Beloved Mother

by Laura Hunter

  Lily set down her glass of water and tried a smile. “Mighty sure of yourself, are you?”

  Gabe answered as he let himself in. “Yep. Reckon I am.” He dropped to his knees before Lily and took her hand. “You name the day, Lily my love. We’ll marry in Wise then go to Bristol for a day or two. I’ll move up here and drive the truck to Breakline every day.” He grinned. “What do you say?”

  “Now, Gabe…” Lily said.

  “You know we were made for marrying. Everybody in Breakline is waiting to come to the wedding, if you want a preacher and all.” Gabe leaned his head to one side. “We’ll have the finest room in Bristol money can buy. I’ve saved up.”

  “Stop your foolishness, Gabe Shipley. I don’t know how to be married. I’ve never lived with a person who was married since I was a baby. So stand up, now, before I laugh. All I can see is the top of your red hair,” Lily giggled. “And you’ve got a bald spot.”

  “No. You stop your foolishness. Nobody knows how to be married till they get married. I’m asking you to marry me ’fore I get so old I won’t be a fitting husband.”

  “I’m not signing up to take care of a sick old man,” Lily laughed.

  “So will you marry me?” Gabe asked.

  Muscles in her back and neck relaxed. “Reckon I will,” she grinned.

  “I can’t believe Great Spirit has let this go so far,” says Sister Sun.

  Gabe whooped out a “yahoo” that echoed down Turtleback Mountain. He lifted Lily and swung her around.

  “But…” Lily stopped him. “You know Eli lives here too. You marrying him?”

  “Might as well. If I have to.” Gabe laughed. When he set her down, he kissed her hard on the mouth, bowed a low formal bow, and left.

  Lily heard him giggling all the way to his truck. As he passed, going back to Breakline, he tooted the horn three times in farewell.

  Monday, Gabe’s regular delivery day, came and went. Gabe did not appear. Lily had never known Gabe not to deliver what she ordered. He had probably seen through her ruse of ordering a dozen rolls of duct tape to get him back up Turtleback.

  “A dozen?” he had asked. “Whatever for?”

  Duct tape was the first thing that had come to mind. “You never know when you might need to hold something tight.” Lily blushed. She had spoken without thought.

  “Reckon so,” Gabe laughed.

  She waited until Friday. As daylight came over the mountain ridge, Lily put on a jacket against an early April chill. She laced heavy boots to keep her steady in muddy patches left by melting snow and set out for Breakline Mining Camp to find Gabe.

  Chapter 40

  On April 7th, 1962, the day opened with cold air blowing down the creek. Six months and Lily would be eighteen. Naked branches waved like grey sticks against the sky. In the distance, Lily saw what she thought was a murder of crows circling overhead. As she came closer, she could see the crows were not crows, but buzzards, turkey buzzards. Some animal must be dead over the ridge. She trudged on.

  The trek up Turtleback warmed her, though the wind chaffed her face. She put her mittened hands over her cheeks. Her eyes teared against the cold air, dampening the woolen mittens. At the top of the rise, she removed her jacket and laid it on the moist ground for a place to rest. Within minutes, wet seeped through where she sat. Lily shook out her jacket and continued the climb toward Flatland. She braced herself against a wind that whistled and hit hard where the road to Flatland intersected the mining road to Breakline.

  Briar Slocomb had passed Boone Station two weeks before, returning from Covington. He had not walked back down the mining road since Bad Billy was killed. He must still be at Flatland. She veered off the road and shimmied up a hill so underbrush would block her presence from view. She did not want to encounter him. Her anger at losing Bad Billy was still too raw.

  As she neared the highland, the dog barked. A man yelled, “Shut up!” The dog barked again, a hoarse yap as if it strained against a chain. A gunshot snapped, its echoes bouncing from mountainside to mountainside.

  Lily dropped to the ground and crawled cat-like farther away from the noise.

  Out of sight of Flatland, she returned to the road and ran. There, around a sharp curve on the lower side of the road, sat the buzzards. They encircled the carcass of a last year’s doe. Dried blood from its nose and mouth blackened the road. Its white belly, inner ears and chin and its tawny coat so fresh, without the blood and buzzards, she would have sworn it to be alive.

  She ran at the buzzards silently waving her arms about, to startle them away. Four of the five took to trotting so they could hoist their thick bodies into the air. A large, glistening buzzard, black as the inside of an open mineshaft, sat on the doe’s spine and continued to eat from its gut. The buzzard tore flesh loose and gulped it down its gullet, and then lifted a frightening, crimson beak, as blood-coated as a butcher’s cleaver. The doe’s blood coated the buzzard’s naked head and neck, a reminder that predators reign.

  Lily picked up a limb and swung at the buzzard. It flapped its wings and settled back down. From her distance, the two wild creatures merged into one. The buzzard, with its flat feet, could not lift the doe, nor did it plan to abandon its meal. The other four circled lower and lower, testing Lily’s willingness to challenge their territory. She counted her heartbeats ten, twenty, thirty, before she edged away from the buzzards. She moved around the rear of the deer.

  Who would leave good venison to rot in the road? Had Gabe hit the deer and careened off the hillside? Lily peered down the ravine. No tire tracks. She tramped back up the road and up the hillside to overlook the drop-off below her. No panel truck in sight.

  She hiked back and moved away from the deer. The raven-colored bird, still as stone, eyed her. A trail of blood led from the deer’s haunches to the ditch and into leaves. From this side of the carcass, she could see that it had been shot. And shot somewhere other than where it lay. A bullet hole had opened its chest just below the heart. A track of blackened blood marked the path from the wood line and down the bank. Already dead or dying, it had been dragged and left on the road.

  The wake of buzzards circled closer. Their wings swished above her head. Lily backed away, leaving the scavengers to their carrion.

  The following morning Lily bundled up against the cold and left again for Breakline Camp. She could have called, but this question was too important for a telephone call. Using a telephone to carry a message had not settled easy with Lily. She wanted her talk to be face-to-face.

  As Lily neared where she had encountered buzzards the previous day, she climbed to the edge of a rock bluff and made her way around that section of road. She refused to face the stench a warming day would bring. Lily noticed no spirit mist, not like the one above Boone Station when her mama died.

  She arrived at the commissary before noon. Inside, seeing Seth White behind the counter startled her. What startled her more was that something inside had told her back at Boone Station not to expect to see Gabe here. Before Seth could question her walking all this way, she asked about Gabe, where he was, when he left, where he was going without allowing time for Seth to answer. Outside the mine whistle blew its shrill mid-day shift change.

  At the sound, hoping perhaps Gabe was working underground, Lily turned toward the door ready to spread her arms and run to meet Gabe. This need to hold Gabe took her aback. She had not expected it. No one entered the door.

  Seth had no answers for her, other than that he left seven days ago with her supplies for Boone Station. “I figured you two was runned away to Bristol, so I come in and covered for him.”

  When the door still did not open after the three whistle calls, Lily sat in a chair and cried.

  Seth scurried around the counter and stood before her. He put his hands out toward her and waved them right, then left, as if he needed, but hesitated, to touch her. His wide eyes said he feared she might break as some women were wont to do.

  “I’m going for Juanita now. Just
you set right here and don’t you cry.” He called out toward the office, “Mr. Rafe. Come out here. This girl, she’s crying and I’m going for Juanita.” Seth spoke on the run. By the time he finished, he was down the steps.

  Lily had not thought of herself as loving Gabe in a marriageable way. She had agreed to marry him, but he had pestered her so. And he was old, she admitted. But now that she had lost him, she knew Gabe was who she wanted, who she had pictured herself with all her life. Her vision of life had acclimated itself to include Gabe. The two of them at Boone Station, with Eli in the loft.

  Rafe appeared from his back office, a cigarette between his fingers. He tapped a Lucky Strike from its pack and put it to his lips as he walked out of his office. Lily’s hard weeping left her hiccupping. Winston bent over to see her face. He took her chin in one hand and brushed her hair back with the other. “You’re Anna Goodman’s girl. Know you anywhere.” He spoke just above a whisper.

  “You knew my mama?” Lily asked between hiccups.

  “Your daddy gave her a heart bracelet.” His memory spoke without his thinking.

  “I know,” Lily said.

  “She was a beautiful girl,” he added. Lily so favored her mother at that age that Rafe stepped back and took a deep breath.

  “Please, Mr. Rafe. This is not about my mama. She’s gone. Gabe’s gone. He left and didn’t come to Boone Station. A deer’s in the road and it’s been shot and buzzards are eating it in the middle of the road and somebody put it there ’cause it was dragged and there’s blood on the road and in the ditch.” Lily blubbered through the remembering, “I come to find him and Seth says he’s been gone all these days and I looked in the ravine and everywhere.” She caught her breath and added, “We’re going to get married.”

  Rafe moved away, his brow creased. His mouth opened to speak, but no sound came out. He ran his free hand through his hair. His breathing slowed, and he wiped his forehead.

  Seth burst in the door, Juanita behind him, her calico housedress catching between her legs. Her determined track told Rafe to step out of her way. She stooped before Lily. “What’s a matter, girl?”

  Before Lily could answer, Rafe said, “Gabe’s missing.”

  Juanita eyed him from the floor. “Lily love, my own sweet Anna’s baby girl.” Juanita drew her arms around Lily and kissed her forehead. Lily tried to rise, but Juanita had her wrapped in a tight hug. “Gabe told me ’bout your mama’s sickness and dying and burying and him waiting you out to marry.”

  Lily was not certain whether Juanita said marry or bury. The miner’s wife in her distress had let the flat nasal twang of the camp loose and rolled her tongue back, favoring the r’s with music of crickets, frogs and cicada.

  Juanita led Lily to the door. “I’m taking this child home with me. You take care of this, Seth White.” She narrowed her eyes and nodded. “Mr. Rafe.”

  Her arm on Lily’s elbow, Juanita bent toward Lily’s ear and said, “Come, my pretty.” She lifted Lily. “Why, you don’t weigh no more than a little bird.”

  “What have you known about all this, Seth?” Rafe’s voice faded away as the two women walked down the commissary steps.

  The first two searches of Turtleback Mountain resulted in cold feet and scratched faces. Night shift men worked the mountainsides like black ants, pulling away downed limbs from the winter blizzard and kicking off snowdrifts the sun had not yet found. The sun hid all the days of the hunt.

  “About time you came out from behind those layers and layers of clouds,” says Brother Moon.

  “I will not. I’ve seen all I want to see,” replies Sister Sun.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “’Course I do. Don’t I see every living thing that happens in the daylight?”

  “Are you going to help them?”

  “No. And Eli’s not helping them either. He’s too scared of the granny. He’s watched her from Old Oak. He knows what she’s done. Killing Bad Billy. Killing that deer. What she did to Gabe. ’Sides, I’ll blister his face if he does. I leave helping to Great Spirit. He knows more about that than me or you.”

  “I stand here amazed,” says Brother Moon. “I never thought I’d hear you admit that.”

  On the second day of the hunt, searchers took a hind leg that pointed toward Flatland and pulled the deer carcass off the road. They found the truck overturned on the underside of Turtleback, near where the deer carcass had been left.

  Gabe had been missing nine days when searchers found him in a deep ravine. His body lay under a red oak limb that had collapsed from rot and the weight of snow. When the camp got the report and verified it was not hearsay, men, women, and children plummeted into a dark pit with no way out. No one believed Gabe Shipley would no longer sit behind the counter reading his books and acting the fool. People could not speak.

  Seth brought the news to Juanita and Lily. No one could account for the attack. “He weren’t beat. Just walked with his murderer up the road from where the truck had been pushed over the edge,” Seth reported. Footprints showed the two walked together into the ravine, their feet angled to keep them from sliding too far down the grade, too fast. “Almost like Gabe knew his murderer.”

  “You think he had a gun? The killer?” Juanita spoke above a whisper, not wanting to upset Lily more.

  “Maybe so,” Seth said. “But maybe not.”

  Later in the dark of the night when they thought Lily slept, Seth told Juanita more. Gabe had been taped where they found him. His killer had taped his ankles, his wrists behind his back, his mouth, his nose. Ruts in the dirt showed where Gabe, on his back, had tried to inch his body uphill using his heels, before smothering under bands of duct tape.

  “The boy died a fearful death in that cold, cold gully,” Juanita shook her head.

  “Would have been more human to shoot him like he did the deer. A 30.06 woulda put him out of his misery,” Seth said.

  “Weren’t no reason to rob him,” Juanita said. “Gabe never carried no money, not even script.”

  “Gabe and me, we talked about the tape before he left. Said Lily wanted it.” Seth said, “Gabe laughed about it that last day. Only thing missing was duct tape.”

  Juanita heard Lily collapse in the next room. Seth ran for the camp doctor.

  Juanita gave Lily small doses of belladonna berry juice Dr. Braxton brought. Lily slept, but she did not eat. When awake, she stared at nothing. It was as if her soul had followed Gabe down the ravine.

  Now an inability to move spoke to her loss of power as a potential Beloved Mother. In time, as she drifted in and out of the belladonna haze, she wanted to talk to Kee Granny about these strange feelings and how they might alter the work she and Kee Granny had done over the years in their attempt to pull Lily into harmony with the world. Then she would remember Anna’s death and the birthing chair and Kee Granny’s confession. Lily had severed her bond with the granny.

  “Everybody dies.” Lily, her voice hoarse, spoke to Juanita. “Daddy. Mama. Bad Billy. Now Gabe.” A thought struck her across the mouth, and she sat upright. Gabe. Both kerosene and alcohol deliveries to Kee Granny. “You been to Kee Granny’s.” Her eyes went straight to Juanita where she sat on the bed’s edge. “You know.”

  “I reckon I have,” Juanita said, dropping her chin.

  “I saw your name.”

  “Yes. It’s there for everybody’s knowing.”

  Outside, a punishing wind slammed into the top of a mountain oak. Leaves scattered across the ground.

  Chapter 41

  Breakline Camp buried Gabe Shipley in Unity Church Cemetery next to Clint Goodman. Lily did not go. She spent the burying time on Juanita’s front porch, wrapped in a brown afghan. Its zigzag pattern of variegated browns wasted away into tans the closer the color came to its fringed edge. Lily rocked a slight back and forth and stared absent-mindedly at the road. Straight ahead, neither left nor right. Her lonesome emptiness refused to force Gabe to walk up the road, to appear in his clomping gait and ign
ite her hope.

  Juanita stayed inside against the morning chill. She pulled a stained white cotton curtain back from time to time to see that Lily had not moved. “Anna and Clint all over again,” she said.

  Once enough time had passed for the service to close, Juanita joined Lily on the porch. She talked to keep Lily from hearing the echo of dirt clods thump off the coffin lid.

  “You trying to move that there rock with your staring?” she asked.

  Tears slid down Lily’s cheeks and dripped off her chin, but she made no sound. She looked cornered, a trapped animal, awaiting her own tearing apart, piece by piece.

  Juanita took Lily’s hands and led her down the steps. “See them clouds, Lily?” Juanita lifted her hand, palm open, toward the sky. “Stars’ll be out soon. What if they ain’t stars atall? What if they’re little holes in the bottom of heaven where our lost ones pour their love through and shine down on us to let us know they’re happy?” She took Lily’s face in her hands and turned it to her own. “What if, Lily? It might just be, you know.”

  Lily did not answer.

  “People have to have something to believe, don’t they?” says Brother Moon.

  “Yep. Too bad they all don’t know it.” Great Spirit shakes his colossal head. He initiates a cyclone in the Pacific where Sister Sun has spent the day heating ocean waters. “Sure makes some lives hard. Believing or not, either way.”

  Juanita walked Lily into the house. “Here. Lay down on this bed.”

  Lily obeyed. She lay stiff, her hands folded over her bosom, and stared at the ceiling. Juanita pulled a nubby chenille bedspread over her.

  “Close your eyes and rest.”

  Lily closed her eyes on command.