On Agate Hill

by Lee Smith

  Jacky took my hand and sat me down on the green blanket, then sat Indian-style across from me, cocking his head like a gawky bird. He makes me laugh, Mary White.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Then he leaned forward and put his mouth on my mouth, just lightly, once. He didn’t touch any other part of my body.

  “Now,” he said. “Start talking. I want to know all about you. I want to know everything.”

  “First, I am engaged to be married,” I said.

  “I don’t care nothing about that,” he said. “That don’t mean nothing to me. Where did you come from, anyway? What are you doing up here?”

  So I started talking, slowly at first, then in a big rush like a creek running down off a mountain. I told him about Mama and Papa and the War and Spencer and Uncle Junius and Selena, and about going to the Gatewood Academy. I got hot and threw off my cloak, still talking. He nodded, chewing on a long piece of straw like an animal. I kept on talking. He acted like he had all the time in the world. So I kept on talking. I told him all about Agnes, and Chattie, and the Bobcat School, and Cicero Todd and the gun. He kept breaking in, asking more questions.

  I feel like I have known him all my life.

  “Now it’s your turn,” I said, despite the fact that the changeable weather was suddenly changing fast, the sun entirely gone now beneath a pile of gray clouds that were fast moving in from the west. I put my cloak back on and hugged it around myself.

  “Me and my cousin, we run a store up on top of Rag Mountain. You can spit off the porch and hit Tennessee. We hold dances on top of the store. Daddy built it for that. But Mama don’t dance, nor play music no more either, she’s been crazy ever since the War and all the terrible things they done to her . . .” Jacky talked up a blue streak. He talked more in one afternoon than Henderson Hanes has talked in all the time I have known him. Jacky said they have about twenty family members living up at Plain View, “give or take some at any given time,” and “some several” of them play music. Jacky himself started in on the piano at age two or three, taught by his uncle Blind Bill, who tuned pianos for a living, and played at dances. Jacky’s mama played piano too, or used to, before the Home Guard came upon her when she was out washing clothes and tried to make her tell where Jacky’s daddy and his uncle had hidden out, plunging her hands down into the boiling water when she refused. They hanged her from a sycamore tree too, but let her down before she died. She never told. “She hasn’t never been the same since,” Jacky said, and I said I’d imagine not. When the War was over, Jacky’s daddy found the men that had tortured her, and killed them both — shot one man while he was out plowing in his cornfield, picked him off from the edge of the woods, and shot the other man as he came out of church with his wife on his arm. Big Jack Jarvis was never prosecuted for these murders, as there were no witnesses, and everybody figured they had it coming. He had gone on to live a long life, running the store and playing music.

  Jacky had learned the banjo from an uncle who had learned it from a negro just before the War. He said his uncle traded a coon dog to the negro for the banjo, and called it his “coon dog banjo” ever after, playing it for years.

  I started laughing, though thunder rolled in the distance.

  “I want to go up there,” I said, which I did, all of a sudden, more than anything. “I want to go dancing on top of the store.”

  “No mam,” he said.

  “Don’t call me mam,” I said immediately.

  “Plain View ain’t no place for a lady like you.”

  “I am not a real lady,” I said.

  “You’re a schoolteacher, ain’t you? You look like a lady to me. Shoot, you have even been to lady school.”

  “Well, maybe it didn’t take,” I said.

  “Iffen it did or iffen it didn’t, it sounds to me like you are fixing to be a real grand lady yourself soon enough.”

  “I’m not a lady.” I don’t know why I started crying. “I’m not a ghost girl either.”

  “Well, you sure as hell got that right.” He pinched my waist. “You feel pretty solid to me.”

  The wind was blowing like crazy now. Jacky’s horse whinnied and stomped her feet.

  “Then take me up there.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  “Shoot, honey, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Chicken!” I let go of his hand and jabbed him in the side. “Fraidy-cat! Fraidy-cat! Don’t know where his tail is at!” This is what the children sing at the Bobcat School. I pushed him as hard as I could and then he pinned my arms behind me and I twisted him off of the rock onto the ground and together we rolled over and over down the steep hill through the scratchy weeds and sage grass. By the time we fetched up against another big rock, I had gotten to laughing too hard to quit.

  “Shoot, you’re a crazy girl, aren’t you, you know that?” Jacky spoke in bursts, breathing hard.

  We both lay on our backs, exhausted. But now the sky had turned dark. The light all around us was a pale, sickly green. A long deep roll of thunder, like a growl, came crawling across the sky, soon followed by a jagged bolt of lightning back up at the tree line not far away. Jacky’s horse reared up, whinnying.

  “Hellfire,” he said, jumping up and pulling me after him. “Come on, I’ve got to turn her loose, and then we’ll go over there and get up under the Manbone Rock, there is kind of an overhang if I remember right. Hit’s fixing to come a big one.”

  The wind was against us as we struggled back up the hill. I waited while Jacky went over to the horse, still tied to the tallest pine. “Whoa, Betty, whoa, Betty,” he said, but Betty kept on rearing up, her eyes rolling. She pulled her lips back so I could see her gums and her long yellow teeth. “Damn, Betty!” Finally Jacky got her untied and gave her her head and she galloped back up the hill snorting toward the woods.

  “Oh no, Jacky —,” I cried, but he hollered, “Don’t worry, she will come back,” and I had to believe him.

  “Now come on.” He grabbed my hand as we ran hell for leather back up the hill toward the Manbone Rock which loomed up white and ghostly as a galleon in the dark stormy afternoon. Thunder boomed. We scrabbled up the hill, falling back again and again as the little loose rocks rolled under our feet. I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you run and run but you don’t ever get anywhere. Jacky was pulling my hand. We had gotten almost to the rock when there came a sharp crack, as loud as a firing squad, which threw us both to the ground.

  And then the first thing I knew, Jacky was leaning over me saying something. I could scarcely see him in the gray light which was all around us now, and scarcely hear him for the ringing sound in my ears. My mouth tasted coppery, like pennies. “Where are we?” I asked, and he said we were up under the Manbone Rock, and the storm was passing. Then it seemed like my eyes started working again and I saw the wide oval mouth of the cave and the gray slanting rain outside.

  “What happened to us?” I asked next.

  “I reckon we nearabout got hit by lightning,” he said. “Iffen we’d of been any closer to that big tree, we’d most likely be dead now.” He gestured toward the mouth of the cave. “Oh God, Molly, this is all my fault. I never should have brung you out here.”

  “I came on my own,” I said. “I wanted to.”

  “Are you all right then, sure enough? Oh God. I didn’t have no business getting you into something like this.” Jacky sat cross-legged in the rocky dirt with my head in his lap. He pushed my hair back off my face.

  It occurred to me to sit up too, and I did, and nothing happened. “I think I am all right,” I said carefully, though my feet and legs were hurting and tingling like when they have been asleep.

  Jacky took off his buckskin jacket and put it around me and set in to picking up wood from the corners of the cave and making a little fire which he got going in no time, he is good at things like that. We sat beside the fire getting warm and watching the firelight flicker on the cave walls. “
I have to get back,” I said, but he said, “Wait till it quits raining so hard. It’s going to stop directly.” How do you know, I almost said but didn’t. By then I knew better than to ask.

  “Looky here.” Jacky moved his hands so that shadow animals went prancing across the red rocky walls of the cave. First a horse, then a deer, then a rabbit chased by a fox. He made animal noises with his mouth. I clapped my hands. “Molly, you swear you’re all right?” He turned back and grabbed my hands.

  “Yes,” I said, “far as I can tell. Old Bess always said if you get hit by lightning yet live, you will have special powers,” I told him.

  “Well, I reckon we are going to need them,” he said solemnly. We sat side by side leaning up against the cave wall holding hands like children at the end of the world. “I am not a good man,” he said, “but I am not a bad man either, and by God, I’ll be good to you. I swear it.” We sat in silence while the rain gradually stopped and the sun came out again exactly like nothing had ever happened.

  But it has, Mary White. It has.

  Jacky stood up and stomped out the last of the fire. He helped me outside, steadying me, for at first I could scarcely see. Just when I was about to get scared, my eyes adjusted and then I saw the tallest pine tree blackened and leaning way over to the side, a long open tear down its trunk. While we watched, it cracked in two with a sound like a pistol shot and crashed onto the rocks below, the same rocks where we had been sitting earlier, completely covering up Jacky’s blanket which we had left there, of course. It was a massive tree, its branches covered that whole outcropping. The branches shifted and settled with loud crackling noises.

  “Damn,” Jacky finally said when all was quiet again.

  “Where is Betty?” I asked, for my legs still had pins and needles as we used to say, and I knew I could never walk all the way back.

  Jacky grinned at me. “Don’t worry. Watch this.” He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a shriek that pierced the whole forest. He waited and whistled again and here she came bursting down from the treeline toward us, reins trailing. “Good girl, good girl,” Jacky slapped her glistening wet side. “Well, it looks like I lost a pack someplace,” he said to me. The banjo was still tied on. “But I reckon we are lucky to get off with our lives.”

  We were so lucky that I still couldn’t believe it as we rode Betty back up the trail through the dripping laurel and across the Pisgah Bald and on up the road toward Bobcat. I felt like we had been saved for something. Twice Jacky stopped and jumped down to clear the road of fallen branches, for it had stormed heavily up here too. The sun was setting all red through the lacy trees by the time we pulled up in front of the Badgers’ cabin. “They’re not back yet.” I was surprised.

  “Chances are, they got rained on too. Who knows? All them Baptists might have got washed right down the river like the great flood.”

  “You better go.” I jumped down but had to grab the fence as my knees threatened to buckle under me.

  Jacky wheeled Betty around, then reined her in for a minute, both horse and rider black against the fiery sunset, like figures on a magic lantern. “I’ll see you,” is all he said before he rode away, yet those words seemed to enter my body.

  I went in and took off my clothes and washed up and dressed again. I couldn’t believe that I had left here only this morning, that I had been gone for only one day. It seemed like years. I opened the pie safe and ate everything I could get my hands on, old biscuits and a big hunk of cake and a handful of dried apples almost too tough to chew. I went out and got more wood for the fire which I had got blazing again by the time they all came trooping in, wet, exhausted, yet excited and full of stories. The storm had hit just as the invitation hymn was offered, according to Chattie, sending tens of people rushing forward to be saved. Agnes winked at me, then stared at me curiously. “What did you do all day, Molly?” she asked. “You look, I don’t know, different.”

  “I went walking, and got rained on too,” I said. Just then Granny Took made a snorting, strangling noise, so we all rushed over to her bedside where she was clutching her coverlet hard as she could with both little hands, her mouth working furiously. Yet no words came.

  “Why, what is it?” Chattie cried. “Has she been all right today?” and I said, “She has been just fine.”

  I went off to my leanto with her little black eyes following me, hot and intense as coals.

  WEDNESDAY

  Today I was walking the Indian trail home from the Bobcat School alone — Agnes has gone down to Jefferson with Cicero Todd to pick up supplies — when out of the woods popped Jacky Jarvis. The sun came down through the trees, lighting up his hair. He was hatless and shirt-sleeved, as if he had joined up with spring. And I have to say that after all that has happened, I wasn’t even surprised to see him, though I acted surprised.

  “Why, what are you doing down here?” I asked. “Don’t you have a job?”

  “This here is my job,” he said, falling right into step beside me. “I am getting to know you.”

  “Oh, you are!” I said, and he said, “Yes mam,” which I hate, and said so, and then he walked me on home talking a mile a minute through these woods which are more beautiful right now than they have ever been. All the leaves are coming out now, with fiddlehead ferns popping and the May apples and bloodroot blooming. Two bluebirds flew through the trees keeping just ahead of us, I’ll swear it was the same bluebirds though I didn’t mention it, rattling on about my students and what all had happened that day in school.

  But “Looky there!” Jacky said, pointing at them. “I reckon I am getting to know them too.”

  I had just started to say something else when I saw a flash of white moving on up the trail, and somehow I knew it was somebody’s shirt. “Jacky,” I turned to whisper, but he was already gone, vanished entirely into the forest as if he had never been, leaving me alone on the trail yet burning as if with a fever.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Molly,” said Horace Groats, awkward as ever, carrying a sack of coal down to the school, for which I thanked him kindly.

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON AT THE BOBCAT SCHOOL

  Today Felix came up to school bringing an “urgent” letter from Henderson’s mother. I opened it on the spot. She wants to know my measurements, wondering if I can fit into her own wedding dress. “Isn’t that sweet?” Agnes said. She is going to measure me tonight.

  FRIDAY

  Jacky came again

  SATURDAY

  And again, he says he is camping out like an Indian in a hollow tree down toward the river

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  Today I walked right out attracting no suspicion as the house was full of visitors, Badger cousins and such, everybody was eating cobbler. The weather has not changed yet, it is still pretty, the prettiest spring I can ever remember. The river shone like a distant mirror through the trees as I started down the path which I was not sure of, afraid I would get lost, and this is when I thought I saw your little red coat just ahead of me, Mary White, flitting through the trees, showing me the way. I walked faster and you walked faster. I know I can never catch you. But I was just so happy to see you, all the same. I was out of breath when I finally spotted the tree where he emerged like a forest sprite, grinning and waving, and then I started running down the hill toward him, I couldn’t help it, and he ran out to meet me and picked me up and squeezed me, hard, and carried me into the tree where he had made a kind of nest with the thick leaves covered by a beautiful old quilt. “That’s a wedding ring quilt,” I said, and he said, “Is it?” and we fell down upon it. We stayed there all afternoon, Mary White, and I would be there still, but he woke me up saying, “Molly! Molly, you have to go home.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes mam.”

  “Don’t call me that.” I put on my clothes one piece at a time as slow as I could, watching his face all the while. You could never say Jacky is good looking, but I think he is beautiful.

  “You better get a move on, girl,”
he said.

  I stood up and pulled on my skirt.

  “Take me with you,” I said.

  “I can’t take you up there, crazy girl. Besides, he would come after you.” Now Jacky was walking back and forth in front of the hollow tree, in and out of the sunlight, very agitated.

  Jacky does not know that this is not true, because Henderson Hanes has never yet done one hard thing in his life.

  Simon Black is the one who would come after me.

  Jacky kept walking back and forth, then stopped right in front of me. He took both my hands in his. “Well Molly, I’d still like to get to know you, but I reckon I’m going to have to marry you to do it.”

  I looked up at him. The sun was in his hair, and on my face. “All right,” I said.

  At last this is my own true love story, for you, Mary White, though I will remain forever your own

  Molly

  Plain View

  STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, WILKES COUNTY

  This testimony made this 18th day of November 1907, by John Howard Willetts, aka “BJ” aka “Black Jack” Jarvis. Duly sworn before Coroner George Ragland, at Wilkesboro, and state of North Carolina.

  YES, I WILL SWEAR it on this Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I swear to God. May God strike me dead if this ain’t the truth. She never done it. Molly Petree could not have done this thing if her life depended on it, which I reckon it does. But this is the truth, and the whole truth insofar as I know it, and I know more about it than anybody else in the world, for I was right there. I been right there all along. And it may be that Jacky Jarvis has had a bullet out there waiting for him all along too. Well I’m telling you whether it’s necessary or not, it’s the truth.