Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  When they arrived at Argyle in the middle of the afternoon, few people were about and the handful of stores and businesses huddled along Main Street already seemed to be closing down for the evening. At that particular moment the deadness of the place suited Plutina fine. Charlie didn’t own a car (yet, but he had promised) and she hadn’t been looking forward to having strangers see her riding a mule through the middle of town like some common hillbilly. (The roads, Charlie had explained several times, were too bad for him to bring the wagon.) She walked with him to the livery stable where he had boarded the mule the day before. The livery stable also doubled as a Dodge dealership, a fact that gave Plutina the impression, which she never quite got over, that the town of Argyle was a place where things could go either way. Charlie saddled the mule and lifted her onto its broad back, where she primly sat sidesaddle. She tried to look regal and unconcerned as he led her out of town toward the looming mountains, despite the fact that she was terrified of the mule. Her father had always owned a car, and as a town girl she had ridden horseback very little—certainly never anything as big and dangerous-looking as Charlie’s beast of a mule. She would’ve straddled the animal and held on to the saddle horn for dear life but didn’t want the first impression she made in Hudgins County to be parading down Main Street with her dress hiked halfway up to her tail and her legs hanging out for everyone to see.

  Charlie’s people came from the high ridges above Corpening, where the government had recently flushed them from their perches when it bought (or illegally seized, depending on your point of view) most of the land in Donald County for the park, a scattering from which the Shires as a clan never quite regrouped. There weren’t many of them to begin with, and when they left Donald they flew every which way. Plutina had spent so little time with Charlie’s relations that she couldn’t say with any surety whether or not that was a blessing. Charlie had borrowed enough money from an uncle—whom, incidentally, had lit out for Texas before Plutina ever laid eyes on him—to buy eighty-three acres of land and set up housekeeping in the deep mountains ten miles outside of town. (Charlie’s property had figured heavily in her calculations as she considered his proposal—calculations she silently adjusted once she understood that the majority of that property approached the vertical in pitch.) She had almost gotten used to riding the mule, and was beginning to sleepily pretend that she and Charlie were Mary and Joseph on the way to Bethlehem, when Charlie climbed on behind her and wrapped the arm not holding her suitcase around her in such a way that his forearm casually but noticeably pressed into her breasts. (Unlike Henrietta, she was not flat-chested.) The forwardness and broad-daylight nature of this affection struck her as a little trashy, but she was glad to have both the warmth he provided as well as someone to keep her from falling off the mule in case she dozed off.

  The road away from town climbed up and up and—each time it no longer seemed possible—up some more. She tried to remember the way back to Argyle as they rode along, but was soon lost beyond finding. They weaved in and out and around the ridges the way a child might have found her way through a drawing room packed with adults. More than once they seemed on the verge of dead-ending into the face of a mountain, only to veer at the last minute into some previously hidden pass; in the passes the road picked its way along the courses of narrow white creeks that bounded down from the high country as if fleeing something. Because Weald lay on a riverbank in a wide, fertile valley, the mountains Plutina had grown up knowing stood politely some distance away from where she had viewed them. These new peaks, however, pressed in on her like rude strangers. They seemed haphazardly piled on top of each other, like toys in a box or apples in a bowl, and left little room between them for anything so pleasant as a valley, let alone one with bottomland enough for a farm. She didn’t know where Charlie was taking her, but increasingly began to think that it couldn’t be anyplace good.

  An hour and a half into their journey the road tunneled through a hollow so thick with balsam and rhododendron that they could see neither the sky above their heads nor the rushing stream whose echo hissed in the leaves all around them. Once they climbed out of the hollow Plutina noticed that the woods continued to hiss even though they had moved out of earshot of the creek. It had begun to sleet. The tiny, flat hat that she wore with her wedding suit was mostly ornamental, and within minutes her hair began to freeze. Plutina’s hair had never once froze before she married Charlie Shires and set off on a mule into the wilderness, so she pushed his forearm away from her breasts. Back in Weald, Henrietta would be cooking supper, probably chicken. Henrietta was good with chicken. Their father would be reading and rattling the Asheville paper, which came without fail every afternoon on the train. He was more than likely grumbling about Herbert Hoover to anybody who would listen. Now Henrietta was the only possibility. Plutina had always felt a little sorry for President Hoover, but because he was a Republican (an affiliation that could get you shot in Weald on certain days of the year) she had never said so out loud. With the hand she wasn’t using to hold on to the mule, she reached up and patted her stiff hair. But honestly, how could the problems of an entire country be the fault of just one moon-faced man? Shouldn’t people at least be nice to him because he was trying? Plutina found the state of the world too much to think about with frozen hair, so she decided to go ahead and cry. If Charlie noticed her sobbing he never let on.

  Just when she began to consider the possibility that Charlie was taking her off into the mountains to kill her, they rounded a bend and he pointed off to the right and said, “There’s our house.” It was small and white and occupied the top of a knob that sprouted at the base of App Mountain. Already more than a hundred years old, it had begun life as a dogtrot cabin constructed out of chestnut logs by some pioneer whose name had been forgotten. Later occupants had enclosed the dogtrot and covered the logs outside with weatherboarding and inside with plaster. Charlie would eventually raise the roof of the center pen and add a second story. Miraculously, for a house set so far back in the mountains, it overlooked a narrow but perfectly flat creek valley.

  He helped Plutina down off the mule and they ran onto the porch as if they had been caught in a sudden shower only moments before, and were not already soaked through and half frozen. When he picked her up to carry her across the threshold the ice on her coat began to break. He put her down in the dark, largely empty center room and set her suitcase on the floor beside her. “That way’s the kitchen,” he said, pointing to the left, “and that way’s the bedroom. I’ve got to put the mule up.” Then he was gone. He hadn’t even lit a lamp. Plutina sat down on top of her suitcase, facing the front door. Although her teeth were chattering, and had been for a while, she couldn’t be sure if the rest of her was shivering from the cold or because she was so mad. She made up her mind that when Charlie Shires opened that door again she was going to call him everything but the son of a righteous God and demand that he take her back to Argyle that instant and put her on the next train to Weald. Her daddy would take her in no matter what he had told Charlie.

  Luckily, the barn was behind the house and Charlie returned through the back door with a handful of eggs from the chicken coop and set to building a fire in the stove. They would eventually come to laugh about her rude introduction to farm life, and “putting up the mule” even became their euphemism for sex, but Plutina would find nothing funny about the episode for some time to come. In fact, from that day on she counted each of the succession of mules Charlie would own a personal enemy. (During the summers he did spend more waking hours with them than he did with her.) She listened to Charlie banging around in the kitchen for a few minutes before deciding to join him. I’m only going, she told herself, because that’s where the fire is.

  Plutina awoke early the next morning, before first light, and one by one considered the surprises of the night before. Her nightgown was still pushed above her waist, and Charlie was spooned up against her, which didn’t feel that different than Henrietta being spooned up
against her, except that she, Plutina, didn’t have on any underwear and Charlie was naked as the day he was born and clutching one of her breasts like it was something that would blow up if he dropped it. She moved around slightly, trying to locate and gauge the condition of Charlie’s “thing” without waking it up. (She didn’t know what else to call it without cussing. He had not referred to it by name. She had once heard her father use the word “tallywhacker,” but that sounded like a piece of farm machinery that would chop off your fingers if you got too close to it.) When “interested” (that was Charlie’s word for the way it got, “interested,” as if it had a mind of its own), Charlie’s thing had about the same girth as a good stick, the kind you might pick up in the woods if you needed to kill a copperhead, and was longer, she thought, than was absolutely necessary. He had insisted on prodding her with it the whole time it was “interested,” and not just in the place she had expected him to prod her with it, but wherever it happened to be aimed. She had found the constant poking irritating (how would you like it if somebody spent half the night jabbing you with a stick?) but when she tried to move her leg or whatever it was butting up against out of the way, or got mad and pushed against it with her hip, trying to drive it back to its side of the bed, Charlie only took that as encouragement and redoubled the poking and jabbing. (If his thing made him that crazy every time it inflated, what in the world had he done with it before he got married?) She wiggled again. Charlie, in his sleep, shoved his thing up against the back of her thigh, except now it was as harmless and squishy—and very nearly as disgusting—as the chawed-up plug of tobacco Henrietta had years ago double-dared her to step on with one of her bare feet.

  The sheets, she figured, and probably her best nightgown, had to be a sight. If it hadn’t snowed she was going to find out first light where Charlie kept the washtub, then build a fire and give everything a good scrubbing. (She could only hope they hadn’t gotten any blood on the quilts; blood was nearly impossible to get out of a quilt.) As for the sex itself, well, that had hurt worse than she had thought it would—which was saying something, because after Plutina started going out with Charlie Shires, Henrietta had been explicit in her speculation about the pain girls experienced when they lost their virginity. It’s like getting shot with a gun. It’s like being crucified. It’s like getting branded. Henrietta had only been trying to scare her, of course, but her speculations hadn’t been that far off the mark. On first consideration, Plutina’s “female place” seemed a receptacle entirely ill-suited for its apparently God-ordained purpose. No, Henrietta, it’s more like sticking an ax handle in a pencil sharpener. Nor did she like the sound of “female place,” even though it had been her mother’s term of choice, because it sounded like some fenced-off spot where girls were sent to be punished. Now that the gate was open she needed a new word. “Vagina” sounded nasty and all the other words she knew for it were vulgarities.

  Still, awful as the sex had been, she sensed glimmering off in the distance the faint possibility that she might somehow be able to find pleasure of her own in it. The thought troubled her a little. The “loose” girls Plutina had gone to school with—there had been three for sure, maybe four—had been rumored to like doing it and she, or any other respectable girl, wouldn’t have been caught dead talking to any of them. Was liking sex the thing that had made those girls bad? She supposed that letting Charlie do it a reasonable amount was part of being a good wife—Plutina meant to be a good wife and besides, it was the only way to make babies—but did liking it turn you into something else? Did it diminish you? Would it cause you to lose favor in the eyes of your husband? Of God? The people you passed on the street? Could you be a faithful, Christian wife and still be loose? Plutina had no idea. She had occasionally sneaked and read parts of Song of Solomon when she was supposed to be memorizing Bible verses for Sunday school, but she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails out of it, all that talk about young stags and mountains and spices and pomegranates. (What was a pomegranate, anyway?) She suspected the book was about sex, but there wasn’t anybody she could ask. Because of her mother’s stroke Plutina had never found out just what, if anything, Mrs. Scroggs would have had to say; the one time she had shown a passage to Henrietta, Henrietta had slapped her face and run into their room and slammed the door.

  That afternoon, Plutina sat wrapped up on the back steps and watched Charlie chop wood. He grew so warm with the labor that he took off his coat, then his shirt, before finally wiggling out of the top part of his union suit and letting it dangle down behind him as he worked. His bare skin steamed in the cold. Despite the lingering soreness, Plutina began to feel warm and blurry down there. (Down there. She hated that, too. It made her private parts sound like South Carolina.) When Charlie glanced over at her she blushed so exorbitantly that he grinned. She couldn’t look at him just then so she picked at a loose thread on one of her coat buttons until she almost worked the button off the coat. She could feel him watching her. Her nipples puckered up the way they did when she ate a pickle. Female place. Down there. Vagina. South Carolina. She twisted impatiently on the step. Now she knew why babies got mad and cried when they wanted to tell you something. They didn’t know the right words. Charlie drove the ax into the chopping block. The echo clapping off the mountainside made her jump.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s the matter with me.”

  “Well, you look like something’s the matter with you.”

  “Well, there ain’t.” She finally forced herself to glance up at him. Tallywhacker, she thought. Dick. Peter. Charlie. “It’s cold out here,” she said. “You interested in going inside?”

  In the spring of 1935 Charlie took a job working on the new road through the Smokies. They had eaten well enough in the intervening years but made only enough money farming to cover the fertilizer bills. Charlie left home Sunday afternoons after dinner and walked over the mountains to the work camp near Corpening. He walked back home Fridays after he got off, arriving at the farm by 2 AM. (How he made the trip through the dark without a lantern was a mystery to her.) Plutina would have preferred to stay with her family in Weald while Charlie was gone, but the farm work fell to her. That spring and early summer she not only kept up her vegetable garden, but she also fed the animals and hoed and fertilized the cotton and the corn and the watermelons. Most days she had to work from can to can’t just to stay close to even with all she had to do. The work seemed to her a hateful thing she chased but never once caught. She just tried to keep it in sight, and in the process developed the mannish calluses of a field hand. (Charlie did the cultivating when he came home on weekends. Sometimes he had to work Sunday mornings to get it all done.) Plutina took Friday afternoons off to straighten up the house so it would be clean when Charlie got home. Before she went to bed she drew enough water from the well to fill the washtub. When Charlie stomped onto the back porch she lit a lamp and went out and sat with him while he bathed. If the night was chilly she lit a fire in the kitchen and boiled a kettle of water to pour into the tub. Charlie always washed himself with his back turned to her but whenever he turned around he was, without fail, interested. His thing pointed at her like a weather vane. They had both thinned down to gristle and skeleton, and when he climbed on top of her each of them complained about the rough hands and boniness of the other.

  Before Charlie went to work on the road crew Plutina had never spent a night alone. She had, in fact, spent precious few nights in a bed by herself. She wasn’t particularly scared during the daylight hours because she had so much to do, but she suffered through the nights. She was afraid that when word got out that a young girl stayed by herself in the middle of nowhere men from three counties would line up to rape her. Whenever she dozed off their faces peered in the window. Panthers leapt into her bedroom and landed almost silently on the floor. Ghosts of the old settlers creaked through the rooms. Haints formed in the mist that rose from the creek and floated on the night breeze toward
the mountainside. Large animals ran through the woods and the leaves said shhhhhhhhhh. The katydids and whip-poor-wills chanted run away run away run away. The mountain itself leaned over the house and watched her. When it breathed in it sucked the curtains tight against the window frame. Once Charlie learned how frightened she was he brought home a dog that had been hanging around the work camp, but it was a skulky, mistrustful creature that spent most of the two weeks it stayed there cowering under the house. One morning she tossed a biscuit toward it while it wasn’t looking and it took off down the road and never came back. She began sleeping with the head of the ax resting on Charlie’s pillow. She kept a butcher knife underneath her side of the mattress, its handle poking out where she could grab it. Charlie’s shotgun leaned loaded in the corner, but she was almost as afraid of shooting it as she was of the things she imagined coming through the window.

  But she stayed. Word surely got out about the Shires girl who spent the week by herself up App Valley, but nobody came to rape her. She never stopped being afraid, but learned to go to sleep anyway. Over time fewer faces appeared at the window and the panthers stopped coming entirely. She missed one period and then she missed another. Charlie had the week of the Fourth of July off and they laid by the crops. She didn’t tell him. When he returned to work she found herself facing the prospect of several weeks with relatively little to do. What surprised her most during the lull was how lonely she was. She tried taking naps after dinner to pass the time but the house was too hot, the air too still. She always wound up crying. She sat on the front steps and stared down the road and imagined someone coming around the bend—a neighbor girl her own age who lived just over the hill and had a lot of fun about her and loved to play games and sing and sit beside her and lean close and whisper about the boys she knew. But when that girl never materialized (Plutina knew that in reality nobody at all lived over that hill or that hill or that hill or that hill almost halfway to Argyle) she dragged herself up to milk the cow and feed Charlie’s hateful mule. When she tried singing alone she found her voice too loud for the valley, the mountain too close and too big, the echo it shot back at her sharp as a scold. The nearest church was six miles away but they were Holy Roller Jesus jumpers who spoke in unknown tongues. The nearest Baptist church was all the way in town. Sometimes she got mad at the silence and went into the yard and worked up her courage and made herself holler out of spite. One moonlit night she dreamed she saw her mother walking through the vegetable garden and woke up heartbroken because she hadn’t come in to talk. Sometimes she waded in the creek and caught crawdads and looked into their uncomprehending foreign faces and let them go.