The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Cassie saw her mother’s warm-eyed glances, long glances when the doll lay forgotten, and once, after a moment’s peering up the hillside, she said, “You think that old house’s pretty, Mom?”

  Gertie nodded. “But pretty’s th least uv it. It’ll be warm in th winter an cool in th summer, an no matter how hard th wind blows that house’ll never shake, an th hard north wind’ull never tetch it. Recollect, I used to come here when I was a little girl about your size a long time ago. An behind it in th hillside they’s a cellar with a smokehouse, an nothen never froze in that cellar, an in th hottest summer weather that cellar was so cold it ud keep milk sweet from one mornen to th next.”

  “An we’d put them pears an apples in our cellar, wouldn’t we, Mom?”

  Gertie nodded. “An we’d pick blackberries, our own blackberries in our own fields—we’d never have to go a asken my mommie er Old John could we please pick berries. An we’d—”

  “Will we have to give Uncle John much a what we raise?”

  “Not so much as one blade a fodder. We’ll have fat hogs an chick—”

  “Mom, make her a curledy skirt.”

  Gertie bent to her work again, slitting the bark above the shoes up to the waist in narrow little strips. Then gently with the knife point she lifted each strip free up to the lifted arms, so that there grew upon the doll a little skirt; but winter was in the wood and the bark was brittle from the fall frosts or maybe her mind was not with the knife, for often a fringe of bark was broken so that the skirt was ragged. Still, when the last strip was lifted and Cassie reached for the doll, Gertie held it a moment, smiling. So little, but there was about it something light and joyous as it smiled between its lifted arms above its dancing feet. “It’s a quair-looken thing,” she said, handing it to Cassie.

  Cassie brushed the tiny smiling mouth softly against her cheek. “You’re awful late gitten in frum school—it’s milken time an th sun’s low down. An did you read your lesson good? My, my, ten pages. Ain’t you smart?”

  “Who’s your youngen’s teacher, Ma’m?” Gertie asked, dropping the knife into her pocket and getting up.

  “Miz Callie Lou, an there ain’t no youngen she can’t teach to read. She’s th finest—” There was a scurrying through the leaves down the hillside, and both turned, listening. “It’s Gyp,” Cassie cried, and began calling him.

  Reuben yelled from down near the creek; and a moment later Gyp came, sniffing at Cassie’s cheek, leaping on Gertie, who smiled on the big-jointed, high-behinded tree dog, and wanted to know if he’d helped Reuben get a mess of squirrels. But Gyp only shook himself and then lapped greedily in the spring branch. “Mom, oh, Mom.” It was Reuben again, his calls loud and excited.

  Gertie hurried over the rocky creek bluff toward the sound. Reuben wasn’t fool enough to hurt himself with his gun, and he was too much at home in the woods for frights and falls, but now the strangeness of his screaming troubled her. She reached the last ledge above the creek, and looked down, and seeing him, unhurt, and with hands empty save for his gun, called in some exasperation, “Son, you’ll never be any kind a hunter a maken noise enough to tangle a flock a wild geese.”

  Reuben looked up at her, his slate-gray eyes laughing, like Cassie’s eyes. “I done more’n tangle a flock a wild geese. I shot at a bear in thet pawpaw grove—th biggest ole thing you ever did see—an did he run!”

  “A bear! Are you certain? Vadie Sexton said she seed th track a one out by her smokehouse but nobody believed her,” Gertie said, taking Cassie by the shoulders and swinging her down the ledge.

  “It was a honest-to-goodness bear; Gyp knowed it wasn’t no possom er coon—he give one little runnen growly bark—acten big like he was aimen to fight, an that bear growled an kind a swiped toward him. You ought to ha seen him, Mom. It was a sight! I shot twice to scare him—he never did run, jist kind a walked off. I wish I could ha killed it. Would they have put me in th penitentiary, Mom?”

  Gertie listened, her eyes almost as eager as Reuben’s. “Th meat would ha been good an we could ha had us a bear rug—but it’s off th game preserve. It’s agin th law to kill it. What color was it, son?”

  “Browny black …” He sighed, smiling a little, reliving the scene with the bear. “I wisht I’d ha tried to kill it. Wouldn’t that a been somethen? I wished Henley could ha …” His face was sullen again, as in the morning. He looked down at the gunstock in his hand, the muzzle pointing over his shoulder as Henley had taught him to carry it in the woods.

  Gertie cleared her throat. “Hunten an trappen’ull be good this winter, all up an down th creek, an this place is close enough to th river a body could run down ever little while an git a mess a fish.”

  He looked at her, wondering why she spoke so, his thoughts still trying to grasp death, hold it, look at it. He could never tell Henley about the bear in the pawpaw grove. That was death.

  “An these little cedar trees up on these ledges here,” she went on, speaking against this awareness of the dead, “they’re might nigh fencepost size.”

  He looked up the bluff side, shook his head slowly, as when after her awakening shake in summer before daylight he tried to awaken. “Ain’t this Granpa’s land?”

  She shook her head. “It used to be your great-granpa’s. Your great-great-granpa Kendrick owned all th land tween here an th ridge road clean down to th river an up to th head a th creek—nigh onto four thousand acres, I’ve heared Pop say. This is th Tipton Place now.”

  “Oh,” he said, and started up the bluff side.

  Cassie, in no wise excited by Reuben’s bear, for bigger bears chased Callie Lou, cried: “Could we put bear meat in our cellar, too? An we’ll can a million cans a blackberries an—”

  “Not so fast, my girl; that was jist talk,” Gertie said, but turned again to Reuben. “They’s th best garden place an more manure an that new ground …”

  “It ud be a deal a work to clean up—fer somebody else,” Reuben said, studying her face.

  “Mebbe—it won’t be fer somebody else.”

  Reuben studied her a time in silence, afraid to believe. “Pop wouldn’t like it,” he said at last. “It’s too far frum th gravel. Anyhow, he’ll be needen a new truck er new tires er somethin like allus.”

  “He won’t need nothen in th army,” Gertie said. “He’ll want us to have a place a our own—that is, onct we’ve got it. Pretty soon we won’t be a haven to give away half a what we raise.”

  “You been sayen that a long time,” Reuben said, but unable to hold the doubt on his face he plunged up the hill, not just walking through the woods, but stopping now and again to study a tree. And once, before he disappeared, she saw him take his pocket knife and cut a little crooked cedar away from a straight one so that the straight one could grow.

  FOUR

  CASSIE RAN AHEAD OF her down the long slope of the pasture field. Gertie stood by the rail fence and watched her grow smaller and smaller, but always a child running, until she disappeared behind the new barn that Henley had built to hold his tobacco. The barn was empty now. The old barn that had held the hay and his black beef cattle was empty, too.

  Suddenly the timbered hills, the fields rolling down to the river, the white-painted house with its two stone chimneys, the barns with the smaller outbuildings huddled about them, all these were no longer as they had been. When she was a child her father’s place in the valley with its fenced fields, many of them green with bluegrass, had seemed a world of its own, richer, flatter, greener than any other farm she knew. She had married and learned the chaos of yearly moving and the struggle to make corn grow—never all your own—on the thin worn soil of sandy ridges. Her father’s farm with Henley running it had seemed finer still. Now the ragged, uncut hay fields, the pasture, empty of cattle, the beginnings of a gully in the lespedeza field below her, all cried out to her that her father was old, with a crippled leg, and that Henley was dead.

  She hesitated a moment longer, looking down. Then, her eyes bleak and gr
ay, her mouth like a gash across her face, she strode on, stopping only after she had gone onto the screened-in side porch where the family ate in summer. She stopped just past the porch door and stood, looking at first one and then the other of two doors. The door on the end opened into the kitchen; her father might be there. The other led into the new part of the house that her mother had had built when she came there as a bride. Intended for a dining room, it had through the years become her mother’s room, the center of her mother’s kingdom of crochet work and potted plants.

  Cassie called from around the house, “Mom, Mom, Granpa’s out in his blacksmith shop,” and ran back to her grandfather, expecting her mother to follow.

  Gertie, with an uneasy glance at her mother’s window, turned swiftly, soundlessly, and opened the porch door she had just come through. Her foot was on the second step when there came a wailing cry behind her, and her mother rushed onto the porch, “Oh, Gertie, Gertie, your own born brother dead in a foreign land, an never once do you come to comfort your poor mother a weepen her heart away. An when you do come, you cain’t so much as come in an speak to your poor dyen mother. Oh, Gertie, Gertie,” and her mother, standing on tiptoe, caught her around the neck, kissed her wetly on the cheek, and fell to weeping on her shoulder.

  Gertie stood like a stone woman, only her hands clenching and unclenching with the effort not to shiver at her mother’s kiss. In a moment the older woman’s sobs had subsided enough that she could speak again. “Oh, Gert how could you do me thisaway; your sister Meg has been so good an kind, has writ me so many letters, an is aimen to come an see me at Thanksgiven when her man has a extra day off. All th way frum that minen town Meg’ull come fer a day er two jist to see her mother—but you,” and for the first time she lifted her head and looked fully at Gertie.

  Gertie looked back at the face, pale beyond any face she knew, almost never touched by sun or wind, seeming always close to death and God. The eyes so big and dark and sad below the pale forehead; the eyebrows black by the little weak white hand that rubbed them now in the old gesture of unspoken suffering. Gertie watched, unable to think of anything to do or say, while the hand rubbed the forehead, went up and back into the dark, ungraying hair, then dropped suddenly and lifelessly while the head bowed slowly, eyes closing.

  Her mother leaned an instant weakly against the house wall, then slowly, as if the effort were very great, she straightened but, still tottering, she turned toward the front door. Gertie watched her, clenched hands tight by her sides, the muscles in her thin cheeks corded over her clenched teeth. Her mother was going round to the front door that opened into the parlor. The organ she had used to play while Henley sang was there, and on the wall above it, his guitar. “Please, Mom—let’s—let’s set in your room.”

  Her mother turned and looked at her with curiosity, “You sound like you’d been runnen.”

  “I hurried—kinda,” Gertie said, her voice hoarse, sullen-sounding, defiance in her step as she turned back to her mother’s door.

  “Hurried,” her mother was shrilling, beginning again to weep. “Three weeks since th word come for poor Henley. An I’ve had such a time, an everbody else has been so kind but my own born child. They got me through th fainten spells, somehow—but from God alone can I be reconciled. I wish I could believe like them that Meg writ about in th minen town. An like you—if you believe anything. They’ve got some a them in jail, Meg writ; they go around a claimen they ain’t no burnen Hell fire, that our God would never allow it; that at th very worst them like Henley will only be destroyed, but—oh, Jesus is kind—but it says, ‘Th Lord thy God am a terrible God,’” and on the last “God” her voice rose in a terrible wail of weeping as she looked up at her great daughter, who stood now as in childhood when her mother wept or scolded—silent, high-headed, straight-shouldered, stony-faced.

  It seemed a long while before Gertie could think to open the door, and in a voice which was hoarse and harsh, instead of gentle-sounding as she would have it be, remind her mother that she might catch cold, running out as she had done in nothing but a little crocheted cape about her shoulders.

  Her mother refused Gertie’s hand on her elbow, but by clinging to the doorframe and then seizing a chair back she managed to reach the rocking chair, reserved always for her, on one side the fireplace. “An what mightn’t a terrible God do,” she moaned, flinging her head against the back of the chair and looking at the ceiling. “I cain’t bear to think on it. Henley, my onliest son, a flamen there in Hell. He never found that narrow gate, oh, Lord, that little narrow gate to eternal salvation an life everlasten. But he follered that broad road straight to perdition, a dancen his dances an a drinken his drop—infinite justice, infinite mercy, let me be reconciled. Seems like it’ll kill me. How could God do this to me?”

  “It was Henley He done it to, Mom,” Gertie said in a low voice, and added, “He broke none a th Ten Commandments.” She had stopped just inside the door, and stood rigidly still, her shoulders hunched a little, her hands clenched at her sides, almost with the air of a frightened and defiant animal dragged into the warm, overcrowded room against its will.

  Her mother made a little business of straightening her head and looking at her, a flame of something close to hatred brightening her tear-wet eyes. “Maybe if’n it hadn’t a been fer you, Henley would ha give hissef to God. You was th oldest; he thought a sight a you, too much, I’ve thought many a time. He seen you stand stiff-necked an stubborn in th face uv th Almighty God. You never repented a your sin a dancen. If you an your father, too, but mostly you, had set Henley a good example, he might ha been singen in heaven now.” The rocking chair gave an angry, impatient creak. “What a you a standen there a glaren at me that away—mad as fire. Seems like you’ve been mad about somethin ever since Henley went away. I recken you wanted me to lie—say Henley was our sole support. He wasn’t.”

  “Pop ain’t been able to do hard heavy work since—” Gertie began in a low hard voice.

  She stopped when her mother’s head fell upon the chair arm and she began weeping again, words of heartbroken moaning mixed in with the weeping, “Oh, God, oh, God, thy ways with my children are past understanding.” She was silent then, chair still, bowed head slipping slowly off the chair arm toward the floor.

  Gertie could only twist her hands, stare at the sagging figure, and back away. She did lift one hand to catch her mother’s shoulder, but jerked it back. Her mother would shrink from her touch and shrug her hand away, as when she had tried to help her through the door. Her frantic glance quite by accident struck the camphor bottle on the mantel. She seized it, held it toward her mother, meanwhile begging in a hoarse and broken voice: “Please, Mom, please; try yer camphor. Mebbe it’ll keep you frum fainten.” Her mother reached blindly, without lifting her head, and Gertie put the bottle into her hand. Gertie watched concernedly as she sniffed and revived enough to speak:

  “Gert, I recken you wanted th whole neighborhood, specially them like your mother-in-law, that ole Kate Nevels, with her three boys gone an Clovis called, to go around a throwen off on me a sayen I kept my onliest one at home tied to my apron strings.”

  Gertie opened her mouth, but closed it. She was silent, staring at the fire while her mother gradually gained strength enough from the camphor to sit up and say with a little headshake: “You ought to read yer Bible, Gert. It’s all foretold. ‘I come not with peace but a sword,’ Christ said. An recollect how in Revelations it tells us we can’t buy er sell ‘thout th mark uv th Beast’—that means these ration cards; they’ve got th Beast’s number an mark. Christ is a scourgen th world like he scourged th temple, an in his mighty wrath he—”

  “But, Mom, mebbe,” Gertie began in a low hesitant voice, turning to look at her, “mebbe they’s another side to Christ. Recollect he went to th wedden feast, an had time to fool with little youngens, an speak to a thief an a bad woman. An Henley was like Christ—he worked an loved his fellowmen an—”

  Her mother’s rocker gave
an angry swish, and Gertie, whose voice had grown ever lower and more hesitant, fell silent. She looked past her mother through the open door, her eager glance hunting up the hill-pasture path she had walked a few minutes before, then pausing on the brow of the hill where the woods met the bright blue sky; and for an instant it seemed that her Christ, the Christ she had wanted for Henley was there, ready to come singing down the hill, a laughing Christ uncrowned with thorns and with the scars of the nail holes in his hands all healed away; a Christ who had loved people, had liked to mingle with them and laugh and sing the way Henley had liked people and singing and dancing. That Christ walked down the hill now and stood by the door asking to be let in, because it was Henley’s home and he knew Henley.

  He wasn’t there, of course. It was only her mind made this Christ alive, the way Cassie made the witch child Callie Lou alive, or gave life and heart to the piece of hickory sprout.

  She jumped, then strode with awkward quickness toward the door. Her mother was shivering, exclaiming, “Gert, no wonder Amos like to a died with th croup if you don’t shut th doors at your place no better than here.”

  Gertie opened her mouth to say that the croup was a disease Amos had caught, but tramped on her tongue in time. She closed the door, soundlessly, as she had been taught to do as a child. Forgetting to take off her coat, she sat down on the edge of a split-bottomed chair, a good distance back from the fire. She tried to recollect at least one of the many things she had planned for talking with her mother, pleasant things that would take her mother’s mind from Henley in Hell. She couldn’t remember them now for wanting to ask about her father, but she dared not show too much concern for him too soon.

  She was glad when her mother broke the silence, saying with a sorrowful shake of her bowed head: “Gert, I allus say let a body believe what their Bibles tells em to believe. But you’re mighty close to bein’ a infidel. You’re bad as them people Meg writ about in th coal-minen towns. They’re a claimen that, come Armiegeddon, this world won’t be destroyed by fire an brimstone frum heaven like th Bible says. Some a them got put in jail fer not saluten th flag, claimen it was a graven image.”