by James Still
“I ain’t charging my neighbors nothing,” Father said. “I ain’t a regular horse doctor, and got no right to charge. Anyhow, I don’t reckon I’ve got a grain o’ use for the colt.”
Words were great upon my tongue, but with Clabe and Oates there, I could not speak them. My hope seemed a bloated grain of corn on a diseased ear, large and expectant, yet having no soundness beneath.
“I’d be right glad if you’d take him,” Clabe said, knowing Father was stalling.
Father looked at Clabe. “If you’re so powerful shore you want to git rid o’ him, I’ll drap around some fine pretty day and fotch him home. Some far day when he’s weaned off and hain’t bridle-scared.”
Clabe and Father went into the barn. Oates spoke to me, showing his tushes. There was anger in his face, sitting dark as a thunderhead in his eyes. I knew he was angry about the colt, not wanting to give him up. “Paw’s got a dram hid in the loft, I reckon,” he said. He walked toward the lot gate, turning to look back at me, and I followed, going out by the pen where two razor-backs waded up to their flanks in slop mud. We went out into an old apple orchard, walking side by side. There were mushrooms growing pale and meaty under the trees. Oates kicked them as he walked, shattering the woody flesh of their cups.
“I heered tell mushrooms is good eating,” I said, stepping carefully among them. “I’d like to try a mess cooked up in grease.”
“They ain’t nothing but devil’s snuffboxes,” Oates said, drawing his lips down sourly. “They’re poison as rattlesnake spit.”
A wren was nesting somewhere in the orchard. We heard her fussing in the thick leaves, and we heard a cat sharpening her claws on the bark of a tree.
“Looky yonder at that there pieded cat setting in the crotch o’ that tree,” Oates said, his tushes breaking from his lips. “Paw wouldn’t take a war pension for her, but she ain’t worth a tick. She wouldn’t catch a rat if’n they was a cheese-ball hung around hit’s neck. Oncet I took holt of her tail and wrung it right good. Now she has to climb a tree to sit down. You’ve seed nothing like that, I bet.”
“I heered tell of a boy who’s got a store-bought leg,” I said. “He whittles on it for meanness, and oncet he driv a sprig in with a hammer, and a woman had a spell and fainted.”
“That hain’t nothing,” Oates said, his lips turned accusingly. “I seed a man with one eye natural, and the other hanging down on one side of his face in a meat-sack like a turkey gobbler’s snout. Ever time he winked that sack would jump a grain.”
“I couldn’t stood to look at it,” I said. “It would be a pity-sake to have an eyeball growed like that.”
Oates stopped under a tree, his eyes hard and his voice nettled. “I heered tell you Baldridges is spotted ’round the liver,” he said.
“It’s a lie-tale you heered,” I said.
“It’s a gospel truth,” he said. “I seed you run away when the colt was a-borning. And I brung you down here to show you nobody’s going to take him, now nor no time coming.”
I stood there looking at him, my eyes watering with anger, and for the moment I saw nothing except his tushes sticking out of his mouth, white and hateful, and his hands doubled into a rusty knot. Then he struck me in the face, and I struck back, wildly though with all my strength. We fought, swapping blows silently. Oates’s nose began to bleed. He stepped back, his face twisted in fury. He searched the ground around us, picking up a stick of applewood fallen from a tree.
“I’ll kill you graveyard dead,” he said.
I did not move, and the stick fell swiftly upon my head, shattering in my ears like thunder. My knees doubled under me. Oates spoke, but I could not rise, and his words came as out of a fog, having no meaning at the moment though the words were clear and separate. Later, I knew what he said, looking back and remembering.
“Hain’t no yellow-dog coward Baldridge going to git my colt,” he said. “That there one’s belonging to me, and I’d break its neck afore I’d let him be took off.”
After a little time I stood up, feeling the knot on my head. Oates was gone. The wren was worrying among the leaves, chittering and fussing, knowing the cat sat in the tree crotch motionless as a charm. I walked toward the barn, not caring now whether I crushed the mushrooms underfoot.
Father stood with Clabe in the lot, looking at the colt. It was stretched upon the ground, its legs dry and stiff. The mare whinnied, rubbing her nose over the colt’s body. I saw its eyes were open and staring. There was no life in them. The colt was dead.
“He musta got hurt a-borning,” Clabe said.
Father was ready to go. He looked at my swollen face, though he said nothing, and we set off walking down the creek, keeping to the left bank where the cows had broken out a path in the shape of their bodies.
I walked along bitter with loss, comforted only by the cruel wisdom that the colt had been spared Oates’s rusty hands. Being seven on that day, and bruised and sore from fighting, the years rested like an enormous burden on my swollen eyes. We went on, not stopping or speaking until we saw our hill standing apart from all the others.
Mole-Bane
Our house burned in March and we lived that spring in the smokehouse, sleeping in two beds pushed close into the corners, and with strings of peppers and onions hanging from the rafters overhead. We planted our garden early, using the seeds Mother had hoarded, but it was long before the vegetables were ready for eating. Mother cooked under a shed Father built against the house. There was no abundance of food and we ate all that was set before us, with never a crumb left. Father told us the mines were closed in the head-waters of the Kentucky River and there was hunger in the camps. We believed that we fared well and did not complain.
Father’s face was thin as a saw blade, and it seemed he had grown taller, towering over us. His muscles were bunched on his arms, blue-veined and not soft-cushioned now with flesh. He went hunting, searching through the sedge coves and swampy hollows, never wasting a shot. We ate squirrel and rabbit, broiled over hot coals, for there was not a smidgin of grease left in the stone jar. The handful of bullets was hoarded in a leather pouch. Never more than three were taken for the rifle-gun, and Father rarely missed.
With spring upon the hills, it was strange now to go out and kill in the new-budded wood. The squirrels moved sluggishly, carrying their young. Rabbits huddled in the sedge clumps, swollen and stupid. Once Father brought a rusty-eared rabbit home, setting Euly to clean it. When she came on four little ones in its warm belly, she cried out in fear of what she had done, flung the bloody knife into the dirt, and ran away into the low pasture. She stayed there all day crying in the stubble and never ate wild meat again.
We had come through to spring, but Mother was the leanest of us all, and the baby cried in the night when there was no milk. Mother ate a little more now than the rest of us, for the baby’s sake, eating as though for shame while we were not there to see, fearing that we might not understand, that we might think she was taking more than her share.
The garden grew as by a miracle, and the blackberry winter passed with the early April winds, doing no harm. Beans broke their waxen leaves out of hoe-turned furrows, bearing the husk of the seeds with them. Sweet corn unfurled tight young blades from weed mould, timid to night chill, growing slowly and darkly. Crows hung on blue air, surveying the patch, but the garden was too near the house. Our shouts and swift running through the tended ground kept them frightened and filled with wonder.
Before the garden was ready, Mother and Euly gathered a mess of plantain and speckled jack, and we had salet greens cooked with meat rind. The beans were still young and tender, and the potatoes thin-skinned and small. We watched the beans grow, measuring them day by day with joints of our fingers, and dug under the potato stalks carefully with our hands so as not to bruise the watery roots. We picked off the potato bugs and scraped their egg patches from the leaves. Fletch saved the bugs in a fruit jar, pinching off buds to feed them when we were not looking.
We went
out into the garden in the cool of the evening, turning the vines to look for beetles on the underleaves. Father would pull off a bean and break it impatiently between his fingers, looking hungry enough to eat it raw.
“I figger they’re fair ready for biling,” he would say. “It’s time we had a mess.”
“They ain’t nigh ready,” Mother would say. “When a bean snaps like you’d broke a stick, hit’s time. They ain’t had their full growth.”
One morning we found the heaped trail of a mole across the garden, damp with new earth. Father was angry, stamping the ridge of its path with his feet, packing the ground down hard where it went among the bean vines. He whittled two green walnut sprouts, shaved the bark until they were brown with sap, and drove them in the farther ends of the trail.
“That walnut juice ought to git in its eyes and turn it back,” Father said, laughing a little savagely and rubbing his hands in the dirt.
Euly begged Father to dig the mole out. “If’n I had me a moleskin, I’d make a powder-rag out o’ it,” she said. “When I get me some face powder, I’d have a mole-rag to rub it on with.”
Father looked darkly at her, and she ran out of the garden, ashamed of her vain-wishing.
On the day the men came from Blackjack, Mother was washing clothes, and Father swung the battling stick for her on a chestnut stump. Euly saw the men first as they climbed the hill from Little Carr Creek, and she ran to tell us. “They’s three men a-coming, and they got mine caps setting on their heads, and two of them has got pokes.”
We went around the smokehouse and looked down. They were still a quarter off, and their legs were awkward like a hound’s against the steep climb. Mother went back to the tubs. Father waited, shading his eyes from the sun-ball, trying to see who they were. And he knew them long before they turned over the last short curl of the path, and he knew why they had come.
“Hit’s Fruit Middleton and Ab Stevall and Sid Pindlar,” Father said.
The men came into the yard, looking at the gray pile of ashes and the charred ends of rafters where our house had burned.
“We heered about your burning,” Fruit said. “Hit’s a puore pity with times so hard and all the mines closed up tight as a jug. We’d a come and raised you a house, but we heered you was living in the smokehouse and gitting along peart.”
“We’re so packed-up inside we do all our setting out here on the ground,” Father said. “We got one chair, but it’s holding a washtub.”
“Aye, God,” Fruit said. “We’ve done so much setting these last eight months it’s like pulling eyeteeth climbing that hill.”
“Setting and hearing our bellies growl,” Sid said, dragging the poke he held back and forth across the ground. “The grace o’ God tuk us through the winter. We’ve come out skin and bone. We would a planted a garden if they’d been any seeds. They was et up, and anyhow there ain’t a fittin place to drap seeds in the camp with all the beasts scratching and digging.”
The men glanced out across the garden, now thick with growing, and with the furrow-ridges lost among the leaves. Father slouched down, looking worried.
“We was thinking you could spare us a mess o’ beans out o’ your patch,” Fruit said. “Our womenfolks and children are right mealy in the face.”
“Begging comes hard for us who’s used to working for our bread,” Ab said.
“The beans ain’t half-growed yet,” Father said. “They ain’t nigh filled out.”
“We hain’t asking you to give us nothing,” Fruit said, the wrinkles around his eyes drawing tight. “You’ll be paid when the mines open. Aye, God, we ain’t asking for a handout. Our folks need some green victuals.”
“They ain’t nigh ready,” Father said again, and he trod up and down in his tracks without moving from where he stood. Then he looked off down the hill, saying quietly and sadly: “I got my first hungry folks to turn down. I never yet turned a body down. Go out and see what you can find fittin to eat.”
The men walked out toward the garden. Mother was hanging clothes behind the smokehouse and she saw them jump over the split-paling fence, their pokes flaring up in the wind. Father went around to the washtubs, standing there helpless, not knowing what to say. Mother began to cry silently, saying nothing.
“You can’t turn down folks that’s starving,” Father said at last, and he knew his words sounded foolish and with no weight. He began to hang a tubful of clothes on the line, spreading them out clumsily until it sagged, and the shirt-sleeves were barely clear of the ground. He tightened the line, drawing the raveled cord with all his strength.
The men came out of the garden after a spell. They came with their pokes bulging at one end. We knew they had picked every bean, that not one was left.
“Our womenfolks will be right proud to taste a mess o’ green victuals,” Fruit said. “You’ll shorely git your pay when the mines open.”
Sid held his poke up and laughed. “You got a right fair garden,” he said. “I seed a brash o’ blossoms on them vines. In a leetle time you’ll have all you kin eat.”
They had turned to go when Ab suddenly pulled something out of his pocket and threw it upon the grass. It was a dead mole.
“I dug this varmint out o’ the garden patch,” he said. “I seed where he’d holed up under a pile o’ dirt and I scratched him out. They ain’t nothing that can tear up a garden like a mole varmint. You ought to plant a leetle dogtick around. Hit’s the best mole-bane I ever heered tell of.”
Ab hurried down the hill to catch the others, the rocks rattling under his feet. Euly grabbed up the mole and was gone with it before Father could stop her, running swiftly around the house. And Mother ran too, swinging her arms in dismay, for she had heard the clothesline break, and the clean garments now lay miserably in the dirt.
Journey to the Forks
“Hit’s a far piece,” Lark said. “I’m afraid we won’t make it afore dusty dark.” We squatted down in the road and rested on the edge of a clay rut. Lark set his poke on the crust of a nag’s track, and I lifted the saddlebags off my shoulder. The leather was damp underneath.
“We ought ne’er thought to be scholars,” Lark said.
The sun-ball had turned over the hill above Riddle Hargin’s farm and it was hot in the valley. Grackles walked the top rail of a fence, breathing with open beaks. They halted and looked at us, their legs wide apart and rusty backs arched.
“I knowed you’d get dolesome ere we reached Troublesome Creek,” I said. “I knowed it was a-coming.”
Lark drew his thin legs together and rested his chin on his knees. “If’n I was growed up to twelve like you,” he said, “I’d go along peart. I’d not mind my hand.”
“Writing hain’t done with your left hand,” I said. “It won’t be agin’ you larning.”
“I oughtn’t to tried busting that dinnymite cap,” Lark said. “Hit’s a hurting sight to see my left hand with two fingers gone.”
“Before long it’ll seem plumb natural,” I said. “In a little spell you’ll never give a thought to it.”
The grackles called harshly from the rail fence.
“We’d better eat the apples while we’re setting,” I said. Lark opened the poke holding a Wilburn and a Henry Back. “You take the Wilburn,” I told him, for it was the largest. “I choose the Henry Back because it pops when I bite it.”
Lark wrapped the damp seeds in a bit of paper torn from the poke. I got up, raising the saddlebag. The grackles flew lazily off the rails, settling into a linn beside the road, their dark wings brushing the leaves like shadows.
“It’s nigh on to six miles to the forks,” I said.
Lark asked to carry the saddlebag a ways, so I might rest. I told him, “This load would break your bones down.” I let him carry my brogans though. He tied the strings into a bow and hung them about his neck.
We walked on, stepping among hardened clumps of mud and wheel-brightened rocks. Cowbells clanked in a redbud thicket on the hills, and a calf bellowed. A bir
d hissed in a persimmon tree. I couldn’t see it, but Lark glimpsed its flicking tail feathers.
“A cherrybird’s nigh tame as a pet crow,” Lark said. “Once I found one setting her some eggs and she never flew away. She was that trusting.”
Lark was tiring now. He stumped his sore big toe twice, crying a mite.
“You’ll have to stop dragging yore feet or put on shoes,” I said.
“My feet would get raw as beef if’n I wore shoes all the way till dark,” Lark complained. “My brogans is full o’ pinchers. If’n I had me a drap o’ water on my toe, hit would feel a sight better.”
Farther on we found a spring drip. Lark held his foot under the cool stream. He wanted to scramble up the bank to find where the water seeped from the ground. “Thar might be a spring lizard sticking hits head out o’ the mud,” he said. I wouldn’t give in to it, so we went on, the sun-ball in our faces and the road curving beyond sight.
“I’ve heered tell they do quare things at the fork school,” Lark said, “yit I’ve forgot what it was they done.”
“They’ve got a big bell hung square up on some poles,” I said, “and they ring it before they get up o’ mornings and when they eat. They got a little sheep bell to ring in the schoolhouse before and betwixt books. Dee Finley tuk a month’s schooling there, and he told me a passel. Dee says it’s a sight on earth the washing and scrubbing and sweeping they do. Says they might nigh take the hide off o’ floors a-washing them so much.”
“I bet hit’s the truth,” Lark said.
“I’ve heard Mommy say it’s not healthy keeping dust breshed in the air, and a-damping floors every day,” I said. “And Dee says they’ve got a passel o’ cows in a barn. They take and wet a broom and scrub every cow before they milk. Dee reckons they’ll soon be brushing them cows’ teeth.”
“I bet hit’s the truth,” Lark said.