by Gin Phillips
I walked toward Moses, who jerked her head at me as soon as she saw me. Tess wanted to name her Jesus at first. You can’t name cows after the Son of God, but she was only five. So she got to name her Moses. After the confusion about Jesus, nobody had the heart to bring up that Moses was a boy name for a girl cow.
She was the meanest cow we ever had. Mama tried to teach me to milk so she and Papa wouldn’t have to do it every morning, but I couldn’t. Their teats looked soft and pliable, like they’d be no rougher on you than squeezing a sack of water, but there was a knack to how you pulled them. Trying to learn the feel of it, your wrists swelled up and your fingers felt like they’d been skint on gravel.
I called for Tess, hoping she’d answer me before I had to pass Moses. The cow was just outside the barn, grazing, and I wished Mama had left her in the stall. She started shaking her black-and-white head. I wanted to turn around, but I could tell she wanted to run at me, and Papa always told me to walk on by her and don’t let her know I was afraid. But she knew.
I stood like a statue, and Tess came from behind the barn. She wore her favorite dress, lavender-checked with pockets shaped like chickens, embroidered with black trim around the bottom and the chickens. Our aunt Merilyn had sewed it.
“She’s gone run at you,” she whispered.
“Shhh.” I kept staring at Moses, who was still shaking her head, eyes rolling. She looked at Tess and seemed to hate her about as much as she hated me. Tess took two steps back.
“Papa says don’t show her you’re afraid, and she’ll go right on grazing,” she said, not sounding too convinced. But she lifted her pointy little chin up higher.
“I know.” I stepped back, too, and it made me mad that this wobbly thing with her awkward swinging udders and too-big tongue made me afraid. Chickens and pigs and Horse—they all knew their place. Even the rat dog Papa kept around the barn. But this cow thought she had some hold over us. Like she knew we needed the milk and that gave her some kind of confidence not at all proper for an animal to have. That cow was overfull of pride.
I looked back at her, looked her straight in the eyes. I almost took a step toward her, but she moved enough, just a twitch, to scare me. I looked away then, and so did Tess. We both ran all the way back up to the road, dresses flapping up around us. As always, I tried to hold mine down.
“Were you yellin’ at somethin’?” I asked, smoothing my hair.
“A spider.” She looked up at the porch and grinned, then took off like a shot toward the steps.
Papa’s sister Celia was standing on the porch, leaning over the railing to spit. She had Papa’s blue eyes, and curly, dark hair that fought her braid every step of the way. She spiraled it like a snail shell at the back of her neck, and it was bigger than an orange. Her face was all angles, and she was tall as Papa. He always smiled whenever she showed up.
Aunt Celia was also the spittiest woman I ever saw. She spit Copenhagen way out, over the porch rail, over the rosebushes, and sometimes almost clean to the road. She thought it was disgusting for women to smoke cigarettes.
Tess ran up to her and hugged her neck. “Did ya hear, Aunt Celia? About the baby in the well?”
Aunt Celia situated herself in a rocker, then made a V with her fingers and spit through the V—ha-ick puh, over the railing. The O of her lips hung there between her fingers for a second, then she went back to her normal mouth.
“That’s why I’m here, Tessie Lou.”
Tess’s middle name isn’t Lou, but Aunt Celia liked to call her that.
While she was talking, I hugged her neck, too, not squeezing as hard as Tess had. Then I backed off, settled against the railing, the shadow of the roof falling on me. Tess crowded against Aunt Celia, just touching the edge of her sleeve. If Tess could’ve sewn herself onto Aunt Celia’s dress like a big curly-headed button and stayed with her ever and always, she would’ve.
I liked Mama’s sisters best of all, especially my aunt Merilyn, who moved like she was dancing. She could fill up a whole house with laughing and talking and fluttering around—there was nothing delicate or fluttery about Aunt Celia. Her mind and her mouth were as sharp as her cheekbones, and Tess would sit and stare at her like she was a picture show. She made me antsy. She made me want to stay out of range. Once when I was little, I hid under the bed when she came over.
Papa was leaning against the wall of the house, one foot propped on the porch railing.
“Sheriff came,” he said. “Looked at it and took it to Jasper for Dr. Grissom to look at. To guess how old he was and see if they could figure out anything.”
When Papa worked days at the mines, he didn’t get home until near or after dark—“on at seven off at six,” Mama’d tell us over and over when we were little and couldn’t remember when we’d see him again. When he did finally get home, if there was still daylight, he’d go straight to either the garden or down the road to the farm until the last of the light was gone. But the mines had cut back everybody’s days, laying some men off completely. He no longer worked there six days like he used to, and sometimes for two or three days in a row he’d be farming when we came home from school. He’d wave to us as we walked by, but he had stopped altogether for Aunt Celia.
His soft gray shirt was wet from working in the garden, and his nose and cheeks had turned pink. Like Aunt Celia, he was all angles; his arms, neck, even hands were corded, not soft at all. Sometimes I thought if the mines fell down around him, Papa would still be standing, harder than the black diamond. In his wide-brimmed straw hat—not his mining cap—he was a railroad spike.
“Couldn’t you tell how old he was from looking at him?” Aunt Celia asked. She snorted before he could answer her. “’Course you couldn’t, but couldn’t Leta? Think a woman would know by the looks of him.”
Papa looked at Tess and me and frowned. “Couldn’t say. Not quite normal after the water and all. Thought he might be undersized, too, if he’d gone hungry. No tellin’ what a mother like that might’ve done to him.”
Tess sat on Aunt Celia’s lap, even though she was too big, and kept her arms around Aunt Celia’s neck. “I dream about him, Aunt Celia.”
“What do you dream?” Aunt Celia’s mouth stopped moving as she peered down at Tess.
“I see his little fingers and toes and sometimes I think he’s in bed with me.”
“You ain’t said nothin’ about that in a few days, girl,” Papa said, eyebrows sloping down toward his nose. “You still havin’ trouble sleepin’?”
“I sleep. I just keep havin’ nightmares. I never even see his face good.” She snuggled into the crook of Aunt Celia’s arm, looking a little silly with her legs hanging all over the place. She looked at Aunt Celia, not at Papa or me, and asked almost in a whisper, “Do you think he’s hauntin’ me?”
Aunt Celia didn’t pause for one second. “Nah,” she scoffed. She turned her head to the side. Ha-ick puh. “Why would he haunt you? He ought to haunt that poor excuse for a woman who threw him away like a corn husk.”
“You believe in ghosts?” I asked her.
“Not the kind that torment you, Virgie May.” My middle name is Elaine.
“I’m right there in the bed with you, Tess,” I said. “I’d snatch a ghost baldheaded if one tried to get near you.”
She didn’t look at ease. “But what if he’s a good ghost?”
Papa walked over and put a hand on her head. He always comforted you different than Mama did. She stroked and petted with the tips of her fingers; he didn’t move his hand at all. He’d lay it on your head or shoulder or back and keep it there, steady, letting you feel the weight of it. “If he’s a good ghost, he’ll understand he needs to leave you be. And if he won’t, send him on over to my bed.”
She smiled. “Yessir.”
Aunt Celia glanced at Papa. “Y’all’s water safe?”
“Oughta be.” Papa shrugged. “Baby was only there for a day, and bein’ stream fed, there’d be a steady flow of water down there. Leta’s bee
n boilin’ all the water anyway.”
Mama swung open the screen door, carrying two cups in her hands. Aunt Celia liked coffee in the middle of the day, so Mama had put some on to perk. Papa had decided he’d have some, too, I guess, which I couldn’t understand with him already sweating. Children weren’t allowed to have coffee.
“Albert’s already been after me to stop the boilin’,” Mama said, handing them each a cup. “Which I guess I will. Don’t have the time for it anyway, but it made things seem a little cleaner.”
After the morning coffee boiled, Mama always put a little piece of cloth in the spout of the pot so that no bugs would fly into it. I could see how a dead baby in our water would trouble her.
“Ah, you’ll be fine. Come join us,” said Aunt Celia, waving to a rocking chair.
“Floors won’t keep with the soap on ’em,” said Mama. I saw her hands were red from the hot water and the scrubbing. “But come see me before you leave, Celia. Makin’ some fried peach pies.” She looked at Tess sprawling over Aunt Celia’s lap. “And after you’ve squashed your aunt flat as a fritter, you girls can come in and help me with the floors.”
“Yes, ma’am,” we both said. Mama’s skirt swished when she went through the door.
“Don’t know if it’s hot enough,” Papa said, holding the cup up to his face.
Aunt Celia, quick as a flash, reached over and stuck her finger in his coffee. “Reckon it is,” she said, finger still in there.
Papa smiled big enough that we saw the hole where his side tooth used to be.
“You hear President Hoover gave up control of that power plant in Muscle Shoals?” she asked. Papa never talked politics with Mama, who said not one politician was worth a flip. But he and Aunt Celia would talk about the president and the governor and people losing their jobs. I don’t know if she liked politics, but she did like to argue.
“You gone beat that dead horse?” Papa asked after he took a sip of coffee. “If it was federal, we’d get jobs and power from it. Ain’t a bad deal.”
“You damn Bolshevik.”
“Celia…” Papa said, looking at us.
“Ah, they’ve heard a helluva lot worse from school kids. And you are a damn Bolshevik.”
“I don’t think you even know what a Bolshevik is,” Papa said, just ignoring her language that time. “Main thing is that President Hoover don’t think the government should get involved. Thinks folks should just up and volunteer to help.”
“And what’s wrong with that, Albert? You got a short memory. Everybody pitchin’ in got us through the war.”
Papa shifted his shoulders up and down, then rolled his neck a little, taking his time about answering. “You know better than that, Celia. You got sense enough to see the difference. For every man with a job here—shoot, from here clear to Birmingham—there’s two men without one. They’s a lot more to be volunteered on than to do the volunteerin’. Just look around…” He stopped, and I knew he was on the edge of getting in a real stew. I could see the vein just over his ear bulging. But he waited awhile and just smiled.
“Heard the governor of New York might run against him next year,” he said finally.
“New York.” Ha-ick puh.
Tess had slid to Aunt Celia’s feet and was looking at our aunt’s mouth, her eyes narrowed and nose squinched up. “Aunt Celia, will a man kiss you tasting like snuff?” she asked.
“Tess,” I scolded, but Papa nearly spewed his coffee laughing, and Aunt Celia just cocked her head.
“Ain’t had no trouble yet in that department,” she said. She looked like she wished she could spit for emphasis, but she took a sip of coffee instead. “Had your first kiss yet, Virgie?” she said, turning to me.
I couldn’t even look at Papa, couldn’t even open my mouth to say something back. I just shook my head, and at the same time Papa said, so natural and comfortable, “She’s only fourteen, Celia. Don’t be rushin’ her.”
“Nearly fifteen,” she said, winking at me. “You married Leta when she was sixteen.”
“Ain’t the same now.”
“’Cause her daddy didn’t skin you alive the way you plan to the first boy that comes callin’?”
“Ummm.” He nodded. He was looking back toward the garden, though, and draining the last bit from his cup, tipped his head back in one quick motion. “Only an hour or so of daylight left,” he said, squeezing Aunt Celia’s shoulder. “Best be finishin’ up. Don’t forget to take Leta up on her pies, and tell Mama I said hello.”
I was glad they’d left me out of the whole conversation.
Papa clunked down the steps, and I boosted myself up onto the porch rail, with my legs over the side toward the house, where nobody from the street could see up my dress. “Hope the sheriff catches whatever lunatic did this at any rate,” Aunt Celia said.
“Do you think she was crazy?” I asked.
“Have to be off-kilter in some way.”
“Who do you think did it?” asked Tess.
“I don’t know, but it’s the baby, not the mother, that’s your concern, Tessie Lou.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s him you’re seein’, you say. If that’s so, if you feel like he’s calling to you, you’ve got a responsibility to him.” Ha-ick puh.
“To do what?” Tess looked confused.
“To do right by him.”
“How?” I asked, puzzled.
“You girls know about my baby?” she asked, just as casual as if she was asking if we knew about the new hat she’d bought.
We didn’t answer her for a long while. It seemed like half an afternoon we sat there, her rocking, us still as stones. Finally I said, “You had a baby?”
“Yep,” she said. She’d been married a long time ago—I knew that. He’d been a miner like every other man around, and he died before I was born. Something bad wrong inside him. “Only ever carried the one, and she was born early,” Aunt Celia went on. “Lived three days, then I buried her up at Pisgah. Buried Marcus next to her the followin’ year.”
“Who’s Marcus?” asked Tess.
“My husband.”
“Your husband?” Tess looked at me expectantly, as if I’d jump in and argue that, no, Aunt Celia couldn’t have had both a husband and a baby that disappeared into thin air, that it was nothing more than a story.
“My husband,” she repeated. “But what I wanted to tell you was that after my baby girl died, she’d come to me in my dreams. Crawling, though, not like she was in real life at all. Older, with chubby cheeks and healthy color. Cooing and happy and grinning. Sometimes she’d come to me when I was awake; not in a vision, like, but I’d feel her heavy in my lap. Feel the heat of that little, squirming body. That went on for a year, and for a while I thought I was plumb crazy. But then Marcus fell over dead in the yard, quick as a wink, and I started looking forward to that weight in my lap like I’d never yearned for anything before. I’d sit in my chair for hours at night just waiting for her to come. Never saw her there, just felt her…held her. Rocked and sang to her.
“About a year after Marcus died, I didn’t feel her anymore. Didn’t dream of her. Like she’d moved on. I think she stayed with me out of kindness, ’cause she knew I’d need comfortin’. Maybe she figured I’d have to deal with losin’ him, so she stayed until I didn’t feel such an ache no more.”
I tried to picture Aunt Celia sitting there, a baby in her hands instead of a snuff tin. Making silly, pleased-with-herself mother sounds to the top of a fuzzy head instead of spitting and sticking her finger in cups of coffee.
“I sure don’t feel like he’s doin’ this out of kindness,” Tess said. “He don’t comfort me. He makes me feel sad. Nothing but sad.”
“I’m sayin’ he’s got an attachment to you and you to him,” insisted Aunt Celia, shaking a finger at Tess. “For whatever reason. Sounds like it’s him that needs the comfortin’.”
“So what should I do?” asked Tess.
“Well,” she said, “s�
��pose you could figure out who he was. Find who threw him in and give him some peace.”
Albert HALF MY LIFE WAS SPENT TAKING THINGS OUT OF THE ground, the other half spent laying them in. Trying to dig my way into the dirt from up here, then praying I could get to the surface from down there. The tenants—Talberts their names were that year—farmed the sixty-acre piece of land up the road for me. They got a share of it. But the patch by the home place we did ourselves. The five of us setting out potato slips, tomatoes, and pepper plants. Blistered noses and hands black with dirt.
The sun was strong, and I was calmed by the heat, the sweat. Amazing the difference between the smell of the earth, warm and moist, full of cucumbers and tomatoes, watermelon and corn, compared to barren dirt, ripe with only black rock. I loved sucking up great breaths of that growth and green—full-sized lungfuls of peas and squash and soil instead of careful, shallow sips always testing for a pocket of after damp or black damp, one of the stranglers.
Picking beans still bent the back, but I could stand whenever I pleased. That small freedom numbed the ache. Leta wanted to can a mess of squash and beans on Saturday.
“This one ripe, Pop?” Jack poked his head around the tomato vines behind me, hair sticking up in front like a peckerwood. I turned, and he rolled a watermelon twice as big as his head around the edge of the row.
“I see you went ahead and picked it,” I pointed out.
“Had to show you to ask you.”
“Didn’t think to bring me to the melon?”
“Didn’t want to trouble you.” His eyes got big and innocent. “You’re workin’.”
Smart boy—promised myself I’d never let him see the inside of a mine. He’d go to business college, maybe lawyer school. Have clean fingernails every day of the week.
“Reckon you’d like watermelon for dessert,” I said.
“Yessir.”
It looked ripe, and I stepped over and thumped it good, lifted it to smell where the vine had been. Could smell the sweetness.