by Leah Weiss
After I do my business, I sit in that chair like Bert told me to, a stranger stranded on an island, watching life flow around her, cut off from her normal footing. The dialect of Bert’s people strikes my ears as peculiar, and I remember I’m still in North Carolina, the land of my people, but not these people. This must be more like Oma’s Germany I never knew. I understand her better coming here. I know now that our dense air was hard to breathe. She must have missed her homeland terribly.
Ruth crosses the yard carrying a plate of food and a glass of water. Two little girls trail behind her. One sucks her thumb, and the other carries a piece of blanket. “You gotta be hungry,” Ruth says and places the plate on my lap. With a weary sigh, she sinks to the ground beside me, and the girls sit on the far side. She must be worn out from all the change her life has seen.
I lean forward and say “Hey” to the little girls, but they duck their chins shy and nudge up against Ruth’s side.
She says, “They called Hattie and Nell. They mama went to Jesus a while back. This one, Nell”—she puts a hand on the girl’s tiny head—“turned sickly two months back bout the same time Pa had a sinking spell. It was a healer from Baines Creek who come all the way here to help. Miz Birdie done right by Nell, and she grows stronger, but Miz Birdie can’t help Pa make it through. We be staying at this place these weeks, but Homer got his own homestead for us to work. I hope Allie Bert might want this one.”
I had put food in my mouth when Ruth delivers the second dose of possibility about Bert staying here that makes me sick to my stomach. Why hadn’t she said anything to me? It takes effort to swallow the food.
“That’s for her to decide,” I say evenly, though my heart gallops. “I’m sorry we kept her to ourselves all this time.”
But am I sorry? Would I want to turn the clock back to that summer day at the bridge but have Bert stay sequestered at Miz Violet’s home? Our paths may have never crossed in Riverton. Her aunt may have gone crazy, and Bert would have found her way back here to a land I’d never see. She wouldn’t learn to read and write. Or do numbers and tend bees and dance the jitterbug. There would have been no return today of the prodigal daughter.
Ruth reaches for my plate of food I’ve neglected and says, “You gotta be tired. Let me take you to yor sleepin’ spot.”
My sleeping spot is up the ladder in the kitchen to a feather mattress and quilt under cramped eaves. The murmur of prayers and footsteps on plank floors below and dishes being washed mingle. As I drift off to sleep, I hear, “That’s some kind a city talk from that girl, ain’t it? Sounds book smart to me.” Another says, “Think Allabert done gone above her raising?”
I think they don’t know the half of what Bert Tucker can do.
The whiff of dying seasoned with fried chicken and faith flavors my restless sleep. I wake to the sound of rain pounding the tin roof a foot above my face. Water drips from holes. I climb down the ladder into the dry warmth of the kitchen. Ruth slaps a plate of eggs and thick bacon in front of me and pours a cup of strong coffee.
“Morning,” I say.
She says “Mornin” back.
“Where’s Bert?” I ask between mouthfuls.
Ruth nods toward the parlor.
“Still there?”
“Been keeping him company all night.”
“What’s your pa’s Christian name?”
“Jacob Bartholomew Tucker, but folks call him Tuck, and that suits him.”
“That’s a fine name. He must have been a fine man.” I sound like Mama when she gives comfort, but my appetite wanes with the thought of seeing a body three days dead. I pick at the rest of my breakfast. Finally, I scrape the leftovers in the slop bucket when Ruth’s got her back to me, then wash and dry my plate to buy a little time. I head outside and run to the privy through the misty drizzle. When I come out, I stand in awe. The drifting clouds squat low, and the mountain peaks jut high. It’s like Bert said that first night at supper. I can wash my hands in the clouds. They snake over and around these blue, undulating hills.
Ruth comes out of the house and throws scraps to the chickens. At first glance, I think it’s Bert, only more serious. She comes to stand beside me.
“Bert talked about this place, but my imagination couldn’t conjure it. Where I come from, the land is so flat you can see a wall of rain march across the field. And when the rain falls, it lies like a shallow lake on the land. It’s a different place that’s hot and sticky in the warm months. These mountains have names?”
Ruth nods. “That’s Mount Mitchell.” She points to peaks and reels off names as foreign as Oma’s world. I think I hear Roan, Big Bald, Big Butt, but her accent throws me. I could be wrong about Big Butt. I look back at the cabin that Mr. Tucker likely built to house his family. It’s time I paid my respects.
Bert’s in the parlor. The open pine coffin sits on sawhorses against one wall. An odd mix of chairs placed here and there around the parlor hold people with heads bent in prayer. Bert stands beside the coffin, holding the cold hand of her dead pa. My stomach turns sour.
“Bert?” I step beside her. “You okay?” is my trite question.
She takes her time. “I missed all em days with Pa. Can’t never git em back.” The pain has made her slip into her childhood vernacular. “I won’t never know if he forgive me killing Ma.”
Ruth comes up beside us and puts her arm around Bert. “He love you, little sister. Pa love you. Weren’t no blame. Weren’t no sin. Rest your weary heart. He be waiting on you to come home so he can go to heaven. You coming is a gift.”
The two sisters cling to each other, and the people in the room stand and gather the girls in the folds of their arms. I’m to the side, looking at Mr. Tucker in his pine box, his scarred hands lying still, his legs like broom handles under the fabric of slick-worn trousers, his chest empty of a beating heart. Bert puts out her arm from the knot of people and pulls me into their warm center, and I let her.
Then the serious job of putting Mr. Tucker to rest begins in earnest.
Like square dancers following calls, the people in the parlor move with defined purpose. The coffin is closed and nailed shut. The pallbearers take their places and struggle to get the coffin through the front door. The swirling clouds drift away, and the sky clears as if on command. More people appear as if summoned by the tolling of a bell only they can hear. From all points around the meadow come more men in clean overalls and hats worn low, women in gingham dresses, and quiet children who line up behind the procession with the pallbearers at the lead. They walk to the graveside and stand in a square around the waiting grave. Bert steps into their midst and gives tonal pitches as starting points. She leads a powerful harmony that bursts forth from this clan of her people. Her arm keeps beat to the somber tempo that unifies the believers sending Mr. Tucker to heaven. It is an ancient farewell grounded in faith as old as these hills and I quiver with emotion.
A young man I saw yesterday from a distance stares at Bert with broken heart written all over his face. He sings strong, but his eyes pull at Bert with a wanting she doesn’t see or chooses to ignore. Opposite him stands the girl I saw outside the privy last night. She looks at the young man with broken heart written all over her face. She sings strong, but her eyes pull at the man with her wanting he doesn’t see or chooses to ignore.
Why didn’t I know that Bert was loved and missed? Why had I conveniently forgotten she had a life before us? I know Bert doesn’t belong here, not with her hunger for more and her taste for different and her love for our family of Browns. A life beyond these blue hills was the thing that pulled at her, and I’m confident that despite a family cemetery, her sister Ruth, and Sam Logan, she won’t be staying.
Mr. Tucker’s casket is lowered. The last thing we do is drop handfuls of dirt on the pine box. I pick up two handfuls, throw one on the coffin, and put the other in my pocket. I want to take a piece of this place
with me. Here makes my heart soar like the eagle drifting over thermals. Its haunting tune calls to me. I miss it already.
Chapter 52
Bert: Letting Go
I missed his last day and his last breath and the tolling of the bell thirty-nine times to tell of his dying year. I missed the washing of his body and dressing him in burial clothes. I missed lining his casket with his quilt to add comfort to his final journey. I missed the start of the wake when folks and food showed up and filled his home with mourning. I was sent away and come back too late.
Now Pa’s friends stand round his casket built by my sister’s husband, Homer. Folks talk kindly about the dead man inside. He was a good farmer, a servant of God, a fair man, a family man—until his family was mostly gone.
Before he died, he told Ruth his first sacred harp song would be “King of Glory, King of Peace,” and I was to take the lead. It’s been a long spell since I sang the Lord’s words on this mountaintop in front of a square of believers. I sound the pitch and set the tempo like I was taught long ago.
Out their mouths comes the power of Shape Note singing that thrives in these hills. It presses against me on all four sides and holds me upright in my hour of loss. The powerful sound washes over me and over Pa’s plain box. We sing “Love Divine,” “Sons of Sorrow,” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” until legs are weary and voices are spent and his coffin is put in the ground. My eyes stay away from the tug of Sam Logan, who turned into a man while I was away. He belongs here. I don’t. I throw a handful of dirt on top of the casket, and everybody throws a handful of dirt on top of the casket. They drift away from the graveyard and walk to the house for a meal spread out on planks and sawhorses and to talk about the goodness that was my pa.
My feet won’t move.
Ruth stands on one side of me, and on the other, Lu slips her arm through mine. I start shaking and can’t stop. My hollow bones and teeth rattle, and my belly burns, and my chest fills up with rememberings that squeeze the air outta me. If it won’t for Ruth and Lu holding onto me, I’d fall on top of Pa’s coffin. I can feel his eyes. They burn through those coins and that soda cloth and the bare pine and into my thoughtless heart. Before they closed the coffin, I slipped into his hand the pocketknife I stole long back. Have mercy on me, I say inside my head, ashamed to beg out loud. So ashamed…
“…too much for her, I reckon.” A cold rag is over my eyes. I hear Ruth’s voice while I lie on a soft bed. But what bed?
“Is this Pa’s dying bed?” My voice is raspy, parched. I struggle to my elbows, for I need to know.
“This ain’t his bed. Lie still.”
“How’d I get here?”
“Homer. He spotted you sinking and he run back. You been up all the night and all the livelong day and ain’t had a speck a food neither. You weak as water. Let Lu get you some vittles, and you eat and rest. Burying Pa’s done. Stay here while I see to folks leavin’.”
My best friend, Lu. What does she make of this strangeness? Of the old harp singing? Of my weak heart? Does she see why I had to leave? Why I don’t belong? And Sam Logan. He tried to lay claim to me once upon a time, him making plans built on sand. He deserves more than me.
The hum outside the door and the shuffle of shoes and the light of day fade away. The house grows quiet, and so do the noises inside my head. The sun is low when I sit. Lu is slumped in the chair napping, but she hears me stir.
“Hey,” she says and stretches.
“I never asked Weegee if Pa was okay. I won’t thinking bout him one bit,” I confess.
“You think you could have saved him? Think you could have stopped him dying?”
“No.”
“That’s right, so stop punishing yourself.” Lu’s voice is soft. “But you gotta be hungry. I know I am.”
“Yeah. Let’s get some food and watch the sun set. You gotta have questions.”
“A few.” Lu grins.
The platters of food are covered with a sheet to keep flies off. We fold back one end and find fried chicken, angel biscuits, field peas, turnip greens, and sweet potato pie. These’ll do. Plates of vittles and spring water in hand, we head to the yard and sit facing Mount Mitchell. The red ball nears the ridge and turns the clouds and us to gold. I bite into a chicken leg.
“Tell me about Sam Logan,” Lu says.
I chew and chew and take my time. “Not much to say.”
“He couldn’t take his eyes off you. He was all moony-eyed.”
“He’s eighteen.”
“Tell me about him,” she says, then eats on a biscuit.
“He was a boy I used to know. He was sweet on me. I won’t sweet on him. The end.”
Lu keeps eating, but I stop. The sight of the clothesline, the woodpile, the scratchy hinge on the screen door, takes my hunger away. The path in the distance to my thinking spot and to the dell where blue ghost fireflies rise up in June. The sun is going down on the second hardest day of my life.
Lu reads my mind and says, “Wanna talk about it?” like she did when I needed to talk about Ma dying. And me getting throwed out of Aunt Violet’s place in the storm. Lu is good at listening, but I’m not good at sorting things yet.
“Not much to say. Ma died, I went away, Pa died, end of story.”
“Do you hear yourself, Bert Tucker? Every answer you give me is not much to say, when I know you’re hurting. Don’t make it simple. Life isn’t simple. It’s messy with a lot of heavy layers. We don’t have to be old women to know that.”
“You sound like your mama.”
“Our mama. And is that good or bad?”
I grin for the first time all day. “Both, I guess. She’s smart, but she’s hardheaded.”
“And you’re not? Maybe we’re both like Mama.” We laugh in the waning light that has come with only the outline of mountains backlit. Lu says, “Ruth said one of these mountains is called Big Butt. Did I hear right?”
“Uh-huh. And there’s one named Little Butt, too, but we can’t see it from here. It’s behind the other side of Mount Mitchell.”
“Behind. Little Butt. Cute, Bert.”
“Don’t forget Big Butt,” I say, and we laugh for real and keep laughing the kind that makes breathing hard but not like that muslin round my middle. This laugh feels new.
Chapter 53
Lucy: Transformation
Bert’s sister comes out of the house carrying a lantern in one hand and in the other, the feed sack of gifts Bert brought. The little ones walk close beside this woman who’s now their comfort. The younger girl looks to be close to the age of Violet Crumbie’s little boy, who would be a toddler now.
Ruth sets the lantern on the ground and the three of them sit in the pool of light with Bert and me. Five girls. Two who don’t have a clue about what’s coming and one who stepped over the line into womanhood on her own accord. Then there’s Bert and me, getting closer to the line every day.
Bert made these gifts for Ruth and the girls a while back and was going to mail them, but then the funeral came and changed things. When she unties the bag, Hattie and Nell get up on their knees eager to see better. The first present is an apron for Ruth made by Bert with Mama’s help. It has big pockets to hold things and rickrack around the edge, likely fancier than Ruth has ever seen. Bert said they like plain up here, but she snuck in a touch of green on the ties.
“Reach in the pocket,” she says, and Ruth’s face lights up when she finds a tiny bottle of Emeraude perfume. Cousin Patricia gave it to Bert last year when she and her friends made us movie stars. Bert saved it for Ruth. She unscrews the tiny cap and holds the bottle near Ruth’s nose so she can smell orange and lemon and a vanilla sweetness unlike any flower that grows wild on the mountain. Bert tells her, “Put a tiny dab on the insides of your wrists—right here—and rub your wrists together. Now smell.” The little girls lean in, sniff, and get the giggle
s.
Next comes two stuffed rabbits Bert and I made from scraps and modeled after the velveteen rabbit Oma made years ago. These ears flop, and their button eyes and noses are black, and we stuffed them with cotton batting and used tiny backstitches on the seams so they’ll hold up to heavy handling. The two rabbits are alike except for heart-shaped velvet patches—one is red and one is purple so they can tell em apart. The children hug and kiss the bunnies.
Then Bert pulls out her favorite book, a thin book written twenty-three years ago by Margery Williams. My friend once told me that the lines on page five were written for her. Becoming. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily. Bert has learned she doesn’t break easily.
“Would you like me to read the story about your bunnies?” she says, and the girls rush to snuggle up beside her and put tiny arms round her shoulders like they belong there. The lantern lights the page and their delicate profiles and their anticipation, and Bert begins. “There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid…”
Here so high—watching the girls watching Bert read to them in this moment close to heaven, with stars almost within reach—I am so very proud of my best friend. She has become a masterful storyteller. She stresses and pauses and pulls them along at the perfect pace. She is so much more than she was. When the book ends and she looks up, Ruth is crying.
“What?” Bert says, unaware of the magic she spun.
“You kin read.” Ruth’s voice is one of awe. “I can’t cipher them words, but you kin read. How’d that come to be?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
I say, “She worked hard. We read after supper every night and have a stack of books by our bed. Tell em how many books you’ve read on your own in only two years and three months.”
“Seventy-seven,” Bert admits, only half willing to brag, likely thinking how different her world is from this one. “At the start it was mostly picture books. I got some in here for y’all to start your own library.”