Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  “Jink.”

  It was Mary, all wrapped up in the brown coat that used to be Dory’s, her face peeping outen the hood. She was coming along the creek, picking her way, and biting her bottom lip so as not to fall. It would kill you to watch Mary coming, how careful she is, and the way she sets down her feet like the ground might just give out at any minute. Mary was the only one who knew about my summer place. Still, I was mad she had come.

  “What are you doing down here?” I throwed a rock and broke some ice. “You ain’t got no business out here in the cold. Mamaw’ll kill you,” I said, and Mary smiled that smile she’s got, it goes all over her face.

  “Mamaw’s killing hogs today,” she said. “She ain’t got time to fool with me.”

  I allowed as how that much was true, anyway, and got to grinning myself. It tickles me when Mary gets around Mamaw, how sometimes she’ll be so sly, like the time when Mamaw locked me down in the root cellar for lying and Mary brung me food for two days solid and then swore it on a Bible she had not.

  Mary sat down and her breath went out white like a cloud around her, she looked like she was in a cloud herself and if she took off that coat, she’d be all in white like a holy angel.

  “Get on up to the house,” I said.

  “I ain’t coming till you do.” When Mary sticks her lip out like that, they is no reasoning with her, she’s just like a snapping turtle that won’t turn loose till it thunders.

  “All right,” I said, and I got up, and we went up the mountain together, slow because of Mary. She had these red spots on her cheeks by then, from the cold.

  Mary went on in the house but I stayed out in the yard with all the other kids, where Red Rover was breaking up, and Johnny Ramey was crying his arm was broke, he always says that, and then Lute come around for hide and go seek. “Eeny-meeny-miny-mo,” he said. “Catch a nigger by the toe, if he hollers let him go. One-two-three spells out goes he.” Ray was it. He throwed himself down in the yard with his eyes hid on his jacket sleeve and commenced to counting, and we all took off like a house afire. “10–11–12—” I run around the house and smack into Hester’s Billie, who slapped me one time good acrost the butt and said for me to watch out who I was running into. I thought I’d get under the house, but Darlene and Kenny and Hank was already there, and wouldn’t a one of them scrunch over. “15–16–17—” I run out to the woodpile, and they was two kids there too, and by then Ray was on “19,” so I run back and stopped by them cedar trees and got behind that old rotted-out bench out there. I knowed—knew—Ray could see me if he come that way and looked good, but I hoped I’d be long gone by then. I was having a real good time by now, in fact I was glad that Mary had brung me home.

  “Twenty!” Ray yelled out, and he was coming. My heart was bumping, bumping in my chest. I laid real still and heard them shoot the firstest hog. Then I heard Ray yelling and Cindy squealing and Ray said “Dang it,” and I knew she had gotten home. Home is the hollered-out rock in the yard that the rain sets in, what Dory uses for washing her hair. I thought about eeny meeny miny mo and what you’d do with a nigger if you caught him by the toe. What you’d do with a nigger anyway. They used to be slaves, he said, but that was immoral. I seen a nigger once, but not close up. They sent a bunch of them over here from the prison farm where they was building the hard-road, and ever morning they’d bring them in, and ever night they’d carry them back out in a prison truck. We won’t have no niggers in this county after sundown, that’s for sure. Everbody went down there to see them work, you’d take a lunch, I went with Dory and Ora Mae, and Nun throwed a rock at them and the straw boss looked the other way. That was immoral.

  Ray was coming, and he seen me, and I took off. I might be little for my age but I can run fastern wind. I took off alongside the fencerow, running over top of all them buried jugs of liquor, and zigzagged around the garden patch, and run down the little creek from the springhouse, wasn’t no way Ray could catch me in the world. All the other kids was yelling out and running home. “Goddamn you, you little piss-ant,” Ray said, way behind, and I lit off acrost the yard for the other kids all yelling out and jumping up and down around that rock. I made it.

  “Home free!” I hollered, grabbing out so hard for home that I got my sleeve wet in the water cotched in that rock.

  “No, you ain’t,” Peter Paul Ramey said, hauling me up by the seat of my britches. “This year, Vashti says you’re coming with me,” and before I knowed what was happening, he had got aholt of my arm and twisted it behind my back and he was taking me off real fast-like around the house where they were out there killing the hogs. So I didn’t have no choice, and I had to go out there with them, and hunker down around the fire, and watch.

  They had shot the first hog in the back of the head and cut its neck, and the blood was pumping out and running all over the ground.

  “You got to stick him right in the goozle,” Wall was telling me, but I couldn’t stop looking at the blood and how red and pretty it looked in the sun, and worrying too because I’d thought pretty.

  Soon as the bleeding slowed, they drug him over to the drum and hove him up and over into the water. Then they hauled him out and scraped him, and Wall said “Come on, boy, get to work,” and I saw I’d have to go and get my knife. “You get right on back here, now,” Wall said, and I said I would. Mamaw was out there working along with the men, she always does, and looking at me out the side of her eye. The older Mamaw gets, the more she looks like a Indian.

  When I got up to the house, Dory give me a great big piece of divinity fudge. “Here, honey,” she said, and popped it right into my mouth. She was holding one of them twins—I can’t never tell if it’s Pearl nor Maggie—in her arms, and her hair was curling all around her face again, not pulled back the way she had wore it so long, and she looked real pretty. “Have another,” she said, and she give me another, and I felt better when I went back out.

  At least she was smiling again. For a long time there it was like somebody else had come in and took over her body, or else it was something like that, and she’d go all day without a word, getting bigger and bigger, and never say a thing to Little Luther nor any of them others who’d try to come by.

  Before she got so big, there was three or four or maybe more of them coming around, Mamaw said they all of them had an eye on Dory. And Mamaw wanted her to take up with one of them, any one, she didn’t care which, she said, and give that baby a name. But Dory said her baby didn’t need no name. Me, I liked it when they was all of them coming around, they used to bring stuff to me and Mary, like jawbreakers and marbles and rubber bands. But Dory wouldn’t have no truck with a one. She’d smile sometimes, real sweet-like, and she was still pretty enough in spite of how she pulled back her hair so tight then, it made you remark those gold earrings right off, but it was like she was someplace else in her mind. In her mind, she’d gone off from us all. Sometimes she’d go around humming, or nod her head up and down exactly like she was agreeing with herself about something, and she wouldn’t eat a bite for Mamaw. In fact she wouldn’t do a thing Mamaw said, which tickled me and Mary, but Mamaw liked to rode her to death, telling her what was good for her. And Dory all the time smiling a little, and cocking her head like she was listening to somebody else. So them fellers stopped coming one by one, you couldn’t fault them a bit.

  Although they told it different, Lute says, up and down the hollers and where he lives over at Tug.

  Lute hears everything right off, his daddy runs the store. Lute says that when these fellers come a-courting, soon as they’d start up the mountain they’d hear a woman’s voice in their ear that said to turn back and not to go any farther. “Leave, leave,” they said it sighed in their ears as they came, and it was like they could feel a woman’s hot breath on their cheek but when they turned to see, wasn’t nobody there but them and the empty night, and a kind of cold shaky mist in the air.

  Now I give Lute a bloody nose for it. It’s crooked yet, and going to be crooked the
rest of his life. I don’t give a damn neither. We’re friends again, I guess, we cut our fingers and mixed the blood and swallered some to prove it, but I can’t hold with them telling lies like they tell about Dory. It’s immoral is what it is. I wanted her to take up with Little Luther, cripple-leg and all. I swear I did. Shut all of them up, and then I wouldn’t never have to hit Lute and crook up his nose for life, nor hit any of the rest of them, like I had to do now. Sometimes I wished it was just Dory and Mary and me and him off someplace, someplace pretty, and all the rest of them dead as the dead in the tales they tell, like Lute and those damn bloody bones he’ll tell about, that man and that lady that ate up their girls and the bloody bones come to hant them. I wished it was Dory and Mary and me and him in a little house in that grassy bald where the fine grass grows all around in a perfect circle, up top of Hoot Owl Mountain. I wished it was me and them.

  Dory give—gave—me another piece of divinity and sent me back out the door.

  I knew I was in for it now. At least Wall had gone and got Lute and had him scraping too, so I could get over next to him and do it. Then they hauled up the hog and throwed him in it again, and then we got him back out and scraped him again. You can’t leave him too long in the water, Mamaw said, or the hair will set instead of loosen. Wall took the ax and cut off his head, which rolled a little way and then fetched up against a rock. Its eyes was looking at us. Here came Old Harve with the gambling stick, while Wall cut the hide offen the back legs till the leaders come clean, and they stuck the stick in between the leader and the leg on both hind legs and strung him up on the pole they had put in the trees.

  “I don’t feel too good,” Lute said to me, low-like so nobody else could hear. I didn’t feel too good either by then—for one thing I hadn’t had nothing to eat since I got up so early except for that divinity, but I wasn’t going to allow it, so couldn’t nobody use it agin me later. Garner Blankenship, on my other side, was all perked up listening to hear what I’d say. So I never said a thing—it was going on ten o’clock by then, I’d guess—and the Rameys shot another hog while Mamaw made the first cut in the one they had strung up. She slid her eyes over at me first to see if I was watching, and when she saw I was, she cut him. I looked the other way real quick, like I heard something off in the woods, and by the time I looked back, the innards was all in the tub and they was already soaking the liver in the bucket by the spring. Garner had had to take it over there and throw it in. Then they started stripping the first hog, and chopping it up, and they had the second one down in the water, and then they hauled it out and set us to scraping again.

  “That’s good work, boy,” Old Man Justice said to me when he come by. It made me feel so good, I swear, I quit listening out for the kids playing down in the yard and wishing I was there instead of here. I quit looking off in the woods.

  Little Luther, who had been scraping with us, put down his knife and wiped his hands and went over and got his guitar. “Rabbit up a gum stump, possum up a holler. Fat gal down at Sudie’s house, fat as she can waller.” I laughed along with the rest of them. Little Luther is kindly a natural antic, so what if he’s not good-looking. I knowed the men didn’t take him serious, though, and not because of his leg. They was something about his face, I think, the way he didn’t have no chin to speak of and his adam’s apple stuck out in his throat, and something soft around the eyes. Everybody liked him, but you didn’t expect much out of him, I couldn’t tell you for why. The way he was follering Dory around was not a thing, for an instance, that any of them other men would do. I knowed—knew—it and they knew it, but I don’t know if Little Luther knew it or not. It was like he was bound to love her, didn’t matter what she did or how she felt about it, there was something there that rubbed me the wrong way and Mary too. “Head in the clouds,” Mamaw said about Little Luther. She wouldn’t give him too much credit. Me neither, but I liked to hear him sing.

  “If ever I marry in this wide world, it’ll be for love, not riches. Catch a little girl about five feet high and fuck her through the britches,” Little Luther sang.

  Lute’s eyes went big and he poked me in the side. “You hear that one?” he said.

  Little Luther went on singing a whole bunch of stuff you don’t hear him sing when the womenfolks and girls is around, now that don’t count Mamaw of course nor Granny Hibbitts. Some of the time they was—were—out there at the hog-killing and some of the time they were up at the house getting ready to put up the meat.

  While they were up there, Little Luther sung, “Ring-a-ding-a-doo, Now what is that? Something soft and warm like a pussycat. With long black hair and split in two, now that, my friend, is the ring-a-ding-a-doo.”

  Lute punched me in the ribs so hard I liked to drap my knife. I could tell my face was getting hot out there despite of the cold. All the men was looking at us and laughing. Lute’s daddy was getting the leaf lard outen the gut and throwing it into the pot on the warming-fire where it set to hissing and popping, rendering is what Mamaw calls it, and afore long I knowed we’d pour off the lard to save it up and then we’d eat the cracklins. My stomach got to hurting, that’s how bad I wanted them cracklins, it was like I could taste them already, and Little Luther set in on the verse.

  Lulu the schoolteacher

  Went out West

  To take up fucking

  ’Cause she liked it the best.

  The boys come and the boys went

  The price went down to fifty cent.

  When over the hill from Bare-Ass Creek

  Come the bald-headed bachelor

  Known as Pisspot Pete.

  I kept looking down and scraping, with my face not working right. I hated that part about the schoolteacher and also I hated the way Little Luther’s little old chin would wobble when he sung, and how he’d grin, the idea of him singing all them dirty words and then making eyes at Dory. I kept looking down and scraping, had no place to lay my eyes. I didn’t want to look at Little Luther, nor at none of the other men who was looking at me, nor at Lute, nor most of all at that hog-head fetched up agin the rock.

  Pete had the claps

  And the blue-balls too

  But he took a shot

  At the ring-a-ding-a-doo.

  I got to grinning despite of myself. Then I got to laughing, and before I knowed it, I was singing along with the rest.

  Ring-a-ding-a-doo,

  Now what is that?

  Something soft and warm

  Like a pussycat.

  With long black hairs and split in two—

  Now, that, my friends, is the ring-a-ding-a-doo!

  I finished up singing loudern Lute. They poured off the lard and all of us got some cracklins. They were the best thing I ever ate in this world, I thought right then while I was eating them, you never tasted nothing so good. I ate them cracklins till I liked to bust, staring that hog-head straight in the eye. Then they sent me up to the house with a bucket of trimmings for the womenfolks to put in the sausage-pots.

  On the way up there I walked right through the middle of the kids, still playing all over the yard, and I thought how little they were and how a man don’t have time to play. When I got in the kitchen I seen that they had set some of the biggerunses to working in there, grinding up the meat and canning the sausage, and I was glad I didn’t have to do that no more neither.

  “Mary’s been asking for you,” Dory said, elbow-deep in sausage in a washtub on the table.

  “I got to go right back out there,” I said. “I brung you some more trimmings,” and I set the bucket down next to the washtub and picked up the empty one to take back with me.

  “You orter go in and see Mary,” Dory said. “She’s doing poorly again.”

  When Mary does poorly she has these little spells, like a kind of conniption-fit, she’ll fall right out in the floor and then wake up and not know a thing about it afterwards. She’ll be real tired too, and have to lay down on her mattress-tick, which is what she was doing right then. The fire was
going and they had pulled her right up by it to stay warm. Wasn’t nobody else in the room except Old Man Little fast asleep and snoring real loud like a engine, and a Davenport girl nursing a baby, and that crazy old Rose Hibbitts over in the corner, talking to herself. I didn’t like it a bit for her to be in there with Mary. But I had to get back out.

  “Howdy,” Mary said when she saw me, and I said howdy back. Then she closed her eyes, it was like she went back to sleep. I couldn’t see but her head, she was all tucked in under the bear-paw quilt. So I started backing off.

  “Wait,” Mary said. She has the littlest voice after she’s had one of her falling-out spells. She said something else but I couldn’t hear her.

  “What?” I said, coming closer.

  “Ooh,” Mary said. “What-all have you got on your pants?”

  I looked down and seen the blood and hog-hairs on my pants legs, where I’d been wiping my hands.