“You’re so beautiful, Vine. The best-looking woman I ever seen.”
All at once I was too mad to care what he could see, and I stood right up. The water fell from my body in great blocks. I jerked the bucket from the cliff and held it in front of me, as if it might protect me from harm.
“You shouldn’t say such things to your sister-in-law. It’s not right.”
He got up and put his hand on my shoulder. As his arm stretched out, I could hear the crackle of his wet shirtsleeve, and I felt his fingers through the cloth of my blouse. “You know how I feel. You’ve knowed for a time now,” he said.
The water seemed to grow louder and faster. I could hear the sun beating down on us, I was sure of it.
“How could you betray your brother like this?” I asked. “He loves you more than anything in this world. More than me, even.”
“But I love you more than I do him,” he whispered, like he was afraid the woods would overhear, but also like this made an intimacy between us. “Leave here with me, Vine.”
I shook his hand away and splashed past him. I stomped up the shoals of the creek, back toward the head of the holler, back toward the house. I hugged that bucket to my chest. The wet dress hung from me like deadweight, but I didn’t let it hinder my escape. The rocks were crooked and slick, but I managed them like I was walking up a flat road. Even so, I could feel him right behind me, struggling to keep up. And then real sudden he caught me by the elbow and pulled me around to face him.
“You know you want to. This is a big world. We could go anywhere.”
“You talk such foolishness, Aaron,” I said. “I love Saul. Not you! You’ve lost your mind.”
He grabbed both of my shoulders in his big hands. “But I want you,” he said, and I looked into his eyes. They were pale and dead. He shook me, shook me so hard that I lost hold of the bucket. The berries poured out in one shining clump and bobbed down the creek in a thin purple ribbon.
I pushed him away from me with all of my strength, and he stumbled around on the rocks before steadying himself and looking into my eyes as if he were in wild pain.
“You leave here!” I screamed. “You leave this place, or I’ll tell Esme what you’ve said. She’ll believe me, too. She’ll see I’m telling the truth. I’ll write Saul and tell him.”
I left him standing in the middle of the creek. I climbed the steep bank and walked down the parched road without looking back, the water from my skirts staining the dust.
THE NEXT MORNING, I left Birdie asleep in the bed we shared, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I had coffee only once a week, since I was too stingy to buy it often. That morning, I intended to enjoy it. I tried to make it as dark and bitter as Mama did, but I failed. I needed a taste of home, but I had never been able to get the flavor Mama could boil up with ease.
I looked around the house at all I had to do and wondered if I might be able to get everything done in time to ride over to Redbud to see my people. The stove needed cleaning out. The floors had to be swept every day because of the never-ending dust that flew in off the road. And I knowed if I didn’t pick the beans, they would bake in the solid heat that was sure to come down on the creek later in the day.
I tried to shake all of this from my mind, as well as the run-in with Aaron the day before. It was too much to calculate, and I didn’t want to think about any of it. I went out onto the porch to have my coffee. Daylight had just broke, but it was already warm. A little breeze drifted down. The new sun caused many smells to seep out of the earth. Everything on the mountain seemed to be sending its scent down to me: the musk from the cedars, the wetness of moss that laid beneath dripping cliffs. Birds called and sang, announcing morning. Later, when the sun became a blazing thing at the top of the sky, the birds would go so far into the shady woods that their songs would not come to me. I sipped the coffee and tried to savor the taste of it enough to get me through the week.
I closed my eyes and imagined what Saul was doing. He had probably been up since the day was still black, and now he sawed down giant pines that would be cut and mashed until their wood could make turpentine. I wondered where the turpentine that my own man made would go. Italy or France, I guessed. People talked about the western front all of the time, but I didn’t know where that was. The soldiers wouldn’t have no idea that the turpentine had come from a ridge in Kentucky, and would not care. I daydreamed about Saul’s big shoulders—he would be bare chested, and his freckles would shine beneath a layer of sweat. I imagined his hands, the flat determination of his face, his quiet laughter when one of the other men told a long, funny story. The other men probably respected him above all others: men always respect another man who is quiet. They remember him even more clearly than they do the man who laughs the loudest.
I always thought of him working and could not imagine what he did when his shift was over. In his letters he said he worked right alongside his men, even though he was the foreman. I wondered if he ever went into town. Wildcat Mountain was close to London, and that was a big place with a movie theater, restaurants, a federal courthouse, and three banks. For the life of me, I could not picture him going into London and buying his own shaving lather or walking into the drugstore to sit down to have a Coca-Cola. I had never even seen him drink a pop before. I wondered if he laid awake at night, thinking of me and Birdie, before he drifted off to sleep.
I patted my apron pocket and found the letter I had took from the post office the day before. Saul said things in his letters that he would have never let escape his lips. This struck me as odd. It seemed to me that a man who don’t announce what his heart wants to say would hesitate at putting it down in writing. Words become solid on the air when spoken, but quickly drift away. Ink lasts always.
The letter was short but full. I unfolded it and admired his small, crooked writing. His handwriting made me picture him hunched low over the paper, his face close to the nib of the pen. I thought about the way the tips of his fingers looked when he had finished a letter: black from the leaking fountain pen, maybe even a smear across his fine cheekbones. Saul began each letter with two words that I knowed for certain I would never hear him say aloud:
My darling,
It is a bad time all round. We have cut down all the trees atop this big mountain. It is the ugliest thing you ever seen in yore life. It has not rained here in near a month and I have to watch them close to make sure nobody does anything to cause the hills to catch fire. I can’t even let them smoke when we are cutting. Only when we are in the bunkhouse. If you’d tap a cigret ash down on the ground I believe the whole woods would blaze up, as it is dry as a chip.
How are things there on little God’s Creek? I never knowed I could miss a place so bad. I even miss the smell of it. Every evening I think about how it was to come home from work and be able to smell supper when I got to the mouth of the holler. When I could smell biscits and meat and gravy, I always knowed I was home and I’d smile to myself.
Every day another man leaves because he decides to volunteer for the war. Men are fools to do such a thing, since we are doing a lot for the war right here. This turpentine will be medicine. I’ve told many a feller good-bye knowing that I’d never see him again, knowing he’d die over yonder. I am not afraid to go. The hardest part would be sailing over that ocean and not knowing if I’d ever see you all agin.
Say hello to Mommy and Aaron. I trust that all is well for you. Here is a few dollars from my last payday. I know you are too tight to buy yoreself something nice with it, so I won’t even say to. I wish you would tho. That’s why I work, so you can have good things. Kiss my baby ever night and tell her that her daddy loves her. I mean it, I want you to really do this now. I found a redbird feather other day up on the mountain and I’m putting this in the envelope and want you to give it to her. Tell her I sent it just for her.
They are sending so many men over that the war is bound to end soon. I may get to come home for two days week after next. I’ll tell you when for ce
rtain next letter. Until then I remain
Your loving and lonsome husband,
Saul Hagen Sullivan
No sooner had I folded the letter back up and put it into my apron than I heard somebody coming around the side of the house. I figured it was Aaron for certain, and my body stiffened up at the prospect of seeing him there on my yard. I made myself ready to face him again, but it was only Esme. As soon as I saw her face, I knowed that Aaron was gone.
Esme had walked down the road barefoot and wore nothing more than her nightgown. The hem of it was filthy from dragging on the yellow-brown dust of the road. It was plain to me that she had got up out of bed and walked straight down here. Her face seemed to be more square, her mouth firmly set. Her arms were crossed so tightly that she looked like she was hugging herself.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, already sure of what had happened. I set my coffee cup down and leaned forward.
“Aaron’s run off,” Esme said. She did not move from her place at the foot of the steps, so I had to look down upon her like a preacher from his pulpit. “I woke up and didn’t even go in to start breakfast. I could feel how empty the house was, soon as I got up. I went into his room and there was the bed, stripped clean. He took all of his books and his quilts and the jar of money he kept on his window. The horse, too. All gone.”
I stood without a word and offered my hand to help her up the short steps, but Esme didn’t even seem to notice. She come up onto the porch, her eyes toward the floor, and folded herself into a chair. She cried without shedding tears, the real sound of grief, a weeping that sounded like funeral cries.
Esme took deep breaths and hid her face behind her hands. Her knuckles were big as marbles, and skin lay in deep folds across them. She sat with both feet flat on the gray floorboards of the porch, and I looked down at her feet. Most old people’s toes were gnarled and twisted with thick nails and skin tough as rawhide, but Esme had the feet of a twenty-year-old girl. Each toe was shorter than the next, and they were all straight and narrow.
“He’s went to enlist. I know it,” she said, and looked up at me real sudden. Her eyes were big and wild, as if she had just seen a vision of his death. “He’ll get killed over there, Vine. He’ll not make it.”
I set back down in my chair and reached out to put my hand on Esme’s back. I rubbed her back in a circle, feeling her bony spine beneath my palm. It was as knobby as a row of buckeyes. “Now, Esme, you don’t know that.”
“I do, though,” Esme said.
“You don’t even know that he’s signed up for the war, and you sure don’t know he’ll be killed.” I felt a sudden shame in hiding the truth from Esme. Still, I didn’t know of any way to tell her that I had ordered him to leave. “Hush this foolishness, now.”
Esme wiped her face on the sleeve of her gown, even though I could see no water beneath her eyes.
“Maybe he run off to work on the railroad. He always talked about that. He always did want to go off on a big adventure.”
“Looks like he could’ve told me bye, though,” Esme said. “Seems he could have wrote me a note at the least.”
“Well, you know how he is. He never would have thought of nothing like that.”
That seemed to calm Esme a little. Finally her shoulders relaxed. She laid her hands atop each other in her lap. I felt so sorry for her that I could barely stand it. I was sick to my stomach.
“What will we do now, Vine?”
I picked up my coffee once again, but it was cold. I drank it anyway, not wanting to waste it, and realized its taste was even more bitter this way. There was no reason to say “What do you mean?” because I knowed exactly what she meant.
“Both of them gone,” Esme said. There was a catch in her throat. “I don’t believe I can live and stand it.”
“We’re capable, I reckon,” I said. “There ain’t nothing they can do that we can’t, is there?”
“That ain’t what I mean. I never needed no man to do for me,” she said. “I’ve lived a long time without my husband, but never without my children. You don’t know what that feels like, for them to all be out in the world and you not to know what’s happening to them. I don’t know if I can live.”
I studied the blue veins in the tops of Esme’s hands, the thin wisps of gray that her pillow had caused to escape from her bun. Esme had been small when I first met her, but it seemed to me that she had shrunk even more since yesterday.
“We’ll make it,” I said. There was nothing else to say. We sat silent for a long time afterward, listening to the birds as their songs grew farther and farther away.
Ten
It sounded like somebody was tearing down the front door. I was setting straight up in the bed before I had even come awake, and when my eyes opened, I had to look around a moment to realize that I was in my own bed in my own house. I had been dreaming of Redbud. In the dream, me and Mama had been planting watermelons—a seed that had never graced the ground of Redbud before—and Mama had said, Come summer we’ll eat them. But you have to be careful not to eat the seed, else it’ll make you big with a child.
Somebody was slapping the door with their open palm instead of their knuckles, calling my name as if possessed by a wild fever, over and over, saying nothing more than “Vine!”
I had the sudden sensation that Birdie was not in the bed with me and started to feel around in the tangled covers in a fit of panic. At last my hands landed on Birdie’s face and felt her hot, even breath. Birdie could sleep through the Rapture.
The room was striped by gray moonlight, and when my eyes finally adjusted, I found the cold metal barrel of the shotgun that was leaning in the corner. I picked it up real easy with one hand, tucked the butt up into my armpit, and moved quick through the house. I didn’t know why I felt the need to take the gun, but I did.
I pulled the curtain aside just enough to see that it was my little brother, Jubal. I knowed that he bore bad news, and I did not move fast to let him in, for fear of what he would tell me. The knocking stopped and I heard him take a step back, as if he knowed that he was being watched. I eased the curtain back and stood there. Then he started slapping his palm against the door again. “Vine!” he yelled.
I throwed the door open. “Jubal! Who’s dead?”
Jubal fell into my arms and shook with crying. His weeping was so heavy upon me that I knowed he had kept it bottled up on his journey here, wanting to wait until he was with me to unleash it.
But I didn’t have the time or the patience for his grief. I took him by the shoulders. He was limp as a sleepwalker. “What is it?”
“Daddy.”
“No!” I hollered, but it felt like my voice went back down inside myself.
“He’s not dead, but it’s bad. He may be by the time we get there.”
I gathered Birdie up in the quilts that were already wrapped about her and run up the holler barefooted to Esme’s. Esme set up big eyed but didn’t say a word. Stripes of moonlight fell across her face. She held her arms out for Birdie and tucked her into the bed beside her.
“It’s my daddy,” I said.
“Go on,” Esme said. Her voice was hoarse and half-awake.
Jubal had brought his horse up beside Esme’s porch, and I jumped from the steps onto its wide hips. I wrapped my arms about Jubal’s waist and spurred the horse with my bare feet. I hadn’t even took the time to put on shoes.
We splashed down God’s Creek and climbed Buffalo Mountain. The world was a dark blur, but the night air was cool and opened up my eyes. I tilted my head back and looked up at a purple sky crowded with stars. I prayed with my eyes open. I was not ready to lose my daddy.
When we got to Redbud, it was still dark, but the promise of dawn showed against the horizon, where daylight breathed a line of lavender. Every house was lit with yellow squares of window. The porch of our house was crowded with people smoking and talking in low voices. They moved aside without saying a word as I made my way into the house.
Mama met m
e at the door. “It’s not as bad as it seemed at first,” she said.
“Mama, where is he?” I stood on tiptoes to look over the shoulders of my uncles. My little cousins tugged at my skirt, happy to see me, but I paid them no mind.
“Now listen, Vine,” Mama said. She took hold of my wrist and tried to make me sit, but I would not move. I looked her in the eye, ready for her to tell me the truth.
“Tell me what’s happened to him.”
“A stroke, I believe. I ain’t no doctor, but it’s what it looks like to me. He’s complained of a headache for two days, and this evening he got plumb down with it. I ain’t never seen that man take to bed with a sickness, but he laid down with that headache yesterday evening. I woke up every hour or so, worried over him, and last time I got up, he was laying there with his eyes wide open.”
I tried to force my crying back down. Mama let go of my arm and set down. My three aunts came out of Daddy’s room in a great bustle of exodus.
“I thought sure he was dead, Vine. I knowed it. I jumped right up on him, straddled his chest, screaming. But then his arm moved. His whole left side’s gone, but he held his right hand up to me and run it over my face. But he can’t talk.”
Mama did not cry. I could never recall having seen her cry, and all at once I was enraged at her because of this. She had pinned up her hair into a neat bun and made coffee—its thick smell had settled on everything in the house—and I felt mad at her for being so calm. I couldn’t understand how she had had the mind to fix her hair and make coffee for everyone. I looked down at myself and realized I was dressed only in my gown. I turned and went into Daddy’s room, where he laid on the bed with a quilt pulled up to his neck.
“Daddy,” I said. I set down on the bed and smoothed his hair back, tried to make my eyes see him in the shifting shadows of the room. Outside, the mountains were turning red in a bloody daybreak. I waited, and as the redness seeped through the windows, light made its slow way up the bedcovers until it lit upon him, making me able to see him. His face was drawn on one side. His shoulder seemed stiff, as if his arm had been replaced with wood. Cold sweat stood on his forehead like beads of holy water had been sprinkled there. I had never in my life seen him still before. He was a man of motion, always busy with something. Maybe I had never even seen him asleep before—I couldn’t remember—but he looked like a corpse to me. Daybreak moved about the room slowly and the red light left his face and moved on up the wall, leaving him to shadows. I balled my hand up to my mouth, stifling my tears, when his eyes opened. He looked at me without moving or making any sign that he knowed me.