On Agate Hill

by Lee Smith

  Molly wore a bright blue satin dress, blue as the sky. Clara had tried to argue her out of it earlier, saying it was not a proper dress to wear to a funeral. I don’t care, Molly told her. Jacky bought me this dress, and he liked it, and I am wearing it. Molly could be as stubborn as anybody when she took a mind to. She stood with her straw hat in her hands while the wind pulled at her yellow hair. I swear, she still looked like a girl, at least to me, like the very girl she was when she come riding acrost the bald with Jacky all those years ago.

  At the end, she would not leave but stood to watch them shovel on the dirt with no change in her fierce bright face, though those around were crying. It was hard for us to lose Jacky, you know, even if he drove you crazy half the time, you had to love him. You had to enjoy him. It was hard to take in that he was gone for good. It was like somebody had blowed out the sun in the middle of the day. For I had always felt that Jacky was my brother, but closer than a brother. My other half.

  BJ, Molly said to me while they was doing it, I don’t know if I can stand this. I don’t know if I can live without him or not. And the truth was, I didn’t know if she could, neither.

  Then all of a sudden at the very end Molly ran forward then stumbled and knelt down by the side of the grave, scooping up the dirt with her hand. She pressed it to her mouth and kissed it, then threw it on the grave. Goodbye honey, she said real clear, so all could hear her. Several people gasped. Molly bowed her head. When she got up and walked away, her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and dirt had got on her skirt too.

  Now you tell me, you reckon she would have done that if she had killed him?

  Molly held up her head looking neither right nor left when we come out into the open and saw that crowd of people stretched across the bald — Lord, it was the awfullest number of folks gathered up there you ever seen, there was even more of them by then than there was when we had left carrying Jacky, or what was left of Jacky, which was not much. We had not let nobody see the body. It must have been three hundred people up there.

  Cousin Percy Allgood had not moved a muscle. He was still standing right there where the path goes into the woods, holding his rifle over his shoulder, staring down at the crowd so that no one would have thought of following us. Ernest Dollar and Jubal Smith stood beside him, and General Gentry with tears running down his face.

  They took off their hats when we started coming out of the woods one by one, and the whole crowd stopped what they was doing and went silent. I swear, you could hear the wind through the balsams despite of all the people. Then Molly stepped out, and they all went Aaah as one. Some people leapt to their feet while others craned their necks, it seemed they all had to get a good look at her. They had been gathering for days, growing in number ever since the fire. You would think that they had never seen a fire before. Of course they had been going through the ashes with a fine tooth comb too, taking everything they could find that was any use to them, which was precious little.

  Will the circle be unbroken bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye?

  There’s a better home a-waiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky

  Biddle started singing as we walked on down to the store, or where the store used to be, and all took it up as we walked along, stopping to shake hands and hug people, Molly too. Seemed like everybody wanted to touch her, for a fact, and stroke that shiny blue dress, kind of like Christabel used to stroke the edge of her little blanket. Everybody wanted to say they had been there and seen her, I reckon. Everybody we knew, everybody that had traded in the store or danced on top of it. It made me sick, to tell you the truth. This whole thing makes me sick. People can act so nice, bringing food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

  Finally I got her back over there in the house. I thought she would want to lay down, and I was prepared to sit on the porch and keep folks away for the rest of the night if need be, seeing as I couldn’t run the store no more. I had thought it all out ahead of time. I was going to guard her from everybody.

  But Molly fooled me.

  The first thing she done was get a jar of Jacky’s corn liquor and pour out two glasses of it. One for her and one for me. She tossed her head back and drank hers down, while I sipped at mine.

  BJ, she said, I want you to take me over there.

  Over where? I asked.

  You know, she said, looking me straight in the eye.

  I did. I waited while she changed clothes, and then we slipped out the back door. I made to harness the mule but she said, No, I can ride, so I saddled the horses instead. I want to ride Jupiter, she said. That was Jacky’s horse.

  We rode out through the woods acrost the old pasture instead of acrost the bald, though several of them seen us, all the same. Still, nobody tried to stop us, though I knowed that Newt Letcher, the sheriff’s deputy, was out there someplace in the crowd. He did not make to stop us. On we rode in silence acrost the mountain and headed toward Round Knob, crossing Little Horse Creek at the mill, with Molly taking a sip every now and then from the silver flask Jacky always carried in his saddlebag.

  We went to the Ponder Cove.

  I had not been there in years, but I remembered right where it was. For I had gone there too, once upon a time, but that is another story. We reined in our horses at the head of the holler and stood looking down. The sun was fixing to set by then, so every tree and every rock and every thing cast a long, long shadow. It was still sunny up at the top where we were, but already getting dark down there at the house.

  The cabin was set down in a little blind holler up against the side of a mountain. I had remembered it as a nice big cabin, but now it looked real small to me, and pitiful. Some kind of a building had fallen down right there at the back, a kitchen or a lean-to or something, and she had just let it lay there. Trash was scattered all around the yard where several children were playing, all of them blond as angels. Their cries barely reached us, like the sound of birds. There was no sign of Icy herself. Molly sucked in her breath, sitting Jacky’s horse ramrod straight. A hot little breeze blew over us, lifting her hair. A bigger girl was taking wash off the line and putting it into a basket.

  Then all of a sudden, a black and white spotted puppy came tearing around the side of the house and ran circles around the children, who screamed and tried to catch it. They rolled over and over in the weedy grass. The bigger girl carried the basket of wash into the house. After a while she came back out and called to the other children, a baby on her hip. She looked almost too slight to be holding the baby.

  All right, Molly said to me without turning in her saddle. Let’s go, then.

  You don’t want to go down there?

  No, she said.

  We turned and rode back through the gathering dark. She didn’t say nothing more about it, so I didn’t either. It was past midnight when we got home. We found the sheriff’s deputy waiting for us, setting on the porch.

  He stood up.

  Hello, Newt, I said.

  BJ, he said. Then, Mrs. Jarvis.

  Then, Will Floyd found a pistol in the ashes this morning.

  You know the rest of it.

  YES SIR. THE FIRE, then. Again. Ain’t you all got ears? How many times have I got to tell it? Yes sir.

  It was August 25, 1907.

  I had done made my patrol that I was telling you about, and gone to sleep. Well, we was all asleep, I reckon. That is, me and Aunt Belle in our house, and Molly over in her and Jacky’s house, Calvin and Clara and them on up the hill. Uncle Hat and Biddle was up in West Virginia playing music. Everybody was asleep. It was a cool calm night in the dark of the moon.

  Then Molly woke up out of a sweet dream for no good reason. She said she just laid there with her heart pounding, and wondering what was wrong, and why she had woke up in the first place. She couldn’t figure it out. So she got up and walked through the front room and out on the porch and looked over at the store and seen it all lit up from inside by a red fiery glow and she set out
running over there barefoot. She said she seen some big white flashes as she was running over there, which I have took to be the oil and kerosene tanks exploding, and then she seen Jacky’s wagon, the rolling store, pulled up to the barn back there, and she knowed he had got home sometime in the night, and she got afraid he might be in the store.

  She said she just knew he was in there. He often did this, you see, he’d come in late and go over there and get himself something to eat, or drink, you know, and put his money in the register, and such as that. Maybe pick on the banjo for a while to relax himself. Jacky never was one to sleep much of a night, you know. He was like a possum, he’d stay up all night, sleep all day long. So there was not hardly any doubt in Molly’s mind where he would be.

  She started screaming his name, over the sound of the fire, but the fire was so loud that she knowed he couldn’t ever hear her. So she run up onto the burning porch.

  It is the sorrow of my life that she did not come to get me first.

  But you can’t really watch over nobody, you know, no matter how hard you try to do it. You can’t get them to do whatever it is that you want, and you can’t get them not to do whatever it is that you don’t want them to. You might as well not even try.

  Yes sir. This is what happened when I woke up. Now I wake up kind of slow-like as a rule, and it taken me a minute to grasp that here was Aunt Belle a standing in my bedroom by my bed in her big old wrapper, whispering to herself and plucking at my covers. I don’t know how long she had been standing there when I woke up.

  What? I hollered. What is it? I jumped out of the bed and she commenced to picking at my sleeve. Still, I wasn’t worried about anything in particular, just kindly mad at old Belle for coming in there and waking me up like that, even though I knowed she was crazy. I wanted to go back to bed but she kept picking at me, and backing up to the door like she was drawing me on or something. Her white hair flowed down past her waist.

  All right, I thought. I will go see what this is about.

  I no sooner stepped out of the bedroom than I seen the awful orange glow of the fire and smelled the smoke which filled our house too, by that time. I set old Belle down in a chair and told her to stay there, and went back and pulled on my boots and took off running.

  I got over there just in time to see the whole front of the store cave in, porch and all, dance floor crashing down and sparks shooting up to the sky like fireworks. I seen the rolling store too, outen the corner of my eye. Uh-oh, I thought as I busted in through the back door that I have gone in and out of all day every day of my life. From where I stood, the front of the store was nothing but a wall of fire coming toward me, but right in front of me there was Molly all bent over and pulling on Jacky’s legs, and there was Jacky a laying on his back all bloody and burned looking. His head was laying way over to the side and his mouth was open with blood coming out of it. It wasn’t no question that he was dead.

  Molly, I hollered, getting over there finally. Molly! I grabbed her from behind. She was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear her. The heat and the noise in there was terrible. You could not breathe. I figured I had about one minute to get her out of there or we would all be dead. I pried her hands off of Jacky and picked her up and carried her out, kicking and screaming, and held her back while the whole store fell in and the rest of it happened. By that time Calvin and Biddle and them had appeared, and it took all of us to hold her back. She didn’t want nothing but to go in there and try to get him out, she didn’t want nothing but to go to Jacky. To be with him. This is what she kept screaming, I want to be with my Jacky.

  I was right there all along, and I am swearing to it. Yes sir. May God strike me dead too if this ain’t the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Molly would have died too, a trying save Jacky, if we had let her. It was pitiful.

  B. J. Jarvis

  John Howard Willetts aka “BJ” or “Black Jack” Jarvis

  George Ragland

  George Carter Ragland, Coroner

  Wilkes County, State of North Carolina

  Mildred Hash

  Mrs. Mildred Cooley Hash

  Court Stenographer

  Duly sworn, signed, and witnessed this 18th day of November 1907

  • • •

  MOLLY AND THE TRAVELING MAN

  (Traditional Ballad, Ashe County, NC)

  Gather round, ye young lovers, and I will tell

  How a match struck in Heaven can end up in Hell.

  They was two lovers met at a dance one night,

  They fell in love by the fire’s bright light.

  Well, it burned them up, like a fire will do.

  Now there ain’t nothing left

  But ashes and rue.

  Lord, Lord,

  Ashes and rue.

  There ain’t nothing left

  But ashes and rue.

  And a smoking ruin on a mountain top

  And a gal who begged her traveling man to stop.

  Then she shot him dead, and burnt up the store.

  Said, “Honey, you ain’t going off traveling no more.”

  For Jack was bound to wander, like a man will do.

  Now there ain’t nothing left

  But ashes and rue.

  Lord, Lord,

  Ashes and rue.

  There ain’t nothing left

  But ashes and rue.

  She helt up her head, she looked left nor right

  Her yellow hair hung down, and her eyes shone bright.

  She come walking down the mountain so fancy and so free

  And that big crowd it parted like the sea.

  Lord, Lord,

  That big crowd it parted like the sea.

  She was all dressed up in satin blue.

  Now there ain’t nothing left

  But ashes and rue.

  Now the wind blows cold on that mountain so drear

  For pretty Molly is gone far away from here.

  And you can’t buy love, nor hear the banjo ring

  For the general store ain’t selling anything.

  Lord, Lord,

  It’s true. That store ain’t selling nothing

  But ashes and rue.

  Another Country

  April 10, 1927

  Agate Hill

  Dear Diary,

  I can’t remember anything about the weeks between the night of the fire — August 25, 1907 — and the day before my coroner’s inquest, which finally took place in Wilkesboro, not Jefferson, there being so much talk about it at the time.

  It was almost Thanksgiving.

  I had been held at the Wilkesboro jail for nearly three months, and frankly I had come to cherish the confines of my cell, ten by twelve feet, the single low hard bed, the dim hanging bulb which swung slightly on its chain through the still air every now and then for no good reason, the old green iron washstand in the corner, the high slitted window where I could glimpse a piece of the changing sky. It was all I could stand to see. I would not go out for exercise. Nor would I allow myself to be visited by the slimy pockmarked preacher or the fat old righteous preacher they sent in to see me, either one. I do not have time for preachers, I told them all, and turned my face to the wall.

  I was too busy remembering Jacky, memorizing him, every inch of his body, every expression on his face, the way he threw his head back when he laughed, how his thumbs were double-jointed, the one-sided grin that always asked a question, the way he stared at me when he wanted me to come to him, his tawny eyes turning darker and darker. He had a rosy birthmark on his arm in the shape of the letter C, or a sickle moon. He was so skinny that I could feel his shoulder bones like folded wings, his hip bones like white china door knobs so close up underneath the skin it was scary. And the skin was so smooth right there, over his hip bones, smooth as a baby’s, while over most of his body was spread a curly tangle of gold hair. I took him inch by inch, rib by rib, bone by bone. I remembered everything.

  Memorizing Jacky took up all t
he time I had.

  The jailor, Odell Cartwright, was a huge gruff man with a creaking gait and hair growing out of his nose. He walked heavily, his legs now stretched out straight in front of him like trees while he sat in a metal rolling chair looking at me as he ate cold fried chicken, one piece after another, which Martha Fickling had brought for me along with some clothes for my hearing. He had not let me see her. Odell Cartwright threw the bones in a pile on the floor where Tom Bright, the trusty, would have to pick them up later. Odell Cartwright liked to roll his chair over in front of my cell and sit there watching me, as if I were an animal at a zoo, and you know what? I didn’t even care. I turned my face to the wall and memorized Jacky. Once or twice I had had to use the pot while Odell Cartwright was watching me. I looked him in the eye while I was doing it.

  “Mrs. Cartwright will bath you off tomorry,” he said to me — he always called his wife Mrs. Cartwright — “and then myself and some others will escort you over to the courthouse. They have finally got up a jury of six, by the hardest, the way I hear it. But you’d just as soon stay here now, wouldn’t you? unless I miss my guess.”