by Todd Johnson
“That feels divine. We are so glad you’re here, you have no idea,” she says. “Thank you for doing this, we know you don’t have to.”
I don’t have to, I think. But I’m here. My voice sounds softer. “I’m sorry, I forgot your name already.”
“Margaret, you call me Margaret. You’ll have plenty of time, honey, don’t worry. We’ll be here. That’s an understatement, right Bernice?”
Her friend laughs and says, “Fine, thank you, and you?”
CHAPTER FOUR
MARGARET
One of the ugliest things God put on this earth is a tobacco worm. I know this from direct experience, as does anybody else who’s ever seen one, so I’m not being judgmental about a fellow creature. One of my first memories is of just such a nasty thing as that. I am five years old, sitting in gray dirt between rows of tall tobacco with the flowers still on the plants, waiting to be topped. I am using a twig to poke at a big green worm with a pointed horn on its tail. It looks like a stinger, but it’s not. Tobacco worms won’t hurt you but they can sometimes be five inches long, and stepping on one barefooted in the summer is a disgusting mess. The workers have to pick them off the leaves by hand, they can’t just brush them off or shake them loose. They might as well be glued on. I am hiding in this field from my sister Catherine, called Callie, three years older than me, because I have stolen part of her stash of candy out of her underwear drawer where she hides it. Why she hides it there I don’t know because I always steal it. It looks like she’d have sense enough to move her treasure around, but some people would do exactly the same thing their whole life even if it were to kill them, which, depending on what the thing is, it sometimes does. When she finds me I will throw the worm on her, which will ruin her by leaving her in tears, and me too, because Daddy will punish me by making me sit in the chicken coop. I hate it in there because it smells like chicken shit, which should come as no surprise, but somehow is easy to forget until you find yourself sitting in the middle of it.
My daddy was the Reverend Reuben Driver Barclay. He owned several tobacco fields, all handed down to him by his own daddy who farmed his whole life. A couple of the bigger ones were near our house, but the rest were scattered patches of land all over Johnston County. Daddy was also a Baptist preacher, alternating Sundays between two or three churches. He had a man, Ardor Lee, who ran the farm and lived out in a shack way back on the edge of the field behind ours, but Daddy still went to the fields some part of every day. Ardor Lee didn’t have a wife or children, he was a loner. His hair was a mixture of gravy brown and whitish-gray, along with raggedy whiskers, you couldn’t really call it a beard, it was more like he only shaved once every two months. Callie said he wasn’t right in the head, not bad enough to be put away, but still not right. Mother said, “Ardor Lee may not be as bright as you girls seem to believe you are, but he works harder than either of you ever will, so don’t speak ill of him.” Mother always chose to think the best of people and wanted us to at least try and do the same.
The fact is Ardor Lee did not like us. We didn’t pay him any mind when we were little, but once we were older, he thought we were watching him all the time, and we were, because of his strangeness. I often saw him talking to himself when he was harnessing a mule, having a full on conversation like he thought that animal could answer him back. Ardor Lee didn’t talk to any person much except Daddy. He might tell a field hand what to do, something Daddy had already told him, but not much beyond that. I never saw him say one word to Mother. He looked at the ground like he was scared of her, and my mother was the last person in the world anybody needed to be scared of unless they’d done something mighty bad. Ardor Lee did however yell at Callie and me if we even got close to his place. He’d been known to throw a rock at us too even though we never did anything but look. His house only had one window and he couldn’t afford any curtains so it was wide-open all the time. Callie said one evening she looked in there and saw him with no clothes on and his hands on himself with his head back and eyes closed. She stepped on a dead pine branch that snapped and he saw her and yelled. I asked her if she told Daddy and she said no, didn’t I know what Ardor Lee was doing, because if I didn’t she sure wasn’t going to tell me. And I didn’t know exactly, but ever since then, he said things to scare us, like “Y’all girls better mind where you’re poking around, there’s a old woman lives in them woods who ate her baby, cooked him, and carved him up and ate him, and she’s liable to do the same to you.” If we told Daddy that Ardor Lee was trying to frighten us, Daddy said, “I don’t know why you all don’t leave that poor man in peace with all the work he’s got. He hasn’t got a soul in this world, and this farm is lucky to have him.”
I knew we were not poor. We didn’t have any money, nobody did, but even as a girl I could tell we had more than a lot of country people. My mother’s maiden name was Raynor. Her father owned and ran O. D. Raynor Dry Goods store and saved every penny he ever made, so when he died, Mother sold the store and hid away all that she got out of it, pretending like she never had it in the first place. Her father did not at first approve of her marrying my daddy. He didn’t envision his daughter as a farmer’s wife, the only reason he gave in was because Daddy was also a preacher and that meant he was more educated than most of the country boys that would be hanging around Mother. Education meant something to Mother’s daddy. Even though he didn’t have more than a few years himself, he could add numbers like they were going out of style when he was buying and selling in his store. Mother says sometimes he didn’t even write them down, he might look up at the ceiling for a minute and then come out and tell a customer what his total was.
My mother loved the land as much as she loved Daddy, she said she had to be on it. She said she was never as happy as when her hands were in dirt. That’s what makes a woman born to be a farmer’s wife. Also being a preacher’s wife, she had to wash the dirt off herself every Saturday night and then, on Sunday morning, put on a long stiff dress and high boots, both of which suited her because she could have a kind of high and mighty way about her. Not that Mother looked down on people, far from it. I think it was her one aim in life to make folks feel like they all could do better if they only tried hard enough. My mother honestly believed that, and at times I saw that resolve as the hardest thing about her character, primarily because even as a young girl I knew that what she preached was simply not true. Some people try as hard as they are humanly able, and their lives never change at all. They are as empty-handed when they die as they were the whole time they were alive. Mother couldn’t abide it; she could not accept that people couldn’t rise above their lot in life with enough willpower, hard work, and faith.
When I got old enough, I worked every summer in one of Daddy’s fields. I never did the backbreaking work of priming, but I helped at the barns, handling sticks at first, then learning from the black ladies how to grab handfuls of tobacco and shake them, looping them with thick white string onto a stick so they could be hung up on the rafters of a tall barn to dry out. I loved to watch those women pull the tobacco off the wooden sled when a mule sauntered up. They shook out their tobacco leaves like big fans in a rhythmic dance, and I tried to copy them but the leaves were huge and I shook so hard that I ended up dropping them all over the ground. The white women would have liked to scold me but they couldn’t cause it was my daddy’s farm, but the black women laughed out loud, especially the oldest one Glendolia, who had worked for my daddy’s family almost her whole life. “Child, your daddy ain’t gon have no crop left with you ’round here,” Glendolia said and then swatted me on my rear end with her kerchief. The men worked harder than any person was ever meant to. Bending over pulling tobacco leaves, their hands covered in black gum that wouldn’t come off, under July and August sun that was like a furnace planted square on top of their heads. More than a few times, I saw grown men fall over in the field. Daddy insisted that Ardor Lee carry water around to everybody, but the sun was not interested in the frailty of us living down here. Its one pu
rpose was to burn, and an eastern Carolina summer is still proof positive of that. I prayed at night for rain so the workers could have a day out of the fields, but it never rained during those summers, never ever. Daddy only stopped work once that I recall, when one of the primers had a heart attack. Daddy didn’t think the heart attack had anything to do with the heat, but he told everybody to go home anyway, he knew they’d all be thinking that it could have been any of them who died out there.
We always started before the sun came up. Mother stormed into Callie’s and my room and woke us up at about five because we had to eat something and go with Daddy straight to the fields so he could start the morning out there before coming back at dinnertime and doing his preacher duties later in the day. I never liked to eat anything hot first thing in the morning and I still don’t, but there was no arguing with Mother. The smell of breakfast wafted through the house in no time. Mother made her biscuits in a big rectangular pan. Daddy wanted fresh ones at every meal, so she threw the leftovers out three times a day. She wouldn’t give them to Tally our retriever because she said that dog was already too fat to be as young as she was. I could have learned to put the biscuits in the oven by myself, but Mother always stopped me and took some buttermilk on her hands and patted them, all around the pan because it made the tops brown better.
She said to me, “Maggie, you can’t forget the buttermilk if you want them to be pretty.”
“What’s pretty about a biscuit?” I answered, and Mother’s face looked like I’d just told her that she was an ugly woman, suddenly sad and faraway. I understand that now. Whatever she was doing at any moment was not only the most important thing she could possibly be doing but she did her best to enjoy it and couldn’t understand why other people might not feel the same. Most mornings I’d take a biscuit with some jelly on it for later on, once my stomach started growling. By the time the summer was over I was brown as a chestnut, just from being in the fields. Mother didn’t particularly like us to be so tanned because while we were farmers, she didn’t like the idea of us looking like field hands, especially as we got older. By the time she was thirteen, Callie was starting to look more like Mother in her body than like me. She left me behind with my flat chest and bare feet. She brushed her hair, showed signs of small bumps of breasts, and started wearing underwear on top as well as bottom.
A mixture of heat, dry dirt, tobacco, and bugs at night sums up all of my summers as a girl. Once in a while there was swimming in the pond if Daddy agreed to watch us because Mother was deathly afraid of water. More than once she warned my father, “Reuben you know exactly how I feel about those girls in that pond and yet you choose to let them swim in it. Lord have mercy on you if anything ever happens to one of them, I swear.”
“You ought not take the Lord’s name in vain, Sallie,” Daddy answered.
“It’s not in vain, I mean every word of it.”
That was usually the end of it. We’d go to the pond with Daddy anyway, but what Mother said had definitely made an impression because anytime one of us put her head underwater, Daddy squirmed around on the bank until he saw us come up again, even if it was only a few seconds.
I have no doubt our parents had as many fights as anybody else, but the only other time I remember was when Daddy brought home a caramel-colored pony. I don’t know where he got it, maybe I did at the time, but it seems like somebody gave it to him because they couldn’t take care of it anymore and Daddy being the preacher, people gave him things lots of times. He was a pretty pony, but I didn’t like to go around him because he made a snorting sound through his nostrils which sounded hateful to me. Callie on the other hand wasn’t afraid at all and was ready to ride him first thing even though she had never done it before. That’s where Mother stepped in and declared that no child of hers was getting on a strange pony that we didn’t know and so help her if Daddy let one of us, he better plan on sleeping on a church pew because the only way he would step into the house was over her body lying dead in the doorway. Daddy did not challenge her. He ran the house and made every important decision as far as I could tell, but on the rare occasion that Mother put her foot down, he understood that the battle was not worth the casualties and simply moved on. Callie did not ride the pony, and within a couple weeks the pony was living somewhere else.
Every fall, I couldn’t wait to go back to school. It was all I thought about the whole month of August. By the time I was fourteen there was no one else left in my grade. Farm children, if they went to school at all, only stayed long enough to learn how to write their names and read a little, then went back to work for their families. Daddy had taught me to read before I ever started school, mainly because I was always curious and asking questions when I saw him studying and writing notes for his sermons. I don’t think he ever wrote out a whole sermon, if he did I never saw it, but he always made notes to help him think about what he was going to say, which is more than I can say for some preachers I have heard since. If I asked him, he would stop what he was doing and let me sit on his lap, and we would sound out words together from the Bible. I know now that he picked easy ones because there are still some Bible words I couldn’t sound out if I had to, names of places, and people and rivers. I read anything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t a lot because there wasn’t any such thing as a library. The only books I got were presents now and then and the ones our teacher, Mrs. Eloise Grimes, would let me borrow. Her husband got killed by lightning in a bad storm and she never married again, but she had family up in Richmond and she went to see them about twice a year, which was a lot of traveling back then. She always brought back books. I think my eyes would be better now if I hadn’t stayed up many a night squinting by a kerosene lamp. Callie only went to school because Daddy made her but had already stopped by the time she was my age. She could read as good as anybody, but she didn’t care two cents about it.
Callie grew into as pretty a girl as ever lived. She had long light brown hair, almost blond, sometimes she braided it and other times wore it up on her head. To have spent her life on a farm, her skin was as pale creamy as a dogwood blossom, almost white. I myself had skin the color of ruddy earth, and hair to match. Some people still say I’ve got good color, I guess that means they can tell I’m alive. Callie’s skin was so unusual people talked about it at church when she was dressed up or if we went into town. Callie was looking to get married if she could find someone she would have, and there were plenty of boys that took an interest in her. She wanted her own house and a bunch of children to go with it. At the end of the summer, picky as she was, after many a picnic and Sunday afternoon visit, she had decided on who it would be, Lawrence Adams, the son of Sanford Adams the banker. Lawrence hadn’t asked her to marry him, but I could tell it was coming once he felt comfortable that she would say yes.
Ninth grade would be my last school year according to Mrs. Grimes. She said I had already done all the work and there wasn’t anyone else at my level. After a few hot days, leftovers from summer, the leaves started to change. I loved seeing a patch of fiery red or shiny yellow in the middle of a thick bunch of pines. The greatest change was about to come in a way that my family would never get over.
I had been back in school for only about a month, and I was reading on my bed before supper. Callie came running into our room, wild-eyed, scared to death. She had dirt on her face and one sleeve of her dress was torn so her shoulder showed through, scraped and bleeding. “Callie?” I said, sitting up.
She threw her arms around me, “I didn’t do anything, this is Daddy’s farm. I can go wherever I want to, can’t I?”
“Ardor Lee,” I said. It came to me like daylight.
“I didn’t do anything,” she cried.
“Wait for me. I’m going to get Daddy.” Mother was digging in her vegetable garden by the henhouse and shouted at me when I ran past her to the barn where Daddy always was at the end of the day before supper. When Mother saw us running together back to the house, she dropped her hoe on the gro
und and ran too.
The sheriff told Mother and Daddy they had been to every farm around, and that nobody had seen him. Ardor Lee’s house still had everything that belonged to him in it, like he had gone to the outhouse and planned to be back any minute. Daddy said he wanted that shack burned to the ground, and he hired a man and his son to come haul off anything that wouldn’t burn. Callie stayed in our bedroom and wouldn’t come out; I wasn’t allowed to go in either. Mother made me a pallet on the living room floor to sleep on, and every morning she got whatever clothes I needed and brought them to me.
I never saw my father look so sad, it was a sadness that would stay on his face for the rest of his life, in lines across his forehead and sunken eyes. He didn’t preach that Sunday or the next. Nothing had to be explained to the congregation. What they didn’t know they figured out. Weeks passed and I had the feeling that our life was different but didn’t know how, it was like we were caught in a place where nothing happens except waiting, and everyone sucks in their breath and holds it, feeling like they might explode. Ardor Lee was gone.
In the middle of a November morning while I was at school, Mother found Callie lying at the foot of her bed. She had swallowed most of a bottle of poison. They did not let me see her, they thought the way she looked would be too upsetting for me, even after the undertaker got her ready to be buried. Daddy insisted on preaching his own daughter’s funeral, even though Mother tried to get him to reconsider. I thought it might be the only thing that would ever make it real to him. Seeing the faces of the people in church told me they weren’t listening to him, but feeling sorry, amazed that he could stand in front of them and talk about the love of God with what his own family had been through. We buried Callie when the leaves were all gone, and not a cloud was overhead, only plain blue sky going on forever. After the funeral, Mother went to bed for a month. She didn’t speak to anybody, including Daddy, and didn’t eat one morsel that I ever saw. Daddy went in every evening and sat with her by the light of a lamp. Sometimes he held her hand and read to her from the Psalms, then he’d leave her and come back into the living room to ask me about my schoolwork, and we would talk for a few minutes before both of us went to bed. There wasn’t anything else to do once it was dark.