Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  And after every meal he witnessed her performing the ritual of resetting the table for the next—teaspoon, butter knife, china fork, salt and pepper cellars, sugar bowl, a cruet of apple vinegar steepled in the center, the whole overlaid with a cloth of starched white linen, the tabletop with its snow-covered peaks and ridges resembling a miniature Alps. True Alps if the kitchen were not so seethingly hot. Those tropics through which passed generations of White Rocks and Wyandotte, white miles of biscuits, acres of steamed greens. Her life was composed of such lists.

  Wherever she was, but in the kitchen especially, her word had the force of law, and as Jarom could testify, her words were many. She was the most forceful person he had ever known, though she limited her sphere of interest to things domestic, especially the preparation of food. She affirmed by some unspoken right or title that the kitchen was her domain. This meant no pets, no children underfoot, meals served with the imagined timeliness of well-regulated trains. In her cosmology the kitchen was a continent apart, a country whose capital was the cookstove. From the time he came to live with her after the death of his father, Jarom was under her sovereignty as though he had crossed the frontier of another country—keeping the woodbox filled, seeing that the cook-fire embers never languished to the point of extinction. Chores were performed in accordance with long-established schedules. Knives were whetted the first Saturday of each month, sausage rendered on such and such a day if weather permitted, radishes, potatoes, and other plants whose edible parts grew underground planted during the dark of the moon. Though she would not scruple to wring the neck of a fryer, meat she required to be delivered to her kitchen gutted and dressed. Leisure to her was another species of waste.

  “Idleness,” she said so often it was a litany, “is the serpent’s second head and squalor’s midwife.”

  For Aunt Mary, life and the preparation of victuals followed two time-tested principles: utility and plenitude. Gastronomical refinement and delectation of taste were not matters she bothered herself about. Living plainly among plain people, she served plain fare. Eaters of normal girth who sat at her table looked to her puny—a minister of the Russellville Methodist church, visiting relations, the odd passerby. Once they entered her precincts, she made probing and persistent inquiries about their health, contending that their ailments were imagined, that what their constitutions lacked was nourishing food in generous portions.

  Opposed to spirits in any form, she would not cook with wine and would not tolerate anything more fortified than buttermilk. Holidays and special occasions were no exception. She was also obsessed with tonics of one kind or another. She drank sassafras year-round and attributed her robust health to the pots of tea she consumed each day as well as to the eating of rhubarb, okra, and poke in season. She passed these preferences on to Jarom, insisting that he swallow what seemed like gallons of well-drawn water each day.

  “Stand up straight,” she would say, “or you’ll go through life arched like a rainbow. Get ahold of yourself and rediscover your backbone.”

  Upholding one end of a conversation was not among her social skills, and she reviled gossip that so often had taken root among those of her association, in church and out. “About” and “out” she pronounced in the Tidewater way as “aboot” and “oot.” A woman generous in bestowal of food, she was an inveterate borrower of wisdom, often relying on notations in the ladies’ journals and books on household husbandry that prescribed ways to redirect one’s moral compass. In response to an innocent observation about the weather, for example, Jarom heard her turn her response in such a way so as to drive her convictions home: “A cook in the kitchen is a shade tree in summer and a backlog in winter.”

  Was this, Jarom asked himself, some kind of code or riddle?

  Then and after, Jarom was never sure he understood such homilies, especially the notion of her kitchen as cool when in fact, summer or winter, it was a tropical zone elevated above the temperature outdoors with something always baking. The beads of righteous sweat on his forehead never comported with her references to shade trees. What he understood was that waste in her world of efficient consumption was unforgivable, that the abuse of plenty was the moral equivalent of the Antichrist. Many evenings he’d found himself marooned at the dinner table, condemned to sit until he’d eaten his broccoli or had the opportunity to secrete it in his pocket.

  But there was a slacker side to her intercourse with the world, a quality of kindness that softened the frictions of the kitchen. During the summer months she would keep demijohns of buttermilk cooling in the springhouse. When hay was being cut and raked into manageable windrows, she would serve pitchers of lemonade in the side yard under a dark latticework of maples as the men came in from the fields, hay dust like a batter on their necks, their fingers melting chill-beads from the glasses. No other drinks were as cold or as restorative as that pale liquid afloat with squeezed yellow rinds and gravelly ice chipped from blocks of winter pond stored underground in sawdust, the lemonade accompanied by platters of sweetmeats to fortify the blood.

  Jarom came to know her by helping in the kitchen, not always with complete willingness. A large bowl on the table between them, they snapped beans or cored apples or peeled potatoes. When the garden hit its peak of profusion and vegetables came in by the basketful, he watched her can tomatoes, squash, okra, and similar truck. The aqua jars into which they were converted formed neat rows along the tiered shelves of her pantry. While they worked, she would tell stories and recount the family saga of settlement, the struggle of her father to wrest a living from the earth. Often she peppered her talk with references to what she always referred to as the Word of God. Jarom came to savor the hours he spent with her, unconsciously fitting his life rhythm to hers, taking her teachings as a lens through which to interpret the world. Seldom laughing, alert to any failing, she seemed derived from one or all of the prophets of old. Despite the sternness of her behavior, Jarom discovered a vein of affection beneath the crusty exterior.

  She did not so much dwell on Scripture as live it, though Jarom sensed that her spirit was always more comfortable in the Old Testament than the New. And she always retained a healthy portion of heathenish superstition, convinced as she was, for example, that the cure for itching fungus between the toes was to step in fresh cow dung. She moved with nervous feet, a kind of quickstep that some would describe as clumsiness as though her limbs, her body, were, like poor servants, to be tolerated but never trusted. She took snuff in small doses but did not permit tobacco to be smoked indoors. Though she was well up in years when Jarom came to live with her, the only sign of her aging was a turkey wattle under the chin. She carried all of her receipts in her head and from May until November never appeared outside the house without a bonnet.

  MOLLIE THOMAS, SUMMER 1861

  The house where Jarom came to stay with Aunt Mary Tibbs and her many floating connections stood on a slight eminence surrounded by fields generally flat to rolling. The land about it sloped down on three sides and drained into a nameless creek—simply called “the creek”—that formed a horseshoe around the rear of the farm. What lay inside the hoof was mostly cleared and put in crops of wheat, Indian corn, and dark-fired tobacco or was sown in hay or dedicated to pasture. The lush bottom the generations of Tibbses reserved for crops up to where the ground softened into marsh along the branch. What lay outside the hoof was wilderness.

  The house consisted of two stories of wood, built over an original log pen whose enormous stone chimneys dominated the gable ends. Against the sky the elevation stood plain and unpretentious, ample rather than severe in plainness, the side- and fanlights at the main door being the only concession to ornament. Ash and sugar trees shaded the whole of the fenced-in yard, survivals of the old woods that drew a breeze even during the hottest months. The canopies interwove so tightly that only a few varieties of grass would grow there. To the rear lay a plot of land, an acre or so, set aside for garden. It formed an axis for a cluster of outbuildings—a henhouse
, toolshed, smokehouse, privies, and a small barn for implements. Jarom could seldom resist pedaling the treadle grinding wheel outside the toolshed.

  To the rear of the garden grew an orchard, several rows of apple and peach trees, some planted by Aunt Mary’s grandfather before the Second War of Independence. Nether and the field hands Ralph and Sam and their families lived in three neat cabins along the edge of the orchard. Aunt Carrie, the oldest person on the place, had a cabin to herself, closer to the house and kitchen where she helped Aunt Mary when needed. To the right and halfway down a hill was the “new” stock barn and stables that Fenton Tibbs, Aunt Mary’s late husband, had built two years before he died.

  One Sunday afternoon when the house was full of Tibbs relations, including a dark-headed girl a year or two younger whose company Jarom wasn’t willing to keep for an afternoon, he decided to disappear to the springhouse down the hillside from the house. If asked by a trusted questioner where he found sanctuary from work and the world of adults, Jarom would have answered the springhouse. It was a simple, one-room structure built of rough fieldstone with dry-stacked walls topped by a few feet of logs and a shake roof. Its floor was dirt except for the spring that flowed from under a rock shelf. Jarom searched among the fine gravels and silt for crock shards the color of bone, each with its mosaic of hair-thin cracks. The air in that place seemed cavelike, always cool and dense with humidity. He could close his eyes and imagine the grotto of the fairy stories his aunt Nancy Bradshaw had read to him. Among the rocks he lifted he found salamanders, a tribe of them, in the coolness sheathed by gravels that were fine as sand. He classified them as members of the lizard family, all tail and no trunk, their stubby legs ending in clawless toes. Like miniature hands. Bright and peppered with specks, with reddish backs that gave them a gaudy look, bracelets dropped glittering among the stones.

  Life went on in layers there. High along the eaves, the dry climate of rafters, he spied the tubular nests of mud daubers. When he broke the crust of one of them, he found it stuffed with dead insects to feed the unhatched young. A cat’s cradle of webs, a wheel of stretched spittle boxed into the frame, spanned the window that opened onto the humming pasture. In it Jarom noticed one wasp balled up in tinsel, a housefly marooned in the upper weave, the iridescent sheen of its armor a nasty jewel. The smell inside, stale and somehow safe, seemed most to him like the ruptured horsehair loveseat in the attic of the house.

  After a time he felt the desire to wander. He left the springhouse and followed the water that spilled through a sluice in the stone wall and flowed toward the back of the farm. A few crow caws broke the stillness of the summer afternoon, the sky above him nicked with buzzards floating in lazy circuits above the fields, the tips of their great wings curling for balance.

  Roughly following the stream along the hard ground above the marsh, he passed a dozen or so milk cows that grazed pasture sown in fescue and bluegrass. He passed Nell and Rio, two fat-haunched workhorses that he sometimes bribed with sugar for a ride, throwing a halter over Nell’s head and slipping in the bit, then hiking himself up and going bareback. In the soggy bottom he passed the beds of watercress Aunt Mary had him pluck for salads through late spring and summer. Wading, he would yank it up in green heaps, exposing the undersides with their skein of stringy white rootlets, which smelled like moss. On another day he might search along the banks for arrowheads and bits of flint, having once found a grinding stone large as a man’s fist. He could imagine the first dwellers of that place grinding cornmeal harvested from stalks in the flatland along the creek. But today he went on, entering the shade of the woods where the branch widened across large flags of stone in a series of descending shelves that dropped into falls like rough steps up the creek bed. In one place the creek flowed over the ledges into a natural pool, just deep enough for swimming when the sun drove him from the fields. John Patterson had shown him the spot first on one of their outings. But now John had other interests—mostly skirts and sweet nothings whispered to eligible young women. More often Jarom spent time with George and Easter, his play- and workmates whose parents lived in the orchard cabins and worked the fields.

  Jarom followed the path of least resistance toward the pool. As he approached the overhang from the upper end, he sensed something different. He stepped into a pocket of chill air, the same unearthly cool of the springhouse, and he felt himself on the border of another world. He remembered Nether telling him that Induns, as he called them, held such spots sacred, believing there were places in the world where the spirits gathered, their expelled breath explaining the cooler air. Sounds from the upper world of sunlight and open field—cow bellow, dove call, the snapping of butterfly wings—were absorbed in the low, steady patter of creek water leaving its bed to drop on the rocks below. The surrounding walls of the overhang formed a cavity or chamber in which the water sounds resonated.

  Stopping short of the edge, Jarom veered off and circled past a margin of trees and down a funnel-shaped slope matted with ferns. There was a path, and he felt the ferns brushing against his legs, half expecting to step on a sleeping snake. He was halfway down, the water sound welling in his ears, when he realized he was not alone.

  There, in the shallows of the pool, water just above her white ankles, head fringed by a sparkling curtain of water, was the girl he had been studying to avoid when he left the house, Mollie Thomas.

  For a moment he did not recognize her. She wore a simple, high-waisted frock, a speckled blue with a wide band about the middle. To one side on a platterlike rock at the rim of the pool she had neatly paired her stockings and pumps.

  Staring into the shower of spray, water plashing into the pool and vibrating under the hollow stone shelf that curved around the falls, she did not hear him on the path. Over the centuries the falls had gradually undercut the softer minerals until the overhang in places had tumbled in, leaving thick sheets of canted stone and pockets scooped into banks of clay. Fixing on her form centered among the rocks and water, Jarom saw that everything about her was damp or wet, her skin jeweled with droplets. As he watched, he felt a slick film of moisture forming on his own arms and face.

  Though he had met her earlier in the day, he met her as he would a stranger, more an object to be avoided, like a footstool in the center of the room, than a composition of flesh and senses. He had given her no more attention than he would the sun-faced clock on the landing of the stairs or the first lightning bugs in June, momentarily registering on the mind, quickly forgotten. Here, removed from the household and transported to the creek bottom, she seemed a new person, someone Jarom determined to know. Age? She might have been fourteen, and he regarded her as a child, though only a year or so separated them. He imagined her moving in the company of women, a fence of them around her like upright trees in a palisade. There were no fences here.

  A full minute must have passed before she sensed that anyone was near. Her back to him, she stood perfectly still in the water. Then she turned. She did not start when she saw him. Nothing in her face, as he would remember, showed the least surprise. Slowly she raised a hand to sweep back some wisps of hair that fell across her forehead in bangs, a dark color made darker by the water, not so much a color as a texture, fine and tightly woven.

  “I didn’t hear you come,” she said, smiling. “You must think me a fool or a simpleton standing here in the water like this.”

  In fact, to Jarom she seemed to belong there.

  “No,” he said. “No, it’s all right. I come here myself. I come here all the time.”

  “Why aren’t you off chasing horses or fooling with those boys, with George or Easter?”

  This struck Jarom as more observation than question.

  “So this is where you get off to when you want to be alone?” she said.

  “This or a dozen other places,” he told her, realizing only after he said it how silly it sounded.

  Then she stepped out of the water, careful to keep her footing on the slippery rocks, her skirts still
hitched slightly above her ankles. Under the water her feet had seemed foreshortened and bone white as the roots of watercress. As she raised her foot, he glimpsed a tracery of blue veins in its curvature. Spots of light played across her face and frock when she moved, the shade above deepening but strands of brightness still shimmering about her head.

  Turning to one side, she sat on the stone platter to pull on her stockings and shoes. As naturally as the flow of water around them, she began to talk as if to some lifelong friend, telling Jarom things that were neither really important nor very personal.

  Jarom sat down on another rock and listened as he seldom listened to anyone but John Patterson, commenting after each pause and even talking a little about himself. Above the bowl of rock and water in which they’d hidden themselves, he knew the sun had nearly dropped behind the western ridge.

  They walked together up the path and across the pasture up to the house. Back at the house they sat on the porch until Mrs. Thomas, an older version of her daughter so close in appearance she might have passed for a sister, came out and scolded Mollie for missing supper and quickly sent her to bed.

  In his own room Jarom rehearsed the afternoon, reconstructing it in almost perfect detail and sequence. But clearly as the sight of her fixed in his mind—down to the water skates skittering in the shallows, the clusters of gnats, the huge spiderweb they stepped through passing between some trees on the trek uphill—he couldn’t remember much of what she’d said. Yet something about her, not so much her appearance as the setting in which he found her, fixed that evening in his mind, established her shape and expression as firmly as paint on canvas.