by Ian Weir
“Do you?”
“Sure! What the devil is so strange about that?”
“The devil, friend o’ mine? No. Oh, no. Let’s not invite him into the conversation.”
The lined-up indigents were muttering darkly, now. Much more of this delay and there’d be outright mutiny. There’d be pitchforks. And still Brother Amos looked at me.
“Friend o’ mine,” he said, “we will make a bargain. If I do you this service, then you must do me one in return.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I have your word?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
“And what is it worth?” said the man with my mother’s eyes. “What is it worth, your word?”
–EIGHT–
From The Sorrows of Miz Amanda and her Two Brave Boys
North Carolina, 1848—1850
1.
THE AUTUMN OF THE YEAR that Lige turned four, Bobby Collard came down from Hanging Tree Ridge. It was Mr. Dillashay’s custom to hire extra hands for the harvest and for planting in the spring, paying them with dollars that he squeezed out of his purse like rabbit-farts. Lige heard one of them say so once, though not within his Daddy’s hearing. Reese Holcombe it was, the older of two brothers from up Black Mountain, who ran trap-lines in the winter. The farm was prosperous, by the standards of the time and place; some seasons Mr. Dillashay would take on half a dozen hands, and that autumn Bobby Collard was amongst them.
He was seventeen years old that year, a young man bubbling up with laughter who knew riddles and songs and abruptly out of nowhere would pitch himself forward and walk some distance on his hands, for sheer exuberance of being alive. He could be a good worker, though, when the mood was upon him. Mr. Dillashay admitted this himself in that particular manner of his, which was to scowl but not contradict when Lige’s Mama made the observation. He even grew to like the boy, and paid him more fairly than he paid the others.
Thus, as all catastrophes do, it began in part with kindness.
Lige’s Mama had never been the same, after giving birth. Lige heard this said by Solomon and others. Doc Semmens said it too. The young doctor had stopped by the farm a few months after Lige had been born. It was on his way to call on another patient, and he was prepared to set to one side his grudge against Mr. Dillashay. From time to time he would stop by again, to deliver the medicine he had prescribed to help Lige’s Mama regain her strength. Each time she would profess herself to be more vital, and for the span of half an hour this might seem to be true. But the effort of such vivacity would wear on her. The doctor would frown to himself and shake his head, observing that Lige’s Mama continued to languish, even as her boy grew sturdier by the season—almost as if one came at the cost of the other. Doc Semmens thought this privately, and once said so out loud to Solomon, who was greatly unsettled. Solomon held such statements to be pagan.
“So what if they are?” the doctor said. “Being pagan does not make a thing untrue.” Doc Semmens was a young man with a young man’s thoughts in his head.
Lige’s Mama and his Daddy were still on terms of fondness, of a kind, though she continued to keep to her own bedroom at night, the room she had taken during her confinement. Mr. Dillashay was kindly in his way, asking awkwardly after his wife’s health and from time to time bringing her bunches of wild flowers. These she would place in Mason jars by the window, and sometimes braid them into wreaths, which in playful moods she would wear about her forehead. The tincture from Doc Semmens would leave her languid, and one night in the tumult of a thunderstorm she was found to be walking barefoot in the pasture, drenched with rain and garlanded with petals, as if she were Persephone released from the Underworld. She fell gravely ill for a time thereafter, shaken by chills and wracked by fever. She recovered, but once again there was an infinitesimal loss, as if with each return she stopped another half-step short. She asked Doc Semmens for more of the tincture, which he with some misgiving brought to the farm at more regular intervals. This continued until the time of the Great Schism—such would be Miz Amanda’s bitter term—which prompted Mr. Dillashay to ban the young doctor permanently from his property, on pain of being shot down like a dog. After this Strother would ride dutifully each month to an apothecary in Asheville; there and back again in one day, regardless of the season. “My Roman,” his Mama would say on his return, opening her arms in benediction. The fever-glow had never entirely left her eyes, which in candlelight would shine.
Often of an evening she would have Strother read to her out loud. Her father, Mr. Beauchamp, had been a mighty scholar, as Mr. Purcell had been, in his less robust manner. She had a whole shelf of her father’s books, which had come with her all the way from Virginia. Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe and two volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and Mr. Dryden’s Aeneid and tragedies by Shakespeare and a collection of stories from the Classical myths. There were as well books by Virgil and Plutarch written in Latin, and old Herodotus in Greek, which Mr. Beauchamp had been able to read just as easily as you parse nursery rhymes.
Strother was his mother’s project. “You are my Roman and my scholar,” she would say, and Strother would set himself to each task she put before him. “You have your grandfather’s intellect,” she would murmur—though the fact was that he plodded, working doggedly through a text with unbreakable resolve, looking neither left nor right as he did. Lige possessed the keener mind, much swifter and more nimble, though given to sudden swallow-darts and veerings. This occasioned frequent dismay to Solomon, to whom Miz Amanda had delegated the education of her youngest boy. Solomon’s sole text was the Bible, from which Lige parsed his begats and shalt nots and began to glimpse the stain of mortal sinfulness that seeped down through the countless generations, all the way from Adam to his own small, squalid self.
The following spring Bobby Collard came again.
There was strife between Bobby and Harris Collard, who had cursed the boy for a wastrel. Lige was too young to understand, or to ask. But Strother learned the gist of it from Mama, who felt a protective instinct toward the outcast. A sort of friendship had grown between them; of an evening you might see them standing together, or even walking in the field. One evening, Lige came around the side of the barn to see them in close conference by the well.
“He is your Daddy, nonetheless,” Miz Amanda was saying. “You understand? Whatever he said or did, nonetheless he is your Daddy.”
Bobby Collard replied impatiently, and Miz Amanda grew more earnest still. “No,” she said. “Bobby? No.” She touched her hand to his forearm, the better to communicate conviction. “There is duty—yes, there is—a duty owed by every child to his Daddy. And I believe you know it, too.”
She spoke to Bobby Collard with the wisdom of long years, though in truth she was not so much older than he was. She’d been just seventeen years old when she married Mr. Purcell; even now she was not quite thirty. It was a fine May evening as they stood together by the well. Bobby Collard had been working all day in the field, and had stripped off his shirt to wash himself.
Mr. Dillashay stood watching from a distance. Lige scarcely noticed at the time, but in later years looking back he would see his Daddy clearly. His Daddy had been in the upper pasture that day, beyond the creek. Now halfway down the hillside he had stopped, and stood in stillness amongst the stones.
“Do you understand?” his wife was saying now, to Bobby Collard. “There is a bond—there is blood—and there is duty. You must always and ever be straight and true.”
Bobby Collard drank water from the ladle, then poured what remained over his head and shoulders. Arching back, he shook his head, the droplets flying.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.
Doc Semmens had been in Mama’s chamber the afternoon of his last visit, listening to her breathing with his stethoscope. Strother had afterward explained this to Lige, who had been the one to blunder in on them. In the confusion of the moment Lige had seen only a flustration of bodies separating, and his Ma
ma snatching at a smock.
“A consultation, is what it was,” Strother had told him. He was himself still flushed a little, and shaken by the outburst that had followed when Mr. Dillashay found out. Mr. Dillashay’s swarthy face had been white with anger, and his voice had been taut as he said what would happen if Doc Semmens set foot on his property again.
2.
Kleobis and Biton had been straight and true. Lige knew this from a story.
The air seemed especially full of stories, that summer when Lige was four years old. Oh, there had always been stories in the world, and always would be. The world itself was woven from stories, as Lige in some manner had come to intuit already. But it would never be more alive with them than it had been in that year.
Kleobis and Biton were the two brave sons of Cydippe, a priestess of mighty Hera, queen of the gods. Greeks these were, from ancient times. Cydippe was beautiful, and at harvest time bedecked with flowers she would ride in an ox-cart up the winding mountain road to Hera’s Temple. But when the day of the Festival dawned, not a single pair of oxen could be found to draw the cart, all beasts being occupied elsewhere with labour in the fields. So Kleobis and Biton said: “Let us take this task upon ourselves.” And together they drew the heavy cart up the mountain, while beautiful Cydippe wept with happiness to have such sons.
Miz Amanda told the story as Lige sat with her on the front porch in the twilight. A breeze had begun to shift the oppression of August. Strother was with them, sitting on the step nearby. “Five miles,” their Mama said. “Five miles up that mountainside—straight and true. Her two brave boys, not one single day older than the two of you, yoked to a task that was meant for two oxen together. Such was their love for their Mama.”
Their strength gave out at last, but not until they had drawn the cart to the steps of the temple, where Cydippe was welcomed with all honour. Great Hera herself asked to hear the story told, twice through from beginning to end. So impressed was the goddess that Cydippe summoned all of her courage and asked Hera to grant her two brave boys a gift.
“And not just any gift,” their Mama said to them on the porch, telling them the tale. “Cydippe asked: ‘Grant them the greatest gift that any mortal may aspire to, in this world.’ So Hera did. And can you imagine what that was?”
Strother said: “They died.”
He spoke with solemnity, as was his way. Leaning back on his elbows, looking down the length of his outstretched legs. Strother was now twelve; his legs stretched prodigiously.
“Yes,” their Mama said.
The two of them had shared this tale before. This was Lige’s first thought, and it cut at him, though afterward it would seem to him more likely that Strother had read the story on his own in one of their grandfather’s books. But now Lige saw with some confusion that tears were welling in his Mama’s eyes.
“She went to wake them,” Strother said. “But they were dead and cold.”
“Yes.”
“Now, there’s a downright daisy of a gift,” said Bobby Collard.
He had come up by the side of the house, where he stood listening. Lige startled at his voice, as did Strother. Their Mama alone seemed unsurprised. Perhaps her senses had been more keenly attuned, that evening at least, to the whisper of bare feet in the grass.
“Their time had come, you see,” she said. Smiling at Bobby Collard through her tears. “Their time had come round, so they died in their sleep. But their hearts had stopped before they broke. And really, who could ask for more than that?”
Bobby Collard was full of stories too. But his were of a different nature, being tales he had learned from Drusilla Smoak. Tales of haints and hauntings, of tommy-knockers who lived down deep in mines, and of crossroads in the wood where Old Scratch might very well be waiting at this minute. Such tales as could make the blood run cold, though not always in the way that Bobby told them. He could describe the most harrowing haint with wide-eyed glee, and was apt to punctuate damnation by flipping straight over and walking on his hands: back bowed, shirttail slipping to expose his midriff, bare feet paddling at the sun.
He chuckled now to himself, and shook his head as he moved away through the gloaming toward the barn. There was a bunkhouse for the help, but Bobby Collard preferred to sleep in the hayloft, by himself. His hair, bleached by the summer sun, was the colour of straw.
Their Mama followed him with her gaze, tears still streaming.
Lige was left unsettled by the story. For a long time that night he was unable to close his eyes.
“They died of exhaustion, is all,” Strother said in the darkness. They slept in the same room, he and Lige, being brothers. “Their hearts blew out. Like a horse’s will do, if you ask too much. Or else their lungs just ruptured. So go to sleep.”
Strother lay on his back, staring up into the darkness; Lige could discern his profile, etched in moon-glow.
“That’s where the old story started, Lige. Stories start somewhere, after all—that stands to reason. They don’t turn strange till later, in the telling.” Strother turned onto his side then, and soon settled into sleep. His breathing grew steady and measured.
Lige lay awake alone, willing his heart from one beat to the next.
3.
The look upon his brother’s face: that would become Lige’s most vivid recollection of the day Bobby Collard rode off with Dapple the mare. Lige would tell the tale in later years on numerous occasions, sometimes to others but most often to himself. It could cause him to laugh right out loud, though not in a manner that you would recognize as mirthful. And of all the recollections he might have carried forward from that day—the day the rat-gnawed timbers of the world gave way at last, and it all collapsed in ruination about them—the most enduring was the expression on Strother’s face as he swung the scythe.
September. They had already begun the harvest, about which there was an unaccustomed urgency, the season giving signs of turning early. The days still sweltered, but the temperature at nights had plunged to the edge of frost; last evening dark clouds had massed beyond the line of mountains to the east. They’d start work well before sunrise, but instead the day began with the discovery that Bobby Collard had up and fled, riding on Mr. Dillashay’s mare.
Mr. Dillashay uttered terrible oaths. Gathering up the hands, he rode off through the ghosts of dawn to fetch back the mare and to deal with Bobby Collard as such wretches are to be dealt with. The hands were a motley assortment that season: low and indifferent men, and not the sort you’d choose for a posse if choosings were to be had. But they entered into the spirit with some exuberance, as low men will do when licensed to despise. As the trail led them north they drew others into the hue and cry. The Holcombe boys were amongst these, keen trackers and hard dark men. They hated a horse-thief as much as any man in these hills, or did so at least on this occasion. They bore as well grudges unspecified but profound against the Collard clan.
Bobby Collard had stayed on right through the summer, sleeping in the loft and making himself more useful than Mr. Dillashay might have expected. He did not want to go home, though once he disappeared for a day and two nights without explanation, and Strother on another occasion glimpsed two distant figures standing together on the ridge just at sundown. One of these was surely Bobby Collard, and the other—so Strother was sure—was Drusilla Smoak.
It stood to reason that those two should have kept in contact. Blood is a powerful bond, and Bobby had always been his aunt’s especial favourite. Like her he had eyes like a cat’s, which changed their colour depending on the angle of the light, and knew more than was canny about the properties of plants and herbs, some of which were known to cause deadly harm.
“It is all the truth, what they rumour,” Bobby said once to Lige, in a moment of fearsome confiding. “I am a witch-boy, and sold my soul.” His eyes as he said this glowed green, and Lige felt his sphincter tighten its grip all the way up to his heart. But just as suddenly Bobby whooped with laughter to see the look on Lige’s
face, and was blithe and hazel-eyed again. This was another reason for Drusilla Smoak to love him best, Lige supposed: just being near Bobby Collard could bring you joy. He knew the best salves for cuts and wounds, and once when Mr. Dillashay was chalk-faced with megrim headache Bobby Collard brewed him a willow-bark tea that eased the pain.
Then in September darkness he rode off. Just up and galloped away, for no earthly reason—or none that a four-year-old boy could comprehend. The air had been roiling these past few days, ever since Lige’s Daddy had spied his Mama lithe-stepping back from the barn in the shroud of night, and demanded to know what errand she’d been on. Last evening an argument had thundered beyond closed doors. But surely nothing to explicate why Bobby Collard should gallop away of a sudden on another man’s mare, as if fleeing some impending retribution?
Lige recollected creeping down the stairs that dawn, into the knowledge that Bobby Collard was gone, and that his Daddy was already gone off after him. Gone off with all of the men excepting old Solomon, with the crop in the field and the weather commencing to turn. The last night had not been so cold, and by first light the air was grown sluggish and thick. Lige recollected the weight of it, sagging down. He recollected as well their beautiful Mama: the haggard dignity with which she saw what must be done.
“Mr. Dillashay has rode off,” she said, “with his duty undischarged.” Her hair was askew and her eyes were wild, but she spoke with great conviction. “Mr. Dillashay is derelict, but you will redeem the day—my two brave boys. You must bring in the harvest between you.”
And so they did. Or at least, they tried. Long afterward, Lige would recollect that vast expanse of grain stretching out across the hillside; the rhythmic sweeps of his brother’s scythe, and his own puny hackings. And their beautiful, mad Mama, exhorting them onward.