Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  “Cleaned his plow,” said Luther Wade, standing with Almarine on the porch of the store that morning in the pearly faint dawn watching Harve stumble off down the trail toward Hurricane and that sharp-tongued woman of his and all those gals and that wall-eyed son. Almarine grinned, watching Harve go.

  “Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds, I knowed you of old. You done robbed my pockets of silver and gold,” Luther sang out to the morning. But Harve never turned around. Luther mounted his horse and rode off then, and Almarine stretched and yawned. It was like he could feel the light cool dew coating his face. He guessed he had taught Harve a lesson after all. But he ought to be on his way.

  Almarine packed up his horse and left without waking Joe, the store wide open behind him in the early slanting sun. He was pleased with what he carried in his packs—white sugar, coffee, tobacco, scissors, a new razor, a hammer, sweet-smelling store-bought soap for the baby and Pricey Jane, a string of rosy beads for Pricey Jane. And newspapers, too, a magazine—he liked to watch how she’d look through them, pointing at the pictures, making those soft clucking sounds in her throat and giggling to beat the band. Then she’d make her a flour paste and put them up so careful on the wall, it tickled Almarine how she kept everything just so. Anytime the papers got sooty, why down they’d come, and he’d better have some others there to take their place.

  Now Almarine’s head bobs up and down as the horse picks its way up the rocky trace. Luther’s voice goes along in his mind. Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds, I knowed you so well, you lost me my woman and done sent my soul to hell. Almarine grins, dozing.

  She’s never suspecting no rosy beads.

  But he sits up straight as he passes through the stand of pine trees, as he hears his cow for the first time.

  “Lord God,” Almarine says, kicking hard, urging his horse ahead. When they break out of the pines, galloping now along the short level space at the mouth of the creek, that’s when he sees the buzzards wheeling in their circles overhead, black wings outstretched and never moving, flying circles over his holler. No smoke comes from his chimney. “Lord God,” he says again. But getting up there takes forever—there’s no way to hurry that trail.

  Finally he comes to the cow, lying on her side with her belly distended and her large brown eyes already gone filmy and blank. She’s still breathing, he sees, but that’s all. Sometimes she makes that sound. Duck circles her, barking, the hair on his back standing up.

  Almarine gives a whoop so loud it come back from all three mountains. “Pricey Jane!” he hollers. “Pricey Jane!”

  Insects buzz through the hot yellow day and a black and yellow butterfly settles for a second on the cow’s belly.

  “Eli!” Almarine hollers, and he hears nothing, and then he’s back up on that horse and gone ahead and finally he hears the baby crying in a way she’s never cried, a thin little wail like a mewling cat.

  “Pricey Jane!” he yells. The cabin door is still bolted from inside so he kicks it open, his heart banging hard in his chest and all of this happening, it seems to him, in some clear awful light that renders it both real and not real, happening but not to him, not to him and Pricey Jane and their family, and not in Hoot Owl Holler.

  The air in here is foul. She lies on her back on the tick by the fire with one thin arm extended out and dropping beside the bed, her fingers open, her head turned a bit to the side as if in sleep, her body curled on the star-flower quilt. Purple flowers, yellow stars. She must of gotten up, she must of pulled up the quilt, she must of gone and laid back down. He sees the churn where she pulled it out, where she started churning before she lay back down.

  “Pricey Jane.” Almarine kneels by the bed and pulls her to him, shaking her frail shoulders, but her head rolls over to the side and her mouth drops open and slack. Her breath smells like something dead. But anyway she’s still breathing, and a faint blue pulse in her temple beats on when he smooths back the hair from her wild white face. Dark circles ring her eyes. Finally she opens them. She cannot speak but something seems to show there, for an instant, in her eyes. He thinks she knows him. Almarine lays her back gently and whirls toward the other bed, but Eli lies so still there, and the skin of his cheeks has gone cold. Dory’s crying fills the cabin. The smell is everywhere. Almarine grabs Dory up out of the cradle, wraps her in her quilt like an Indian baby, and holding her tight he runs back out of the cabin. Throwing his packs to the ground he rides one-armed holding Dory, faster than anybody has ever ridden down that trace before, and off on the trail toward Hurricane Mountain. He hollers it out to everybody he sees. Dory is crying and crying. Miraculously, the sun shines still; and it’s still summer, it’s still afternoon.

  Later Almarine will not remember how he almost rode his horse to death until bloody-mouthed and foam-flecked it buckled to its knees not thirty feet from where he was headed, Granny Younger’s cabin on Hurricane Mountain. He will not remember how Granny lay in the bed with her face turned toward the wall, or how Rhoda Hibbitts told him to get on back, that Granny was sick and maybe dying, or how Rhoda took a second look at him and jumped up and then Granny Younger looked too and got up out of her sickbed and took off the white socks she had put on for dying, her burial socks, and put on her boots instead, to go back to Hoot Owl Holler with Almarine. He will not remember how Rhoda rang and rang the bell, summoning Bill Horn to take Dory over to Peter Paul Ramey’s cabin for a spell so she can get some titty off Peter Paul’s wife who is nursing a baby herself, or how they sent a Justice boy hell-for-leather toward Black Rock for young Doc Story, or how the Davenports came and strapped a bed-tick onto a little sled and strapped Granny on top of that, hitching up their mule to pull her along, three Davenport men and a bunch of children running behind, and the smoke from Granny’s pipe floating out blue behind them in the hot still air. Rhoda Hibbitts and her daughters came last. They marched along carrying everything they could think of; they looked like they meant to stay.

  Almarine remembered none of that as he rode a Davenport mule ahead of them all, holding fast in his mind’s eye to the scene that lay before him, or behind him, the scene that would never leave him again: the look that came into Pricey Jane’s eyes when she saw who he was, the way her head drooped slack to the side, the feel of his boy’s cold cheek, how the dog barked and how the buzzards, slow and graceful, made those awful circles in the blue sky over his holler.

  He beat them all back by nearly an hour, and nothing had changed. She was still alive.

  The Davenports paused with the sled to let Granny observe the cow.

  Granny’s eyes squinched tight together, her mouth bunched around her pipe.

  “Dew pizen,” she said. “I knowed as much.”

  Granny closed her eyes and lay back against the bed-tick. “Giddyap,” said the Davenports.

  “How much farther is it?” asked the older Hibbitts girl, Rose, and the younger one said she was so tired she was about to die. All the little Davenport children had stopped following them back at the Hurricane turn-off. “I wisht I’d of gone back too,” the younger one, Louella, said.

  “Hush your mouth,” said their mother, picking up her skirts as she walked a wide circle around the dying cow, with both of them following behind. Rhoda lowered her head and prayed, approaching Almarine’s cabin. She knew—they all knew—about dew poison, and they all knew it had no cure. Either you lived through it or you died. Rhoda had had an uncle to die of it, over in West Virginia. This was why you had to watch where a milk-cow grazed, keep her out of cow-stomps and shady swamps and ferny places so she wouldn’t get took milk-sick like this one did. Anybody who drank off a milk-sick cow, or ate her butter, would die too.

  Granny had had the Davenports drag the churn out on the porch by the time Rhoda got up to the cabin; Granny was lifting the dasher to see. The milk, silver-black, dripped down from the wooden dasher and would not foam. “Lord sweet Jesus,” Rhoda prayed, but Granny threw the dasher down in the churn and stomped back inside chewing her pipe. “
Git me some water and bile it,” she yelled back out to Rhoda, who had to do it herself because her daughters were crying out in the yard. They were not good for a thing! The eldest Davenport sat on the porch and commenced whittling while the other ones fed the stock. Across the long valley, over Black Rock Mountain, the sun rode low in the sky and when the Hibbitts girls had stopped crying, they remarked on how good the view was from up here, how pretty the sunset looked. The Hibbitts girls had mousy-pale hair and pock-marks all over their faces. Rhoda set them to peeling sweet potatoes; she had a lot of folks to feed, and a long hard evening ahead.

  “Cool up here,” the eldest Davenport said, whittling.

  “Wouldn’t never know twas dog days,” the youngest one said, and they looked at each other then, thinking the same thing, how blood won’t clot in dog days, or a sore heal up, or a bone mend.

  “Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide my soul in thee,” Rhoda sang at the door, to nobody in particular, and then she said, “You-unses come eat.” Rhoda was a big woman, running to fat but sturdy, a bosom like a shelf beneath her face. Nobody messed with Rhoda. The Davenports all stood up, and she fed them—sweet potatoes and sallet and sidemeat—and she tried to feed Almarine too who wouldn’t eat or leave the bedside of Pricey Jane. Louella and Rose stared down hard at Almarine there by Pricey Jane’s bed-tick as they came past, but he never raised his head or looked their way. Louella and Rose stared as hard as they could at his fair hair spread on the bed-tick, at the heave of his shoulders, as if they knew somehow already that this was as close to passion as they would ever come; their pale eyes watered as they stared. When the men had finished eating, Rhoda and the girls ate.

  Almarine wouldn’t touch a bite.

  Neither would Granny Younger, out in the lean-to laying out Eli. Sometimes the rest of them heard her murmuring voice out there, and looked quickly away from each other’s faces. Who knew what Granny was saying, or worse yet, what-all she did?

  Nobody went to sleep.

  Finally Granny came around from the lean-to like a little old bent-up straw doll in the night. They could barely see her.

  “Davenports!” she cried, and the Davenports got up off the porch and went with her and then in a while they brought Eli back around, laid out on his own little bed-tick, hands crossed over his sunken chest. The Davenports carried him to the front porch and put him down.

  “Don’t he look pretty,” Louella said, but Rose started crying.

  “I need me some silver money, Almarine,” Granny called, hobbling after, and Almarine got up from his wife’s bed and came to the cabin door and stood there, looking out. The Hibbitts girls and Rhoda sat on the porch rustling their skirts and bending back and forth in the darkness like big dark flowers. They wanted to see it all. Then the Davenports went and stood in the yard, all three, and Granny Younger stood by Eli, laid out on his little bed-tick on the porch.

  “Air you got any silver money?” Granny said.

  Almarine stood in the door.

  “Yessum,” he said, and he reached into his pocket and held out his hand to her, and she put a dime on each of Eli’s closed eyes. Eli looked like a big doll laid out on the porch.

  Almarine stood in the door thinking about how he had been playing poker at Joe Johnson’s store, that was why he had the money and more money besides, how this might not have happened if he had come straight home. He was sure it would not have happened if he’d come on home. He said it to Granny Younger, who snorted.

  “Hit ain’t got nothing to do with yer poker,” she said. “Hit all has to do with the cow.”

  “That cow has eat in the holler before,” Almarine said. “Hit ain’t never took sick.”

  The yellow light from the fire came out through the open door to light the porch, and Eli’s body, and Granny Younger’s face.

  “Now that’s a pure fact.” Almarine stood dark against the door. “Hit ain’t never took sick before, and neither has none of yourn, and every one of you-unses knows it.”

  They stood like that, all quiet, until a hoot owl started up steady in the pines right behind the cabin and a little sliver of moon skidded out from behind Snowman Mountain and hung there blood-red in the sky.

  “Like a killing knife,” said Rose—she was the fanciful one—and Rhoda shook her head at her daughter but it was too late.

  Almarine said something low and strangled and took off running down the trace as fast as his legs would carry him. “Lord sweet Jesus,” Rhoda prayed out loud. The Davenports pissed in the yard. Five shots rang out directly, echoing off the mountains, and Granny nodded. She bunched her mouth. She knew he had cut out the cow’s heart and fired in the light of the moon. What he orter do. You have to cut out the heart still beating and shoot it five times. Granny lit her pipe and they all waited for him to come back, but he never came. That little moon slipped across the sky. They sat up with Eli’s body all night long while Pricey Jane moaned in sleep beside the fire and Almarine ran through the night toward Snowman Mountain screaming out like a crazy man, or like a man bewitched.

  ROSE HIBBITTS

  Lord! It was awful. He was awful. I will hate him now to the day I die, and that’s a fact, I don’t care if it’s not Christian. I don’t care what Mama says neither. I’m not one to go throwing myself on a man, all I was trying to do was help out. But the whole time I was over there at Almarine’s, I felt so funny and weak-like, I just couldn’t do a thing. And cry! I never cried so many tears in all my days, and never a reason for it. Of course I have ever been the sensitive one. I have a good heart. And of course I missed Mama and Louella. And it truly was sad and all, that little Eli dying and then Pricey Jane, but it wasn’t like Mama had died, nor Louella, and I still don’t know why I took on so. I just couldn’t do a thing! I could feel it coming on and I’d have to run right out to the springhouse or the cedar trees to cry in peace. And it made me feel so funny in my stomach and around the tops of my legs, like I was coming down with the ague. Lord! I never would of stayed over there if it hadn’t been my Christian duty, neither. If Mama hadn’t said. I’m not one to throw myself on a man, I’d never of done it for sure. And it was awful. Sometimes I thought I’d die iffen he looked at me, other times I thought I’d die iffen he failed to.

  Which made nary bit of difference, that’s a fact.

  Almarine looked, but he never saw. He never minded nothing, and this went on for the longest kind of time, for days and days. They brung Dory back home from Margie Ramey’s by and by, after Margie had got her weaned to a cup, and I took care of her and kept the house as best I could. Lord! That Dory was the sweetest thing. It would just make you cry. But Almarine wouldn’t have nothing to do with her neither, oh not for the longest time. All he did was set on the porch like he was sleeping, or he’d set inside by the fire. Everbody came over and cut his corn or he would of let it rot, and I’ll swear it. He would of let it rot in the field. He never minded a thing. It was so sad how he set with his face all still, and never a flicker in them blue eyes.

  “Almarine?” I’d say, coming up behind him. I’d say, “Almarine?” But he never said a thing, and then that would start me off crying again, and I’d have to run out to the spring.

  One time I remember I woke up way in the night and sat smack up in the middle of the bed. I thought I had heard him speak. It was dark as pitch in the cabin, little tiny fire nearabout out. But I thought I had heard him speak. “Almarine?” I said out loud before I could stop myself. I said, “Almarine?” I don’t know what I would of said if he had answered, or what I would of done. I swear it to this day I just don’t know, and him so hateful. My heart was a-beating, beating to beat the band, while he slept away there so sound. It was like all the blood rushed up to my head then, and made me cry, but still he slept on and on.

  The way he slept and the way he done nothing but sit, you couldn’t hardly remember how he had carried on at her passing, the way he had ranted and raved. Why Lord, it scared Louella and me to hear him! He come back all tore up
covered in blood and said his dog had been kilt in a fight. And the dog never come back neither. But we knowed the truth of course, that he had gone to that witch and kilt her and I’ll swear it made goosebumps all over my arms. I’ll swear it made goosebumps come. We all knowed what he had done.

  By the time he come back it was morning, and Pricey Jane had passed on. Granny had her in the lean-to, laying her out, and when Mama told Almarine the news, he give a big holler and kicked in the lean-to door and told Granny he’d do it hisself. You see how hateful he is.

  “Hit ain’t fitten,” Granny told him, and Mama too, but he was wild. He wouldn’t do a thing they said. He kept his gun by his side, couldn’t nobody change his mind.

  So Almarine was laying her out hisself and Mama was a-praying and Granny was mad as a wet hen when all the rest of them finally got there, Harve Justice with the pine to make the boxes, and old Joe Johnson, and Luther Wade and Hester Little, and all the Rameys and the Justices, Ratliffs and Horns and Skeens, and one-eyed Jesse Waldron hauled the liquor up there on a sled, the same way they had hauled Granny. They had come across Doc Story at the creek and sent him back.

  It took considerable doing to get Pricey Jane in the box that evening when they had finished it, considerable doing. They had to hold Almarine back, I forget how many it took to do it. But after they done it, and after Harve nailed her shut, it was like all the fire went out of Almarine directly. It was like he had done give up. He slept finally, that night, and early in the morning they carried her and Eli up Hoot Owl to the burying ground and put them down.

  I didn’t go up there myself. Mama made me and Louella stay and clean out the cabin while they was all gone a-burying. We cleaned and swept and beat out the bed-ticks in the yard. I’ll tell you, we worked like dogs!

  And all for naught, which I’ll get to directly.

  I recall how Mama pulled me over when we was finished, and set me down out there on the little bench he’d built for her under the cedar trees. “Now listen here, Rose,” Mama said. Mama can lay down the law when she wants to. “After this burying, we are all of us going on home. Excepting me, I mought go on to Granny Younger’s. Her time is coming on and I can tell. But we are all fixing to go off from here and leave you to take keer of Almarine.”