Cassie ran back up the stair hole, Gyp at her heels. Gertie for the first time recollected the job she had given Enoch seemed like hours ago, and that from him she had since heard no sound.
She climbed the narrow stairway. Three steps there were below a wide planked door that fastened with a button, then, a little landing, and the stairs turned. She reached the top step, but instead of calling to Enoch in the attic above she stopped and for the dozenth time admired the upstairs. The log house had been built by the old pattern with the logs laid high enough for a real upstairs with windows and divided like that below into two main rooms. She went to the one that had a little fireplace just big enough to burn cookstove wood. She looked at a corner between fireplace and window; that was the place for the block of wood. Nights up here in the firelight, she’d bring the head out of the wood. She could do fine work when the youngens were asleep and Clovis wasn’t around to talk, and now with her own land she’d never have to feel guilty about wasting time.
Such good rooms! Out one window she would be able to see the north star, and from the other she could look down the valley toward the Big South Fork and her mother’s house. Almost every day she would see her father. His land touched her land—her land, her land. Then she remembered Enoch, and raised her voice. “Enoch, you found any leaks, son?”
“She ain’t a leaken,” Enoch answered after her second call.
“You been looken good? Don’t wait fer drops. Look good—all under th shakes an see if it’s a seepen enyplace.”
She waited, and hearing no sound of feet over the boards to token his searching, called again: “You be keerful a thet lantern. What a you doen nohow, a bein so still?”
“Mom,” he said, as he came and stuck his head over the cubbyhole, “I looked good, real good, but they wasn’t no leaks.”
She saw the book in his hand. “So’s you’ve been a setten a wasten good coal oil a readen when you could ha been pullen them old nasty newspapers off’n our bedrooms. We’re a goen to start moven in less’n a week.” She sighed and studied her second son with more sorrow and puzzlement than anger. “Enoch, honey, what ails you? Everbody else is a worken an a plannen, an you go a setten a readen books ’stead a looken fer leaks.”
Enoch held out the book for her to see. “Honest, Mom, I looked fer leaks real good. I saw all these books an I recollected you wanted us to study ever day like we was goen to school. So’s I studied some spellen. They’s a sight a books, but they’re old an they ain’t got pretty pictures.”
Gertie took the book, a narrow little thing, the back a faded blue, the pages yellow and worn. “It’s a old blue-backed speller,” she said. “They quit usen them when yer granma was a girl, but all th same, many’s th night yer granpa had me spell out a it.”
“An, Mom, they’s a book with th funniest number problems.”
“Ray’s higher arithmetic, I bet,” Gertie said, and reached for the armload of books Enoch held. She raised her voice. “Clytie, Clytie, you’ve been a wanten books. Come an see what Enoch’s found.”
Clytie and the others came running and explored the pile. The books were mostly readers with small pictures showing little girls with long ruffled panties and little boys with hats and hair long as a girl’s. On most was the name McGuffey, printed large; inside were names in faded ink. The one most often seen was Maggie Gordon, the Maggie beginning with a great curling M. When the children wanted to know who was Maggie Gordon, Gertie fell into a long musing and remembering aloud of who had married whom before she realized that this was the Maggie Gordon who had married old Isaac Tipton and was the granma of Silas Tipton who had gone off to Muncie, Indiana. She was up in Deer Lick graveyard now with Uncle Isaac.
Gertie thumbed through one of the books. Many of the poems were familiar as old neighbors who, though moved away and not seen for years, seem neighbors still when seen again. “Look, youngens,” she said, glancing up from “Into the Ward of White-Washed Walls” with the guilty realization that she was wasting time, “you all have been worken hard. Th rain’s kind a slackened, I’d better go up in our patch a timber an hunt me a little hick’ry that’ll do fer saw handles an a good big tough maul, fer we’ll be haven to split some rails pretty soon. While I’m gone you all can do a little studyen till dinnertime. Clytie, you start gitten some poems by heart. Pick out somethen good, an th rest a youens practice readen an spellen.”
She caught the sorrowful, shame-faced look that always came to Cassie’s face at the mention of reading. “All but Cassie an Amos, an they can git a poem by heart. Cassie, they’s a real pretty poem. I got it by heart when I was about yer size. Look through th second reader, Clytie. I don’t think I recollect it all: ‘Once there was a little kitty with paws white as snow—’ ”
They gathered in a ring around the hearth, heads bowed over books, with Cassie whispering after Clytie about the kitten that frolicked a long time ago.
Gertie took the big double-bitted ax and went out into the wind and the rain. She climbed to the edge of the cornfield above the house and stopped and looked back. Gray rain and curls of fog from the rising creek and the river made the hills across the creek seem one black iron mountain smudged and indistinct. Her father’s farm and the hills beyond the river were blotted out so that she could see little but her own. Just below her was her house with the blue smoke rising, and set in the curving sweep of grassland, as green almost from the warm fall rains as grass in the spring. She saw the apple trees, black-trunked, gray-twigged in the rain; the pear trees, the peach, and rising like an outpost in the fog, the great poplar by the spring, its arms held up as if reaching for the sky. She wished she could see the cedar bluffs above the creek, with more cedar for fence posts than she would ever need, and the old sugar trees with their gray scarred bark, and the beech trees with their thin fine twigs that would on winter nights make a lace-like pattern against the stars.
Saw briers pulled at her skirt, and rain-drenched sumac and sassafras sprouts slapped at her, but she continued to smile as she plodded on up through the old cornfield. Now and then she would stop to cut a sprout or a grapevine, whispering to it, laughing a little. “Jist you wait till I git started. Away you’ll all have to go to make way fer my grass an clover an corn.”
She came at last to the steeper part of the hillside, that had never been plowed. Among the brush and second-growth timber were several young hickories and an old one scarred by lightning. She paused, ax uplifted by the old one, but the ax came slowly back to her shoulder, and she smiled at the old hickory, “You’d be good an tough,” she said, “an yer heart wood’s dead, but I’ll leave you fer seed an hicker nuts fer th squirrels an my youngens.”
She considered some of the less thrifty of the small hickories, but always instead of cutting she only slashed away the nearby hornbeam or other useless brush, whispering to the little hickory as she did so. “It won’t be many years ’fore you’ll be big enough fer the saw mill, er mebbe I’ll be needen you in that new barn I’m aimen tu build.”
It was with a little sigh and a fleeting look of sorrow that at last she chose her tree. There was more than enough tough straight trunk for the big maul and the handles, but some winter weight of snow, some accident with man or animal or weather, had crooked the top so that it could never grow into a fine upstanding tree.
NINE
SHE LOOKED AT GYP, outlined in the stove light as he stood by the open kitchen door. He whined into the darkness, then twisted his head to look at the shotgun high on its two nails above the eating table. He looked hopefully at her, then turned away whining again toward the sounds that came from the ridge field.
“Go on,” she whispered, with no pause in the churning, “’fore you wake th youngens. But I cain’t go with you. I’ve got a big day’s work ahead a me. Long as they’s light to see, I’m goen to be down at our farm splitten shakes to fix that barn roof so’s we can move our fodder an corn. It ain’t no coon, nohow,” she went on; “them hounds is hunten. They’re a chasen a fox
, I guess. But no matter what it is they’ll be nobody come to their cryen.”
She held the dasher still and listened. “It’s ole Sugar Bell. He don’t know that Barney cain’t hear him or Jesse neither in that prison camp in Italy. An that’s Lister Tucker’s ole Thunder. He took up with Pop when Lister moved to Hampton Roads. Go on,” she said to the still hesitant Gyp, “But they’ll be nobody come to you.”
She churned again, but between the steady glugs of the dasher she heard the crying of the hounds. It seemed like she’d heard it all night, the crying. Sometimes like a fiddle hidden in the hills, now far on the ridges, now near across the rented cornfield, rising and fading like a wind, mingling with the wind until it was hard to tell which was hound cry and which wind.
She had lain there in her bed and heard it and felt alone in the hearing. There was nobody else in the whole country to hear the hounds. The ears for the hounds heard other things, if they heard at all. Maybe some heard in their sleep, dreaming as she had dreamed of Henley. She stared into the stove grate trying to remember. It seemed a long time since she had dreamed of Henley. And hardly a month since the word had come that he was dead, not five since he went away. Now there was little left of him but the lonesomeness in her insides and the land his blood had helped to buy.
She slowly shook her head. It was as if the war and Henley’s death had been a plan to help set her and her children free so that she might live and be beholden to no man, not even to Clovis. Never again would she have to wait to bake bread till Clovis brought home a sack of meal. “‘I’ve reached th land of corn an wine; an all its riches freely mine; here shines undimmed one blissful day where all my night has passed away.’”
The lonesome sound of the crying hounds filtered through the kitchen, but she sang on, softly, so as not to awaken the children, thinking, planning, selecting what to do first. Today she’d burn the lantern and do the barn work before daylight. Soon as it was light enough to see she’d go dig up two or three little white pines. There were no white pines on the Tipton Place, and of all the trees she knew, a white pine had, she thought, the prettiest voice, warm and kind somehow even in winter. Old John wouldn’t mind if she grubbed up two or three out of the edge of the cornfield where the next renter might grub them out anyhow. She’d set them below the gate close to the two poplar trees she’d already set. A poplar was a lonesome kind of thing, not like a maple or a hickory, seemed like one would hardly grow at all without other trees for company.
Later, in the gray, cloudy dawn, she scolded herself for wasting time. She’d better be at the shake making or digging up something useful like a plum bush; but it was such a good time for digging trees. She’d dug up three good-sized white pines and two little dogwoods before she hardly knew it, and as she wrapped their roots in the balls of moss that Enoch and Cassie had gathered from a rocky ledge below the field, she smiled as she told Cassie, “They’ll be big afore you hardly know it.” She added, with a warning look, “You mustn’t be a hurten em now, an a tryen to climb em soon’s they’re big enough to git a holt on.”
Cassie laughed her quick bubbling laugh, then came very close and whispered up to Gertie: “Don’t say hit too loud. Do you know what that youngen Callie Lou ud do? She’d pull up yer little trees.”
“Our little trees,” Gertie corrected. She made a mighty frown that brought her brows together until their blackness met above her eyes. “When I git these trees set with their roots spread out, Callie Lou er nobody else, not even a witch, can pull em up. But,” and it was her turn to whisper after a quick glance around, bending low to Cassie’s ear so that the forever listening, watching, waiting Callie Lou might not hear, “but if’n you see her a tryen to pull em up you let me know an I’ll give that youngen a good switchen.”
Cassie blinked and considered, then rising on tiptoe whispered, her voice troubled: “You won’t make it too hard, will you, Mom? She ain’t a bad youngen at heart, jist full a jumpy meanness.”
Gertie nodded. “Mostly, I’ll jist scare her. I’ll break me a little twig frum our peach tree behind th kitchen—no hick’ry limb.”
“Mom! Mom!”
She looked up, listening, then dropped the tree and started running across the field. Something uncommon bad, like the house on fire or Amos hurt, had happened. She’d never heard Reuben scream so, worse than when he had seen the bear. She was past the barn and running down the muddy lane before she saw her father’s white saddle mule, standing carefully still as she always did for her father, while a plumpish figure so coated and bundled and scarfed she could not tell if it be man or woman climbed slowly from the saddle and became for an instant hidden on the other side of the mule. Then quickly the voice came, crying with the same scolding anger, pain, and sorrow in the cry, the old cry of, “Gertie, Gertie.” A moment later she saw her mother weeping with her face against the porch post.
The younger children had rushed out, but overcome by the sight of their invalid grandmother getting off a mule they stood in a silent little huddle by the door. Only Enoch could find his tongue enough to ask, “Granma, is Granpa dead?”
Her mother broke off her weeping and patted him on the shoulder as she said with such pitying sorrow that even brash Enoch was troubled, “No, no, honey, your granpa ain’t dead. Pore old crippled, sad-hearted soul, but he’d be better dead. He’s lived to see his own flesh and blood bring disgrace to his bowed gray head.”
Gertie’s heart went out to her sister, Meg, gone so long. What had she done—lied, fornicated, danced, played cards? “Mom, Mom,” she began, “I don’t know what Maggie’s done but it cain’t be much.”
“Meg?” her mother shrilled, lifting her head, anger bright in her eyes. “Meg’s a decent woman. She ain’t a sneaken an a slippen around a conniven to leave her man an make her children fatherless. Fatherless. Fatherless.” Her tear-brimming eyes had traveled slowly from child to child, resting an instant on each as she designated its condition, but now again her forehead pressed against the porch post as she went on, her words spaced by sobs, “I give yer mammy money—yer dead uncle’s money, her own born brother’s money—fer to buy you decent clothes an all th things you need. Yer ever-loven papa goes away an is a stranger in a strange place—jist fer tu keep bread and meat in your mouths. There he is,” she went on, looking now at Reuben as if he were the guilty one, “away off in that cold, dirty, flat, ugly factory town, a haven to mix up with all kinds a foreigners an sich, a haven to pay money to a union—him that’s never been made to belong to nothen. He ain’t got nobody to cook him a decent bite a victuals. He could be took in th army, an you’d never see him agin. An what does yer mom do?”
Reuben’s shoulders stiffened. “She bought us a place a our own.”
Her mother turned away, weeping now into the saddle blanket, talking both to the gray mule and to God. “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, she’s turned her own children against their father. She’s never taught them th Bible where it says, ‘Leave all else an cleave to thy husband.’ She’s never read to them th words writ by Paul, ‘Wives, be in subjection unto your husbands, as unto th Lord.’”
She managed to lift her head and look at Gertie, standing stiff and dumb as ever under her mother’s words, “I couldn’t believe it last night when Rildy come over to spend th night an told me th tales that was a goen around. Sue Annie told her that Mary Ballew had said you was buyen that old hillside and that old house.”
“It’s a good house,” Reuben said.
“Young man, you need a father’s hand. You’re gitten sassy. Do you want th whole country a talken about yer mom?”
“They don’t talk about Ann Liz Cramer, an she’s lived without her man fer two, three years,” Reuben said, and looked to his mother for help, but Gertie stood and looked like Cassie when somebody caught her in a piece of meanness.
“Ann Liz Cramer lives where her man left her, a keepen his house an his youngens, an a doen what Claude wants her to do—fer he’s a born farmer at heart. Soon’s th war’s over he’s
a comen home. Yer pop,” she went on, looking at Reuben and speaking slowly, “ain’t no farmer. Yer mom knowed that when she married him. She’s held him back all these years. He could ha been maken big money down at Oak Ridge but she wouldn’t give in to go with him, an—” She stopped, listening to a gay and lively whistle that changed soon into Clytie’s singing as she climbed the short-cut path home from spending the night at Mamie’s.
She waited, watching. Gertie, watching her, thought there was something like satisfaction in her face as Clytie, still singing, not knowing she was being watched, came in sight, and then began a dance like skipping on the big flat sandrock at the top of the path. Gertie wanted to cry out to Clytie that her grandmother watched, but could not, not even when she changed again from singing to whistling, and then, no more thinking that any one watched than a squirrel, flung her arms out wide and did a lively tapping dance that made the ragged coat she wore seem even more ragged, while Reuben’s old overalls unrolled themselves and flopped about her feet. The only thing about her that seemed new and clean and shining was a Montgomery Ward catalogue under one arm.
Gertie’s mother nodded slowly, her eyes on Clytie. There was satisfaction in her voice, and sorrow, deep sorrow, when she said, all the anger gone now: “Look at her, growen up like a heathen, learnen how to dance frum that trashy Mamie, dirty, ragged. I’ll bet she ain’t combed and braided her hair in a week. You know she wouldn’t ha been goen to ruin if’n Clovis was home.”
“You sound like she was comen up with a bastard,” Gertie said. “We’ve been awful busy.”
Her mother began crying again, sobbing about Gertie’s vile talk. Clytie heard and came on, the dance steps gone from her legs, her eyes fixed worriedly on her grandmother, shame in her face as if she had done great wrong. The bright catalogue was clutched like a shield against her bosom, but when she had walked up to the white mare her grandmother lifted her head and managed a wan and kindly smile. “What are you a fixen to order, girl?”