by Austin Boyd
“How long has your family been here?” Sophia asked, turning to sit on the rail of the porch. Her features were a gentle brown in the lamplight, her hair a dark skein in the dim glow of the distant flame.
“We’ve lived on The Jug since 1796. My great-grandfather George Gregg—five greats — built the mill at The Jug handle where the crossing washed out. He’s the one who cut through a low ridge to build a mill at the bend. He sold The Jug to his sons at ninety cents an acre. His grandson Thomas bought up most of the property, including the acreage we farm today. The property passed down through family, and most of them eventually sold their shares to the state for a Wildlife Management Area.” She waved her hand toward the dark. “Our farm is all that’s left of the original homestead. A hundred-seventeen acres.”
Sophia stared out into the night. Tree frogs chirped in the limbs of walnuts and sweetgums that surrounded the sides of the house, a gentle background to the night’s peace.
“I have no idea about my family history,” Sophia said, her voice subdued. “We just were. I had grandparents, but don’t know anything about them. My father didn’t talk about relatives much, and my mother was an orphan.” She clung to peeling paint, her fingers tracing some invisible figure in their touch on the old rail. After a time she asked, “Did your dad talk about his family?”
“All the time.” Laura Ann moved a step closer to Sophia. “We’d recite our ancestry for fun. It became a game.”
“Ancestry?” Sophia asked with a chuckle. “How far back can you go?”
Something warm swelled inside her. Maybe that’s the way Daddy felt when she’d asked him about his family. “We go back to 1403,” she said. “Daddy was named for Angus Dubh Mackay, a fierce chief of his clan. His name meant ‘Black Angus’ in Gaelic. The Mackays were descended from Picts, the ancient tribes of the north. The McGehees spring from the Mackay line, and became cattle herders in the northernmost lochs of Scotland. They used to battle the Sinclairs — Momma’s clan — until everyone sort of settled down during the seventeenth century.”
“Keep going. Please. I need to hear this.”
“Honor was strong in our clan and it bred tough warriors. Our family never backed down. The Mackay motto is manu forti, or ‘with a strong hand.’ “ She hesitated, and then added, “An old Gaelic proverb says, ‘Better a swift death in battle than a slow one in bed.’ Daddy repeated that saying every morning at breakfast.” She sighed, adding, “Angus Dubh died of an arrow wound in the Battle of the Sutherlands.”
Laura Ann took a long look at the dark, her eyes imagining boundaries for their property beyond the limit of her vision. “In 1792 our Scottish relatives were kicked out of their homes in a horrible land grab called ‘The Clearances.’ My relatives emigrated to the United States and settled here, in mountain lands. McGehees, Mackays — and Sinclairs, Momma’s family. They married into the family lines of Scots who’d come over a hundred years earlier, like the Greggs from the southern highlands, who came with William Penn in 1682.”
“Tell me more, so that I can make it mine.” She put her hand to her belly. “And make it his.”
“Daddy and I used to sing our ancestry.” Laura Ann hummed the tune to herself for a moment, tears welling in her eyes. Not since Daddy’s last days had she recited their family tree. It percolated up from deep inside, like a nursery rhyme she’d learned and could never forget. Salty joy ran from her eyes into the corners of her mouth as she recited her legacy, the eight generations who had farmed this land.
Laura Ann, of Angus and Hope, son of James and Joy.
Son of Justus and Andrea, son of Alice and Roy.
Alice Marie the only child of Mary and Thomas Gregg.
Thomas a son of Mary and George, the settlers of The Jug.
George Jr. from Virginia, son of Sarah and George,
Quaker son of William and Alice, co-founders of P.A.
Greggs of Glen Orchy, McGehee of Loch Hope,
Highlanders for ‘aye,
From Scotland to the farm at The Jug.
McGehees of Clan Mackay.
Laura Ann wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, reliving fond memories of Daddy singing to her on the old Ford tractor when she was a little girl, sharing his roots with her. Deep taproots that now took hold in the womb of another woman.
Sophia reached to her left and pulled Laura Ann into a hug. They stood, united in arms, swaying to the evening song of tree frogs. “Would you ever leave?” Sophia asked, her voice a sweet harmony to the night’s sounds.
“No. This is what I was raised to do,” Laura Ann replied. “To be. And to be here. To move the farm forward another generation. And to raise a family.” She looked back, Ian asleep behind her. Her gaze lingered on his long frame, legs dangling over the edge of the couch. She wanted to give him a bed. She would, in time.
“Did your dad ever think of leaving, of breaking the chain?”
She pondered her friend’s words, Sophia unaware of Laura Ann’s history, of her father’s last wish. More tears welled up, but she set her jaw, breathing deep. How to explain this?
Laura Ann pulled at Sophia’s elbow, tugging her gently to turn about on the porch. She pointed up to the beaded board ceiling. A mud nest snuggled into the corner, five yellow-white beaks visible over the edge of the cup-shaped nest. To their left, two adult birds rested on a ledge.
“Do you see those barn swallows?” she asked, pointing to the adults. “They return to that spot every year, building a mud nest in the spring. Every year they lay eggs, every year they raise chicks. Every year they leave. But they always return, to that very corner. Not to the other end of the porch, not to the eaves. Just to that corner.”
She pulled at Sophia’s arm once more, moving closer to the sleeping adults. “Every fall they migrate six thousand miles to South America. They fly hundreds of miles a day to lands I can only dream of. But they always come back. To this home, and to that very spot, to raise their family.”
In the dim light of the kerosene lamp, she could see their colors. Perhaps she saw them in her mind, mixing with the partial shades visible in the lamplight. Orange-brown throats, a sharp black bill, pointy black tails that spread to reveal a beautiful fan of white markings underneath. Darting birds that raced from point to point above the yard, gathering bugs for food. Food that fed pink-orange furry throats peeping for attention, bugs that spilled out of tiny yellow-white bills clamoring for yet another insect morsel.
“I am that swallow,” Laura Ann said, taking Sophia by the hand in the dim light. She squeezed for emphasis. The words panged her, sparking an irresistible desire to place her fingers on Sophia’s stomach, to reconnect with a part of her that she’d lost forever.
Her very first chick, alive in the womb of another woman.
“No matter how far I roam,” she said, her gaze shifting to Ian asleep on the couch, “I will always come back. This is my home.”
She looked back at the gentle outline of Sophia’s swelling belly under a crisp cotton top. “One day, a time will come when I am but a memory. Then one of my swallows will carry on.”
“Laura Ann?” Sophia called out from her bedroom half an hour after her turn in the bath, washing up from a brutally hot day.
“Yes?” Laura Ann said from her bed. Like in the old days with Daddy home, speaking to each other at night after the lights were out, she answered her friend in Daddy’s old room.
“The baby’s moving again,” Sophia said, her voice cracking. “Would you like to come feel it?”
Laura Ann hesitated to respond. This, the very answer to her prayer that night, yet it seemed so dangerous, so personal. She might connect for good and never let Sophia go. Like a last kiss before saying goodbye forever to someone you love, perhaps it was best not to kiss at all.
She lay there for a long moment in silence.
Sophia called out again. “Laura Ann, I understand if you don’t want to. But it would mean a lot to me.”
She could wait no longer, every fib
er screaming to jump up and run to Sophia, to lay her face on her friend’s gown and cry for the baby she might only see once. To hold it, even if only through the soft fabric of Sophia’s skin, to cuddle the life that she’d given away to save a farm she’d vowed to protect. She’d sold her chick to buy the nest.
Laura Ann rose, like a spirit under the control of another, drifting from her room to the bed next door. Sophia sat propped up, pillows under her back, her legs splayed, the outline of her belly visible under her nightgown. Starlight their only illumination, Sophia was a dim form on the sheets. Yet, like seeing with infrared vision, and with a mother’s sense, Laura Ann could discern the form of the baby as it moved under the cotton covering of Sophia’s nightclothes.
A tiny life bumped and stretched inside this woman. A life that began inside her own body. Laura Ann’s heart leapt for that life to be inside her, to move and announce its coming to her family. She knelt at the side of the bed, but Sophia patted the top of the mattress. Laura Ann took a seat beside her, Sophia’s hands guiding hers to the correct place. A knee poked up, a foot rubbed across the inside of the womb, tiny motions seeking some temporary relief in the tight confines of Sophia’s athletic frame.
Laura Ann’s heart slammed inside her, a question begging to be answered, a request screaming to be made known. Her hands shook under the guiding caress of Sophia’s fingers. Her mouth dry, Laura Ann spoke the words that had lingered on her lips for days. No more time. She had to ask now.
“Can I see him after he’s born?”
Sophia lifted her hand from Laura Ann’s and put it to the girl’s forehead, like the gentle touch of a mother Laura Ann could scarce remember.
“Yes. I hoped you’d ask.” She made a sound, like cooing at a baby, then added, “I promise. I’ll bring this little swallow home.”
Laura Ann shook, as from a fever or a deep chill. She wanted so to see the child, to hear his name when he lay in her arms, something to give meaning to her sacrifice and to her family’s roots. She yearned for Sophia to draw on the child’s history, to honor treasured family names, in a way that remembered those who’d come before. The way Daddy would have wanted.
Sophia spoke again, her hand resting in its place on Laura Ann’s head, perhaps sensing the unspoken need. “Like my late husband, a man he can never know … and his grandfather who passed along proud blood through you,” she said, “I want him to be called ‘James.’ “
Laura Ann’s heart broke, that name so precious when spoken in this bed.
Sophia lowered her hand to rest on Laura Ann’s, where together they palpated a prominence just beyond the reach of their fingers. Sophia squeezed her hand, willing the shaking to stop. Laura Ann looked up, her sister’s wet eyes twinkling in the starlight.
“We’ll teach him his ancestry, Laura Ann. And his middle name will be ‘McGehee.’ “
CHAPTER 18
JUNE 28
Fog invaded every crevice, a suffocating cloud that blanketed the bottomland. It stole sound and dampened the morning call of birds and the crow of roosters. Even her voice felt sucked from her throat when Laura Ann tried to yell back to Ian from the barn. Like a giant muffle, it lay over her, spiriting voices away into the vacuum of an invisible sunrise.
Distance disappeared, no sense of depth to the barnyard. Buildings emerged from the dense covering as she approached them, eerie structures transforming with each step forward. She crept along ground she knew well enough to cross blind. But blind might have been better. This goo robbed her senses of direction and perspective.
In the barn, Laura Ann started the tractor and headed for the front of the house. A ride through the pasture to his canoe would save Ian — and her — a long walk through tall dripping-wet grass.
Ian bounded off the porch, grabbed the tractor’s roll bar, and swung himself up on the big Case. He took a seat on the fender aside Laura Ann. “You ready?” he asked quietly, wiping condensation off his brow. The wet blanket of cloud seemed to invite whispers, as if sound offended nature itself.
“Ready to be left alone? No.” Laura Ann wondered at other possible meanings of his question. Would she share her burden with him? Not yet.
“Secrets don’t become you,” Granny Apple said once. Here sat a man she cared about more than anything on Earth, yet she kept him in a fog of her own, a dense blanket of secrecy wrapped around her relationship with Sophia.
“I’m worried about her. I wish you could stay,” she said in a furtive attempt to keep the focus on Sophia, not herself.
“If it’s heat stress, she’ll shake it off with rest and liquids,” he offered. “But she needs to see a doctor about that blood pressure when she gets home.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Question is, will you be okay?”
“Yes. But I plan to keep that radio of yours close by.”
“Just a minute,” Sophia called out, rushing onto the porch. “Don’t leave! I packed some leftover breakfast pastries for you to take with you.”
Ian smiled, raising his hands in mock resignation. “If you insist. Those sugar horns were great.”
“Cuernos de azucar.” Sophia repeated in Spanish.
“Whatever.”
“Hang on a minute. I think there’s a couple of marranitos left too.”
“Yeah. Love those ginger-pigs.”
“Gingerbread pigs, Ian,” Laura Ann chided.
Fifteen minutes later, Ian sat in his canoe, his gear stowed and ready to push off into the pea soup that hid the Middle Island Creek. The tractor sat a few yards away, idling at the upper limit of the flood line. Any other day, the growl of the throaty diesel would echo off nearby ridges. Today, fog muffled the engine to a low rumble.
“You be careful,” Laura Ann said, pushing his small green canoe backward into dingy water. Ian pulled with his paddle and spun the canoe about once he hit deeper water and cleared the grip of the grass.
“No problem. Call on the radio if anything pops up.” He tarried before pushing through thick branches to join the river on the other side of the tree line. He pointed his paddle at Laura Ann. “You’re my rock. You know that, right?”
“I’m a rock?” she asked with a laugh.
“No,” Ian said. “You heard me. I’m proud as punch about how you manage everything. Especially now.” He tipped his green game warden ball cap in a mock salute. “You always manage to find a way, Miss McGehee.”
His words pierced her, his trust untarnished by any knowledge of her darkest secret. She bit her lip and raised her hand in a silent wave.
Ian eased the boat forward, slipping into the fog. His last words were clear, though he quickly faded from sight. “I love you, Laura Ann. Always have. Always will.”
“Ian raved about that breakfast,” Laura Ann said, hanging a dish towel on the oven’s handle. “He’ll nurse the leftover pastries and make them last for a couple of days.”
“More where those came from,” Sophia replied. “Just get him back here to try them out.”
“He’ll probably stop in tomorrow morning. But now we can call him any time we want with the radio.” She shook her head. “Somehow he keeps his job and his trips out here in balance.” Laura Ann looked at Sophia, remembering too well yesterday’s fainting in the pasture. “How about you. Any better?”
“Good as new,” she said with a smile. “No headache. No wooziness. No problem. So … how about a tour of the place? It’s supposed to be dry today once the fog lifts. And I need to get out.” She smiled and wagged a finger. “But no long walks. Maybe we can take the truck?”
Laura Ann nodded, leading her to the back door. “I need to get out too. We’ll start with the woodshop, and your stools. Then I’ll show you the barn,” she said with a wave. “Something very special out there. Up in the hay loft.”
Sophia followed and for the next hour the women wove their way through her father’s shop. It was a slow trek, handling stools, smelling fresh-cut wood, and walking through a history punctuated by spoken memories of Daddy. From the sh
op, she led Sophia to the barn, Laura Ann explaining how to care for the cows in the winter, describing how to put up hay, and extolling the virtues of dried corn, barn cats, and clover.
“Come upstairs for a minute,” Laura Ann said, gesturing up a short flight of stairs to the loft. Sophia fell in line behind her. “When my great-grandmother was little, she carved her initials and the date in one of the beams. I did too when I was six. I’ll show you.”
Cobwebs of long-dead spiders hung from the corners of the stairwell, draped with flecks of hay that drifted down from above. The sweet perfume of dried grass grew stronger with each step up the old rough-cut boards of the staircase, worn smooth by more than a century of use. Laura Ann put her hand to the doorjamb at the top of the climb, pushing open a small board-and-batten door.
“Her initials are over here,” Laura Ann said pointing ahead to a dim corner of the barn where the steep pitch of the roof approached the floor. “She carved them in 1906, when she was seven years old.”
Laura Ann knelt down, running her fingers along the shallow engraving of two ragged letters in the face of a thick beam. “N.M. 1906.” “Novella McGehee 1906,” she said, turning back to face Sophia.
But Laura Ann knelt alone.
“Sophia?” She dashed back to the stairwell. Two steps from the door where her hands had lingered moments ago, she heard a gasp. Sophia’s hand extended out the door onto the worn oak flooring of the barn’s second floor, her fingers balled into a fist. She moaned as Laura Ann went to her knees at the top of the stairs.
Sophia lay prostrate, her cheek bloodied where it hit a hay-littered step, arms outstretched and grabbing at air, as if clawing her way up the stairs. Her chest rose and fell in a series of raspy breaths.
“No!” Laura Ann exclaimed, slamming the door back at the top of the steps and grabbing Sophia’s extended arm. Miraculously, she’d not fallen off the precarious staircase, or slid to the bottom. Laura Ann felt for Ian’s radio in her pocket. She’d left it in the kitchen.