by Lee Smith
R.C. had gone off to town to pick up something or other, which was unusual—mostly, he wouldn’t leave Lucie’s side when she came over to visit, since she never stayed long. Her aunt and uncle wouldn’t let her spend the night, so she and R.C. would have to leave at sunset to get her back across Cemetery Mountain before midnight, and it would be near dawn when R.C.’d come dragging home again, grinning the silliest grin.
It was hot as blazes that July day, as I recall. Lucie had hiked up her skirts and wrapped her strong legs around little Sally, who stood still for once and let Lucie braid her pigtails. We sat out on the porch. Sally was just as crazy about Lucie as the rest of us were.
“Listen here, Lucie,” I said all of a sudden, “are you going to marry R.C.?”
Lucie laughed her merry, musical laugh. “I reckon so,” she said, “whenever I take a final mind to, which I reckon I will before long. It don’t do to say yes too quick. They’ll think they’ve got more if it’s a little bit harder to get.”
As I said, it was very hot and still that day—dog days, it was—and the heat made my head hurt and my dress stick to my back while I sat in the rocker mending. Her answer infuriated me.
“Lucie,” I said, though in truth it was none of my business and I knew it. “Lucie, it is not a game. It is not a play-party,” I said between my teeth. “You are fooling with fire,” I said. I felt so angry.
Lucie just threw back her head and laughed and laughed. “Why, it is a game, too!” she said. “Don’t you know a thing?” I fell silent then, for I sensed that I knew too many things altogether. I felt far, far older than she.
Then it began to thunder, and lightning shot through the heavy clouds. The air smelled the way it always does right before a storm. The wind picked up and the leaves on the trees turned inside out, showing their silvery undersides.
“Oh, where is he?” Lucie wailed, peering down the darkening road, but just then R.C. came galloping right up to the porch and thrust a big box at her. “Here, honey!” he hollered, then wheeled his horse and headed for the barn just as the drops began to fall in earnest.
Lucie opened the box. It was a brand-new little Gibson guitar that he’d sent off for—she’d told R.C. she’d always wanted a guitar. As it turned out, this would be Lucie’s wedding present—no ring, but a new guitar, and it would be just fine with her, too. That’s how she was.
“Oh!” gasped Lucie then. She jumped off the porch and ran out toward the barn in the pouring rain, calling his name.
“Come on, Sally,” I said, and we went inside, for the rain came down so hard and fast that we were getting splattered even on the porch. I picked up the guitar and took it inside with me. Sally went to play with the paper dolls Lucie had brought her.
But something made me walk through the front room and into the dark kitchen, and stand at the open door looking out through the rain, where I could see my brother pushing Lucie Queen against the side of the barn and kissing her, putting his hands all over her body, finally pulling up her skirts behind and putting his hands there, too. I felt hot and terrible, watching this, yet I could not stop watching. I could hear Daddy snoring in the other room, and Sally making her paper dolls talk to each other. Then lightning flashed so bright it looked like day outside, and I could clearly see Lucie Queen down on her knees in the barnyard mud. Thunder crashed, followed by a deluge, and when the lightning came again, they were gone, inside the barn I supposed. I felt sick. I went and finished the mending.
Much later they came dripping into the house and said that they had gone for a walk in the rain. They looked flushed, intoxicated, as if they’d contracted a fever. I pretended to believe them. I gave Lucie a dress of mine to wear, although she had to leave most of the back unbuttoned as she was so much bigger than I.
R.C. did not take her back across Cemetery Mountain that night or the next, and the day after that he took her over to Holly Grove and brought her back married, waving the certificate to prove it. I don’t believe Lucie Queen’s aunt and uncle ever forgave them for that. But Lucie didn’t seem to care. She had eyes only for R.C., and I must add that he fast became a different individual altogether, a great deal less difficult and much happier as a result.
At first it angered me that he had been so difficult, so moody and temperamental, with us, and was now found so much easier to live with. I felt that we had had the worst of the deal! But I soon realized I should be grateful, for Lucie’s presence there on Grassy Branch gave me leave to help Miss Covington, and I dearly loved to accompany her as she went about the county trying (in vain, or so it often seemed to me!) to educate people about basic sanitary procedures and nutrition, tending to their illnesses and complaints. We delivered many a baby and wormed many a child. Miss Covington, I firmly believe, was a saint, never betraying any dismay at anyone’s ignorance or prejudice or lack of standards, maintaining always her calm, cheerful demeanor. Her felicitous manner is transmitted even now in the letters she occasionally writes, from the hospital training school in Cincinnati which she directs—and I imagine she is very good at it, too! Never again did Cana have a home health nurse as effective as she, and her successor, Gertrude Blivens, a horse-faced, bossy type of person, actually undid, or so I believe, much of the good Miss Covington had done. For we mountain people are a peculiar, proud lot, and must be approached correctly if we are to be approached at all. We will not brook contempt, or being talked down to—“biggetyness,” as Lucie would say. Nor will we accept charity in any form. Miss Covington’s practical manner always made it seem that she was just there to do a “job of work”—the only manner, I believe, which could have assured her entry into those remote homes.
So although I’d been forced to cease attending the Methodist school at Cana, I received an education all the same, from my dear Miss Covington. I learned not to drink water from springs or shallow wells when they are situated close by the outhouse—if there is an outhouse, which often, in the far-off areas, there is not! (They use the woods, like animals.) I learned that a baby should not be allowed to eat and drink just anything it can manage to bring to its mouth, that tomatoes are not poison, that measles will “come out” whether the unfortunate sufferer is fed sheep-dropping tea or not, that precautions should be taken against rain, as wet clothing is conducive to respiratory infection, that gargling with salt does help sore throat, but that a piece of smooth creek gravel placed inside a woman will not keep her from conceiving a child and is, in fact, very dangerous for her; also that putting butter on a sore and getting a dog to lick it is not a good idea, nor is there any reason for a woman not to bake a cake while menstruating. I could go on and on. I learned these lessons not from lectures, for Miss Covington never lectured, but on the spot, as these issues of health presented themselves during our time together.
And when the end of this time drew nigh—for Miss Covington stayed with us only four years before returning to Cincinnati to teach, this decision prompted by her mother’s illness—when her departure was imminent, she asked me whether or not I should like to go to nursing school, if she could find one that would waive the normal entrance requirements, for she felt that they would be unnecessary in my case.
She broached this idea one fall day when we’d been over to Frog Level and I was leaving for home. At first I did not want to let her see my excitement over the prospect, for instantly I felt disloyal to my family.
“I’ll think about it,” I said carefully, and I mulled it over as I rode the colorful trail along Grassy Branch on my way home.
For much as I’d enjoyed and profited from my time with Miss Covington, I had come to love Lucie Queen, and even R.C. in his new, more pleasant guise. They had had their first baby by then—little Reese. We all called him Pancake because he loved to eat pancakes so much. And Lucie was already pregnant again! I thought about her as I rode home. I had explained to her all the precautions Miss Covington had explained to me, and I had emphasized that nursing a baby will not prevent another pregnancy, as commonly believed,
and yet, and yet . . . Look at her! I thought, full of fury. My words had gone in one ear and out the other, obviously. So often I wanted to take Lucie by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. “Lucie, Lucie, Lucie!” I imagined saying. “Life is hard . . . hard! Don’t you know it? Don’t you know anything? Life is so precious, so easily lost. . . . You must be more serious, Lucie. Life is meant to be serious.”
But I had never found it in my heart to speak those words. They did seem happy, R.C. and Lucie. I had to grant them that. They had begun to sing in public, often accompanied by Durwood. It had come about accidentally, and now afforded all of them the greatest pleasure in the world.
Lucie liked to be the one to tell the story of how she and R.C. had gone into Cana shopping and had already spent all their money (on a new store-bought dress for her!) when the wagon broke down on their way home. But a blacksmith, Shorty Roberts, lived back toward town a ways, and when they walked back there to see him about it, he said yes indeed he could fix the wagon and shoe the horse besides, but it couldn’t be done until the morrow and he’d have to have cash money for it.
“Why don’t you-uns go to the bank?” Shorty had inquired, looking at them.
But of course they had no money in the bank. R.C. didn’t believe in banks. They went by Tom Kincaid’s store to borrow the money but found that he had gone off on a hunting trip, so they couldn’t think what to do next. They had twenty-five cents left between them.
Then, as Lucie tells it, “we gone into the drugstore and got us a dope, and whilst we was a-setting there, looking up at the front of the store where they was bills of all kinds posted, meetings and sales and such as that, why, all of a sudden I took this notion.
“‘R.C.,’ says I, ‘R.C., I reckon we will have to do something to get us some cash money, and there’s not but one thing I can think of to do to get it quick.’ And R.C. he was jest a-looking at me, for as a rule he was the one with all the big ideas. ‘Well, do you want to know it or don’t you?’ I says, and then he says, ‘Well, all right, Lucie, what in the hell is it?’ and I says, big as you please, ‘Sing! Hit’s the only thing I know how to do that wouldn’t make you mad or get the law on us.’ And R.C. is jest a-looking at me. Then he starts laughing. ‘Well,’ he says after a while, ‘just where do you propose we do all this singing?’ and I point straight out Mr. Sutton’s screen door at the square. ‘Right over there on the courthouse steps,’ says I, ‘but we had best get on with it, for it is late in the day and most folks is fixing to head on home.’ R.C. jest looks at me. He never did say yes. Then he puts his hat on and stands up. ‘Why don’t you go back over to Tom’s and put on that purty new dress?’ he says, and then I knew we were going to do it. I jumped right up and kissed him on the spot,” Lucie reported, “and we gone and done it all.”
This was Lucie and R.C.’s first public appearance. They took in more than enough to fix the wagon and shoe the horse. They took in enough to spend the night at the Mountain Inn, the only fancy hotel in Cana, and order breakfast in their room. “You never saw nothing like it!” according to Lucie, who never tired of describing either the room or the breakfast—the rolling table that the boy brought to their door, the white tablecloth, the sugar in little paper packages, and the silver covers that hid the food.
After that, given their enterprising natures, there was no stopping them. R.C. took it upon himself to have bills printed up and hire a hall or a schoolhouse. Then he’d post the bills himself wherever they were playing—Oak Hill, Holly Grove, Cana, etc. I have kept one bill as a souvenir. It says: “LOOK! The Bailey Family Will Offer a Musical Program at Pig Branch School on Saturday, August 1. The Program is Morally Good. Admission is Ten Cents. Posted by Mr. R.C. Bailey, Grassy Branch, Va.”
They played at square dances, play-parties, candy parties, house raisings, bean stringings, too. They played wherever anybody would pay them. After Pancake was born, they took him along and would put him down on a pallet on the floor; then later they took Sally along to hold him. They did not play at many dances, since R.C. was enough our father’s son to be uncomfortable with dancing, although it is my own private hunch that Lucie would have loved to dance if she’d been allowed to. But R.C., always tortured, forbade her, and the family never missed meeting at the Chicken Rise church, not even when R.C. and Lucie had to drive most of the night to get back for it. R.C. took Daddy to church every time they held the meeting at Chicken Rise, rain or shine, summer or winter, regular as clockwork. It made my heart swell to see the two of them sitting there. Ever since R.C. came home, he has been devoted to Daddy.
Although I can’t vouch for their programme’s being “morally good” or not, I must say it was altogether entertaining, and everyone seemed to find it so. The secret of their success, I feel, was Lucie—so unaffected, so guileless, she demonstrated absolutely no embarrassment or stage fright, and sang straight to the audience, looking at them all the while. She sang each song as if she believed it, and of course her voice really is remarkable—low, full, rich, almost smoky somehow, yet she is capable of hitting any note effortlessly. How I thrilled to hear her sing Mamma’s favorites, which I had taught her!—“Barbry Allen,” the cuckoo song, “The Gypsy Laddie,” “Brown Girl,” and the riddle song I used to love so much as a child: How can there be a cherry that has no stone? How can there be a chicken that has no bone? Finally the riddles are answered: A cherry when it’s blooming, it has no stone; a chicken when it’s pipping, it has no bone, and so forth. I always experienced a deep satisfaction upon hearing Lucie sing this song. For I feel in general that the world is a mystery, I suppose, one vast riddle, and it is good to think that there are a few answers, even though they be fleeting—only the words of a song.
Initially, Lucie accompanied herself upon the autoharp, but as she gained in proficiency on her guitar, she began to employ it more and more frequently. Durwood started performing with them as well, alternating among fiddle, autoharp, and mandolin, and at these public appearances he became virtually a new man, I must admit: neatly shaven, all spruced up, he took on an alacrity heretofore missing in his life. The act of public performance, which encouraged Lucie to be more herself , seemed to produce a brand-new Durwood altogether, a Durwood who emerged as the spokesman of the group, telling corny jokes, acting the fool—a regular crowd-pleaser!
R.C., eccentric to his bones, was oddly less professional. Sometimes he sang with the other two and sometimes not, rising abruptly to pace round the stage whenever he chose. But instead of distracting from the programme, R.C.’s sudden mysterious movements added a sense of drama and unexpectedness to the proceedings. And when he wished to, of course, he could fiddle like a house afire—“Bonaparte’s Retreat,” “Sally Goodin,” “The Devil’s Dream,” “Arkansas Traveller,” “Sourwood Mountain”—oh, nobody could fiddle like R.C. when the mood was on him! Or play the banjo, either. I suppose it goes without saying that R.C. was the presiding genius of the group. It was he who “worked up,” as he called it, the songs, figuring out new arrangements for even such old classics as “Shall We Gather at the River” and “Shady Grove”; it was he who found new songs for them to sing. Indeed, some of these turned out to be among the most requested—such as that haunting ballad “Preacher’s Son,” which R.C. picked up from an old man over at Bee, or his own “Melungeon Man,” its title referring to a mysterious strain of folks scattered through the mountains, which some believe to be descendants of this country’s first Roanoke Island settlers. Regardless of the origin of the Melungeons, that ballad captures such a feeling of otherness , of being outside, cut off from the rest of humanity, that I never heard them sing it without feeling a chill.
I was thinking of “Melungeon Man,” in fact, on the night I alluded to earlier, the night when I was returning to Grassy Branch with Miss Covington’s suggestion of nursing school filling all my mind. Yet I thought I could never do it, I could never leave Grassy Branch, as I was so sorely needed at home—and too, I’d never been anyplace else. I sim
ply could not envision another life.
It was fairly late as I returned. They had long since finished supper and were sitting now around the fire in various postures of abandon and repose—Lucie and R.C. and the child, I mean, Durwood being off on one of his jaunts. They did not expect me, nor did they notice my arrival. The door was open, as doors are always left open in those mountains. I stood there with my foot poised over the threshold, ready to say “Hello,” but something bade me hold my tongue. It was such a lovely scene I gazed upon! R.C. sat in Daddy’s old rocking chair with a guitar, looking down at several little scraps of paper on his lap; clearly, he was in the process of “working up” something. Lucie half sat, half lay against his knees, her face flushed by the fire, her red hair tumbling in a cataract nearly to her waist. Lucie was huge and beautiful in her second pregnancy, daydreaming there. Little Pancake, wearing only a light shift, lay sprawled on Lucie’s lap, nearly asleep, sucking his thumb, while my own sweet Sally slept on a pallet beside them, thin but pink-cheeked, not appearing nearly as fragile, in that moment, as I feared she truly was. Everybody, then, was asleep, or nearly so, excepting R.C., driven by his relentless genius. (There were nights when R.C. didn’t sleep at all; I knew this for a fact.) With the other lamps extinguished, the firelight bathed them all in a rosy glow, it held them suspended in a round warm circle of light. While I watched, Lucie sighed and moved a bit; R.C., still absentmindedly picking the guitar with one hand, put his other hand on her breast. Pancake was sucking his little thumb.