Milkweed Ladies

by Louise McNeill

  The store, which was also the post office, was where we got our mail, did our trading, picked up the news of the week, and visited with our neighbors and kin. There, the men sat around the stove, or on the store “platform,” talking, chewing, and spitting. On clean-up day, Wint would have to take a shovel to the dried tobacco spit, sort of scaling it off like he was digging up a hard-packed garden in the spring.

  The store building was a long cavernous structure, with only a little light filtering in from the high windows in the front and rear. In this narrow darkness, Wint kept a wild assortment of store goods in stock. There were showcases full of neckties, armbands, rolls of ribbon, button cards, rifle bullets, and shotgun shells. Horse harness, oil lanterns, steel traps, and gum boots hung from nails along the wall; and there were pepper boxes, vanilla bottles, cheese, fireworks, Arm and Hammer soda, yard goods, wooden buckets of salt fish, women’s “fascinators,” Fig Newtons, and high-buttoned shoes. Wint also took in products from the neighborhood as trade goods: eggs, prints of butter, pokes of ginseng, maple sugar cakes, berries in season, and in the winter, the stretched and aired skins of foxes, raccoons, possums, and skunks.

  Various odors mingled in the smoky air, but the two that gave the pungent essence of the store were the brown Brazilian fragrance of coffee, and the stewing brown smell of tobacco juice. To a mountain child, these odors gave promise of a five-cent tablet for school, a poke of striped peppermint candy, or even a box of Uneeda Biscuits or a can of sardines. We particularly envied our cousins, Wint’s four children, who could come freely into the store, open a can of tomatoes, pepper it, and drink it down for a quick lunch. The tomatoes Mama canned at home lacked the exotic flavor of the store brand. In all cases our homegrown and homemade products seemed inferior to us, and we would refer favorably to “store cheese,” “store cookies,” “store peaches,” and “store clothes.”

  Over this wild profusion, Wint presided as entrepreneur. He was a natural storekeeper, canny, warm, persuasive, and gifted with a poetic and prodigious wit. He would stride up and down the store platform, beading down on the floor nail heads with shots of tobacco juice and summing up the eccentricities and equivocations of the neighborhood in highly colored phrases. In a sense, Wint held the neighborhood together, like my peg in the haymow door. For Wint had charisma, a kind of red-headed Irish power to attract, to hold, and to finish off. If a world problem arrived in the weekly copy of the Toledo Blade, a war or a diplomatic crisis, Wint could finish it off with the same quick dispatch he used on a mangy hound dog sniffing around his salt fish kegs. The store was kept open from early morning to late at night, and it was for all of us, but most of all for the men. They would sit, and as their spit fried on the stove, world problems, and old guilts and ancient sorrows would fade away.

  The schoolhouse stood about a hundred yards above the store on a patch of dry, rocky, crick gravel we called the playground. The Big Road ran on one side; Rush Run along the other, and up on the laurel-banked hillside canted the two wooden privies. Two well-worn paths led uphill to these sanitary and social centers, and under a hemlock tree by the run was the girls’ playhouse of flat rocks.

  The schoolhouse, one of the best in the county, was painted white and had an imposing bell tower and two classrooms, one called the Little Room and the other the Big Room, with two rooms for storing dinner buckets and two long cloakrooms with rows of metal hooks. Each of the two schoolrooms had a big pot-bellied stove, rows of fastened-down desks with ink wells, two well-worn blackboards, and a shelf of books. Up front was the teacher’s desk and, facing the teacher, the Recitation Bench where we lined up to recite. On two sides of the room were several windows with ragged, incorrigible window blinds. There were erasers and chalk, a metal waste basket, a picture of The Landing of the Pilgrims, and out in the hall, a metal water cooler. Outside stood the flagpole, and every morning some favored student would be selected to run the flag up.

  When the bell rang from the tower, the teachers would stand at the top of the steps in front of us, and the Big Room teacher, the principal, would call “attention” as we lined up, clapped our legs together, squared our shoulders, saluted the flag, and then marched up the steps and into our rooms. When the teacher came in and stood behind her desk, we would stand and sing “My Country Tis of Thee” for “opening exercises.” On the last verse, the teacher would hold up a warning finger, and we would all sing very softly. After a story or Bible reading, the teacher would call the roll. Some of our teachers had us answer our name call with a Bible verse: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”; or “The words of a man’s mouth are as deep as waters”; or the favorite short one, “Jesus wept.”

  In the Little Room, we had twenty or twenty-five pupils and there would be about ten or fifteen minutes for each class: reading, arithmetic, spelling, English, and penmanship. Each class in turn would file up and sit on the Recitation Bench. For spelling, we lined up against the wall, had a “head” and a “foot” of the class, and “turned each other down.” Sometimes, we read history stories like “The Pilgrim Fathers,” or “George Washington and the Cherry Tree,” or the story of George Rogers Clark’s men drinking deer broth on their way through the swamps to Kaskaskia. When I was six and in the second grade, we learned the names in alphabetical order of all our state’s fifty-five counties, and of all the forty-eight states.

  When we got up into the Big Room, we had regular classes in geography and history, and in “physiology and hygiene,” “agriculture,” and “civil government.” Our history stories were about “Nolichucky Jack,” Christopher Gist, Francis Marion the “Swamp Fox,” and Concord Bridge. In our big readers were many of the Greek myths. We read “Pandora’s Box,” the story of how evil and hope came into the world; the story of Proserpine and Pluto, of Theseus and the Black Sail, and of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

  Sometimes on Friday afternoon we would have “recitations” from the floor. We said poems like “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” or “Old Ironsides,” or “Westward, westward Hiawatha Sailed into the fiery sunset Sailed into the purple vapors / Sailed into the dusk of evening….”

  On winter mornings after we had waded a mile or two through the snow, we would sit on the benches around the stove to dry our feet and clothes. The room was cold, and steam would come up from our sodden shoes and stockings; the smells of wet woolens and long underwear, of onions and floor oil mingled in the room. At noon hour we would hurry up with our cold sausage sandwiches and rush out on the school ground to play in the snow. We would have snowball fights, slide on the crick ice, play Fox and Geese in a snowy ring, and coast on our wooden sleds down the river road. About 1917, when lumber-mill prosperity hit the village, my brother Ward had a second-hand sled with the words Flying Arrow painted on it in red and blue. When the coasting was good, we might come back at night, build a fire down by the bridge, and coast until ten o’clock. Then we would walk home, pulling our precious sled behind us up Uncle Dan’l’s hill.

  In good weather, when noon hour and recess came, the big boys played paddle-ball with a yarn ball, or football with their blown-up hog bladders, or sometimes they would play Run, Sheep, Run. The girls and little boys played Drop the Handkerchief, Pet Squirrel, Skip to My Lou, or Green Gravel, Green Gravel.

  Sometimes the teachers had trouble with kids who went into the dinner bucket room and stole food out of the pails. Or boys would dip the girls’ long hair down in the ink wells or draw dirty pictures or pass dirty notes. If kids got into fights, they might get a whippin’ or have to stay in after school. Sometimes, they were shut up in the cloakroom for half a day or ordered to write some moral motto a thousand times, like “For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.”

  Sometimes some kid would get infested with what we called the “seven year itch,” or a girl would come to school with “nits” in her long hair. Then the whole neighborhood had to rub with sulfur and grease or comb their hair out with doses of lamp oil.
In the fall we often got “diphtheria sores” that would bleed and run, and we would have to take a dose of Epsom Salts every morning before breakfast for seven days.

  The most important thing to us girls was that the teacher should be pretty and wear nice clothes. We would think about it all summer, wondering if the teacher would have a pretty dress. One year in the Big Room, we had Miss Anne Correll. She was nice-dressed and “modern,” and she had the board of education put in a new, flat-topped stove. Then she told us to bring cabbage, potatoes, and onions from home, and she put them in the pot and made us “hot lunch.” For Valentine’s Day, Miss Anne pasted red hearts and let us have a Valentine Box. Sometimes, she would use colored chalk on the board, and for Christmas she drew a border of red and green holly and red bells around the top of the blackboard and pasted Christmas trees on the window. Miss Anne had a subscription to The Normal Instructor and Primary Plans and she took pictures out of it and programs for Christmas.

  We always had a night Christmas program at the schoolhouse. We would have a tree decorated with strings of popcorn and teaberries and red paper chains. The presents were put under the tree, and the bracket lamps lighted, and the stove boomed up until it glowed red. We all wore our best clothes, and we girls had our hair curled in ringlets (on rag curlers) and we had ribbons in it. The kids in the program would hide in their costumes out in the cloakroom until the crowd gathered on the small, crowded seats. Little girls dressed in long cheesecloth robes carried candles and sang “Away in a Manger,” and we said poems. At the last would come the pageant, with the baby Jesus lying like a china doll in his straw crib; and little shepherds dressed in sheepskins and little wise men in their sisters’ long dresses with tinsel on their turbans; and then little cheesecloth angels with gold cardboard wings.

  When the last little shepherd had gone from the stage, Tone Lightner, our village blacksmith, would come in his big Santy Claus suit and give out the presents. Tone was jolly and good, and he always came in acting like he was all out of breath because his reindeer had given him a little trouble. Once when he fell on the footlog crossing a stream, he came in all bloody, with his suit and whiskers torn, and he told us his reindeer had run off with him and nearly spilled the sleigh.

  At the schoolhouse too we had neighborhood cake walks, pie suppers, and box suppers. The box was usually a decorated shoebox full of fried chicken, cake, and pickles. The pies were in boxes too, all covered with crepe paper and cut-out pictures or tinsel bows. The big girls worked and agonized over their boxes, for the boys would bid on them when Tone Lightner auctioned them off. The boys who got the boxes would get to eat with the girl whose name was hidden in each box, and the money went for a new dictionary for the schoolhouse, and later, for a playground swing.

  On Swago Crick, both of our churches were Methodist, one a Methodist Episcopal and the other a Methodist Protestant. There was no noticeable variation in faith or service, and the people of the community attended both. The churches were both white frame buildings, and both had dark varnished benches, a raised platform and altar railing, oil lamps in hanging brass brackets, long wood stoves, and wheezy foot-pump organs. Neither had a full-time preacher, but both were served, off and on, by a circuit preacher who came every second Sunday, or as rarely as once a month. Other Sundays we had Sunday school, sometimes in the Upper Church on Sunday morning and in the Lower Church on Sunday afternoon.

  The Upper Church was distinguished by its high bell tower and, much later, by its two privies out behind. Porter Kellison was the Sunday school superintendent and led the singing, and Aunt Edna or Nellie Kellison played the organ while Dorsey Little passed the plate.

  We kids would get dressed on Sunday mornings and Mama would give us each a penny to take to the Korean orphans. She would tell Elizabeth and me to tie our pennies in the corners of our handkerchiefs so as not to lose our offerings; then we put on our decorated straw hats and walked barefoot down the lane on our two-mile road to Sunday school. We always carried our shoes and stockings to “save them.” When we got to the culvert just below the church, we would sit down and carefully put on our stockings and our white canvas Sears Roebuck slippers that had been cleaned on Saturday with Old Dutch Cleanser and set out in the sun to dry.

  The church bell rang out over the valley, and when all the people had come in and sat in their places, Nellie Kellison went to the organ and Porter Kellison got up to lead our first hymn. It was often “Oh, Come to the Church in the Wildwood.” We would all “rare” back and sing at the top of our lungs, for we put more stock in volume than in modulation for praising God. When we came to the chorus, Porter Kellison and Grandpa Will would come in strong on the bass: “Oh come, come, come, come,” and the great deep “comes” would roll out the open door as though calling all the world home.

  My Grandpa Will could read the old shaped notes in the hymnbook for, way back, he and Mama and Grandma Susan had all gone to Singing School. Grandpa Will said family prayers, and said grace at the table three times a day. He gave money to the church, helped keep the building repaired, and read his Bible. He believed that when we all died, we would meet again in Heaven: he and his father and mother, his six brothers and two sisters, all their children and grandchildren, and all the kin and neighbor folk, gathered together where Jesus had gone to prepare a place with golden stairs and no sin nor sorrow nor parting. Grandpa Will would lift up his head, and his blue eyes would look far away as he sang: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river / Gather with the Saints at the river that flows by the throne of God.”

  The summer I was eleven, we held a daily Vacation Bible School for the little children at the Lower Church. It was a new thing and a lady came in from way-off to hold the school. Hiram Barns, who lived in a neat painted cottage just above the village and was active in church, had helped with all the plans. The lady’s name was Miss Virginia, and Mr. and Mrs. Barns had her to stay with them and fixed their spare room all nice for her. Since I was a big girl then, I helped Miss Virginia with her teaching. She had colored paper and crayons for the little kids, and new songs to teach, and a little play to put on. I went down to the church every morning, and I loved Miss Virginia. She had a nice soft voice and curly hair and wore lace on her white blouse. I read to the little kids and helped them with their songs. Miss Virginia let me take them outdoors, where we sat in a circle on the grass near the graveyard, and I read them stories about Jesus. The children got to take their pictures home, and on the last day Miss Virginia had a program so all the mothers could come to see.

  When Miss Virginia told us good-bye, I almost cried and could think of no one else for a week. Later, we began to hear things about her. It turned out that Miss Virginia had gone away and written a bad story about us in a church magazine. Hiram Barns was a subscriber to the magazine; and when it came, there was a story about the community of S———, by Miss Virginia. In the story she told how it was up in the mountains, how ignorant and crude the people were. She told about Hiram Barns’s house and made fun of it and of how Mrs. Barns dipped snuff. Hiram Barns passed the magazine all around the neighborhood, and we all read what Miss Virginia thought about us. I felt sorrow and disillusionment, and, for the first time, I began to wonder about the people beyond Swago Crick.

  For all the years of my childhood, our little neighborhood centered on the store, the schoolhouse, and the church, and the narrow roads and paths that ran up and down. Once every summer, we went down to the little railroad flag stop and took the one coach train to town to visit our relatives there. Still our village pattern held, and we walked down over the hill to the store or up Dry Crick to the church night-meetings. Coming home with our lantern through Uncle Dan’l’s woodland, we could sometimes hear the small animals scrambling off in the woods or see a piece of foxfire shining at us from an old, rotten log. When we went through the gate at the barn, I always felt the peg set solid in the haymow door, and then old Jack or Shep would begin to bark, and I could see the panes of
lamplight shining through the night.

  Signs and Portents

  Aunt Malindy was no kin of ours, but all through my childhood she stayed at our house, a free boarder who always sat in our best rocker. She was very old and very fat and always wore her shining fat dress of black sateen; and she ate enormously, never did a lick of work, never even peeled an apple or snapped a bean, and I loved her and lay safe and warm, pillowed against her sateen breasts.

  G.D. always said that she was there because she had no other place to go to; but we never thought why she was so welcome, so well come. We didn’t even think to wonder, for she was our Seeress, the Priestess of the Swago. She made the prophecies, the telling of daisies and the writhing of mystic serpents; and she had all the children to rock.

  Aunt Malindy was full of signs and portents. She had her death-bell sign, her howling hound dog, and, from her girlhood, that strange, death-ridden omen which she had seen one long-ago summer midnight: the great fireball screaming in the sky over Buckley Mountain the night her brother Potts was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg.

  It’s a strange thing about old tales and superstitions: you believe them and you don’t. You know that deep down in the depths of them they are as true as the morning, but that all the glittering, eerie surface is as false as false. Nobody comes to visit because you drop a dirty dishrag, but you keep your dishrag clean. And no snake stings a tree to kill the tree, but back in the Garden, his eyes were as green as glass.

  There were so many snake stories that they crawled slowly on the edges of a child’s sleep. To begin with, Satan had gone into the Garden in a snakeskin, and now the black snakes sucked the eggs in our chicken house, and it was rumored that they sometimes sucked the cows. The snake stories were most often Aunt Malindy’s; but they could be Uncle Dock’s or Cousin Rush’s or the true one G.D. told. Aunt Malindy told how her sister Mag had been charmed by a beautiful red and blue circled viper whose eyes fixed on her so she couldn’t move. At last a dog ran between her and the snake and broke the spell. Aunt Malindy’s other sister had been bit by a copperhead in dog days, and every year after that, for fifty years, in dog days her sister’s leg would swell up and mottle with red, coppery spots.