Across two hours Raphael cajoled, flattered, charmed, pleaded, argued. He quoted the Bible to the preacher, and though they argued the question back and forth the preacher acknowledged that there was a good deal in Scripture to support Raphael’s choice.
In the end Raphael won on a 4–3 vote. The preacher voted for him and persuaded one of the farmers, who felt that with Clark’s death the Hardins had suffered enough. The teacher and the salesman voted to support his application because they figured they’d be doing the armed forces a favor by keeping him out. The shopkeepers and the other farmer voted as a bloc: no, no, no.
Soon afterward the government announced the end of the draft.
But Raphael guarded in his heart this new knowledge, imparted to him by the military questionnaire. It was the first time he’d ever seen the word homosexual used in some ordinary public place, it was his first clue that there were others who were something like the something he feared he might be; enough of them (evidently) that the Army worried about keeping them out.
The same night of the draft board’s confidential hearing, the preacher told his church secretary about the board’s decision (they were secretly in love and shared all secrets). The next day she told the county judge—she could hardly keep it a secret; it was only the second such hearing in the history of the draft board and naturally the judge was curious. In turn he told a monk from a nearby monastery who was in traffic court for speeding (50 m.p.h. in a 25 m.p.h. zone). And the monk, Brother Hippolytus, told Rose Ella when they saw each other in the monastery vestibule after Sunday mass.
That afternoon she searched Raphael out—he was packing for college, for the trip west he was about to take. “I saw Brother Hippolytus,” she said. “He tells me you—that you met with the draft board the other night.”
Raphael kept packing.
“Why didn’t you tell us about it?”
“It’s not like one of us wasn’t enough. You have to ship me off, too.”
Thinking back, Rose Ella realized she’d never heard him speak so openly such resentment and anger. But at the moment she was blinded by her own anger. He had never talked to her like this—none of her children had. “You don’t know how I feel,” she said. “He was my son.”
He gave her a look of such contempt that she left the room.
That afternoon, for the first time in their marriage, Rose Ella asked Tom Hardin to meet her in his woodshop. She had to tell him about Raphael’s hearing and the board’s decision—better she than somebody Tom Hardin ran into on the street. She had a notion that she’d seat herself on Tom Hardin’s high drafting chair—her feet barely reached its footrest—and tell him everything that Hippolytus had told her, everything she knew about the hearing and the vote (excepting Raphael’s last look as he was packing—she’d leave that part out. Tom Hardin would cut a forsythia limb and whale into Raphael as if he were a child, and Lord knows what that would lead to). She sat in the kitchen marshaling her arguments: This war had damaged the family enough, she was not about to let it divide them further, Tom Hardin would support Raphael in this or at least hold his peace. Then she went to the shop.
She shut the door behind her—Raphael was somewhere around the house, and she had no wish to let him witness this conversation. She turned to face her husband, all his familiar lines and creases; she opened her mouth to plunge into her speech.
“Love is a flood,” was what she said. She crossed her arms, clenching her fists into her armpits. “A creek coming down, is what you meant. One big wall of water and then nothing but a dried-up old slough.” It was the first time either had spoken to each other of their first date.
He frowned for a moment, then picked up a block of pale cypress he’d been cutting into a hobbyhorse for Joe Ray’s new baby. “To tell the truth, I never thought you’d shoot that dog. I thought you’d carry him back to the truck—make him into a pet. You could of done that. He wasn’t hurt that bad.”
She looked down at her hands—she saw them covered with blood. Patch’s blood, after she’d carted him a mile and more from the river, to heave his corpse into Tom Hardin’s truck? Or her own blood, the afterbirth of her children?
Afterward she could not remember what followed, except that she was screaming and throwing what was in reach—chisels, nails, a hammer—at Tom Hardin until he pinned her against the wall, clutching her doubled wrists in one hand while with the other he slapped her with silent, fury-filled blows that she watched happening as if from another world and time and place. And then she was punctuating the close air of the shop with her screams and he was on his knees sobbing at her feet.
She ran from the shop to escape, but where was there to go? This house was her only home—to enter it was no different from walking deliberately into a trap, a drowning set in which she herself was drowning. She ran past the house, down the dogleg drive until the stabbing pains in her side forced her to slow to a walk, but she walked on until she reached the fresh mound of Clark’s grave, where she lay herself carefully down on the grass and turned her eyes to the sky and its silence. Here she lay for some long time.
Lying on the grass she removed her memory to the morning a few years into their marriage, when Tom Hardin taught her to set bank poles. They’d left Leola at the house, then crept past the room where the children slept four abreast in Rose Ella’s grandmother’s four-poster. They drove the old truck (held together with barbed wire and baling twine but still running) into an opalescent dawn. From the riverbank they ducked through a cut and into the river’s green tunnel.
Life devouring life: mosquitoes sucked at Rose Ella, minnows snapped at mosquitoes, frogs snapped at minnows, turtles snapped at frogs; when Rose Ella waded into the water, crayfish nibbled at her toes. River, river, the place that she loved more than any other place. She waded toward the first bank pole, to be startled by a dead branch that plopped into the water, then swam away.
They pulled one pole, then another from the bank: no luck. Tom Hardin thrashed at the smartweed with a long wand of cane. “I know I stuck a pole in here somewhere.”
“Father.” These names, taught to their children and then learned back, they now used for each other.
“Won’t you know it’ll be the one with the five-pound bass.” Oblivious to the stinging leaves, he waded into a jungle of smartweed. Rose Ella saw nothing of her husband, only the plants’ thrashing tops.
“There!” Pole and man came flying out of the weeds. No fish.
She pointed at the next pole, dipping and bobbing. “Looks like we got one anyway.”
And that was all they got. Rose Ella swam across a deep hole, pulled the pole from the bank: He was hooked good, a nice steel-blue channel cat.
Back at the house the kids were still in bed. Tom Hardin hooked his fingers under the cat’s gills and handed it to her. “You catch it, you kill it.”
She looked blank. “Well, it’s not like it’s a chicken.”
He laid the fish on the carriage rock, a huge block of limestone from which his great-grandfather had mounted horses. “It’s tough to do it quick with a knife. A cat has this thick skull—a knife just bounces off. What I do is pick it up by its tail and slam its head flat against the rock. That’s fastest for the fish, seems to me.” He stood behind her, wrapped his body around hers, ran his arms down her arms and his hands over her hands. As if clutching a baseball bat their hands entwined around the fish’s tail—some smooth, prehistoric thing, less like a fish than some large worm that had crawled from the muck.
Supper, she thought, and together they swung, and the impact of the fish against the rock stunned her like sex.
Beside the newly planted sod of Clark’s grave, Rose Ella remembers not so much the solid smack of life against rock but the pleasure of learning, and being taught, and—she is too honest with herself to deny it—the running of his arms down and along her own.
It was the learning that drew her to him, she understood it that morning at the carriage rock, she’d understood it without
knowing as much when she’d first said yes to his invitation to run traps. From him she could learn something about the workings of another, different world. Camp Junior—he’d been at the university learning law, learning about the feint-and-dodge manipulations of men and women, but she was a woman, to whom an understanding of all that came with her particular territory. (In another, later era she might have been a lawyer—years later her youngest daughter told her as much.) What stirred her about Tom Hardin was his different knowledge, his place so foreign from her own; the lure of a lover as foreign as she was likely to find under Strang Knob. This he would never lose; this, and the plain old challenge of riding herd over her own desire for a man more bullheaded in desire than even she. This would last her lifetime.
But with Clark’s death their stubbornness had reached a standoff; hardly for the first time, though this time the enormity of their pain intensified the moment. Once again it had come to this, where one or the other would have to yield and submit. Always Rose Ella swore that this time she would be a bigger rock than he, a wall higher than his, a range of mountains to his high peak; and then the memory returned of those terrible days following Raphael’s birth, when she had been a rock, a wall, an unmoving range until her stomach rebelled and every bite of any food tasted of her own bile and Tom Hardin had been—himself; unmoving, unmoved.
Now she was here again with seven children (no, six, now, six) all grown but still hers. She had things to do, a world to attend to, she was the wearing water, the river flowing to the sea and still he was the rain-washed stone, the unmoved and unmoving rock in the river, his wearing down was that slow.
Tomorrow she could reason all this out—she could see how exactly right she was, she would know exactly what she ought to have said and done. But at the moment itself she was always seized by—what? Some force larger than herself, that she did not want to name but that held in it all that time and children, Clark and now Raphael and even Patch, and the desire that could seize her still when that time came and the moon was right and it had been long enough since she’d had his chest under her hand.
And so she would break around him and move on. Did this make her a fool or a saint? That question she could not answer. She knew only that she was the ever-changing foundation, the fixed place that changes its shape to accommodate the needs of the hour, the day, the year. She was what this family must have if it was to endure.
She rose and walked home to fix supper, an ordinary supper of mashed potatoes and fried catfish and green beans.
Tom Hardin remained in the woodshop, too stunned by what he had done to follow his wife. He’d never before been seized and drawn out of himself in front of another human being, though looking back now he saw how and where this had been coming: the storing up of anguish, waiting for the opportunity of lashing out at the target closest at hand; and Rose Ella was always closest at hand.
He forced himself to sit at his bench, to take up the hobbyhorse on which he’d been working. It quivered in his hands as if alive—it was his hands that were trembling.
He took out his knife to bevel its edges. His fingers knew how to shape the wood without thought or volition on his head’s part; the knife was an extension of his hand, a sharpened sixth finger. Watching the horse emerging from its sleep in the heart of this blond block of cypress, Tom Hardin resolved this: Rather than risk such violence he would retreat from himself. He would place enough distance between his heart and what he does that there can be no chance of his striking her again.
He would not speak of this decision, he decided, to Rose Ella—to speak of it would only be to invite this turmoil back into his life. He had struck her from some blind love—for his dead son, for her—and from some self-contempt too deep-seated to risk examining: contempt for his wordlessness, his stubbornness, his inability to submit to the yoke, his shifting of its burden always to her. He understood this, at the same time that he feared more than pain the labor of putting it into words. He was too proud.
That night he turned to her, to rest his hand on her swollen cheek. She did not resist. He opened his mouth—he wanted to find some words with which to speak of love. He was daunted by the largeness of her heart—by the completeness and certainty of its demands.
She covered his lips with hers; she made love to him.
She is big enough to do this, he thought. Of the two of us she is the stronger.
I am the one who forgives, she thought this in her last thinking moments before desire consumed her thoughts. This is the source of my pain and power.
It was not what she had imagined when she was young, or what they’d had in the first years after they married, but it was more than sex—it was all that shared time and memory that had bound them together on this starry, pricking wheel, long after they’d settled into the ordinariness of their married lives. Clark’s death was one more binding thing—even as it belonged to them separately it was another of those things that held them together. They both knew this, in some unchanging way; it was the only unchanging thing they knew.
He never raised his hand to her again. Raphael’s military service vanished as a subject of conversation or argument. The war itself vanished: Raphael left to drive west to California for college; Tom Hardin stopped watching Walter Cronkite and went directly to his woodshop from supper. They had no more sons to give; they would not think or talk of the war again. It was as if Clark had died in a car wreck, or of some strange, unheard of, untalked about disease.
Grief is like any wound—some terrible pleasure resides in it. Better to knead that pain, that terrible pleasure than to have nothing at all. If love fulfills itself in companionship, grief fulfills itself in solitude, for we grieve finally and necessarily less for the dead than for our living selves, our aloneness in our survival, our inescapable invitation to the dance.
Rose Ella still takes flowers to Clark’s grave—flowers that she cuts from her yard, mixed with wildflowers that she gathers along the roadside and from fields. She arranges these in containers that she herself designed to sidestep the new cemetery rules against flower arrangements. Spring: jonquils, sweet-scented hyacinth, daffodils, extravagant peonies. Summer: roses, sweet william, honeysuckle, day lilies, money plant, brilliant ironweed, and the recumbent obedient plant. Autumn: black-eyed Susans, joe-pye weed, purple loosestrife, chrysanthemums. Winter: cattail, crown of thorns, lustrous green magnolia leaves, pampas grass; tight-berried scarlet cones of staghorn sumac entwined with red-orange bittersweet.
The flowers on Clark’s grave evoke for Rose Ella the progression of the seasons—she measures, for example, the end of summer by the day when she cuts the last violet inflorescence of ironweed from the fields. His grave comes for her to represent time passing, her own mortality, and she goes and stands before his plain white cross and grieves into the unbroken gray stillness of her heart.
The Way Things
Will Always Be
[1963]
Climbing the ravines that carve the sides of Strang Knob is the only way to reach the rock house. From above, an overhanging cliff forms a pouting, precipitous lip; to either side a dense undergrowth of briars blocks the way. The cliff forms the roof and ceiling for the house, whose floor is a flat, sandy ledge, always dry except in one corner, where a spring seeps from a crevice in the limestone. To find this place a newcomer must be guided by someone who knows the land, who in his turn has learned the way from someone before, on back to the Cherokee who camped here on their hunting forays into the valleys under Strang Knob.
During Tom Hardin’s childhood, arrowheads had been plentiful—in the ravine that funneled down the cliffside from the rock house they’d all but crunched underfoot. By the time his son Clark walks these hills the arrowheads have almost disappeared, picked over by white men and children and lost to erosion. But on sunny afternoons in early spring, after winter rains wash the banks of dead leaves but before the concealing sprouts of ginseng and coltsfoot, Clark still turns up an arrowhead or two, their immigrant flint
foreign against the calcified limestone.
Each summer and into the fall the rock house is home for Gaspard, the last Cherokee whom anyone in these parts knows of, who is possessed of the cheekbones and straight black hair to prove his lineage. He lives in the rock house until Christmas Eve, when he brings his few possessions down from the hills to Leola Ferber’s house, to receive his Christmas basket from Tom Hardin and to spend his winter months living with the woman the town has decided to call his wife.
On this particular Christmas Eve, Clark is thirteen and readying himself to spend the afternoon at the house of some friends who (they claim) have sneaked a pint of whiskey from some suspecting adult’s liquor cabinet. But Tom Hardin corrals his son at the door, to order him to come along on his Christmas rounds. Clark argues, but Tom Hardin is not much given to listening to argument, especially from his sons. “You’re of an age,” he says. “It’s time you learned your responsibilities.”
Rose Ella has prepared baskets, each with cheese, bread, store-bought Florida citrus, secondhand clothing, nuts, cupcakes, and some practical gift (for Leola, a hammer; for Gaspard, a wool cap). She searches her closets to put together a packet of ironing—paying work for Leola. To this Tom Hardin adds a gallon jar of white dog, gin-clear whiskey legally made and illegally tapped from the condenser before years in a charred oak barrel give it color and weaken its proof, and before the government men have gauged it for their tax. Clark loads the baskets in the car and he and his father set off.
Leola lives in a small house in what passes for the colored section under Strang Knob. Excepting her months with Gaspard she lives by herself, but until the past few years she has never been alone. First she had her own children, then grandchildren and great-grandchildren turned up on her doorstep, left by sons and daughters long gone to the city. Leola was not one to haggle over details of genealogy. So long as they were not the proper ward of some overzealous Christian charity she took them in. If they were old enough, able-bodied, and clear of mind, she put them to work ironing and chopping wood. The feeble and the maimed she shut inside a chicken-wire fence, where they were safe from the depredations of the pigs and where they more or less entertained themselves with whatever lay at hand.
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