by Jan Karon
‘Did it hit you when she throwed it?’
“Went on pas’ my ol’ gray head an’ knocked a chunk of brick outta th’ steps yonder.’ Mose laughed. ‘If this pot was to hit my hard head, hit’d be plumb ruint, couldn’t fix it a’tall.’
He would long remember what a terrible racket could be made by hammering out a dent.
‘Looky there, little mister—good as new. But m’ mallet’s broke.’ Mose sighed. ‘If hit hain’t one thing, hit’s two.’
‘Where’s Willie at?’ He was terrified of the answer.
‘They done took Willie off from here. Po’ little chap.’
Without meaning to, he began to cry.
‘Whoa, now. What that all about?’
‘Did they give ’im’—he scrubbed his eyes with his fist—‘a nice funeral?’
‘Oh, Willie ain’t dead. Nossir, not a bit. They took ’im out t’ th’ country t’ stay wit’ ’is granny.’
ThankyouGod, thankyouGod, thankyouGod. ‘Is he comin’ back?’
‘Nossir, Willie ain’t comin’ back. Miz Lula dead, y’know.’ Mose wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘Things is changin’ ’roun’ here.’
‘Mr. Boss, is he comin’ back?’
‘He be back now an’ ag’in, I reckon. This Mr. Boss’s homeplace, he born in th’ room at th’ head of th’ steps.’
He’d heard that Boss Tate often gave children a dollar bill wrapped around a pack of Dentyne; he would like to have a dollar bill from Boss Tate; he would keep it as a souvenir and never spend it, but he would probably chew the gum.
He had another question, one he’d been meaning to ask somebody, but he kept forgetting. ‘What’s Mr. Boss th’ boss of?’
‘Less see, how I gon’ say it?’ Mose threw his head back, closed his eyes, jiggled his leg, grunted, ‘I’m thinkin’.’ Then he leaned forward and said, ‘He be th’ boss of ever’thing.’
He raced across the yard and around the house feeling light as air, as if he might lift from the earth like a kite and fly.
‘Thass a happy boy you got,’ said the mammy.
His mother beamed. ‘You found your marble!’
‘No, ma’am, but it’s okay, I don’t care.’ It was a relief to tell the truth. He wished he could always tell the truth, especially to his mother.
On the way home, he stood beside her on the front seat and put his arm around her neck and held on, the way he’d often done before the vase was broken. He had never been so happy.
‘There’s my darling Timmy,’ she said. ‘He’s come back. Where do you think he’s been for such a long time?’
He shrugged, pretending he didn’t know. But he knew. He’d been in that place he’d heard about in church—the fiery furnace of HELL…
He threw up his hand to Frank. “See you tomorrow. I’ll try to get here before th’ fried chicken runs out.”
He stopped at a convenience store for a jug of water and a bag of ice, and headed east. It was nearly four o’clock, and sultry. As for the temperature, ninety-two degrees in the shade would be a safe guess. Maybe he’d put the top up and turn on the a/c. He started to pull over, but changed his mind; the air was heavy with smells he wanted to explore.
He caught a blast of honeysuckle as he crested a hill; the scent seemed to enter his bloodstream like a shot of whiskey. Honeysuckle and gardenias. That had been his first bouquet to Peggy Cramer, the summer before seminary.
He craned his neck looking over the landscape, trying, perhaps, to reclaim something he’d lost. Over there, a copse of trees had been snared like flies in a cobweb of kudzu. Farther along, a barn had disappeared in the stuff, leaving visible only a rusted tin roof to mark its place. For all he knew, his homeplace had long been covered over, leaving no trace of its columns and porticos. Since cotton had pulled out and left Holly Springs “boilin’ up chicken bones,” why couldn’t something profitable be done with this noxious weed?
He glanced at the speedometer; he was twelve miles over the speed limit, trying to catch a breeze.
Whatever fear he’d had of coming back to Whitefield had vanished—he realized he was looking forward to it, eager, even. If nobody was living there, he would walk out to the cotton fields where he’d often been a picker, and look at the barn, if it was still standing.
He realized, then, what he wanted to do even more.
He wanted to see Peggy’s house…
Sometime before Christmas, he noticed that his mother looked pale, older somehow; she seemed more like a stranger than herself. Then came the terrible pain.
‘Run!’ his father said. ‘Get Peggy!’
He ran as fast as he could to the little house behind the privet hedge on the lane.
The late afternoon was dark, and freezing cold. His breath vaporized on the bitter air.
Peggy was hanging wash on a line in front of her fireplace.
‘Somethin’s wrong with Mama. You got to come.’
‘I can’t leave this fire goin’,’ she said, shoveling ashes on the burning log. A log had rolled out on Peggy’s floor one time and burned a big place in the boards. “You’re takin’ too long,” he shouted. “Hurry!” She blew out the flame of the lamp and threw on her coat, and hand in hand they raced up the frozen lane.
When they reached the house, the black Buick wasn’t parked by the front porch.
Peggy squeezed his hand so hard it hurt. ‘Yo’ daddy done took ’er to Memphis.’
Memphis. Where they had the big hospital. For a long time, he stood at the window to see if his father had changed his mind and would bring his mother home and let Dr. Franklin make her well with his medicine bag. But the car didn’t come.
It was almost bedtime when Peggy took him to her house and stirred up a fire. Then she fed him cornbread and milk, and a mashed sweet potato with molasses. He ate as much as he could so he wouldn’t hurt her feelings, and went to bed on a pallet of quilts by the fireplace. He lay there, helpless and afraid, looking at the clothes hanging above him on the line, at the way her oldest work dress fluttered when she opened the door to bring in a stick of wood.
He thought he would never forget the way Peggy’s house smelled—like ashes and cold biscuits and fried side meat; it was a smell that made him feel safe and connected. He’d never before paid attention to the smell of her house, but this time was different—somewhere a kind of door had opened in him.
When he couldn’t sleep, she squatted beside the pallet and stroked his back. ‘Ever’thing gon’ be all right, baby, ever’thing gon’ be all right.’ Just this once, he would let her call him that.
Shadows cast by the flaming lamp and the flickering fire danced around the walls, and for a long time Peggy prayed, aloud and urgent, raising her hands and talking to God as if He were right there in the room.
Everything was going to be all right, she had said. But if she was telling the truth, why was she crying?
Because he loved Peggy almost as much as his mother, he believed her at last, and went to sleep…
Whitefield could no longer be seen from the state road. In nearly forty years, trees and shrubs mature, undergrowth thrives, and things change. His mother had liked having her home seen from the road. She’d had Louis and his minions plant acres of azaleas among the pines and oaks and maples; the driveway had run straight through the woods to the green front door.
But the drive had been rerouted; it was winding now, which cut off a direct view of the house.
“We’re in Rabbit City, buddy. Stick with me, and I don’t mean maybe.”
Cooler in these woods. He prayed the prayer that never fails as they rounded the final bend.
His homeplace.
Not derelict or torn down. Not vanished into a vernal grave. But just as he remembered it, except better. Much better.
He sat with his foot on the brake and his hands on the wheel, forgetting to breathe.
Metal scaffolding encased the front of the two-story house. The plastered, brick-core columns and double front doors were
freshly painted, as were the Greek-order pilasters flanking the doors. Shutters leaned against the house, sanded and ready for primer. This was the very sort of work his mother wanted to have done, but then her illness had come, and it was too late for mending and painting.
A shirt hung over a bar of the scaffolding; empty paint cans lay discarded on a blue tarp.
Quiet. Nothing stirring. No breeze, nothing.
He noted a primordial Volvo, and a pickup truck, its fenders a lacework of rust.
He parked beneath a pine tree and snapped the leash on his dog’s collar. Barnabas sniffed the area, then zeroed in on the rear wheel of the truck and lifted his leg. Together, they walked to the house and up the steps; the double doors were open.
A tarp covered the heart-pine floor of the entrance hall that led past the stairwell to open double doors at the rear. He could see out to the lawn and into the sun-bleached field beyond.
“Hello! Anybody home?”
A fly buzzed. A crow called.
A strong odor of fresh paint, combined with the sweltering heat, unsteadied him. He would wait awhile, maybe sit on the steps ’til someone showed up. As the sun was at the rear of the house, this was the coolest place to be, anyway.
“Hello!”
Then again, forget sitting on the steps like a lizard; he wanted to explore.
He didn’t sense anything left of his mother here. The woods had crept closer to the porch, and the gardens appeared to be long gone. All that remained was the allée of ancient boxwood.
Nothing familiar except the box. Nothing at all. No asters as large as dinner plates, no masses of double hollyhocks, no thriving display of hostas at the woods’ edge, nor any gardenias to scent the air. The ardent sweat and labor of years had vanished as surely as the barn in kudzu.
During more than one of Holly Springs’ famous Pilgrimages, hundreds of people had wandered along the paths his mother had designed through the woodland grove of four hundred azaleas, and out to the smokehouse with its peony beds and trellises of roses and purple wisteria.
It was prophesied that nobody would travel four miles from town to see a garden, especially in wartime when gas was rationed and car parts were unavailable and the mechanics had been shipped out to Europe. But his mother, who longed to share her gardens with one and all, had been of a stubborn and visionary stripe. If she could not live in town, she would bring the town to her. By dint of sheer will and bone-crushing labor, she created gardens that drew spectators not only from Holly Springs, but from towns as far away as Memphis and McComb. Someone had also turned up from Brazil, which had caused a definite stir.
He walked through the allée and saw that the washhouse was gone, though some of the stone foundation remained. He’d had many whippings, recited many scriptures, and even been de-liced with sulfur in that venerable building.
It may have taken years to realize it, but a good deal of whatever character he might have had been formed in the washhouse…
He burst into the kitchen to tell his mother the news.
‘Louis’s Ol’ Damn Mule got out an’ run over to Tommy’s house an’ Mr. Noles, he wouldn’ let Louis come in th’ yard an’ take ’im home, an’ if Mr. Noles keeps Ol’ Damn Mule an’ won’t let ’im go, Louis says th’ police gon’ come.’
About the only time he saw police was when they were hanging around Tyson’s scarfing up ice cream, or sitting in their cars with sunglasses on.
‘What did you call the mule?’
‘Louis’s Ol’ Damn Mule.’
He saw the little furrow appear between her eyes and over her nose. ‘Go to the washhouse and wait for me.’
He sat in the washhouse on a chair with busted caning, among the laundry baskets and lye soap, and paddles that stirred farm clothes in the black iron pot outside the door.
His mother arrived, wearing her apron and looking tired. Even with Peggy helping, he thought his mother worked too hard. If she didn’t work so hard, she wouldn’t be so tired, and if she wasn’t so tired, she might not get so mad about nothing at all. He had no idea why she’d made him come out here for what a stupid old mule had done.
‘There are the dirty farm clothes,’ she said, pointing to two baskets. ‘Muddy, because of the rain on Sunday. Smelly, because of the cows and horses and chickens and pigs and all the sweat it takes to run a country place.’
She waited for him to say something, as he tried to figure out what she wanted him to say. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said at last.
‘Over there are the clothes Peggy and I washed this morning, and brought in off the line before the rain came. Clean, sweet, smelling like sunshine.’ She waited.
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘Which would you like to be? A basket of dirty, smelly clothes or a basket of nice, clean clothes?’
He knew the answer, but he had a question.
‘What did I do bad?’
‘You used a bad word.’
‘I did?’
‘In describing Louis’s mule.’
He’d completely forgotten he wasn’t supposed to say that word. But that’s what Louis called his mule. That was his mule’s name. He couldn’t help it if that was the mule’s name.
‘That’s th’ mule’s name, Mama. Louis always says Ol’ Damn…’scuse me.’
He was going to get his mouth washed out with soap, he could feel it coming. He cut his eyes to the glass with the toothbrush in it, sitting on the windowsill.
His mother had crossed her arms and was looking at him in an odd way. He was thankful that his mother, and not his father, had taken him to the washhouse. He’d heard her tell Peggy that his father was ‘too severe,’ which was why she hardly ever told on him if he messed up. More than once, his father had half killed him for doing stuff, while his mother was gentle and forgiving—at least most of the time.
He hung his head. Why didn’t he just say he was sorry and get it over with?
‘I’m going to overlook this, Timothy. You were repeating that word in innocence. But it won’t be overlooked again, do you understand? I want you to memorize Ephesians, chapter four, verses twenty-nine and thirty.”
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He raised his head, suddenly bold and decisive, and met her gaze. ‘An’ I ’preciate it.’
His mother turned away; it looked like she was laughing. He was pretty sure she was laughing…
“If you live as long as that mule,” he told Barnabas, “you’ll probably outlive me.”
When Ol’ Damn Mule died, Louis declared him to be twenty-one years old. ‘Votin’ age!’
Louis and Sally Ponder and their four boys had lived and worked at Whitefield, and were another family to him. He had played at their house at the edge of the woods, eaten at their table, and picked cotton with them. Louis had been a type of surrogate father—wise, no-nonsense, and willing to listen when nobody else would. He wondered if he could find the mule’s grave that he and Louis and his boys had dug on the other side of the pond. They’d used a cast-off wagon tongue as a marker, and Louis had cried.
He revised his earlier estimate of ninety-two degrees. It was ninety-five and climbing or he was a monkey’s uncle. It was no time to go hiking around the pond.
“Okay, buddy, let’s go look…”
What a strange thing he’d almost said. He’d almost said, Let’s go look for Peggy.
FIVE
The privet hedge was long gone. The tin-sheathed roof had collapsed, cedars grew through the rotting floor of the kitchen, and honeysuckle was taking care of the rest.
Thomas Wolfe had been right, of course.
Barnabas sniffed the spot where her front door once opened off the lane—in the old days, if he’d been sitting on her stoop when a wagon passed, he’d tuck in his toes, just to be safe. The traffic through here had been especially active at cotton-picking time—his father on horseback, Louis driving the wagon team—‘Hum up!’; pickers straggling in from the fields, half crazed by the killing heat; Louis’s boys on one reconnaissance or another; t
he cotton trucks rattling by.
In the searing Mississippi summers, their farm had seemed like a small town unto itself. Cole Jenkins even knocked together a lean-to store under a walnut tree at the south end of Big Field, eager for the cotton pickers’ business. Nehi Strawberry, Sugar Daddys, peanut brittle—all a nickel, and every once in a while a walnut or two hitting Cole’s tin roof, blam, blam, blam. ‘Run fo’ th’ woods, hit’s th’ law!’ Cole would holler, then slap his knee, laughing.
Cole spent a lot of time trying to get on Peggy’s good side. Some evenings he would walk up from the field and bring her a Coca-Cola, but she wouldn’t drink it. She wouldn’t even put it in the house and save it ’til later.
‘Courtin’ that woman’s like eatin’ soup wit’ a fork,’ Cole complained.
‘You ain’t s’posed t’ be courtin’ that woman,’ Louis said. ‘You’se married.’
‘I ain’t married,’ Cole said. ‘When th’ preacher had us sayin’ vows, I let m’ wife do all th’ talkin’.’
Once when his mother sent him to shell peas with Peggy, Cole tried to tempt him with a Baby Ruth, which he never saw anymore now that the war was on. ‘Ol’ rats like cheese, too. Go on off an’ leave me an’ her by ourself, an’ this here’s all your’n.’ Cole winked at him; his half-toothless grin was a terrifying sight.
But he wouldn’t leave Peggy by herself with that old nose booger, not for a hundred dollars, much less a Baby Ruth. He sat tight and stared bullets at Cole ’til Cole got mad as fire and left.
‘I gon’ butter you a piece of bread wit’ sugar on it for gettin’ me out that mess,’ Peggy said later. ‘That ol’ darky look like he been chewin’ t’bacco an’ spittin’ in th’ wind.’
They had laughed as loud as they wanted to.
Barnabas lay in the road, panting from the heat. Time to move on.
He saw something in the weeds by the chimney, and walked over and poked at it with the toe of his shoe; it looked like a handle. He grabbed it and worked the thing loose from the clutch of weeds and red dirt. It was a cook pot.