On Agate Hill

by Lee Smith

  I looked over to see her clutching at the table with both hands while a pool of water spread out around her feet.

  She is coming, BJ, Molly said.

  I didn’t ask how she knowed it was going to be a girl, but somehow it didn’t surprise me none, her knowing. She was smart, smart, Molly — and then some.

  What ought I to do? I asked her, running around the counter, but just then she moaned and sunk to her knees on the old oak floor, so I helped her over to this big old bag of rice we had there on the floor and stretched her out some. Help me, BJ, she said, and she pulled up her dress, and things commenced to happening real fast. I stayed right there so Molly could hold on to my arm, which she done so hard that her fingernails cut little bloody moons through my white shirt sleeves, now I was proud of that. See? I have still got these little scars to prove it.

  Calvin run in at some time and said, Lord God, and run back out, and come back in with Clara and Nancy, and then I made to go, but Molly said, No, stay with me awhile, BJ, and so I did, and it were a miracle, sure enough, though it taken upward of five hours and we were all wore out when it happened, she came popping out all bloody and waxy into Clara’s hands.

  Now let me have her, Molly cried, her hair wet with sweat and her face so white in that lantern light, I wondered if all her blood had done seeped out between her legs. They had brung a ring of lanterns and put them all around us on the floor, and more of them up on the counter.

  Clara cut the cord with those big old scissors we used to cut the wrapping paper, and handed her over to Molly, who held her to her breast, eyes jumping in the lantern light. Oh BJ, she said, isn’t she beautiful? And though she weren’t, naturally I said she was, and stuck to it until she was in fact, when her head had ceased being so pointy-like and her little eyes had turned blue.

  Her birthing made a mess of my store, let me tell you! And that was a hundred-dollar sack of rice. Jacky had a fit when he came in a day later and heard all about it, and he called her his rice-baby ever after. They named her Christabel, after a poem, Molly said. She said she wanted her baby to have her own name, a name that nobody else had, which turned out to be true, at least up here. Jacky was crazy about Christabel and did not leave Molly’s side from the day he got back until a good two months afterward but stayed underfoot in the store all day long, so we couldn’t get a thing done.

  It was the longest time I had ever seed Jacky stay put in his life time.

  But everbody else carried on about Christabel too, now this was a baby that did not know a stranger. Molly kept the cradle over in the store where everybody could see her and marvel at how soon she was smiling back and cooing at them. Christabel was walking at a year, she used to follow me ever-place, I don’t know why, but she took to me, I have to say. And then she would take her nap on a pallet Molly had fixed up for her behind the counter. Pretty soon she was walking and saying Ma-ma and Da-da which tickled Jacky about to death.

  She called me Bee.

  Christabel was just over two when Calvin and Clara’s little Dolly, age five, come down with the diphtheria, and died of it, and when we all come back down the mountain from the burying ground, why there was Molly on the porch with Christabel in her arms just a-screaming.

  BJ, BJ! SHE HOLLERED. Jacky was gone then too. Come here! Oh, everybody come! Christy has got it too. Which turned out to be true, sure enough. She was struggling for breath with her face all red and her little eyes flat in her head.

  We done everything we knowed to do. Clara swabbed her throat with turpentine, then blowed brimstone sulfur down it though Christabel cried so piteous that I had to go out and stand in the wagon yard. They lit pine tar torches all over the house. Christy’s mouth was full of old gray stuff like spiderwebs which Molly in her desperation tried to scrape out with a spoon until the blood started running down her little chin and Molly couldn’t stand it and had to quit. By the time Jacky got back, Christabel had yellow stuff coming out of her nose just as fast as you could wipe it off and was choking for air. Jacky snatched her up against his shoulder and walked her all night long singing “All the Pretty Little Horses” over and over. Molly sat on a chair and watched them. All over the store, you could hear Christabel trying to breathe.

  Jacky carried her wrapped in her favorite little quilt that she dragged around everywhere, and rubbed the satin edging all the time with her fingers. She was the funniest, best little girl. She was dead by morning.

  It took three of us to get the baby away from Jacky, so we could bury her. Oh, he carried on awful.

  That is no way to act, Clara came right out and told him severely. Look to your wife, who sat still as could be, staring off at the mountains, at nothing.

  Well, you know that sorrow will take over different people in different ways. And of course it is unnatural, the most unnatural thing that there is, for a child to die like that. They say there is no greater grief. When old Preacher Livesay come up here saying it was God’s will, and suffer the little children to come unto him, why Jacky jumped on him like a bobcat, then run him plumb off. Everybody was scandalized including Clara and them who go down to his church pretty regular. That is the Welcome Home Baptist Church in Sweet Holler which me and Jacky never did attend. I ain’t got no use for it, and Jacky didn’t have no time for it.

  Two of the Rumples children died too, and that little Hawks boy from up on Groundhog. It was a sad, sad time.

  But even so, the body will take over after a while, you know. The body wants to live, and it is bound to do so. So because they was young — and naturally sparky, both of them — Molly and Jacky come back to theirselves after a time, or seemed to, though she said privately to me that she never would get over it, nor want to. We were sitting out on the store porch in the old rocking chairs, watching it rain.

  I want to think about Christabel every hour of every day, she told me. There is a hole inside me now that will not be filled up, ever, nor do I want it to be, no matter how many children I might have. It is a place for me and Christabel to be together, like we used to be on those nights when Jacky was gone and I’d get up to nurse her. I remember the rain drumming so loud on the roof, and the moon shining out on the snow. It was like we were the only people awake in the world, just her and me.

  I turned to look at her. You reckon you will have some more then, sure enough?

  I never once thought I would want a child, she said real slow, but now I want it the worst in the world. I want it for Jacky. It is all I want.

  Well, I hope you get another one then, I said, and she said, Thank you, BJ, and so summer came along and all, and her and Jacky took to sweethearting up a storm and carrying on silly the way they had done before, and to look at them, you couldn’t have told that anything bad had ever come up in their life. Except that sometimes a look would come over Molly’s face when she sat down alone for a minute, or come back in from the garden by herself, a real private look, not sad exactly, and I knew then that she had been there, in that place with little Christabel.

  Then at the tail end of January 1889, Molly’s second baby, named Spencer Jarvis, was pronounced dead at birth by Dr. Bowen who attended. I made the coffin myself. It was about the size of a toolbox. Jacky carried it. We all climbed up there in the snow except for Molly of course, some of the women stayed down at the house with her.

  It was hard work digging in that frozen ground, but there was a lot of us up there, and we didn’t have to go real deep, of course. We buried Spencer next to Christabel whose stone reads CHRISTABEL JARVIS, OUR DEAREST HEART, B. MARCH 9, 1885, D. MAY 12, 1887. Old Mister Crabtree carved it for them free, I swear it would just break your heart. Later he made Spencer one too, with just his name and the date on it, one date only, Jan. 29, 1889. We stood out on top of the mountain and took off our hats and said the Lord’s Prayer, and that was that. It was a low heavy sky covered in clouds, looked like the underside of a quilt, and sure enough it started snowing on us as we went back down the mountain.

  Later that same nig
ht, Molly ran out barefoot and rolled in the snow, over and over, in her grief. She did not know what she was doing then or for days to come. Ever time she’d lose a baby, seemed like it took her longer to come out of it.

  Yes sir. I am doing the best I can, sir. But now we have got up to the hard part, and it is not an easy thing to tell. I will try to tell it a quick as I can.

  Another stillborn baby, Junius, was to come in 1890, and then a beautiful little girl she named Mary Agnes, that lived for three weeks in 1893, long enough to get everybody’s hopes up.

  It was sometime in between the two of them that Jacky invented the rolling store. He bought a wagon, a mule, and a red bow tie for seventy-five dollars. I never did know where he got the idea, but I for one was glad to see him go. For Jacky did not have it in him to be sad for long, or sit still, or stay in one place, he had to get out and get moving. First we put sides and a good tin roof on the wagon, then we built shelves up against each side with a little space in between, just about big enough for one person to go in and see what was for sale, or for Jacky to get in there and find what somebody wanted. We put a regular house door on the back. Then he stocked it up with everthing he could cram in there, remedies in particular, such as castor oil, black draught sulfur, Epsom salts, mustard plasters, milk of magnesia, and Dr. LeGear’s Cow and Horse Prescription, now that has always been a real big seller for us.

  We all thought the rolling store was a crazy idea when Jacky first come up with it. Fact is, it was a good business decision. Damn good. Jacky hit the road and done great with it. Came back empty every time. Sold out. Me and Molly and Calvin kept on running the store, and Molly run the storehouse school too, in the mornings, and everybody loved her. Time passed as it will. Grandaddy Roscoe died, Aunt Luvenie died, God bless her. Biddle and Betsy had twins. Boys.

  Molly had another boy herself, Washington, born dead three years after Mary Agnes, and another baby born real soon after that, and not natural. Not normal. Named her Eliza. Molly grieved so, and wouldn’t let hardly anybody see that baby, but I seen her, poor little thing, and laid her out myself and then buried her up in the row. Put a rock on her grave the same as Washington and Junius. It had got to where it didn’t seem right to let Mister Crabtree carve a stone for every one of them, and Jacky claimed there was no point in naming them anyway. Jacky himself would not take any part in naming them. But Molly insisted, and swore they could not go to Heaven without a name, I don’t know where she got that from. She named every one of them.

  Anyway, this time it was summer, and Jacky was drunk when we done it. Calvin and Biddle were holding him up by the shoulders on each side.

  Looky here what a fine crop of babies I’m a raising, he said. Like cabbages all in a row.

  You bastard, said Molly, shaking all over, leaning on me.

  Jacky took off with the rolling store the minute we got down off the mountain and did not come back for a month and a half. Molly stayed in the bed for the longest time with her face turned to the wall, and would not even get up when Miss Agnes came to see her. Mister Black sent the Indian up here to inquire about her. But it seemed like it taken her longer and longer to get over it, ever time.

  It was to happen once more, now that was Fannie, born Christmas Day 1900, you could not even hardly call that one a baby. And then that was the end of it. Just a row of rock babies up on the mountain like a little stone wall, and a husband with a red bow tie that had took up traveling in a rolling store, and a pretty wife alone on a windy bald. Well she wasn’t really alone. Not strictly. For I was there too, right along, and the rest of us, and half the county still coming up here for the dances. But the situation of it, see, was what caught people’s fancy, for people are interested in other people’s business anyway, and so of course there was a lot of talk.

  All kinds of stories started up about the two of them, as stories naturally will, kind of like that old love vine that grows all over Rag Mountain, it comes back every year, and you can’t kill it. It was said that Jacky was mean to Miss Molly, as they all called her by then, and that he just liked to run around and never wanted no babies in the first place, and that he beat her to make her lose them. I am here to tell you, this was not true. Jacky loved her. And he mourned those babies something terrible and hollered from mountain to mountain every time she lost one. Other folks said she didn’t want them, and done things to herself to get rid of them, and this is the meanest tale of all. I don’t know what is wrong with people, to start such stuff as that. I reckon they have not got enough to do, or they have just got to believe that somebody else someplace is worse off than they are.

  The only part of them stories that was true was the part about Jacky running around on her, a thing he could not help, it seemed, for he was bound to be a traveling man. I knew it, and it may be that Molly knew it, but I could not tell you that for sure. There’s things a person can not bear to know. You can’t never tell who somebody will love, you know, nor how fierce they can be about it. What I do believe is that she loved him anyway and could not stand to lose him. If she knowed anything about any other women, such as Ruby Coldiron or Icy Hinshaw, she did not let on. She kept cheerful, and held her head up with a smile. And every time he came home, she was always so glad to see him. She’d run out the door to fling herself on him and hug him, and Jacky he done the same, swinging her around in a big circle and kissing her in front of anybody, even at their age. For we was all getting on a little, you know. But Jacky always thought she hung the moon, and he loved her something terrible.

  Now I kept a pretty close track of this myself, for I was watching over her, in my way, same as I always watched over Swannie and Miss Luvenie and Aunt Belle. I had to. Wasn’t nobody else up there to do it.

  Well, for an instance, I’d take me a walk around the place every night, pretty late, just checking on things. A patrol, you might say. Seeing that all them women was asleep and the horses was put up and the doors was latched and what-not, and I have to tell you, it was not a month before the end that I seen Molly and Jacky out waltzing on their porch in the middle of the night, him singing something into her ear. I couldn’t hardly hear him, but she could hear him. And the moon so bright, you could see them as plain as day, swooping all around real graceful-like. I can’t tell you how I felt, standing there in the shadows while they was dancing. And this was no time atall before it happened. Whatever that spark was between the two of them, it did not go out, not even after they got done farming that crop of stone babies.

  So there is no way that she could have killed him. No sir. That is all talk, just a story, told by fools. I ought to know. I was right there.

  NOW THERE WAS ONE time not long before it happened that Icy Hinshaw come up to the store herself. It was a dark afternoon with a cold mean kind of a rain. Somebody had drove her up here in a wagon, some man, but I couldn’t see who it was for the rain.

  Can I help you? Molly went toward her when the bell rang and the door opened.

  I come around the counter as quick as I could, as soon as I seen who it was.

  She stood just inside and took off her wet scarf and shook her head like an animal so that her red hair sprung up and then settled all around her shoulders. She was wearing an old brown coat, a man’s coat, which came down to her shoes. Old shoes, I noticed. Wore out. Now you could never say Icy Hinshaw was a pretty woman, not with that sharp nose and sharp chin and those sunk-down pale gray eyes. White eyes, almost. But there was something about her, for a fact. I remembered back when we was all young, and she’d run with the rest of them, and fiddle like a fool, all night long. She was a match for Jacky, sure enough.

  I walked over to where she stood ignoring Molly.

  Well Lord, if it ain’t old BJ. Icy grinned the lopsided grin I remembered, so that just for a minute, she was beautiful. How are you doing, you old ugly thing?

  Just fine, I said. It’s good to see you, Icy. What can we do for you?

  I’m looking for Jacky, she said.

  He’s not
here, Molly spoke up quite plainly, like a schoolteacher talking to children.

  You sure? You sure you ain’t got him hid back there someplace? Icy squinted at us.

  I am afraid not. Molly smiled at her. He’s over in Tennessee with the rolling store.

  Either Molly had turned into the best liar in the world, or she truly didn’t know a thing. It was a curious moment as they stood there looking at each other in the dim gray light of that dark afternoon.

  Maybe I can help you out, Icy, I said. Come on back here with me. I reckon this is something about that timber lease your daddy has up on the mountain, I said, making something up. She followed me back over to the counter where I gave her some money and some all-day suckers for the kids. I knew she would not have come up to Plain View unless she was desperate.

  Molly busied herself with sweeping up, and then went over to stand on the cold porch and watch the wagon move across the bald and out of sight.

  I came up behind her and put my arms around her waist and my face — my face — in her hair which smelled like lavender. Molly — I started, determined to say it all then, finally.

  Oh BJ, she said, breaking my hold. She turned to face me. You know you will always be my best friend in the world. She stood up on tiptoe to kiss me, just once, on the mouth, then pulled back and put her finger to my lips the way you would shush a child, and ran down the steps and across the wagon yard to their house through the rain without her cloak.

  So I WAS SURPRISED, to tell you the truth, when she asked me to take her over there right after the funeral which we held ourselves, up on the mountain where we buried him. Preacher Livesay had offered to come and preach, now that is the one Jacky jumped on, but Biddle just grinned and told him, Not hardly. If Jacky didn’t want you up here when his baby died, he don’t want you up here now. We turned down Felix Boykin and Reverend Graebner from down in Jefferson too. We bury our own, said Uncle Hat, who run the thing, and so we did. Grandaddy Roscoe would have liked it, he believed in the family doing for themselves and staying to themselves. So they tuned up and played “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” and “Angel Band,” Jacky’s favorites. It was a hot sunny day in August — dog days, it was — with a little wind blowing across the black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace and daisies that grow all around in the burying ground up there, flowers so thick on the ground that you couldn’t hardly see some of them little baby rocks there in the row. Big spiky thistles and purple phlox. Orange and black butterflies everyplace.