The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  “Gertie-ee. Gertie-ee.”

  They both jumped like guilty children at hearing her mother’s calling, exasperated and shrill. Gertie hastily opened the door, but much to her relief and surprise her mother, in a fresh crocheted cap and apron, seemed pleased and relieved to find her with her father. She pushed Gertie back into the blacksmith shop, then closed the door with a great air of mystery. “Th Reverend Brand is a comen down th big road,” she whispered, pleased, “an this is th last chanct I’ll have to see you by yerself all day.” She fished in her left-hand apron pocket that always held her current crochet piece.

  “You’ve allus been awful good to us—in a way, Gertie,” she went on, pulling a handful of bills from her pocket. She opened the pocket wide, peeped in, took another, and then held out the loosely crumpled handful. “Take em; they’re fer you. Your father an me has talked it over. You hepped a sight back in your younger days—you stayed with us longer than most girls—an me an yer pop, we’ll git along—somehow.”

  Gertie stepped backward, staring at the money. “Law, Mom, you an Pop—you’ll be a needen it worsen Clovis an me.”

  Her father smiled at her. “It’s Henley’s cattle money,” he said. “He wanted you to have it—all of it,” and he gave a quick glance at the bills as if he would count them. Failing, he glanced sharply at his wife, who held the money half hidden in her hand. “His last wish—all of it,” he said, insistent.

  “His dyen wish,” her mother said, in the unmoved but intentionally dramatic tone she might have used to arouse interest in some unusual bit of neighborhood gossip. “He writ to me not long afore they took him across th waters, that if’n anything happened to him, to hep Gertie. You raised him, he said.”

  Gertie choked and moved hastily backward, knocking her shoulder against the nail shelf as she did so. Her mother sighed heavily. “It ain’t like me an yer poor father had long fer this world.”

  “But there’s insurance money comen in ever month,” her father said.

  “Mebbe it’s like he allus said,” her mother went on, shoving the bills into Gertie’s apron pocket: “if you hadn’t been big enough to hep on th farm while he was growen up we’d ha lost th place. Take it,” she said, turning away.

  “Oh, Mom,” Gertie said, and her bleak face became a hideous thing, breaking into twisted wrinkles and grimaces as she began to cry, giving all her big being to the crying, wholeheartedly, like a hurt child.

  Cassie, who had peeped in when her grandmother opened the door, had never seen her mother cry. She was terrified past tears, and buried her face in Gertie’s apron. The child stood shivering, clutching her mother’s leg when her grandmother broke into a mighty wail of weeping, screaming as she flung her apron over her head and hurried toward the house: “Gert, Gert, think a me. I can’t stand to see you cry. If Henley’s goen hurts you so, think on how your poor mother feels.”

  Gertie cried on, her hands pressed against her face, the crumpled money spilling from her pocket. Just as she had been unable to tell her father any word of how she felt for him, she was tongueless to tell her mother that sorrow for Henley did not cause her tears, but her mother’s unexpected gratitude, never mentioned through all these years. Maybe her mother had loved her. What a sin to have doubted it ever! She cried afresh over her own hardness of heart—Clovis going to war, and she thought only of money.

  She rushed out of the shop and away with long quick strides, unmindful of Cassie’s frightened eyes peeping up from her apron, or the small hands pulling on her skirt. At last she noticed the drag on her walking, and picked up the child and strode on, her feet following a path of escape in childhood—up the hill to the spring.

  She was halfway there before she noticed that Cassie’s arms were clasped so tightly about her neck they were choking her, while the child shivered and trembled like a young lamb in a January rain as she said over and over in a low, terrified voice, “Don’t cry, Mama; don’t cry.”

  The shameful realization came to Gertie that she was scaring her own child the way her mother had used to scare her. “I won’t cry no more,” she said. “I ain’t hurt. I’m all right, less’n you choke me to death with huggen. ‘Miss Cassie hugged her mommie to death.’ Now wouldn’t that make a pretty piece fer th paper?”

  Cassie smiled and patted her mother’s hair, but was troubled still. “Where we a goen, Mom?”

  “To th spring—you know th spring—yer granma’s spring.”

  “But you ain’t got no bucket.”

  “Jist to look around—an git a drink,” Gertie said after a moment’s wondering on why had she come. She realized she was clutching the money, and through all her sorrow there came a panicky fear that she had lost some of it, and that she didn’t know how much there had been. She hastily slid Cassie to the ground and counted it, smoothing each bill, laying them evenly one above the other—fifteen twenty-dollar bills. She wished she had her coat. She would sit in the sun up here where no one could see, and count it all—more already than John had paid for the Tipton Place. She wouldn’t have to wait. She wouldn’t have to depend on Clovis. She wouldn’t have to ask old Uncle John for credit. She wouldn’t have to ask anybody for anything.

  She hurried a few steps further up the hill, her eyes searching hungrily ahead. When she had gone high enough so that she could see the gray-brown roof of the old log house on the Tipton Place rising above the cedars on the rocky creek bank, she stopped and stood a long time looking. Such a safe and sheltered place; if a body didn’t know it was there she would never notice it among the leafless trees. It was close to her father, and her own, all her own. Never, never would she have to move again; never see again that weary, sullen look on Reuben’s face that came when they worked together in a field not their own, and he knew that half his sweat went to another man.

  She heard her mother calling her again, and remembered it was past dinner-getting time and a preacher come for dinner. The fire in the cook-stove would have burned away, and where was Cassie? She saw her at last, far up the field, the hickory doll on one arm while with the other she fought something with a dried stickweed longer than she was tall. Gertie heard her cries of “Sooey, Sooey,” saw the stickweed break the air, but for all her fierce fighting Cassie was losing ground before the enemy, running backward at times down the hill.

  Gertie called to her. Cassie whirled about, dropped the stickweed, and came running, laughing. Halfway to Gertie, she glanced over her shoulder, then ran the faster, screaming, “Mommie, Mommie, throw out some yers a corn. These wild hawgs can eat them stid a my little youngen. They’re a overtaken me.”

  Gertie made great motions of throwing ears of corn to hungry hogs, stamped her feet, cried, “Sooey,” then held out her arms to the flying Cassie. She caught her up with a cry of, “Woman, you oughtn’t to take yer little youngen out through a bunch a wild hawgs thataway.”

  “Thar warn’t so many,” Cassie said, settling herself on her mother’s shoulders. “Callie Lou chased em all but two ole sows off up the creek.”

  “That Callie Lou sure is brave,” Gertie said, hurrying down the hill.

  Cassie hugged her mother, and Callie Lou was gone. “Mom,” Cassie whispered as they neared the house, “I heared Granma when she come cryen onto th porch. Was that why you was a cryen—because a Uncle Henley cain’t never go up to Jesus?”

  “Pshaw,” Gertie said. “A body don’t have to go to Jesus. He’s right down here on earth all th time.”

  “Have you seen him, Mom?”

  Gertie considered, looking up the hill, “Well, it’s kinda like you a sean Callie Lou.”

  “You mean he’s got black curley hair an black eyes like Callie Lou?”

  “N-o-o. When I seen him walken over th hill—he jist looked like a good-turned man.”

  “Like a preacher in suit clothes a carryen a Bible?”

  “No. Seemed like he wore overalls like a carpenter. He made things like yer granpa.”

  “Was he a carryen a ax to cut a ax handle?�
��

  “I didn’t see his tools. He’d been in th woods, though, a looken fer somethen, fer he was carryen a big branch a red leaves. I figgered he’d cut down a old holler black gum tree fer to make beehives, an th leaves was so pretty he took em with him.”

  She gave the down-hanging feet and legs of the child a quick squeeze. “Jesus walks th earth, an we’re goen to have us a little piece a heaven right here on earth. Your pop has to go away, but he’ll be back—he’ll be all right.”

  FIVE

  SHE WAS STANDING BY her father’s corn crib with a two-bushel sack of corn on her shoulder. She wanted to load it on Dock, but Dock wouldn’t stand for it; every time she started to throw the corn behind the saddle he jumped away and the corn fell to the ground. Henley bent to pick it up. She saw his right hand reaching for it, his blue sleeve rolled to his elbow above the big sunburned arm where the dark hairs had bleached a golden brown, and on his reaching hand there was the ax scar between thumb and finger; but his hand was young-looking still for twenty-eight, the back less rough and brown, the palm less leathery than her own. As he stooped again to reach for the corn, he looked up at her, his hair, dark as her own, but not so straight, fallen across his forehead. Through it she could see his eyes, dark blue like her father’s eyes, more laughing—they had used to be like Cassie’s eyes—but not laughing now; sober-serious, asking, “Why—why do this to me?” and he was both hurt and angry, picking up the sack of corn. He flung it hard across her shoulder, so hard it hurt her neck, and the corn poured out, spilling swiftly to make a golden pile by her feet. Sorrowful, she was staring down at the spilled corn, so sorrowful, her insides aching as if the corn had been a wasted pile of yellow gold; and Henley was so mad at her. She wanted to ask him why, but the sack hurt her neck and she could not speak.

  She struggled against the choking weight, reached for it, found Clovis’s hand, half open, limp in sleep, the back of it flung like a dead weight across her neck, high up against her throat. She lifted the sleep-heavy hand and laid it back across his chest. All the pieces of reality scattered into nothingness by her sleep drew slowly back together; but she lay for a moment longer, fighting to hold the dream. Henley was looking at her, and in a moment he would laugh and go riding away with the shelled corn. She lay, her eyes closed, but she could not bring back the shine of the yellow corn or Henley’s eyes. They were back there now in her memory with all other things.

  She rolled out of bed, careful not to waken Clovis. Barefooted, and with the long coil of her hair falling down her back, she went to the little window in the end of the loft, so low and so small she must kneel in order to see any sweep of the sky. Yesterday had brought a thin gray rain, changing to sleety snow at twilight, but it was clear now, with no wisp of fog or cloud between her and the stars. The cup of the Big Dipper was getting close to the top of the sky. It was a long time till daylight, not much past three in the morning, but she could get up now and have fresh coffee ready for Clovis when he got up. She looked a moment longer at the stars, crouching lower, tipping her head far backward, sending her glance higher until it searched the ceiling of the world. She lost herself in the thousands and thousands of cold lights, her mind empty as when she had slept, so that for an instant she almost recaptured the wondering look in Henley’s eyes—a moment more and he would have spoken. Then it was gone, and the lights were stars saying that dawn would come.

  She tiptoed across the rough wide-planked floor to the stair hole, unconsciously remembering to crouch and not strike her head on the eaves, for even in the center of the loft she could not stand fully upright. Clovis had complained at times because he and she slept in the loft. He agreed with her that it was indecent for parents to sleep in the same room as half grown children, but let the boys sleep up above, he’d say; but Gertie was afraid of fire in the little rattletrap renter’s shanty with the kitchen stovepipe going out through a hole in the wall. She thought now as she climbed down the ladder-like stair, how she had told him her fears of fire, but never a word about the goodness of wakening to stars or the night sound of rain on the shake roof.

  The children slept in the two big beds in the main room. She went to the walnut bed in one corner, put one of Cassie’s wandering feet back under the covers, and took her tightly clutching arm from Clytie’s neck, for Clytie complained often that Cassie choked her and kept her awake with overmuch hugging. The three boys, as always in cold weather, slept fitted together like three spoons in the great cherry bed. Reuben was in front to keep the smaller ones from falling to the floor. Enoch next in the warmest spot, and Amos last, his chin on Enoch’s neck.

  She straightened their quilts, and still without striking a light, went into the kitchen. She shook down the ashes in the great cookstove, her one new piece of furniture, and it a gift from her father. She felt in the corner of the woodbox where the fat pine in fine splinters lay and built the fire. Quickly the top of the stove took on shape and size. The caps were marked by thin circles of red light, while the grate openings made six squares of light on the wall. The stove light shone on the wash bench of her own making, and on the bottoms of the water buckets. One was of red cedar, made of pieces of wood fitted together barrel fashion and held together with copper bands. It was an old bucket and had, like most of the furniture which she had not made herself, been a cast-off from her mother’s house.

  Clovis quarreled often at the weight of the cedar bucket and the clumsiness of it, pointing out that a new tin one would cost only a quarter. The children seldom carried it to the spring, but filled it from the smaller buckets. But now, as Gertie broke the thin skim of ice on top and lifted dipperfuls of water from it to fill the coffeepot, she smiled on it, remembering the years she had had it, and was filled for a moment with a proud consciousness of ownership, something solid and old, known and proved long ago by hands other than her own. She smoothed the middle copper band, bright in the stove light from many scrubbings with ashes. She decided that when she moved to the Tipton Place she would keep the bucket on the porch shelf and quit using it for water; instead, she would keep garden truck or meat in it, as her grandmother had used to do.

  She put the coffee on, and stoked the stove afresh. Then, as always in any weather, she picked up the red cedar bucket and went to the spring. She as usual in clear weather stopped when she had rounded the house corner, and looked at the morning star. It rode high and bright above Old John’s pines on the ridge top, seeming hardly the morning star, for as yet no promise of the sun’s rising had paled the east and washed away the smaller stars. Last year it had in winter hung in the bare limbs of an old sweet gum by the road gate on Samuel Sexton’s place they had rented. The year Cassie was born she’d never seen it at all; they’d lived low down on the eastern side of the ridge.

  There was no whiteness of rock or glimmer of starlight under the pines to mark the craggy path down the ridge side to the spring, but she followed the path with no more thought for her feet than she would use to cross the kitchen floor. The spring seeped into a hollowed-out sand-stone basin at the foot of a low ledge, and without being able to see where stone ended and water began she squatted by the pool and dipped the bucket in, then lifted it and drank easily and soundlessly from the great thick rim as others might have sipped from a china cup. The water, cold with faint tastes of earth and iron and moss and the roots of trees, was like other drinks from other springs, the first step upward in the long stairs of the day; everything before it, was night; everything after, day.

  She rinsed the bucket, then drew it up brimming full and went back up the path. Though at the top of the stair-like climb her breath came slowly and soundlessly as ever, she stopped and shifted the bucket to her other hand, looking straight above her through the pine branches to the stars. Little of the blue-black sky could be seen, and the pine boughs were mixed in with the stars, as if the trees carried stars instead of cones. A pine tree was a pretty thing. They’d let Clovis stay around three or four weeks before they took him off for good, and with mo
re than enough money to buy a farm, and knowing the army would send her more, she’d buy coal oil and keep the lamp burning. Nights she and Clovis would sit around the stove and she would whittle on a poplar biscuit bowl like she’d been needing. Around it she would put a ring of pine twigs and on the side one white pine cone. But when Clovis was gone and she was settled on the farm, she would work again on the block of wood, nights in the firelight. She’d waited so many years, and now there was no need to wait. She had her land—as good as had it—and the face was plain, the laughing Christ, a Christ for Henley.

  She hurried back to the kitchen where the two front caps of the stove glowed red, the coffeepot purred and talked to itself, telling itself it was ready to boil, and in the red glow from the stove the steam rose pinkish white from the tea kettle. She climbed the stair ladder and shook Clovis into wakefulness. “It’s time to git up,” she said.

  He roused, shaking his head, then lifted himself on one elbow, and looked across the foot of the bed, searching for the square of light that would mark the loft-room window. Seeing only the star-sprinkled sky, he dropped back to the pillow, pulling the covers around him. “Consarn it, Gert. It ain’t anywheres close to daylight.”

  She drew a deep breath. “It’s your army examinen day, honey,” she said.

  At that he was up, for the special bus taking men to Cincinnati for their army examination left Town at six-thirty.

  She wouldn’t sorrow now and be afraid, she told herself. The real army was a little while away, and even then it would be only the training. Maybe the fighting would be over before he had to go across the waters; and all the while he was away there would be dollars every month to build up the Tipton Place. No money would have to go out to keep an old truck running, no half of the crops they raised would go to another man for rent. She felt guilty, pleasuring herself with such thoughts. When she scooped her hand into the lard, she took an extra pinch, for Clovis liked his biscuit bread flaky with lard.