“Where’ve you been, you old fool?” asked Olivia, trying to pretend that she was angry.
“I been off to Charlottesville loven them city gals,” replied Clay. “Where’d you ’spect me to be on payday night?”
“I thought probably you were down there at The Pool Hall drinken and gamblen.”
“Thinken it over, boy,” he said to Clay-Boy, “don’t get married at all if you can help it. Women have got a suspicious nature and they’re pesky to live with. Get up there, woman, and round me up some supper. I’m hungrier than a bear in the springtime.”
Clay-Boy followed his mother and father into the kitchen. Olivia was still trying to pretend that she was angry because it was midnight and Clay was just getting home, but she was pleased that he had not been drinking and this time when she demanded to know where he had spent the evening she was not so much angry as curious.
“Woman,” he said, “you are looken at a man who owns a power saw.”
Olivia was pouring the coffee she had kept hot for Clay. When she heard what he said she set the percolator down beside his place and looked at him in real anger.
“Clay,” she cried, “have you gone and spent every cent of the paycheck?”
Clay reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills which he placed in her hands. Olivia started to count the money, but he said, “No need to count it. It’s six dollars short.”
“Where’d you ever find a power saw for six dollars?” she asked, worry over the six dollars already crowding out the relief that the entire amount had not been spent.
“Well now,” explained Clay, “five dollars of that money was the down payment. The other dollar I paid to a feller to take me down to Old Man John Pickett’s in his truck.”
Mr. John Pickett was a rich man, the only person native to the country who could make that claim. Of course, Mr. John Pickett had done nothing to earn the money. It had simply come down to him from his family along with the remains of what had once been a great tobacco plantation on a high bluff overlooking Rockfish River.
“You see,” said Clay, “I got word down at the mill that Old Man Pickett was sellen his power saw. Wanted thirty dollars for it.”
“Don’t tell me you got him down to five dollars!” said Olivia.
“No, I didn’t,” said Clay. “I know better than bargain with Old Man John Pickett, but I did make a deal with him. I’m buyen that power saw on the installment plan. Five dollars down and five dollars a month.”
“Clay!” she said. “These children need shoes and you go throwen your money away on a thing like that. I don’t see what could be in your mind.”
“It’s springtime. Let ’em go barefoot for a while. It won’t hurt ’em. And anyway, it wasn’t money thrown away. Me and Clay-Boy are goen to work on the house first thing in the mornen.”
“What are you goen to do? Go up there and dig some more on that hole in the ground?”
“No ma’am,” said Clay. “I’m goen up there, and we are goen to start cutten down trees and sawen them trees into lumber. That’s what took me so long tonight. The saw is already up on the mountain. I took it up there tonight.”
“Clay,” said Olivia, “why can’t you just sit down and rest of a week end like other men do. Let the house go.”
“Don’t talk crazy, woman. Come here and sit down. Clay-Boy, get me a pencil and paper.” Clay-Boy brought the pencil and a writing pad. Clay pushed his supper away and began to draw. “Look here, honey,” he said. Olivia sat and watched as he sketched an outline on the paper.
“Now this here,” he explained, “is where I’m goen to put you up a kitchen. It’s goen to be big enough that when all my babies come home for reunions and all, they can bring their babies and there’s still goen to be room for everybody to sit down and eat. I’ll put you a big window right here in this wall because it looks out on the prettiest sight anybody ever saw. There’s a clump of birch trees right under that window and I’m leaven them so you’ll have somethen pretty to look at while you’re washen your dishes.”
It was a familiar story and listening to it again Olivia only half-heard what Clay was saying. His head was bent over the drawing and from this angle his face looked as young as it had been the night he first declared his love for her.
President Wilson had just declared war on Germany and that night in prayer meeting they had prayed for the Belgian babies and sung “Tenting Tonight” in memory of the boys from New Dominion who would be going over there.
After prayer meeting she had found Clay waiting for her in the shadows outside the church. Walking home he held her hand and asked her to wait for him while he was away. The next day Clay walked to Lovingston, the county seat, to offer himself to fight for his country. He did not know where Germany was or why they were at war with his country, but he was a crack shot and thought his country could use him. To his dismay he was turned down and he could never understand that the reason he was disqualified from fighting for his homeland was that he was only fourteen years old.
Having been turned down by the Army, Clay returned home to a good job. The company was particularly short of workers in the gang room, the place where the great diamond-tooth saws ground twenty-four hours a day to chew the stone into separate slabs. Here Clay found work as an apprentice.
In the years that followed, Clay Spencer became a legend in the community. He could drink more whiskey, hold it down longer, and walk straighter afterward than any man in the community. He developed a flair for cursing and the swear-words he invented passed into the local language. He grew to a height of six feet two and always weighed two hundred pounds unless he’d been in a good fight and if the fight were worth the effort he would usually lose from four to five pounds and gain them back at breakfast.
He was always the first to arrive at a square dance and the last one to leave, and if the square-dance caller grew weary Clay himself would take over. While many of the mothers in the community expressed their disapproval of what they considered his wild ways, their daughters looked on him with favor.
One of the mothers who looked upon Clay with particular distaste was Ida Italiano. Ida was a strict Baptist and considered dancing, drinking and swearing among the most abhorrent sins, and since Clay excelled in all three she found him especially ineligible to court her daughter Olivia.
“I don’t want that wild boy comen around here, Homer,” she would say to her husband.
Homer, a carpenter at the mill as his father had been before him, would answer, “What you got against the boy, Ida?”
“He’s a heathen, that’s what he is. You got to tell him to stop comen around here.”
“Livy don’t seem to mind him comen.”
“Livy’s not old enough to have a mind.”
Ida’s statement had some truth in it; Olivia was only sixteen years old. A quiet pretty girl who sang in the choir at the Baptist church, Olivia was obedient to her mother in all respects but one. When Ida forbade her to see Clay Spencer, Olivia continued to see him. On Wednesday nights after prayer meeting, Clay would be waiting for her outside the church and he would walk with her home. Again on Friday night after choir practice she would find him waiting for her and they would walk home slowly—but not quite all the way home, for Ida had threatened dire things if Clay ever set foot in the yard.
The people of the village watched the romance and marveled that a boy with such wicked ways as Clay would choose such a religious girl.
“She’s too tame for him,” said the jealous girls, but the older and wiser women noted that Olivia might be just the right girl for Clay.
“Settle him down to have a girl like Livy,” and it appeared that Olivia was already having a settling difference on Clay, for he began to drink less; he no longer appeared at the poker parties on the night he was paid and only occasionally would he show up at a square dance.
On a Wednesday night in June of 1922 Clay Spencer climbed the hill to where Olivia lived. The footpath was covered with a canopy of
dogwood trees which emerged at the gate of the Italiano house. Clay stopped beside a lilac tree and was about to call out when Olivia came quietly from the shadows. When he took her in his arms, he whispered,
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not. I’m just a little nervous.”
“How did you get away?” he asked.
“I told her I was goen to Prayer Meeten.”
When he had stilled her trembling they went down the hill to the car Clay had borrowed for the night. They drove in silence to the Baptist parsonage where hand in hand they walked along the flagstone walk to the minister’s house. Clay knocked once, a little nervously. From somewhere in the house they could hear footsteps and then the door opened and they saw Mr. Goolsby, the old Baptist minister. He held up a lamp to see who had knocked.
“Come in, children,” he said.
Holding the lamp to light their way down a long dark hall he led them into a small, comfortable living room.
“I’m sorry we won’t be able to have a long visit. I have to go in five minutes or I’ll be late for the Prayer Service.”
“We won’t be needen more than that, sir,” said Clay. “We come here to get married.”
“I thought probably you had,” said Mr. Goolsby, “and I’ve been trying to decide what I should tell you.”
“What do you mean,” asked Clay.
“Children,” said Mr. Goolsby, “marriage is a grave undertaking, not to be entered into lightly, not to be risked if there are factors that would seem to doom it from the beginning.”
“Mr. Goolsby,” said Clay, “if you’ve only got five minutes hadn’t you better save the sermon for another time?”
“I’m sorry, son,” he said to Clay and then turned to Olivia. “Olivia, your mother is a good friend of mine. Knowing how she would feel about this marriage I cannot perform it.”
Olivia began to cry and started out of the room.
“Come on, Clay,” she said. “I told you he wouldn’t.”
“All right,” said Clay, “We’ll go.” But turning to the preacher he said, “I just want you to know you are not the only damn preacher in the world.”
They had nearly reached the front door when Mr. Goolsby called them back. “If that’s the way you feel about it,” he said, “I will marry you.”
The ceremony took longer than five minutes because when Mr. Goolsby became nervous he stuttered, and he stuttered now as he realized the consequences that would come when it became known that he had joined together one of the fairest daughters of the Baptist church and the wildest devil in the county.
After they left the parsonage, Clay drove along the main road until they came to the foot of Spencer’s Mountain. Here he turned off the gravel road onto a smaller roadway that led to the top of the mountain. He stopped the car at the edge of a pasture on top of the mountain and led Olivia out into the field.
A brilliant moon shone down, so bright their shadows stood out sharp in the dark green grass at their feet. Below them they could see the village. The air around them was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle.
He took her hand and led her farther up in the pasture to where the land leveled off and a pleasant grove of trees stood. He looked at Olivia, watching for some reaction.
“It’s pretty here,” she said.
“This is where I will build you a house,” he said. “A place to live in and bring up our family. A place all our own.”
At night in the company-owned house, going off to sleep beside her he would say, “I will paint the house to your liken.”
“White I would like,” she would say, “with green shutters. I would like a flagstone walk goen down to the gate and a wisteria vine over the gate like an arch. I’ll plant petunias down that walk on either side and we’ll need a fence to keep the children inside so I won’t worry when I can’t keep my eyes on them every minute.”
“White with green shutters is pretty,” he would agree and drift into sleep.
“I’ve always been partial to green,” she would say, and then realize that he had gone to sleep. Then she would join him and their dreams would be akin, of the house and the children and the scent of honeysuckle.
Looking at Clay now, Olivia realized suddenly how much he had aged. There was the beginning of a streak of gray at his forehead. The skin around his eyes and in his forehead showed deep wrinkles; sitting there over the drawing he looked stoop-shouldered, as if his back were permanently bent a little forward.
She did not have the heart to stop Clay’s description of the work he would start the next day. It was only when Clay-Boy, half asleep with his chin resting on his hand, let his head fall forward with a jerk that Clay realized it was nearly one o’clock.
“God Almighty,” said Clay. “It’s goen to be daylight in an hour or two. If we’re goen to get any work done tomorrow we’d better get some sleep.”
Clay-Boy yawned “Good night,” and stumbled off to bed. Olivia and Clay turned off the downstairs lights and then tiptoed quietly up the stairs and into their room.
Taking off his shoes as he sat down on the bed, Clay said, “I’m goen to finish off the basement first. It’ll be a good place to store your canned goods.”
“It’s goen to take plenty of that to feed the hungry mouths around here,” Olivia said. She lay down and Clay switched off the light by pulling the cord he had rigged to the bare electric globe in the center of the room.
“Night, Sweetheart,” he said.
“Night, Clay.”
Men are strange creatures, thought Olivia as she yawned and rolled her head against the pillows; they really believe all the things they promise women. For seventeen years he had promised her the house and now he had renewed that promise. And women are just as foolish, she thought a moment later, for the vision of the house hovered in her mind. It was there so bright she could see the shining white clapboard in the sunshine and smell the honeysuckle sweetness carried on the wind. Then she went to sleep.
Chapter 8
At dawn the following morning, Clay-Boy, still half asleep, followed his father across the meadow that rose to where Clay had started his house. The sun was just rising above the horizon and lingered there above a distant mountain. Fog rose from the damp meadow and the sun was a cool smoldering orange. Clay-Boy stumbled along behind his father but he came awake in a terrible rush of fear as a covey of young quail rose in startled flight around them. The covey dispersed in the air with fierce speed and then darted toward the ground and shelter and again the morning was still except for the tentative call of the hen as she assembled her chicks.
“Near about nineteen or twenty in that covey, I figure,” said Clay. “How many did you make out?”
“About that, Daddy,” said Clay-Boy.
“Them jaybirds is goen to make good eaten come fall of the year,” said Clay. “Quail is plentiful this year. You come back here on week ends from that college course and we’ll shoot us a mess of ’em.”
“I wish I’d hear something from ’em down at the University of Richmond. I go down to the post office twice a day and not one letter has come from ’em yet.”
“Well, I wouldn’t bother my mind about it. They probably take their time maken up their minds.”
They walked on through the brightening morning until they came to the hole in the ground which was Clay’s basement. Nearby was the new power saw. It consisted of a rotary blade attached to one end of an axle. At the other end was a band which connected to an old Model-T engine by a thick heavy leather strap. It had been little used and was in good condition.
“Don’t you tell your mama, boy,” said Clay, “but I paid ten dollars more for that saw than I told her. Old Man Pickett was asken fifty, but I got him down to forty. I told your mama thirty because you know how she is. You name a big amount like that and she’ll worry her head off about how we’re ever goen to pay for it. We’ll pay it all right. It wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t make money on this saw and get the house put up to boot.”
“How you goen to make money on it, Daddy?” asked Clay-Boy.
“Well, there’s plenty of dead wood on this land, chestnut mostly, that got killed in the blight. There ain’t much else can be done with it, but it’ll make good firewood. Once I get the house built I’m liable to go into the firewood business.”
“I reckon there’s money in it,” said Clay-Boy.
“There is if you know how to make it,” said Clay. “Now me, I ain’t goen to waste my time sellen wood to these poor folks around here that can’t afford lard to make bread. What I aim to do is get me a truck of my own, go over there to Charlottesville and peddle it there. That’s where the big money is. Them city folks will pay money. Around here, all you’ll get is a pat and a promise.”
Just then the last wisp of fog vanished in the meadow and the bright light of the sun fell on the man and the boy and the hole.
“Better get started here,” said Clay, and found a file with which he began sharpening the teeth of the saw.
When he was satisfied that the teeth of the saw were sharp enough, he started the Model-T engine. After a preliminary coughing it huffed away enthusiastically, splitting the quiet morning with its busy sound. Next Clay connected the leather pulley which led from the motor to the saw and the blade began a slow gradual building sound that ended in a steady metallic clawing scream.
“That buzz saw is ready!” shouted Clay to his son.
“She sure sounds it,” agreed Clay-Boy.
Clay stopped the engine and the whine of the saw gradually subsided to silence. The boy looked at his father and saw that his eyes were glowing with pleasure.
“Let’s cut lumber, boy,” said Clay.
“Yes sir,” said Clay-Boy.
They walked across the meadow and into the woods. Once in a while Clay would stop and examine a tree but reject it because it housed a nest of squirrels or because it was so old that it might have decayed sections. They came finally to a great oak which might have been a hundred and fifty years old. It was located near the edge of a clearing where it had received sunshine for most of its years and in its seemingly effortless growth toward perfection had grown a thick almost perfectly round trunk from which branches appeared at uniform intervals. Its leaves were a bright healthy green and when Clay saw it he recognized it as the wood he wanted for the underpinnings of his house.
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