Tammy out of Time

by Cid Ricketts Sumner

  Then there was the last day, suddenly come, the day before the one he had set on to leave. All the day had a going-away feel. Toward evening Tammy took him for a walk, to try out his strength. They went up the bluff and down into the hollow and on to the bayou. Tammy made him stand on the beech log and see the cypress knees, how they had a carved and fluted look, rising from black still water like turrets from sunken castles. She showed him the spring and the rise where there were bricks in a heap where a house once was, and chinaberry trees grown from seeds of trees that somebody must have planted long ago, so that the far past was tied onto the present by a brick and a chinaberry tree.

  She found some yellow chinaberries and pinched off the soft part to let him see the seed had a fine carving to it and a soft place through it that a thorn could poke clean. “You can string them on a string and dip them in dye. They look like something you might buy in a store and pay money for,” she told him.

  Then they went round by the other side of the rise where the yellow jessamine was all in bloom, spread out over the underbrush, rising up to the trees so it was like sunshine pouring down out of the sky and settling there. Tammy picked a load of it to take back to the graveyard. On the way there she took Pete to the high point, the rocky lookout that looked over the whirlpool. That gave him a start, all right, seeing the brown water whirling and the great bend of the river he had come down.

  “So that’s the place,” Pete said, staring down at it. “A mile across, I’d say, and the water going round and round—”

  Tammy pointed to where the foam made a lacy trail across the current. “About there’s where we found you, on the big log.”

  “I might be there yet,” Pete said.

  “Well, you ain’t.” Tammy waved her hand toward the bend in the river and the level Louisiana land, laid out like a map on the other side. “Look how high we are. Grandpa says the pilots on the boats long ago used to set their course by this high point. They called it ‘the rock,’ and it used to be whitish before it got worn down and covered over with bushes and things. They could see it at night.” She spread her yellow jessamine out on the grass and sat down. “I like to come here. Makes me think of the place the devil took the Lord and showed him all the world. You better set and rest your legs.”

  Pete sat down beside her, cross-legged, his eyes on the circling water far below. “I’ll tell you one of Grandpa’s tales,” Tammy said, wanting to take his mind from whatever it was on. “It’s about a settler coming down the river on a flatboat with all his family and belongings, looking for good land to settle on. It was a moonlight night and he took a notion to float all night instead of tying up, like he mostly did. Well, coming along with the current, he looked up and he seen a house on the bluff all lighted up with music and dancing and he said, ‘This sure is a dancing country.’ After a while he come on another house and it was all lighted up with folks having a merriment, and he said, ‘This is the dancingest country I ever hear tell of,’ and after a while there was another house and it was lighted from top to toe and there was more music and partying and he said, This here is the outdancingest country in the world.’ But when daylight come, he seen he’d got caught in the whirlpool down yonder and he’d been going by the same house over and over again all night long.”

  Pete laughed. “Sounds possible.” Then his mind went back into its own way of thinking, like something caught in a groove. “It looks as if I ought to do something special with a life that’s been saved as many times as mine has—when there were so many that were not saved.”

  Tammy didn’t answer. She pulled a blade of grass and chewed on it in silence, letting him think aloud.

  “All the time I was away from home I was so sure I had everything settled. But now I’m back, I’m about as unsettled as anyone can be.”

  “What was it you were planning to do?”

  “I was going back into the bank. I’d worked there one summer—I’d worked on a newspaper too, the advertising end. Everything was going to be fine—just the way it always was, only better.”

  “What would you do in a bank?”

  “Oh, I’d count up money, pay it out—all that kind of thing. At first, anyway.”

  “That don’t seem to have much of a muchness to it, don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

  Pete turned and looked at her. “I guess you don’t understand how things are.”

  “I know, Pete. But look, you wouldn’t be making anything in a bank. The most fun is making something, like this cedar necklace you carved—it gives you satisfaction.”

  “Yes. But in a bank I’d be making money.”

  “Money—money’s sort of secondhand. It’s like wearing gloves. Oh, hell’s bells, I don’t know anything about it, Pete. I’m just talking.”

  Pete said, “The trouble is that when you come back everything has changed. You try to plan something and it fizzes. It makes you wonder what it’s all about, what life’s for....” He pulled a blade of grass and chewed on it.

  “Goshamighty, Pete, life—life’s for living, ain’t it? To see what it’s like to grow up, to get some kind of a living somehow, and make things, and have children and get middle-aged and old, and come at last to dying. That’s a real mystery to find out about, saved up for the end. Why you don’t need any reason for life but living.” Then suddenly she burst out laughing, and when Pete looked around at her in wonder she said, “Here we set like a couple of billy goats chewing grass. Come on, the sun’s fixing to go down and I want you to see the graveyard before it gets too late to read the stones. Besides, Grandpa’d give me a whipping for sure if I stayed out so I didn’t get back before dark.”

  There were only a few stones in the little old graveyard on the brink of the bluff. They were old and crumbling and long forgotten even by those who had set them up. The big live oak with gray moss hanging down was all that grieved over them now. It shaded them and kept back the underbrush by its shade, letting only the grass grow, and the harmless gray and green lichens. Tammy went first to the unmarked grave that was only a low mound under the pointed cedar tree. She spread her yellow jessamine over it with tenderness. “This here’s Grandma. Grandpa says when he gets some more cash money he is going to put up a stone for her that’ll last a hundred years and she can lie safe under the carving of her name. The poor floaters over yonder haven’t got any names.” She pointed to the row of wooden markers with UNKNOWN and the dates painted on them in green paint. “They seem sadder than the rest. Not because they’re any deader but because they haven’t any names. How can they be called on the Great Day if they have no names?”

  “I don’t doubt they’ll be given back their names any time they have need for them,” Pete said. He walked around with his hands in his pants pockets looking at the stones.

  “Anyway, being buried up here so high, they’ve got the jump on most—they’ll have a head start on their way to heaven when the Last trumpet sounds.”

  Pete was studying the stone top of the one grave that was above ground, a little stone house that said it was Celeste who died on Christmas Day in the year of our Lord 1831. “They’re all built up like this in New Orleans,” he said.

  “Are they afeard of being covered up?”

  Pete shook his head. “The ground’s low. Dig and you strike water.”

  “H-m, that’s funny. There’s a sight of places in the world, isn’t there? All different. I’d sure like to see them all.” She went to a small leaning stone and knelt beside it, fingering out the worn lettering. “Listen to this one, Pete. It makes a poem. Listen:

  “Serve the Lord while yet there’s time;

  Your sickness may be short as mine.

  Serve the Lord while yet ye may,

  For no man knows his dying day.

  “Give you a creepy feeling, doesn’t it? Like life was liable to give out on you any minute and you’d better get what you can while it’s going on.” She looked away, out over the river to where the sky was red and gold with sunset. The water
was bright as the sky and the low green shore was all that kept one from going into the other. The gray moss hung down across the sunset with an airiness delicate as foam. The shadows of oak and cedar were lying down across the grass and the graves. They stretched themselves, settling for the night.

  Tammy felt a lonesomeness come over her, sharp as an aching tooth. Tomorrow Pete would be gone. She wanted to hold back time, but there wasn’t any way of doing that, any more than you could hold back the river. She stood, looking out, as Pete was looking, over water and sky. “Couldn’t anybody but Joshua hold back the sun. Grandpa keeps trying to figger out how he done it. He says science hasn’t got far enough along yet to give him a due, but he keeps ahoping it will some day.”

  Pete put one arm across her shoulders. “Tammy,” he said, “I don’t know how you do it, but you...you restore my soul.”

  She turned her head away so he wouldn’t see the quick tears that came in her eyes. Her fingers found the cedar chain that hung round her neck where Pete had put it. Soon that would be all she had. “I’ll sure miss you, Pete,” she said.

  All the time from then till next morning had an unreal feeling to it. It was like a sound and its echo coming both together, confusing. It was as if the space between a staying and a going was neither here nor there, but just a heavy in between time to be lived through. An enduration, that’s what it was.

  Next morning Tammy dished up the grits and eggs and got out the white-flour biscuits from the oven and called, “Breakfast, Pete.” The edges of the words were sharp, they cut into her because they would not be said again.

  Pete came in from his washing at the water shelf outside. He had a glow in his cheeks now and his eyes were not hollow the way they were when he came. He folded his long legs under the table and after Grandpa had asked the blessing, he said again what he had said before—that he could never repay their kindness, and if there was ever anything he could do for either one of them...

  Tammy had poured their coffee and now she went out on deck to breathe the air because a kind of weight had come into her breast. Far off in the swamp there was a wood thrush calling, pure as pain. Tammy made up her mind—she wasn’t going to walk to the edge of the swamp with Pete. She didn’t want to scatter her good-by through the swamp, trailing it out. She wanted to hold it fast here all together. Grandpa had said he was walking part way along the path, and he could show Pete the way.

  Then Pete came out and she put her small brown hand in his and said good-by and he said the same to her. Then he followed Grandpa across the plank and up the bluff, turning at the top to look back and wave. It was a good good-by. Tammy thought, standing straight and firm by the rail; it had been said with dignity, and nothing told that should be hid.

  5.

  THE Mississippi kept on rising. Far to the north the snows had begun to melt. Rains came, rivers were filling up—the Chippewa, the Red Cedar, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Big Black, the Yazoo and many another. They poured brown water into the Mississippi that stretched itself lazily to receive them all. The shanty boat rose too. It floated now amid the tops of half-drowned trees. The full-leaved willows, caught by the current, were bent all the same way as if blown by a constant, ghostly wind. They trembled at the sides of the Ellen B. and the bigger branches scraped and complained at the stern.

  The morning sun poured down the slope of the bluff in a water-fall of bright warmth. It drenched the paintless deck and Tammy, sitting on a box plucking a fat hen, wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She put the softest of the hen feathers in the feather bag to make a pillow, when she got enough. The old hen would make a good gumbo. Too old to lay, all she did was set on the empty nest. Plumb mad about setting, she was.

  Tammy stopped now and then to look out over the bright river. Away in midstream the water went stumbling over itself to get where it was going. She wished she was going somewhere, too. Ever since Pete left—it was only ten days and nights ago—she’d had a restlessness inside her, wanting to go somewhere, wanting something to happen. She had scrubbed the Ellen B. from stem to stern, she had kept herself busy every minute, but nothing eased her missing of Pete. She was one bereft. Grandpa had promised she could have some clothes and go to school in the fall, but that was a long time off. She hadn’t told Grandpa how she’d been fishing for Cap’n Joe, sending the money off by him to get her a dress she’d seen a picture of in one of the newspapers he brought by. It had come yesterday and she’d spent most of the day just trying it on. It had a silky brown skirt, kind of tight, but they must be wearing them that way, she thought, and a pink satin top, and it sure looked nice. She would put it on if Pete came sometime, as he had promised. He had said he would come when he got all his little plants set out of the hotbeds and into the cold frames. The man he had trusted with them had moved away and he was having trouble getting work done, but he would come when he could. He had promised, in a letter that came by Cap’n Joe, along with the coffee and side meat.

  Tammy was in the kitchen with the gumbo cooking on the back of the stove and the smell of it going halfway up to Vicksburg, mighty near, when she heard the sputter and throb of a motorboat. The sounds came from down-river somewhere near the mouth of the bayou. She ran out on deck to see, but there was only the warm sun on the river, a tugboat far away rounding the upper bend, and over the flat Louisiana land, a curve of buzzards drifting down and around, lower and lower in ease and languor.

  Then the boat came into view through the willows and Tammy’s hands tightened on the rail. Three men were in the boat and one of them was Grandpa, the skiff bouncing along empty behind. Grandpa sat bent over, in the bow, elbows on knees and his old felt hat pulled low over his eyes. It was strange to see him sitting like that, not talking when he had company to talk to. They all should have been talking, shouting out words above the noise of the motor.

  There was a great stillness when the engine was cut off and the boat came around to stop alongside. The younger of the two men said, “Half an hour, Deadwood, and no fooling, mind you.”

  Tammy jumped to give Grandpa a hand aboard. He said, “I mind what you told me. No need to keep asaying it.”

  “You sick, Grandpa?” Tammy whispered.

  He straightened up, waving her to silence. “I’ve give my word, haven’t I?” He stood stiff, looking down with scorn into the faces of the two men.

  “Okay, okay,” the man said, handing him the rope to the skiff. Then the motor spit and coughed and the boat shot away toward the middle of the river. There it came to rest, the motor going just hard enough to hold it still against the current. It was like a buzzard sitting on a limb, waiting, waiting. Tammy stared at it, feeling a cold wind run along her spine. Grandpa made the skiff fast, saying no word, so at last she had to ask, “What is it, Grandpa, what—?”

  “Tammy, child,” he said, slow, keeping his eyes on the gray splintery planks of the deck, “they’ve caught up with me.”

  One hand rose to her throat. All the old pain and terror she had felt for Eddy that morning long ago came back to her, multiplied a hundredfold. “All account of me——” she began and a choking stopped her from speaking any more.

  “Now, now, child, no need to take on about it. ‘Tain’t as if I’d done a crime. I’m willing to take moral responsibility for what I’ve done. Each man according to his conscience, when laws quit making sense—that’s my rule. I had need of money and I hit on this way to make it, that’s all. Needn’t hang your head about it.”

  “Yes, Grandpa.” Her voice was a whisper, but she straightened her shoulders.

  “Now come on inside and hark to me because my time is short.” He went in and sat down, leaning his arms on the table. Tammy sat opposite him with her heart beating so hard it came nigh shaking the table. She felt trembly inside, like the lantern that hung from the ceiling, shaking with the strong spring current.

  “Don’t you fret about me, honey.” His voice came more natural and easy now he was out of sight of the men and
the motorboat. “I’ll have time for prayer and meditation, and it may be that I am meant to carry the Word into prisons—the Lord moves in mysterious ways, don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t, Grandpa.”

  “And another thing—they can put me in jail, but I’m a free spirit. Can’t nobody but the good Lord take that away from me. Besides, like as not the dryness away from the river will ease my rheumatism.”

  “Yes, Grandpa.” She drew a long breath and some of the tight went out of the back of her neck.

  “John Bunyan spent a time in jail. So did Martin Luther and many another, account of his moral convictions. It ain’t no disgrace. Might be I’d get time to write me a book about science and religion. I got plenty ideas.”

  “Yes, Grandpa.” Some of the scare went out of her now. It wasn’t like it was with Eddy. Grandpa hadn’t done a murder. “I’ll sure miss you, but I’ll look after everything till you come home.”

  Grandpa shook his head. “You can’t stay here alone, child. Wouldn’t be right, a young girl like you. You must set out quick as you can, whilst the sun’s still high, and go to Pete’s house. We had a good talk about things afore he left and he made me promise if anything happened to me that I’d send you to his house—though to tell the truth I was thinking more of my dying than getting took up, and so was he.”

  “Goshamighty,” Tammy breathed, “that would be something, to go to Pete’s house! It sure would.” She dwelt on the thought with wonder.

  “I got confidence in Pete,” Grandpa went on, “and his folks is all right. I made some inquiry and I know. That’s the place for you. Now hand me down my Bible.”

  Tammy reached it down for him from the shelf, her hands so shaky she almost dropped it. Why—not two hours ago she was awishing something would happen. Plenty had happened now.

  Grandpa opened up the Bible and got out a map drawn in pencil with names and numbers of roads. “Pete made this so’s you would make no mistake in the road.”