by Rilla Askew
But the girls were silent, and for a heartbeat on the ridge there was nothing but silence, and then Fayette, unable to help himself, had to keep on. “You going to take a look at that howdah or ain’t you? I reckon you don’t even want to know if it’s one of yours. Hell, it’s bound to be, I seen your handwriting all over it. That goddamn Tanner, I bet you he made off with a flat dozen. Listen here, Son, we got to pay attention to business here, take a look at something that matters a little bit. Forget that blame mule.”
“Something that matters,” John Lodi said, his eyes keen on his brother. His face was still unfathomable as he repeated the phrase. “That matters. Yes.” Slowly he turned to Mitchelltree, said calmly, releasing the words one at a time into the burnished air, “Mister, if you don’t mind a minute, I’d like to take a look at that gun now. We don’t intend anything. Just want to take a look at the mark on it. I’ll give it right back.”
Mitchelltree nodded once, though later he would wonder why. Pondering it, he would conclude that there’d been something about the directness in the cracked voice, maybe, that told him this one spoke the truth. Or he would mention to himself the presence of the two children, strange as they were, bound together on the edge of the ridge between the two white men. In fact, he was never fully to understand why he suddenly gave that brief acquiescent nod to John Lodi before he eased his head in the direction of the shadowed men behind the post office wall and said softly, “Let them down yonder know.”
John Lodi looked at him a moment, and then turned and called down the hill. “Blaylock! We’re all right up here now! Y’all may as well get on back to your business!”
A voiced floated up in the twilight.
“Fate? Y’all got everything under control up yonder?”
Fayette waved his loose hands amiably over his head.
Mitchelltree held his right hand out from his body, and with his left lifted the checkered grip by two fingers and pulled it free of the homemade holster. John stepped toward him to take it. The children never stopped staring, although it was not at the enormous four-barreled pistol they stared; the gun held no fascination for them. They’d grown up around guns, the making of guns, the sound and smell of guns all their lives, and the lure of them held no sway over their souls. It was Mitchelltree the two children continued to stare at. Fayette took a step toward the weapon, eagerly, but by then John had hold of the gun. He broke it open at the breech, checked the three remaining cartridges, turned calmly, almost gently, and yet too fast for anyone to understand what he meant to do, and, without aiming, shot the charcoal mule once in the head.
The girl began, in the warmth of the earth’s turning, to walk. She would sneak out of the house without her sister, each day ranging farther and farther, though Jonaphrene would call her sometimes, would see her walking quickly away from the log house and try to run after her. But the girl went on, relentless, unseeing, driven in her inheritance as she’d received it from her father: her birthright stronger than the blood union that had left her naked without the feel of her sister’s thin bones beneath her hand, touching, so that for a month and more after Thula Henry’s coming, she had continued to walk joined tight to Jonaphrene when she could have walked alone. All was changed in the twinkling of an eye, a gunflash, as Matt became at once unyoked from her sister and driven forward by the killing of the mules.
On the crest of the ridge, with the black man before her and Delia dead by his hand on the hillside, and Fayette’s big mule dead by her own father’s hand, the change had come on her. She did not know when her arm slipped from around her sister. She watched her father give the gun back to the black man and, without a look or word to his brother or his two daughters, turn and walk straight down the side of the ridge toward the town, and before she knew she had done it, she’d left her sister and followed him. She followed him along the road toward Cedar until she fell too far behind and the night dropped too dark, and then she found her way back to her uncle’s store at the end of the row of town buildings and slept behind an empty cracker barrel on the plank porch.
The next morning, when she awakened at first light, she stood up and immediately stepped down off the porch, not east toward the log house, but south toward Waddy Mountain. The old hound dog Ringo saw her from his sleeping place beneath the store porch, where he slept separate from Fayette’s dogs since the black-and-tan, wounded in a coon fight and suffering from blood poisoning, had been shot by the girl’s father and buried in the yard. The beagle trotted down the hill behind her, followed her, waddling, as she crossed through Faulk’s field.
Thus began the girl’s restless, ceaseless roaming. She would leave the house early, the dog following, and walk until she could walk no longer, along the rocky slopes of the hills beside the valley, or she’d follow Bull Creek to where it joined the Fourche Maline, and then walk east until she was too weary to turn back. She would sit on the clotted bank then, with the sun warming her naked head, and look at the elm buds pricking red on the bare branches, the peachleaf willows swelling pale green. Her eyes would follow a cardinal darting through the cedars, a thousand shimmering insects skimming the water’s surface, dancing in the changing air, but the girl did not see. She would turn her gaze to the hills, where the flowering trees daubed the ridges sweet cream and raspberry, but she had no eyes for the rush of life, could not see how the earth scrambled to cover itself. She was caught alone in the words of her own mind, and those words were like a chant or a prayer, though there was nothing of God in them but only the repetition of thoughts shaped in monotonous rhythm. Papa put them in a cave somewhere. Safe from rain. Safe from moths and rust and summer dirt daubers, safe from the pilfering fingers of Fayette’s boys. I’ll find them in a minute, our quilts and clothes, Mama’s trunk, I’ll load up the wagon. It’s just over that next rise. Beyond that cedar yonder. No. On the other side of that sandrock ridge.
The girl’s chanting thoughts did not include what she would do once she’d found her family’s belongings, how she might carry them to the wagon, or the wagon to where they were hidden, now that Delia was dead and old Sarn nodded his aged dreams in the shed barn alone. The destruction of the mule, rather than being the event to end her determination, became, instead, the act which sealed her obsession. She would find their things. She would load up the wagon. She would drive east into the mountains and get her mama; she would carry her mother back home.
On she went, walking.
Her aunt forbade her to leave if she could catch her before she got out the door. Jessie would stand with her palm laid across her swelling belly, saying, “Get right back in here this minute, child, there’s work to do!” The girl would look up at her, unblinking, and turn and go out the door. The woman’s voice was no more than a lone hornet to her, or yellow jacket, buzzing: one could give a nasty sting if you did not stay out of its way, but one could not kill you. She believed she knew the truth in her aunt. She was not afraid of the woman, but she did begin to rise and leave the house earlier so that she might not have to listen to her aunt’s buzzing whine. As soon as she heard her father leave, the girl would roll from the pallet. She did not have to take the time to dress, because she slept in the one calico she had to wear; she didn’t have any shoes. She’d go to the table, as her father did, and place her hand beneath the cloth and take a piece of cold cornbread or biscuit, turn and lift the latch on the front door, and go out.
Jessie began to complain bitterly in the evenings to her husband that the girl would not work, that there was something wrong with her, but Fayette raised his head only once, said, in Matt’s general direction, “You got to pull your share around the house now,” and turned back to his coffee.
So Jessie determined that she would, no matter what, she would speak to John about the girl. She waited up for him one evening. She’d left his supper on the stove and blown the lamps out, but for the one on the pine table, where she sat, sewing, when her brother-in-law came in. The rest of the household was long abed, her sons and husban
d snoring upstairs. John did not speak but came in heavily and, seeing her, hesitated a moment and then went to the washbench. He returned to the table, pulled a chair out, and sat down. They didn’t greet one another. Jessie gathered the bulk of the muslin sheet she was hemming and put it on the table, stood up and went to the stove and fetched his plate, placed it quietly on the oil cloth. She dipped up a glass of buttermilk from the ready crock and set it before him, then took up her sewing again and sat.
She said, “You’re going to have to do something about that girl.”
John looked at her from beneath his slouch hat, chewing, but still he did not speak.
“She hadn’t done a lick of work since I don’t know when,” the woman whispered. “Stays off and gone from daylight to dark, won’t do a thing in the world I tell her.” She was silent a moment. “I can’t have that, I’m sorry.”
The man still didn’t say anything. He took a bite of bacon, picked up his cornbread and crumbled it into the buttermilk.
Jessie’s fingers moved faster and faster on the sheet. “The rest of them act just like her! She shows out, and the rest of them act just like her. We can’t be feeding a bunch of young’uns that won’t work, I don’t care whose they are.”
The man turned his dark look on her, and immediately the woman fell silent. There was no sound in the room then but a moth that had come in with the night air, batting around the table, thumping softly against the hot globe of the lamp, falling to the wood. John pushed his plate away, leaned back against the chair slats and reached in his front pants pocket for his purse. The room sounded with the hard thunk of coin wrapped in leather when he set it on the table. “I give Fay twenty dollars Friday,” he said. “Have my children eat more than that?”
“Oh, it’s not that. It’s not just that.” The woman hesitated, her hands still, then the sound burst in a harsh whisper. “The child don’t act right!” The words spat into the room. “She hadn’t acted right since . . .” Jessie’s voice trailed off. She picked up the sheet again and went to sewing in fast, tight little stitches.
The man turned and looked at the children on the floor near the hearth. The girl immediately twisted around on the pallet and sat up.
“I don’t know what to do with her,” Jessie said, still sewing. She looked at Matt, seeming unsurprised to see her awake and listening, sitting up on the pallet with her gown tucked over her knees. The woman went on talking, as if the girl were invisible. “From the minute she quit having fits, or pretending to have fits—”
“Fits. She hadn’t had no fits.”
“Well, whatever it was, whatever that bouncing around and falling down was about—”
“She quit that.”
“No, I know. That’s what I mean.” The needle paused, and then the woman clasped the sheet around and dropped it to her lap. “She’s fine now, she could help now, but she won’t stay put. She won’t work. She runs off the minute you leave in the morning, don’t come back till nearly dark, and I know good and well you know it. Lord only dreams what she’s up to, because when she comes trailing in here for supper she don’t have a thing to show but scratches and stick-tights in her skirt tails and, day before yesterday, a bleeding foot. Look there, the child’s face is getting dark as a you-know-what, I can’t keep a hat on her. I can’t do a thing in the world with her. You’re going to have to do something because I can’t and I don’t aim to, I’ve got all I can say grace over now.”
“Nobody’s asking,” the man said. He didn’t take his eyes off his daughter. In a bit, he said, “Mattie, y’all been running off every day like your aunt tells me?”
The girl looked at her aunt, at her aunt’s mouth, not pinched but tucked in at the corners as though she might any minute break into a smile. She waited for her father to speak again, but he said nothing, and at last she said, “I been out.”
“Out where?”
“Outside.”
“Doing what?”
“Walking.”
“Walking where?”
“All over.”
Her father looked at her. He was turned halfway around at the table, his hat pushed to the back of his head. The girl could see his eyes clearly. “What is it you been doing while you been out walking?”
“Hunting,” she said.
Jessie snorted. The girl continued to look at her father, unblinking.
“How come I don’t ever see any game?” he said.
The girl didn’t answer.
Jessie said, “You don’t see no game because she’s lying through her little yellow teeth.”
“Jessie!” Fayette hollered from upstairs.
The room was still, just the soft mothwing thump and flutter. The girl knew then there’d been no snoring for a long time. Her brother Jim Dee was awake, lying very still on the far side of the pallet. Her sister was breathing quickly beside her, her face covered with the blanket. The girl felt the cousins rustling awake above.
“Get up here and get to bed.” Fayette’s voice from the upper room was not a shout this time but cold, uninflected. The wood overhead creaked.
The woman looked at her brother-in-law, but he didn’t look back at her. She folded the muslin sheet and bent to put it in the sewing basket on the floor. She stood then. Before she turned to climb the stairs, John said softly, but still loud enough for the woman, for even the ones upstairs to hear, “If you aim to hunt, Matt, I believe you better take my muzzle loader. Y’might have better luck.”
The girl heard her aunt grunt, the wind bursting from her gut as if she’d been kicked.
“Another thing,” the man said, looking at the girl, his voice stern, his eyes bright in the firelight. “From here on out, wear a hat.”
So the girl began to carry her father’s rifle. From the hand-hewn nail beside the fireplace in the mornings she would take whichever slouch hat came beneath her fingers and slap it on her head; she’d sling the powderhorn by its leather thong across her thin chest, hoist the long-barreled gun to her shoulder, and walk out the door in the dawn light just before or after her father, turning her face up to him sometimes, her mouth slightly open, as if she would speak but could not. Once, she put her hand on his arm and he paused, one foot upon the stone step, and looked at her. Matt turned her face away quickly, whistled for the old beagle hound Ringo, jumped off the log porch, and walked off with the dog west. It was as if her mouth was stopped when she was alone with her father, stripped of voice and will to ask him what had happened to their belongings. It became the same within her as the memory of the baby sister, lifted away in the red darkness, taken away, disappeared, unspoken of, as if the child had never lived. To ask was to remember, to learn, to hear what she didn’t want to know, and so she would not ask.
In the dark of night she stole a pair of trousers from one of the boy cousins and hid them beneath the pallet. Afterwards, in the mornings, she’d take them with her, wedged tightly like a narrow bedroll beneath her arm. When she was out of sight of the house she’d unroll the homespun trousers and put them on under her skirt—to save her legs from the briarbushes, she told herself, but in the depths of woods far from white eyes, the girl would gather the ragged expanse of calico skirt in her arms and tie a knot with it around her waist so that she could stride fast on her skinny, hickory-hard legs, unimpeded by anything more than the stone cut and scrabble of rocky earth; she used the pants pockets to hold wadding and lead. If the old hound dog scared up a rabbit and ran it around by, the girl would shoot it, but that seldom happened, because she didn’t go quietly through the woods; she would not wait for Ringo to head a rangy swamp rabbit in a great loop back to where she stood, but walked in her relentless and driven manner, snapping sticks, the swiftest and broadest way to cover the earth. One time she shot a cottonmouth swimming toward her on Bull Creek. Another time she took the head off a gray squirrel flattened tight to a tree trunk, its tail twitching. She did not bother to go over and pick the squirrel up. It was not game to her then, not food or pelt, but a gray ta
il on a mockernut hickory, twitching.
The land turned over hot and dry. Before green had settled on the earth that first spring, the long grasses began to wither. Dust coated the blackjacks and cedars. Elm leaves shriveled and crimped brown on the edges before they’d hardly unfurled. Everywhere dusty land terrapins crawled on the dusty roadbeds, scritched slowly through the dry grass in the ditches, moving each with webbed neck stretched out and head lifted, following its own imponderable purpose. Some whites who’d lived awhile in the Territory talked about the great number of crawling terrapins, the fact it was more than a month too soon to see them crawling. It was common to see hundreds in the high heat of late June, fumbling their lone journeys along the choking roadbeds: crawling for water, some said; hunting a partner, said others—though the Muscogee people knew the land turtles were only returning home to their stomp grounds for Green Corn ceremony in the time of the full summer moon. But never had folks seen so many crawling so early, and they spoke of it, some of them, a little in fear, shaking their heads. The year was too new for that migration. The weather was too hot for early May.
Thus, in the aptness of Providence and the story’s unfolding, it was cold when the girl found the cold, empty wagon, but hot on the afternoon she found the charred remains. She came upon them near the place called the Narrows, the narrow cleft south of town where the hills lap together and form the pass to Cedar. The blackened circle lay sheltered low on the east side of the mountain—this was Bull Mountain, not Waddy: the western twin shaped like a kneeling buffalo slumped toward the earth. At first the girl could just make out a dark patch on the ground through the grid of pine trunks and pin oaks; she and the dog were coming down through a part of the mountain that hadn’t been logged yet. The old hound labored down the slope in front of her, panting and wheezing and trotting his fat and aged self, and Matt in her man’s hat and boy’s trousers, with the blue bunch of skirt tied in a knot at her belly, followed at a slow pace, her face red and sweaty, and the long barrel of the muzzle loader too loose in the crook of her arm, dipping nearly to the ground with the force of its own weight. She could see the black place on the earth, she could smell it, charred and bitterly rank from old rains, but she couldn’t see the size of it or the size of the clearing. She thought it must be an old Choctaw cabin burnt to the ground. Then she came down between the trees and saw it, too small to have been a cabin, and the shape wrong: a very nearly perfect circle, laid out on a bald rock face, open to the sun.