Tammy out of Time

by Cid Ricketts Sumner

  This edition is published by Valmy Publishing – www.pp-publishing.com

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  Text originally published in 1948 under the same title.

  © Valmy Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

  Publisher’s Note

  Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

  We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

  TAMMY OUT OF TIME

  A Novel

  by

  CID RICKETTS SUMNER

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Contents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

  1. 5

  2. 13

  3. 19

  4. 25

  5. 35

  6. 41

  7 47

  8. 53

  9 61

  10. 71

  11. 81

  12. 97

  13. 107

  14. 114

  15. 127

  16. 136

  17. 150

  18. 161

  19. 167

  20. 179

  21. 192

  REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 199

  1.

  OLD DEADWOOD’S shanty boat had squatted all winter at the foot of the bluff in a tangle of bare willow trees like a hen on the nest, the skiff a lone chick behind. Now the Mississippi had begun to rise and the Ellen B. was rising too, among the willow branches, yellow-green with early spring. The big hack berry with the hawser chaffing at the trunk was lifting folded leaves against the sky and all the bluff was touched with tender promise.

  Old Deadwood’s granddaughter Tammy ran up the path that cut a slanting gash across the face of the bluff. Her blue dress flashed between the bushes like a jaybird’s wing, her bare feet made no sound. But the little nanny goat she had trained to follow like a dog, was keen to hear, and came on a run, the thud of her hoofs fluttering hens from the way. Tammy stopped at the top of the bank and waited for her, swinging the empty water bucket at her side. The sun was slanting toward the far Louisiana shore, but there was time enough to go to the spring and back.

  The path led straight along the crest of the bluff for a way, then the trees opened out to show the rippled shine of the river, curving back upon itself, cradling the swamp in the crook of its arm. “It’s a fair sight, Nan,” Tammy said. Nan nibbled grass and Tammy waited, looking up at a plane so high in the sky that it went easy and quiet as a buzzard, a silver buzzard, beelining it for New Orleans. Then she went on with Nan following close at her heels. They dropped down the wooded slope into a glen and crossed a still, black bayou by a fallen beech.

  It was a long way to go for water when all the river was ready to hand, but Tammy was going to wash her hair and it was no fun washing in water that was already so muddy the dirt didn’t show. Grandma used to say the first of April was time enough to wash your hair but Tammy was not going to wait till then—her head was getting itchy and this was a fair, warm day even if it wasn’t even February yet.

  The spring water had a good taste to it, though Grandpa claimed he liked the river better. “A sight healthier for you,” he’d say. “The mud’s good for your constitution. Bet I got enough mud in my stummick to raise corn and I ain’t never been sick a day in my life, if you don’t count the rheumatiz.” Grandpa was always talking like that.

  The spring itself was a kind of mystery. On the far slope where the fern began, it came out from the roots of a sweet-gum tree and ran over lichen and leaf, clear and cold and no kin at all to river or bayou. Where had it come from; how was it made? Did the earth strain out the earth, creating something better than itself, making the unclean pure? Or was it a miracle, as when Moses smote the rock? Without a ripple it slid into the circle of a sunken barrel so old that it would be gone to staves and hoops but that the water pressed it outward, the earth pressed it inward and the sky was laid atop it.

  The water in the barrel made a mirror. Looking in, Tammy could see herself fair and true. The blurry little looking glass on her wall put a crook in her cheek and warped her mouth this way and that as she moved, and set one eye higher than the other. “I wish I could see myself whole just once,” she said, kneeling, leaning over, careful lest she frighten the water bugs to ripple her image. “Seventeen year old and I never seen myself altogether yet.” Would she always have to have this wonder about herself? Would she never be able to gather into one the inward self that was known and the outward that was yet strange? “That’s me, that one in there, me,” she whispered, trying to link the two.

  The water mirror teased her. When she bent down so that her dark hair, falling loose and long, was just above the surface, her reflection came into shadow and she could see no more than the wide sweep of her forehead, the line of dark straight brows. She had to draw back to guess how gray her eyes were, how pointed her chin. Turning a little, she got a notion what her nose was like—too big, she was sure.

  She sat back on her heels with a sigh. Maybe there was another kind of looking glass to know one’s self by—made of things people said. Like Cap’n Joe on the fish boat, calling out to Grandpa, “Likely-looking gal you’ve got there, Deadwood. Looks like she could stand in a peck measure and shoulder a bushel of meal!” Then there were those ladies on the packet boat long ago, with a sign across the boat saying they were bound for the Pilgrimage at Natchez and New Orleans. “Quaint!” they had said, speaking right out as if she could not understand, looking down from the high deck as they passed close by, laughing at the line of clothes she was hanging on a fishing pole cane stuck out from the window, pointing to the stovepipe smoking its blue wood smoke right into their laughter. Grandpa, with his pipe in the shade of the tin roof, had paid them no mind. Not even when they said, all high and mighty, “How do they live, people like that?”

  A kind of fury had possessed her then, made her free and daring. She had mounted the rail and stood balanced there. Her body swayed as the shanty boat rocked with the packet’s churning and her bare toes curled over the flat toprail. “We live all right,” she shouted into the noise of the packet’s engine, into their frightened faces looking down, drawing away, going forever out of her ken.

  “Quaint! I’ll teach folks to call me quaint,” she shouted. Then Grandpa had yanked her down to the deck before she had time to fall overboard.

  “Spunky little devil, ain’t you? But you needn’t drown yourself sassing folks. Quaint’s nothing bad. ‘Taint a thing to be ashamed of.”

  Tammy, on her knees by the spring, laughed to herself. Then she picked up the bucket and, plunging it deep in the barrel, shattered her image and set the water bugs leaping and skimming. “I’m as good as the next one, I reckon,” she said, setting the brimming bucket down on the ferns and shooing Nan back from sticking her nose in and slobbering all over it. Eddy and Gladys had said she was better than most. That was way back when she was no more than six or seven and they were tied up close to Natchez with lots of other shanty boats. Circus folks gone to seed, Grandpa had called them.

  Tammy found a level spot and walked on her hands just to prove she had not forgotten. Eddy’d taught her that, and Gladys had showed her some
dance steps and made her sing all the old songs Grandma had taught her, like “Last night I dreamt of my truelove,” and “Old Rosin the Beau.” They’d said, “That’s a smart young un.” They’d wanted to take her away with them, said she’d fit into their act. Goshamighty, she’d have been a top performer by now if Grandpa hadn’t said such dancing and doings were sinful and the fire and brimstone would get her if she didn’t lay off. What a whipping he’d given her about it! He’d give her another, big as she was, if he knew she still had that little jar of face paint Gladys gave her—kind of dried up, but holding its color still.

  That whipping hadn’t hurt half so bad as she hurt inside the morning the police came and got Eddy. She hadn’t really known what it was all about then, though she’d seen Gladys taking on over that man who was always hanging round when Eddy was out of the way, cutting her eyes at him, snugging up to him. Then along in the middle of the night she’d heard her screaming bloody murder and hollering at Eddy not to kill him. But Eddy must have killed him, all right. Because they found the man next day floating downriver with a knife hole clean through him, and then they came and got Eddy and took him away. It still made her ache just thinking about how he looked with a man each side of him.

  Tammy picked up the water bucket and set it on her head. It was Gladys that had told her to put books on her head and it would teach her to walk like a queen. “You got to walk like a queen in the show business,” she’d said. But all the books Tammy had on the Ellen B. were the Bible and the catalogue and some her mamma had in high school and the one a boy got mad and threw at her once. She thought she’d better save them for the inside of her head instead of the outside. Besides it was more fun with a bucket of water because she’d get a ducking if she didn’t walk right. She’d got drenched many a time, but now she could walk across the beech log and up the slope without spilling a drop.

  At the crest of the bluff Tammy stopped to look out over the river. She had come at just the right moment to see the sun sitting on top of the land, to watch the land bite a piece out of it and the shadow of the far willows creep across the river. A tugboat was chugging barges upstream, hugging the other side, too far off to wave or holler at. It put a veil of smoke across the sun and made it look like an orange the earth was eating.

  Tammy looked away downstream. There was no sign yet of Grandpa coming back from wherever he’d gone. “You tend to your business and I’ll tend to mine,” he’d said when she asked him what for he was going to the swamp all the time, instead of fishing like he used to do. She called, “Yoo-hoo” loud and long, patting the sound with the palm of her hand so it was broken like a hoot owl’s cry. She cupped her ear to listen. There was no answer save a far-away cowbell down the river somewhere. The lonesomest sound in the world was a cowbell.

  Tammy looked down at the Ellen B. nuzzling at the shore, red geraniums bright on the shelf and stovepipe thrusting out and up like a saucy wren’s tail. A good boat, bigger than most, with two rooms and the tin roof jutting out to make a little porch. Good enough to go anywhere in. Only Grandpa—looked like he wasn’t ever going to move far from this lonely neck of the woods. Grand-ma’s grave in the little old graveyard along a bluff a way, was an anchor, holding him. Oh, he’d go a little piece up toward Vicksburg or down toward Natchez—he’d been doing that every now and then for the last ten years or so—but he’d never go back all the way to where there were folks.

  It was lonely here without other boats drawn up alongside, the way she could remember it long ago. She could recollect clear as day how it was to shout back and forth with the washing waving on the line and all the other children running about and jumping across from deck to deck. There were big girls making their hair frizzy and their lips red and moving with that special motion that beckoned better than a finger, there were babies crying and dying and getting born with pain and struggle, and the old women talking their long talk about how to cook a gumbo proper and all the sicknesses their folks had died of and how they used to live in a house set steady on the ground with a real good salad patch and Cape jessamines at the door or oleanders, upriver somewhere or down in the French-speaking parts, back in the good old days that don’t come back.

  She could remember Grandpa preaching to all the river folks on deck or alongshore of a Sunday morning, the women silent for once and hushing their children, the men harking reluctantly to the Word of God and all joining in at the singing of the hymns, the sound spreading free across the water and going up like a water-spout to top the towering bank. Oh, Tammy sighed, that was living! Maybe Grandma had thought it was too much living. “‘Tain’t fitting for a young girl,” she’d told Grandpa and, right after, they’d come on up the river to here and Grandma’d taken sick and died. Then the lonesome time began.

  Tammy called once more and, getting no answer, went on down the slanting path singing to keep herself company:

  “Make me a cambric shirt

  Without a stitch of needlework,

  And you shall be a true lover of mine,

  Rosemary and thyme.”

  The sun was clean out of sight now and the air was saying it wasn’t summer yet. She shooed the chickens back out of her way and crossed the plank that led from shore to deck. Time to feed them, time to milk Nan. Always something to do—and never anything happening. She did wish something would happen for a change. And by something she meant something sure enough, and not just the young preacher coming from ten miles or so down the big road and three miles through the swamp to tell Grandpa she ought to be going to school and learning how to live in the world. As if they didn’t know anything, either of them. It made her mad just to think about it, even yet. Milking Nan, she played a quick sharp tune on the bottom of the can with the streams of milk. She didn’t need any schooling. Why, she could read and write and she could figger faster than Grandpa and she knew the Bible backwards and forwards. And yet—if there was more, she’d like to know it.

  The river still held light from the sky, but in the kitchen, which was Grandpa’s bedroom too, it was time to get the lantern going. Tammy took a spill from the flowered china mug on the shelf, stuck it through a crack in the stove door till it blazed. Then she stood on a box to reach the lantern that hung down from the ceiling. The soft yellow light made the room cozy and welcoming. Grandma’s crazy quilt that covered the bed had kept its colors in spite of many washings, and the curtains made of flour sacks and dyed with boiled-up juice from yellow clay still looked gold at night though by day the sun streaks showed.

  Tammy got wood from the box beside the stove and built up the fire so her wet hair would dry. The collard greens were boiling on the back hole and she put the griddle with the hoecake in the oven to finish off and to make room for the skillet. While the catfish was frying she sat down in Grandma’s rocker with the goatskin seat and leaned back, her feet on the footrest, her arms resting on the chair arms and her hair flung over the high back to air and dry as she rocked. It sure was a luxury, having a rocking chair. Pity Grandma never got to sit on it. She’d pestered Grandpa to make it for her ever since the old goat died and they tanned the hide. Then the day after Grandma was buried up on the bluff, Grandpa got out the hickory boards and started whittling on them. A kind of fury of grief had come over him and it looked like he couldn’t rest till he got it done. Sometimes now when a boat went by and the waves rocked the Ellen B. and set the chair to rocking all by itself, he’d look at it like he saw Grandma sitting there. It gave him the lonesomest look in his eyes. That was a good kind of love for a man to have for a woman, Tammy reckoned. Lasting.

  She rocked on with her eyes closed and her head leaning back on the slats of the high chair back. Love—nigh as she could figger out, there was more than one kind, not counting the love-your neighbor kind in the Bible. One was fancy-spoken, like the lords and ladies in the Idylls of the King she had read the covers off of; one was fancy-pillowed like that frizzy-haired woman who left her cabin open on hot nights and Grandma said she might have the decenc
y to shut it. Still, it was a good thing to know about, even if it had made Grandma say they had to get the Ellen B. amoving and find a place where they could raise a girl decent.

  Tammy stood up to turn the fish and heard the rattle of Grand-pa’s oars. The lantern swayed as he stepped aboard and the boat rocked lightly with his weight. “Supper’s ready, Grandpa,” she called.

  He came in grunting because of his rheumatism, a thin old man with a round head, skimpy-haired, a round ruddy face and a small, sparsely bearded chin. He hung his coat and battered felt hat on a nail on the wall, sat down on a box and leaned his arms on the bare pine table. “Dish it up honey. I ain’t got much time.” His blue eyes were round and sad when he was not talking, and they went over the room now the way they always did when he first came in, trying to find somebody that wasn’t there and wouldn’t be ever again.

  Tammy said in wonder. “You’ve got all night, haven’t you?”

  He made her no answer nor did he speak again, except to say the blessing, till they both had cleaned their plates. “Anything happen today whilst I’s gone?” He got his pipe from his pocket and started filling it.

  “Cap’n Joe came by soon this morning. I got a sack of meal and some side meat from him like you said. He brought me seeds like I asked him for, and some extra flower seeds thrown in. Now if there’d just be some chicken wire come floating down, I could add on to the garden patch and——”

  “You have enough fish to pay him?”

  “Yes, I had a sight of them.” She lighted a spill at the stove and held it to his pipe.

  “Say anything special?”

  “Wanted to know when you’s going to start fishing again. Said fish’s bringing a good price now.”

  “Humph. That all?”

  Tammy had the dishes in the pan that was rigged up with a pipe to make a sink, and she waited till she had poured hot water over them. She looked round at him through the steam. “He brought you a word from the sheriff.”