Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  When he was satisfied that the cobs were sopped, Nether laid the stick aside and picked up the bucket, pouring some of the thick mixings onto the bark. With the stick he worked the gummy mass until it was spread evenly over the yellowing inner bark. When he’d finished, he gave a grunt, collecting bucket, ax, and his coat from where he left it on the limb, motioning Jarom to follow.

  “Now, honey,” he said, “watch what comes to sweetness.”

  The lookout he chose lay in speckled shade, just into the trees where he and Jarom could eye the bark without drawing notice to themselves. Unlike the rocks, the shade to Jarom seemed to swim with motion. The trees formed a knit of shadow that shifted with the slightest breeze. The light riddling the dust reminded him of Uncle Beverley in his garden, his face flecking with sunlight through the basketry of his hat.

  The slab was about thirty feet away. Beyond it was furrow after furrow of ridge that in the distance softened into the silver blue of sky. Jarom asked Nether what to do next.

  “Hush,” he said. “Keep your eyes hungry and your mouth shut, and you just might see something.”

  Jarom locked his eyes on the clearing with its centered bark slab. Each rock, each twig, each tuft of stubble was still as though glued in place and drying under the heavy wedge of sky. Watching, Jarom could almost feel the glare building in the rocks, the green baking out of the piled cedars. When he looked toward the rocks, he could see a fluting of heat rising off them. In the clearing was the honey on its bark platter, an amber splash in which he recognized the color of resin knots on the enormous black cherry shading the fencerow at home.

  They waited over an hour before Nether nudged him, directing his eyes to the honey. Jarom didn’t see anything at first but soon spotted a dark speck that flitted into the clearing, orbiting a few times before lighting on the slab. A honeybee. One of the dark natives that Nether described as “nigger bees.” Diving, it feasted on the gooey cobs, a bullet springing nervously from one to the other in sticky leaps. This went on for several minutes. Then, rising perceptibly slower, almost drunkenly, the speck made a circuit above the bare spot and struck off neatly through the trees.

  “This missionary,” Nether said, breaking the silence, “has gone off among the Canaanites to spread the good news.”

  Soon, more specks darted into the clearing and flew the ritual circuit before descending on the sweetened cobs. They would feed for a while, then rise abruptly and vanish in the same direction as the first.

  Before they could return, Nether hustled Jarom over to fetch the slab. Nether took it and started off through the woods, roughly in the direction of the bees. About a hundred yards in, he and Jarom came to a natural clearing next to a place where a large oak had fallen. The clearing was smaller than the first, covered with buckberries and some spindly grass. Nether deftly flattened a space with the ax, batting down the buckberries until a flyway was cleared. Again the slab was placed in the center, this time on the splintered stump of the fallen tree. More honeyed corncobs were poured onto the slab, and Nether led him to a niche in the trees, closer and not so well hidden this time.

  In minutes the mixture was black with bees, each taking its fill and zipping off along the same route. As they rose from the bait, Nether carefully calculated the path of flight between the trees until he was sure his sighting was true. When Jarom asked how he meant to follow, Nether explained that the course the bees traveled was a path in the air that would lead them directly to the honey-pot, for the line from the first feeding spot to the second would form arrows that crossed. Where they met, Nether told him, they would find the hive. Facing ahead, then turning to face behind, Nether sighted until he seem satisfied.

  “Halfway to honey,” he said when he’d finished. “Now we know which way, we just must know how far.”

  To fix the distance, he paced off an imaginary line of about fifty or sixty yards, then reset the slab. Again the bees came, lifting from the honey toward the hive. Leaving Jarom to follow that line, Nether returned to the original, telling him that to find the hive they had to walk very straight. Each set off following their lines, which met about a quarter-mile away. They had crossed along another ridge to reach a dense stand of trees, mostly hickories and white oak. The branches formed a canopy through which the light leaked only in patches and daubs.

  When they met, Nether told him they were in voice distance to the hive.

  “I can smell ’em,” he said, scanning each limb of the trees, his gray head making a slow revolution. “I can smell ’em fretting over that honey.”

  Finally, he nodded and pointed off to the right. Following Nether’s angle of vision, Jarom saw a busyness in one of the trees. What seemed to be hundreds of specks were swarming around a fist-size hole halfway up a largish white oak at a spot where lightning or wind had lopped off a limb.

  Reaching its base, Jarom heard a droning like the hum of a whipsaw cutting a hollow log. Putting his ear to the trunk, he heard a humming that resonated through comb and hollow like bows on fiddle strings. Again Nether grinned.

  Though this spot was far enough from any wagon road that no one was likely to chance on it, Nether then lay formal claim. With great solemnity, he took up the ax and cut a neat X in the bark about chest high. The blond cleft was an unmistakable sign that the tree and its contents had been spoken for. It was a hunter’s mark that all were bound to honor. Whose property it was on, Nether told him, made no difference. The tree and its contents would be safe until fall when Nether would return with a crosscut saw and gum. He told Jarom that he would fell the tree and cut out a section a foot or so above and below the hive. The “mother of ’em all” would be delicately removed and placed in the homemade gum. When it was moved, the swarm would follow to build a new nest, and Nether would portion out enough of the honey to see the bees through the winter. Nether took pride in his reputation as the best bee man in Logan County. Farmers called on him to transport hives and answer their bee questions. He had an eye and also what he described as a heart for bees, having located hundreds of hives without, or so he claimed, ever being stung. Though nothing out of the usual for Nether, for Jarom the hive was a first find.

  Hunting with Nether, he understood later, was more than a practical application of a Greek named Euclid whom Nether had never heard of. Along those paths, through gruffness and peach grizzle, he often saw that smooth face, the dome of Nether’s head yellowed and later creased like a butternut, the great jowls sloping from the nose and chin, a tired intelligence in the heavy-lidded, turtle eyes. At ten Jarom could follow a beeline though he and Nether knew that the woods were not a lesson so much as a means, that what Nether taught was method and patience, patience and pluck. How honey is rendered from honey.

  WHO MY PEOPLE ARE

  (from a composition book belonging to M. Jerome Clarke, 1860)

  My father’s people, the Clarkes, and my mother’s, the Hails, came to this region of west Kentucky in the early years of the century. My grandfather Charles Clarke, of Chesterfield County, Virginia, was a soldier in the war of independence, fighting under General Horatio Gates. In 1815 he picked up and passed through the Cumberland gap into Kentucky, settling in Logan County, which later came to be Simpson County. With him he brought, in addition to his wife, his two sons, Hector (who fathered me) and Beverley, and his daughter Nancy, in whose house I later came to live.

  My mother, born Mary Hail, held me in her lap and told me that my father was named for Hector, chief of the heroes of Troy in Mr. Homer’s Iliad. Of my father, my mother said that he had fighting in his blood but no war to use it. She told my Aunt Mary Tibbs that the tragedy of his life was he’d been born too late for one war and aged too early for any of the others. She said he joined the County Militia to satisfy his love of martial exploit. They had married in the early 1820s and lived on a farm of three hundred acres where I and my brothers and sisters were born. From earliest memory, she called me Jarom, a kind of pet name that others came to call me by. My father set up as a
farmer though he was not much suited to working a farm. He relied on laborers of the African race to put food on our table but mostly kept his own boots and hands unsoiled. He wore a white shirt nearly every day of his life.

  After his death, which I will presently tell you about, my Aunt Nancy told me he always prized his station in life a little too much and scorned working with his hands. She told me this in hopes that I would follow the blood of the Hails, who never thought so well of themselves that they would not join those who labored in barn and field. Though no one said it, it became clear to me that my father, despite his good traits, had no head for details and was but a poor manager. He let others handle his accounts, just as he relied on others to empty his slop jar or take up his hoe. Though we were never hungry, we were never well to do. For a time he held the title of postmaster of Franklin, a job of work he took from need, not from inclination. Yet he loved all of us and saw to it we lacked no advantage it was within his means to provide. For my fifth birthday he led me out to the stable where I found an Appaloose pony, which I soon learned to ride about the farm. After I fell off him several times, my father called him Bouncer.

  Aunt Nancy told me that my father’s biggest passion was for the citizen army of the county militia. She said that after the threat of Indians passed it was mostly a game, a gathering more social than military in its doings. He loved the sound of drumrolls. He loved the pageantry of wars, the display of arms and uniforms, shooting matches and turkey pulls. I was proud that he rose to the rank of Brigadier General of the state militia.

  My Uncle Beverley came to prominence in the public eye, not in the military but in politics. Born in Virginia in 1809, he came first to Logan County and then hauled off to Christian County. He read for the law in Lexington and soon became a candidate for a seat in the Kentucky General Assembly. Not one who knew him, it was said, was surprised when he won the election. After one term, he went to Washington City as a U.S. representative in the Congress, promoting the principles of the Democratic party. In 1855 he ran for governor of Kentucky, losing to James Morehead, a candidate then on the Know-Nothing ticket. President Buchanan soon appointed him Minister to Guatemala, but the fever raging there took him shortly after he arrived at his post.

  Beverley was a particular favorite of Mary Tibbs, a relation so distant I was never sure of the tie of kinship, though I believe she is my great aunt. She favored Uncle Beverley, praising his elevated state as a source of family pride. It was she who told me that if I cut my finger the blood would run blue. I should also mention Uncle Beverley’s daughter Pauline, who married an attorney of Howardsville back in old Virginia. His name is John Singleton Mosby. She left the Protestant faith and converted to the Roman Catholic Church.

  I am sorry to confess that the family has at least one black sheep. Branch M. Clarke, my father’s cousin, was never mentioned among the family in my hearing. He had committed a murder in the town of Madisonville, though I have not learned the particulars. His son Tandy was painted with the same stripe for a jury convicted him of robbing the mails. Although the family tried to keep it a secret, he chopped off one of his hands in the penitentiary to escape hard labor.

  My mother’s family, the Hails, are disciples of respectability, solid and predictable in their ways. My mother’s father, John Hail, came to Kentucky from Halifax County, North Carolina in 1810. He too served in the army, fighting on the Wabash and Raisin rivers during the second war of independence. He and a group of citizens named Simpson County after one of his comrades, John Simpson, who was among those massacred by the Indians after surrendering at the River Raisin in territory that in recent years became the state of Michigan. In school we learned the battlecry “Remember the Raisin!” and my classmates would always add “And don’t forget the Grape!” John Hail came home unscathed, living as a farmer and deacon for over forty years before dying late last summer of a fever that took him in his sleep. He had a reputation as a shrewd trader, owning nearly a thousand acres and a large number of African slaves. He was a county magistrate more than forty years.

  Only once, he told me, did fortune bring him before the public eye. He was selected foreman of the jury that tried Samuel Houston, governor of both Tennessee and North Carolina, for fighting a duel. His opponent was General William White. Houston had said that his political opponent had not the moral character to serve the public trust. His honor offended, General White challenged him to a duel. To avoid legal difficulties, Mr. Houston accepted and the two of them fought at a farm just over the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. When they fired, General White missed his mark but himself took a ball in the groin. His wounds mended, and the two of them were said to have become friends, burying the hatchet. Though John Hail owned a good many slaves, he became in sentiment but not practice an abolitionist, refusing until he died to give up his slaves until his neighbors did.

  My mother, Mary Hail Clarke, brought six of us into the world and died of pneumonia before I was five. I was the youngest of the six, with two older brothers, John and Billy, and two older sisters, and another sister, Virginia, that I never saw since she was carried off by the typhoid as an infant two years before I was born in the year 1845. My mother had a weak constitution made frailer by having so many children. Young as I was when she died, I remember her as a gentle presence. It is hard to summon her face, but she wore her hair done up around her head. There is a charcoal likeness of her made just before she married. She stands stiffly but smiling, wearing a wide straw hat with a ribbon wound about it. Her eyes stare off into the Beyond, as if she saw things the rest of us don’t or heard sounds the rest of us don’t hear.

  When she died, my father was at sea without her. Pained by memories, he moved twenty miles away to Rabbitsville in the north of the county. He may have moved because he needed extra help for us, though my brothers and sisters have since married and set up housekeeping on their own. Or maybe he wished to start anew in a place that was new to him. He never was a man to take others to his bosom with confidences.

  When he moved, others saw a need to keep me close with a woman’s care. My father, not much able to do anything for himself, much less for others, did not raise a fuss when I was taken to Aunt Nancy Bradshaw’s. She is the wife of William Bradshaw, the largest building contractor in Logan County. She has no children of her own. Though I lived under her roof, I visited my father on most holidays and family gatherings. This was the way of things until he took sick and died in the fall of 1855, a few weeks after Uncle Beverley lost his election and not long before my eleventh birthday. I can remember the military band at my father’s burial and great swags of black crape hanging from the porch. Someone covered every mirror in the house for fear of raising spirits of the dead.

  One obituary that Aunt Nancy later showed me described him as “possessing an abiding fondness for weapons, martial music, and heroic characters.” The article went on to say how he belonged to all the military companies of the county, counting him always present on parade days wearing a cocked hat and plume. Another noted that he had “courage, pompous manners, and the kindest of hearts.”

  After the burying I had to make another adjustment. The court appointed me a legal guardian, Mr. A. G. Rhea. My father’s friend since before he married, Mr. Rhea lived near Russellville. I lived with Aunt Nancy until I reached the age of thirteen when I was deemed old enough to be reunited with my larger family. In 1858, along with my brothers John and Billy, I moved to the home of Mary Tibbs. She is a widow well up in years and owns a farm of ample size known as Beech Grove. Her three great nieces, Elizabeth, Sarelda, and Sarah Lashbrook, looked after her for a time and helped her keep house. Then Elizabeth and Sarelda married my older brothers and moved not far away. Also living with us is John L. Patterson, her grand nephew or some such relation. Living in this large household with those of my blood, I no longer feel myself an orphan. As for the Hails and the Clarkes, for better, for worse, I see myself taking after the Clarkes more than the Hails. Aunt Mary Tibbs repeatedly
speaks the notion that blood will tell. I do not know what to make of this, whether it is a threat or a sign of promise.

  HOME LIFE

  If he were asked six months before to portray those he knew in terms of mechanical contrivances, Jarom would have described Aunt Mary Tibbs as a steam engine. She seemed to him in all particulars the perfection of that vessel designed to boil water into an almost invisible vapor—steam—and force that vapor through an airtight cylinder in order to drive a piston and produce energy, the energy to be converted into mechanical force and motion. Work. As with any machine, the ultimate measures of her value were productivity, efficiency of operation, ease of maintenance, and durability.

  Jarom imagined taking this engine and placing it in a kitchen. He imagined it housed in a human form of late middle years, the body as an upended boiler tapered inward slightly at the midline, quadrangular, neither bulky nor slight. If he were asked to re-create a model, he might have provided the following as specifications: Sheathe it in gingham, a modest print stippled like a guinea’s back, buttoned at the neck and dropping to the very toes. Roll the sleeves to the elbows at mealtimes and freckle the forearms. Blanch them with flour or slick them with shortening scooped from the vat. Pinch the features of the face and flush them crimson from the stove heat in whatever season. Draw the hair back in an uncompromising Calvinist bun but release a few intractable wisps about the temples and bead them with droplets of righteous sweat. Tie a white apron, stiff and spotless, about the middle. Shoe the feet under the long skirts with mannish shoes.

  Set the engine in motion. Supply soup spoons, fry pans, cook pots, kettles, colanders, fruit jars, a stone-china measuring cup, a biscuit cutter, butter mold, a flat-handled skimmer, cake plates, breadboard, and spatterware. Furnish a basket of garden truck fresh from the dooryard each morning before sunlight tops the upper step of the porch. Brisk and bustle. See her bending over the new kitchen range that required six men to carry, one toweled hand opening the firebox, the other chucking kindling from the apple crate, kept constantly filled. A metal hod next to it for ashes, kept constantly emptied. These are her verbs: pluck, pare, peel, hull, dice, mince, chop, slice, roll, knead, strain, mash, grate, sift, mix, measure, stir, spoon, pour, bake, parboil, simmer, fry. Serve: mutton soup, dandycake, hoecakes, mustard greens, dill, quince preserves, watercress, kitchen ketchup, corn dodgers, cabbage pickle, shoat steaks, veal.