A Parchment of Leaves

  The car came onto the white road, black smoke puffing from its pipes. I heard the screech of the parking brake. The vehicle spat and hissed as the engine was turned off. I raised my head to see a round man climbing out of the car. He squeezed himself through the little door and pulled at the bottom of his suit jacket and straightened his hat. He started to walk across the field, then stopped as he realized his pants were covered with beggar’s-lice. Birdie run to me and held on to my skirt tail. She clutched the bouquet of flowers tight in one hand.

  “You’re trespassing!” the man hollered. He pushed his glasses up with his thumb. I stood up straight with my hands on Birdie’s shoulders.

  “I wanted to show my little girl where I come from,” I said. I didn’t speak very loud, hoping that he would be forced to ask me to repeat myself.

  “I’ve seen you,” he said. “I know you from somewhere.”

  “We’ll go now,” I said, since I knowed now exactly who he was. My voice quavered. I didn’t like the feeling of hate, and it washed up over me. He’d forced my family to leave, to pack up everything they had and move across two states. And I seen now that he was also the man I had argued with on the street in Black Banks. The one who had called me stupid. He was Tate Masters. He had robbed my family. I remembered the way it felt to kick his tail, and now, knowing it was Masters made it all the more satisfying to me. If I stayed here and argued with him, I would get too mad. I would be liable to go wild on him. There was no use in that. I steered Birdie around to walk back to the horse.

  To my back, the man hollered, “Don’t be back on my land.”

  I clenched my jaw, trying to keep quiet, and I wished that all those tales about me had been true. That I could throw a hex. That I could cause a snake to rise up and strike him. I turned around real slow and said, “It was my land before you took it.”

  He stepped closer. “Where do I know you from, girl?”

  “Probably from when I kicked you right in the hind end on Main Street.”

  He drawed in his breath. He pushed at his glasses again, trying to figure out what to say next.

  “It will come back on you, what you’ve done,” I said. “A person can only do so much wrong before it catches up with him. Someday it will find you out.”

  “Get off my land!” he yelled. He put his hands on his hips. “We ought to run all you Indians out!”

  I lifted Birdie up onto the horse and then took the reins in hand. I walked the horse back through the woods slowly. I run my hands along the slick trunks of old sycamores as I passed them. Trees I had grown up with.

  I stopped for a moment at the confluence, then pulled myself up onto the horse and rode away, the familiar scent of Redbud Camp filling my head. I felt sure that my great-granny Lucinda was up on the high ridge, watching me leave. I turned around and waved to her.

  I had said good-bye to my home place at long last, and I realized that I was slowly saying good-bye to everything I held dear. I had already decided what I was going to do, although I had not yet told myself.

  Twenty-seven

  In the days after Esme’s funeral, Saul was quiet toward me. I thought he was just grieving his mommy, but one evening I put my hand on the back of his neck, and he flinched. He had never acted sick of my touch. Was he mad over how close me and Esme got to be, or over me not letting him bury her beside his daddy? Or over how I went back to Redbud, or was it even more than that?

  It was hot as the hubs of torment that day. The corn wilted in the garden, turning from green to nigh blue. In the woods the heat bugs screamed. Saul was in the garden, chopping out the rows, and I took him a big jar of water. He didn’t have no shirt on, and his back was golden. I stood at the edge of the garden a long time without saying a word, watching him work. I liked the way the long, narrow muscles on either side of his spine grew hard, then flexed back to unseeable. Beads of sweat stood on his big shoulders. His body arched into his work, then pulled away again, a giving and a taking. There is nothing so thrilling as seeing your man in the heat of work.

  I put the jar of cold water in the small of his back, and he jumped, glancing back quick to look at me; then he kept right on hoeing and didn’t say a word. I took a drink of the water myself and watched him. I had brought the water from the springhouse, and it tasted mossy and sweet. It was so good that I took too big a mouthful, and it spilled down my chin and run down the inside of my blouse. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  He looked good to me. Birdie was up at Aidia’s, so I put my hand on his neck. I touched him in a way that he knowed well. It’s funny, the way you can lay your hand on a person a certain way and make it mean a certain thing. Just by the way you place your hand, they know if you mean for them to hush, or to turn around to kiss you. This is the way I meant for my hand to feel on him. I wanted it to be a sign that he looked good to me. But he jerked his body away so quick that I pulled my hand back as if I had just realized I was about to touch fire.

  So I walked out of the garden and left him to his business. I thought I would go up to Aidia’s and get Birdie. I had to churn the butter, and she loved to do this with me when I did it inside the springhouse. It was so hot I would have to. If we got done in time, we could go up on the mountain. Some of the flowers would still be in bloom.

  I had to pass Esme’s house to get to Aidia’s. I hated looking at it, standing there so quiet. It had only been a few weeks since we had put Esme in the sod, and already her house had the look of desertion on it. It was a place now made up of stillness. I could not remember a time when there was not smoke pumping from the chimney, or clothes hung out on the line, or Esme in the yard tending to her chickens. Only the guineas babbled at me as I passed by on the steep trail.

  It seemed ten degrees cooler up at Aidia’s, for her house sat tucked back into the mountain. I was surprised that Aidia didn’t have the children out on the yard, since she was firm against keeping a child in the house on a pretty day. But there was no one about. The porch was empty, too.

  I walked on in and through the front room till I seen Aidia sitting hunched-up against the kitchen cupboard. Birdie and Matracia was out on the back screen porch, playing with the churn. Aidia didn’t realize I had come in for a minute. She set there like she had been stunned. She brought her head up real slow and looked about the kitchen. Her face was red with tears, and her hair hung down in her face. I wondered what she was looking for, her eyes scanning the floor, but then I seen that she wasn’t looking at anything.

  “Aidia, what is it?” I squatted down and took hold of her shoulders.

  It took her a minute to recognize me. “I’ve had enough,” she said. Her voice was flat and short.

  I wet a dishrag and washed her face off. She set there like a child. She had cried so much that her skin was raw. I looked to Birdie and Matracia, wondering if they had been witness to a fit, but they was playing as if nothing at all had happened. “No, baby,” Birdie said to Matracia, and pulled the dasher end out of her mouth.

  “What in the world’s wrong with you?”

  Aidia took the dishrag out of my hand and wiped her face again, then held it in her hand tight and wrung the water from it. Drops fell onto her lap and made spreading circles on her dress. “I took the children down to the mouth of the holler. Just for a walk. We looked at the blackberry flowers. We was walking along and America Spurlock come out onto her porch. I throwed my hand up to her, but she wouldn’t even speak.”

  “So?” I said. America was a funny old woman. She would snub you one time you saw her and be as friendly as anything the next time. “That don’t mean nothing.”

  “They all hate me, Vine. They all think I killed Aaron. And so they blame me for Esme dying. All her friends.”

  “Aidia, you think such foolishness sometimes. Nobody thinks that.”

  She spread the dishrag out on the floor and picked at it until it lay there in a perfect square.

  “I overheard some of them at the funeral. Talking about me. They all knowe
d about me shooting at Aaron that time. Right before he run off. I guess Esme told them. And so they think I killed him.” She said all this very calmly, as if it was a matter of fact.

  Birdie and Matracia run into the kitchen, and Birdie climbed up onto my lap. Matracia put her arms out for Aidia to lift her, but Aidia paid her no mind. She kept smoothing out the dishrag, watching it. “Come here, baby,” I said, and pulled Matracia up to sit on my other leg.

  “Why did that cause you to start crying so and to set right down on the floor, Aidia?”

  Aidia raised her head and looked me right in the eye. It was the deepest look. I felt I had never been stared at so hard before. The girls scrambled down out of my lap and ran back onto the porch.

  “You don’t know how it feels, to be left. I’m sick of feeling like I’m setting here waiting on Aaron to come back. I’m tired of taking handouts from you all. First Esme would help me along, give me money here and there, and now you and Saul will do the same thing. I wasn’t brought up to live like that. I have to get me a job. Do something. And I ain’t going to be setting here waiting for Aaron to come back. I’ve told you before, he ain’t coming back. I know in my bones that he’s gone for good.”

  “You help plenty, Aidia. We ain’t giving you no handouts. We couldn’t work all this place without you tending to the children and the chickens and the cows and everything else.” I leaned over and started to take Aidia’s hands in mine, but she made no movement to offer them to me. “I’ve told you and told you. We’re your family now.”

  “No,” she said. “I have to get out of here.”

  “You’re not leaving with Dalton, are you?”

  “No, Lord no,” she said. “I’m going back to East Tennessee. They’s jobs in Bristol. All kinds. They’ve got a movie theater there and everything. I can find work.”

  “You can’t leave us, Aidia. I’d die without you.” I meant it.

  Aidia nodded toward the bedroom. I hadn’t looked through there before, but now I seen a box on the bed. Beside it was the satchel she had brought when she first come here.

  “I come back up here and thought about it a long time,” she said. “I thought about being alone. And being broke flat as a flitter. And about people thinking I had killed Aaron. There ain’t nothing for me to do but leave. I love you like my sister, but I’m leaving here, Vine.”

  I watched the children on the porch. I was already thinking about the prospect of Matracia leaving. The thought of losing someone again made me mad.

  “Don’t make me let go of you and Matracia, too. Losing Esme is too fresh.”

  Aidia hadn’t heard a word I had said. She leaned in real close to me so that our eyes were level with one another. Now she did put her hands out. She took mine and held them very tightly. “And I’m asking you to keep Matracia for me. Until I get situated down there.”

  I looked out at them again. I thought, Aaron’s baby. “I can’t,” I said. Soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. “I love her good as my own, Aidia. But I can’t do it.”

  “You have to do this for me, Vine. Just for a little while. I have to get a job and get us a good place to live. I’ll have to stay with my daddy when I first go down there, and I won’t take Matracia into his house. I won’t go off looking for jobs and her staying with him, wondering if he’s doing the same thing to her he always tried to do to me.”

  I knowed right then and there that Aidia would never be back to get Matracia. She would never get situated just right, or settled in, or make enough money. I seen her future. She’d go down there and get her a man to keep her up. Aidia didn’t know no other way. She knowed how to defend herself, and she knowed how to fight, but she didn’t know real happiness and didn’t know how to go about finding it. Maybe I could teach that to Matracia. Maybe I could even redeem myself. I could take her as my own, and when I went on the mountain, I would take not only Birdie, but Matracia, too. I could teach them to find God in the treetops. And then maybe I would be saved.

  AIDIA DIDN’T TAKE MUCH: the clothes that would fit into her satchel, a few knick-knacks. She always had been moony, and she filled that box up with souvenirs instead of things she could actually use. She took one plate from her set of dishes; she wanted to take the whole set, but it would have been too heavy and she would have had to pay extra for the train. She took a couple of pictures in their frames. One was of Matracia, and the other was her wedding picture. I wondered if she took it for sentimental reasons, or just as a way of proving that she had been married. I knowed that she would get down there and tell everybody her man was dead. It would be too hard to tell them that the truth was she didn’t know where he was. She packed her bedroom curtains—the first thing she had ever sewn all by herself. She took the horseshoe that had hung over their front door for luck, Matracia’s first bib and tucker, the doily from her nightstand.

  Last of all she took Aaron’s hat. She held it a long time, turning it around as if inspecting it for lint. She held it gently by the bill and looked at it with no expression on her face. The way she held the felt between her fingers made me know that she still loved him. Sometimes you can’t help but love somebody, no matter how bad they do you. And sometimes, it seems the worse somebody treats you, the more you love them. That’s the way it is for some people. She caught me watching her, so she put the hat on her head, and her hands on her hips, and leaned back, laughing. “Maybe I ought to wear this home,” she said, and drew her finger around the edge of the hat bill very quickly. “I’d make an impression soon as I stepped off the train.”

  I helped her get ready. She dressed up pretty in her best dress and then sat down so I could braid up her hair. After I had plaited it, I curled it up in a heap on the back of her head. I sent Birdie out into the yard and she brought me back purple violets. I weaved their stems into the braid.

  Aidia said she wanted to leave right then, while she didn’t have much time to think about it. She wanted to run away. She didn’t want to tell Saul good-bye; she said she would send him a postcard. She would stop on her way out of the holler and bid her farewell to Serena.

  I held her to me a long time so I could have her scent with me always. I could feel the bones in her back. With our bodies pressed together, I could see the little violets trembling on the back of her head.

  “If you ever need me, I’ll be there quick as I can,” I said.

  She cried when she told Birdie good-bye. Birdie said, “Don’t fret. We’ll be together by and by.” Birdie always spoke like an old woman. Maybe it was because she had spent so much time with Esme. But I knowed Birdie would miss Aidia terrible bad, for they had been playfellows.

  I went out onto the porch while Aidia spent her last bit of time with Matracia. I cannot say that I understood her leaving her baby, because I know that she loved the child. She was a defeated woman. Her spirit was a deflated thing. I could not understand it, but I could forgive her anything. After all, I was the one who had widowed her. I could hear her in there, crying and going on. I started to go in, as I was afraid she would have Matracia in terrors, but I didn’t. I could not bear to see it.

  Me and Birdie played on the yard for a long while as we waited. I let her pick violets to put in my hair, and then she sat on the rock between my legs and let me braid hers. It was the longest, whitest day, with the light falling through the trees in narrow streams that showed dust motes and little bugs floating about. It seemed the world was holding its breath, as if there were no movement anywhere. It felt like we was the only people in the world.

  After a long while, Aidia come to the door, holding the baby. Her face had fallen in on itself. I went up to take Matracia, and Aidia shook her head wildly, smoothing at Matracia’s face with the backs of her hands, then ran into the house. I walked away. I packed Matracia on my hip down the mountain, Birdie holding on to my hand as we stepped carefully on the steep path.

  Matracia’s weight felt just right on my hip. Holding her there and leaning over a bit to hold on to Birdie’s hand
felt like the perfect balance to me. I thought over and over, This is a good thing. I hoped it was. I had not even considered asking Saul before accepting Matracia, and he would be mad over this. But I knowed that he would have taken her, too. He wouldn’t have refused his brother’s child, after all. But he would never speak of Aidia again.

  But I didn’t care. I never had thought much about what people say. As I walked back toward my house, toward the silver glint of Saul’s hoe catching sunlight, I felt better than I had in a long time. It felt like a beginning to me. For Aidia, and for me. For every one of us, I hoped.

  I pictured Aidia riding on a train through them mountains. I imagined her sitting with perfect posture, nodding to the other people on board, Aaron’s felt hat perched on her head. When she got to the depot, she would lean down out of the train car and step down onto the platform. Everyone would look up. They’d whisper to one another, See that woman wearing a man’s hat? And Aidia would just strut right on by them, her pretty dress hugging her hips just right. Just when she was about to round a corner, she would stop, look back at the people, and take one hand to tip her hat to them.

  I wished this for her.

  Twenty-eight

  After Aidia left, people began to talk more about Aaron and whether Aidia had killed him, hid his body, and simply vanished. They reckoned that he had returned and Aidia had been so mad that she had killed him. And the next day, she had slipped off onto the train, never to be heard from again. People never asked me, maybe because I was the one who had Aidia’s child and was raising her as my own. But it seemed like the women did talk more loudly about Aidia when I was near. They hoped to rile some reply from me, to get me to join in on their gossip and fill in the gaps. I went a long time without giving in to the temptation, but when I realized that Aidia was being blamed for the very thing that I had done, I didn’t have no choice but to defend my sister-in-law. They could say what they wanted to about Aidia pulling up stakes and leaving her baby, but I wouldn’t let her be called a murderer.