Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “Did you?” She arranged the orders into two piles, secured them with clothespins.

  “I thought it was interesting that she was still there.”

  She shrugged. “Where else would a nun be?”

  Then David arrived, hungry for supper. And we never spoke of it again.

  Unlike me, my mother did not look back.

  AGAIN school. Nine months. Like a pregnancy, I thought. Nine months to incubate knowledge and give birth to a bit of paper that said I could advance one level. Well, no matter. By now I was a skilled survivor.

  Our personal and social development progressed rapidly these days. We were encouraged to turn our attention outside the classroom, into the big world. With other private schools in the area, we went to Audubon Society meetings, Sierra Club gatherings, State Historical Society lectures, to planetariums and art museums. We took a long bus ride to view the treasures of ancient Egypt, small bits of gold we barely saw as we hurried past. We hiked to special meadows to study wildflowers and identify edible weeds (each of us with a copy of Euell Gibbons in her backpack). We took overnight trips to battlefields, and national monuments, and cemeteries, and the childhood homes of presidents. We camped in mosquito-ridden national parks with strange slippery rock formations and deep river gorges.

  And sports, all kinds of sports. There were whole weekends of competition followed by awards banquets. I was voted the Regional Most Promising Athlete and wore a small silver charm around my neck. The silver had been badly cast, so that the running figure seemed to be fleeing in screaming terror.

  There were picnics and hayrides and bonfires, all carefully chaperoned. There were homecoming dances and holiday dances, spring dances decorated by flowers, and autumn dance floors lined with piled pumpkins and silver-beige stalks of dried corn. On Sundays, after church and midday dinner, we went to promenade concerts in the park pavilion; with crowds of other young people we strolled about, sipping our Coca-Colas, wearing our best clothes, watching each other.

  I cultivated my silence and my detachment carefully—rare flowers in a cold climate—as I watched girls chatter and giggle, faces contorted with vivacity, bodies vibrating with eagerness, while boys stalked stiff-legged like roosters, mint-flavored breath panting into the air.

  O children, little children, the things I could teach you, the ways and skills my mother gave to me.…I myself, in my virginity, I am weary of sex. I know it for the business it is.

  I was asked to the fall dance at St. Michael’s School by a boy named Thomas Dorsey. A tall, thin boy, whose father taught history at the state university, whose mother gave piano lessons in the afternoons. He pointed them out; they were both chaperones at the dance. His father was stocky and balding and red-faced; his mother, taller than her husband, was wearing a long dark cape. “That’s lovely,” I said to Thomas Dorsey as we ate the sticky cakes and drank the cherry-flavored punch.

  “What is?”

  “Your mother’s cape.”

  He glanced up briefly, uninterested. “She makes them.”

  “How do you mean, makes them?”

  “I mean she makes them. She’s a weaver. The back room in our house is all full of her looms and stuff.”

  “Would she show me?”

  “Tell her you’re interested and you’ll never get rid of her. She loves to talk.”

  Mrs. Dorsey invited me to her workshop. She picked me up at school the following week. (The nuns positively beamed with pleasure: I was integrating socially.) We spent almost three hours in her studio (so she called it); and she showed me how she made cloth, step by step. It was all there, the raw wool heaped in baskets, the carding combs, the spinning wheel, the looms, and the separate outside dyeing shed. “It really smells,” she said, “that’s why it’s back here.”

  It was one of the happiest afternoons I have ever spent. I told her so.

  “I see that.” She grew even taller in her pride. “Your eyes are positively glittering.”

  Well, yes, I suppose so. I had never seen Appalachian crafts before—the weaving, the quilting, even the basket-making, danced like jewels before my eyes.

  “In Slocum County, where I grew up,” Mrs. Dorsey said, “these are things all girls learn, and don’t think anything about it.”

  “Would you teach me? If I came back?” It was one of the few times in my life I have asked a direct question. I do not usually risk being told no.

  “Will you have time? I hear the nuns keep you girls very busy.”

  “I have every afternoon,” I said. “I could come then. The nuns will arrange a ride for me,” I said confidently.

  And they did. Three or four times a week a senior town girl dropped me off after class, and the wife of the maintenance engineer stopped for me on her way to school to pick up her husband shortly after seven. Sometimes I was late for dinner, but the nuns did not object.

  I spent hours watching Mrs. Dorsey at her looms. The work was tiresome and dull—though not half so bad as the spinning, she told me. We soon ran out of talk, so she began to sing the songs she’d learned as a girl, hill songs, monotonous and repetitious and hypnotic. I brought my violin from school and we sang together, her reeds against my strings.

  Sometimes Mr. Dorsey came home early and played the living room piano and sang with his wife, voices raised loud against the clacking loom. And sometimes Tom was there and brought out his guitar, and all of us played together. For a bit, in the midst of those songs, we were a family, really, truly, a solid southern mountain family, father, mother, son, and daughter, three white and one black.

  Later, when my enthusiasm ended, as my enthusiasms always do, I wondered what had fascinated me so. Perhaps I fancied I was becoming a part of her life. The daughter she’d never had. These skills and sounds and melodies came from her family to me so that I became a part of her

  traditional America, my native land, where I was a stranger. I intended to slip into her world, to hide there until I belonged to my country as much as she did.

  Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all. Perhaps my happiness was nothing more than a feeling of freedom—of being away from the echoing halls and bare formal rooms of the convent school.

  I spent Christmas Day with the Dorseys, their brothers and sisters and cousins, grandmothers and babies. Dozens and dozens of them. A tribe, uncounted. I was the speck in the uniform white flour.

  It was also my first Christmas celebration. My mother and I did not celebrate any holidays, and at the convent Christmas was a religious occasion.

  Some people, those from farthest away, came days early, filling all the beds, even the folding one in Mr. Dorsey’s study. Two young men camped out in sleeping bags in Mrs. Dorsey’s backyard dyeing shed. They had thick arctic sleeping bags and knitted caps and down-lined drawstring helmets. It was cold in that unheated building—snow fell in flurries and blew into drifts and the ground rang stiff and hard with frost.

  Most people arrived very early on Christmas morning, bringing food: turkeys and hams (and the carving knives to go with them), fried chicken and a roast suckling pig, huge casseroles of sweet potatoes, red and green gelatin salads decorated with mayonnaise stars, pumpkin and pecan pies and half a dozen coconut layer cakes. They all brought liquor, too, wine and whiskey and brandy and rum. As fast as they arrived, Mrs. Dorsey set out the platters and plates and stands—there were five turkeys in a row on the dining room sideboard—until every table and counter was filled. The bar was on the glass-enclosed side porch, a long board trestle covered with red Christmas cloth. All the bottles went there, in neat straight rows. When the top filled, bottles lined the floor along the wall.

  “Come help me.” Tom Dorsey picked out two bottles, checked the labels carefully, and carried them into the kitchen. “You stand by the door and keep it closed for a minute. I don’t want anybody to see me.” He opened one bottle, sniffed, and carefully poured the contents down the drain. “Don’t want to splash it,” he explained with a grin. “The stuff is like paint remover.”<
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  A strange odor floated through the kitchen, sweet, musty, odd. “What was that?”

  “Mrs. Frank Pope’s dandelion wine. This other bottle is her rhubarb wine and it’s even worse, so out it goes too.”

  “Wait,” I said, “I want to taste it.”

  “You have lost your marbles.” He handed me the bottle. “You’ll be sorry.”

  It was a regular wine bottle. I lifted it to my lips and tasted. Very sweet and prickly on the tongue. I poured it out.

  “I told you it was awful.” Tom hid the empty bottles under the sink. “My mother doesn’t want to hurt her feelings, but she doesn’t want anybody drinking the stuff either. So she told me to get rid of it.”

  “It wasn’t bad or nasty. It really didn’t taste like anything.”

  “Drinking that stuff won’t make a hillbilly out of you.”

  I stared at him. “I don’t want to be a hillbilly.”

  “Sure you do. First comes weaving and dyeing. Now comes drinking homemade wines. Pretty soon you’ll be drying apples on window screens in the attic and stringing bean pods from the rafters. Maybe you’ll start making your own soap like Grandma Jenny.”

  “Who’s Grandma Jenny?”

  “Well”—he grinned—“she’s not my grandma. I’m sure of that. I think she’s some kind of relative of Pa’s. She lives in Goshen, in Smith County. Up a narrow little valley, way back from the road, all rocks and trees and a spring coming down. She calls it a hollow. You want to be old-timey, that’s where you got to live.”

  “I don’t. I told you I don’t.”

  “Anyway, we went to visit her once. She had an old quilt my mom wanted to copy. But first Grandma Jenny’s got to show us around the place—the house and the new cistern, her garden, and her chickens, and the new cow and the way she pruned her apple trees. She was making ash water that day, fixing to make soap. And I can tell you, making soap stinks.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “Comes every Christmas, one day early. Wouldn’t miss it for anything. Tall old woman with a face like a horse and hands like a prizefighter’s. You know, busted knuckles. Anyway, like I was telling you, my mother got the quilt pattern she wanted and everybody kissed everybody goodbye and we climbed down to where the car was parked. When we’re driving away, my mother looks back up where we’ve been, and she tells me she was born in a place like that. Only she got out fast as she could.”

  So Mrs. Dorsey was a fugitive too. “Wherever she learned, your mom’s weaving and quilting are beautiful.”

  “Sure. You want to hear more about Grandma Jenny? Her son now, he makes real high-class likker. Look there, those two bottles. That’s from him. It’s rum. It’s as good as his ma’s wine is bad. He makes it from hog molasses in a nice little still right behind the house.”

  “He does what?”

  “He feeds some to the hogs and runs some through the still.”

  “I think you are being stupid. I’m going to see what everybody else is doing.”

  In the living room Mr. Dorsey was playing the piano. Under his thin yellow hair his scalp was red and shiny with sweat.

  Somebody shouted, “Hey, bro, play ‘Silent Night.’ We need to do some singing.”

  Mr. Dorsey wiped the top of his head with his shirtsleeve. “Here we go, Cap.”

  They sang. I watched. They were all so very much alike, blond and red-haired. They looked tattered, I thought, mottled and lumpy like the rugs Mrs. Dorsey hooked.

  The front door was open; wind blew through, cold and wet with the breath of snow on it. I stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind me. On the boards underfoot were half a dozen smashed kumquats, their shiny white and orange glazing in the cold. The entire porch was cluttered with overshoes and boots, umbrellas stuck upright to dry, two baskets of pinecones tied with red ribbon, and one basket of kindling with a sprig of holly on top. From porch to sidewalk was a line of red plastic poinsettias, stems stuck into the muddy snow-streaked ground. From the bare lower branches of a sugar-maple tree a paper Santa danced and dangled, for all the world like a jolly hanging man. Cars lined both sides of the street, as far as I could see, until the street disappeared over the lip of a hill and all there was beyond was a view of the interstate highway and the Goodyear factory.

  There were other parties going on in the neighborhood. The corner house—two stories, green shingled—was so crowded that people gathered on the front lawn despite the cold. They hopped from foot to foot, shouting out toasts. In the house directly across the street bagpipes began playing. After a minute or so the piper himself emerged, a short square man, kilted and capped. The crowd at the corner, noticing, drifted toward him. He adjusted his cap and sporran, shifted his pipes, puffed his cheeks. Whistling and creaking, he searched for a tune, lost it, found it again, blared it out, triumphantly. People drew back, parted by the suddenly coalesced sound. The piper marched twice in a circle, drawing confidence from each step, then set off down the street, pipe tassels fluttering, a clear high melody streaming behind, a deeper rumble coming from the bag across his front, like a second stomach. Everyone fell in line behind him.

  The Dorseys and their friends rushed out, cheering and clapping, carrying cups and glasses, and joined the parade. Two dogs followed. One, a kind of collie, stopped long enough to bark at me.

  I turned back to the house, shivering in my light sweater. Tom was standing in the door. His eyes were very shiny and red-edged.

  “I thought maybe you’d gone off with the big parade.”

  “Too cold for me,” he said.

  The pipes were fainter now; the melody changed; the crowd cheered approval. “Where are they going?”

  “Them?” Tom shrugged. “Who knows. Last year they went all the way to that traffic circle on Cumberland Drive. Whatever Mr. Kidd feels like. He’s the piper.”

  We went back inside. “This happens every Christmas?”

  “What are you so all-fired curious for? You studying to be white? Yes, dear girl, every single Christmas long as I remember. Now what else do you want to know? Who’s Mr. Kidd? That’s his daughter’s house there, he’s visiting. Why does he play the bagpipes? I don’t know. Okay?”

  The house was quiet now, just a murmur of conversation from the old people in the living room.

  One woman twisted her head to look around the sides of the wing chair by the fireplace. “Would you get me a cup of coffee,” she said to me.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I followed Tom into the kitchen.

  “She thought you were help.” He snickered.

  “It’s happened before.”

  “Now don’t get huffy. You gonna bring her the coffee?”

  “No.”

  He was still giggling. “Maybe you should be nice to her. Her brother makes the best corn whiskey around; even ages it, my father says.”

  “I can buy my own whiskey.”

  “Not like this, you can’t. It is something special. I’ll show you.”

  He handed me a half-gallon vinegar bottle filled with pale liquid. There was a label pasted on the side: FLOYD. “What’s Floyd?”

  “Her brother, you dummy. I told you he made it. Go ahead and taste.”

  I looked around for a glass.

  “Don’t be a nigger,” he said, “nobody’s looking, just have a swig.”

  “I am a nigger,” I said firmly. “I do not have to try to be one.” I unscrewed the top and took two quick swallows. My eyes started to water, then just as suddenly grew dry. A great soft aromatic sweetness flooded into my mouth, a taste like nothing I’d ever known.

  “You see why people say he’s the best? Let’s have a proper drink now.”

  “Of this?”

  “Sure. Nobody will notice, and if they do they won’t care. It’s Christmas.”

  We mixed the whiskey with ginger ale and decorated the glasses with orange slices and cherries stolen from the top of a coconut cake. We sat side by side on the kitchen counter, sang carols, and drank. We turned on the radio
and danced. We had a second drink and listened to the far faint sound of the bagpipes returning. And sometime later I sneaked outside, to the very back of the yard, behind Mrs. Dorsey’s dyeing shed, and vomited into a little shrunken patch of snow.

  I stayed quite a while, waiting for the dizziness and the hissing in my ears to pass, waiting for the cold air to clear my head. As I walked back to the house, using the narrow side path along the fence, I heard voices in the dining room. The window was open an inch or two, so I heard clearly: a man and a woman.

  “She’s a student at St. Catherine’s,” the woman said. “Betsy told me.”

  Betsy was Mrs. Dorsey. I stood perfectly still in the frost-burned ivy.

  The man said, “I didn’t know they had Negro girls at St. Catherine’s.”

  “She’s the first. They say she’s brilliant.”

  “Good of Betsy to ask her here for Christmas.”

  “You know Betsy, the soul of kindness,” the woman said.

  “Well,” the man said, “I hope she has a good time.”

  “She’s very polite,” the woman said. “And it isn’t her fault that she’s colored.”

  “Colored?” The man laughed, and I could hear the ice rattle in his glass. “That’s no high yellow. That is black, might even be Gullah.”

  “Hush,” the woman said. And there was just a hint of a giggle hanging in the air.

  And that was my first Christmas as a White Chile.

  By the end of those Christmas holidays I had finished my sketches for clothes made with Mrs. Dorsey’s materials. She herself wasn’t enthusiastic. “Honey, these are homespun fabrics, country fabrics, you can’t go and use them for fancy dresses like that.”

  But that was just exactly what I wanted to do. And I knew that my mother would agree.

  My Christmas present had been one of Mrs. Dorsey’s shawls, deep heavy uneven texture, rich earthy colors. I sent it to my mother, along with the sketches I had done. Yes, my mother said, if Mrs. Dorsey could supply enough material. After a flurry of phone calls, the orders were settled. Mrs. Dorsey’s loom clicked steadily, hour after hour into the night—she got her sister to help her. Two more sisters travelled up and down the state, collecting pretty hill-country quilts. And the following season my mother introduced a special limited line of American clothes, all very expensive. (It was, I think, my mother’s first venture into the truly upscale women’s market.) Rough woolen coats, wide shouldered, flare skirted. Swirling capes lined with peau de soie. Quilted waistcoats over long satin skirts. Despite their price, the clothes were immensely popular. That season prosperous blacks walked about wrapped in the traditions of the Appalachian white. I wonder: Did their skins grow paler, did they feel the melanin leach away under the pale English aegis?