The Truest Pleasure

by Robert Morgan

  For some reason I decided to walk up the hill behind the springhouse to see if there was more cardinal flowers under the hemlocks there. And then I went on around the junipers and come back to the house from the other side. As I stepped on the porch I could hear their voices in the kitchen. I stopped without opening the door, and saw them through the west kitchen window.

  Tom stood before a pan on the table sponging hisself off. His shirt was open and he had loosened his pants. It looked like he had lathered his face to shave and Florrie had come in on him.

  “Where does Ginny keep her blueing?” Florrie said, giggling.

  “In the cupboard there,” Tom said.

  He turned to hand her the blueing, and grabbed at his pants that was unbuttoned.

  Florrie looked at him as though she was studying. “Some women like hairy men,” she said. “But I always preferred ones that was strong, however much wool they have on them.” And then she slapped his belly right over the navel. It was something she used to do to David when they was courting.

  I felt like I had been hit by lightning, and waited to see what happened next. My skin prickled and stung with heat, as if sweat was hurting to get out through my pores. I didn’t want to see any more, but I couldn’t move.

  Tom reached out like he was going to touch Florrie’s neck with his left hand, and then he stopped. “I’ll just finish washing up,” he said with a laugh.

  Florrie laughed too, and hurried back outside.

  I waited at the front door for a few seconds before going in.

  Since Tom and me wasn’t speaking then I never said anything to him. And later I tried to see it was an accident—which it was—her coming in on him in the kitchen. I told myself it didn’t amount to a thing. When people are living and working close such embarrassments are bound to happen. I tried to let the sweetness of the meetings touch the rest of my life. Wouldn’t make sense, if everyday life was bitter. What good was the revival Spirit if it couldn’t soak out through the rest of my life too?

  After the molasses was made that fall Tom started working to improve the place again. Even before the corn was gathered he started widening the road. He kept working just as hard as he had in the garden and in the fields. He took a shovel and dug into the bank of the road in the steep places, and he piled the dirt on the outside shoulder. After years of hauling and bumping on the rocks and puddles the road was nothing but ruts. In places rain had washed right across the tracks.

  The first third of the road followed the old wagon trace right down to the original homestead where Pa was raised. It had been cut almost a hundred years before through mealy yellow dirt with plows and dragpans. Runoff from the draw above sliced through its soft ruts. Tom dug a ditch from there down to the bend.

  When Pa had built the house by the river he plowed and shoveled a road around the hill above the spring. The ledge he cut was just wide enough for a wagon. One wrong step and the horse would stumble over the edge. That was where the most widening had to be done, above the spring.

  After the road swung out of the woods beyond the spring it followed the curving hill to the turning yard above the house. It passed the strawberry beds and Joe’s Poplar then forked, and one set of tracks run through the gate past the junipers to the wagon shed by the crib. The other followed the fence out to the log barn. Both tracks continued to the bottomland fields, the first dropping down the bank past the hogpen, the other sloping along the upper edge of the fields toward the river.

  Tom made a new gate where our road entered the Green River Road. We had always had a pole gap there, and every time we drove out or in the poles had to be took down and then put back in place. It was a job I hated, especially in wet weather when the poles got wet and slippery. Tom dug out space at the entrance to turn a wagon around in. It looked like the entrance to a fine estate. He never said a thing to me or Pa about his plans. He just went ahead and did it.

  He built the gate itself out of oak slats. It was at least ten feet wide and strengthened with crossbraces. The gate swung on a locust post in iron loops that Tom greased with wagon grease. A blacksmith in town made a latch that could be worked from either side. There was no lock, but a chain could be padlocked around the latch. A guy wire from the top of the post held it level and light. The gate could be pushed by your little finger. He painted the whole thing dark green.

  I didn’t speak to Tom in those weeks, and I was busy with the baby. But I took an interest in what he did. Hadn’t anybody worked on the road in my lifetime, except for stopgap digging and filling in puddles. It was amazing to see the difference the work made. The old section of the road must have been the easiest to rework. All he had to do was dig out the ditch on both sides and throw dirt to crown the middle. The ground of the first fifty feet was hard red clay, but after the road turned at the hill and passed a big poplar it run through loose yellow soil and rotten rock. The ground was shiny with pieces of isinglass and sparkled as if a mirror had been crushed and scattered. The ground crunched on the shovel. Where the tracks had washed in summer rains Tom dumped rock gathered from the pasture. He didn’t want to buy pipe for culverts, and I guess he figured the rock would do the trick if he reworked the road every four or five years.

  Below the big poplar, sycamores growed down the wash of the gully. The road there was covered with their seed balls which got crushed to a golden mat by wagon wheels. Sycamores will plant theirselves all down a valley, they drop so many seeds.

  The curve above the old homestead had a wet-weather spring, and after the least rain the place got muddy with seepage. I reckon Tom hauled more loads of gravel to pack there than anyplace else. He shoveled gravel and sand out of the edge of the river and carried them in the wagon to the road. He broke rocks in the pasture with a sledgehammer and pounded the pieces into the roadbed. I think he figured how to do it as he went along.

  I walked up the road and saw what he was doing when I took Jewel to school the first day of the term. I put on her new blue coat and carried the baby. Moody stayed with Pa. Where Tom had cleared the brush and leveled and widened the road so much I hardly recognized it. You could look out over the branch valley and the pastures to the church and schoolhouse. I could see down to the school spring where boys was already fighting.

  Beyond the spring the tracks run through solid clay above the strawberry beds, except for one spot where the hill seemed made of gravel. I thought the Indians had chipped arrowheads there. The ground was sharp with bits of quartz and flint. They must have worked on that very spot. Many of the rocks Tom dug he spread on lower sections of the road and in the turning ground near the house. Digging in the clay was like carving cold butter, always chilled, melting at the top in rain. He leveled out a place wide as two horses and wagons end to end. And then he built another gate above the house and painted it the same dark green. I didn’t say anything to him, but I thought it looked like the entrance to a rich man’s estate. Tom had an eye for making things look right, not fancy, but solid and prosperous.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The winter of 1905–06 was one of the coldest and snowiest I ever saw. Usually in the mountains we have some hard freezing weather and a few snows, but they don’t last long. A whole night of snow will melt by the middle of next day. The white frosty world of morning will be a muddy thaw by evening, on the southside of any bank or hill. Old-timers used to talk about seeing the river freeze over when they was young, and driving wagons to mill on the ice. But I had never seen such. You know how old-timers like to brag to the young about the awful times of their youth. They like to say they’ve seen snow over the fence rails for weeks, and freeze so deep it got taters in pits, and now they said there was signs those times was coming again.

  All my life I heard Pa talk about Cold Friday when the sun never did come up and chickens didn’t leave the roost. He said the mill froze to the creek by a beard of ice, and the fireplace wouldn’t hardly give any heat.

  That winter there was snow in December while Tom was working on
the road, but it disappeared by the next day and didn’t stop his work more than a few hours. But in early January, after he had finished the gates, it snowed again, two or three inches, and a bitter freeze turned everything to ice. The snow sealed over the ground, and the top of the snow crumbled like stale bread when you walked on it. The cows in the pasture had to step careful on the crust to keep from sliding, and they cropped the tufts of grass sticking through. Tom went out and spread tops for them at the edge of the pasture. The stack of corn tops was so weighted with ice and snow it was hard to pull stalks from it.

  After a day or two of setting inside Tom went back to work as usual. He never could stand to stay in where I was working. He called daytime “the cook’s time,” meaning it was the time only the cook was supposed to be in the house. I reckon he figured it was wise to bring in more firewood, in case it snowed again.

  Joe come by and said he was having trouble reaching his traps because of ice along the river. Pa put an extra sweater under his coat when he walked to the road to get the mail. Every time the younguns went out in the snow they got wet and started coughing. I had to make them stay inside. Moody was playing cowboys and Indians and he kept saying there was outlaws outside. “Look Mama, they’re hiding behind the smokehouse,” he would say. “I’m going out to kill them.”

  “You stay here,” I would say. “You don’t want to kill anybody, and besides it’s too cold.”

  “What if they shoot us?” Moody said.

  “Maybe the outlaws will freeze,” I said.

  Exactly a week after the first snow I got up early and went to the kitchen. Pa was reading his Bible at the table. Tom had took the buckets to the barn to milk. I stepped on the back porch to grind more coffee and saw this glow in the sky, a faint, almost blue haze, as if from a lighted city just beyond the mountains.

  “There’s a light in the sky,” I said to Pa back inside.

  “Snowlight,” Pa said.

  “What does it mean?” I said.

  “It means there’s some condition in the air that shines like the northern lights and makes snow.”

  I had heard Pa talk about snowlight all my life, but I never believed in it. Didn’t make sense a light coming from somewhere else could tell you it was going to snow. It wasn’t daylight yet, and it wasn’t dark either. The glow outside made me shiver as I fixed oatmeal. When Tom come in from milking and feeding the stock I saw the first flakes brush against the window. I was nursing Muir at the table. “This is wash day,” I said. There was a basket of diapers on the porch that needed to be washed.

  “If it snows I’ll go get Florrie to do the wash,” Tom said.

  “I’ll do the wash myself,” I said.

  “No, I will,” Tom said. But he didn’t look at me. I didn’t say anything else. I knowed that soon as he finished eating he would turn the horse out to pasture. While he was gone I put Muir in the cradle and got on my shawl and tied a scarf around my head.

  “Can I go?” Moody said.

  “You stay here by the fire,” I said.

  “I want to fight the outlaws,” he said.

  “You stay here and fight the cold,” I said.

  “Moody told a big fat lie,” Jewel said.

  “I did not,” Moody said and hit her on the arm.

  I took matches and cobs and kindling out to the washpot. To start the fire I had to protect the match from falling snow. Even so, the first match got hit by a flake and hissed out. I cupped my hands around the next flame. Soon as the kindling caught I throwed on cobs and run to the woodshed for wood. I carried a big pile to the washpot and got a crackling fire going.

  By the time I had carried a third bucket of water from the springhouse Tom come back from the barn. When he saw me filling the washpot he hollered, “I said I will do the wash.”

  “No, I will,” I said, and started back to the spring for another bucket. The trail was slick with new snow already.

  “Then I’ll go after Florrie,” he said.

  “No you won’t,” I said. “I’m doing the wash.”

  “You’ll kill yourself, Ginny,” he said.

  “If it’s so dangerous, why ask Florrie to do it?” I said. “Don’t you care if she kills herself?”

  “You are a fool, Ginny,” he said. He followed me to the springhouse and grabbed one of the buckets of water out of my hand. Some of it splashed on me. “Now you will freeze,” he said.

  We walked back to the fire and dumped our buckets in the pot. It was beginning to steam, and steam mixed with smoke made a column that rose straight into the falling flakes. I had never seen it snow so hard. The air was full of white blossoms and you felt you was rising into the fizz of flakes. I couldn’t hardly see the house across the yard. I throwed more sticks on the fire.

  “It’s too cold for you to be out here,” Tom said.

  “But it’s not too cold for Florrie?” I said. I had learned a trick in arguing with Tom that always worked. Instead of acting mad I would be calm and cheerful. He couldn’t stand to see me smile when he was mad. He depended on me getting angry too.

  “I’d be ashamed,” he said. “A woman with a nursing baby has to take care of herself.”

  “But you don’t mind if Florrie gets sick?” I said, and smiled.

  “I’d be ashamed,” he said.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster.

  I was going back to the porch for the diapers, but he stalked ahead and grabbed the basket. I thought at first he was going to take them out of my reach, but he hurried with the load to the wash table. He dropped the basket on the planks and walked away without another word. The snow was coming so fast it fell in my eyes like gnats, and I had to keep brushing snow off my cheeks.

  All morning the sky fell like pollen and big crumbs of sugar. I fed the fire under the washpot and smoke pushed its way up through the snow. Sometimes a breeze would sway the smoke into my face and then jerk it away again. I scrubbed diapers and clothes in the steaming tubs until my hands and arms was pink. I figured if I worked hard enough I would stay warm.

  The snow come straight down, not reaching under the hemlocks. But the clothes I had hung on the line was beginning to freeze. First they got stiff like they had a lot of starch, then they got hard as boards. Fins of snow built up on top of the clothesline.

  I dumped another basket of stinking diapers into the hot water, and thought, This is one load Florrie won’t touch. She has got into my house, into my kitchen, into my clothes, but this is one day she won’t need to cross the hill. As I stirred the boiling diapers with the troubling stick I felt a child’s delight in getting my way. And I guess I was thrilled by the snow too, and the feeling of closed-in-ness inside the falling snow.

  With the white world descending over me it seemed my troubles was being buried and smoothed over, just like gullies and stubble and muddy roads and the manure pile in front of the barn got covered and made clean by new flakes. After hanging most of the diapers on the line I took a few inside to stretch by the fire. If it kept snowing all would have to be brought in to thaw and dry, a dozen at a time, by the fireplace and kitchen stove.

  It felt too hot in the house. After the flush of the morning’s work the house was smoky and dark. I needed to nurse Muir soon, but I was happy to get back outside after a few minutes, into the pure whiteness of the storm.

  At sundown I went out again to get more clothes. The sky was clear and wind off the hill was smoking cold. Snow tossed around devils and tall sails in the pasture. The air was filled with crystals that glittered and swirled in the late sun. Everything in sight was turning gold. I felt giddy in the light and wind.

  Soon as I put the clothes inside I went out to gather eggs. The ground from barn to chickenhouse was pure untracked snow. The manure pile steamed with inner heat, and in a day would melt away the snow on its sides. The low roof of the chickenhouse was piled like a layer cake with last week’s snow and the new snow.

  It was awful dark in the crib as I shelled
corn into a basket. The smell of shucks and cobs was sweet in the air that cut through cracks. I felt weakness in my bones, and tightness in my throat. I hurried to the chickenhouse with the corn.

  I scattered corn on the floor and gathered eggs into the basket. Reaching into the nests was like searching for secrets. Where a hen was setting you had to reach under her and feel which of the warm eggs was just a china egg. Real eggs was heavy.

  Suddenly I sneezed and the hens started cackling and flapping. There was dust in the air, and the more they fluttered the worse the dust would be. I tried to hold my breath, but found it was short. I imagined mites and lice in the air that got stirred up. A chickenhouse smells so sweet it makes you sick. And chickens are so hot-blooded they warm it up in all but the coldest weather. I gathered nineteen eggs in the basket and hurried out.

  As I walked to the house I was suddenly dizzy and my legs and arms hurt. It’s the low temperature, I told myself. When it gets this cold strength drains away. I held a sleeve to my mouth, but couldn’t see that way and had to inhale the ether-cold wind. I almost slipped on the snow, and kept losing my balance.

  Even while I put on supper I felt hot and flustered. The cold had tired me more than I realized. I would start to do something and then forget what I meant to do. I would begin to speak, then wonder later if I really said it. Halfway through the meal there was an ache in my bones and I wished I could go to bed.

  I tried to feed Muir some mashed potatoes, but my hand trembled as I held the little spoon.

  “Are you sick?” Pa said.

  “Mama, your face is red,” Jewel said.

  Moody come over and pulled my sleeve. “Are you sick, Mama?”

  “No, I ain’t sick,” I said.

  “You look like the outlaws shot you,” Moody said.

  But things was spinning around, and I couldn’t even clear up the dishes. It was as though things started swelling and shrinking wherever I looked. The lamplight got brighter, then dim. At some point Tom led me to the bed.