He opened their bedroom door slowly, trying without success to avoid its high-pitched squeak. “Nell, honey, are you okay?” he asked softly.
“What is it?”
“Little Elizabeth has a fever.”
“Oh my God. Let me see!” She bounded into the kids’ room, Jim close behind. She felt Little Elizabeth’s forehead and picked her up. “Oh, sweet baby, it’s going to be all right. Mommy promises,” she cooed. She leveled that look at Jim. “Right now, call the doctor.”
“Honey, that telephone’s for emergencies.”
She clenched her jaw and grabbed Little Elizabeth a little tighter. “What in blue blazes do you think this is?”
“Let me fix some spicebush tea, best thing in the world for a fever. It’ll give her relief way before we could get to town.”
“Tea,” Nell said. She wiped her daughter’s forehead and mouth with the damp washrag. “My precious could die in my arms and you want to make tea. TEA? What kind of hillbilly hick are you, anyway?”
“Nell, I’m just trying to do what’s best. This stuff’ll sweat that fever out of her, I swear.” He started to fill the teakettle.
“Jim Hawkins, call the doctor. Now.”
Considerable heft to her words made him lift the receiver. After a half minute someone picked up. Jim arranged to be connected with Doc Bennett’s office, but no one answered. Jim rubbed his eyes and asked for the hospital. They said Bennett was at Ironduff but a new doctor was there. “My daughter is sick,” Jim said.
“Where are you?”
“Cataloochee. This is Warden Hawkins. My little girl has a high fever.”
“Can you get her here by ten?”
“I’ll try. Can you at least tell me what not to give her, or what to let her have? I see. Okay. Please tell the doctor to stay.” He hung up.
“What did they say?”
“You heard my end of it. There’s a Dr. McGuire there. The nurse said it could be one of any number of diseases. No way to tell over the phone. I’ll get the car.”
The hospital was a new three-story brick building with a stone-stepped portico. They walked up the steps a bit before eleven, shoes echoing in the night air. Jim had driven like a bat out of hell. Nell’s hat was skewed, revealing frizz above her right ear. Her dress was spattered from car sickness. Jim had no idea if his hat had blown out the window or lodged somewhere in the car. His tie hung at half-mast and his forehead was sore from hitting the bouncing car’s windshield frame. Mack looked confused and scared.
Dr. McGuire, just out of Chapel Hill’s medical school, was not yet used to people whispering about his youth. “Don’t want him cutting on me,” folks said. “He ain’t dry behind the ears.” At the exterior door’s whoosh, he looked up at a tall, angular man wearing half a uniform and holding a young boy’s hand. A pretty but disheveled woman stood at his side, holding a gangly girl in her arms who looked—he could think of no other term—dead. One leg swung lazily in odd time with her head, which hung at an angle to reveal an unblemished lily-white neck. Her face was cold and as white as marble. So was her mother’s.
“You are the Hawkins family,” McGuire said quietly. “Come this way, please.” As they followed him down the hall, their shadows alternately lengthened and shortened under the yellow glare of ceiling bulbs.
Nell laid Little Elizabeth on an examining table, white paper crinkling loudly under her limp body. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she, Doctor?” Nell asked, smoothing her daughter’s hair.
“I have to diagnose her,” said McGuire. He looked at Jim. “Sir, please take your family to the lobby. I’ll be out soon.”
“I’m not leaving my little girl,” said Nell. “Not for a million dollars.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you must. Hospital regulations. Please, there’s no time to waste.”
Jim put his arm around Nell. “Honey, let the doctor work.”
Nell pointed Mack door-ward. “Okay, Son, your father’s right.” She kissed Little Elizabeth’s cheek. “See you soon, dearest. Be sweet, hear?”
McGuire found a pulse and decent blood pressure, for which he lifted thanksgivings. Her temperature was 103.8. He checked eyes, ears, nose, and throat. After listening to lungs and heart he wrote on a form and walked down the hall. He returned with a nurse and an IV setup.
Within two minutes the girl’s cheeks bloomed and her breathing slowed and deepened. He gave her aspirin by mouth, and she drank a little water through parched lips. Her fever soon dropped two degrees. He left her with the nurse.
Nell jumped from the chair when she heard the doctor’s footsteps. “How is she?” she cried. Jim stood beside her while Mack slept in a chair.
“She’s going to be fine,” he said.
“What has she got?”
“Could be one of a number of things. Fever and rash suggest scarlet fever, although it could be meningitis or the initial stage of whooping cough. But she responds to aspirin and I’m giving her a bottle of saline. We’ll need tests, of course.”
“Can we see her?”
“Certainly. This way.”
Dr. McGuire studied religious art avidly, like some men fished or hunted. When he left Little Elizabeth’s family, he felt he had viewed a new Nativity—light focusing on the mother adoringly brushing her sleeping child’s hair, father and brother shadowy except for expectant faces reflecting the female glow. Missing were the traditional cattle and sheep, shepherds and magi, but the IV and its stand somehow served as a modern savior.
Nell used to keep her mother’s letters in a small box, but had lately taken to burning them, because Elizabeth Johnson had escalated her campaign to convince Nell to leave Jim.
The letter Nell received after she told her mother of her granddaughter’s illness—three weeks after the fact—was what Jim would have called (if he had seen it) a son of a bitch’s son of a bitch. She read it the night it arrived:
My Dear Daughter Nell,
It is a beautiful summer day, but one can barely keep windows open here lately for the haze in the air. I have been SO miserable, nose running and eyes scratchy, it’s enough to make me want to live in Arizona. How have YOU been? You used to be such a dear baby, but I thought you’d never learn to blow your nose.
Pastor King preached this morning on that horrid passage about Moses lifting up a snake. Seems to me we have enough as it is without having to hear about them in church. It’s nice when they talk about Jesus without dragging in all that unseemly ancient stuff.
How is my Precious Little Elizabeth? I hope very well by now and that medicine has worked. It is a miracle what they can do these days. When I was little, there was nothing to be really done for fever except horrid hot tea to sweat the fever out. Barbaric, don’t you agree?
How is Henry? I hope he is not suffering from not being around children his age. I worry about him being around men so much—they can be such Beasts.
Now, Nell, I must tell you—not ASK, TELL you—that if you will not leave Cataloochee for my sake, or your father’s sake, or even your own—please leave for the sake of your dear, precious children!!!! Next time you might not get a sick one to the hospital in time. A child with a high fever can be severely damaged so quickly. I know you love your Husband, but, really, dear, he has done his work. He has given you two wonderful lives. Whether he considers that a sacred trust is one thing, but as a MOTHER you certainly do, and must act upon it. If that means leaving him in that dreadful place, SO BE IT!
Your father and I have prepared a place for you and will welcome you when you come to your senses. We would happily make that awful journey once more to get you and our grandchildren, so they can grow up in a safe place that will give them a good education and all the benefits of a caring church and loving community. Let us know when you are ready and we’ll be Johnny-on-the-Spot!!!!
Nell sighed, laid the letter in the fireplace, and lit a match to it. Walking to the window, she looked at her reflection in the crazed glass, held herself, and wept.
CHAPTER 29
Wash Day
Nell had never fully mastered kitchen chemistry, nor did she enjoy gardening, even after Aunt Mary showed her the difference between radishes and pigweed. The one household chore she perfectly understood was washing clothes. Not that she ever came to love it, but it got her out of the house, gave her some exercise, and made her feel as though she had accomplished something.
She had not grown up with a washing machine—in fact, until she was six there had been no indoor plumbing—but after that her father bought appliances as long as he had credit. In 1924 he replaced an old machine with an Allen from Sears with a punishing wringer atop and a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Then Nell married Jim and left for Cataloochee.
When Nell first asked Jim where the laundry room was, he laughed. “Out here,” he said, and led her to the creek, where an ancient iron pot sat beside a fire pit. Her eyes popped. “You’re joshing. I am supposed to wash here? Jim Hawkins, this is the twentieth century.”
The pot was surely as old as its original owner, Lige Howell’s wife Penny’s mother—at least a century. Jim told Nell to build a fire under it, but not before filling it, lest the old iron crack. “Treat it nice, it’ll last another generation or two,” he said, and it sounded to her like he meant her to be using it that long herself.
The beetling block—a wooden bench upon which boiled clothes were paddled clean—was the fourth or fifth copy of the original Lige Howell had built about the time of the Civil War. “It’s got nothing to do with beetles,” Jim explained. “It’s because you beat the clothes half to death to get the dirt out. Up some coves they’re called ‘battling blocks.’”
Jim, in a concession to modernity, had bought her two galvanized tubs. Her routine was to fetch firewood—after once being frightened nearly to death by a weasel in the wood stack, she had learned to knock on it with an ax handle before picking up a load of firewood—then fill both tubs with creek water and throw clothes in one. She fetched in turn overalls, shirts, and dresses, laid them atop the block, beat them with a paddle, then rinsed them in the other tub. When her pot boiled, she laid in clothes and soap, and stirred them. She refilled the tubs while the clothes boiled, then rinsed them twice, Jim’s really messy things thrice. The children loved to help, holding pins while she hung the wash on the line at first, then doing all the hanging and a great deal of the beetling.
“Nell, I don’t think it’s a good idea to wash today,” Jim said on an August Monday in 1933.
“Why, Jim?”
“I’ve lost Willie McPeters.”
“What’s that got to do with laundry?”
He sat at the kitchen table. “I hadn’t wanted to worry you, honey, but McPeters sets these dern fires around here. He’s not dangerous, I don’t think—anyhow, I haven’t known him to bother women.” He examined the salt shaker like he’d never seen one before. “But he carries a Marlin, and they say he killed a revenue man back in 1916. I was chasing him the other day and lost the trail. Unless I have an idea where he is, I don’t want you or the young’uns outside.” He dusted his palm with salt and licked it.
“What does he look like?”
“Three inches shorter’n me, about one eighty, I’d guess. Kind of stooped, with these black eyebrows jammed together. Mean look to him. Not mean like the old grinning devil, but kind of vacant, like he would kill you same’s he’d swat a fly, and maybe for less reason.”
“Is he a native?”
Jim laughed. “You make folks from here sound like aborigines. He was born, if that’s the right word for such a critter, up Carter Fork, close to my homeplace. Always was quare, never talked much. Don’t think he’s done a lick of honest work in his life. So, dear, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the doors locked.”
Monday folded into Tuesday. Jim came home both days with no news of McPeters. Nell washed the insides of the windows with vinegar and newspaper and scrubbed the floors. Wednesday morning she decided to get out of the house long enough to wash the curtains, which the half-clean windows made look shabby. After checking on Mack and Little Elizabeth, who—despite their father’s objections—were allowed to sleep late in summer, she filled the pot, lit the fire, and looked around. Nothing seemed amiss, but she was aware of her heartbeat. Rearranging a curl, and wiping perspiration from her upper lip, she noticed nothing moving except chickens and a solitary towhee scratching at the base of the big maple. A jaybird screamed but seemed only to warn of the barn cat to Nell’s left.
Suddenly the cat skittered behind the outhouse. Nell laid two more sticks under the pot and folded arms over her chest. Still. No breeze, no crows. Nell slowly walked toward the house. Her footsteps in the yard seemed as loud as Chinese gongs.
Indoors it seemed no more threatening than normal life in such a place. But she nearly jumped when Jim’s dogs barked, tentatively at first, then earnestly, not the music of chase but a chorus of “I’ll rip its guts out.”
She ran from the kitchen across the dogtrot to the children’s room. “Mama, want me to make them be quiet?” asked Mack, who had crawled out of bed to look out the window. Little Elizabeth thrashed groggily in her bed.
“Hush, Son. Stay in here.”
She went to the porch and crossed the dogtrot again. Parting the gauze curtains in the kitchen, she peered toward the road. Across it, in a patch of incipient woods, mostly tulip trees and scrub hemlocks, was a tree, walking. No, she thought. Look again. It floated fog-like to the edge, then stood as still as a cigar store Indian. No tree, but a man, intently watching something to her left. The dogs raised holy hell.
Nell returned to the kitchen and locked the door, hoping the man would not hear the click that seemed to her as loud as hammer on anvil. At the window she saw the figure had moved toward the road. He held a rifle in his left hand like a suitcase and rubbed his crotch rhythmically with his right, eyes focused toward the creek.
Good God, that’s nasty. What kind of wickedness ruts after a wash pot? Oh, my God, what if he decides to come in here?
She ran to the pantry. Jim had given her a .32 Smith & Wesson not long after they’d moved. He had had in mind protection, but Nell had thought it fun. They had practiced with paper targets nailed to the barn, and she had aptitude and soon learned not to recoil at the noise. The pistol’s four-inch barrel gave a small chance of hitting what she aimed at.
It stayed wrapped in a dish towel behind the pickles. She pushed the latch with her right thumb and with her left index finger persuaded the cylinder to open. Six cartridge ends stared at her like fish eyes. She snapped the cylinder shut and tiptoed to the window. McPeters rubbed his swollen, filthy overalls more quickly. He seemed not to hear dogs or have an eye for anything save the dwindling fire. She cocked the pistol and looked at it. Its hammer reminded her of some odd, running animal. She wondered if she had the nerve to open the door and kill a man.
Then she uncocked the weapon. If I miss… he’d kill me… or worse…. Better keep it, though. He might try to break in.
Little Elizabeth squalled for her mother from her room. “Oh, shoot,” Nell whispered. “Please, God, don’t let him hear.” She unlocked the door as slowly as she could and glanced outside. McPeters did not seem to notice. She whisked across the dogtrot into the children’s room and shut the door as gently as her shaking hand would allow. When she put finger to mouth to shush Mack and Little Elizabeth, she realized she still held the Smith.
“Mama, why the gun?” asked Mack.
Little Elizabeth ran to her mother and embraced her waist. “Mama, I’m scared,” she said.
“Both of you please be very quiet. There’s something unpleasant on the place.”
“What is it?” asked Mack.
“A man. A bad, bad man. He mustn’t hear us.”
McPeters did not change expression when Nell’s fire burned itself out. He eyeballed the place, walked toward the house, then stopped. A dark spot bloomed a few inches down his left inseam. He sniffed the air behind h
im and put his hand to his midsection. He held his breath and closed his eyes for a moment, then turned and stalked toward the barn.
The dogs quieted after a time, and Nell wondered if McPeters had wandered out the back of the barn for other places. She did not want to risk a kitchen fire so figured to serve the children peanut butter and bread for dinner.
At about eleven the dogs started again, but in their “Here comes the guy who feeds us” bark. Nell had grown up with cats, so was always amazed at the sensitivity of dog ears. She did not relax, however, until Jim rode in.
The horse would not enter the barn, where a vile odor in the shape of a man hung like a mist. McPeters. Jim pulled his revolver while trying to calm the mare, which he tied beside the maple.
The tracks were clear—the boot heel with the cross had come from the road, stood for some time facing the creek, then started toward his house, then turned toward the barn. Torn between finding McPeters and checking on his family, he looked first one direction, then the other, then ran to the house when Nell waved frantically from the kitchen.
Nell did not remark Jim’s hugging her with a pistol in his hand, nor did he chide her for a similar offense. “Did you see him?”
“That was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen. Oh, I’m sooo glad to see you.”
“Which way did he go?”
“He went into the barn, then I never saw him again.”
“How long ago?”
“Maybe a half hour, I don’t know. Jim, I’m so rattled I can hardly think.”
He holstered his pistol and took hers. “Never show this unless you mean to use it, honey. Never.”
“I know. You’ve told me that. I just thought, if he tried to break in, I’d… Oh, Mack, Little Elizabeth, honey, don’t listen.”
Jim squatted for a hug from his children. “Don’t worry. Things are fine now. I’ll take care of that bad man.”
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