by Jory Sherman
For a moment, he forgot that the pups were gone. He expected them to run up the road, barking at him, scolding him for leaving them behind.
Katie emerged from the spring house, looked up at him. She lifted her hand in a tentative wave.
Jess waved back, his heart suddenly swollen in his chest.
He worked the rifle bolt, spilled the bullets on the ground. Then, he held them up triumphantly.
He began to stride down the road, letting the gravity pull him faster and faster until he was in a lope, hurrying to take Katie is his arms.
Long before he reached her, she started to run, too, and her arms were outstretched in a lover's welcome.
As he rushed up to her, he saw the bright tears brimming her eyes. They shone, he thought, like the sunlight on the waterfall. Someday, after their child was born, he would take her up there, to the bluffs, to the birthplace of the spring.
Maybe they would see the cubs, too, and their mother, feeding contented in the wild deep hollow that was their home.
Granny: a Love Story
I MET GRANNY a few months after we moved to Arkansas. She was a pioneer and had lived in the Ozarks for over eight decades. Now, she is gone.
Granny had an insidious growth in her body that they call oat-cell cancer. I don't know what this is, but it's very tiny and very destructive. It was draining the light from her eyes, thinning her sinews, and spreading pain through her frail body.
The first time she held out her small hand and cracked a worn smile, I fell in love with her. She was right at home in her rocking chair on the front porch. There were no modern conveniences in her home. No electricity or running water, no telephone or television. And, she had the kind of home that was somewhere near you, near us all.
The house had not been painted in years. The boards were weathered to a silvery gray, and the hand-froed shingles had been patched with cedar over the years. Inside, she cooked over an old wood stove. There always seemed to be a few glowing coals in the firebox, the lingering smells of fresh-baked bread or stewed squirrel, bluegills fried in cornmeal batter. The living room was small, cozy. A potbellied stove sat in its center so that the room was democratically warmed. She had a battery-operated radio so that she could listen to church services and the Grand Ol' Opry. On the front porch, there was a propane-powered refrigerator. These were the only modern touches to a home lit by lamplight, graced with religious prints on the walls, samplers in old frames.
She remembered the old days with a fine mind full of memories. She reflected on her past with clarity and affection despite the bitter years of drouth and economic depression. When she spoke, it was like listening to a brook rippling over stones. Her voice rasped with half-whispered memories, as if she was speaking from the past herself.
She talked of her children, her husband, buried not far from her house, in a cemetery grove lined with massive oaks that shaded the stones, the mounds long since sunken into the loamy earth. There was no dejection in her talk, no rancor.
She had seen life and she had lived it. She knew what the gone days meant, what hardships she had been through and that suffering was often a part of it. Now, she could sit on her porch and look down through the pasture and past the far gate and see way beyond the place where she would live out her last days. Way beyond.
A surviving son lived with her, one of seven children, a man who had been crippled by polio, but had grown up like a weather-gnarled tree, defiant of his apparent handicap. Red, as he's called, planted their garden, raised the chickens, took care of the two dogs and calf, the forty-year-old mule named Pete. He hunted the game that was part of their diet, and cut their firewood. Under Granny's careful scrutiny, of course.
Red was a twin. His brother had died several years before, leaving his shadow on the earth around the old place, in the faded photographs Granny showed me one day.
Granny used to give us fresh milk. If it was going bad, she said that it was turning "blinky." She and Red would skim off the cream to make their butter, but the milk was still very rich. She gave us seeds, as well, in little handfuls, or the vegetables themselves, from which we could extract the seeds and dry them for next year's planting. She gave us a huge cucumber once, telling us to wait until it "swiveled up." We did as she said and planted those seeds the following spring. When we ate the cucumbers that grew from the seeds in that "swiveled up" cucumber, they were very sweet to the taste.
Some days Granny wasn't always up to snuff. When I asked her how she felt, however, she always answered, "tolable well." I knew she was sick. Still, the smile was there, sometimes forced so much that it hurt both of us.
There is a spring branch that runs through Granny's place. Sometimes it runs full and rampant over the shale ledges and sometimes it slows to an almost silent seep over the rocks. The water keeps running, though, as it has for many years. Granny commented on it often, took pleasure in its energy. It was a life-giving source for her and Red, and she never failed to give it homage. She was proud of the water and there was always a pitcher full to pour for guests.
Granny has passed on now, but the branch still flows. Now, as I write this, I want to go to her porch once again and look out at that branch, think of her. I want to see it keep running forever now that she's gone. I want to see it smile as it passes by Granny's old house on the way to Osage Creek, to the Blue Hole where the children swim. I want to see it smile as it did when she was alive, a reflection, somehow, of her indomitable spirit. For I know what that is out there, shining through the trees, full of sunshine and warmth. Not just a stream bubbling up out of a hidden spring deep in the rocky earth. Not just a trickle of water where deer and quail and squirrel drink, but a smile.
Granny's smile.
Guardians
SOMETIMES I stand in the hush of these woods early of a morn and wonder if I am their temporary caretaker. Is that why I came here?
The woods are changing every day. I do not like most of the changes. The string of hot days has murdered the leaves on many of the oaks. There are brown splotches, the dried bloodstains of dead leaves, in these August hills. Last week a storm blew through here at sixty miles an hour and did some pruning. The winds blew down a couple of big dead trees, hollowed out oaks, and trimmed a few dead limbs from some others. They will not go to waste. Wood for the fireplace this winter.
If I do not dismember these downed giants, they will rot and become homes for ants and other insects. They are just as useful now as when they were alive. There is one tree that I hope does not come down soon, though. It is a bent tree and serves as a deer stand. In another time, I imagine, the Osage men took the sapling and bent it, tied it down with leather thongs so that it would grow that way. It points toward Bull Shoals Lake.
In the days when the Indians roamed here, the growing tree pointed toward the mighty river that the white man later called the White. There was probably a game trail running alongside. The Osage put up roadsigns like that all through these hills. Trees that pointed toward water.
I have been walking up through the woods on these cool mornings before the sun is up, getting some exercise, waiting for the light to come up so that I can see to shoot my bow. I have a foam target set in front of three bales of straw. I have been shooting 30 arrows at the target from distances of 20,30, and 40 yards.
The sights are set perfectly at those ranges. A few weeks ago, Gary Wakefield, one of our premiere bowhunters, took my Browning Deluxe Nomad II and tuned it up. He replaced my bent bowsights, put on a new string, installed a new burgher button, locked in the pull at 57 pounds. When I first shot it, I thought my arms would break.
So, I built up my strength slowly, and my confidence rose in direct proportion. The bow has never shot better, truer. There was a time when I hated its wheels and pulleys and wished I had never switched from a recurve to a compound. But now, even though my trigger finger is worn bloody from the bowstring and the muscles in my arms ache every time I move them, I think it will do fine on New Mexican elk, Ozarks whi
tetail.
This is the season when the Indians would hunt the deer, and I think I know why. There are plenty of them, and they do not spook so easily. I could have had a dozen easy bow shots these past few weeks. The deer are feeding in the hardwoods and curious about my presence. They gather to look at men with chainsaws and trot up to places where other men are hammering nails into lumber as they build new houses.
They seem to be like guardians of these woods. They sniff around the fallen trees, they look up at the dead leaves rattling overhead like brittle skeletons. They own the hills now and they roam through them like sentries in a game park, their coats sleek and reddish, shiny as sable.
The hunting season is a long way off, but the fever is there as I shoot the bow and watch the mist rise through the trees. The bowstring has taken away the feeling from one of my fingers. I hope a good hard callous grows where the skin is worn off my index finger. Next month, it's the Gila Wilderness in S.W. New Mexico, packing in on horseback after bull elk. The bow in my hands has to be second nature to me by then. The walks have to get longer, tougher. My eyes have to get sharper, my ears keener.
No, I am not the caretaker of these woods. I am not the guardian. I am a passerby, an observer, only. The woods were here before I came along, they will be here after I am gone. The trees and the deer, the creatures that make the woods their home, they are the true guardians of the land. Once, perhaps, there were others who watched over things.
I am just someone standing under a bent tree that points to water, that points back to a misty past when there were other passersby here, other bowmen practicing with slender arrows made of Osage orange, fletched with turkey feathers, tipped with flint.
Guardians.
The Girl down the Road
I ALWAYS think of her standing on the porch waiting for me.
Of course, that's not the way it is, but I guess I try to fix her in my mind and hold her there for as long as I can and that's the way I have to do it.
When she stands on her front porch, she is very still. The sun is going down, making spectacular light plays in the green trees, the rays getting all tangled up and shooting out in different directions, burnishing the emerald leaves until you can't look at them anymore. Shadows lie all around the porch like the cast-off garments of children.
She is staring down the lane, past the gate in the picket fence.
The sun is sliding down the edge of York mountain, but is stuck there for a long moment so that it catches her in a single dazzling beam. The fine loose hairs on her head are like spun fibers of coppery light, delicate as spider's silk. You wouldn't notice these usually if the sun wasn't stuck there on the corner of that mountain, wedged in there like a twenty-dollar gold piece. Her face is more distinct than it usually is. It is difficult to fix a face in your mind when you're too shy to look at it direct.
But, when she's standing there on the porch like that, bathed in light, caught there in the failing rays of the struck sun, you can see her features very clearly. You can see her eyes and the way the colors shift like the stone in a mood ring. Hazel eyes that pick up glints of gold from the sun and green from the leaves and bronze from her summer skin. The eyes are the hardest to hold in my mind. Even when she's standing still like that, her eyes are the biggest mystery about her. She is looking, but what does she see? What is she looking for, or who? Every time her eyes change color, I am puzzled.
The first time I saw Hollie MacGuire, she was picking berries at the old, abandoned Griffin place. There had been nobody living there for years, but the blackberries didn't know that--they grew in wild profusion all over the meadows and the hills.
Hollie was singing some little song to herself. I couldn't hear the words, but her voice was musical, soft. I always cut through the Griffin place to go down to where the beaver have built dams on Osage Creek and pooled up the water over deep holes where the small mouth bass lurk in their secret underwater nooks. I was carrying my fishing pole and a plastic box full of lures, a knapsack with a sandwich and a couple of colas in it.
I made a noise and Hollie stood up in the blackberry thicket, startled.
Her lips were purpled from nibbling on berries. But the sun caught her hair and spun through it, threading it with golden honey. She smiled at me after a frowning moment and something inside me melted. She blew a strand of hair away from her mouth. The simple dress she wore was faded from many washings. She was thin, with a frail, country-girl strength in her bones and limbs. She seemed full of a sad joy that I can't explain. As if she had found something wonderful that was too late to enjoy as she once might have, like discovering a favorite childhood doll in an attic trunk that stirred up memories of other times.
"You're the man who lives down the road," she said.
"Yes. Jim. Jim Lawrence."
She told me her name.
"You must be Pat MacGuire's daughter. He plowed my garden for me this spring."
"His wife," she said, a shadow sliding across her face.
MacGuire was in his sixties. This was no more than a girl. Nineteen? Twenty? She looked even younger than that. Well, this was the Ozarks. Such things happened, I was told.
She looked at me oddly. I was staring. My mouth dropped open.
"I'm sorry. You look so young," I stammered.
"I'm eighteen."
"Yes." I didn't want to say any more. My mouth tasted of foot as it was.
"Want some berries?" She held out her pail to me. I took one, more to be close to her than anything else. She smelled of the fragrance of earth and growing things. There were scratches on her arms from the brambles, white streaks on suntanned skin. Her hair was tied back with a faded ribbon, but the loose strands kept moving over her face, as if caressing her. Her eyes were large, bright. Open, like her face. A book to be read, studied.
"Going fishing?"
I nodded.
"Can I watch?"
I guess I shrugged. It's hard to remember now. She came with me down the path to the beaver dams. I found a spot, put on a yellow #2 spinner, snaked it along between the bank and a beaver house. The second cast brought a bass out of hiding. I felt the line pull taut and then the water boiled.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "You got him. Big one."
She laughed like a child as I played the bass, reeled him in. I threw him on the bank and the sunlight smelted silver on his sleek skin, stippled it with pastel colors of the rainbow. I took him out of the grass and slid a stringer through a gill. I secured one end of the line to a strong root sticking out of the bank, tossed the fish back in the water.
"I love fish," she told me. "Pat doesn't fish much anymore. He used to take me fishing up at Table Rock."
I caught two more smallmouths, a sunfish, a big bluegill and a sucker. I threw the sucker back in.
"I'd like you to take the fish," I told her, "cook them up for you and your husband." The last word was a lump of cornmeal dough in my throat.
"Oh, I couldn't do that."
"Sure. I can't eat all these. No freezer. But I fish all the time. Take them."
"Thank you, Jim."
I took the lure from my swivel, put it back in its plastic box, fastened the swivel to an eye on the pole. I sat beside her in the shade.
"I'll split my sandwich with you," I said, pulling it from my knapsack. The sandwich was bent. Hollie laughed and it sounded so strange, I wondered if it had been a long time since she had laughed like that.
I smoothed out the crumpled sandwich, took it from the plastic sack and pulled it into two pieces. She took her half with its ragged edge when I handed it to her.
She ate without self-consciousness. When we were finished, I leaned back against the tree and watched Hollie take the hem of her dress and dab off the corners of her mouth.
I wanted to know about her.
"Have you been married to Pat very long?"
"A year. We been married a year now. Almost. Are you married?"
"Not anymore." I didn't want to tell her about it, but she l
eaned forward, her legs drawn up in a bipod, her arms folded across her knees. "Divorced." I didn't tell her that my wife had broken me in half, that she had brought another man into our home when I was on tour with an exhibition of my paintings. I couldn't tell her that I had lain broken and fallow for a year until I had left Colorado and come to the Ozarks just to try and find myself again. I had not been painting very much, but I was healing.
I didn't know much about Pat MacGuire. He had been neighborly. For six months, I'd been hacking out a place to live, on ten acres I'd bought from an estate. My house was small, comfortable.
"Mr. MacGuire took me to his home--after my folks-- died," she said, in answer to my question about the taciturn man who had plowed my garden. "He thought he ought to have married me, so he did. He--he's nice to me."
"What happened to your folks?"
Hollie looked down at her feet. She wore sneakers that were worn at the toes. No socks.
"They were killed. Mr. MacGuire's son did it. He's in prison now. His name was Wilbur. He robbed them and killed them with a gun 'bout five years ago. They used to own the store up on the highway. They didn't have much money, but Willie thought they did. He got a .22 pistol and shot them to death one night. Mr. MacGuire, he took me in, and then when I got grown, he thought we maybe better get married. Wasn't his fault his son was bad. He took some of the blame, I guess."
The lump in my throat wouldn't go away. I had heard the story, of course. It had been so distant from me then, but now I would remember it every time I went by that little store up the road.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"It's all right. It happened some time ago." I started tearing off blades of grass to put in the plastic sack where I would put the fish she would take home. I'd fill the sack with creek water to keep them fresh.
I wanted to ask her more about Pat MacGuire, but I didn't trust myself.