by Jane Yolen
Then Cousin Nancy got out another bottle of pop that she’d stored in her satchel, plus two glasses. That satchel was like the never-empty bag in the tale about the old woman and the wind. I wondered what else it contained.
Filling each glass to the brim, Cousin Nancy told me the story of when I was born, a story I hadn’t heard in years.
“Your mama was plumb wore out from your birth, but when she held you, all her spirit came flooding back into her.” Cousin Nancy smiled. “She stared down at you lying by her side and said, ‘Looky there, Nan, she’s all red and white and black,’ her voice a wonderment, though weak. ‘Like that girl in the fairy tale.’ Your mama just plain loved the old tales.”
“Happily ever after,” I said. “Anyways, that’s the promise.”
That made Cousin Nancy glow, like she was a jack-o’-lantern all lit up inside. She kept her hands tight clasped in her lap, afraid to reach out and touch me in case I shrank back away from her like I had before. How could she have known that now I’d have welcomed that embrace? Even if I couldn’t have told her so. But she said, like it was an echo, “Happily ever after,” and clinked her glass against mine.
We both knew Mama’s story and my story were a long way from any such happiness. And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she’s ever going to be. Unhappiness seemed to me a straight line into forever. I clutched onto the drawstring with all my might and made a birthday wish. Then I clinked her glass with mine.
When we walked back to my house, I believe that both of us were fearful that our faces would give away what had happened between us: a small hope if not an actual promise of happiness ahead. But Stepmama was gone, a note on the door stating only: Gone to church.
“Which church?” asked Cousin Nancy, for it was already three in the afternoon, way past time for any service in any of the churches around here.
“I don’t rightly know since Stepmama hasn’t ever been to any church that I know of,” I said, shrugging. Then, putting my hand over my chest and feeling the horror/ comfort of the bag and what was in it, I opened the door and went inside.
Cousin Nancy didn’t come in, of course. She hadn’t set foot inside the house since the day Stepmama arrived. I waved at her out the window, then turned.
As always, Papa sat in his chair by the fire though it was unlit since this was still early fall. But he smiled just a bit at me, possibly more a touch of heartburn than an emotion. Still, I took it as a sign and after stuffing some of the rowan berries in his pants pockets, I gave him a huge grin and went into my room.
I glanced back right before closing my door. His head had already sunk back onto his chest and he’d begun to snore again.
Heartburn, then.
But the church thing was niggling at me. If Stepmama planned to take me along, I needed to know what to expect. There were all kinds of churches, up and down one side of our mountain and the next. Most of those churches were pure Baptist and some were Pentecostal and a few—a very few—were Catholic. I heard this from the kids at school. But none of them, as far as I knew, met late Sunday afternoon. So was she really at her church—or up to something else? And how would I ever find out?
It was too much of a dark puzzle for me and thinking about it threatened to spoil my joy in the day. So I put it out of mind and went into my bedroom. There I reread Cousin Nancy’s card and looked at my parents’ photograph for the longest time. Then I put them both in the secret drawer of my dresser. Next, I nailed the string of garlic over my window and the rowan branch over the door, believing that now I was as protected as I could be. And, I hoped, Papa, too.
I went back into the living room, carrying my homework with me, to watch Papa sleep until the night wrapped around the house. Only then did the front door open and Stepmama—like a shadow—slip back into the house, taking her scarf off as she entered and filling the house with cold.
•15•
COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS
I’ve often wondered about courage. Easy to read about it in the old tales, where it takes the right sword or spell to defeat the witch. Easy to read about it in scripture, where a good heart and a strong belief are all one needs to be armored against evil. But courage in this world is a subtler thing. A word said right or wrong. A chance meeting. A photograph. A promise. A satchel. A caul.
Would any of these save my godchild from what lives in her house and attacks her soul? Would any of these save her from that she-devil’s hand?
And what about my poor Lem, who is all but lost? Did I lose him or did he lose himself?
Yet take heart, Nan. Aren’t we promised that the lost will be found, good turn away evil, the prodigal return? Doesn’t the priest warn against sinking into despair, which is a lack of hope? Doesn’t he tell us that losing hope is a sin?
I will not lose hope. I will find my small bit of courage so I can help Lem somehow find his.
That night, of the twelfth birthday lunch with Summer, when I got down by the side of my bed and said my prayers, I spoke for a long time to Ada Mae. I could just about see her at my bedside, wrapped in a flowing white robe, her white wings fanned out behind her, an angel.
“Ada Mae,” I said, “help me that I may do God’s work. And yours.”
She smiled, but she said nothing.
I suppose angels don’t talk to mortals simply because we want them to, but only under orders from God. So I stood up, realizing with a sharp pain under my breast that in fighting this thing, except for God’s watchful eye, I was to be on my own.
But surely, I thought with a shiver, that’s enough.
It had to be.
•16•
SIGNS
My courses came right before my thirteenth birthday, early for some, late for others, but my mama’s had done the same, or so Cousin Nancy had warned me. The very next week, Stepmama’s told me we’d be off to church together on Sunday.
Since she’d said I was to go when I turned fourteen, I wasn’t really prepared for it. But evidently, it was getting my first period that decided Stepmama that it was time.
By then I’d had over two years with Stepmama and should have been ready for anything. Two years of charms, cozening, threats, curses, cold comfort, privation. Two years of icy glares, small meals, hard work. Two years of watching Papa sink deeper and deeper into his chair despite my stuffing his pockets with the rowan berries any chance I got, mostly after I’d washed and ironed and hung his trousers in the cupboard. Still Papa slipped further away into the comfort of his chair till it was hard to tell which was which.
It’s not for nothing they say around here: “Meanness don’t happen overnight.” Stepmama was well practiced in meanness. And the thing about meanness is, it saps the spirit. There were times when I felt like sinking deep in Papa’s chair with him.
But at least the beatings had stopped. The pinchings, too. The garlic and rowan branch and caul had worked magic enough for that. And even though it may have had as much to do with my getting older and wiser and sneakier, I thought every day since: Thank you, Cousin Nancy.
I had taken to wearing the caul in its string bag around my neck, taking it off only when I bathed, and even then kept it close to hand. I’d made new little bags to house the caul; the best and safest was one I sewed in home ec class, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Cadwell. The bag was of silk with silver and gold threads. And a few bits of Papa’s hair that I stole out of the bowl on Stepmama’s table.
Yes, I believed the caul had kept me safe. And maybe the thing was also somehow a sign from God. I began to believe that even if I couldn’t ever best Stepmama, I could outlast her. I mean, I was almost thirteen and she was old. Nigh on to thirty-five if she was a day, I thought. Even her powders and face paint couldn’t disguise the age lines and the gripe lines that ran as deep as the railway tracks some said were bound to cross our mountain any day soon. A railway! I longed to see one, but I knew Papa would hate it, the steel rails crushing the green.
As I got closer to my birthday, I promised myself that when I was old enough, I would run off and make my own life. Ride a train. Go to a city. Maybe even take classes at the university in Morgantown. It was all a dream, of course. At eight or nine or even ten and twelve, I could never dare to actually believe such a thing could happen. But with my thirteenth birthday looming, suddenly I did dare. And believing it, I was lulled into a sense of safety instead of constantly looking for a way out on my own.
My Sundays at church with Cousin Nancy and the everyday-ness of school, where I once again shone, seemed enough to sustain me. Though I hadn’t any close friends—because I’d no one I was allowed to spend time with after school—I wasn’t bothered by it. The girls at school thought me stuck up, but it was more as if I was bottled up. I kept my heart and my confidences tightly locked away. As for the boys, they were intent on hunting and fishing and telling stupid jokes. The other girls laughed at them, but I couldn’t do any such thing. So they ignored me as well.
At least by now I knew what to expect from Stepmama. Or I thought I did. Love—true or otherwise—was no part of the equation.
And then I woke on an ordinary school day at the hind end of May with blood on my sheets and a queasy stomach. I wasn’t particularly surprised. I knew what I had to do.
Stripping the bed quickly so that the mattress wasn’t spoiled, I washed the sheets by hand with lye soap and salt till my fingers were sore. Then I put the sheets through the wringer, careful not to get any of my fingers caught. Papa had a sprung thumb from the time he helped his mama with the wringer. I knew a moment’s inattention could mean disaster.
Then I hung the sheets out to dry. This all before Stepmama woke. But since I always did the laundry before going to school, there should have been nothing about my washing the sheets to alert her.
Cousin Nancy had already given me a copy of Good Housekeeping magazine at Christmas and pointed out the ads in it for Kotex. She even slipped me several of the napkins. I’d been a bit embarrassed by the present except she was so matter-of-fact about it. However, it turned out to be a fine gift because now I could take care of myself without letting Stepmama know. I’d hidden the napkins in my bottom drawer, under my winter nightgowns, a scattering of rowan berries on top—just in case Stepmama should pry.
So off I went to school that morning, with one of the napkins pinned in my panties, another two stuffed in my school satchel, thinking myself safe.
But Stepmama must have had a secret talent I hadn’t been aware of. She sniffed out the blood even though those sheets—snapping in the May wind and glistening in the morning sun—smelled only of sunshine, lye soap, and salt.
When I got home, she was waiting for me, the bottom sheet in her hands. She didn’t want to see the 100 percent I’d gotten on the arithmetic test or the A+ on the English paper that I’d labored over for three nights though usually that’s the only part of my schooling she was interested in.
“So, you’re a woman now,” she said abruptly, holding up the telltale sheet, which to my eyes was white as snow, white as the name she called me.
“I’m thirteen. Almost. That’s hardly a grown woman.”
But it was merely her way of letting me know that she knew. And my snappish answer, usually bitten off before I ever dared speak it aloud, let her know all.
“On Sunday you’ll come to church with me.” She didn’t touch me. She hadn’t touched me since I’d come home from my birthday celebration wearing the caul around my neck. But there are subtler ways to practice abuse. “May’s the perfect time to celebrate.”
Perfect time for what? I wondered. Celebrate what? But I didn’t ask. Instead, looking down at the ground, I asked, “Which church?”
I tried to speak casually, as if the question didn’t matter, but she’d guessed in a moment. Smiling that serpent smile, she waited for me to look up and notice, and only then turned away.
It should have been a warning. It certainly was a sign. But I didn’t recognize it until later. Much later.
Stepmama’s church was far enough away that we had to drive to get there. It was rare that I was allowed in her car. I’d been in it only twice in my life, once when I’d had a toothache so bad my cheek swelled up to twice its size and I had to be taken to the dentist out in Cowan, fourteen miles away; once when I’d had a tonsillitis attack that was so bad, Stepmama took me to the hospital in Richwood, over an hour on the twisting road.
If I’d been looking for signs, the weather was bright and the sky still shining, the color of apricots. The roads were clear as we made our way up the mountain. It was warm enough that we had the windows down. Anyone watching us might have thought they were seeing a girl and her mother driving off into the evening in companionable silence. A girl dressed in a modest long skirt, her mother with a face scrubbed clean of lipstick and powder and a navy blue scarf covering her hair. I thought it a peculiar way to dress for church. Cousin Nancy and her friends always wore their finest. But there we were, in the dowdiest of clothing, and Stepmama was looking decidedly unlike herself.
Well, at least the silence was real.
The night birds were already singing. One had a high-pitched squeak that sounded like a door that needed oiling: Aek-aek, aek-aek. And then the whip-poor-wills started up. I tried to pretend they were angels following me, just in case, but it was just the ordinary kind of birdsong you hear on a spring night.
Soon enough, I knew, the sky would be full of stars. Sometimes on the mountain, they seemed close enough to touch.
When we rounded the hairpin turn going out of town, the trees closed in overhead like curtains, and cold air suddenly rushed in through the open windows.
“Close your window tight,” Stepmama said. It was to be the only thing she said to me until we reached the church.
We drove for maybe a half hour more along the curving road, then suddenly turned off the blacktop onto a country lane. Another few hundred yards and I saw an old building backed up against the tall, dark trees. Once upon a time it had probably been somebody’s house, but now it had a plywood steeple tacked up over the second floor, the top of it reaching above the roof like a hand signaling for help.
There was something carved over the front door. As we got closer, I could read it: With Signs Holy Church.
I said the words out loud, then turned to Stepmama. “What does that mean?” But she didn’t answer.
We drove nearly up to the church door, and I was afraid we were going to drive right in, but at the last moment she turned the wheel sharply and landed us up on the grass. There were about a dozen dark-colored pickups parked close by.
Only one man was outside the church, standing by the front door. He was sucking hard on a cigarette as if to get it all smoked down before the service began. When he saw Stepmama, he let some of the smoke drift back out through his nose, suggesting a banked fire.
“We’re here,” said Stepmama to me.
I didn’t say, “Obviously.” Stepmama never said anything obvious. There had to be a reason that she told me. Maybe an emphasis, I thought. Like underlining something in an essay, which my teacher said was one way of letting the reader know you really mean something.
We got out of the car and walked to the door.
“Evening, Miz Morton,” the smoking man said. “Things are about to start. Reverend Fred has some new—”
Stepmama stopped him with a hard glance.
“Some news,” the man said, flicking away the cigarette. I watched as its little red light fell into the short grass like a shooting star. “He has some news.”
I didn’t think that was what he meant to say, but like Papa, he was under Stepmama’s charm.
Now I could hear singing through the closed door. It was nothing like the singing in Cousin Nancy’s church, which is quiet and often off-key. This was a rollicking, hand-clapping version of the old union song “We Shall Not Be Moved.” I could feel the beat of it beneath my breastbone.
Suddenly touched by the song
, I began humming along.
“Enough,” Stepmama warned, hand raised.
Even though I knew she wouldn’t hit me—not while I was wearing the caul, and not in front of this man—I stopped humming.
She pushed through the door and we went in.
I was used to the beauty of Cousin Nancy’s church with its simple pews and the single lovely stained glass window. Even the plain Baptist church I remembered going to with Papa—long before Stepmama came into our house and our lives—even that church was pretty compared to this. And the one time Mama had taken me into the abandoned church on the mountain, it was peaceful; the very stones seemed to breathe.
But here in With Signs Holy Church the main room was no more than two or three rooms of the old house knocked together, the walls separating them having been removed. I could still see where the old walls had been. The low ceiling made me feel pushed down, not lifted up as I did with the high vaulting of Cousin Nancy’s church. Besides, I could see where the paint was peeling off. The curtainless windows were closed against the cold of the night. In fact, several of them had been painted over with black paint.
There was little in the church sanctuary but three rows of wooden benches, a long table at the front, and a stove in a corner, already lit. It’s not for nothing the mountain is nicknamed “Freeze Your Heart Mountain” and “the Ice Maiden.” That stove was pumping out a stream of heat. A stack of cordwood lay right beside it and every now and then, one of the men would slip another log in.
On the walls were cutout magazine pictures of Jesus with his hands on the heads of different small children, all of them white, ragged, and adoring. Also three handmade quilted banners hung from the ceiling by ropes. One said: Jesus Saves. The second proclaimed: Welcome to With Signs Holy Church. The third stated simply: Mark 16:16–18. I was pretty sure that last referred to the Bible, but as to what verse I had no idea.