by Lisa Alther
He buttered and ate a Parker House roll while his mother continued her critique of Jude’s wardrobe.
Jude, whose skirt was hiked halfway up her thighs as she sat with her feet hooked behind her front chair legs, fixed her gaze on the glass goddess in the middle of the table. Baby’s breath and pastel snapdragons were sprouting from her head. She clutched a bow and wore a quiver of arrows on her back. A pack of dogs was leaping up around her legs, which were laced with thongs from her sandals.
“Thank you, Momma,” said her father. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Jude glanced at him, scratching her neck, which was itching from her scalloped lace collar. Often he agreed with his mother to her face, then ignored her behind her back. Hopefully, this was one of those times.
Satisfied, her grandmother resumed her account of the siege of Fredericksburg, told to her as a girl by a legless soldier at the Confederate Veterans’ Home: “As the Yankees crossed the Rappahannock, Lieutenant Stevens hid behind a stone wall to shoot at them. All of a sudden, he saw a baby girl toddling down the street chasing a rolling shell casing, with bullets whistling all around her. He ran out and grabbed her and carried her down a side street, where he came to a young woman in a dirty ripped dress who was sitting on a pile of rubble.”
“Ma‘am,” he said, “is this here your little girl?”
She and the child reached out for each other. “Sir,” she said, “my cow’s been shot. It’s lying in that shed over yonder. You can go butcher it and take the meat if you want to.”
“Thank you, ma‘am,” he said, “but the Yankees is coming fast, and I surely would be honored if you’d come along with me right now.”
“Why, thank you, sir,” she said, taking his outstretched hand with a coy smile, as though he’d just asked her to dance. “I don’t mind if I do.”
As he led her up the street, a shell exploded beside them. He woke up to find a starving hog licking the stumps where his legs used to be. The mother and her baby were lying dead beside him. Down the hill, he could see Yankee soldiers dressed in gowns stolen from the town houses. They were drinking fine French wines from the bottle and waltzing with one another around a bonfire of Chippendale chairs.
“There was no way in the world,” Jude’s grandmother concluded, “for our fine colonial cavaliers to prevail over that race of barbarians.”
It was her favorite story. Although it was a good one, Jude had heard it a hundred times.
“And another thing, Daniel,” her grandmother said as she ladled milk gravy over her fried chicken.
He looked up, the green beans on his fork slowly dripping fat-back. “Yes, Momma?”
“This poor child has no mother. And the way you’re behaving, running around with that floozy from intensive care at all hours of the night, now she has no father, either. It’s not going unnoticed around town that Jude is practically living at the Elkins’s while you cavort in back alleys with your concubine.”
“Yes, Momma,” he said, chewing his beans. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“What’s a floozy?” asked Jude, studying the wallpaper over the sideboard, which featured a white columned mansion surrounded by women in hoop skirts and sunbonnets. This was what her mother’s mansion in heaven looked like. One day soon, she was going to come take Jude there. It wasn’t true that she had no mother. Just because no one else saw her didn’t mean she wasn’t real. “What’s cavort?”
“Momma, tell us about Provence, why don’t you?” said her father.
“Provence? Oh, Provence was lovely. You know, I believe I like Provence almost as much as I do Virginia. Except for all that funny food. And that strange language nobody understands except the French.”
Her father laughed, running his hand over his bald spot. “I declare, Momma, you’re the only person I ever saw who travels the world searching for Virginia. Why don’t you just go to Virginia in the first place?”
She sighed and patted her red lips with her linen napkin. “Well, you know, Virginia’s not what it used to be. Once, before that dreadful war, it was a gracious land of rolling pastures, where sleek cattle grazed and blackbirds sang.…”
“May I please be excused?” asked Jude, laying her napkin on the damask tablecloth, desperate not to hear again about the joys of plantation living.
“WHAT’S A FLOOZY?” Jude asked Clementine on her way out the door to school the next morning.
Clementine paused as she mopped the redbrick kitchen linoleum with the golden liquid that smelled so good and tasted so terrible. “Where you heard that word, Miss Judith?”
“My grandma said my daddy’s running around with a floozy.”
Clementine grinned, leaning on her mop handle. “That a fact? Good for him.”
“What’s a floozy?”
“A floozy is…um, a woman who likes to have some fun.” She tucked a coil of springy hair beneath the edge of her head cloth.
“But what about my momma in heaven?”
“Sugar, be glad if your daddy’s found him a new woman friend. He be a good man, and he been so lonely for so long. It don’t mean he love your momma less. Fact is, I’d say he got him a graveyard love for your momma.”
“What’s that?”
“A graveyard love be a love that lasts till you both be dead and buried in the graveyard. Like what I expect you got with Miss Molly. A graveyard love don’t never end, no matter what.”
CHAPTER
4
JUDE WAS OPERATING atop the desk in her bedroom on a doll her grandmother had just brought her from India. She had removed and set aside the red-and-gold silk sari. Now she was carefully snipping open the cloth belly with scissors. Reaching into the aperture, she extracted the wad of stuffing that was the dead baby. Once the baby was out, she hoped the mother could be saved.
After sewing up the incision with red thread, Jude discovered that her patient had stopped breathing. Turning her over, she administered artificial respiration, repeatedly pressing her back and lifting her elbows. But she still refused to breathe.
Jude had never lost a patient before. Feeling her throat tighten so that she could hardly swallow, she stumbled down the carpeted hallway and into her father’s bedroom, which was painted lime green and had a gold quilted bedspread and velvet drapes. She searched the floor of his closet for a shoe box, intending to dig a grave in the backyard and make a headstone from a brick. Finally, she found a coffin, but unfortunately it was full of letters.
Carrying the box into her room, Jude plopped down on her bed and examined the French stamps on some of the envelopes, which featured the head of a woman statue with wavy stone hair. The letters were between her mother and father while he was away at the war. She removed one from an envelope that had an American eagle stamp. The paper was light blue, and the handwriting was small and squiggly. Right in the middle of the page, Jude spotted her own name.
Being in the top reading group now that she was in second grade, Jude used her father’s dictionary to decipher the paragraph containing her name: “Your mother and I rode the train to our nation’s capital last week. One afternoon we visited the National Cathedral. While we were looking up at the beautiful stained-glass window, we discovered that Jude, whom I was carrying on my hip, was blowing out all the votive candles in the rack beside us. Darling, I have my hands full with this marvelous child of ours! How I despise this awful war, which has taken so many men away from the wives and children who need them….”
The letter paper smelled like her mother’s favorite perfume. Closing her eyes, Jude remembered sitting on the pale green carpet in her parents’ bedroom watching her mother get dressed for parties. She’d let Jude fasten the lacy tops of her silk stockings to her garter belt. Jude had been fascinated by the way the little padded buttons slid into the wire hooks. Then her mother would ask her to arrange the crooked seams down the backs of her legs into straight lines. After pulling on her dress, her mother would take the cut-glass vial of Narcissus perfume off her dressing tabl
e and dab her wrists and throat and behind her ears with the stopper. Jude would hold out her own wrist for a dab. After her parents’ departure, she would lie in bed with her wrist to her nose, breathing in the sweet floral fragrance of her beautiful vanished mother.
Jude held the letter to her nose and took a deep whiff, gazing at the photo on her nightstand of her mother smiling into the camera, holding Jude’s cheek to her own, black hair waving around her face like seaweed around a drowning swimmer.
Jude remembered the poor dead doll she’d left lying on the operating table. She got up and cradled it for a moment in her arms. Then she hurled it into the back of her closet and slammed the door.
Hiding the shoe box under her bed, Jude worked on the letters whenever the coast was clear. One evening, Clementine asked as she carried corn bread in from the kitchen, “Miss Judith, what you be doing alone in your room all the time, honey? You ought to be outdoors playing with the other children.”
“Nothing. Reading. Thinking.”
“I guess we’re raising an intellectual here, Clementine,” said her father as he cut the meat loaf. He still wore pale green scrub clothes from the hospital and looked very handsome with the candlelight reflecting off the ever-larger bald patch on his head.
“What’s an ‘interlectual’?” asked Jude, swinging her legs in her chair, pretending she was pumping really high in a swing.
He laughed. “An intellectual is someone who knows what the word intellectual means.”
“I don’t want to be one anyway,” said Jude with dignity. “I want to be a medical missionary. Either that or a person who makes little girls’ shoes that aren’t silly.”
“Same difference,” said her father. “One heals souls and the other heels soles.” He practically fell into his plate laughing.
Jude liked seeing him so happy all of a sudden. But it bothered her that he never stared anymore at the photo of her mother in the wine bottle when they sat together in his brown leather chair listening to John Cameron Swayze. Her mother was talking in her letters about how much she missed him, but here he was cavorting in back alleys with a floozy. It just wasn’t right.
“I don’t get it.” Jude looked to Clementine for clues to her father’s hilarity.
Clementine shrugged and limped toward the kitchen in her huge white shoes. Apparently, her arthritis was acting up, which meant rain was coming soon.
Her father sighed. “I wish there were some intellectuals around this place,” he said, passing her the corn-bread squares, “to appreciate my bons mots.”
“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens,” drawled Clementine from the doorway. It was the punch line from a joke they all loved.
As Jude and Clementine giggled, her father shook his head.
JUDE AND MOLLY CLIMBED into Jude’s father’s army-surplus jeep. When Jude was younger, he used to wrap her in a blanket and let her sleep on the backseat while he paid house calls back in the hills. If she woke up, she’d sneak over to the lighted windows, through which she might see tall, thin mountain people with gaunt faces and hollow eyes. Sometimes she’d watch her father lance boils or stitch wounds by lantern light.
Her father drove them across the pasture behind her grandmother’s house and down through the Wildwoods, the olive hood bobbing and the power lift clanking on the back. The mountains lay spread out below them, a lumpy crazy quilt of rust and mauve and mustard and dark green.
As they sifted the dark loam along the riverbank in the slanting golden rays of the setting sun, Jude’s father told Molly the story about his grandfather’s mother, Abigail Westlake, whose forebears had lived in bark lodges by the river for centuries, fishing the slow-drifting waters and hunting the steep slopes of the Wildwoods. Later they put up a log cabin, growing corn and grazing cattle on the rich bottomland. By Abigail’s time, they had built a plank house, brought slaves from Charleston, converted to Christianity, learned English, and begun wearing white people’s clothing. Abigail’s brother married a missionary from Baltimore.
One day, white soldiers came with rifles to round them up and march them off to a reservation in Oklahoma. When her brother tried to escape, a soldier shot him in the head. Coming home from gathering herbs, Abigail watched this from the Wildwoods, then hid in a cave while an unfamiliar white family moved into her family’s house.
After several days, a neighboring farmer found her, nearly dead from cold and hunger and fear, and carried her back to his cabin on the ridge. He himself had recently arrived in America, having been evicted from his croft in the Scottish Highlands. He confronted the new family in her house and ordered them to leave. After they obligingly moved out, they burned her house to the ground. Jude’s father pointed out the cellar hole, which was now overgrown with a tangle of Virginia creeper. An early frost had turned the leaves the scarlet of spilt blood.
Abigail learned from relatives who had survived the forced westward trek that her parents and sisters had died of typhoid in the Ozarks. As she lay in bed week after week trying to recover her will to live, she told the farmer about the dances in this valley when she was a child, at which warriors carrying red-and-black clubs painted their faces vermilion and circled their eyes with scarlet and black. About her cousins, who came down on horses from the deep mountain coves wearing deerskin leggings and embroidered hunting shirts and red-and-blue turbans, to watch the violent all-day ball games on the playing field downriver. About the shamen, who raked the ballplayers in their loincloths with turkey-quill combs to grid their flesh with blood for good luck. About the prophets who had recently begun painting their faces black and proclaiming the end of the Cherokee people.
The farmer told her about having his hut in the Highlands burned down around him in the middle of a winter night because he refused to leave to make way for a herd of sheep. About his wife and baby, who died as he dragged them from the fire. About being forced onto a ship in Ullapool with his young son, bound for no one knew where. About being dumped at Cape Fear on the Carolina coast and wandering across the Smokies in search of an unoccupied spot where he could farm in peace. About the recent Cherokee raid on his cattle, during which his son had disappeared.
Having loss in common, if nothing else, the two fell in love and married. Their son, Jude’s great-grandfather, grew up learning from his mother which parts of which plants to use for which ailments. When he became a man, people arrived at his new log house from all over the region for his remedies. During the War Between the States, he patched up soldiers brought to him by both sides, but he refused to join either, having also learned from his mother a certain skepticism about the projects of white men, whatever their proclaimed creed.
Jude looked up from her digging to study her father. He had a big crooked nose just like her grandfather—just like the Indian on a buffalo nickel. And his cheekbones were so broad that his mahogany eyes seemed to be peering out from inside a cave. People always said Jude’s eyes were just like his. While he talked, the valley came alive, with painted warriors paddling canoes up the river and shooting deer with arrows in the Wildwoods. With teams of men in loincloths catching balls in the nets of woven squirrel skin at the ends of their long wooden spoons. With bayoneted soldiers herding little children like cattle. With blazing houses and screaming people.
But when her father stopped talking, it all vanished and everything fell silent, except for the whirring of grasshoppers in the withered alfalfa and the cawing of a crow from the top of a sycamore.
Her father scraped soil from a pointed shard of rock and handed it to Jude. She and Molly looked at it. It was shiny black with a vein of white down the center and pointed wings at the top for tying it to an arrow shaft.
“Hang on to that,” her father said. “Some ancient cousin of yours probably made it.”
Jude kept inspecting the chipped edges of the arrowhead with her fingertips. It seemed strange that all that was left were these bits of rock, herself and her father, and her father’s stories, told to him by his grandfather, who w
as told them by his mother. At school, they played a game called Gossip in which everyone sat in a circle and one person whispered something in the ear of the next, who whispered it to the next, and so on. By the time it had gone around the circle, it was completely wrong or stupid.
They drove up to the Wiggly Piglet, which featured an outline of Porky Pig in flashing neon, with a slogan beneath that read: “Our pigs are dying for you to eat.” A high-school girl in a cowboy hat and boots arrived to take their order of pulled-pork sandwiches and peanut-butter milk shakes. As the girl strutted away, Molly reported that she had had goose bumps on her thighs below her short shorts.
After the waitress returned, carrying their order on an aluminum tray that she attached to their car window, Jude asked her father, “Why did the soldiers want to march Abigail Westlake’s family to Oklahoma?”
“The white settlers wanted their land,” said her father, handing out the wrapped sandwiches. “That soil along the river is very rich from centuries of flooding.”
“But that’s not right, just to take it like that.”
He smiled faintly as he unwrapped his barbecue and poured extra sauce from a tiny paper cup onto the coleslaw atop his pork. “No, it isn’t. But the Cherokees were sitting ducks. They believed that land belonged to everyone. It never occurred to them that it could be taken away.”
“But you said they owned slaves?”
“Yes.”
“Negro people like Clementine, who had to do all the work for free?” A speaker attached to the restaurant roof was blaring Hank Williams singing “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not right, either,” said Jude. The barbecue sauce was so spicy that her nose was starting to run.
“No, it’s wrong. Very wrong.”
Jude sat beside Molly on the backseat, sucking her milk shake through a straw, trying to figure out how the same people could be right and wrong, both at the same time. She glanced at Molly.