My Old True Love

by Sheila Kay Adams

  Larkin was staying pretty much with us, and it was from him that I heard about Hackley going by Maggie’s and that she’d run him off. “Well, go it, Maggie,” I said. He allowed as how he’d told her them very words. He said that Hackley had let on to Maggie that he did not know about Silas being her feller. I said, “That’s a damn lie, because I told him so.” We both shook our heads at that. I asked him how our Maggie was getting on and Larkin said she looked really good. When I shot him a look, he grinned. “Oh, no, it were nothing like that,” he said. “She let me know right off that she was very happy with Silas.” Larkin got real quiet after that, and it was like I could see right into his head and read his mind. I said, “You cannot take it upon yourself to tell Mary, honey,” and he got up real quick and said he knowed all about that. As he was leaving he looked at me and said something I have never forgot to this day, nor the look on his face when he said it. “Why don’t you tell her, Amma?” And then he was out the door and gone.

  IN MARCH, ZEKE’S BROTHER Hugh come home to see his brand-new son. Rosa had not had an easy time and I was glad that he was able to come, though I was jealous too. This would be his second time home since they’d left. He come by the house to tell me Zeke was well and fit over at Strawberry Plains and it tore me all to pieces to think of my sweetheart just across the ridge. Hugh had rode the last few miles dozing in the saddle but I could tell he was wide awake now. He was all for beating a path home. He grinned when I told him this one had come a boy and allowed how Rosa had probably had a fit since she’d wanted a girly-child so bad. I told him she’d just have to use the name she’d picked out for it, which was Cora June, the next time around. This one he’d name Douglas Eugene and call him Doug. We spoke of his other boys. Regular stair-steps they was too, Bose, Mitch, Tom, and Jess. He made for the door then, and I let him go. But I watched his horse plumb out of sight, because from the back he surely looked like my man Zeke. It would have give me great satisfaction to have seen his dear face right then.

  THE NEXT MORNING HUGH had got up just at daylight and headed for the spring. Hugh and Rosa had one of the sweetest springs in this part of the world, and they both took great care to keep it cleaned out. I know exactly what he did that morning because I’d seen him do it myself a hundred times before. He would have splashed some of the icy water on his face and cupped some water to his mouth to drink. That water was so cold it would make your teeth ache plumb to the bone. Then he would have just set back and looked out down the valley and been quiet for a little while. That’s what all of them did that come from the war, all of them craved the quiet. The one thing they all said they hated most about the war was the loudness of it. Rosa said he was gone for a long time, and she finally had to send Bose for him. He’d come back all sheepish and she could tell he’d dozed off. And that was why he’d not seen the blackguard that was his brother Shadrack slinking about up on the ridge.

  Hugh’s brother Shadrack was not even supposed to be home. He’d left Asheville the morning before with orders from Silas McMahan to ride straight downriver to Marshall, and it were only by chance that he’d decided to take the long way around and come through Sodom. And it were only by chance that Tildy had mentioned their cow had found a calf somewhere up on the ridge, and he’d gone to look for it. But he had not found no calf. He’d found Hugh instead. Shadrack rode hard as he could go until he got to the Confederate encampment at Warm Springs, where he told upon Hugh, and they sent out some men to get him. Cassie Leake watched them go by, and when they took the right fork in the road she run to the barn calling for her boy as she went. Jimmy beat them up there, too. Hugh run out the back of the house and headed up the patch of new ground. Poor old thing had grubbed the day before clearing roots as big as his arm out of the rich dirt, and now the field offered nothing to hide or shield him from the Rebels what was coming up the road. They was already so close he could hear their horses. Rosa said he was running hell bent for leather and she saw him raise his eyes toward the trees at the edge of the clearing. She said it was funny how she’d thought earlier that the clearing was so small, and she’d aimed to ask him to clear more of it off before he left. Now she said it seemed as wide as a mile.

  They were shooting at him now and he went to zigging back and forth with his eyes fastened on them trees. Rosa said bullets was hitting all about him, jerking up big clods of dirt. Hope rose in her as she realized he was going to make the trees. Just another three or four strides and he’d be there. She strained forward herself willing him on. A flash of blue caught her eye and her heart almost stopped. It was Jess! Right there straight in front of him was their boy Jess.

  And she’d screamed out at him and he’d faltered, then turned and run back out into the field they’d shot him down.

  THAT NIGHT HACKLEY, LARKIN, and Andrew rode out heading back to Tennessee.

  IT WAS LATER THAT month that I got a letter from Larkin that ended like this:

  They was a man here what had a necklace of ears that was found stabbed in his guts. He died yesterdy and was carryin on in the awfulest way about the Pharaoh of Egypt. Is it not funy what comes to us at the time we are leeving this old world?

  Your bigest boy,

  Larkin

  I tore off that part of the letter and buried it next to Fee’s grave. In my way of figuring, that’s right where it needed to be.

  14

  FINALLY WE GOT US a good spring. That year of ’64 they was no rain that would not stop, and I did not have to worry about one of them bust-outs happening to us. We got the corn in and we moved the garden far from the house so the soldiers could not just ride by and take it. If they got it now, they would have to work a little for it. But I will tell you I did not aim for them to get so much as one ear of my corn. I would kill them for it now as my ten-percenting days was long past.

  Hack Jr. was one of the prettiest babies I had ever seen. His hair was so blond it looked white and he had Hackley’s blue eyes. He was the smilingest little thing too. I reckon he looked plime-blank like his daddy, and Mary was a big fool over him. Pearl was as jealous as she could be, and we had to watch her like a hawk because I was afraid she would hurt him somehow. Mary had took to staying during the day some at her own house. I could understand that. She had her own baby now and wanted to be home, though she always come back with us around suppertime and slept with us.

  I had waited till the dew had dried off of the bean patch that day in late June, and as I was picking my mouth was watering. I was not thinking about a thing other than that big mess of beans I was going to be fixing for dinner, when of a sudden all the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I raised my eyes to the end of the row and there stood Larkin. He did not say a word to me, just stood there with his big hands hanging down empty, but I swear to you I knowed it.

  And I can never say what and all went through my mind. I reckon every memory I had of my little brother went to crowding up in my head till I centered on how he would stand there with his blond hair shining like gold and make that fiddle just talk. It hit me right then and there that I would never hear a single note come from his hands again. Still, I did not think it was real until I run to that mule and saw that thing what was wrapped up and throwed over its back like a sack of taters. I reached out my hand and touched it, and still it was not real to me. And then I looked down and saw shoes sticking out and the britches had rode up and I could see a pale line of flesh. They was just something so helpless and pitiful about that little stretch of white and I felt the tears coming and could not have stopped them if I had tried. And Larkin’s eyes was like black holes that had been bored out in his head and they had the awfulest look out of them you have ever seen. Me and Larkin held onto one another, and we both cried. Then he said, “Amma, I’ve got to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done now,” and I said, “You will not do it by yourself.” I went in to tell the young’uns that their laughing and cutting-up uncle had come home throwed across the back of a strange mule.

  As we went ac
ross the ridge Larkin told me Hackley was the only man killed on the Union side in the battle that was being called Winding Stairs. He made no further motions to tell me more, and I did not ask, for I was plumb numb inside and it made no real difference. We had a bad thing to do and they was no sense in making it worse.

  It was getting up toward late morning when we topped the ridge and stood looking down at the house. I could see where Mary had swept the yard, and there was a curl of smoke rising out of the chimney. Even from up here I could smell that she was baking bread. “Oh, Amma,” he said, “I don’t know that I can do this.” And I said, “You can do it because you have to.”

  MARY WAS COMING UP the path from the spring when she saw us. A big smile bloomed over her face and she dropped the buckets and come running toward us laughing and calling out Larkin’s name in the same breath. When she got close enough to see his face, she stopped and lost her laughter and her great big eyes looked from me to him and back to him again. I don’t know that I will ever feel as sorry for anybody as I felt for her right then.

  “Mary,” was all he had to say.

  “No,” she brought her hand to her mouth. “No,” she said again and she started backing up and her forehead got all bunched up.

  “Honey,” I said.

  Her heart broke then. I saw it happen as clear as day, right as she was turning to run back toward the spring. Neither one of us knowed what to do except go to running after her. From the corner of my eye, I spied Julie standing on the porch holding the baby. Larkin’s legs was so much longer than mine that I thought for a minute that he was going to catch her. I knowed for a fact that there was no room for nothing else in his heart except for that little figure ahead of him, just now entering the cool, dark path that ended at the deep pool where the spring broke ground. But then he had to slow down. Mary’s bare feet grabbed hold of the damp rocks going down there, but his heavy boots were slick. I was right behind him and we both heard the splash.

  “Oh, God, Larkin,” I hollered out and he broke to run again, boots be damned.

  Mary’s hair was all fanned out around her small head and she was laying face down in the water.

  Larkin hit the shallow water at a run, but it was only when he touched her that she began to fight him.

  “Let me be. Leave me alone!” Her fists bounced off his chest as he lifted her up out of that cold water and started toward the bank with her cradled against him like a baby.

  “Mary, honey, shhh.” His voice was soft and he set a long time holding her close. A bright shaft of sun found its way down through the leaves and he scooted until they were in it. They were both shivering from the icy water.

  The smell of honeysuckle came to me and the sweetness of it seemed somehow out of place.

  She fought him for a while longer but finally stopped. He began to rock her slowly.

  I squatted beside them and went to rubbing her hair. Nobody said nothing for a long time, then finally I said, “Scream, Mary. Scream as loud as you want to.”

  And finally with a great wail she started to cry. I knowed she would be all right then.

  WE ALL PILED UP and stayed at Mary’s that night. She said she wanted to stay at her own house, and I knowed I would have felt the same exact way. The young’uns right down to Hack Jr. were quiet and went off to sleep early. Mary had not wanted us to tell nobody until the next morning. I reckon she wanted some time to gather herself. She clutched onto Larkin like a drowning woman and could not stand for him to be out of her sight. We was out on the porch about all night and she wanted to hear it all over and over again until I thought if I heard how my brother had died one more time I would start screaming at the top of my voice and not quit.

  “Did he tell you anything to tell me before he died, Larkin?” she asked again.

  He said what he’d already told her at least ten times and his voice sounded so tired but so patient with her, that I felt so sorry plumb to the bottom of my soul. “He was dead by the time I got to him, honey.”

  She looked all done in, and I cast around for something that I might ask him myself. “Not even before you went to fighting?”

  He looked up at me and was in such a struggle and a misery that I wished I had kept my big mouth shut. “We’d had a fuss the night before, Amma. I had not talked to him that morning.”

  “Oh, God. Larkin, honey, I feel the worst in the world for you,” I said and went to them both and put my arms around them. We set there till it was daylight.

  Poor, poor Mary. This was her first big loss in her life, and God knows I knew as much as anybody about grieving, and now she had a big mess of it to do.

  AND SHE DID JUST that and I done a lot myself over that next year. I got only a few letters from Larkin after he left, and he was doing his fair share, too.

  Then just like that the war was over. It had started a way off in South Carolina and it ended a way off in Virginy, and as the hot months of the summer of 1865 went by, men what had been gone off fighting in it started to come home. You can only guess at how I searched every face hoping it to be the one I loved.

  In late June, Daisy Stanton was out at the chop block shaving enough splinters from a piece of firewood to use for kindling. The evening sun was slanting in at her and had throwed her shadow up against the side of the cabin. Suddenly a great big shadow popped up right beside hers there on the house. Big John had come home.

  That blackguard Shadrack Wallin knowed things would probably not go well for him back here in Sodom. The hand he’d had in the death of his brother would not be forgotten, let alone forgiven. And, yeller dog coward that he was, he didn’t have the heart to face neither Rosa nor his baby brother Zeke. He timed his homecoming with the new moon and he snuck in here and gathered his belongings and collected his wife and family, and they was gone by daylight, bound for Virginy. On the way he changed the spelling of his name to Wallen, and we never saw hide nor hair of him ever again. Good riddance to bad rubbish is what I have to say about that.

  Brother William come up on Mommie at the spring and she hit her knees right there on the bank of the stream, praising the Almighty for delivering her oldest son back to her arms.

  Soon after William Jr. showed back up, we heard from Robert, who was living in Mississippi with his new bride after having served out the war with the Confederacy.

  Tete come home from Knoxville, where he’d been released from his duties as office clerk to General Hartwell Jackson.

  Old Lawrence Allen and his cousin James Keith was afraid for their lives over the Shelton Laurel massacre. And well they should have been, for Pete McCoy had swore he would kill them. Them two made a beeline away from here and headed out for Arkansas.

  • • •

  THEN THERE WAS THEM what did not return.

  Roderick Norton, Larkin’s bearer of apple stack cake, was killed by the Home Guard while on a recruiting mission for Kirk.

  Andy Chandler got better from the dysentery, went back to fighting, and was killed over at Strawberry Plains.

  Little Johnny Norton deserted from Allen’s regiment and was killed in a poker game by another deserter over on Shelton Laurel.

  Pete McCoy hid out on Shelton Laurel until the war ended. After his mother died in August, he headed for the western country, but made a trip to Charlotte first, where he shot and killed a man that had been with Allen’s murdering bunch on Shelton Laurel. Pete died in a dispute over a gold-mining claim in California.

  But neither Zeke nor Larkin come, and I was beginning to wonder if they ever would.

  ONE WARM NIGHT TOWARD the middle of July, I woke from a dead sleep by a rustling of the mattress as someone sat down on the foot of my bed. Quick as a cat I was up and running for the door when Zeke’s voice stopped me right where I was standing. I come back to the bed on slow feet and could hardly believe it was really him and not his haint.

  “I’m home,” he said.

  “I see that,” I said, but was not certain until I laid my hand on him and felt him wa
rm beneath it.

  We set for a minute with our shoulders touching.

  “At night sometimes I dreamed so hard that you was next to me that I would wake in the morning with my hand closed tight like this,” I said and held up my clenched fist to him.

  He closed his fingers around my little fist and raised it to his mouth where he kissed every one of my knuckles. “I wouldn’t let myself dream, Arty,” he whispered to me. “Dreaming done me no good. Only made me long for you more.”

  I palmed back a thick lock of hair from his wide forehead. His eyes was plumb purple in the light of the moon that was coming through the open door. “You won’t never have to long for me next to you again, Zeke. You ain’t never getting away from me again. I don’t ever aim to be no further away from you than I am right now.”

  He laughed. “It’ll make it hard to plow joined at the hip this way.”

  “There don’t need to be no plowing for a while, Zeke. Except for the plowing that needs doing right here.”

  And he needed nothing else said when I patted the bed.

  AND IN AUGUST LARKIN came home.

  I WAS STUDYING HIM and he knew I was doing it. This was his third time by the house in as many weeks since he’d come home, and he was awful quiet. He’d been in the upper field with Zeke all morning, and they’d come in for dinner all hot and sweaty but easy with one another, like men can be when they’ve spent time working together. I followed them out onto the porch talking up a storm while they’d washed and poured water over their heads. Neither had said much, but then Zeke was always spare with his words. But it hurt me that the easy way I had always had with Larkin seemed gone. Even when Carolina had bounded onto the porch like a big puppy and went to poking him in the ribs and batting her eyes at him, flirting with him a little, Larkin had barely smiled. And it was hard not to laugh plumb out loud when Carolina was around. She was always cutting up and going on, slinging that big mane of glossy black hair, with them big blue eyes just dancing with fun. Zeke had finally sent her to the spring for buttermilk just to get her out of the way.