Fair and Tender Ladies

by Lee Smith

  This happened the summer after that spring I was telling you about, nobody knows exactly how long she was dead up there in the cabin before Tenessee came down here to tell us, but it was some several days according to Oakley and his daddy who went up there later to do the necessary. I will never forget the night Tenessee arrived, in a thunderstorm, it is no telling how she found her way to us in the night or why she chose not to wait until morning. But here comes a pounding on the door, and the dog barks and the baby cries, and Oakley says Hang on, Ivy, don’t move and gets his gun, for we don’t have too much company up here in the middle of the night as you can immagine.

  And lord, it was Tenessee! all by herself, sopping wet with her hair straggling down in her eyes, clutching that little bead purse in both hands. As soon as Oakley opened the door, she rushed in and hugged me and set to crying. Behind her, lightning flashed and lit up the whole of Bethel Mountain, lightning branching out like a sycamore up in the sky.

  It is Garnett, Tenessee finally said, and Oakley said What? Who? for I guess he had never heard Granny called by her given name in all these years.

  Go get your daddy and go up there as soon as it gets light, I told him, and finally I got Tenessee to lay down although I couldn’t get her to take off her clothes or give up that filthy purse. But I covered her up with a quilt and laid down beside her to warm her up, and I could hear her mumbling, mumbling as I fell back to sleep.

  When I woke up again it was light, full light, and she was gone. Oakley was gone too, and so I thought Tenessee had gone back up there with him and his daddy of course. Immagine my surprise when Oakley came home that night and said, Why! Where is Tenessee?

  I thought she was with you, I said.

  She was here asleep when I left, said Oakley. That beats all.

  It does, too.

  For Tenessee got up in the early morning and snuck off from here, Lord knows where she went, either. She had no money that I know of, no food, and no clothes but the clothes on her back. Now do you think she went out looking for a man, after all these years? Maybe she finally found one. Tenessee is seventy if she’s a day. And she is gone, gone for sure, as surely as uncle Revel is gone, him that suffered such a love as to spin him loose for ever in the world. I reckon Tenessee has suffered from the lack of such a love. Anyway, nobody in Majestic has seen hide nor hair of Tenessee since the day she left. We have not seen her either, nor has she been back up there to her cabin, there is a Mister Burley living there now, Oakley and his daddy have leased it.

  So. Tenessee is gone, gone, and the statue I have of her when I close my eyes is this—Tenessee standing still in the rainy door with the lightning branching out behind her head.

  It’s a funny thing, but I don’t think she’s dead. I think she’s still wandering somewhere.

  And Granny too, in a different way. For I did not go up to the burying ground with them when they buried Granny, so it don’t seem to me that she has died really, but that she is off wandering too, with Tenessee. I have gone to Granny’s grave since, on Decoration Day, and felt of the dirt with my hands, but it still don’t seem to me that she is in there, it just dont.

  Do you remember Decoration Day? It is the second Sunday in June, when you go and fix up the graves and put flowers in your mason jars and sink them down in the dirt to stay. The first time we went back up there, it was so much work to do. You have to tend a grave regular, Ray Fox Senior says. He knows all how to do it, too. Oakley’s family is real good at keeping things up. Danny’s grave is sunk in now and covered all over in violets, but won’t nothing grow on Babe’s, he was so mean. Babe’s grave is hard red dirt. They laugh at me when I say this, but it is true.

  Still, I can’t get no feeling that Granny is dead, none atall, and sometimes when I am walking the trace, I think I will catch a glimpse of her long skirt swishing just around the bend ahead, or I think I smell her pipe-smoke in the air. And sometimes it is like I hear her talking in my ear. Just the other day for an instance, I heard her say to me just as plain, A body can get used to anything except hanging.

  But I think this is wrong, Silvaney.

  I think a body can get used to hanging too.

  A body can get used to anything.

  And even though she’s gone, it’s still like I can hear Granny talking in my ear. I can’t get a feeling she is buried, nor the Cline sisters neither.

  You remember them—the lady sisters, Virgie and Gaynelle Cline that used to come telling tales on Old Christmas Eve, and had told Daddy all the tales he ever knew, and he took us up there one time when they all lived on Hell Mountain and their house was so neat and they sat in those two little rush-bottom chairs on the porch. You wore a red skirt, Silvaney. I remember. It used to be Beulah’s skirt. The sisters used to take turns talking.

  Well, right before Joli went down to stay with Ethel, I got it in mind to go up there. I am not sure why either, except it had something to do with Joli leaving. I made her leave, I made her go on to school. But anyway, one pretty day last summer, Joli and me put some peaches in a poke and took off up Hell Mountain, leaving the younguns with Dreama and Martha. I was giggling like a schoolgirl that day. In my mind’s eye I could see the lady sisters the night they left our cabin, flying over the snow. I told Joli about it, but she just laughed and said, Oh Mama. She didn’t believe they flew. But that is Joli, she is more like Ethel some ways, and I am glad of it. I would not want her to be like me for anything.

  So we climbed and climbed, and Joli kept saying Mama, you know they are not going to be up here. You know they’d be a hundred years old by now. This is crazy.

  Oh just come on, I said. For I had got it in mind to go up there and take her. Before she left, before she went down off the mountain for good—for when Joli comes back she will be all different. I know. So I took her up on Hell Mountain while she was still mine.

  But she was right.

  I had a stitch in my side something awful by the time we got up there, and everything was gone. There was nothing left—nothing. And yet I was sure it was the right side of the mountain, the right cove. I remembered the chimney rocks on the way, and the two big pine trees behind the cabin. The pine trees were still there, blowing ever so gentle in the wind, with that sighing noise I remembered.

  Oh Mama, Joli said.

  Come here, I said. I dragged her over to where the cabin had stood and then we saw the heap of stones that was the chimney and the white roses running wild through the high green grass.

  This here is it, I said. It is where they lived all right. They planted those roses, I said.

  So Joli and me sat down and ate our peaches and they were so good, the best peaches ever, the juice ran all down my face and I didn’t care. Bees buzzed everywhere among the roses and the long sweet grass. They say there is blue grass over in Kentucky but I have not seen it.

  Joli laid back in the grass. She looks like a girl yet even though she is a full grown woman, almost nineteen. She has a sweet sharp pointy face and those big gray eyes. What all kind of stories did they used to tell? she asked me.

  So this is a statue too, me in the grass at the old Cline place with Joli, roses blooming and bees buzzing all over. That day was like a day out of time, frozen fast. I was a girl again, that day. Joli and me were like girls together. I started telling her some of the old stories. It’s funny how clear I can recall them. It is like they sit in a clear calm place in my head that I never even knew was in there. I told Mutsmag, Old Dry Fry, and how Jack fooled the smart red fox. Joli left a few days later, crying, mad at me for sending her away. Oakley drove her into town.

  Then came fall, then winter, one of the hardest winters we have ever had, and I lost the baby I was carrying then, that day last summer when Joli and me went up Hell Mountain and sat in the grass. It was a boy, we buried him up on Pilgrim Knob.

  And now for Oakley. The statue of Oakley is always working. Its back is always bent, its face is always turned away. For it aint no way to make a living from a farm. And y
ou know, I must of knowed that somehow, it must of been down in my mind the same as those stories are, in the still place where you just know things. I must of knowed it from childhood, from watching it kill Daddy first, then Momma. But that is the thing about being young—you never think that what happened to anybody else might happen to you, too. Your life is your own life, that’s how you think, and you are always so different. You never listen to anybody else, nor learn from what befalls them. And the years go so fast—oh lord, it seems like yesterday that we were plowing this field for the first time with Sal, who has been dead now seven years. It seems like yesterday that me and Oakley planted those taters in the dark of the moon. Well, we still plant them that time of the month. And Oakley still gets a deal of pleasure from this land, moreso than me, for when his work is done of an evening then it is done, for he don’t have to mend the clothes or can the corn or feed the baby. I don’t mean to sound like he lays around, neither—not like some. Oakley’s statue is bent over like I said, working. But his face is turned away. So it would be hard at first to say what he might be doing, for he don’t talk much and as times have got harder and harder, he has turned his hand to many a extry job. So he has lost the love of it that he used to have.

  For instance, we don’t grow cane now, as it was a pleasure crop. In the fall when it got ripe, Ray Fox Senior and Delphi Rolette would come up here and help Oakley cut it, and then cut the stalks out of the blades. You know it has the prettiest spike of red seeds that stand at the top of the stalk when the cane is ready—oh you remember, Silvaney, don’t you? We used to grow cane up here in the old days too, before Daddy got sick, when we were little. And you and me and Beulah and Ethel would take those spikes and stick them in our hair for fancy hats. Well, Joli and Martha done the same, and Ethel got us to save her a pile of them to take down to sell in the store. She says that people in town will use them for decoration! I can’t see that. But Ethel has got a good eye for what will sell. Ethel can sell anything, Stoney says. He says she could sell a bucket of mud if she took it in mind to, and I reckon she could! Anyway, we used to cut the stalks and save the spikes for Ethel, and borry the cane mill from Mister Gurney on Dogleg Branch, and then the men would dig the ditch and place rocks from the creek along the sides to hold it, and cut up wood to feed the fire, and then I’d scour the vat and we’d haul it in place, and word would go out everywhere—

  A big stir-off!

  Early that next day, Oakley would hitch up Sal and we’d all take turns walking her around and around while the mill crushed the cane and the green juice ran out in the trough. We carried it bucket by bucket to the vat, and Oakley started boiling it. It takes nearabout a day to boil it down. Meanwhile folks came from far and wide with their jars and bowls, to take some home. The children skittered like waterbugs all over the place, real excited, darting in to the fire to skim off the yellow foam with a spoon. They’d eat it till they got sick! We had fiddling too, and singing, and a lot of drinking, and dinner on the ground. We’d come out with about 8 gallons of molasseys, when all was said and done.

  Not enough, Oakley says now, to warrant so much time and trouble, for then we would split those molasseys with the Rolettes and Oakley’s daddy, of course. So after a while when times got hard, we stopped putting in the cane patch. But I miss it. I miss the stir-offs, and storebought molasseys is not the same. I loved the taste of that hot yellow foam and the ginger biskits that Edith Fox used to make with those molasseys, and I loved the notion of a day so different from all the rest.

  You know what Granny used to call molasseys? the long sweetening.

  Reach me some of that long sweetening, honey, she’d say at the breakfast table. I can just hear her now.

  So we don’t hold the stir-off any more. Too much trouble, Oakley says, turning his face away.

  But I remember so well one night in October when we had been back up here for about four years, we held it on the night of a big full moon—we had got going late because Sal had busted one of her sweeps—that is the long pole you hitch the mule up to—and so it was well into the night when the molasseys got boiled down good and thick. Oakley was there by the fire, stirring it with a long wood paddle and laughing at some men that had gathered around drinking. His face was red in the firelight, and the moon was red too when it come up at last over the top of Bethel Mountain. It was a windy, chilly night. I stood right outside the firelight, watching. Early Cook, who was a real old man by then and has passed on since, Early sat right up close to the fire in our daddy’s ladderback chair and ate out of a vat with a tiny little spoon. He was so busy eating that he never once cracked a smile at the stories told. But Oakley! Oakley was laughing and laughing, stirring those molasseys. Then all of a sudden he looked around. His face got bright and full of yearning in the light.

  Ivy, he called.

  I hung back watching, I don’t know why. Oakley looked from face to face around the stir vat.

  Dreama, do you know where Ivy is? He asked his sister who has always been a little bit hateful to me purely out of spite, since she loves Oakley so.

  No, Dreama said.

  Ivy, Oakley hollered. Ivy! He hollered real loud and then I came running and Oakley caught me up and kissed me on the mouth right there in front of Dreama and his daddy. But I could feel him shaking under his old wool shirt.

  Oakley, whatever’s the matter? I said.

  I lost you for a minute, Oakley said. He held me tight.

  We made us a baby that night I believe, a baby which did not come to term and is buried now up on Pilgrim Knob, that was the first one we buried up there. Now I have got two little babies on Pilgrim Knob. I never gave them a name. But I remember losing them and getting them both, I remember everything. I remember the fire and the moon and Oakley’s face, and exactly how we made that first little dead baby that very night, what I have come to call in my mind, the night of the long sweetening. It is like a curse, to remember as good as I do.

  So you see why I am sad that we have stopped the stir-offs.

  And you see that it was not always like this, with Oakley’s face turned away.

  But he has had a lot to contend with, it is true. For a man that likes farming as much as Oakley does, not to be able to do much good at it is awful. But it is not you, I keep trying to tell him. It is the times. It is the economy. We did good to get out of the mines when we did, that’s a fact. It is worse over there. Why it used to be that a man couldn’t make but a dollar a day in the mines, and the days they could work was precious few. It is a mighty big difference between the old days—those boom days—and these sorry times now. People from the coal camps are moving out in droves, going to Detroit, going back home to stay with their relatives and try to farm again. Like us. But they have mostly forgot how to do it, and so there’s lots that are worse off than we are. At least we got out while the getting was good, which I keep telling Oakley and it is true.

  Violet and R.T. are still up in West Virginia with the union, it is no telling when they will ever come back down here. So it looks like we have got Violet’s Martha for good and I am so glad. Martha is simple but she’s a fine hand to help out, I don’t know what I would do without her. Martha runs and hides if a stranger comes up the holler, but she will come when you call her out. And loves a baby! She is so good to LuIda and little Maudy.

  Oakley says, The depression dont make no difference up here. May be he is right too. But he and others have turned their hands to trapping and hunting sang these last years. Trapping pays pretty good, you would be surprised. A muskrat will bring a dollar, a mink up to 12 or 15. Gray foxes are easy to catch, but a red fox is hard to get and brings up to forty. A couple years back, Oakley got a red fox and didnt tell me, and came back from town with a new blue dress for me. He had picked it out himself at the Family Shop. It was blue velvet, too short and real impractical, but I never said a word, except Thank you. Oakley uses double spring traps because if you shoot, you mess up the hide. He is good at trapping. Most men around her
e, they wont do it despite of the money, they have not got the patience. They like to shoot too good. And you have to skin whatever you get, and case the hide. If takes time. It is the kind of work Oakley is good at, and likes. Oakley moves slow. He has got all the time in the world. The better you case the hide, the better grade you will get on it from the companies. Mostly Oakley takes his hides down to Ethel and Stoney’s store and they pack them off to Sears Roebuck for him.

  He goes after sang too, mostly in October when the leaves turn yellow so you can find it. Not that it is easy even then. There’s some folks will follow others, to see where they get their sang. I have heard tell of one man leading another astray apurpose, so as not to let on where his secret place is. A man is mighty close-lipped on where he finds his sang. For a big bunch of it will bring a pickup load of meal and flour, bacon and salt and other goods. Just to look at it, you wouldn’t think it would be worth a penny. It is a no-account plant with three large leaves and two littluns. But it is the root they use, and the root is shaped like a human body, like a little man. It gives me the creeps. It is the Chinese people that want it, lord knows what they do with it. Granny used to boil up sang to clear out your throat if you had a roomy cough as I recall, and also she said it would cheer the heart, comfort the bowels, and help the memory. Well, lord knows I don’t need no help with the memory! My memory works overtime anyway. I just can’t bring myself to boil up any sang, because I think about all those creepy little Chinese people liking it so, and somehow this puts me plum off of it. I feel like it is foreign stuff. So when Oakley has been out sanging, I tell him, Sell it all.

  And you know, now as I am writing all this down, I wonder if this is what has made Oakley turn his face away, him going off by himself so much up in the mountains after hides and sang. For a man can lose the habit of talk and the habit of looking at you. Oakley looks down at his hands, whittling. A man can work so hard he gets caught way down inside of himself.

  Another thing Oakley does is go around on carpenter work, particularly in the winter, building steps for some and sheds for others, and fences and gates, and what not. But you have got to watch him on this because he is like to do it for free, and will for sure if it is a widder woman or somebody bad off in any way, or somebody in his church. And while it is true that Oakley would give you the shirt off his back, it is also true that he would give the shirt off his back to anybody. This makes me feel bad. And I feel like Oakley works so hard, and stays so busy, that he has not got time for me! If he’s not working, he’s going to church. Ever time they crack the door now, there goes Oakley.