When Birdie finally awoke, we went outside and showed him the crops I had put down. Already the potato plants stood high and blue-green. Onions in straight rows, beans beginning to vine up the horse corn. My gourds hung from the fence like fat women holding their knees to their chests, their heads tucked between their legs.
“You the finest woman I ever seen,” Saul said.
WE HADN’T BEEN asleep long when Esme run in the house, barefooted and in her gown, crying and screaming. Saul jumped up before he had said a word and was jerking his britches up around his legs, the belt buckle clicking and knocking against the bedpost.
“He’s going to kill her!” Esme cried. “I can’t get him off of her.”
Birdie awoke and scrambled across the room to get into the bed with me. She hooked her legs about my waist and trembled against me. I got up with her wrapped around me and followed as Saul and Esme ran toward her house. Every window was lit with yellow light. I could hear Aaron cussing and going on. By the time we got up there, Aaron had come out onto the porch, where he was pacing like a dog that had been locked up. He walked the length of the porch over and over, breathing hard, his shoulders throwed back. He didn’t have on anything but dungarees, and his chest seemed broader than I could have imagined it. When I had first met him, he had been such a little feller that Saul had called him String Bean. There was three straight lines—fingernail marks—down one arm. When the shadows moved away from his face, I could see that he was drunk. His eyes was wild, scary.
Through the open door I could see Aidia folded into a corner, shivering, her gown pushed so far up that we could all see her drawers. They were very white against her long, brown legs. She leaned her head against the wall. Esme grabbed Aaron’s wrists, but he pushed her away softly. I moved toward Aidia and didn’t say a word, just gathered her up and put her head in my lap. Little spots of blood touched the top of my gown and spread out as they sunk into the cotton. The blood was from Aaron’s arm, I guessed. I couldn’t find no cuts on her.
“Run jump in Mamaw’s bed, now,” I told Birdie. “Go on.”
Aidia moved her legs against the floor like she was running in slow motion. She pushed her head between my legs as if she was trying to hide her face there. “Oh God,” she said every few seconds, as if these were the only words she knew. It sounded as if her mouth was full of lard.
“You whupped your woman?” Saul said. His voice boomed. “A pregnant woman?”
“He liked to strangled her to death,” Esme said, her hair wild about her head. Aaron paced past her, then back. “And she went so wild she about killed herself on the furniture.”
I looked back and forth between Aidia and the porch, where Saul finally got Aaron to stay still. Aaron backed against the porch post and looked at Saul with wide, unblinking eyes. He heaved for breath.
“What in the hell are you doing, son?” Saul hollered, although his face was right in Aaron’s. “Surely to God you didn’t choke her like that.”
“Tired of her mouth,” Aaron said in great deep breaths. “Wanting a house of our own, wanting to go and never hushing.”
“You’ve scared Mama to death and about killed your woman. Have you lost ye mind?” Saul finally turned away, as if he could not bear to look at Aaron. He spoke to the black yard: “And she’s carrying a baby, ain’t she?”
“I never—” Aaron started to say more, but stopped.
“I ain’t ever even raised my hand to Vine,” Saul said, trying to calm his voice. The veins in his neck rose beneath his skin.
“You didn’t have no reason to,” Aaron whispered.
Aidia twisted on the floor, now holding on to me with both hands. I feared she would bruise my arms, she held so tight. “Hush now, honey,” I said, my eyes still on the porch. Esme moved near Aaron.
“You two are worrying me to death,” Esme said. “I won’t have this in my house. You shame me.”
“God damns a drunk,” Saul said. He raked a hand back through his hair.
At that, Aaron took off. Jumped off the porch and run down the yard until he hit the road. Moonlight was thin, and in just a minute he was lost to darkness, but we could hear his heavy feet on the dirt of the road.
Saul kicked a chair, then bent to put it upright and sat down in it. He folded his hands before him and dropped his head. “What’s happened to that boy?” he asked no one.
I took Aidia by the shoulders, but I could not move her. She was deadweight on my lap. I finally hooked my hands beneath her armpits and managed to get her up on my shoulder. She laid there like a little child, shivering.
“Mommy,” Birdie said, half her face showing at the corner of the wall.
“Go get back in Mamaw’s bed, baby.”
I stroked Aidia’s face, trying to see if he had hit her. Her mouth was black with drying blood. Her eye was tender and she flinched when I put my fingers there. There were no fist marks. She must have fell into the chairs, onto the floor. Bruises showed on her neck already—blue handprints.
I put a hand flat on her belly. It was as hard and tightly stretched as the hull of a watermelon. I closed my eyes and prayed the baby was all right, but didn’t mention this to her, as I feared it would startle her.
For a long time there were no words. The cries of crickets and night things was deafening, sounding like they would soon overtake the house, as their songs moved closer and closer.
I finally got Aidia to stand up. She wiped at her right eye with the back of her hand, but her other eye was already turning blue. Her mouth swelled as if she had been stung by a swarm of bees. Without a word, she started walking as she held on to me. I asked her if she would go down to the house and stay with us, but she didn’t answer me.
“You lock him out,” Saul told Esme. “Let him sleep in the barn tonight, till he sobers up. I don’t want him in this house.”
“I can’t lock him out,” Esme said weakly.
“Well, by God, I’ll stay here, then. Untelling what a fool like that will do. I never knowed my own brother.”
Saul packed Birdie down to the house, walking slow beside me as I led Aidia down the yard. She moved like an old woman, leaning against me, one arm across my back. “Listen at the crickets,” she said, like she was out of her mind.
I put Aidia in the bed with me and Birdie, and I set upright on my pillows as I watched Saul go back out to set with Esme. Neither of them would lay down that night. They would probably set on the porch, silent, until either morning or Aaron came. Aidia curled against one side of me, and Birdie against the other. Aidia didn’t cry, but she breathed loud and ragged. Every once in a while I could make out her eyes in the gray of the bedroom—they were wide open. I liked to never went to sleep that night, either. I set there and listened to Aidia and Birdie breathe. The longer I laid there, the louder they seemed—so loud that I thought I would go mad from hearing them. I tried to focus on the crickets and katydids. I remembered Aaron’s eyes. They had looked just the way they had that day in the creek. Like they belonged to somebody else.
I DOZED OFF around daylight, but I didn’t sleep no more than a few hours. When I woke up, the house was quiet as a cave. I could hear chattering out on the yard. The house was so full of light that I didn’t see how I had slept this long. It streamed through the windows and slanted toward the floor to end in a long patch of yellow. The floorboards were warm from the morning sun, and I walked through the house but couldn’t find a soul.
I went out onto the porch and seen Aidia and Birdie playing in the yard. Aidia had waded into the creek and got Birdie a dish of mud, which she was patting out into pies and putting in neat rows on the sand rock in the middle of the yard. Aidia sat on the edge of the rock, clad in my housecoat, and commented on each pat that Birdie gave to the mud pies. When Aidia felt me staring at her, she put the side of her hand to her brow and peered up at me, as the light was in her eyes. Her eye was black and her lip was swole up, but she had washed the blood from it.
“I hated to wake you up,
” she said. “They’s coffee on the warmer plate.”
I stepped out onto the yard. The ground was cool and sandy but held the spring.
Aidia stood and untied the housecoat when I drew near. “Here,” she said. “I hated to come out here in my gown. I didn’t want to go up there and get clothes.”
“Keep it on—it’s all right.” I smoothed her hair out of her eyes, but the morning breeze knocked it back in place. “How you feel?”
“Sore all over. I’m sorry this had to happen, and Saul just getting back.”
I put my hand atop Birdie’s head, but she didn’t look up from her play. “Lord God, Aidia,” I said. “You’ve got no call to be sorry.”
“I don’t know what to do, Vine.”
“You ain’t seen him, or Esme?”
“No. Nothing’s moved up yonder.”
“Where’s Saul at?”
“He come down here early this morning,” Aidia said. “I never did go to sleep, and I heard him in the kitchen. I waited till he went out, and got on up.” She nodded her chin toward the mountain. “He went up that path an hour ago.”
I never had knowed of Saul to climb the mountain just to be doing it. Only time he went up there was to hunt or scout. I eyed the hillside.
“I love him, Vine,” she said, squinting in the sunlight. “And I hate him.”
“It ain’t my place to tell you what to do, Aidia. But a woman can’t take that.”
She set back down on the rock and leaned over close to Birdie. “Run fetch you a stick and you can prick dots in the tops of your pies,” she said. “When they dry, they’ll look real.”
“You set here with Birdie while I go look for Saul?” I asked.
“Why, yeah,” she said. When I turned to hit the path, she called to me. “Vine? Thank you for helping me last night.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say to her. It was hard to look at her with her face all tore up. I thought about going into the house to put on a dress, but the air felt good. The air breathed through my gown, but there would be nobody to see me up on that mountain. I walked past the chickens clucking and scratching in the back, the rooster strutting among them. And I climbed the mountain, the air smelling more clean as I went higher up.
Saul was setting at the edge of the clearing, one leg laid out straight in front of him, the other pulled up to his chest. He had a hand to his face, and when I bent down to touch his wrist, I seen that he’d been crying. I lifted his chin with my thumb, and he didn’t turn away from me. I sunk down beside him.
“Lord God, Saul,” I said. I was out of breath in my surprise at finding him this way.
“I hate being away from you all. Now that I’m home, I can’t do nothing but dread leaving here,” he said. “And last night … I thought Aaron would take care of you all. I felt so much better once I knowed he had come back home.”
“Come back to work at the mill here, then. You’ve done your part.” I laid my head on his shoulder, not wanting to shame him by looking at his wet cheeks too long.
“I can’t. I signed them papers, binding me to the lumber camp until the need passes,” he said. “I feel like I don’t even know my little girl. I never thought it would be this way when I took the job.”
“I know it,” I said.
“I seen an awful thing in the lumber camp,” he said. “We push them oxen hard. Push em awful hard when we’re dragging them big trees out of the mountain. Some of them men are pure evil, the way they press them poor animals. Sometimes the oxen get their legs broke. I seen a great big tree roll down and fall right across one’s back. It took it forever to die. Strong thing, an ox, but you can only push one so far.”
I closed my eyes and let the breeze move over me, soothed by that fine air and Saul’s voice. He had never talked to me like this before.
“And the other day, we’s having the awfullest time ever was, trying to get a big hickory off there. That mountain’s too steep for a tractor, too steep for any truck. So they had six oxen hooked to that tree. I went down the mountain to check on all my crews and seen the driver was pushing them too hard. Before I could get to him, he whipped them till their flanks was just raw meat. Blood pouring down, the meat split wide open. Them oxen just took it, just kept pulling. And he kept whipping, hollering, and going on. I run down there and took the whip from him. I drawed it back on him. I wanted to strike him with it, but I didn’t. I made the men unhook them oxen and lead them out of there. It made me plumb sick, them poor animals. Terrible what people can do to a living thing.”
“It was good of you.” This was all I could think to say. I could picture everything in my head and wished I had been there. I loved him for this act, above all other things.
“You get out, away from your people, see something like that—just makes you sick with wanting home. I can’t tell you how it got to me. I felt like leaving that place right then. Wanted to come home and tell you what had happened. Wanted to see my baby so bad.”
“You home now,” I said. I put my hand in the little opening of his shirt between the buttons.
“I don’t understand the way people operate,” he said. “The way that feller could whip them oxen like that. The way my own brother could keep choking a woman who is past taking any more. Hurting her like that. It makes me sick.”
I just set there against him and held him for a long time, wanting to never move.
Fifteen
Aidia’s excuse for going back to Aaron was that she couldn’t bear staying with us during Saul’s furlough.
“I know you all want to be alone,” she said. “You need to be.”
She gathered her clothes up in a paper sack and kissed Birdie on the forehead, then walked back up to Esme’s.
“I wish Aidia would come live with us,” Birdie said. She pressed her face against the window glass as she watched Aidia climb the hill.
I felt bad for letting Aidia go back. I was glad to be shed of her, though. I hated to admit that, but it was true. Me and Saul did need some time alone. He would be going back the day after next, and I wanted to spend every minute doing something with him, making time stretch out as long as it would. We set right down on the porch floor and played with Birdie, hoed the garden together. Still, it seemed like we were only waiting and dreading his departure.
“I’ll be home for good in no time,” Saul said. “They ain’t many more trees there to be felled.”
I knowed that he would not be home for a while when we took him back to the train station. I could feel it all through me, a certainty I could not explain to myself. The war showed no sign of slacking up, and they would need more turpentine. At the station I waited until he had left before I cried, my face turned away from the others.
Saul had had a long talk with Aaron before leaving and I hoped this would do some good, but I doubted it. Aaron seemed tired of Aidia. He would not let her touch him and barely grunted when Aidia asked him a question. That’s just what I noticed. Aidia wouldn’t speak of their marriage to me anymore. I believe she had decided to convince herself that everything was going to be all right once the baby arrived. She was like a child who makes herself believe that snakes don’t live in the creek so she will be able to swim there in peace.
Nothing changed but the weather. Aaron was happy for a few days, then laid out for two or three nights gambling. He would come home stinking of liquor and filth in the same clothes he had left in. Aidia tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, and Esme busied herself with chores and church, the two things in her life that were most important, besides her family.
But there was a feeling of dread in the air. It crept over the holler like the rain clouds that rolled in every evening. When the summer thunderstorms raged, I stood on the porch and let the mist of the rain light on my face. I felt as if something was building up, growing and becoming more powerful. Sometimes I thought I might bust from a burden that I could not name, and felt as if I was mourning something that had not even happened yet.
I s
tarted writing long letters to my family and received many from them, but they told the same things over and over. They were settling in fine. My aunt Hazel was about to get remarried, and Jubal had already done so. He had married a young girl and received his draft papers on the same day. Mama had written, “He had to marry her. She got knocked up.” Daddy was doing well. I read these words many times, trying to see what Mama was really saying in her tight, hunchbacked writing. I wondered if she was trying to spare me from suffering the truth, that he wasn’t getting better, that he was worse. I often laid the letters on my chest and leaned back, closing my eyes and trying to picture him, to see what he was doing. I missed all my people, but being away from him was the hardest part, knowing that he was sick and not able to do for himself. It hurt me to the bone.
I saved all the letters. I got castaway shreds of fabric from Esme’s quilting box and tied the letters in neat stacks. Sometimes, when I didn’t think I could stand being away from my family any longer, I sat down and read all the letters again.
LATER THAT MONTH, I stood near the door and watched as Serena delivered Aidia and Aaron’s baby. It was the easiest birth I had ever seen, so I had gotten out of the way; it seemed Aidia bore down no more than an hour before the child come screaming forth.
Aidia laughed like a lunatic when Serena laid the baby in the crook of her arm. She laughed until tears streamed down her face. “She’s mine,” she said over and over, as if in a daze.
Aaron hesitated about holding the baby. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt it,” he told Serena.
Serena held the baby out to him, but still he wouldn’t take her. She laid the baby back on her arm. “See here, as long as you keep her head up, you can’t hurt her. Just keep her head steady.” Then she gently placed the baby into the crook of Aaron’s arm. “There you go. There. See?”
Still, he held the baby like he was afraid of her. I didn’t like the look of fear on his face. He held her with both arms and hunched over her, whispering so low that none of us could hear what he was saying. He appeared to be humbled, as all men seem to be right after a birth, but there was nothing peaceful about him.