by Jessie Haas
The empty rooms were their rooms. Of course. “What about my father?”
“He was sick already when he met your mother, though Sarah wouldn’t see it. He knew what he had coming to him, and he told your mother, but he couldn’t scare her off.” Truman gazed past the stove. After a while his chest heaved, as if to push off sorrow. “All over now. They’re together.”
And I’m alone.
Truman said, “But you’ve heard this all a hundred times.”
I’d never heard it once. Oh, I knew Aunt Sarah had raised Father, and I knew what he’d died of. But Mother didn’t tell her life as a story. I knew the events, but not the details, not the flow of one thing into another. The fever epidemic, the orphanage, school and love and widowhood—I knew they’d all happened, but Mother didn’t look back, so I didn’t either. I felt ashamed of my ignorance.
We sat silent. Outside, the drips slowed, and a breeze stirred the wet leaves. Of course Aunt Sarah hated Mother, I thought. She took away baby Walter. Mother might have shared, but Aunt Sarah never would have. It was all or nothing with her.
“So why is the house like that?” I asked. “Why are those rooms empty, and why is everything crowded into the front parlor?”
“Had some good times in that parlor,” Truman said musingly. “But y’see, Harry, Sarah had to go on living there after all that happened. She had to manage some way.” He glanced down at himself. “It’s like this arm. Wa’n’t hurt all that bad, but if they hadn’t cut it off, ’twould have gone black, and the black would have spread into me, and I wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh.” I was trying to see how Truman’s arm and the house at Vinegar Hill went together. Cleaning out those rooms, where maybe they’d died, filling with furniture the room where they’d had good times together—was that like cutting off an arm with gangrene? What if I’d had to live in the house where Mother and I lived and where she died? What would I have done with her bed-room? Maybe rearranging the house was the closest Aunt Sarah could come to moving.
Truman gazed at the front of the stove as if it were a window. “Nothin’s come out the way we thought it would. Here we thought that farm wouldn’t be big enough to support ’em all, and maybe one of ’em’d want this place, and who else could they buy a little land from … and now the ridge is empty, and Clayt cuttin’ back a little every year. He ain’t a spring chicken, Clayt, for all he was the baby of the family.”
“That’s why Aunt Sarah hated Mother,” I said. “She took my father away from the farm.”
Truman shook his head, not disagreeing, just shaking his head at life. “That’s about a tenth of it, Harry. Your mother was—well, you know what she was, and Sarah—Sarah ought to have had more scope. Ought to have gone to the Academy, and I s’pose Dave would have sent her if Melinda’d lived. She has great abilities, Sarah does, and we’ve all benefited from ’em, but it’s been a narrow life, no denying that.”
“I… see.”
“Well, you don’t see, Harry, but in time you will. You make sure you get your schoolin’. Sarah doesn’t know what she missed—well, she does and she doesn’t. But she played the hand she was dealt, like you’re doin’ now.”
The hand I played was the Academy, the colt, my strength, and my sorrow: Mother’s love within me. All this new knowledge was like another card I’d drawn from the deck. It changed everything, but for the moment I couldn’t see how. “I should go,” I said after a few minutes.
“Tell Clayton I’ll be over.”
The rain had given way to heavy mist. I walked slowly along the road, listening to drips and loud birdsong. Bright pink worms stretched and contracted themselves between the ruts. I saw a robin snatch one and fly away.
So Aunt Sarah was an orphan. Like Mother. Like Father. I come from a long line of orphans.
Everyone’s an orphan, if they live long enough. But not everyone is orphaned young.
But Mother was happy. I knew now that she was happy on purpose, with sorrow in the past and sorrow sure to come, in debt, with a bad heart. I made her happy. She always made sure I knew that.
Before me, Father. Before Father, her school, her friends.
What’s going to make you happy, Harry? I could be an orphan like Mother or an orphan like Aunt Sarah.
“But that’s not fair!” I said out loud. Aunt Sarah must have been splendid. She raised them all, and Truman wanted to marry her—and then they died.
Just for a moment I felt bitterly ashamed. All I had done was hate her. When I said, “You want me to die,” when she turned to me, blotched and still, she must have felt as if she’d been stabbed in the heart. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She did try to kill my rooster. She did say those terrible things.
Still, pain could twist people. I’d felt it inside myself, mean and sour. Mother must have known that about Aunt Sarah, but she also knew that Aunt Sarah had raised my father, made a good man of him. Sending me here, she sent me back to good as well as bad.
I reached the pasture gate and paused, looking across the hills. Somewhere down there West Barrett nestled among the trees, with the sawmill humming at its heart and no view at all. I would have missed this place. But in all those years, Mother came up again only as far as the blackberry pastures.
I heard a step and felt the colt’s warm breath on my cheek. “Hello, Kid.” I rubbed his hot, wet neck, and he pressed against my hand, tossing his head and grimacing.
Here was my baby. He’d been left to me as I’d been left to Mother, and baby Walter—my father—had been left to Aunt Sarah. I crawled between the bars, struggling against my wet skirt and oilskins, and put my arms around his neck.
He tried to rub his body along me. He must itch from the rain. “Hold still!” I moved along with him, hugging the muscular neck as it tossed, but then his shoulder pushed, my heel caught in a rut, and I sat down hard.
Legs; big, smooth joints; surprised, innocent face. Sweet breath clouded around me.
“Yeah, how did I get down here?” I clambered back; through the gate and leaned there, scraping mud off the back of my skirt with a flat stick. “No, I won’t scratch you anymore!”
The colt heaved a sigh, gazing across the hillside. Lid and lashes folded close over his eye, like calyx over bud. His breath and his warm, wet smell made an atmosphere around us. I breathed it, remembering his birth, remembering Belle’s deep, soft-voiced whinny to him, remembering Mother’s delight in the new little creature, and how everything about him had pointed us toward the future, when I was grown, when I was in school.
I hope I can train you, I thought. Everything had changed, but the future, the colt giving me independence, could still come true. If I could make it.
When I walked into the kitchen, Aunt Sarah said, “What did you do, sit down and make mud pies?”
“I—” I bit back a sharp answer. She brought the tin bathtub in from the back room and began to draw steaming water from the tank beside the stove.
“Get out of your wet things and into that tub. Your uncle’s gone to town with the butter, so have a good long soak and get warm all the way through.”
She turned back to her rolling pin. I peeled off my clothes, folded myself under the water, and gazed around the kitchen. Its very size made it ugly, and the snuff-colored wainscoting and the vinegar smell.
But scent it with mulling cider, fill it with young people, color Truman’s beard brown, straighten Uncle Clayton’s shoulders, and set them dancing …
“Who made the music?”
She turned her head. “What?”
“Tru—Uncle Truman said you had dances. Who made the music?”
She turned back to her piecrust. Squeak, squeak went the rolling pin. “I did.”
I stared. As if she could feel my eyes, she said, “I had my father’s fiddle. He taught me to play.”
“But then you could never dance!” Not that I could imagine her dancing, but Truman had been courting her, and Uncle Clayton, too. Did that happen while she h
ad a fiddle tucked under her chin?
“I wasn’t much for dancing.”
No, I could see that. Aunt Sarah played the tune, and everyone else danced to it.
fifteen
The next morning the sun came out, and in the afternoon Uncle Clayton cut hay.
Big white clouds sprang up by the following noon. I watched them while I churned. At dinner Uncle Clayton glanced at the clouds only when Aunt Sarah’s back was turned. His eyebrows worked like the brows of a worried dog. I didn’t think, I’ll tell Mother. I’d gotten over doing that. But without the words to choose for her, it seemed as if I missed half of what I was seeing. My mind felt like Truman’s hand: mateless, distorted.
I could write her a letter, I thought, and that seemed so close to crazy that I went right out to catch the colt.
There was no reason for him to want to close his mouth around a piece of metal, no way for me to explain why he should. Reaching for a nose grown high as a giraffe’s, prying open clenched teeth, listening to the grating of a snaffle being gnawed, I kept myself in the here and now.
As I turned the colt loose, Truman arrived. Uncle Clayton caught Whitey and hitched him to the rake. Aunt Sarah stepped out of the house, tying on her hat. Her sleeves were rolled up, showing her muscled arms. She climbed onto the rake and drove away up the hill. Uncle Clayton hitched the team to the wagon, and Truman, having put Jerry in a stall, brought two hay forks from the barn.
“Can’t I help, too?”
Uncle Clayton glanced up the hill, where the rake had begun to clack. He opened his mouth, and it stayed open.
“Grab another fork,” Truman said.
We rode out on the bumpy wagon to where Aunt Sarah had begun raking the hay into rows. There Uncle Clayton showed me how to roll each row into a tumble. He made the fork look intelligent, turning this way and that as if it could feel the hay and never wasting a motion. His tumbles were smooth and lifted neatly onto the wagon. Mine looked like crow’s nests, and hay cascaded onto the ground when I lifted one.
Aunt Sarah drove the rake past and pulled up just above me. I struggled without looking up, waiting for her to send me back to the house and more empty hours.
“It’s like kneading bread,” she said. “Fold it.”
“Oh.” It didn’t make sense, but nothing I was trying made sense either. I tried folding, and most of my small, shaggy tumble made it onto the wagon.
Truman had stayed up there. By wrapping his wrist around the handle, and bracing the handle against his shoulder, he could use a pitchfork. As we put the hay up, he placed it where he wanted it, trod on it a few times, and turned for the next forkful, eventually building a load as flat and firm as a mattress.
The sun beat on our backs, and then abruptly the world went dark and cool. We looked at the sky and worked faster. The rake clacked ahead, behind, above us, as Aunt Sarah circled the hillside.
Sweat stung my eyes. My hands were starting to blister. But I noticed suddenly that my chest didn’t hurt. Quickly I turned my thoughts away, to the smooth ash handle of the fork, to the black snake that whipped away across the stubble. But I couldn’t help noticing that just for this moment I wasn’t actually unhappy.
Aunt Sarah finished raking. She wrapped the reins so Whitey would stand and came down the hill toward us. “Shall I get up there with you, Truman? It’s getting pretty high.” It was getting too high for me to reach, actually, and I was hoping we’d stop soon.
“Send Harry up,” Truman said.
I was expected to climb up the smooth, round side of the load, but how? What would I hold on to?
“Here.” Uncle Clayton drove his pitchfork into the side of the load, so the handle stood out straight. He made a stirrup with his hand. I stepped into it and then onto the fork handle, and then Truman’s hand caught mine and pulled me up.
The horses’ backs were small and far away. Aunt Sarah looked like a dumpy little doll. Truman handed me his fork. “Reach down,” he said, “and take the hay they fork up to you. Don’t go too close to the edge now.”
What was too close? I wondered. The load felt firm beneath me, but the hay was slippery. I inched to the edge, clashed my tines with Aunt Sarah’s, dragged her forkful of hay to the center of the load.
“Put it on this corner,” Truman said. “If we build it even, we can still get quite a bit on.”
Another forkful of hay nosed toward the edge of the load. I crept toward it. Don’t be such a coward! I told myself.
Suddenly I felt a hand grip the waistband of my dress. “Go on,” Truman said. “I got you.”
He held my dress, and I reached down again and again, learning to feel safe at the edge of the load, learning what was too far. After a while Truman let go.
“Full load,” Uncle Clayton said finally, and drove the wagon down the hill. I lay on the fragrant, scratchy hay and watched the sky. Beside me Truman leaned on his elbow, chewing on a straw.
Uncle Clayton drove into the barn and helped us off the load. I watched as he reached for a thin rope hanging against the wall. He pulled it, and down from the rafters with majestic slowness swung a huge iron jaw. It hung from a heavier rope that ran through a pulley at the peak of the rafters and down again to another pulley beside the barn door. There Aunt Sarah payed it through her hands, making herself a counterweight. If she didn’t do that, I realized, the jaw would fall, and crush Uncle Clayton.
When it settled on top of the load, he spread it wide. It had a tooth on each corner, like a saber-toothed tiger. Uncle Clayton sank the teeth deep into the load, stepping on each one to push it deeper.
Meanwhile Truman brought Whitey to the barn door and hooked the heavy rope into his harness. Aunt Sarah got a fork and climbed over the half wall into the haymow.
She saw me standing by the team’s heads, with no idea what was going on, and hesitated. “Are you tired?”
“No.” I was, but I’d never say so.
“You could help me in here. Bring a fork.”
I stood with her against the back wall. Truman led Whitey away from the barn, tightening the rope. It groaned through the pulleys, and a third of the load lifted slowly toward the ceiling, swaying and dripping hay. Its sweet green fragrance filled the air.
Then the jaw clicked onto its track, and the hay rushed above us toward the end of the barn like a ship under full sail. “Whoa!” called Uncle Clayton. He yanked the thin rope. Whumpf, the hay dropped into the mow. Aunt Sarah stuck her fork into the edge of the pile and glanced at me. “Do what I do,” she said. I copied her, and together we pulled the hay in one mass back to the wall.
The whole process repeated twice. Then Uncle Clayton forked the remnants off the wagon and glanced at the sky. Patches of blue showed between the clouds now, and they were white, not gray. “Drink of water,” he said, and crossed the yard to the house. Aunt Sarah caught up and passed him, to forestall some disaster like his drinking from the wrong pitcher.
“How you like hayin’, Harry?” Truman asked, passing his gossamer-thin bandanna over his brow.
“I love it!”
Two weeks after dropping me off, Luke wrote:
Dear Harry,
Have you ridden him yet? I hope it’s going well.
Was your aunt mad after we left? Mama was
so mad she swore! Don’t let her crush your spirit,
Harry. That’s what Mama says she wants.
Remember, we are here.
Papa says give your colt time to see for himself
that things won’t hurt him. He says a horse
never forgets what he figures out for himself,
but things you pound into his head go right
out the other side.
I can’t wait till August, can you? Hazel says
Billy misses you and carved your name in one of
their trees, but I saw him holding hands with
Mildred Dean, so I don’t know. I think he likes
all girls.
Write back.
&n
bsp; Love,
Luke
Write back? How could I explain that everything was different from the way it had seemed? The empty hill was populated with people dead and gone. They bloomed slowly to the surface of my awareness, the way yeast springs to life in the proofing bowl. No one had spoken their names in years: Edward. Lettice. Violet Anne. No one spoke of them now, except Truman once in a while, but I knew about them. They lived inside me.
We hayed and hayed and hayed, and time slid by. I fell into bed exhausted and woke up aching. In the morning there was churning or housework. Just after noon I worked the colt. Then came haying and the hot sun, the smooth-handled pitchforks, stop and start of the team, clink of harness, Tippy’s white tail waving as she hunted mice in the weeds—sweat, chaff, headache, and the sorrow emptying out of my body. In the hayfield I felt like a figure in a landscape painting, not like a person. It helped.
Aunt Sarah watched me closely. “Don’t run with a fork!” she snapped when I did that. She made sure I wore a hat. She passed second helpings of dinner before I asked. Even so, the waists of my dresses began to hang slack.
And how was the colt? What would I have written to Luke if I’d managed to answer her letter? I had ridden him—sat on him anyway—but no one saw it. He was standing beside the fence, surrounded by cows, and I just slid on. He didn’t do anything, only curved his neck around to sniff my foot, and then ambled along the fence line, reaching under it to snatch bits of grass. When he turned downhill to chase a cow, I slid off.
Not much else was as easy as that. Every day he walked sleepy eyed to the gate, but as soon as he stepped over the bottom rail, his head came up, his neck stiffened, he began to bobble and step on me and look for things to shy at. Every day. The only sign of progress was that he now ignored hens.