Beloved Mother

by Laura Hunter

  “You do,” said Slocomb.

  Lily visualized him standing tall, pushing his chest out, he sounded so firm. “No, I don’t.”

  “Listen to him,” said Ena.

  “My animals. I give you a chance to return them. If you don’t give them to me, I’m taking them. I made them and they belong to me.” Briar pounded on the door again. “Open the door.”

  “No. I found the animals. They’re mine.” Lily rubbed her eyes. So tired. She wondered when she had last slept. “I’m not opening the door. Go away.”

  “You can’t get rid of me as easy as you did my mama.” Snow crunched under his feet as he stomped off the porch. “You’ll rue the day you made me come back,” he called.

  “You must give them back,” said Ena. “You cannot take from a man unless he gifts it to you.”

  Lily dropped on the bed. She had been light-headed since Briar’s first knock. A shiver ran down her back. She rose and pushed the bureau in front of the door so it could not be forced open if anyone broke the lock.

  That night she slept with the light on. Powell Valley Electric had strung lines over Turtleback at least ten years ago in the early 1950s, when the state started grading and tending the dirt road that ran from Covington to Breakline Camp. Tonight she was glad. She dozed and awoke with each sound. When the sun topped the mountain ridge, she peeped out the window facing the porch. The animal carvings were still hanging over her mother’s coffin.

  Sister Sun turns bright white. She has not seen an argument before where both are right. She slips behind a long, wispy cloud to think this thing through.

  Before noon, Briar Slocomb again stood at Lily’s door. Lily saw him through the window. He stood, his legs splayed out. The questions on his brow made him look uncomfortable, as if he had lost power over his tongue. Lily slid back the chest and cracked the door. “Did you carve them?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Your mother told me the Little People made them.” She braced her foot against the door and folded her arms across her breast, daring him to contradict her. “They are wonderful.”

  Briar’s flushed face and jutting chin told Lily that he had the same anger she had known against his mother. She had felt it grow within her from when she first realized Kee Granny had manipulated her into killing the trees surrounding the holy cedar. Briar’s anger was so tangible she looked away. When she looked back at Briar, he looked as if he had swallowed ground glass, his pain was so deep.

  “My father…” He stammered and started again. “Tall Corn, the man I thought was my father, is gone. And at my hand.”

  “What do…?” Lily began.

  “Now you have my animals. Animals like those Tall Corn carved on his gunstock,” Briar said. “They are all I have of the man I called father.”

  “I didn’t know,” Lily said.

  “You can only have what is given you, not what you take,” said Ena.

  “You’re right to take the animals,” Lily said. “I’ll miss them.” She closed and relocked the door. Sometime that day Briar Slocomb took the animals, leaving nothing behind but tracks in deep snow.

  Chapter 35

  The burying had been those few days in February when false spring appears and then vanishes, killing all leaf and bloom it had duped into coming out. Lily buried her mother in the middle of the road. A stretch, more track than logging road, abandoned when the mine on the face of the mountain played out, created the only strip of land suitable for burying without climbing to Flatland. She had decided early on that she would bury her mother there. Her daddy had never been a part of their lives, so no need to take her to Breakline to bury her next to Clint Goodman. She had no idea about her Covington folk.

  The ground, brown from last season’s leaves and musk, lay soft from rains that had beaten trees naked after the blizzard and melted ice. They survived as no more than stark grey shadows, barren of winter ice and its weight for one more season.

  Morning of the first February break in the weather, Lily walked the road to Breakline Camp, the road soggy by melted snow. At the top of Turtleback where the road dipped into Breakline, she saw in the distance the open hole of the mine’s black mouth. She wondered about life in tunnels that had at one time been little more than burrows. Tunnels that bent men double under their low ceilings. She wondered if her father had walked with his face to the ground like so many others. Dark miners moved about the camp like impatient insects, as they manipulated massive yellow machines that would soon eat away at what had once been an underground mine.

  At the commissary, she found Gabe and Seth White. She brought them back, offering to pay twenty-seven dollars, all she had left from her father’s pension, if they would put the body easy in the grave.

  Lily took her long-handled shovel and helped dig the grave, while her mother lay on the front porch threatening to thaw. Because her mother had been a slight woman at her death, they dug the grave shallow.

  Gabe and Seth lifted the coffin, each supporting an end, and set it down feet first, before positioning it straight in the trench.

  “Ought this hole to be a mite deeper?” Seth asked.

  “It’s deep enough to keep varmints away,” Lily answered and turned her back to them.

  “These ruts that old mining road?” Seth asked. “Seems the old mine used to run right nigh here.”

  “No matter,” Lily said. “I won’t have my mama buried on a slope. I want her steady in the ground. Not where she’s standing on her feet through eternity. Here’s where she’ll lie.” Lily stood with her legs slightly apart, in lopsided comfort, with one foot in a rut, one slanted on the loose dirt. Turtleback Mountain stood behind her. The town of Covington below to the south and east; Breakline Mining Camp, north and to the west, she stood in the center of all that had been her life.

  “Reckon this’ll do then,” Seth replied, and he shoveled dirt and rock in on the coffin. The sound muffled itself against the wood like rain on shingles too long on the roof.

  “Wait.” Lily set out for the porch. “Stop your shoveling,” she called back. From the edge of the porch, she picked up a pint fruit jar, its ring at a cocked angle, its lid flat against the glass mouth. Inside dead fireflies stuck to the bottom, stiff, their once vibrant ends the color of dried wood. Lily placed the jar of insects in the grave, next to the coffin’s head, and stepped back.

  “Now. Do what you’re here to do.” Lily walked back toward the house in step with the thuds of dirt as each hit against the coffin. “Don’t you break that jar, Gabe Shipley.” She spoke without turning.

  From her mother’s old chair on the porch, Lily stared past the scene in the side road, leading up the Turtleback. Beyond, a band of blue opened from between skeletal white clouds. Lily sat on the porch and wailed a chant-like dirge neither of the men had ever heard. She took three or four notes from one of Kee Granny’s old minor scales and worked them back and forth, weaving a lament that reverberated off the mountain wall, a nagging melody that rivaled a whippoorwill’s sorrow:

  Bring me a fruit jar and fill it with light

  of fireflies and wonder to stave off the night.

  No spirits born evil dare enter the door—

  bring morning—not darkness—

  for fireflies no more

  gleam bright in the moonlight—not fireflies—

  but wonder will outlive the night.

  Gabe and Seth never looked up. When Lily’s funeral song ended, they patted the filled grave with the backs of the shovels and stood the tools against a sycamore trunk.

  Lily thought the uniqueness of her mother’s service unimportant. The burial would not be worth the telling in Breakline. The men would not be remembering words. They probably thought burying the fireflies was something else again. They had not seen lightning bugs since cool weather had set in. The power of fireflies to ward off sinister spirits lay in their glow against a black night. Dead bugs don’t shine. But all that had not mattered when Lily had gathered the insects.
r />   Two weeks of heavy rain and ditches filled to the brim with gushing water brought an imposingly deep and full rumble from the earth. The sound signaled a transformation Lily had not expected. Gabe would later tell her that the mouth of the abandoned mine between Boone Station and Covington had collapsed.

  Chapter 36

  It was March, Kee Granny’s Month of the Windy Moon, when Lily opened the door to let in fresh air. She looked down and slammed it shut. On the doorsill lay a copperhead as long as the door was wide. She pressed her back against the slatted door as if her body’s weight could keep the snake at bay. Her heart beat faster than the day she discovered Rattler, for that day she had eased up on his bed. He had not been right where she planned to put her naked foot. That day she had been a child. And Rattler had been Rattler.

  As her breathing settled and her heart rate slowed, she chastised herself. Perhaps it was only an oak branch. In the leaves in a close face-to-face encounter, its markings camouflaged the snake so precisely that it took on the appearance of a limb.

  To be safe, she slipped on shoes and picked up the fireplace poker and coal shovel. With the poker, she could lift him up and sling him into the road. He would leave on his own, for copperheads were not aggressive. If he coiled, she could chop him into pieces and feed him to the chickens or leave him for Owl.

  “Open the door,” said Ena.

  She eased the door open again. The snake had not moved. She nudged him with the tip of her poker and nudged again. He did not bend. He was dead. “Dead as a poker, Mama would have said.” Lily laughed in relief.

  Lily stepped out on the porch and, using the poker, picked up the copperhead. It was perfect. In all its brown and grey glory, its symmetrical patches of tans and chestnut hourglasses marked its length, its head a tawny solid. There was no sign of battle.

  Looking closer, Lily found the deathblow. One tiny fang puncture through top of the snake’s triangular head. The snake had not suffered. His death had been swift and sure. His beauty earned him a decent burial.

  Using her coal shovel, she dug a narrow trench for the snake’s burial. If a dead snake isn’t buried, the mate will come to claim vengeance for the death. As she patted the earth back in place, movement across the road caught her eye. There sat a cat. A large calico Lily had never seen in these parts. A housecat would not survive on Turtleback with its rock ledges to shelter the likes of Rattler, its caves to harbor spotted bobcats, ancient hardwoods that nested night-flyers the size of Owl. And then there was Briar Slocomb’s dog in Flatland. But Briar Slocomb’s dog was different, almost an extension of his owner.

  A car, a truck must have dropped off the calico. With Anna gone, the calico would make for company. Lily called “Here, kitty, kitty.”

  The calico ignored her. Or maybe the cat was deaf and that was why somebody had dumped her. Lily started across the road bent close to the ground and murmured softly to entice it to stay until she could catch her. As soon as Lily reached the middle of the road, the cat disappeared in underbrush.

  With time, the calico brought squirrels, chipmunks, mice, more snakes. Each equally perfect. Each looked as if it could have risen from the dead and skittered away. The calico waited for Lily to accept her gift, bury it and try to coax the cat across the road. Each time the cat vanished into the woods.

  Each new day, Lily watched for the calico. This day, she sat in her mother’s pea-shelling chair and hummed an old ballad she had dreamed in the night. Out of the underbrush walked the calico. The cat crossed the road and rubbed her body against Lily’s leg.

  “Did I call you, little girl? What’s your name?” The cat straightened her tail upright. “If I listen, will you tell me your name?” The calico purred and wound her tail around Lily’s leg. “I’m listening.” The cat looked up at Lily then across the road as if she thought of leaving.

  “It’s Sunday,” Ena whispered, his green gown swaying.

  “Of course,” Lily said. “It’s Sunday,” Lily said aloud. “Welcome to Boone Station, Sunday.”

  That night Sunday moved into Lily’s place in the front room bed.

  On St. Patrick’s Day, Lily spent the morning hoeing weeds from potato rows while Sunday slept in the sun near the woods. Heat from the midday sun and lack of water were making Lily’s head swim. She had been thinking about going to the house for a bite to eat when she felt something behind her.

  A scrawny boy, or perhaps a man, appeared at the edge of the clearing, so thin and leggy, he could have been mistaken for a dirty wood sprite. Backed by lush mountain shrubs, he stared through ringlets of white hair at Lily while she stared back at him. Then he walked to Sunday where she lay in the grass and kicked at her underbelly. Both Sunday and Lily jumped and ran, Sunday for the woods, Lily for the boy.

  “Don’t you kick my cat!” she yelled, throwing the hoe.

  He did not answer. He turned into the woods, ducking through the brush, and, without looking back, called, “Gotta get the cat.”

  Lily stopped at the edge of the clearing and called for Sunday. The only sound she heard was the popping of fallen limbs as the boy crashed through the undergrowth. Comfortable with the knowledge that Sunday would survive, she picked up the hoe and took the path to the house. Before nightfall, Sunday was back. Lily pushed the bureau against the locked door and slept with the light on.

  The next morning Lily opened the door to find a half-man, so puny he was going on dead. He stood off the edge of the porch. He wore an oversized shirt and a hat that resembled one she had seen Briar Slocomb wear.

  “Gotta get the cat,” he said quietly. So clawed up by briars and thick brush, he wore black-blooded strips down his face and arms.

  Memory spoke up from somewhere near the back of her brain. Maybe the hair. “Do I know you?”

  “Gotta get the cat,” he said.

  “Eli O’Mary. What happened to you?”

  “Gotta get the cat,” he repeated.

  “No you don’t,” Lily replied. “This is my cat and you leave her alone.”

  “Gotta get the cat,” he said again, stepping on the porch and pushing past Lily into the room.

  Having grown so naturally placid, Lily wasn’t rattled, but she refused to let Eli have Sunday. Lily grabbed his shirt to toss him back into the road. Though thin, he was tall and lean, and he out-strengthened her. Tugging his shirt out of her hand, he went straight to the bed and lifted Sunday, much as he would have an infant. He cradled her in his arms. His movements were so swift that Lily had barely moved into the room before he swept past her and across the road to the woods.

  “Sunday!” She called. “Sunday!” She chased the two into the woods. Thrashing through ferns and deeper into briars, she called, overwhelmed with an innate sense that this man meant to harm her cat. Scratched and bleeding, Lily wandered out of the underbrush. She had found no trace of Eli or of Sunday.

  Memories make a family. Lily carried memories of her mama and Kee Granny. She had had Sunday for such a short time, but Sunday had proven her commitment. Lily saw her as family. Sunday was gone. Lily grieved. She wept, harder than she had for her mama, for she feared Eli would cause Sunday to die a fearful death somewhere along the road to Covington or throw her down an open mine shaft. By midnight, Lily awoke with Sunday scratching at the door.

  The next afternoon, after working the lower pea patch, Lily opened the door to find her bed covered in wild flowers, lavender to deep purple. Gabe must have spent the entire morning gathering dwarf iris. Her first thought when she recognized the flowers were irises was rainbow, promises. Promises? Hope? She called out to Gabe and looked around to see if he were watching her reaction. He was not there. Neither was he in the sleeping loft. He had come, decorated her bed and left while she worked the pea patch.

  This was not something she had expected. She had known Gabe all her life. What was he saying? He, at forty-two, was old enough to be her father. She loved him like a father.

  While caring for Anna, Lily became a creature of habit: be
fore sunrise, milk the goat; stoke the fire until her body sweated; then shake her mother until Lily could hear the shallow defeated breaths across the room; try to get her mother to eat. But that time was gone.

  She could not remember her mama as a wife. Nor Kee Granny. The only wife she knew was Juanita White over in Breakline. Juanita spent her days cooking, washing, cleaning, then cooking and cleaning again. Juanita had no idea a fawn, still spotted by its camouflage, could be fed calf manna and thrive. That it would follow like a puppy waiting to play. She did not know to ignore a coon when cornered or the coon would attack, as fierce as a small bear, and hang on till dark. That hanging a dead snake belly-up over the fence would bring rain. Juanita did not want to know such things. Shelling, canning, and washing fit her just fine. Such days did not fit Lily. She and Gabe would have to have a face-to-face talk when he returned.

  That afternoon the sound of wood breaking, followed by a moan then laughter, startled Lily. Beneath Boone Station, Lily gathered her eggs. She dropped her egg basket. Every egg cracked. Whites ran through the basket’s open weaving. Shells cut into yolks.

  “It’s beginning,” says Brother Moon.

  She crept from behind the house. She could not see the front porch. She saw no car. She hesitated to climb the hill unarmed. The long-handled shovel stood against Bad Billy’s fence. She looked for the axe handle, but it must have been next to the woodpile. She picked up the shovel, holding it at the ready like a rifle and eased up the rock steps leading to the front of the house.

  Before she rounded the corner, she dropped into a crawl. Whoever was there could not hear her; a man was laughing so hard he coughed. She stepped up on the porch and stood, propped on her shovel.