Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  Anyway Billy got a divorce and had a nervous breakdown and came home too, not long after Pearl, and sat in the rocker out on the porch and rocked all day long and half the night. And then Pearl was pregnant, and had the baby premature and never got over it—Pearl died of complications—and when the baby died, Ora Mae buried it herself up on the mountain or so they said. Nobody ever saw that grave.

  And then, of course, you know about the murder.

  Everybody knows about that.

  How Billy was sitting out there on the porch in the rocker drinking ice tea when all of a sudden here comes Donnie Osborne, Pearl’s high school boy, at ten o’clock in the morning, walks straight up to Billy and takes out his father’s pistol and shoots him point blank in the face. Billy never even had a chance to stand up from his chair. If he would have, I mean, which I have had my doubts about all along. Billy was looking for that bullet as sure as it was looking for him, if you ask me. Especially since Pearl was gone. Anyway, Billy pitches forward out of the chair and falls half off of the porch. Blood and ice tea all over the place, and that rocker rocks back and forth.

  Now, who knows what Donnie Osborne thought?

  Who knows what went on in his head?

  Some said he was jealous, and had got it in mind that the baby was Billy’s, not his—and who knows but it might’ve been? When you get right down to it, who knows? Life is a mystery and that’s a fact. Anyway, most said he was crazy with grief at Pearl dying, and he was just a high school boy to begin with, and you know he was crazy period. Life is one big mystery, as I said.

  The murder took place one month to the day after Pearl died of complications.

  Now Pearl’s was the saddest burial I ever went to, and the smallest.

  Pearl was buried on a February Sunday, cold and cloudy, up on Hoot Owl Mountain. That little Jennifer was not there—Ora Mae had sent her right back to the upholsterer, and I must say I can’t blame her—and the upholsterer was not there either. We stood out there in the wind, me and Roy, all hugged up tight together, and the wind blew so slow and steady it was almost like you could see it, like it was a real, gray thing sweeping across that flat wet grassy bald. The clouds had covered all the mountains, had filled the gorge. They rolled in gray and scary out of Kentucky. A young minister none of us knew—he was in the Junior Toastmasters with Al—said the words, and when it was over, it started to rain. Not a thunderstorm, or a good rain, the kind you don’t mind being out in, but a slow rain like the saddest rain you ever saw. They put Pearl next to Mama, which was fitting. The clouds from Kentucky had rolled in so far that you couldn’t even see the graves on down the hill at the edge of the burying ground next to the cliff, even if you knew who was buried down there anyway, which I don’t.

  And don’t care!

  I held on tight to Roy.

  It was Pappy and Ora Mae, Al and Debra—Maggie couldn’t be there, it cost too much to fly, and Billy wouldn’t get out of the rocker—and Roy and Davy and me. Lewis Ray, of course, couldn’t make it. And Donnie Osborne’s mama would not have let him come.

  After the preacher said the words we went back to the cars, and that was it. The preacher had a pickup truck and he and Roy got to talking about trucks, or something, and then Davy came up to say he was ready to drive Ora Mae and Pappy down the mountain—them being, of course, naturally too old to drive by now—but they couldn’t find Ora Mae.

  “Can’t find her!” I said. “Well, where could she be?”

  There’s noplace in the world beyond the grassy bald at the top of Hoot Owl Mountain, there’s nothing left but sky.

  “You keep Pappy in the car,” I told Davy. “Don’t let him out in the weather and get sick. I’ll find her,” I said.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I spied something moving down at the cloudy edge of the cliff near the gorge. I knew in my bones it was Ora Mae, and I also knew, right after I thought of it, that she would never jump. It’s not in her to jump, I thought. She thinks she’s too important. Crazy old woman! But I was dying to see what she was up to. So I just took off down the burying ground, ruining my shoes entirely if they weren’t already ruint by then, I guess they were anyway, and snuck up on Ora Mae from behind.

  In her long dark coat she looked right spooky, there in the clouds at the edge of the cliff. She looked like a rock or a tree, something that belonged there.

  Ora Mae! I was just about to holler, but I did not.

  Something made me stand still and watch her. Ora Mae was fishing around in one of the pockets of that big dark coat of hers—I’ll swear she’s had that same coat, and this is no lie, for fifty years.

  I stood still and watched her.

  She pulled something little out of the pocket, pulled it out slow and painful, the way she does everything, and then she let out the awfulest low sad wail I ever heard. It did not sound like a person at all. It sounded like something right out of the burying ground, some rising up of age and pain. She fiddled with what she had—I’d guessed what it was, by then, and I’ll bet you have too—and she got one of them in each hand and held them up, I watched her, for a long, long moment, to her own ears. That old, old ugly woman! It was just about the worst and saddest thing I ever saw. And I’ve seen some things. Then she slung both arms straight out and threw the earrings into the swirling clouds in the gorge and they went down, down, I guess, to the river so far below, and I guess that’s where they are now, thank God.

  Gone.

  Ora Mae had the right idea.

  But she stood there with her arms flung out, like a big black statue in a church or something, for the longest time.

  She gave me the creeps.

  Then she lowered her arms real slow, and while I watched, she shrank back from whatever she was to old Ora Mae again, so old she can’t even drive. I took her arm and helped her back up the burying ground to the cars and she didn’t say one word, never mind thanked me, her eyes rolled kind of back in her head like she was in a trance, both of us soaked through by then from the rain.

  “It beats all, don’t it,” I said to Roy, “her holding them up to her ears?”

  “It does and it don’t,” Roy said. Roy is getting stoop-shouldered now, his hair gone gray, but he’s the finest figure of a man I ever saw. And the nicest, a man like an old sweater, the older it gets, the more comfortable.

  “Is that all?” Roy said.

  “Well, it’s time to eat,” I told him—I’d been fixing a pot roast, cooking while I told it—“so I guess it is.”

  And just as soon as I got it on the table, wouldn’t you know in came my grandson Roger, the one with the smart mouth, he eats over here all the time. Roy gets a kick out of Roger. So Roger ate with us, and then he left, and finally I got Roy where I wanted him, alone in the bed with me after the ten o’clock news, and I propped his cast up real nice on three pillows and we were just fooling around when all of a sudden Roy busted out laughing. He’s got this big, big laugh.

  I was a little put out.

  “What’s so damn funny?” I said.

  “Well, if you didn’t laugh you’d have to cry, it’s like you said,” said Roy, “and all of that, and now it’s all come down to Ora Mae and Pappy and me and you and Al and Debra and those three kids of theirs, the only ones connected, still around I mean. Good Lord, Sally. You’ve had a life, old Sal.”

  “Well, it’s not over yet!” I said.

  Roy started laughing. He likes to get a rise out of me.

  “That’s the past,” I said. “It’s nothing to talk about now. Now it’s you and me. It’s what happens after this, and if Roger gets into college or not, and if Rosy ever gets married again, and if Al gets to be a double ruby or whatever the hell else it is he takes it into his mind to do next, or if those men buy the land and put that ski run up Hoot Owl Holler, or who knows what will happen in this world? It’s not over yet,” I said.

  “And you?” Roy said. “Old Sal?”

  He reached over and put his hand on my breast where it fits.


  Then he got real tickled.

  “Tell me your dreams,” said Roy.

  “Now I’ve got one more I want you to hear.” Little Luther cackles out from the swing as if from a dream, as if none of that had really happened at all, not Jennifer coming or Al going up the holler to get the tape recorder and coming back all shook up. “Wait’ll you hear this one,” and he starts strumming, but Ora Mae rises up white and definite on the steps.

  “You hush up, you old fool,” she spits at him. “It’s way past your bedtime anyhow.”

  Jennifer stands up, clutching the tape recorder tightly in both hands. “Well, I guess I’d better be going,” she says in a high strained too-sweet voice. “Thank you ever so much, Grandmother—”

  “Thank you ever so much.” Al mimics her from the door. “Shit.” He comes out drinking a beer. Jennifer finds herself backing down the steps but she won’t let him know how she feels, he’s her uncle after all, she won’t let him know she feels scared. The wind is still rising, it whips her hair around her face and into her eyes. But Jennifer holds her ground.

  “What happened up there?” she asks him. “You never did say.”

  Thunder rolls softly over the mountain while Al drains the last of his beer.

  “Oh, nothing much,” he says finally, affecting elaborate scorn. “That chair was just rocking, that’s all, nothing much, all by itself in there, and when I went by it to get that thing—” he walks over and jabs at the tape recorder in Jennifer’s arms like it’s something awful, and she grabs it before it drops—“ when I went over there to get that thing, I felt a cold chill come over me and I got goosebumps all over.”

  “I can’t wait to hear the tape,” Jennifer says. “Dr. Ripman will be so excited.”

  “I need me another beer,” Al says, turning to go, and Jennifer starts to feel better. The rain is coming now, big drops that ring like marbles on the tin porch roof.

  “You ever hear the one about the three dogs and the pussycat?” Little Luther asks.

  “I said hush,” says Ora Mae.

  She turns to Jennifer. “Now you take that thing, and you go on. Go on. He never had no business saying you could come over here in the first place.” Ora Mae is talking out now from that place inside her where she knows things. “I reckon you’ ll find plenty of banging on that tape, everything you want to hear,” she says. “You take it and go on, and don’t you ever come back here no more with no tape recorder because if you set it going up there, you’ll likely hear what you don’t want to hear.”

  Jennifer feels cold all over. The rain has slowed now, drumming softly on the roof. “What will I hear?” she asks.

  But Ora Mae has said her piece. She puts her arms across her bosom and goes inside. “I need to lay down,” she says.

  “Thanks so much for the delicious dinner,” Jennifer calls out after her, her hands on the tape recorder have gotten so sweaty. But Ora Mae doesn’t look back. Somewhere inside the house, Debra is giggling. “Serves you right, you damn fool thing,” she says. “You ought to know better.”

  “Jennifer, honey, you come back real soon, you hear?” Little Luther calls from the swing. “And if you was to put me on that tape recording machine, why that would be all right with me.”

  “Yes sir,” Jennifer says. She goes back and gives the old man a kiss on his hard wrinkled cheek, recoiling as she encounters tears. Tears? And close up, he smells terrible: body odor, tobacco, something else. Maybe it’s just old age. Maybe you cry from old age. He’s still on the porch, still strumming the dulcimer, when Jennifer walks back across the yard to her car. She’s surprised to find her uncle Al there, leaning up against her little Toyota like he has all the time in the world, like it’s not even raining. Al lights a cigarette and when the match flares up behind his cupped hands, Jennifer can see the gleam of his eyes and the long curl of his lip under the blond mustache.

  “Thanks so much for everything, Uncle Al,” Jennifer says. “It’s been real nice getting to know all of you, and I especially appreciate your going up to get the tape recorder for me. I’m sorry it was such an ordeal for you.”

  Al snorts. “Ordeal, hell,” he says. “Nothing to it.”

  “Well—” Jennifer feels very tired and kind of light-headed out here in the soft wet dark. The tree frogs are singing so loud. She sticks her hand out to shake hands with Al, but he does not take it although Jennifer is sure he can see her do it even in the shadow of the van. When Jennifer tries to move past him to get in her car, he’s blocking the way.

  “I want to tell you one thing,” he says, “Short and sweet. Don’t you come back here with that thing anymore, you hear me? Mama is having one of her spells now but she’s dead right on that one. So don’t you do it. We are doing all right around here. We are doing just fine, you hear me?”

  Jennifer starts to cry. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” she says. “I mean, I don’t see why she’s so mean to me—your mother—or why Little Luther is crying, or why nobody will tell me why my cousin Billy sat in that chair for so long.”

  Al leans over her, big and dark, breathing beer down into her face. “Because nobody knows, that’s why. People don’t know everything. But I’ll tell you one thing. It was your own mother had to do with it, and that high school boy, and it wasn’t from pneumonia your mother died, neither. Hell no.”

  “It wasn’t?” Jennifer hears herself say this from a long way off, like somebody down in a cave.

  “Almarine?” Little Luther’s voice carries across the yard. “Almarine?” he calls.

  “Go on,” Jennifer whispers. Each word bites into the dark. “Tell me. I want to know.”

  But Al throws back his head and laughs and laughs. “Well, it might have been pneumonia.” He is talking real loud now. “Hell, maybe it was pneumonia. Or maybe it was complications. There’s people die of complications all the time. Anyway, you can’t take all that too serious-like. You take that tape recorder on back now and I hope you get a hundred on it. You come back sometime and see us again. And drive careful now, you hear?”

  This makes Jennifer feel a whole lot better. But when he opens the door of the Toyota for her, just before she can get in, her uncle Al grabs her right up off her feet and kisses her so hard that stars smash in front of her eyes. Al sticks his tongue inside her mouth. Then before Jennifer can even think what is happening to her, Al lets go of her and she drops back against the open door. “Drive careful,” he says. He walks across the yard and helps his daddy inside, and then they all are gone. Jennifer backs up so fast she slams into the bumper of Al’s van. Then she’s gone too, off down the holler like a streak, crying and crying and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  But by the time she gets back to the college, Jennifer has stopped crying and gotten a hold on herself. She has changed it all around in her head. Al is nothing but a big old bully, a joker, after all. They still live so close to the land, all of them. Some things may seem modern, like the van, but they’re not, not really. They are really very primitive people, resembling nothing so much as some sort of early tribe. Crude jokes and animal instincts—it’s the other side of the pastoral coin.

  Jennifer’s tape, when she plays it, will have enough banging and crashing and wild laughter on it to satisfy even the most hardened cynic in the class. Jennifer will make an A for the course. Jennifer will marry Dr. Bernie Ripman the summer after she graduates from college, and her stepmother will give a dramatic reading from the works of Kahlil Gibran at the ceremony. Jennifer will not send a wedding invitation to any of her real mother’s family in Hoot Owl Holler: not to Ora Mae, or Al, or Debra, or even to Little Luther. And even though in later years her husband will urge her to go back there and take him, and even though in a way she intends to, Jennifer will never get around to going back over there, and then when she and Dr. Bernie Ripman move to Chicago, it becomes clear that she never will. Jennifer will never see any of them again.

  Eventually, Debra will have a hysterectomy. Rosc
oe will win a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina; Troy will start a rock group; Sally and Roy will buy a retirement house at Claytor Lake where they will continue to live out their long and happy lives; Suzy Q will marry young; old Richard Burlage will write his memoirs and they will be published, to universal if somewhat limited acclaim, by LSU Press; Little Luther and Ora Mae will get sick one by one and then die. Donnie Osborne, institutionalized for years, will grow older and older fashioning the dowels he especially loves to make in the prison workshop, the smoothly rounded, tapering, perfectly symmetrical beautiful wood. Al will be elected president of the Junior Toastmasters Club. Then he will make a killing in AmWay and retire from it young, sinking his money in land. He will be a major investor in the ski run which will be built, eventually, on the side of Black Rock Mountain. The success of this enterprise will inspire him to embark on his grandest plan yet: Ghostland, the wildly successful theme park and recreation area (campground, motel, Olympic-size pool, waterslide and gift shop) in Hoot Owl Holler. Ghostland, designed by a Nashville architect, will be the prettiest theme park east of Opryland itself, its rides and amusements terraced up and down the steep holler, its skylift zooming up and down from the burial ground where the cafeteria is. And the old homeplace still stands, smack in the middle of Ghostland, untouched. Vines grow up through the porch where the rocking chair sits, and the south wall of the house has fallen in. It’s surrounded by a chain link fence, fronted by the observation deck with redwood benches which fill up every summer night at sunset with those who have paid the extra $4.50 to be here, to sit in this cool misty hush while the shadows lengthen from the three mountains—Hoot Owl, Snowman, and Hurricane—while the night settles in, to be here when dark comes and the wind and the laughter start, to see it with their own eyes when that rocking chair starts rocking and rocks like crazy the whole night long.

  Click here for more books by this author