by Rhonda Riley
Clarion was not a tolerant community. Racism was the most glaring intolerance, but even small differences were noted. My father was known for his unusual habit of smoking a pipe as he pushed the dope wagon through the mill, selling the candies, colas, and tobaccos that helped the mill hands keep the stupor of their work at bay. What set my mother, my sisters, and me apart from everyone else was our height—even the women in the family were near six feet—and our copper-red hair from the McMurroughs, my mother’s side of the family. I was teased without mercy for what I could not control. The public library and the farm were my escapes.
I had hardly been more than a toddler when I first wandered away from our mill-village home. Dual lines of flapping sheets hid me from Momma’s sight while I made my getaway, past the streets and the other houses, across a meadow and through woods to a creek. Nothing beyond the meadow was familiar. The rapid purl of creek water made a comforting sound, sweeter than the noise of the mill and the chattering voices. Ferns lined the narrow bank of the creek, some open-handed, others still furled tight. Overhead, in the cathedral of the bright spring canopy, a woodpecker rapped. I sat on a tree root and watched pale butterflies siphon water from the sand. An owl’s bell-shaped call rose, then fell. I was happy. I was at the center of the universe, certain I had found the place where everything began.
A low branch lifted nearby, and my mother, stooping to go under it, emerged. She stepped out, scanning the underbrush and the creek, her face knotted in concern. A lock of her red hair caught on the branch behind her. I followed her glance down the creek but saw nothing unusual. Then she screamed my name and ran toward me.
I bolted, slid across a flat rock, and plunged neck-deep into icy water. Scrambling to the opposite bank, I choked on a mouthful. Momma scooped me up and turned me toward her, shaking me. Instead of scolding, she stared at me as I dangled, dripping in her extended arms. Wordlessly, she looked me over as if I was an unexpected stranger, a child she had never seen before. For one terrible moment, my mother did not know me.
Then she clutched me to her chest, her face inches from mine, fear in her eyes, an old, large fear. Her whole face opened into a wail and she crushed my head against her breasts. Her hand covered my ear, pressing me into the cacophony of her sobs and heartbeat, inside her sweet, milky odors. She stumbled back through the woods, clutching me. I could not have been more than three years old.
After that, the world began its split into twos: the spoken and unspoken, the known and unknown, home and not home, my mother and myself. Curiosity locked into my soul and put me at the edge of my tribe, an observer more than a participant, scouring the land for words and clues.
I was still very young, not in school yet, the first time I made my way to the farm by myself. Unsure of the route that appeared different, more spacious, without my family, I hiked from familiar point to familiar point. Then, there it was: the house on top of the hill. Following the narrow road up and around to the barn, I presented myself to Eva, who stood at a chest-high trellis of roses.
“I was wondering when you’d make it up here on your own. Figured you’d show up one day,” she said. Then she did something she had never done before. She knelt and took my hand.
I was a well-cared-for child, and so took those who cared for me for granted. Adults were simply part of a world that moved to rhythms and needs invisible to me. Large boots or full skirts to stay out of the way of.
As Eva knelt in front of me, sunlight glinting in her clear green eyes, she took me in with a long, assessing gaze. It was as if she had stepped out of the vague ether of the adult world into a full and separate being before me. The sweetness of her tea roses surrounded us. For the first time in my life, I was conscious of loving another person.
So it was I who became compensation for Eva’s lack of a daughter and my labor on the farm payment for the cans, baskets, and sacks full of food that Eva and Lester brought down the hill to my family.
On the farm, my three older cousins called me Little Sis. There, I could forget the children in the mill-village who teased me about my height and my bright red hair. I slept on a cot in the corner of the parlor. With no little sisters to complain about the lantern’s glare, I could read as late as I wanted. I learned to chop wood, sew, milk cows, cure hams, make butter, sauerkraut, and biscuits, bleach apples, store or preserve almost anything, and to make a toothbrush out of a hickory stick. Eva combed out my hair in the evenings and told me I should be proud of its new-penny brilliance.
Each time I came up the hill and saw the house, its front half shaded by the chinaberry tree, the farm seemed full of possibilities and far from the drab mill-village. My love for the farm set me further apart from my peers. While other children were fascinated with everything modern and aware of the deprivations of the Depression, I collected eggs and churned butter by hand and thought myself privileged, wealthy. It was a good place to be a child, the best place to be a child during the Depression.
During my first months alone on the farm after Eva’s death, I thought of these two events frequently—my mother’s pained gaze in the woods and my first solo trek to visit Aunt Eva. They seemed the first points in a line that led me to where I now was as the farm’s caretaker. Gradually, I also came to realize how much freedom and trust my parents had always given me. A kind of special dispensation. While other girls my age, particularly those with younger siblings, had been kept home with chores, I had been allowed to wander.
At times, I felt guilty about the pleasures I took on the farm while the suffering of war persisted. But I relished the luxury of my solitude. I worked hard. I ate when I was hungry. I took naps in the barn and, on one particularly cold night, made myself a pallet on the kitchen table and slept there to soak in the dying warmth of the stove. Whole days passed in which I saw only my neighbors, Mildred or one of the McAverys, when I took the eggs down the hill to them. Some days, I saw no one at all.
Having never had so much as a closet of my own, I now had a whole house, a whole quiet house. At night, cranky Bertie wasn’t there pulling quilts off me as I slept. Rita didn’t kick me in her sleep or wake me up because she heard some little noise. No radio blaring, no doors slamming. No neighbors arguing.
Privacy also had its smaller, vulgar privileges. Alone, I cursed out loud. I checked my armpits and crotch to find out if it was time for the trouble of drawing a bath in a house without indoor plumbing. Momma never would have tolerated such. On the first warm night of 1945, I slept naked, something I’d never done before. Moonlight spread across the sheets and over my bare belly, a thing not possible in a Baptist house with sisters crowded in a bed.
Later that year, when the Germans surrendered, the whole mill fell silent. Then a cheer burst from the office and rolled through the workers who ran outside, whooping and hollering, kissing and hugging each other. Kids poured out of the schools. I wasn’t there. Everyone told me about it later.
But up on the farm, I heard the car horns blasting. Church bells clanged. The mill horn blew as if calling God Himself to the cotton. I stopped mucking the barn stalls and dashed outside to the road. Louellen McAvery, who lived down the hill, knelt in the middle of Clear Lake Road, praying. Her boy, Tom, was still overseas. When she finished with God, she jumped up, danced a little jig, and waved to me, shouting. The war was over!
I jumped and ran back to the barn to tell—tell who? The chickens? The cows? The chickens, the sky, the barn were all the same, as indifferent to the end of the war as they had been to the war itself. I stopped halfway across the yard. The land I had worked stretched out before me and the blind sky above.
The horns and bells continued. The people celebrating below were people I knew. I knew their sons far away at war or fresh in their graves. They’d eaten the beans and corn my family grew and brought them back to us in heaped bowls when someone got sick, or died. The boy who would dig my grave was probably out there among those cheering.
We were under the same sky, breathing the same air. All of us.
And not just us. The Germans and the Japanese, too.
In the months after the victory of war, a stunned quiet followed, then the town leapt into optimistic giddiness. Everyone everywhere seemed relieved, fatigued, excited. The world seemed wide-open. At church, at the feed store, in the shops downtown, and on the streets of the mill-village, expectation and relief blossomed into robust intent. Any moment things could burst out of themselves. I felt it in the long bones and muscles of my arms and legs.
Even in the quiet of Sunday morning, returned to us now that the war was over and the mill no longer ran seven days a week, I woke aware of the people down the hill, my family still warm in their beds, sleeping the sound sleep of victors.
Downtown one Saturday, I saw a woman open a newspaper. The headline declared the liberation of the death camps. The photograph showed gaunt, skeletal Jews. She studied the front page and crossed herself.
A violent scorn rose up in me. “Fool,” I thought. “You have the same God as the Germans.” I imagined a Nazi crossing himself before he turned on the gas.
I stood outside Bun’s Café, about to cross the street. Then, like a slap, the thought came: I, too, had the same God as the Nazis. I stepped away and turned my back to the busy street. I saw my face mirrored in the window of the café. The reflection of a passing car slid over the backs of the men eating inside at the counter. They were—we all were—Christians. Good Christian people.
A door shut in my mind. My heart tilted.
I kept that moment, running my hands over the worry stone of it. Church was not the same after that. I sat at the same pew every Sunday. My family expected me to be there and I did not want to disappoint my mother, but my throat could not be open as it had once been to those old familiar hymns.
A few weeks later, one rare day when I had finished my morning chores early, I took my lunch and walked down to Clear Lake. A snake the color of the water undulated near the shore, barely disturbing the reflection of clouds on the water’s surface. Trying to move with the same deftness, I followed on the lake’s bank as the snake paralleled the shore. After a few minutes, the snake turned toward the deeper waters of the lake. I watched its silent swiftness until it was lost in the glare of the sun. I longed to move through the world like that, deliberate and certain, the waters folding around me, wakeless.
I felt I could wander, seduced, into the woods and forget myself, leave my hair uncombed and let my name fall away. I wanted to lie down where I was with only the sky above me. I recognized this desire as the feral love of an animal for its place of being. It seemed most akin to the awe and holiness I knew I should feel in church. I also sensed in that impulse a kind of danger, a dissolution that could lead me from my own kind.
I was grateful, then, for the farm and the animals that demanded my attention. They tethered me, protecting me from the impulses that the land engendered.
Everything on the farm seemed purposeful: the bird calls; the thickness of the morning dew; light moving across the kitchen floor; the barn’s musk of hay, fresh manure, and dust. Even the sow’s prissy, mud-caked haunches were imbued with grace.
I settled in, grew lean and muscular. I ripened, ready for whatever came next, certain it would be good and new. I’d slept through the war, but now I was waking up. At night, I tossed and turned in my bed. In the house of my refuge, I set aside the God I was raised on and woke each morning, tenderized by light, bird song, and hard labor.
The farm was once again the solace it had been. It knew me and I knew it. On the hottest night in the summer, when I could not sleep for the heat and my sister Rita snorting through her dreams beside me, I made myself a solitary pallet outside under the stars. But the bugs kept me awake. Finally, with only the full moon for light, I got up and, in boots and nightgown, walked the creek and cut through the fields. A breeze stirred the corn, whispering, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Everywhere my foot pressed the land I heard, “Home. Home. Home.” I was in love.
But love of land is not enough for a young body. I had put on weight and curves. I was stronger than I had ever been. At the feed store, at church, anywhere I went, I could feel as much as see how men were looking at me. Their gazes, like hands, cupped my hip or shoulder.
Some of the men were the same boys who had called me “carrot top” when I was a young girl, sneering as if red hair was an aberration worthy of hell. Many of them, fresh from combat, were broken-faced. Around them, I felt the burden of my innocence. I told myself that their attention was just the war’s end, just men lusting, as I did, for the land and smelling it on me. If one of them showed up at the farm, I did not stop my work to chat and flirt. I put him to work.
Something had been in the corn, so I rode the plow horse, Becky, out to check the fence between the Starneses’ pasture and our cornfield. I reined to a halt deep in the shade of a broad, low oak near the border of the Starneses’ land. One of their stallions was after a mare. I had seen horses mate before, but this time I went closer, right up to the fence, and watched. The receptive mare danced before the stallion and then stood still, her tail swished to the side. Becky snuffled and took a little two-step under me. Despite the cool of the shade, heat rose up from my belly.
I did not hear or see Cole Starnes ride up. But suddenly he was there in the shade, taking off his hat and wiping his face. I startled. Becky shinnied sideways again.
“We weren’t planning on breeding her this season,” he said, as if we had been discussing the situation for a while. “She came on earlier than we thought. Caught us off guard.” He was a good-looking boy, tall and thin, with a broad, friendly face and cowlick above his forehead.
I could feel the red in my ears. I kept my eyes on the horses.
Cole kept talking. “We were working on the tractor. Didn’t know she was coming on. I don’t like that tractor much.” He glanced back toward his house as if he expected to see the tractor coming his way. His horse stomped and pulled.
I turned without a word and left just as the stallion dismounted.
After that, Cole gave me a little nod and a comment every time we ran into each other, which began to happen more often. Every Sunday after church he was there, not saying much, talking about fences, tractors, and the foal that was coming. He never mentioned seeing me in the pasture that day. The swirl of his dark brown hair above his forehead made him appear continually windblown and slightly surprised, qualities that I began to find endearing. He’d never teased me about my hair or my freckles. I found myself thinking of him.
Then one night, he showed up at my back door with a bouquet of cornflowers and lilies, and a little Mason jar of moonshine. The day’s chores were done; there was no work for him to do, so I fed him supper. We drank the moonshine for dessert. I cut mine with cider, but he drank his down manly, grimacing. Outside of family, it was the first time I’d had company for supper on the farm. I felt like a grown woman, entertaining in her own home.
I was fine until he slid his hand over mine as I passed the jar of shine back to him. Once he touched me, it was all over. I lost my virginity that night and so did Cole, the two of us fumbling at each other until we got the job done. I don’t think either of us was very impressed. I had brought myself more satisfactory pleasure alone at night—a pleasure I’d never associated with boys. But the intensity and how badly I had wanted it stunned me. We were suddenly shy and sober afterward, the booze sponged up by our amazement at what we had done.
The next day, I waited for God to strike me down. I thought I would feel bad, but I didn’t. I felt relieved that the first time was over. I was curious to try it again, to get a better look at Cole. The barnyard can take some of the mystery out of the mechanics of the act, but a man is not a hog, a bull, or a stallion, though some do aspire to be one of the three.
A week later, Cole was back at my door. He had flowers again, but no shine, and asked in a shy, sweet whisper if we could try “it” again. There had been no punishment from God, so, being curious about both God and Cole, I said yes.
> After that, he would wait until dark fell and cut across the pasture instead of coming up the road. For the first time in my life, I made a conscious decision to sin and continue sinning. I braced myself for God’s retribution. I was careful though, making Cole withdraw. I didn’t want a baby to be the payment for my sin. Cole would have married me. He was that kind of boy, but I didn’t want that either. We were just very young and doing what nature told us to do.
Still, I was doing something I had been warned against all my life. A terrible sin. I continued listening, expecting some punishment from God. But there was none. In that silence, I kept remembering something I’d once heard that contradicted all else I’d heard about sex and sin.
When I was about twelve years old, Grandpa Mac, Momma’s grandfather, came to Sunday dinners at our house. Rail-thin and nearly blind, he sat on the front porch one evening with Momma. He rocked in the cane chair and she shelled peas beside him. I stood just inside the screen door behind them, bored until I realized they were discussing the mother of a boy I knew and a man she snuck around to see. I got very still, wishing Grandpa would stop creaking in the rocker so I wouldn’t miss a word. As if he had heard my wish, he paused. I thought he stopped to listen better to Momma, but he looked off toward the mill and said, “I don’t understand how something that beautiful between a man and a woman could ever be so wrong as people make it out to be.”
To my amazement, Momma nodded, smiled, and kept shelling as if he was discussing the beauty of sunshine, not sin. Grandpa spit off the side of the porch and went back to rocking.
Being quiet around adults, I was often rewarded with gossip or bawdy jokes. But suddenly, I realized that there were other worlds and ways of thinking, secret agreements and understandings among adults.
After I had been with Cole, I thought about what Grandpa had said. “Something that beautiful between a man and a woman” didn’t seem to describe what I did with Cole. But what we did didn’t seem to be an awful sin like stealing or hurting someone, either.