The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Gertie’s head came up; she looked quickly at her mother. “They cain’t put em in jail. Th Constitution says, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or—’”

  “Gert, Gert,” her mother cried, more angry now than sorrowful, “don’t you know they’s a war on, an things is different? If a religion is unpatriotic, it ain’t right. Yer pop would learn you th Constitution an some a th Bible—an you been spouten em ever since like you was a preacher an a lawyer, too.”

  Her mother began sniffing the camphor again, and Gertie, desperate for conversation, said quickly and in an unnaturally loud voice: “Mom, how’s that bad pain in your side? Clovis was a tellen me you’d been mighty bad with that old pain.”

  “Gert, darlen, do I matter so little you cain’t even recollect what hurts me? It’s not that old pain that come after th bornen a you nearly killed me.” She sighed a moment in remembrance of Gertie’s birth, then continued: “I’m mighty bad constipated, mighty bad. Soon as I git a little stronger, an before they take Clovis fer good, I’m a goen to git him to take me to a doctor in Town. That doctor where you took Amos, it’s got so his medicine don’t do me one lick a good no more, not my constipation. I don’t think he’s as good as that little doctor at th Valley. He went off to war right away. Your doctor’s a slacker an not patriotic, er he would already ha gone.”

  “But people has got to have a doctor. I don’t believe Amos could ha—”

  Her mother was sniffling again, her head bending toward the chair arm. “Gertie, Gertie, if you’d lost a son like me you’d know they was a war on. Amos jist had you skeered. Clovis said th hole in his neck wasn’t bigger’n a marble. After my poor Henley went an give his life, I feel that ever man—”

  “God didn’t give Henley his life to give away; an he didn’t give his life. They took him an he didn’t—” Her mother began to weep—Gertie realized she was saying things she had made up her mind not to say. She looked about the room, hunting desperately for something of which to speak; but the room seemed as it had been since childhood, forever crowded with things she had seen many times, but forever alien territory that had from the beginnings of her memory made her seem even bigger, uglier, more awkward, more liable to break something than she had seemed in other places.

  Here and there on the walls, in little wooden shelves contrived by her father, covering the low windowsills, set on the cedar chest, on the center table, crowding Henley’s picture on top of the phonograph, were her mother’s potted plants: geraniums, begonias, varieties of cactus, coleus, sensitive plants. Many were blooming, but in a sad, halfhearted way, as if they were tired of the red clay pots, tied with crêpe paper, that cramped their roots like too tight shoes. A whole corner of the large room was taken up with a dais-like piece of furniture built by her father. It had three broad steps rising on all four sides, each step wide enough to hold a row of potted plants, with the small square on top holding the king of her mother’s plant kingdom, a giant maidenhair fern that seemed to have changed little since Gertie first remembered it. She had memories of trips to the woods for the black rich earth from generations of leaves dying on limestone ledges, for the dirt must be scraped from a damp limestone ledge where other ferns grew, so that every few years the plant had been repotted and divided, with rooted fronds going out to all the neighbors. Not long after her marriage her mother had given her a good-sized piece of it, rooted in a large red pot. She had on the way home stopped by a limestone ledge above the creek and there set the fern where it belonged to be.

  Hanging from ornamental pegs whittled by her father for her mother could never abide a nail in her wallpaper, were innumerable pincushions. Some were of patchwork, others, in the shape of knitted or crocheted hearts and stars and diamonds run with pale blue or pink ribbon, faded now into dusty grayness. There were old almanacs advertising remedies for the female troubles that had plagued her mother so much since Gertie’s birth. There was a great watch that had come down to her father from his grandfather; a never used powder horn—filled with two crêpe-paper roses brought home nine years ago from Uncle Chrisman Ballew’s funeral—alongside an unframed, faded picture of Joshua blowing his horn by the walls of Jericho. Everywhere, on the dresser, the mantel, under the giant fern, on the chairbacks, the curtains, the sewing machine, the cushions, were samples of her mother’s handiwork. Covers, scarves, and doilies were all embroidered and edged with crochet work or tatting, and all starched and ironed until they seemed of the shiny stiff coldness of metal when a bit of one could be seen between the medicine bottles, clocks, lamps, and vases of artificial flowers that surmounted them.

  They somehow matched the floor, laid years ago with one of the first linoleum rugs in the settlement, so fine that for fear of spoiling it her mother had put a rag carpet over it, and over the carpet, new then and one of the last to come from old Aunt Sarah Kramer’s loom, lengths and pieces cut from the old red turkey carpet that had been in the front room when she came to it as a bride, and over the old carpet to brighten it a bit, small rugs she had from time to time ordered from Montgomery Ward. One of these, depicting a very pink-faced little girl with overly large eyes and butter-colored hair with one reddish-pink hand resting on the shoulder of a large yellow-brown square-nosed cur dog, the breed of which had at times thrown Gertie into long fits of silent pondering, her mother had always considered too fine for feet, and kept in front of the flower stand where almost no one ever stepped for fear of knocking over a plant or breaking a frond of the swelling fern.

  Gertie fidgeted in her chair and touched the knife in her apron pocket, then quickly jerked her straying fingers away. Her mother had ever hated the whittling, even in her father—and in a girl it had seemed almost a sin. Strange how she could whittle, but never learn to do a bit of fancywork. In spite of all her mother’s teaching in the little spare time Gertie had had from the farm work, even her plain sewing was poor—all but the patching. Her mother often pointed out that her buttonholes looked like pigs’ eyes—and she made all her own dresses too big and too long.

  She realized her mother had left off crying and was looking at her. She turned eagerly, trying hard to smile, even when her mother said: “Gert, did you let anybody see you a comen down th big road a looken that away. You’ll have beggar lice an Spanish needles all over th place. An why don’t you take off yer coat? What ails you anyhow? You act like you was a stranger.”

  Gertie got up, jerked off her coat, knocking the faded flower from a large begonia as she did so. She stood then, staring into the fire, and unconsciously fell to pulling her fingers till the joints popped, a childhood habit that had always slipped upon her when trouble overtook her with empty hands. Her mother, just beginning an account of her wartime trials with the buying of thread, interrupted herself to scold, “Gert, Gert, you know that drives me crazy.”

  Gertie’s frantic glance struggled with the curtains. Maybe her mother could be led to talk of the curtains. They looked new. But were they? They looked exactly like all the other curtains in this room she could remember, thin and white and edged with her mother’s crochet work. But the starched lace, fragile-appearing as rows of snow crystals sewed upon the curtains, only brought back Battle John Brand, stampeding the souls of his flock to Christ with his twin whips of hell and God. She could feel the torture of the lace again as it had used to be on those long hot summer Sundays of her girlhood when she would sit by her sister Meg in the meeting house and listen to Battle John Brand.

  His hell would quiver like the heat waves through the meeting house, and she would sit trying desperately to think of other things, but never succeeding. She could smell her own flesh burning, rising like an incense to God in heaven, with her mother who was forever listening down the golden stairs, but never hearing her daughter cry: “I love Battle John’s God. I love the Sunday clothing my poor weakly mother works so hard to make for me.”

  She never, no m
atter how hot the coals or bright the flames that Battle John made, was able to say such things, but sat on in sweaty-handed guilt and misery. Was she, like Judas, foreordained to sin, she’d wonder? She knew, but was unable to imagine, that the torture of Hell was a million times worse than the torture of her Sunday clothes. The starched embroidered white dress of dotted swiss or voile, always edged with her mother’s crochet, seemed by its very daintiness to make her own body, brown, big-boned, big-muscled, brier-scratched from the man’s work she did on the farm, even more ugly. Her thighs, that could endure the jolting of a mule’s back or long hours on the iron seat of the iron-wheeled mowing machine, cried to her in church with unceasing agony at their confinement in the encircling bands of knitted or crocheted lace and tucks, all starched and ironed until each toothed edge seemed so much iron cutting into her sweating flesh. More starched lace chafed her breasts, her back, and her chigger-bitten armpits; the pains and discomfort of these, added to the too tight shoes and the layers of starched slips and petticoats, made the long sittings under Battle John a greater agony than any pain she had ever known.

  The cuckoo in the clock on her mother’s wall whirred and creaked, for it was getting old, then leaped from its little house and cried eleven times. Gertie had seldom heard a pleasanter sound. She started toward the kitchen, but paused, her hand on the doorknob, and asked somewhat timidly, for she had never been a cook to match either her mother or Meg, “Mom, couldn’t I git dinner this onct an save you th trouble?”

  Her mother considered as she juggled a bottle of pills so as to make one and only one pill come from the bottle. She succeeded, swallowed the pill, gagged, shook her head violently at Gertie’s suggestion that she get her a glass of water. “Law, Gert, I recken in times like these you can cook about as good as anybody.” She paused to gag again before continuing. “Many’s th time I’ve wished here lately that I had th stingy hand with lard an sugar you’ve allus had since you got Clovis. We run out uv our own lard back in August, an that ration don’t hardly give me enough fer biscuits, an till hogkillen time I’ll have to cook with butter, an butter seasonen gives me th sick headache. I tried fryen a chicken in butter, but it tasted jist like beef to me. I couldn’t eat one bite but th liver.”

  Gertie stood in the doorway while her mother went into a long pondering on whether or not she should let Gertie get the dinner. She did feel weakly, but on the other hand somebody would surely come on such a pretty Sunday. She finished at last with the decision in favor of Gertie, who went quickly into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. She hung her coat on a peg, gave the hem below the torn pocket a swift, critical glance. It looked flat and empty, like the tail of any other old coat. She pinched it between thumb and finger, and was reassured by the soft whispering crackle of money.

  She paused an instant looking round the great room. She glanced into the wide-mouthed fireplace where her great-grandmother had baked the bread and cooked all the Kendrick food, and smiled a little on an unusually large Dutch oven, one her father had always prized. His grandfather had brought it back from Alabama one early spring when he and the other men of the settlement had returned from driving their hogs to market in the south across the mountains. She crossed the kitchen to the great cookstove with its high curving legs, and rolled back the warming-oven door.

  She looked at the platter there with two pieces of ham left from breakfast, two fried eggs, and on one end a little mound of biscuit. It was for an instant as it had been before she married, when this was home and if she grew hungry at any time of the day or night she had only to come to the warming oven or go to the cherry cupboard, where a selection of jams and jellies and canned and baked goods, especially gingerbread, were kept. Endlessly replenishing the kitchen, like the widow’s barrel, were the smokehouse, the springhouse, and the roothouse. Behind these were the hogs and cattle and sheep on the range, the timber on the hillsides, the little coal mines—worked by paid miners but good for cash money. And under everything was the Big South Fork of the Cumberland that each year in the time of tides laid a thick coating of rich black earth on the already rich land of her father’s river-bottom fields, sheltered from the fiercest currents of the river so that sand and gravel never came on the flood tide, only black silt settling slowly down from quiet back waters.

  There’d been no fried meat left at her table in a long time. She turned quickly to the woodbox filled with the only kind of wood her mother could abide: split maple, hickory, and oak, cut green and seasoned, with one small corner given up to split red cedar root for kindling.

  When the fire was burning well, the stove crinking with the rising heat, she hurried soundlessly through the outside door, then down the lane toward the thin thread of smoke that rose from the blacksmith shop, a little log building that in the days of her grandfather had served much of the settlement, but was seldom used now save by her father for his own work.

  She pushed open the door, but paused a moment looking; in the dim light her father seemed a stranger, some old man, older than her father, who was hardly sixty, too deaf to hear the opening of the door. His hair had the thin straggly look of an old man’s hair, and his shoulders, bent above the freshly made ax handle he was smoothing with a piece of broken glass, had the tired look of an old man’s shoulders. He scraped on, smoothing the wood, not looking up until she stepped across the threshold, questioning more than greeting, “Pop? Oh, Pop?”

  The ax handle fell from his knees as he got up, and with the piece of glass still clutched in one hand he pulled her tightly against him, whispering, “Gertie, Gertie.” He held her away from him, looked into her face, repeating, “Gertie, Gertie.”

  The never spoken knowledge of childhood that her father, not her mother, was the weak and pitiful one, the one who needed help, came back to her, but now as then she could say nothing of what was in her heart, nor speak of Henley, who in dying had taken with him the Kendrick name, the Kendrick land. In a moment she was able to say, “Pop, I’ve been a worryen on how you was maken out with yer leg in this rainy fall weather.”

  “Pretty good, pretty good,” he said. “I was lucky to have Reuben to hep in th fall work, an I got th Cramer boys a few days.”

  “I heared they’d went away,” she said, picking up the ax handle and hefting it.

  He nodded. “Th oldest ain’t seventeen, but they’re big as men—so they took off fer Muncie an they’ll kill theirselves in one a them factories.” He sighed. “They won’t be men enough left to dig th graves. Looks like they could ha left us Clovis. He could ha kept th mail car runnen.”

  She tried to smile, “Why, Pop, many’s th time I’ve heared you tell about how th women managed in th War a 1812 when they wasn’t a man above fourteen left in th settlement. I can do a man’s work.” She studied the ax handle. “I kind a kept a hopen they’d leave Clovis. I mebbe ought to ha let him a gone to Oak Ridge er some factory. I think he wanted to. He hated to leave his old people an sell th truck—but he would ha gone. Mostly it was me, afeared he’d want me an th youngens to foller him to some city.”

  He patted her shoulder. “Clovis, he’ll be all right in th army.”

  She nodded, repeating, “He’ll be all right,” remembering that other, “He’ll be all right.” She and her father had stood together in the barn; late spring it had been then, with the sun rising far northward. They had stood in the pale spring dawn with milk buckets in their hands and listened to Clovis’s truck as it took Henley to the railroad, and they had repeated each to the other, “Henley, he’ll be all right.”

  She watched him as he took the ax handle, settled himself slowly and cautiously into the chair, and commenced scraping again, looking over his spectacles at the oak wood. She saw the glass make a deeper mark than it should have, scratching the oak. He too was thinking of the other “all right.” In a moment she was able to ask, “How’s yer leg, Pop, an yer rheumatism?”

  “Aye, not bad; nothen to speak of.” He reached and gave the bellows string three quick pulls
that brought first red glowing life and then pale flames to the charcoal in the forge. “I been kinda baken myself, an that helps. I ain’t so bad.”

  “Whyn’t you set inside, Pop? It’s jist now beginnen to git warm in th sun. A forge fire’s no good fer baken yer legs an back.”

  “Aye, law,” he said, looking through the little window to the hills across the river, “you know how it is. Th mess a my whittlen allus aggravated yer pore mother—an seems like since—since this trouble—I’ve allus got to be a whittlen, an a chewen an a spitten, too. An yer pore mother, th smell uv it an a sean me spit—why, t’other night I was a setten by th fire and she had such a gaggen spell she come nigh fainten. How’s th little un? I wanted to ride over to see him, but yer mom’s been so bad I couldn’t leave.”

  “He’s fine,” Gertie said, studying his hand scraping the oak. Seemed like it wasn’t steady; but maybe she only imagined it, like a minute ago when he had stood up, his eyes had not seemed quite level with her own. No, she didn’t imagine it: she had been little, looking up at her father, the tallest man in the world, six feet four; then grown, looking into his eyes when it seemed his eyes alone were the only ones in the world high as her own; and now the eyes were lower. She realized she was pulling her fingers again, but did not stop. “Pop—I ain’t right certain—well, I’m almost certain, but soon as Clovis is in th army—they’ll be money I can depend on fer a little while—I’ll move closer an …”

  “The Tipton Place?” he asked, and his eyes were eager, glad as Reuben’s. “It’s good an—”