As she returned from the barn with the bridle, she realized she was singing at the top of her lungs. “I’ve got a home in glory.” She checked herself with the guilty wonder of how she could sing on such a day—the day they took Clovis. They would turn him loose for a little while, but he would still be theirs, like a sheep wandering free on the range but carrying its owner’s mark in its ear. But if some sheep were marked for slaughter, like Henley, others, like Clovis, would be all right. He’d be safe and cared for in the army. Once she was settled with the land bought and paid for, he’d be glad. He’d be more than glad if she saved his army wages for a truck. He might quarrel at the three miles of dirt road fit for nothing but a sled, but she and the boys would help him fix that.
She walked faster. There was inside her another upsurge of singing, even though she kept telling herself that all her fine plans would come to nothing if Uncle John Ballew didn’t want to sell the Tipton Place. She plunged down the steep hillside below the field where the land lay north and east. Last night’s thin snow still lay in the cup-like hollows of the leaves and at the feet of the tall, light-hungry trees. The dark hillside, after the sunny ridge, seemed another world, cold and set forever in a blue twilight. Dock came eagerly up to her and sniffed in her jumper pockets as if looking for corn. Lizzie lifted her head from a clump of fern and watched as Gertie broke a dogwood switch, brittle with the cold. Then, as if she were thinking, The night is cold and corn and fodder are better than fern, Lizzie turned straight about and went swiftly home.
Gertie smiled as she neared the barn, and heard Cassie’s calling: “Good night, sun, good night. I’ll see you in th mornen. Sleep warm, sun.”
Supper without Clovis seemed more natural than dinner and breakfast. Bad roads, flat tires, and long trips had often made him full dark, coming home, so that the bigger children often ate supper before he got in and the little ones were sometimes asleep. The hominy making, the gathering of walnuts, and their other regular chores in the clear sharp weather had given them all good appetites. Gertie, sitting at the foot of the table with a lard bucket of sweet milk on one side of her, buttermilk on the other, a great platter of hot smoking cornbread in front, and other bowls and platters within easy reach, was kept busy filling glasses with milk, buttering bread, and dishing out the new hominy fried in lard and seasoned with sweet milk and black pepper. It was good with the shuck beans, baked sweet potatoes, cucumber pickles, and green tomato ketchup. Gertie served it up with pride, for everything, even the meal in the bread, was a product of her farming.
They were just finishing up on molasses and honey when Clytie let out a disgusted cry and sprang away from the table so hastily that her split-bottomed chair tipped backward. Cassie, standing between Clytie and Gertie, put her hand over her mouth and looked guiltily at her mother, while angry Clytie cried as she ran for the dishrag: “Cassie, you’re the gommeniest youngen; allus a spillen things. You’re half pig.”
Gertie sighed and pushed the spreading pool of milk along the oilcloth with her knife blade so that it might run to the floor and Gyp get the benefit of it. Enoch quarreled, “You’d slap me, Mom, if I all th time went around pouren out stuff.”
“You’re bigger than her,” Gertie said, and to them all, “Quit measuren your own corn in somebody else’s basket.” She looked at Cassie, turning away from the table to hide the tears spilling over her cheeks. “Hush your cryen, honey. Don’t you want some bread an butter an jam? Recollect them wild strawberries we all picked back last spring? Well, I’ve got some a that jam open; sugar-sweetened it is, too.” She went for the jar she had opened for Clovis. Since he had not touched it, she had put it back in the press, thinking to save it maybe, for some Sunday morning when they were out of flour, with nothing much but cornbread and molasses and butter to eat.
The other children fell on the little jar of jam and emptied it in a moment. Only Clytie lingered daintily over the sandwich she had made for herself; Cassie’s bread and jam that Gertie had fixed and urged upon her lay on her plate, untouched except for one corner scalloped with the marks of her small teeth. Gertie, clearing the table, called Cassie to come finish it. Instead of an answer there came from the main room, through the hubub of the other children, Cassie’s voice, and low elfish laughter: “They’ve took your man to th wars, Miz Callie Lou, clean acrost th waters, but they’ll send him back to you. Allus recollect, Miz Callie Lou, they’ll send him back to you—nailed down in a box with nickels on his eyes he’ll mebbe be, but they’ll send him back to you. So don’t be a blubberen and a carryen on, Miz Callie Lou.”
Clytie, not listening to Cassie, was crying, “Mom, Mom, you’re a goen to make the lamp explode, a holden it sidewise thataway.”
Gertie hastily set the lamp she had jerked up back onto the table, and quickly turned away, afraid Clytie would notice the flusterment in her eyes. “Now, Cassie, you’ve been a listenen to yer old rattle-tongued Aunt Sue Annie,” she called, raising her voice in mock sharpness. “You’ll be a scaren Callie Lou. Git in here, an hope Clytie with th dishes. You know how yer pop hates to come home to a dirty kitchen. An,” she went on, looking about for the others, “don’t any a you youngens be a gitten dunder-headed an sleepy now. We’re a goen to have some studyen soon’s th kitchen’s readied an we can have the lamp in th middle room. Reuben, you build up th fire in th heaten stove. No matter how late it is, we don’t want yer pop gitten back to a cold house.”
It was in the barn, where she had gone, as was her custom each night after supper, to take the supper slop to the fattening hog and make certain that all was well for the night, that Gertie stopped in the midst of scolding the pig for wasting his slop to say, “I’ll buy another lamp with th egg money this week.” She pondered, smiling a little at the pig, who looked at her and batted his long-lashed eyes. “Two lamps’ull mebbe seem kind a wasteful, but when th nights is long th youngens, specially that Cassie, kinda needs em.”
She stood a moment in the barn hall, listening. The steady clink, clink, of a bell told her that Lizzie was chewing her cud. She heard Dock move in his standing sleep; a hen dreamed, talking; and she came away, sighing a little as she wished for sheep. The Tipton Place would be good for sheep, and she would get a start when the money started coming in from the army. She stopped as she crossed the barn lane, and, though she told herself that Clovis wouldn’t be home until maybe the half-light, she listened until even her body, toughened to all weathers, felt the cold.
Back at the house she heard, as she opened the kitchen door, Enoch’s soft but precise voice briskly sounding words from an old reader Mrs. Hull had loaned them a few days ago: “‘the policeman held up his hand. The children—’”
Silence, then Clytie, her voice dressed up as if it had put on Sunday clothes as she tried to sound like the young teacher they’d had down from Lexington for two months in the summer before the city school in which she was a regular teacher had opened, “Surely, Enoch, you know that word—a little common word like that.” More silence. “Well, it’s ‘smiled.’ Now look at it so’s you’ll recollect it.”
“I can recollect th big words a heap sight easier than the little ones,” Enoch said before reading again.
She heard Reuben’s pencil on her old slate, and smiled. Her mother had laughed at it, for even when Gertie was little slates had been out of style. But her father had ordered it from Montgomery Ward, saying a slate was a good thing, since a teacher could, by listening, know if his scholars were working.
Gertie brought in the red cedar churn of cream, clabbered now, and Clytie looked up with her finger under a word. “Mom, you oughta switch Cassie. We could have a real good school if it warn’t fer her. She won’t try to read her primer. Look at her.”
And, sure enough, Cassie lay on the sheepskin, one elbow on her neglected primer while she explored Gyp’s mouth, her fingers feeling his teeth, even the ones far back, while he obligingly held his mouth open, smiling on her. He would have clamped his teeth hard on a hand of any of the o
thers could they have managed to get so much as a finger into his mouth, but for Cassie, whether wandering through the woods or lolling in the house, he was ever a patient, smiling friend, even when she put her bonnet on his head and called him Callie Lou’s granma.
“Listen, Cassie,” Gertie said. “You want to grow up ignerent as old Gyp. Now leave him be an git busy with that primer.”
Cassie understood her mother’s voice and smiled up at her through her long black lashes. Gertie thought of some bright-eyed wild woods bird giving her an instant’s notice before it flitted away. “Gyp?” Cassie asked, giggling. “Where’s Gyp? This is a lion. He’s about to choke to death on gingerbread. He eats it too fast, like Amos, an he’s been a choken an I been a hopen him.”
“You’re all mixed up,” Clytie put in with some tartness. “Th lion I’ve been a readen to you uns about in that old language book had a thorn in his paw.”
“My lion,” said Cassie, “is choked on gingerbread.”
“Cassie, you’re th biggest idjet. I’ll bet Pop, if he wanted to, could draw coffee on you,” Clytie said all in a breath, then realizing what she had said, looked at Gertie with shamed eyes that asked forgiveness.
Gertie sighed, but only said, “‘He that calleth his brother a fool is in danger of hell fire.’” She turned to Cassie. “Come read in yer primer now. I’ll teach you while I churn.”
Cassie walked to her mother’s chair, slowly, as if some great pain awaited her there. The mingled look of shame and guilt and puzzlement that always came when she wrestled with the primer changed her at once into a timid creature who seemed no kin to the Cassie of a moment ago.
Gertie turned away from the churn, put one arm about Cassie’s waist, pulled her against her knee, and after smoothing her hair out of her eyes opened the book to the first untorn page. She put a finger under the first word as a signal to begin. Cassie bent very close to the book, then twisted backward against her mother’s arm, peering fixedly at the word while Gertie warned, “Don’t git so far away, honey; you cain’t see,” but already Cassie was sing-songing:
“‘Here, Bobby. You can play. You can play with my kitten. Look, Bobby, Look.’” She turned the page, looked at the picture, then went on with no pause for breath, faster and faster: “‘Come here, Bobby. Come here and see. You can see my kitten. You can play with my kitten. I can play with you.’”
“That’ll do,” Gertie said. “Now what’s this word?” and she put her finger under “play.”
Cassie frowned, bent forward and studied the word, then pulled backward still looking at it. “Ball?” she asked in a low voice, studying Gertie’s face more than the word.
Enoch giggled, and even Reuben’s slate was silent while he listened. Gertie sighed. “Oh, honey, you’ve got yer whole primer by heart. It’s ‘play’; now look at it good till you can recollect it. Now, what’s this word?”
Cassie whispered rapidly to herself, then said in her hesitant, questioning voice, “Come?”
“That’s right,” Gertie said, pulling her closer. “You’re a goen to learn to read good, real good.” And she went on, pointing to words. Sometimes, after looking at the picture and whispering to herself, Cassie gave the right answer, but more often she did not. Gertie grew more and more conscious of Enoch’s jeering giggles, Reuben’s disapproving silence, and Clytie’s brisk attempts at helping. “Mom, mebbe if you tried that sample primer thet teacher give us—”
“We’re gitten along fine,” Gertie said. But when the child looked up at her there was such shame and sorrow in her face that Gertie closed the book. She pulled the churn between her knees, smiling meanwhile at Cassie. “You’ll learn, honey; you’re kindly little yit; jist five a goen on six, and you ain’t had no schoolen, but you’re a doen fine an—”
“But, Mom, you learned me fore I ever went to school,” Enoch interrupted.
“If’n you say another word, I’ll git yer daddy’s razor strop,” Gertie said, and gave the dasher such a hard quick lick that clabber squirted out the top.
The children stared at her. Their mother almost never threatened a whipping, and when she did she usually gave it. She took Cassie’s hand and felt the cold sweat on the palm; trying too hard she was, trying harder than any of the others; she would from now on teach her when the rest were not around. Gertie said quickly: “Cassie can count good; better’n any a you at her age—clean to a hundred. Show em, Cassie.”
But Cassie did not begin her usual gay tripping off of numbers. Instead she looked at her mother, and she was the wise one now, teaching the foolish. “Mom—didn’t you know you cain’t take Pop’s razor strop to Enoch? It ain’t there no more. This mornen Callie Lou—she was a acten up so, a jerken my little youngens out a their beds an a playen in th fire an a carryen on so, th meanest I ever did see her, so’s I tuck her to show her th razor strop. ‘Feel it,’ I says. ‘It’ll hurt on yer backsides,’ I says. An, Mom, it warn’t there. Pop, he’s tuck it clean away.”
“Yer pop’ull be in about midnight; he ain’t—” Gertie dropped the lifted churn dasher, pushed back her chair, picked up the lamp, and turned toward the kitchen. It seemed a long way from the chair by the stove to the kitchen wall behind the wash bench; the circle of lamplight moved with her, black shadows melting in front, black shadows closing behind. The silent children followed close at her heels in a tight little huddle, as if the lamplight were a warm thing that could shield them from the coldness of the shadows.
She walked close to the wash shelf without stopping, holding the lamp so close to the wall she could see the faint stripe of darker pink where the razor strop had hung for almost a year while the rest of the once red paper faded still more. She bent and rubbed the brighter strip, her hands more then her eyes forcing her brain to believe the emptiness. Clytie was crying behind her in accusing sobs, “You’d ought to a told us, Mom, an a got us all up to a told him goodbye.”
Amos looked at his sister and cried from sympathy. Enoch sniffed, but he sounded happy, satisfied, when he said, “Pop’s gone off to war—none a th youngens around cain’t make their brags to me no more, an say, ‘Yer pop he ain’t a helpen with th war.’” Then he, like Clytie, began to sob accusingly: “Mom, you’d ought to a told us; we might never see him agin no more.”
Reuben caught his younger brother by his overall suspenders, and shook him until the twigs and dust and weed seeds flew out of his turned-up pant legs, “Don’t be a talken that away—don’t.” And his voice rose, shrilling, until his last “don’t” was more wailing cry than command.
“You’re a hurten him,” Clytie said, catching Reuben’s arm, then looked up at her mother’s broad, unmoving back, and spoke to it as she said: “But Enoch, honey, they’s no use to carry on so. Fer all we know th war ain’t a wanten Pop—leastways not right away—he’s gitten kind a old. Mebbe he’s gone to work awhile in one a them factories.”
Gertie whirled with such a quick fighting swerve of her big body that the forgotten lamp in her hand sputtered, the flame hissing down to a dark blue line so that her voice cried from a darkness, “He’d be better off in th war than in one a them factories!”
SIX
GERTIE PASSED THE EMPTY schoolhouse on its high legs by the road. The yellow daisies Cassie and the other little ones had made back in the summer during the two months of school they’d had still clung to the windowpanes, but the petals were faded, unglued, and curling away from the glass. Forever Saturday the school was now. The coal the county board of education had paid Clovis to haul lay untouched in the yard.
She gave a backward glance to make certain Cassie was following, then walked on. It was the first time she had walked the graveled road since the day she had gone to her mother’s. Though early and a weekday morning, the road seemed even stiller now. Sometimes she saw the sign of the mail mule, and twice she saw a rabbit, motionless in the road, looking at her with more curiosity than fear. Once, a squirrel quarreled at her from a young hickory. “Sass, sass,” she said. “You think c
ause th men’s all gone, they ain’t nobody left to hunt. But ole Gertie can shoot, an so can Reuben.”
The squirrel sprang away, and Henley for a moment came up from the back of her mind, thinning out the troubled wonder on Clovis. Tuesday now, and he gone since Thursday a week ago, and never a word. She was for an instant dead still, as if the death of her brother and the absence of her husband made a wall she could not pass. In spite of her plans for the Tipton Place, the days had dragged. The bigger children almost never worried aloud, but looked too often down the lane. Nights, as they sat studying, she saw too often the lifted head, the listening eye, when the faraway sound of a train or an airplane brought the hope, at least for a moment, that it was the sound of their father’s coal truck coming home.
Cassie came calling behind her, “Where’s all the coal trucks, Mom?”
“Them that drove th trucks has gone away.”
“Why?”
“It got harder an harder to git tires an gas, an anyhow, even your daddy—he was th last trucker left—found plenty a people wanten coal, but he couldn’t hardly git a load to haul.”
“Why?” Cassie persisted, running backward ahead of her down the road.
Gertie gave a weary headshake. “They took a heap a th miners to th army, an some, like th Tiller men, went off fer th big money, an then them few that was left was like the truckers: they couldn’t git blasten powder an hardly nothen they needed to work with. I recken they figgered that th mines, like the farms, was too little to—” She realized that Cassie had disappeared into a pine thicket by the side of the road.
She walked on, and soon came opposite Lister Tucker’s house, where the yard gate lay fallen across the stepping-stones that Lister’s father had put there before Lister was born. The frost-blackened, wind-beaten morning-glory vines still clung to the strings Lister’s wife had tacked to the porch last spring, before Lister gave up trucking because he couldn’t get tires for his truck. He and all his family had gone to Hampton Roads, Virginia.