The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  “Way before then,” Gertie said, smoothing the sheepskin over the wood. “He’s been a waiten there in th wood you might say since before I was born. I jist brung him out a little—but one a these days, jist you wait an see, we’ll find th time an a face fer him an bring him out a that block.”

  “An she’ll never be whittled up into door locks—she was for door locks, but Granpa Kendrick give her to you; she’s too fine fer door locks, th old man said to Granpa, such fine wild cherry wood.”

  “They don’t make wooden door locks with wooden keys, no more,” Gertie said, going for her coat, looking about her to make certain the room was fit to leave. She shook her head over the ugliness of the tin heating stove, looked with satisfaction on the other things: the rag rug of her mother-in-law’s weaving, given to Clovis as a wedding gift; the ceiling-high wild cherry sideboard put together with pegs, the wild cherry bed in one corner, with the tops of the head-high posts carved into the shapes of acorns, bigger and heavier than even the black walnut with the pure round uncarved knobs in the other corner. All these wooden pieces had belonged to her father’s grandmother and had been cast off from his house to the barn when her mother came there as a bride.

  She was hurrying down the lane toward the gravel road before she realized that Cassie, instead of talking to Callie Lou as was her custom, was talking to her, almost in tears as she said over and over: “But I’ve got a mem’ry verse, Mom. You never did ask me did I have a mem’ry verse. You learned it to me,” she added when Gertie turned and looked at her, “all about shoes an gold an silver, what th old man that kept sheep said.”

  Gertie took the child’s hand, and Cassie began in her skipping, whispering voice, “That we may buy the poor for silver, an th needy fer a pair of shoes … an sell—an sell—an sell their golden crowns.”

  “Now, now, my girl, you’re adden things to th Bible; th pore don’t have crowns. ‘An sell th refuse of th wheat,’ it goes. It means, I recken, that th hungrier some is, th richer some others can git. Nothen much makes sense,” she went on, tucking a wisp of Cassie’s hair into a braid, “without th before an th after. But you done good, real good, to git some a old Amos by heart. When I read him to you all t’other night, I never thought you’d recollect him. You’re a real smart girl,” she added, reaching for a cocklebur on the child’s dress tail; but Cassie had darted out of arm’s reach, and was now tiptoeing for a late-hanging crimson saw-brier leaf near the tumble-down rail fence by the lane.

  “But I cain’t learn to read,” Cassie said, holding the leaf above her head, and for an instant still, troubled. “An Clytie an Enoch, they both learned to read fore they was as old as me—but I cain’t learn.”

  “Don’t fret, you’ll learn,” Gertie said, trying to put a hearty conviction into her voice. They had never in all their moving about as renters lived less than two miles from a school, so that even before the war she had taught the older ones much at home in bad weather, or when they had no shoes. Since the war had taken the teachers, she had taught them all almost entirely at home. The bigger ones had gone ahead in their books, but Cassie, who could learn anything by heart, had never, in spite of all Gertie’s efforts, learned even her letters.

  Cassie lagged again, and Gertie, hurrying down the lane, gave a slow headshake, as over a puzzle, as she listened to the child, now in the road, now hidden in the brush, trying at times to skip in the too big shoes, now and then singing snatches of her wordless songs that almost always ended in bursts of laughter or low murmurings. A moment’s silence, then Cassie sprang into the road in front of her, whirled about and stood laughing, crying as she pointed to her shoes: “Lookee, lookee. I’ve got red shoes like Tildy.”

  She had, between the laces on the coarse, crooked shoes, stuck some freshly fallen black gum leaves that lay brilliant red along the road. “They’re sure fine shoes,” Gertie said. “Where’d you git em?”

  “Montgomery Ward, an they costed forty dollars.”

  “Law, law, an how did you git so much money?”

  “Callie Lou’s man—he’s gone acrost th ocean to th wars, an he makes good monies—Callie Lou, she brung me th shoes, an six more pairs—golden slippers with silver heels like we take in Needle’s Eye.”

  “An where’s your own man?” Gertie asked, catching at her hand.

  Cassie laughed and ran backwards ahead of her. “Oh, my man, he ain’t much account; he lives in th holler heart uv a big dead chestnut tree.” She was spinning about, running away, one hand held out, the fingers carefully curved, her face turned now and again toward the curved hand while some smiling talk went forth to the playmate who ran down the road by her side.

  The child’s prattle faded. Gertie heard the plop of a falling, frost-sweetened persimmon, the clop of her shoes in the sandy ridge road, and cowbells—her own Lizzie’s near, the others far away and faint; but mostly she heard the silence. She walked even faster, running away from the silence, the emptiness; in it would come Henley—never the soldier. She had never seen her brother as a soldier. He had, like others from their settlement, been trained sixteen weeks and shipped across with never another sight of home. Always he came in the silence as the farmer, blue-shirted, a lock of black hair fallen down between his slate-blue eyes; and in the silence, like now, or at night when the work was done and she patched by the fire, there was his face with the questions: “Why me? What have I done? Why am I dead? Why?”

  Unable to answer, she was like a rock bluff, echoing his questions, “Why?” up to the stars and into the silence of the still Indian-summer noons. “Why?”

  Many times at night, unable to sleep, she had got down the Bible, but mostly she sat in the lean-to kitchen, so as not to waken Clovis or the children, with the book closed across her knees. The old questions that had always been in the Bible for her came back with Henley’s one question—Job’s children, did they know or question why they died to test the patience of their father? And Jethro’s daughter bewailing her fate in the mountains, had she ever, like Henley, asked, “Why me?” Did Judas ever ask, “Somebody has to sin to fulfill the prophecy, but why me?”

  She walked faster, but slackened her pace when she heard Cassie’s prattle, behind her, now. She looked back and saw her high in a wide-branched pine by the road, and called, “You could fall, climben so high,” her tone kindly with no scolding, speaking less in fear that Cassie might fall than to fling some sound into the silence of road, pine tree, and sky.

  “Callie Lou, she’s th one that’ll fall. She’s clean to th tip-top branch. Cain’t you see her red dress?”

  “She’d better git down,” Gertie said, walking on.

  “She’s a looken out fer heaven,” Cassie said, but after a little argument with the strong-willed witch child she sprang down and ran after Gertie, walking now in the graveled road that led the six miles to the highway. “Where’s all th coal trucks, Mom?” she asked, coming up to Gertie.

  “Them that hauled th coal an them that dug it has had to go to war,” Gertie said. She walked faster again, eager to be away from the empty road that, once so fine and new, tying their settlement to the outside world, seemed now only a thing that took the people away. She turned down the ridge side by a small red gully, crept since the fall rains into the road itself with a bit of the road gravel caught in its red, crumbly sides. Less than two years ago the gully had been the Tipton path. She followed it down through a stand of young poplars, each holding still a few leaves in its topmost branches, yellow as if each tree wore a golden crown. She smiled at one, higher and straighter than the others, as she stopped to listen to Cassie calling from the pine wood around the ridge side, “Make me a pine cone turkey, Mom, please?” and an instant later the child came running, holding out a fat, fully opened cone.

  “Not now. We’ve got to git on. Your granma’s expecten us.”

  “But this ain’t th way to Granpa Kendricks’.”

  “We’re goen a new way, down by th old Tipton Place. You recollect th Tiptons; they move
d off to Indianee, about a year ago last summer. They had six youngens, one about your size, recollect? Their pop got him a job in a powder plant, an they sold their place to Uncle John Ballew.”

  Cassie made a great business of wrinkling her forehead, turned to Callie Lou. “Can you recollect these little youngens that has gone to war?” Callie Lou must have answered, for the two were deep in conversation as they disappeared in the woods.

  Gertie hurried on through the gloom of the young, close-growing pines, over a tumble-down rail fence and through the Tipton new-ground cornfield, a rocky, steeply sloping bit of hillside where the sumac and beech and oak sprouts grew high as her shoulders and the wild grapevines and saw briers caught at her coattail and made traps for her feet. Twice she stooped and scratched at the earth with her fingers. Each time she smiled, for the soil was black and loose still, almost as good as fresh new ground.

  She crossed a second rail fence, tumble-down like the first, but mended with pine brush piled in the corners and two strands of rusty barbed wire. Below it stood ancient black-trunked dying apple and pear trees, almost lost in the sumac and scrub pine that were smothering the growth of sage grass. One tree with a few knotty red apples still clinging leaned tipsily like a tree not quite blown down, but on going closer she saw the gully, deeper than she was tall, a red wound in the hillside stealing the earth from the tree.

  She threw in some fallen dead apple limbs and a few sand rocks, whispering as she walked away, “That’ll hold back a little dirt, an keep this hillside frum bleeden to death.”

  She went on, throwing quick searching glances about her. She paused by a row of black gum beehives, most tipped over, their bees dead or moved away, but a few lengths of the hollow logs stood upright, each sloping roof board held in place by one great stone.

  Past the beehives and the orchard, sheltered by the curve of the ridge side, and on a southern slope where the early sun struck fully, lay the flattish bench of ungullied land that held the house and yard and barns and garden spot. She smiled on the shake-covered roof of the old log house; the white oak shakes, weathered to a soft gray brownness, must have been rived in the wrong time of the moon, for they had curled in places, and in some of the little cup-like hollows moss had grown. Now in the yellow sun the moss shone more gold than green, and over all the roof there was from the quickly melting frost a faint steam rising, so that the dark curled shakes, the spots of moss, the great stone chimney, all seemed bathed in a golden halo and Cassie called that the house had golden windows.

  Some of the golden light seemed caught in Gertie’s eyes as she walked down and around and at last stood by the yard gate. It was a good little gate of white oak slats, built to last, like the old walk of limestone stepping-stones half buried in the sod, bordered with clumps of tansy and catnip and hoarhound, brightened by a great bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, so sheltered here on the southern slope that they were blooming still, like the artichokes that grew higher than her head by a porch corner.

  Cassie was laughing, pointing. “Lookee, Mom, th Tiptons is home.” Gertie for the first time noticed the three ewes on the porch, chewing their cuds, and looking for all the world like people who have just stepped out their door to see who their visitors might be. Cassie called, “Oh, how do you do, Miz Tipton; we’ve come to set all day,” and ran up the walk.

  Old John’s half wild ewes went leaping over the three great slabs of stone that made the porch steps. Cassie ran across the porch and pushed against each of the two front doors, big stout things made of three oak planks and three crossbars, but the doors were nailed shut, like the boarded-up windows. Gertie touched the Tipton dipper, rusty now, with a cobweb across it, but hanging still on its nail in a porch post. She walked around the house, hoping for, but never finding, an unboarded window. She brushed twigs and leaves from the high shelf where the Tipton clabber had soured for churning in summer and sweet milk and fresh meat had stood in winter, but the porch shelf, like the puncheon wash bench and rusty tin pan, was empty, forgotten like the ungathered walnuts that lay thick in the grass by the back porch steps, fallen from the big black walnut a little distance up the hillside.

  Cassie, running, looking, sniffing, pointing out the wonders of the place, filled her cupped hands with walnuts, and came running back to Gertie, pleased beyond measure that she, who so seldom had anything, now had something to give. She was looking at her mother when she stumbled and fell, her face striking hard against a washed-out walnut root. She sprang up and stood rubbing her mouth and looking down at the spilled walnuts. Gertie put an arm about her waist. “Cassie, honey, learn to look where you’re a goen. Didn’t you see that root? You’re allus fallen down.”

  “It’s my shoes, I reckon,” Cassie said, looking fixedly into her mother’s eyes so close to her own, then pulling her head away but staring still.

  Gertie pulled the laces until the tops of the shoes touched, but still they were loose about Cassie’s thin ankles. “I’m a goen to git you some new shoes one a these days—all your own,” she said, then added quickly; “Some time along toward spring—it ain’t like they was school an you needed pretty shoes. These old uns uv Enoch’s can run you through th winter.”

  Cassie wasn’t thinking of shoes. She was crying now, “I can see little girls in your eyes, Mom, little bitty girls.”

  “They’re little Cassies,” Gertie said, bending her head to look at a smear of blood on Cassie’s teeth so that the little girls went away. She scooped her up on one arm. “We’ll go down to th spring, honey, an you can rinse that bloodied-up mouth in that good cold spring water.”

  Cassie cuddled against her, one arm about her neck, her cheek on her shoulder, all her child for an instant; the other in the red dress was gone. They passed the old log barn, and Gertie lingered a moment to study it. The shake roof was almost gone, but the walls were good and sound, like the hollowed-out chestnut log feed troughs; and in two of the mule stalls, under the good part of the roof, there was such a deal of manure. Her eyes on the good manure were warm as they had been on the house.

  They were going down the weed-choked spring path when faintly from the head of the creek they heard two shots, little popping sounds Gertie recognized as Reuben’s twenty-two. “Mebbe your brother’s killed us a couple a squirrels,” she told Cassie, but Cassie was asking for a dogwood toothbrush. Gertie cut each of them a red-tipped twig from the little tree of Cassie’s choice, and they chewed as they went along, savoring the sharp bitter clean taste of the wood.

  The leaf-choked spring seeped from under a limestone ledge at the foot of a great poplar, left by generations of timber cutters because there was, rising up from the roots, a low wide hollow fringed with moss and filled now with fallen leaves. Gertie reached into the hollow where the cup had used to be, and after a little searching brought it out. Pressing it down through the pale poplar leaves, she filled it, rinsed it, gave water to the child, then drank two cups herself, slowly, enjoying the water. Cassie, seeing her mother’s leisurely, time-taking ways, began begging again for a toy; but now, instead of the pine-cone turkey, she wanted a doll, “a doll with a skirt, please, Mom.”

  “We oughtn’t to be a wasten time thataway,” Gertie said, but was still, looking up toward the house, smiling a little.

  Cassie saw her indecision and begged the harder. “It’s nice an warm, now, Mom, here in th sun. We could set on that ole log an make a doll.”

  Gertie studied the shadow of the poplar tree. It was still a good while till dinnertime. She looked at the friendly moss-covered log, then turned swiftly about, the knife out of her apron pocket and open in her hand. She searched until she found a smooth-barked little hickory sprout, so crooked it could never grow into a proper tree, and from it cut a piece not much longer than her middle finger but with a little branch on either side, that, no sooner were they shortened, than they seemed arms reaching above the shorter end of the wood, which was no longer the end of a hickory sprout but a doll’s head.

  Gertie sat on t
he moss-grown log, and with Cassie leaning on her shoulder she cut on each twig a tiny hand with thumb outspread and fingers close together like those of a child in mittens. Then on the main twig, she cut between the upraised hands a tiny face. Eyes, nose, grew on the face, and the mouth heeded Cassie’s plea, “Make her laughen, Mom.” And above the face she notched the bark to form a jagged crown. Then, far enough from the other end to leave a space for feet, she ringed the bark, and Cassie begged again: “Make her pretty shoes, Mom. High heels like Gussie Duncan’s been a buyen since they took her man off to war an gived her big money.”

  “They’ll be mighty little,” Gertie warned, as she cut out a little sliver for the space between the feet. Quickly the knife point made shoes grow on the doll—dainty high-arched things with tiny slender heels and the faint tracing of a buckle above each instep, the feet pointing downward like those of a dancer on her toes. “You’ll have to put th diamonds on th shoe buckles, yerself,” Gertie said, lifting her head from the work for a leisurely glance up the hill. She could see the house, and past the strip of shadow that fell slantwise of the yard, the bluegrass, green as grass in spring. The grass, the golden flowers by the house wall, the moss on the roof, the yellow chrysanthemums by the gray stepping-stones, all glowed warmly as if they, with the house on the sheltered southern hillside, were set in some land that was forever spring.