by Jeffrey Lent
“I don’t understand much of this.”
She looked at him quick then. Again like his father. She said, “That’s not my fault.”
Prudence crossed over the lawn to meet them and the women led him in through the back entryshed filled with tools on a bench one side of the walkway and room to stack firewood the other side and through a heavy door into the kitchen. They sat with him there, not in the parlor like a guest but around the pineplank kitchen table. Abigail filled glasses of water from a gravity line running into the sink and Prudence set out a plate of lacy-edged molasses cookies that none of them touched although Foster drank off half his water when first it was handed to him. Then he told them without being asked what had happened to his father, adding no conjecture but simply and briefly what was known to have taken place. What seemed to him all that was proper to say. All he was quite sure his father would want him to say. The women sat watching him and he looked from one to the other as he spoke. Prudence it seemed to him was most struck by this news, her face in a constant working tremble. Abigail sat up against the table, her hands flat before her. Several times he saw questions run across her face but she remained silent.
He finished by mentioning the property in New Hampshire, the deed in his name, that his father had left to him. He did not want these women fearing he expected anything from them. He could take care of himself. Then, as means of explaining his presence here, he mentioned again finding the letters from Abigail to his father.
“You knew nothing about us? He never spoke of his family?”
“Abby, wouldn’t of been Jamie to’ve done such a thing.”
“I was asking young Foster here, Sister.”
“He slipped out that door the middle of the night and never once in his life looked back. You know it and so do I. There’s no need to torment the boy.”
“I’m tormenting nothing but your imagination. I was asking a question was all.”
“Actually,” Foster said, “Pop never said anything about family at all. But then I never asked. Although I seem to remember that he didn’t have any family. That they were all dead. Somewhere back in my mind there’s that.”
Abigail interrupted. “Living and breathing the both of us as you can see. And your grandfather, his own father, alive and mostly hearty too until just two years this past March.”
“The thing is—” Foster faltered. “The thing that’s hard to explain is after my mother and sister died we just didn’t talk about whatever used to be. I think that was a lot of it. Also, he worked for years in one of the big hotels over there, the Sinclair. Was a manager. But that trade’s slowed awful the past years and there’s lots of men without work. But Pop had a liquor business going. A pretty good one I guess. And it wasn’t like people didn’t know what he did. But still we kept close-mouthed. I think it was all just habit. And so no, he never did tell me about you people here. I didn’t have any idea. And I still don’t. I don’t know a thing about what’s going on here or who you two are or any of it.”
He stopped himself. As if he’d gone too far and still not far enough. Both women watching him: Abigail detached, amused, his father’s hawk eyes floating out of her head; Prudence back in her chair, slumped a little as if at rest, studying him.
Foster stood and went around the table and filled his glass again and drank it down and refilled it. As he did this Prudence stood and waited for him and told him to come follow her and they went down a hall to a parlor door, Abigail following. The parlor sofa was of old dark wood with a funereal blue-black upholstery. Heavy drapes of the same material flanked the windows. The rest of the furniture was even older: a spindle-backed Boston rocker, a set of slender-legged tables, a small dovetailed blanket chest, a newspaper stand by the rocker. Prudence took up a gas lamp from one of the tables and lighted it and carried it to the mantel behind a parlor stove with ornate fenders and sculpted legs. She set the lamp beside an eight-day clock and stepped back to let Foster come close. On the wall above the mantel was a double portrait in an oval frame.
He looked at the man first and quickly. Young, stern-faced to the camera, deepset dark eyes sadder than his age, a thick burst of dark hair. But it was the woman. Dark-skinned with a wiry rage of hair pulled back away from her face. A Negro woman. He could not tell her age but she was young. Even in the faded dunyellow of the portrait her mouth was a dark lustrous fruit upon her face, her nose hawked from the bridge down to her nostrils. Her pale-colored eyes reared up as if her gaze intended to travel far beyond that moment and wait—wary forever for whomever it might need to meet. Ferocious eyes, he thought. Then he looked back at the man and decided his eyes were less sad than keenly pitched also, as if he had determined to face the world squarely and then gaze beyond it to some world of his own making.
“What,” Foster asked, still looking at the portrait, “are their names?”
“Norman and Leah Pelham. Your grandparents.”
“Mother,” Abigail said, “was a Mebane from Carolina. Her maiden name before she met your grandfather.”
“That name don’t mean a thing,” Prudence said. “It was just the name of the man she ran off from.”
“He was more than that.”
“Hush that,” Prudence said.
Foster lifted both hands and rested the tips of his fingers on the mantelpiece. Not ready yet to look away from the couple on the wall. Feeling sweat running down his sides with his upraised arms.
Behind him Prudence said, “He’s the spit of Father.”
He took his eyes from the Negro woman and looked at the man. He could not see himself.
Abigail said, “Father went off to the war in eighteen and sixty-two. He went, scared and frightened, swept along by what was going on around him until that became what was happening to him. He went because it was where he had to go. He was just a year older than you are when he set off. All he’d ever tell me, when I’d ask him about it, was that he felt he didn’t have a choice.”
Foster turned then and looked at her. Abigail standing back in the center of the room, watching him. He said, “I can understand that.”
She smiled at him. “Oh yes,” she said. “I imagine you can.”
Prudence said, “He served right on from ‘sixty-two until the end. Was wounded two times, the first at Gettysburg. They don’t brag about it because they wasn’t that kind of men but it was the boys of the Second Vermont that broke the back of that battle, the way I heard it. It was them tore into Pickett’s flank when he made his famous charge and made a hole there and that was when the whole thing turned. He took a sabre wound to his right arm high up. It cut through the muscle right to the bone. He was in hospital with that but went right back after he got out. He could’ve come home. But he didn’t. Second time was right there at the very end, the spring of ‘sixty-five. They were down in southern Virginia chasing after the ragtag ends of Lee’s army and some of them rebel boys threw some shots back at them, a couple rounds from some little artillery gun. Tore up a tree beside where Father was crouched and a piece of the tree struck right into his head. I don’t know what happened then, he was never sure whether he wandered off and got separated or maybe was left behind. But he got lost. He didn’t recall any of it. When he woke up there was a runaway slave girl taking care of him in the woods. That was Mother.”
“So she nursed him,” Foster said, “and he brought her back here.”
Abigail snapped her eyes on him. “Something you must understand. What Father said about our mother. That she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life.”
He turned back to the portrait and studied the woman. Yes, he decided, he could see she was beautiful. And guessed also if a man saw her that way, living in the flesh, he would feel all sorts of other ways about her as well.
Prudence said, “That old sabre wound bothered him in his later years. Weather would go wet and cold, it would stiffen up on him. He could tell two-three days ahead it was going to change. That wasn’t just his arm; all those o
ld boys read the weather like a book. But he’d use the arm to explain it. Say, It’ll come rain by Monday. That sort of thing. Now I think about it, I guess that wound bothered him right along, but as a younger man he wouldn’t speak of it, wouldn’t let it slow him down. Father was like that. No complaint out of him. Tough as ash-wood he was.”
So Foster studied the image of the ash-wood tough man. That this old carrot-colored woman claimed he was the spit of. Seen on the street, Foster would not claim him as blood. Even as he peered at the image and began to see how someone could pronounce that he and this man resembled each other. All of this at the same time feeling the eyes of these two strange old women upon him. Taking all of him in, head to toe, in a way he could not do for himself. And he considered this, still looking at the portrait of his grandfather. Straightbacked beside the Negro woman. His grandmother.
The world, he thought, moves too fast. Oh Poppy. Daddy.
He turned back to the room, the two women, his hands swept behind his back where one hand clenched the other. “He died,” he said, “just a couple years ago. What happened to her?” Caught on a slick boulder midriver in flood he launched out toward the next. Slick-wet mossback.
The women flurried. They did not move and even their eyes only cast for split seconds before landing back upon him. But still he saw the tension rise and sweep their bodies. As if they had been holding themselves some other way since first sighting him. It was Prudence who spoke. And her voice was kind and very sad. “She died a long time ago. Your father was just a little chap. I’d think her dying was most of what he might recall of her.”
“He never recalled anything.”
“To you.”
“I was all there was.”
Abigail said, “And the rest of us. That your father chose to ignore. His own father.” Then she shrugged. “Sister and myself as well.”
“She’s angry about that,” Prudence said. “But then she’s angry over most everything.”
“I see things clear-eyed is all. Unlike some.”
“The world is a great huge stone that don’t care how many times you hurl yourself against it. It just sits there. You might’s well sit back and laugh along aside it.”
“If I see fit I will shriek with my final breath.”
“No one doubts it, Sister. No one at all.”
Foster was alarmed. He recalled Glow’s big worried eyes turned on him during his night-grieving over his father. He spoke, and even as he spoke he realized he was breaking into a long conversation started years ago and one in which both women took part perhaps without even being aware of it. A mold of language so old grown between them it served as conduit for other, more remarkable, less easily spoken words. But his own were out. “All I’ve done is upset everyone. I shouldn’t ever have come.”
The women went silent, very still.
Then Prudence said, “You did the right thing coming. I am upset. Years since I determined I’d not see or hear of my brother again until word of his death. But thinking that and this day are two different things.”
Abigail said, “You shouldn’t pay much attention to us, young man. Two queer old ladies living alone together so long when we’re not arguing we’re finishing each other’s sentences and neither one of us ever noticing one way or the other. But you, maybe you’re thinking you really hadn’t ought to’ve come. You’ve got reason to feel that way. Because we’re much more than the two old maiden aunts you must’ve pictured. Your father left more than us behind, left some part of himself as well. Because he could pass.”
Prudence said, “You could too. You’d of done fine, away.”
“No,” Abigail said. “I could not have. Because I could no more step away from my people than you could ever change that ratty old hair of yours. But Jamie, he could float away from himself like dandelion floss.”
The eight-day clock chimed four. Fine fluted bells peaceful, a minor beauty breaking the tension. Prudence turned her frown, her tightened mouth, from her sister to the clock. Then she looked at Foster and back to her sister.
“I’ve got cows want milking.” And turned, her shoulders tight and broad in the old sweater as she walked from the room, her gumboots a soft slap on the hall runner.
Abigail raised her eyebrows at Foster. Her lips pursed in amusement, not a smile. She said, “What she means is that it’s time for me to get out and take care of the hens and feed the horses and check on the ewes while she does the milking. As if I wouldn’t do it if she didn’t remind me. Because, you see, she loves doing it. She knows I do my share but there’s no love in it for me; it’s just what needs to get done. I warned you; two old ladies living alone, gone off a little queer.”
Foster grinned at her. Crossed his arms over his chest. “Can I help?”
“Can you help? No. You cannot help. Even if you were farm-raised it’s not for you to do. Pru and I each have our chores and we do them and walk together at the end of each one’s work up here to the house. What I would do, I was you, is eat that plate of cookies sitting in the kitchen and then take those dogs cooped up in that fancy automobile for a walk up the mountain. Let them run themselves out so they won’t worry over the hens. There’s a rough lane, goes up through the sugarbush. Do that and come down and we’ll sit down to supper.”
Foster studied her a moment. Then said, “What did you mean, that Pop could pass?”
“Pass? Pass for white.”
When he came out to the edge of the sugarbush he stopped to look down at the farm below, the two dogs mostly at heel, Lovey trotting in her steady over-the-ground pace and Glow worn down with exuberance, both happy to pause there with him. Late summer gold late afternoon light, the sky blue near to black. Some goldenrod stalks blooming in the tall meadow grass grown up at the wood’s edge. Purple asters.
They’d hiked hard, not just up through the sugarbush but beyond that as well up through the spruce and hardwood ledges on the rough ground above the sprawl of the old maple canopies. Dogs pent up, released from the trap of the Chrysler into the wild unknown scent-land. The boy hiking hard after to keep up with them and to let himself just work. Then there were the birds. More pa’ts than he could hope for in a week over to Bethlehem. Young birds, still not fully broken up from the spring broods. He thought of Andy Flood: “A passel of pa’tridge.” Glow had the right name, he decided, standing looking over the bowl of valley. She’d burned through the spruce and ledges in a constant back-turning series of figure eights, her tail a rotor that would only stop to arch when she locked on yet another young partridge. She’d forgot all about chickens, he guessed.
He’d come across an old platform for sawing logs, the frame still sound but the sawdust pile beneath low, sunk with rot and years of not being used. Young popples grew up through the frame of the platform. He’d stood there, in a small draw in the woods, big spruce surrounding almost choking out the old skid-trace, knowing this was something of his grandfather’s. He stood there a long moment, thinking something might come to him of the man. But only the big mute timbers, notched together by axe, not a nail to the structure. And the considerable spread of rotted sawdust. Some kind of work he could not know. Some kind of man he could not know but felt flicker inside him. The spit of him, he thought. He’d hitched up his pants and moved on, whistling the dogs, thinking, We’ll see.
Now he stood in the opening up over the farm. His body sweet with ache. His mind a sweet drink of water. Disturbed by the twin stones of the sisters dropped into it. Almost loath to descend the hill, to take them up again, to break the woods-peace over him. But even as he thought this watching one figure move outside the barns, driving slow-footed cattle before her. And wanted also to approach again, to walk down there and sit with both of them and learn whatever he could, everything he could. And not, he realized, because it was the only place to come to. But because it was someway all part of him as well. And he scanned the hillside below, the close-cropped sheep pasture with the sheep spread across in the last light of day, their heads do
wn as they moved in one direction together. And saw the stone-walled enclosure set in the middle of the pasture with a single grown-wild apple tree against one wall and over the opposing wall a tangled joyous trove of roses also long since grown wild. And between the walls in the plain upright wilting late-summer grass the simple slabs upthrust as if determined out of the earth. Each with its own shadow.
So he laid a hand either side of him atop the heads of his waiting dogs and cut down across the pasture to pass through the granite gateposts where no gate hung into the small graveyard.
The stones all simple granite, the only deviation being some had rounded corners at the tops. Most were blackened and the chisel-work softened so that he had to at times lay his fingers onto the stone to trace out the letters or numerals. A full half of the markers were small, with the dates spread over short years, some even with only a single date. So many infants dead. Great-great uncles and aunts. The freshest stone, still bright clear-white granite with sharply incised engraving, was his grandfather. Norman. Eighty years of age. Second Vermont Regiment, Grand Army of the Republic. Beside that the other most recent stone was his grandmother. Leah Pelham. No birth date was listed but for the year 1848 and then the day in November of 1890 of her death. She was only forty-two years old. Below this was the inscription She Could Not Stay. He squatted there, studying this. Then rose and wandered through the remainder of the stones. James. Earl. Amos. Osborn. James again. David. Henry. A James who was clearly his great-grandfather. Died 1864. And women: Charlotte, Jane, Estelle, Ellen Ann. And beside his great-grandfather, Cora Pelham. Died 1886.
He lay on his side propped on an elbow, the late sun slanting over him, the air still and losing its warmth. The shadows long, flowing one stone into the next, leaving only aisles of light down the rows of grave markers. The dogs stretched out nearby against the heat of the earth. From below the bawling of a cow. She could not stay. His grandmother. The Negro woman. The same age at death as his own father. He tried to picture that, gauging his father against the unknown woman. He could not do it. Could only keep thinking, What does that make me? A question he had no answer for. Negro? Some part clearly but what part was that? How to know? And then, what to do with that. Pass for white. Pass for what? Pass? As if it were some kind of school. And then finally, growing cool as the earth itself cooled, back to She could not stay. Recalling those ferocious eyes in the plain front-faced portrait. She could not stay. Why not?