Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You

by Fred Chappell

  “But you have to consider how mighty desperate they must have been. Old Talbot Lucas: He was a close one in every way. Close with a nickel, close with a smile, close with his words. If the good Lord gives each of us a fortune of words to spend from the day we get born, Talbot Lucas died a dictionary millionaire. And his wife, Little Mary, was the same way. They made a dark and silent pair, those two, and they lived in a dark and silent place. Back in Drovers Holler, where the sun is a stranger almost till Maytime and the hoot owls have all the nights to themselves and the snow lays long and crusty.

  “When I name Little Mary, I’m talking about Talbot Lucas’s first wife. She was a Simmons by birth, the least and toughest of a brood of four boys and four girls. I reckon she had to be the toughest to make it through, she being the lone straggler by about five years and the others so much bigger than her and as hungry as bears in March. She had to scrabble for what she got. Old Daddy Simmons—that’s what everybody called him—fancied himself a right smart feller, but he was as luckless as Job. His bucket didn’t have a hole in it; his bucket had no bottom, and that’s the truth. If he built a stout-looking haystack, it would mildew and rot in a week; if he planted a hillside of potatoes, there’d come a freeze two foot deep; if he picked up a likely walking stick in the woods, it would turn out to be a copperhead snake. There’s some people like that in this world and you have to hope their reward is in the world to come.

  “But the other world was no succor to the Simmons children and especially not to Little Mary that hard cuffs and harsh words had taught to be chary and watchful. It must have seemed to her that her fate was sealed; she was always to be wearing threadbare hand-me-downs and being the tail-ender at dinnertime.

  “And that’s the way it turned out. She was a sallow bitsy thing, not more than five foot five or so; her hair was a mousy brown and she kept it pulled back tight and parted in the middle in the old-timey modest way. Her figure didn’t call for notice and her hands were too big for the rest of her. Her face was unremarkable except for the eyes. She had big, dark, steady eyes and sorrow was in them like lamplight that would never go out. When you looked at her eyes—for you wouldn’t look into them, not for more than a fleeting moment—you felt like you knew her destiny from beginning to end and all the burdens of her spirit. Somewhere in Little Mary there must have been a spark or two of hope, but in her eyes all you saw was that she expected no glory and little pleasure in this life.

  “Not every woman needs to be a rose-cheeked, pigeon-chested beauty to capture the fancy of a man. You find a feller clever in his mind and settled in his thoughts and not too wild with the hot blood of youth and he’s as likely to choose a plain girl as a pretty one. But she has to attract him with some fetching quality—her wit and humor or her high spirits or a lively step or an agile needle or savorous cookery. She has to show mettle, and Little Mary didn’t show much mettle, because her long suit was endurance.

  “Let me try to be clear. It was like Little Mary, when she was in the room with other girls her age, was a mule in a stableful of saddle ponies. If anybody peered close, they could tell she was a right good mule, but the men’s attention just naturally skipped over her in such situations.

  “So when she was chosen, it had to be by somebody who was looking for exactly what she was. It had to be a man who felt he hadn’t the advantages of the other beaux of the county, not a high-stepping clog dancer, not handsome of face and limb, not favored by fortune with land or livestock or money in the bank vault. And that was Talbot Lucas. Head to toe he was a dim man. I don’t mean he was slow-witted; he could read and cipher about as good as the rest of them, I reckon. It was only that there was no shine to him. Looking upon his tall but stoop-shouldered form, a girl would feel no flutter at her heart, no warmth in her cheek. He was born to plow an inhospitable patch of earth, rocks and briars and steep hillside every step of the way. And a girl had to feel that if Lucas’s plow horse happened to die on him, she’d better be ready to step into the traces.

  “So they made a good pair, him and Little Mary Simmons. That is to say, they were well suited because they were resigned to each other almost before they ever met. It would be love at first sight in a strange sort of way; it wouldn’t be the sudden blossoming of violets and the entwining of leaping flames. It would be a recognition, like when in a houseful of strangers you spot somebody you know must be some kin to you, a second cousin or an aunt by marriage. That’s the way they came together and that’s the way the story played itself out, as far as anybody could tell.

  “They didn’t have a lot of visitors back there in Drovers Holler. Talbot Lucas had no close kinfolk and he must’ve made it clear he didn’t cotton to the notion of meeting Little Mary’s brothers and sisters too often at his dinner table. The arrangement would have suited Little Mary just as well; she’d always felt put-upon by her brothers and sisters, and the person in the world she was fondest of—her mother—died three months before her daughter wed. About the only visitors they entertained were the necessary ones: the Price boys that came to help Talbot with the spring planting and the fall harvest, the circuit preacher, who made it his certain business to wend back into the holler to call, the occasional peddler or chair caner or tinker, and Doctor Horace, who delivered all three of Little Mary’s stillborn babies.

  “That’s a sad circumstance, but to say the truth, I don’t know that children would have made the happiest difference. Talbot and Little Mary were fated to stand on the unsilvered side of the mirror, so to speak. In the waning moon. They had to be some comfort to each other, but that part of their life didn’t hardly show. They were devoted to each other pretty much as a matter of duty.

  “Still, they endured. They made a way of life where many another couple couldn’t have done it, and if they ever looked up from the rooty furrow before them, maybe they could take some pride in just hanging on. When I put myself in the place of Little Mary—and I’ve done it more times than two, I see myself taking pride in living through, not dead of heartbreak or unending toil or the fearful winters of Drovers Holler.

  “But I don’t know that Little Mary thought that way. When she came to the wedding of her sister Betty Ann down at the Bitter Creek Church, she hung back, as always, from the crowd. It was supposed to be a thankful occasion, because Betty Ann had lost her first husband, Ki Melton, in a sawmill accident and nobody had figured on her finding another man at age fifty—at least age fifty. But she’d done it and was just sparkling with joy afterward, surrounded by her lady friends in a circle that her sister Little Mary didn’t join, standing by the wall the way she always did and half-turned away. Aunt Delia Thompson made up her mind to go and speak to Little Mary and try to draw her in. She took her hand, which had a man’s calluses on palm and fingers, and said, ‘Little Mary, won’t you give your sister a wedding-day kiss?’

  “Little Mary cast her brimming eyes down at her feet. ‘I’m shy to step up in front of everybody,’ she said. ‘Betty Ann knows I wish her a world of happiness.’

  “‘It won’t do no harm to tell her so right now.’

  “‘I’ll just wait, thank you, till a later time,’ Little Mary said, and no matter how persistent Aunt Delia might press her, it was clear that Little Mary preferred her wallflower place in the room. So they chatted on a while there in the corner and Aunt Delia gathered as much personal information about the Lucases as you can carry breeze in a soup spoon. But her impression was that Little Mary’s days were long and wearying but that Talbot was not cruel to his wife, only unbending and cheerless and matter-of-fact.

  “Now it’s a truth,” my grandmother told me, “that life is difficult and man is condemned to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and we had all better take heed and store up for the hard times a-coming. I’ve never been one to say a body should spend the livelong day in frolic and foolish merriment. But there’s a cast of mind that makes things cheerfuler. You take notice sometime how different women will have their go at a heap of mending to be done.
One of them will shake her head and set her mouth in a straight line and begin the chore like she felt that every time a needle pulled a stitch, it went into her skin. But another woman will sort through the clothes, smiling as she thinks about the younguns that wear them, and match the colors of cloth and thread like she was arranging a bouquet of flowers, and make it a contest with herself how straight a row she can sew and how fine she can stitch. Both the women will get the work done proper. But for one of them there’s been some joy in it, and it’s been my observation that hers will be the tighter, neater work. Tell you what,” my grandmother suggested, “you watch the difference between Aunt Caroline and Aunt Frieda sometime, how they do their chores, but don’t tell anybody I told you to.

  “Anyhow, that was the way of things between Talbot and Little Mary. She didn’t say anything specific, but what Aunt Delia was able to gather only confirmed her idea, the same idea we all had. ‘I must say this,’ Aunt Delia added. ‘I don’t believe Little Mary is right sound of body.’ That was all she could say; it was no more than just a thought she had.

  “But her thought came true. It wasn’t five years after that when Little Mary was laid in her coffin and had a spare and solemn funeral said over her and was tucked in the gravelly ground on the slope of Siler’s Hill where the few Lucas family graves were sited. People had thought that at the funeral Talbot might shed a public tear or two, but he only stood alone, hard and dry, with burning eyes. He couldn’t look at any of the mourners, though. He shook their hands and stared above their heads. The stone he erected for Little Mary only said that she was ‘A Good and Faithful Wife.’ The second word wouldn’t seem necessary unless you knew that by faithful Talbot meant she was faithful in doing her duty day to day, not that she resisted strange affections of the heart.

  “So that was the life of Little Mary. She had got through it, we each of us thought, the way you eat a plate of food when you’re not hungry a bit. She was only forty-three when she died. I forget what medical reason the doctor wrote down, but it wasn’t the one that counted. The truth was, she wore out. Just wore thin and then wore through, like a shirtsleeve at the elbow.”

  * * *

  “It was the end, too, of Talbot Lucas, we thought, for he could never make it alone on his feeble scratch-ankle holding in that cold, cold holler and he’d never find another female like Little Mary, one that was already beaten down and ready to start turning the heavy millstone without hope and without complaint. But our supposing was way off the track on that one. I have to reckon there’s more women been scrubbed threadbare on the washboard than ever we count, for it wasn’t a whole year passed till Lucas was able to take him another wife.

  “Of course, he had to forage out of Harwood County to find her. The women in these near parts looked upon the fate of Little Mary and decided that slope was too steep for them to climb. Even the widow women figured it that way. It’s awful hard to be alone and lonesome, but it’s worse to be married and lonesome and weary and empty as a churchhouse on a rainy Monday morning. So we expected Talbot to die a bachelor and we expected wrong.

  “But it wasn’t like he won the heart of Sarah Currie. Talbot Lucas couldn’t conceive what it was to do such a thing as that. He must’ve made an arrangement with Sarah’s daddy, the way people used to do in the olden time. Back when you’d see, just like you saw with Sarah and Talbot, a young woman not twenty years old in the yoke with a man in his sixties, if not older. Talbot I’d put in his mid-fifties about this time, but I don’t know for sure. He looked old, but when was there ever a day he hadn’t looked old?

  “So he brought Sarah Currie into Drovers Holler and she settled into place as natural as a door latch slipping into its sleeve. She was even more ready for her fate, it looked like, than Little Mary was. More silent, more obedient, more bowed to the will of her husband. He wasn’t a cruel man, given to hard drink and blows. He only just never lifted his eyes from the rocky path to look at the flowers blooming sunny on the hillside.

  “I hate to admit this part of the truth, but we all wondered how long it would be before Sarah wore out like Little Mary had. That was an ugly thought, but we couldn’t help it coming to us. At least I couldn’t. Talbot had found him a woman with even less spirit than the one before. Little Mary showed the soul of herself in those big sad eyes, but Sarah wouldn’t even show her eyes. Kept them fixed on the ground or skittering away nervous from the gaze of whoever she’d be talking to. She was a mite taller than Little Mary but slighter in figure and paler. Her hair was reddish and her eyes—if you could catch a glimpse of them—were blue.

  “The Lucases now kept to themselves more than before. Talbot hadn’t been coming down to Plemmons’s Grocery but every two weeks, and now it would be three weeks to a month before you’d see him there, stocking up on staples—flour and sugar and coffee and such like—and nothing else. Sarah, we figured, must have been a thriftier housekeeper than Little Mary, and we wondered how that could be.

  “We figured and wondered too much,” my grandmother said. “Gossip is a curse on the community. But it’s such a refreshment to the spirit, nobody can resist. Well, actually some can. Now and then you’ll find one that won’t indulge in gossip. And what happens to them? Why, other people talk them down so low, the moles can’t sniff them. Ginny Slater—I’ll tell you her story sometime maybe.… The things we wondered and said out loud about Talbot and Sarah ought to’ve made a mule blush, but we’d got our teeth into it and the less we knew, the more we rattled on.

  “Came a time, though, when I was able to find out some of the truth myself. For I was there, right in the same room, when Talbot and Sarah paid their first call on Aunt Sherlie Howes. I’d been sent to take Aunt Sherlie a syrup cake to pay her back a little for solving a problem my own grandmother Akers had. To this day I don’t know what the problem was, only that it was an important one. Syrup cake was a special dish Granny made and she only made it once a year maybe, at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  “I’d presented Aunt Sherlie the cake and she’d marveled at it and we took it back to the kitchen and then she insisted I stay and have a cup of tea with her. There I was, seventeen years old and proud as a princess to be sitting and sipping in Aunt Sherlie’s living room, when there came a rap on the door. Well, not a rap—more of a gentle tapping, no more sound than a blind man’s cane makes along a rocky road. She motioned for me to answer it and invite the caller in. And when I saw it was the Lucases, I was so struck with surprise that I couldn’t speak. Talbot stood there with his old dented brown hat on his head and Sarah half-hid behind him. Aunt Sherlie had to call out, ‘Come in, come into the house!’ Because, of course, she wasn’t a bit surprised, or didn’t seem so.

  “I stepped back and they passed me by till I shut the door and followed. She asked them to sit in her straight chairs. The other preliminaries were got through in a hurry. Not because the Lucases were unmannerly. They were only tight-lipped and strongly distressed. Aunt Sherlie took their abruptness in good humor and was perfectly willing to skim along to the heart of the matter. But when she asked them point-blank what she could do, all the hurry went out of them and they gave each other uncertain glances and faltered and then fell silent. She didn’t try to persuade them, only sat easy and silent in her armchair, turning that well-known silver thimble over and over in her fingers.

  “Finally Talbot got it out. ‘It’s a hant.’ he said. ‘It’s a hant come to vex us in our house.’

  “You can just picture how I perked up at that. I leaned forward in my chair and could feel my ears growing as long and twitchy as a hare’s in hunting season. A hant!

  “But Aunt Sherlie only waited.

  “‘It comes ever night almost,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to make it go away.’

  “Aunt Sherlie spoke as quiet as water filling a spring run, the way she always did. ‘It’s not so easy to lay ghosts. Of course, I’ll do what I can to help.’

  “‘We hate to put you out,’ Talbot said. ‘But it’s got to where
we have to do something about it.’

  “‘Well then,’ Aunt Sherlie said, ‘tell me about this hant you see. What does it look like?’

  “‘It’s a woman,’ he said. ‘All dressed in silver cloth and shining like the moon. Long silvery blond hair she has, that reaches down to her waist.’

  “‘Do you see this hant, too, Sarah?’

  “The shy woman nodded, not looking up.

  “‘Do you see the same one Talbot sees? Because, you know, sometimes with ghosts they will appear different to different people.’

  “Now Sarah raised her head and looked Aunt Sherlie full in the face. ‘I thought it was an angel. So bright and shining. It’s the prettiest thing you ever saw.’

  “Aunt Sherlie smiled. ‘Well, maybe it is an angel. You wouldn’t want to drive an angel out of your house.’

  “They looked at each other glumly. ‘It ain’t no angel,’ Talbot said. ‘We found that out pretty quick.’

  “‘How?’

  “‘Well, it dances,’ he said. ‘It twirls around in the air and that thin dress of silver floats up all around it and it will keep right on dancing for an hour or better.’

  “‘Where does it do this dance?’

  “‘In our bedroom,’ he said, ‘where we’re trying to sleep.’

  “‘You say it dances. Do you hear any music for it to dance to?’

  “‘There ain’t no music. Not a sound.’

  “‘Does it ever talk to you?’

  “‘No.’

  “Sarah put in a soft disagreement. ‘It don’t talk, but it signs to us.’

  “‘What kind of signs does it make?’

  “‘Signs with its hands,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know what they mean. Sometimes I think it is telling us to follow it to where it is in the world to come.’