I wanted him to come home, but I didn’t want to face him. My guilt would be stamped clearly on my face.
After that, something in me changed. That letter seemed to get me going. The day after the snow, it was fair and the sky was white as a sheet, with not one sign of weather about it. There was no hint of the sun, as if it had tucked itself away. Yet the strange sky made the world bright. It was cold, but the day looked so pretty that I set into cleaning the house. Aidia had set up all night with Esme, who had took on a bad chest cold, but she still come down to help me. We scrubbed the floors and the walls and stood on chairs to clean the corners of the ceiling. I set my kettle up near the creek and washed out the curtains and all the bedclothes. We washed all day, and while I hung out the curtains to dry, Aidia made us a little supper.
When I walked in, Matracia waved and said, “Vine.” She was in that stage of calling people’s names, but Aidia paid no attention, as she claimed Matracia asked for me all the time. Aidia kept right on stirring and moving pots around while Birdie sliced the corn bread.
Aidia had warmed up the soup beans from last night and baked a fresh skillet of corn bread. She opened some of the chowchow and sweet pickles we had canned that summer. I set down at the table and ate everything on my plate while Birdie fed Matracia beans. Aidia wiped down the sideboard, her back to me.
“I’m wore out,” I said when I had cleaned my plate. “I never did like to do the wash.”
Aidia didn’t say a word back. It wasn’t like her. She bent over the sideboard, scrubbing hard. I walked over to the dishpan to dash out the dregs of my coffee and seen her face. She was far away, in deep thought. I touched her on the arm and she turned to look at me.
“What in the world’s on your mind?” I said, laughing at her, for she looked serious as a lawyer.
“You know why Aaron tried to strangle me all them times, don’t you?” she said. “Why he treated me thataway?”
“Because he was drunk, I reckon. Because the devil took charge of him.”
“No,” she said, and glanced at the children, who were still eating.
“Why, then?”
“Because I wasn’t you,” she whispered.
I should have denied it. I should have laughed at her and told her that was foolish talk, but I couldn’t add to my lies. She had forgot to put the onions on the table, and when I seen them on the sideboard, I took a rind and bit into it and looked away.
“I’m studying on leaving here, Vine,” she said. She folded her dishrag and laid it over the lip of the dishpan. “I can’t stay here.”
“Where would you go, Aidia? You can’t leave here.”
“Back to my people, I guess. East Tennessee is booming since they found all that coal.” She looked out the window. The world was so bright outside that her face seemed lit up. “I won’t set here all my life, waiting on a man I know won’t be back.”
“Don’t leave us, Aidia,” I said. “You’ll regret it before long. You’ve got us, now—me and Esme and Serena and the younguns. We’re a family, ain’t we?”
“Esme despises me. She hain’t even spoke to me since the night I fired that shotgun. That’s been two months now, and me living right in her back door, almost. She don’t look on me the way she does you. You please her. She ain’t liked me since the minute she seen me.”
“I ain’t never heard her speak ill of you,” I said, and this much was true. But I knowed that Aidia was right. I had seen the looks Esme gave her, the long sighs she breathed out when Aidia said something she didn’t agree with.
“You know it’s truth, though,” Aidia said, and took a quarter of the onion and bit from it. “Aaron hain’t coming back. I’ve done accepted that.”
I didn’t answer. Aidia looked at me as if she could read my thoughts. After a long time, she looked away and made herself a plate. She set down at the table and began to eat her beans as if a great hunger had all at once fell upon her.
Around a mouthful of food, she said, “I heard tell they was having a big square dance at the schoolhouse. On account of the war ending.” Her eyes widened and she smiled at me, as if she had completely forgotten what she had just been talking about. That’s the way she was, though. Sad one minute and laughing the next. “We ought to go. I’m so tired of setting in the house. It’s just now November, and already a snow has fell. Once winter comes, we’ll never get out to go nowhere.”
“Two big married women can’t go to no square dance alone,” I said.
“If you don’t go with me, I’ll go by myself. I can’t stand to know they’s a dance happening and not be there. That’s what I was just telling you, Vine. I ain’t going to wait for the rest of my life on somebody that ain’t coming back.” She thought for a long time, chewing with her mouth tightly shut. Then she slammed her fork against the plate, like she had had a revelation. “Serena will go with me.”
I MENTIONED IT to Esme the next morning. “What could be wrong with going?” she said. “The war’s ended. If I was able, I’d go to celebrate it.”
So I took this as a sign to go. I thought it might do Aidia good.
Serena was tickled to go, too. She had not sung in public for a great while, and even though she claimed not to like to show herself, I knew that secretly she did. She enjoyed the clapping and the whispering about how beautiful her voice was.
Even though Esme said her cold was better, I went down and asked Nan Joseph to stay with her. Nan seemed outright shocked that we would be going to a square dance without our men, but I told her that Esme had insisted upon it, so she never said another word. Me and Aidia hooked up Esme’s gig and loaded the children in the back. We rode over to pick up Serena, and it was like we were young girls out to catch some man’s eye. It would have looked that way, too, if it hadn’t been for the baby on Aidia’s hip, and Luke and Birdie following right at our heels.
It seemed like everybody in Crow County was at the dance. We could hear the music from a long way off. There were cars and gigs parked all up the road, and horses tied to every pine. The windows of the schoolhouse were all lit up, yellow and square. As we walked up the path, we could see the people dancing inside. Their feet made such a racket that it sounded as if the floor would fall through. There were men standing out front, just like at any other gathering. They stood around a bonfire and passed around a bottle of whiskey, nodding to us as we passed.
When Serena opened the door, the music busted out onto the night air. The warmth from inside hit us in the face, and the scent of coal burning in the stove settled on our cold clothes.
There was a fiddler, two banjo players, three guitarists, and an old woman with a dulcimer. Her music was lost to the strings of the men, but she was having a big time, sitting there hunched over the curved wood in her lap. Her face was lit with the happiness of the war being over. All the desks had been piled up behind the pickers, and the floor was full of people dancing. The band was playing “Buck Creek Girls” and the caller moved amongst the dancers. “Fish for the oyster!” he called. “Weave ye a basket!” Those who weren’t dancing were standing about in a great, thick circle, clapping and laughing. There was a pie auction lined up on tables over to the side, with pies that didn’t look fit to eat. The girls fretted about the table, each leaning over every few minutes to turn her pie around, as if wanting the light to hit its surface just right. Each girl was trying to figure out which man would bid the highest on her pie and take her to the cloakroom for a piece of the pie and a kiss.
Aidia shed her coat and handed it to me, gave Matracia to Serena, and broke through the circle and found her a man to dance with. He was standing on the outer edge of the circle, watching all the others. Once he caught sight of Aidia’s pretty face, he went right out with her.
“She’s a feisty one,” Serena said. I could hear the glee in Serena’s voice. “She can dance, too.”
I knowed that everyone there was watching Aidia. I could see the women leaning over to one another. “Married,” they whispered.
r /> There was a crew of children playing off in the corner, so I let Birdie and Luke join them. Serena bounced Matracia around on her hip to the beat of the music. Women surrounded Serena, telling her how their babies were doing. She had delivered every child on this side of Buffalo Mountain for the past seven years.
I was the only Cherokee there, of course, and ever since that Cherokee boy had killed the bootlegger in Bell County, people had acted different toward me. I was not a regular face to these people, either. They knowed me only as Saul Sullivan’s wife. Some of them had helped raise our house and had been good to me, but none of them took me by the arm to talk.
ONCE THE PIE AUCTION got under way, we could not find Aidia. We all stood, watching the men bid on the pies. We clapped and went on when each girl received her bid and packed the pie down to the highest bidder, but I wasn’t paying that much attention. I looked over the crowd, trying to pick out Aidia’s curls.
When the auction was over, the couples went off to the cloakroom, the men already pulling their knives from their pockets so they could cut the pies. They were in a hurry to eat a slice and maybe get a kiss if they acted as if they liked the pie. The old woman playing the dulcimer motioned for Serena to step out into the middle of the floor. Serena handed Matracia to me.
Serena sung “O Beautiful For Spacious Skies” and everyone sang along as loud as they could. It was a song they all knowed by heart, and several of the women cried as they sung. They let their tears flow without wiping them away. Their voices rose and moved over the crowd. All those voices together made me want to cry, for I thought of the war again and what so many people had been through. My troubles were few next to what women over in Europe had suffered. And women right in America, receiving word of their sons or husbands being killed over there. It seemed like it took the end of the war for me to realize it all.
I did not want to dwell on such things. This was a time of celebration. So I closed my eyes and listened to Serena’s high, pretty voice. I could feel Matracia going to sleep against my chest. She was sung to sleep by that high chorus, by that collection of happiness. I stood there with my eyes closed until Serena had finished, even through the crowd hollering and clapping. Matracia raised her head for a minute, then put it right back down on my shoulder. It seemed as if Serena was back beside me all at once. I felt her elbow in my rib. “Lookee there,” she said.
Aidia was out in the middle of the dance space. A waltz had been called so that the pie couples could dance. Aidia had latched onto somebody, too. She was dancing with a tall, good-looking man who I recognized right away. I pulled at Serena’s sleeve and motioned for her to look, too.
“Lord, that’s Dalton,” she said around her cigarette. “I ain’t seen him in a coon’s age.”
Serena could not even bear to speak Whistle-Dick’s name, but she bore no ill will toward his brother. He had offered her some money to get by on after she run Whistle-Dick off. The last she had heard, Dalton had took off to Harlan County to work in the mines.
Aidia waltzed with Dalton like someone who has spent every day of her life dancing. She held her back straight and her head high. She leaned back and laughed. She held on tightly to his hand and did not flinch when he put his hand too low on her back. I felt like storming through the crowd to grab her and drag her from the dance floor. She was flirting with him—Looking him right in the eye, hanging on every word he whispered into her ear.
I moved through the crowd with Serena close behind. As they walked back off the dancing space, Aidia hooked her arm through Dalton’s. Serena come up quickly behind them and laid a big hand on Dalton’s back, squeezing the meaty part between his neck and shoulder. He spun around, and Serena broke out in a high laugh. He put his long arms around her and hugged her.
Another dance had been called and the fiddler was sawing away. “Let’s go outside, where we can talk!” Dalton hollered over the music.
It was much colder outside now. A frost had fallen and our feet crunched through it. On our way out, I had jerked somebody’s mackinaw off the coat tree and put it over Matracia, making her twice as heavy. Aidia broke away from Dalton while he talked to Serena. She run up and ran her hand down Matracia’s back. “Oh, it’s went to sleep,” she said. Then she hugged me tightly, laying her face against mine.
“Thank you so much for coming with me,” she said. Her breath played against my face. “I’m having the biggest time ever was.”
I pulled away from her. “You’ve been drinking.”
“Me and Dalton stepped outside and had a sup to warm us up.” She raised her eyebrows.
“You’re going to be the talk of the country. A married woman acting thisaway.”
The smile fell from her lips. “Do you think I care what these people think? You never have. Why should I?”
“Aidia, think of your baby.” My breath spread out between us. I tried to talk quietly, as I didn’t want Dalton to overhear. He and Serena were in deep conversation about old times. “You’re drinking and flirting. Let’s go to the house, now.”
“Why should I?” she said. Her mouth was a little red pout. She crossed her arms and hugged herself against the cold. “He’s dead. You know it as well as I do.”
“Why would you say such a thing?” I said. I felt as if she had hit me in the stomach.
“I can see it in your eyes when I talk about him. You know it all through you, but you don’t want to tell me. You don’t want to make it real for me.”
I looked away from her. I knowed now why I didn’t want her dancing and carrying on. If I was witness to that, I had to admit that Aaron was dead. And even though I thought of it all the time, I still tried to deny it, too.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” she said, and laid a warm hand against my face. “I just want to live, Vine. You know what that feels like.”
I patted Matracia’s back and bounced her up and down a little. I thought Aidia would at least want to hold her, but she slipped back beside Dalton, looking up at him like a moony-eyed girl. He had pulled a pint bottle out of his pocket and handed it to Serena. She threw her head back and took a quick drink.
Serena held the bottle out for me. “Here, this’ll warm you up.”
I shook my head. “We better be getting on back to the house, Serena. Before it gets any colder.”
“It’s cold as it’s getting,” Serena said. She shook the bottle in front of my face, and the liquor bubbled inside.
“Go on,” Aidia said with a little laugh. “Let me take Matracia. You need to have a little fun, too.”
So I did take a drink. I felt bad for doing it, what with Birdie right inside the schoolhouse and all, but it felt good to me, sliding down my throat. It felt like hot salvation that would flow into my veins and spread out across my body. I handed it back, and Dalton smiled at me with teeth so white they fairly glowed in the darkness. I wanted to drink more of it. I wanted to hold my skirts up and dance and be the talk of the town, too. But there would be no real celebrating for me until I seen Saul’s face again, until I accepted what I was or was not going to tell him.
Twenty-two
Me and Esme chose a morning just before Thanksgiving to gather up our greenery. As soon as it got daylight, I took Birdie up to Aidia’s and then went down to Esme’s to wait for the day to settle in good. Every year we went up on the mountain to find things like mistletoe and holly and mountain laurel. We kept some for ourselves, to use at Christmas, but we took most of it to Sam Mullins’s store in Black Banks, where we could sell it for good money. Sam Mullins shipped it by train to places like Philadelphia and Boston, where rich people bought it to decorate their fine houses. It amazed me to think of the branches of our trees being shipped off that far, seeing a world that we would never know.
Esme was on the porch, running the butcher knife over a whetstone. She knowed how to work with a knife; each time, the stone bit into the blade at the perfect angle. A fine dust of little metal shavings laid in a line across her apron. She was wearing Aaron
’s coat. The November morning was bitter, but Esme liked to sit outside in the fall of the year. She said autumn air was good for her lungs.
Esme glanced up quick and said, “Hidy,” before looking back to the knife. She touched the blade with the tip of her finger and laid it aside. She fished her pocketknife out of her apron and began to sharpen it, too. “Going to be a clear day,” she said.
“It sure looks it,” I said, and looked again at the butcher knife laying on the table. It made my stomach turn over. “Got all your knives sharp?”
“Yeah, after this one, I’ll be done,” Esme said. “They’s coffee on the warmer plate. Bring me a little sup, too.”
Esme’s kitchen smelled like lard and flour. The coal stove fairly glowed with heat, as Esme loved a hot house. I usually suffered sweat and closeness while visiting Esme during cold weather, as I was hot-natured anyway. Esme kept a fire right up into the spring and built them on rainy summer nights, too. I poured the coffee out into the dainty teacups that looked so out-of-place in her kitchen. I wondered where they had come from.
“Here ye go,” I said. She had finished her sharpening and was sitting with her head propped back against the wall of the house, her eyes closed. Her glasses laid atop the folds of her dress. She jumped as if startled, then smiled at her own fright and put both hands out for the cup. I laughed. “You didn’t nod off, did you?”
“Naw, I’s resting my eyes. I’m going to have to get me some new specs,” Esme said, wiping her glasses with her apron. “I keep a headache anymore.”
The coffee was so hot it burned my tongue, but I sipped at it anyway. I could feel its warmth spreading out over my whole body. I eyed a dying moon just over the mountain—no more than a silver scratch on the morning sky. It was very quiet and we listened to the creek bustling along. On Redbud, the creek had not been so close, and when I first come to God’s Creek, I had thought the sound of rushing water all night long would drive me crazy. Now I could not imagine laying down to sleep without hearing that gentle roar. Sometimes I woke up from nightmares and was assured that time had not stopped when I heard the creek slipping over the old rocks. That sound was a part of me now. It was funny how I was always aware of it, too. Usually when things are constantly present, you don’t even notice them, the way you will get used to the smell of your own home and not even catch that scent anymore. But I always heard the creek. It was like a song.