by Smith, Lee
“Now Mama,” I said. I never knowed what she had in mind till right then.
“They’ll be bringing that baby back up here directly,” Mama said. “Almarine is in no shape to keer for her neither, as ye see, and so I’ll be a-leaving ye here to do it fer him. Somebody has got to stay fer a while, and that’s a fact. He ain’t got no people in the world.”
Well Lord! My heart was just a-thumping in my breast. I knowed what she was up to.
“Mama,” I said.
But Mama looked right hard at me and pushed back my hair and said, “Hush your mouth.” Then she said it was my Christian duty, but I knowed.
My mind went back to a time years and years ago when I was naught but a girl and already I knowed, even then, how I looked and how boys turned away. Even if folks tries to hide it, you allus know. Well, it was early spring right after the thaw and I woke up before light and I heard it raining and I slipped out. If you wet your face in the first spring rain it’ll make you beautiful, Granny said. So I was a-standing out there in the yard, in the rain, when it got light at last and Mama opened the cabin door and said, “Oh Rose. Oh Rose, come back inside.” I was soaked clear through to the skin. “Oh Rose,” Mama said and she held me so close and she cried.
This all went through my mind when she said stay.
“Let Louella,” I said, but she took ahold of my shoulders and shook them till my teeth like to left my head.
“You’re the eldest,” Mama said. “Don’t be a fool,” she said.
But I was a pure-tee fool for Almarine, till I saw how hateful he is.
And he wouldn’t never look, nor never speak. Oh I felt so sorry for him, it like to broke my heart when they come back with the tales of the burying and how Almarine had built a little lattice burying-house above her grave to keep out wolves, and how Joe Johnson who had the learning and the skill had carved her name PRICEY JANE CANTRELL on a slab of fine-grained oak he brung from home a-purpose and nailed it over the door. They said it almost kilt old Joe to climb Hoot Owl Mountain. Nobody thought he’d make it, but he did. Nobody preached at the burying, of course, that was still to come. When the circuit rider comes around he does all the funerals and marrying which has built up over time, since last he came. But you’ve got to go ahead and get them in the ground, all the same. They say Hester Little played the harmonica over her grave. What with all that building and digging and so on, it was full dark when they come back down and went their own ways home. I guess they was glad to leave, the Davenports in particular.
I stayed on.
And he never paid me no mind atall, nor even spoke to Dory when they brung her back, until three weeks or more had gone by and he started coming out of it. All of a sudden I could tell. He picked Dory up, that was the first sign, and then the next day he turned to watch me pass as I come in with water from the spring. I could feel his eyes in my back as I passed.
“I’m Rose,” I said, and Almarine said, “I know who you are.” I cotched up my apron and started to cry, I’ll say it—oh Lord! I was such a fool. I won’t even say what I thought then, or what I hoped.
Well, it went on this way into October, and one rainy cold morning early when he was out feeding the stock, come a knock at the door.
I opened it.
A woman who looks like she might be part Indian is a-standing there, and a little old girl behind her a-holding her skirts. This is a skinny little girl with great big eyes. Now this gives me a surprise because where that cabin is, don’t nobody much get all the way up there without you knowing it, and I never heard a thing. Dory starts to holler then and I turn to get her, and this half-breed woman just walks right in. She sighs and puts her sack down on the floor. That little girl is peeping out behind her skirts, and both of them dripping wet.
“Can you spare me a bite to eat?” the woman says, and I get her a cornpone and she eats it and gives the little girl half. She is a tall woman with thick shiny black hair, dark complected, of course, and a big strong nose and a wide mouth and big dark eyes. She made me feel puny a-standing there. The rain had made beads on her shiny black hair.
“I’ve come a long way,” she said. Nothing moved in her face when she talked, old Indian poker-face is what I told Mama later. Of course I would not have given her the time of day if I had met her in the road, and there she walked right into Almarine’s house.
I never said a thing.
“I’m looking for Almarine Cantrell,” she said. “Air you his wife?”
“No, she ain’t,” Almarine said from the door and I started crying and run past him out that door into the rain, he was hateful just like I said.
By the time I come back, she had clean took over. She was the kind of woman to do that—just like I am the kind, I reckon, to have such a tender heart. Oh she was hateful, and he was too. She was making coffee and frying eggs and her little girl was holding Dory on her lap. This was Riley’s wife, I found out—that brother who ran away, and now he had died, and she came looking to find his people. Her name was Vashti Cantrell, she said, and her daughter was called Ora Mae. She said it all in a low flat voice, just like an Indian, and her face never moved atall. By then she was sweeping his floor. Almarine was just a-sitting there blowing on his coffee and nodding his head and watching what-all she did.
“You might as well stay for a spell,” he said, “since it’s raining.”
Lord! I went and packed all my things in a poke and said I was leaving, but he never made nary a move to stop me, after all I’d done. He sat there watching that half-breed work. He did say I orter take a mule to get home on and he would come get it later, but I said I never wanted no mule of hisn. Then he said he wanted to pay me something for my trouble, and I’m proud to say I throwed it down on the floor. I was not such a fool as he thought!
By the time I got home, I was wet clear through and coughing. I take a cold really easy, allus have. I’m the delicate one. I had liked to fell in the creek a-trying to cross it at the bottom of Hoot Owl Holler. It was all swole up from the rain. I never got home till after noon, and the rain had paled to a little old fine cold drizzle by then. Mama saw me coming and run out the door.
“Rose!” she said. “Why honey.” I could tell she was mad at me for coming back and that started me crying again, to have your own mother rile on you for coming home.
“Hit ain’t my fault,” I said. “Hit ain’t my fault atall. He ast me to stay but I won’t,” I said. “He ast me to git married and I turned him down. Hit’s a curse on the whole holler,” I said, “and I ain’t having any part of it. Almarine has done tole me hisself. That witch, she put it on before he kilt her, and I ain’t staying there, Mama, you couldn’t pay me to stay.” These words come out of my mouth just as smooth as glass, and I liked to have died when I heard it. I had never knowed what I would say till I opened my mouth.
“That holler is hanted,” I said.
“What kind of a curse?” Now this is Louella, asking out in the rain from the cabin door.
“Never you mind,” I says, “but I’m not having no part of it myself, I’ll tell you that.”
“Oh Rose,” Mama said in the funniest voice, so I couldn’t tell if she credited me or not, but then she put her arm around my waist and pulled me toward the door and said, “Why honey, you’re wet clear through, you poor thing, come in and we’ll make you some pennyrile tea. You poor thing,” Mama said, and I thought just for a minute about the time I sat up in the bed and called his name, and about what would have happened if he had come, and I was crying then with the rain on my face and I remembered that other time I went out in it to get beautiful. Lord! I wouldn’t of stayed over there in that hanted holler if you had paid me.
AT THE BURYING-GROUND
The funeral of Pricey Jane Cantrell was preached two years after her death, in July, upon the arrival of Brother Lucius Basnight, the circuit rider, and his son. The funeral honored the memory of old Nan Cantrell, of Pricey Jane Cantrell, Eli Cantrell, and Granny Younger, who had asked befo
re her death to be buried in the Cantrell family plot on the top of Hoot Owl Mountain. “I likes the wind up there,” she had said to Almarine, “iffen ye’ll have me,” and Almarine had smiled and said he would. He had buried her himself, near Pricey Jane, at the edge of the grassy bald nearest the precipice, over the gorge that the wind rose from.
It took them all morning to climb the mountain, with Almarine leading the way. Almarine walked straight ahead up the path carrying his walking stick, to beat the bushes for snakes, and the others followed behind, stopping often to talk or to rest. Nobody had traveled this path since spring, and yet the path itself was clear. “Weeds won’t grow in the way of death,” Rhoda said, clutching her side, and the Justice boys looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “Mama, you sound like Granny Younger,” Louella said, and one of the older Wade girls said she had heard how when Granny died, all the doors in all the cabins on Hurricane Mountain flew open. Was that a fact? the Wade girl asked. The Wade girls were pretty, with dimples in their cheeks and sandy hair. “Yes, it is,” Rose Hibbitts said, and Louella turned to stare hard at her sister.
Rose had changed so much in the last several years. Louella had seen the children teasing Rose sometimes, lately, and she had heard the littlest Skeens girls jumping rope to the chant: “Rose, Rose, runny nose.” Louella couldn’t remember the rest of the chant. Rose’s blotched complexion had grown blotchier than ever, with scaling sores that appeared often now on her cheeks, impervious to all her mother’s medications. Her pale hair, always thin, had fallen out gradually so that now it was possible, sometimes, to see the pale blue rift of Rose’s scalp when she pulled it back. But the way she looked was not the worst of it, to Louella’s mind: Rose had taken to crying suddenly, inexplicably, at the most inappropriate moments. Louella shook her head. They were passing through a laurel slick, so dark as to be nearly impenetrable to the bright July sun which still shone, Louella knew, someplace. The air up here was chilly, the path steep. Louella climbed. Behind her, Rose sobbed. Ahead, their mother gasped in a long rattling intake of breath. She was determined to get up this mountain, she had said, if it killed her. And it might, Louella thought. Ahead of them walked Paris Blankenship, Luther Wade, Harve Justice, all the Davenports and the Rameys and some of their wives. Behind them walked more wives, and older children, and behind them still more children, skittering in and out along the trail like bugs on the surface of water. Children never get tired, Louella thought. Every time is a big time.
Then Louella thought of the time not really so long past when she and Rose were children together, when they had drawn a bear in the dirt with the point of a stick and then an angel. They made towers with smooth bright creek-stones. This time seemed so long ago. Louella bit her lip. Almarine was so far ahead on the trail that nobody could actually see him, the children so far behind. The trail wound up and up through rocky dimness; Rhoda clutched at her side. “Lord, Lord,” Rose cried, and Louella had a moment of sudden awful clarity where she saw them getting old this way, all of them, and dying. Louella bit her lip; she thought she saw them dying.
The big boys carried sticks, too, and hoped for snakes.
“Hoop snake’ll run like a hoop,” Wall Johnson said. “Roll fastern you can run.”
“That’s nuthin’,” said Billy Skeens. “You ever seed a joint snake?”
“Ain’t no such thing,” said Wall, whose daddy was back at Tug dying.
Both boys beat the bushes alongside the path as they climbed.
“Is too,” Billy said. “You hit ’em and they fall all apart, then you turn yer back and they runs together again.”
“Liar,” Wall said, whacking Billy on the leg with his snake stick, and Billy hit him on the side of the head and the two boys rolled off the path and into the laurel, fighting. Nobody told them to stop. The big girls giggled, passing, to see the fight.
“Come on, come on,” the big girls said, dragging the little ones on. The little ones giggled and stumbled and came, and sometimes they had to be carried, and everybody wanted to carry Dory. Ora Mae walked by herself, a bit removed from the other children though she was only six or so, but already she looked older, with that smooth closed face like her mother’s and that way they both had of looking away when they spoke. The path was dark and hard and Ora Mae hated it as much as she hated everything else since they had come to live here: Almarine, and Dory, and Hoot Owl Holler. Hanted, Rose Hibbitts had said, her bleary eyes holding fast to Ora Mae’s making her see her face. You live over there in a hanted place, and all of ye’ve got a curse. Rose’s eyes had watered in tears that coursed slowly over her pitted face. Ora Mae climbed steadily.
Behind them all came a bunch of Davenports arguing.
“I tell you he kilt her,” the eldest said. “You was there too and you seed him come back. You seed the blood.”
“I don’t know if I seed it or not,” the youngest said.
“Well, you was right there as sure as you’re a-living,” the eldest yelled out. “What ails you, boy?”
“Never kilt her,” another one said. “Bill Horn has seed her in West Virginia on the streets of Williamson, I tell you, right out on the street a-whoring. And he said she looked pretty good.”
“Ast Almarine iffen he kilt her or not, an’ you credit me,” the eldest said, but the others said, “Hoo! Not me!” and “I’ll not ast Almarine nothin’!”
The Davenports stopped to roll cigarettes and smoke.
The group ahead moved out of the laurel and into the bright full sun on the grassy bald at the top of the mountain. The little girls broke in a bunch to play “frog in the middle.” “Ye can hold my hand,” Rose Hibbitts said to Ora Mae, who stood silently watching them, but Ora Mae gave Rose such a look and ran up ahead to her mother, to hold to her mother’s skirts. “Frog in the middle can’t get out,” the little girls chanted until Margie Ramey went back to swat them. Ora Mae held tight to her mother’s skirts and finally Rose Hibbitts walked on. “I tell you she ain’t dead,” said the youngest Davenport. “If she was dead, then whar’s the body? Answer me that,” he said. “You know old Cord looked high and low and never come up with no body.”
Almarine moved ahead of them all across the grassy bald to his burying ground. The sun fell thick as a blanket; trees won’t grow on a grassy bald. The peak was the highest for miles and miles around: crowned by the windswept field, it fell off in sheer cliffs on three sides.
And now they are here; it is time; the men go to form one group and the women another. The littlest children playback by the trees. The preaching starts. Brother Lucius goes until he gives out and has to be helped to sit down. He sits right there on the windswept grass wearing his black hat and coat, with his legs stuck straight out ahead like a child’s. Brother Lucius’s son takes it up, and then old Hester Little, who will preach whenever anybody will let him, whenever he gets half a chance. Some of the men leave the group for a little drink or a hand of cards down in the woods; the women move back and forth tending to children. Old Lucius fans his face with his hat, and wonders why in tarnation they always have to bury them up so high. He thinks he will leave off riding, perhaps this fall. But then he’d have to stay home with Bess. Hester Little goes on and on. Lucius Basnight’s son, Milton, his part of the funeral over with, goes off down the mountain a piece, pursuing a Ramey girl.
Immediately beyond the black stick figure of Brother Lucius, who sits as if painted there on the yellow grass, lies the Cantrell burying-ground itself with its burying-houses sagging now in disrepair, its few straggling wooden crosses, its several unmarked graves. Nobody knows who lies in those. The only legible name is Pricey Jane’s. The graves, and there look to be about a dozen or so, meander in an uneven line across the grassy bald, with Pricey Jane’s and Eli’s and Granny Younger’s separate from the rest. All the graves face the rising sun. The women and men talk among themselves as Hester Little goes on and on, and the sun moves across the blue sky. You have to come to a funeral but you don’t have to listen too
close, it ain’t expected, it ain’t like meeting. These folks have been dead a while.
Almarine stares out over the graves and beyond them, across the deep gorge named the Breaks and beyond it, into Kentucky. They say the soil is richer over there. They say it’s black as coal. Almarine looks at her little burying-house which he made himself out of white oak staves, weaving them into lattice for the sides. The white oak has turned darker now, but the house still holds. She likes to stay home, Pricey Jane does, but she’ll need some air. The air up here is fresh and clean and cold even now, in summer. She likes it. Granny likes it too. But he made Pricey Jane that lattice for the air. A steady wind rises from the gorge far below, where the Big Sandy River flows through the Breaks, too far down to hear or to see. But the wind comes up. It blows across this grassy bald, this burial ground, in every weather, a steady wind, so the grass lies flat as if it had been grown that way on purpose, trained like that, long flat yellow grass like you never see down below.
The July sky is a deep, brilliant blue. A hawk circles lazily, slowly, over Kentucky. She could see that hawk iffen she could see. Almarine’s face has changed in the past two years: what was sharp and vital once, has grown hard and cold. His prominent nose and his cheekbones and chin look flinty. He rarely grins these days. His blue eyes are stern and flat. Almarine stands shoulder to shoulder with the other men and looks at that hawk circling and thinks or tries to think of his old friend Joe Johnson who carved her name and is not here now because he too is dying, coughing blood. The next one we’ll bury is Joe. But what Almarine feels is not pity or loss, it’s nothing really, or nothing more than a sense of the void which opened up when Harve nailed Pricey Jane into the box. Nothing, Almarine thinks. Just nary a thing. He remembers Joe Johnson carefully—squirrel hunts, poker, all the years—but he feels nothing. He considers how Joe Johnson’s eldest, Wall, will run the store, in time, as his own sons will work his land. A man’s got to have him some sons. Almarine’s mouth tightens. He remembers meeting Emmy at the spring, and how she turned. He remembers Pricey Jane: the delicate line of her cheek, the luster of her long black curls, the little squeal she had when she laughed sometimes. Hester goes on, chanting now and punctuating his chant with an occasional sharp loud intake of breath, while the wind blows steadily across the grassy bald and the people talk under their breaths until at last it appears he is through. Luther Wade takes off his hat and starts singing then, and others join, Rose and Louella Hibbitts’s clear voices soaring away above them toward the sky. “Bright morning stars are rising, bright morning stars are rising, bright morning stars are rising, day is breaking in my soul.” They’re helping old Brother Lucius up to his feet now. His face has a yellowish, lost look to it, as at last he stands, supported by Rameys. He’d hate it at home with Bess. “Oh where are our dear loved ones, oh where are our dear loved ones, oh where are our dear loved ones, day is breaking in my soul.” Luther’s voice rings out deep and true over the burying-houses and the silky blowing grass: out over the whole burying-ground and into the far hazy distance beyond it, the mountains of Kentucky. Rose and Louella sing rings in and out of his voice. “They have gone to heaven a-shoutin, they have gone to heaven a-shoutin, they have gone to heaven a-shoutin, day is breaking in my soul.” Funny how two ugly girls can sing so sweet. “Let me hold her now,” a Skeens girl says, and Susie Ramey hands her over. Dory’s earrings catch the sun as she cocks her head, for all the world as if she can understand the words of the song. “I wish you’d look at that!” the Skeens girl says. “A coachwhip snake’ll ride a horse to death,” Wall Johnson says. “I seen ’em a hunnert times.” Almarine does not join in the singing but stands like a man asleep or a man in a trance perhaps, staring off into long blue distance. “Hit’s hanted back where we live,” Ora Mae tells the little Wade girls playing at the treeline. “I live in a hanted house,” says Ora Mae, and the little Wades giggle and give her their hands and they all go off to play follow-the-leader. “Oh where are our dear mamas oh where are our dear papas oh where is our dear Jesus day is coming Jesus in my soul.” Rose Hibbitts can’t help but cry. Rhoda is praying out loud. Vashti, singing, loosens her dress to give Almarine’s son Isadore some titty and he hushes and sucks as singing they leave the burying ground and the grassy windswept bald on the top of Hoot Owl Mountain.