Good Ground

by Tracy Winegar

  Ellis couldn’t tear his eyes from his father’s face. He wondered if there was life after death, if Jim Hooper had really witnessed his Edith as he was passing over, or if it was just a dying man’s prayer, falling from his lips in one last urgent plea.

  The next day, Doctor Fielding helped Ellis dig a grave next to Edith Hooper’s final resting place.

  The rain had abated during the night. The day of the burial was sporadically sunny and overcast until evening, when it began to rain again. Gilda Fielding stood among all of the others with a black umbrella clutched in her hand, her face grim, her lips frowning. After the mourners had left, she lingered, cleaning the cabin, making a meal for Ellis. She had something to say to Ellis before she finally left.

  She took him by the hand, looked him in the eyes, and waited for his full attention. “I don’t know a soul that doesn’t have their faults, Ellis. And your father wasn’t exempt. But if there was one thing that he was perfect in, it was in loving you.” And then she left him to himself.

  With nothing to do but tend to the business at hand, Ellis busied himself in the gathering gloom, loading up some of his daddy’s things that had managed to escape the fire. Any tools and equipment that had been worth anything had been in the barn. Ellis went through the house and put a few odds and ends in the bed of his daddy’s old 1922 Red Baby truck: some household items, two quilts his mama had pieced, a few pots and pans, a pistol, and a rifle—things he figured would be handy to have about. Then he tied Edith’s mama’s rocking chair to the cab of the truck with some twine.

  Jim had kept a few pigs too. They were set aside in a pen off in the cow’s pasture and had survived the fire because they didn’t live in the barn with the other animals. They were off to themselves in their own field.

  Ellis borrowed some crates of rough wood from Purvis to transport them to his farm. He figured he would have to come back for the cooking stove anyhow, and he would return the crates to Purvis then. Climbing over the fence, he set to work catching the piglets first. They ran about wildly, voicing their resistance to being caught in high-pitched squeals. He caught the first by the hind legs and held fast as it struggled to break away from him. He dumped it into one of the crates and then went after the other squealer.

  It was when he went after the sow that the real difficulty began. She appeared good and angry at the injustice done her piglets, and she was making quite a ruckus about it when the boar, with all of his one hundred and fifty pounds, came charging up the hill, his short legs carrying him with lightning speed to his lady’s aid.

  That boar was half wild, his snout long and ears short. All black with the eyes of a devil, wily and malicious. The boar’s bristles were standing threateningly on end, the stumpy teeth on his upper jaw working against the one long tusk of his lower jaw. He cracked them together as he worked his saliva into a foaming lather. To add to his overall aggressive appearance, one tusk on his lower jaw was broken off, which had given him his name, Snaggletooth.

  Jim had caught him roaming free in the woods several years before, and despite his best efforts had never managed to completely domesticate the angry beast. He was good for nothing but procreating. Ellis had long suspected the animal had a chip on his shoulder on account of his small size and was doing all he could to make up for it. He’d never liked the old hog, and the feeling was mutual on the hog’s part, he supposed.

  Snaggletooth put his head down and charged him at a full run, but Ellis managed to jump over the fence before he got it good from the boar’s mean-looking tusk.

  When he got up from the ground, he was fuming mad. “Well, I’ll be, you son of a gun!” he yelled at the animal, picking his hat up and beating it against his leg to knock the dust from it before he put it back on his head.

  It took him a good hour to get the two grown hogs trussed up and into the crates. By then, both he and the pigs were run ragged, filthy dirty, and drained of energy. He loaded them into the back of the truck by pushing them up a makeshift ramp fashioned from two wooden planks.

  Just as he finished his work, he saw Coy Struthers coming up the drive with his eldest son, Cyril, sitting next to him in the car. Ellis waited for them to park the car and climb out to see what it was about.

  Cyril leaned against the car with his foot perched on the running board, looking bored and resentful. It was likely his daddy had made him come along.

  Coy smiled in a friendly sort of way and approached Ellis with his hand extended. “How do, Ellis, how is it with you?”

  Ellis thought it was a ridiculous question, all things considered. How should he be? His father had just died. All the kin he had were now gone but for his aged great-aunt Sissy. And so he answered, “Just fine.”

  “Good to hear. Good to hear.”

  “I’s just packin’ up and headin’ out,” he explained, gesturing toward his daddy’s loaded truck.

  “Need any hep?”

  Woulda been a fine offer when I was chasin’ after them pigs, he thought. “Don’t reckon so. I aim to come back for the stove, but I done got everythin’ else.”

  “Well, I ort not to keep you, so’s I’ll get right to it,” the middle-aged man stated. “I come to offer you a fair price for this here land.” Just like that. No pleasantries, no condolences.

  Ellis was surprised, taken off guard. It would make sense that Coy wanted the land; it butted up against his own property. He would have a mighty big piece if he were to get the farm. Ellis suspected that it was something he would pass onto Cyril, who apathetically watched the exchange with a detached demeanor, too young yet to know or appreciate what an immense favor his father was attempting to do for him.

  Ellis hesitated. “Don’t know that I aim to sell.”

  “Now, hear me out, Ellis. ’Tween this here place and your own, you couldn’t care for it proper, and it’s no good to you no how if you ain’t usin’ it for plantin’. ’Least this a-ways you’d have the money in your pocket.”

  “Don’t know that my daddy woulda wanted me to sell it.” Ellis pictured his father with a disapproving look on his face. This had been his land, his home, and he had worked his life away to make it prosper, to bring it to a thriving farm. His daddy had left it to him, just as Jim’s father had passed it down to Jim, and Ellis just couldn’t see that he would be pleased by the notion of selling out.

  “Well, now, son, your daddy ain’t here to tell you that you can’t sell it. It’s up to you now,” Coy persuaded. “You’re your own man now. It’s for you to judge.”

  Ellis scratched his jaw line with a thoughtful frown, sorry to disappoint but resolved in his decision. “Sure it is, but I ain’t in the mood to sell.”

  Coy roughly rubbed the back of his neck in irritation. He opened his mouth as if he might say something but then shut it again, looking over at Cyril who had climbed back into the car, ready to go. “If you don’t wanna sell, you don’t wanna sell. I can respect it. But now, if you change your mind, if you fix on gettin’ rid of it, would you gimme first chance at buyin’ it?”

  “Fair enough. If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know it,” Ellis agreed.

  “I sure would be grateful for it.”

  “Yessir.”

  At that point, Coy probably didn’t know what more to say so he held out his hand and they shook. “Take care, boy.”

  “Thank you,” Ellis said with a nod of his head.

  Coy turned back to his car, his shoulders slightly rounded with dissatisfaction. Ellis felt some empathy for the man, but he wasn’t willing to get rid of the place. Money was not enough to convince him to give up his inheritance. Some things were simply not worth the almighty dollar.

  Ellis paused to think about the happy childhood he’d had in this place before he shut the door to his boyhood home and headed back to his own place. Without his father there, it would never feel the same. Life would never be the same again. He felt a heaviness that he attributed to being alone in the world and realized that he had only himself to rely
upon now.

  As he drove away, he felt out of place in the red pickup—his daddy’s truck. He recalled when his daddy had bought it eleven years before, how proud he had been when he’d driven it up to the house. It had made life considerably easier. Now Ellis would benefit from it; now it was his truck. That should have pleased him, but it only made his heart hurt worse.

  Back at his place, he put the pigs in the barn, locking them in an empty stall for safekeeping, working in his mind as to how he would build them a proper pen and enclosure off the barn where they could wallow in the mud on a hot summer’s day. He didn’t fancy the notion that they should stay in his barn, smelling up the place, making a mess. Pigs didn’t belong in a barn. No, just as soon as he could get to it, he would start on the new fencing and the small building that would house them.

  He set about unloading the remaining items from the truck. When he put the rocking chair next to the fireplace, it seemed to belong there. He sat in it and rocked for a time, running his hands over the worn, smooth wood of the arms. Ellis leaned his head back to rest for a while, until he was forced to come back to his responsibilities and go out to feed his cow and mule, the chickens, and newly acquired pigs.

  Thinking about the loss of his daddy created a steady ache in his chest. Struggling to lessen the pain, he told himself that death was part of life. He would keep his hands busy and his mind occupied, and the hurt, the emptiness, would become easier with time somehow.

  Chapter 10

  ELLIS LOOKED BACK ON THE SUMMER with a certain sense of accomplishment. The long heated days wore into fall and turned the hardwood trees bright with patches of reds, yellows, and oranges on the mountainsides. One day blended into another as dispassionate in content and colorless in character as the next. It seemed as if they were all identical, as if it was the same day unending.

  The work of building the pigpen and enclosure had kept him occupied. Along with that, he had set two wooden poles in the ground with a stout crossbeam for future pig slaughtering. He’d also brought in his and his father’s abundant tobacco harvest and hung it up to dry in his barn. Then there had always been small projects and odds and ends he’d worked on. In truth, the busy work had kept him going; otherwise, he didn’t know what he would have done with himself.

  He didn’t like admitting it to himself, but he was in a low place. With his daddy dying and his lonesome state, there were long stretches when he would get to feeling sorry for himself. He would linger there for a time, long enough to wonder why it was he continued going through the motions of living. Then he would scold himself mentally for allowing such self-indulgent behavior and would go on as he always had. With winter coming, there was plenty to do to prepare.

  Somehow, the work and the monotony of repetitive tasks kept him from becoming swallowed by gloom. With his tobacco fields and his father’s fields that had been set before his death, Ellis struggled to keep up. He traveled back and forth between his place and his daddy’s, doing his best to care for both crops. As he worked, he tried to avoid looking at the burned-out shell of what had once been the barn. Memories would float through his mind, soft as cotton fluff spread by the wind.

  Those were the fields he had worked with his father for so many years. The image of his father, solid and substantial, was what carried him along. It had not been merely his daddy’s size that lent Ellis such recollections, but his strength of character, his unfailing steadfastness, his ability to strike at the heart of a problem with a minimal use of words. It left Ellis with a mixture of sorrow that he was gone and pride that he had been Jim Hooper’s son. It gave him the desire to want to live up to his father. To try to be the man that his daddy had been.

  Ellis brought in the last of the vegetables when the weather began to turn—carrots, squash, turnips, and potatoes—from his garden and arranged them carefully in crates. The crates were layered with fresh straw in between the vegetables and stored in a cellar he’d dug next to his house. He had lined the hole with fresh straw as well before lowering the vegetables in and covering them with a canvas to hopefully last through the winter.

  He was sitting on the porch about noontime that day, eating an apple, when he saw a car coming up the drive. He stood, pitching the core into the yard, and leaned against one of the posts near the stairs, thinking at first it must be Purvis Little. It was Purvis’s car, but to Ellis’s surprise, Purvis was not driving.

  As the car pulled around the last bend and over the final ridge, he saw who it was and had mixed emotions. He recognized that it was only Fergus driving the car and was disappointed because he would have preferred other company. But at least it was a visitor. It was Fergus and Elvira who had come to call. Despite Ellis’s annoyance at the fellow, he supposed any company, even Fergus Bayard’s, was better than no company at all. He hadn’t gone anywhere for months, and no one had managed to drop by to see how he was faring.

  Fergus and Elvira got out of the car and came up the steps, grinning as though they were up to mischief.

  Ellis nodded a welcome to them. “I thought for sure you was Purvis. What’re you drivin’ his automobile for?”

  “That there was a gift from my new pappy-in-law,” Fergus boasted, his skinny chest puffed out as much as was humanly possible.

  “Pappy-in-law?” Ellis asked incredulously.

  “That’s right. This here’s my new bride,” he said, indicating Elvira who was smiling bashfully and lowering her eyes.

  Ellis looked at Fergus and Elvira and hoped that the surprise did not register on his face. He was amazed at the pairing of the two. While he had seen them at the dance, he figured that the young girl’s interest in him would have evaporated long ago. Fergus was the butt of every joke as far back as Ellis could remember. He was a dyed-in-the-wool mama’s boy. He had no prospects, no ambition, and no desire to ever cut the apron strings. And there he stood, with the most beautiful girl in the county.

  Elvira had to be completely oblivious if she was not aware of these character flaws, yet Ellis did not sense any naivety in her. Although he couldn’t put a finger on it, he was distrustful of her. Maybe it was her cat-like manner or the slightly devious look in her dark eyes; he wasn’t sure. She was a strange combination of pouty girl and sultry woman, and in Elvira, the two didn’t mix. She exuded femininity, a power that she likely didn’t completely understand but wielded recklessly. What had she seen in Fergus? She could have had any one of a dozen other young men. Why him?

  “Well, I’ll be,” Ellis replied with a pat on Fergus’s back. “You gone and done it!”

  He ushered them into his small front room, and they took chairs from around the table to sit by the fireplace. Elvira sat in the rocking chair, arching her back, running her fingers over the arms as she rocked. Her interested gaze roamed the room, as if taking mental notes of the place.

  “Purvis done gave me that there automobile as a weddin’ present. Said we’d need somethin’ startin’ out to get round in,” Fergus bragged.

  Elvira said, “We’s livin’ up yonder with Fergus’s mama for now. But Fergus is goin’ to get us a place right quick. Ain’t you, Fergus? Ain’t that what you said, that you’s gonna get us a place right quick?”

  “Certainly I am.”

  “And he says I’s to have a garden right off the back door, a big ’un with enough to bottle so’s I can fill the shelves all up, and it’d have a porch, and a sittin’ room, and a wash room. Ain’t that what you say, Fergus?”

  “That’s what I say,” he concurred proudly.

  “Oh, and I’s to have a well real close, so’s I ain’t gotta carry the water far neither. A well with a proper pump and all. And he’s goin’ to make us a fine big bed. He done started it already. He’s been in the barn a-workin’ away at it with his tools and such.”

  “That sounds right nice,” Ellis said. Fergus, with his incessant grin, was irritating him, and he kept telling himself that he shouldn’t be so harsh with the man. After all, Fergus had reason to be in good spirits,
and it wasn’t his fault that Ellis was not.

  “So we ain’t goin’ to be at his mama’s place long. Just long enough to get us a place of our own. Not that you ain’t got a real nice place here for yourself, Ellis, but we got plans for a bigger place. Somethin’ real nice with lotsa room. Ain’t that right, Fergus? Where we can spread out and have plenty of breathin’ space and all.”

  “Now, hush up, woman. You’re likely to put poor Ellis to sleep there for all your carryin’ on.”

  He was obviously uncomfortable with her prattle. Perhaps he didn’t want Ellis to know what the two of them had discussed in private; perhaps he thought she really was boring Ellis. On either account, her husband’s mild reprimand made Elvira self-consciously gaze down at her clasped hands, avoiding the men’s eyes. It was clear to Ellis she didn’t like being put in her place like that.

  “Well, I’s just tellin’ him what you done tole me,” she said defensively.

  Ellis felt sorry for Elvira, just a girl of fifteen and now a married woman. Because her family had lived on the adjacent property, Ellis had been privy to her past. Following the death of her mother, she had become a servant to her family. Someone was always underfoot, the younger children bawling and needing attention or to be fed or put to bed. She had never had time alone to herself. No one asked what she wanted. There were too many children to care for. The house was so small that they had all shared the second-floor dormer in her daddy’s home, two or three to a bed. It couldn’t contain them all, and they spilled out onto the porch and into the yard.

  She must have had dreams of her own, desires left unfulfilled, moments where she wanted nothing more than to be still and know quiet. So much so that she had settled for marrying a man twelve years her elder to get what she wanted. Fergus, such as he was, was the means of seeing her dreams come to fruition.