Oral History (9781101565612) (10 page)

“Don't get on my yard, now,” Pricey Jane says, but it's too late, and Eli has tracked the swirls. You can't keep nothing nice, thinks Pricey Jane, but she doesn't really believe it. In a month, she will turn eighteen.

The chickens are coming up to the back of the cabin now, and she sends Eli around with a panful of dried corn to scatter while she sets Dory up on a pallet in the floor and makes some cornbread and cuts some sidemeat off the piece of it hanging there by the chimney and fries it. She nurses Dory again. When Eli comes in, she feeds him and then she eats too, cornbread and sidemeat, and drinks some milk. Dory plays with the wooden clothespins in front of the fire, turning them in her hands. When Eli was Dory's age, he was creeping everywhere, but Dory sits still and looks at her play-pretties one by one and smiles right back when you speak. Then Pricey Jane pours her milk in ajar and puts a clean cloth over the top of it and sets the jar in the corner to clabber. She'll churn first thing in the morning. She sits up with Eli until he falls asleep and then she gets some more wood and puts in on the fire for the night.
Where is Almarine anyway, what can he be doing, away off down the trace?

Pricey Jane can barely remember Black Rock. She recalls the blacksmith's sooty mustache, and purple feathers in the lady's hat.
What can he be doing, to take him so long?
Yet Pricey Jane smiles. She goes out on the porch to set for a spell. Her breasts hurt, full of milk, and she opens the front of her dress and fans herself with her hand. Rhoda said it's time to ease up some now, and wean her to a cup. Don't never wake them up to feed them, Rhoda said. A cool breeze comes up from no-place and her breasts leak a little. She wipes at the watery milk with her hand and tastes it experimentally, giggles, and makes a face. Too sweet. But the throbbing hurt in her breasts has stopped. Pricey Jane sits on the porch while the dark comes on, until the cedar trees are just a blacker patch against the black of the night all around the cabin. No moon yet. And the air is cool; it's always cool up here, even now in dog days.
Down below they're burning up
, thinks Pricey Jane. Away across the long valley she can see two fires on the side of Black Rock Mountain. Might be hunters out there. Might be Paris Blankenship's place, she knows he lives that way, Almarine said so. Almarine and Paris growed up as friends. But Pricey Jane has never laid eyes on Paris, nor has she crossed back over that mountain since Almarine brought her here.

Tree frogs and crickets call out in the night; she likes the way they sound. A little wind comes up and sighs through the cedar trees. She likes this sound, too. Pricey Jane sits surrounded by Hoot Owl Holler like the fall of her mother's hair; and after a while, the moon comes sailing out of the clouds over Snowman Mountain, a slip of a moon like one of Eli's leaf-boats, sailing in and out of the puffy silver clouds. Pricey Jane stands up and goes in the cabin, closing out the night noises of Hoot Owl Holler and the long strange sound of the cow.
Oh he'll be home tomorrow
, she knows he will. But Pricey Jane feels weak suddenly, and kind of sick-like, as she bolts the heavy door and goes to bed.

It was nearly noon the next day when Almarine's heavily laden horse came picking its slow accustomed way up the trace to Hoot Owl Holler, picking its careful way with Almarine slouched over and dozing. Duck ran along by his side. Almarine had been up all night playing a little poker with the boys at Joe Johnson's store. That's as far as he'd got and no farther, on his way coming home from Black Rock. They were in the back room dealing when he came in. Even then he might not have stayed, in spite of his skill at the game, even then he would have come on home to Pricey Jane if Harve Justice had not started riding him the way they all did about the way it was with him and Pricey Jane. Harve asked if his gypsy-girl had put him on a leash or maybe under a spell, or maybe he was still under a spell from the first one. Now nobody ever mentioned
her
. Harve had been drinking some or he would not have said it, and Almarine had been drinking too or he would not have let it get by; in another mood, or in later years when he had darkened so much because of what was to come, Almarine would have simply killed him. But he sat down at the table instead, and the cards came his way as he knew they would, as everything came his way lately, and he wouldn't quit until he had taken every cent Harve had on him.

“Cleaned his plow,” said Luther Wade, standing with Almarine on the porch of the store that morning in the pearly faint dawn watching Harve stumble off down the trail toward Hurricane and that sharp-tongued woman of his and all those gals and that wall-eyed son. Almarine grinned, watching Harve go.

“Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds, I knowed you of old. You done robbed my pockets of silver and gold,” Luther sang out to the morning. But Harve never turned around. Luther mounted his horse and rode off then, and Almarine stretched and yawned. It was like he could feel the light cool dew coating his face. He guessed he had taught Harve a lesson after all. But he ought to be on his way.

Almarine packed up his horse and left without waking Joe, the store wide open behind him in the early slanting sun. He was pleased with what he carried in his packs—white sugar, coffee, tobacco, scissors, a new razor, a hammer, sweet-smelling store-bought soap for the baby and Pricey Jane, a string of rosy beads for Pricey Jane. And newspapers, too, a magazine—he liked to watch how she'd look through them, pointing at the pictures, making those soft clucking sounds in her throat and giggling to beat the band. Then she'd make her a flour paste and put them up so careful on the wall, it tickled Almarine how she kept everything just so. Anytime the papers got sooty, why down they'd come, and he'd better have some others there to take their place.

Now Almarine's head bobs up and down as the horse picks its way up the rocky trace. Luther's voice goes along in his mind.
Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds, I knowed you so well, you lost me my woman and done sent my soul to hell.
Almarine grins, dozing.

But he sits up straight as he passes through the stand of pine trees, as he hears his cow for the first time.

“Lord God,” Almarine says, kicking hard, urging his horse ahead. When they break out of the pines, galloping now along the short level space at the mouth of the creek, that's when he sees the buzzards wheeling in their circles overhead, black wings outstretched and never moving, flying circles over his holler. No smoke comes from his chimney. “Lord God,” he says again. But getting up there takes forever—there's no way to hurry that trail.

Finally he comes to the cow, lying on her side with her belly distended and her large brown eyes already gone filmy and blank. She's still breathing, he sees, but that's all. Sometimes she makes that sound. Duck circles her, barking, the hair on his back standing up.

Almarine gives a whoop so loud it come back from all three mountains. “Pricey Jane!” he hollers. “Pricey Jane!”

Insects buzz through the hot yellow day and a black and yellow butterfly settles for a second on the cow's belly.

“Eli!” Almarine hollers, and he hears nothing, and then he's back up on that horse and gone ahead and finally he hears the baby crying in a way she's never cried, a thin little wail like a mewling cat.

“Pricey Jane!” he yells. The cabin door is still bolted from inside so he kicks it open, his heart banging hard in his chest and all of this happening, it seems to him, in some clear awful light that renders it both real and not real, happening but not to him, not to him and Pricey Jane and their family, and not in Hoot Owl Holler.

The air in here is foul. She lies on her back on the tick by the fire with one thin arm extended out and dropping beside the bed, her fingers open, her head turned a bit to the side as if in sleep, her body curled on the star-flower quilt. Purple flowers, yellow stars.
She must of gotten up, she must of pulled up the quilt, she must of gone and laid back down.
He sees the churn where she pulled it out, where she started churning before she lay back down.

“Pricey Jane.” Almarine kneels by the bed and pulls her to him, shaking her frail shoulders, but her head rolls over to the side and her mouth drops open and slack. Her breath smells like something dead. But anyway she's still breathing, and a faint blue pulse in her temple beats on when he smooths back the hair from her wild white face. Dark circles ring her eyes. Finally she opens them. She cannot speak but something seems to show there, for an instant, in her eyes. He thinks she knows him. Almarine lays her back gently and whirls toward the other bed, but Eli lies so still there, and the skin of his cheeks has gone cold. Dory's crying fills the cabin. The smell is everywhere. Almarine grabs Dory up out of the cradle, wraps her in her quilt like an Indian baby, and holding her tight he runs back out of the cabin. Throwing his packs to the ground he rides one-armed holding Dory, faster than anybody has ever ridden down that trace before, and off on the trail toward Hurricane Mountain. He hollers it out to everybody he sees. Dory is crying and crying. Miraculously, the sun shines still; and it's still summer, it's still afternoon.

Later Almarine will not remember how he almost rode his horse to death until bloody-mouthed and foam-flecked it buckled to its knees not thirty feet from where he was headed, Granny Younger's cabin on Hurricane Mountain. He will not remember how Granny lay in the bed with her face turned toward the wall, or how Rhoda Hibbitts told him to get on back, that Granny was sick and maybe dying, or how Rhoda took a second look at him and jumped up and then Granny Younger looked too and got up out of her sickbed and took off the white socks she had put on for dying, her burial socks, and put on her boots instead, to go back to Hoot Owl Holler with Almarine. He will not remember how Rhoda rang and rang the bell, summoning Bill Horn to take Dory over to Peter Paul Ramey's cabin for a spell so she can get some titty off Peter Paul's wife who is nursing a baby herself, or how they sent a Justice boy hell-for-leather toward Black Rock for young Doc Story, or how the Davenports came and strapped a bed-tick onto a little sled and strapped Granny on top of that, hitching up their mule to pull her along, three Davenport men and a bunch of children running behind, and the smoke from Granny's pipe floating out blue behind them in the hot still air. Rhoda Hibbitts and her daughters came last. They marched along carrying everything they could think of; they looked like they meant to stay.

Almarine remembered none of that as he rode a Davenport mule ahead of them all, holding fast in his mind's eye to the scene that lay before him, or behind him, the scene that would never leave him again: the look that came into Pricey Jane's eyes when she saw who he was, the way her head drooped slack to the side, the feel of his boy's cold cheek, how the dog barked and how the buzzards, slow and graceful, made those awful circles in the blue sky over his holler.

He beat them all back by nearly an hour, and nothing had changed. She was still alive.

The Davenports paused with the sled to let Granny observe the cow.

Granny's eyes squinched tight together, her mouth bunched around her pipe.

“Dew pizen,” she said. “I knowed as much.”

Granny closed her eyes and lay back against the bed-tick. “Giddyap,” said the Davenports.

“How much farther is it?” asked the older Hibbitts girl, Rose, and the younger one said she was so tired she was about to die. All the little Davenport children had stopped following them back at the Hurricane turn-off. “I wisht I'd of gone back too,” the younger one, Louella, said.

“Hush your mouth,” said their mother, picking up her skirts as she walked a wide circle around the dying cow, with both of them following behind. Rhoda lowered her head and prayed, approaching Almarine's cabin. She knew—they all knew—about dew poison, and they all knew it had no cure. Either you lived through it or you died. Rhoda had had an uncle to die of it, over in West Virginia. This was why you had to watch where a milk-cow grazed, keep her out of cow-stomps and shady swamps and ferny places so she wouldn't get took milk-sick like this one did. Anybody who drank off a milk-sick cow, or ate her butter, would die too.

Granny had had the Davenports drag the churn out on the porch by the time Rhoda got up to the cabin; Granny was lifting the dasher to see. The milk, silver-black, dripped down from the wooden dasher and would not foam. “Lord sweet Jesus,” Rhoda prayed, but Granny threw the dasher down in the churn and stomped back inside chewing her pipe. “Git me some water and bile it,” she yelled back out to Rhoda, who had to do it herself because her daughters were crying out in the yard. They were not good for a thing! The eldest Davenport sat on the porch and commenced whittling while the other ones fed the stock. Across the long valley, over Black Rock Mountain, the sun rode low in the sky and when the Hibbitts girls had stopped crying, they remarked on how good the view was from up here, how pretty the sunset looked. The Hibbitts girls had mousy-pale hair and pock-marks all over their faces. Rhoda set them to peeling sweet potatoes; she had a lot of folks to feed, and a long hard evening ahead.

“Cool up here,” the eldest Davenport said, whittling.

“Wouldn't never know twas dog days,” the youngest one said, and they looked at each other then, thinking the same thing, how blood won't clot in dog days, or a sore heal up, or a bone mend.

“Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide my soul in thee,” Rhoda sang at the door, to nobody in particular, and then she said, “You-unses come eat.” Rhoda was a big woman, running to fat but sturdy, a bosom like a shelf beneath her face. Nobody messed with Rhoda. The Davenports all stood up, and she fed them—sweet potatoes and sallet and sidemeat—and she tried to feed Almarine too who wouldn't eat or leave the bedside of Pricey Jane. Louella and Rose stared down hard at Almarine there by Pricey Jane's bed-tick as they came past, but he never raised his head or looked their way. Louella and Rose stared as hard as they could at his fair hair spread on the bed-tick, at the heave of his shoulders, as if they knew somehow already that this was as close to passion as they would ever come; their pale eyes watered as they stared. When the men had finished eating, Rhoda and the girls ate.