by Lee Smith
“I am home for good,” I told them, and even though Daddy couldn’t talk none, he could understand me. Tears came up in his old blue eyes. I hugged him as hard as I could. “You took good care of usuns,” I told him, “and now I aim to take good care of you.”
2
Lizzie Bailey
We depart for Europe within a fortnight, as soon as the Red Cross is completely stocked and outfitted. Caroline and I have been down to the harbor to see it more than once, of course, and I must say it is a fine sight, the great white ship brilliant in the sunlight, the broad band of red and the fluttering flag proclaiming to the world our mission of mercy. In fact, the newspapers are calling it the “Mercy Ship,” and there is a write-up daily concerning these preparations. I have to pinch myself to assure myself that this is actually happening. Events have moved with such swiftness! First the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination at Sarajevo in June. Then in eight astonishing days, comprising July 28 through August 4, Austria, Germany, Serbia, Belgium, France, Russia, and Great Britain threw themselves into the war. Of course there is a lot of sentiment in this country for us to do likewise, with feelings against Germany running high at this time. Yet our mission is mercy, and a hospital unit of surgeons and nurses will go to each country involved in the war, myself to France, for I have a smattering of that language. “Neutrality” and “Humanity” are engraved upon the great seal of our ship, but I foresee that maintaining this position will become increasingly difficult if the war continues. Here at the Nurses Settlement, I busy myself with the routine that has occupied me for several years, yet my mind skips about in such an alarming fashion that I fear I will dispense the wrong medication to some unlucky patient!
Caroline and I have several books about France. We read them nightly, and practice the language . . . and yet, and yet—oh! Here is a riddle worthy of any of our new practitioners of this so-called science of the mind: How can it be, I wonder, that the closer our date of departure draws, the less I am able to even imagine France, and the more I find myself travelling back through time and circumstance, back to my Virginia childhood? In my current heightened state of mind, I remember everything—the painful and the pleasant alike, and I feel, oddly, such a need to set these reminiscences down on paper. Indeed, I feel a sense of urgency to do so. Perhaps it is always thus, for those departing—as I am—upon a great journey.
As if it were yesterday, I see our house set on the gentle hill, a large double cabin, two cabins really, connected by the breezeway in between, the wide porch overlooking the yard and the little road, hardly more than a path, which winds around that bend following Grassy Branch itself. Impossible to say how many hours I spent just sitting on that porch, looking down the road, wondering who might come along.
I can still see the wildflowers that grow in profusion all along the road, the burning bush that grows by the gate; I can smell the sweet wild perfume of the honeysuckle whenever I close my eyes; I taste the tart little apples that grow on the gnarled trees behind the barn; and I still hear Grassy Branch itself, running and gurgling along over the big rocks where I sit in the sun and dangle my feet in the clear, cold water. Even in the house, we can hear Grassy Branch—it sings us to sleep each night. And over all, of course, behind and above everything, stands Cemetery Mountain, gentle and sloping at its lower elevations, where we farm, austere and forbidding as it rises sharply to its mysterious craggy peak (which my brother Durwood nicknamed “Witch’s Tit”!). How well I remember the taste of the cressy greens that grow wild in the creek, the coffee smell of early morning, Daddy’s crooked black hat, Durwood’s old dog Ruth that lay up under the house, Daddy saying “Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the Lord my soul to keep” with me and little Sally every night, and how the rain swept up our valley—you could see it coming from a long way off.
In my mind’s eye I see so clearly that little girl I was then—miserable and motherless, to be sure, yet full of life and longing, full of belief that sometime, somewhere, there would come a better day. Lord knows whence it derives, the foolish, innate optimism of youth. . . . I was nearly ten when Mother left us, twelve when we learned of her death, and fourteen when Daddy had the stroke and R.C. returned to us from whatever dark and mysterious realms of the spirit he’d travelled through in those lost years. (Try as I might, I was never able to persuade him to tell me anything at all about that time in his tortured life.)
I say “tortured”—for I am persuaded that R.C.’s anguish is habitual with him and has always been so, that it was not simply the result of our mother’s abrupt departure. R.C. has been a person of extremes for as long as I can remember. Even as a boy, nobody laughed harder, or ran faster, or yelled louder—or sulked longer, or acted meaner, or was sweeter . . . or more tenderhearted! Yet he was quick to anger, and many was the fistfight to the death which he and Durwood waged in the yard, with me crying and imploring them to stop it, stop it! Other times, he and Durwood would act the fool until they had me rolling on the floor breathless from laughter. And no boy could sing nicer or play a sweeter fiddle than R.C., either, though he had to hide his talent from Daddy in the early days. I remember he kept his fiddle out in the barn, in a special dry space he’d built up under the corncrib, and many were the afternoons I saw him sneak and grab it, wrap it up in a gunny sack, and set off for town or wherever it was that he went, grinning and sitting tall on his big black horse. How I missed R.C. when he went off to work at Beady Nolan’s! For there was an intensity about him which is difficult to describe.
Let me put it this way—everyone felt more alive when R.C. came in the room. There was something about R.C. that put an edge on things.
It was not so much the way he looked, although Lord knows he was good-looking—at least, the girls thought so! He had the curliest, prettiest fair hair, which never turned dark as so often happens, yet his once fair skin was now nearly swarthy. He had a big nose, high cheekbones, and a large, mobile mouth. In form he was big and hulking, he seemed to loom over you as he spoke, and his dark eyes burned out in his face. Yet his voice was deep and gentle, almost halting. He hardly spoke, or else he spoke too much. R.C. was a young man of extremes. Often he seemed abstracted, brooding, lost in thought.
I believe he was a kind of genius, for he could build anything, make anything he chose to. Once he conceived of it, there was simply nothing R.C. couldn’t do. I’ve heard that even as a little boy he made bread trays from buckeye wood and sold them downtown on Court Day—along with biscuit boards, rolling pins, rocking horses, deadfalls for catching animals, you name it. One time Judge Reckless’s wife rode all the way out to Grassy Branch to find out if R.C. could fashion a newel post and a gazebo for the fine new house she was building.
After he came back, he used to go up on Cemetery Mountain regularly to trap muskrats, minks, coons, skunks, and possums, and then he’d trade the skins for shoes for us—as well as for sugar, flour, salt, and coffee—whatever we didn’t grow. We always had plenty of everything after R.C. came back. He was the best trapper in our mountains by far, because of some secret trapping device he’d invented, which he would show to no one.
I believe, thinking now in retrospect, that R.C. could have gone anywhere and done anything he chose, and been successful at it, too—even if he never would be happy. The only time he was truly happy, I believe, was when he was actually playing music. The rest of the time he was driven by a great restlessness—yet I suppose we were lucky for it, as it led him into scheme after scheme, and we were the beneficiaries.
I will never forget the day, soon after R.C.’s return, when a man came by our house with a banjo. It was certainly the first banjo I had ever seen, and it may have been the first that R.C. ever saw as well. The fellow sat down, at our request, and played a few tunes—I remember his playing “Get Along Home, Cindy” for one, and “John Hardy.” Then he handed the banjo over to R.C., who took it and played it instantly. The fellow was amazed, but Durwood and I were not, well aware of R.C.’s talents.
Of course, had our visitor happened by Grassy Branch before Daddy’s stroke, Daddy would not have permitted such music in the house, but after the stroke, all that righteous fire went out of him, to be replaced by a sweetness and light that would make you weep. I don’t believe that Daddy lost his faculties, mind you, upon losing his speech; I believe rather that a finer, more tempered nature came to him. But in any case, R.C. was fascinated with the banjo from that time on, fashioning several and ordering others from a mail-order catalogue. I dearly loved to sing along, especially on the old ballads and lullabies, for they reminded me so of Mamma. I’d sing “Barbry Allen” and “Brown Girl,” “Down in the Valley,” and the cuckoo song. Sally especially loved “All the Pretty Little Horses.” When she was a baby, I had sung it to her every night to put her to sleep.
In more recent years, friends have remarked upon how difficult it must have been for me—just a child myself—to raise Sally. And yet, as I’ve answered in all honesty, it was not hard at all! For Sally was a sweet-natured, easy baby, and a docile little girl. Actually, she gave me a great deal of pleasure at a time in my life when pleasure was in scant supply. And I derived real satisfaction from the knowledge that this—taking care of Sally, I mean—was something I could do which would make a real difference in the world. For I felt helpless, you understand, as indeed I was helpless to control the situation which had placed her in my charge, just as so many, many children—God help them!—are helpless, trapped within the circumstances of their lives.
I think I knew, even then, that I would have no children of my own—and though events may yet prove me wrong, for Heavens! it is not too late—I suspect this will turn out to be the case. To date, I have not been able to envision combining marriage and vocation satisfactorily, or indeed, at all.
For mine is not a profession to adopt lightly, or casually, and I have felt—ever since that day in 1904, after Daddy’s stroke, when Miss Covington came out to Grassy Branch—a sense of real vocation. Perhaps “mission” is the more exact word.
I shan’t forget my first glimpse of Miss Covington as she rounded the bend of Grassy Branch on her little mare, wearing a gray cloak over her gray split skirt, the little white cap perched firmly atop her pale blond hair, which she wore in a careful bun at the nape of her neck. Her cap sported the little red cross, and on the snowy breast of her white blouse she wore a smaller gold pin bearing the caduceus. My schoolteacher, I knew, had sent her to us—Miss Covington had only just come to Cana at that time, the public health program being in its very infancy, and strongly resisted by most folks in our community, who swore by the granny women and the old remedies. Miss Covington came riding along by Grassy Branch looking pretty as a picture, sitting straight up. For some reason, she put me in mind of a little soldier. I went out and opened the gate.
For there was something in me, I see it now, which needed Miss Covington—which craved her.
Since Mamma left, I’d been doing the best I could, of course, for I always felt her departure was my fault, in a way—after all, I was the one who wanted to go to the medicine show! I can never forget this. So I have always done the very best I can, dedicated to erasing some of the harm done by those who run loose about the world doing just whatever pleases them at any given moment, those who are messy and heedless, prisoners of their passions, unmindful of all others save themselves. I will not be like that, I had told myself over and over, and so I had worked my little fingers to the bone, especially in those years before R.C. came back to us. Of course Daddy was strong then, doing the farm work of several men, yet Durwood was shiftless, Pack had gone off to work on the railroad. Sally needed my constant attention, and I was all alone, the only girl in the house, the only girl—I often felt—alive in all the world!
For we were very isolated there at Grassy Branch. And Daddy, hard as he worked, did not talk much except to pray. Durwood stayed gone for days and weeks at a time, or lay out under the apple trees in a dreamy stupor when he was home. Sally, though a good child, was of course too little for conversation. So I did what I had to—cooking, milking, feeding the animals, running after Sally, churning, patching, washing, ironing, cleaning . . . well, there is no end to it. A woman’s lot is a terrible one, and I realized it early, even before the age of twelve, yet I had no alternatives, it seemed—if I wished to be good and do my duty. And this is what I wished, above all things.
“You take good care of your daddy and your little sister, now,” Preacher Johnson had said to me. I tried my best. But I was a mere child, a slip of a girl, and oftentimes I grew so exhausted I felt I might die, and oftentimes I wished I would die! And yet, still other times, my soul would rise up like a bird and beat its wings, flying high into the blue sky above Cemetery Mountain, wild, wild with longing—for what, I knew not. I’d be seized with emotion then, and often I’d fall weeping on the ground.
I’d been quite a fine student, yet when Mamma left and I had to stay at home with Sally, all my “book learning” seemed to fly right out of my head. My studies, which I had loved, struck me then as useless, wasted. I imagined all the books I’d read as lined up on a huge bookshelf suspended somehow in the air, separate from me, separate from my life as it was then on Grassy Branch. I yearned so for something, yet I could not even name my yearning—until, as I say, that day in 1904 when Miss Covington rode around the bend of Grassy Branch.
She seemed so—how shall I put it? So all of a piece. For when I thought of Mamma, I thought of her as falling apart, somehow—the combs flying out of her hair, her hair curling down around her face in an untidy mass; her petticoat hanging; her bodice unbuttoned as she went singing about the house, the milky-white curve of her breast showing. I thought of our household as falling apart, too, especially now in her absence—goods scattered, dishes broken, chores undone, the laundry left out in the rain—for of course I could not keep up with anything but Sally after Daddy’s stroke.
And as for myself, I felt, I was not only falling apart—why, I was literally flying apart, with great velocity, little bits of me spinning off to every known corner of the universe.
Then Miss Covington came out to Grassy Branch, and bandaged Daddy’s arm.
The day before, not understanding at first the limitations which the stroke had delivered to him, Daddy had tried to go out to the woodshed—or I suppose this was where he had intended to go, Heaven knows what he had actually had in mind—and he’d slipped and cut his arm on the ax blade, not deeply, but it was a jagged, messy cut.
First Miss Covington tethered her mare. Then she took her nurse’s kit out of her saddlebag, set Daddy down in a chair, and proceeded to clean out his wound and bind it, wrapping the white bandage round and round his arm while Sally and I watched. I admired Miss Covington’s kindness, her gentleness, her quick efficiency.
“There now,” she said when she was done. “I will leave some of these bandages with you, and every day you must wash the arm with soap and water just as I have done, and wrap a new bandage around it just so. It should heal up nicely in two weeks’ time. But if it does not, if any redness or puffiness or red streaking develops around the cut, you must have him come in to see Dr. Potter immediately. Immediately. Do you understand?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. She looked at me steadily for a moment with her soft gray eyes.
“Why, yes, I believe you do,” she said. “I believe you will make a splendid little nurse. Now how old are you, dear?” she asked further.
“Fourteen,” I said.
“And the little one?”
“This is Sally,” I said. “She is five now.”
“And how are you getting along out here?” she asked, looking all around and into the messy house, which embarrassed me.
“Just fine,” I said, and then I burst into tears.
Miss Covington held me while I cried for what seemed hours, until Sally started crying, too, just to keep me company. Daddy sat right there in his chair in the midst of all this crying, his face as blank and expectant as ever, reg
istering nothing. Once I thought I was finally through with crying, but then I looked over at him and started up again. At length I was done. Miss Covington made me blow my nose and sniff some smelling salts, and said that on second thought she would come back the following week herself, to check on Daddy’s progress.
Thus it began, the friendship which was to change my life, as faithfully she visited us during the next several years, through Sally’s measles, Daddy’s cough, R.C.’s stomach troubles (Ulcer, quit drinking, Miss Covington said), and the birth of R.C. and Lucie’s first child, the one they call “Pancake” now.
I see I am getting ahead of myself—I am always getting ahead of myself, it seems!
R.C. met Lucie Queen when he was off on one of his numerous money-making schemes, selling furniture to farmers around Oak Hill. He had bought a wagonload of furniture on the cheap, from a man in Bluefield who needed some cash money fast to pay off a debt.
The first time he saw Lucie Queen, R.C. always said, she was sitting in her aunt and uncle’s kitchen playing the autoharp and singing. She had long red hair, freckles, a deep strong voice, and an easy laugh. And R.C., who had “sworn off women for good,” or so he said, was so smitten with Lucie Queen that he failed to sell her aunt and uncle a single chair—and instead bought a whole set of china dishes that she was selling, for Lucie Queen was every bit as enterprising as R.C. Bailey!
I imagine they are using those dishes still, up on Grassy Branch—thick white china with a bouquet of purple violets in the center and a ring of violets around the edge. I imagine they’ve seen some rough use, with all the children up there now—I lose track! But those dishes were made to last, and so was Lucie Queen. I loved her from the minute I set eyes on her. She was just my age, sixteen.
I loved her, but I did not want her to marry R.C., though that would mean I’d have a friend at last. I did not even want her to love him, because the very notion of love terrified me, bringing to mind all the old ballads, which show love as a kind of sickness, or a temptation unto death, a temptation which destroys women, even as it destroyed Mamma. To me, “falling in love” was like falling in death—and one time, when R.C. had brought Lucie Queen over to Grassy Branch for a visit, I tried to talk to her about this.