But maybe, just maybe, when he saw my sketch of Nimrod, he’d forget to chastise me. I had labored to capture every detail. Th e precise pattern of red and white. The bony kneecaps. The broad horns and pointed ears. The symmetrical testes. The large furred sheath pointed straight at the ground, except for the last bit of the tip. My father often bragged to neighboring farmers about the conformation of the bull’s male parts. Their efficiency caused our neighbors to part with hard-earned cash to breed their cows with Nimrod.
I held out my drawing. “Look, Daddy, you can show my picture to other farmers and drum up more business.”
My father’s spine stiffened like the bull’s penis when it spotted a cow in estrus. He marched the sketch back to our two-story farmhouse and cornered my mother in the kitchen. “Ann, you take this girl in hand, or I will.” He ripped my drawing into miniscule pieces that fell onto the wooden kitchen table where we took all our meals.
“I’m sure Ro meant no harm,” my mother said.
“She is out of control, totally out of control.”
Eyes burning with unshed tears, I retrieved a few pieces from the table, though I’m not sure what I was thinking. There was no way to rescue the drawing. How many times had I heard my father stand before a congregation and preach about the perfect beauty of God’s creations? “You’re not being fair, daddy. I drew Nimrod exactly the way God made him.”
“You jest hesh-up, young miss, before you get the blistering you deserve.” My father’s lips quivered, the rage in his belly boiling up a mess of spittle. Then his work-roughened hands snatched the pencil box and sketchbook away from me. He shredded sketches of goldenrod, morning glories, squirrels, sunflowers, joe pye weed, and the shimmery silk dangling from a fresh ear of corn.
Finally I could hold back no longer. The tears fell, and my throat was strangled by sobs.
He destroyed portraits of my brothers—Mark, Paul, Josiah, and Timmy—and now my mother joined in the weeping. As if to punish her for showing sympathy, he ripped up the drawing of my mother in her rocker, her hair arranged in a disheveled topknot, two hens with their little pea combs and feathered bodies nestled in her lap, the scene framed by the Reine de Violette and Gloire de Dijon roses that twined up the porch posts and braided their way across the ceiling, secured by loops of twine fastened to nails.
If he could have spared that one sketch—just that one—I might have forgiven him. If I close my eyes even now, I can smell the heady scent of those roses. A few shattered blossoms have spilled their petals onto the wooden steps. My mother basks in the last amber rays of the evening sun. If I close my eyes even now, I can smell her, the light sweat evaporating from her gingham housedress after a day of chores. I smell the dusting of flour brushed down her apron while she makes dumplings for dinner. And if I push really hard, I can detect the fragrance of lavender and rosemary sachets she sewed and scattered throughout the painted chest of drawers in her bedroom.
She smells exactly like love.
After my father stomped back to his fields, she helped me pick up the pieces.
For six months, my father banned drawing from our house. Twice I heard my mother plead with him to lift the punishment. “I love her drawings,” she told him. “They give me such pleasure.” Her efforts on my behalf only succeeded in renewing my father’s wrath. Their heated voices seeped through the walls, my mother accusing him of being self-righteous, father retorting that she was spineless.
“Leave it be, Ann,” he said, “afore your indulgences ruin the girl. She must learn to be a proper wife according to the word of God: ‘To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.’”
“Surely, forgiveness is a virtue. God gave his only son so that ‘we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.’ As a man of God, can’t you find it in your heart to forgive such a small sin, one that surely was unintentional?”
“You forget yourself, wife. The Bible commands women to be silent, to be obedient to their husbands.”
Man of the cloth he might be, but my father could never surpass my mother in quoting Bible verses. She answered him from Philippians. “I am obedient. Yet I think you might strive to be reasonable: ‘Let your reasonableness be known to everyone, the Lord is at hand.’ ”
He erupted with such fury he likely curdled the cows’ milk and they were far from the house in the barn. “Damnation, woman, don’t you quote the Bible to me.”
My mother suggested they should lower their voices lest we children could hear. After that, I could only make out a few words of their back and forth: hard-hearted, rigid, forgiveness, joy. I had little trouble guessing the context of each.
The door slammed soon after, my father’s temper on full display.
Finally at Christmas, he relented. My present was a new sketchbook, presented to me Christmas morning by my father. Stubborn creature that I was, I refused to take up drawing again.
My mother had moved back into my father’s bedroom. Within months, she was expecting again. This time, neither she nor the baby survived a long and complicated labor in mid-January when the ground was frozen solid. Their interments were delayed until the cloud of white blossoms on the serviceberry signaled sufficient thawing. For two months, I was tormented by the thought of my mother lying inside that cold receiving vault. Not that the thought of her being underground would offer much comfort, but at least our family and community could perform proper tribute and acknowledge our grief.
Many years later, though long before I heard of Margaret Sanger and learned to despise Anthony Comstock, I understood what my mother had traded for that sketchbook. My mother taught me much about sacrifice. Much about love.
~~~
After my mother’s death, the family fell on hard times. My mother had trained me well and I did my best to take over her duties in the household. My education had ended after completing the sixth grade, though I continued to borrow books from the school mistress, who had befriended me.
The farm was heavily mortgaged and to pay off debts, my father accepted a permanent position at a church in nearby Clarksburg. The loose dirt hardly settled atop my mother’s grave when he married Martha Saunders, a woman barely out of her teens. Martha was a pious soul, long of face, with a disposition as severe and tightly wound as the mousy hair she pulled into a bun. She always occupied the front pew, hanging on every word as if it came straight from the Holy Ghost to Herman Krause’s mouth.
Soon after they married, she beat my brother Timmy with a stick right there in the churchyard so everyone could bear witness to her piety. During the sermon, Timmy had crept under a pew and tied Lester Palmer’s shoe laces together. At the end of the service, there was much hooting and hollering and general commotion when Lester tripped and tumbled into Miss Moore, knocking her flowered hat askew. When we returned home, my stepmother slapped my face. “You shouldn’t have laughed,” she said. “You are wrong to encourage the boy, you wicked girl.”
I couldn’t help myself from indulging him. Timmy was an adorable scamp with brown eyes like a puppy’s. A motherless child in need of cuddles and hugs, not scoldings. One summer afternoon after I’d finished my chores, Martha happened upon me in my favorite spot in the whole world. I was sprawled beneath the largest of our weeping willows, the music of the creek trilling in my ears. I was reading Dickens’ Little Dorrit, a loan from the school mistress. Martha couldn’t wait to tattle to my father.
“You shouldn’t allow her to read novels,” she announced at the end of our supper of beef she’d over-roasted until it was utterly dried out, bloodless—the Martha approach to life. She read aloud a passage from Dr. Mary Wood-Allen’s book, What A Young Woman Ought to Know: “Romance-reading by young girls will, by this excitement of the bodily organs, tend to create their premature development, and the child becomes physically a woman months, or even years, before she should.”
My father glared at me, remembering my sketch of Nimrod, I
suppose, and he forbade novels from entering his house ever again. “What husband wants an uppity book-read wife anyway?” His question was rhetorical, and I knew better than to mouth the smarty-pants response that was running through my mind. “You want to read, read the Bible,” he added.
The ban only intensified my desire to read and plunged me headlong down the path of breaking the fifth commandment. I sneaked novels borrowed from the schoolmistress into the house at every opportunity, though it was difficult to squeeze reading time into my schedule of chores. I no longer honored my father’s wishes. Any of them.
~~~
Several years passed with Timmy and me trying to stay out of trouble, mostly succeeding by evading my stepmother. I did my chores faithfully but avoided her. If she set to cleaning the kitchen, I scrubbed the bedroom floors; I wrung the chickens’ necks and left the stew pot to her while I wandered off to weed the garden or dig potatoes. I churned butter when she hung clothes on the line. She never commented on it. Avoidance was mutually acceptable.
When I turned fifteen, my duty, according to my father, was to marry a good man. He had one in mind. Gunner Beck.
I cringed, imagining Mr. Beck’s farm-roughened hands touching me. Besides being twice my age, he smelled as musty as the goats he raised. He had three children from his first wife, who had passed away delivering the last. Just like my mother, except Mama had lost the baby too.
During the next Sunday service, I studied the Becks in sidelong glances. Mr. Beck’s mother was jostling the newborn against her shoulder. It looked like every other baby and failed to stir even a smidgen of maternal feeling. The older boy, possibly about four, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt, leaving behind a slimy trail of snot. The two year old was kicking his shoes against the pew, until Mr. Beck reached over and smacked his chubby knees. After that, the child alternated between pouting and hiding his face in his armpit. I didn’t blame him. I wanted to hide from his father too. A memory surfaced of the only advice my mother had offered concerning marriage, once when she’d been angry with my father: Don’t marry a self-righteous man. Mr. Beck, I felt certain, was just such a person. Anger surged through my chest and turned down my lips. Why hadn’t my mother followed her own advice? How could she have left me alone at the mercy of my father and Martha?
When we got home from church, my stepmother mounted the next phase of attack. “Isn’t Mr. Beck’s baby adorable? What a blessing you would bestow on that family if you married him. And consider how well off you’d be.”
The last statement was true. The Beck farm consisted of at least two hundred acres. “Money is the root of all evil,” I said.
My father held out his palms as if supplicating the Lord, a gesture I’d seen him make a thousand times in church. “Not always. Think of the glory you would achieve in the eyes of God for accepting this burden.”
Burden was right, and I was too young and too ambitious to chase after that particular glory. I wanted to choose my own husband. Someone handsome and dashing. Someone who would take me far away from these backwoods West Virginia hill towns and show me the world. That night I prayed fervently that the Lord would deliver me from Gunner Beck, from his goats, from his snot-nosed children. If that was a sin, I would fully accept culpability.
The following Sunday, Jack Joyner ascended the church steps, morning sun glowing behind him like a nimbus, his eyes shining as if they’d stolen beams from Apollo’s chariot. An inexplicable magic infused him. The perfect symmetry of his cheekbones, dark with a hint of stubble, generated heat in my belly when he smiled at me. I smiled back and wondered, with a sense of awe, if my prayer could have been answered this quickly. He accompanied his aunt, Elizabeth Barnes, a well-off widow who lived in one of the large homes on Main Street in Clarksburg. His aunt had often spoken of him to me. Elizabeth had been a dear friend of my mother’s, so dear that when Elizabeth had fallen ill with the croup the winter I was nine, my mother had sent me to stay with her for a week. I fixed her meals and did small housekeeping chores, as well as reading stories aloud to her from the Saturday Evening Post. She was so pleased with a sketch I made of her cat Herkimer that she thumb-tacked it immediately to her wall. I almost busted my buttons when she told my mother I was the daughter she wished she’d had. Sadly, she was childless. I often visited her after that—until my mother’s death, when my own chores consumed all my time.
My father’s sermon addressed accepting one’s duty willingly. God commanded women to serve their families and communities, he said, by easing the burdens of others—and the task, my father assured us, was the greatest and most rewarding part of every woman’s life. “Woe be to the woman who shuns her God-given role in life, for she will reap naught but sorrow and pain,” he said, finger pointed directly at me.
Father’s intention to shame me with that accusatory finger failed. Was he that anxious to get me out of his house? Hadn’t I been a good daughter? If he loved me, he wouldn’t force me to marry an Old Goat. Well, I would not be shamed into marrying Mr. Beck, though I was somewhat ashamed of myself for thinking of him in those terms. It was unkind.
Throughout the service, I imagined I could feel Elizabeth’s nephew’s eyes on my back. I wondered how old he was—perhaps eight or ten years older than I. Maybe even as old as Mr. Beck, but far less shopworn. His suit appeared newly sewn from fine cloth. A city fellow, then. I scoffed at myself for indulging an overactive imagination. A fellow like him wouldn’t be interested in me. I was plain—and plainly flat-chested. But later as I stood in front of the congregation to lead the singing of “Amazing Grace” and “Doxology,” I glanced his way—and yes, he was watching me—he certainly was.
So was the Old Goat, but I refused to make eye contact.
At the end of the service, I couldn’t wait to escape the pressure of my family’s expectations— and to avoid shaking Mr. Beck’s hand. I raced down the church steps into the shade of the grand maple that shadowed the lawn and breathed in the fresh air like someone who’d been on the verge of drowning. I believe I had been holding my breath throughout the whole service for fear of inhaling the odor of Gunner Beck’s goats.
Tingles shot up my spine as I caught the fragrance of tobacco— sweet, like overripe apples. Instantly I knew Elizabeth’s nephew had followed me onto the lawn. His features thrilled me from the square lines of his jaw to the way his smile carved vertical creases in his cheeks to the ever-elusive, mesmerizing color of his eyes. Jack and Aunt Elizabeth walked partway down the lane with me where black-eyed susans, Queen Anne’s Lace, and ironweed sprinkled their merry colors along the ditches. Jack plucked two umbrellas of Queen Anne’s Lace and presented one to his aunt and one to me.
“Do you remember how you used to put these in colored water so they’d turn pink or blue?” he asked his aunt. “How’d you do that?”
Her laugh tinkled out. “You remember that, do you? I crushed berries to turn the water colors.”
I recalled my mother doing the same for us as children. It was a sign, surely. He was meant for me.
Our courtship was no different than any other, so I’ll spare you the details. I was flattered when he singled me out after Sunday services, when he paid attention to me though far prettier girls paraded through our town streets. No local boy had ever made me feel so desirable—or desiring.
Once, I invited him and his aunt home to share Sunday supper. As soon as he departed, my father chastised me. “You aren’t near half as smart as you think you are, Rosella, or you wouldn’t be taken in by a man jest ’cause he’s got a purty face.”
Was that such a sin? Didn’t make a lick of sense to dislike a man just because he was handsome. I couldn’t wait to find out what that mustache of his felt like on my lips.
My father raked callused fingers through his thin brown hair, making the pale streaks of scalp that peeped through even more noticeable. “You had half the sense God gave a snail, you’d marry someone solid, like Gunner Beck.”
“I don’t love Mr. Beck. I love
Jack Joyner.”
My stepmother huffed. “What you feel ain’t love, my dear. It’s lust. It’s sinful. It takes time for love to grow.”
How much time? Four months? That’s how long it took after my mother died for this woman to latch onto my father. Besides, Martha was showing off her ignorance. Mama said only ignorant folks used ain’t, and she wasn’t raising her children up to have ignorant ways.
“Daddy, we met in church. That should earn points in his favor. And we’ve known his aunt practically my whole life.”
My father shook his head. “Only a fool would marry a railroad man. You tie up with the likes of him and you’ll be alone like a widder woman, only not so good. You won’t be free to find yourself another husband.”
“I won’t want to marry someone else. I’ll draw while we travel.” I hadn’t drawn since my father had torn up my sketches, but as soon as I made this declaration, it felt like destiny, as if the Hand of Providence had taken charge of my life. I would marry Jack Joyner and become an artist.
My father snorted. “Colored pencils will be cold comfort when he takes up with a different woman in every town.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. I started sketching again, the weeping willow by the creek, the black-eyed susans by the fence, a crow sitting on a post. He loved them all, Jack did. And so I drew his face, over and over in all its expressions. I drew him standing in the church door, I drew him striding down the aisle and standing under the maple in the church yard. I made excuses to go into town and saw him behind my father’s back. Twice, he drove his aunt’s carriage out as far as the bend in our road and walked the rest of the way. The moss under my favorite oak was our carpet; the stars, the only light required.
Buried Seeds Page 7