“You ain’t been to church before,” I said.
“I go down to Crossroads,” he said. Under his Sunday clothes he looked powerful the way a horse looks powerful. His shoulders was so broad it seemed he could lift the corner of a house.
“You should come back to visit us,” I said. I couldn’t believe I heard myself saying it.
He looked at a stain of melon juice on his pants. Careful as he’d been, the piece had dripped. “What a shame,” I said.
“Ain’t nothing,” he said.
“Come down to the spring and you can sponge it off,” I said, “quick, before it dries.”
“Where is the spring?” Tom said.
“It’s just a ways down this road,” I said.
We started walking toward the spring. That’s what courting couples did after church in those days. The road by the spring was maybe half a mile, but in several places it went under trees, and there was side trails off into the pines on the pasture hill. The excuse was always that they was walking to the spring for a drink. Older folks smiled when they saw young people go that way, and kids giggled and sometimes hid in the thicket and throwed rocks at couples kissing under the white pines. Many a marriage got started on that walk to the spring.
Tom and me ambled down the road in the August heat. It was cooler in the shade, but deerflies and gnats was out. I had on this big hat with flowers on top. It was the kind of floppy hat women wore back then. I brushed flies and gnats away. It didn’t seem dignified to slap at them. But in the shade above the spring the air was whining with bugs. A breeze come up. After a hot day in August it will oftentimes blow in a storm.
We had been so busy talking, or I had been so busy talking, I hadn’t noticed any clouds over the mountain to the south. I raised my hand to brush a gnat away and hit the rim of my hat. The breeze snatched it and lifted it above the road and into the trees below the road. Tom reached after the hat and missed.
Wind knocked the hat right down through the trees toward the spring branch. It looked like a big white and pink bird flopping through the woods, bouncing off limbs and saplings.
“Oh no,” I said. Tom was after it like a hound after a rabbit. He run down through the brush and hemlocks, trying to catch the hat on his cane.
“Let it go,” I hollered. “Come back.”
But he had started out after my hat and he was determined to get it. He disappeared in the hemlocks going toward the pasture. I was embarrassed all this trouble had happened over my silly hat. I picked my way around the hill toward the fence, trying not to catch my Sunday skirt on briars or holly bushes. It was a good ways to the edge of the pasture.
Pa had been one of the first to put in barbed wire. He said it was easier than splitting rails, and would last longer too. He put the barbed wire around the pasture where he kept the bull.
By the time I got to the fence Tom was already in the pasture. Wind jerked my hat in little hops over the grass, and he kept trying to pin it down with his cane. Every time it looked like he had caught it the breeze jerked the hat further along.
“Don’t matter,” I hollered.
Just then the bull come around the rise. He started running right at Tom, straight ahead in a beeline. Then Tom saw the bull. He jumped up and started for the fence.
“Hurry hurry hurry,” I hollered. I stood at the fence and pushed the top wire down so he could jump over it easy.
The bull stopped for half a second, then charged as if shot from a cannon. Tom was maybe a hundred feet from the fence, and it appeared he was stretching to reach the strands while his feet was way behind pushing on the grass. I never saw a man reach so far, with the hat in one hand and the cane in the other.
I pushed the top wire further down and he kind of turned sideways and hopped across the fence still holding the hat and cane. He made it except the pants on his left leg caught on a barb and ripped a tear maybe a foot long in the cloth. The bull run right into the fence and stuck his head through, snorting.
“Get away, Bill-Joe,” I said. “You get away.”
My hat had pieces of grass and little bits of trash stuck to it. Tom handed it to me like something I might not even want.
“You shouldn’t have gone to such trouble,” I said.
His face was red from the heat and from the running. And I guess he was embarrassed too. His straw hat had been lost by the branch, and his blond hair was all messed up. The tear in his pants was so big I could see white skin through it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “This old hat wasn’t worth it.” I had ordered the hat from the catalogue from Chicago for exactly $2.98. And now it was dirty and probably couldn’t be wore again.
“I better look for my hat,” he said. While he was poking around in the brush down by the branch I glanced up at the sky. A cloud passed over the sun and it got dark all of a sudden, like you had put a light out. Something snapped in the air straight above, and there was thunder at the very top of the sky. Then there was a flash over the mountains, and booms faraway.
“It’s going to rain,” I hollered. He had found his hat in the branch and was wiping it off. The wind come harder all of a sudden, as if it sprung out of the shadows. There was a big flash, and then a boom off the sides of the mountains, and I heard this roar. It was a sound I knowed only too well, having growed up across the river from the mountain. Sure enough, the top of the ridge was already white with rain. Rain at a distance looks like fog that stretches down, pulled straight down.
Just then lightning snapped like a sheet tearing in the sky above us. Rain was marching down the mountain across the river valley. “We’re going to get soaked,” I said.
“How far is it to the house?” Tom said.
“It’s around the hill there,” I said and pointed.
We started running along the fence toward the road from the spring. Thunder banged like boulders dropped on a roof. I took Tom’s arm and pulled him along. He seemed a little dazed by all that had happened, by the thunder and roar of the coming rain.
A big poplar was up ahead. It was the yellow poplar beside the strawberry bed, the one we used to call Joe’s Poplar because he would slip away from hoeing strawberry vines and set in the shade there. It was one of those poplars that seem to go up to the sky and look like they’ve been there since the beginning of creation. I pulled Tom toward the tree.
Rain crossed the river and was coming in walls of gray over the fields and hemlocks by the house, advancing up the branch.
The rain hit us not ten steps from the poplar. The drops felt big as nickels and quarters as they stung my neck and shoulders. We dashed through the red dirt and stood close to the trunk of the poplar, out of breath and already wet. The drops had soaked through my blouse. Big drops hammered on the leaves above us.
“How come rain is so cold if it comes from where lightning is?” I said.
“Maybe falling cools it off,” Tom said.
I shivered as more drops soaked through my blouse. I had let go of his hand when we got under the tree. We stood up close to the sooty bark of the poplar.
“This rain will wash the dust off the corn,” I said.
“Have to wait a week longer to pull fodder,” Tom said.
A cricket, the first cricket I had noticed, started chirping at the foot of the poplar. It was a big black meadow mole with a mellow note. “Six weeks till frost,” I said. I looked at Tom and he leaned over and kissed me. He put his hand under my chin and his mustache tickled my nose and the sides of my mouth. But his lips was firm. Just then a big cold drop hit me on the forehead and run down my nose. We pulled apart and laughed.
There was a flash, like the air was stung. It felt like the air prickled and crackled. Lightning had hit a pine on the hill. Thunder shoved us and we saw the pine tree catch fire as it busted all to pieces. Limbs and big splinters went flying. A smoking piece of wood landed in the mud just in front of us.
Rain blowed in right under the poplar then, and lightning hit a tree further up the hill. “We better get away from her
e,” I said, “before this tree is hit.”
“Ain’t no place safe,” Tom said. The air had a sharp smell, like scorched resin and hot sap in wood. But there was something like bleach too, or smelling salts that burn your eyes.
Lightning kept hitting like it was walking around us. And the thunder made us feel inside a big drum. “Let’s go,” I said and took Tom’s hand. We started running, and rain hit my face in splashes that could have been throwed from buckets.
There is a strange feeling of protection when you are out in a storm. The rain and wind drive you deep into the shelter of yourself. Even with rain crashing on your face it’s like you’re way inside and watching the storm.
The road to the house swung round the hill, toward the barn, but the shortest way was to cut through the pasture. Once we got past the bull pasture we climbed the slick rail fence and run by the molasses furnace.
Lightning hit other places higher on the hill. Fire appeared to leap out of the trees to meet the bolts coming from the sky. “The Lord help us,” I said, and pulled Tom along the wet trail.
But just when we got past the molasses furnace I heard this other roar. It was the sound fire makes when chimney soot catches. Or it sounded like a train going through a tunnel.
“Wait!” Tom said, and pulled me back. I don’t know how he saw what was happening. He jerked me back so fast I almost slipped on the muddy trail. And then I saw this bucket Pa had left by the furnace go flying in the air like it was swung on a rope. And next a barrel for water to rinse the skimming ladle went soaring up in a curve. The roof of the furnace shed shot up and away.
It come to me this was the end of time, but instead of the souls of this world took up in Rapture it was the things of this world carried off into the sky.
“It’s a twister,” Tom said, “a little twister. Run!”
“I ain’t running,” I said. I planted my feet in the mud and faced the ugly thing. If it was my doom I might as well look at the thing fair and square.
Tom stayed with me. I guess he figured it wasn’t any use to run either. He held up his stick as though it was a sword. The twister come on closer, and it was like looking into a furnace of burning water. The wind raged with madness. My hat was jerked off and sucked into the wind. The handkerchief in my sleeve was pulled out and flung into the black whirl. My blouse was covered with spots of mud and my face was too. My hair was wet and my skirt was soaked. My blouse had pulled out at the waist and my Sunday shoes was wet and muddy.
As the twister crossed the branch we could hear it sucking up water. Even above the roar of the rain and wind it sounded like the sky was swallowing through a big straw. All the water that fell as rain was being pulled up to the sky again.
“No use to hurry now,” I said. We walked through the pasture, splashing in big puddles. Tom’s suit was covered with mud and his new collar had melted. I held his arm and we walked like a couple promenading through the streets of Greenville. “Perfect weather for a stroll,” I said.
When we got to the house Pa was standing on the porch, just out of the drip. “Was you caught in a flashtide?” he said.
“We got chased by your bull,” I said, “and by the Devil hisself.” Tom and me busted out laughing. Looking at ourselves on the porch, there wasn’t anything else to do.
CHAPTER THREE
While Tom and me was courting, my brother Locke come back from the army on furlough, and his first night home we stayed up late. Locke was always a mighty talker, when he got going. He had served as a nurse on a hospital ship at Havana, and he had lived in Washington, D.C., and in the Philippines. He brought me a toy rickshaw from Tokyo. I fixed dinner for the whole family.
“Do you go to church in the army?” I asked him.
“Most of the time there’s no church to go to,” Locke said. He had never attended services with much enthusiasm when he was home. I was just needling him a little, to see what he would say.
“I read the Bible from time to time,” he said, “and a book a friend gave me called Science and Health.”
“Why that’s Christian Science!” Pa said.
“It’s interesting,” Locke said. “It makes a lot of sense.”
“I’ve heard it’s h-h-h-heathenism,” Joe said.
I poured more coffee for David and Pa and a little for myself.
“It’s not heathenism,” Locke said.
“Then what is it?” Pa said.
“It teaches thought is more important than anything else,” Locke said. “Afflictions of the body are mostly in the mind.”
“That’s foolishness,” Florrie said. “Locke, you always did have a quair streak.”
“Have you studied it?” Locke said to her.
“No I ain’t, but I don’t need to. If I’m constipated it’s not in my mind but in my guts.”
“How can you criticize what you haven’t read?” Locke said.
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor,” Lily said, “and was studying medicine.” She stuffed her handkerchief in her sleeve.
“I am studying medicine,” Locke said, “every way I can.”
Everybody at the table was silent for a second. It was early summer and still not dark outside. A whippoorwill started calling from the trees out near the barn.
“You have seen a lot of the world,” David said.
“What do the Rocky Mountains look like?” Lily said. “I have always wanted to see the Rocky Mountains.”
“They are mighty pretty,” Locke said, “and mighty rocky.” Everybody laughed. “But when I crossed them on the train I wasn’t thinking about scenery. I was feeling too hungry.”
“Don’t the army f-f-f-feed you?” Joe said.
“They gave me money for the trip, but I spent it all in Washington. I bought medical books, and it took the last dollar I had to buy the train ticket for San Francisco.”
“What did you live on?” Florrie said.
“I had forty-three cents left and bought some cheese and soda crackers in the station. I was going to make them last all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I figured if I set quiet on the train and watched the scenery and drunk plenty of water I could make it to the ship. But it takes almost a week to get from one coast to the other. I rationed myself to five crackers and a slice of cheese each meal. When the other people went to the dining car I stayed in my seat and ate soda crackers and hurried to the fountain for a drink of water.”
“You must have got constipated,” Florrie said.
“I got constipated and I got all tight with gas,” Locke said. “But that wasn’t the worst of it. By the time we had got past St. Louis and approaching Kansas City all my crackers and cheese was gone. I had to cross the whole West with nothing to eat.”
“Did you pray?” Lily said. “For something else to eat?” She patted the lace collar of her lemon-colored dress.
“I prayed that the trip would be over and I would get to my ship. I set in a kind of daze all the way across Utah and Nevada. You never saw such an empty place. Sometimes I looked out at the stars above the icy peaks. Once I looked down and saw the sparkle of a stream way below as we crossed a trestle that seemed half a mile high.
“I must have dozed off, for suddenly I woke to a kind of humming and roaring. It was completely dark outside the window. I had the feeling it was time for daylight, but there was nothing but blackness outside. The roar was like a high wind.
“Suddenly the train shot out into daylight and I saw the sun on peaks above. We had been going through one of these snow sheds the Chinese coolies built to keep the deep snows from blocking the train. We had been in a kind of tunnel made of timbers.
“We come down into the valley and passed all these orchards. It was late summer and you could see people picking peaches. Far as you could look was one orchard after another. We stopped at a little town for about a minute and this woman got on and set down across from me. She put a bag beside her and took out this golden ripe peach. It was the biggest peach I’d ever seen.
“Sh
e spread a handkerchief over her lap and took a little knife out of her purse and begun to peel the peach. It was so ripe juice run off the knife even as she lifted away the long curl of skin. I watched her eat the peach in slices. When she finished that peach she took another out of the bag and begun to peel it.
“In less than an hour we got to Sacramento and the woman left her seat. She put the handkerchief and peelings in the bag and left it. I waited for her to come back, and tried to figure how many more peaches there might be in the bag. The train started pulling out and still she had not come back. I waited until we was almost outside the town, and looked up and down the aisle, then grabbed the bag. Under the peelings and wet handkerchief there was five more peaches, big and ripe and firm. I held the bag on my lap and ate one like it was an apple. Juice run down my chin but I didn’t mind. When I finished that I had another. By the time we reached Oakland I had eat them all.”
“And your constipation was cured,” Florrie said.
“It sure was,” Locke said. “It sure was.”
“Who wants some popcorn?” I said.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I tricked Brother Joe?” Locke said.
“About a th-th-thousand times,” Joe said.
“Tom hasn’t heard it,” I said. Tom had been setting at the corner of the table and hadn’t said a word.
“It won’t take but a second,” Locke said. “Remember the ditch in the lower end of the field, before Pa put the pipe in there? Joe and I was coming back from fishing and it had got dark.”
“I’ve heard this story,” Lily said. “It’s a mean story.”
“Well David hasn’t heard it, and neither has Tom,” Locke said. He took a sip of his coffee. “I had a string of fish in one hand and my pole in the other. And when I got to where the ditch was I took a little jump, like I had crossed the ditch, and said, ‘Watch out for the ditch, Joe.’ Then I jumped the trench in a long leap, quiet as I could. Behind me Joe took a leap from where I had told him to and landed right in the water.”
“Wasn’t you nice?” Florrie said. She looked at Tom. “That’s the kind of family we are. You better watch out for Locke.”
The Truest Pleasure Page 3