Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  I stared at her, fascinated at the certainty with which she spoke. The piece of paper lay warm in my hand. I wanted to look at it but Miss Alice had not quite finished. “More people than not think religion dull. Some religions are dull. But believe me, Christianity isn’t. It’s the most fascinating, delightful thing I know. You’re standing poised on the threshold of great adventure, Christy. Go on now, you’re dying to see what I wrote,” she said airily. “Go—and take that first step.” Cheerfully she waved me off.

  So I left her and started walking in the opposite direction from the mission house, still restraining myself from reading what was written on the slip of paper. But I did lift it to my nose. Yes, that same fragrance clung to the paper. Then I remembered. The clothes, a woman’s clothes that Dr. MacNeill had loaned me to wear that afternoon Old Theo had dumped me in the creek. Woodruff—that was it. But not many women in the Cove could possibly use such a sachet. I thrust the paper in my pocket.

  The dirt trail I was following was well-known to me. For the first part of the way it rose in a gradual ascent, skirting the outside margin of Coldsprings Mountain. Black-eyed Susans were thick along the path. Then I came to a certain giant tulip poplar tree where I left the trail and plunged into the woods. Here it was crunchy underfoot, mossy in spots, and cool—a world in itself. A few hundred yards on, I parted the rhododendron and laurel thicket and slipped into the sanctuary of my little woodland room. This was a site that I had happened upon about two weeks earlier at the height of the trouble with Lundy and the schoolboys and the moonshining worry when I had felt the need of solitude to escape confusion and to think. Immediately this had become my secret retreat.

  Outcroppings of flat rock surrounded by moss had kept the forest undergrowth from impinging on the enclosure. Water tumbling down from the heights above formed a miniature waterfall over one of the boulders, the clear cold water being caught in a hollowed-out place in the rock floor. Ferns overhung the tiny pool. When I parted the laurel and rhododendron branches that formed the walls of my woodland room, there before me was a panoramic view of the valleys of Pigeonroost Hollow and Cutter Gap running together to form the Cove, and the mountains of Lonesome Pine Ridge to the west of El Pano.

  But at the moment, I was wasting no time on the scenery; I had waited long enough. The jaunty handwriting with its exaggerated curving capitals read:

  If any man will do his (the Father’s) will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.

  I read the words over two, three times trying to comprehend. I felt let down. Why did the Bible always disappoint me this way? Other people seemed to get meaning out of it: Miss Alice certainly did. Why couldn’t I? What had I expected while I had been standing there watching Miss Alice write? Some magic, obviously. Then I tried to recall her exact words. “Go and take the first step,” she had said. Something about the next move then being up to God. But what first step?

  I looked at the paper again, stared at it a long time. “Any man” . . . Well, that could be me. “If Christy will do the Father’s will—” What was His will for me, Christy? I had thought I had been doing God’s will when I had marched up to the front of the Montreat auditorium and told Dr. Ferrand that I was volunteering to come to this forsaken place. What more? What now? I set my mind to reason it out. The words seemed to say that obedience was important and since this must have been Christ speaking, then He was telling us that some sort of knowledge or insight about Him and His “doctrine”—what he taught—the ability to know whether it really was true or not, would follow on the heels of obedience.

  A kaleidoscope of impressions and faces danced through my mind. David . . . with his jet-black hair, his intense brown eyes, his manliness, his booming voice, the impatience of his fervor about what he thought right. Dr. MacNeill . . . the way annoyance toward him would build in me time and again. I would not think about him. Little Burl, with the freckles marching across his face . . . always reaching out for love. He might have slipped away from us. Perhaps it had been the little boy’s capacity to receive love that had helped to save him. Lundy . . . big, brutal, with his pimply face and his small ugly eyes, but somehow one of God’s creatures too, who had to be dealt with some way. Fairlight Spencer . . . a princess in homespun, I had come to think of her. Her name was so right. Spenser’s “faery queen,” to the manner born, her mind athirst to learn, her hands reaching out for beauty. Tom McHone . . . I could see again his crumpled blood-stained body slumped over in that saddle. Opal . . .

  Opal! The swinging thoughts stood still, like the gyrating needle of a delicate instrument finally coming to rest to point steadily. Go to Opal. Talk to Opal. Opal is the key. But talk to Opal about what, I asked back? She holds the key to what? To the tangled mess of relationships in the Cove at the moment? Surely not! Opal and Tom were themselves caught in the thick of the mess. But the gyrating needle did not move again. There it pointed quietly, with a take-it-or-leave-it, obey-it-or-not, it-was-up-to-me quality, however fantastic or silly I might think all this.

  I rose from the rock where I had been sitting, wondering how long I had been there. Quite a time apparently because my legs were numb. I parted the laurel branches to look. There was the Cove, the troubled Cove with its poverty and its smells, with so many problems, as if it embraced within the borders of one small kingdom a sampling of the hungers and lacerations of the whole world. The light breeze of the earlier afternoon was gone now; not a rustle stirred the leaves around me. A brooding quietness lay like a presence over the mountainside and the valley.

  The sun was low in the sky, the light mauve. If I hurried, there would be time to get to Opal’s before dark. Yes, I would go, though I had not the least idea what I would say or do when I got there.

  As my feet sped over the familiar woodland path that Ruby Mae and I had taken that day the McHone baby had died, there must have been the same crouching shadows, the same rustlings as before—but I took no notice. My thoughts were with Opal wondering why this strange summons to be with her.

  At the edge of the girdled trees marking the boundary of the McHone land, I remembered to call out loudly and clearly—but there was no response, none at all; that was not a bit like Opal. As I got halfway across the front yard a group of men stepped from the woods at my right. I stopped short, my heart thumping. The man in the center was Bird’s-Eye Taylor. I saw now that there were four in all; they stood there rigidly with their hands on their rifles, looking at me. I had been all but running; now I stopped as suddenly as though some giant hand had thrust itself in my path.

  No one spoke. Four pairs of eyes stared at me, waiting for me to make the first move. For me, Bird’s-Eye stood out from the others—dirty overalls held up by galluses, old felt hat with holes in the crown, brim turned down all around, several days’ growth of stubble on his chin, mouth narrowed to a grim slit, eyes like steel—a look of frozen immobility. I realized that I had never before looked into faces as hard as these, made spartan not through discipline but through hate. Finally Bird’s-Eye spat into the dirt at his feet in that same gesture of contempt he had used toward David the day of the Working. “Come traipsin’ to do some more pesterin’ with other folks’ business?” His mouth snarled like an animal’s.

  Still I did not move; I did not dare. I wondered how long he had been hiding out here, wanted by the sheriffs of three counties. At last I found my voice. “I’ve come to see Opal, that’s all.”

  “Yon,” Bird’s-Eye jerked his head in the direction of the cabin, though he never once took his eyes off me. “Go on in, but don’t try no dodge with me. I’m right spang nervish this evenin’, leetle keerless-like with this here hog rifle.”

  Slowly I moved forward across the bare, hard-packed earth. The men did not shift direction until I reached the creaky porch. Then as if on cue, they turned to face me, rifles ready. It might have been funny—except that it was not. What did they think I could do?

  I saw that the heavy wooden shutters h
ad been closed across every window with even the bars in place, making the cabin look like a place besieged. Before I could knock or call again, the front door swung slowly open. As I walked across the threshold Opal rushed at me from the darkness; I felt her before I could see her. She clutched at my dress as if to satisfy herself that it was really I. “Oh, Miz Christy—I kept wishin’ and hopin’—” Her voice was soft, almost stifled behind pent-up emotion. “I needed you—so much.” She seized my wrists and sank to her knees, clasping my arms. “How could you know that I wanted you?”

  “I didn’t know you needed me. I didn’t have any idea what was happening.” I reached down to pull her to her feet. “Opal, you may as well know the truth. I’m here because—well—God told me to come.”

  Immediately the words were out, they sounded so pat. What I had just said, I meant literally. But would Opal take it as just so much theological jargon?

  Instead, she asked wonderingly, “He did! Comin’ here this evenin’ weren’t your idea?”

  “No, it wasn’t my idea. I started for your place just about the time Miss Ida always puts supper on the table at the mission house. I wouldn’t ever have thought of coming this time of day.”

  “But how’d He tell you?”

  “By a thought that wouldn’t leave, like an order on the inside. ‘Go to Opal—Opal needs you—Now—’ over and over.”

  Slowly my eyes were adjusting to the shuttered gloom, and I could see that Opal’s face registered in turn wonderment, then acceptance, then joy. “Then God knows about Tom and me and Bird’s-Eye.” A note of awe crept in. “He cares—about us.”

  She was looking at a new and startling concept. But I still had no realization of what it was going to mean to Opal to have this proof that God cared about her.

  Somewhere in the room a child whimpered. In the minutes since I’d walked in, the children had been so quiet that we had not been aware of them. They were sitting on the floor in a corner huddled together with Isaak—the twelve-year-old—in front as a sort of shield for Toot and Vincent. I realized that this must be a terror-filled situation for them. Isaak would understand that the men outside were waiting for his father to creep home after he’d gotten tired of hiding out in the mountains, but the smaller ones would not know what it was all about—the dark shuttered cabin, the tension, the fear-filled atmosphere.

  Opal sank into a rocker, held out her arms to her children, and the two younger boys came scrambling. Still her mind would not be diverted from the fact I had just given her. She was stretching toward a new dimension. As she cuddled Vincent and absently stroked Toot’s head, she reasoned, “Look-a-here! If God knows what’s goin’ on here and if He would tell you to come that-a-way, don’t you reckon He’d talk to me too? D’you reckon?”

  “Yes, Opal. Absolutely. Else He wouldn’t have told me to come here.”

  “Then let’s ask Him to tell us what to do next,” Opal urged. “Will you ask him?”

  I might have known! Having started this direct-approach business, someone like Opal was going to see it through to the end. I sat down on the cricket stool by the hearth, realizing that I had never prayed aloud in my life except for the school prayers. But as I remembered those hate-hardened faces outside, I knew this was no time for coy reticence. “God,” I plunged in, “this is all new to Opal and me. We’ve trouble on our hands, and we don’t have the least idea of the way out for Tom and Opal. We just can’t believe that You would have told me to come here, if You didn’t have some sort of plan. Would You please tell us what to do next, and what to do about Bird’s-Eye? And—” sudden self-consciousness all but smothered my words, “thank You very much.”

  Opal said nothing. Gently she slid Vincent off her lap, rose, and began stirring the cabbage and side meat cooking in a black pot over the fire. Finally when she had finished stirring and tasting, she turned away from the fire, wiping her steaming face with her apron.

  “I’m recollectin’ what Granny told me ’bout how Bird’s-Eye was raised,” she observed. “His daddy didn’t treat him good. He was a hateful-like man, had a gredge against the world. Used to smoke that young’un’s britches for the least thing, whupped him not only for badness, but just to be whupping. When he was a real teensy boy, his daddy learned him to cotch birds in a trap, bust their legs, make a play-game of rockin’ them till they querled over dead. His daddy taught him to be such a good aim that he would drive a rifle-ball plump through the eye of a bird as far as he could see it. That’s how he come by his name ‘Bird’s-Eye.’

  “But the young’un couldn’t stomach all that hatefulness, so when Bird’s-Eye was fourteen he lit out from home. Peeled the bark off’n a hick’ry log, scooched down with the bark over his head in the bresh at the edge of the yard. Watched while his daddy hunted for him and his mother cried. Weren’t a bit of use, never did find him.”

  Opal got up, took another look at the black pot, then continued her reminiscing. “Then Bird’s-Eye put out for the thick wilderness. For goin’-on seven years, let his grievin’ mother think a varmit had got him. Traveled on, traveled on, never slept the same spot any two nights. He was a sharp one. Begged and roamed from one settlement to another, worked a leetle, done fairly well.

  “Then sudden-like, Bird’s-Eye showed up at his old home one evenin’. It had set in t’rain that evenin’, thunderin’ and light’nin’, awful racket. Bird’s-Eye’s mother heard an uncommon sound—hallooin’, knockin’ on the door. There stood her son. ’Course his mother didn’t know him right off. But Lordamercy, when he told her who he was, her jaw was hangin’, her eyes popped, she most died dead on the spot. But then she welcomed him in and he stayed. T’was good Bird’s-Eye come back then ’cause his Maw died a short time after from milk sickness and his Paw was kilt the next year when his horse throwed him in a thunderstorm.

  “And now I’m re-callin’ something else. Bird’s-Eye was bad stuck on me for awhile. One reason he’s as mad as time at Tom is because Tom courted me away from him. ’Course that really weren’t no job of work for Tom; in no time a-tall I thought right smart of him.

  “Only time I ever seed Bird’s-Eye nice was one spring afternoon whilst he was still courtin’ me. Bird’s-Eye and I had gone traipsin’, struck out through the woods, pretty far piece. Without meanin’ to, jumped a deer and Bird’s-Eye shot it with his rifle-gun. When we got to it, saw that it was a doe and in the breshes was its fawn—spotted, wobbling on tall thin legs, bright leetle eyes. Bird’s-Eye picked up a rock, swung at it, busted one of its legs, commenced to swing again, that time at its head.

  “I was already riled that we’uns had killed a doe, but when Bird’s-Eye fixed to kill that baby that-a-way, I got fightin’ mad. I fumped him on the head, scratched and pounded him. At first he laughed at me, thought I was a puny girl carryin’ on. But then when I kept on standin’ him off and he saw that I was really aggravated, he drapped the rock and looked at me considerable.

  “Told him that while I was thar he wasn’t a-goin’ rock any more animals that couldn’t fight back. Saw he couldn’t do no good with me actin’ like that. Guess Bird’s-Eye never had nothin’ to do with animals but to kill ’em—ceptin’ for hound-dogs, that is.”

  “Well, then Bird’s-Eye he looked at that leetle cryin’ fawn like he was seein’ it for the first go-round. Seemed like he took pitysake on it then. Studied a little, opened his knife, cut a saplin’, took the baby onto his lap, splinted that pore leetle broke leg.

  “He was as gentle as a gal could want. Real handy with the docterin’. His face was a study too as he looked into the eyes of the leetle thing, like somethin’ new was bein’ borned inside him. Seemed like it weren’t Bird’s-Eye a-tall—leastways not the Bird’s-Eye I knowed—but some other man. A body could have confidenced that Bird’s-Eye—if’n he had stayed that way.” Opal’s eyes were soft and warm, remembering.

  “It must have been like seeing through a peephole in his armor,” I remarked, “seeing the man as he was meant to be.”


  “Aye, that’s it. Miz Christy, you said that God talked to you with an idea that wouldn’t go by. Wal now, here’s my idea—that I’m to mosey out to the yard thar and keep a-thinkin’ and a-seein’ Bird’s-Eye like he was whilst he was docterin’ that baby fawn. Talk to him, see what’n’all happens after that.”

  Turning this over quickly in my mind, I knew that Opal was already way out ahead of me in perception—and in courage. “But what are you going to say when you get out there?”

  She shook her head. “Seems if I keep a-seein’ that peephole in the armor like you said, I’ll know what to say to the hole.”

  “Shouldn’t I go with you, Opal?”

  She hesitated, considering. “You’d best stay with the young’uns. But I’d like it, if you would stand in the door.”

  She secured the bun at the back of her head with hairpins, blew her nose, took off her apron. One of her rare smiles broke over her face. “God told you to come. He told you to come—right here—to this here cabin,” she repeated, as if fingering the thought lovingly, like counting the beads of a rosary. Then she hugged me—and was gone.

  I stood in the doorway with Vincent and Toot hanging onto my skirts, Isaak standing to one side, trying hard to act manly.

  As the men saw Opal leave the porch, they stepped into the clearing from their hiding place in the edge of the woods.

  Opal had a fine line to walk, it seemed to me. Taking the fact that Bird’s-Eye had once considered himself her sweetheart, she would have to avoid letting him think that she was turning her back on Tom now. There was far too much of what the Cove folk called “step-husband” business going on anyway—another man stepping in when the husband stepped out. In fact, most of the killings in these mountains were over either women or land. It would not be easy for Opal to remind Bird’s-Eye about the episode of the baby fawn without his misinterpreting it.