Beloved Mother

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Beloved Mother Page 25

by Laura Hunter


  The next day, exhausted, Lily stoked dying logs. The fire sparked and hissed against Lily’s probing. She placed another log on the irons. It popped and blazed into a stronger flame.

  Lily crossed the room and laid her hand on Anna’s forehead. Her mama’s skin felt like the dry paper Lily had used to tender the fire. She lifted the woolen quilt and placed her mama’s arms under it.

  From the porch she brought a pitcher of Gertie’s milk to the table. She cracked a freshly laid egg into a jar, poured in milk and added sugar for temptation. She stirred the drink, clinking the fork against the jar sides, to see if her mama would respond. Anna did not.

  Lily lifted her mama’s head, enticing her to drink. Anna’s lips had frozen into a thin straight line. What Lily offered her spilled down a crease that ran from her lip and dripped off her chin. For a moment, Kee Granny’s tear-filled scars flashed before Lily. She rubbed the scar on her own arm still knotted and black from soot the granny had used to slow the blood when Lily had cut herself and new to Boone Station. It was so familiar she rarely noticed it, but it marked her arm as surely as would have a brand of ownership signified by the granny. Lily went to the washbasin, took a towel and wiped her mama’s face.

  A storm cloud passed over the house. Light in Boone Station faded at once. Lily lit the kerosene lamps, one by the bed and one on the table, to take away the dark. Lamps cast softer light than Powell Valley electricity. Lily needed softness, not harsh reality. Later she would take a dried rabbit from the clothesline between the side posts on the front porch and boil it into broth. Tomorrow. She would try again to rouse her mama tomorrow.

  Perhaps it was grief. Perhaps it was guilt for the part she had played in taking her mama down this path by letting the granny treat her. Whatever it was, it came upon Lily and sent her into rages. When a rage overcame her, Lily took care not to touch Anna. Over the next weeks, her anger would explode and she would slam her fist on the table. Lily’s hands ached from clutching whatever she came near. Her aggression left bruises that enlarged with each strike. To settle herself, she would bite her lips and swallow the sweet blood. As time passed, each calming time grew shorter than the one before.

  Memory came to Lily in a flash. She opened the top bureau drawer and removed the box of carved animals she had collected from her time on Turtleback Mountain. She had been a younger Lily, a Lily who had trusted Kee Granny, a Lily who had believed that the Little People, the Laurel People, and the Dogwood People would come to make her happy. She had left them hidden, for as her mama had said about the little treasures that first day coming up the Turtleback, somebody might come and claim them as their own. Now she needed to have each carving before her, in sight so she could relive each one and its place in her past.

  “Good that she respects her past,” says Great Spirit to the dark universe. “She’ll be less likely to make the same mistakes again.”

  “Should I tell her about her father?” asks Sister Sun.

  Great Spirit curls his upper lip and turns his back. “Don’t take the problems of the innocent and increase them, Sister Sun. Don’t put misfortune on the blameless.”

  Lily took the carvings, a thin strip of leather, a large needle and began to string. First a turtle, for Turtleback Mountain itself. Then a fox, a fox she had once found on the trail to the revered cedar. Next a cougar, larger than the rest. And the fat, round bear that had dropped into her lap the day she and her mother rested by the roadside. She rubbed the bear with special tenderness against her cheek. She had not worn it since she boarded the school truck for Covington. She had not realized that she missed it so. There were several turkeys. These she threaded in among other animals. And a little nesting bird her mother had refused to explain.

  She saved the beautiful, full-antlered stag for last. Taking it from where Anna had it on the mantle, she slipped the leather through its hole and tied a secure knot, adding a loop so that the menagerie could be hung from her porch. The superb stag would lead the procession, a total, she counted, of seventeen animals, all in a row. Great Spirit had sent one for each year of her life.

  Before hanging the animals, she caressed each with her fingers. They felt old, old enough to remember the Creation. She memorized each cut, each detail, so completely that she would later be able to re-create each in her mind. She hung the carvings in a swag from the porch rafter where Owl still came to roost. Their presence helped alleviate her solitude.

  Lily had watched Anna try all summer to die. At the end of summer, once her mama could no longer lift her arms or speak, Lily knew it was time to ask Gabe to go to Covington to buy a new, long-handled shovel for the burying.

  Sister Sun tries not to scorch the mountain. Brother Moon cools each night. They call to night breezes to give Lily restful sleep. They must make this trying time easier for Lily, this young woman they have come to think of as their own.

  “Losing her father and now losing her mother after casting Kee Granny out,” says Brother Moon.” Me and you and Gabe Shipley are all she has left.”

  “Does she know?” says Sister Sun.” About us, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” says Brother Moon. “Maybe one day when the universe is in syzygy Great Spirit will speak.”

  Lily planned for the laying by. It came to her in the night on the floor while she lay wrapped against the damp in the extra bed quilt. The event would be a non-event with only Anna and Lily. Maybe Gabe. If the weather allowed. It had been only Anna and Lily and Gabe these past months now that Kee Granny did not come. It would be right that they did this alone.

  Anna favored a woolen crazy quilt for its pieces and the precise chicken scratch stitching in bright blue thread, much like the one at Granny’s church. Lily would clean her mama’s waist-length hair with cornmeal. She would brush it afresh, plait it, and wrap it around her mama’s head like a tarnished silver tiara. Forty years old, she was. Too young for grey hair. And a cotton dress. No shoes. Just the quilt and her mama. And socks. To warm her mama’s feet.

  No. She would write words of honor and place them in the coffin so, if bones were found, the reader would know that Anna Goodman had been a flesh and blood woman, a woman who had loved and been loved.

  Lily took a pencil and spiral notebook. She sat at the table and palmed her forehead as she thought. After a moment, she wrote:

  Anna Parsons Goodman

  Born in Covington, Virginia the 7th day of the Month of the Bony Moon

  She erased “the Month of the Bony Moon” and replaced it with the word “February.”

  in the year of our Lord - 1921

  Married Clint Goodman the 24th day of March in 1937

  in Wise, Virginia at the court house

  Widowed in Breakline Mining Camp by a rogue coal truck the 22nd day of July 1945

  Mother of Lily Marie Goodman who was born

  October 9th in 1944

  Moved to Boone Station October 24th of 1946

  Passed from this earth

  She left the rest blank. She took a mason jar from the shelf over the washstand, found a lid and put her mother’s obituary and the pencil stub inside. She placed the jar back on its shelf. The thought of babies and jars in the old church and how little her mama’s life had come to made her shiver. An unborn child settling in a jar of alcohol and less than half a piece of paper to verify its existence. Lily needed to add something that would make her mother a real person. She took out the paper, scratched through the words “Passed from this earth” and added, My mama was a woman who made do.

  Chapter 31

  The month of November found Briar returning from Covington. By early afternoon, he was fighting a gusty north wind. He walked with his head thrust forward as if he were searching for some unknown something he expected to find round the next turn. By late afternoon, he stopped halfway up the mountain to relieve a cramp the climb brought to his lower calf. He sat on a rock outcropping and leaned his back against the ground. Cold seeped through his jacket. He should have stolen a bit of copp
er wire to wrap around his ankles when he had to make more than one trip to Covington in a day. Keep on cramping and his calves would be strutted so big he couldn’t get his pants on.

  A hickory nut dropped in front of him and rolled down the incline. It settled in a cluster of nuts resting in a bed of rust-tinged leaves. Early leaf colorings foretold that weather was turning toward winter, even had the nuts not attracted his attention. This winter would be bitter cold. Squirrels had been vigilant in storing nuts. Wooly worms were fat as Briar’s thumb. It would be a winter Tall Corn would have understood.

  Briar longed to talk to his Cherokee father so he could learn more about who Silent Wolf was supposed to be. Two Tears kept busy so raising her herbs, collecting her ’sang and dropping babies that she had no time for him. He had become Silent Watcher, rather than Silent Wolf, as he wandered Turtleback. He often dropped wooden animals on the forest floor wherever he whittled them. One day when it was time for him to know his purpose on this mountain, he would collect those he could find. They, like some miniature totem, would speak to him. He would then understand who he was and why Two Tears had brought him to this place.

  The wind eased into a bitter cold. Over Turtleback’s longest ridge, a solid bank of clouds, almost black, blocked the sun’s warmth. Briar pulled his jacket closed and buttoned the neck button. He then unbuttoned it. A true Cherokee would not strain against what Great Spirit sent. To prove himself qualified, he removed his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt’s neck. Though he stiffened himself against the air’s iciness, his body shook. In fairness to himself, he wrapped his arms around his chest and tucked his chin down on his chest.

  To his right, a rustling of leaves caught Briar’s attention. Clearly not Cherokee. Whoever was walking this way was tromping without regard to what or whom he disturbed. Nearer now, someone slid on dry leaves, dropped and uttered a moan. Male. Tall, taller than Briar. It took longer for the man’s head to hit the forest floor than it would have taken Briar’s.

  Briar straightened his back and looked over his shoulder. A boy, not yet twenty, lifted himself into a crouch and grabbed at the bag that lay by his side. His greasy hair touched the shoulder of his once-white shirt and hid his face. He combed his white ringlets back with his fingers. They snagged in the tangles. He pushed the hair behind his ears and looked at Briar.

  His pasty face had burgundy blemishes from the sun and wind. His dry cheeks and lips puffed as if the skin were ready to split and slough away. A stark bone structure separated his eyes from his forehead. Briar turned easy to face him head-on.

  Two more nuts fell. The boy jerked his head toward where the nuts hit the ground then back to Briar. His sinewy body tensed. His free hand grasped his throat as if he were trying to hold back words or strangle himself.

  Briar stood and extended a hand to the boy to lift him up. Rather than take the hand, the boy rounded up on his knees and hoisted his weight up with his forearms.

  “What you doing on Turtleback?” Briar said. “Great Spirit lost sight of you?”

  The boy did not answer.

  “I said, what you doing up here?”

  The boy picked up his sack and hugged it to his chest.

  Briar stepped forward. “Where you from?”

  The boy tried to move back but staggered, never taking his gaze off Briar.

  “Are you run away?” Briar moved a step closer.

  Wind rose behind the boy and picked up leaves. They spun into an eddy. A squirrel scurried up a nearby oak. The boy crept backwards, tripped and caught himself with his free hand. He landed soft on a patch of moss.

  “Are you dumb?” Briar asked.

  The boy stared at Briar, then glanced left, then right.

  Briar reached into his pocket and extended a closed fist. He opened his fist to expose a small, carved wolf. “I’m Silent Wolf,” Briar said. He shifted unconsciously into the more stilted language he recalled from his years with Tall Corn. “I will be your brother.”

  The boy stared at the carving and nibbled on his lower lip.

  “Take it. It’s yours. We will be brothers.” Briar moved closer.

  The boy glanced over his left shoulder.

  “It’s a wolf pup,” Briar said. The boy reached for the little wolf, then pulled back his hand. Briar waited. After a moment, the boy took the wolf pup and slipped it into his pocket.

  Briar’s hand felt oddly bare. He had given his animals to the earth when he dropped them hither and yon, but he had never deliberately relinquished one of his animals. He had stepped into an alien land and was not sure which way to trod. He questioned if perhaps Great Spirit had guided him. Only his mother could speak with Great Spirit, so she said. So it must not be that. Why had he handed an animal over to a stranger? He should ask for it back. But no. He had gifted the wolf. It was no longer his. He would carve another, a better one.

  Wind whistled up from the base of Turtleback telling Briar to move on. He glanced at the bag the boy held. “You can’t stay out here in this coming weather. Even Great Spirit’s animals ready for a blizzard.”

  Briar glanced at the bag the boy held. “Where you live?” Briar asked.

  The boy shrugged his shoulders and took the wolf cub from his pocket. He examined it and clasped his hand, hiding it in his fist.

  “So. You can hear. You just ain’t talking,” Briar said. “You can’t stay out here in this coming weather. Big snow soon.” Briar turned toward orange sunrays that slid earthward under the cloudbank. “You ain’t got no place, you can come with me.” Briar walked south, toward Old Man Farley’s place. The boy followed, clutching his bag in one hand and the wolf cub in the other.

  In the night, Briar returned with blankets, clothes much too large, matches, and food. The next morning, he took the boy by the hand and led him up a hidden path to Old Oak. He showed the boy how to climb and on which limb to sit so he could watch the comings and goings in the camp and on the road between Covington and Flatland.

  Chapter 32

  Early November rained every night and misted every day for two weeks. Air on Turtleback smelled like wet straw. Lily stayed inside. Waiting. She knew Death would come before hard winter. Kee Granny had not come back. Lily had not gone to get her to tend Anna for three months. With Kee Granny gone, the room smelled less of cedar. Lily had nurtured potted herbs on the east windowsill since summer. The herbs filled the room with battling aromas of lavender, mint and rosemary.

  The night the wolf began to howl, Lily knew. Lily thought the wolf to be Briar Slocomb’s dog, and perhaps it was. The howl started long after the moon rose, and it bayed until dawn. If the dog was primarily wolf, he could bring no less than evil, for Kee Granny had taught her that evil rides on the backs of wolves.

  Lily pictured the wolfdog away from the buildings that comprised Flatland. Or perhaps he sat on the cedar’s high ridge so that his voice would carry over the mountainous expanse. He rested on his haunches with his head thrown back, his mouth open to the cold air. Lily envisioned him as a statue, his chest hard as stone, yet mist would rise from his jaws as if his innards were afire.

  The second night of the wolf, a flicker of light appeared on the floor before the hearth. Lily picked up what seemed to be a shiny straight pin. She held it up to the light, looking close. She gazed, slack-jawed, in rapt wonder at a wee glowing creature. A minute being, glorious in his gossamer green robes, stood on the head of the pin. He spoke to Lily in a voice that jingled with tiny bells. “The time for beginning has come,” he said. Holding the pin as far away as her arm allowed, Lily moved to the table and stuck the pin in a mound of brown-crusted bread. She stepped over to the stove and waved her hand over a black eye, feeling for warmth, to prove she was not dreaming. Heat radiated upward, forcing Lily to draw back her hand before burning her palm. She looked back at the pin. He was still there.

  “Come,” he said. “Sit.”

  Lily hesitated, her confusion morphing into fear.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.


  Lily stepped gently over the floor. She pulled out a chair, pushed it away from the table and sat on the edge of the seat. “You are a spot of mold,” she said.

  He tingled a little half-laugh. “Call me Ena,” he said.

  Lily gulped. “Are you a tiny Little People?”

  “I’m Ena,” he said. “I come with the wind.”

  “An angel?”

  “I can be an angel, if you like.”

  “Did Kee Granny send you?”

  “Who?”

  “Beloved Mother.”

  “I came on my own. I sensed you need me.”

  “Some other Beloved Mother?” Lily asked. Anna had told her about angels, but they had always been silver or gold with feathery wings that brushed the ground. “You’re not real.” Lily walked across the room. “I’m talking to myself.” She splashed cold water on her face. As she straightened up, a button fell off her blouse. She pulled the straight pin from the bread and closed the gap that exposed her breasts. It was time to begin.

  Lily took out the clean dress she had selected for her mother. She picked up the brush for braiding her mother’s hair. The heat in the room forced Lily to sweep her bangs from her forehead. Though damp, they fell forward again as she bent to select wool socks from the bureau drawer. Anna’s feet were cold summer and winter. It would be damp and cold in the ground, so Anna must have thick socks.

  Stiff with age, the bottom bureau drawer stood ajar. There near the back was the bill of sale for the two coffins. Lily placed it on top of the bureau. Taking a fresh blouse from another drawer, Lily laid the straight pin aside. She changed and, after looking again at the pin, reconsidered. Kee Granny had told her never to doubt. She wove the pin into the collar of her blouse. Little Ena rested on the head of the pin, sheltered under Lily’s right ear.

 

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