As David and I were leaving, Mrs. Spencer sought me out, timidly tugging at my sleeve. “Miz Christy, could I speak with you?” She pulled me away from the others to the far corner of the room.
“Look-a-here—you’ve never handled a school afore. That’s a heap of young’uns for one gal-woman. Is there anything I can do to help, like clean up the school yan? I’m a good hand to work. Or wash some of your go-to-meetin’ clothes? It’s my turn to favor you now.”
The words were spoken with a gentle dignity, as if a parting gift were being bestowed on me, as was indeed the case. Here was a mountain woman with a husband and five children to care for, living in such poverty that if she had any shoes, she was saving them to be worn outside the house, yet thinking of me. Even as I started to answer, I realized something else . . . there was more to this gracious offer than met the eye. Fairlight Spencer was not just volunteering to do some washing and ironing for me; she was also holding out to me the gift of her friendship. Among the mountain people, this was the most cherished gift of all. It was a breakthrough of those walls of reserve that had so far seemed impenetrable.
“Mrs. Spencer, that’s the nicest offer anyone has made me since I left home. You’re right. Sixty-seven children are a handful and I do need help.” I paused, groping for words that had no condescension in them. “I’ll accept your wonderful offer, if you’ll let me be your friend. You see, Mrs. Spencer, I’m a long way from home. Sometimes I get lonesome for another woman to talk to. And maybe there’ll be something I can do for you too.”
The face that in repose could look so spartan and pioneer was now wreathed in smiles. “Aye, you can holp, Miz Christy.” Suddenly she was shy again, her voice sinking almost to a whisper. “I cain’t read nor write. Would you learn me how? I’d like that!”
The eagerness in her voice added such pathos that at that moment I wanted to teach this woman to read more than I’d ever wanted to do anything before. “I’d love doing that, Mrs. Spencer. Could you come down to the mission house, maybe Saturday?”
“For shore and sartin, I’ll be there,” she said joyously. “Oh, and would you—handle my front name, ‘Fairlight’?”
On the way back to the mission I was so gratified by the success of the afternoon that it was all I could do to keep from skipping along.
David sensed my light-heartedness and began to whistle a tune. Spotting a pink flower ahead I forgot my resolution about acting more grown-up with David and ran over to pluck it. There was an aromatic scent. Impulsively, I thrust it under David’s nose.
“What’s that smell like, David?”
He shook his head, “I can’t tell.”
I studied him for a moment. He seemed a little preoccupied and I didn’t want him to think I was a giddy little flirt. I threw the wild geranium to one side and walked on beside him quietly.
“Why so solemn?” David finally asked.
“I get annoyed at myself sometimes—especially when I act like a little girl.”
“But I like you that way.”
“What way?”
“Little girl-like. You seem so natural and uncomplicated.”
“You talk as if I were your little sister.”
David stopped and looked at me sternly. “That’s a lot of nonsense. You have more maturity than a lot of older girls I know.”
“Do you know a lot of girls, David?”
“A few.”
“Have you been in love with any of them?”
David considered the question for a moment in silence. “I’m not sure. There was one who was rather special for a while. But she would never have been interested in this kind of life.”
“What was she like?”
“Dark-haired, quite good-looking, rather reserved—and I’m afraid her family had too much money.”
“David, do men like girls to be, well, reserved and a little shy?” When David looked at me quizzically, I rushed on to clarify, “What I’m trying to get at, David, is that we’re all taught to be modest and not too talkative and not too forward and all that sort of thing. Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite and . . . and sometimes just plain stupid when I try to act demure.”
“Well then, be yourself.”
“All right, I will, but there will be some people who won’t understand and who will think I’m being too aggressive. Why, I even got into trouble with Miss Alice just with my letter writing! You see, David, there are so many things I see and feel and want to do something about—and then when I rush ahead, I suddenly feel like I’m being a fool.”
“But there’s a difference between the kind of ideas you get and the way some aggressive women I know want to run other people’s lives.”
“One thing is sure, David. The women around here will never be like that.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it’s almost as though they aren’t people. I mean the hard life they have, so much work, and the way the men here sort of use them and then dismiss them.”
David let his hand fall on my shoulder for a moment while he stopped to consider this blast. “Christy, you’re full of fire, aren’t you? Why, I can see you marching down the street as one of those suffragettes with a sign saying ‘Women Have Rights.’ But I wouldn’t try it in the Cove—at least not for a while.”
He let his hand slide off my shoulder—I thought, almost reluctantly. I felt secure and yes, exhilarated walking beside him.
On Saturday morning Fairlight arrived at the mission before we had finished breakfast. She was wearing a freshly laundered blue-checked gingham dress with a wide white collar and this time, shoes. Since David was going to be stringing telephone wire rather than working on the belltower, I took Fairlight over to the empty schoolhouse where we started our lesson on two desks pulled side by side before an open window.
I had a box of materials ready and Fairlight was all eagerness to see what was in the box. From magazines I had cut out some pictures of landscapes to use for background scenery; some figures of men, women and children pasted onto cardboard bases so that they could be stood upright (as I used to do with my paper dolls when I was a very little girl); a copy of the alphabet printed in large clear letters from my first grade class; a Bible, a fresh ruled pad and some pencils.
Since teaching an adult to read was a new experience for me, I was not sure how to begin. It would not do, I felt, to down-grade the dignity of a human being like Fairlight Spencer by using the primer books for six- and seven-year-olds: “The rat ran from the cat.”
“Here the boy sat.” Then too I believed that Fairlight would learn more readily than the children, and I wanted to give her even in this first lesson the concept of words as ideas. And since I knew from having seen some of her quilt patterns and flower arrangements that she was a creative person, surely she would learn fastest if I could find an imaginative way to teach her. My problem was how to achieve this.
I picked up the Bible. “There are lots and lots of words in this book.”
“How soon will I be able to read it, Miz Christy?”
“In no time! And I’ll tell you why. Every single word in this book and all the words together use only twenty-six English letters—these here. So after you’ve learned just twenty-six and know how to put the letters together to form different words, then you can read. Easy!”
Her eyes shone. “I’d like that the best in the world.” Already she was concentrating on that alphabet. After we had read it aloud twice, she became so intent on learning it that she almost forgot I was there. So I sat back watching her, feeling instinctively that I should let her set the pace, even do most of the talking—if she would. At last she sighed and looked at me. “Think I’ve got it . . . A-B-C-D—” on she went making only one mistake.
Next we propped up a backdrop picture of a landscape drenched in sunlight. “Now, Fairlight, you pick out one of the paper people from this pile.” So she selected a dapper-looking man and stood him up before the landscape.
We learned MAN and my eager pupil
practiced saying it and forming the letters. Soon we went on to TREE, LIGHT, SUN, GRASS, SKY . . . It was at that point that Fairlight stumbled onto her own kind of phonetics—the relation between the way the word looked and how it sounded. She was as thrilled as if she had found a jewel in the dust. She rolled the word “sky” over and over her tongue, spelled it again and again. This went on until we had our first ten words.
Then I opened the Bible to the first chapter of Genesis. “Now, Fairlight, look at this. The words on this page are just ideas marching. Like this one, ‘And God said, Let there be light—’ ”
“L-I-G-H-T! There it is! I see it.” Her slender forefinger was on the word. “Oh, I love the light! Don’t you? I hate the darkness.”
Let there be light . . . I sat there thinking that I had never seen light dawn so quickly for anyone as for this woman. What an alive mind she had! She scarcely needed instruction, only a chance to let the light come.
Teaching Fairlight Spencer was going to be pure delight. Up to this point in her life, she had been like some outcast child staring through the iron railings of the tall fence around the great estate of knowledge, longing to romp with the other children on the clipped lawns inside, but always excluded. She saw learning to read and write the English language as the key to unlock those gates. For the first time that Saturday morning the hinges moved, the gates began to swing open. The Elysian fields of knowledge and of identification with other human beings would soon be hers where she could roam and explore and even cavort.
On another Saturday morning, I was invited to Miss Alice Henderson’s for the Sewing Circle which met on the only two weekends a month that she was in Cutter Gap. But the women enjoyed the meetings so much, Miss Alice told me, that they wanted to gather every week. Would I take charge of the Circle in her absence? This first time she wanted me to watch and listen as preparation for that.
As I headed down the hill I noticed how the gently sloping roof of Miss Alice’s home seemed to tie the building to the ground. Sunshine and snow, rain and the heavy mountain mists had already weathered the unpainted shingles and the logs. Native shrubs hugged the walls closely, so that the cabin though only five years old, looked as if it had always stood on its patch of earth—solid, immovable, at one with the hills and the sky.
How unmistakably her cabin bore the flavor of Miss Alice’s personality! In both the woman and her home there was an effortless beauty, never a straining for effect, a harmony that seemed to come from having one’s roots down in the place where the roots were meant to be.
There was something else I had noticed too: an initial acceptance of herself as she was and so of other people with their foibles. And so she did as little scolding or criticizing of others for their foolish behavior or their sins as anyone I had ever known. It was not that she was willing to compromise with wrongdoing or poverty or ignorance, just that she was a long step ahead of wasting emotional energy on fretting. And she never put pressure on the rest of us to accept her opinions. The secret of her calm seemed to be that she was not trying to prove anything. She was—that was all. And her stance toward life seemed to say: God is—and that is enough.
But why was it enough? That was what I had to find out. Even supposing one had proof of the existence of God, how could the fact of God suffice when all around us were conditions crying to be righted? How could Miss Alice be so sure that He had the world in His hand?
After only three months in the Cove, here I was already fretting and stewing and pawing the ground in my reforming zeal—at least inside myself. Not Alice Henderson! There had been times recently when I had found her Quaker calmness maddening. Always my thinking came to this point—and stopped. Beyond that my understanding ceased. Miss Alice knew something I did not know. That was why I watched for every chance to be with her, to observe her in action, one reason I had agreed so readily to these Saturday mornings with the women.
I quickened my pace toward the cabin; I should be there ahead of the others to help greet them. But as I stepped from under the fir trees, I saw that an old woman had reached the yard ahead of me. The old lady made quite a picture with her black skirt over a Balmoral petticoat as she stepped up to the door, holding herself with unself-conscious dignity.
Miss Alice heard us and opened the door. “Aunt Polly Teague and Christy, have you two met? No, I thought not. Do come in.”
At closer range, the one called Aunt Polly looked as if she had stepped out of a Rembrandt portrait. Above the black skirt, a faded calico shirtwaist was buttoned high on her neck. Cornflower blue eyes were sunk deep in a parchment skin, crisscrossed with a network of fine wrinkles. Because the face was shrunken, the ears looked too large for the head.
“Aunt Polly, how have you been?” Miss Alice asked solicitously.
“Tole’able, tole’able. Can’t complain. Old bones be cold bones, guess.”
Miss Alice turned to me. “Aunt Polly has a rare distinction. She’s the oldest woman in the Cove. Ninety-two. Isn’t that right, Aunt Polly?”
“Ninety-two, ninety-three, I cain’t be bothered!” The cornflower blue eyes snapped and crackled. “When my eighteenth young’un was birthed on my fiftieth name day, jest took a notion to drapp all such out’n my head. Birthdates are jest a botheration.”
I looked at her in astonishment. Eighteen children! A baby when she was fifty! And she was apparently far from done with the business of life.
But now the rest of the group was arriving. Finally there were twelve, including Fairlight, who had already had her reading lesson with me that morning and Ruby Mae, who refused to be left out of anything and who had been looking forward to the Sewing Circle as a great social event. She had persuaded Lizette Holcombe to come with her and Clara Spencer. I was glad to see other mothers of my schoolchildren too—Opal McHone (still pale and wan from childbirth) and Mary Allen and Lenore Teague. Then there were two others whom I had not met before—Granny Barclay, who was said to be the last “Granny” woman of the Cove—official midwife—but whose continual squinting showed something now seriously wrong with her eyes. Then there was a young girl, Liz Ann Robertson. Liz looked fourteen—certainly not more than fifteen—but was already married and obviously in a family way.
It was a group with such extremes of age that I was curious to see what Miss Alice would do. She began by serving sassafras tea and big chunky sugar cookies, using delicate Limoges china. All over again I noticed Fairlight’s hands as she handled the beautiful china cup, putting it carefully to her lips, and I had the curious feeling that they were the hands of a great lady, that the red, work-worn skin was only a disguise which would drop away when some evil enchantment broke. When the tea was gone, she lifted the cup out of its saucer and nestled it between both hands. “Feels good,” she said wonderingly, “like silk to the skin.”
She must have been speaking for all of the women because they acted as if they were sipping liquid ambrosia straight from Mount Olympus out of those cups. Politely they tried to restrain themselves on the cookies, but soon there was not a cookie left.
“I see that most of you have brought quilts to piece,” their hostess observed. “While you sew, Miss Christy and I could take turns reading to you from the Bible.”
“Now that would be purely a delight,” Aunt Polly agreed.
“Then after the readin’,” Granny Barclay broke in, “would ye pray a little for the folks that has miseries and poorly young’uns and such-like?”
“Of course we will.”
“My eyes are worse than ordinary. Don’t see good no more. But Doc’s a-studyin’ on it.”
Clara Spencer asked cautiously, “Granny, you be seein’ a lot of Doc. Is it true what pretty nigh everybody says, that thar’s a room at his place that he keeps locked up and won’t let nobody see?”
Miss Alice picked up some teacups and the empty cookie plate to take to the kitchen.
“Aye, lassie, for a fact.” Granny smacked her lips as if over secret knowledge.
“Thar’
s scattered talk,” Liz Ann’s voice lowered confidentially, “that yon’s the room where Mistress MacNeill died. So Doc won’t take no nonsense ’bout a single thing bein’ tampered with.”
This was the kind of talk that Ruby Mae liked best. Her eyes glittered. “I heerd more’n that . . . Doc knowed how to preserve his wife’s mortal remains and he wouldn’t have no funeralizing a-tall. Still keeps her in that room.”
On her way into the room Miss Alice had heard the last sentence. I could see that she was eager to turn off such wild talk. “Lizette, didn’t I hear that your mother had a new baby?”
“Long time back, that was. Four month now. Ailin’. Sure cries a heap.”
“Was the young’un a gal-baby?” Aunt Polly asked.
“Yes, it was a gal.” The girl paused a moment, her face immobile. “And it’s a gal yit.”
I choked back a laugh. I still could not tell when these people were joking. Did Lizette mean to be funny?
Clara, sitting on a stool in the corner, said, “I know somebody who’s sick—Bessie Coburn hurt her leg t’other evening when the sled turned over on her. Doc MacNeill says the leg’s not broke though.”
It made me feel like an insider to know that they were not referring to a snow sled but to the drag-sleds pulled by a mule or a horse, used because of the almost perpendicular slopes.
“You’d best pray for Liz Ann too,” Ruby Mae added. “She wouldn’t tell you herself, but her time’s well-nigh here.”
While the women worked on their quilt pieces and Miss Alice cleared away the rest of the dishes, I started to read at the place she pointed out. I was still self-conscious about reading aloud to grown-ups from the Bible because I was afraid of the pronunciation of all those strange Oriental names. The passages selected were marked by numbered slips of paper stuck between the pages. It was just as well, since I would not have known whether Jude was in the Old Testament or the New, or whether I Kings came before or after Isaiah.
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