Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  “Saying that Richard had sowed his oats in the wrong field, basically, and advising him never to come back here again.”

  Justine sighs and crosses her arms behind her head.

  “Well, what have we here?” old Aldous asks, raising himself up so he can see her face. “I believe you were a bit sweet on him yourself, Justine, if the truth be told.”

  “Oh shit,” Justine says, her mouth in a plump round pout.

  “Yes?” Aldous asks, in a grotesque parody of the manner he adopts when his few parishioners come to him with their problems. “Yes?” he prompts again.

  “Shit yes,” Justine says. “He was a sweetie, Aldous, he really was. I mean he was so polite, he was always thanking me for something, even if I hadn’t done a thing. He was always saying please. You know how he was.”

  “I know,” Aldous says.

  “And he had that little look on his face, like he thought you were going to give him a present, or like he thought he was going to learn something.”

  “Which he did not,” Aldous interjects.

  “Like he was waiting for something good to happen,” she goes on. “That’s what it was. And then he used to worry so much, too. Well, you know how he was.”

  “Yes,” Aldous says, laying back to stare at the billowing curtains, “By God, I do,” realizing he had never liked the boy precisely because he knew all too well how he was, a young man a lot like himself, thinking back to when he had been that young and that idealistic, that capable of obsessive love, and thinking too of the women he’d spent it on, wasted it, the first one who used to undress in a closet and the second who sewed all the time and snapped off her thread with her teeth. Good women both. He had picked them himself out of his various congregations, out of some obscure sense of what was fitting, what was right. Thank God there had been no children. It had been wrong all along, the second as wrong as the first. Perhaps this was why he had not stepped in when he learned that the boy had sent for Dory, that the boy had decided to take her back to Richmond with him. Let him have her, Aldous had thought then, even if it’s not fitting, by God! Let her go. But then she had not come! to his great surprise, for Dory—as he well knew—was a girl who had been doted on all her life, a strong-willed girl, he thought, who knew her own mind, and it still surprised him that she had not come. Yet it would be better in the end, he was sure of that, better at least for the boy. Aldous smiles up through the turning dust in the sun, smiling at nothing, as he tries to remember how it was to be young like that and torn up all the time over something. He remembers a time on a trip with his first wife when he had strode furiously out to a gazebo (where had they been?) where he paced and smoked for half the night, flinging his cigarettes over the railing into the roses, but he cannot now recall the quarrel. Nor can he recall how he felt then, or why he was so upset. He’s glad it’s behind him now.

  Justine is at it again, holding one arm straight out and clutching at the drooping flesh of that upper arm with her other hand.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “I read it in a magazine,” Justine says. “See? Looky here. That means you need to go on a diet.”

  Her upper arm dangles and Aldous snorts. Justine is always dieting, diets she reads in the magazines, but she never stays on them long enough to matter. For one thing, she’s such a good cook. Justine is soft all over, white freckled skin so fair she’ll bruise if you give her a pinch. Now she turns to him and begins to stroke his penis, pull it a little, and Aldous lies back and looks up and lets her work. They both know he probably won’t manage an erection again; once is enough for an old man, but it feels good and she likes to do it. She likes to do it, this is what Aldous can never get over about Justine. Her rolls of fat bunch up at her waist and her breasts slide sideways, all of her companionable, as she leans up on an elbow and does it now.

  When Justine says, “He was a fool, he couldn’t of parked a bicycle,” they both know who she’s talking about, and why she seems so mad.

  Aldous keeps his eyes shut tight as she keeps on. Eventually he says, “He was not a fool, Justine, not exactly, I think. He was something much more dangerous, to my mind, a total innocent.”

  “You know what I think?” Justine giggles now, whatever vestige of whatever it was she still feels for the boy apparently gone, “I think you’re full of shit, all that talking you done. You are just as full of shit as he was,” and she laughs—she will never be too old to laugh, Justine won’t—and Aldous smiles: of course she’s right.

  “I do think there’s a curse on the Cantrells, though,” she says. “All you have to do is look right on the face of it, you don’t need any fancy supposing. Like you take Almarine, shot to death, and you take them three sons of hisn, scattered off God knows where. And you go back and take that crazy girl, and he kilt her—”

  “We don’t know that,” Aldous says.

  “Well, we just as well as know it,” Justine says. “And then that first young wife he had, the one with the gypsy blood . . .”

  “She wasn’t a gypsy,” Aldous says. “Her name was Pricey Jane.”

  “Well, whatever! Anyway, where is she now, answer me that, and her little son dead with her, not to mention Paris Blankenship or that sick little girl they’ve got up there right now or what Ludie Davenport saw on the trace, or Harve’s Clovis, or whoever else you want to name. There’s something up there, Aldous. You ought to go on and say it, honey. You’re the one that believes in the spirits.”

  Aldous is erect now. “What spirits?” he asks.

  “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I reckon,” Justine says. “The big three. I reckon they’re spirits too.”

  “Mmm,” Aldous says.

  “Listen, I think that old thing is gonna work,” Justine says. This time she gets on him, the whole satisfying weight of her, and after they’re through, she lies back and starts up again. Justine on a subject is just like a dog on a bone.

  “Well, you can’t say there’s nothing up there,” she says, punching him. “You can’t go telling me that.”

  “Ludie Davenport is a still-healthy woman saddled with a sick husband,” Aldous answers her finally, dragging his mind back up from a place near sleep. “Maybe she needs some excitement.”

  “Excitement, my hind foot!” Justine says.

  “Look, Justine. You could make up something about anybody up in any of those hollers, and you know it. Take the Skeens, and that fire they had last Christmas and three of the children burned up, or the way Mavis Rife had two babies to die in a row, just up and died in their cribs with no reason Doc Story could find to ascribe to it. Or take the Harmons—”

  “Oh my God!” Justine rolls over giggling. Everybody knows the Harmons are the ultimate sight, God threw out the book when he made up the Harmons, intermarried for eighty years and half of them wall-eyed with short little necks and all of them so backwards that town kids come to gawk whenever they come down the mountain to Black Rock.

  “Or any number of other people. Take Rhoda Hibbitts’s daughter Rose, for instance.”

  “Well, Rose is just touched in the head,” Justine says reasonably. “Everybody knows that.”

  “I know it,” Aldous says. “Everybody knows it, you’re right. But somebody could have started up a tale about her—this is the point—only she started up a tale about Almarine instead. And once it starts, it just goes on by itself, it takes on a life of its own no matter who may be hurt in the process. It’s ignorance, is what it is, and by God I see no end to it, to ignorance and darkness. I can’t see that it does any good to preach false hope or promise some kind of golden hereafter, some happy heaven that people believe in only because the things of this world are so goddamn bleak they can’t stand it if they don’t have that to fall back on, or that to look forward to, some spurious golden robe.”

  “Well, for goodness’ sakes, Aldous!” Justine stretches lazily. She gets bored when he starts all that. It’s getting hot in here now but the sun feels pretty good, as a matter
of fact, it’s a shame that women can’t take the sun, but it has been shown to cause wrinkles. Anybody that can read a magazine knows that. Aldous goes on and on. He’s like a clock if you get him wound up on his favorite subject, which God knows she never meant to do. He’s a crank, she thinks: old crank.

  “Listen here now,” she tells him finally. “It makes people feel good to go to church.”

  “Oh my God.” Aldous strikes his forehead with the back of his hand, a gesture she’s seen before.

  “It makes me feel good, so there!” she says, and that’s that, but isn’t it crazy how she’s the one who believes in God, and the preacher’s the unbeliever? or says he is, but he’s said it so much now, it gives her a thought.

  “You’re just tormenting yourself,” she says, “just like a man, and you’re old enough to know better, you old fool. If you didn’t believe anything, you’d just shut up about it, don’t you know that?”

  Aldous quits beating his forehead to stare at her.

  “I been thinking about moving down to Florida,” Justine says. “Sell this place.”

  “What?”

  “Or maybe Kentucky.” She stretches in the sun like a big white cat. “Go to the races,” she says.

  And Aldous, who has decided to leave Black Rock once a day for the last thirty years, is dumbstruck. He knows she means it, if she says so; she really might move.

  “I ought to get on down there,” she says, meaning the kitchen, “and see what-all they’ve got into now.”

  “Florida,” Aldous says.

  “If I could get a good price for this place, I’d move in a New York second,” Justine says, “which I can’t, the way things is now.” But also she knows she likes it, the daily contact with her boarders, the in and out of people, the hiring and firing and knowing what happens in town. Jake, bless his heart, did the only smart thing in his short sad life when he died and left her this. Because she was always a lot like Jake’s daddy anyway, a mover and a shaker, a woman that had a way with a dollar bill, it was a funny thing, a daughter-in-law that took after Old Man Poole. And Jake smiles, standing there in his new blue suit, an absolutely still point in the middle of Justine’s mind, a boy-man, not ever going to age or get fat or get sick.

  Aldous zips his high-waisted dark gray pants—“preacher pants” is what Justine calls them—and then he leaves, an old man in preacher clothes, but he’ll be back in a week or so for another cup of coffee. That’s how he puts it: going over to the Smith Hotel for a cup of coffee, that’s what he says. But what he wants now is a drink.

  He leaves, and Justine rolls over to feel the sun on her back but it’s getting too hot now for sure, women can’t take the sun, and she’s starting to sweat. Wonder if that rivet man is going to come? Sometimes she thinks it’s all she ever does, just pleasure men, but then there’s not a hell of a lot else to do either. Fucking is fine as far as it goes. But it’s nothing more than a prick in your belly and that quivery flash and a man’s hot breath in your ear. Forget the particular man. It don’t matter who the man is, nor what it means to him, nor what he thinks it means. Don’t none of that matter, and it’s fine as far as it goes, but it don’t mean a thing in this world but a man and a woman clamped together in a bed behind the closed door having nothing to do with all the rest of it, with death or fate or sudden sorrow, with the rivet man’s daughter, for instance, who has taken to acting so funny, he says, and how she’ll talk in a different voice from time to time, nor with Aldous and how he sleeps with a handkerchief all balled up in his hand, he has to have it to sleep at night, nor with Jake, for instance, that time at the fair in West Virginia when she wore her new red dress with the patent belt and he shot the gun and won her that paperweight with the little blue flowers blooming inside. Justine wonders where the paperweight is now. Lost someplace in the jumbled closets of this big house or more probably stolen by boarders. They’ll take anything you don’t tie down—Justine sits up and squares her shoulders and swings her legs off the bed, thinking of boarders—they’ll eat you right out of house and home.

  JINK CANTRELL

  First I got up in that sycamore where I like to get but then I knowed—knew—they could see me up in it when they started coming in for the hog-killing, they could of seen me for a country mile. Yet still I was up there when the sun come up. Lord it was cold too, and black as hell that morning when I woke up and snuck outen the house and went down there. I don’t need no light. I clumb up in the cold black night and oncet I got up there hit commenced to changing, the sky did, it growed from black to pearly white in no time, and these little slippy clouds just running acrost it to hide behind Hoot Owl Mountain. That’s what I was after—hiding—and yet those little clouds could fly and I could not. It weren’t that long ago I thought I could. I used to sit up in that same tree and say the words—I made them up and it was long, a long piece I made up in my head—and it was so long I never could get it right but I thought if I ever did get it right I would fly. I swear I did. It weren’t—wasn’t—but two years back. Seems like it was a million years ago now, seems like the dinosaur days. So I sat up there in my thinking place in the top of that tree while the day come on, no way I could of stopped it any moren I could fly. But then after while I commenced to get taken with it.

  The pearly-white sky set to changing before my eyes, glowing pink like it had a light behind it, like how the sun came in those colored windows the time he brung me with him into Black Rock and we went in the old man’s church. The whole sky started glowing pink, and them little clouds still running acrost it as fast as they could go, and the wind blowing cold and so hard that my thinking place was blowing back and forth too, and me still up in it, away up high. I leaned my head back—I was leaning into that part where the branches come together and make like a kind of a seat, I call it the mother-seat, don’t ask me why—I was leaning way back looking straight up, and the thinking place was blowing, and it was like I was the one flying acrost that rosy sky while all the rest of the world stayed still. It was just like I was flying. And the way I was leaned back into the tree put me in mind of a picture in the poem-book he had, of Wyncken, Blynken, and Nod in that boat, sailing off through the stars. Of course they wasn’t no—any—stars by that time, nothing but the moon like a ghost-moon, fading away in the full pink light which growed ever minute I looked. Rosy-finger dawn, he said. He read it outen a book. It was eating up the moon and I was glad.

  Old ghost-moon nearly gone, and nearly full, I knowed it without even looking. That’s why we was—were—killing the hogs. You don’t never want to kill a hog on the new of the moon, Mamaw says, or you wouldn’t make no lard. And if you kill on the new of the moon, the meat’ll blow you till you can’t hardly cook it. But if the moon is shrinking, the meat’ll shrink, and you won’t get but half of what you orter. You got to kill on the first cold day in late November when the moon is right, and this was it. I set up in my place and wished I’d die. Because this was the year I had to help them, Mamaw said. She said it was high time to stand up and be a man, she wasn’t keeping no lily-livered fancypants around her house. She said I’d have to go this time, and I knowed it was high time too. Some of me wanted to go and some did not, but didn’t none of it make any nevermind with me leaning back in the mother-seat and flying all out through the dawn. The little clouds started taking on that pink color too, then, like it was somebody coloring them in with a crayon, and then some yellow streaks come shooting through, and I sat up straight in time to see the whole round sun come right up over the top of Snowman Mountain, all huge and pink and dignified, it put me in mind of a sweet old man. It seemed like there wasn’t a thing in the world but me in the top of a tree and that big fine round new sun.

  Up at the house I seen the smoke arising bigger from the chimley, and I knowed—knew—Mamaw was up, and then directly I seen another line of smoke come up behind the house and I knew she had gone out there and started that fire too, the one in the dugout under the hog drum. Me and Mary and Dory had
to haul the water for it the night before.

  And then the sun was coming on for sure. It switched from pink to silver white till it looked like a big old electric lightbulb set right on top of the mountain, and then it took on orange, and then it was shining all over the place. Ice down on the creek shined out like new money way below. I wished it was new money, I’d of clumb down that tree and grabbed it up and gone. Well it wasn’t, of course, and I knew it, and neither did that sun have any warmth. It’s crazy how a day can sparkle so and stay so cold. Mamaw says you’ve got to have it cold so the meat won’t spoil.

  Then all of a sudden I could hear them, coming up the trace. I heard the Ramey boys holler out, acting the fool I bet, and I heard Little Luther too. They was not but a hoop and a holler away. I got down that tree lickety-split and took off for my summer place at the bend of the creek, where that rocky-hill pooches out into kind of a overhang and you can get under there, can’t nobody see you either. The ground was all spewed up with frost. When I run acrost it, it made this little crackle-crackle noise neath my feet. When I was little I used to think it was hollering out, like my feet was hurting it. I used to think everything could talk then but it can’t.

  “Jink! You Jink!”

  Mamaw was hollering out the front door.

  Then I could hear all of them, talking and laughing, and I could hear the horses neighing out and the mules, and stomping their feet where I knew they’d hitched them in the piney-trees, and if I was still up in my sycamore I would of been right on top of them nearabouts. Then I felt like I was still up there, like I could see it all, the horses’ breaths coming out white in the air, and everbody milling around and starting up the mountain. I knew Wall Johnson was wearing his hat and his big black coat, and some of the big gals was helping Granny Hibbitts along now she’s gotten so stout, and I knew the women was carrying food. And more and more of them coming afoot that had parked down there where the hard-road quits. I knew the women would go in the house and get some coffee outen the big pot Dory’d have on, and they’d be gooing and gaaing over Dory’s babies, them little twins, and putting the food out, and pulling off their wraps and settling in, like chickens ruffle up and calm when they go to roost. I knowed all of it. And then the men would be out back by the hog-drum watching it boil, and hunkering and talking, and taking a little nip, but wasn’t nobody made any liquor to equal ourn, everybody said. Of course they is some of it left. Mamaw made me and Dory go out and bury it all along by the fencerow, it’s froze down in there solid now. Except for the liquor in the jugs, now that don’t—doesn’t—freeze. Alcohol doesn’t freeze, he said in school. So the men would be taking a nip, passing it all around, and by then old man Harve Justice was whittling, I’d say, cleaning off the gambling sticks for stringing up the hogs, and they’d have another fire built too, to warm by. It was like I was right up there and down at Grassy too, and I looked around, at the rocky-jut hanging out over my head, and the black creek singing a little old song, in and outen the ice. Tadpoles in it of a summer, and fast green lizards so pretty it hurt you to watch them.