Then the room was lit bright by a coal-oil lamp that Mama held high above her head. I could hear the dull whistle of the oil burning as Mama set the lamp on a wide shelf and squatted down on her knees beside the bed, spreading her arms out across Daddy’s chest so that she could take hold of his right hand. Two of his fingers pushed into the meaty flesh of her palm and held tight.
“He’ll live,” Mama whispered. “But probably never talk again.”
“No,” I said. I could feel anger pecking in the vein of my neck. My voice was low, even though I didn’t mean for it to be. I wanted to shout it out. “I have too much left to ask him.”
I put my hand atop his and Mama’s, but his fingers did not move this time.
Looking down at him, I thought, He already looks like a ghost of himself.
I stood by the bed without moving. I stood there and tried not to listen to Daddy’s rasped breathing. I let myself drift off and thought about the day I had been snakebit. Memory swirled around me so close and fast that I swear I could feel the hair lift from my shoulders, like it had been stirred by memory’s breath.
I recalled in perfect detail the day the copperhead sunk its fangs into my leg.
I was fifteen—already a woman in shape and mind—and I was far up on Redbud Mountain. Mama had told me that it was the last pretty day of fall, and said I ought to enjoy it while I could. “Ice will be here before long,” Mama said. At first I refused, knowing that I had to help with the washing, but Mama pushed me right out of the yard, smiling. “Go on. Hazel will do your part in the wash.”
Except for the pines and cedars, all the trees were bare, and they stood like black skeletons. The air was cool, but my breath was no more than a little bloom in front of my face, barely visible. The sun was a white ball on the sky, and I could feel its heat on the top of my head. It was unnaturally warm for the middle of November. Mama said such a warm autumn day meant snow was sure to follow. She said people called this Indian summer, and she and Hazel had laughed at that.
I climbed the steep mountain and crawled out onto the cliff that jutted out of the summit. The cliff pointed down toward the earth at a steep grade, so I bunched my dress up against one thigh and scooted out on my rump to keep from falling. The cliff was warm and sandy beneath my legs.
I got as close to the edge as I dared and wrapped my arms around my knees. I could feel the sensation of height turning over in my stomach, but I tried not to think about it. I set down. The breeze was constant here, an endless flow of breath washing over my face, and I could feel the wind lift my hair off my back, as if I were in a place where gravity did not exist.
Below me I could see the same things that my grandparents had seen when they had first set foot here. In the summer, all you could see were the bushy heads of a legion of trees. They rolled like waves toward the two big-shouldered mountains that stood on the other side of the valley. But in late fall, my ancestors had probably seen what promise this piece of land held. They had seen the confluence of the slow river and the fast creek. The flat shelf of land between them. Slopes that would make perfect bottomlands for gardens, a little field where an orchard could catch sunlight.
I was looking down on Redbud. Our little piece of the world. Down there where Mama and Hazel were laundering the clothes, a thin ribbon of gray smoke curled up into the sky, so tall it seemed impossible. And I tried to imagine the way my great-grandparents had felt upon seeing all of this. I pictured my great-granny Lucinda stroking her belly, where new life stirred.
I was picturing them when I felt a sharp sensation on my ankle, as if I had been burned by the tip of a fireplace poker. I leaned over my knees and saw it.
A snake. A snake in November.
It’s not possible, I thought. It’s their sleeping time.
But there it laid, moving about in the circles of itself, like it was defying me. Its tongue was short, quick, and black. Its scales caught the rays of the white sun.
I jumped to my feet and snatched the snake up by its tail. I could hear Daddy’s voice: If a snake strikes, you must kill it. I held it firm by the tail and snapped it against the cliff as if it were nothing more than a wet towel.
It was as if I could feel the life going out of it, sizzling up my arm and across my shoulder until it petered out. And I knowed that it was dead.
The snakebite on my leg was throbbing, breathing. The snake lived only in me now. For a brief moment I wondered if it didn’t pass on more than mere poison. Perhaps it instilled a bit of its own evil into the blood of its victims.
I ran down the mountain. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I thought that at any moment my leg would simply fall out from under me. I was certain that it would go to sleep or turn numb or just give out, and I run quicker, wanting to get as close to home as I could before my knee buckled.
Daddy was near the foot of the mountain, cutting firewood. He dropped his ax in midswing. I never knowed if he did this on account of seeing the fear on my face or because he caught sight of the snake dangling from my hand. I fell at his feet.
“It’s a copperhead,” he said, dropping to his knees. He picked the snake up and ran his fingers down its shining body, like someone feeling for broken bones in an arm. “Where did it strike?”
I shoved my leg into his lap and laid back against the earth, not wanting to see what he would do. The ground had not soaked up the sun, and it was cold and hard. It felt too flat to be real. Mama and Hazel were down by the creek, tending the laundry kettle, but they seen what was happening and come running. Before they had run halfway across the back field, Daddy squalled out for the snake medicines. He went to work right away, without a word. Mama squatted down and took hold of my hand. Hazel—always squeamish about blood and pain—run off crying with her apron throwed up over her face.
While Daddy went to work on me, I lifted my head and looked at him. His knees were planted into the ground, his legs spread far apart as he sliced the cut, applied the lard and medicine. It seemed that he never blinked. He worked quick and patient. His eyes were dark and he held his mouth very firm, the way Mama did when she was trying to thread a needle. Right then, I loved him more than I could ever remember doing before. I had always worshiped him, of course, but I felt affection for him swell up in my chest so largely that I feared for a moment that it was the poison blooming toward my heart. I loved him for the calm look of fear upon his face. He was collected, but there was fright on him. His forehead seemed flattened by it, his face pulled down and aged in one moment. All color had been drained from his cheeks. In his eyes I could see how much he cherished me, how afraid he was of losing me.
“Lay back down, now,” Mama had said, her voice a coo. “Be still, little bird.” Mama was usually a loud woman, but she had a special tone for such situations. Her voice sounded like water on smooth rocks. She held very tightly to my hand and hummed without rhythm.
“It is all I can do,” Daddy said. He walked on his knees up to where he was beside my head. He put the back of his hand on my cheek and looked at Mama. “Run in there and turn our bed down for her. Boil us some water.”
Daddy leaned down real close to my face and gathered up my hand in his own. He held it as if it was a fragile thing. “Lay still for just a minute,” he whispered. Then he closed his eyes and he prayed aloud. He prayed in Cherokee, and his words were so beautiful that they made me picture birds taking flight, flowers bending their heads in the breeze. His breath was hot against my cheek, and even though I didn’t know a word of the old language, I closed my eyes and prayed, too.
When he was finished, he lifted me up and carried me into the house. I rested my head against his big chest, feeling like I might be lulled off to sleep before he ever reached the door. He smelled of wood and woodsmoke and warm autumn air.
“Martha?” one of my uncles said from behind me, and I realized I was at Daddy’s bedside. It seemed impossible for him to be laying there.
My uncle Eldon had all at once filled up the doorway, a tall black s
hadow of a man. “You going to let us take him to the doctor now?”
“Go on,” Mama said, with much defeat evident in her tone. None of our people had ever been to a doctor before.
Eldon moved forward with great hesitation. “Vine?” he said. “I guess I ought to take him on. They’ll need to look at him.”
I looked up at him, anger shooting into the ends of my fingers. “You mean to pack him out of here?” I asked.
“It’s the only way I can see,” he said.
I stood up to move aside, but then I couldn’t. Eldon stood at the foot of the bed, looking from me to Daddy and then back again. He knowed that I carried a lick of fire in my belly, I guess. He didn’t want to do anything to rile me. I made fists with both hands, then unclenched them. I leaned over the bed so I could kiss Daddy’s forehead, and then I slid my arms between him and the mattress. He was as stiff and heavy as a pile of lumber, but I lifted him. I gritted my teeth and pulled him up against my chest. My knees shook, but this was the least I could do. Daddy had never been fond of Eldon, and I wasn’t about to let him pack my father out. I would be the one to take him out, and if it half killed me, that would be all right.
As soon as I cleared the bedroom door, Jubal and my uncles Jack and Red rushed forward with their arms cupped in front of them. Jubal stepped to my side with an air of great pity, as if he was embarrassed by me. His breath was hot in my ear: “Vine, let me.”
I ignored Jubal and all the rest of them. I looked them every one in the eye, but I didn’t say a word. They parted the way for me. They stepped back, so still that I thought they might all be holding their breath, just as I was. The quilt that had been spread over Daddy still clung to his legs, but half of it was dragging on the ground by the time I come off the porch steps. Eldon had pulled a wagon up close to the gate, and when I got there—ready to lay him down—I realized that all of a sudden he seemed very light to me. He was heavy, but he didn’t weigh enough to be my father.
Eleven
3 September 1917
My darling,
I won’t be able to come home for a while. The war is getting worse and they need all the work they can get out of us. It is just too busy for me to trust the operation to somebody else right now. They said this war wouldn’t last a month and already it has been five. It kills my soul not to be able to see home and you all.
I’ve grieved over it terible, but there is nothing to be done. At least I am not over the ocean. In a way, though, it would be easier to accept if I was fighting the war. It makes it that much worse knowing I am only two counties away from you. It’s not right for a man to be away from his woman and little girl and land that needs tending to, but we are at war, so all things are turned upside down. It could be worse. That’s why I need to make this money for us. Hard times are coming.
I sure hated to hear about your daddy. He is a good man and a strong one, too. You never know what might happen. One of these days he might come right out of that. I heard of a man who was told he had a stroke and one day he woke up and was done with it. Jumped out of that bed just like the man he had always been before.
No, I have not heard a word from Aaron. I know this is worrying Mommy to death. I’ve wrote her a letter and told her that she ought to move in with you, at least until spring. The war should be over by then and all will go back to the old ways. Her letter ought to come with this one, so you read it to her. You will have a time getting her to leave that old house, but I want her to. Knowing you all are together will be one more worry off my mind.
My baby will be grown before I see her, I feel like. I picture her and think of her all hours, wondering what she is into. I hate to think about all I am missing and won’t say more, or else I won’t be able to sleep a wink tonight for troubling on it. Until I see you again,
All my love,
Saul Hagen Sullivan
Sometimes I felt like I was learning more about Saul through his letters than I had ever knowed about him before. I read his letters over and over, trying to find hidden meaning in his tight little words. I would run my finger over the pages, feeling the curved pressings of his pen against paper. Sometimes he wrote to me in pencil, and I had felt of some of these sentences so many times that the words were barely there anymore, so smudged and smoothed that they looked like ash that had been smeared into thin lines.
I loved him more on account of his letters, and I wondered how such words of hope and grief could come through the hand of a man who had been so silent when he was at home. I could see now that his mind was always at work. His homesickness was spelled out clear in each envelope that stood in my post office box.
Esme would not hear of leaving her home, and she didn’t care if Saul demanded it or not. She swore that she wasn’t able to sleep a wink out of her own bed, and when I offered to move the bed right down to my own house, she said she couldn’t sleep away from the creaks and moans of her own house. The way she acted, you’d think those night sounds gave her some lesson she could not do without. Esme didn’t offer for me and Birdie to move in with her, so I never brought the matter up. I had had enough of that house when me and Saul had lived there before. And I couldn’t blame Esme, as I knowed what it was like to love your own home. I had left one home already, and I had no intention of leaving this one.
I did have company every now and then, though. Serena stayed the night at my house pretty often, and when she did, the rooms were full of laughter and talking. Luke and Birdie played good together, and even when they didn’t, I savored the sound of their bickering. Serena had run Whistle-Dick off and found her own house too lonesome. She had quit him after finding out that he had another woman, who lived in town. Serena talked about it constantly—so much that I sometimes wondered why I wasn’t sick of hearing about it, but I never was.
“I seen them right in town together,” Serena said. “She has a house right on Main Street. You know that little red house up on the mountain, right before you get downtown? I seen him walking right up her steps. Holding her elbow in his hand.”
Serena rolled one cigarette after another and smoked them like somebody starving to death. “But I just drove right home. Could have went up there and whupped him and her both, but it wouldn’t have been worth my time. When he come in the house that night, I met him at the door. I took my skillet and knocked his brains out!” Serena slapped her thigh and moved back with such glee that the two front legs of her chair bounced off the floor. “He laid there a good hour, and at first I thought I had kilt him. But then I seen that he was breathing and I got tickled. He had the awfullest big knot on his head, just like a big egg. When he come to, he laid there a long time, blinking his eyes. Then he felt of that bump. Lord God, he thought he was going to throw him a little conniption fit. Then he seen me standing there, still holding the skillet.”
She sucked down the last draw of her cigarette and started right in on rolling another one. “I told him I’d divorce him.”
I didn’t know anybody who had had a divorce. I didn’t think women could even file for a divorce, but I never said anything like this to Serena. I just liked to hear her go on about it.
“Where’d he go, then? Has he plumb left the house?” I asked.
“Oh yes, honey,” Serena said. “I told him I wanted the house and his car. Either that or I’d report him to the war office and tell them where he was, since he dodged his selective service papers.”
“Where is he?”
“Went back to live with his bitch of a mommy, I guess.” She put her middle finger to her tongue and dotted off a piece of tobacco.
I couldn’t help but laugh at her. “I swear, Serena, you’re a sight.”
It was a comfort to me, having her and Luke there. When they were there, sometimes we’d set up way into the night and make peanut butter candy or brown syrup. Serena would sing for us. And even when fall started to set in good and proper, every now and then we’d build us a big fire in the yard and fry bacon on sticks we held over the flames. Times
like those helped ease my homesickness for my people, which I carried with me always. And it seemed to calm me from missing Saul so bad, too. Serena’s high pretty voice could cure anything.
Twelve
All of us women on God’s Creek were killing a hog when Aaron returned.
Esme had called on every woman she knowed to come down and help with the slaughter. There were no men left on the creek except Old Man Taylor, who was so bent that he reminded me of an upside-down L when I saw him walking alongside the road. We numbered six. Serena was there, along with America Spurlock, Bess Morgan, and Nan Joseph. America was cold natured and wore so many layers of clothes that she would not be of much use, besides to do bossing, which she was known for anyway. Bess was plagued by croup but thought the winter air might help clear her, and Nan was tickled to death to have been asked—she had always helped her father kill the hogs. All she ever talked about was her daddy, so much that people made fun of her over it.
They all elected me to shoot the hog. I accepted with nothing more than the nod of my head and went into the house to get my rifle. I had killed animals all of my life. I had wrung the necks or cut the heads off of countless chickens. Once, I had talked Jubal into taking me hunting with him and had ended up shaming him by shooting three squirrels to his one. But when I walked out to the pen behind Esme’s house and saw the hog pacing back and forth—heaving like it knowed what was about to happen—I was certain that I would not be able to do it. I dreaded admitting this to all of the women, for fear of them making fun of me. I couldn’t blame them if they did. After all, I had never felt bad about blinking out the lives of small things like hens and squirrels, but I pitied the huge, block-shaped hog that looked at me with black eyes through the slats of the pen.