Love and Lament Page 6

  For all the changes, though, Haw was rural to its dirt-road, pine-strewn, silage-scented core. A couple of thousand farms large and small—and nearly that many tenant farmers—raised crops and livestock. And the new things, when you stumbled upon them, took you by surprise.

  Old Hartsoe’s gristmill had been eclipsed by others—bigger mills with better equipment, some of them running two stone sets at a time. Now an old man, Hartsoe still had a ferocious energy, which he channeled into an obsession that had been steadily consuming him for the past several years—the creation of a perpetual-motion machine. O’Nora was on her way to see her grandfather, his mill an hour south of town. She had talked Mary Bet into coming with her, riding behind her in the saddle, on the promise that they wouldn’t go faster than a trot. There were three things that Mary Bet feared most, and they were germs, horses, and her grandfather Samuel. He had a stern, unyielding way with children—what little he said was in a nearly incomprehensible German accent that made him seem as distant as the prophets.

  O’Nora wanted to do something for her father, and at sixteen she also wanted to prove her independence. She offered to deliver some swamp-root tonic to their grandfather—really in the way of a peace offering from Cicero to his father, after Cicero had neglected to send for his weekly supply of flour and feed. To Samuel this could only mean disloyalty, never mind the fact that there were closer mills for his son to do business with.

  So O’Nora loaded her saddlebag with two bottles of tonic and a dozen big yellow onions—the kind her father ate raw for his health, as he had since the war. “Don’t be scared of Grandpa Samuel,” O’Nora told her little sister. “He won’t bite you.”

  Mary Bet pictured her grandfather baring his teeth at her, then thought of the big dapple-gray horse doing the same. She stood on the mounting box in the barn and let Siler help her into the saddle behind her sister, and off they went. It was a beautiful May morning, wild jonquils and sweet yellow jasmine blooming along the roadside. After a mile, O’Nora announced that there was a shortcut through the woods that Siler had showed her and she wanted to try it.

  “Maybe we should stick with the road,” Mary Bet said. She felt less confident of O’Nora than of Siler and Myrt, and not simply because they were older. O’Nora was apt to try something just for the sake of trying it, and then later find that it was not a good thing to do.

  “If it doesn’t work, we’ll come back,” O’Nora said. “It might be easy as pie, so what’s the harm?” At her command, Jackson stepped across the culvert on the left and up the little embankment and into a shadowy copse of trees, the white-flowering hawthorn and red-tinged crab apple as pretty as candy. Soon the woods gave way to a clearing of low weeds and stumps ringed by shreds of morning fog. A bluebird flitted from a hickory stump at their approach. It was quiet. “I don’t remember this,” O’Nora said. “This is new. But the trail must go on into those woods yonder.”

  “Don’t you think we should go back?”

  “Let’s go a little farther.” The horse continued, picking his way between log skids and plow clods, the torn land unreadable. After several minutes they came to the woods’ edge, but the trail had disappeared. O’Nora slid from the horse, smoothed out her skirt, and began studying the ground in all directions. Before them lay a dappled wood, carpeted with mandrakes, a fairy forest of little green umbrellas. Mary Bet knew it was no use to argue with her sister. “I maybe took the wrong turning,” O’Nora finally said. “We’ll cut through these woods and find it farther on.”

  Mary Bet gave her a hand up and after a while they were through the woods and out to a meadow. O’Nora looked all around.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Mary Bet said.

  “No, this is right. I remember that tree with the pitchfork-like.” O’Nora clicked her tongue and began posting, pushing Jackson into his fastest trot.

  Mary Bet kept quiet so as not to be thought timid. She wrapped her arms so tightly around her sister she felt she must be squeezing the air out. She pressed her cheek into the velvet of O’Nora’s riding jacket and she could hear her heart thumping along with the horse’s hooves. The thickets and deep woods flashed by as they jounced along, now so fast that her bottom no longer hurt—they went bounce, bounce, bounce in the saddle, and the woods moved as they veered left or right, sometimes downhill, then slowing to step through a creek, then back up again. A strand of O’Nora’s hair came loose and flew across Mary Bet’s face so that the green world smelled like her sister’s warm red-brown hair.

  Out into a field of switchgrass and meadow grass they went. There were doves calling off somewhere; Mary Bet remembered this distinctly, because she had always thought that doves sang only in the late afternoon, mourning the end of day. They were cantering through a field, the grassy ground moving under them faster and faster as they plunged down through a thicket, and O’Nora said, “Hold on!” as the horse leaped a stone fence. The wind felt sharp in their faces. O’Nora hooted a laugh and made Jackson go even faster, until they were bounding over the ground. O’Nora hated riding sidesaddle because you could never go this fast—she liked bareback best of all because, she said, “you can really feel the horse.” But she only did it when her father was not around.

  There was another dip and then a rise and then a sudden dip, and a fence that Mary Bet saw just as they started down. There was something about the gait that seemed wrong—they were going too fast, then they slowed way up as O’Nora tried to veer off to the side. At the last second she went ahead and made Jackson jump. Mary Bet clung to her sister, and she heard hooves strike the top stones as her insides rose and fell. And yet they were still sailing over the fence.

  When they landed on the other side, Mary Bet at first wondered why the trees were so high and moving in a circle instead of rushing by. She was still touching her sister, though only with one hand. Then she saw a horse standing a little ways off, shaking and snorting. It looked like Jackson, yet he was riderless. “It’s Jackson,” she said, laughing, as she pulled a little pinecone out of her hair. She realized that her back was sore because she was lying on a pinecone in a soft pile of needles.

  The sun angled through the skinny limbs overhead. Beyond them was blue sky. A bobwhite called far off in the woods, and the wind disappeared in Mary Bet’s ears. O’Nora’s ankle crossed Mary Bet’s, and when Mary Bet sat up she saw her sister lying faceup, her arms out as if she were flying. Her head was turned away. Mary Bet crawled around and saw that her sister’s face was still, the eyes closed, the jaw slack. She kissed her forehead. “Wake up, O’Nora,” she said, “please.” Not a whisper of breath came from her sister, nor a ripple of movement, nor was there any sound but the sighing of wind in the trees. It blew a loose lock of hair across O’Nora’s rosy cheek.

  Mary Bet began crying. But she angrily wiped the tears off her face and stood up and started calling “Help!” After a while she began walking. She finally came to a road, and after a few minutes an old Negro cart driver came along and went with her back across the fields, his cart bumping slowly lest a wheel break in a burrow. “No use in hurryin’ just to be late,” he said.

  It took a lifetime.

  All the way home, the man tried to comfort her, telling her of his wife’s many sorrows and saying, “It’s just a cryin’ shame, missy, a sweet girl like that.” Jackson plodded along with the driver’s mule, and all Mary Bet could do was stare at the driver’s bare toes sticking out through his shoes and wonder why one of his big toes had a cracked yellow toenail that angled off his toe while the others looked fine. She wondered if it hurt, and she wondered why Negroes had brown nails. She wished she could have cracked yellow toenails if it would make O’Nora well. And when she thought of O’Nora and glanced back into the cart and saw her curled up between burlap sacks, she prayed that she would wake up by the time they got home.

  When they arrived, Mary Bet and the black man were praying aloud together, and she couldn’t remember who had started it. Yet when she saw her house she rea
lized that her own grief was not what frightened her the most nor held her in the most suspense. She thought she could not bear to tell her father.

  Siler was the first person she found. She pulled his hand because she did not want to make the word for “dead.” She would show him and let him decide what to do.

  Mary Bet held Siler’s hand through the whole funeral, and it felt to her as though she could never let go. Cicero got the stonecutter to carve a bas-relief hand in the stone, with a finger pointing the way to heaven. The stonecutter had a number of new sayings. None of them seemed just right for O’Nora, but Cicero picked out, “None knew thee but to love thee,” engraved in cursive. He decided it was after all perfect. After the service he had Essie strip O’Nora’s bed and bring him the sheets. “These is good sheets,” she said, shaking her head at the waste, and at her employer’s impulsive, erratic grief.

  “Let the day perish that I was born,” Cicero said, taking the bundled bedding. “Let the stars of the twilight be dark.” He took the sheets out into the backyard and tore them into strips, then placed them on the fireplace where Essie boiled the laundry, shoved the cauldron to the side, and burned them. Then he ordered Essie to scrub the floor of the girls’ room.

  The gray-haired servant got on her swollen knees and scrubbed the floorboards to wipe away the curse. “At least he didn’ tear his own close,” she said, hoping Mary Bet would hear. “Ought to be grateful for the livin’,” she said, eyeing Mary Bet and pitying the motherless girl. She shook her head and continued with her work, pausing every so often to glance up to Mary Bet. Essie’s lower lip nearly covered the upper, the way it curled over, hiding an almost bare gum—her ponderous slowness reminded Mary Bet of a large turtle. She liked the comforting slowness of Essie and her heavy smell of laundry and cooking and sweat; besides Myrtle, Essie was the only woman in the house now, with any regularity. She was tall and had heavy eyebrows that knitted together when she was serious and opened out when she was making a joke. Mary Bet could talk to her and not have to think about O’Nora, and the thrown glass, and the soft rabbit that loped through her dreams and followed her in daylight shadows.

  Though she was too old for imaginary friends or guardian angels, she knelt before the small fireplace in her bedroom that evening, the low-banked fire making the angels glow and seem to move upon the black iron. There were two of them—surely enough to watch over herself and Myrtle Emma. You couldn’t pray to graven idols, but you could pray in front of them and so she said her prayers right there on the hearth bricks.

  Cicero aired the room out, as he had done after the other deaths. And he went back to work, his family now down to four.

  CHAPTER 6

  1900

  IT WAS JUST before Siler was to go off to Morganton that he and Mary Bet became at last good friends. She had school friends, but she had always preferred her own family. Now with O’Nora gone, she and Siler, five years apart, were the youngest. Siler would’ve had trouble making friends in the village even if he were outgoing, which he was not particularly. At home he would do and say funny things that made Mary Bet laugh, yet in public he behaved like a trim little soldier, his watchful, deep-set eyes ever alert and his thrust-out chin daring anyone to make fun. He wore a boater tilted back on his head in the cocky way the baseball players did. He tried out for the Hartsoe City team and made right field, his strong arm cutting down many a would-be run. He was considered friendly and handsome, but, above all, quiet, deaf, and a loner. Mary Bet noticed him more now that he was leaving.

  They went together to the Fourth of July celebration. The Hartsoe City Concert Band was marching by, the trombones and drums pounding excitement into the chests of the bystanders, the dignitaries’ carriages draped in bunting, the flags, dipping and rising, carried by the Masonic Lodge members, stiff in their starched white shirts and dark ties, stepping proudly along. A midget named Gus Hightower marched by holding a large flag, beside six-foot-five-inch farmer Richard Wren, who waved a small flag. Then came the veterans, some in uniform, some on horseback, with swords strapped to their waists, and as the crowd cheered Mary Bet felt a strange sadness that had been with her for days now. She had been feeling out of sorts in a way that was new and disturbing. And then she decided to go home, and she wished she had brought a friend other than Siler. She made her way out of the crowd of mustached men in linen suits and bow ties, women in flower-pile hats and long-sleeved white blouses, then hurried back to her house.

  It felt as if she had sat on a wet chair—why did she have to wear white today? Well, there was nothing she could do about it now. Myrt had showed her what to do with the sanitary napkins, so she was not unprepared. She washed her hands, letting the water trickle down past her wrists, the way the Hebrews did long ago. She laughed at herself in the mirror—it’s just me, she thought. No more a woman than I was yesterday. Her breasts were growing, her hips taking shape, yet she was still short, still unsure of herself. No one at school thought so, of course—at the new public school, divided into two rooms and attended by fifteen children, she was a smart aleck, always quicker to answer than anybody and reading books that the others could not understand. They thought her strange. One teacher told her not to be so proud of herself, and for the rest of the year she quit raising her hand until, her mind wandering during class to the characters in her book, she was thought as dull as the others.

  When her father heard about it, he came in and spoke with the teacher, who told him that his daughter was of average intelligence. Cicero said nothing. He went home and told Mary Bet to answer up loud and clear in school. “I shouldn’t be proud,” she said. “Not if you don’t have anything to be proud of,” he replied.

  She wanted to tell someone about what had just happened to her. She wanted to open the window and shout, “My monthly started!” She looked at herself again, tucked a loose piece of hair, readjusted a clasp on the back of her head, and thought, “I’m not bad-looking.” She shook her head at her vanity, staring into her own black, impenetrable eyes. “Not pretty,” she whispered, “just not bad to look at.”

  The next week was sweltering hot, a hundred degrees, and there was talk of a group going down to Hackett’s Mill on the Rocky River for a picnic and swim, but then somebody suggested they go to Hartsoe’s. Mary Bet and Siler were against this plan, but Myrtle Emma said she wanted to go see her grandfather. After all, he was their last grandparent alive. That he had lately become obsessed with perpetual motion should not prevent them from making a visit.

  Myrt and a friend named Sallie Wood were going in the Woods’ surrey, with room for four more. Mary Bet was not much on swimming in places where there might be snakes, but she was not about to be left out. Myrt was going away to Wilkesboro to teach at the end of the summer—a prospect that, along with her brother’s imminent departure, scared Mary Bet more than snakes. Now twenty, Myrt told her father she needed to go out in the world and do some good and make a living. Cicero could only shrug mutely at the diminishment of his family, vowing silently that Mary Bet would never leave him.

  Mary Bet and Siler squeezed in on the two seats, along with Sallie, Myrt, and Sallie’s two cousins, visiting from Rocky Mount. The mill was a journey of about an hour, during which Mary Bet discovered that Sallie Wood’s cousins, a boy and a girl—straddling her in age—were unimpressed with anything they had seen in Haw County. They and Mary Bet were on the backseat, and Mary Bet pointed out some daisies growing next to a patch of little sunflowers. She said, “That looks like eggs and suns. It looks like pastries you could eat nearly.”

  The boy sniffed, and the girl, sitting in the middle, didn’t change her sullen expression. Mary Bet wished she was up front with the others. “I can drive a horse and buggy,” she said.

  “Who can’t?” the boy asked. Siler turned around and glanced from one person to the other, Mary Bet smiling at him with eyes that she knew he could interpret. He shot a stern look at the boy and girl, but they seemed not to notice.

  “I can ride s
idesaddle and astride,” Mary Bet said.

  “I could ride bareback when I was four years old,” the boy answered, kicking the seat in front of him.

  “Well, I can wring a chicken’s neck,” Mary Bet retorted. “I like doing it too.”

  The boy was quiet a moment. “I don’t even like chickens,” he said. The girl laughed quietly at her own thoughts. Another mile rolled by, the two young women talking in the front seat and the shadows of pines across the rutted road alternating with the clear spaces where there were green-and-gold fields of knee-high tobacco and corn and wheat and hay and sometimes cotton, not yet flowered.

  The boy pulled a tin from his pocket, took a pinch of snuff, and sniffed it into his nose. He offered some to his sister, but she shook her head. Then he held it over to Mary Bet. She too shook her head. “Go on and try it,” he said. “It clears your head right up.”

  Sallie Wood turned around. “Leave her alone, Jacob,” she said.

  But Mary Bet reached into the tin and took a big pinch like she’d seen the old men doing down at her father’s store. She held it to her nose and smelled the sweet dank foresty odor, and then she breathed some in. It tickled her nose so that she sneezed. But Jacob had been right—it felt as though cool air filled her entire head. Siler turned and gave Mary Bet the same stern look he’d given the other children, but he took some snuff himself. The young women politely refused. “Not too much,” Myrt warned her sister. “It’ll make you sick.”

  When they got there they saw no one about, except Samuel’s last remaining black man, whose name was Ezekiel Hallelujah Monday. He was known as Zeke, and he had once been Samuel’s property. The other handful of slaves had drifted away as soon as the war was over, including Zeke’s own mother. Zeke was older than Samuel, which put him somewhere over ninety. Still, he came out of the barn when the carriage pulled up and greeted the arrivals with a toothless smile, or what appeared to be. He was wearing a shirt of blue homespun, butternut trousers, and a straw hat. He unhitched the horse and led him to a tree, where he watered him, then curried and brushed and rubbed him down.