“By god, what do we have here?” Burl roared. Dorotha grabbed the guitar and ran toward the front door. Burl grabbed her arm, snatched the guitar from her hands, and flung her off the porch like a rag doll. She rolled into a ball, too scared to cry.
He waved the guitar, taunting us, and nearly knocked me off the porch. “Got us a opry star, I guess.”
Fleetie, trying to distract him, walked to the screen door. “Come in the house, and I’ll get your dinner. They’s fresh beans and sausage. Save your dinner bucket for tomorrow. The kids can finish this here bean work.”
“No, by god, dinner’s not going to save you. Next, you’ll be dancin’ and runnin’ the hollers like the whore you are.” With every word, he swung the guitar closer to the porch post.
Fleetie reached for the guitar. “Burl, give the guitar to Dorotha. She can take it up the hill to Mary. It belongs to some of her people.”
“You’re a lying whore. This is your sorry daddy’s guitar.” He swung one last circle and slammed it against the post. He grabbed Fleetie by the neck and forced her down.
Mother had been hanging strings of beans on the side yard clothesline. She came around the corner of the porch just as Fleetie’s knees hit the porch. The pieces of the guitar were scattered at Burl’s feet.
“You devil!” Mother screamed. “Take your hands off her. How dare you hurt her? You sorry good-for-nothing. Have you lost your mind? Only a yellow coward comes come home drunk, beats his wife, and scares children. Leave her alone.”
Burl did not know that Mother was on the place, and her shouting fanned his fury to a fever pitch. He lunged off the porch, grabbed her, and drew back his fist.
“You hit me, Burl Sargeant, and before the sun sets, Ed Ramsey will have your sorry hide locked up. Do it. Go on! It’ll give Fleetie and the kids a break from you worthless piece of trash.”
At first, I was scared he would kill her for standing up to him, but as much as he hated her right then, he must have been more scared of jail. He’d been locked up before for more than one drunken rampage. He pushed Mother backward, and she stumbled just before Geneva caught her. He slammed through the front door and into the house. A loud crash in the kitchen propelled Fleetie through the door behind him.
“Nessa, you run up the hill and get Johnny. Tell him to hurry,” said Mother.
Geneva grabbed her three children and ran out of the yard and down the road toward home. Fleetie pushed open the screen door, a red handprint spreading its angry stain across her face.
“Fleetie, I’m taking the kids up to the house with me for a little while. They’ve seen too much already, and you ought to go with us.”
“Kathleen, that’d be awful good of you. Burl will be all right after I get him to eat something. He don’t usually lay a finger on me unless the kids are around to know it. With them gone, he’ll ease off.”
“Fleetie, he’s dangerous. If you won’t come up to the house, you could go to Geneva’s. I sent Nessa after Johnny. You can’t fight off a strong man half out of his mind with liquor. Let him take Burl off somewhere and sober him up. The children will be fine with me. Are you hearing me?”
Johnny walked up behind Mother. “What’s the matter?”
“Is Minty in labor?” said Fleetie. That was Fleetie all over. Burl drinking, the kids scattering, her face swelling from a beating—and she asks after Minty!
“She’s fine. She’s settin’ up there with Mary, talking up a storm.”
Mother broke in. “Burl’s mean drunk. He smashed Fleetie’s guitar and took after her with those fists. Can you get him away from here?”
“I’ve got a stash of beer hidden about a half mile down the river. By the time we row there, he’ll sober up some. Things is rough at the mine. It’s enough to drive anybody to hard drinkin’ and worse.”
“Drinking is one thing. I don’t care if he drinks a river dry, but he has got to stop using those fists on Fleetie and the children. He’s acting like a pure heathen. I will call in the law if I have to, and won’t that be a pretty sight for these kids to see?”
“Lordy, don’t call no law. There’s enough trouble already at the mine. I’ll get him out of here, I promise. Just don’t be calling no law.”
I had to hand it to Mother. Fleetie might be all about turning the other cheek, but nobody crossed my mother and came away in a piece. She took no nonsense from fools or drunks, but none of the ruckus was anything new. Men used fists, straps, belts, or whatever was handy when they got riled, and you had to learn to duck or be too tough to tackle. Burl was pure spoiled by Fleetie puttin’ up with his foolishness. Those chickens had sure been chased off the roost today.
I watched as Burl and Johnny left out the back door and walked to the riverbank, where Burl’s rowboat lay moored to a sycamore.
“By god, Johnny,” Burl said, “Pridemore’s is about to beat us, and all we can do is float down the damn river.”
“Nobody has beat us yet, Burl. Maybe Ed can get us an injunction to stop all this shit. Let Ed get the law on our side. You and me will just get on down this river, catch us some fish for supper, and someone else can worry over it for a spell.”
Burl baled out the bottom of the boat with a rusty coffee can before he answered Johnny. “I am pure wearied out with it. I’ve a notion to go see Windham and see if I can get on over at his place. He has gone and bought up about fifty head of Hereford, and last I heard, he was getting tired of it already. A money man like him can’t farm no how. All he’s done is spend money on that place. He’s probably thinking it’s about time he made a little.”
I watched as Burl sat down in the boat and listened to Johnny through the fog of the rotgut he had been slugging down since he left the mine. Burl grew up in a different time before the mines were running full out in the whole county. He’d had a touch with crops and animals before he had spent the best of himself gouging the earth for black diamonds. I heard him tell Daddy that he wished he could work the land pulling crops and harvest out of the stingy ground.
One day, when he was sober, I even heard him tell his kids that lumbering would have been a better way than a deep pit where all you ever saw was the glow of the next miner’s lamp and the misery of the black soot sinking deeper into your hide with each passing day. Maybe that day, I felt a little sorry for him but not much, and it didn’t last because he would turn right around and do some other meanness to Fleetie or the kids.
Johnny pushed the boat off the bank and let it follow its own steering. A river calm would soon be settling in and around Burl and Johnny. The soft morning sun and trailing breeze would soon mesmerize both men. I could see they had poles and lines over the side of the boat where they dangled in the water, unattended. No self-respecting fish was going to commit suicide by giving either pole a nibble. The promised beer was still a ways down the river, and it looked like Burl had settled down to wait. It would not be long before he would lose his battle with the alcohol and drift off to sleep. Fleetie and the kids would be safe again for today.
All of us kids left the yard and went over the crossing to start the long walk up the hill. Rebecca, next to the youngest, was crying her eyes out over the lost ice cream. She was like that. Seemed like she could never just move on to the next thing. She was always looking back and whining over what couldn’t never be. Nessa, always the one to spoil her the most, worked to make it right.
“Come on, Rebecca. Don’t cry. Remember the mulberry tree? It’s right up the hill, and the mulberries is ripe and just right for pickin’. We’ll get some good mulberries. They’re better’n ice cream anyway. Ice cream’ll give you the headache. Nobody ever got the headache from mulberries.”
I looked back for Mother just as she started out of the gate with her pan of beans. She turned to Fleetie, but there were no words. The smashed guitar had disappeared, and all that lay between the two women right then was the hurt, scraped raw and
stinging, the melodies now only a memory hanging soft in the hot July air. Bean Day was over.
Part 3
SONATA
Chapter 22
AND THEY PICKED UP SERPENTS
It was late July, and dog days stole over the mountain and smothered the valley. The river flow slacked off sluggish, and jar fly buzzing filled the air. Their hiss and the heat pounding on us seemed to almost stretch each day into two. Vegetable gardens were picked clean and now sat in rows of canned jars throwing gaudy color on the whitewashed shelves. Potato, rutabaga, and turnip mounds cast competing shadows deep in the root cellar, the only cool spot left, as the rest of the world hunkered low in the gut of August.
Mother receded into the shade of the screen porch, and if we kids didn’t out and out bleed, we got little more attention than the cicadas yammering on the hot rocks. She had resurrected an ancient Underwood from the storage closet at Daddy’s office and pounded away, writing stories I was not allowed to read. She didn’t know I found her stash of True Confessions magazines long ago and read each one from cover to cover before returning it to the stack behind the shoeboxes. Since she wouldn’t let me read her stories, I figured they must be pretty raunchy too. If she only knew some of the books I brought home from the library practically dripped with passion, desire, sex, murder, and mayhem. For that matter, the Old Testament did its share along that line too.
I whined and drooped through August, but the brilliant sunlight inspired Daddy. I guess his good mood was a throwback to his liberation from the coal mines. At dawn, he put on the coffee pot and laid a fat-rimmed ham slice on the skillet and stood on the back porch to fiddle the sun over the knife-edged mountain that climbed straight up behind our house. His violin seemed given to sadness; even his fast and funny tunes were played in a minor key that dug under the laughter to find your hollow spot.
When the coffee perked and the ham fat was rendered transparent, he repeated his violin ritual. First, he loosened the bow then checked the bridge and snapped the velvet cinch. Finally, he opened the bedraggled case and returned Uncle Bruce’s handcrafted masterpiece to its faded velvet berth.
One Saturday morning, right in the middle of “John Peel,” the music stopped, and he stuck his head in my bedroom door. “Rachel, don’t let the kids go near the store today. Not one step. Hear me?”
I pulled the pillow over my head, but his warning coiled its way through my Saturday sleep. I waged a hopeless battle to shut out the morning sun, the fiddle playing, and his warning, but sleep was all but gone. I shook off the rest of it and pushed back the wrinkled sheet and sat up on the side of the bed. Something must be going on at the store, and I knew in this news-starved holler, I wasn’t about to miss any small tidbit of excitement. What that bunch of tobacco spitters on the store porch could have come up with just might be worth checking out.
I grabbed yesterday’s clothes that lay puddled on the floor by my bed as I listened to see if Daddy had left the house or if Mother was stirring. The house was silent. I picked up a wet dishrag draped on the sink and dropped it over the screen door spring to muffle the metal screech. No use waking the whole house. If the kids got up, they would demand a dozen things, and before I could escape, Mother would be up too. I slipped out the door and held on to the screen handle until I could settle the door back against it frame. Screen doors made a smacking racket when they shut, and that sound was loud enough to wake the dead, but not this morning. I was real careful to protect my escape.
The dirt path down the mountain still held heat from yesterday’s sun, and dust swirls puffed beneath my feet. I stopped and backed downhill and made perfect footprints in the warm red powder. No use lettin’ a panther track me easy. I hadn’t ever, even one time, seen a panther, but the hold over habit held sway this morning. I eased off the warm dust onto sunburned grass that crunched like Cracker Jacks and moved on down the hill. Leatha and I were each other’s lifeline on this mountain. The need to share and explore life filled our days whenever and wherever we could manage it.
As I rounded a stand of giant poplars, I could see the Sargeants’ house—part log, part clapboard—perched on the bank, overlooking the Poor Fork branch of the Cumberland River. Tuck and Blue Boy, Burl’s bird dogs, were sprawled in the dust, their bony bodies hidden under the porch. In April, they would have jumped all over me, legs, noses, and tongues leaving friendly marks, but in August, sun-stunned, they barely bothered to wag a tail.
Leatha’s sun-browned legs dangled off the porch swing as she minded the latest Sargeant baby. With a string of siblings, six strong, babysitting was as natural to Leatha as breathing. We Ramseys had only three kids, and we were the smallest family in the valley. How pitiful can you get?
I crossed the dirt road and pushed open the yard gate. Leatha and I were bound hand to hand, head to head, heart to heart. I suppose I ought to wonder how we came to such a place, bound as we were to each other. I didn’t. She was here, and to me, that was as natural as the river rocks and steep cliffs we both loved to scale.
“Well, look who’s up before eight o’clock,” said Leatha. “I thought Ms. Princess slept till noon on Saturday.”
“Come on, Leatha, I drug myself down here before sunshine hit the roof. Daddy woke me, yelling for us to stay away from the store. What’s going on that got him riled enough to forget I get to sleep late on Saturday?”
“Nothing now, but last night, Coburn and Daddy sat out here on the porch and talked half the night. Coburn told us the whole story about the snake handling that’s coming.”
The hairs on my arms stood straight up, and air rushed in between my teeth. A snake handling caused as much commotion as a flash flood.
“What did Coburn say?”
“He talked about all night. It’s a pretty long story. Most of what he said was about his notion of how to make some money. He told Pap that traffic at his store is down to a trickle. Money to spend is gone, and credit from most of the wholesale houses is in a sorry shape. Coburn is having trouble paying his bills for the fresh seed, milk, and bread. He needs some new traffic soon, or he will have to close the store. The way he told it was that early one morning, right after planting, when he was walking to the store, he kicked at a fallen limb and jumped nearly two feet straight up. It was a big ole black snake.”
“Poor Coburn. I would have screamed bloody murder, wouldn’t you? Can’t you just see its long black snake tail whipping around and begin slithering away with every muscle working in that slimy way they move? Just saying ‘snake’ makes me shudder,” I said.
“Rach, dummy, a black snake can’t ever hurt you, but since his ole lazy bones are wrapped in all that snake body, it can startle you some. I hear tell that black snakes keep down mice and rats. Most people in the valley just let them be, but not Coburn. He never saw a snake he didn’t try to kill. He ran to the store porch, grabbed a hoe, and chopped off the snake’s head. Can’t you just hear him? ‘Snakes are the most useless, dangerous creatures God ever made. Snakes don’t do nobody no good.’ That’s probably what he said.”
“What else? Why does this have anything to do with a snake handling?”
“Well, Daddy told us he pushed open the storeroom door, but he was still feeling skittish, so he looked around hard and long before he stepped inside. Then he remembered—snake handling. The memory of snakes wrapped around the necks and arms of the handlers tore him up. He told Daddy that back a few years ago, a gaggle of handlers came traipsing through recruiting lost souls with their terrifying preachin’. They borrowed Mr. Ben’s large storehouse just across the road from Coburn, and before he knew it, they started a revival. Hordes of people streamed from the hollers and branches from as far as twenty miles away. The crowds grew for weeks.
“More like a carnival than any preachin’ he ever saw. He couldn’t close the store at night for selling pop, candy, and about every other thing he stocked. Most of the crowd was there just to gape and jaw,
and there was a profit to be made while it lasted in spite of how much it made his skin crawl. After about three weeks of excitement, word got around that the law had been tipped off, and the handlers packed up their rattlers, copperheads, and water moccasins and left the valley. Most everybody thought Coburn tipped off the law, and he refused to talk about it. But today, he told Dad, in spite of himself, a snake idea tickled his brain, and he was about to go back on his own conscience. If there was to be a big snake handling, he could pay off McComb Supply and keep the store open.”
The baby had fallen asleep, and Leatha stood up and went in the house to put her in her crib. When she came back and settled herself on the porch swing, she had remembered more about the conversation from the night before.
“The handlers, always on the move, are usually eager to find a safe place to hold a meeting. Run-ins with the law the last few years has thinned the faithful considerable. The store, being right on the road, is not the best place for them either. A gathering crowd is a dead giveaway, but it worked before, and so he tells Daddy he thinks it just might work again, long enough to save his business for him and for the valley.”
“Why did Mr. Ben figure in the snake handling?” I asked.
“Everybody in the settlement knows Ben and Sarah used to handle. They were in their twenties not long after their newborn twins died of diphtheria. But since they’re in their late eighties now, the fire to prove themselves has long since burned out. There are days now when Sarah can’t even remember the names of the babies Ben buried in that miserable January over sixty years ago.”
Fleetie's Crossing Page 17