Tending to Virginia

by Jill McCorkle

  “Tessy.”

  “No listen,” she whispers louder. “You are the only good thing to come from me marrying Harv, not Lena, not your mama, just you. There are only two people on this earth that I love; I love you and I love . . .”

  “Tessy, don’t,” Emily says and grabs her hand. “They’re liable to come looking for us out here.”

  “I don’t have to tell you,” she says. “I don’t even have to say his name. You’re the only person I’ll ever tell and that’s enough. I know he loves me and I love him. All day long I hear his sad sweet music in my head like a promise.” She lies back in the hay and crosses her hands over her stomach. “I’d like to hold onto a green velvet dress, a dress the color of a deep dark forest and I’d fix my hair all up in a twist and then let it down real slow over one shoulder.”

  “Oh Tessy,” Emily shakes her head. “You’d look pretty but where around here would you wear a green velvet dress?”

  “I’d wear it right out in the field. I’d wear it into town when I went to the store. I’d wear it at a ball and I’d dance around and around.” Tessy stands and holds her dress out to the side, curtsies. “And I’ll wear it when . . .” she turns and drops back down in the hay, her cheeks flushed.

  “When?” Emily asks, fearing what she knows to be the truth, that Tessy has never given up on her dream that that man will be back for her. Tessy is so pretty here in the dusky light, her thick hair curling and twisting, the color blending with the hay, her thin face filled with color.

  “When? When?” Tessy laughs, lies back and laughs such a loud fit of laughter that Emily catches herself laughing even though she’s not certain why. “When I’m buried,” Tessy sighs. “I’ll wear it in the grave.” And she laughs until the tears start rolling down her cheeks and Emily leans over to hug her.

  “That’s a long way off,” Emily whispers.

  “And a long way down.”

  “Tessy!” Emily hugs her closer. “You’re forgiven all of that. You’ve asked haven’t you?”

  “Oh I’ve asked.” Tessy backs away. “But I ain’t so sure that’ll take care of it. I ain’t so sure I want to be forgiven; that’s asking forgiveness for the best part of my life.”

  “You believe don’t you?”

  “You gotta believe something, I reckon,” she says. “I believe I ain’t meant to have more babies. I believe I ain’t meant to spend my whole life like an old woman.” She pauses and stares hard at Emily. “But I believe that if God is good like you say that he wouldn’t give me such a bad life, that he’d give me a chance.”

  “We can’t question how things are done,” Emily says, tears coming to her eyes.

  “Oh, you can’t cry enough over it,” Tessy says. “It’s all so sad. The only thing that keeps me going and working and living this life is that feeling I had that I told you about,” Tessy lowers her voice and watches Emily’s back go stiff. “Just tell me if you’ve ever felt something, if you’ve ever felt like every drop of blood in your body could pump right out, felt your face go hot and felt so funny between the legs like you needed to cross them real tight.”

  “Tessy,” Emily whispers, stares at her hands. “Just hush up.”

  “No, tell me.” Tessy kneels and grips her hands. “Has James ever made you feel that way? Has anybody?”

  “James is my husband.”

  “And Harv is my husband,” she says. “But he has never made me feel that way.”

  “Harv is good to you, a good husband. If a woman’s got a good husband who is kind to her then she’s got a lot.”

  “But she doesn’t have everything.”

  “Nobody has everything.”

  “Oh, I think you do, Emily,” Tessy says and stands, brushes off her dress. “I never would have told you how I felt that night and all those afternoons when I’d see him downtown. I wouldn’t have told you how he made me feel that way if I hadn’t thought that you’d know what I was saying.”

  “I have never discussed myself with you. It’s not to be discussed.”

  “Why? Why can’t we discuss it?” Tessy pulls that barn door open wide and they can see Harv and James standing over by the woodpile, one of Tessy’s children chasing after a hound dog with a stick. “But you know what I’m talking about, though. I know you do and I reckon I feel lucky to have felt it once.” Tessy steps out into the yard and reaches for Emily’s hand. “I think you’re lucky ‘cause you’ve got your whole life to feel it.” Emily doesn’t look at her as they walk side by side, but Tessy feels stronger now; she feels the energy coming back to her, she hears that slow sweet tune with every step of her feet in those dead crackly leaves.

  Tessy stands and watches James and Emily get in the buggy and pull away, down the road, a fine slice of that strange gray light between their bodies. She takes a deep breath, that crisp autumn air, feeling like a part of her is in that buggy and gone in a cloud of yellow dust.

  “I reckon you needed a woman to talk to,” Harv says, his hand clumsily finding hers as they walk up to the house. He has already built a fire and has the lantern on the front porch lit. “I’m sorry for what you went through.”

  “I know you are,” she says. “I’m thinking I might go to town with you tomorrow, thinking I might buy me some cloth. I want to sew some cloth.”

  By summertime, Emily has herself a baby girl that she calls Hannah Elizabeth, straight from the Bible and Tessy is all swoll up with what she hopes will be her last. If it’s a boy, she wants to call him Jacob; if it’s a girl she’ll just call her something like Madge or Peg and try to get on with her life.

  * * *

  The silence, the way that his eyes never leave Tessy’s face, is comfortable until a large acorn thumps the dusty dirt, reminding her that there are people passing on the street, the iced salted fish that she has just bought leaking through the newspaper onto her hands. She looks briefly away, past the tall oak where a straw-haired child pulls a wagon full of empty bottles, then down at her hands, the black sticky smudges.

  “I best be going,” she says and takes one step back from him, his violin in the case beside his feet. “Mighty nice to have seen you again.”

  “Yes,” once again he looks at her and there is that impulsive sense that he might suddenly reach and grab her hands, pull her close in spite of the people, the fish, the child who now is passing, the wagon wheels whining with every bump of the road, bottles clanging. He extends his hand to her and she pauses a minute, realizing her hands are covered in sticky smudges, as calloused as any man’s hand. He waits, palm toward her, long smooth fingers with tiny callouses at the tips where he pressed the strings of his violin. “It’s always nice when you stop by, Tessy. I hope to see you again.”

  She nods and turns quickly, hurries down the road, the colors so warm beyond the fields where the sun is setting. Just the sight of it all makes her feel as if she could be swallowed up by the sky; it makes her feel so good, so sad, free, strong, and then weak and tired. She can hear his music, calling her back, or maybe giving her the strength to go on. Just hearing the music, knowing he is there, is going to stay for awhile, is enough to make her keep walking, down the road, past the small row of houses, the large open fields that lead down to where she and Harv live.

  She realizes that she is walking faster and faster, ready to run at any moment, the fish clutched so tightly that they are soiling the front of her dress. She must stop, breathe, because Harv will be at home, will see the flush in her cheeks and the slight shaking of her hands. She stops at the curve in the road and relaxes her grip on the fish, turns to look back where he is standing in front of the hardware store, a handful of people stopped there to listen to his music, to toss coins in that open case. She slows her pace to that of the music, steady, sweeping, the whole time that she imagines his smooth lineless face, his young strong body, and at night when there is someone there beside her, she imagines that it’s him.

  She arranges her days in ways that she has to go to town; she takes her time get
ting ready, combs her hair down smooth around her shoulders, pinches her cheeks and lips. She does this for weeks, her stops in front of the hardware store sometimes lasting into late afternoon, their stares becoming longer and longer until one day she meets him there by the Saxapaw River, the bend that is always deserted, as he follows the road by the river to his home and his wife and children. The bend is a shaded area blanketed in moist green moss and hidden from the ridge of trees that blocks the sight of her own home, Spanish moss hangs from the trees, grapevines like large ropes all around. She meets him just that once and soon there is no reason to go to town, no reason to comb her hair down around her shoulders. His name repeats itself in her mind, over and over, like a song of her own until too many weeks and months and years pass and the tunes that he played only come to her in odd little bits and pieces.

  * * *

  Lena thinks she’s dying at thirteen. That’s all blood can mean, dying, and she flings herself on top of the bed, pulls a quilt up over her and rocks back and forth, her hands covering the wounded area while she prays as loud as she can. She thinks of all the lies she has told, how she told her mama that the reason she didn’t have recess at school was because the teacher needed a helper when all the time it was because she slapped a girl upside of her fat head for not letting Lena use the speller that had bad pictures drawn in it. She thinks of all the times she had called Curie, “Nigger, nigger black as tar,” and gotten switched for it. She thinks of her sister way up there in the churchyard “starved like a skeleton” or so they say. But Lena isn’t starving, she is bleeding to death and it makes her scream louder just to think of it.

  “Lena Pearson, what on earth?” her mama asks, standing in the doorway so gray and washed out, always so gray and washed out like she might not have any blood and Lena’s blood is so red and dark, on her hand and between her legs. She can’t even tell where it’s coming from. When Harv sliced up the front of his leg with that axe, they were able to get it to stop because they could see where it was coming from. But when Curie was tied up to that tree, before her daddy took him down and threw his coat over him, she couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from. It seemed the blood was coming from everywhere like right now and Curie died.

  “I’m hurt,” Lena says. “I’m dying,” and she is somehow relieved by the very sound of it, the pronouncement. “I’m dying.”

  “What is wrong?” her mama sits down at the end of the bed.

  “I’m bleeding, bleeding to death.”

  “Where?” Her mama pulls back the quilt.

  “Here, down here,” she says and holds up her hand for her mama to see. “I’m bleeding from where I pee.” Her mama turns away and shakes her head.

  “All women bleed that way,” her mama whispers as if Lena should have known, as if she’s done something wrong in not knowing. “It’s how women have babies.”

  “By bleeding?” Lena sits up and looks at her mother. She suddenly doesn’t feel quite as weak as she did before. “But I don’t want to have a baby. I want to go to the fair.” Her mama goes on and on about how women are put on this earth to suffer, that it is God’s will that they suffer, that a lady (if she is a lady) has a hard row to hoe and the earlier that lesson is learned, the better off she will be. Then she takes Lena to the linen closet where she has a stack of diapers there on the bottom shelf and tells her how that’s what she’ll wear and how she’ll need to wash them out and hang them on the line down at the end of the field so that no man will see them hanging there.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Lena asks Emily late that night when they are in bed. “I’m so mad that nobody told me this.”

  “Mama said it needn’t be discussed,” Emily whispers. “It’s personal.”

  “Well, you still should have told. I thought I was dying, bent over to pick up some chicken feed and caught a glimpse up my dress and thought I was dying.”

  Emily turns her face to the wall. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “How? How can I get used to something that I’m supposed to keep a secret?” Lena lifts her gown and hikes that diaper back in place. “Mama says it’s a sign from God that you can have babies. Mama says that God wants you to cramp up and bleed like a river, that he makes you.” Lena watches Emily’s back jerk with a loud sigh. “Mary Towney told me that babies are made from pee.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What is true then? Tell me what is true.” Lena feels so mad she could spit fire. “Do you know?”

  “Not completely, no,” Emily says and rolls to face her, Emily’s eyes so wide and fearful. It seems to take the anger right out of her to see Emily look that way.

  “Well, I’m gonna find out all there is to know,” Lena whispers. “I am.” She nods her head at Emily but now she feels so tired and confused about the whole thing, concentrates on that throbbing she can feel like a tiny heartbeat, dreads that she’s going to have to wash that nasty thing out and walk half a mile where nobody will see it drying.

  * * *

  Emily stands in the center of the yard and watches Lena playing there by the pump. Lena is in her underwear, her feet potty black. She glances at the front door to make sure her mama isn’t there behind the screen, and Curie is off to the side, waving his hat and grinning at her. “Dance yourself a jig, Miss Emily,” he says, “Come on, now” and raises one finger, twirls it as if he has a june bug on a string, and she starts, slow at first and then faster and faster, Lena and the front door and Curie’s dark face just a blur beneath that wide blue sky. She laughs and twirls till her head is light and dizzy. “Rain, rain, rain,” she cries, her heart beating fast like the word might be magic. She knows the yellow dust of the yard is clouding up and covering her shoes that she just greased to a fine shine with chicken fat, covering the hem of her dress and her ankles. Her hair has come undone and is whirling with her, sweat trickling down her neck, and she has to breathe faster and faster to keep up with her feet, the sky spinning, until finally, she flops down on a grassy spot and stares open-eyed at the spinning trees and clouds, Curie’s face spinning as he gets closer. “That was a fine dance now,” he says. “Don’t it make your heart feel good?”

  “Yes, yes,” she whispers and closes her eyes to the spinning, her arms and legs so tired in a good way. “I’m going to dance every day.”

  “Emily Pearson? What are you doing?” Her mama is on the porch, the screened door creaking shut, and she bolts up and brushes off her dress, searches through the yellow dust for her hair pins. “You are too old for such.”

  “Last time I ask you to dance a rain dance,” Curie whispers the next day when the sky is so black and stormy. “And you just a child.” His warm face is right next to hers so her mama who is kneeling by the bed won’t hear. “I guess children got the power,” and he grins and heads down the road through the pouring rain, and she stands at the window and watches, thinks about Curie’s girl that he speaks of so often, the girl that has one of Emily’s doll babies, a girl that Emily bets gets to spin and dance and feel that good feeling every day. Her mama tells her to kneel down and pray, that God has the power and that Emily must believe that God has the power. And yes, she does believe in the power but it has nothing to do with her mama’s ways.

  * * *

  Virginia Suzanne Pearson wakes to see her mother standing at the end of the bed, a slight shadow, white bony hands clutching the neck of her robe made visible by the glow of the kerosene lamp that Curie had hung from a porch rafter. “I gotta see my way from the house to the barn or back,” he had told her. “I can’t stand no pitch black darkness.”

  “All right, Curie,” she told him, recalling with amusement the last time he stayed overnight. It was the middle of the night and he made his way to the end of their bed and stood there reeling off all the chores that he had in mind for the next day. Cord had not even awakened until she returned to bed after walking Curie back to the door. “It was so awful,” he finally confessed as he stood in the darkness on the othe
r side of the screened door. “I dreamed I come into this house and you was all ghosts, white and still with glassy eyes and not a breath I tell you. I called out and nobody said nothin’, I was the only one of us livin’. I says ‘Miss Virginia, I’s scared’ and your head turned so slowlike, them eyes still glassy and you says, ‘Curie, ain’t no reason,’ and I says ‘but I am, why ain’t you in the bed, why’re them children setting up and it way in the night’ and you says, ‘Curie, ain’t no reason’ just that same way. You said it over and over and then little Lena she said it too, and Emily and on and on till I woke up in a sweat like I’ve never in my life had.” His eyes were wide and frightened as he told the dream and she felt a chill go through her scalp just listening, the same chill that comes now with Mother’s voice.

  “I’ve come to tell you something,” her mother says and though Virginia cannot distinguish her mother’s mouth in the darkness, there is a difference in her voice, her teeth clenched. “You have to listen,” she whispers and steps closer to the bed. “I’ve come to tell you that if any of those children of yours ever run wild, if you let them grow up to be hateful or cheap, if you ever let them go without food and clothes and knowledge of the Lord, I’ll come and stand here every night after I’m gone. I’ll stand right here and I’ll never let you rest.”

  “Mother,” she begs. “Please don’t say things like that. You know I’ll take care of my babies.” But her mother turns and leaves the room as quietly as she had come in. In the days that follow when Virginia’s mama sits out on the porch and waves a straw broom back and forth, Virginia tries to ask her about what she said, ask her why she did that, but her mama’s stare is foggy and distant. It is as if that night never happened, as if Virginia dreamed it all. Even after her mother’s death, she catches herself wondering about those words, if they were real, or if they were like the words “ain’t no reason” that Curie’s dream had given to her, words so foreign to her mouth and yet so real for him. And Curie did have a reason to be afraid, and now she has a child who is dead, a child who went without food and starved.