by Vicki Lane
“Where are you going?” I asked again, “And when will you be back?”
He paused at the door. “I—or if not I, my driver—will be back just before the snow flies to take you across the river. Till then, I have other obligations to fulfill. You’ll be safe here, Miss Birdsong.”
And he lifted his hat and was gone.
Time is like a river, Granny Beck told me, and most of us is in that river, swept along with no way of stopping or turning back. But they is some few what walks the banks of that river, up and down, stopping or going at their own pleasure. I believe that Mr. Aaron is one of these and I believe that I will see him again.
My bruises healed and Inez and Odessa fixed me up fine with some nice clothes. They taught me how to cut out a dress and how to use a sewing machine. Law, they was so much I didn’t know about the ordinary way of life. Those girls stayed busy with all manner of things—games and books and picking the guitar and piecing quilts and I don’t know what all.
And they both of them keep these little diaries that they write in every day, come what may, as Odessa says. They are the cutest little books with locks on them so can’t no one look at what they write. But Inez has showed me hers. It is a little small thing and it is for five years, so there is not room but for one or two lines for each day.
I would admire to have one of these books but there ain’t none at the store right now. Odessa says they only get them in around Christmastime. But she has give me a speckledy black and white composition book, with lines ruled in it, and I am writing down things just like the sisters do.
I hated it that I couldn’t go about with them—they go to picture shows and there are entertainments up at the school—but there is always the fear that someone or other would know me for Redbird Ray. Or, come to that, for Least, the quare girl. So I stay close to the house, working in the garden and helping in the kitchen. Odessa has let out that I am a cousin come to stay and that I am recovering from an unhappy attachment and don’t like going among company. Which is true enough, in its way, I reckon. Ha.
But months has passed, my hair has grown out, and the henna is all gone. I can look in my mirror and see nothing of Redbird—that firecracker dancing girl with her flaming hair—nor can I see aught of the sorry little Least who was near about feared of her own shadow.
My hair has grown long again and it is a shining dark waterfall. When I brush it, Inez says that I look like a princess. I have learned how to twist it up in what Odessa calls a Grecian knot. Now the girl I see in the mirror, with her golden skin and blue eyes and shiny hair, is a different somebody than anyone I have been yet and I wonder how Young David will like her.
Chapter 29
A Letter
Dewell Hill, 1938
Me and Inez is canning applesauce and there is several bushels yet to be cooked down. I am all a-sweat, though Odessa says ladies don’t sweat—they glow—and I leave Inez stirring the kettle of sauce and go out for more stove wood. It is October and the air is as crisp as the apples I’ve been peeling. I draw in deep breaths and it feels most like I was drinking wine. The air is chill but the sky is clear blue and I know I still have a time to wait.
When I reach down to get an armful of the hot-burning locust wood, my hand touches something that moves beneath my fingers. I jump backwards, the breath most knocked out of me.
It is a great blacksnake, twined there in the warmth of the sun amongst the billets of wood. I ain’t afeared of snakes but it is still the case that coming upon one all unsuspecting will give a body a start. Once I see what it is, though, I stop to watch.
He is shedding his skin, working himself free of the dusty, worn-out old covering that even clouds his eyes. Slow and deliberate, he rubs the length of him along the sticks of wood, twisting in and out, and, as I watch, a shining new snake comes out of the mouth of the old skin and slides along the woodpile, jet bead eyes all bright and skin as glossy as Odessa’s patent leather slippers. He lifts his head and looks me in the eye for a minute, then, like water going down a drain, he oozes into a rat hole there at the edge of the woodpile.
The old skin lays there, draped along the wood, and I pick it up to study on it. It is moist and supple now, and complete down to the scales that covered where his eyes was. I think how the snake is new on the outside, just like me. Twice now, I have changed from one person to another.
“Birdsong?” Inez calls. “Are you coming with that wood? The fire’s most out.”
Back in the kitchen, Inez is stirring at a great kettle full of apple slices. Her face is red and sweating with the heat of the stove and she pauses to wipe at it with her apron.
I drop the stove wood into the wood box and turn to go get another armload. Just then Odessa comes in the door. She is carrying a paper poke and me and Inez look at her, wondering why she is home so early from the Mercantile.
Odessa sets the poke on the table and plops down in a chair. “Ooo eee, those apples sure smell good,” she says, leaning back and rolling her shoulders. “Why don’t we have us each a saucer—and put some of that top milk on it?”
While we are eating our apples—hot and sweet and cinnamon-tasting with the thick cold yellow cream melting atop, Odessa tells us that her back has been acting up, and since things was slow this afternoon, they said for her to go along home.
She reaches into her poke and I hold my breath—I never know what Odessa may have brought from the store. Sometimes there are bananas, hard and green and as bad to pucker your mouth as a persimmon but they will turn sweet and soft and yellow if you let them set a few days. Another thing I like that comes from the store is Wint-O-Green Life Savers.
Today she has brought my favorite, which is Goo-Goo Clusters. They are the best thing you ever tasted, all chocolate and peanuts and marshmallow and caramel. We will save them for after supper, she says.
Then she pulls out the mail. The post office is in the store and Odessa always brings the mail home with her. She spreads out the letters on the table and pushes over a couple to Inez. Then she hands one to me.
I have never got a letter, not ever, and I don’t much know what to do. I think at first maybe it is from Young David, but even as the thought rises up, I know it cannot be as this letter says on the front, Miss Birdsong, Dewell Hill, North Carolina.
“Go on and open it up,” says Odessa. Inez is already reading one of hers and she looks up and makes a face at her sister.
“Violet says she wants to come for a short visit before it gets too cold. Ha. Last time her short visit lasted over a week.”
“Now, Sis,” says Odessa but I don’t hear the rest for I am reading my letter.
My dear Miss Birdsong, it says. My car and driver will be waiting for you at 11 o’ clock on the night of December 16. Yours truly, J. Aaron.
Chapter 30
When the Snow Flies
Back to Dark Holler, 1938
Just like the letter said they would be, the black car and the black man named Rafe are waiting on the dark road when I slip out the kitchen door at eleven o’clock. My bed is stripped and my bedclothes folded and I have left a note for Inez and Odessa. I puzzled over whether I should take the pretty new dresses they made for me but, remembering that Mr. Aaron had left money to pay for clothes, and knowing that the sisters was too big to wear my things, I rolled the dresses and unmentionables and such into a bundle and tied it with the sash from the cornflower blue dress.
The first flakes are falling and, as we drive the road down towards Gudger’s Stand, they are like big white moths caught in the beam of the headlights. It seems a marvel that Mr. Aaron knew, over a month ago, that this would be the day it snowed. I ask the black man about this and he just says, very dignified, “We have our ways.”
I had asked Rafe right off where Mr. Aaron was, having hoped to see him, if only to thank him again, but the black man shook his head. “His Friday evenings are never free—a longtime commitment prevents his being with you.”
When the Stand comes in view,
it is ablaze with light shining through the snow and I catch the sound of the fiddle and the banjo, the stamp of feet, and the swell of laughter. They are playing “Sherman’s Burning in Hell” and I think of Fran and Lo, both Yankees, but good somebodies all the same. I hope that the money I left was enough to pay for Francine’s suit I took and I hope that those girls make their stake so they can leave and set up their chicken farm soon.
The tune ends and the musicianers strike up “Under the Double Eagle.” For a minute the music floods through me and takes me. I remember the drunken feel and the excitement in my blood and what it was like to be Redbird Ray, the Firecracker Dancing Girl, and for a moment my heart beats faster and my desires run back to that place on the hill.
As we pass by the turning that leads up to the Stand, an automobile is coming down the drive and its headlights sweep across the inside of our car. A fear catches at me like something bad is about to happen all over again and I start to tell Rafe to hurry, when the car pulls out fast and cuts in front of us. A flashing light goes on and the car slows, then stops in the road just ahead.
Rafe has to brake hard not to hit it and I hear him mutter, “Uh-oh.” He freezes, hands on the steering wheel, as a big man carrying a flashlight gets out of the vehicle that is blocking us. The flashlight is pointing at us and the man is hid behind its dazzle but as the light moves closer and closer, I catch the heavy dead stink of a Raven Mocker and know that it is High Sheriff Hudson. In the headlights the flying snow looks like sparks around his big shape and the overcoat he has on floats out on either side of him like wings. I hear the roaring of a great wind as he gets nearer.
“Go around him, Rafe! You got to get around him and across the bridge!”
My voice don’t sound like my own but Rafe throws the automobile into reverse and backs away from the Raven Mocker, which looms up before us, getting taller and taller. A great howling surrounds the evil thing and tangled up in the howling is the wail of a train whistle and the steady chug of the locomotive.
In the light of the train I see the Raven Mocker standing there all spread out in our path and the stink of its being, life upon life, surrounds us and I am choking and smothering in the foul-smelling cloud. “Rafe,” I call out, “please, Rafe …”
Rafe’s black face looks like a grinning mask, like a thing older by far than the Raven Mocker, and all at once I see that he is more than a servant. He too has the Gifts and Powers and he is making full use of them. A high wild sound comes from his lips as he shoves the car into first gear and makes for the bridge.
The Raven Mocker is howling and flapping as we brush right by him and then we are flying across the tracks without an inch to spare before the freight train roars past, its whistle blowing and its wheels singing as they slice along the metal rails.
Rafe doesn’t slow down till we are across the bridge and a little ways up Ridley Branch. Over the river, I can see the dark line of freight cars flashing by like beads on a jet necklace. And then the road bends inward to where the river is out of sight and I have so many questions but Rafe answers them all with “Wait and see.”
It is just now getting into my head that I am on my way back to Dark Holler—the place I fled a half a year ago. As I try to think what lays ahead, Rafe turns onto a narrow road that runs by a barn and the car is jouncing up and up into a white curtain of snow.
I only came this way once before—on the day that Mama died—and it is some time before I begin to see things I remember. There is the big flat rock in the middle of the branch and there is the crooked fence post that marks where Mama said I must not pass.
And now I see the big boxwoods that was my hidey place by the road, all white and covered with snow, and all at once I wake from this dream I’m in. Is it likely that Young David will be back this very night? What if he has come and gone, not finding me there?
Cold black fear is filling me and I cover my face with my hands, afraid of what I may see. But as the car slows and stops, I hear Rafe’s deep voice saying, “You’re home now, Birdsong.”
I crack my fingers and look through them to the house. There is an oil lamp burning just inside the front window, the light all wavering because of the tears filling my eyes. And, as I watch and wonder, the front door opens and Young David steps out to the porch.
In an instant, I am out of the car and flying up the steps and into his arms and we are kissing and hugging and asking questions. He tells me how a black man picked him up when he was hitchhiking back home and brought him to this very place, telling him to build a fire and wait, for the girl he was expecting would be coming soon.
Later he will say that I was the most beautiful thing he ever saw—with the snow that lay on my lashes like jewels and clung to my dark hair like a wedding veil.
Page from Inez’s five-year diary
Dec 17, ’38
Cold today; more snow. Got Birdsong’s room ready for the new boarder. Went to Missionary Society meeting. Hemmed brown wool skirt; cut out a dress. Artamae Brady stopped by to visit and said that High Sheriff Hudson got killed last night by the 11:20 train. Why he had got out of his car, no one knows. Violet is still here. Short visit, ha.
Chapter 31
The Taste of Joy
Dark Holler, 1938
It was a magic time, a time out of the world, those last weeks of the year in the snowbound cabin. The black man Rafe brought in boxes and boxes of groceries from the back of his automobile before he drove off into the white-swirled night. No one had disturbed the house and in the cellar there was still jars of canned garden stuff—dusty row upon row of beets and peaches, beans, corn, and kraut, gleaming soft red and orange, green and yellow when I lifted the lamp to see what was there. There was even sausage and backbone, put up last fall. We found lamp oil too, a big can of it, enough to keep the night away. The cow was gone as was the pig and the chickens, but me and Young David feasted on what there was. And we filled ourselves up with love.
I must not call him Young David no more. That was but a made-up name I gave him, along of him looking like the picture in Granny Beck’s Bible. His name is Luther, a fine strong name, and when we are married, he will say I, Luther, take thee—and I will be Birdsong—Birdsong Honeycutt Gentry.
“Seems like a big mouthful of a name for a little bitty someone like you,” Luther says and he takes me in his arms and we go to loving once again. He calls me Little Bird and Birdie and sometimes Miss Birdie, and all those names sound sweet to my ear.
The snow has been falling for days but we have pulled the feather tick into the front room by the stove and piled it high with quilts. We snuggle there in the warmth and he tells me how he worked with the WPA, building roads around mountainsides over in Avery County. He has made good money and reckons that, now times is better, we might put money towards the farm that’s for sale down on the branch.
For I have told him that I don’t want to stay here. As long as he is by me and there is light, I can’t hear Mama. But sometimes, when I wake of a night, I can hear her screaming.
I have told him most of it—how Mama killed Snowflower and about the paper that said a doctor was going to cut out some part of me so that I couldn’t never have babies. I have told him how she died and that I ran away because I was afraid the neighbors would take me to that doctor.
In a way, it was hardest to tell him about Gudger’s Stand and the dancing but I made a clean breast of it, though it took several days and many tears. It was midafternoon and we was under the quilts by the stove. Outside the snow was flying, beating against the windowpanes, but we was safe in our nest, finding warmth in one another.
When we was done, I begun to tell Luther something of where I’d been after crossing the river. At first he thought I was funning with him. But as I talked on, he went to shaking his head, saying, “No, no … you in a place like that?”
And when I come to tell him about the tango I had done with Francine, he threw off the quilts and jumped up and begun to put on his clothes.
> “Luther, I didn’t never go upstairs with none of them—I promise you that.”
I was setting up now, a-clutching at his britchie leg with one hand and holding the quilts over my breasts with the other, but he paid me no mind, just went to pulling on his boots and his heavy coat.
The tears was beginning to come and they dripped down my face onto my bare skin. “Luther, I had to do something. I couldn’t stay here and I was afraid to go far.”
He shook his head and bit his lip like he was trying not to cry. Then he jammed on his old hat, pulling it down hard.
“I got to get outside,” he said, his voice all choked. “I got to think.”
And he was gone, slamming the door behind him. I could hear his boots crunching in the snow on the porch and the creak of the loose step and then I couldn’t hear him no more.
There was naught but the crackle of the fire in the stove and the little rustling sounds of the old house around me. As I listened hard, almost holding my breath, hoping to hear the sound of his footsteps returning, I seemed to hear the tinkling voices of the Little Things beating against the windowpanes and calling to me, but then she began to speak, low and mean like she used to do, whispering that Luther’d not come back, that no one could love a crazy girl who—
I made myself as small as I could and pulled the quilts up over my head. I pretended it was Granny Beck’s love wrapped around me and tried not to listen to the things that Mama was whispering.
The fire in the stove has sunk into coals when at last I hear the squeak of the front step and the sound of boots on the porch. I peek out from under the covers and see Luther as he comes in the door, stomping the snow off his boots. He looks over at me and smiles, just as sweet.
“I brung you your Santy Claus,” he says and reaches into his coat pocket. Stepping over to me, he lays two oranges and a big old peppermint stick down on the quilt, then drops his coat to the floor and sets beside me.