Gap Creek

by Robert Morgan

  BUT FOUR WEEKS after I did, Hank joined the Gap Creek Baptist Church too. I knowed he would change his mind, because he loved going to church and singing just as much as I did. And I knowed he would change his mind without telling me, that he would not admit that he was wrong but would go ahead and join. I had learned Hank’s ways and I thought that was what he was going to do, and it was.

  It was late January and we was attending Sunday service though the road was froze and there was ice in puddles and along the edges of the creek. The air in the church was toasted by the little stove in front of the choir, and the church was filled with the smell of hot metal and burning oak and the lift of the preacher’s voice. When Preacher Gibbs called out the invitational hymn and give the altar call, Hank stepped out in the aisle and went to the front of the church. He done it like he had planned for days to do it. He had made up his mind without telling me. That was his way.

  Hank didn’t kneel down at the altar like he was praying. He stopped in front of the preacher and said something to him. And I seen him reach out his hand like he was going to shake hands, like he had said he wanted to join the church by profession of faith. And then I seen him fall forward like he was going to lean on the preacher’s shoulder, but he sunk out of sight.

  I must have hollered, for I heard somebody cry out as I run down the aisle to see where Hank had fell to the floor. I’d heard a knock like a rock hitting a block of wood, which must have been Hank’s head hitting the floor. He sprawled in front of the altar just like he had fainted. I bent over him and the preacher rolled him over. “Hank,” the preacher said.

  Hank’s face was white as a pocket handkerchief, and his eyes was rolled back. I wondered if he had died or had some kind of fit. “You folks stand back,” the preacher said. The singing had stopped and people was gathering around to look at Hank.

  “Bring him some water,” Preacher Gibbs said. Somebody brought a dipper of water from the bucket at the back of the church. The preacher lifted up Hank’s head and I held the dipper to his lips.

  “Wake up, Hank,” I said. I tipped the dipper against his lips and water spilled down on his chin. Hank opened his eyes and some color come back into his cheeks. There was a startle in his eyes when he seen all the people gathered round and looking down at him.

  “Stand back,” the preacher said and waved his left arm.

  “What …,” Hank said.

  “You must have fainted,” I said. “Have a drink of water.”

  “Don’t want a drink,” Hank said. He put his hands back against the floor to push hisself up. The preacher and me helped him to his feet. There was a red mark on his forehead that was beginning to swell to a pumpknot. Hank took a deep breath like he was trying to catch his wind after a struggle. He grinned and looked embarrassed. Everybody was gathered round and there was no way he could escape their attention.

  “Brother Hank has asked to join our church by profession of faith,” Preacher Gibbs called out. “How do you vote on his membership?”

  “Yea!” several voices called.

  “All opposed?” the preacher said.

  Nobody said nay and the preacher declared the yeas carried the motion. “Let’s all come up and give Brother Hank the right hand of fellowship,” he said. He motioned to Linda Jarvis at the organ and she begun playing “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

  People formed theirselves into a line and come forward to shake hands with Hank. He grinned cause he didn’t know what else to do, after fainting in front of the whole church. But I think he was relieved too. For he wanted to sing with the congregation and pray with the congregation as much as I did. For Hank liked to lead in prayer, and he knowed as well as I did it was better to sing with others than to stand off silent by yourself.

  Eleven

  It was a good thing Hank and me joined the church and had the support of the church, for things got harder that winter. Along in early February it come the hardest freeze I had ever seen or heard of. It reminded me of Cold Friday.

  The sun come out on Gap Creek but it didn’t do much good. The sun was little and cold in the sky as the tip of an icicle. The ground was set like steel. It got so cold frost started growing like white ferns and fancy lace on the windowpanes, and fire in the fireplace couldn’t heat the house enough to make it melt. It got so cold the mud puddles and low spots in the road set hard.

  “Can’t stay this cold for long,” Hank said when he come in with his face and hands red.

  “What if it snows?” I said.

  “Too cold to snow,” Hank said.

  “How can it get too cold to snow?” I said.

  “It can’t snow when it gets near zero,” Hank said.

  Almost all our taters had been ruint, and some of the canned stuff. The flood had rotted all the meat on the lower shelves of the smokehouse, and we had eat up most of the rest of the meat by the beginning of February. The cow was gone and there was no milk or butter. It was too cold for Hank to want to climb up on the ridge looking for turkeys.

  “Everything is hiding away in thickets,” Hank said.

  We had some cornmeal and grits and a little bit of shoulder meat left. But we was fast running out of coffee and sugar and things that had to be bought. We didn’t have but a few cents of money. By early February my belly was beginning to show. Everybody could see I was expecting.

  “You should eat more than you do,” Hank said.

  “I eat plenty,” I said.

  “You ought to eat more to grow a strong baby,” Hank said.

  The thing I begun to crave in the cold weather was jelly, hot biscuits and cold jelly. I had eat all the jelly Mama had sent with Lou and Garland. There was still a few jars of blackberry jelly and grape jelly and apple jelly in the basement, but only a few. I brought them up one at a time and wiped off the dust and eat jelly three times a day. I had to stop myself from eating jelly between meals. I put jelly on cornbread, and I put it on oatmeal. I wanted jelly so bad I could have eat it with a spoon. I thought constantly about the cool quivering softness of jelly melting on my tongue. There is something about the firmness of jelly that makes it taste better. Jelly has body and has to be cut; it won’t pour like honey or molasses. Jelly is soft rubies or amber. Jelly is almost alive. I craved jelly so bad I put it on grits and mush when I run out of biscuit flour. I wanted jelly so much I smeared it on whatever else I was eating.

  I dreamed about jelly and imagined I was eating it with butter and toast, long after we didn’t have any butter. I dreamed I was eating jelly and drinking milk, and that was the perfect thing for the baby. I dreamed about jelly and feared we would run out of jelly before the baby was born. I counted the jars; there was only four left.

  • • •

  ON THE FOURTH day of the cold spell, when the sky was clear as a big bubble the sun played its light on, there was a knock at the door. I wondered who could be out in such withering cold. I prayed it wasn’t Timmy Gosnell. It was Elizabeth Rankin and Joanne Johnson. They had scarves wrapped around their heads and around their faces. Their noses was red as coals.

  “Come on in before you freeze,” I said. Even after I closed the door I could feel the cold air falling off their coats. I led them to the fireplace.

  “We wanted to see how you was doing,” Elizabeth said and looked at my belly.

  “Takes all my strength just to stay warm,” I said.

  They unbuttoned their coats but didn’t take them off. I asked them to please set down.

  “We can’t stay but a minute,” Joanne said.

  “I’m mighty glad you come,” I said.

  Elizabeth opened her coat and took out a bag she had been carrying beneath it. “Here is a few things I thought you could use for the baby,” she said. She opened the bag and took out a little flannel jacket that looked small enough for a doll.

  “Most of these is for a bigger baby,” Elizabeth said. “But you’ll need a few things for when it is first born.”

  “And because it’s yellow you can use it for
either a boy or a girl,” Joanne said. I took the little jacket and it looked no bigger than a glove. The flannel was soft as velvet.

  Elizabeth reached into the poke and pulled out a little gown and another jacket. She took out a coat and cap. “My Jessie wore these a few years ago, but they’re practically new,” she said.

  “I certainly do thank you,” I said. I felt my eyes get moist. I’d never had many women friends and I was touched that they had walked in the cold to give me the baby clothes. They made the cold February sweeter, and the heat from the fire sweeter.

  Joanne reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper. “I have brung you this,” she said. It was a pair of knitted booties and a cap to match. They was made of lavender and blue yarn, in a pattern that reminded me of a picture I’d seen of stained glass windows. The yarn was so bright it seemed to glow.

  “I figure these colors will suit either a boy or a girl,” Joanne said. Her fingers looked too rough and swelled at the joints to do any knitting. I leaned down and hugged her I was so touched.

  “You have both saved me a lot of work,” I said.

  “When a baby comes, a woman don’t have time to make clothes,” Elizabeth said.

  I set down and held the baby clothes on my lap and just looked at them, stroking the soft flannel and the warm knitted yarn of the cap and booties.

  “Do you crave sour things or sweet things?” Joanne said.

  I hesitated to say I craved either one, because it sounded so silly.

  “Sometimes a woman craves salty things,” Elizabeth said.

  “I never heard of that,” Joanne said.

  “I guess I always had a sweet tooth,” I said, and giggled.

  “Well, I brung you this,” Elizabeth said. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out something dark. It was a jelly jar. “This is cherry preserves,” she said.

  “How did you know what I craved?” I exclaimed.

  “I was just guessing,” Elizabeth said. “I remember how I craved jams and preserves.” Her face was wrinkled and she had a few gray hairs, but she looked utterly happy, happy the way people are when they give to somebody or please somebody.

  Cherry preserves was one thing I hadn’t had in years. It was something different from blackberry and grape and apple jelly. I felt like gobbling it up right there. There was nothing Elizabeth could have brought that would have been more welcome. “How can I thank you?” I said.

  “And I brung you some of this,” Joanne said. She reached into her other coat pocket and brought out a jar. The jar looked almost black, but when I held it up to the firelight I seen the contents was deep red.

  “It’s raspberry,” Joanne said.

  I put the two jars on the mantel and felt tears in my eyes when I turned back to Joanne and Elizabeth. “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said.

  “Nothing but a little jelly and some castoff clothes,” Elizabeth said.

  “Best way to thank us is to have a healthy baby,” Joanne said.

  “The world wouldn’t have lasted this long if women didn’t help each other,” Elizabeth said.

  “The world would be a better place if people helped each other more,” Joanne said.

  I held up the baby things with their fine stitches and knitting done for little arms and legs and heads one by one. “You all are mighty good to me,” I said.

  “It’s the least we can do,” Elizabeth said.

  THAT NIGHT AS I laid in bed, I kept thinking about how kind Joanne and Elizabeth had been to me. It made me feel growed up and kind myself to be treated that way. It made me feel like I was a bigger person. They made me want to be better.

  There was a crack, like a shotgun blast, not too far from the house. Hank jumped up in bed like he hadn’t been sleeping sound either.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “I heard it in my sleep,” he said.

  “You must not have been asleep,” I said.

  We listened in the cold dark. It was the coldest night I could remember. The air in the bedroom felt prickly and needled with cold. The house creaked in the roof, as a house will when the temperature drops to zero.

  “I know what it was,” Hank said.

  “What was it?” I said.

  “That was a tree exploding,” Hank said.

  “How can a tree explode?” I said.

  “When it gets real cold and the sap freezes in a maple or poplar, some tree where the sap is starting to rise. And when the sap freezes it will bust a tree wide open.”

  I laid in the dark thinking of a big poplar that had busted to splinters. I had heard of such a thing a long time ago but had forgot about it. The tip of my nose was cold and firm.

  “I guess a person would explode if they froze,” I said. I thought of some poor soul like Timmy Gosnell that might have lost their way in the dark and fell in a sinkhole.

  “People has too much salt in them to freeze,” Hank said.

  “People freeze to death,” I said. “Drunks freeze to death.”

  “But they don’t freeze solid and explode,” Hank said.

  There was another blast come out of the dark. It sounded like a hammer fell out of the sky onto a big rock. It sounded so loud it hurt the air. The sound echoed off the sides of the valley two or three times, off the cliff I called Old Fussy Face.

  “Sounds like there’s a war going on,” Hank said.

  “I’m glad I’m inside,” I said.

  “And I’m glad the baby is warm inside you,” Hank said. We laid in the dark talking like that. I could remember hearing Mama and Papa talking in the dark when I was a little girl. It felt good to talk when you couldn’t see anything. Under the warm quilts we laid like we was in a nest or a tent, or maybe a cave.

  “What are we going to name the baby?” I said.

  “If he’s a boy we’ll name him Lafayette after my daddy,” Hank said.

  “That’s a long name for a youngun,” I said.

  “People will call him Fate,” Hank said.

  “We could name him after Papa,” I said.

  “But he will be a Richards,” Hank said.

  “What if the baby is a girl?” I said.

  “Then we’ll name her after your mama,” Hank said.

  I was glad he had said that, for I sure would hate to name my daughter after Ma Richards. “Delia is a beautiful name,” I said.

  There was another pop, but it was in the house, and it was not as loud as the others. We laid still and listened to the creaks and groans in the house. And then there was a crash in the attic, like a ham of meat had fell.

  “This house is going to fall apart,” Hank said.

  “Its bark is worse than its bite,” I said. We both giggled. And then there was another explosion out in the woods across the creek where a hemlock or poplar, or maybe a cucumber tree, had busted wide open in the cold.

  I’D HEARD THE rumor that Timmy Gosnell had been arrested in Greenville for public drunkenness and was being held in the county jail. And it must have been true, for I hadn’t seen him on the road in weeks, though sometimes his name come up when I was talking to Elizabeth or Joanne, or the preacher’s wife.

  “Poor Timmy,” they would say. “Ain’t he the saddest case.”

  “He never was no count,” one would say.

  “I reckon his daddy was worser than him.”

  Elizabeth asked me if it was true I had run Timmy out of the yard with Mr. Pendergast’s walking stick.

  “I was so mad I didn’t hardly know what I was doing,” I said. I was ashamed to think of that day.

  “He scares me,” Joanne said, “the way he stares at you sideways, and the way his voice rips out in such an ugly way.”

  “He could mark a pregnant woman’s baby,” Elizabeth said.

  “How come?” I said.

  “He’s got a demon in him that makes him drink,” Elizabeth said. “He’s possessed by a devil that will mark a baby.”

  “Mark it how?” I said
.

  “Mark it so it’ll stagger and roll its eyes and won’t have good sense, just like him.”

  HANK AND ME was eating dinner on Saturday when we heard somebody holler from the road. All we had was cornbread and green beans, but they tasted mighty good. There come this holler from out front, and it sent a shiver through me, for I knowed on the spot who it was.

  “Piieendergaasss!” the voice yelled.

  “Is that Timmy Gosnell?” Hank said.

  “I think it is,” I said.

  “That drunk,” Hank said. “I thought he was in jail.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “Piieendergaasss!” the voice hollered, “come outch hhhrrrrr.”

  “He can’t come here and bother us this way,” Hank said. I seen Hank was scared, because this was something he wasn’t used to facing. And because he was afraid I was afraid. But I wasn’t as much afraid of Timmy Gosnell as of what Hank might do that he’d be sorry for later. When Hank was scared was when he lost his temper. And Preacher Gibbs wasn’t here to help out this time.

  Hank pushed back his chair and hurried to the front door, and I run after him. When he flung open the front door I seen Timmy Gosnell standing halfway between the road and the steps. He had on his long black coat, but he had lost his hat and his head was mostly bald. There was a scab on top of his head like he had been hit or cut there.

  “Where’s Piendergaasss?” he said, and gulped, when he seen Hank and me on the porch.

  “Mr. Pendergast is dead,” Hank said.

  Timmy Gosnell stood in the sun like he was trying to take in what Hank had said. He bowed his head and looked at us through his eyebrows. “Piendergaasss is hiding,” he said, “cause he ooowes me money.”

  “We don’t owe you money,” Hank said again, and moved toward the steps.