“Anyhow, her Spanish class was on the second floor of the proud new building out at Bigelow and it so happened that Joe Robert’s class in general science was located on the third floor, right above the room where Cora taught. Many’s the time she’d come home shaking her head. ‘I wonder what scientific facts that wild man claims to be teaching his students today,’ she’d say. ‘There was the awfulest commotion up there. I thought the ceiling was going to come down on our heads.’
“But that was her cue to get him started talking, I’d say. She asked him what he’d been teaching and he explained to her all about his ‘demonstrations,’ as he called them. He told her how he liked to get the students involved in his demonstrations so they could see and do for themselves what the great men of science had done over the ages to bring the marvels of the twentieth century into being. One of the things he wanted to do was fly them Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite, the one that proved how lightning rods work. But, he told Cora, he hadn’t been able to find the right material. He needed silk, he said, and he, being a bachelor, had no old silk clothing and did not wish to spend money at the store on such cloth. When she told me this, I struck upon a notion. ‘When does he want to fly this kite?’ I asked Cora.
“‘He’d hoped to do it next week,’ she told me.
“‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘today is Thursday and you’ll be seeing him tomorrow, so inform him then that you think we might be able to supply him with what he needs. On the way home, stop off at Virgil Campbell’s store and get some red dye to dye cloth with. Say to Virgil that we need the reddest dye he’s got. I’ll tell you next what to do after that.’
“So she did, and while she was at school that day, I went through the back bedroom closet upstairs and found an old-fashioned silk petticoat that used to belong to my aunt Emmaline Trowbridge. It was all yellowed and musty and spotted with mildew, but I didn’t mind. I took my shears and cut it down to Cora’s size, more or less; didn’t need to be exact. And snipped off some of the old-timey furbelows but left on all the lace I could.
“Saturday morning we got out the big washtub and set it in the front yard. I fetched Aunt Emmaline’s old petticoat that I’d cut down and the packet of dye and handed them to Cora. ‘This is to be your slip next week,’ I told her. ‘You’ll want to dye it as bright as the dye will color. We want to see it the brightest scarlet since the days of Babylon.’
“‘Why Mama,’ she said, ‘I can’t wear any such slip as that. You know it wouldn’t be becoming for me to wear a red slip. I would feel silly all over.’
“‘Never you mind about that,’ I said. ‘You just dye this silk as scarlet as the sins of Salome.’
“‘But it won’t even fit me. No matter how red it gets, it’s not going to fit.’
“‘Never you mind,’ I said.
“So she poured in the water and dye and vinegar and let that old rag soak. Every time she’d dip it out with the wash paddle and hold it up to look, I’d say, ‘Not yet. Let it take some more color.’ Finally along about milking time, I judged it to be satisfactory. Red enough to suit me at last, it would put a raging fire to shame. If there was e’er a man with blood as red as that silk, he would be acclaimed a stalwart hero far and wide. It kind of hurt my eyes to look at it. ‘All right,’ I told Cora, ‘now lay it out to dry and set and don’t mind if it streaks a little. That won’t much matter.’
“‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I will state plainly that I’ll never wear this scarlet scandal. Why, I’m ashamed to be in the same county with it.’
“‘Never you mind,’ I said. ‘Let’s get the milking done and the other chores and sit us down to a bite of supper.’
“So we did, and at the supper table I unfolded my mind to her. She was to tell Joe Robert, come Monday, that the only silk she had been able to lay hands on was the very slip she was wearing. ‘You tell him it’s seen its best days,’ I said, ‘and that you are willing to contribute it to a worthy cause like science, only you don’t know how to give it to him without occasioning gossip. Then he’ll figure out some way to get hold of it and you tell him you’re going into the teachers’ cloakroom or somewhere and take it off right there and deliver it. If you do that, I believe it will start up a chain of events leading to a fortunate conclusion.’
“‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I will tell you once again that I shall not wear that scarlet slip to school or anywhere else.’
“‘I’d be ascared if you did,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is tote it to school in a paper poke. He won’t know you didn’t wear it.’
“‘You want me to lie to Joe Robert?’
“‘Well, I’ll admit that it’s a fib, and a pretty good-sized one,’ I said. ‘So you must promise me that when you two are married and living content together for a while, you’ll open up to Joe Robert and tell him the whole truth.’
“‘Even about my mother putting me up to it?’ she asked.
“‘If need be,’ I said, though I’ll admit to you, Jess, I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“‘And you think this will do the trick?’
“‘Daughter, I believe that it must.’
“And so it did, for she recounted to me how Joe Robert took an interest in her silk and how his eyes lit up when she told him she would secretly disrobe and deliver the slip to him and how round as saucers his eyes got when he peeped into the paper poke and saw that silk as scarlet as the flames of Sodom and Gomorrah. He peeped down in that paper bag she sneaked to him under the table in the lunchroom and when he raised his head, he looked at her with an expression she had not seen on his face before, nor on the face of any other man besides.
“Don’t ever imagine, grandson, that an old woman like me doesn’t know what’s on the minds of hotblood lads like your daddy was and you pretty near are. If women couldn’t figure out things as simple as that, where do you think the human race would be? Perished off the face of the earth, is where. And science would have to wait a mighty long time for another set of monkeys to turn into human people again. Not that that’s the way it happened we got here. It’s only one of your daddy’s bright ideas that will cause more trouble yet, if he’s not careful.
“Anyhow, it turned out like I thought it would. Your daddy opened up that brown paper poke and I expect he closed it again quick as a flash. But even before he got it closed he was thinking thoughts about that Cora Sorrells wearing a slip of such color. Red flag to a bull, that was, though of course it didn’t make him mad. Only wondering and curious and eager as a shirttail youngun to see Christmas come.
“I had a strong notion that scarlet slip would catch his interest, but Cora said, ‘And what will he be thinking of me now, do you suppose? I’d give a pretty to know. He will consider me to be one of the easiest sort.’
“‘It’ll all turn out well,’ I told her. ‘There’s a lot of stop and go in a courtship. With Joe Robert, we’ve had to get him going strong before we’ll ever need to stop him.’
“‘But what will he do? What’s going to happen now?’
“‘He’ll have to teach his demonstration about Benjamin Franklin’s kite. Tonight he’ll be up late putting it together and tomorrow you’ll see it flying through the sky.’
“‘Then what?’
“‘On your way home from school tomorrow afternoon,’ I told Cora, ‘I want you to stop by Virgil Campbell’s store again and get three boxes of twelve-gauge shotgun shells.’
“‘What in the world for?’
“‘Never you mind,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going the way we planned. You just bring home those twelve-gauge shells.’
“She looked at me like I was a woman insane, but I knew she’d do as I asked. As soon as she went off to school and I got most of my Tuesday-morning chores out of the way, I went up to the attic and moved some old tobacco canvas and other truck out of the way till I uncovered your grandaddy’s shotgun. It had been up there since the week after he died, but I knew it would be in good shape. Uncle Uless had cleaned it and oiled it and wrapped it tight in oil
cloth and put it away for me. I took it out in the yard and unwrapped it in the sunlight so I could see it clear. I didn’t spot a speck of rust, only a little grime and attic dust, and of course the oil had leaked away from some parts. I cleaned it the best I knew how with some rags and a curtain rod and thought it would shoot well enough. It is a striking-looking shotgun with a curly-maple stock and some gold engraving along the barrels.… Well, you know what it looks like; your daddy has let you hold it once or twice, I reckon.
“When Cora came home after school, she told me how Joe Robert had wasted no time before flying his kite. He took his science class out into the schoolyard and told them to run it aloft. ‘Be sure and feel that red silk, boys,’ he said. ‘It came from Miz Silverside’s silk panties that I believe to be left over from her years as a cancan dancer in the wicked haunts of Paris, France.’
“So they flew it in the air and he made sure to pass it by Cora’s windows, where she was teaching her Spanish class. Back and forth, back and forth—like a redbird building a nest, she said, and she told me it made her feel peculiar. ‘What if it really had been my slip that I took off for that man?’ she asked me. ‘How would I feel then? And what if somebody else thought it was my slip? What if he told one of the other teachers it was?’
“‘Never you mind about that,’ I said. ‘Did you bring home those shotgun shells like I asked you to?’
“‘They’re in the back of my car,’ she said.
“‘Well, let’s get them,’ I told her, ‘because you’re going to need to practice up.’
“‘Practice what?’
“‘Your marksmanship,’ I said. ‘I’m going to teach you how to be a shooting woman.’
“‘I don’t want to be a shooting woman,’ she complained.
“‘Yes you do, Cora. Tell me the truth—hasn’t everything happened just the way I told you it would? Have I misled you so far?’
“‘No,’ she admitted to me.
“‘Then let’s just keep on with my plan,’ I said.
“And so we did, and you know the rest of the story. Joe Robert wouldn’t give up on Dr. Franklin. He ran that kite past Cora’s classroom windows every day for a solid week. Meanwhile, she was out in the pasture every afternoon shooting away at tree limbs, thistle heads, daisies, squirrels—anything that would serve as a target, sitting or moving.
“I have to say, though, Jess, that she wasn’t born with a natural talent for firearms. I’m a pretty steady marksman myself, but your mother was always a little ascared of the shotgun and couldn’t stop from flinching and jerking the trigger. But practice makes perfect, you know, and if Cora never actually got to be perfect with her twelve-gauge, she finally didn’t need to. That red kite flying so close, just about anybody could bring that contraption down, and that’s what Cora did.
“She let go both barrels, she told me, and there wasn’t anything left of that silk kite but a red snow flurry. Then she leaned out and looked down at your father, and his mouth was open so wide, it looked like somebody had dug a hole in his face. That’s what she told me, anyhow, and I can well believe it. He wasn’t expecting any such force of arms. Then she hollered at him to stop distracting her Spanish class and slid the window down and left him standing foolish in the middle of the schoolyard, looking like he had been lightning-struck.”
* * *
“So that’s how she won his heart,” I said. I had heard about shooting the kite down. My father liked to tell the story and now and again my mother would allude to it. I’d heard other accounts, too, some confused and partial, some elaborate and fantastic, from the loafers down at Virgil Campbell’s Bound for Hell Gro. and Dry Goods. But I had never heard how my grandmother had planned out the whole drama from day one and how her strategy had worked every step of the way as perfect as a waterwheel turning.
“No. That’s how Cora got Joe Robert interested enough to start up a fiery courtship and lead her on to marry him. That’s not the same as winning his heart.”
“But I thought—”
“No,” she said. “The mind is swift to passion, but the heart is not an easy learner. She won his heart on their wedding night.”
“Oh,” I said, swallowing. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear anything about that part.
“That’s when he saw her left shoulder undraped,” my grandmother continued, “the way I’d been looking at it for four days. It was blue and purple and downright black in places, the way any girl’s soft-skinned shoulder would be who had fired off fifteen boxes of shotgun shells in less than a week. Looked like she’d suffered more than one stout kick from Johnson’s old gray mule.”
“Fifteen!” I said. “I thought she only bought three.”
“I kept sending her back for more.”
“Why? She didn’t need that much practice. You told me that almost anybody could have shot down that red kite.”
“Yes, but only three boxes wouldn’t have left much of a bruise.”
“Why would she want a bruise?”
“She didn’t. She complained about it hourly. But I wanted her to have it.”
“Why?”
“To win your father’s heart for good and all. When he saw how bad her shoulder was bruised, he’d understand how much she loved him and was willing to endure to get him. That would make him feel proud of her and would be the beginning of a love as deep as she desired.”
“So it was your plan that brought them together. Did you ever tell my daddy how you worked it so he’d marry my mother?”
“Do you think that would be a wise thing to do, Jess?”
I thought for a full minute of time. “I guess not.”
“Well,” she said, “while you’re guessing, why don’t you tell me what you think this jar contains?”
I took the quart of thick muddy brown liquid and held it against the lightbulb, but no rays could pierce that murk. “I think this one is thousand-year-old eggs from the Kiangsu province of China, brought to this country at great financial expense.”
She took the jar from my hands and looked it over again. “I believe you must be right,” she told me. “Your daddy said the very same thing about it last year. I’d plumb forgot where I’d placed these Chinese eggs.”
She slid the jar back into its niche and turned to pull the chain to cut the light. “I’m getting old and forgetful. Pretty soon I won’t have the least spark of memory left.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “You’re wrong about that. What you forget ain’t worth remembering.”
THE FIGURING WOMAN
“Aunt Sherlie Howes was known in our western North Carolina hills,” my grandmother told me, “as hands down the smartest woman there was. Only she wasn’t—she was the smartest person, man, woman, or child. Of course, the menfolk would never say so; they say women rush at a problem with their feelings and don’t think. But Aunt Sherlie was not only keen-witted; she was orderly in her thoughts. Folks called her ‘the Figuring Woman’ because nobody could beat her at figuring things out.
“You, being of the masculine gender, wouldn’t think so, but it is true. Many a woman you’ll meet as you go along in life that has orderly thoughts and many a man disorderly, and yet you’ll come out at the end like your daddy and grandaddy, believing that it’s men alone can think a puzzle through.
“Yet Aunt Sherlie sat out there in her little house on Devlin Road, stitching and stitching in light good or bad, having taken up as a seamstress after her husband, Ben, died of a flock of heart problems. And people would bring their conundrums to her and she would listen and then lay aside her sewing for a little and, might be, would take a pipe of tobacco in Ben’s old black briar and wait in her chair a spell and then deliver her mind. She spoke softly, so softly you’d sometimes have to hold your breath to hear her, but whatever she said was gold or, at the least, silver. She couldn’t solve every problem, but her near misses were valuable, too.
“She had a gift for listening and the patience to draw out facts that looked as little a
s liver pills until she put them in a proper light. Then they rose as big as boulders. Some feller might desire to know if it was worth breaking up his farthest-off patch of ground for a cornfield or was the soil too grudging. How many bushels would that rooty hillside yield? The questions she asked didn’t seem much to the point. Wasn’t there a thorny hedge that ran all down the east side? Didn’t that gateway down by Miller’s pond marsh up with September rains? Hadn’t Dummy Pendleton busted the axle on that three-quarter-size wagon he had? Never a query about the kind of seed or the slope of the hill or anything that would make sense. Until she said at last, ‘Well, Harley, if you plant where you’re thinking about, you’ll feed the crows and the jaybirds, but not one grain of meal will come to your table.’ Because she’d understood, you see, that Harley Stansberry could get into that piece of ground with his team and his plow, but there was no way he could drive in with a full-size wagon to pull his corn and haul it out, being as how the one other way in would be hip-deep in rain-season mud and being as how the one small wagon in the settlement was incapacitated and so was Dummy Pendleton, in a manner of speaking, that man never having mended a broken thing in his life.
“That’s just an example of the way Aunt Sherlie thought, and I could give you many another.
“But it wasn’t only practical problems, farming and carpentering and money matters and so forth, that she was asked about. The young women—and some of the young men, too, though they were a little shamefaced—would come to her about affairs of the heart. It is the affection of love that causes most perplexities in the world, and you will come to understand that in about five years. Because I don’t see you as a natural-born bachelor,” she said, and gave me a smile.
My grandmother always smiled slyly, furtively, almost secretly. Then she would wipe the smile off her mouth with the back of her hand, as if she were erasing some naughty word from a schoolroom slate.
“The one I best remember,” she said, “was the problem of Daniel Rathbone’s daughter, Vonda, who had two beaux to her string, as we used to say, two boys as different as night and day and no love lost between them. Now that’s a situation not wayward at all with a fresh-looking young thing like Vonda Rathbone, her hair shining like oat straw and bound up with a ribbon red or pink, and her gray eyes as clear as raindrops, and her way of walking that made her modesty flirtatious without her seeming to know. She was the prettiest girl in the county.
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You Page 4