A Parchment of Leaves

by Silas House

  She whispered, leaning close to my ear as she worked through a rat’s nest of tangles.

  “They hid for years. They’d run up on people who told them that the army had moved, that the government was tired of looking. Lucinda was getting to be a big girl, about eight year old, I believe. Her people had lived a little while on a big, wild mountain, had built them a good cabin and made friends with some white people they trusted. They didn’t dare to go back home, but they felt safe there on the mountain. They got to where they’d let Lucinda roam some.”

  “And she was out picking blackberries, wasn’t she?” I said.

  “Out picking blackberries. High summer, the sun a white ball straight over her head. The woods full of birdcall, so loud that she couldn’t hear anything but. A creek close by, falling hard on big rocks. Her basket was full.”

  I could see Lucinda. Against the black that was the inside of my eyelids, I seen it all: her little dress, her fingers scratched by briers, the beads of sweat standing on her forehead.

  “She didn’t know how close she was to the road, paid no attention to the cloud of dust rising over the trees. She moved on down the mountainside, followed the thicket, so heavy with berries that she had to bend low where the vines was near touching the ground.”

  The comb slid through more freely now that she had rid my hair of knots. She went faster, and even though she did not raise her voice, she talked quicker, her words matching the hooves of the horses that I knowed were coming up that road toward Lucinda.

  “Her back was to the road, the river on the other side of it. And on she went. She should have knowed by the white dust that was on the berries. Should have knowed how close she was to being out in the road. By the time she heard the horses coming down toward her, she could see them. Men in uniforms, blue they was. The metal on their rifles caught sun, and she dropped the basket of berries. She knowed right then to move, to run, but she couldn’t. She looked at the first horseman’s face and she could tell that he hadn’t seen her, but he would.”

  Mama stopped combing. She put both her hands atop my head, like she was feeling the shape of my skull, testing it the way she did melons when their bottoms had lost their yellow and they were ready for picking.

  “Then an arm come through the trees, and she seen it try to find something to take hold of. All he could catch was her braid, and he pulled her up like a man taking hold of a snake’s tail. She flew up and the tree limbs tore across her face. She landed on top of him and they both fell into the tangles of brush. She laid there on him, her back to his chest. His big hand come around to cap over her mouth.

  “The soldiers went on, none the wiser.”

  “And that was him, wasn’t it?” I said.

  “Your great-granddaddy, hiding out in that same mountain with his people. Eight year later, he married her.”

  It was here that Mama always stopped speaking. She could never go on beyond this point without prodding.

  “Can you remember them?” I asked.

  “Lord, no,” she said, and laid the comb on the table. She set down and took her coffee back in hand, although I knowed it had to be ice-cold by this time. “They was long dead before I come along. But right after they married, they left that mountain and come here, to Redbud. And that’s how we ended up here.”

  I had a quick revelation and couldn’t understand why I had not thought of it before. I realized that she must have had the hair all along, and this morning she would give it to me. It was to be my wedding present.

  “Do you have the hair?”

  Mama smiled. It was not often that she let her teeth show. She fished down into her apron pocket, a square of cloth that had held so many things in my own lifetime, and brought out a net with the ball of hair inside. It looked like silk curled up there, like a great round wad of night sky. She held it on her flat palm, balancing it like it was something that she wanted to know the weight of.

  “He figured, see, that since this was the part at the very end of her hair, it was the same hunk he had grabbed hold of all them years before. He wanted that piece of her to keep.”

  Mama put the net into my hands. It was heavy and cool, like black water made solid in my hand. I brought it up to my nose and breathed in its scent. It smelled of the cedar chest Mama had kept it in all these years, but I imagined that maybe this was the scent Lucinda had had about her, too. Maybe she had smelled just as musky and sweet. I pictured the two of them, my great-grandparents, as they rode over the mountains up into Kentucky, where they settled. I imagined that all of the cedars they passed through on that journey planted this smell on their skin so thickly that they had never been able to wash it away.

  So my ancestors would accompany me on my wedding day. Lucinda—the one person I longed to know above all others—would be near as I married Saul. I kept this scent with me the rest of the day.

  WE HAD ENLISTED Esme’s pastor to marry us. My daddy’s people had been converted to Quaker long ago, so my family had no such person to call on, as we held our own services there on Redbud. This was fine by me; I felt the preacher was nothing more than a required part of the wedding. The man—who everybody just called Pastor—agreed to make the trip over to Redbud and marry us, although he acted like it killed him to do so. Pastor was tall and thin as a post, with a face to match, and he wore the same look in his eyes that his church house did: one of disgust with the rest of the world. Esme had asked for us to be married in the church, but I could not agree to it, since it was such a grim-looking place. Saul couldn’t have cared less. He more or less agreed with my and Mama’s notion that God moved around more on the hillsides than He did in the church. I picked the spot where Saul had proposed to me—right there at the confluence of the river and the creek. Nobody would have to strain to hear over the pounding falls, as the river and creek were both way down. It had been a parching summer and the water was now no more than a soothing song on the rocks.

  My aunts seemed downright giddy as they got me ready for the wedding. They darted around me like laughing birds while they picked at my hair and sprayed perfume onto my wrists. They fixed me a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and ironweed picked from the riverside. They made me stand in my shift with my arms straight up in the air as they slid my dress onto me. Mama sewed the dress for me. It was made from purple material she had bought in town, and she had stitched purple violets all across the bodice. Within the folds of the skirt, she had sewed a small pocket. The ball of hair fit in there perfect.

  When I got the dress on properly, they all stood back for a minute with their hands to their mouths.

  Mama received everyone and acted like she was tickled to death that her only daughter was leaving home. She was good at putting on. All day long, I felt her hands upon my head, combing our history into my mind. She walked around the yard with her arm looped through Esme’s and introduced her to everyone. Everybody from Redbud was there, and this made for a big crowd. Daddy and my brother, Jubal, moved through the crowd, shaking all the men’s hands and nodding to the women. Saul’s own people were scattered all over the country, and the only family he had there was Esme and Aaron. People surrounded Aaron to ask about how I had saved him from the copperhead, and he was good-natured enough to hustle down his shirt and show them the little mark it had left behind.

  After Pastor stumbled through the vows and we were married, we ate the biggest meal that had been prepared on Redbud in ages. The women had spent the last two days cooking to get everything ready, and now the food was laid out on tables all across the front yard. We ate on quilts spread out on the ground. I don’t believe Pastor cracked a smile all day long, even when Mama set a heaping plate of every good food known to man in front of him.

  We didn’t even take a picture. Never thought much about it. I wish now that I had a photograph of that day, just to catch a glimpse of the girl who was slowly fading away on the film. I realized that my new life was beginning that day. I felt like I had something to do now and I cherished the though
t of mattering to someone besides my own people. I pictured my future all laid out before me. I seen the children I would have before long, children that would need me, that would crawl up onto my lap when they was hurt or sick. I would have a husband who would be glad to see me waiting in the yard when he got back from working all day. That’s all anybody can ask for, if you think about it—to have somebody love you and depend on you and take care of you when you’re sick, and mourn over your casket when you die. Family’s the only thing a person’s got in this life.

  Saul had borrowed the car of one of his buddies from work, and people went on about it a sight. All the children were sitting in it, playing with the knobs. Men kicked at the tires, and women reached in to feel of the seats. There wasn’t many cars that come up into Redbud Camp. It coughed and spat black smoke but seemed to run fine. I had never rode in a vehicle of any kind before that day, but I climbed into that little car as if I had been doing it all of my life. We pulled away waving and honking the horn, but I wouldn’t let myself look through the back window to see them all standing out there by the road, the cloud of dust settling on their clothes.

  Riding over the mountains toward the place I would now call home, God’s Creek, I decided to wash any homesickness out of my mind and start a life. I thought about Lucinda, hunched tight to her husband’s back as their horse bounced over rough trails toward their future. I wondered if she had felt the same way I did today. I sat as close to Saul as I could get, one hand on his warm thigh, the other curled around the crook of his big arm. The car rode rougher than any wagon that I had ever been in, but I didn’t complain. I couldn’t get over the vibration of its engine beneath my feet. I laid my head on his shoulder and breathed deep. My breath was shuddery, the way it is after a good, long cry.

  For our wedding present, Esme deeded us a plot of land just down the creek from her house. It was a fine place, flat as a table and dotted with walnut trees older than Methuselah. Saul had already laid down rocks for the foundation, but until we could get it built, we would live with Esme and Aaron.

  Esme’s was a big, rambling house that went off in three or four different directions. Each room had been added on over the years until the house resembled a maze. The original part was a log cabin, another part made of roughly hewn lumber, and the last addition fashioned from lumber cut perfect and straight at the mill. Some rooms had to be stepped up into, and others had to be stepped down into. The house had once held a whole crew of people—Esme’s mother and daddy, Esme and her husband, Willem, and six children. Now all of the children were gone except for Saul and Aaron—the three other boys were traipsing the country, and the girl was long dead. I believe they were all glad for my sudden company.

  Esme was awful good to me. When I first met her, I was almost scared. I had never seen a person so little in my life. She looked to me like a child with wrinkled skin and white hair, she was so short. All of my own people were tall, strapping men and women. Esme was so little that she had to have a man in town make her shoes special. I believe she told me once that her feet was only six inches long, which I could not get over.

  Esme looked older than she really was. Grief had long ago turned her hair the kind of white that many older people coveted. When it was combed out, it was as long and straight as a curtain. Even though hard life had given her the shape and stamp of age, she was still a pretty woman. Once I was able to get up close to her and look into her eyes, I knowed that she possessed a good heart. Her eyes were blue as robins’ eggs, and the way they wrinkled up at the corners let me know that she was kind, even if she didn’t want everybody to realize this. Life had taught her to appear more hard-shelled than she really was. Her thick skin didn’t fool me for a minute. We were both used to hard work, and we respected each other for that. While Saul was off working at the sawmill, we kept busy, but all the while we worked, we talked and got close to each other in a way that I had never knowed before, not even with my own mother.

  One evening when Saul was up in the mountain felling trees to start building our house, Esme told me to go set down on the porch and close my eyes. I could hear her making a loud commotion in the house. There was the sound of chimes and iron hitting metal, and before I was even allowed to look, I knowed that it was a clock Esme was packing out to me.

  Esme put the big old mantel clock in my hands and I balanced it on my knees, studying it for a long time. It was made from the yellowest wood that I had ever seen, carved with great care. I wondered how long it had taken to create something so beautiful.

  “My great-granddaddy made that over in Ireland. Feel how solid it is in your hands,” Esme said. “That come in a boat all the way across the ocean and then over these mountains. All that way. That’s always amazed me.”

  “It sure is something,” I said. It felt like an alive thing in my hands, pulsing with the energy of all the people who had held it before me.

  “When I die, I want you to take care of this,” Esme said. “A man is crazy over a watch but don’t care nothing for a clock. It’s something a woman has to remember to wind and clean out. I want you to make certain that it don’t get destroyed.”

  “I’ll take awful good care of it,” I said.

  “I know people’s probably told you that I wasn’t pleased with Saul marrying you.”

  “No, ma’am. Nobody’s said such a thing,” I said.

  “Well, I won’t lie to you and say that it’s what I always wanted for him, but I’m a good judge of people. I ain’t seen nothing bad out of you yet.” She looked at the clock instead of me while she talked. “My own girl died when she was twelve year old. Consumption. I watched it eat her up. When you live through something like that, you realize that you have to accept things the best you can. So I did, but I was wrong in just accepting you. He’s made a real good choice.”

  She took the clock back and talked as she went into the house with it. “I’d go on and give it to you, but I couldn’t sleep me a wink without having it tick through the night.”

  In that moment I loved her like a girl is meant to care for her mother-in-law. I had watched the way Esme’s slender hands—crisscrossed by veins blue enough to match her eyes—carried that clock with such care and tenderness. For being so little, Esme had a strange sort of grace about her. Her way of moving reminded me of a queen. She was noble in the way she carried herself, even though she always looked wore slick out from working all of the time.

  She was the most workified woman I had ever met, too. That woman could do anything. She made chairs and baskets, raised the awfullest garden you ever seen, cooked meals big enough to feed an army. She milked the cows, churned the butter, slopped the hogs, without ever asking for help. One thing that always tickled me was that she kept a little hatchet tucked into the waistband of her apron so it would be there in case the need for it ever arose. She used the hatchet as often as some people used pocketknives, snatching up a hen to cut off its head, chopping down a sapling that had grown up suddenly in the hog’s pen. She seemed to always have flour on her blouse, and her head was forever frizzed up with little wisps of silver flying around her forehead.

  Aaron was crazy over me, too. I could tell right off that he was struck on me. He had shot up in that summer. When I first met him, splayed out on the road with the copperhead’s juice still in him, he was no bigger than a tree limb that can be held at the knee and broke in two. Now he had started to fill out; everything about him was bigger. He was nineteen year old, and that age of man is plenty man. He would have waited on me hand and foot if I would’ve let him, and every time we was alone anywhere, I could feel him staring at me. I tried to brush this aside, though. I figured it would pass, like most things do if they are ignored.

  That boy loved to talk to me, said I was the only person who really listened to what he was saying. He did talk pretty. Aaron was a dreamer, full of foolish notions that he thought might come true, and I liked hearing somebody talk like they still believed in fairy tales, and him that old. He’d set in
the kitchen, strumming snippets of tunes on his banjo while I cooked and cleaned. He’d say that he wasn’t going to break his back in no sawmill, that he wasn’t going to spend his life behind a plow and tending bees, like his daddy had. He might go to East Tennessee, where they had found a big vein of coal. He figured he was smart enough to make an office clerk for the mine supervisors, since he was a good hand to figure math. He talked about going out west and being a railroad engineer and getting rich. Always something like that. He thought you all the time had to be doing something big to be living. Never could set down on the front porch and take a deep breath and feel satisfied that his day had been well spent. Couldn’t just set there and talk with everybody and listen to the creek. He was always thinking, always dreaming. But as much as I shook my head at him, I liked to listen to him.

  They were both good as could be to me, but I still couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  I was miserable for a place of our own. A place I could make curtains for to hang in the windows and set up all night talking if I wanted to. Esme always laid down early—she went to bed when the chickens did—and I couldn’t stand that. When I lived at home with my own people, we’d set out on the porch in the summertime till way up in the night. Everybody on the creek would gather on our porch, and Daddy would tell big tales while all the little children caught lightning bugs in the yard. Some of the men would drink and Jubal would tell big lies and we’d all laugh. Sometimes the men would play banjos or fiddles, and Mama would clog for us.

  I missed all that real bad when Esme said it was time to lay down. With Saul snoring beside me, I’d set up in bed, staring into the blackness for an hour or two before I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d sneak out to sit by the creek or lay back on the pine needles in the yard to watch the sky. At night an old whippoorwill would holler. It was such a pretty sound, but a lonesome one, too. I’d be out there by myself, straining to hear the laughter coming from miles away over the mountain, back home on Redbud. It was only at night that I missed home so bad that my stomach hurt from it. I felt as if my people were becoming ghosts to me. I feared that I would someday be unable to remember them, the way my aunts had forgotten the language of their people.