It Happened in Silence

by Jay, Karla M

  I lean against a tree and recollect my hoboing days last year. I miss swapping newspapers with other hobos when I was riding an empty from St. Louis to Wyoming. Learning hundreds of hobo signs left on fences, walls. We slept in the nearest barn, worked the endless wheat fields, listened to men like Rhymin’ Bob recite poetry while decking on top of a flyer.

  In hindsight, I could’ve learned more hobo signs. That’s the truth. Didn’t recognize the sign for the Town Has Corrupt Police when I waltzed into Euharlee. Didn’t have a clue that every free man wandering the street is gonna end up in shackles.

  Was only after I lost everything that I now truly understand freedom. Four months and fifteen days. I ain’t never gonna feel the bite of shackles again.

  Ardith Dobbs

  Oliver is crying from the upper floor of the house, dragging down my good mood with shrieks of “Mommy.” A voice in my head retorts, “Hush up!” with each screech. I have so much to accomplish today, and the child barely went down for a nap. Where is Josephine? The girl has one child to take care of and she can’t even do that.

  “Josephine!” I set my pen aside, careful not to ruin the ledger. The other ladies admire my penmanship, and I don’t take my duties as secretary and treasurer of our newly organized Daisy Ladies’ Society lightly. “Please stop that child from screaming,” I shout while seated behind my mahogany desk.

  “Coming, Miss Ardith!” Josephine dashes by the door to my office, holding up her long blue skirt before she thumps down the carpeted stairs. I follow the thud of her footsteps as she crosses the room below me. I can’t discern what she says to the five-year-old, but he immediately quiets down.

  In my favorite room, I arch my neck and study the high ceiling with the flower pattern stamped into it. Cream-colored walls and my new light green silk curtains frame the two tall windows. Morning sunbeams push inside and lay ladders of yellow across the two butter-cream armchairs adorned with near-scandalous red pillows. I remember begging William to buy this house two years ago, even though his advertising agency wasn’t doing as well as it is now. Thank goodness today is full of optimistic consumers who will buy any new product that’s just invented. Been no better time in America, I’ll bet.

  The baby rolls inside me. I rub my swollen middle, trying to calm her. Yes. I know it’s going to be a girl. This pregnancy has been so much different than my miserable time with Oliver. I had a miscarriage last year, but only two months in. This is Katherine. That’s the name I’m choosing. She hasn’t caused me to vomit even once. William doesn’t care for the name, but he won’t have much say. The other night while we played bridge with our best friends, Frank and Teresa Greer, Teresa laughed at him for being such a fuddy-duddy and thinking name picking is left to the head of the household.

  I still can’t believe how testy William got over Teresa’s question concerning what we’d name the baby.

  “We’re still discussing names,” William snapped.

  I know my eyebrows scrunched together because I remember thinking I’d get age lines if I didn’t relax them. The truth was, we’d been arguing over names seconds before our guests arrived. I made it clear that no child of mine would be called Hester or Chester.

  Frank saw my consternation that night. “William, ol’ boy.” He clamped a hand on my husband’s shoulder. “We’re in trouble now. We gave them the vote, and by darn they think they have the right to name their babies.”

  Teresa snorted. “Gave us the vote? The law passed alright. Did you vote last fall, Ardith?”

  I shook my head, careful not to show too much displeasure. William didn’t care for Teresa’s vocal opinions about events he would call “men’s issues.” Frank Greer is the Marietta City attorney, and William has needed him more than once, including early last week. Frank unearthed the loophole that forbids that Jewish family from opening their dry goods store next to William’s advertising and insurance business on Main Street. For this reason, William held his tongue when Teresa railed against the rules she believed confined women.

  “I didn’t vote either.” Teresa slapped her cards against the table edge. “But women in Utah did. Wyoming. Idaho. Those backward places followed the new law. If we don’t get a chance this fall, I’ll organize a women’s march like Atlanta has never seen.”

  A statement like that always made the men nervous, and both William and Frank flinched.

  And here I am at my desk organizing Marietta’s Spring Festival with a parade for all the new women who joined our organization. Not really a march, but we will put on quite a show.

  I return to my ledger and add the last of the names and mark off they paid the annual ten-dollar dues. I’m pleased with the new inductees. Three schoolteachers, a midwife, a social worker, the bank president’s wife, and three women from the gardening club. Of course, the majority of our new members switched from the Dixie Protestant Women’s Political League once they realized we shared the same goals to carry out our Christian duty and that we are a social order for social purposes.

  Two hundred new members this month alone. Two thousand dollars to spread the word.

  Soft footfalls come closer in the hallway. Josephine lightly knocks on the doorframe before stepping into view. She is a big girl, not fat but taller than I am and strong. Her hair is fashionable, worn swept up in a chignon bun. One characteristic I liked about her when she interviewed last year. Most Negro gals wear their hair in a twisted-up rag, and she has a few of those. I let Josephine wear them on her own time and have told her to keep those dirty old cloths out in her sleeping quarters attached to the house. Josephine is what we call a high-yellow colored. Her mother is white. We assume her father was black. Thanks to the civilized laws of our land, her mother is confined to an insane asylum in Virginia for having relations with a blackie, married him even. Then they were found out. Her father was killed working off his crimes in the brick foundry near Atlanta. So far, Josephine doesn’t appear to have too many of the destructive genetic outcomes that arise from interracial breeding, except for her sexual promiscuity.

  She is hugely pregnant, due a few weeks before I am to deliver. I was furious and fired her the day the growing bump under her housedress became impossible to hide. How dare she? Who would look after Oliver and the new baby if she has one of her own to worry about? Then I remembered my friend Nancy Withington, Sheriff Withington’s wife. They have four children she’s handed off to wet nurses after they were born, just like in her parents’ days. I unfired Josephine as she was slinking away, carrying her carpetbag and wearing that ugly head rag. William will have to understand that I need a nanny and a housekeeper whether she’s tending her own baby or not. In these years since Oliver was born, I now have social duties I’ve pledged to follow through on just as William does, and Josephine will be an asset.

  By the looks of the enlarged mounds under Josephine’s bodice, she will be able to keep her child and my baby well-fed. She won’t say who the father of her child is, but I’ve seen her talking to the neighborhood bootblack who services the wealthier houses. A black-as-coal boy indeed.

  Josephine is holding Oliver’s hand as he quietly stands beside her. “May I take Oliver outside to the terrace?” How she gets that boy to behave, I’ll never know. As long as she keeps doing it, I’ll never care.

  “Yes. Please do. I need to walk some papers over to the Greer house, but I won’t be gone long.” I gather my ledger and the envelope with the dues.

  “Hi, Mommy,” Oliver says.

  I raise my eyes. He has a big grin on his face, resembling his daddy with his big gray eyes, auburn hair, and chin cleft.

  “Hi, sweetie. Now you do as Josephine asks. Run along, and I’ll see you when your father gets home.”

  His smile evaporates, and he disappears along the hallway. Is every child this needy? Shoot-fire as we say back where I came from. My ma and pa barely paid us a minute of attention unless we stopped hauling water, boiling laundry, or scrubbing the cabin floor. I need to toughen up Oliver. He’s t
oo delicate for his own good.

  I drop my paperwork into a brown leather satchel William bought for me the last time he was in Atlanta. “For the businesswoman in my life,” the card read. I was tickled he recognized I have important duties, too, and am not just his bed partner. He had no choice but to marry me. I flirted with him so hard, taking him to the edge on every date. I made sure he knew he’d be satisfied whenever he wanted. Now, six years later, I have more important duties filling my time. I’m glad he recognizes how busy I am, although I know he’s often frustrated when I beg off.

  In the hallway, I stop so I can view myself in the full-length mirror. Who knew the daughter of a railroad fire-knocker, one of the dirtiest jobs the Southern Atlantic offered, and a mother who never rose above working herself to death in a moss-covered shanty, would grow up to live in a mighty fine house with wealthy friends and neighbors? Surely not my folks. It took me tiring of a family secret to drive me away from Hickory Nut Hollow and to show me the world. I learned that having money is not evil. After a winding path of missteps and some small luck, I created a new image in Atlanta. That’s where I met William.

  The mirror shows the reflection of a fashionable woman in a bright lime green and white lace dress. She has foregone the modest Puritan look and could be a woman right out of the American Vogue fashion magazines she peruses. Thank goodness women no longer bind their middles to the circumference of a canning ring. Women in old newspaper advertisements always looked like ants with big bottoms on one end and big heads on the top. My new straight dress has a drop-waist sash with a wide green bow tied in front below my bump. The shift is loose enough to cover my curves in keeping with modesty at all times but is also so freeing. And that’s the motto of women today—we’re free.

  Free to vote. Free from being told we have no ideas worth hearing. Free from the chores of only raising children, cleaning, and cooking meals. My women’s group raised money for milk for the public-school children and put together food baskets for the poor. We have a say in the community and in helping our husbands and other members of the Klan keep Marietta pure.

  We pay attention. We report. We preserve our town’s Protestant heritage.

  I smile at my reflection. I am a Kligrapp, a secretary, and the Klabee, the treasurer.

  William and the other husbands on our street are Kleagles, paid organizers, inviting men of good heritage to join them. I love our secret names, all the creative K words.

  I touch my stomach. Baby Katherine will be our newest member.

  Willow Stewart

  Jacca follows the deer trail into the thick forest. The morning woods vibrate with the hum of locusts, rising and falling as if they’re in a church sing-along led by a master insect. The trail is a shortcut. It will be slow going, but once off the steeper part of the mountain, we’ll make good time. Morning fog rises and twists toward the sky, and like a magician pulling away his white handkerchief, reveals lady slippers, trillium, and jack-in-the-pulpit along the forest floor.

  Twenty minutes later, I catch the first rumble of Ransom Creek. It cuts through the base of the holler, separating Uncle Virgil and Aunt Effie’s hillside from ours. I’ll cross it at the Miller Coal train bridge. When the rains come down like they did yesterday, the face of that peaceful summer creek, full of hidden crevices and muttered secrets, distorts into something ugly. It turns into a violent and unrecognizable downward rush of green and white water that can sweep a body off the lower wooden bridge we often use. It will strain that person through snarled boulders and logs before his last cry echoes from the dense forest.

  Auntie and Uncle were forced to cross this higher-up bridge this morning, leading their horses across the train trestle. The same dangerous crossing that killed their son Len nearly four years ago. His mare spooked in the center of the bridge when the rails began vibrating underfoot. The animal tried to turn back moments before the daily coal train hurled around a blind curve, forty minutes later than scheduled. He knew the time of day by the set of the sun in the sky. What he didn’t know was that the daily train was forced to stop at a rockslide. Although the railway men worked fast to clear the tracks, the engineer couldn’t make up the lost time.

  Len and I were twelve at the time. He was my favorite cousin. I touch his coat button on my necklace and try to remember his voice. It was somewhat moss green, I think, like fine wool unspooled across a cutting table. Some shade of green for sure since we spent so much time in the woods, digging roots and gathering plants for my mama. She has a deeper knowledge of herb care than most folks in the highlands.

  There aren’t more than two hundred and fifty people on these peaks, and all our houses are linked by dirt roads and winding passes along the ridgeline. I go with her sometimes to check in on the sick. There’s a lesson to be absorbed in visiting other countryfolk. Take the word poor. It’s like striated rock ledges, with different meanings of the word at different levels. We mountain folk are self-sufficient and don’t rely on outside goods to get by. But one day, we came across a new level of down and out, where it was as clear as daylight something had gone sideways.

  We found a rotting cabin backed up against a granite ledge, the shingled roof sloped near to the ground. A dark and woeful setting. The father had died from the Spanish Flu nineteen months earlier. He’d been off to war when the disease caught him, like millions of other people in the outside world. Poppy and Uncle Virgil made it back from France without the flu snatching their breath away. The ravages of mustard gas were enough to abide. Earl Scoggins, the traveling tool and knife grinder, told us most mountain folk stayed free from the deadly disease. Relatives heeded the message to avoid the cities because there the flu outran righteousness. At that dark house in the woods, I remember the children. All twig arms and legs. Faces unwashed for a season. The hateful poverty nothing more than an afterthought to the grieving mother. We took food back a day later and located some kin who soon drove them away in a brittle, rusted truck.

  Jacca nickers and suddenly stops. The wispy hairs on my neck stand up, and I cut my eyes from side to side. I trust the horse’s senses. He heard something. The silence lasts half a minute and then the forest sounds begin again. I don’t find what spooked him, so I tap him on his side with my heels, and we move ahead past the chaotic mass of boulders and down toward the river crossing.

  About twenty minutes later, Jacca’s hooves clomp across the train bridge, and I send a prayer heavenward for Len, letting him know he’s in our thoughts. We head down a wider trail with the river to our right. In an hour, we’ll meet up with a two-lane paved highway Poppy calls “The Fancy Road.” It will take us into Helen. There is another way off these hills, but it’s a winding dirt road. Tray Mountain Road leads from The Fancy Road right up to our cabin, past the neighbors, but it’s miles longer. It also connects with Indian Grave Gap Road, an area that births most of the holler’s ghost stories. I never like riding by there. I’ve not seen one of those restless spirits, but in all my growing-up years, heard tales of them stealing souls. Our cabin has haint-blue ceilings, a color used to confuse the spirit into believing it’s underwater. And our outhouse has newspapers pasted to the walls because everybody knows evil spirits will be too distracted by all the words and pictures to bother a person having a personal moment.

  I have no paint or newspaper and no reason to believe I’ll need them on this trip.

  The breeze off the river scrubs the air clean. I breathe in the fresh scents, ripe with sun-warmed grasses, rotting bark and leaves, and wet earth. Fallen trees blanketed with moss line the bank, pointing downriver. A pile of rocks creates a jumbled island, water slipping over wet stones, leaving them shiny like they’ve been greased with a layer of lard.

  Having lost myself in the welcoming caress of the woods, I’ve let Jacca slow his pace. I nudge the horse, and he walks as fast as the path will let him. He’s surefooted, and with our silent bond, he reads my changes in leg pressure and my pats on the neck even better than
a tug on his reins. In an emergency, Jacca follows commands with the wooden whistle Poppy carved.

  Before long, the ruckus of the river is behind us and Ransom Creek flattens into a wide stream. I stop and dismount so we can drink. Jacca follows deer prints into the creek and loudly slurps from a clear pool. I make my way upstream from him, avoiding exposed tree roots, and pick my way over pebbles to the stream’s edge. This is my only pair of leather boots, and they need to stay dry. I cup my hands and scoop the cold water, taking notice of the small fish flashing beneath the surface against the riverbed’s mottled greens and browns. Jacca is making all kinds of racket, overturning stones with his hooves. They clack against each other, a loud hollow sound.

  A flutter sets down in my chest. I’ve been off the mountain with Poppy before but never alone. We aren’t but a quarter mile from the paved road and the Chattahoochee River ahead, though we won’t cross that river. Thanks to all the rain yesterday, I imagine it’s a rushing waterway that will wash a person’s poor judgment straight into eternity.

  Jacca is a great trail horse, but I worry about the twelve miles of paved highway into Helen. If we can travel through side fields and stay away from logging trucks and other vehicles that might spook him, we’ll make it fine and dandy.

  I hear a moan on the wind, a sound that has no business disturbing this peaceful setting. My mind could be playing tricks on my ears with my earlier musings concerning haints. I click my tongue, and the horse heads my way. Until I get him out of the water and away from his slurping and rock rolling, I won’t be able to tell for sure what I’m hearing. I lead him up the bank and rub my hand along his warm flank, calming my rapid breath. Stopping to pull several handfuls of new grass from alongside the river, I offer it to him. The tickle of his whiskery chin as he eats from my palm is one of my favorite things.