never come to my mind. But it is the truth. Mama is lying down to die. Right here is where she wants to die, and as soon as she can. So it must be mighty hard with her, because she wouldn’t do a selfish thing like that unless she simply could not help herself.

  Sam has done big things in the music. She is on that radio show—the “Grand Ole Opry,” they call it—a lot of times. But I won’t have it on in this house—it would make me too sad and dissatisfied to hear her. And I would still get mad at my daddy. After all these years. You’d think a body would get over it. I’ve got over harder things. Like losing Rowe and Frank, my husband, and our good house burning down and Johnson Gibbs getting killed in the war. Things lots harder and lots of them. But they were part of my life, the life that was to come to me. The music was my other life, the one I never had and never would have once my daddy said no. So I was always bitter about it and held it against him, and that’s a sin against me, and I wish it was the worst one.

  I reckon Mama has done selfish things in her life, I reckon everybody has, but I never found out one she’d done. I have always thought she was all the world, that the sun and moon and stars all turned about her. Now that she has decided to leave me, it will be an empty sky above my head. I know I can go on, Joe Robert will stand by me, and I’ve got Jess and Mitzi, but it won’t be the same. I’ll be a stranger inside my own life because Mama was a chief part of it. I’ll be a little bit of a stranger to myself and there will be some things I will have to learn to do different, to think about in different fashion.

  I guess that on this dark and perilous way I’m treading I will meet all my sins and have to face them one by one. It won’t do any good to say I did the best I could, because there’s nobody to listen and it might not be true. There were times I could have done better, I will admit. But mostly I tried my best, I do believe. And when I did wrong to others, it was mainly because I didn’t know better.

  She is no sain
t, I will acknowledge. When Mama makes up her mind about something, there she stays. Doesn’t matter what you say or do, doesn’t matter sometimes what the facts may be. She doesn’t give. Got that from her daddy, I expect. I’ve always heard he was such a stern person. It was John Howard Early told me that the first time and he said it in such an odd way, it stuck in my mind. He didn’t say stern; he said sternd, with a d on the end of it. Your grandaddy was a sternd old man, he told me. There’s a dark vein of willfulness that runs in your family. But Grandaddy didn’t seem that way to me. He died when I was five, so mostly I only imagined him. I pictured him as being sweet and kind and gentle and not smelling of snuff and cow shit and stale whiskey breath like Uncle Burleson that lived to be ninety-three. In my mind, my grandaddy was anything but sternd, yet they tell me when he was set upon a thing, he always got it to go his way.

  The window has lit up again and I can see the outside plain. I can’t hardly see the inside of the room at all, I can’t see Cora good, but I can see the outside. It is full daylight now and the light is the light of a fine May morning you would never mistake. One morning one morning one morning in May. There again. That’s another line from an old song and it goes perfectly with what is in the window, the blue sky with one fluffy cloud and rounded green hills with perfect trees stuck here and there about. Of course it is not the real outside. The window is showing me some country where I’ve never been, the kind of country you see in your mind when you’re a child and read in a storybook or if someone tells you a happy tale about when they were children. It’s not real to walk in, but it’s a real place. I don’t know if my soul will be traveling in a place like that or not. The only thing before me now is this scorching creek bed. But the window shows me this other place, so maybe there is a chance.

  John Howard Early, he was a case. He would stand right in your face to talk to you and if you backed up a little, not being able to help yourself, he would just move in on you some more. And looked as hard and deep into your eyes as any creditor presenting a long-due bill. I don’t know that he meant anything by it. That was just a way he had. Probably he couldn’t see real well. But it made an impression on you and you’d remember something he’d say where you’d forget it if it was anybody else. Looked so grave and solemn, you wouldn’t believe he’d think of mischief. That’s why he got away with so much. Not like Joe Robert. He’s such pure mischief, you can see it coming a mile.

  One morning one morning one morning in May, I met a fair maiden a-walking my way.

  That’s why you don’t mind; that’s what makes him so irresistible to my heart. Because I know he’s nothing but mischief and I see it coming and I know it’s harmless because it’s so open. It’s an education to watch people meet Joe Robert for the first time. They become all attention. They know something is coming, but they don’t know what.

  Good morning good morning good morning my dear, Where are you going so sweet and so fair?

  That man, I tell you I don’t know. Twenty years married and I still don’t know.

  It wasn’t only that Holme Barcroft took songs from us here in the mountains to put into books and share with the wide world. He taught us songs, too. He taught me a little song in the French language I can’t remember now. Not a word. And it had the liltingest tune to it, as light as a sparrow’s feather, but I don’t remember. One I remember well, all too well, is Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter. That was the one Frawley Harper brought back to our hills from his travels as a handsome sailor to bewitch all hearts, even mine a little bit, I will admit, though I was married to Frank by then, held with bonds of love as strong as iron.

  It nigh wears you out, though. Every day with Joe Robert being so new and fresh, it’s almost like you have to wake up with a new man each time and wonder what in the world is going to happen. I was crazy about him from the start, but Mama was afraid at first, thinking maybe he wasn’t quite right in his mind. Then she decided he was only an overgrown boy of a special sort. I’ll say it, though, we’d never have been married except for Mama. You have to be patient with men and wait for them to settle down, she told me more than once. That’s the way she did with Joe Robert and the hired help and maybe even Daddy, too. With Luden, she waited and waited, but it never happened. It might yet, I keep telling her that, but she only smiles gray and sad.

  O Shenandoah I love your daughter. All away, you rolling river, I have come this day to greet her, Away, I’m bound away, Across the wide Missouri.

  But I don’t know that she ever had a closer friend, man or woman, than her son-in-law. They will go on and on at each other, or pretend to. He’s always trying to get her goat, but it usually works the other way. My husband is a strong, brave man, I expect, but this will break his heart, he admires my mother so much.

  When I hear that song in my head, I hear the high silvery voice of Holme Barcroft. He had an accent that was simply winning. It sounded more English than Scotch to me, but how could I know? He teased me. Never never ever tell a Scotsman he sounds English, he said. Don’t you know there’s a history of blood between the nations? I could have told him all about Mary, Queen of Scots and the Battle of Culloden and the Bonny Prince. I told those stories many a time to the pupils I taught on Long Branch. But in the presence of Holme Barcroft I only smiled and shook my head. It was my wish that he would tell me the stories in his own tongue.

  There have been some sharp times and some sharp talk, too. Some of Joe Robert’s rusties could have got mean if he was a different sort. Mama has never forgotten how Joe Robert and Johnson Gibbs switched pullet eggs for her fancy chocolate candies and made her so embarrassed in front of her lady friends. She has never ceased to laugh about it, either. Sometimes a look will come on her face that shows she is trying to hold back a giggle and I’ll know she has remembered those pullet eggs wrapped up in colorful foil and put back into the candy box where the boys had eaten the real chocolates. That goes to show how close they are, that she’ll still laugh about that fifteen years later.

  I had better not be thinking now about Frawley Harper and Holme Barcroft. I had better be getting ready to meet my Lord. And don’t say Scotch, he told me. Say Scots. Say Holme Barcroft is a Scotsman, not Scotch. Scotch is something to drink.

  No one could count the nights they’ve sat at the table after supper and argued religion. Not that Joe Robert is against it—I don’t believe he is. Only that he can’t resist teasing anybody who seems dead certain about anything. I believe he only takes personal things seriously. Big ideas like religion and politics and science he only likes to play with.

  Oh Shenandoah. The path is steep and crooked and rocky and burning and it hurts my knees and the palms of my hands to be crawling along. In the burning silver rocks there is the sound of one kind of wind and in the blue rocks the sound of another and in the red another. In the silvery rocks the wind sound is the sound of women weeping. All the women who ever lost their men are crying inside that sound. In the blue rocks it is the sound of children who have lost their mothers. In the red rocks the wind sound is hottest of all. The wind in the red rocks is flame and it is the sighs and moans of everybody who lost their way in life. It seems like the window is farther away than ever now.

  But I don’t know what we’ll do with Mama gone. Can’t bear to think. I will be distraught. Joe Robert will be heartsore for I can’t guess how long. And Jess. And Mitzi. Jess, I think, will understand, but Mitzi … I don’t know. She’s ten. I can’t remember what it means to you at ten. I know you never forget, but I can’t remember how you feel.

  Now the window is a mirror. Dark and peeling. It shows me this room with me lying in the bed and Cora sitting by, but that’s all I can tell, because I don’t look like a woman lying down and Cora looks like she’s wearing a dark brown robe with a hood over her head. She looks like she is praying, but I am the one praying, yet I don’t look like a person, but like something drifting on a river. I am being carried away from Cora praying by me.

  Don’t leave me yet, they
thought or said together at the same time. There must be time left for us to say things we never got said and to make sure we know the lights and shadows in each other. It is cruel how the power of time is a power only to separate. We were mother and daughter before time came upon us. We only want to be together a little while longer. There are many things between us we still don’t understand.

  Mama, I can’t go much farther. I have to stay here with Joe Robert and Mitzi and Jess. The way for me turns back to this world now.

  O Cora, don’t try to go this pathway of rock and ember. It is too soon for you. I would not be struggling away if I could help it. I would rest in the bosom of my family and spread on the table a fresh, clean tablecloth and lay out shining plates and in the morning sweep the dust off the steps and the cobwebs out of the ceiling corners of the porch. But I feel the darkness or the light, I don’t know which, pulling at me with such an awful strength that I cannot go anywhere but toward the window with its light or darkness, whatever is there.

  Mama, I’m afraid. My throat has closed up and my tongue feels thick and mushy. “Would you want some water? Could you take another sip or two?”

  What is that sound?

  “Mama?”

  Somebody is calling my name, but I can’t tell which shore they are calling from. Both shores are as dark as the night I laid down in to begin with. I don’t know which shore to turn toward. Is it you here, Cora?

  “Co.”

  “It’s me, Mama. I’m still right here. The doctor hasn’t come yet. Would you like to have another little drink of water?”

  Reach out your hand and touch me so I’ll know which shore you are calling from.

  “Here. I’ll just put the palm of my hand under and raise your head a little bit. Now. Try to drink some. Try just a sip.”

  Something is happening to me in darkness, but there is a light coming into my mouth that feels good.