“Get back,” I hollered at Wallace, but he didn’t pay no attention. He kept follering me.
I stopped and looked away at the ridge. The sun was gold on the many-colored trees. I couldn’t bear to look at the face, but knowed I had to. The body slumped there on the poles with its arms crooked and the legs drawed up. They had took its boots and the legs looked whitish green. I got closer and stooped down. They had killed him and tied him up in the scarecrow’s rags.
“Get back,” I said to Wallace, but he come right up and looked too, before he run away and puked among the cornstalks.
I backed away and held my apron over my nose.
“What’s wrong?” Lewis said. “Hush up,” I said. “We’ve got to go back to the cabin.” I led them across the fields and hollered for Wallace. He made like he was going to the woods, and then he follered us at a distance.
When I finally got the younguns back to the cabin I told them to stay there. Willa and Lewis begun to cry, and I set with them a few minutes by the fire. But I had work to do.
“You stay here,” I said to Wallace. Wallace didn’t answer. I took a sheet from the shelf. “You stay here with the little uns,” I said. “They’s a job you and me will have to do later.”
I got some lime in a gourd from the shed and a hatchet the Indians hadn’t found. I took the sheet and marched right out through the field to the new ground. I’d lose my courage if I didn’t do it directly. They was no leisure to stop and think.
The body was big and I knowed they was no way I could hold it up while I cut the arms free from the scarecrow frame. I’d either have to chop the frame down or cut the body loose and let it slump down. If I chopped the frame, I’d still have to lift the body to cut the arms free. I stood behind the frame and hacked at the ropes till one arm fell free. The body was stiff and swung over like a side of beef. The hat fell off and I tried not to look at the hollow eyes. When I cut the other hand free, the head fell against me, and I jumped back as the body hit the ground.
Children, I’ve never worked as hard or as fast. Several times I thought I would black out from the smell. I wished the soldiers would come back and help me. I thought of running back to the settlement and getting my Daddy and Henry to come. But that would take another day at least, with the body exposed above ground. They wasn’t nothing to do but what I was doing.
As I worked I got mad. It kept going through my mind Realus had deserted me and the younguns. After deceiving me for eight years he had left me to raise the children. Blood rushed to my face from exertion and anger. The resentment give me strength. The sudden hatred of your Grandpa allowed me to do that work.
First thing I done was cut all those scarecrow rags off the body. I couldn’t let nobody be buried like that. They had took his own clothes and his body was too stiff and drawed up to put more clothes on anyway. I thought it was better to bury him in the sheet, the way he had come into the world.
I tried not to look at the body when I tore all them rags off. It was turning black as a bruise in places and was light green on the limbs. I didn’t look at the face where the birds had pecked.
When the body was bare I sprinkled it all over with lime. Lime will sweeten any smell. Don’t know how it works, but the white does make things seem cleaner and dryer. I spread the sheet on the ground, knocking down cornstalks to make room.
It must have took me an hour to get the corpse on the sheet, but finally I did. Then I tied it up with the corners of the cloth and the pieces of rope that had been on the scarecrow. While I worked I had been planning. The easiest thing would have been to dig a hole right there in the field. But I knowed it was better to bury the body up on the hill with Little Eller. That was the graveyard and that was where a body ought to be at rest. It wouldn’t be right to bury him under no scarecrow. The problem was how to get the corpse up there. I couldn’t hardly roll it over, much less carry it to the top of the ridge.
Then it come to me in my anger that the timber sled was still in the woods where it had been cut loose. If I could pull it by myself to the field, then maybe Wallace and me together could drag it up the trail to the top of the ridge with the body on it. We would have to go slow and do it a little at a time.
I run to the woods where the sled was. It was still partly loaded with sticks of firewood. First I throwed out the wood, then gathered up the cold trace chains in both my hands. The sled felt like it was stuck by its sourwood runners to the leaves. I jerked harder and it give a little. Once the runners had moved a little, it got easier. I pulled the sled through the woods, backing as I went. But soon as I got to the field, I put the chains over my shoulder and hauled by leaning way out forward. I drug the sled to the body and left it.
All the younguns was standing at the barn watching me. They hadn’t stayed in the house like I had told them, but they hadn’t come out in the field either. They had half-obeyed me, which is what children generally do.
“Lewis,” I said, sounding stern from the work and anger, sounding out of breath. “You stay right here with Willa and don’t let me catch you in the field.”
Lewis looked solemn and sorry for hisself. Willa didn’t hardly know what was going on.
It took most of the day for Wallace and me to roll the body onto the sled, and then drag it across the field and up the trail. I took one chain and Wallace the other, and we’d pull for a few yards then stop. It was just possible to do on the steep places if we pulled for twenty feet and rested. In one rocky place we had to put sticks crossways for the runners to slide on. It was after dinner before we got to the top of the slope.
Willa and Lewis had stood in the yard watching us a long time. Finally they got bored and went back to the cabin to play in the sand by the front door. They had built all kinds of mounds and tunnels there by the time me and Wallace returned. At least they had kept away from the footlog.
“Ain’t we going to have no dinner?” Lewis said.
“We’ll have dinner later,” I said. “I’ll make us an apple pie.”
I got the shovel and Wallace carried the mattock, and we climbed back up the ridge. The ground there was hard clay. Where Realus had kept the area cleared around Little Eller’s grave the dirt was packed hard and baked by the summer heat. I seen it was going to take some mighty work to dig any sort of grave.
Wallace was too little to swing the mattock, so I took it and broke up the ground in a shape as long as a mound and maybe two feet wide. I seen we couldn’t dig a proper grave six feet deep. Besides, we didn’t have a casket to go in it. We’d have to dig as deep as we could, enough to be decent, before nightfall, and let it go at that. First thing I hit was a white field rock, and I had to dig around that so we could lift it out. The dirt up there is just red clay. They never is much soil on ridge tops. Maybe that’s why graveyards is put on ridges, to keep from taking up good soil. And to keep them away from floods.
When we dug down about a yard and squared out the corners of the hole, I seen that was as far as we could go. I was running out of strength, and the day was almost gone. Me and Wallace throwed our tools aside and took hold of the sheet around the body. It took several tries to roll the body off the sled and into the hole. I tried to do it so the body was facing up, head to the east, but with the legs drawed up and the sheet twisted around I couldn’t really tell. We filled the grave halfway before we went back to the cabin for Willa and Lewis.
I was almost give out by then, but I remembered to get your Grandpa’s Bible before climbing back up the hill. It was near sundown, and I lined the younguns up beside the grave. Even Willa stood solemn and quiet in the late sun.
I opened the Bible somewhere—I can’t remember where—and read a few verses. It seemed the only thing to do. And then we sung a song. The only one the younguns knowed was a Christmas carol and we sung that. All I remember afterwards is filling in the grave with loose dirt and clods while crows was calling in the pines on the hill and down in the field where the scarecrow was just a frame. You don’t often hear crows fu
ssing at the end of the day, but I guess we had disturbed them. It was mostly dark and the moon was coming up over the ridge by the time we walked back down to the cabin.
That night after we finished covering up the grave I still had to milk and cook supper. I was so tired I felt drunk. When you’re that tired it’s like somebody else is going through the motions of work. You feel like you’re watching yourself. I drug myself back up the hill in the moonlight to milk and then I strained the milk and put it in the spring house.
After we eat I cleared away the supper things and set down by the fire. The younguns was so tired from the long day they was almost asleep before they finished their buttermilk and pie. Wallace and Lewis climbed up to the loft and Willa went right to sleep on our bed in the living room. I figured I’d just let her stay there for the night.
I thought I’d set by the fire and think about things for a while. I wanted to think about what had happened to me in the past two days, and what had happened to Realus. Too many things had come at once and I needed to study on them. I was mad at your Grandpa, and I was afraid of being left alone. And being afraid made me even madder. I kept rehearsing in my mind what I would say if I seen him. At the same time I was bone-chilled thinking of not seeing him no more.
I kept running over the words that I would say: deceive, seduce, cowardly, unforgivable, blackguard, low-down, sinful, sneaking, infidel. It was like I had a fever and was talking to Realus across the top of the mountain, telling him never to come back, and that he better come back. It was like somebody was calling to me in the woods. I went to look, and though it sounded like a person it turned out to be a snake. That snake was looking me right in the eyes.
With a jerk I come awake. I had almost fell out of my chair. It was like something had shouted at me. But the house was quiet. They wasn’t even a clock ticking. The stillness seemed to push against me, like a pressure in the air.
The door had not been latched, and I got up to bolt it for the night. But before I dropped the hickory bar in place I thought I’d look outside. Moonlight was coming through the crack. I stepped out onto the threshold.
The hunter’s moon must have been completely full. It filled the creek with light, but hung so high in the sky it seemed unconnected with the light on the earth. The air was so bright you could almost see the fall colors on trees across the creek. The yard and fields looked clean in the blue light.
They was a figure standing in the field beyond the barn. At first I thought it was a stump from the old deadening, but then I seen it was too close. The figure was hunched over a little, and just stood there. I couldn’t focus on it because the light was not good enough. A cold pain shot down through my bones. In the moonlight I couldn’t even be sure I seen the figure. I shivered and stepped back into the house and bolted the door.
Now I had to think what to do. If it was an Indian, he was just watching for a chance to attack and rob us. I wondered if it was a soldier that was wounded or lost, coming back from the fight with the Tories, or with the Cherokees. It even crossed my mind it could be a ghost, maybe the ghost of the man that was killed and hung on the scarecrow. It also come to me it could be Realus out there. But it didn’t seem like him to just stand in the field and watch the place. It didn’t make sense that he would stand there and not come in.
I wished they was a gun in the house. But either the Indians had took it, or Realus had took it. They wasn’t even a lantern. I set there by the fire trying to make up my mind. First I thought I should just stay there and keep the house locked up and wait for daylight. Wasn’t much else I could do.
I got up and stood by the door listening, to see if anybody had come into the yard. Way off I heard a screech owl and then I could hear the water in the creek. Next I heard a kind of whimper, the kind a dog makes when it comes around after it’s been away a long time. It sounded like Trail.
I unbolted the door and opened it a crack, and sure enough there was Trail standing in the moonlight and whimpering. I put out my hand and he sniffed it and licked it. He wagged his whole body with excitement and pleasure of being home.
“Here boy,” I said. “Here boy.” I stepped outside and looked toward the field. The figure was not where it stood before, but closer. The man stood right by the barn in the moonlight, and I knowed it was your Grandpa.
That made me madder than I was before. It riled me anew that he was afeared to face me. I went back in and got a piece of cornbread and give it to Trail. And then I shut the door and latched it. Let him stand out there and freeze, I thought. Let him shiver till he falls apart like crumbling chalk.
I set down by the fire. I wanted to take a burning stick from the fireplace and go out there and hold the light in his face to see what he would say for hisself. That was always my inclination when they was trouble, to go right to the cause. Wasn’t no use to put off trouble. I wanted to see his face when he tried to explain why he had fooled me all them years, and left me alone to birth Wallace with no help on the night of the painter. I wanted to hear what he would say about all those times I had gone without a woman to talk to and my own Mama just across the mountains, no more than fifteen miles away.
I put another stick on the fire and set looking into the flames. Like I said before, I never did see the signs and mysteries in a fire that other people claim is there. I never did see no faces of the dead or the flutter of angels, nor hear the tramp of steps warning of bad things to come. What I always seen was paths that led to distant fields and far mountains. Behind the flames I watched faraway valleys reached by trails that run right up to my feet.
I thought, can I ever live with Realus after what he done? How can I live with a man that would deceive me so? Man and woman can’t be one flesh in hatred and suspicion. If I didn’t take him back inside I’d have to live on the creek by myself like a widow woman raising her children.
But Realus could go off to the west and start a new place and a new family. A man could just vanish into the wilderness and clear him up a new place and find another wife.
I would take your Grandpa back. Children, I done a lot of thinking that night, and I did a lot of growing up. When we finished burying that poor young man, I was just a girl. By the time that night was over I felt like a grown woman. I don’t think a body ever really grows up, but we keep learning. That’s part of the interest in getting older, is to learn a little more.
What I seen next was that I was going to have to forgive Realus. And if I forgive him just partly, they would always be that distance between us the Devil hisself seemed to have made in our lives. If I only forgive him in part, that Devil would worm his way back into our lives through that gap and never go away.
No sir, I seen that for my own sake, call it my own selfishness, I had to forgive your Grandpa complete. I couldn’t live no other way, and I couldn’t live with myself no other way. As I kept thinking I felt myself growing. I seen that I might have a long life, and that I might have grandchildren like you all. I was always a slow learner. It takes me a long time to make sense of things, but I always see eventually where I am, and once I seen how everything had to be the rest was easier.
I must have wandered off in my thinking again, for it was Trail whimpering at the door that called me back to the task at hand. I felt twenty years older. I wrapped my shawl around me and unbolted the door.
Trail whined and licked my hand. I reckon he was so happy to be back home, he was near beside hisself. Dogs love to gallivant but they also love to come home where their people are.
The figure was still standing out there by the barn in the moonlight. It could have been a statue, except it was stooped forward a little. That stoop told me a lot because Realus was never one to slouch. The yard looked like it had been frosted with some kind of blue powder. Even the dirt and the manure pile looked scrubbed and starched. The mountains was shining above the creek in the moonlight. Trail trotted alongside of me, and run circles around me as I walked. But the figure by the barn never moved. Its front and face was dark
.
“Realus,” I said. “Is that you?” My breath was tight in my throat and chest. But the figure made no more answer than a statue would. I had forgot to bring out a pine knot for a light.
“Ain’t no use to stand out here shivering to death,” I said. I walked right up to within ten feet of the man but I still couldn’t see the face. I knowed it was your Grandpa by the height and shoulders. “You might as well come on in,” I said.
Still he didn’t say nothing. It was like a big dark ghost standing there. For a second I almost got confused about what I was doing. Had he maybe lost his mind with shame and worry and wandering in the woods? Had he been hit on the head and lost his memory? Was he dead and this was his ghost come back?
Trail was whimpering and jumping between us. He licked my hand and then run to the man. “Calm down, Trail,” I said. “Calm yourself.”
But I seen what to do then. That dog showed me its wisdom. It was no good to talk. No words could break through the distance between us in the bright frosty air. “I can’t see your face,” I said, and stepped forward and took his arm in my left hand and his hand in my right hand. His fingers was icy cold.
Now a touch speaks far beyond any words, children. A touch is a little thing, but at the right time it’s like a current pours through. People ain’t whole unless they’re connected, and a touch is the first and true sign of that connection. You can see that in a little baby, how it will delight in being touched and held, how it recognizes affection. They’s all kinds of holding and caressing, but I’m just talking about the first touch of friendship and fellowship, the touch of family and kith. Every single person really feels a part of the same family.
I took your Grandpa’s arm and hand and held them. His big fingers was froze. I turned him around so he was facing the moonlight. Trail was jumping up on us, and I said, “Get down, Trail. Get down.” And I seen Realus’s face was wet. It was like dew had settled on it, or the dog had licked it. The moonlight was caught in the drops down his cheeks and in his beard.
The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts Page 15