“Look what a pretty place,” I told Birdie, and nodded to the courthouse.
As I was looking at it, I ran right into a fat, round man who was coming off the post office steps with a stack of parcels in his arms. When I bumped him, he lost all control and let the parcels fly out of his arms and onto the sidewalk. “I’ll be!” he boomed.
“I’m awful sorry,” I said with a little laugh, and bent down to help him get the parcels back up into his arms.
“Stupid Indian,” he said, snatching a parcel from my hands. “Why don’t you people watch where you’re going?” And then he took off down the street, his short legs pushing against the air like stubby logs.
I stood there for a minute, watching him go. Letting these words sink in. The sounds of business around me seemed to grow louder. Nobody had ever called me stupid before, and I had never really thought that people would judge me solely on being a Cherokee. My people had always got along pretty good with the town folk, except the magistrates. I spun Birdie around and I took off after the man. He was so short that it didn’t take me long to catch him. I tapped him on the shoulder.
“What did you say to me?” I said, cool as could be.
He huffed around until he could meet my eye and blew out a big puff of air, like he had forgotten to breathe up until now. “What, girl?”
“You called me stupid. I ain’t.”
He just started walking again. But I followed. “I said, I ain’t stupid,” I hollered loud enough for several people to look. This got him. He must have been a businessman, as he didn’t want anyone to know that he was being yelled at. His gray eyes looked around like he didn’t know which way to go. He nodded to one of the women standing nearest us. She was one of those who had wore her Sunday clothes to town and looked at me as if I had fallen out of the sky.
“Get away,” he said. His lips were small and red, like a woman’s. “If I was you, I wouldn’t be showing my face in town about now. Stupid people ought to stay at home anyway.”
I felt like slapping his face, or even drawing back my coconut to split his head wide open. I was that mad. When he turned and started walking again, I couldn’t help myself. I kicked him, right in the hind end. Not hard enough to hurt him, but he sure felt the toe of my shoe. He nigh about fell down and sent his arms straight out for balance. This sent the parcels flying again.
He was so mad that he looked like he was about to cry from anger. His lips trembled. “You’re a fool!” he hollered, whirling around on me. The woman standing nearest us said to someone, “Don’t she know who that is?”
Then I was aware of Birdie’s hand in my own and felt ashamed. Not for what I had done, but for her being witness to the ignorance and cruelty of people. I must have half dragged her down the sidewalk, going on to the post office, for I was mad as a hatter. I had never thought that people in Black Banks had ill will toward Cherokees, but it looked like I had been wrong. I should have known as much—hadn’t these very townspeople tried to drive us off our land up on Redbud? A great sense of injustice settled over me that troubled me the rest of the day. None of my people had ever done a thing to be ashamed of.
We went on to the post office. Birdie had just got a new pair of shoes and was having a big time, hearing the clicks the hard soles made on the marble floor of the high-ceilinged post office.
There was nothing in our box, so I closed the little gold door and took hold of Birdie’s hand. As we were leaving, the postmistress hollered at Birdie and held out a peppermint for her to take. She was a sweet, hunchbacked woman who was cursed with not one sign of a neck. The little bun of hair on the back of her head sat right on her hump. I always made niceties with her when I went to the post office but had not thought to do so today. I stood at the door, waiting for Birdie to come on and gave the postmistress a nod. But this wasn’t good enough for her. She motioned me over.
“You heard tell what happened in Bell County?” she said in a low voice. The post office had a high ceiling that carried voices throughout, so she always whispered. “They hung a Cherokee boy over there. They say he robbed a bootlegger and pushed him over a cliff.”
I just looked at her. I wondered what she wanted me to say.
When she spoke again, I noticed that she had a dip of snuff under her lip. Her teeth were crooked and brown. “It’ll be bad times for your people, my opinion.”
I nodded to her and took Birdie’s hand and we went on out. I walked back home like a defeated woman, thinking about the man calling me stupid. Thinking that Saul might have to go overseas one of these days. I barely paid attention to Birdie, who called my attention to things along the road: a terrapin in the weeds, wildflowers peeping out of the cracks of rocks. She wouldn’t hush until I looked at a little white flower that stood alone beside the creek.
“What is it?” she asked, stroking its leaves.
“It’s an oconee bell,” I said. The flower took my mind off the matter at hand for a minute. Its petals were waxy, its stem straight. My mama had pointed oconee bells out to me, since they were as rare as four-leaf clovers. They were only supposed to grow in North Carolina, but every once in a while I saw one. My mother was one of those people who could stand in a field and find ten four-leaf clovers without so much as bending over, and she had the same talent for finding oconee bells. She had passed on this magic to Birdie.
“Can we pick it?” Birdie asked.
“Lord, no,” I said. “It’s a rare thing. Leave it. It’s late for an oconee to bloom, so it’s meant to stay here.”
I took Birdie’s hand and walked on toward God’s Creek.
“LOOK HERE,” Saul said, coming in. “Lettuce already.” He laid a mess of lettuce and some green onions on the table and leaned in to kiss me. He had been out working and didn’t have no shirt on. He took hold of my shoulders to turn me around and kissed me. I put my hand on his arm and kissed him hard.
“What was that for?” I said, and started skinning the little onions. “That good kiss?”
Saul put his hands on my waist as he stood behind me. “A man can love on his wife ever once in a while, can’t he?”
“I reckon,” I said.
He kissed my neck. “Birdie’s up at Mama’s, ain’t she?” he said, his lips close to my skin as he spoke.
I turned to face him and ran my hands down his bare arms. I smiled and nodded.
AFTERWARD, WE LAID there with our legs all tangled up, hands everywhere. It was strange to be laying there naked, right in the daytime.
Saul was laying on his back and I was on my side, up close to him. Sunlight fell in a square right across the tight muscles on his stomach. I moved my hand into the patch of golden and saw it change the color of my skin. Saul put his hand on my chin and pulled it up so I would face him. He looked at me a long time without saying a word, just running his hand over my lips and my cheeks. I closed my eyes and he put a big thumb onto my eyelids, soft as a breath. When I opened my eyes again, he was still studying me.
“You’re looking at me like you never seen me before,” I said.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said. “Something you ain’t going to like.”
I set up and gathered the sheets around me, pulling them up to my neck. Saul set up, too, but didn’t cover himself. All at once I thought we ought to get our clothes on—Esme was liable to bust in at any minute. Really I didn’t want to hear what he had to say, since he already knowed I wasn’t going to be pleased.
“Boss has opened him a new mill over in Laurel County. A big mill right at the foot of Wildcat Mountain. They’s a million pine trees there. He’s going to cut them all down to make into turpentine, for the war,” he said. “You know President Wilson is already talking about us getting in on it.”
“So? What’s that got to do with us?”
“Well, he got a contract with the War Department, for the turpentine,” he said. The sun had crept onto his face, and light caught in the red stubble around his chin. “So it’s going to be a big operation.
He wants me to go over there and be his foreman. In two weeks.”
“How long?”
“Long as it takes to log that mountain. I’d say at least a year, Vine.”
I got out of the bed and pulled my shift on. “They ain’t no way,” I said.
He pulled on his britches and walked toward me, tried to get ahold of my arms. I stepped into my dress, though, and went about buttoning it up.
“It’s awful good money, Vine. If I done it for a year, we could have anything we wanted.”
“We already have everything we need,” I said. I walked on into the kitchen and busied myself with making the corn bread.
“I want to make this money for us. I want you to have fine things,” he said. “Besides, it’ll help with the war effort.”
Somehow, I had always thought the war would never touch us. When we listened to the radio in the evenings, I grieved over little children that were probably suffering overseas. I imagined wives being told their husbands were dead, mothers who lost sons. We knowed it was only a matter of time before the United States would enter the war, too. Men were so anxious to fight that they were going to Canada to enlist. But it all seemed far away to me, like we were not a part of that world at all. Now I saw that the war had caught up to us in a roundabout way.
I broke an egg into the cornmeal, then stopped with a sudden thought. “Does that mean they might not make you go overseas, if you’re doing something for the war effort?”
“It might,” he said. “But that’s not why I’m doing it. Not to dodge the fighting.”
It was selfish of me, I know, what with all them other men being called overseas, but if this might help to keep Saul out of the war, it would be worth missing him. I stirred up the corn bread and poured it into my skillet, my mind racing. “You’d get to come home right often, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ll hope to,” he said, and by the look on his face, I knowed that it was settled. He wouldn’t be going to fight, but he would be leaving me all the same.
THE LAST WEEK he was home felt like we were waiting for a death. In 1917, Laurel County was still a long ride, more than an hour by car and much farther by horse. I crammed all the life I could into that final week, feeling like I was vying for his time all the while, as Esme and Aaron were constantly down at the house, already missing him, too.
Saul was just happy at the prospect of making a good living. But sometimes I would catch him studying Birdie’s face while she slept, and I knowed how bad he hated to leave us. If he had been quiet before, he was downright silent now. But he took it in his careful way and was the first one to rise the morning we were to see him off.
“Aaron will be here to help you all,” he told me and Esme.
Esme was acting a sight, as if she was certain she might never see him again. I had never seen her cry before, and she was pitiful in the process. She was the kind of woman who sort of curled her whole body into her handkerchief, heaving with great force each time a wave of tears swept over her. I ran my hand around her back and patted her shoulder, but this seemed to make her all the worse.
“Just be glad I ain’t been drafted yet,” Saul said.
We walked down the footpath toward the mouth of the holler, where Saul’s little truck was parked. The county men had just started building a bridge there so that they could make a road up into God’s Creek. Before long we would be able to pull our vehicles right up to the house. Saul was tickled to death on this account, but I hated it. They had to cut down trees to build the road, and I knew that cars would be rumbling in and out of the holler once that road sliced through.
When we got to the truck, Esme fell against him like a heap of wet clothes.
“Now, Mama, what’s wrong with you?” he asked. “I ain’t going to the war. Lord God, you’re acting a sight.”
“Pretty soon it’ll just be me and Vine. They’ll call Aaron overseas before long.”
“You don’t know that,” Saul said. His voice was as soothing as balm when he talked to her. He always spoke to her in this gentle way that I gathered he had learned from his father.
Aaron come down the holler on his horse and barely let it stop trotting before he slung his leg over its back and jumped down to the ground. He hugged Saul, wrapping both arms tightly about him, and then stepped back. “I’ll see to them,” Aaron said.
“You won’t have to worry much with these two,” Saul said, and laughed. “They can fend for theirself.”
He pulled me to him with one arm flat against my back and kissed me. He kissed me long and hard and he told me that he loved me, right there in front of Esme and Aaron. I looked away when he told Birdie good-bye.
He got into his truck, lifted his hand, and pulled away. And that was all. He drove away that simply, as if he was just running to the store and would be back in a few minutes. But I was convinced that he would not return. Little did I know that it would be me who would be gone when he did come back for good. The woman I was that day would soon be no more.
Nine
That summer was the hottest anyone could remember. Heat bugs sang from daylight to dark and the tin roof on our house cracked and popped like it would pull free of its nails and fly away at any minute. The animals all crowded into whatever shade they could find, their tails slapping at the flies that tortured them. Often a short rain would fall very early in the morning; as if out of nowhere it pelted the earth, then seemed to be sucked back up into the sky. But it never rained during the day, and it never rained for very long at all. Still, my garden flourished. It took the morning rain and tucked this away to sip on throughout the day. The mountains took on a dark green shine, and the blackberries growed so thick that they nearly broke down their bushes. When I saw this, I could not refuse the temptation.
I suffered under the white July sun to gather the blackberries. The bramble growed close to the creek, vines of brier drooping over so far that some of the berries bobbed on top of the foamy water. I stood in the wild creek, but the cool water was no relief—the cold spread no further than my ankles. Sweat dripped from my forehead and down my neck and chest, but I didn’t take time to wipe it away. I reckoned the faster I got a gallon of berries picked, the sooner I would be able to seek better shade. The dusty pines that stood nearest me were thin and runted. The heat bugs screamed.
The bridge stood on the other side of the creek from me, and whenever vehicles passed over, it moaned beneath their weight, sending a flurry of dust my way. The bridge popped and cracked so much that I thought the lumber might be splintering in two. There had been plenty of passing cars earlier—people laying on their horns and leaning out their windows to holler my name—since it was Saturday, but for the last hour no one had passed. It seemed like there was nothing in the world except the creek, sounding like boiling water, and the snaps the stems made when I plucked the berries from their roost. I fancied that I could hear things others could not: the steam rising up out of the earth, the quiet thunder of sunrays that beat against my back.
My fingers were solid purple. The juice had clotted in the cuts that the thorns had streaked across my hands. The bucket was heavy. I moved on down the creek, watching my footing on the slick rocks, and shed the last limbs of their load. At last I had a full gallon, and even under the coat of dust from the road, the blackberries shone in the sun.
I was so hot I could barely move. I put the bucket on a rock shelf and set right down in the creek without even thinking about it. The creek struck me at the waist, so I cupped my hands and throwed water up over my chest and my face. I soaked my hair. I couldn’t remember ever being so hot. The air seemed like a solid thing when I tried to breathe it, as if I stood at the mouth of a furnace. The creek moved like a fever around me: swirling, sloshing, finding its way. I couldn’t imagine where so much water was coming from—it hadn’t rained in days and the earth was a hard, cracked thing that stopped a hoe or a shovel. I laid back against the bank and let the water cool me.
Then I felt the sensation of being watc
hed—an odd feeling that started in my gut and worked its way up the back of my neck. When I opened my eyes, Aaron was standing at the edge of the bridge, looking down at me. He didn’t change his expression when I caught sight of him. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets, his mouth a straight white line. His head was cocked a little bit, like a man considering something that he could not put a name to. His hair hung down in his eyes, and somehow this give him the air of being proud and full of himself.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I just let out a soft laugh. “Aaron? How long you been there?” I asked. I put my arms across my chest out of fear that the water had caused my blouse to go see-through.
“Watching you,” he said. He seemed not even to blink his eyes. “How does it feel?”
“To be watched?”
“No.” He smiled, a slow movement that overtook his face. “The water.”
I set there for a long minute without saying a word. I wanted to stand up, to be ready to get away from him, but I refused to stand and let my dress stick to me. I acted like I wasn’t bothered, though. “It feels good after you’ve stood in the sun two hours picking berries,” I said.
He squatted down, spread his hands out on the big rocks, and climbed down the bank. His hands tore at the ivy that had attached itself to the stones. His feet splashed into the water. His side of the creek was deeper and he waded toward me, the water up to his waist. The creek bed rose at a slow grade, and he walked up out of it until he stood in water that was only calf-deep. He did not hide the bulge that his soaked pants made plain for me to see. When he got near me, he sat down right in front of me, so close that our knees nearly touched. He put a single finger out and brushed the hair off of my forehead. I flinched. I held my breath, feeling like I was waiting on something.