by Jay, Karla M
I can’t relax with the car going this fast, so I hang on tight. The world zips by, blurring things together meant to stand apart. Barbed wire fencing, signs lost in high weeds, white milkweed flowers, two cows, and shredded rubber tires.
“Glad you’re not one of those juvenile delinquents tearing this country to pieces, listening to dance music, wearing britches, smoking. So unladylike.”
With quick sidelong glances, I inspect the driver. I’m glad I’m wearing my riding dress and not my berry-picking britches. Since he’s never headed into a thorny patch wearing a dress, he’s never experienced how prickers can twist a hem tight enough to cocoon a body. Only a good pair of snippers or the Coming of Christ can free you. Pants aren’t a sin. They’re a necessity.
“You’re lucky you live in Georgia. We still have our values, and for a young girl that counts for everything. Chicago, New York City, now those are places breeding immorality faster than clergy can preach it down. Boys and girls together unchaperoned. Women smoking, cussing”—he shakes his head—“Plumb shameful.”
Mama and I read a piece in the Montgomery Monitor about young women being arrested for defying the decency law by rolling their stockings below their knees at the beach. Others hemmed their dresses nine inches from the floor, well above the acceptable three-inch length. They scrub rouge on their knees and cheeks. Mama said it’s because women finally feel equal to men. In many states out West, they vote just like men. They learned menfolk skills while their husbands or fathers fought in the Great War and now don’t want to be told what to do. It seems silly that men are in a horn-tossing mood over a shorter dress. Any practical man would realize his wife is saving money by buying less cloth. I can’t wait to tell Mama about these other big city sins Mr. Vissom shared.
My throat tightens at my last image of Mama. Has she opened her eyes or asked for a glass of her favorite sweet tea? Barbs of worry gnaw at my insides.
But worry won’t take away my troubles. They’ll only rest like heavy fog over my mind. I reset my thoughts and shoo away the worry.
The land flattens out, and the thick woodlands disappear behind us. A road sign reads Robertstown. We top a hill where below, the Chattahoochee River opens up, a winding blue ribbon across a colorful green quilt all the way to Helen.
Mr. Vissom points. “I’m taking you to the Center Baptist Church. Pastor Dean Holcombe and his wife Dorothy will help you.”
I marvel at the wonder of how quickly we’ve arrived and twist my hands in excitation.
We drop into a small valley, and ahead, the road disappears again into the next woods. A right nice storybook picture.
Mr. Vissom barely slows the automobile as he pulls out a cigarette, steering the car with his knee so he can strike a match and light the tip. The unwelcomed scent of the blown-out match drifts by me and dies off out the window.
He smokes in silence for a few minutes.
“You been to Helen before?” Mr. Vissom squints at me around the curling smoke.
I write on my tablet and hold it up.
He squints to read my words. “Only to Folsom, huh? Not much to see there. A dry goods store that’s more dry than goods. Small hardware building. I heard the newspaper closed down last year.”
Two years back, before Luther Junior died, Poppy took Briar and me along on his trip to Folsom Creek. Poppy rode Big Blue while we sat behind on full burlap sacks in the wagon. Poppy was trading dried ginseng for a new brand of corn he’d heard tell of. Coming off the hills on washboard roads left my bones jiggling inside long after we stopped, but my first ever taste of a MoonPie made up for it. Makes me wonder if Briar has eaten another MoonPie now that he’s working in the lumber business and can buy store-bought goods.
“That’s all Byrd-Matthews woodhick camps there.” Mr. Vissom points to neat rows of one-story wooden shacks. “Ever since the Morse brothers bought the lumber mill a few years back, the town’s sprouted wings.”
I flinch as someone working a loud horn blasts a long signal, and swivel my head looking for the source.
“Mill whistle. End of the workday.”
We reach the fringes of Helen and pass slow-going train flatcars loaded with trees. Briar last wrote from the town of Rome, and I know from a map it’s west of here. Course, we’ve heard nothing for several months now. He might think we don’t care none, but even Poppy has softened and asked Mama what the last letter said. He nodded when he learned Briar was working in the lumbering business, and the five dollars Briar sent went into the crockery jar meant for emergencies. It will be good to have him home.
I’m feeling nervous again. With the sun hanging behind the tops of the trees, its shine time was near used up for another day. By the looks of it, I’ll have to sleep in Helen overnight and head home at first light. No way I’m walking past Haint Hollow at dark.
“Almost there, Willow.” He must sense my jitters. “Let’s put the preacher into action.” He turns the car up a short drive and parks in a dirt-packed lot beside the church. The parsonage connects behind the main body of the white building, and that’s where Mr. Vissom points, once he helps me figure out how to open the car door.
A tall woman unfastens the parsonage screen door and waits on the stoop.
She smiles and says, “Deputy Vissom. It’s nice to see you.” Her light brown eyes drop to study me. “Who have you brought with you?” As she talks, her head pecks forward and backwards like a chicken. She’s wearing a sensible hair bun and a long yellow print dress. “Bring her on in here.” She steps inside and we follow.
The room smells of aged wood and fresh-baked bread. In the center of the kitchen area stands a wooden table big enough to seat the Last Supper with the Lord’s followers, but my eyes are drawn to a shelf against the far wall filled with books. The multicolored spines gleam like a candy store shelf, and I hold my urge to rush over and run my finger over their leather and cloth covers. Never spied so many books in one place.
“This here’s Willow, and she’s come to notify your husband he’s needed up in the hills.”
“My husband’s gone at the moment, but won’t you stay? With it being suppertime and all, I’ll set two more plates.”
I smile. I’m not even half hungry. The food from home has filled me up.
Mrs. Holcombe cocks her head to the side, and while her eyes stay on me, her words are meant for Mr. Vissom. “Is she deaf and dumb?”
“She hears just fine and has a good hand at writing”—he smiles my way—“Just can’t talk.”
“Her ma and pa. Are they related?” She isn’t being accusatory, just a mite puzzled.
I shake my head at the same time Mr. Vissom says, “I don’t think so.”
I open my poke and reach in for my writing tablet and pencil. I write, They met on a train.
“That’s good, Willow.” Mr. Vissom scowls at my open poke. “What else do you have in there?”
In the bottom, the wrapped candy is by its lonesome. I pull it out and hold it up.
“Did that peddler give it to you?” Mr. Vissom says.
I shake my head.
He then retells what little he knows of my story to the preacher’s wife.
“Willow was heading off Stewart Mountain when a peddler grabbed her and tried to have his way. She wrote that he’s dead.”
Right off, Mrs. Holcombe gasps and throws a hand over her mouth. Her owl eyes drill into me.
This wouldn’t do. Mr. Vissom made me sound like I killed the man. I cart out my tablet again and turn to one of its last pages and write, He died from eating Death Caps while I was tied up.
Mrs. Holcombe reads the words over the policeman’s shoulder. She clicks her tongue and shakes her head.
“You poor dear.” She crosses the room and drops an arm around me, a motherly embrace I happily lean into. My mama is a wraparound hugger, like the porch on our cabin, both arms enveloping the person who at that moment has caught her affection. But I’ll take this one-arm squeeze for now.
“You’
ve had a day awful enough to make the angels cry,” she tsks. “Not more than an hour ago, Hank Fry came down the mountain near Moss Lick Knob. He was in Bear Paw buying deer hides off the Cherokee. Hustled in here, telling my husband to pack the Good Book. That’s where my Dean is right now. Preaching on Stewart Mountain.”
I feel my shoulders slump as tension runs out. Although I failed in my attempt to summon a preacher, the man was there nevertheless, overseeing Baby Luther’s passage to heaven. Now, my only chore is to reach out to Briar and head home.
I write on the paper, Yes. My baby brother died.
Mr. Vissom’s furry eyebrows are moving every which way, undecided at best. His face sags. A weight seems to pull down his shoulders.
“You mentioned that your mama was ill. I’m sorry to hear there was a baby that died.”
I sign thank you and think he understands the hand signal.
Mrs. Holcombe steps away from me and leans her backend against the table. She hugs and unhugs her midsection—a nervous movement—then her hands drop to her sides like dead doves. She’s chewing her bottom lip, her eyes flitting between me and the ceiling.
I can only reckon her nervousness is because she lost a child during birth, and Mama’s situation circled sadness back her way.
“Child. I’m sorry. When Hank Fry was leaving the mountain, he heard the dinner bell ring dozens of times, signaling an older person had passed. My husband left saying he had two funerals to preach.”
Her words land like big old rocks on my chest, and I fight for air. Mama’s gone? I roll my burlap sack into a quivering ball and then unroll it before squeezing it again. I tied my hopes to the notion that with everyone on the mountain praying for Mama, she would recover. Dark sorrow arrives and severs my hope, cutting any string that’s kept me upright. I collapse.
Briar Stewart
It’s that part of nightfall when the sun has gone but daylight still hangs on. I’m facing the barracks on the Ladds Mountain side. Above me on the hillside sets the Ladd Lime & Stone Company buildings, built on wooden crisscross stands to reach high up against the tall butte. The first part of my jail sentence was on a chain gang, working in that limestone quarry. Hot, dusty, mind-numbing work for fifteen hours a day in chains that killed off many a feller. The ankle shackles chewed scars into my legs, now forever proof I was a no-account convict. Never again.
Vagrancy. That was my crime. I had forty cents on me when a policeman stopped me in Euharlee, nine miles west of Cartersville, where I planned to hop a ride on the W&A Railway to Atlanta to find work at the Fulton Bag Company. The judge in the county court claimed a man needed to have a dollar on him to be judged worthy to walk the streets.
The rub was that the day before, I’d hid my money near there, not putting my trust in a small bank. Poppy hammered home his distrust of banks after the panic of 1907 when a small bank in Diviner Gulch closed between nightfall and dawn, taking the mountain folks’ money with it. Poppy lost all of twenty-three dollars, but the bigger loss was his trust in the government, a trust that had roots as deep as an old white oak. The Mason jar hidden behind the woodpile is the Stewart family’s new bank.
Didn’t have me a jar, but I found a right nice hidey-hole until I get back.
Tuck and I eat supper with the trustees away from the other prisoners. The guards and Warden Hauser take their meal in a clean dining space in the warden’s house. Nice house or our low-slung barracks, the vittles never change. It’s the same grub dished up three times a day in camp. A square of cornpone with grease, red beans, and a spoon of sorghum syrup.
One black woman with a three-year sentence for disorderly conduct works in the cookhouse. There’s an eleven-year-old colored girl to help her. She’s a sad little bitty thing. Skinny as a rail with one eye that turns out, gawking at Lord knows what. She got a year for “stealing a ring” she found on the street in Emerson. I asked her if her parents knew where she was, and she mumbled she didn’t think so. That’s not right, but it’s just another thorn in my shoe that I got to button my mouth and not complain about.
I push my plate away. Everything tastes like ash and dirt. Ain’t barely fit to eat. Cornmeal comes here from warehouse floors, and all taste is cooked out of the beans. Plump maggots would give more flavor. Tomorrow, Tuck and me will load up on some pork with the other foodstuffs. Enough to last the next two weeks in the timber. Hauser already pointed out the four new fellers we’ll take back to the turpentine hills. Strong but defeated, strappy but obedient. Three coloreds and a white feller.
“I’m gonna walk,” I say and leave the trustee table.
The County Prison Camp sits on a hill above the downtown. It’s got five buildings and one guard tower. When facing the U-shaped compound, two smaller buildings are to the right. One holds work equipment, and the smallest is the warden’s office. Another small shack is to the west of the barracks, down the bank and slightly to the rear, pretty close to the chicken coop. I got no idea what the building’s for, but it’s tucked in the woods and a mite hard to see. We ain’t never allowed near it.
The prison quarters themselves are as rotten as all get-out. Ain’t nothing more than drafty wood-frame construction surrounded by a gated fence and barbed wire. Convicts made Georgia’s road system one of the best in the country, according to the newspapers, but we ain’t allowed to build a better prison camp for its slave laborers.
Inside, the building is laid out with rows of narrow cots, each with a pillow with no fluff and an itchy blanket. A small potbelly stove sits on one end, but in winter it might as well be a pile of cold stones for all the heat it puts out. That’s what I’ll remember from my days here. The cold. The ruination.
I walk to the hill jutting out over the Etowah River. I followed it when I was heading into Euharlee. Should’ve walked around that town. Why had I kept moving east? Was I circling closer to Stewart Mountain to test my decision? I said I’d never return home, and I meant it. But time’s worn down my anger, and I’ve thought of climbing that mountain and peeking through the trees to see how the family was doing.
But what would come of it? More harsh words? Mama crying again? No. Once I get free and land a good-paying job, I’ll write and send more money. The mail is brought to the homestead by a crier on horseback half-weekly, coming from Indian Grave Gap. In some ways, I hope it pricks Pa that I am doing just fine.
I sit on a rock. Muffled explosions come from Ladd Mountain. Luther Junior and me worked in a gold mine six months before he died setting dynamite. It was good pay that we sent home every week. Pa had barely got back from the war and couldn’t push a harrow at the time ’cause his lungs was so damaged. Whilst Mama and Ruthy strapped themselves to the plow, and Willow and Billy Leo planted and weeded, we all chipped in to keep the homestead going. Pa got stronger every week. He said the clean mountain air healed him, and it sure seemed like it did.
On our one day off from the gold mine, my brother and me hunted in the hollers or caught a swim in the lake near Pigeon Mountain. Luther Junior was a decent storyteller, even though he wasn’t much of a reader like Mama or Willow. He had dreams like no feller I ever knew. Flying machines, talking critters, another world going on inside our Earth. He also had an easy laugh and a temper faster than greased lightning. And often, he had a gift of knowing something would happen before it did. A coiled rattler, a small cave-in. The good Lord must’ve give it to him.
So how come he didn’t know there was danger the day he died? That thought’s pestered me worse than a hat full of hornets. Or did he know and send me out of the mine to save me?
I swear I’ve heard his voice. One time at his graveside before I left home. Don’t stand by my grave and cry. I ain’t there.
Some days I’m so full of fury. Why can’t we peel back time and tinker with the bad events lying there? If’n I could, Luther Junior would still be here. I’d be gone. His death cut me, and the knife twists deep when I see a lake and hear laughter flo
at out over the chilly waters.
I swipe tears from my cheek. I’m a gosh darn fool for trying to live backwards.
The sun’s gone now. The rooftops on all the town’s buildings have all turned dusty pink. I head to the outhouse to piss before turning in at the trustee quarters. The outhouse door is locked, but behind that, the empty building in the woods offers cover, so I head that way to take a leak.
Lightning bugs blink messages to each other. Songbirds done gone silent for the day but as if on cue, the birds of the night are talking. The spooky songs and whinnies of screech owls cut the silence. The moon climbs higher, splashing down a silver glow, and makes the trees look like shadows against the dark purple sky.
Voices come from the woods behind the building. Quietlike. In the next moment, I hear the sure sound of a shovel turning dirt. I slowly inch closer and slide along one wall to get a closer look. Something’s off. All the work crews are s’posed to be inside at dark. Since I ain’t never known a guard to lift a shovel, can’t imagine who’d be working out here.
In the telling moonlight, two men in regular work clothes are digging a rectangular hole. They seem to be arguing in whispers.
“Alls I’m saying is, the camp does an awful lot of ‘special burying’ these days.” The man looks around like he might’ve heard something.
“And alls I’m saying is, we’re paid ten dollars to dig holes and shut up.” This man has a cigarette clamped betwixt his lips, and when he talks, the tiny orange glow of the tip bounces up and down. “I got you this work to keep Betty off my back. If you don’t wanna take five dollars home four, five times a month, let me know.”
“No. We need money.” He slices the shovel back into the dirt and heaves the scoop on the big pile next to them. “Digging holes after dark. Something wrong going on here and I don’t wanna have any more trouble with the law.”
They’re burying convicts out here? Other side of the camp has a perfectly good graveyard for those who die. Helped wheel a prisoner or two out thataway during my time up here.