"I've decided I want to be put down settin' up. Settin' in a rockin' cheer with a whole choc'late cake in my lap and a silver fork to eat it with. And naturally it's go'n take a heap a-room, me bein' a fairly large woman."
"Ain't no way to bury somebody settin' up in no rockin' cheer."
"Lemme finish now. Since they ain't that much room in yore lot, I just think I'll set beside Mr. Jones through eternity. I'm go'n ast the fam'ly when we go to Hebron next fourth Sunday."
It really made Grandpa Tweedy mad. He didn't say another word the whole meal, not even when the cook and Mrs. Jones were clearing the table. But a gleam came in his eye while he was spooning a mound of whip cream on his blackberry cobbler, and he started telling about when he was a boy and went to the mountains with his daddy, General Tweedy. "We was ridin' horseback, buyin' up cattle. Camped up there in the Blue Ridge for a week or more, gittin' maybe two-three cows from one farmer and six or seven from another. We drove home thirty-five head, just me and him. Son, you ain't never seen anythang pretty as them big blue Georgie mountains!"
The upshot of this remembering was that my grandfather not only went with us to the pasture and watched us catch Big Red and Satan, but got two of his field hands to come help us load the wagon bed with corn, oats, and hay. And all he said as we hitched up was "Y'all be good now. And come Sunday, find you a Presbyterian church to go to. You hear me?" I turned the team into the road, T.R. riding high on the seat between me and Pink.
"Y'all take good care them mules, Will!" Grandpa Tweedy hollered after us. "They's a matched pair and I'll be in a fix if'n anythang happens to'm! Be careful, hear."
"Yessir," I called back as the team broke into a trot. "Don't worry, Grandpa, I know all about handlin' mules!"
26
EIGHT YEARS after our camping trip, I still can't believe how good I told that tale about Aunt Loma nursing a pig, not to mention the one about sticking a pin in her rubber busts.
Five of us boys went to the mountains: Pink, Lee Roy, Smiley, myself, and—at the last minute—Dunson McCall. His daddy, the school superintendent, had a two-horse farm near town and bought a lot of seed and fertilizer at the store, so Papa thought it would be "a nice thing to do" to invite Dunson along.
Dunse kept his nose in a book all the time and couldn't hit a baseball if you hung it on a string in front of his bat. And as the saying goes, he was a lost ball in high weeds when it came to hunting and fishing. But he was all right. We didn't mind having him.
Grandpa Blakeslee's house was on our way out of Cold Sassy. As we rolled past it, Smiley snickered and said, "How you like your new two-timin' grandma, Will?"
I raised the whip and said shut up. "If you got to talk like that, you just get out and go on back home. You and anybody else that thinks she's any of their business." I glared at the whole bunch of them.
By time we got out in the country, we were having a high old time, whooping, talking loud, and all like that. If we saw a creakity wagon up ahead full of country folks going to town, I'd cluck the mules to a smart trot and we'd all wave as we passed them. We knew the big blue-painted covered wagon was something to stare at, and five boys off for the mountains were something to envy.
I began to forget all about Miss Love and what Cold Sassy must be saying about her kissing another man two days after promising to cleave only unto Grandpa. I even forgot to hope she knew it was Miss Effie Belle that told on her and not me.
Our mothers had packed baskets of food to keep us going. Fried chicken and boiled ham, baked sweet potatoes, peach pickles, big buttermilk biscuits, cookies, cakes, apples, boiled eggs, I don't know what all. We traveled thirty miles that first day and never stopped eating. About two o'clock the second day, just past the little town of Clayton in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we took an old logging road into the woods and picked out a site near a little branch. While I fed and watered the mules and staked them out under some trees, the other fellers made camp. We didn't know whose land it was, of course. Just so you didn't set the woods afire and weren't Gypsies, nobody minded. You didn't have to ask.
Though we counted on getting plenty of fish and wild game, we had a wooden grub box full of staples. Smoked ham, bacon, a bucket of salt mackerel, flour, cornmeal, grits, raw sweet potatoes, lard, coffee, a tin of butter, some store bread, and a can of beaten biscuits that Dunse's mama made.
That night we put the box out under a tree to make more room for us to sleep in the wagon. I'd barely closed my eyes good when T.R. went to growling and the mules commenced raring up and squealing. Boy howdy, we scrambled out quick to grab those mules. If they'd pulled up their stakes and run away, I'd never of heard the last of it from Grandpa Tweedy.
What happened, two great big black bears had busted into our grub box. We could see them in the moonlight, eating the ham and those raw sweet potatoes, breaking open cans, scattering coffee and meal—having just the best time you ever saw. Acted like we weren't even there.
Smiley got his gun and was fixing to take aim when I stopped him. "How you think we go'n hold the mules if you go to shoot-in'? These ain't huntin' mules." He raised the gun anyhow. "I'm tellin' you, Smiley! I rather be hungry than walk home!"
You talk about hungry, there's nothing like knowing your grub is off somewhere digesting in a bear to make you feel starved to death. At daybreak we scavenged in the wreckage of the box, but what hadn't been eaten was mashed into the wet pine needles. All we found was a little damp flour in the bottom of a busted can.
In the gloomy, misty, gray morning we grazed on blackberries. That was breakfast. We had blackberries again for dinner. Supper was a boiled goose that Smiley shot on a nearby pond after the sun came out. We had to skin him to get the feathers off, and he was tough, great goodness, despite we boiled him and boiled him and boiled him. But he made a meal, and we thought to skim the goose grease off the top of the water. Used it next morning to fry a few middling-size trout.
We ate blackberries off and on all that second morning, which was cold and damp and overcast. I managed to shoot a dove and a rabbit—not much for five boys—and at noon we roasted them on a spit over the fire. We'd just finished eating when the rain that had threatened all morning blew in over the mountains in heavy black thunderheads. We barely had time to string up some canvas over the mules before the storm hit.
Safe in the wagon, we had a fine time for a while, tussling in the hay and talking about girls and all. But as the day wore on with no let-up of rain, we started getting hungry and cold and miserable. We got even more miserable when Lee Roy noticed that Smiley had left our box of shotgun shells out under a tree. Wet shells meant the end of hunting anything except blackberries and dry wood, which we hadn't thought to collect any real supply of.
I was really mad at Smiley. Bluford Jackson wouldn't of been careless about the shotgun shells or the grub box, either. And he'd of thought to gather piles of wood when we first got there, instead of keeping just enough ahead for the next campfire. I groaned. My throat swelled and ached. Bluford Jackson was six feet under, and the camping trip he planned was deader than him.
Trying to put some life in the party, so to speak, I sat up and said, "Dunse, I don't think you've heard how my Uncle Johnny hung a cow by mistake."
"Aw, shut up, Will," said Lee Roy. "Dunse's heard it. We all done heard it. A million times." He found a blanket and started pulling hay over himself for warmth as the sky got darker. We sat some more, watching the rain drip off the back canvas. When it started down in sheets, I said, "Why don't I tell about Raw Head and Bloody Bones?"
"How about shut up, Will?" said Smiley. "We get tired of your damn stories."
"Don't you cuss me, dernit!"
"Well, shut up then."
There wasn't room in the wagon for a fight. "One time my daddy saw his ancestor who'd been dead a hundred years," I said, stubborn. There was a slight stir of interest.
Pink thought I meant Papa saw his ancestor's ghost.
"Naw, I mean he saw hi
s actual great-great-dead-granddaddy. He was in a brick crypt in a old church graveyard up in North Ca'lina. When Papa and a cousin of his went over to check on the crypt, so much ivy had grown in through the cracks, you couldn't tell if the vines were holding the bricks together or pushing them apart. So they went in, and there was their great-great grand-daddy. The coffin had rotted to pieces and his bones were just layin' there. Papa said the skull had a hatchet cut on the forehead."
"Goll-ee," Pink whispered.
"That ain't all. A little-girl skeleton was in the crypt, too, in a coffin with a glass top. Her bones were just so white and pretty—"
"How'd your daddy know it was a girl?" asked Smiley, suspicions I had made up more of it than I really had.
"The bones had on a little white poky-dot dress that hadn't all rotted yet, that's how."
The drumming of rain on the canvas was easing up, which was a good thing; it had started to drip through on us. But I hardly noticed. Like an actor whose audience has stood up to clap, I didn't want to quit. And now I knew what bait to use.
I said, "I've told y'all bout Great-Granmaw Tweedy dyin' twice. The first time, you remember, she jumped out of the coffin just fore they were fixin' to nail the lid. The second time she stayed dead. But what I thought might inner-rest y'all right now, she rode to the Hebron cemetery both times in this very wagon." I knocked on the side of it. The hollow wooden sound like to busted Pink and Lee Roy clear out of the hay.
"Did you see her die, Will—either time?" Dunse asked in a hushed voice.
"Naw. But last summer they'd just pulled the sheet over her head when me and my fam'ly got out home. And I went in there where she was at."
Smiley gasped. "I wouldn't a-gone in there," he admitted.
"Me neither," said Dunse. "I never been that close to a dead person."
"A old colored woman was sittin' with the body. She said, 'Want to see yo granny, boy?' I shook my head, but she said, 'Miss Mindy ain' gwine hurt you,' and she pulled that sheet back. Granmaw was propped up on pillows. What little hair she had was damp and standin' out like a scairt cat's. Her mouth had dropped open and her eyes stared straight at me. I could a-kilt that nigger woman, showin' off like that, tryin' to scare me. I backed out of that room, I tell you.
"Miz Jones and Mama laid Granmaw out. Fixed her mouth shut with a handkerchief tied under her chin and over her head. Papa hepped my uncles finish makin' the coffin, and soon as the preacher came, we ate dinner quick and set out for Hebron, it bein' a hot day and her not embalmed or anything. And like I said, they carried her to the graveyard in this very wagon here. Used those same mules out yonder, Big Red and Satan. All the way to Hebron, Mary Toy complained about us havin' to miss the Ringling Brothers Circus over in Athens. Every time we had to walk up a hill to save the horses, she'd say why couldn't Granmaw have died last week."
It gave us the creeps, sitting there in that hearse. It was pitch-black dark before the rain finally drizzled away and the moon came out. Wispy clouds scurried across the sky like little ghosts.
I said maybe there was enough dry wood under the wagon to build a fire with.
The fire warmed us some, after we finally got it going, but it didn't cheer anybody up. "I wish we had some good old hot buttered arsh potatoes," said Lee Roy.
Every now and again somebody would say, "I ain't scared a-no old dead woman." Or, "Is all that so, Will?" Once Pink went shush and whispered, "Y'all hear that?...I thought I heard something. Over by the wagon...."
"Just the wind," I said airily, holding a twig in the fire till it got red hot on the end, like a long cigar. I waved it in circles a while, thinking what I could tell next. Pink got up off his log and turned his back to the fire. As we sat listening to the katydids, singing loud as they came out into the wetness, the moon lit up a layer of fog below us.
Blu Jackson is dead, I thought bitterly. Granny Blakeslee is dead. And reckon what has happened by now with Grandpa and Miss Love? I wanted to go home.
Dunse was like-minded. "I'm sick of this dern campout." He groaned. "I'm hungry and I'm cold." Huddled in a blanket, he kicked at a log on the fire. It sent up sparks. The flaring of light made big shadows dance on the wet gray canvas of the hearse.
Suddenly it didn't make any sense at all to stay on here till next week, when all we had to do was leave. I said as much, and the faces lit by the campfire grinned with relief. So it was decided. We would set out for Cudn Jake's place early in the morning and get Miss Love's racehorse.
Not a one of the boys would sleep in or under the wagon that night, despite the ground was wet as heck. I had counted on that. I was going to have a bed of hay all to myself. But as I put one foot up on the axle to climb in, I decided I might as well stay out with the fellers instead.
That night Bluford Jackson came to me in a dream. He didn't look dead but said he was. Said he was damaged goods in the worst way. He wanted me to tell Emma Lee Crutchfield to let him sit by her at preachin' next Sunday and please to save a space for him in her family pew.
"How big a space do you take now, Blu? Same as before, or just a inch or two?"
He didn't answer that. Just said he'd need Sunday clothes, and would I find him some and leave them in the crotch of the maple tree in his backyard.
"What you need clothes for, Blu? If you went to church naked as a jaybird, nobody'd know it."
"Ain't that the least you can do for me, Will, considerin' it was your firecrackers?" That made me mad, but he kept talking. "Will, I got lots of time now. If you want to be a doctor, when you get to medical school you can make room for me in your seat and I'll hep you with your lessons and all."
"I'm not go'n be a doctor. You the one was go'n be a doctor. I'm go'n farm. I cain't live your life for you, Blu." Then I woke up, frightened, and shivering from the cold.
I didn't tell my dream to the fellers, but weeks later I told it to Grandpa Blakeslee. I said, "Grandpa, it was like Blu didn't believe he was dead. Like he don't know what bein' dead means, for gosh sake."
Grandpa studied on it a minute and said, "I think it's you thet don't believe he's dead, son. I think it's you thet don't know what bein' dead means. But who does? Only them as has passed on."
Cudn Rachel was almost as big and fat as Mrs. Jones, and said she could spot hungry boys a mile away. She and Cudn Jake had already eaten, but her cook made us some big graham biscuits and fried half a ham, looked like, and a bunch of eggs, and put a gallon of milk on the table. The cook, having heard about our bears, said this blessing: "Lawd, hep us an' feed us, an' keep our en'mies from us, cause some'll come upon us, an' take our rations from us. A-men." We ate it all.
Miss Love's horse turned out to be a tall, prancy black gelding with a star on his forehead. With him tied behind the wagon on a lead rope, head held proud and high, we felt mighty fancy on the down-go to Cold Sassy, and we made mighty good time. The mules knew they were headed home.
We did lots of talking about whether or not Miss Love could train him. And then for the first time since we left Cold Sassy, the boys got to talking about her and Grandpa. Smiley started it. He said his mother thought Miss Love must have money and that's why Mr. Blakeslee married her. "My grandmother always did think the reason Mr. Blakeslee married Miss Mattie Lou was cause her daddy owned all that land."
That really made me mad. "Shut up!"
"Miss Mattie Lou was a old maid, wasn't she? Why would anybody marry a old maid cept for land or money?"
"I said shut up!" I yelled.
"Yeah, shut up, Smiley," said Dunse. "It ain't right to talk like that about the dead."
But they couldn't let go of the subject. And the more they got my goat, the worse things they said, especially about Miss Love.
Things like "Hey, Will, how long you think they been sweet on one another?" and "You reckon Miss Love's too old to have babies?"
"They ain't plannin' to have babies," I burst out, furious. "Grandpa and Miss Love have a business arrange-ment."
"What you mean by th
at?" Lee Roy asked with a smirk.
"I mean Miss Love is sleepin' in the comp'ny room," I said. "She's just livin' down there to keep house."
"I don't believe it."
"Well, it's so."
"Says who?"
"Says her. She told me."
"Haw! Since when have ladies started sayin' such as that to a boy? Shoot-dog."
Then Smiley crowded close up behind the driver's seat to talk ugly about the rich-lookin' stranger from Texas. "I heard he tore her clothers half off fore he got done kissin' her."
"Well, he didn't!" I was really mad now. "And I ought to know. I was there."
The boys took to making up jokes then, saying things you wouldn't want said about your grandpa's wife even if you hated her. I decided to change the subject. I swear I didn't know when I opened my mouth that I would say what I said, but it changed the subject all right:
"Y'all want to hear about Aunt Loma nursin' a pig?"
"You mean Campbell Junior?" asked Pink Predmore.
"I ain't talkin' bout the baby." We had started down a steep hill. "Slow down, Big Red. Whoa, Satan! Lee Roy, push hard on the brake post! The wagon's go'n run over the team!" Careening downhill, bumping over rocks and dried mud holes, we like to shook apart before we got the dern wagon under control.
"Did you say Miss Loma nursed a pig?" Pink asked as soon as he was able.
"You mean she put a pig up to her tits and let it suck?" asked Smiley.
"If Miss Loma did that, she must be crazy," said Dunse. "Anyhow, Will, how would you know it?"
I didn't, of course. One time I overheard Mama and Aunt Loma talking about a distant cousin over in Athens that did it to keep her milk going while her baby was in the hospital, but I just made up that it was Aunt Loma.
"Well, you know Campbell Junior was born little," I began, thinking fast. "I mean he didn't weigh more'n a fryin'-size chicken. Born early."
Cold Sassy Tree Page 19