by Lee Smith
But Almarine wanted me there, he said, when it come Pricey Jane’s time again. So he comes a-knocking on my door real early, and I got up my things and off I went. I got up my scissors, got my strippy cloth, what-all I need. I knowed it was the lastest time I’d ever birth a baby in this world.
“Come on, Granny,” Almarine said. He was a-poking me and a-pushing me down the path alongside of Grassy, and it so early twerent even full light. Some little birds, back early, was a-rustling along the way, I reckon they thought we was fools. It was early February before the thaw.
“Is Rhoda over thar yet?” I asks him, and he says yes. Rhoda Hibbitts has got to where she has about took over from me in birthing babies. Almarine says Mrs. Crouse is over there too. So we go along as fast as I’m able, with Almarine holding my arm. “You’re about to break hit,” I tell him, and he leaves off holding so tight. Well, we get there directly, and I goes in, and I see Rhoda and Mrs. Crouse has put the old quilt on the bed and Pricey Jane is twisting and turning on it and crying out. When she sees me, she gives a little smile like the ghost of a smile.
“Hello, Granny,” she says, and I feel of the baby, which has drapped, and I say, “Honey, hit won’t be long.” I puts Rhoda Hibbitts on one side of the bed and Mrs. Crouse on the other, for her to hold onto. “Where’s Eli?” I say, and Rhoda says he is down there with her girls and I say fine. Almarine stands in the doorway looking like he’s the one a-having this baby instead of Pricey Jane.
“Git out of here,” I tell him. “Now go on. Git,” but he never moves. “Go chop us some wood,” I tells him, even iffen I know he’s got wood chopped to last him a month. “Git in or out,” I says, and then he goes and then I can hear him a-chopping. He is worrit because of how it was with Eli, and I’m just as worrit as he is. Only it don’t do to show it. But I’m expecting trouble in my bones, and looking down at Pricey Jane don’t do a thing to ease my mind. She’s not as big as a minute, narrow in the hips. And her face is so white and she’s sweating moren I like, a unnatural sweat I thinks to myself. Them women has pinned back her hair but she’s thrashing so that it’s all come down and it’s dripping wet all around her face. She’s got big purple shadows looks like bruises under her eyes. Them earrings is shiny with sweat but she won’t take them off, she’s never took them outen her ears ever since she got them, what she says. She wouldn’t take them off with her firstborn neither. So I am expecting the worst.
It don’t happen, I’m proud to say. Pricey Jane gives out a little scream and I push down, and out pops that baby as easy as pie. I’ll swear it didn’t take a half hour, it was the easiest baby I ever birthed. It was so easy it like to got me spooked, and I’ll admit it. As I said I expected the worst. They is something special about this baby, I says to myself, and sure enough she was the prettiest baby girl I have ever seed before or since, come out with a full head of pale yaller hair like Almarine, not a mark on her noplace. She screws up her little mouth till it looks like a bow and then she cries out real healthy-like. Pricey Jane smiled the sweetest smile.
“Let me have my baby, Granny,” she said, and I did.
And it were a funny thing. Even how twas the easiest baby I ever birthed, I was plumb wore out. I cut the cord and tied the strippy cloths and let Rhoda and Mrs. Crouse get on with it. I sets myself down by the fire to rest, and I set there the whole time while the rest of them was a-carrying on and finishing.
Here’s what they do—you ring your bell, and Almarine done it, and all the womenfolks and gals comes from all over, carrying food. There’s no little girls can come, nor yet no singular women. They’ll eat and they’ll drink, and Almarine has got some corn liquor there ready, along with gingerbread Pricey Jane made herself when she figured her time was nigh, and directly they’ll dust the baby with dust from between the chimley-rocks, for luck, and then they’ll take the ax outen under the bed where you put it to cut the pain.
And then they’ll take it and chop up the man’s hat iffen they can find it—and Almarine had left his a-laying right out in plain view he was that worrit. And then they’ll take and bury the borning quilt and then they’ll go on home, and they done all of it, me watching it all like a dream. I couldn’t make no difference twixt dream and day.
“Poor old Granny,” Pricey Jane said when they left. The firelight was a-jumping everwhere and it seemed like her voice was a song. I could see them gold earrings a-shining. Almarine was right up there on the bed-tick by her, and Eli had him a bunch of dried cobs on the floor, a-building a house of his own.
“Come on and sleep here,” Pricey Jane says, but she should of knowed I won’t. I don’t sleep noplace but my own bed in my own house on Hurricane Mountain. I knowed it was time to go.
Once I stood up I felt good on my feet, and my feet was ready to travel. I looked back at them all from the door. The firelight flowed all over everbody casting such a glow. The new baby was sound asleep in that cradle what Almarine made, and her hair shined out in that light.
“Wait, Granny,” says Almarine. “What ought we to call the baby?”
I says, “Name her Dory. Hit means gold.”
PRICEY JANE
It’s full summer now, July and close to dog days, and Almarine has been gone for three days over to Black Rock, trading. Pricey Jane sits on the front porch nursing Dory and feeling his absence like a live thing, a real presence there with them on the porch, in the cabin, in the yard. Pricey Jane loves Almarine so much it’s like she made him up out of her own head, the perfect only man for her to love.
Mooning, her mama used to say, and send her out looking for eggs. No point in all the time mooning, her mama said. Her mama’s face was white and thin and grainy, and she never said a word about love. She just wouldn’t answer Pricey Jane. And then she was always so tired. If you asked her about love, her eyes would glaze over like she couldn’t remember how it felt or what it meant or even recognize the word spoken right out loud like that, in air. Or she’d act like there was something shameful in it, something Pricey Jane ought not to know.
In some of the songs, love was described as a game, with dosey-do and curtsy and funny responses. In others it was like a sickness. Pricey Jane remembered the song about the two sisters and one of them had drowned herself in a mill-pond, out of love. It was like a sickness unto death. In any case, Pricey Jane’s mother had died before she ever gave any answer, if she had any answer to give. Instead, her mother had given her these earrings, pressing them into her hand. But where had they come from anyway, these beautiful earrings, with the roses traced in gold around the loops? Who had made them, in what faraway country, and when? Was it her father—or was he even the one who gave them to her mother, all those years ago? And where had he come from anyway, to speak the way he spoke—oh, she knew well enough where he had got to, the grave beyond the pond. But what of her brother, or those sisters, all of them gone or almost gone before Pricey Jane was even born, and all of them disappeared beyond this rim of hills, beyond the glaze that had come to her mother’s eye? Questions upon questions, like the mountains close by and the mountains beyond them.
Pricey Jane’s still mooning, as you see. The world beyond Hoot Owl Holler seems a swirling place, and full of wind. The people who brought her to Black Rock—her family, or her father’s, or so they said—had traveled to her out of nothing, then returned. She came with them because there was nothing else to do, because the men were there with the paper to claim the land, and the preacher-man from Matewan had said, “Take her on, then,” when her father’s people came up in the wagon and said who they were. Or she thought that’s what he had said. The journey seems a dream. Them crying out in a foreign tongue, the gruntings in the night, and how the boys had tried to touch her while she slept. They had made her sleep out on the ground. One night she had awakened suddenly and sat straight up to find the boy so close to her face with his eyes shining out in the dark, she could smell his breath, and she pushed him away and the man hit him and the woman cried. But when she first awa
kened she had been dreaming, a dream that she thought was true perhaps, of her own mother singing a song. She could not understand the words. Her mother’s hair was loose and dark and drifting as she whirled, she was dancing, singing a song for Pricey Jane. Her mother had leaned over and kissed her and Pricey Jane had been caught fast in the tent of her mother’s long dark hair. What was the song she sang? Singing, and smiling as she had never smiled in the real time Pricey Jane remembers.
But Pricey Jane remembers it now, the truth or the dream, it doesn’t matter which, and sings a song without words as she nurses Dory. The steady pull on her nipple is like a chain somehow, linking her to Dory and more than that to Almarine, gone off trading. It’s like a chain that closes her in and holds her here, a chain of her own choosing or dreaming.
Since Almarine brought her to his holler three years back, she has never left it. There’s not any reason to leave, and noplace to go if she went. None of the womenfolks do much traveling. Oh, she’s been to Granny Younger’s, and over to Rhoda’s cabin on Hurricane, and down to Joe Johnson’s store in Tug, and to meeting when Brother Lucius comes and holds it beneath the big sycamore down at the mouth of Grassy, and other places. But mostly Pricey Jane stays home, and Almarine brings it all back. Wild roses from along the creekbed, store-bought shoes from Roseann, a cardinal feather, an ironstone platter with a yellow house painted on it he got from a woman in Black Rock. Pricey Jane knows he’s not like other men. The way he brings her things, how sweet he is, how sometimes he’ll cry in the night and when she wakes him she’ll feel his wild heart in his chest when he pulls her close. What’s he afraid of, Almarine? Of losing her, he says. Pricey Jane laughs to think it. She laughs, nursing Dory, and puts her up on her shoulder and turns to wipe the milky drool off her little mouth. Dory is fast asleep. Pricey Jane takes her in the cabin and puts her in the cradle Almarine made, and then she pokes up the fire. Almarine says he’s going to buy them a stove, might be what he’s trading for now. Pricey Jane can’t imagine how he will ever get it up the holler if he does.
“Eli,” she calls from the cabin door, and Eli comes around the side of the cabin riding that stick he calls his horsey. “Giddyap,” Eli says. He is as dark as Dory is fair, with bright black eyes and a nose that turns up like Pricey Jane’s.
“Let’s get us some water,” she says, and Eli says, “Giddyap” again and she takes the buckets. They go to the spring. It’s back of the cabin at the treeline, and Eli makes a mule-noise to himself as they go along. The spring comes right up out of the ground. Almarine has built a little house over top of it, and ferns grow all around. Two dragonflies mate in the shimmering air above the springhouse, blue in the sun. They fly together, a single enormous glittering dragonfly, and Pricey Jane smiles. “Hit’s a woman’s duty and her burden,” Rhoda said. Pricey Jane smiles and fills her buckets at the spring. Almarine couldn’t drink the water down below, he said, down at the lumber camp. He kept remembering his spring up here, he said, but he won’t ever say anything more about that time or what-all he did in the lumber camp. Pricey Jane doesn’t care. Eli makes leaf-boats and sails them where the spring comes out of the springhouse and goes off down the mountain toward Grassy Creek.
The buckets are heavy and Pricey Jane has to stop, and stop again to rest. Eli is crying because he wanted to stay at the springhouse, and when she finally gets back, Pricey Jane lays him down for a nap with a little molassey-tit to suck himself to sleep, and then she pours one bucket of water into the pot on the fire and sweeps out her house while the children sleep. She has a sedge-broom that Harve Justice made. Then she sweeps the yard, too, making graceful circles in the dust, a pattern of swirls all over the yard, and it looks real pretty, and Pricey Jane wishes Almarine would get back in time to see it. She puts her sedge-broom back where it goes by the chimney and puts her hand to her side—she gets a little catch in her side every now and then—but it’s time to shoo up the cow and so she goes down the holler to find her and bring her home. The cow is a skinny old cow, but they’re lucky to have her. Not many folks has a cow, thinks Pricey Jane, finding her finally in the cow-stomp where she ought not to be, Granny said. Said milk is better made in the sun. But the cow knocked down the fencerail and got back there anyway, in the cool shade, and Pricey Jane can’t much blame her. Pricey Jane drives her back with a switch and milks her into the same bucket she poured water out of. The milk foams up in the bucket and she can hear Eli hollering in the cabin while she milks.
“Come on here,” she cries out to him, and he comes dragging his blanket that Mrs. Ramey brought him when he was born. “Whar’s your cup?” Pricey Jane says, and he gets it, a little old hollowed-out gourd, and she scoops him up some foamy milk and he drinks and she dips him some more and then finishes milking. The long purple shadows are slanting now from the cedars across the yard. “Hit’s coming on fer dinnertime,” Pricey Jane says, and picks up the bucket and hits the cow. “Git on,” she says.
But the cow won’t go. Pricey Jane hits her again. “Git on,” she says. The cow stumbles sideways on the rocky ground and turns and looks at Pricey Jane with its big doubtful eyes that have a kind of filmy blue cloud, she sees, across them.
“Git, git,” Eli cries, and swats at the cow, but Pricey Jane sweeps him back and away from the hooves. The cow hangs her head and stumbles. She makes a sound she has never made before. Pricey Jane can’t get her to go and so she takes the bucket finally, and hauls it back to the cabin, and Eli comes along behind her with his thumb stuck fast in his mouth.
“Don’t get on my yard, now,” Pricey Jane says, but it’s too late, and Eli has tracked the swirls. You can’t keep nothing nice, thinks Pricey Jane, but she doesn’t really believe it. In a month, she will turn eighteen.
The chickens are coming up to the back of the cabin now, and she sends Eli around with a panful of dried corn to scatter while she sets Dory up on a pallet in the floor and makes some cornbread and cuts some sidemeat off the piece of it hanging there by the chimney and fries it. She nurses Dory again. When Eli comes in, she feeds him and then she eats too, cornbread and sidemeat, and drinks some milk. Dory plays with the wooden clothespins in front of the fire, turning them in her hands. When Eli was Dory’s age, he was creeping everywhere, but Dory sits still and looks at her play-pretties one by one and smiles right back when you speak. Then Pricey Jane pours her milk in ajar and puts a clean cloth over the top of it and sets the jar in the corner to clabber. She’ll churn first thing in the morning. She sits up with Eli until he falls asleep and then she gets some more wood and puts in on the fire for the night. Where is Almarine anyway, what can he be doing, away off down the trace?
Pricey Jane can barely remember Black Rock. She recalls the blacksmith’s sooty mustache, and purple feathers in the lady’s hat. What can he be doing, to take him so long? Yet Pricey Jane smiles. She goes out on the porch to set for a spell. Her breasts hurt, full of milk, and she opens the front of her dress and fans herself with her hand. Rhoda said it’s time to ease up some now, and wean her to a cup. Don’t never wake them up to feed them, Rhoda said. A cool breeze comes up from no-place and her breasts leak a little. She wipes at the watery milk with her hand and tastes it experimentally, giggles, and makes a face. Too sweet. But the throbbing hurt in her breasts has stopped. Pricey Jane sits on the porch while the dark comes on, until the cedar trees are just a blacker patch against the black of the night all around the cabin. No moon yet. And the air is cool; it’s always cool up here, even now in dog days. Down below they’re burning up, thinks Pricey Jane. Away across the long valley she can see two fires on the side of Black Rock Mountain. Might be hunters out there. Might be Paris Blankenship’s place, she knows he lives that way, Almarine said so. Almarine and Paris growed up as friends. But Pricey Jane has never laid eyes on Paris, nor has she crossed back over that mountain since Almarine brought her here.
Tree frogs and crickets call out in the night; she likes the way they sound. A little wind comes up and sighs through the cedar
trees. She likes this sound, too. Pricey Jane sits surrounded by Hoot Owl Holler like the fall of her mother’s hair; and after a while, the moon comes sailing out of the clouds over Snowman Mountain, a slip of a moon like one of Eli’s leaf-boats, sailing in and out of the puffy silver clouds. Pricey Jane stands up and goes in the cabin, closing out the night noises of Hoot Owl Holler and the long strange sound of the cow. Oh he’ll be home tomorrow, she knows he will. But Pricey Jane feels weak suddenly, and kind of sick-like, as she bolts the heavy door and goes to bed.
ALMARINE
It was nearly noon the next day when Almarine’s heavily laden horse came picking its slow accustomed way up the trace to Hoot Owl Holler, picking its careful way with Almarine slouched over and dozing. Duck ran along by his side. Almarine had been up all night playing a little poker with the boys at Joe Johnson’s store. That’s as far as he’d got and no farther, on his way coming home from Black Rock. They were in the back room dealing when he came in. Even then he might not have stayed, in spite of his skill at the game, even then he would have come on home to Pricey Jane if Harve Justice had not started riding him the way they all did about the way it was with him and Pricey Jane. Harve asked if his gypsy-girl had put him on a leash or maybe under a spell, or maybe he was still under a spell from the first one. Now nobody ever mentioned her. Harve had been drinking some or he would not have said it, and Almarine had been drinking too or he would not have let it get by; in another mood, or in later years when he had darkened so much because of what was to come, Almarine would have simply killed him. But he sat down at the table instead, and the cards came his way as he knew they would, as everything came his way lately, and he wouldn’t quit until he had taken every cent Harve had on him.