To her daddy’s way of thinking, she ought to have been married already. Who ever heard of a farm girl as pretty as she was reaching the age of twenty without being wed? She ought to have had more choices than a fox in a henhouse, but for whatever reason, either the young men weren’t up to scratch for her or else she didn’t suit them. Perhaps the truth was that, on account of her pretty face, she thought more of herself than perhaps she should have, and that made her too hard to please. Or maybe she had so many choices that she just decided to postpone getting on with the rest of her life, and she resolved to enjoy every last minute of her youth and freedom. I suppose we should have been stricter with her, and insisted that she give more thought to the future. Her father seldom put his foot down where Zona was concerned. I should have hectored him into being stricter with her, but I’d had a short and lackluster youth myself, and I think I was secretly glad to see her glorying in all the fun that I never had. There’s little enough time for a woman to be young in this world.
Lewisburg may be a flyspeck of a town, compared to Cincinnati or Washington or Louisville, and Meadow Bluff was barely a settlement, but I reckon Zona could find trouble in a horse trough if she put her mind to it. And find trouble she did. I don’t know where she met that George Woldridge. She wanted to go sashaying off to dances and socials with all the other young people about, but though her looks might have taken her to fancy places, her social class and lack of money kept her out, more’s the pity. We lived so far from town that she didn’t often get a chance to go anywhere. We were glad of that and thought we were protecting her, but George Woldridge must have turned up somewhere along the way, at somebody else’s place, perhaps, or else maybe she just met him on her own. She never brought him to the house. The first I heard of him was when I found her weeping into her apron on the back steps.
“What’s got into you, girl?” I said. She would weep as quickly from vexation at being left out of a party as she would from turning her ankle—there was no telling what had put her out of sorts. I was edging past her down the steps with the wicker basket, more set on getting the clothes off the line before those rain clouds let loose than I was about whatever little shadow was darkening Zona’s day.
“My monthlies never came,” she said, hiding her face in the folds of her apron so that I had to strain to hear the words.
“Your mon—” That sat me down. I let the empty basket tumble on down the steps into the grass, and we sat there without speaking for another minute or two while I tried to take it in. The rain came and I stared out across the yard, watching clouds of mist curtain off the hills, and then pellets of rain began to fall, and the sheets got soaked on the clothesline, but I didn’t register it somehow. Or maybe it just didn’t seem important anymore. Zona was in the family way. That put paid to all her hopes of a storybook life and to all the fine dreams I’d had of getting to watch it happen.
“What were you thinking of doing about it?” I said after a while, when her weeping subsided some, and when I could trust my own voice to keep steady and not give way to sobs.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Mama. All this time I’ve been hoping I was wrong, instead of thinking about what comes next.”
“Well, do you know which of the young men . . .”
“Of course I do!” Her voice squeaked a little as outrage overtook her misery. “There ain’t been but one. It’s George Woldridge. He’s wonderful strong, and tolerably handsome, though not too much for brains. Why, he could pick me up with one hand, as if I wasn’t nothing but a doll.”
I sniffed. “He ought not to have done any such thing. Besides, I don’t see that any of that counts for anything. What does he do?”
“He works as a logger now and again, but lately he’s been hired on at that farm down by the main road, the one on the right side on the way to town.”
I knew which farm she meant. We weren’t well acquainted with the people who owned it, not being kin to them or members of the same church, but we’d see them and their hired folk and their families sometimes at community gatherings. I didn’t know the man she named, though.
“Can this Woldridge fellow afford to take a wife? Well, I don’t suppose that matters now, does it?”
Zona’s face was red and her eyes had swollen into squinty little slits, making her look more like a hobgoblin than a pretty farmer’s daughter. I thought she’d better learn to govern her nerve storms better than that before trying to face down either her beau or her daddy with her tale of woe. Her beauty was her saving grace, and she’d best not try to do battle without it.
“You must pull yourself together, Zona,” I said, though I was close to tears myself. “We’ve no choice but to tell your father about this, but what he will say about it, I don’t know. Thank the Lord he’s not a man of violence, or else your young man might be make-work for the undertaker. As it is, I would expect your father to go and have a talk with the fellow at once to see about arranging a wedding at the earliest possible time. Nothing fancy, of course. Just a simple service in the parlor with only family present.”
Zona’s eyes welled up again. “Talking to him won’t do no good, Mama. He’s already said he has no intention of marrying me—and I don’t know that I’d want him to.”
“Not want him to? I don’t see that either one of you has much choice in the matter, Zona, not with a baby on the way . . .”
The tears stopped, and her nostrils flared. Zona’s temper overcame her grief. “What does that matter? George doesn’t own the farm. He just works there. He hardly makes enough money to feed himself, much less a ready-made family. Anyhow, I liked him well enough to begin with, but I’ve gone off him now. Anybody would, the way he’s been acting.”
“And just how has he been acting?”
“I went to him as soon as I was sure. Told him I was in the family way. And he acted like I had done it on purpose to snare him into marriage. He as much as said so. The conceited fool! As if he was a prize—him with his no-account job and a gut that’ll make him look like a tusk hog in ten years if he isn’t careful. He’d be lucky to have me.”
“Well, Zona, it seems that he already has.”
She flushed. “Anyhow, George was furious with me. Said he didn’t give a tinker’s dam if I had as many young’uns as a farrowing sow, he’d still not marry me. Said he’d swear before the law that the baby weren’t his if I persisted. So what am I to do? Force him to marry me? Would you call that being better off?”
I just sat there on the porch steps, staring out at that curtain of cloud mist that was hiding the hills and wishing that we could pack up everything we owned and head off to the eastern end of the county, where she’d have better suitors to choose from—and wishing even more that we had done it before it was too late.
We ended up waiting a couple of days before we did anything. I needed time to think it over. Zona was more than two months gone by the time she told me her news, so a few days one way or the other wouldn’t have made any difference. Finally, when she managed to calm down and I had got used to the idea, we decided to tell Jacob about his daughter’s trouble. Even though it wasn’t even Sunday, we cooked fried chicken with mashed potatoes and milk gravy—his favorites—for supper that evening, and topped off the meal with a lattice-crust apple pie, to make sure that he’d be in a good mood before we broke the news.
Zona let me do most of the talking. She sat there on the hassock by her daddy’s chair, sweet and sorrowful, with a clean white apron over her calico dress and a pale blue ribbon in her hair, looking as pure as Mary in a manger scene. She was our only daughter, and Jacob doted on her, though he thought he didn’t let it show. Like most men, he never saw beyond her pretty face, and I was sorry that I had to be the one to make him see the truth.
When I finished putting the facts to him as gently as I could, Jacob just sat there for a moment, staring as if he hadn’t made sense of what I’d been saying. Finally he sighed and shook his head. “This here’s the wages of that girl’s w
ild ways, Mary Jane. It’s no use coming to me with it now.”
Zona wept prettily this time, with dewy tears just wetting her eyelashes and making her hazel eyes sparkle. She dabbed at her cheeks with the handkerchief she had stuffed up her sleeve. “Oh, Daddy, there must be something you can do! I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t help me. Mama said you could make it all right. Find me a better catch, or tell folks the baby is yours and Mama’s, or make it go away somehow. Won’t you please try?”
I had said no such thing, but it didn’t matter. Jacob wasn’t to be swayed by his daughter’s wiles this time. He gave her a sorrowful look, and there were tears in his eyes, too. The last ones he would ever shed for her. “Daughter, you sowed more wild oats than a decent woman ever ought to, and I own that your mother and I ought to have reined you in well before now. We must accept our share of the blame for what has befallen you. That said, I don’t know that I can find it in me to fault that George Woldridge for refusing to burden himself with damaged goods. Why should he buy the cow when the milk was given to him for free?”
Zona looked as if he’d slapped her, and although I could see her father’s point of view—if she were somebody else’s daughter, I might even have shared it—still, I knew he was only lashing out in the pain of his disappointment. It wasn’t right to let a family member suffer, though, even if the trouble was of her own making. Men sometimes put justice ahead of loyalty, but I’ve never known a woman to do it.
“It seems to me that there’s blame to be placed on both sides,” I said.
“But her reputation . . .”
“Jacob, the man isn’t an English lord.” That’s an expression I got from my own father. He wasn’t a lord, either, but he was an Englishman. “George Woldridge is a day laborer, working now as a stockman on that farm down by the main road. I wouldn’t be surprised if he drank his wages the very day he got them. He’d be doing Zona no favor by marrying her. He’d be doing his duty. That’s all.”
Jacob sighed again. “She ought to have had more pride than to settle for that. I had hopes for the girl.”
“Maybe Zona was too free with her favors—I daresay she was—but George Woldridge did not turn down the offer, and that baby she’s carrying is the proof of that, so he must shoulder his share of the blame as well. I don’t see why he should be allowed to escape the consequences while poor Zona here is burdened for life, both with the child and with the loss of her reputation. Besides, if he doesn’t own up to his responsibility for this child, who do you think is going to bear the cost of supporting it?”
We were, that’s who, and it was just as well that Jacob be reminded of it. We had little enough money as it was—times were never easy on a hardscrabble mountain farm—and small boys of our own to provide for somehow. Zona was well past the age when she should have been married and settled, leaving us with one less child to contend with. She ought to have been a comfort that we could look to in our old age. Instead, she was proposing to present us with another mouth to feed. Jacob might have been sitting there fretting over fairness and honor, but I had no intention of standing for it, nor of taking the child, for I knew full well that Zona would have done none of the work of looking after it.
“Well, we’ll think on it all some more,” I said. I would think on it, anyhow. I did not intend to let her get round her father and persuade him to take it in. “Zona, you can come and help me with the washing up, and leave your daddy in peace.”
Something had to be done about the situation—I had not changed my mind about that—but right then I saw that it was no use expecting Jacob Heaster to take a hand in it. That same gentle spirit—I would not call it anything harsher—that kept him out of the war as a young man would make him liable to indulge his daughter and likewise unwilling to confront the scoundrel who ruined her. Easier to blame Zona and let it go, he would think, but I was not going to stand for that, knowing full well who would bear the brunt of the burden. I would have to see to matters myself.
A few days later I left Zona to look after her youngest brothers and walked the few miles to the big farm down the road. I put on my second-best church dress and my straw bonnet, for I wanted to impress this Woldridge fellow with the fact that we were respectable people, not to be trifled with and likely to have more influence with the local authorities than he did. It was midmorning when I got there, and I hoped to find him out working in the fields or the barn by himself because I didn’t want to advertise our private business to all and sundry.
When I reached the dirt lane that led into the farm, I was dusty and hot from the long walk in the sunshine, and I hoped I wouldn’t meet the owner of the place, for I wanted to get this matter settled without providing any grist for the gossip mill if I could help it. The farmhouse was neat and tidy, and they must have had a couple of hundred acres in crops and pasture. If George Woldridge had been any kin to those folks, it might have been a different matter, but I knew he was just a laborer here. I doubt if the owner knew much about him, certainly not what he’d been getting up to in his time off. I wasn’t going near the house; my business was with the fellows who’d likely be somewhere in the vicinity of the barn. I quickened my step, scarcely noticing anything around me, because I was busy rehearsing my set piece in my mind. The scoundrel had taken advantage of my daughter; he would not take advantage of me in an argument.
Just before I reached the door of the barn, a rangy man in overalls came out. “How do,” I said. “I’m looking to have a word with George Woldridge.”
The fellow squinted into the sunshine, trying to place me, but I just stood there, waiting for an answer. It wasn’t any of his business what I’d come about. Finally he rubbed the stubble on his jaw and said, “Well, ma’am, last time I seen him, he was headed out to cut brush over that hill yonder.”
So he was out working alone away from the farmyard. That was better. I didn’t want to have to wrangle with him at the barn with long-eared hired men hanging on our every word. I thanked the fellow and headed off in the direction of his pointing, wishing that I’d had the sense not to wear my second-best church clothes instead of getting all gussied up to have words with a farmhand on a brambled hillside. Another quarter mile of walking alongside the south pasture fence got me within hailing distance of the hill, and I could see a man about a third of the way up, scything the weeds and making a brush pile.
“You! George Woldridge!”
He turned with an obliging smile plastered on his face, but it faded quickly enough. He might have recognized me, for there is some likeness between Zona and me. His mustache quivered, and he looked wildly left and right, like a coon trapped by hounds and searching for the nearest tree. Maybe he was thinking that Jacob must have come with me—surely a woman wouldn’t come alone on such an errand as this. Well, he reckoned without a mother’s determination there. I could tell that he figured Zona’s daddy must be close by, and that a shotgun wedding was in his immediate future, or anyhow a shotgun. I hoped he wouldn’t get into such a panic that he’d come after me with that scythe, and then I wished there had been somebody besides me to take him on, but I was determined to stand my ground. I’d do it alone because I had to. Zona would have been no help—like as not she would cry, or else she’d believe whatever lie he told in order to buy himself some time.
Woldridge mopped his brow with a grimy bandana, which he stuffed back into the bib of his overalls. He was a swarthy fellow, with skin coarsened by working in the sun and a gut that promised he’d run to fat sooner rather than later. I wondered what Zona had seen in him—probably nothing except the chance to have an adventure.
“I’m awful busy right now, ma’am. Gotta have this hill cleared by dark.” He backed away from me, trying not to look at me at all. Instead he kept staring at the brush pile, as if his work was too important to be interrupted, which was nonsense. This was the sort of chore you gave a man to do when there wasn’t much else that needed to be taken care of.
I didn’t intend to have a conve
rsation at hailing distance, so I started to thread my way up that little hill, taking care to avoid the loose stones and tree roots that might have sent me tumbling back down again. As I got close, George Woldridge tried to edge away, but I caught hold of his shirtsleeve. Since there was nobody around to see us, I figured there was nothing to stop me from making a scene. I wouldn’t have wanted to, in the ordinary way of things, but if that was the only way to get the weasel’s attention, I’d not shrink from it.
“Would you rather continue this discussion back at the main house with your boss listening in? Or in a court of law, perhaps?”
He sighed, knowing that he was beaten. “Have it your own way, ma’am. Let’s just walk back down the slope and into the pasture a little ways, so’s you won’t fall down this hill and go to blaming me for that.”
“You can walk me back toward the barn,” I told him. I didn’t think there was any meanness in him, but I wanted people to be able to hear me scream if it came to that. When we were back on level ground and had commenced to head back to the lane, I said, “You know who I am, don’t you?”
“Reckon you’d be Miz Heaster from down the road a piece.”
“I am Zona’s mother.”
“Yes, ma’am. I figured you were. Ah . . . Zona.” He hung his head. “She’s a pretty little thing, I’ll give her that. But the truth is that what was between us was not love and respect, but only high spirits. On both sides. We were sporting, as young people do, and I had a jar of moonshine with me, and I reckon we got carried away. I never figured she was in love with me, and I never said I cared for her. I am real sorry for her trouble, though.”
“Her trouble?”
“Well, our trouble then, or maybe the trouble of whoever is the child’s father. It could be mine—I’ll not deny that—but we can’t be sure of that, any more than we can be sure which tom fathered the barn cat’s latest litter. I was not the first with Zona, and mayhap I wasn’t the last, either. I think she got tired of me after a while. I don’t think I had enough airs and graces to suit Miss Zona. Not enough money, neither. So I don’t see what I can do about it.”
The Unquiet Grave: A Novel Page 3