My Old True Love

by Sheila Kay Adams

  My Old True Love

  My Old True Love

  A NOVEL BY

  Sheila Kay Adams

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  © 2004 by Sheila Kay Adams. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Adams, Sheila Kay.

  My old true love : a novel / by Sheila Kay Adams.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-407-3

  1. North Carolina—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 3. Appalachian Region, Southern—Fiction. 4. Ballads—Fiction. 5. Cousins—Fiction. 6. Singers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.D395315M9 2004

  813’.54—dc22

  2003070809

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  This book is in loving memory of my parents

  Ervin and Neple Norton Adams, who kept the family stories

  and memories in their hearts and passed them on to me.

  And it is lovingly dedicated to June Anders and

  James C. Taylor—there could be no better in-laws.

  Come in, come in, my old true love,

  And spend this night with me.

  For I have a bed, it’s a very fine bed,

  And I’ll give it up for thee, thee.

  I’ll give it up for thee.

  “Young Hunting,” traditional ballad

  My Old True Love

  1

  SOME PEOPLE IS BORN at the start of a long hard row to hoe. Well, I am older than God’s dog and been in this world a long time and it seems to me that right from the git-go, Larkin Stanton had the longest and hardest row I’ve ever seen.

  Granny had an old cow that was skittish back then that would kick anybody but her, so I knowed things was bad when she said to me, “Arty, go do the milking.”

  My heart laid in my chest as heavy as the milk bucket on my way back. See, my aunt Polly had been trying to have a baby for days and had screamed till her voice had plumb give out. I heard Mommie crying when I started up on the porch and just as I reached for the latch, the door opened and the granny-woman Hattie come out. She had a bright red stain on her forehead and try as I might I couldn’t get my eyes to look nowheres else but at that red swipe mark. She never even had to say it. I knowed Aunt Polly was dead. Hattie’s eyes was soft as a doe’s as she took the bucket of milk and handed me the one she’d carried out of the house and told me to empty it at the far edge of the cornfield. Oh, Lord, I did not want to see what was in that bucket, but just like that red stain, I could n’t look nowheres else, and I gagged the whole time I was burying the afterbirth.

  Even though they was a candle burning on the rough-planked table inside the cabin, it seemed dark to me. But there was that bucket of milk, and since they was all talking, I figured it fell to me to strain it. I kept looking at the bed where Aunt Polly was covered up by one of Granny’s best quilts. It seemed like the gay colors caught what little light there was and I got sick to my stomach thinking about what lay beneath them. Mommie and Granny stood next to the bed and Mommie was still crying. Crazy-like, the words to an old love song run through my head.

  The doctor he come, to her bed he drew nigh

  Her chambers all parted and moved to the side.

  And quick as lightning, another line from another song.

  No doctor’s hand, just God’s own hand.

  Granny’s face was so full of sorrow and hurt that I could barely stand to look at her, and I busied my hands to straining the milk. But that didn’t stop my ears from hearing every word. In the softest voice ever was, Granny allowed as how Aunt Polly had plumb give up after Luke was killed. Mommie was holding Emily who had cried so long she had the snubs. Hackley had his fists twisted up in her skirt and when she started to say over and over, “My baby sister, my baby sister,” he pushed his little face deeper in the folds. Right about then the baby started to cry, and everybody turned back to the bed. I took Emily from Mommie. It was when I set her on my hip that it come to me that I didn’t even know what the baby was. But Emily was crying and fussing and Hattie was out the door and gone before I had a chance to ask.

  Then Mommie said, “I’ll take him,” and Granny said, “No you will not.” They quarrelled back and forth for a minute, then Granny said, “Thirty-five ain’t young, honey. Ye’ve got eight young’uns and, God willing, soon to be nine. Ye have to think of your own.” And what she said next caused a chill down the whole length of my back. “I’ll keep him.” And then her voice got real soft. “Till he dies, anyway.”

  Mommie’s voice come out in a wail. “We can’t let him die. He’s all that’s left in this world of Polly and Luke.”

  Granny held up her hands and said, “All right, all right.” Then she said one of us needed to go to the spring and bring back water to wash Aunt Polly with before she stiffened, and my eyes flew back to the bed. I felt all done in and Emily was still making this tired little hiccuping sound like she wished she could stop but kept on anyway.

  Mommie folded back the quilt from Aunt Polly’s face. She tucked a strand of hair still wet with Aunt Polly’s living sweat behind one ear.

  “She looks young as a girl,” she whispered.

  Oh, but I thought I would die when she said that.

  Then the baby cried again and Mommie got the funniest look on her face. Her chin jutted out, her eyes went to little slits, and she looked mad as hell. “Come over here, Arty,” she said to me in a rough voice. She jerked Hackley loose from her dress skirt and knelt by the bed.

  “That there is your cousin,” she said. “He’s ours to raise. He ain’t got nobody in this world but us.” Hackley made a little sound in the back of his throat and Mommie looked right at him. “He’ll need a good strong name, now. You come up with a stout one, all right?”

  Hackley looked at Mommie, then back at the baby. He nodded solemnly.

  That must’ve satisfied her because she stood up, got the water bucket, and said, “I’m going to the spring.”

  And as Granny followed her out on the porch she allowed as how Mommie ought to take the pitch torch, since dark had probably come on down at the spring.

  THE BABY MADE ANOTHER little sound and of a sudden I wanted to see that baby more than anything in this world. The quilt they’d wrapped him in had halfway covered his face and I leaned over and flipped it back. His big pretty head was covered in hair as black as a crow’s feather. A tiny hand with fingers all spread wide reached out to us. Hackley stared at the hand, then shot a glance at the open door where Mommie and Granny stood backlit by the yellow light of the torch. I could see what he aimed to do and any other time I’d have smacked his hand. But, I didn’t do or say nothing. I only watched Hackley’s little hand move toward the baby. Quick as a snake the baby’s fingers gripped it hard.

  “Well, howdy,” Hackley whispered. And I swear, that baby turned its head toward him just like he was listening. Hackley smiled. “Howdy, little feller.”

  IT WAS A GOOD summer for growing in Sodom, just the right amount of sun and rain. We wo
uld have plenty for the coming winter. Granny still spent a lot of time up on the side of the mountain where the garden was. With a sheepish look on her face and never quite meeting my eyes, she’d announce before the fog had even burned off that she had to go pull the biggest cucumbers or old bean vines to feed the hogs. She’d say this even though I knew for a fact she would never go in that garden with the dew still on. She’d stay gone until noontime and come in just long enough to fix us something to eat. She’d fuss the whole while about how everything in the garden was going to come in at the same time, which I had to laugh at because that’s the way it always was. Then she’d head back out up the mountain, climbing hard to where the first row of corn started. She’d always stop there to bring her apron up to wipe the sweat that run off her face like little freshets, look back toward the house, then disappear in between the rows. But I could always tell where she was by the moving of the corn. And I could tell just as well when she’d leave the patch for the cool of the woods beyond, too. We’d had no fresh corn in many months, and my mouth watered at the thought of it and when she come in with the first little ears covered with watery blisters, we fell on them as though starving.

  It was toward the end of August before I realized what Granny was doing. It was way up in the day and she was just heading back toward the house. She’d caught up the hem of her apron and had loaded it with potatoes. I had beat out a path on the porch walking the baby. He’d cried so much that day that even when he weren’t crying, my ears rung with the sound of it. Granny was beelining it for the steps when he started to cry again. Her head come up and she made a sudden jag toward the springhouse.

  She didn’t want to sit here in the house and listen to him cry. It was then I knew it was going to be pretty much me for it. From the day he was born, my arms had carried him, but that very day was when my heart claimed him for my own.

  IN OCTOBER, MOMMIE BIRTHED a baby girl. We all crowded into the cabin to celebrate and to hang her with a name. Mommie said she’d be known as Martha Elizabeth, after Granny’s mother and the queen of England.

  We all shouted out, “Welcome to you, Martha Elizabeth Norton!”

  Then Granny stood up and took the floor.

  “When Polly’s baby was born, Nancy told Hackley he could pick out a name for it. And now the little feller’s three months old. It’s time to hang him with a name, too. Hackley’s been wanting to do this for a spell, but we weren’t about to waste a perfectly good name on a young’un that might wind up carrying it to the grave, so we waited till we were certain he’d pull through.”

  I stood up next to her holding the baby. The room was quiet as could be and everybody was looking at us.

  Granny went and put her hand on Hackley’s shoulder. “All right, Hack. You hang a name on him, son. The time has come.”

  Hackley come right across that room and stood in front of me. He looked solemnly at the baby.

  “I name you . . .” He looked around at everyone in the room, then back at the baby. “I name you Larkin!” he shouted.

  The room rang with the shouts: “Welcome to ye, Larkin Stanton!”

  OH, BUT THERE ARE no words to tell how Larkin grabbed hold of my heart forever when he was five months old. They was a big snow on the ground and Granny had just come in from milking the goat she’d got from Jim Leake. Me and Larkin was laying on a quilt in front of the fire and his little face was a constant wreath of the sweetest smiles and he was cooing at me for all the world like a little dove. And then he looked up at me with them big round black eyes and said plain as could be, “Amma.” Tears come so quick to my eyes I was blinded. Though it pleased me beyond all knowing I tried to tell him, “No, no.”

  But Granny stopped me.

  “Let him call you Amma, child.” Granny’s eyes were soft. “He’s chose you to love best of all, and with good reason. You been all the mama he knows.”

  LARKIN TOOK HIS FIRST steps, just shy of nine months old, into Hackley’s arms. From then on he was never still. He was slow to smile, but when he did his whole face beamed, and you felt blessed just to be in its light. He was quick to learn and I could make him mind with not much more than a smacked hand.

  One summer evening me and Granny was on the porch where we’d be more apt to catch a bit of a breeze should one decide to come up the cove. I’d been trying to learn this really hard love song called “The Silk Merchant’s Daughter,” and Granny had already sung it through a half-dozen times. Larkin was in my lap, and halfway through her singing it yet one more time he started to rock back and forth in perfect rhythm. A low hum began in his throat.

  “Granny!”

  Granny never liked being interrupted mid-song like that so she was ill when she opened her eyes.

  “What?”

  “Watch Larkin,” I said.

  Granny began to sing again and the low humming started up again. She stopped and his humming stopped. Larkin’s eyes were fastened on her mouth. She sang and the humming started again.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! He’s trying his best to sing, ain’t he?”

  “He is singing, Granny. Sure as I’m setting here holding him. That’s what he’s doing.” I turned his body until his face was close to mine, but he wanted none of that. He squirmed away back to Granny, humming impatiently in her direction.

  Granny laughed with delight. “Looks like we got us another singer, Arty.”

  He called for a knife his business to do.

  “Hold on,” said the young maid, “for a moment or two

  It’s a silk merchant’s daughter from London I be

  Pray see what I’ve come to from the loving of thee.”

  Larkin’s humming got all mixed in with our singing and it all eased its way into the dark there on the porch.

  BY THE TIME LARKIN was five he had already learned every song I knew. Granny had to start reaching far back in her memory for them love songs that were so old she swore they’d come straight from the old country. I had to agree with her since they talked an awful

  lot about Scotland and England. It made me feel funny to think of singing songs that had been tucked away in people’s hearts that had come all the way across the ocean.

  But Larkin was too little to think about all that. He never cared where they come from. He was just always begging for one more.

  “Lordy, honey.” Granny said. “You have to give me time to study about it. You know who you ought to git to sing for ye is Hackley. He’s learned from that bunch of singing Nortons, too. He’s about the only one I can think of right off that can sing all day and not sing the same one twice’t.”

  And so Granny pieced another square in the quilt that would bind them two boys together.

  These were the days that I would look back on once I’d married with such a longing in my heart. Them were times that seemed almost magic—you know how it is when you remember your childhood. The sun is always shining or there’s a big pretty snow on the ground, and you’re young and never sick or tired, and everybody you ever loved is still living and your whole life is a big wide road stretched out in front of you just waiting for you to take that first step toward the living of it.

  IT WAS IN THE fall of my fourteenth year, just as the leaves had started changing on the highest peaks, when I really noticed Zeke Wallin for the first time. I’d knowed him all my life but this day at church I really saw him. Me and Granny were making our way through a knot of people that were still milling about in the churchyard after preaching and Larkin had darted away from us with the final amen. I watched his dark head move through the crowd until I saw him catch up with Hackley. Then I saw a flash of teeth from beneath one of the old oaks at the edge of the churchyard.

  Zeke Wallin had the same spare build, fine bones, and square jaw-line of his older brothers. Never in his life would he tame his curly black hair, and on this day a glossy lock had sneaked out from under his hat. Oh, but his brows set off his best feature: widely spaced eyes of such dark blue they often looked purple, which
they did now as he was looking at me. In that minute he was the prettiest man I’d ever seen in my whole life. He told me later my feelings was all over my face, and I blush even now at what he must’ve seen there.

  His smile got even bigger as he swept off his hat and give me a little bow. A rush of heat started in my stomach and streaked outward. A line from a love song raced through my head, the words changing and reshaping themselves into the version I would sing the rest of my life.

  Black is the color of my true love’s hair. His face is like some rosy

  fair

  With the prettiest face and the neatest hands. I love the ground

  whereon he stands.

  It felt like my skin had caught fire and it was all I could do to keep my eyes on the back of Granny’s dress as I went stumbling through the crowd. But as Granny stopped to speak to the preacher, there I was face-to-face with Zeke.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Howdy.” All that fire felt like it had settled in my face and I knew it were beet red.

  “I wanted to speak to you before you took off. Tried to last Sunday, but you got gone.”

  “Last Sunday?”

  He flashed me another smile, then his face went all serious. “See, I wanted to ask if I could walk you home. Same applies to today. If you’ll let me.”

  He took a sharp breath. “It ought to be against the law of the land to have eyes that color, Arty Norton.”

  It was all I could do to keep my eyes level on his, but after he’d said that I weren’t about to look away.

  “So can I walk with you?”

  I realized that I’d not be the same again, ever. Already I felt as though my skin laid over my frame differently. I looked up at the towering peak of Lonesome Mountain, imagining the child I’d been a moment ago standing just yonder.

  “I reckon you can if you want to.”