Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  “Lucy and me are going to peroxide our hair,” she said, and none of us said a word.

  Pappy hadn’t even bothered to wash up, he sat in a chair with his hands folded tight in his lap and hummed one little tune over and over.

  “I said we’re going to peroxide our hair,” Pearl said. She went whirling around the kitchen like a dancer in a ballet—storms always did get her all wrought up.

  “Watch out for that basket of tomatoes,” I said.

  Pearl stopped dancing.

  “What’s the matter with you-all?” she said.

  Lewis Ray started crying.

  Pearl started dancing again. “Creek ’s on the rise,” she said to nobody in particular. The rain drummed down like bullets on the roof. Pearl went around and around with her pale skirt flying, and I traced the pattern I couldn’t see. Lewis Ray was crying and nobody cared.

  “Honey,” Pappy said, “sit down.”

  Pearl sat down then and shut her mouth, and we all just sat there, and that’s the way we were sitting when we heard the train whistle down in the valley, and then the squealing brakes.

  When Mama was buried up on the mountain, folks came from all around, the same kind of folks I was telling you about who came later, of a Sunday, to look at our house. Strangers. We were going to bury Mama on a Saturday morning, as I recall, and by dark on Friday night both sides of the road to Tug and on up past Hoot Owl Holler were jammed with cars and trucks and folks in them, waiting. They had brought their food and liquor with them, they planned to stay the night. I remember one whole family, all of them fat, sitting in the back of a pickup truck, laughing and eating fried chicken. I think I remember this so well because the man had on an Hawaiian shirt, and it was the first time I ever saw one.

  Then on Saturday morning, real early, old Eustis Hubie, the sheriff, showed up at the door with five or so of his boys. It was just getting light outside, and drizzling.

  Ora Mae opened the door and stood there.

  “Howdy,” Eustis Hubie said. He touched his hat.

  I was looking at the back of Ora Mae’s head, the black hair pulled tight in a knot, and it never moved. Her back was poker-straight. Nor did she say a word.

  Eustis Hubie cleared his throat.

  “Is Luther around?” he said.

  “He ain’t good for a thing,” Ora Mae said. “Won’t do you no good to talk to Luther, he won’t talk back.”

  “Now listen here, Miz Cantrell,” Eustis Hubie said louder. “My boys and me, we aim to shut this holler off to all them that’s camped down there on the road below, and all the others we hear is coming. Now your daddy was not always straight with the law—we all know that—but it did seem to me and the boys that you all ought to be able to go and bury your dead in peace. Anybody ought to be able to do that. So me and the boys, we aim to cordon this holler off—”

  “What’s that?” Billy hollered from inside, where we were. “What’s that word?” he said.

  “Cordon,” said Eustis Hubie. He was getting red in the face by this time and kicking his boot straight down in the dirt. “Unless of course you folks are too goddamn ornery to—”

  “Now, hell, Eustis,” Pappy said all of a sudden—he had not spoken for two solid days while his brothers built the box and then while she laid out in it. Now Pappy came slithering around Ora Mae like a little snake. He was so skinny his pants half-hung on his waist, and barefooted, so you could see the twisted foot which looked so white. Both of his feet were so white. I had to turn my head away then, it set me back to crying. I wished he wasn’t crippled, I wished he had had on his shoes.

  “Well, Luther, I sure am sorry,” Eustis said. He was a decent man I know in spite of his rough way of speaking, he’d have to have been to have come up there.

  Pappy hitched up his pants and hung his head, and Ora Mae stood still.

  “I guess it’s nothing to say,” said Eustis Hubie, and Pappy said no, there was not. Then a long silence came down on them all during which you could hear Eustis’s boys mumbling and something like a string of firecrackers going off down the road.

  Eustis Hubie jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “You see what I mean,” he said. It was raining harder by then. Eustis’s boys ducked their heads and shuffled their feet in the rain.

  Pappy gave one dry little sob like a baby’s hiccup, which sounded so funny it got me and Billy and Pearl and Maggie to laughing, we couldn’t stop.

  “Go on and do it then,” Pappy said to Eustis. “We’ll be beholden.”

  “I guess this is the first time the law ever came up here to Hoot Owl Holler and got told to stay.” Eustis Hubie was trying to joke.

  All of us were holding our hands against our faces to try and stop.

  Pappy shuffled his little white feet. It set us off again, I’m ashamed to say but it did.

  “Well,” Eustis Hubie said. “We’ll be for doing it, then,” and he turned and left.

  “My God,” Pappy said. “My God in heaven,” he said, and still holding onto his pants he turned back from the door and Ora Mae closed it against the rain. I hoped it would stop before we went out in it, up the mountain to bury Mama, even though we had a road halfway up. Mama was in the back of the Branscombs’ truck already, they were carrying her up there now.

  Ora Mae stared hard at us all.

  I had crammed the end of the blanket into my mouth but it didn’t help. We couldn’t stop.

  Ora Mae looked at us.

  “You all ought to be ashamed,” she said.

  Maggie got the earrings, which Pearl wanted.

  I don’t know who decided it, finally—Pappy probably, and he was right, Maggie took after Mama the most—but a lot was made about those earrings later, and who got them, after what-all happened. Anyway Maggie got them, and they looked real pretty on her, and Pappy bought Pearl some fake gold hoops at the store in Roseann, to try and satisfy her. (“I wouldn’t have them!” Narcissa Ramey said to Maggie right on the street in Black Rock, in front of the bank. “I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole!”) Maggie just smiled at her, she had a sweet smile, like an angel, I’m sure she put Narcissa Ramey to shame. Maggie chose to be beyond the gossip, and all the talk of bewitching. Pearl, too, who was always so busy with her magazines anyway, or reading some book, but Billy fought on Snowman Mountain with Harlan Estep over something he said about Mama, and Harlan broke Billy’s nose which stayed crooked the rest of his life. You can imagine how bad that got to Billy, whatever it was Harlan said, for him to up and fight, which wasn’t like Billy at all.

  Lewis Ray went into a shell of a kind, serious and pigheaded as ever. He’s still in it if you ask me! Anyway he packed his own lunch, for instance, even though I would have done it. I packed everybody else’s. He went off to school every day like a little businessman going to work, and saved all his money in a sock under his bed-tick and got it out and counted it every night. He never mentioned Mama once and hasn’t since in all the years, so far as I know. Would not let you touch him, either. Once when I put my arm around him—we were out by the garden, I think, but I forget exactly what we were doing—he jumped back like he’d been licked by fire. I didn’t do it again.

  And what about me, you might ask, like Roy did—old chicken hawk? Mama’s little right hand?

  At first I tried to keep on doing like I had, even though we were living on Hoot Owl Holler and everything had changed. But you hold—you know you have to hold—to what you know. So I’d get up early to start the breakfast but Ora Mae would have it going before I got up. Oatmeal. Ora Mae had a thing for oatmeal, she said it stuck to your ribs. And after she made Lewis Ray start dressing himself and tying his own shoes was when he took to doing it all for himself and wouldn’t accept any kind of help. Ora Mae made Pearl and Maggie work too, around the house, and wouldn’t let me lay out of school like Mama had. We had to go to bed when Ora Mae said and nobody laughed around our house anymore, not like in the old days. I tried to talk about it to Pappy one time, but he wouldn’t
talk much. “Sally, Sally,” was all he said. “You’ve always been a good girl. Don’t start up on me now.” So what I knew was gone, and I went around with a big empty hole in my stomach and couldn’t concentrate in school enough to do long division. I got real skinny and looked more like a chicken hawk than ever. When a boy from Tug—Miles Looney—asked me to go out for a date one time, to the movies over in Black Rock, I laughed in his face.

  A year had gone by then, and we were back to canning. I was in the kitchen helping Ora Mae, who had a fine garden like she had always had, and we were putting up sweet peppers. Maggie and I had cut them in rings and piled them all up in the center of the table. They were real pretty, red and green. Then Ora Mae would blanch them, and we’d put them in the jars. Pearl was boiling the jars on one side of the stove and we were blanching in the big black pot on the other.

  “I know!” Pearl said. “Let’s put the rings in layers, like a red layer and then a green layer, you know, like that, all the way up the jars. Wouldn’t that be pretty?”

  Ora Mae, who was blanching the peppers, snorted.

  “Oh, come on, Ora Mae!” Pearl said. “It would be so pretty, and besides we could give them to people for Christmas.”

  “Give them to who?” Ora Mae asked. Now Mama used to make a real big deal out of Christmas—or any occasion or any holiday—and sometimes we all forgot.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Pearl said. “Just . . . anybody!” She cocked her head and giggled.

  “Waste of time,” said Ora Mae.

  Pearl stopped giggling. Without another word, she pushed the pile of red pepper rings—which she had just started separating—back into the pile with the rest.

  I took off my apron and left, I didn’t care if the screen door banged. I ran off the mountain down toward the creek, almost falling a couple of times I was crying too hard to see. I ran along the edge of the creek to this special place nobody knew about, this place I had that was all my own where the rocks hung out and made like a kind of a cave and you could get in there and no one could see you. The whole creek was alive that day, buzzing with summer, mayflies blue and shiny skimming over the water. Queen Anne’s lace grew by the front of my cave. It really did look like lace, too, I remember I stopped crying long enough to look at it, but like anything pretty it put me in mind of Mama and then I started up again and cried until I guess I lost my head entirely, I think that’s what they call it, and I came to stretched out full length on my stomach in the dirt, with dirt in my mouth and my nose, couldn’t hardly breathe.

  Now I’m no fool.

  Even at that age, I knew I couldn’t go on acting like that.

  So I laid there a minute tasting the dirt. Then I got up and pushed the Queen Anne’s lace aside and walked out of my cave and straight into the creek and laid down on my back on the shiny little rocks where the water was maybe eight inches deep. It ran over me in little ripples and I laid my head back and let it run over my face. It felt so good, and cold! Grassy Creek comes out of a spring on the top of Hurricane Mountain, or so they say, I’ve never been up there myself. Anyway it felt good. By and by, I sat up on my elbows and let the sun dry off my face, and then I got up out of the creek and went back up the mountain and called up Miles Looney and said I thought I’d like to go to the movies after all, if he still wanted me to.

  Roy stopped me here. “I don’t get the connection,” he said.

  I looked at him. “Connection?” I said. “Well I guess there’s not one. That’s just what I did next.”

  “Honey,” Roy said. “There’s always a connection.”

  “No there is not,” I said. “Sometimes things just happen, is all,” but Roy shook his head and ate some more pimiento cheese—I guess he has to believe in connections, being a lineman and all, but I don’t. I think what I please!—and I went on and told him how it was not much later than this, that same summer, that Pappy moved off of his bed on the porch and started sleeping with Ora Mae. I came in from a date with Miles Looney and Pappy was in bed with her, and she was snoring. Sounded like a mule.

  That was all there was to it, and things went along this way for a while.

  You can get used to anything.

  So this is how we lived then, and how we all grew up. It wasn’t so bad either. There’s worse, I guess. I never liked Ora Mae, of course, but I wasn’t around much either. I dropped out of school at fifteen and got a job at the fountain in the Rexall drugstore in Black Rock, I used to ride over there and back every day with Mr. Bristol from up on Hurricane, who worked in the men’s store. I think we all called him Mr. Bristol because he was always dressed up, because he worked in the men’s store. I don’t remember what his first name was. Anyway I worked at the Rexall, and sometimes if a traveling man came through or a mine inspector or somebody else I took a fancy to, I might go upstairs with them, over at Justine Poole’s, but I never took money for that.

  Mr. Bristol used to give me lectures on the way to Black Rock, it would be real early in the morning and he’d smell so strong, like after-shave, and he’d tell me how a smart girl like me ought to finish high school and then go over to Radford or someplace and learn a trade. He said I could improve myself. At least you could learn to type, he said. Or find you a husband, he said that too, one of the nice town boys. I sat real still in the car—or sometimes I’d do my nails on the way—and listened to what he said. Mr. Bristol didn’t understand that the nice town boys didn’t want to go out with me, or that I couldn’t leave Hoot Owl Holler either. Somehow I could leave enough by then to go off and work but still not leave them entirely, even though I hated Ora Mae, as long as there was something left of the way it used to be.

  I couldn’t go and I couldn’t stay.

  I remember Mr. Bristol, all fresh-shaved except for his neat little beard, pink-cheeked and smelling awful—Mr. Bristol looked exactly like a gentleman, even if he was not, which was why he was so good at running the men’s store—Mr. Bristol giving me more of the same old advice one morning in December—he looked like Santa Claus anyway—when there was ice on the road and even in the car it was so cold that your breath hung like clouds in the air.

  “Little lady,” Mr. Bristol said—he always called me that—“You ought to make something of yourself.” His words seemed to hang in the air like his breath, all the way into town, the same way I was hanging myself between what I might do and what I was doing, between Hoot Owl Holler and leaving these hills, and I was wrapped up in it all like the fog of his breath, like the fog that hung on the side of Black Rock Mountain which I used to look at of an evening, sitting on our porch.

  Pappy was making music again by then. Billy never sang—he was moving away by degrees then, the same way I was—but Maggie and Pearl did, and the neighbors would come over and still it was not the same. It was not so I could leave it, but still it was not the same.

  This is the way it went until Ora Mae got pregnant and Maggie got polio.

  Ora Mae got fatter and fatter, and when I finally mentioned it to her she patted her stomach stretched out big and tight beneath her old black skirt and said “Hunh!” like she was real surprised to find a baby in there. Pappy acted silly, he was tickled pink, you could tell it, and he always did have a silly streak. He told Mr. Bristol he bet Mr. Bristol didn’t know he could still cut the mustard, did he. Stuff like that.

  Ora Mae was real big when Maggie got polio. “Polio!” Roy said when I told him. He shifted his leg on the kitchen chair. You remember polio—nobody gets it anymore, and didn’t then either as I recall except way off someplace in the newspaper and you’d read about it—but Maggie got sick her senior year in high school and the day she went back to school after being sick, she leaned over to get a drink of water out of the water fountain and couldn’t stand back up.

  For a long time we all thought she’d die. I will never forget the time when she was back home from the hospital in Richlands—she was in and out a lot—and she was in Pappy and Ora Mae’s bed in the front room and Pearl had been re
ading out loud to her.

  “That’s enough now,” Maggie said. “Thank you, Pearl.” Maggie was so thin her face looked almost blue somehow against the white pillow, and the quilt barely rose at all over her body beneath it on the bed. That was the bear paw quilt—the old, old one—her favorite. Maggie loved all the old songs, and all old things.

  I was real glad when Maggie said that because Pearl had been reading poems, which I hate. Pearl was the salutatorian. “Do you all want some ice tea?” I asked everybody, and Pearl and Ora Mae said they did and I went to get it.

  “Actually,” I heard Maggie say when I was halfway into the kitchen, “I wouldn’t mind if you read to me out of the Bible, Pearl,” and something about the way she said it stopped me dead in my tracks.

  I knew then she was going to die.

  I knew then it was what I was waiting around for.

  I got the ice tea like a robot while all the rest of them scrambled around like crazy looking for a Bible, which of course we did not have.

  “That’s all right,” Maggie was saying when I got back in with the tea. “That’s all right,” she said, and she held one thin hand up like a blessing, and then she let it drop.

  I held the tea for her so she could drink.

  “I guess I’d better get ready,” Pearl said. She was going to the Key Club Awards Banquet, it was the end of school.

  “Wait,” Maggie said, so faint you could barely hear her. “Just a minute, Pearl.”

  Maggie reached up and took out her earrings, Mama’s old gold hoops, and handed them over to Pearl. “I want you to have them,” she said. “You can wear them tonight.”