by Lee Smith
I made a god out of Johnny Rainette, and I’ve been cut off from the other one ever since.
We formed a little gospel group about this time—it was me, Johnny, Georgia, and Katie. We called ourselves the Grassy Branch Quartet and started out singing at a revival at our own church, where we were such a big hit that we got asked to come around to several other churches too. Mamma and Freda made us girls some blue dresses just alike, with big white collars. Johnny wore a black string tie and a white linen shirt. He looked so handsome. This was before his voice changed, and he sang a tenor rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger” that broke all hearts. There was not a dry eye in the churchhouse when we finished, and all the girls were eyeing Johnny, and I was not looking at him on purpose, for I had my secret to keep. We sang at several revivals and talent shows and once at the United Mine Workers’ Fourth of July celebration up in Welch.
But soon after that, Johnny dropped out of school and got in trouble for “borrowing” a car, and Georgia got a job taking tickets at the movie theater, so we just stopped singing. The Grassy Branch Quartet was officially over. And I have to say, I was glad when we stopped. For I felt bad standing up there with Johnny and singing in front of everybody else, I felt like we were just flaunting ourselves, and asking for trouble.
I remember one of the last times our quartet sang together was in our own church at Chicken Rise, on Easter Sunday. Me and the other girls were wearing white dresses, we had outgrown our blue ones by then. Johnny had wet slicked-back hair but he didn’t look so good, he looked like he might of been out someplace drinking the night before, which he was bad to do. Oh, I had tried to talk to him about his behavior, and Daddy had threatened to kick him off the place. But all Johnny said was that he had to do something, didn’t he, because of course he couldn’t be with me, I was not allowed to go out with boys yet. Everybody was real careful about me, since I was the only girl in my family.
Johnny had a wildness in his bones. He used to say to me, “Listen, honey, whatever I do when I ain’t with you don’t have a thing to do with me. It don’t have a thing to do with this. This is it, honey. This is the only thing that’s real in all the world to me right now, and you are the only one that matters.”
I was afraid this was true. For Johnny never had gotten along too good with his mother, nor with his sister Georgia, who was a real bossy goody-goody. After Johnny dropped out of school, everybody—Daddy and Mamma included—was after him to go in the army like all the other boys done. Nobody could understand why he hadn’t enlisted right off, why he stayed around here quitting one job and then another, hanging out with trash, and acting so generally wrought up all the time.
“I just don’t understand what’s wrong with Johnny,” Mamma would fret more than once.
I didn’t say a word.
But singing in the choir that Easter Sunday, I got awful afraid that pretty soon, somebody was going to figure it out, just by looking at us. We were singing “Wondrous Love.” We also sung a lot of the gospel hymns and spirituals, but not at Chicken Rise of course. We had to stick to the old tunes there, and I must say, I do love them. Nothing else sounds quite like church to me even though now of course me and Buddy go to the Methodist church over in Holly Springs and sit on velvet cushions and sing to an organ playing.
See how my mind wanders? I can’t seem to do a thing about it, I know it drives everybody crazy.
Anyway, it was Easter Sunday. We stood up in front of the congregation in a row and sung, “What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of bliss to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul.” There sat Mamma with Freda and Alice and the rest of the women, on their side. Can’t they tell? I wondered. Can’t they see it all over me, like paint? But they just sat like always, and Mamma had her eyes closed, swaying to the music.
Then I looked at Daddy, face as stern as God Himself, and at all my brothers, ranged about on the men’s side. Lord! I thought all of a sudden. They would kill him, which was something I had not thought of before. But of course it was true, Robert Floyd in particular, with that hothead temper of his. We sung, “To God and to the Lamb, who is the great I Am, I will sing.”
I felt awful. After meeting was over, I went straight home and laid down in the bed, and did not stay for dinner on the ground. Mamma insisted on going home with me, and pulling down the shades, and rinsing out a cool cloth to put on my forehead. I felt terrible letting her take care of me like that, and making her miss dinner, which she always enjoyed so. I laid in the dark and cried.
But even this didn’t stop me, and as time went on, me and Johnny got crazier and crazier, and the crazier we got, the more we did it. I am not saying it was right, mind you. All I am saying is, we did it. It was almost like we were trying to get caught. Rainy days in the hayloft in the sweet-smelling barn, with the horses below, rustling and sighing in their stalls, the rain on the pitched tin roof, and my little-girl ghost peeping in at us between the wide boards. Or out in the woods, we’d make sure nobody was around and then we’d drop in place like we’d been shot.
The last time my family ever had a stir-off up here on the old place, why, right down there, it was—Johnny and me did it outside not a hundred yards from where my daddy stood fiddling in the field. Not a hundred yards! Something broke in me that night, and it has not gone back right ever since.
Daddy had got Uncle Durwood all wrapped up in quilts and blankets and put him in the armchair, and had the boys carry him like that out from the house, and place his chair right close up to the fire and the trough, so he could supervise the whole operation—see, Durwood was the one that loved a stir-off so good. He was the one that planted the cane each year and decided when the stir-off would take place, and went up and down the valley telling folks to come. After he died, nobody planted any cane, and the stir-offs were over and done with. That last year, Daddy had them put him right up in the middle of the action, and bade them fetch another chair from the house to put his feet on, so Durwood was real comfortable when the folks started coming.
To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I remember all of this like it was yesterday. Maybe because it was the last big old time we ever had around the place, for it was soon after that Durwood died, and then Mamma, and Tampa went off her head. So that stir-off has come to stand for a lot in my mind, all the good times we had growing up here, and all the things we done together, all that hard work and fun and music, I mean, the way we lived then. The last time I saw Katie, she said she felt the exact same way about it, she said that stir-off stood out in her mind too.
For I’ll tell you, folks are not the same anymore, families are not the same anymore. Of course I am grateful that Buddy has done so well and all, but a big family night at our house these days is when Buddy and me and Gladys take the kids and ride over to Bristol and eat at Jack Trayer’s Restaurant. Gladys always gets the same thing at Jack Trayer’s, spaghetti, and Buddy always gets the twelve-ounce rib-eye steak. Then we go to a movie. These family nights are not a thing like a stir-off, for instance, although of course they are more modern. I don’t expect that Sugar and Buddy Junior will remember them in particular either. I wouldn’t if I was them. It is nothing like standing out in the meadow in the forty-degree cold, clapping your hands together to keep warm, waiting on it to get dark, watching them press the cane.
When Mamma called us in to supper, I couldn’t eat a bite. Mamma looked at me closely. “You can’t go back out there if you don’t eat something,” she said, but when she turned her back I put my plate on the floor for a minute and let the dogs have it all.
By the time I got back up to the meadow, trailing Bill, who could run like the wind, the other boys had brung Durwood out and placed him to watch the syrup bubbling over the fire. Where was Johnny? Folks took turns stirring the syrup and skimming the green foam that rose to the top. The sky got darker and darker and a wind rose up. The hoot owls started hollering. Where was Johnny? More and more folks came walking up from the valley, carrying lantern lights an
d little pans or crocks to take their own molasses home in, and them that played an instrument brought it, so that it wasn’t long before music rang out on the chilly air, and set everybody to singing, “I’ll eat when I’m hungry and drink when I’m dry, if a tree don’t fall on me, I’ll live till I die.” Some of the younger ones were running a set on the ground. Where was Johnny? I looked from face to face. Folks were dancing up a storm. Soon they started skimming the molasses. You were not supposed to eat the green foam, which would make you sick for sure, but all the kids were allowed to dip cane stalks down in the stir-off pan to get some sweetening, as Mamma always called it. You’d have to wave your stalk around in the air to cool it off before you licked the sweetening, or you’d burn your tongue. Every year, some little kids did that. Every year, old man Rupert Lowe got knee-walking drunk, for by the time it got full dark, there was some drinking among the men, though we were not supposed to know it.
But that last year, I remember Pancake putting the bottle right up to Durwood’s lips for all to see. Durwood was too weak to take much of a drink by then, yet he loved it so. He grinned his big old grin when the liquor hit him, and a great whoop went up from the boys. Durwood said something, and they whooped again. He was everybody’s favorite, always. But where was Johnny? The fiddles went faster and faster. I started dancing with Hollis Boyd from up the road, a little old freckly boy just my age. Oh get around, Jenny, get around, long summer day. All of a sudden I got so hot I couldn’t stand it, and had to run to the edge of the circle and try to breathe.
Then—sudden and sly as a cat—there was Johnny behind me.
“Did you miss me?” he said.
My knees went funny. But by the time I turned to talk, he was gone, dancing with Katie, his feet going double time. Oh, nobody could dance like Johnny! He never once looked my way while he was dancing, but later, when Daddy and them was taking a break and the Baldwin girl clapped her hands and yelled, “Hide-and-go-seek!” then hid her eyes and started counting out loud, Johnny grabbed my hand and pulled me halfway out in the dark meadow, catching me once when I stumbled.
“This is too far,” I said.
“Too far to play games,” he said. “But looky here. Oh, come here,” and he pulled me down in a pile of frosty hay that the boys had missed somehow. From where we lay out in the cold dark field, we could look back at the stir-off and see it all as a dream, the black figures moving to and fro in the orange firelight.
We could scarce hear the Baldwin girl counting—“eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five, one hundred, coming, ready or not!” Then Johnny was all over me. “Oh honey oh baby oh honey,” he went, real loud, and I did not care. I did not care if they heard us or not. I did not care if they found us or not. “Bushel of wheat, bushel of rye, all still hid, holler I!” the Baldwin girl yelled finally, but we kept quiet, and we must have stayed out there another hour, loving each other up, and looking back at the circle of light and fire.
When Durwood died it was early evening. Tampa laid with him all night long and refused to let them take him from her to make him ready. The preacher had to talk her into it, yet then she insisted on sitting up by the open coffin all night long the next night, so that by the time they buried him, she was talking plum out of her head. I don’t believe she has ever got back in her rightful mind since, to tell the truth. Daddy was just about as torn up as she was. I guess we were all so focused on Durwood’s death that we did not remark how Mamma was dragging around; she had worn herself out as always, doing for everybody else.
It was three nights later, after supper, that she dropped a dishtowel on the floor, left the dishes in the sink, and went to sit down in her rocking chair. She sat real still and upright in her chair, like she was listening out for something.
“Why, Aunt Lucie, what’s the matter?” asked Little Virginia, who was helping out in the kitchen.
“I believe I am just tired,” Mamma said. “I’ve been feeling tired all day.”
“Well, you sit right there,” Little Virginia said, “and don’t mind a thing. Come on, honey,” Little Virginia said to me, and I went back in the kitchen to help her, so I missed what all happened next.
“Now Royster!” Mamma called out all of a sudden in a faint voice. “Royster, you quit that!”
But Royster Hall, Mamma’s favorite little first cousin, had been dead for thirty years.
Everybody in the room stared at Mamma for a second, then leaped to her side, but by then she was dead. She sat bolt upright in her rocking chair with her head drooped over to the side, looking for all the world like a little robin. This was the first thing I thought when they brought me in there to see her, and then I don’t remember a thing for a good while after that. I remember the night of Mamma’s laying-out in little bits, like the bright splashes of color in a crazy-quilt. I remember how much makeup Virgie had on, and the purple plume in Tampa’s big hat. I remember the argument over whether to bury Mamma with her wedding ring on or not. Usually you take a ring off, and give it to the kin. But Daddy insisted that Mamma keep her wedding ring on, and he further insisted that her little Gibson guitar be buried with her, so they had to dig an extra-big grave hole up there in the Chicken Rise graveyard where she lies. At the burial, Tampa and Virgie sang “Bright Morning Stars,” standing together under a black umbrella in the gentle cold rain while the boys shoveled on the dirt.
I did not stand with Johnny, of course. He was over on the edge of the group, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face a black study. Whenever other folks got sad, Johnny would get mad. That’s the way he always was. Daddy stood all by himself, it was like his grief had caused an invisible space around him. He stood with his hat in his hands and his face tilted up to the rain, and stared out across the valley with a look in his eye that you don’t want to see. Rain ran down the wrinkles in his face. I got wet clear through, myself, and caught a fever. Freda bade me go to bed right afterward, which I did. By now they had built that little room onto the house just for me, since I was getting to be such a big girl, Daddy said. Daddy had brought me a fancy little vanity table and mirror, edged in gold, back from one of their trips.
The night after Mamma’s funeral, as I was laying in the bed with a fever, I heard a knock on my window. I jumped like I was shot. At first I thought it was Mamma, coming back to lay a cool cloth on my forehead, then I thought it was my own little girl, as I’d been wondering all day where she was.
But it was Johnny.
I started crying when I heard his voice. I raised up the window and he pulled off the screen and climbed in, all wet and warm. I was so glad he was there! His hair smelled real funny when it got wet. I don’t know how to describe it except to say it is a smell I have never smelled since. I would know it anywhere. Johnny kept his clothes on. He just lay on top of the covers and held me, and every time he said he’d better go, I held on for dear life and wouldn’t let him.
Of course we fell asleep that way, to be discovered by Freda when she came in the next morning to wake me up. Freda always tried to take over when anybody died.
As soon as the door opened, I was suddenly, terribly awake. It was cold in the room, for we’d left the window open, and the sun blazed a bright path across my pink coverlet. In the vanity mirror I saw us, me and Johnny, intertwined.
Freda gasped like she was dying. “Well, I swan!” she said to herself, and came over to the bed and peered down close at us. Johnny lay on his side in deep sleep, mouth open, breathing regular as a judge. I acted like I was still sleeping too. But I was just about to wet my pants with Freda standing there over us, watching us. What was she going to do? One thing I remember thinking is how crazy it was to be found like this, when we were doing nothing, and yet all those other times . . . but Freda was shaking my shoulder real rough. “Wake up, huzzy!” she said.
Johnny woke up in a flash and leaped to his feet by the bed. “Now it ain’t like you think,” he said to Freda, with his hair all down in his eyes.
“I don’t think nothing,�
� Freda said in her flat hateful voice. “You get out of here now, John Rainette. Go!” But when Johnny made a move toward the door, she stuck out her bony hand and grabbed his jacket. “You go out the same shameful way you got in here,” she said. “I will not have you upsetting that poor man further,” meaning Daddy. “I don’t never want to see your face over here again neither,” she yelled after him. “Whyn’t you go on in the army and make a man?”
Then Freda shook me so hard my teeth rattled. “I know what you’ve been doing all along, and don’t you forget it,” she said. “You little whore. Now you get up out of that bed!”
And it was a funny thing. It was like whatever had got loose inside me that night at the stir-off started spinning, then spinning faster and faster, until pieces of me were flying off in every direction, to the ends of the earth. It’s the only way I can describe it, I believe. But it would be a while yet before I had my flat-out nervous breakdown. By the time I had it, there wasn’t hardly anything in me left to fly away. By then Johnny was scared to death, for he knew something awful was wrong with me, yet he could tell no one.
In the end, I told Freda. I believe she had guessed anyway.
I was four or five months pregnant when I told her. I was real sick, and flunking everything at school. They all thought I was just upset over Mamma dying. “Rose Annie has always been high-strung,” Mrs. Matney, my math teacher, said to Mrs. Peace in the office one day when I was calling Freda to come and take me home. “I reckon she gets it from her daddy,” Mrs. Peace said.
Things speed up in my mind after this. I know—it’s like that kaleidoscope Robert Floyd brought me from Germany when he was stationed over there. When you looked in it, the colors whirled faster and faster until the shapes flew fantastic and out of control.