B
957,983
A DREAM
OF KINGS


PROPERTY OF
University of
Michigan
ARTES SCIENTIA VERITA:











A DREAM OF KINGS





DREAM
OF
KINGS
by Davis Grubb
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK
1955


828
G886dr
© COPYRIGHT 1955 by Davis GRUBB
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF
THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN
ANY FORM WITHOUT THE PERMIS-
SION OF CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUE No. 55-9671





Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruine'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
John Donne





CONTENTS
BOOK 1
1855-1860
BOOK 2
1860-1864





A DREAM OF KINGS





BOOK
BOOK 1
1855-1860





C ROM the stairwell I could see the strangers in the kitchen while
T they could not see me. For some time I had watched their ap-
proach along the ragged winter road beyond the orchard hill: the
old woman in the flapping gray cape and the little girl in the green
velvet bonnet. The old woman rode the sorrel like a man; her legs
astride the mare's bare back, her skirts above the tops of her high-
laced shoes. The little girl hung on behind and managed the carpetbag,
which stood now on the stone floor of my Aunt Sarah's kitchen,
sagging like a piper's wind-broken bag.
So he's gone away at last! said my Aunt Sarah, standing with her
arms folded, regarding the pair.
And the old woman simpered sadly and snuffled, flicking her nose
sheepishly like a man and then met my Aunt's inspection and nodded.
He took off at last, said Aunt Sarah, and caught up the cold carpet-
bag and stood with it. Well, you're not surprised, Rebecca!
No, whispered the old woman with a foolish sidelong leer, head
atilt.
—and left you to tend his dead wife's child without so much as a
shinplaster in your purse! Well you needn't answer! I know! Lord!
Men! God save us from them! Come along, Rebecca, and bring the
child! I'll show you the room you're to have!
Thank you, Sarah! said the old woman and followed behind, eyes
downcast, tugging the small, strange girl like a solemn, green-caped
owl. They came toward the kitchen steps, to the stairwell and I fled
silently before them up into the dark hallway and hid in my Grand-
father's room, by the giant cherry-wood bureau that smelled yet of his
green glycerine soap and kitefoot tobacco though he had been dead
five cold winters now. And I watched as they passed, casting long


shadows from the pale afternoon windows and Aunt Sarah still
talking.
God would never forgive me, Rebecca Hornbrook, if I didn't offer
shelter to you and the child yonder! Even as ye do it unto the least of
these, ye do it unto me!
And for a moment I thought old Rebecca had cried out in laughter
but when I saw her gnarled fingers fly to her face I knew it had
been a soft bleat of weeping. I crept ahead of them to the hallway
now, past the pier glass that was taller than anyone I knew, and
hunkered out of sight behind a split-bottom chair and watched them
in the little room that crouched beneath the wing of the roof. Aunt
Sarah set the carpetbag down by the spool bed and flicked a flyspeck
from the glass.
Rebecca, get hold of yourself now and I'll have Suse fix a pot of
coffee!
The old woman stood shamelessly weeping, not even covering her
face to spare us the sight of it; standing with her tired arms dangling
like lengths of stove wood in her cape and her own bonnet, shapeless
and glum as a coal bucket, awry and cocked upon her head. The tears
dropped slowly off her twisted cheeks and her tongue Alicked out as if
to taste them as they passed. Then she stopped suddenly and caught
her breath in a mighty heave and opened her eyes blandly.
I'm all right, Sarah! Oh Lord, what would we ever do without you!
We'd be on the roads—we'd be sleeping in ditches this very night,
Sarah Christopher, this little child and 1
Well, you're here! said Aunt Sarah, straightening the quilt on the
bed and fluttering at dusty places with her lawn kerchief. Lord, those
lazy niggers! I could switch them for the state of this room!
Oh my, Sarah, you needn't mind! Cathie and me will have our-
selves a little party redding it! It's such a pre-t-ty room!
And the very prettiness of the room seemed to have her at the
brink of tears again.
Sit down, Rebecca! Yonder in the rocker! And you, too, child! Yes,
you Cathie! Yonder on the carpet stool!
And they obeyed: the woman like an old child and the girl like a
young child but both like children who must be told how a game is to
be played.
Because I fear God and praise His name, said my Aunt Sarah with-
out emotion, without even stopping to fuss and redd and fidget every-
where in that tiny corner of our house. I have taken you in. I have


known you since we were girls together, Rebecca Hornbrook, and I
knew and loved poor, dead Ella. I told her when she married that
man that she would come to sorrow. And she did—cut off in her youth
and blighted in the bloom of her beauty and I will contend to my
last breach that it was for grief at the rottenness and shame of him—.
Crouched there in the hallway, before the cold breath that seemed
to blow always from that tiny door, I listened to her then and was
thankful that those whiplike words were not meant for me.
-and now that he has gone off, I say, Good riddance to bad
rubbish! Yes, I am glad he has gone and I hope he stays away!
Bige meant well! mumbled the old woman recklessly.
Pshaw, Rebecca! If you've come here to take up for him you might
as well pack up the mare again and follow him down the road!
Oh, Sarah! wailed the old one with a choke of fright. I don't
rightly know what I do mean today! It's just me and little Cathie here
and all I want is a home for her! Yes, Sarah, if I seem to be a burden
-if it's too much to take me in, too—then at least let the child stay!
Pshaw, Rebecca! Shut up and stop yammering like a baby! I said
you'd both be welcome here! But let me finish! Welcome here because
I would not face my Lord with that on my conscience—that I'd
turned you away—the least of His children!
God bless you, blubbered the old woman, helpless and wallowing
now, like a broken clock with its whirring mainspring amuck.
But I'll expect you to earn your keep! said Aunt Sarah flatly. I'll
expect you to work hard—the both of you! That's only Christian!
Yes, my dear! Oh, Cathie and me'll be mighty handy to have
around! We can scrub and cook mighty fine, can't we, chicky?
But the child had not even taken off her bonnet yet, perched
gravely and obediently on the carpet stool by the window, her moon
face chalky in the shadows.
Now come along, Rebecca! sniffed my Aunt Sarah. The girl can
unpack and redd up the room to suit the two of you while you and I
go have some hot coffee! Suse! Toot! Put the pot on!
And I retreated again into the dust of my Grandfather's room as
she came hooting down the dark hallway with the old woman
shuffling like a fat obedient sheep behind her and off into the stillness
of the stairwell to the kitchen. The house ticked. And it seemed to me
always when the house ticked that it was thinking, bemused and
speculating, a cunning and watchful intellect of musty, dusty, ancient
joists and slates and shutters. And with the house ticking about me I


stole a glance around the door jamb, into the fusty room to see if
still the moon face beneath the faded green bonnet hung suspended
like a flower in the shadows. She had not moved and since she was
staring clearly and boldly into my face I spoke up in self-protection.
Who are you?
My name is Catherine Ellen Hornbrook, she said softly but dis-
tinctly, and it seemed to me that her dark eyes shone with something
strange and challenging and although I had long moments before
decided that it would be my game for many seasons to make life itchy
and troublesome to her I thought just then that I had best go easy.
Still I walked boldly into the little room and circled the stranger,
staring at her with a princely leer.
Where's your real folks? I whispered.
My mother went when I was three, she said solemnly as if saying
a school lesson by rote, To sit in heaven at the knee of our Lord. My
father has gone South to—10 .
She faltered then—a breath, it was, no more—and then turned her
dark gleaming eyes to the window, to the light of cold winter and
held them there, as if gathering in a harvest of ghostly memories.
My father, she said, her voice a little lower than before, shall be
a King some day.
What?
My father shall be a King some day, she repeated, patiently, as if
one always had to repeat things to children.
And when he is King he will come back, she said, tugging at the
ribbons of her bonnet beneath her chin. And bring lots of lovely,
lovely things and we will be rich.
She took off her bonnet and shook her hair like a small satin flag
and held the bonnet in her lap, staring at it moodily: a dull and ugly
bonnet that would have to serve until the time of Kings had come.
Then she looked at me suddenly.
You can have some of the money, she said. There'll be lots of it!
I don't want any, I whispered meanly and she seemed indifferent to
that and got up, without looking at me again, and began unstrapping
the carpetbag and going about the tiny room, setting the place in
order, and putting the ragged, lavendered clothes of herself and the
old woman in places they belonged. I hung back, grinning like a
simpleton because I was afraid, and I grew wild inside with the
knowing that there was no place I could prick her. And so I perched
cockily on the carpet stool and picked my nose, lordly and mocking,


watching as she went about these mean household chores. Far away
in my aunt's kitchen the voice of Rebecca Hornbrook lifted in re-
proach against this world and its uses and then the even, faintly
nasal voice of Aunt Sarah intervened and I knew she would be speak-
ing of God and the iniquities of man. After she had packed every-
thing away (there was little enough: a drawerful of camisoles and
petticoats and shirtwaists) the little girl climbed into the rocker by
the window and folded her hands like a country wife and rocked
gently, her dark large eyes fixing me again with that inscrutable
inspection.
King-of—what? I whispered.
You're not old enough to know, she said, without anger, as if she
were still speaking to someone with a foolish mind.
I'm ten! I raged suddenly.
Yes, she said. I know. But it's a man's business my father is tend-
ing to. He won't even tell me all of it!
And then her eyes seemed staring at a world beyond this one, at a
face somewhere in the shadows behind my head; a fierce tenderness
in her face.
Abijah, she whispered.
What say?
Abijah, she said, to me now. That's my father's name. Isn't that a
noble name?
That's a stupid name! I blurted and felt a-cold with fear be-
cause I knew I was talking without purpose, without any sense of
what I was saying, just to strike at her. But she did not even seem to
feel these stones I threw and her mouth did not even pause in shaping
the words to come.
A grand, fine name for a King, she said. King Abijah! And he'll
come riding back when he has done what he has to do and he'll be
wearing a velvet cape—a red one—and carrying pistols—pistols of
silver!
Now some of her dream had begun to lay hold on me; now I
knew I had to put an end to it before it had me in a spell as deep
as hers.
Come on! I said, jumping up and beckoning. I'll show you the
house!
All right, she said softly, and then added politely: It's a nice
house.
The cold breath of the tiny room seemed to blow us gently out


into the high, dark hallway and off among its winding ways, so
familiar to me: an old house with many secrets and some I would
never share with her nor anyone. I would never show her the loose
board in the little room where the old trunks huddled in the dusty
light of a moon-shaped window like hunchbacked buffaloes; the
board that pried up and showed the place where I hid rare things:
the sea shell in a rock that I had found on the banks of Fish Creek,
my bird-point arrowheads, the moldering musket ball, and the stone
that I had found in the orchard spring that shone with cold moon-
light when you held it in a shadow of proper enchantment; nor the
bit of blue glass the color of the air before storms. I led her through
the dark, rambling country house of my Aunt Sarah and my Uncle
Joe and I tingled with happiness when we passed secrets that I knew
she would never guess: the place behind the cold, green, flowering
wallpaper in my dead grandmother's room where I had pressed
my ear one stormy August night and heard, plain as doom's own
pulse, the breathing of a ghost; the loose board in the parlor, behind
Uncle Joe's rocker, where, when one pressed just hard enough, one
would hear the bright, green cry of a frog. She could have her King
and his red velvet cape and his silver pistols. I knew of a way to go
out my own bedroom window and down the long roof to the branch
of a giant apple tree and thence off, silent as a Shawnee, to the mid-
night grass. I knew of a silver spoon in my Aunt Sarah's kitchen
which, when one held the handle close against the eye, showed a tiny
picture of the steamboat Sarah Crowder in all her spidery, white
wonder. In the dining room I heard a small cry of surprise and
turned to find her with a toy of mine in her hands: a little wooden
man with a blackamoor's face, whose eyes rolled when you twisted
his wooden head.
That's mine, I said.
But she kept it in her hand, holding it as if she had never seen a
thing so wonderful in all her livelong days.
Put that down, I said. It's my toy-not yours.
She gave it to me and looked at me again and my arrogance failed
before that untroubled, inscrutable regard and yet I thought I had
heard the faintest of sighs when the toy left her hands. I flung it
back on the table where she had found it.
My, she said presently. This certainly is a nice house.
Yes, I said. But you heard what Aunt Sarah said. You and your
Aunt Rebecca will have to work.


Oh, she said. We will. Aunt Becky's teaching me to sew, you
know! And some Mondays she lets me help with the wash! When
Father comes back, of course, we'll have lots of slaves for that.
We've got three! I said, stalking on before her like Lord Jack
o' Dreams himself. Suse and Toot and old Coy! Coy's the best fisher-
man in the whole Ohio Valley! He caught a catfish that weighed
fifteen pounds! He let me kill it and cut its skin off! I got blood all
over me!
My father, she countered, was a steamboat captain before he
went away!
I turned to her with a curling lip.
That's a lie! I whispered.
No, she said, stubbornly, softly. It's really true. It is his own
boat-only, of course, he had to leave it when he went away.
Where? I sneered.
He grounded it, she said. On a bar up Fish Creek. He said high-
water wouldn't get it there and no one will ever find it because no-
body ever goes up there on account of all the copperheads in the
rocks. And when he comes back—it'll be there
Shoot! I cried, waving a scornful hand. That's a big lie!
I'll take you there, she said. The first nice day. I'll show it to you.
It's a beautiful boat and it's called the Nellie Queen. He named it
after my mother. Her name was Nellie.
I turned away before she could see the wonder in my eyes, this
reluctant awe before the daughter of the wandering King, and we
were suddenly in the kitchen and Aunt Sarah was sipping boiling
black coffee from the bone-china cup in her cradling hands and
Rebecca Hornbrook was eating a dish of applesauce in the lamplight.
Well! The children! cried Aunt Sarah. Thomas, I hope you'll be
polite to little Cathie Hornbrook! She's going to be living here now
and I will expect you to be her friend.
Yes'm.
Take your hand away from your mouth when you speak, Tom.
That's common! Just as common as dirt!
Yes'm, Aunt Sarah!
Lord, Rebecca, don't he favor the mother?
The living image! cried the old woman, and her voice, still fresh
with the grief of her own circumstance, wavered at the mention of
my dead mother. Oh, she was a saint on earth, Sarah Christopher!
Yes, said Aunt Sarah. And gone to a well-earned reward!


And now she cupped her hand to her lips and cast a sidelong
glance at me as she bent to the old woman's ear and whispered in a
loud, hoarse breath: He drank! The boy's father! It was his downfall!
Him and the mother was drowned in the Flood of 'Forty-seven!
They say he was too drunken to save his family! Hah! Men-men!
Yes, I thought, he drank but perhaps he was a King and never
knew it: a king with silver pistols and a cape of scarlet. But I grinned
like a barnyard idiot and turned away from their whispering and
looked at the little girl by the stove. She stood in dreadful humility,
her black shiny shoes primly together and her hands laced properly
before her and her dark eyes brooding over us all. And since the
talk was of fathers she spoke again.
My father, she said to them, for I had already been told. Is going
to be a King!
Pshaw! cried the old woman. Cathie, hush that talk!
And though she fell silent then, her eyes did not deny what she
had said: darkly they persisted, repeating it to us all.
If your father is a King, said my Aunt Sarah drily, then he would
have shown a mite more royalty in his nature if he'd stayed home
where he belonged and taken care of his kin.
No, said Cathie patiently. He had to go South. That's part of get-
ting to be King. I do wish people could understand that.
Aunt Sarah grunted and stared reproachfully at the old woman.
How long have you had to put up with this nonsense?
Ahhh! cried the old woman, shutting her eyes. He may have told
her that, for all I know, Sarah! Lordy, such foolishness!
Why did he say he was leaving? What possible excuse could he
give?
Now the evening wind rose and soughed in the little hole in the
kitchen window where old Suse had tucked a ball of gingham to
keep out the trickle of cold. The old woman bent and shook her
head sadly.
Sarah, I never could make head nor tail of that man! Bige is good
at heart—there's no denying it! But he's a queer wild one! And when
he left he was talking of a kingdom in the South—the child is not
lying when she repeats that! Children always repeat! 'Deed sometimes
it sounded like treason to my ears!
Now she bent so that even old Suse and Toot in the pantry, slicing
apples for a supper cobbler, could not hear her whisper.
Bige claims there'll be a war! she breathed, wild-eyed before Aunt
10


Sarah's supercilious regard. Oh yes! He swears it's a-comin' and to
hear him rave it's the time of Armageddon that will be here then!
Brother shall rise up against brother! he cries. Ay, father against son!
And Jehovah shall come out of His golden cloud to judge us all!
Lordy, Sarah, sometimes Bige seemed like the sanest man on earth
and then again—at nights when the dream would get to workin' on
him—that's when he'd start his ravin'. The Kingdom, he called it.
The Kingdom Come. And-well, I reckon, that's what he went
South to look after—. Ah, Lordy, I think Nellie's death took him
hard, Sarah! He'd been home tonight if she were alive.
My mother! said Cathie suddenly and as if she bore us some bright
news from the counter at Carly Juniper's gossipy general store. She
is in heaven at the knee of our Lord!
Yes, child! cried out old Rebecca Hornbrook suddenly and wad-
dling to the little girl swept her into that oblivion of petticoats be-
neath her ample bosom. Ah, Lord, she is there! I know that, at least!
And maybe it's better that way! Maybe it's better!
I took a cold apple from the box by the window and bit into its
red skin, into the white, hard flesh and tasted the bright summer sun
beneath my tongue. Cathie came and stared at the apple in my hand.
May I have an apple? she said shyly...
These apples, I said, with my mouth full, are Uncle Joe's best
eating apples. Run yonder to the pantry and get Suse to give you a
yellow cooking apple!
Thomas, that's selfishness! I'll not abide it! Cathie, help yourself
to an apple.
I glowered when she bowed her curls into the box and fetched one
out, bigger than mine and better, I knew, and sweeter, I would sup-
pose. She did not look at the aunts when she had chosen it but
smiled a little and curtsied quaintly to their reflection in the lamp-
light in the kitchen window and whispered, Thank you!
I stared at her, tried to stare her down, because she was only a
girl and she had come into my world unbidden, unwelcome, and
when my Aunt Sarah and her Aunt Rebecca had stopped looking at
her she suddenly replaced the apple among the others and turning
with a toss of her chin walked suddenly from the room and I heard
her footsteps flying on the stairs.
Here! I cried, suddenly baffled and defeated. You forgot your
apple.
But she was beyond hearing, in the upper hallway already, moving
Il


slowly, proudly, toward the tiny room with the cold breath, her feet
far above me, her heart unassailable and virgin-ringed safely round
by a dream of Kings returning.
Come set with me a spell, Tommy!
And his fingers fluttered across my face; butterfly fingers brushing
eyelid and lip and cheek and chin. My Uncle Joe had been blind
since nearly as far back as the time when the young men of the
bottomlands—some of the bolder ones, at least—had taken passage
on packets to New Orleans and gone to fight the soldier Santa Anna
in some shameful war or other beyond the Red River. But Uncle Joe's
blindness had nothing to do with that war-unless the Lord had
punished him for his part in it; he had gone blind since then and
sat alone in the parlor by the window that looked South, across the
slope where the orchard went down to the meadows and the meadows
at last dropped to the river shore.
And how have you been, Tom?
Right good, Uncle Joe!
I squatted on the carpet stool by his shawled knees and submitted to
the visit because sometimes he gave me a silver three-cent piece when
the talk was done. I feared his blind, wide eyes more than the regard
of any live sight for it seemed, in truth, that he saw so much more
than any of the others: the aunts and the old Negroes and the girl. He
knew always when I came and stood in the doorway of the parlor,
however cat-silent my footfall, and he would turn his round and
somehow babyish face toward the threshold and mutter something
unintelligible: a kind of challenge.
It's me, Uncle Joe!
Tom? Oh, Tommy boy! Come and set with me a spell!
And there was nothing to do for it but see it through and think
hard about the three-cent piece that would buy three black twisted
ropes of smoky-sweet licorice from the glass jar in Carly Juniper's
General Store. I dreaded most his fingers on my face but he always
did that: a butterfly fluttering of those gnarled hands, knotted and
twisted as horseradishes and yet transparent as candle-wax. Those
fingers were his eyes and the tips could tell a smile by the touch, or
the faintest scowl or the flush of anger: He always knew my mood
when his fingers were done with my face. And then he would chuckle
and turn his face to the window again, the pearly eyes unwinking
12


before the light of sun or moon or summer lightning and he would
sit there for a time so long that the clock would speak twice in the
distant hallway before he was done: tales of the past, or that old
shameful war and long-gone days on the river when broadhorns and
keelboats floated past like sleepers in a dream and the bullyboys
played sweet flute-tunes across gold-flecked sundown evenings. And
sometimes while he talked, if it was a summer night and a wind came
in from the river, the white lace curtains of Aunt Sarah's genteel
handiwork would blow and billow in the dusky light until they
brushed his face, or even touched the naked, unfeeling surface of his
staring iris and he would not even flinch, so it seemed, for his voice
would go on and never stop until past the time it took the clock to
speak again. And because Aunt Sarah never bothered to tell him
anything, he asked, that night, about strange voices in the house.
A little girl? he said. Ain't there a little girl somewheres in the
house?
Yes, I said stiffly and stared out the window at the pale yellow
evening star above the winter hills.
Ahhh! I reckon there must be! Yes. I knowed it, Tommy! Because
it warn't a bit like Peggy's voice.
I shivered at that. Peggy had been the only issue of his marriage
to my Aunt Sarah—a girl dead so many years that even in that antique
time the memory of her seemed quaint and shadowy. There was a
dark, wild daguerreotype of her on the cold plaster wall of the hall-
way: a picture in an oval frame, and it often seemed to me as if it
were not a picture at all but a window into an ocean with the lost
Peggy behind it, like a drowning traveler, beckoning tragically
through a porthole to us here in our snug, dry hold. She was not a
beautiful girl but time had sweetened her there, and there was an
hour at evening, in August especially, when the light from the
window above the front door threw a patch of silver across the wall,
that the lost Peggy's face seemed suspended in a crystal cup of
amber wine: haunting and agonized with remembrance. Uncle Joe
talked to her often in the long, pale winter afternoons: alone in the
parlor. He had kept a wax doll from the jetsam of her wrecked
childhood (she died of brain fever during the flood in the Christmas
week of 1847) and sometimes he had used to hold the doll on his
knee in the parlor and pretend to play little games with the child's
ghost but Aunt Sarah had taken the doll one day and burned it and
scolded him for his simpering. But Peggy would not be outdone: no,
13


the shade of her would not be laid and Uncle Joe would never cease
in his gentle illusion that she was there: sitting at his knee as she
had done in the long, lost Aprils, chatting of pleasant things. Yet,
I wanted none of that game. There were more than enough ghosts
in my world. But it was a certainty to me then that her ghost was
real: real as God, real as Christmas, real as fear on the wind against
my windows, and more than once I had gone a-stealing down the
hallway toward the parlor where he would be and heard the beehive
drone of his voice far off beyond the elk's-horn hatrack, beyond the
closed oak door, and when it stopped, I swear, I heard the sweet,
faint prattle of a girl in shy reply.
Now, Tommy, tell me who the strangers are!
It's Mrs. Hornbrook and her niece, I said glumly. Catherine Horn-
brook. They've come to live with us.
Ahhh! Why sure! That's Bige Hornbrook's sister—and his little
girl! They've come to live with us, you say? Well now that's nice.
I knowed Bige well! Fine feller Bige!
You did, Uncle Joe? You knew Cathie's father?
Well now I reckon so! Him and me fought at Nadagoches to-
gether! I reckon when two bully soldiers fights side by side in a war
like that they're friends! Friends for life, Tom!
I swallowed and did not look at him then.
Is he—was he—a—a King?
What say?
Cathie's father! I said. Was he a King?
A king?
He grunted a little and smiled (he never laughed at me) and his
big fingers thumbed the carved grips on the arms of the old Grecian
chair Grandmother Christopher had fetched from England a hundred
years before Noah's flood, or some such time a long ways back.
Well now, Thomas! said my Uncle Joe. He might have been!
He never told me if he was! But then Bige Hornbrook wasn't the
sort of feller to brag!
I glared and chewed my lip; wishing he would tell me it was all a
lie: that she had lied to me in her girl's pride, but he went on for a
spell, in his fashion, playing out the thought a bit.
A king of which kingdom? he said. Americky? Now that couldn't
likely be, Tommy! Americky don't have no truck with kings! A
king of where?
She didn't say! I snarled, mean and mocking.
14


He rocked a little and his old knees stirred under the gray shawl
and he fumbled a nip of snuff from the cherry-wood bowl on the sill
and set it against his teeth: old and yellow as a whaler's scrimshaw,
and then sat gumming it into the lip and rocking thoughtfully for a
spell.
She sounds like a sweet little thing! he said presently.
She's nasty and—and common! I said softly. I hate her.
We are all God's sheep, he said. In the pasture of His Earth.
And he cocked his head faintly, inclining his ear toward the light
breath of wind that seemed to stir the air of the room: I would swear
sometimes he heard the sound of nightfall itself: the faint steamy
hiss as the sun expired at last among the blue hills beyond the river.
A moment later we both heard the carol of a boat whistle far up
river, behind the darkness gathering at the last failing edge of day.
Hark, Tom! That's the Cabinet! It's late, boy! Light the lamp
yonder before your Aunt Sary skins us both alive! She holds me
accountable for lighting that lamp every night at sundown! Though
how she reckons l'll know when the sun's gone down is beyond my
understanding! But I know, Tom! Why, boy, in the kingdom of the
blind there are many eyes! I know when a redbird flies up the lawn
and perches in the willow there by the tanbark walk! She don't
know that but it's true and I'll tell it to you as a fact! Just the same
-do it for me, lad—fetch a spunk and light the lamp! And mind
you don't knock it over and burn the house down!
I went and did as he bade me and came back with my fingers
sweet with the coal-oil: like the smell of winter. And the golden
glow of it shone in his smoky, dead eyes: and I thought that it was
high time he fetched my three-cent piece out of his squashed black
snap-purse if he was of a mind to. But he seemed turned inward
wholly on thoughts and heedings of his own and when I began to
question him again about Abijah and his troubling kingdom he thrust
up his hand and bade me hold my tongue, and cocked his head,
a-harking.
It's my little Peggy, he said gently, his voice faint and bleating
with age.
I shivered and stared at the lamplight shadows in the room,
shadows that were so deep and golden that it seemed they, too, had
been darkened by the usage of years.
Is she—coming?
No, Tom! No—she just ran past. That's all, Tommy! Just ran


through the house on her way somewhere! Playing a game like as
not!
And then like a clarion Aunt Sarah's voice echoed through the
house and the old man's face veiled over and he struggled for his
cane and I helped him to the hallway. It was suppertime. I ran on
ahead of him, hearing the tapping of his stick on the worn rug be-
hind me and feeling a chill on the nape of my neck at his words.
She had passed that way: gone skipping through our world in angel's
play: the girl-child dead these many decades and whose tin face
brooded in the oval frame above me. I dared not look at it through
that dusty dark and even held by breath because I could smell it
plain: the inference of roses in her wake, and pounded off, red-faced,
ahead of the blind man in breathless onset toward the steaming,
golden safety of Aunt Sarah's kitchen and the face of enemies I
could touch and see, at least.
I know now that it was more than her boast that had caused me
to hate Catherine Ellen Hornbrook with such a scalding anger. There
was an elegance about her that rose to the measure of her unyielding
brag; there was the mark of royalty on her, no matter how often my
Aunt Sarah might call her common. I think I knew from that after-
noon she came there that I would never defeat her; that, in the end,
Abijah would indeed one day come riding up the dusty river road
in scarlet and with silver pistols in his belt. As for my own parents
I knew that they were both something less than royalty: how much
less I never knew, possessing within my memory only the barest tat-
tered pictures of them. They were dead and moldering on the hill
by Dulcie's house-gone since I was two and had been carried one
morning into Aunt Sarah's kitchen wrapped in a blue and yellow
quilt my mother had made, blinking and frightened from the voyage
down the flooded valley in the john-boat old Major Tomlinson had
fetched me in. Yet, I would think, perhaps they were Kings, too.
Within the pleasant uncertainty of ignorance my imagination need
mark no limits. But she who had come to challenge me there in my
child's ascendancy, had no doubts about her heritage; none, at least,
as shattering as mine. She remembered more of her mother than I
could recall of mine and her father, within a matter of weeks, had
left her with the most thrilling assurances in the world.
I avoided her in the house when I could. But Aunt Sarah, who
16


pantry, enough to last out a whole winter of impertinences.) No
switch could match the stinging shame of the lessons, though: to
have that hateful girl better at sums, better at reading, to see her
small hand shape letters with the neat quill and know that she was
better at that, too, and with a King for a father, to boot. I squatted
on the naked rafters, under the frosted shutters, sitting atop the
whole world and with them afar from me.
I had a special treasure trove between the joists: a dagger of slats
and a broken Derringer. A penknife that was rusted shut but whose
clotted crust, for all I knew, might be Shawnee blood. A large agate
marble. A blackbird's foot and the feather of a chicken hawk. I
hoarded these relics in my high estate as jealously as if they had been
the fetishes of a Sandwich Islander and they were different from
the things I hid in the space beneath the floor board in the downstairs
hallway: being touchstones to the hope I always needed when life
drove me to the house's highest retreats; talismans against the wind
and the awful things it said between its teeth among those lonely
latitudes. I could hear my Aunt in the rooms below, swishing angrily
from room to room, crying out my name in that peculiar shrill and
breathy voice that meant she was angry beyond all temperance. I
knew she would never find me—she never seemed to guess I would
dare come here: up the ladder from the cold hall closet by my attic
room, perhaps it was a part of the house she had forgotten. After a
while the house grew still and I put my eye to the chink and saw the
evening star and a swinging lantern on the river and I had made
up my mind to go down and accept my punishment when I heard the
stealthy footsteps on the ladder. A moment later the moon face of
Cathie appeared beyond the joists, in the shadows, and she clambered
up and I saw that she had my slate in her hands. I was speechless
and sick.
She's very mad, she said softly and earnestly. But I think if you
took your slate to her and said you were sorry—that you would try
to get the sum-maybe she wouldn't be so mad, Tom.
I opened my mouth but no sound came and the blood roared like
a flood of river in my ears.
Of course, she added, I'll be glad to show you how to do it-before
you go down there. Here, Tom! Come here! There's enough light
for me to show you. See?
Go away! I wailed and she stopped speaking then and the slate
fell to her side and that curious veil of protection fell across her
18


face, her dark solemn eyes glowing sadly across the darkness
at me.
Go away! Damn you! Damn you!
I clambered across the dusty joists toward her, brandishing the slat
sword like a foolish soldier in a church pageant and her face slowly
subsided into the shadows and I heard her little shoes softly finding
the rungs in the darkness of the closet and she was gone.
I went downstairs and took my switching at last and ate a supper
that tasted like paper and grass and would not look any of them in
the eye across the lantern shine and took my milk and cobbler alone
in the end, sitting at the table while Suse and Toot grumbled and
fussed among the dirty dishes by the pump.
What you done now, scamp? whispered Suse.
Shut up.
She sho was mad! My my! You mussa done somepin! said Toot,
Shut up.
My what a sassy-britches! See dis chunk of cobbler I saved him,
Suse! 'Deed I think I'll eat it my ownse'f!
So I sold myself to them for pastry: went to them smiling and
fawning because I had suddenly grown ravenous with hunger since
the others had gone, and sat on a three-legged stool by the feet of
the old Negro women and gobbled the cobbler like a starved dog,
while Suse poured thick cream across it faster than I could eat, and
Toot sat sucking hot black coffee by the pump.
Why you so mean to po' Miz Hornbrook's little gal?
I ate, staring at the two women sullenly with swollen cheeks and
smeared mouth.
Never done nothin' to her, I said. She's a stuck-up ninny!
They laughed at that and then Toot's white eyes rolled and I
thought maybe I would ask her to tell me a story or make a spell
before I went to bed. She would oblige when the good mood was
on her and sometimes she would read the future from the shape of
clinkers in the supper coals when they were cold enough to finger.
'Leas' ways! said Suse tauntingly. She may be a ninny but I don't
see you gettin' no letters in the mail!
What?
Sho,
What do you mean, Suse?
Sho, said Toot. I seen it! She had it in a big amalope. Coy brung
it back when he took de wagon to town dis mornin' to git de sack o'
19


flour at Mister Juniper's store. Hit was in de mail! Shoot, dats de
fust letter anybody got in dis house since old Mars' Joe come home
from de Mexico!
Who was it from?
Shoot, boy! Don' ask me? Hit was mighty important though the
way she took on when your Aunt Sarah made her give it up!
Abijah, I whispered to the mason jar of dried basil on the spice
shelf.
Sho, said Toot.
Sho, said Suse.
And the wind blew and the shutter among the vines clapped the
window like the wing of a wooden bird. I ran from the kitchen
and searched the house till I found her sitting on the stool by the
lamp in the parlor, looking at the pressed flowers in my Aunt
Sarah's book: A Garland of Girl's Dreams. I tarried, hangdog and
Aushed upon the threshold: almost waiting to be asked in. She lifted
that haunted face and gave me a long stare and I thought: I can
bully her into showing it to me if she still has it, if Aunt Sarah
gave it back to her.
Toot said you got a letter.
Yes, she said.
She said Aunt Sarah took it off you!
She nodded.
But when she'd read it—she gave it back to me, she said. She told
me not to show it to Aunt Becky. It would worry her, she said.
Have you got it?
Yes.
Who's it from?
Abijah, she whispered.
And when she said his name there was a singing in her face.
I moved into the room and circled her slowly, with vast and labored
indifference, knowing with a kind of stupid cunning that there would
be no point in my pillaging the letter when I could not read it once
it was in my hands.
What did it say? I said with bare curiosity and stood before her
with hanging mouth.
Her lip trembled then and a goldness brimmed her dark eyes and
she stood up and I saw the letter in her hands.
It's my letter, she said softly, bitterly. Nobody has the right to
to
20


I won't steal it! I said cozeningly. Shoot. Did you think I'd try to
take it?
She took it from me, said the girl. Your Aunt Sarah. She hadn't
any right to. It's my letter. He wrote my name on it and sealed it
with wax and it was me that was meant to break the seal—not her.
Please? I said, reaching out to touch her hand in the clumsiest of
gestures; trying to make an expedient armistice after all those weeks
of war. Just read it to me.
She stared a while longer and then snuffied and blew her nose in
the ragged little lawn handkerchief that her aunt had laundered and
ironed that day. Then she opened the letter and I saw that the paper
was torn above the seal and I knew how roughly my Aunt had
taken the letter from old Coy at the wagon that day and ripped it
open.
Please, I said.
All right. I will.
And I watched while she composed herself and when her lips
parted to read me the letter from the King I turned my face to the
window and saw that it had begun to snow: the white Aakes whirling
past the black window behind the white curtains.
My beloved daughter Catherine Ellen. I am writing to you from a
prairie village far from home but my thoughts are ever with you,
my dearest child, and I pray our Lord to keep you safe. History is
shaping swiftly and events point to an inevitable climax in our time.
A storm is gathering upon our land, my dear, and when it has passed
I think you may see a new nation upon this continent and you will
know that I will have helped to form it,
I closed my eyes and listened and through the blackness of my
clenched lids I could see the whirling wheel of the night snow upon
the window and hated her for the glory in her voice because that
snow was covering the stone that marked the place where my father
lay who was so much less than king.
-a time of Kings, she was saying. Yes, this nation shall belong to
the gentlemen that founded it. I will come back to you when it is
over and take you into the heart of that glorious new Kingdom in
the South. Until then, my dearest daughter, be brave and keep Faith
in our Lord Jesus and honor the memory of your dear mother. Your
loving father-Abijah Hornbrook—November twentieth, eighteen
fifty-five.
And when I opened my eyes she was folding the paper closed and
21


fondly fingering the seal and when I went and stood before her even
her fear before my grinning outrage could not wash away the starry
pride that was still in her eyes.
You made it all up, I said. That ain't what it says at all!
I wouldn't tell a lie! she gasped. Not about Abijah!
You would! It's a lie! A bragging lie! And just to punish you
for lying-.
It's true! It's true! she wailed, when I snatched the letter from
her. My father is a wonderful father and he will be a King! Yes!
It is! Give it to me! Oh, please, give it to me!
No, I said and walked to the hallway, softly tearing it into halves
and then quarters as I went. Her voice wailed like a dream behind me.
My letter! she cried.
No, I smiled and went to the oil lamp on the marble-top table
under Peggy's picture and dropped the pieces of paper into the
chimney and watched as they smoked and then burst into flame,
lighting the whole hallway to a midday brightness for a moment.
And yet I kept the tiny brown circle of sealing wax, because, I
thought, it might be a magic, a spell, a key to that dream of Kings
after all. She was not there when I turned around and then I felt
the lash of cold air against my sweating face and saw the front door
swinging wide and gusts of snow spiraling in upon the fading rug.
Cathie?
I walked to the door and felt the teeth of winter on my face, on
my sweating shirt and hands and saw the black shape of her small
footprints receding into the soft goose-down snow-world and thought
for a moment I could still hear her cries, but I was wrong: it was
only the wind. I closed the door and tiptoed into the parlor and sat
on the stool beneath the lamp where she had been and opened my
shaking fingers and stared at the seal like a droplet of clotted blood
upon my palm.
A lie! I whispered. A bragging, dirty lie.
But then I choked and gave one long and broken breath of grief
and desperation because she had won. Even if she had gone forever
and were found at sunup, stiff and staring on the wind-blown, snow-
swept ice of the frozen river, she was victor in the end. Because
even if she had made up every word of the letter, now blackened
and charred in the smoking lamp chimney, she had won. Even if
Abijah had never lived she had won. For I had no one. And in her
heart, at least, there dwelt a King.
22


In that two hours between Catherine's flight and the discovery of
her absence from the house I had known the guilt and despair of
every murderer since Cain. I huddled by the black, white-swirling
window in the parlor with my face pressed flat against the quartered
glass, heedless of the aching cold that numbed my cheek to the bone.
I would be hanged, I knew, for what I had done, but hanging would
be a mercy after what ghosts I should endure in the interim. Already
they flocked beyond that frosty kingdom of winter: ghosts of my
mother and father, ghosts of myself, the ghost of the long-lost
Peggy and the ghost of God Himself. The ghost of my grandmother
and the ghost, most terrible of all, of my gaunt Calvinist Grand-
father Christopher, his gnarled, ancient finger hooked in accusation,
his white hair awhirl about his head like Father Abraham, his wild
oval mouth shaping the name of my crime. God and my dead, vener-
able, awful Grandfather Christopher had always seemed to me one:
an old man quarreling against Time and Death and spoiled children
who would not mind.
It was not until later that I learned that Cathie had taken the
roan mare from the stable and gone off on it, bareback, into the
storm. Old Coy came stamping to the back door and rapped, blow-
ing his old, loose lips and rolling his eyes like wild moons in the
lampshine when Aunt Sarah opened the door to him.
It's gone! he wailed against the wind that fluttered his torn flannel
shirt around his big twisted shoulders. De roan mare! Someone come
a-runnin', Miz Sary!
What? What say? Suse! Toot!
De roan! cried old Coy again, stomping into the kitchen with eyes
a-wild. Hit was a sperrit I reckon! Hit come a-runnin' into de stable
and clammered up on de roan and went off a-howlin'!
Aunt Sarah flew off into the lower rooms, hollering for Uncle Joe,
for Aunt Rebecca, for the Negro women. As in every moment of crisis
she had her bonnet on and her silver-mounted parasol in her hand
and clumped it roundly on the floor at the end of every outcry.
Thomas! Thomas Christopher Alexander, where are you!
I came into the hallway, hands dripping with sweat, eyes dumb
with murder.
Where's Catherine Ellen?
She went, I said thickly, and motioned with an awkward gesture
to the front door. She run out of doors!
Ah, Lord!


Aunt Sarah was away in the kitchen now, shouting at the old
Negro. Old Suse and Toot, in the face of crisis, pretended sleep in
their corn-husk ticks in the old stone slave house below the apple
tree. Now Aunt Rebecca had appeared, her hair in tight wads of
paper, her toothless gums agape.
She'll be frozen! Ah, God, she'll die out there! Sarah, do some-
thing! :
And Aunt Sarah beat the ferrule of her yellow parasol loudly on
the kitchen floor, like a judge at the bar quelling pandemonium.
Silence! Be still! All of you!
And they subsided suddenly and there was no sound but the
rasping of the wind and the feathery kiss of snow against the
windows.
What made her run out of doors, Thomas? said my Aunt in the
silence, fixing me suddenly with eyes of glass. Thomas Christopher
Alexander, answer me! You were teasing her. Eh? Speak up! It's
written all over you in God's own plain handwriting, boy!
Yes, I said, with eyes closed. I teased her. I burned the letter!
She ran out the front door.
Ah, I thought so! Then you will go with him and if she has
frozen out there at least you can witness your own handiwork with
your own eyes, Master Cain! Coy! Ah, Coy!
The old man had wandered sleepily out into the storm again and
stood blindly in the heart of it, awaiting orders, the snow gathering
on his shoulders and on his head like drift on the branches of a dead
tree. Now he turned and came back into the open door again.
Yes'm.
Fetch the sorrel and the sledge! Rebecca!
Catherine's aunt had slumped back like a fat, swollen doll and lay
in the kitchen rocker with dangling arms, her head lolling in hysteria.
Rebecca, take hold of yourself! Where would she go?
Ahhhh! Gone! Gone! Like a lamb—frozen in the field! Oh, Jesus,
oh sweet Jesus, lover of my soul!
Rebecca Hornbrook! Where would she go?
Promptly and still brandishing the parasol as if it were the ultimate
and final instrument of all safety, Aunt Sarah fetched a dipper of icy
water from the bucket by the pump and flung it splattering into the
old woman's astonished face.
To the boat! whooped Rebecca Hornbrook, the droplets springing
and twinkling on her round pink child's face. To Bige's boat!
24


Ah, yes! cried Aunt Sarah. That's a good five mile down the river
road. Ain't that right?
Yes! Yes! A quarter mile above Jason Lindsay's old corn field-
above the mill! Oh Lordy save us all!
You, Thomas! she whispered in a hush of violence. Fetch your
coat and muffler! Fetch your mittens! Go with Coy and find her and
may God have mercy on your soul!
We sailed off into the thick white midnight with incredible smooth-
ness on the crude oaken sledge: into a storm so thick that we could
scarcely see the horse's rump before us. I huddled close against the
old Negro, wrapped tight in a horse blanket that smelled sharp of
maleness and safety. Once under way the horse stumbled and went
down on the glare of crystal and I realized with a sudden choke of
dismay that old Coy had daringly taken the sledge down over
the shore and out onto the frozen river itself and that like some in-
credible, mythical boat we were skidding at high speed down the
vast ice-bound steam. Above the wind I could hear him singing and
at first I thought it was a prayer or a spiritual, at least, and then I
recognized it, a tune called "Old Dan Tucker” that a minstrel had
sung in the showboat that had docked at Elizabethtown the spring
before. It was better than a spiritual, I supposed, to keep his spirits
up, like brandy: being a tune of good times and safety, while spirit-
uals would have only made him think of the death that lay so close
to us, beneath the ice. We sailed on as if in a dream and once again
the horse went down, legs sprawling wide and thrashing, its mane
reared into the snow-torn night as it struggled for purchase on the
ice again and then went thundering on.
Yonder! cried the old Negro then and we saw the mouth of Fish
Creek after a while, and he reined the horse in to shore and we went
up on blessed land again and found the narrow, dipping road that
followed the creek inland to where, we supposed, Abijah's steam-
boat was grounded on the bank. Miraculously, and as suddenly as it
had begun, the snow had stopped and the moon had come out and
the land lay all around us like white candy in a child's dream: fields
and trees alike topped with it high as whipped egg whites and the
wind that rose and fell shook great sparkling handfuls of stars off pine
branches into a whisper of cold sound, earthward. As the horse car-
ried our sledge around the bend in the road by the old Lindsay mill
I saw it suddenly in the moonlight: the white stacks and forecastle of a
steamboat rising in the aching, cold light of melancholy winter moon.
25


Sakes alive! whispered the old Negro and whipped the horse
on to the bank and we saw it plain now, atilt where he had grounded
it on the gravel bank, but rising pure and beautiful in the lambent
frosty moonshine, lacy and delicate as a woman's wedding
gown, her decks heaped and frosted with the further elegance of
snow.
Yonder! Der's a lantern a-shinin'! cried the old man and leaped
to the road and wallowed away across the ruts and drifts toward
the shore. I followed like one in a dream. I had never believed her
tale of the boat that the wandering Abijah had left before embarking
on his impossible venture and yet here it was: pure and abiding like
a dead swan with its frozen webs in the ice and its proud neck still
straining to the moon. We clambered aboard and found the com-
panionway and reached, at last, the texas deck and the window to the
pilot house shone and lit the snow on the texas round about and
through the window we saw her lying face down among his old
charts and logbooks, clutching his faded captain's cap in her blue
cold fingers.
Miss Cathie! Little lady! It's us—come to fetch you home! 'Deed,
Miss Cathie, you gwine freeze to death in hyer! It'd freeze de horns
off a muley cow!
She was unconscious, or half so, raving and wild-eyed and flushed
with fever and trickling saliva down her cheek when the old Negro
caught her up and wrapped her in his own blanket and carried her
down to the sledge again, his own shoulders bare to the wind's teeth.
I stumbled on behind, keeping out of range of her eyes, ashamed and
seeing nothing but her head on his shoulder and the blue captain's
cap clutched still in her fist.
And she lay huddled with her face in the old man's shirt, breathing
hoarsely and heavily and he was singing that "Old Dan Tucker" tune
again at the top of his voice. We kept to the river road this time
and within a half-hour the black shape of the house swung into
view with every window blazing with alarm.
Cathie! cried the old woman's voice far off on the snow-quilted
lawn when they saw us. Oh, my little Cathie Ellen!
And we saw her tear free from Aunt Sarah's restraints and come
wallowing down through the drifts toward the gate, her arms spread
and flapping like a black, fat turkey's wings, and when the sledge
came abreast of the apple tree she dragged the girl from the old
Negro's hands and went up through the cold, charitable silence of
36


the snow's aftermath, crooning and blathering, toward the kitchen
door.
Is she dead? said my Aunt in the doorway.
Ah, God! Ah, God! wailed old Rebecca and came into the kitchen
warmth and tore the coarse blanket away to stare into the girl's still
face.
Get her upstairs! cried my aunt and went off railing at Suse and
Toot, now aroused and blinking grumpily in the kitchen lampshine,
to set kettles a-boiling, to fetch herbs from their secret jars on
summer shelves. Soon the house was alive with the tingling scent
of sassafras and hot mustard and sheep-nanny and tansy and foot-
steps went a-sushing through the halls and silver spoons tinkled in
goblets.
How can I know what to do unless you tell me! roared my Uncle
Joe from the upstairs hallway where he had wandered throughout the
crisis in impotent circles, tapping out a little orbit of safety with his
white cane. How can a blind man know ?
Hush up, Joe! Be still! Go back in your room! You're only in the
way!
And he retreated into his room again and lay grumbling, toothless
and impotent in the bed, wondering like a child what it was all about.
I watched them all from the safety of distance: saw the pale, naked
girl stripped and steeped in a steaming hot tub of mustard-water and
then lifted and dried, her head lolling like a doll's, her eyelids quiver-
ing and blue-veined as a pretty meadow stone as Aunt Sarah worked
her into a flannel nightgown and packed her beneath quilts and a
hot cobblestone wrapped in a tatter of flannel. At length the hubbub
subsided and the house grew still except for the faint sobs of Aunt
Rebecca and the wind beneath the moon and the muttering of the dis-
tant, chided uncle in his bed. Aunt Sarah had racked her parasol in
the hall, at last, like a soldier relinquishing his musket for the night
and then I heard her moving through the hallways and I knew she
was seeking me out. And so I went to her. There was nothing more
could happen to me now.
Thomas Christopher Alexander, I have something to say to you
and I will make it short! There is a God who watches over each of us
-rich and poor-great and humble. That child Catherine Ellen
Hornbrook was taken into our home to give her shelter-her and her
aunt-poor victims of a man's evil willfulness. If He chooses to let
her live—she has pneumonia, you know! Oh yes! It's plainly that!
27


-if, as I say, He chooses in His bountiful mercy to let her live-
YOU, Thomas, may get down on your knees and give thanks to Him.
Yes, YOU, boy! Because if she dies—you will be her murderer and
- Look at me, boy! No, lift up your face and look me plainly in the
eye because I am saying something I want you to remember all your
living days! Yes, you may thank Him if she lives! And if she dies-
you may reckon on having to face Him in all His Almighty
Wrath!
And she was off then, without another word, without another
glance, to make tea in the kitchen, and to pour herself and the old
sniveling Rebecca a glass of dandelion wine for their spirits.
As for myself I stood alone in that hall, harking to grandfathers
or gods or whatever dreadful judgments rocked angrily in that high
west room.
Aunt Sarah stood like a sentry in the doorway, framed in the cold
morning light of the window in the small room behind her.
Why should I let you go in there? she said stiffly, and rustled in her
clothes like the harsh feathers of a turkey. How do I know you
wouldn't tease that poor child even more?
I wouldn't, I said in soft beseeching.
What do you have in your cap?
I had thought she wouldn't see the cap of useless things tucked un-
der my jacket: gifts for the sick child.
Some presents, I said.
Let me see, she said, and poked a finger inside and sniffled and re-
coiled at them: my marble and my rusty knife, my slat sword and the
hawk's feather and the blackbird's foot.
Phew! Give them here! Gracious!
And she snatched the cap from my slack and boneless fingers and
tossed them onto the hair trunk by the door to her room.
You may go in, she said. If you get down on your knees and ask
forgiveness.
Yes, I
—and if there is any decency in you at all you will ask her to pray
to God to forgive you, too, for your selfishness and orneriness.
Oh, yes, I-
And I thrust past her into the little room that even yet held its pal-
lid, cold breath as if waiting to speak, and crepe toward the bed where
28


she lay smaller, it seemed, than the dead robin in its bunting that I
had laid to earth upon a sad August day when I was six. I would not
have known her, coming upon her there by surprise. Her moon face
was flushed and wild as a Shawnee's upon the starched, fragrant bol-
ster, and for one terrible moment (I could not see her hands or any
shape of her beneath the mountains of quilts and comforters) I held
a wild child's fear that somehow sickness had dissolved her body
away, that fever had done off with all of her but this poor sick mask
of suffering sleep and dreams tinctured with old wives' herbs and the
fumes of elderberry wine.
Cathie?
Like the quick flash of a wren's wings, her long-lashed eyes flew
wide and stared deep into me. And she spoke plain and clear.
Can I have my letter?
I—there is a piece of it left, I mumbled and opened my hand and
held out the King's seal and her hand flew out from under the quilt
and took it and held it up to her eyes and squinted at it and seemed
to find some reassurance in that, for a moment later she gave a deep
sigh and looked at me again.
Is that all? she said. All there was left of it?
Yes.
Did you notice, she sang softly, what a fine script he writes?
Yes, I said. A fine script.
He kept the logbooks on the Nellie Queen in that same fine script.
Like a schoolmaster's hand. I used to practice with the quill till my
hands couldn't hold it no more and I couldn't write that script-not
that fine.
A fine script, I said.
And then we both fell silent and I thought of the good morning
beyond the window and hunted words to tell her how clean the razor
air had been when I had gone down to gather the brown eggs, how
the icicles hung dry as a gnome's diamonds beneath the yellow morn-
ing sun and the cock's blood had gone so wild with the frost that he
had crowed twelve times into the face of that morning.
I never meant to, I stammered and stumbled and was done,
fallen in the first try.
She looked at me again then and smiled a small grave smile and
laid the cracked little piece of sealing wax on a purple quilt square
and touched my hand with hers.
I know how it is, she said. I do things sometimes—get mad-do


awful things sometimes. I know. It's just like a wildness inside you
and you don't mean it but it's done anyways. I don't blame you.
And I felt a little twinge of something strange, a whisper of anger,
that she had done it for me, made grace with herself in my behalf
and I could claim no pride in having begged it. I tried to remember
what it was Aunt Sarah had asked me to ask her about God but it
would not come to me and it seemed after a moment's reflection that
it was none of His affair; that this was between us because God had
never known the terror of strangers.
It doesn't matter about the letter, she said, her eyes black and grave
as deep water. Because I mind what it was about–I can think of
nearly every word of it by rote.
I glanced at her aunt but she seemed heedless of me there and I
stared at her big hand on the arm of the softly pacing rocker, a hand
large with chores, knuckles rootlike with a thousand washdays and
stained with pickle spice and bluing, dyed fast against the erosion of
all time, the gaunt simple gold ring pressed deep into the flesh of
her finger-speckled with liver marks. She rocked gently in the yel.
low morning window light with her eyes veiled with her fingers and
hummed an old tune against the silence.
I wish we could be friends, Cathie said softly. I don't mean I
would expect you to treat me like I was a sister or anything like that.
I mean just good friends.
All right, I said, and thought of the cap full of my treasures that
had been too preposterous and dirty to bring her there, and they were,
after all, things that she would not want anyhow. Yet I glanced
toward the doorway and saw that Aunt Sarah had gone downstairs
again and I thought I would risk it.
Wait a minute, I said. I brought some truck.
And I went out and came back with it again and waited till her
eyes began to shine with curiosity and then I dumped the contents on
the quilt.
What are they?
Treasures, I said. This feather-
And I held it up and it moved faintly in the still air of the small
room.
It's a hawk's feather.
Ah! Is it real?
Genuine, I said. I was down in the meadow below the orchard one
fall afternoon. I saw the hawk swoop and take one of Uncle Joe's
30


Dominick Roosters and before the critter could take wing again old
Junius had him by the throat—that's the blue tick that died—had him
and shook him till the blood drops splattered on the whitewash on
the barn door and—and afterwards I found this feather in the dust
and I know it was his and not the Dominick's a genuine hawk
feather. And here—a real marble—an agate! And these are bird
points!
And I went on in eager catalog of each of these wild trifles, like the
contents of the stomach of some incontinent and stupid owl and she
marveled before each one and insisted on hearing its story and put
each carefully back in the cap again and tucked it under her quilt and
thanked me solemnly.
I seen the boat, I whispered, with the image of it suddenly there
before my eyes again.
The Nellie Queen? she whispered with a wild, quick breath. Isn't
she beautiful?
Yes, I said.
She's Abijah's boat, she said, her eyes on the ceiling in a dream
I could never share. He went to Jeffersonville and gave Mister
Howard the plans and stood by and watched every white-oak plank
from keel to stack. He even made Mister Howard send all the way
to Steubenville for the paint because he said the paint he had wasn't
white enough. And did you notice the doors on the cabins? Gold leaf!
Real beaten gold leaf! And that painting on the texas—that cost fifty
dollars and was done by hand by a genuine artist—an old Cincinnati
Dutchman with only one leg and snowy-white hair.
Cathie? crowed the old woman suddenly and the pace of the rockers
ceased. She rose and came toward the bed and laid the big gold-
banded hand across the child's forehead.
My goodness! You 'pear to be mighty nigh well, Cathie Ellen!
Hello, Thomas!
Hello.
She stood looking at me, without anger, without rancor, as if she
did not remember at all that it had been me that had done it, her eyes
patient and tired and disremembering as if they had grown that way
from looking down at children a long while.
My, Thomas, the way you favor your mother is a caution! Espe-
cially around the eyes! I knowed Tom's mother, Catherine Ellen! Yes,
I did! And she was a fair, fine lady—as Christian a woman as ever
walked this earth!
32


Thomas and me are friends, said Cathie.
Why, sure! said the old woman, and I saw suddenly a strange thing
about her face: that her mouth could smile but her eyes and her fore-
head seemed fixed eternally in perplexity. Sure! she said. Two little
lambs in the world together! Both motherless! And why shouldn't
you be friends! The Lord meant that to be! Yes, He did!
She cast me a little sidelong glance of tender alarm, as if she might
wound me by sending me away and then she said softly that she
thought Catherine Ellen had better sleep, and when we looked her
eyes were already closed.
Thomas?
And I turned and saw Aunt Sarah in the doorway with a saucepan
in her hand and she beckoned to me.
Did you do as I told you?
Oh, what?
Did you ask that little girl's forgiveness?
Yes.
Did you ask God to forgive you? Through her pardon?
-I couldn't remember exactly!
And do you think He will bother if you don't show the slightest
concern whether He cares or not?
No. He might-
He might nothing. God doesn't come to people. They have to go
to Him. I'll say no more though. You've been spared, I might add,
and it's only because God cared about her—not about your poor, sin-
ful soul! She will live. The fever passed its crisis this morning at
sunup. No thanks to you though, my proud, fine peacock!
And she marched off with the saucepan in her hand like the scepter
of some queen of vengeance and I was alone with whispers and time-
browned shadows and the drip of icicles outside the door as the sun
thawed the ice-bound house. I was alone and I was afraid again and
I harked to the paced creak of her aunt's rocker and went to the room
of my Grandfather and wondered if one should knock when there
was really no one there. Because there was no one there. There never
was. And the room smelled the same and looked the same; it would
never change; when doom clapped its iron hands some night to beckon
us all to gather for judgment from its cloud over the hill, that room
would endure and hang there in space, though the house itself per-
ished and went to dust and blew off down the river road with the
leaves of fall; that room would always be there with my Grandfather's
32


watch ticking like the heart of a bleak, white-bearded God. I stood in
the little room and saw the sun, yellow-rayed among the spinning dust
motes by his chair, motley in the wadded rag rug my grandmother's
hands had knotted and shaped in a time before me, and for the life
of me I could not remember. I had forgotten it again: what she had
told me to tell Him.
She survived. But I think in that winter week someone in both
of us died. She rose at last from the quilts, healed and pale as a mush-
room; her dark eyes burning the more in the round livid mask of
innocent, inscrutable girlhood. For a few days she sat alone in the
rocker by the window in the little, gasping, cold room, with a shawl
around her and a picture book on her lap. I never saw Abijah's seal
again that winter; she had hidden it where God Himself could not
have found it, somewhere in a crack or cranny of the little room, I
suspect. As for myself, my heart and mind were in a riot of disorder.
Aunt Sarah watched like a barn owl for the smallest mouse of mean-
ness in me and I think by that time there was no reason for her to
watch. Cathie had won every battle. And by now I was too frightened
even to lift my voice to her, lest the high listener in his room should
hear. Sometimes in those weeks when the winter seemed weary of
itself and waited with an eagerness, like someone old, for the spring
which is its death, I would chance upon her somewhere in the house
staring at something of mine: the blackamoor doll that she had han-
dled that first day—or an old topor my ice skates. Sometimes she
would stand for long moments, a finger in her lips, staring at it,
while I watched from another doorway and I would stand there know-
ing she knew I was watching and I would wish she would touch it,
or pick it up or even break it and not because I would be angry at
her for this but because it might be a chance for me to forgive her
something.
Once when I had surprised her standing by the sideboard in the
dining room staring at the blackamoor toy she had suddenly lifted her
eyes to my spying face in the stained, time-smoked mirror in the peel-
ing, gold-leaf oval and given me back eye-for-eye for a long minute
and then faded away into the sea-gloom of the hall and was gone.
As for my capful of treasures I could never find a trace of them and
I knew she had hidden them away in the same cache with Abijah's
brown wax seal.
33


One cold March afternoon Uncle Joe fetched his musty greatcoat
from the hall antler and went off up the frozen road to Carly Juniper's
store to buy the snuff that Aunt Sarah had refused him that morning
when she had sent old Coy into town to shop. I listened to his white
cane tapping off into the distance and when it was silent I stole to the
empty parlor to look at books. When he was there I was never able
to look at them; he kept me at his knees, talking and keeping him
company to earn my three-cent piece. They were old books, fusty
books, and dull enough except for the pictures which were of ladies
and soldiers and stiff-legged deer but sometimes I would find an old
letter there between the marble-edged leaves or a brown, brittle bou-
quet of thin summer flowers. Aunt Sarah was upstairs with Rebecca
quilting and Suse and Toot were off in the kitchen baking bread and
I supposed somehow that Cathie would be with them.
Tom?
And there she stood, in the doorway, skinny-legged in her long
black stockings and with a green ribbon in her dark hair that seemed
to set off the paleness of her face.
Hello.
May I look at a book, too?
Yes.
And I fetched another carpet stool from the foot of Uncle Joe's
rocker and put it by the bookcase, beside my own. She stole to it
silently and sat, tucking her skirts primly beneath her knees and brush-
ing back a dark lock from her eyes, opened The Christian Martyrs
and began to read. Until then I had been searching the pages for
leaves or valentines or pictures but now, desperately, I pretended to
be reading, too.
We're still friends aren't we, Thomas?
Sure, I said softly. I reckon so. If you're not still mad at me.
I never was mad, she said, scowling at the idea. I never was.
Well, I said. It certainly was a bad thing I did. I guess I'm just a
hopeless sinner. Aunt Sarah says so anyhow.
She sighed and stared at me a while longer.
I hid the treasure, she said. The treasure you gave me.
I figured that, I said. I hope you hid them good. If Aunt Sarah
ever finds them she'll throw them out for sure.
Yes, she said. I hid them in a secret place. Do you mind if I don't
tell you where? It's nice to have a secret place.
34


No, I said, with a wave of my hand. I don't mind. It's good to have
a secret place.
She sighed again, greatly relieved, and then cleared her throat.
They're in a hole behind a loose brick in the pantry, she said.
There! I've told you my secret place.
You didn't have to, I said. I don't want the treasures back. I gave
them to you for your very own.
I know, she said, with a laugh that was half a breath. But there are
some special friends you don't like to keep secrets from.
Aunt Sarah never let me play the music box except on Sundays and
Christmas but I felt suddenly like both days were come at once and
I sprang up and ran over to it and lifted the wide, shining oaken lid
and fetched one of the big rattling, prickly discs and fitted it inside
and pulled the lever and listened to the brassy gasp it gave as the
coil gathered and the disc crackled as it commenced turning.
My, that sure is pretty! she cried as the chimes of it filled the room
with booming, tinkling gold. I just love music!
And we both stared over the rim of the box and listened to it and
felt happy and sad all at once because it was an old tune that Uncle
Joe sang the words to sometimes: the one about the drunkard's grave.
Isn't that the grandest, saddest tune, she said, casting me a ravishing
sidelong look.
Yes, I said.
Sometimes, she said, I just love to cry. Aunt Rebecca says a good
cry washes the soul. Last Sunday after church she told me all about
Good Friday and she said it was just two weeks off and that's when
they murdered our Lord.
I don't like that story, I said.
Oh, I do, she said. I surely do! It's so grand and sad.
I don't see the sense in sad stories, I said. Ones like that, I mean.
But she seemed heedless of me and her dark eyes gleamed in a
dream of it: the story from those old, whispery pages of Rebecca's
black, wrinkled Scripture.
He was just a little child, too! she said. That's the sad part!
Who?
Our Lord, she said. King Jesus!
I never could make head nor tail of that story, I said softly. Aunt
Sarah reads it to me every year.
Oh it's a grand story! she said. He was born at Christmastide-


I know that part.
And then just three months later—they killed him! A little baby
child!
No, I said to her. He was an old man. An old man with a beard.
I beg your pardon, Tom, she said, talking to me again like she
were older and I was small and foolish. He was born at Christmas
and Good Friday is only April. How could anyone grow up to be
an old man in three months?
I shivered again and knew that she was right so I turned off the
music box because Aunt Sarah would come raving at me presently
and the silence in the room was a judgment.
Suse is baking, I said. Maybe she'll give us a heel.
And she followed me to the kitchen and the air steamed with a
sweetness that seemed to flower and breathe out spring.
Can me and Cathie have a heel?
Well sho! Sho!
With strawberry preserves?
She winked one wrinkled lid shut and fixed me, birdlike, with
cunning speculation of a single scowling eye.
'Gainst you go and spoil your supper, you scampy trunnel-bed
trash, Miz Sary'll have my hide off and hung up to dry!
She won't care, I begged, shameless with yearning before that sweet
cloud of baking.
And she sliced us both heels from the new, buttered loaves: crusty
without and soft as goose down within and heaped with butter and
strawberries. We squatted eating and watched.
Suse was old but it was Toot that was wise and she swore to me
that she had ridden on that very ark that had carried old Noah above
God's vengeful floods and had baked him biscuits that first morning
when the bird brought the bough of olive leaves. Yes, Toot was very
old and very wise and Toot's mother Abigail had been even older,
even wiser. So old, Toot said, that she used to tell about her mother's
brother being eat up by a lion. And it was not in any circus menagerie
show either but on a hill above a place called Sarah Lonnie across the
ocean-before the slavers took them down the hot, yellow meadow to
the sea. And Jesus marched among them, singing all the way. So, I
supposed, she would know about that other time.
Suse, I said, cupping my sticky face in my palms. Was Jesus an old,
old man with a white beard?
36


Shucks! What you talkin' 'bout, trunnel-bed trash?
Cathie claims that He was just a little baby when they come and
killed Him dead!
She had her clay pipe lighted now and I was glad of that because
Aunt Sarah forbade Toot to smoke while she was cooking or baking
and now she was just as bad as me. She puffed and twinkled wickedly
at us both and I knew she was up to a mischief or two.
Well sho! she said. Sho he was! An' you mighty lucky they ain't
come to git you yit!
Who? I breathed.
Why, them same sojers that took po' Jesus to the Cavalry! That's
who!
Suse was old and she sat apart and drank coffee and looked through
the almanac, heedless of words, but pondering the woodcut half-
moons and Pennsylvania farmers and Mike Fink's fortunes. But it
was Toot that was wise and she had been upon that hill, I knew, and
so I harked well to this grim and eyewitness testament.
He was born on Christmas Day! piped Cathie, vindicated. And they
killed Him dead on Good Friday! And that's just three months!
Sho! cried Toot, through clouds of white wisdom. Sho, and dat's
a fack!
And then she bent and wheezed wildly through gales of unaccount-
able mirth.
Aunt Rebecca read me the story, said Cathie then, wiping her sticky
fingers on a piece of jelly muslin. And that's a fact! It's the grandest,
saddest story! she said.
Hmmph! muttered the old woman. You wouldn't like it so well if
you knowed the truth! You two chil'n is just markin' time!
And we both grew still at that.
Sho! Dey come and took Him didn't they? And Him jus' a little
baby? Well dey's gwine to fetch you, too! Dey's just playin' you out
like a fish, little ones!
I don't care! I said with a wild, nervous wave of my hand and got
up and walked stiffly out of the pantry and I was proud then because
Cathie came close behind my heels like a little frightened rabbit in
the wake of my braveness. I walked audaciously into the dark hallway
-green and bleak as the depths of the oceans beneath that long-ago
ark and the face of Peggy stared at me from the oval frame upon the
faded wall. Cathie put her hand in mine and we stood watching the


winter night gather like smoke under the hills and far away on the
river road I heard the faint tap-tap-tap of Uncle Joe's white cane upon
the cold stones.
They won't come, I whispered. That lyin' black devil!
She sighed and squeezed my hand and her fingers were like the
arms and legs of a little cold doll.
Just the same, she said. It's mighty good to be friends with people.
Yes, I said. Especially at night.
But it was at night, most always, that I would be alone. Aunt Sarah
had made it plain, from the outset, that old Rebecca and her niece
should retire to the little room when supper had settled and she bade
me, unequivocally, to keep in my place as well. It was a curious, hard
vein in her, an old insistence on order and on some ancient family
ghost of propriety that wound back through time like a fading, in-
terminable silk ribbon into the Restoration England of her great-
grandmother. Rebecca and Catherine Ellen were expected to work for
their keep and when supper was settled they were to go to their room
and mind to themselves. They owed us that and we, similarly, owed
them the courtesy of keeping out of the circle of their own family
lampshine. I think that she was just, at heart, though sometimes she
seemed in life, and seems to me still, as cruel as a Moor. I remember
her sitting in the pantry window with an old, brass telescope that my
Grandfather had kept in the cabin of his boat on the river in the days
when steam was the Devil's own joke in the river towns and farmers
lined on the shore to mock the Water Walkers—sat there with the
cold brass ring to her eye watching Coy and the halfwit Irish twins
from Captina who were hired to help hoe the first corn, spying
on them to see that every last drop of sweat was out of them by sun-
down when she went with the conch to the cold stone stoop and blew
them in to supper. Yet, when a stonemason from Wheeling came to
build the slave house, it is said, she marched among the old man and
his sons through every hour of their labors, noting every trowel of
lime, every crying stroke of the stone-saw, each clapboard, each last
square Wheeling nail; striding primly among them with her little
bonnet on her hair as if she were bound for town and the inevitable
parasol in her dry, clean fingers, faintly sweet of lavender and rose
water, and calculating from time to time on a ruled tablet the cost
of their materials and their work until at last, when they were nearly
38


done and the sandstone gleamed, fresh-hewn and white as angel's
food in the sun, she commanded the old man to stop work and draw
up a new contract.
Why, madam?
Why, because! she cried, as if to reproach him for a cheap deception
against himself. You won't make a penny on this job when you're
done! You must draw up new papers and charge me not a jot less
than one hundred and fifty dollars!
Cold though. Colder than the heart of the black iron deer that
stood in the front yard, and that sometimes seemed almost gentle-
natured by comparison. Cold, when she would deny me the pleasure
of going to the small room of old Rebecca and my new friend to chat
a little, pleasant time and hear the friendly growl of the old woman's
stomach like the ebb and fall of bees quarreling in an August hive.
As for the two of them, they seemed far happier than the rest of us
who were left to the balance of the shadowy house in isolation from
them and from each other as well. Most often I would stay in the
kitchen with the Negro women till they had finished redding the
table and washing the dishes and pots and that was a kind of shad-
owed joy, for when they were not teasing me outright, Toot would
be frightening me with her first-hand tales of times long gone: she
had lived in the days of the Prophets: had known Jonah and dried
him clean of behemoth's frothing slobber on the very day he had
emerged and she had seen the sad core of the apple outside Eden,
marked plain with the small, sad teeth of the woman on the one side
and on the other the place where Adam had eaten. In fact, it seems
to me now that Toot meant no fiction in her accounts of these things:
I think she had lived them through to believing in the black, throb-
bing nights there in the guttering tallow twilight of candleshine in
the slave house.
Sho!
You seen that, too! Well, I declare!
Sho! Seen hit clear as I see dat cream pitcher yonder! And nary one
of dem lions so much as lifted his lip to Daniel! And who you think
it was dat cook Dan'l his supper dat night when dey let him out of
dere?
Who? I would whisper, knowing, but wanting to stretch out the
sweetness of that scary telling.
Me! Dat's who! Biscuits with apple butter! Dried corn stewed in
cream! An'a fine slice of ham—fried to grandness!


Can I have an apple?
Sho.
And she would let the fallen word lie and move industriously about
her redding chore till my hand opened to take it from the box and
then she would resume her little teasing with consummate timing.
Sho. Take an apple. 'Cos, you know what may happen!
My fingers would close, empty, and I would lift my shaggy head
and stare at her, moon-faced with alarm.
What?
Sho. Take an apple. An' take yo chances on gittin' the snaky one!
I would be far from the apple box now and Suse who was not
clever enough to tease would giggle from the shadows where the
candlelight did not fall, behind the stairwell, sipping her black coffee
and wrinkling her lip over Toot's game.
Sho! Gwan! Git one! You heard me tell dat tale las' night! Hit was
Eden and dat apple looked jus' as juicy and red as the one you was
about to eat! And li'l Miss Eve, she picked it,
That's not a real story.
Sho it's real! I was dere, boy! I seen it! And it was a mighty sore
temptation not to pick up dat core where dey flung it and take a
bite my own self.
I regarded the cluster of red apples in the old salt box.
Are they all snaky apples?
No, she said. Just one snaky apple in de box.
Which one? I whispered, and she giggled and the candlelight
laughed, too, with shadows, and the sunny shape of its dancing finger
was a mocking, too.
In every windfall, she said suddenly, dere's one snaky apple. Dat's
why tree apples is so special. 'Cos dey's no snakes can climb a tree
but when an apple's lying there sunnin' itself in de grass dere's
nothin' to stop a copperhead from walkin' right up to it and givin’
it his curse.
Does he bite it?
What you talkin' 'bout! Bite it! Snakes got no teeth for bitin'
apples! He crawls over it and twitches on it and when he done that
he goes on back to his hole in de rocks and he don't bother none of
de other apples in de windfall! Cursin' dat one apple is all he can
take for one day. Hit's a strain!
I stared at the apples till they seemed to droop and fall into a
blurred and disordered design like melted wax.
40


If you was to tell me which, I whispered, I wouldn't eat that one.
I ain't got de gift! she said and then subsided, carefully measuring
out the time so that each part of her joke would come dramatically
and in full effect.
—but Suse does, she added after that long spell of stillness. 'Cos
Suse is the seventh child of a seventh child and Suse has de second-
sight!
Tell me, Suse! I said, going to stand before her.
And delighted that Toot had let her be part of the teasing game
Suse would rock furiously and be gasping with joy and hissing with
wheezy winds of catarrhic, silent laughter like a gaping turtle, her
toothless gums shining like tallow in the candleshine.
Sho. Gwan and take a chance. Sho. Eat dat apple and have Jehovah
lash you from Eden with a pine-thong!
And I would go appleless away, and watch Uncle Joe, his blind,
pink face lifted to the night-darkened window in the parlor and
amuse myself by wondering how a blind man knows sun from moon
or tells starlight from the burning wink of fireflies in a river dusk.
Since Cathie's sickness I had felt nothing toward the strange little
girl but a kind of feverish curiosity, a sickly solicitude. I thought
about her constantly and I even began to share her unceasing dream
of Abijah and his high, proud returning. I was certain that I stood
a little better in Aunt Sarah's regard since this change of heart and
I was sitting on a stool in her room one day watching her winking
steel needle go in and out of a quilt square like a dolphin playing in
a red sea and I suddenly began to pour it all out to her.
Cathie and me is the best friends in the world, I cried. She can
play with any toy of mine and I don't care a bit! My my, it certainly
is strange how different you get to feel about people once you get to
know them, ain't it, Aunt Sarah!
Don't say ain't.
Isn't it.
Not so special, she said. I don't feel that's so special true. Some
of a body's first feelings are right. But a body has to learn to let the
will of God have its way. We can't let our own feelings run our
tongues.
I sat very still, not frowning with puzzlement, not showing any.
thing on my face, because I was so terribly mixed up with what she
was getting ready to say and I wanted her to finish it.
It was natural, she said, for you to resent the stranger in the midst.


Old Rebecca had been helping her quilt that afternoon but sud-
denly Aunt Sarah had sent her off to the parlor to dust. Quilting, in
the end, was more play than work and work was the board and rent
that Rebecca Hornbrook paid in that house.
I just love Cathie, I said, reckless with a fullness of feeling, and
Aunt Sarah's needle halted and shone like a steel tooth that had
paused in chewing, and she fixed me with a long, quiet stare.
No, she said. I'll not have that kind of talk.
I gulped and stared at the floor boards, grinning foolishly.
No, she said again. I'm going to raise you as my sister would have
you raised, Thomas Christopher Alexander. To know your equals and
to accept them and not to mingle with commonness.
Is it bad, I whispered, for Cathie to be my friend?
No, she said. But you must remember that her people are common.
Her mother was no better than a gypsy on the river roads. Her father
is a rascal and a dreamer and a ne'er-do-well who walked off and
left his sister to mind his daughter while he went to the prairies to
help start a War.
A War?
Yes, a War. I don't know what nonsense she'll tell you. Bige Horn-
brook was always queer as a boy. And when your Grandfather was on
the river he often said that a man like Bige Hornbrook was more dan-
ger to rivermen than a sawyer in mid-channel. Many's the night he'd
take his boat through the narrows with every lantern and candle on
her snuffed out, black as the inside of a whale's belly, and him out
on the texas deck shouting the Lord's Psalms in a voice that would
raise the dead. Though they'd be soon glad to go back to sleep again
for it was a mockery—a shame and a mockery! He meant no right-
eousness in his reading! Like as not it was to beg God's pardon be-
cause he had thrashed an octoroon to death in the boiler room. Your
Grandfather told that and no one questioned him. No one ever ques-
tioned your Grandfather's word—not on the river or anywhere else
for that matter for he was a man of God and he treated his niggers
as mortal beings and never raised his hand to one in forty years of
boating. Never. So, as I say, Thomas, there's the mark of meanness
and of commonness on the Hornbrooks. I took them in as I would a
starving gypsy on the river roads. I would do that for a dog. But they
are common and I want no one in this house speaking of love-except
God's love and that's our duty to Him not them.
She paused and lowered her eyes to the quilt and the needle re-
42


sumed and the soft whisper of her taffeta skirts was like a breath
beneath the quilt.
They are servants, she went on. Rebecca and the girl are servants.
No, don't frown like that—as if I had said something cruel. I did
not make their condition in life. God had His reasons for that, not I.
I did not make that evil match of which the poor child was issue. It's
not my fault that Bige Hornbrook is a fool and a dastard. They are
servants because that is the makings of Providence and if it were not
for me they would be hawking brass buttons and thread on the streets
of Wheeling. They are servants. Mark that, Thomas. And mark it
well!
Yes, I thought later in the house, that is true and I had been right
from the first and yet there is something dangerous here: something
that I must be careful over, because if I drive her away again that
will be a sin, too. Yes, I thought, she is common but I have already
said I would be her friend and I have given something of myself
that I cannot take back. But something old and evil and musing
itched and stirred in me again: I could almost feel it in my loins:
perhaps it is there (in the body's own Eden) that such judgments and
decisions ultimately lie: in the loins.
Winter was thin and sour upon the land: old and pinched, and the
sun strained to pierce it and yet spring had not yet come and every-
thing seemed breathless and lackluster in that solstice interlude. Cathie
and I had gone to play in the orchard and the wild, dead wind had
blown all that day and shaken the black twigs of the apple trees above
us.
Do you remember your mother and father?
No, I whispered, not looking at her face.
I remember my mother! she cried with shining eyes, her nervous,
white fingers plucking briars from her black cotton stockings. Yes!
My mother was the most beautiful woman on the whole river!
I did not look at her because there was suddenly such an uncon-
trollable evilness in my mouth.
That's a lie, I said softly and chewed a bitter twig from the apple
tree, tasting the greenness that already lay within it, listening for
spring.
It's not a lie! she said, standing up and tossing back the dark curl
that fell across her eyes, wild and stricken suddenly. You just ask my
43


Aunt Rebecca, Thomas! Ask your Aunt Sarah-she knew my
mother!
And your father worried her to death, I said, sick at myself and
yet unable to stop.
Thomas! How can you say a thing like that! I thought that we were
friends!
Sure, I said. We're friends. Half-friends!
She stood stock still, and straight as a stick, her black-stockinged
legs close together and her thin, pale wrists dangling from the sleeves
of the dress that was too small for her: the one her aunt had made
over from something a cousin had given them.
You just dasn't believe in anybody, she whispered in a breath that
was hollow with dread. Oh, Tom!
Just the same, I said in a voice that seemed not my own: but some
snatch of evil conversation overheard in a dream. Your father is
really a fool!
And it was not till a full moment after the stone had struck me
between the eyes that I realized how deeply I had wounded her. She
sprang back gasping but I was swifter and we went down together
in the dead dry grass and she struggled like a fish beneath me when
I caught her wrists and pinned them to earth.
I'm glad I did it! she whispered through furious, clenched teeth,
and it was all I could do to hold her there, listening to the mingling
of our harsh, furious breathing, and feeling the trickle of blood down
my nose like the summer tiptoe of a ladybird.
I'm glad! I'm glad! she wailed to the wind, but stopped fighting to
be loose and I thought miserably to myself: It's nothing really, being
stronger than her because she is only a girl.
You could have kilt me! I yelled.
I wish I had! I wish I had! I hate you! she cried, struggling again
now, straining her face from side to side and biting her lip in shame.
I will kill you if ever I get the chance!
I snickered and let her free then because I was frightened: I had
never seen her angry before. And I stalked cockily to the welling
spring in the worn cup of sandstone by the embracing roots of the
oldest tree in my Grandfather's orchard and then, squatting, with my
back to her still, thrust my face into the aching-cold water. When I
turned to her again, holding my bandanna to the stinging welt on my
forehead she was sitting, cross-legged, like a wild, slim Buddha in
the winter grass, staring at me with calm and furious eyes.
44


If it wasn't for my Aunt Sarah you and your Aunt Rebecca would
be selling buttons and thread on the streets of Wheeling!
Her face did not flinch, nor the dark eyes lower from me, though
her underlip seemed to draw up a little into the red shadow of her
mouth.
Just don't ever forget that, Catherine Ellen Hornbrook! You and
your high and mighty ways! Why, when you first come to live with
us this winter you had everything you owned in that stinkin' old
mildewed carpetbag! Everything you owned!
She still said nothing and her face betrayed nothing except the
barest sparkle on the rim of her lower eyelid and I could not be sure
that it was a tear.
Everything! I roared, marching up and down in the grass like a
lord of the valley. And you told me that day that your father was
going off to be a-a King! Lord- amighty! Where did the King go,
Catherine? Where is he? Where's King Abijah?
And I stood before her, fists on my hips, mocking and sick at
heart.
You and your aunt, I said softly, are just servants, Catherine Ellen
Hornbrook!
And she glared, stricken, speechless, her dark pupils spreading like
the feather of a tiny, dark bird, her clenched knuckles a-shine.
Servants! Servants! I yelled, knowing that I had touched her at last.
And I thought I would be sick at my stomach with the sound of
my words.
Servants! I cried again, choking, and she whirled and ran off among
the spidery black lace of the apple trees in that cold time before the
spring, the dead time, and I watched her run through the grass of
the long river meadow toward the distant house and I stood by the
stone fence my Grandfather had fashioned and yelled it into the dead,
winter wind until my throat ached and filled with the sourness of
defeat. In the hollowed stone where the spring water trickled from
the hill and gathered like a cup of sky I squatted again and stared
down at the wild face mirrored there: peering back at me like a
garden god among the winter branches. And I counted the droplets
of red as they broke in that other sky and stained that water and that
sky, reddening it. I flung myself to earth and bit into the mushroom-
tasting earth—the land racked with winter and tired of itself: tasting
the earth as I bit into it: old earth, tasting of an old season: like
kissing the flesh of someone rocking and tired and mumbling, tooth-
45


less and slack-cheeked, counting clock-ticks and waiting for Death's
tap upon the pane. I screamed and wept until my jaws ached and my
teeth were cold.
I hate them! I hate them!
And yet I could not name the ones I hated and she was only a girl
and the only one I had to play with, the only one I had ever had as
friend and I had to hate her, too. And she would survive it all. And
endure. Because even now I could hear her far voice in the yard above
the slave house, chasing the old hound and spending her wild laughter
on the wind.
They were all there, on the counterpane in my attic room: every
one of those special treasures, except the hawk's gray feather and it
had blown off onto the floor. I fingered them one by one, still sting-
ing with anger and shame, still feeling the throb of the bruise of my
forehead. And I could not guess, for the life of me, where the magic
of them had gone: these things that she had given back to me.
Thomas, have you been fighting?
And Aunt Sarah was there behind me.
No'm, I whispered, shamed and ashamed. I fell. Me and Cathie
was running in the orchard. I hit my head on a stone.
Catherine Ellen?
And I saw her then, standing behind the expanse of my Aunt's
billowing crinoline: a hateful, suck-finger girl with mocking in her
eyes.
Is that true, Catherine Ellen? Did Thomas fall?
Yes.
Say "yes ma'am" when you speak to older women. That's manners.
Yes ma'am. We were playing touch-tag in the orchard, she con-
tinued blandly and without even the passion of falsehood. And Tom
caught his foot in a root and went a-tumbling.
Come yonder, Thomas, and let me put some hartshorn on it!
And I went with her to her room and let her dab it with the sting-
ing rag of choking spirits and then she left me and went downstairs
and I wondered how to face her: Cathie. And then she appeared
suddenly in the doorway and stood staring at me.
I put your things on your bed, she said.
I glared and sucked my lip like a fool. She stood staring a while
longer.
46


I couldn't find one of the arrowheads, she said. I think it fell
through a crack in the floor.
It don't matter.
I could hear her breathing quietly and I could smell the little girl,
soap smell of her.
She knows we lied, she said suddenly.
What?
Your Aunt Sarah knows, she said. I can tell. She knows we were
fighting again. I only lied so she wouldn't punish you.
Yes! Yes, and I suppose that makes you some kind of something
wonderful! I suppose you think that's mighty high and mighty of
you! I don't need your lies!
Tom, what you said is so.
I don't need your protection!
It's true, Tom, she said, numbly, dumbly. About Aunt Rebecca
and me. We're just servants here. I hadn't any cause to be so mad!
I fell silent then and stared miserably at a little china boat full of
brooches and pins on Aunt Sarah's dresser scarf. Lord, that was the
terror of it: every time my hatred for Cathie came out clean and bare
something would rise up to tell me that it wasn't really us against
each other but us against them; they'd force us always into a together-
ness despite ourselves.
I forget sometimes, she said, her voice near a soft singing: husky
and windy with the dream within her. Sometimes I forget that me
and Aunt Rebecca are just servants here. Sometimes I get so proud
thinking about how it will all be when he comes back that I think
that time is come-I half think it's here already and Abijah is back
and we're together again on the Nellie Queen and he is King and
we go sailing to his Kingdom.
I sat down suddenly in a rocker and stared out the window at gray
March meadows and listened to the rising flow of wind that had
suddenly ceased in its fitful gusts and now coursed steady across the
earth.
Do you really think, I whispered, that he'll come back?
Oh, yes! Yes!
I could fight it no more: it was round me now, that dream: it had
wrapped me silently through those lonely months until its gentle
ivy had sent tendrils into every stone and cornice of my mind.
Tom!
Yes?


Could we be friends—again?
Yes.
Oh, Tom, I just got so mad! I'm sorry I hit you with that stone!
She ran over and stared at it, her bland, smooth brow furrowed
with womanly solicitude and she stretched out a forefinger and probed
the flesh to either side.
Does it hurt awful?
I shook my head manfully and drowned in blushes.
My my! she said. It's a caution what a body will do when they're
mad.
It'll go away, I said, waving my hand like an old soldier.
I met her eyes then for the first time in long moments.
I'm sorry I said them things, I said. I don't know why I do!
I knew though that the treasures were gone: there was nothing
to give back to her: they were just things now. Nothing could bring
that back. And she did not ask for them and that night after supper
I buried them all in a hole in the thawed black earth at the corner
of the house by the puzzle tree.
The wind persisted, like a soft, quickening tide. Most always in
my childhood I remember loving to hear the wind: at least when it
was the common kind of wind that seemed to play around the eaves:
quickening and falling and quarreling with itself and making a many-
sound like the telling of a tale. But the wind that March was unvary-
ing and mounting like a rising, desperate sigh and I hated it.
How are you feeling, Rebecca?
Eh? Is that Bige?
It's Sarah, Rebecca. Do you think you could take a little mutton
broth tonight?
Sarah? Who? Ah, Sarah! Ah, Lord bless you, Sarah!
Rebecca had fainted that day in the meat house with a twelve-
pound ham in her arms and gone a-sprawling among the rakes and
hoes and it was Toot that found her: babbling like a fat, foolish baby
about strange times and long-gone names, one side of her round,
blameless face puckered and drawn down like the melted face of a
wax doll held too close to an open oven door. It took all of us to get
her indoors and to fetch her upstairs to bed and all the while she was
dead weight in our hands and yet as soft as a great bag of goose down.
Bige? Is that you Bige Hornbrook? Now where's Nellie?
48


Nellie's dead, Rebecca! Get hold of your wits! This is Sarah
Christopher! Gracious, Rebecca!
Sarah? Who? Ah, Lord bless you, dearie! You're so good to me!
Everyone was in the hallway behind Aunt Sarah: myself and the
Negro women and old Coy. Uncle Joe stood and hollered from the
foot of the hall stairs, hammering his cane on the last step, demand-
ing to know when supper would be set out on the table. I did not
see Cathie until Aunt Sarah turned and herded us all downstairs like
sheep and came railing and shouting at Uncle Joe to be silent. Cathie
had been standing far behind us in the shadow of the doorway to
Aunt Sarah's room, her face gone to fish-belly whiteness.
Is she dead? she whispered to Aunt Sarah. Is Aunt Rebecca
dead?
No, she is not dead, Catherine Ellen! Your Aunt Rebecca has had
a sinking spell. I've got to fetch Joe his supper before he shouts the
house down. You go tend her.
And she left Cathie there on that threshold of dread and drove me
before her down the steps into the hallway.
What's wrong? yelled my uncle. Why ain't supper laid out?
Hush! Hush, you old fool! Rebecca's had a stroke!
A stroke? Oh, indeed now! Oh my, that's a pity!
He seemed overcome with genuine shock and sat down suddenly
on the floor beside the hallrack, clutching his cane like a shepherd's
crook and blinking his blind, white eyes.
Get up, Joseph! You'll catch your death and I'll not have two sick
fools in my house at once! Get up or I'll pack you off to the Home.
It was his mortal dread: his perpetual dream of fear: that he would
be sent to the Old Folks' Home at Wheeling and she was always
quick to use it like a stick upon him when he balked at this or that.
My my! he kept repeating, over and over, at meal time. Ain't that
a pity! A stroke!
Hush and eat, Joseph!
It was a kind of secret wonder: his eating. Though he was blind,
his fingers moved with an old and almost courtly politeness among
the china and silver: pinching a biscuit delicately from the plate,
finding the apple butter with the other hand: his fingertips imper-
ceptibly brushing things, naming them by the heat of them: I would
sometimes think that his fingers had noses, to watch them sniffing
and nuzzling among that veritable crockery shop of gravy boats
and sugar bowls and coffee cups. Yet he never spilled so much as a
49


drop of gravy on his clean shirt, not so much as a crumb of bread:
he was neat as a shrew. Though now tonight he seemed unnerved and
slopped cream on his trouser leg and dropped a biscuit in his lap and
I think that even as a child I knew why: because he was old and had
felt the settling of time's frost upon him.
Catherine Ellen, I would like to have a little talk with you after
supper. Thomas, Joseph-you will leave the table as soon as the meal
is finished.
And we obeyed and went but I hid in the hallway and heard every
word of what she said despite Uncle Joe who set the music box to
chiming in the parlor to ring away the mood of dissolution which
had chilled him at supper.
Catherine Ellen, said Aunt Sarah.
Yes'm.
Your Aunt Rebecca has had a stroke.
What is a stroke?
It is a kind of brain fever, I think. No—I'll not say. I'm not a
physician. I can only say it's some act of God's Providence. She is—.
Is she sick bad?
Please don't interrupt me, child. I know this is a hard thing for
you but I want you to let me say this.
Yes'm.
She is sick abed. She-
Will she die?
Let me finish. Gracious, Catherine Ellen!
Yes'm.
How can I answer a question like that? Only God knows that. He
will decide that hour—for her—and for you and me, as well. But no
matter. That's apart from us. I just want to say now that I think it is
your duty to take care of her while she is infirm.
Yes'm.
You say yes'm but I wonder if you know what Duty is.
I love my Aunt Rebecca, said Cathie, and it was long years
after that I was to hear that same faint choke of desperation in her
voice.
Yes, you love her. Of course, you do. She is all you have.
Yes, she sighed, and the wine of courage was warm in her again.
Until Abijah comes back.
If he comes back, child. And that I sorely doubt.
Oh, no! You mustn't say that!
so


It is a little hard to set in my own kitchen and have a child of eight
impudently tell me what I shall or shan't say.
And she paused, waiting for Cathie to say that she was sorry but
she did not, and with my face blind in the corner of the wall there,
behind the corner of the door, I could see her face in my mind: small
and stubborn and scared.
Now may I finish, Catherine Ellen? Have I your permission to
finish speaking in my own kitchen?
Yes'm.
Thank you. I was going to say that whatever else you think about
me-however you may think of me as hard and mean and crotchety
-you know that I am a Christian woman. You know that I live by
my religion and the religion of my sainted father. Duty, my dear. I
saw it my Duty to take you and your Aunt in when your father turned
you into the roads. I would do it for a gypsy on the river road. For
a dog.
Far off in the house now she had commenced to sing: old Rebecca,
and suddenly laid there before us was all her happy, country youth,
for it was a ringing, rousing good-time tune that old-timers still sing
at country fairs and in the lampshine of minstrel boats and Aunt
Sarah stopped and fell silent, smiling thin-lipped as if she had known
how common Rebecca was from the start.
Well! she said with a little sarcastic laugh. "Old Dan Tucker.” My,
that's a pretty tune to be singing when a body's carried to their death-
bed.
Is she!
Hush! And mark this moment well, my little lady! And pray to our
Lord that when you are borne to your last sheets you may have led
the sort of life-
Why is she singing?
-that will bring to your last breath a hymn in His praise.
And she came over and shut the door against the sound and I had
to press my ear close to the crack now to hear the rest of what she
was saying to Cathie there by the cooling oven.
- I will try to patch up the harm that your elders have done you,
Catherine Ellen! I will try to set you on Duty's path! And to begin
with I expect you to take complete charge of your Aunt while she is
sick. If she needs setting up with o' nights—you must do that! You
must take her her meals. You must bathe her. You must
She's calling my name now, ma'am.


You may go to her when you've sworn that you'll do your Duty
by her, child!
I swear! she whispered and fled like a faint dark shadow through
the hall and I listened as her small shoes trod softly and unfailingly
up the stairway of night and were gone. Far above me, above that
gaunt tower of taffeta and cwinkling jet I saw my Aunt Sarah's face
in the lamplight of the hallway and, like the painful squeeze of sap
from some dense winter wood, tears were slowly trickling down her
cold cheeks.
It seemed that the wind that had risen that month had come like
a rider to bear her off: it was Rebecca's wind, one might say. For as
it steadily rose through those nights her own lamps went winking
and failing down the dark and it seemed that all the fever and life
that ebbed slowly from her went into the body of the little girl and
gathered there in those hot and desperate eyes.
Here, Aunt. Drink this.
Eh? Who's that? Bige?
It's me, Aunt! It's Cathie! Drink this—it's good for you! There!
She would do anything you told her. I think if Aunt Sarah had
come storming into the room and beckoned to her to be off down-
stairs about her dusting she would have risen somehow and dragged
her numb, slack self off down those steps with a good will, humming
some outrageous old mountain tune as she went. As it was, Aunt
Sarah came twice daily (no more—no less) and stood in the doorway
with her arms wrapped in her apron to the wrists and asked how the
patient was and if there was anything she might need from town
and would stand while the old woman got her head turned and fixed
Aunt Sarah in her watery good eye and smiled a half-smile and mis-
took her for a drunken river rouster dead for forty years and Aunt
Sarah, offended and mute, would bow politely and withdraw again.
I stood by helpless and chewed my knuckle and wondered why I
could not weep and felt the ache and throb of some old loss of my
own that I could not remember. And suddenly in the clear, high,
cathedral vastness of the night she would life her voice again and
commence singing.
Raining raining, cold stormy weather! In comes the old man
drinkin' up the cider!


Hush, Aunt! Oh do be quiet! You'll wake them all! Oh please,
Aunt!
And I would have started up at the sound and dug my fingers
into the whispering quilt squares and lain shaking for a while, listen-
ing to the rest.
Get out of the way for Old Dan Tucker! He's too late to get his
supper! Oh and will we ever dance! Jason? Jason, will you fetch the
fiddle? Ho, dearie, you mustn't kiss me here! Mama will see!
Never a sound, never so much as a whisper from Aunt Sarah's
shut-up room, but even that stillness was tacit with a kind of violence.
And yet I think she understood-perhaps was even moved by it-
perhaps her silence was an answer, a blessing, a farewell. For though
her whole soul must have recoiled at these wild night echoes of
cotillions and brandy and dances under the river moon: though she
must have heard in these fragments of Rebecca's last soliloquies the
shameless hammer of hussy heels and the thrashing of the boots of
the men from Shawneetown and Louisville and the keelboatmen from
down under the hills in the Chickasaw Agency, she felt stirring in her
heart and mind some old, long-stilled reverence for Life and Death.
And perhaps she was reminded that all her own days might be sung
of and ended and forgotten in a few loose verses cried out to a silent
house.
And though she had forbidden it, I would creep out and go the
cold length of the hallway in my bare feet and whisper to the girl
from the threshold: Can I do anything to help?
She would turn her face to me, a livid, vivid mask of desolation
and shake her cheeks numbly.
I'll take care of her, she sometimes whispered, but, more often,
would say nothing and turn her eyes to the yellow mask in the candle-
light again. Once I crept into the room and stood beside her and
reached out and took her hand and tried to squeeze it, but the gesture
failed somehow and my hand fell to my side again: lank and helpless.
But she wanted to talk.
I wished she wouldn't carry on, she said with a dry tongue.
She don't know, I said. She can't help it. Lordy, Cathie, she must
be awful sick.
I just wish she wouldn't sing those songs, whispered Cathie, her
eyes widening and the dark slits of her nostrils a-quiver like a good
mare's.
53


They're just songs, I said.
No, she said. They're common.
They're what?
They're common, she said. I know what your Aunt Sarah must
think when she hears her sing those songs! They're bad songs! My
Aunt wasn't bad!
I couldn't think of a thing in the world to say because they really
were the most common river-bank tunes in the world; the kind Stick-
ney's Minstrels used to sing on the Sensation and Mister Emmett's
black dandies and their banjos in the good-time days.
Is that you, Bige? General Jamieson? Why, bless my soul! It is
General Jamieson! Bige, run and fetch the demijohn of peach brandy
from the trunk yonder! Gen'l, you must be chilled to the bone!
General Jamieson had been a thread in the cloth of legend in the
bottomlands, an old soldier through no more a general than I was,
but a soldier none the less and dead and gone to lead his last army
of worms in a time before my mother's childhood even: a man of
stiff and starchy temper, I would suppose, from the tales they spun
of him: less than five feet tall but fierce as a hummingbird with a
great snow-shock of hair like Old Hickory and a tomahawk scar in
his forehead that he could put his thumb into up to the second joint.
But a ghost now and yet she saw him and made a place for him in
that final room of her life, a last warm country hospitality
Bige? Where's Nellie? Bige? Eh? Eh? Who's that yonder in my
pantry? Is that those young Lindsay scamps? Ha! I might have knowed
it! And I suppose you heard I'd made some seafoam candy this
mornin'! All right! All right, I say! Help yourselves, children! There's
the lambs! Ho! Ho! It's night already and time to light the candles!
Where, where do the days go? Life is a dream! A dream and we all
wake up! A-1-1-1- wake up!
I wish she wouldn't shout like that.
Aunt Sarah understands. She knows she's ter'ble sick, Cathie.
No. She don't understand. She hears her talk that way—yelling the
names of all those people—all those common people. I just wish like
anything she would be still!
Why 'pon my soul! cried the old woman with a voice like a hickory
fiddle in the moonlight of her bed. Here it is broad day again! Where,
where do the days go? Merrily merrily merrily merrily! A dream is
all! 'Pon my soul—'pon my soul
And suddenly Cathie moved forward in the moonlight and it
54


flooded her face suddenly and I saw it twisted and anguished and dry-
eyed with it.
Shut up, Aunt!
Bige?
Be still, Aunt!
Cathie! I whispered. She's ter’ble sick! You mustn't!
Rainin' rainin' cold stormy weather-in comes the old man !
Aunt! Be still!
And with an incredible and almost airy deftness her small hand
went out and struck the old woman's numb, slack cheek and then
both hands flew to her gaping mouth and she stared, helpless and
stricken, at the thing she had done.
Cathie! whimpered the old one. You never used to hit me when
you was little!
Oh, Aunt! Aunt! Forgive me! Forgive me!
Cathie! Little Catherine Ellen! crooned Rebecca, and it was all
forgotten and forgiven now. Run yonder, child, and help yourself
to 'lasses cookies and a cup of milk from the pitcher in the ice house!
There's a lamb! And, Cathie? Fetch another candle, dearie! These
winter days it gets so dark so soon! So soon!
Cathie stood frozen, speechless and slumped into her hands, shak-
ing and sobbing with a blessing of tears. And suddenly Aunt Sarah
had appeared in the doorway in her nightdress and cap, her jaws
wound round with a cloth like a cadaver in her own right.
Thomas, get yonder to your bed! You disobeyed me.
But-she-
Do as I say, Thomas!
But she needs me! When she's gone she won't have anybody!
Neither of us has anybody!
When we are older the death of someone close is an agony—but
it cannot dream to touch the epic and classic tragedy that death is
to a child. When we are older, part of us goes when someone we
love dies. But to a child a god is gone.
In the last few days Rebecca seemed to subside into a glum and
puff-cheeked retrospection and, having demanded that her old spec-
tacles be wiped in muslin till the tiny lenses were clear as a body
might want them to be to watch for General Jamieson, or the dream
children or the Dark Rider upon that wind-blown road, lay mum
55


and pensive with the glasses pinched on the end of her round nose
and looked at none of us and waited.
How is she? Aunt Sarah asked Willie Curtis, the doctor from up
the hill.
Gonter die! he observed and added a fresh wisp of black tobacco
to the quid which hung in his udderlike cheek.
There's nothing we can do?
She'll not last the week, I say! he snapped and licked dust from
his stovepipe and was gone up the road to the house of his sister
and a dipper of applejack to save him from the damp.
Then, said my Aunt Sarah, that is no room for a child! Stay here
in the kitchen, Thomas! I'll fetch Catherine Ellen down here and
stay with Rebecca till the end.
An end, one might suppose, that was far off-riding to judge
from her singing which, now, suddenly and almost as if it had sur-
prised herself, roused and briskly caroled through the house.
Go tell Aunt Sally! Go tell Aunt Sally! Go tell Aunt Sally, the
old gray goose is—..
Hush, Rebecca. Lie still. It's Sarah! Everything is all right. Cath-
erine Ellen, run yonder.
No'm.
Catherine Ellen, mind now! Run downstairs and play with
Thomas. I'll tend Rebecca!
No'm. I'll not. She's my Aunt. I'm obliged to stay with her.
Catherine Ellen, this is not a time for impudence. Now mind me.
No'm. I'll not.
I listened in the hallway with my ear at the foot of the stairs for
I was the sneak-o'-the-world and would have eavesdropped on God
Himself if I had been sure where His quarters were and would have
learned who was planned to be born that day and who to be taken
away. Cathie was like someone old with the voice of a child: she
would not go; I knew that flames would not have driven her from
that room and Aunt Sarah knew it, too, and retreated before it as
she had never done before and would not soon do again.
And as if this victory were insufficient, Cathie, moved by some
strange dark need, stood still on the threshold and told Aunt Sarah
why it must be so: that she should stay.
She is my Aunt, she said, her breath husky in her voice. She is
Abijah's sister. He would want me to take care of her because when
he rode off that day he told us to take care of one another. He said
56


that and I said I would do it, Miss Christopher! Yes, I did, and I have
to. And you yourself told me that it was my Duty. Yes, you were
right! Before God it was my duty you said.
Yes, child! Oh Lord save us all!
I had not ever heard her so moved, to speak so warmly, with so
much aching in her throat: my cold, proud Aunt Sarah.
Raining raining cold stormy weather! rang that gay, uncracked
voice.
Please! pleaded Cathie. Go away! Let us alone! Let us alone!
Please! Oh, I'm sorry! I'm impudent! But go away! Please!
Child! Yes! Yes, child!
And she swept down the stairways and whispered past me in her
tall skirts, her face like wood but her eyes wild and wandering with
a sorrow that shamed her cold pride.
Oh, Aunt! Aunt, be still!
Bige?
No. No, Aunt! It's Cathie!
General Jamieson?
Hush, Aunt!
Get out of the way for Old Dan Tucker! He's too late to get his
supper! Light a candle, love! Oh raise the shade, dearie, the days—
so short—so short! It's dusk and suppertime and I haven't shelled
one of them peas. Bige?
Aunt, please! Hush! Hush! Don't let them hear you!
Nellie? Is that Nellie? Why, bless my soul! Me eyes must be
failin' me! It's Tom's mother—it's Ella Christopher!
And I stood wrapped round in fear while the ghost of my long
dead and unremembered mother came and took her turn with the
others and stood at the bed of the dying Rebecca.
Is that you, Bige? Who's—? Who's? Ah, it’s Peggy! Joe's and
Sarah’s Peggy!
I would not have wanted to have seen Aunt Sarah's face then as
she would now fix it, turning it to the wall and burying her eyes in
the dumb, unreflecting wood. But now Rebecca had abated in her
outcries and seemed to subside muffled in happy chuckles and bright
anticipation. Her long, good life had been, in those last days, rib-
boned out before us all to touch and feel and see, like a bolt of
good, staunch drygoods, printed through with cheap, sweet flowers
and fresh from the buggy of some honest drummer.
It began to rain that afternoon and the wind rose and lashed the


house with white sheets of it, blowing hard from the river, and
struggling its crystal against the windowpanes and streaming down
the house and bounding on the road. Since Rebecca had called out
my mother's name I had grown numb with thoughts. By my window
now, harking to wind and rain, I could still hear nothing but the
echo of that voice that had cried out my mother's name and I
thought to myself: Yes, she was there. She came and stood before
her bed, right there by the hair trunk in the little room with the
cold breath. My mother came and stood there and she saw her.
I've got to know. I've got to know.
And nothing could have kept me from that threshold now. I fed
down the hall and darted past Cathie and confronted the old one,
the wild face with the spectacles now fallen and dangling from her
lip, life gone and sweet laughter gone and the song and lust stilled
at last.
Is my mother beautiful? I cried out.
But she was dead and Cathie said nothing because she had done
all that God and Aunt Sarah had asked of her and even when these
were done she had done more: had closed the secret eyes and, be-
cause they had no pennies, either of them, she had cut two neat
horn buttons from her ragged child's coat and set them on either
lid.
The wind had stopped blowing but it seemed that it had not
really subsided but had passed us by and was howling now against
other windows somewhere behind the world. The morning of the
old woman's funeral Uncle Joe relinquished his chair in the parlor
like a meek child, and a little fearfully, for it was not wholly clear
to him who had died. In blindness and in age I think he had come
to think of death with a kind of generalness; a failing in the tissue
of all humankind.
Ah, don't she look natural! someone said, everyone said, and it
became the day's chief falsehood for, in fact, the substance of
Rebecca Hornbrook lay heaped glum and dull as a wad of tallow
there in the coarse pine box.
The Negro women were set to clean the parlor and found little
enough to dust for Rebecca had gone that way with her feather
duster not ten days before and whatever she did she always had
tried to make it her best. And old Cynthie Cox and Miss Dulcie
58


before long the old friend Noam from us all: dic
Curtis and her brother Doctor Willie came in their spidery black
buggy and brought stone jars of potato salad and fried chicken
wrapped in pages from Godey's and, for what purpose none of us
could imagine, a demijohn of turpentine. Willie was tipsy (he was
never in his life any more drunk than he was sober) and he came
across the parlor behind the two women with whom he lived, sway-
ing faintly and yet decorously, and with elegance bore the demijohn
of turpentine like a temple lamp in his tapering, waxlike fingers, and
hiccupped softly.
And it rained. It seemed the penultimate downpour and I sus-
pected before long that black Toot would go to the window and
watch anxiously for her old friend Noah to come riding through the
submerged mountains. Cathie kept apart from us all: dressed in her
good black dress and with her moon face wan and silvery under her
dark cloak of hair. And I could not face her somehow because I
think I knew how much of me I would find mirrored there: how
much of the grief and loss of faces too darkened by memory to be
seen. And Pastor Blake came and Elmer Thornton, the undertaker,
fussed and picked around his handiwork like an Italian music master
primping his star pupil for her first recital. I dreaded him with a
loathing that choked me. He seemed Death's own advocate and he
would stand and let his eye rove round the room and rub his dry,
chalky palms one against the other and survey each of us in his turn,
the measuring eye and the practiced, swift estimate of the size of the
box we would need and the price we would be worth when the shovel
tamped the neat mound at last. And I wondered to myself that day
with the strange and candid innocence of childhood who would bury
Elmer Thornton when he came at last to the black hour.
Curiously the house seemed a-bustle with an almost Christmas
energy-Death seemed to generate its own industry and liveliness
all around it—and everyone was hungry-everyone but Cathie, every-
one but me—and neighbors had brought enough to feed a church
picnic and after a while we grew hungry, too. It was a mortal hunger
as if Death had made us all love life so fiercely that day that we
could never be filled, could never taste Life's substances strong
enough upon our living tongues.
Bless me! cried Dulcie Curtis in that wild, happy voice that
nothing, not funerals at least, ever softened. There's the Captain's
grandson—Tom.
And she came over and threw her stiff, scratchy taffeta arms around
59


the mound of fresh earth but she had turned away and was starting
off toward the river far beyond the toy meadow beneath the hill. I
walked to her with feet heavy with mud and confusion and stood still,
trying to guess her expression behind the bonnet rim. And presently
she spoke out.
I just hate her, she said, and I leaned around and saw her face
then, pinched and raging.
Who?
Her! Her! she gasped, gesturing woodenly toward the grave and
weeping now, sobbing, unabashed and shaking with it. Aunt Rebecca!
You mustn't say that! I said softly, staring at the mound and the
cheap country lowers.
I do! I do!
Why? I whispered and my eyes went a-wandering among the stony
names and the dates and the sandy angels with their dreadful, beckon-
ing cherub hands.
She was awful! Abijah would have been so ashamed!
Why?
The way she carried on! The things she hollered and the songs
she sang! Awful awful awful! And the way she—she looked in the
coffin there! Didn't you see how awful she looked? How—common!
Nobody looks good when they're dead.
Some people, she cried, are beautiful! My mother was beautiful
when she was dead! Not old and ugly—like a servant!
And I had no heart nor word to answer that; I who had called
them that.
Go away! she raged at me, and my eyes wandered to the stones
again and I saw the name of my mother and father and wondered
if they listened in their ancient room beneath the roof of grass.
Go away! she wailed. Just leave us be here for a while! Her and
me! Go back to your big house, Thomas Christopher! You and your
Aunt Sarah and your Uncle Joe and your slaves! Leave the servants
be!
And I was glad to go and wandered down to the house and went
up to my room and stayed there till dark fell, listening for her to
come back and just at dusk she rapped softly at the kitchen window
and Toot let her in and I heard her creep to the little room that was
all hers now.


II
VITHEN I was very small the house of Dulcie Curtis was a
place I swore to live when I was a man and could come and
go as I pleased, without Aunt Sarah's by-your-leave. Once, I had
been there, when I was five, and had come away wide-eyed and
clammy-handed with wonder, my mind twinkling with the vision of
that candy box of a front room in Dulcie's house: a spotless, shut-
tered chamber within which the light of day sifted so dim that it
seemed always late pleasant afternoon there and at night when the
lamps were lighted the air grew golden as pollen and caught its
breath and shone green and soft like a forest in the sea.
Dulcie and her brother Willie had lived all their days in that
house. Willie had gone off when he was seventeen and studied for
medicine at the University and remembered the aging Jefferson in
those days and had come back to the bottomlands as fine a doctor
as we, or anyone else, could ask and settled down with a genteel and
resigned smile and commenced to drink peach brandy. He had never
stopped that, nor his medicine either, and it was the custom in the
bottomlands when a woman was quick with child and her burden
awoke from its dream at last and began to stir, that they would come
fetch Willie Curtis and hold him prisoner a week before the confine-
ment so that his lean, cunning fingers would be fit for the task.
There was about him—however thick-tongued with drink he might
be—an unvarying and unfailing gentility of a breed antique and
extinct in these brusque times. In the summer he wore a white linen
suit and a white shirt and black string tie and under his white mus-
tache he thoughtfully sucked on a clove from Dulcie's spice cabinet
so as not to offend the bigoted and faint of heart. In the winter he
wore a gray alpaca suit and a beaver hat and carried peppermints in
62


said nothing and after a few weeks followed him again and peered
in the same window and saw the same quiet spectacle. And it had
gone on that way for thirty years, rain or shine. Dulcie never let on
she knew, not even when he had forgotten one night and called her
Cynthie in the starshine of their pillow. And when, at last, Charley
Lindsay died in an apoplectic seizure on the courthouse steps at
Elizabethtown when the final result of the election of Tyler was
nailed to the oak tree, Dulcie had taken the buggy down river to the
house of Cynthie Cox and introduced herself and they had sat there
and cried for a while and had tea and cried some more and a week
later Cynthie came to live at Dulcie's house. To Aunt Sarah and,
for that matter, to most of the decent women in the bottoms this
seemed the blackest scandal since Eden-mistress and widow under
the same roof. Yet each had loved him, each had wondered at his
strangeness, each knew the ultimate joke that Providence had played
them and it seemed, I think, that something pleased them in the way
it had come out in the end. I doubt if his name was ever mentioned
between them, except perhaps when one of them would find some
poor, pathetic memento of him in the parlor or bedroom and ask
whether it should be thrown out or not. In the end, I suppose, all of
him was thrown out, memory and shoes and beaver hat, until at last
there survived between these two women only a sweet, mute kinship
of understanding and a secret laughter at Life which had not let
either of them know the love of man. Spinsters they were, in fact.
Spinsters to see, certainly: sweet and spotless in black taffeta dickies
and with bonnets perpetually on their heads: old bonnets like limp
marigolds whose petals cupped round their dusty white faces. It
seems to me that there was always something of filigreed gold and
polished jet about their throats, always a scent of cedar about their
clothes with a breath of tansy from their pantry still clinging to them.
Cynthie was small-voiced and genteel and Dulcie was delicate as a
needle but blunt and outspoken as a man.
A cat, she had been heard to remark to Uncle Joe in her spring
vegetable garden one morning, will walk a mile to piss on parsley!
And Uncle Joe would tell this to make Aunt Sarah sniff and purse
her face and go off angry into the kitchen and leave him be. For she
could not countenance them and the house of Dulcie was a place she
would not let me go when I was small. Though the spring I turned
thirteen I went where I pleased and Cathie came, too, for in those
years since the death of Rebecca some new and somehow frightened
64


kinship had grown between us. She was now eleven and tough as a
boy and in the summers she would reach August as brown as I was
and her legs would be scratched and torn by the same wild-berry
thorns that laced my own and we would race through the fields and
meadow by day and sometimes by the light of moon, like the wild
children of the fox. Sometimes, ravening with thirst in the shimmer
glass of a blinding August afternoon, we would come up the hill,
through the cemetery, to the house of Dulcie. And she would fix us
cold drinks with some sort of fruit syrup she had made and kept in
a cool stone jar beneath the pump and we would move cautiously
like quivering horses through the delicate half-light of her little par-
lor, our flanks twitching with carefulness not to knock against the
spidery legs of a tiny table, or the bellied glass of her souvenir
cabinet, or the bell-jar with the tiny boat. And when we had had our
poundcake and our cold drink in the parlor of Dulcie and heard
Cynthie play Mister Foster's tunes on the harmonium we would race
out again onto the hill, bound again for home or to the woods again
to see if the redbird whose nest we had found that morning had come
back again to its eggs. What bound us together in those years was a
thing so totally unlike the first year that the death of Rebecca seemed
a gateway between those two worlds of darkness and light. In that
time Abijah had written two letters from Kansas and she carried
them with her always in the pocket of her dress and sometimes when
her temper was generous she would let me hold them and read them
again.
The first letter spoke of the death of Rebecca. The second told
us that he had joined the cavalry of a gentleman named Morgan in
Kentucky and that he would come back by and by. And it was clear,
although he did not mention it again, that when he came he would
be a King and riding proud, in scarlet, and with silver pistols in his
belt. Because that had always been her dream and in those years,
strangely and magically, it had come to be my own and she had
shared it with me like the warmth of a home hearth. I could hardly
remember the bitterness of that first winter now and, often, in my
dreams I would see the vision of him: high and lofty on a frothing
mare, a man higher than the sycamore by the north fence, a giant
printed on the sky. And yet sometimes, although we were insepa-
rable, I would feel a sudden, choking rise of hatred and violence
against her that made those first resentments seem like the paleness
of a star beside the moon. We were together from breakfast till
65


Aunt Sarah snuffed out every lamp and yet there were times when
we would find one another caught up in a sudden trivial incident
and a moment later would be standing, toe to toe, lashing at each
other's face with fingers or stones or whatever happened to be at
hand. Things came too easy for her; I could not forgive her that.
She rode like a highwayman—she could bring down a bird with a
stone no bigger than her thumbnail-she could swim deeper and
more swiftly than I. And once when we stole Willie Curtis's john-
boat and went clean out to mid-channel and stood in the very path
of the morning packet to Sunfish as it came churning toward us, she
had dived when it swept past and disappeared beneath it and I
gasped and prayed and was sure she would come up broken and
bleeding in the wake of its paddle wheel but she had done the in-
credible feat: she had gone under it and up the other side and bobbed
now in the churning spindrift of the blowing river wind, her hair
streaming in her mocking eyes and her red mouth taunting me till
I bit the blood out of my own tongue in envy and outrage.
She never mentioned her Aunt Rebecca once in all those years
and one time when our day's fortunes had taken us by chance through
the graven stones on the hill by Dulcie's house I had caught her hand
and held her and stared down for a moment at the stone above that
mound that the grass and stars-of-Bethlehem had covered now: the
name already worn by the ceaseless fingers of the rain: “Rebecca
Hornbrook — Born 1790-Died 1855–Night winds, night winds
blowing leaves in heaps—Fall gently over the grave where Rebecca
sleeps.” And she had suddenly clenched her fingers and bent my
thumb back till I squealed shamefully and tore it free, and I saw
the hate and dread in her eyes before she sprang off and raced me
to the road. We never tarried there again-in that village of the
sleepers—and I never hit her that day for bending my thumb because
it was a justice.
I'm going to cut my hair off! she said to me one day when we
were stripping to swim in the river.
You'd never!
I would! she cried and her voice echoed in the grove of willows
and a bird climbed, startled, and cried across the sky. Because that's
how your Aunt Sarah knows when we've been swimming! And she
shed her camisole and the rest of the incongruous female frippery
that Aunt Sarah bedecked her in (she had grown unaccountably fond
of her in those last two years) and stood glaring out at the river,
66


hugging her brown arms round her chest, the sunlight twinkling
like tiny fires on the fine down of her thighs.
Then I can dive all I please! she said. And she'll never know.
But even the thought of this forbidding seemed to enrage her
and, wet hair or no, she suddenly arched and plunged neatly into the
deep amber pool in the river shoals below. I watched her far be-
neath it, far down in the very depths of it where the sunfish broke
and scattered like chips of pearl before her naked slimness and I felt
my temples pound with anger. She was a better diver than I and
could stay down for a length of time that brought me to the surface
with aching ears and a nose full of green water. I stood and watched
her surface and claw her dark hair back and mock me again with her
eyes.
He taught me to swim, she shouted.
Who? I cried, and dove off the bluff and struck the water like a
falling chair and sank tumbling heel over ears and came up choking.
Abijah taught me! she laughed. When I was only three he threw
me off the Nellie Queen and told me I'd have to swim or drown.
And I swam!
I taught myself, I said, and it was the glummest, dullest fact in
the world.
Damme! she swore. I'm going to cut all my hair off! That's just
what I'm going to do.
Stop swearing, I said, or I'll tell Aunt Sarah!
I don't care, she said. Abijah used to swear something wonderful!
That's no matter, I said. You heard Jamey Toomey, the old scissor-
sharpener, say “damme” that day in the back yard and you just say
it to be smart.
I used that word long before she cried. Damme! Abijah used to
say that all the time!
That's a lie! You just say it to be smart because you heard him
say it and you know Aunt Sarah won't let Jamey sharpen our knives
any more.
She dove again, heedless, and was gone, and I ducked under and
saw her whiteness loping like a far, ghostly porpoise in the murky
shoals and then I swallowed water and came up gasping. She was
nowhere in sight and I knew that she was teasing again, trying to
scare me, trying to make me think a big snapping turtle had caught
her foot, and I could see bubbles rising, mocking bubbles that broke
and each held a small laughter. In the end I always grew frightened
67


at the trick and just at the moment when I would imagine that at
last she had really gone down in trouble I would hear her laughter
behind me and there was never time for me to turn before she thrust
me under and turned me over and then scrambled up on the bank
before I could get my hands on her.
Sometimes in the wild sweetness of those days we would go sol-
emnly to the beached boat of Abijah on the sandy bar where he had
left it and there was no mocking or struggle in us then: we went
fingers-linked and dumb with shared pride, like pilgrims, to some
barbaric ivory temple in the wilderness.
She is very beautiful, she would say after a spell of looking. Isn't
she! The Nellie Queen!
She sure is. Prettier than the Zachary Taylor!
Pooh! That old shantyboat!
And once while we had stood there among the rocks of the sand-
bar I had known one small moment of glory: I had spied a copper-
head not a hand's length from her bare toes and I had killed it.
Then she kissed my cheeks like a general and promised that when
Abijah came he would make me first mate of the Nellie Queen.
A thousand nights in her pantry had made us canny of Toot's
teasing. She did not find us such easy game in these wiser years. One
night when Cathie had taken an apple from the box and Toot saw
her she told her that it was the snaky apple she had chosen.
Sho! said Toot. And de way you just grab and pick it out the fust
time shows that you got the makin's of mischief within you already!
Shoot!
Gwan! Eat a bite, Li'l Miss Evie! And den give some to poh Adam
sittin' yonder! And then just see the trouble come switchin' round you
like de snake of damnation!
Cathie glared at the apple a moment and then bit it so angrily
that the crackle spoke out sharp in the room and the juice of it
spurted round her nostrils.
There! she cried when she had chewed it and gulped it down. I
ate a bite! Here, Tom!
I took it and ate a bite, smaller than hers, to show that I was not
afraid, and watched her whirl on Toot.
See there! she cried. Nothing happened. I'm the same! So's
Tom!
You think you the same! sniffed Toot. But just wait till temptation
comes through de grass!
68


and in that strange summer a kind of dreamy frenzy sometimes seemed
to seize her and I would find her often staring moodily off into the
river wind or alone in the top of a tree in Uncle Joe's orchard with
a half-eaten pear in her hand, and when I spoke to her she would
look at me dumbly and then look at the fruit as if she wondered how
it had come to be there and wonder whose teeth had spooned out its
tart sweet flesh in that bitten place. Sometimes she would stop speak.
ing in the middle of a sentence and it would almost seem that she
were listening to remote voices.
What's wrong, Cathie?
Nothing! Nothing! Let me alone!
You're sure different these days! You must be sick with growing
pains or something!
Sometimes she would fight me for a word like that, come rushing
at me with her face livid and drawn with unspeakable spite and we
would tumble to the sward of buttercups in a tangle of mad limbs,
our fingers striving for each other's hair and the breath of us min-
gling in numb, furious strife. Other times she would seem not to
have heard me at all and move off and sit alone somewhere or go
and devil Suse or Toot in the pantry or sew with Aunt Sarah in the
north room. And then in that September a thing came to pass that
seemed to quicken her fever all the more. We had walked all the
way to Carly Juniper's store to buy licorice and a spool of green
thread for Aunt Sarah and were easing homeward. Just as we rounded
the clump of pawpaws by the road at the corner of our fence we both
spied the man on the bay stallion cantering toward us. I heard Cathie's
quick sob and I think for a moment she thought it was Abijah and
we both began to run toward the rider as if we knew that it was us
he had come for.
Hi! he cried, reining up when we were abreast of him. Are you
Catherine Ellen Hornbrook, madam?
Yes! I am! He's not!
Well now, I wouldn't reckon that feller yonder would have a name
like Catherine Ellen!
What do you want? Are you a friend of Abijah's?
Hold on now, madam! Don't get wild! My name is Frank Seton
and I'm lieutenant in Morgan's Kentucky Rifles!
Is Abijah all right!
Fine, fit, and full of fight!
Where is he?
70


Hit don't matter where. You couldn't go to him now if you was
a mind to, and he'll not be back home for a spell. When I told him
I was ridin' up the river to Wheeling to see a lady he asked me to
stop .
Have you got a letter from him?
That'll wait. Let me finish. Lord, you're his all right—there's the
same brimstone smell when you speak a while! He's fine, as I've
already said, and he sends you his blessings and his love and says
he prays to God for you ever' night and asks you to do him the same
favor. God knows he'll need them prayers and so will we all.
Why?
Ain't you heared, daughter? Don't newspapers git back this far
in the country? Ain't there enough steamboat talk to keep you farmers
posted? There's a war comin'!
War! she whispered and the word blew soft like a wind through
her. Yes, a war!
Sho, he said. A real war! And soon, I allow! Soon!
He was dressed for a war, I thought, and stared in dumbstruck
love at his knee-high boots shiny and wrinkled as prunes and his
fine gray wool suit and the pistol in his belt as long as from my
elbow to my little-finger tip.
Sho, he said again, staring off up river. A right smart of a war!
But we're feeling up to it!
And Abijah will lead them! she cried suddenly, bringing her
palms together with a soft clap, and threw her head back with that
light in her face.
Well now! cried the man in gray. I don't know about that. There's
some other ideas about who's to lead! But he'll be in the thick! Don't
worry 'bout Bige Hornbrook.
He said to give you this, said Frank Seton and reached in his
shirt under the gold buttons of his gray jacket and fetched out a
piece of midday summer sun. He held it down to her, swinging on
a gold chain as gossamer-thin as spider's silk. Cathie took it, breath-
less, and cupped it in her palms, the locket with the feathers scratched
on it and the looped chain coiled like a golden hair.
It's Mama's locket! she breathed. He carried it with him every-
where!
Well, he bade me give it to you and tell you to keep holt of it till
he gets back!
When?
'71


The man in gray laughed: a sound like the soft breaking of a rifle
and looked down at us both, smiled down at us.
Sho, he said. I know the answer to that like I know the day of
Armageddon.
He grinned and fetched out a chew of plug and bit off a corner
and jawed it a minute and then looked at us again with his strange,
quiet, violent face.
Morgan says it'll be over and done by the spring of 'Sixty-one, he
said with a soft chuckle. But I reckon the Lord will measure the time
of it—not Morgan nor me nor even yore Daddy, Catherine Ellen,
madam!
War! she breathed again as if the word ran like a soothing thing
upon her tongue.
Sho! said the gray man and caught up his reins again. But it's
good-by now. There's a lady in Wheelin'
Good-by! she said and bit her lip, scowling, as if she knew there
were something she must tell him: something about a King. But
she kept her peace and he smiled again and tipped his hat and bowed
a little in the saddle and then his black heel flashed in the stallion's
flank and the hooves sprang up in a thunder and they were gone in
dust and a wild flourish up the river road again. Cathie stole off by
herself to the shade of the pawpaws with her back to me. I knew
she was prying open the tiny gold shell of the locket to stare inside
and when I crept up behind her to look too, she clapped it shut in
her hands and whirled on me.
I just detest a sneak and a spy! she cried, stamping her foot in the
dust.
Why can't I see?
Because it's a special locket! That's why! It's my mother's picture
and it was hand-painted by a genuine Spanish artist and it's just for
me and Abijah to look at!
It was too near suppertime for us to have a fight so I walked off
indifferently, kicking my bare toe in the dust and watching a toad
thumping off ahead of me a dozen yards or so.
I'll bet she's ugly, I said. Just like a hop-toad!
And she chased me to the house for that and I ran ahead of her
through the long meadow laughing and yelling it over and over all
the way indoors and up the stars and latched the door to my room
and she hammered on the old wood until Aunt Sarah came and yelled
at her to stop.
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Tom, unlatch that door this minute!
Yes'm.
Toot said there was a rider on the road!
I said nothing and Cathie shook her head with wondrous bewilder-
ment and looked Aunt Sarah square in the eye.
I declare! Cathie sighed. That Toot is the blackest liar in all
creation.
Indeed! Then what she said ain't so?
Why, no! laughed Cathie in wide-eyed surprise and kept the locket
in the hands she had laced behind her.
I could have sworn I heard hooves! Well, no matter. You know
what I've told you children about talkin' to strangers on the road.
Yes'm, we said together.
Then remember it! There's gypsies abroad in the land and they
steal children! Remember that! They steal children and sell them for
slaves in Egypt! Would you like that?
No'm, we lied, for we should have loved that.
All right. Now go wash for supper. The both of you. And get
clean all the way to the elbows. And, Tom, put on your shoes too!
And we went to the pump and washed and I thought that I would
die if she didn't show me the locket soon. It had seemed to me in
those months that Abijah was as much my own dream as hers and it
was wicked of her to keep this glory from me.
The thick, bunched heat of the day broke at twilight in a wild
river storm and we sat after supper in the kitchen listening to the
drip of the rain and the far-off rumble of the retreating thunder.
You col' Miz Christopher a lie, you scallawags!
We never did! cried Cathie.
Sho you did! said Toot. I seen dat man on de horse plain as you
see me hyer!
You're always seeing things! said Cathie scornfully.
Toot fell silent then, muttering from time to time like the way-off
thunder, and her old face crinkled in worry as if misdoubting that a
body could believe their eyes at all in that strange time, when ants
marched like the tragic legions of the world's benighted men and
when summer thunder upon the far-away ridges sounded more and
more like the gathering fury of an outraged god.
It was an hour after the rain stopped that the clouds were gone
73


and a thin moon lay curled in my window and when the owl began
to blow its soft grieving flute in the orchard I heard her tap on my
door. The house was long abed and I knew it could be none but her
and yet I cried out the whispered challenge as if I feared that it
might not be a mortal at all.
It's me!
And she opened the door, knowing how to bear down and swing
it with a little swift push so that the brass hinge would not speak.
She was standing there in her long nightdress like a pleasant ghost
with her dark hair in pigtails down either shoulder, and it was then
I saw the moonshine glint on the gold in her hand.
You can look, she whispered when she had come to my bedside,
and I tore out of the quilt and took it gently from her fingers.
Careful you don't break the chain, she whispered. Here, let me
open it! It's very hard to do!
And she took it and her hair fell over her hands as she bent and
plucked the tiny lid loose with her fingernail and then held it out
in the patch of moon for me to see.
That's her, she said softly. Nellie. Abijah's beautiful Nellie.
. I took it and saw it in my own hand and felt a little of the shared
love of it flow into my fingers: the magic of that tiny, oval face with
the frame of dark, wooden hair and the sad smiling mouth.
Isn't she beautiful? Like a queen! That's why Abijah called his
boat after her. The Nellie Queen. You can see why—can't you?
Yes, I said with a strange grief in my throat. She is surely a belle!
She crawled up on the quilt and tucked her feet under her night-
dress and sighed happily, holding her hand out to take the locket
back. But I could not let it go just yet: there was a magic in it that
warmed something cold in me.
Don't keep it too long, she said gently.
All right, I said. Here.
And I gave it back and suddenly I knew that I had to lie to her
and as soon as the lie rose to my lips it magically became a truth.
I told you once that I couldn't remember my mother, I said.
Yes.
Well, that ain't so, I said. I was just making that up. I mind her
very well.
Yes, but you said —
I know. The reason I said that was because I knew your mother
was dead and I didn't want to make you feel bad. I didn't want to
74


go bragging on my own mother when you couldn't even remember
yours.
But I do! I do!
Sure, I said. I never knew that then! Now I know and it's all right
to tell you! My mother's only been dead about five years, you see!
I've been here nearly that long! she said frowning. And you said —
Well maybe it was six years, I said, wallowing desperately through
these thick, deep waters. A body loses track of time.
Tom, she said softly. You seem to forget sometimes that we're
friends close friends! You don't have to lie to me!
Stop saying I'm a liar! I whispered fiercely, bunching up my fist
to hit her. My mother was beautiful! I remember! I remember!
Tom! Tom, don't start fighting now! Please! Oh, Tom, I'm so
happy tonight! The news from Abijah and everything.
I pouted, glum and wounded, and would not look at her.
And there's going to be a War! she whispered, in a wondrous
trance of happiness. A War, Tom! And Abijah will win-he'll be
the one to lead them and then he'll be King.
And for that matter, I said, I happen to remember my father very
well, too. He looked just like that man on horseback today!
Tom!
Well, I do!
Tom, why do you make up stories! Our being friends hasn't got
anything to do with that! Can't you understand? We're both of us
alone!
And when I thrust out both hands and struck her in the chest
she gawped and gasped and fell back on the quilt and did not move
and I crawled over and stared down in her face. I had thought that
there would be a fight and Aunt Sarah would hear us and come and
find her there and it would be her that would get the licking, not
me, because it was her that was out of bed and prowling the house.
But she lay very still with her eyes closed and with her white teeth
bitten deep into her lower lip and there was a gold brimming of tears
in her lashes.
What's wrong? I whispered, shaking her shoulder. Did I hurt
you?
She nodded, a fast quick motion of her head and I saw her clenched
hands and the tears shook loose from her lashes and trickled down
her cheeks. And I think they were not so much tears of pain as they
were of shame that she had not fought me.
75


I'm sorry, I said, and hated myself for the weakness of that.
She lay a while longer and then sat up suddenly and dug at her
eyes with the heels of her hands and sniffled haughtily.
I think I hurt my chest swimming yesterday forenoon, she said,
and snuffled, not looking at me. It hurts lately.
Your chest hurts?
She nodded, still with her eyes in the moon and the tree that had
caught it and whose branches now relinquished it like opening, re-
luctant fingers which could hold it back no more.
I guess that's a good thing for you to know, she said with an angry
snuffle. When we fight.
What?
About my chest, she said a little wistfully. If you want to hurt me
now—you know how, Tom Christopher! Just hit me in the chest!
I won't, I said after a while and wished she would let me look at
Abijah's locket a little while more.
Why not? she said. It's fair. When you fight someone you can
hit them anywhere! That's fair! I'm not asking any special favors!
I made no reply because I knew that fighting with her in those
last few weeks had not been any good: there was something wrong
with her and maybe something wrong with me as well. Fighting her
was no fun any more because there was a softness gathering silently
beneath her skin in those months and when you hit her it was soft,
it did not feel right. And after a while there in the moonlight I
didn't even want to fight her any more. Perhaps because of this
strangeness or perhaps because she let me hold the locket again to
stare silently at that haunting tiny face upon the oval of ivory, dusted
with the antiquity of that summer moonlight and I kept it there in
my hand and she did not quarrel with me to give it back until I was
ready. And when the owl began faintly chuckling again in the
orchard I think it frightened us both and she took it back and kissed
my cheek and stole softly into the darkness again.
And there was this strangeness common to her and to myself and
to the season: a hush before the raging. Once I found her, after a
whole day's search, in my old haunts, in the crown of the roof, atop
the world: squatting bony-kneed and desolate on the naked, harsh
rafters that had been laid there in my Grandfather's time. All I
could see in that whistling, empty darkness was the shape of her
76


face: watched it turn slowly from the chink of steaming daylight to
shape itself to full roundness, the black eyes slowly blinking at my
head and shoulders in the open square above the ladder.
What do you want?
Nothin'.
She said nothing and the white of her face slid to half moon and
then to none and I knew her eye was back at the peephole through
which only the pure of heart might spy upon the universe. She would
have none of me.
Go away, she whispered, dispassionately, after a spell.
What's wrong, Cathie?
She was still, and my eyes, accustomed now to the shapes of things
in that darkness, saw how she held the old bird's nest cupped in her
hands.
Well, she said after a while. There is something wrong, Thomas,
since you ask. And I just might as well tell you.
What? I whispered, and thought about the bird's nest and of how,
if I were a bird, I would come back betimes to visit the round, gentle
place of my birth.
It's just that you've all turned against me, she said with a dark
broken sob, and I knew that she would have dropped the bird's nest
now so that she could clench her fists for strength against sobs,
against showing herself to me at all.
That's not so.
It is, too! It is! You've always been against me! You and your Aunt
Sarah and even your Uncle Joe. The only ones that were ever nice
to me in my whole livelong life were my Aunt Rebecca and she's gone
to glory—!
Cathie, -
—and maybe Miss Dulcie and Miss Cynthie and Doctor Willie!
They're nice to me and when you say something to them they don't
turn up their noses at your every little thing! I declare, Tom, some-
times I wish it was me instead of Aunt Rebecca up there under the
grass!
Cathie, don't say that! The Lord might hear!
Let Him! she cried. If God is listening right now I'm not ashamed
to have Him hear me say sometimes I just naturally wish I was
dead!
I think I squinted some; faint before the thunder sure to come:
the smiting of us both to dust, gray, faint child-dust that would swirl
77


and blow among the timbers of that high place in lean-fanged win-
ter nights, among those rafters which might, for all I knew, comprise
the floor of vengeful heaven itself: dust to sift among the old loved
twigs of the birds' unremembered nursery.
I clambered up and walked toe-to-heel along a timber to where
she was.
Let me look, I said. I ain't looked for months!
And she sighed and moved away and left a warm shape of girl-
smell in the air where she had brooded so long and I put my eye to
the chink of wind-blown light in the broken slates.
The whole world, I whispered. My, it sure is a grand view!
Yes, she said.
That one word told me she had revived a little from her funk and
I fanned the flame hopefully.
Look away off yonder there! I cried. You can see Coy off in the
south meadow cutting brush-filth!
That's not all, she said softly. There's a way to hold your eye to
that hole so's you can see — No, I won't tell you. I'll make you find
it!
What? Where?
Some days you can't see it—when there's a misty rain-or when
there's fog you can't see it at all! Today you can though. Most always
when there's a clear wind you can!
Yes!
Abijah's boat!
Yes!
The Nellie Queen!
Yes! Yes! I cried.
Beautiful! Beautiful! That's why I come up here mostly! It just-
it just restoreth my soul!
I know! Like it says in the Book!
She rose and tiptoed away proud and mean and happy again;
walked straight with her narrow, naked feet unerring and smooth
along the rafter to the square that led to the ladder.
And I followed her, dumb and thick-tongued with beholden and
graceless longing: there was such a power in her to make or ruin
me after all. Since it was past five it was all right for us to take the
roan and we climbed her firm rump and code bareback into the
south wind, the mare's hooves beating a muffled, proud drum in the
dust of the river road. I rode to forward and she clung behind, her
78


hard arms round me and her breath gasping in my ear, all the way
to the place.
Sometime! she cried boldly, springing down to the stones, her face
flushed and shameless with the pleasure of the wide-legged riding.
Sometime let's fetch a cord of wood from home and fill the boilers
and get up just enough head of steam to blow the whistle once!
No, I said. Aunt Sarah wouldn't let us have stove wood!
There's wood up in the thickets yonder on the hill!
Yes, but it's still wet from the rain. Some day in September when
it's dried out maybe!
Just wait! she cried, striding toward the steamboat. Wait till you
hear her whistle, Tom! Abijah used to say it was like a choir of
mockingbirds!
Yes, I thought, as I followed her up the stage plank. We'll blow
that whistle: that choir of mockingbirds one day shall sing out to
the land.
It was not more than four hundred yards down Fish Creek to the
mouth of it and the sycamores and willows on either side framed it:
the river beyond, coursing heavy and majestic and on any day, in
those times, one could stand there and, in a single afternoon, witness
the stately passage of a dozen lacy, white packets, like proud swans
on their way to Cincinnati or Louisville.
Let me be pilot this time!
No, me!
No. That's not fair. I was leadsman last time.
Then be forward watch!
That's no fun. That's a nigger's job.
Well so's leadsman.
I know but it's dangerous. Let me be pilot this time.
We'll flip. I've got a penny.
If it's Indian up I get to be pilot! she cried, and her eyes were
laughing already: she always won.
And the red coin spun in the sun and splattered on my hand-heel
and the dark chief mocked me and she darted gangle-legged up the
companionway to the pilot house and tucked her cropped hair into
Abijah's old blue cap and stood framed in the giant spokes of that
vast mahogany wheel while I waded, ruefully, into the shallows. Yet
even in this there was a sweetness that caught my very heart: wading
there, waist-deep, in the shoals beyond the Nellie Queen's bow, now
rank and green-glistening with sumac and creepers, and squinting
79


my eyes till my lashes blurred the light of day and conjured it into
fog: the swirling mists of a desperate night and I, the black leads-
man, held the boat's safety in my fingers' cunning. In my imagined
skiff I would make my way cautiously to a distance of twelve feet
off her starboard bow and hearing in my dreaming heart the ghostly
crank of my fog-shrouded oars, while I dandled my leadline into
the treacherous depths. It was a glory but it was a solemn doing:
we were never closer to our gods than then. It was not playing: ic
was ritual and salvation and a praying-time.
Half tw-ain!
And I would hear her shrill voice chant out response, and would
wade on, heaving my leadline cautiously.
Quarter less ta-ree! I would sing.
Dreaming then, yes dreaming of nights in the thick blood of sum-
mer heat when the channel shallowed to treacherous limits and I had
heard the Zachary Taylor feel her way like a blind peddler down to
Powhatan through mists as thick as the inside of a cotton bale and
heard Captain Dohrman's bell clang hotly at those black scallawags
in the leadsman's skiff.
Mark ta-ree!
A singing to it: a ghost of a voice as old as river, as old as scritch
and rasp of frogs beneath the willows, and the locusts sawing down
the last tottering legs of summer under the green dark hill, while
certain small lanterns swung like scarlet fireflies.
Quarter ta-ree!
When I opened my eyes wide the magic had become so thick and
rich that it was still that night and I would chant the old thing Coy
remembered his dead brother singing-Judah, the octoroon who had
gone up with the Chickasaw when her black diamond boilers blew
one night off Memphis in the dead of Christmas Eve: "Captain,
Captain, don't you think I'm sly!-Goin' to do my leadin' and keep
my leadline dry!"
And when the boat. was safely through and heading huffy with
triumph, her wheels churning green water like a queen's white lace
wake, we'd sit on the rocks on shore a while and brood and listen
to the locusts tune themselves up for evening. And yet even in the
sweetness and high province of our ritual there in the great boat
something was gone. Something had left us that summer: like the
birds had fled the old nest in the attic and there was in us both that
despair that no singing thing would ever return to that clod of sticks
80


and clay and hope. Something had gone out of us and it was a gap
between two phases of us each: like the old of the moon. The tried
joys seemed failing and the incantations of pagan infancy seemed to
have ceased in summoning up the ghosts we loved.
What's wrong with you?
What?
You just sit there and kick that pinching bug with your toe! she
said, and presently: Let's go home.
No, I said. Let's go to Dulcie's house.
All right, she said. You're the one who always says we mustn't
go to Dulcie's house!
Aune Sarah don't allow it.
Well then why do you want to go there now?
You're right, I sighed. We better hadn't.
She stood awhile, her eyes smoky with a strangeness.
She'd whip us, she said. Yes, she'd whip us if she ever knew we
went there. But that's all she can do. She's not God.
That's sacrilege.
It's not. I didn't make fun of Him! That's what sacrilege means!
I just said your Aunt Sarah was not Him. And she's not.
She clambered onto the mare's rump behind me and dug her
knuckles into my ribs and rested her pouting, brooding lip on my
shoulder.
Anyway, she whispered. Everybody knows God's no old woman.
He's a man.
And I held my tongue at that because another word of argument
and we would have tangled and gone a-pitching into the ditch and
that would have been an end to it all, with only a frothing, white-
eyed mare prancing at Aunt Sarah's gate, snorting the tale of our
deaths.
She was there, as it was, biting her tongue with outrage for she
had found the pile of curls and the already rusted sheep-shearers
under the puzzle bush behind the smoke house where, that morning,
Cathie had cropped her hair to the shoulders.
March yonder to the house, Missy! And you, too, Mister High and
Mighty!
Toot stood in the kitchen door stuffing her apron in her mouth
and wheezing with wild mirth at the sight of the hair shorn ragged
as a cropped mane.
Sho now! Hain't she a sight fo’ God!
81


Hush up, Toot! Catherine Ellen! Did you cut your hair?
Yes'm.
Did Tom help you?
No'm. I did it every bit myself.
And mighty proud of your handiwork I can see! And brazen to
boot! And lookin' like a hussy from Sodom's alleys!
Sho now !
Hush, Toot! Git back in the kitchen, you old fool, and hush!
Cathie stood stick-straight and chin-high, still flushed and short-
breathed from the ride and dark eyes twinkling, squarely staring into
Aunt Sarah's wrathful spectacles.
Go indoors! The both of you! Get yonder into the pantry!
She came behind us and shut the door and latched it against the
bald-eyed amusement of the Negro women and fetched a handful
of switches from the corner. A blue-bottle fly buzzed and thudded on
the window sill, his million eyes wild with yearning for the sun
beyond.
Why did you cut your hair off?
Because.
She looked away then and her eyes were scared for a flash and then
her mouth squared and she turned back to Aunt Sarah.
Because it's my hair, she said gravely.
Ah, because it's your hair. And you think you may do with your-
self as you please?
I hated it, she breathed, the soft flesh beneath her eye curling at
the thought. Sometimes I just hate being a girl at all.
But it has been so ordained, said Aunt Sarah. By God who knows
His own reasons that you have a woman's full hair.
I know! I know! she cried bitterly. I was born a girl! I'll aways be!
Yes, she said. Female created He and Male. And you would fight
against His ordaining.
I can't help it! I still wish it sometimes! Girls can't-girls are just
awful!
And you nigh a woman, said Aunt Sarah. In a year you will be
a woman, Catherine Ellen. Do you know that?
Yes, she breathed, and the word moaned like a small one-sounded
tune.
You had beautiful hair, Catherine Ellen! Look at it!
She held out the tumbling dark curls of it—the smoky, tumbling
coils like thick ropes of night.
82


I still hate it, she whispered. I'm glad I cut my hair off!
Then I must punish you, said Aunt Sarah. If you kneel here at
my knee and pray God to forgive you for what you did—you and
Tom may go. If you ask Him to pardon you your mockery of His
will—to forgive your willfulness!
No. No, I won't. Because I'm not sorry.
You're old, Catherine Ellen Hornbrook, said Aunt Sarah, lifting
the hem of Cathie's skirts to bare her pale, scarred calves for the
switch. And big to be whipped. But I'd not be true to the vow I
made your Aunt Rebecca to mind you and take care of you if I let
this pass.
And the switch whicked and bit and Cathie caught her breath and
then as if in a wild try at courage and defiance she opened her mouth
and began, in a high, clear voice, to sing.
Hush that while I'm switching you! Hush it I say.
But she would not stop and she found the furious little rhythm
of the switch strokes and matched her song to that.
Nellie Bly, Nellie Bly, bring the broom along!
We'll sweep the kitchen clean, my dear, and have a little
song!
Be still! Be still, I say!
-Hi Nellie, Ho Nellie! Listen, love, to me!
I'll sing for you, play for you a dulcet melody!
And Aunt Sarah switched till the branch was bare of its bark and
broken and dangling in her thwarted hand. She stared at Cathie's
quivering back a moment and then whirled her round to face her.
Cathie's face was pink and wild with mingled pain and a smile of
speechless victory.
Are you sorry now?
No, ma'am.
Then I've done all God could expect, said Aunt Sarah. Sometimes
I wonder if I'm strong enough for the task of raising you both up
decent and Christian.
Her face seemed suddenly a decade older and her eyes were pale
and scared.
It ain't been the easiest thing in the world! she snapped at us both.
Neither of you know the nights I've laid awake and sleepless
praying for you—asking His forgiveness for the Sin that has already
stained you! Sometimes I wonder if I'm strong enough for it. If I'd
had a man to help with it—a man, mind you, and not him yonder
83


in the parlor with his tonics and snake oils and pills-a man with
eyes, and backbone, mind you! I just wonder if either of you knows
what it's like to live all your life in the same house with a father you
loved and feared for the first half of your days and a man you pitied
and sickened over for the rest. Do you? No, I'll allow you don't as
yet. And may you never. Are you listening to me? Does any of this
mean anything to you? No. Of course not. I'm a fool. Come yonder,
the both of you.
We stepped shy and high-footed into the radius of her strange,
camphorous embrace and let her hold us there stiffily and strangely
with her chin above our heads and at her gathered collar the gold
claw pin with its dusky, faded pearl scratching my ear as she drew
me to her. She held us there a while more and then began speaking
again, as if she had half forgotten we were there.
I whip you and holler at you, she said harshly, as if the words
strained like steam against a cock. And you'll never get too big for
that-but I pray for you, too. And if I can raise you both to be
Christiaa and decent I'll not mind how you remember me. I'm queer
and old and you can think what you please of me but remember, if
you can, that it's none of it been easy. I done every bit as good as I
could with you and with everybody else—him included who sits
yonder blind and simple as a halfwit on the roads-mocking God by
trying to call back the poor ghost of the child of my own womb—the
child, Catherine Ellen, that I watched laid into the hill up yonder-
under the creepers. Mind that, the both of you! I'm not asking your
pity and I'd box your ears if you had the impudence to give it. But
I must say this. God only knows I must say it once, at least—that
I think only of raising you both-poor, motherless orphans—to be
decent and Christian! God help us all! It's a dark time that's coming
on us! A dark time! We'll need His Love.
She would not let us go for a moment longer and each of us was
too puzzled to move—too stunned at this seeming softness in her,
and she sensed that and withdrew suddenly and folded her hands
in her apron and surveyed us coldly through her tiny twinkling lenses
and then sniffed drily and turned and left us in that quaint, bitter
wake of camphor and lavender that always trailed her like a memory:
that smell mingling with sassafras and cider and the smell of crum-
bling summer in the pantry where, upon the dusty pane, the fly still
bumbled and strove against his brief summer covenance.
84


In the parlor. Nightfall. And now, as I sometimes liked to do, I
crept there, across the threshold, to see how close I could come to the
blind man before he sensed me there. And it was a thing that seemed
a kind of witchcraft that he would turn his head always to me the
very moment my foot touched the farthest ragged fringe of the old
flowery rug, no matter how soft I came.
Tom? Eh, boy? Ah, come and set a spell!
And I went to the square stool, big and gangly and twelve now
but no less eager for the three-cent piece that came less regularly
now, for times were lean in the last years of that decade. His fingers
finished their quest of my face and fell with a soft thump to the
chair arms again.
Where's the gal?
She's in her room, I said. Thinking, I reckon. She thinks a lot
these days, Uncle Joe. She's queer, I think.
All women are queer, boy!
Why?
Hah! Ask Adam. It was his ribnot mine. For one thing there's
always something workin' in 'em!
How do you mean?
Workin', that's what I mean! Bubblin' and workin' in 'em-like
mother in the cider barrel! A female is always changin' into some-
thing or other new, boy, and don't forget it! It's always brewin' in
the bone-in the flesh of them! In their blood, I allow! And here's
the tricky thing!—you never know how it'll turn out—if it'll come
up vinegar or apple cider. The main thing is to let 'em be till they
git done with one changin' and hope for the best! And then when
they start in to changin' again just go find a rocker and shet your
teeth on snuff or a chew and thank God to be out of their path!
He reached out suddenly and patted me heavily on the head.
And you, Tom? Are you well?
Yes, I said. But I'm worried about Cathie.
Ahh.
She can't fight like she used to, I said darkly and with a kind
of desperation. She just ain't worth a tinker's dam in a fight any
more.
He grunted and tapped his foot nervously and his stomach quar-
reled shrilly and growled low and suddenly he chuckled and tapped
his foot some more.
Her chest hurts easy, I said.


Ah! Hah!
What are you laughin' at!
I'm not laughin', Tom! That's a bad sign in a gal of eleven! A
bad one indeed! What else?
Nothin' you can pin down, I said. Her muscles have just gone
plum to wrack and ruin, though.
Ho. Hah!
What?
The apple cometh to ripeness upon the bough, he cried softly to
the dusk and rocked and his stomach growled shrilly again and he
chuckled some more.
What?
Shhhh. Hush, boy. It's her!
Cathie? I whispered, blushing with nameless shame and jumping
to my feet.
No, he said softly. It's my little dear. My Peggy. It's her birthday
and I've got a little gift.
And I saw it in the lampshine in his palsied, dead-white hands-
something shapeless and foolish wrapped as fancy as he could make
it in a bit of brown paper and a ribbon he had stolen from the box
in Aunt Sarah's quilting room. I shivered and bade him good-night
and fled softly up the hallway and there was a cricket somewhere in
the wood and it cried so silver and sharp in the motionless, limpid
blackness that it seemed speaking on my shoulder.
Peggy? he cried softly in the stillness behind me.
And I thought to myself: I will run out the back door quickly,
before I hear her black, small shoes go padding to him, before I hear
the bell of that small, ghost voice as it rises before his believing
blind gaze. It was dark now and there was no moon and the mists
lay on the meadows below the road like a white swaddling with
trees rising amidst it like motionless soldiers, in a snow field. I
thought: I will go to Dulcie's house and talk to Doctor Willie. And
I hurried, knowing all the way through the darkness of our barn-
yard, tumbling up the hill through the twinkling dust of fireflies and
all about me on the still apron of the hill, sheep lifted blunt noses
and tinkled and bleated their sheep-dreams and scattered pell-mell
down the hard, narrow trails. I saw the lamp far off and gold behind
the curtains of Dulcie's parlor and knew they had not gone to bed,
and I hurried through the graveyard, running lightfooted on my
heels so the dreamers would not waken and yawn their ivory jaws
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and turn troubled in their long rooms, ran along the backbone of the
hill into the hair of the wind and saw where the moon was, after
all: curled and cunning in a chestnut tree by Dulcie's stable.
I rapped softly and waited and rapped again and something sighed
beyond the panels and Doctor Willie opened the door and stood
there smiling at me in the light of that faint August moon: stood
there with the quietness of the small house pouring over his shoulders
like a soft sea of cinnamon-scented air.
Do you feel the need of medical attention, Thomas? he inquired
with a twinkle. Or did you just come to be sociable and have a dish
of Dulcie's Italian Cream?
I'm fine, Doctor Willie! I said and watched him smile again and
spied between his yellowed long teeth the black nail of the clove.
Yes, I said, sitting carefully on the embroidered shepherdess on
Dulcie's special company chair. It's Catherine Ellen Hornbrook I'm
worried about.
She is not well?
Mighty queer!
Eh?
She's actin' mighty queer these days!
Ahh? How so?
Her chest hurts her!
And you? How are you, Thomas?
Me? Oh, I'm fit as can be expected, Doctor Willie! Fit as can be
expected.
That's fine, boy! These are trying times!
Do you reckon? I said lowly, with the sudden dreadful presenti-
ment that I would soon be left alone in the world. That Catherine
Ellen has consumption?
Thomas! cried Doctor Willie, bowing to me gravely and chuckling
to himself over something very secret, something very wise and old.
You may as well know it now ,
What? I gasped softly and felt my palms grow wet.
We are all suffering from a sore disease, boy! I am a man of
medicine and, however melancholy it may be, I will not keep the
truth from you—!
He fetched a black crooked stogie from the inner pocket of his
immaculate white coat and fumbled in his vest for the silver cutter,
holding the stogie aloft, meanwhile, like the wand of a conjurer
while I waited, caged in dread.
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We are all mighty poorly, Thomas! All of us—mighty, might-y
poorly! And would you like to know the name of our affliction?
Yes.
Time! Time, dear heart. I doubt, Thomas—(and he bent on the
words, eyes bulging with the drama of it)—I doubt if we shall live
out the century!
I scowled and itched with puzzlement and thought how grown-ups
never spoke out plain: never handed you the truth without a fancy
wrapping round it. But now Dulcie came into the parlor with Cyathie
in her wake, bearing between them a blue willow-ware platter of
fresh bread and strawberry preserves and a golden stone pitcher of
chilled Jersey milk from their dappled, sweet-chymed cow.
Good evening, Thomas! Pleased you could come!
Dulcie wore a lace bonnet and she never smiled with her small,
pursed mouth though her eyes were sometimes full of it: a mocking,
slow irony and a gentleness even about that. Like Cynthie she was
spare as a bird—wrenlike and chipper and fond of old woman's
fripperies and one might have thought her trivial until she spoke
or until she turned her dark piercing eyes upon the wisdom of a
thing, or on the folly of some person. Cynthie was one of the foolish
ones of this world: she simpered and giggled almost continuously
because she was frightened and believed, like as not, that in giggling
lay safety. Dulcie was practical and put up fruit against winter but
Cynthie saved string imagining a time of poverty, perhaps, in which
the world should grow bare of string and she would have none and
none, in fact, would be anywhere: a desperate stringless time. Dulcie
looked upon life's functions with a plain candor and although her
marriage to Charley Lindsay had been an arid season she knew, at
least, what she had missed. As for Cynthie she never guessed what
there might have been to miss and I am convinced that through those
long, strange evenings when Charley rode the river road to her cot-
tage there was nothing more between them than euchre.
Thomas! said Dulcie in her faint but snapping voice. You look
peaked! I don't believe Sary feeds you good! Eat that bread and jelly
and drink your milk. Pshaw, Willie, don't that boy look underfed
to you?
But he had slipped off to his pantry cup and stood in the shadows
somewhere in the little house, eyes shut, shuddering a little under
the impact of the half cup of brandy, sucking the bitterness of it
from his mustache.
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He's drinking again! Cynthie observed in a harsh whisper that
shook her onyx earrings, announcing it as if it were a new fact of
Willie Curtis' life and not the habit of four decades.
Pshaw, Cynthie! Tom knows Doctor Willie is a drunkard!
Dulcie, I declare! You're just awful!
Well it's true! There's no need to hide the truth-nor to dwell
on it neither! Thomas, how's the little Hornbrook girl!
Poorly, I sighed.
Pshaw! I hear her and you come whoopin' through the graveyard
every day like red Injuns! How can she be poorly!
I shrugged glumly and stared at my hands.
I think, I whispered, that she has taken the galloping consump-
tion.
Shoot! She gallops enough. I declare, Cynthie, young people seem
such fools since I was a girl! Thomas, drink your milk—it'll put
meat on your bones! Willie, come look at Thomas—I think he's got
the solemncholies!
Doctor Willie came back into the room, some steadiness gone but
no elegance lacking and snorted and sat down in a rocker with his
legs dangling like a child in long white pants.
Willie, mind now and don't overindulge—the Bakers expect you
at Powhatan tomorrow noon. Ellen Baker is quick with her child and
you know there's no one else can come! Mind now!
Madam, I have not had one drop of brandy since Christmas!
Hah! Well Merry Christmas then, you old fool! she snapped and
her eyes laughed again.
Thomas, what word is there from the father?
What father, Miss Dulcie?
Why Catherine Ellen's father—Bige Hornbrook?
He writes sometimes, I said. He's gone off to the prairies!
Gone to the prairies has he! Like as not to join up with those fools
who'll have our rooves down around our ears before they're
through.
Bige says there's going to be a War, I whispered and felt a
proudness tingle my legs as if he were my father, too.
And there will be! she cried. With a bunch of damned fool men
to start it and the women to endure it as they always have and take
care of their orphans and wait hand and foot on the poor crippled
ones that come a-draggin' back! Lord, I mind Mexico! Such a pack
of fools!
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Abijah is not a fool, I said a little archly. He's goin' to be a King.
I finished my milk, keeping my eyes in the cup till the whiteness
was gone.
So Bige aims to come back to the bottoms a King, eh? Well, Lord
knows he might at that. Lord knows who'll be King when these
fool men get done with the ruckus Mister Calhoun's stirred up!
Cynthie nodded at each thing Dulcie said and regarded me meekly
with eyes as blue as double wash-water: innocent newborn eyes, it
seemed: foolish and pleasing as a lamb's. It was Dulcie who knew
the wide world's ways while Cynthie had grown both deaf and blind
to all mortality, heedless of time or of human orneriness.
And I reckon your Aunt Sarah would be fit to be tied if she knew
you was here, eh Thomas?
But it was not a question at all because when she had said it her
eyes crinkled again in a smile and she snatched up the blue platter
and went to the kitchen for more bread and strawberries.
Mister Curtis says there'll be a War, too! said Cynthie in that
soft, high quavering voice that seemed to come faintly always as if
through water. The snow shall fly again, he says, and then there'll be
a War! Ain't that so, Doctor Willie?
It is so, Miss Lindsay! It is so!
Tell young Thomas about Mexico, Doctor Willie! Thomas, Doctor
Willie rode with Winfield Scott—such a fine man!
When I was a boy fresh from school, Thomas, I went up the
mountains with Pillow's Third Division and I was at Chapultepec
and Churubusco and sawed off more legs and arms than you've cut
stove wood! And I thought that war was the finest thing mortal man
had ever done! Proud of it, d'ye see? And it took me thirty years of
reflection to find it was a war of cowards and bullies. But what good
does it do to tell you that! When the War starts in the South you'll
like as not want to enlist as drummer boy! Pshaw!
He sprang down from the rocker and pointed, his head thrown
back and his mustaches stirring like a bleached flag.
Look yonder, boy! There by the window in the glass case. The
mask!
That, too, was the magic of Dulcie's house. I went to where he
was pointing, to the round-bellied curio cabinet by the window and
stared inside at the ordered litter of nautilus shells and souvenir hand.
kerchiefs from Mister Barnum's Museum and the arrowheads and the
little button box crusted with seashells and the ivory fan from India.
90


I stared at the mask, too: a hammered copper oval the size of a man's
face, its metal brown with time and rains and scarred perhaps by the
fires of some old Armageddon. He fetched a tiny key from a tiny
amber glass on the mantelpiece and unlocked the glass door and
lifted the mask out.
Looky here, boy! Here-hold it to your face and look at me
through it.
I held the mask to my face. It had eyes cut out the slant-shape of
a Chinee's eyes and the cheeks of it were long and flat and rippled
with savage, faint marks like the tattoos of a Sandwich Islander. I
stared at Doctor Willie through the savage, ancient slits.
I dug that mask out of the big mound up yonder at Elizabethtown!
he exclaimed. That mask, boy, that was made by the hand of man
dead and moldering a thousand years.
Injuns?
Pshaw no! Injuns never made masks—not out of metal leastways!
The Lord God Himself only knows what people made that thing.
But mind this, Thomas—the man that made that mask was mortal
like you and me! Get that? Mortal. And where is he now? Gone to
dust, that's where! Gone to dust and sprouting up in the corn and
blowin' on the roads! And mind you—his were a people proud and
powerful long before the Injuns—though I've contested that by the
hour with Major Tomlinson on the courthouse steps! Gone, Thomas!
And if he had a flag that's gone, too! You may be breathin' his
mortality this very minute and the dust of that ilag, as well! Sure!
And I will allow he thought he was the best man that ever lived and
his people the chosen of whatever God he had! I'll bet my last
shinplaster he even thought his wars would save the world! And
what's left, Thomas! A sheet of copper with the green, moldering
ages crusted on it and the eyes that looked out of those slits where
your eyes peer-dust! Dust! I tell you Time is our sickness, ladies
and gentlemen! We shall not live the century out! And Pride is our
Crutch. Lord, but the Almighty Jehovah must be plaguey sick of
drums by now! Caesar in Spain! Hannibal on the Alps! Frederick
and Tippecanoe and all the rest! Preachers'll tell ye there's a Hell
and Heaven, sir! But I say there's a Third Place and it's called the
Old Camp Ground and it is populated by the ghosts of poor idiots
that followed a drum!
Somewhere behind him in the sea-green house a clock struck in
punctuation to his words and Dulcie came back with more bread and
91


preserves just as I rose to leave. She fussed and fretted that company
never stayed long enough and I thanked her kindly and said I'd
better get home before Aunt Sarah sent Coy hunting me. From afar
I could see the tiny black shape of Aunt Sarah in the golden oblong
of pantry window under the dappling apple boughs. She was waiting
for me when I came in and from the way her black eyes twinkled
I believe she knew where I had been. But she said nothing; I think
she was abashed for the way she had bared herself to Cathie and
me that day.
Get along up to bed now, Thomas, it's past nine!
Yes'm.
I went up the pantry stairs and then because the glory of some-
thing in Doctor Willie's voice had stayed in me and stirred me like
strong drink I turned suddenly to her on the stairs and cried out:
There's goin' to be a War, Aunt Sarah! Can I go?
Hush, Thomas! You're a child yet!
I'm twelve! I cried in the cracked-voice humiliation of my halfway
years.
God knows if you will go, she said strongly to the darkness out-
side the window. He will dispose whether you go or not and if you
return. It's not for me to say or you either, Thomas! Go to bed now,
child! There'll be no war tonight at least!
I dreamed through that dark August night. I sweated in my sheets
and turned my face to the moon until it burned and then thrashed
round and lay with my sleeping face to the dusky, faint flowers in
the faded, stained wallpaper and the dream wound me round. I had
heard a night bird whistling when I fell asleep. And I thought to
myself: It's a bad thing for birds to sing at night, the moon troubles
them, I guess, and they sing because they are afraid. I had heard
Toot say that once and I thought it must be so because Toot had
known God when He was a boy, innocent and free and lonely in
His garden with no child named Adam to cheer Him by the supper
fire. Toot must be right because Toot had told me once that when
the snowball bush bloomed in the wintertime it was a sure sign of
death and it had bloomed the week my dog Cato froze in the laurels
above Fish Creek with a stiff, staring hare locked in his grinning
teeth. I dreamed that I had the gold mask that old Adam had worn
and it was mine now and when I put it up to my face it suddenly
92


grew into the flesh of my cheek and brow and lips and shaped itself
to the shape of me. And I went to the browned, watery mirror in my
Grandfather's room and looked at myself to see who the mask made
me be and I saw who it was and it took my breath away. Abijah. Yes,
and Cathie came into the room then and looked at me, crying, and
stamping her feet the way she used to do when she was little and
shouted: Take it off! Take it off! You're not Abijah! You're not!
It's just pretend! You're not Abijah! And outside the house someone
was beating a drum and someone else was playing a fife like when
the Fourth of July parade happens up at Elizabethtown and the little
darkies sell pink lemonade round the courthouse yard. Cathie holler-
ing at me to take off the mask and the drum getting louder and the
fife getting louder and she came at me then with her face all wild
and ugly like Aunt Sarah's face sometimes when she's mad and she
put up her fingers to pull off my mask and I hit her. I hit her again
and again and again with something long and thick and killing and
she fell across me and I could feel the warm blood jetting and hot
all over my belly and I kept trying to push her off but she was heavy
with deadness. And I woke up then panting and gasping with my
fingers in the feathers of the bolster and my eyes blinking in the
burning summer moon and thought: It's real. It's real. Oh Lord, I
really done it. I killed her. I done killed Catherine Ellen. Because I
can feel it still all over my stomach, thick and hot and dead under my
nightshirt: the blood of her.
I lay for a long time hearing the fife of the night bird and the
drum of my slowing pulse and dreading morning when I would have
to look and see if the wetness was really her blood after all.
Toot met me in the kitchen doorway scowling and suspicious.
What you doin' with de spade dis time of morning? Shoot! De ol'
rooster ain't even crowed yet!
Nothin'! I bleated, blushing wildly.
Sho now! I seen you put it back in de smoke house wid my own
two eyes and Suse did, too! And I heared you up and bustlin' 'round
de yard 'fore Miss Sarah even lit de lamps!
I buried a dead bird, I lied, and she sniffed and turned the mush
in the sputtering grease of the black skillet and went to call them to
breakfast.
May Tom and me have the mare this mornin'? said Cathie when
93


Aunt Sarah had finished her coffee and seemed kindly disposed
toward the day.
No. Coy needs her to haul fence posts from the west pasture.
Yes'm.
What do you want her for? Seems like you children ride that poor
beast to death. Where do you go?
To see about Abijah's boat, Cathie said with a shy, proud smile.
He meant for me to mind it for him till he gets back.
Pshaw! That boat! It's the laughingstock of every river man in
Wheeling! If Bige Hornbrook meant to leave the river and go off
about whatever nonsense took him South then he should have sold
that boat to someone who could get some good out of her!
Oh no! Abijah would never sell the Nellie Queen!
It's not proper for a child to refer to her father by his Christian
name!
He likes me to, said Cathie, eyes downcast with angry pride.
That doesn't matter. It's impudence. If I'd ever dared to address
my sainted father as Michael he'd have had my hide off with a buggy
whip. You've a sight more manners to learn than you've got now,
Miss Hornbrook!
Yes'm.
And that fool steamboat of your father's is better off left to rot
down there on the creek bank where he left it. Pshaw! A man who'd
put an old woman and a child ashore and then go off gallivantin'
ain't fit to be pilot! Steamboatin's for responsible men of Christian
character.
Cathie suddenly took a long drink of milk and hid her blazing
eyes behind the cup a long time after the milk was gone and her
throat had stopped swallowing. Aunt Sarah went off muttering into
the morning and Cathie ran out the back door and stood under the
apple tree looking off toward the hill behind which the white boat
towered.
Let's go see her today, Tom, she whispered. I'm worried about the
Nellie Queen. I had bad dreams about her all night long! Wasn't
last night an awful night to sleep?
I gave her a quick, darting glance but I thought: she couldn't
know my dream any more than I could know hers. But I wasn't sure.
It was too hot to sleep good, I said. And the moon was in my face
all the livelong night! And that fool mockingbird kept singing in
the apple tree!
94


Oh yes! I just love to hear them!
Well, I don't! It means evilness when a bird sings at night!
Who said?
Toot did.
Oh. Well, it did sound pretty!
I couldn't sleep good.
I know, she said, not looking at me. I could hear you crying in
your sleep. It woke me up. I could hear you all the way in my
room.
I said nothing, stumping on ahead of her, a stick in my hand now,
punching the dust beside me like a gypsy's staff.
Tom-
What?
Tom, what were you burying this morning?
I stopped and turned and stood facing her.
Nothing.
Yes, you were. I heard you go downstairs long before sunup and
after a bit I looked out my window and saw you walking down from
the smoke house with the spade over your shoulder and your night-
shirt under your arm.
Suddenly I wanted to hit her like I had done in the dream and
that scared me and I laughed like a fool and began whistling a jib.
What were you, she teased while I thought of an answer.
The bird, I said at last and turned and walked into the sunlight
safely.
The mocking bird?
Yep.
You never!
I did too! I just couldn't abide that daggone whistlin' any longer
and I went out and took a rock and fetched him down off the branch
of the plum tree slick as a whistle! And then I fetched the spade
and buried him.
That's a lie.
It's not.
It is too, because I heard that bird singing long after you'd gone.
That just shows you! I cried, inspired. Toot said it was a witchy
bird! That was its ghost singing.
And she said no more and we walked on into the morning and I
frowned, wondering to myself why I had done that thing: gone and
buried my nightshirt there in that cool shadow before sunrise, like
95


a murderer, under the plum tree, spading out the cool, small grave
in the secret shine of the morning star.
We spent the whole morning on board the beached and splendid
Nellie Queen and Cathie found a ring of tiny bronze keys in a box
in the pilot house and we tried them and found each one unlocked
one of the staterooms below. In the texas we both stood, fingers
locked and tongues still, and stared up at a framed daguerreotype of
Cathie's dead mother-her faint, frail face dark and violent as a
gypsy's. On a hook hung a faded blue gown that she had worn once
-Abijah would never throw any of her things away. On a shelf we
found a tortoise-shell box full of glass gimcracks that she had treas-
ured and her silver-mounted comb and a hand mirror that was
cracked and when I lifted it my own face seemed halved and shifted
in a bewitched and frightening way and I put the mirror quickly
back and smelled a faint perfume in the air: a something of that
long-vanished Alesh that still persisted in the place where she had
been loved. We spent an hour unlocking all the staterooms softly
and peering in: the Ohio, the Virginia (an old beaver hat and a
bundle of Travelling Menagerie posters still lay on the bunk) and
the Kentucky where Cathie showed me the hole where the bullet
had gone into the wall the night a gambler had killed his wife with
a little dueling pistol. By ten the day burned and stagnated in the
creek hollow and we lolled on the texas deck and listened to the
mud-dawbers crawling up the shimmering air and the redbirds flash-
ing and quarreling above us in the blue fever of sky.
Far off where the river shimmered we heard the blast of a tin
horn and jumped up and ran to the stern of the boat and peered out
over the paddles toward the trees. Behind the green curtain of
willows we could see the slow movement of a small hooded craft
and when it came to the mouth of the creek we saw the peddler at
the till and he blew his tin horn again and we shouted and waved.
He saw us and fought the long covered boat into the creek and rowed
up abreast of the Nellie Queen and took off his leghorn hat and
peered up at us, squinting into the sun.
Where's the master of this hyer boat?
I had opened my mouth to claim that honor but Cathie hollered
back to him that Captain Abijah Hornbrook had gone ashore on
business and left her in charge.
96


Need any buttons? Need any pins?
Yes! she cried and I saw the hunger in her eyes to see the peddler's
fancy store and I was curious, too, and followed her down to the
boiler deck where the peddler now stood. He was the skinniest man
I'd ever seen and his hair was white as calf-slobber and his face was
wrinkled and sunburned.
Er you the Cap'm's daughter?
Yes, sir, I am! she cried, curtsying.
Well, what's he at!
Gone ashore, I said! she cried. To tend to business! And I'm in
charge of the Nellie Queen till he gets back so don't try any impu-
dence!
Do you need pins? Can I sell you some needles er a piece of purty
ribbon? Sa-a-y! Bet that feller yonder could use a jew's-harp! I tuk
on a box of 'em at Wheelin' and I bet they won't be a one left 'gainst
I put in at the Falls! Shore, now! How about a dress! Got a fancy
calico! Shucks, I derned near sold everlast tarnal one of them
dresses up yonder at Elizabethtown but somethin' told me you'd be
here and needin' one! Yes, ma'am, hit war just like I knowed afore-
hand you'd be a-standin' right there whar you er now on the boiler
deck of yore daddy's boat and I saved this hyer last dress fer you!
He had gone back under the strange, patchwork canopy of his
little boat and came out with the thing in his arms—the folds of it
blowing in the sudden gust of hot wind that had come up behind
him from the river.
It's beautiful! she breathed softly. Oh, Tom, it is beautiful!
Shore it is! Fit for a Queen!
Yes! For a Queen, she said in that trance, beside me.
Want to know somethin', little miss? I sold a dress just like this'n
hyer to Mister Charles Dickens himself when he come through
Wheelin' years and years ago! And ye know what else? He declared
up and down that he'd take it back for old Queen Victory herself
'cause it was just too tarnal purty for gentry! Them was his words
and I'll swear to it. Too purty for gentry! There now! Three dollars!
And that's just naturally walkin' off with it!
Could I-hold it up to me?
Why shore! Hyer!
She took it and held it to her shoulders with quaking fingers and
let her eyes run down its length in a kind of fearfulness of such
beauty.


Lawk! Hit's a shame you hain't got a peer glass, ma'am! You look
fancier than the President's lady!
· Run fetch the mirror from Mama's shelf! It's in the texas, Tom.
I went and got it and came back with a leaden heart, knowing
how sourly the bright interlude must end at last, when he found out
the fact of our poverty. But I held the cracked hand-glass before her
while she pranced and curtsied in it like a bewitched bird, wild with
longing and so lost in the dream that nothing could snatch it away.
The peddler fetched his knee a slap with his ragged yellow leghorn
hat and crowed at the sight.
Lawsy, it was made for you, miss! When does yore Pap get back?
She let the dress fall to her waist then and stared at him gawk-
mouthed for an instant. Then she thust the dress out for him to take
back and stared off up the shimmering road, to the groves beyond
where the wild birds cried in the coolness of the pawpaw leaves.
Three dollars hain't much! he sniffed. For a store-made dress like
that!
I don't really need it! she cried. The Captain's gone to Elizabeth-
town to buy me a much prettier dress than that!
Why, pshaw! I thought you was real taken with it!
It's nice, I'll grant you! she said. For some girls. Maybe some of
them yellow gals down on the landin' at Cincinnati!
Shoot! Hain't one of them nigras could buy a store-made dress
like this!
Just the same! she said, turning away from him and cocking her
head at herself in the cracked looking glass. I don't think it goes
with my eyes!
Two-fifty and, by Jingo, I'd starve and dry up and blow away if
I was to give my stock away like this ever time I put in to shore!
No, she said. When Abijah—when the Captain gets back-
And she stopped, not in a sob, but in a way that made me know,
without seeing, that her white teeth were fixed tight in the fullness
of her lower lip.
Well, I declare! growled the peddler and wallowed off back to his
boat and sat in the shade of it scratching the sandy hair under his
hat and spit in the water.
How about some pins? Or horn buttons? Or a piece of fancy
ribbon mebbe?
She walked away to the Nellie Queen with an elegance that could
have been either disdain or downfall or pride either and it was only
98


I who knew which. And directly the peddler's oars creaked off into
the stillnesses of humming noon and faded, finally, into the hovering,
lacing whine of wasps and the pirate honey-bees in the meadow's high
clover. I followed her and laid my hand on her stiff, trembling
shoulder.
Sometimes, I said, a body has to tell a lie.
And before I could catch my breath she spun round and struck
me flat-handed across the lips.
I never lied!
There was a taste of blood like pennies on my tongue and I tried
to remember what it was I had dreamed under the moon that night,
under that night long washed away: that dream of killing.
Don't say I lied! she wailed, wild-faced and sorrowing and proud.
Because it's true! It's true! He'll come back! And he'll bring me a
dress and it'll be silk and not any cheap, common river-peddler's
calico! And pins! Gold pins! And ribbons for my hair!
Her face dissolved in a wash of mad grief and she turned and
ran.
I hate you! I just hate and despise you, Thomas Christopher!
And she ran ahead of me all the long way home.
Toot missed my nightshirt in the Monday wash and quarreled
aplenty about it. She accused Coy of stealing it and he denied that
and so she quarreled with the wash-water as if it might have prank-
ishly dissolved my nightshirt just to tease her poor tired eyes. And
she never thought to ask me what I knew and no one ever mentioned
it again and I was left with only the abiding and corrosive memory
of that night.
Hit's blowin' up a storm! said Toot that afternoon with a glance
to southward through the pantry window.
There was not a breath of moving air in the house or outside in
the burning sun, but I knew there were winds that Toot heard that
no one else could know.
Hit's kickin' up my gout somethin' terr'ble! she cried, glaring out
into the parched, quivering air beneath the apple tree. I can feel hit
comin' long befo' the rain splatters on the window. Sho now! I
reckon it's gwine to be a storm bad enough to blow down de moun-
tains!
I don't see no clouds, I said. And the wind's not blowin'.
99


chat curious fever was upon me: to the attic and the wing of the roof
that hugged one like the sheltering feather of a mothering hawk, to
the most solitary place in God's creation.
I declare! I don't know what I'm going to do with you children!
That girl, especially! I expect a Christian day's work from each of
you and instead of that you seem to do nothing but wander about
like dumb sheep! Did you call her, Thomas?
Yes'm.
Have you laid eyes on her, Toot?
No'm!
Gracious sakes alive!
She went to the great flagstone by the corner of the smoke house
and stood with the toes of her high-laced boots touching the carved
initials, worn nigh to obliteration now by time and wind and rain
and moon: T.C. Anno Domini 1767-my Grandfather's father had
chiseled them there in the time of the Iroquois, and the mad Eng.
lish king: she stood there shadowing her eyes with her fingers and
scowling off into the impending storm: twenty-five miles down river,
beyond the Ohio hills. I came and stood beside her and stared at it:
the rim of blinding light fringing the far horizon and the purple
gathering clouds above it: curling and moving now in high and
sluggish tumult.
Sho gwine to come a-crackin' down d'reckly! cried Toot from the
kitchen. Reckon I better fasten de shudders, Miz Sary?
Yes! Go shut them, Toot! Run help her, Tom! Gracious, I wonder
where that Hornbrook child has gone to!
Toot and I ran round the house shuttering the windows. The air
was calm as held breath before a quick word and there seemed to
everything a sharpness of line: the black iron deer confronted his
eternal hounds by the front porch, his nostrils fair quivering with
alarm. The gum tree, three hundred yards down the meadow on the
river road, seemed so close and vivid that a hand could have reached
out and held it like a toy. And the darkness quickened and now
small gusts of wind Aung against the house like gales of small
laughter and random rain drops broke in crystal on the windowpanes
and thunder rolled like struggling armies, faintly.
Great day in the morning, Tom! Run see if that girl is in her room!
Toot!
Yes'm.
Are all the shutters fastened?
101


It was night and the day had not even ended and the house was in a
midnight of hushed waiting for the storm's assault. And yet I knew
that Aunt Sarah would not light one candle nor any lamp in kitchen,
hallway or parlor. She would have no light in the house when storms
came as if she imagined that God might think our small lamps offen-
sive rivals to His lightnings, or that perhaps the dark judgment of
His storm would pass us by safely if it could not see us huddled
there by the cold stove in the fragrant, cinnamon-scented safety of
Toot's pantry.
Thomas! Thomas Alexander Christopher!
Yes'm!
And I jumped from my stool just as the white rain exploded
against the six panes of my window and the world dissolved and
thunder fell about my ears.
Cathie!
I clambered up the ladder and peered at her in the shadowed eave,
watched as her moon face turned and stared.
Go away.
No. Aunt Sarah's mad. You know how she gets when it storms.
She wants us to come downstairs till it's over. You better mind.
All right, she sighed. It was so beautiful!
She got wearily to her feet and stood slender and frail against the
slates for a moment brushing the cobwebs from her linsey skirt and
then came toward me, her white toes pacing shrewdly along the
narrow joist like small white birds. When I had gone down the
ladder to make way for her and stared up at her brown heels hugging
the rungs I saw that she had a sheet of Aunt Sarah's writing paper and
a pencil in her hand.
What's that?
Never mind what! she scolded and hid it behind her.
What is it? That's Aunt Sarah's own private writing paper!
I only took one sheet.
What are you writing?
Thomas? Catherine Ellen? If I have to come up there after you I'll
bring a switch or two!
Come on! Cathie cried with a brave laugh and folded the paper
and hid it in her dress and the pencil with it and went gangling,
long-legged and pigtails flying down the carpeted stairway to the hall.
Come here, children! By me! Joseph! Toot, run fetch Mister
Christopher in from the parlor! Lord, it's a blessing to be blind with
103


all this lightning. Here, Thomas! Catherine Ellen! By me. Here!
Come with your stools!
And she embraced us in the stiff awkward angle of those arms so
unused to the several shapes of love or its enfoldings: held us tight
against her and put her chin up to the window and when the light-
ning blazed against the rain-swarming panes like a swinging torch I
could see her dark pupils widen the smallest breadth and that was
all; her lips would not quiver nor tighten and I think her heart did
not even quicken but beat on, steady as the thick flowered gold watch
that hung in her bodice.
God's a-wandering tonight! she breathed once and did not think
we heard: it was a word meant for herself; and Toot came into the
black pantry with Uncle Joe's white cane tapping behind her and
squatted behind the stove with Suse and Coy and smacked her lips
and rolled her white eyes in the gloom. Faint and mournful and lost
in the tumult of the storm the whistle of a boat cried as it groped
far away on the river channel.
Lordy God! chanted Toot softly. Hit's de Julia Dean! Out dere
lost in all dis wrath! I bet Cap'm Newbolt sho' is prayin' fo' his
rousters tonight!
We heard the boat's cry again: a rolling, chorded sob of sound
and the thunder boomed and drowned it. And still the storm mounted
and we knew it was far from its peak and the lightning quickened
so that there were whole praying moments when the air seemed alive
and shaking with light and the face of each of us, wooden and wait-
ing there in helpless Mortality, would be silvered with it: all things
bright as mirror-shine in that dreadful shimmering wash: silver
faces and silver pitchers on a cloth of silver calico and the eyes of
the blind man like silver grapes above his silver cane crook.
Sho! God's mighty wrothy!
Hush! cried Aunt Sarah, and Cathie stirred impatiently and I saw
her face in the lightning in an instant's picture and her eyes were
wide as if in the stare of a sleepwalker and her lips were curved in
a smile of thralldom and glory.
It's beautiful! she breathed and Aunt Sarah heard her and twisted
her head to stare down at the girl in outrage.
Hush, Catherine Ellen! Don't mock the fury of His elements!
I'm not! I'm not! she sang softly. Oh, it's so beautiful! I wish you
could have been upstairs and seen it a-coming! So beautiful! Like a
vision!
104


Be still! And if you must speak—say a prayer!
Toot had commenced rocking in a furious, stubborn rhythm as if
life and death depended upon that motion, as if by this bobbing to
and fro she might persuade God to spare her.
I did see a vision! cried Cathie softly.
Hush! That's sacrilege!
But I did! I saw white armies on white horses!
I will not abide that talk now! Hush, Catherine Ellen! We are in
the palm of God's wrath!
I saw them clash together in a meadow and fight a glorious war!
And I saw Abijah on a white horse and he led them! Oh, it was so
beautiful!
Sho! cried Toot. Ev'body talkin' 'bout heb'n ain't goin' dere! Sho!
Be still, Catherine Ellen!
You think I'm lying! Cathie said solemnly. You think I'm being
untruthful when I say I saw that vision upstairs! It was like the
Armies of God!
Be still! cried Aunt Sarah. On your knees before the wrath of a
merciful God and still your tongue with these blasphemies against
His wonders!
I won't! I won't!
And she tore free from Aunt Sarah's embrace like something up-
rooted by wind and the lightning blazed and lit us all, silvering the
wild faces of Aunt Sarah and the girl, mouths open and working
with angry words that the thunder drowned.
-not one of us! Aunt Sarah was screaming when the boom sub-
sided. I say that you are not one of us! We are Christian people and
we pray in the face of storms!
No! cried the girl. It's true! I'm not one of you! And I'm proud
of that!
You are the Devil's own!
Yes! Yes! If you say it-I am the Devil's own! And glad to be!
Let me alone now! Let me be! I never did belong and all your saying
that I did was lies!
And she turned suddenly, in flight toward the pantry stairs, and
the lightning failed but the etched shape of her stayed in my eyes
when the darkness clamped back around us.
What's all the shouting? cried Uncle Joe, stamping his cane
sharply on the floor. Be still. A body can't hear the storm with you
women caterwauling!
105


Let me go, Aunt Sarah!
What?
I gently tried to pry her arm loose from me with my fingers but
it was locked round me.
Be still, Thomas. The storm hasn't even begun!
I want to go upstairs.
Thomas, be still! You will stay here. We will remain together
until the storm is over!
No, Aunt Sarah!
What?
I want to go upstairs.
And I saw her face, agape and speechless at this mutiny, as the
window lit again and shone upon us like a bursting moon.
To be with her? she said.
She doesn't understand, I said. She didn't mean
She understands nothing because she is not and never has been
one of us. She is not a Christopher and I don't even think she is a
Christian. She's got that mean Hornbrook blood in her.
Let me go, Aunt Sarah, I said again, not angry, but swinging down
free of the rigid angle of bone and flesh and bombazine that ringed
me in.
Thomas Christopher, how can you tempt God out there with the
lightnings in His fist! she cried harshly above the crashing rain.
Hear Him, Thomas! He is a God of vengeance! You are a man now,
Thomas Christopher, and not a boy and He will hold you account-
able—He who knows of every sparrow's fall! Where are you
going?
I stared wild at her, clench-fisted and frightened beyond the
telling.
She hasn't got anybody! I screamed above the rain, above the wind.
Can't you understand that in your Christian mind! Can't you! She
hasn't got anybody! Don't you see! Please! Please, Aunt Sarah! Call
her back! God won't mind!
She was not even looking in my direction now: her face had lifted
again to the window as if awaiting the blazing entrance of Jehovah.
I ran up the stairs to Cathie's room and saw her on the bed with the
paper and the pencil, stretched out on her belly with her face to
the rain on the quartered panes.
Cathie! Cathie, come back downstairs!
But she did not move and I saw that she was waiting for the
106


lightning to see to make a word on the paper-square black words
from the tip of the broken pencil in her fist.
Cathie! I screamed, beating my fist against the door jamb. Come
back down stairs! Don't make us be apart!
But she was not hearing, her pencil poised and ready to spring
upon the paper and write when the lightning came again.
Cathie, listen to me! Turn around and look at me! Cathie?
I was afraid of her then: or more afraid perhaps that once I
crossed that threshold to her room I would have cast my lot irrev-
ocably and deserted these rooms which had sheltered me in the old,
beloved safeties that I could not name; crossed the threshold from
childhood into the time of man. I leaned against the sill and closed
my eyes and thought: Aunt Sarah will call to me in a minute and
when she does I will go back downstairs and it will be all right again.
I know that it was midnight when the storm subsided and passed
us because the clock chimed, its own voice somehow breathless with
aftermath and the whole house lay basking and spent in the peace
of the rain-sound and the drip of it outside seemed the gentle pulse
of something safe, while far away, behind the hills, the thunder
brawled and muttered in the foaming flash-floods of the backland
hollows. I was sitting beside her on the carpet stool, watching her
face in the darkness on that bed where old Rebecca had died, in that
little room with its cold, curious breath.
What was it you wrote? I said presently.
A letter, she sighed.
It's sure a funny night to write a letter.
No, she said. I had to. I just had to write a letter about the storm.
And my vision. The white armies I saw!
She was still a while and I heard her folding the paper quietly
and slipping it into her dress again.
Your Aunt Sarah doesn't want me to stay here any more, she said.
Pshaw! She don't mean half she says!
No, she said. I don't blame her. I'm queer, Tom. I can't help it!
I just have to do things sometimes and I don't know why. I tried
to tell everybody how beautiful it was! And she said it was a blas-
phemy against Him. And Lord, Tom! How could it be! It was Him
that made it! You'd think she'd see!
She doesn't believe in that God, I reckon.
107


Aunt Sarah was putting water on for tea. In the drip and gurgle of
the steady downpour, the thunder hunched and growled like an
angry dog beneath the house.
Don't worry about nothing, I said, and put my hand on her head.
She did not cringe nor move away and yet I felt her scalp quiver
beneath my fingers and the spasm seemed to run clean to her heels.
. She sat a while longer with the letter in her hand: that letter to
no one, to everyone, a letter to the Lord Himself. But there was no
address on it: there was nothing but the bare envelope, and inside
it the words that she had written by lightning and wonder. Now she
tore her stare from the dark window and looked at me in quiet
anguish.
I've been feeling it for weeks now, she said. Knowing that some-
thing—something bad was going to happen to me.
Pshaw! She never meant nothing by all that,
Yes. She meant what she said. And it was true. She's been good
to me—she was good to Aunty, too took us in that time. I mind
it all and I am beholden.
She done it because it was Christian.
I am beholden.
Well, sure you are! But you have to keep remembering that she's
old and queer.
We stopped talking then and listened as Aunt Sarah came slowly
up the hall stairs: we awaited her like prisoners at the bar, with no
sound but her just, soft tread and the gentle sighing groan of the
great house, still tired from the storm's ordeal, and the dripping of
the long night rain.
Catherine Ellen?
Yes'm.
Thomas?
Yes'm.
She came to the doorway with the old tin candlestick and the
dripping tallow taper and the wavering flame-shine painting the
tired lines of her peaked face.
Go to bed, children, she said in a soft hoarse voice.
And she was gone, dragging the shadows behind her and I knew
her so well that her not saying anything to us about our pantry
rebellion was more eloquent than many speeches. She would say
nothing until tomorrow-perhaps not until Sunday—perhaps not for
a week or a month. She would keep the wound covered and bound
109


and then upon the first occasion_snatch away the stained swathing
and confront us with it: all the hurt and anger she had saved until
that moment. It was worse, I think, when she said nothing and bore
her cross like a Christian. Worse, by far.
She's forgot all about it! I said cheerfully.
But Cathie shook her dark locks in a soft rhythm from side to
side.
No. She hasn't. She knows. And I know. He will punish me.
In the morning the whole round land shone with a crystal sharp-
ness. The day was clear as cold spring water with slow herds of
clouds like sheep upon the sky and summer gone: vanished in that
wild metamorphosis of elements that had lashed the valley during
the night. Gone, too, was our giant apple tree-wrenched in half
from its trunk, rooted for a quarter-century in the earth above the
smoke house, planted there, legend said, by Johnny Appleseed him-
self, and now tumbled down the slope by the wind like a ball of hay.
Aunt Sarah was up in the barn with her parasol, poking slates and
lath and shingles to see if the storm had unsettled them. And
Cathie stood watching in the pantry window in sullen and aggrieved
dignity as Coy came up the meadow in the buckboard with a sack
of flour from Carly Juniper's. My fear that the storm had done
damage to the Nellie Queen was so strong that I dared not even
mention it to Cathie. But she seemed to read my thoughts.
She wasn't hurt by it, she whispered.
Who?
The Nellie Queen, she said.
You went all the way up there to see?
No. I went and looked-up in the attic. I went there before day-
light and when the sun come up I saw the first light of it shine on
the pilot-house windows. I could count every pane-like little
diamonds.
Well then, cheer up, I said. Don't look so miserable.
She sighed and would not look at me.
A body can't be very cheerful, she said, when they know they've
got a punishment coming. A judgment.
Pshaw! She won't punish you.
I don't mean her, she said.
Who then? I said, and she shook her head and looked away.
110


I can feel it gathering in my flesh, Tom. I was impudent and un-
grateful to her when I should have been beholden. Abijah would be
ashamed of me. Tom! Tom, it just made me so-50 wild! I just
went crazy when she kept saying it was a lie—what I saw! Tom, it
wasn't just the rain! Don't you believe me?
Yes.
And she said it was sacrilege! Oh, maybe it was. Maybe I am the
Devil's own! Oh, Tom, I could just die!
But she didn't cry then: she hardly ever cried in all those times:
not that I saw at least. She stood with face tilted high to the window,
to the light of morning and her lip sucked in; eyes as wild as a
filly at her first taste of bit: standing there a-quiver with a little
pulsing heart-sign in her milky throat.
Let's have a game! I said suddenly, desperately, an hour or so
later: grappling to pull her from these deeps.
What kind of game? she said numbly.
I took the letter from her fingers and she did not even seem to
know it: her wild eyes did not even turn.
Let's give Toot this letter and tell her Coy brought it from town!
Tell her it's got her name on it!
I don't care what you do with it, she said. I just don't care.
It'll be a joke, I said. Because Toot can't even read her name and
she's always teasing us!
I don't care, Tom. Do anything you want with it. Just let
me be!
But don't you see? It'll be the best old joke in the world!
Go ahead. I don't care.
The pantry was wild-smelling and steamy from the kettle of
bubbling strawberries brawling and stewing on the stove. Cathie
turned and sat straight in the cane chair by the door. Her eyes were
dark: seeing and not-seeing, and her mouth a ghost of pink.
Now ne'mind gettin' under foot, you scampy trunnel-bed trash,
whilst I'm cannin' dese hyer strawberries fo' yo' Aunt Sary! I sho
don't want no chilluns under my feet this morning!
But look, Toot! I said, holding up the white envelope and wag.
gling it under her nose.
What's dat?
It's a letter Coy brought from the post office—that's what! And it's
got your name on it!
I don't see no name on it!
III


Well, it's got your name in it! That's the important thing! Dear
Toot, it says.
How you know?
'Cause I held it up to the light in the parlor window is how!
Pshaw! Ain't nobody ever wrote my name down! How you know
it if you seen it?
AT and two goose eggs and another T! That's plain enough!
Pshaw! Lemme see now! Shoot!
And she snatched it from me and held it a half inch from her
nose, squinching up her poor, nearsighted eyes.
I be dogged if I see nothin' with no double goose eggs on hit!
Open it up! I said. It's for you and that's for sure. 'Cause Coy
said so!
How he know!
'Cause Carly Juniper told him—that's how! Carly said that letter
came in the mornin' mail off the Julia Dean and the Cap'm said be
sure to see you got that letter!
I glanced aside at Cathie to see if the game had kindled in her
face yet, but she sat sallow and glum as ever: her eyes dark with
brooding, hardly seeing any of it at all. Toot, meanwhile, had fixed
me in a pecking stare of most henlike scrutiny, sniffing and suspicious,
fetching the bubbling strawberries a lick with the long wood spoon
every moment or so. Coy had gone up into the north pasture for the
day and so there was no way he could verify my tale—nor deny it.
Pshaw! Who'd be writin' me a mail letter!
The Lord only knows, I said darkly, and smothered a giggle. The
Lord only knows.
I reckon He do. And that don't noways call for you takin' His
name in vain neither! I reckon I better open dis hyer letter and
read what hit say!
Pshaw! I teased. You can't read!
Who say I can't read! Hit was your own dead mother taught me
to read, Thomas Christopher, long long ago!
Pshaw!
Hit's a fack, boy! I can read as good as de Preacher!
I felt the smile go foolish on my face and the teasing in my eyes
turned to challenge.
I bet you can't!
But she had snatched the reins now and was riding the joke like
a high, wild horse in maddening circles round me.
U12


Sho! she cried and tore the white envelope open and fetched out
the letter and held it to her nose and peered and grunted and
squinched her eyes and moaned a little and clicked her tongue with
amazement at what she pretended to see there, and then lowered her
gaze to stare at me, eyes a-mocking.
Sho!
You can't read!
I be dogged if I can't. I did.
Who's it from then?
Maybe I ain't sayin'!
Because you don't know. You can't read it! You can't!
Be dogged if I can't. I done did.
Then who's it from?
It's from a mighty old man. A man older than you'll ever grow to
be, judgin' from your orneriness!
Who?
You'll know his name when I say it.
Who? Tell me!
I was angry now: wild; caught like a sparrow in hunter's bird-lime
and my stick legs strained in the gum to be a-flying again.
Who! Who!
You heard his name in de Book many times. Hit was him dat
built de Ark!
Pshaw! That's not a letter from bim!
From Master Noah! Sho 'tis!
It's not!
Sho 'tis!
Suse came in with baskets of strawberries from the ice house
the sweet flesh of them pink and glowing in the straw.
Looky hyer, sister! cried Toot, waving the letter in Suse's face.
Looky what come on de mornin' packet! A letter from Master Noah!
Sho nuff? whispered Suse who would believe anything: that
fool.
Sho! Got his name wrote down plain as in de Book. Cap'm Noah,
Master of de Ark!
I be dogged! said Suse. Lemme see hyer, sister!
No, by jimminy! cried Toot, stirring the berries with the big
wood spoon and waving her letter in the sweet rosy steam. Dis hyer's
my letter and ain't nobody gets der hands on it!
What's hit say?
113


Lemme read it and see. Sho! Lemme see now. Hit says dat Master
Noah had a talk with the Lord God Jehovah not three days ago!
Hallelujah! sang Suse softly and set the berries on the canning
bench. And what He say!
Say He gettin' mighty sick and tired of the evil, sinful, mean
and contrary ways of two chill'n named Catherine Ellen Hornbrook
and Thomas Christopher!
Sho nuff?
Sho! Hit's writ here plain to see!
I fetched a box and sat down beside Cathie's stiff, silent figure in
the cane-bottom chair. The sweet smell of the pantry and the spice
of my joke had gone to sourness and fear. And even Cathie was listen-
ing now: her eyes watching Toot with grave and grieving quiet.
Yes, Cathie breathed. It's true, Tom. We are a poor sight in the
eyes of the Lord!
Pshaw! I scoffed weakly, but nothing helped: reason did not help,
telling myself that Noah was a man gone to dust before the eyes
of the warrior had stared through the copper mask even. Nothing
helped. Toot had won the game and I was growing sick with dread
for I would have sworn in that moment that the letter had come
from God Himself had she said so and declared that His bright
seal shone like a sun upon the innocent paper.
Master Noah say de Lord God Jehovah gettin' mighty sick and
tired of trunnel-bed trash mockin' po' ignorant niggers! Sassin' der
Aunt Sarys, too! Master Noah say de Lord God Jehovah fixin' to come
a-ridin' on His chariot and smite dem rascals whar hit'll do de
most good!
Cathie stood up like someone struck by the curse of a witch and
wandered off, dumb and eyes lacklustered, into the darkness of the
hallway.
Cathie, wait!
Sho! She knows de Judgment is a-comin'! Sho now!
Shut up! Shut up! It's a lie! It's a lie!
I be dogged if hit's a lie!
Suse giggled and fetched a cup of sugar from the hogshead and
giggled again.
You can't read! I screamed.
Sho I can read! Can you?
No! But I know who wrote that letter! She did!
Who did? Master Noah did!
114


He didn't! He didn't! Cathie wrote it!
I be dogged if she did! Didn't you say yo’self it come in de mail
on de mornin' packet? Didn't you say yo'sef it come by Coy's hand
to de house? Didn't you say yo’sef dat Carly Juniper tol him?
Give it to me!
I be dogged!
And she held it behind her and would not give it up and all I
could do was stand there before her, impotent and raging.
Thomas Christopher, you want me to tell yo Aunt Sary you been
lyin' to me?
No.
And she could have done just that, for Aunt Sarah came in the
pantry door at that moment and glared about her, with the yellow
parasol folded and fluttering like a golden hen in her hands.
Thomas, leave Suse and Toot be! They've got their hands full
with canning today! Where's Catherine Ellen?
She-she-,
Where is she? Don't mumble your words, boy!
She went upstairs, I reckon. I think she's sick.
Sick? Sick from idleness like as not. That's a sickness, Thomas,
and you've caught it, too! Run fetch her. I went her to help scald
the stone jars!
Yes'm.
No, wait!
She stood, stiffening suddenly: straight and stark as a ship's mast
and the morning light shone in the worn velvet of her old bonnet
and her mouth moved softly in dumb dread as her eyes widened
at those few faint scarlet splatters on the floor.
Dear God, it's come.
What's come? I whispered. Who?
The stain of mortality, she whispered, not moving, clutching the
crook of the parasol in her creaking white knuckles, her eyes glazed
and unwinking on the floor. The shame of Lilith.
And I looked again at that faint dappling of crimson where,
only moments before, Cathie's numb cold feet had wandered stricken
and cursed from the room: the tiny splattering of blood that marked
her passing from more than a room, from more than a summer: a
passing from innocence into the thorns beyond Eden. Suse and Toot
stopped and stared too, and then went back to stirring the bubbling
pot and made no more of the joke that had been our common down-
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fall that forenoon. Aunt Sarah walked out into the hallway and I
heard her feet whisper up the creaking staircase.
What's wrong? I whispered to Suse and Toot. Is Cathie bad
sick?
But they would pay me no mind, would not even turn from the
stove to face my question and there seemed to be a blood-scent of
shame weaving among those sweet aromas of cooking things: the
fragrance of the berry harvest like the sweetness of the garden, laced
now with the spoor of the snake. I went to the foot of the steps and
listened and heard Aunt Sarah in the clothes press tearing up strips
of clean linen she kept there for reasons that had always been to me
a mystery: cloths I was forbidden ever to touch. I started up the
stairs and she heard me and came to the head of the steps and
beckoned me back with her parasol, her bonnet still incongruously
perched atop her head, her face ivory-yellow and drawn beneath it,
her eyes dark with something wild and glorious and furious all at
once.
Go back down, Thomas! This is woman's business up here! Don't
take another step! I forbid it!
And I stopped and stood there and when she had gone away again
I listened and a door slammed and I crept to the highest step and
listened again and off behind the door to Aunt Sarah's room I heard
Cathie's voice high and brave: I don't mind! I knew He would
punish me and I don't mind!
And I sat on the step and put my head against the damp cold paper
on the wall and closed my eyes and wondered what would happen
to me there alone in that house when she was dead. Because God had
struck her as she had known He would—as Aunt Sarah had pre-
dicted—even as Master Noah himself had foretold—. And I could
not get it through my numb wits somehow that the letter had been
my joke and not the two-edged teasing Toot had made it be. No,
she would die. He had struck her and she was bleeding, and with
my eyes closed there I suddenly saw it plain again: the dream of
that August night and the killing thing I had done to her.
Please God, I prayed, don't let Cathie die! Please God, don't!
Don't let Cathie die!
And I kept whispering it over and over again while Aunt Sarah's
voice droned on behind the silent door and I made my lips stop
making the prayer long enough to listen and I heard her voice
faintly and she was reading something out loud from the Scriptures
116


and Cathie was listening, not making any sound at all, as she silently
stood there, I supposed, bleeding to death from the curse of God.
Thomas! I thought I told you to say downstairs.
Is she dead?
I stared up at her in the doorway of the room and saw no sign of
Cathie in the sunlight from the window behind her.
No, she's not dead. Though it would be a just God that struck
every woman dead on this day of her life.
Is she bad sick?
Go downstairs, Thomas. I order you!
I'll run fetch Doctor Willie!
Do as I say, Thomas!
And because there was something female and ancient and dark
about the whole business, I obeyed, and spent the whole terrible
day in waiting and wondering. I roamed the downstairs and waited,
but the door stayed closed and when Aunt Sarah came down she left
it latched behind her.
That night I waited till the house was asleep and rose in the
cascade of autumn moonlight in my room and crept to Cathie's room
and opened the door softly and stood for a moment looking for her
face and seeing it at last on the bolster, small and livid among dark
curls as it had been that other time in the winter when she had
fallen so sick.
Cathie?
And no sound of breath from her: no sense of living at all.
Cathie?
And when I had said it once more I crossed the threshold and
stood by her bed. She lay staring at the old pattern of a rain stain
on the ceiling and I thought for a moment that she had died. Then
her lashes blinked once and she looked at me.
Cathie?
Get out.
Cathie, -
Get out. Can't you understand that? I'm cursed. She told me I
was cursed. She even read it to me in the Book-how all women
are cursed.
Cathie, we're still friends.
I despise you, she whispered wildly. And I despise her, too!
Cathie, don't say that no more.
Why not? It's true. Maybe that's why God came down and
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punished me! Maybe He's not punishing me for the things I said
but for the things I didn't say! All these years I've hated you and
I've hated her, too.
Cathie, don't keep saying that!
I will! I will! i'll say it till the last breath in me is gone! Be-
holden! Beholden! I've always had to be beholden for everything-
to her—to you—o them niggers in the pantry!
And your Aunt Rebecca—
Yes! Yes, she was beholden too! She died in this bed beholden!
Shamed and crawling and beholden! And she was just as good as
your Aunt Sarah ever was! Ever! Ever!
Shut up.
I won't! Throw me out. I'll walk the roads and sleep in haystacks
till Abijah comes back. I'll be beholden to no one but him.
And it had been there, abiding and sleeping like the winter bear,
in the rocky caverns of my heart: all the old, wild hatred of that
first winter. The truce of childhood was ended and I suddenly knew
that it had been a lying, cheating thing from its outset: that I had
always hated her with that same ardor that had burned me that first
day she and Rebecca had come into our pantry breathless and pink-
cheeked from the winter roads. But now she was smiling and squint-
eyed with malevolence as she looked at me again.
I only hope God makes you suffer as He has made me suffer to-
night. I hope it and I pray it and I would sell my soul to the Devil
if I could make sure you would crawl and cringe in the shame and
filth and cursedness I've had put on me this day!
You deserved it!
Yes! Yes! I deserved it! Now get out! she whispered.
I hope you die, Catherine Ellen Hornbrook! I hope you die!
I hoped it, too! she moaned, rolling her head with the words; her
knuckle hard in her teeth. All day today! Prayed for it! But I won't
die yet! No, God's got some more tricks stored up for me yet! He's
not done with His deviling me!
Shut your mouth! That's blasphemy!
My tongue's my own! I'll say what I've a mind to!
And tomorrow Aunt Sarah will drive you out in the road where
you came from!—where you always belonged!
I choked then on the fury of my dry mouth and was silent, and
the terrible hissing, whispering struggle was ended, and Cathie re-
turned her dark stare to the stain on the ceiling as if I were no longer
118


even in the world. And suddenly all breath and spunk were gone
from me and I crept back to my bed, weak and sick as an autumn
wasp, and crawled under the quilt and lay awake long past the clock's
third chiming and heard those hushed sobs from somewhere in the
world and listened to a river owl whooping his muffled cry faintly
to the still moon meadows and listened when he grew quiet for a
spell, prowling the black morning, and listened when, at last, he
dropped and something up in the orchard screamed like a penny
whistle and died. And then there was no listening but to that far,
faint gasp of grieving and I lay waiting, in my turn, for the feathered,
soundless fall and filled my mouth with quilt and bit it hard to keep
from screaming when it came.
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Can you forgive me, Thomas?
There's nothing to forgive, Aunt Sarah! You've always done your
best in raising me. I never made any complaint.
Ah, that's so! And I'm glad you know it—or at least say it. And
yet I think I've been a mite harsh sometimes. With you and with her,
too.
I kept my teeth together at that mention and looked out the kitchen
window at the morning hoar like a beard of age on the black earth
of winter.
You raised me as you believed, I said, still not looking at her. And
I reckon my own mother could have done no better.
Ah, you're a good boy, Thomas! I don't know what comes over
me sometimes. With all the bitterness round about these days a body
gets to thinking.
The times has nothing to do with Right and Wrong. That's some-
thing that don't change.
Just the same, boy, I'd think you might at least speak to her. At
meals, at least.
I bit my teeth together in silence.
Yes. That's only Christian, she said.
I 'low as how you've got no right to censure me on that, at least!
On bein' a Christian.
No, she said softly, staring at the knotted cough wool in her hands,
the taut heel she was mending across the skull of the darning gourd.
Don't mistake my meaning, Thomas. You've been a good boy. And
you're a good man now. As good a Christopher as any, I judge, and
that's saying a good deal because your Grandfather-
And I'm not ashamed before him neither! All my life I've kept in
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mind that he'd be judging me—somewhere—and I've tried to live
by that.
No no, boy! Now be still till I finish. We're a strange family, I
know, and it's not easy to live up to the standards set by them that's
dead and gone. And her—she's strange-queer! Because I've told
you time and again about her blood—the Hornbrooks—the father and
all. Queer!
I'd as soon not talk about her.
Queer! Let me finish. I'm an old woman and I like to talk so shut
your mouth for a minute and hear me out! I just mean to say that
living under the same roof-eating at the same table-seeing one
another in the rooms of an evening, in the same light of the lamp
Thomas, it just ain't natural for two young people to live like that
and not say one mortal friendly word in a whole year's time.
I'm not obliged to talk when I've got no words to say.
No—that's not the heart of it, boy! There was words a-plenty
between the two of you for all them years when you was both growin'
-shapin' into the man and woman you are now. Thomas, strange as
the girl is I think you should try to speak to her civilly-genteelly.
I chewed my lip and cracked my knuckles and stared hard at the
space in the pantry floor between those boards that had grown sleek
and dark beneath a century's whispering feet and the scouring suds
of Toot's hickory broom.
I've got no words to say.
I think the Lord would want you to think of her as if—as if you
were a father.
I looked at her now, furious, and yet afraid to let her see.
A father? Ain't that strange talk from you that always said as how
her family was trash and ours the salt of the earth?
Thomas, you're twistin' perfectly good words into nonsense. I
never said you was her father. I said you should try to treat her as
that-out of common Christian custom. She's care-kin, at least.
I doubt that. She seems mighty independent these days.
Ah, Lord, I reckon I'm to blame for it. It all began that night of
the storm—when she was impudent.
She blasphemed. You said that yourself.
She was scared. Storms scare me, too. I'll not deny it. She never
meant what she said. And she longs for that shiftless Hornbrook -
that Abijah. I forgave her. Long ago I forgave her for that night,
Thomas. Why can't you?
I21


I don't know.
I got up and jammed my hands to the wrists in my britch pockets
and stared into the crazy black branches of the winter apple tree.
I declare I don't understand you any more, Aunt Sarah.
Pshaw, Thomas!
It's so. I never thought I'd live to see the day when you'd be takin'
up for her this way.
She laid her darning down and I heard her skirts whisper their
dry, breathing stride across the room and she put her hands on my
shoulders and drew me round.
It's the times, I reckon, she said. There's so much meanness goin'
round. I can't expain it somehow. It seems to me sometimes like all
the old good things are slipping away. Now that I've decided to have
your Uncle put away-..
When did you decide that?
Last Sunday. I talked for a good hour with Pastor Cockayne. I
told him what I'd done for Joe—all these years—these wasted years.
Not that he don't know. Lord, he's watched it with his own eyes and
he told me he had prayed for me many's the time—wondered how I
could bear my cross.
Where's he going to be sent?
To the Home at Wheeling.
That's a lunatic asylum.
That's a cruel word for it, Thomas, she smiled. Your Uncle's a
man that needs tending—more than I can give him.
But he's not crazy.
Not crazy? Have you had to lay beside him of a night and cringe
while he thrashed in the bed and called the name of my dead child?
It was his child, too.
You're a cruel boy, Thomas. You'd never talk to me like that if
you wasn't.
It's the truth.
Yes. Yes, it's the truth. And it's the truth that he's soaked his brains
in those medicines of his till he's little more than a dope fiend.
Pshaw. Them Injun herbs.
Injun herbs nothin'. I found a vial of laudanum in his shirt pocket
when I sorted the wash last Monday. But that's not for you to judge.
But it's all part of the feeling I've got these days. Lord, I reckon I'm
getting old and queer myself. I reckon they'll be sending me off one
of these days—maybe you yourself will send me, Thomas.
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Don't say that, Aunt Sarah.
Well, it's true. I've tried to be a good wife to Joe. I've tried to
raise you up as if you were my own—washed in like a half-drowned
bird from the river. And the girl, too!-tried to make you both
Christian. Lord, it's not been easy. It's not been easy.
She turned away from me and I felt the old wash of shame that I
had wronged her, but there was nothing I could say yet.
I just can't abide it, she said. The feeling of hate that hangs in the
air of this house sometimes. It's like a cake burning in the oven—a
scorched sweetness. Some Wednesdays when I open the windows to
air the rooms I have a feeling that it will blow away in God's clean
air. But when I shut the windows—it's there again.
I hate no one.
You hate her, she said, and then suddenly turned to me and stared
hard into me with black prying eyes. Don't you?
I don't know, I said, and suddenly I began to speak despite myself
and I said more than a mouthful, for it had been storing there a
long time; working like mash.
I don't know what I ever really felt about her. Sometimes when I
look back to that day when you took her and Rebecca in I can't mind
exactly what it was like—the color of the sky—the way either of them
looked. It's a queer thing—there's whole patches of time in them
years that are blank and empty as that sky yonder in the window.
Sometimes I try to bring the feelings back but it's just like they was
cut out of me like pictures scissored from the page of a book.
You felt sorry for her. The shiftlessness of a man that would turn
his sister and daughter out in the winter-into the roads.
More than that. I kept seeing how I'd feel-if I was her.
As ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren .
No, don't quote Scriptures at me. Not now. Not yet. I know what
you mean and I reckon that's what it was but there's too much evil
in me now for that. It's been that way since the night you sent her to
her room—the night there was blood on the floor yonder where God
had struck her. I never walk over that floor there that I don't feel it.
Like something burning my naked soles.
She lowered her eyes and went back to the rocker and caught up
the darning egg again and squinted to the winking steel needle.
Not just her, she said softly. Ary one of womankind.
No, I said. I didn't get that meaning from it.
But that's so, she said.
123


ay it again. He stood and shame anding the same
Then you should have told me that. I thought it was her alone
that He'd singled out in His wrath. Did He strike you, too? Did you
bleed?
I dislike this talk, Thomas. The Lord will disclose these things to
you in His time.
That would have been the time, I said.
Then I'll say it and I want no more talk about it and no more
questions. That night was the night that Catherine Ellen became a
woman.
You said the Lord had struck her.
I said that and I say it again. He struck her as He has struck every
woman since the Fall of Eve. With blood and shame and sin.
I studied a spell and remembered her own voice saying the same
words to me that night: that black night when the river owl had
killed that little crying thing.
My mother, too?
Every woman.
But you said she was the Devil's own. It was you that drove her
away from you that night.
That was the night of the storm.
It was all part of it, Aunt Sarah. Those whole four days were like
a whirlwind.
Yes, we have none of us been the same since then, she said. It's
been a house where you could scent the hatred like a spoor.
It's her that hates, I said with tight aching lips. Not me. Not you
either.
But it's the true Christian that loves his enemy. That's why I say
you should try to be more kindly, Thomas. Think of the girl as your
daughter. Not blood kin, mind you.
No. I'll not. I can't. Because I know how it would be. It would be
fighting again and it wouldn't be children fighting this time. It was
bad enough when we were neither of us big enough nor ornery
enough to do much more than bloody each other's noses. I know what
it would be next time we fought.
What?
I covered my eyes with my fists and pressed them until red lights
winked and swam and softly blew like stars in a mist.
I don't know. God above, will you let me be, Aunt Sarah!
I'm trying to understand you, Thomas.
I don't know what it would be. Sometimes I dream about it!
124


I hear you cry in your sleep sometimes.
Yes. And I reckon she hears me, too. And I reckon that's some-
thing for her to laugh at. I seen that in her face, too, at supper or
here in the pantry. Oh, don't think we ain't been talkin' all this time
-her and me! There's been no words. But there's been talk a-plenty.
I pass her sometimes on the stairs and I see such a mocking and a
laughing in her eyes that I could kill her. Sometimes I catch her
starin' at me during the meal. Don't tell me you haven't seen that,
Aunt Sarah! Lord, there's been talk a-plenty. Eye-talk!
Don't take His name in vain when you speak, Thomas.
It was always her that won when we fought, you see! Even when
I whipped her it was her that won. Even that night when she drove
me out of her room.
Then you went there?
Yes. Yes. You never knew.
I knew. There's a lot of things I knew that I never said. I held
my tongue for the sake of Peace.
At any rate, she drove me out of the room-her mouth was twisted
and foul with the Devil's own blasphemies. She hasn't been the same
since then. And I don't reckon I have either. That's why I know what
it would be if I even spoke to her now. We'd be at each other's breasts
like pit dogs.
Mercy mercy mercy! she sighed. Why does He put us here on this
earth? It's like a war. Like a war.
Sometimes, I said so softly that my own voice seemed to come from
beyond the cold window, from the yard somewhere among those cold
crystal winds of that river winter. Sometimes I have a dream about
her, Aunt Sarah.
What's the dream?
I don't know, Aunt Sarah.
Pshaw! A body can remember a dream.
I can't say! I said, blushing scarlet with all the blood in me burning
my face. Except that there's a shame—a pollution comes with it.
I reckon I'd best have Doctor Willie have a talk with you. No-
that drunken sot. And Joe's not fit. Mercy, how can a woman survive
in a world with no men. Lord, if my strong, good father were alive.
He'd tell you the facts of things.
What facts, Aunt Sarah? Am I sick?
Sick with the sin of the world. That's a sickness, Thomas. And
what is she to you in this dream?-a daughter?
125


I can't remember! Damme!
Thomas, I will not tolerate cursing in my father's house!
I'm sorry. Forgive me.
It's Him that will decide that. Go on, Thomas.
It's—it's killing, I think! Yes, it's killing.
Killing who?
I-I-her. Her! Her!
Ahhh. Then you must pray to Him for strength.
I'm prayed out. I've prayed till my whole body feels like I've been
bled. Sometimes I feel just like I'm praying to an empty room.
No. He hears you.
But I could not go on; could not say the words that came shaped
and deadly to my tongue: that I sometimes thought God had died and
that I might as well be speaking to the rocking chair in that room or
to my own bleak, gaunt image in his darkened mirror: to the shock
of brown hair above my scared, white face; or that I might as well
go to the hill by Dulcie's house and sit in the flesh-fed grass amid
those mute stones and talk to the wind among the wistful sandstone
angels and watch the slim, figure of a dark girl walk among the trees
of my Grandfather's orchard.
It was settled then in the second week of November that Doctor
Willie was to come in the rockaway buggy on Wednesday morning
and fetch Uncle Joe off to the asylum at Wheeling. I will never know
if Aunt Sarah's charge was a fair one: that he was insane or a dope
fiend or to what sore tests he had put their marriage in those decades
before my time. In my childhood he had seemed, in that household
of gods, to be the God of Three-Penny Pieces: no more than that. He
had never charmed me with the outspoken, hearty bluster of Doctor
Willie. He had frightened me more than most of the older people
in my child's world, more even than Aunt Sarah, because he talked
to ghosts while she only talked to God and God, at least, never left
his rocker to prowl the panels of the hallways, to creep and clatter
among the joists and whistle a child's sweet tune down the draughty
carpeted corridors.
Doctor Willie stood up to her and arraigned her roundly for the
decision and would not sign the papers that declared Uncle Joe in-
competent and insane and she sent for an effeminate young doctor
named Fred Baum from Wheeling and he did the deed. And per-
126


haps they were right. I felt no loss nor pity at knowing that he was
going. He had always seemed remote from me, and in my childhood
I remembered that his favorite had not been I but a whisper and the
flutter of a curtain and the name of a child named Peggy who some-
times shook down sickle pears on my head on ghosty, gusty days in
the orchard. Yet I went, half out of curiosity, to see him, finally, in
the parlor, as he sat feeling for the last time against his face the
fading of the dusk of that habit-worn window.
Tom? Is that you, boy?
Yes, Uncle Joe.
Come set with me, boy.
He would never believe that I was a man now, and I hated him a
little for that. He would make me sit on the stool beside his chair
and reach out his hand to feel my face and it would strike against my
breast: he believed that I was still a child five hands high.
Tom, did ye hear? She's sending me away!
Yes. She told me, Uncle Joe.
He made a sound and I flashed him a look because it was as much
a sob as a chuckle and I saw that it was both, and neither.
Lawk! Just like an old dray carted off to the boneyard! Ain't that
the way!
I heard, I lied, that it was comfortable up there.
Just like an old wind-broke horse! he went on in that rambling,
faint-voiced way. And what will my poor Peggy do now! Pshaw!
That young sawbones from up river told her I was crazy, boy! Don't
that beat all? He said I'd took dope till my brains was just like an
old worm-eaten stump in the woods! Poor little lamb! Poor little
Peggy!
He paused and gummed a few more wandering words and shook
his head in disbelief.
Will Curtis said my brains was sound as hers! Sounder! Hah! That
hook her whalebone stays a little!
There'll be folks up there, I said, to take good care of you, Uncle
Joe.
Pshaw! Didn't I always take care of myself! And her, too, when
V had my eyes—when I had the store! And then—and then
He turned his head a little, listening, harking always for sounds
my ears would never hear.
The Captain hated me, he said softly. And that's why she hates
me, too.
127


Grandfather Christopher?
Hated me from the day I set foot in this house. Hated me when
I took his dear Sary away. Hated me till the night he died upstairs.
And let me tell you a thing, boy—I hated him, too, because he was
just like her—sick.
Sick?
Sick with too much Almighty! Lord, he was worse than her-
prayin' and setting stiff-backed in his chair with the Scriptures on
his knee. Lightning would not have struck him down from that chair
when he prayed! I hated him.
A body needs religion.
Not that kind. Not that much.
A body needs to pray, I whispered, hoping that no one would hear
us there and yet somehow entranced with his talk. I seemed never to
have known him before and I had a curious new kind of despair at
the prospect of his leaving.
And when at last he come to die he went on-he lay yonder in the
shiny box with candles round him-candles at his head and candles at
his side and candles at his feet. Lord, how still the house was that
night—even the mice was still—even the crickets that used to live in
the pantry was still. There wasn't no sound in that whole night but her
a-sobbin' in her room. Think of it, boy! Sarah Christopher sobbin'
and cryin'. I bet you never seen that and I'll vow you'll not see it
again.
And his face twisted and he wept but no tears came from the dried-
up lids and after a while he stopped suddenly and began speaking
again as if nothing had happened.
I'd been to Elizabethtown with Will Curtis that night, he said.
Will and me and Captain Dorcas from the steamboat Bird of the
Prairie got drunk with old Jabez Koontz, the wharfmaster. I come
in about seven in the evening and I seen him lyin' there-still proud
and no stiffer in death than he'd been in life—in that shiny box-
with his beard pointing to heaven like a pilot's compass needle-
lyin' there with them candles at his head, candles at his feet, candles
on either side. I seen them hands—still shaped in the clasp of prayer
on his stiff linsey coat—and her up in the bedroom sobbin'. Mind ye,
boy! Sary Christopher cried! That face of wood with tears comin'
out of it. And poor little Peggy prowlin' the pantry among all them
stone jars of food the neighbor women had brought and nobody to
dish her out a meal. Ay, boy! I stood there in the door-thick with
128


Monongahela rye and puffin' on a good black stoga—and I done the
deed that marked the rest of my life. Ay, I did!
He chewed his mustaches for a spell and then snatched the shawl
ends close around his armpits and grunted.
I seen him lyin' there in that box and I knowed he couldn't never
glare at me again—couldn't never stare me down with his pride
and his soft, cold talk of righteousness again! Boy, I teetered back
on my boot heels proud as a rouster and I hollered out: "Cap'm!
Come have a drink with me!" Oh, Lordy, she heard that! You bet
your britches she did. But I never minded. It was just me and him in
the whole world right then. Because I'd been drinkin', you see! I'd
never had the gumption otherwise. And I stood there a spell longer
puffin' smoke into the air of that death-still room and then I swaggered
right up to them candles by his side and I stood there a spell longer
and I belched, and I said: "Cap'm! 'Pears like your hearin' ain't what
it use to be!" And he never said a word-bein' as he was dead, you
see! Dead and stretched out there in that shiny fine box with all them
candles round him in the gloom. And then you know what I done?
No, I whispered in a trance.
It was the drink, I tell you, boy! I wouldn't never have had the
gumption without it. Good drink it was, too! Cap'm Dorcas had rolled
a barrel of good Monongahela off his boat that mornin'-fresh from
Pittsburgh!
What did you do?
I lifted that whispery white gauze they had stretched all over the
box there and throwed it aside where the candles wouldn't catch it!
And then I leaned down and I blowed tobaccy smoke right square
in the Cap'm's face! It was the drink, you see! And when I'd done
that I said loud and clear: "Cap’m, Sary'd been a right good woman
if it hadn't been for you! But you ruined her for ary man that walks!
Christ Himself couldn't
Uncle Joe!
-Christ Himself couldn't please her!" Ay! I said it. And then I
tucked my jacket sleeve up and drawed back and I slapped his cold
cheek. I did! Lord, I could feel that coldness on my fingers for years.
I can feel it yet! Like mutton! Ever slap a dead man's cheek, Thomas?
No.
Well, then don't drink! Don't fool with it, boy! Providence might
tempt you to slap hers when at last she lies a-coolin' with candles
shinin' all around! Hah!
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And did she know what you done?
Know! Know! Lawk, boy! She was standin' in the parlor door
yonder watchin' me throughout! Know! She's knowed all these years
and she's been waitin' forty years for the buggy ride I'm takin' to-
morrow! Pshaw! It was like she was married to him/her own father
-and our own weddin' wasn't no more than a child's game. Sure!
She seen it! Seen me slap him! Seen me blow smoke in his face. Seen
me pinch out all the candles when I'd done and stared me down when
I turned, grinnin', and met her face in the black doorway! Sure! She
waited and kept still till I'd done it all to the last candle! Maybe
she wanted to see it! Maybe in her soul she hated him more than me!
Hate and love is just like them Siamese freaks that's all the talk these
days!
I glanced toward the doorway as if I half thought to see her there
again, listening to his dreadful account of that night.
Here, boy! These'll have to do for a while!
And he fumbled in his shawl and fetched out a squashed black
leather bag and pressed it into my hand.
Now leave me. She'll come a-prowlin' directly and scold you for
bein' up! It's long past tom-cattin' time and a little lad your size
needs his sleep to grow on!
He would never know that I had gown. That I was a man now.
And I went off, surly at that and forgot the leather bag until I was
long a-bed and lay watching the candle shadow of Cathie combing her
dark hair—the stretching black shape of her on the flowery hall
carpet before the door of her small room. And when I remembered
I jumped out of bed and fetched the bag from the pocket of my shirt
and undid the little string that his old fingers had clumsily knotted
around its mouth and dumped it on the quilt-iwo dozen shiny silver
bits. And so he had been that to the end: the God of the Three-
Penny Piece—and it was that that I would always remember him for.
Doctor Willie came for him long before daybreak and bundled him
into the rockaway and the last sound that I was to hear from him in
this mortal life was a plaintive beseeching from the yard that Peggy
stay indoors because there was a frost in the air and she would catch
her death of cold; poor wandering thing.
November fell on the valley like a black dog. It would be a hard
winter: something quickened in the air: a pulse and a drum of cold
130


alarm. Every black twig stiffened in the cold of it and the green-
watered river froze white and dry as a bone and the air crackled and
splintered like thin, blown glass. I will never know why but it seemed
to me in that season that we lived in a house by the sea. Perhaps
it was the imminence of that spreading waste of winter, stretching
from the very lip of the pantry window to world's end itself: a vast,
natural enigma beginning such a few inches from our charitable,
cheering oven warmth. And sometimes in the high, pure morn-
ings immense clouds came westering down the hills like the grand
sail of frigates outward bound, and sometimes there was a true ocean
flavor in the air: a salt and a challenge that seemed to me what I had
always thought the sea to be. Though I cannot say why it so seemed.
No more than I can explain those other impressions of strangeness
and illusion to that year. Cathie seemed my mortal enemy more than
ever before and we kept our silences like passionate, irrevocable
vows. Aunt Sarah seemed to have grown stiffened and sharpened and
her black eye more watchful now that Uncle Joe was gone. And
though I would have denied it then—I missed him. It seemed to me :
a sore and saddening irony that all in the moment of one evening I
had first come to know him and last said good-by. Though it was not ::
so much pity at his dismal fate that itched me as an uneasiness that
with him gone I was alone in that queendom of women folk. And.
so the feeling of strangeness and of danger quickened in the air of
the house and I felt my shoulders pressed closer and closer to a final:
wall. And even the common annual events of the country calendar
seemed to bear within them special portents of some wrathful on
slaught. Mid-November: the Killing Season.
Aunt Sarah bought a good heifer at the Cameron auctions and
tethered it in the barn. It cried piteously all that weekend and the
two fat shoats skirled and muttered in their frozen pen on the hill-
side above the smoke house; seeming almost to guess, at the sight of
Noah Lindsay, the butcher, what dark business he had come to at-
tend to on the cold Monday of the Killing. It was a day like clear
water with a bright, dry morning star fast fading and the faint sun
that hung between the smoking chimneys of Dulcie's house seemed
diminished and stunned and gave no more warmth than a cold day-
time moon. We were long out of bed by then, the whole household,
for it was a day that called for every hand and foot. Kettles of water
brawled and boiled among small, red, roaring fires in the yard and
Noah Lindsay fetched the hard shoats screaming down the hill on the
131


sledge, hog-tied and struggling, while the mare tossed her lip and
rolled her bald-eyes and smelled death's onset. And we all stood
by the porch, witnessing, while Noah hoisted each shoat in its turn
by the hind legs to the breach of the gallows and then, humming
loudly in his high, fuzzy voice like a Marietta Dutchman, leveled the
cruel hammer and stunned them each with a smart, smacking blow
between the ears. The first gave a grunt and said no more but the
second uttered a mornful groan and hung like a limp, broken hand
as he marched round it, still humming and puffing cheerfully on his
corncob, and lifting the great razory blade with a theatrical flourish
so that we might all be awed by the single sunflash from its steel,
drew it with a gentle, cunning quickness and stepped back as deli-
cately as a cotillion fop as the blood fanned out scarlet into the cold,
gay air. And then the hard work commenced. By noon we were all
smeared as red as Cain himself: blood on our faces, blood to our
elbows, blood on our shoes. And no one joked: It was the Killing
Season and there was little sound but the hoarse breath of effort and
the bubbling song of the kettle and the crackle of the roaring brush-
filth fire beneath its black, three-pegged belly, and the hack of the
cleaver upon joint and moist bone and cartilage and the scrape of a
blade across harsh hide and bristle. Suse and Toot fetched coffee by
the gallon and we drank it in the killing cold while the steel flickered
and worked in the still Ainching flesh and entrails spilled and
quivered steaming on the frozen earth, aimlessly busy yet, it seemed,
with their wondrous and secret metabolisms. Aunt Sarah-dainty and
marvelously unbloody in her brown velvet bonnet-supervised the
business like some fierce druid queen.
Catherine! Help Tom with that bucket yonder!
Tom! Save the lights! And save the tripe! It will make a meal for
Suse and Toot!
Never once in that whole livelong day did Cathie look me in the
eyes. Yet her face was Aushed amid all that carnage and when I first
saw that and sensed it and fairly heard her heart quicken at the sight
and scent of blood a strange anger gathered in my breast and a cry
began in my throat—some challenge, a curse, perhaps—and yet I
bit it back at that final moment of utterance. It seemed to me that
there was in her some knowledge of blood that would ever be denied
me. And it was this I hated and could not understand.
By three o'clock the business was nearly done and the yard glistened
like some primordial abattoir: the blood already black and clotted
132


upon the cobbles and in the ruts, the entrails shining and hardened
as if they had been carved from alabaster and sapphire and ruby. All
four hams had been sheared cleanly away by Noah's wise steel and
the spareribs lifted from the blood-choked lights and laid in long,
gleaming sides in the smoke house and Toot was grinding sausage
already in the pantry by the pump and there was sage in the steamy
kitchen air: sweet and bright as summer in our noses.
A good heifer! And good lean shoats—the both of them! cried
Aunt Sarah. Four fine hams for next winter! Leaner than Pharaoh's
swine—the both of them! A good day's work, Noah!
And she paid him his two silver dollars and a side of spareribs for
his day's killing and he stumped off down the river road into the
frozen hoar of the dusk, singing gay as bloody Herod.
Now to bed, Thomas—Catherine Ellen! she cried the moment the
last supper fork was laid down. Toot and Suse will need help all day
tomorrow with the soap! Tom, we're short of potash. You'll take the
mare to Elizabethtown at sunup and fetch a bag home.
I slumbered away by the firelight in my room: my wits wandering
in the blow and hiss of the bubbling coal behind the grate: seeing in
it skies and summer-safety and the green of the warm river running
to the sea and small flowers hidden in the black crotch of cool wood-
lands. Aunt Sarah kept lamps a-shine in downstairs windows on those
cursed cold nights; as if, by some means, their small light might add
a warmth to our sanctuary or, perhaps, that their steady dip of flame
might stand sentry against the sea of winter ranked against the pane.
Each glass was etched and whorled with its own geometry: cold
spectral prints of the ghosts of perished leaves and flowers murdered
by Old Time and his seasons: white and cruel as the tooth of the fox.
And I lay teetering on the warm brink of sleep, swaddled in my
mountain of heaped quilts and comforters: some stitched and fash-
ioned by grandmother-hands, older than Injun times and never
fetched down from the camphory closets except in these bitter con-
tingencies of winter. I hovered on the warm shore of a dreaming
ocean, my lashes fanning softly together across eyes that wandered
in the flame-ghosts beyond the hot hearth. And I dreamed presently.
And I could hear my voice off in the world of waking, moaning and
whimpering in the silence of the firelight room and I knew all the
more that I had to escape because of that and because of something
long and bloody and quivering in my hand and because of the thing
that had stained it so. Behind me on the bed: Cathie would by lying
133


there, I knew: cold and wise-eyed and stately as a slaughtered Princess
and that was why I had to flee because she would rise suddenly, in
death, and come a-beckoning. A black owl was wheeling and whoop-
ing down the frozen clouds above the dream-sea and I heard that
far voice of my cry grow louder and I woke wide and felt a square
of quilt rip under my fingernails and lay panting and temples thump-
ing and shamed and wild-staring amid the red summer hearth
shadows. The hall carpet with its dusty flowers shone with the fire-
shine from the little grate in Cathie's room and I lay there, biting
my lip till it bittered, knowing that she had heard my nightmare
gaspings and laughed and mocked me, like as not. It was a silence
then like the whole world was goose feathers and after a bit I heard
the tinkle and puff of the molten cinders and I fell asleep, dreamless
at last, hearing the thin, brave bark of a she-fox under the hill where
Dulcie lived.
as
Did you sleep well, Thomas? asked Aunt Sarah, at breakfast, but
when I lifted my eyes from the stack of morning buckwheats it was
at Cathie that I looked and saw all the mocking there that I had
feared would be.
... Passably well, I murmured and hurried through my breakfast with
'a thick throat and then bundled up and saddled the roan mare and
set off down the river road that was fragile with frost worms and
hard as stone. I had not been to Elizabethtown in more than a year
and I rode down Lafayette Avenue blushing like a clown thinking
that all the changes that year had wrought in me must surely show
for everyone to see. I had become a man in that twelvemonth and it
· seemed somehow a shameful state and I would turn my eyes to no
hollered greetings from the sidewalks because I knew that folks were
. laughing at my first shadow of a beard and if I spoke they would
hear the dark deepness in my voice that was still strange and new to
me. At Carly Juniper's store the old men clustered round the stove
like frost-sick bees around a smoke-pot and they kept their beavers
on their heads and their scarves round their chins because the air
was cold even there: except in the radiant halo of the roaring, red
stove. And these old men spoke little and spat from time to time at
the cherry-red stove and watched the juice dance and bead and hiss
off into the air.
The store seemed to me now what it had seemed to me as a child
:134


when Coy or Aunt Sarah had brought me there: a palace of wonders.' .
And I had to fight back the need to stare now in a child's gaping
dumbfound at every exotic item on those laden shelves: pineapple
cheeses and snuff cans and glass jars of cigars: Principes and Caza-
dores and Stogas and Duke's Cigarettes and the candies, too, and the
smell of it all mingling into a compost that was nothing less than
the Spirit of Bounty itself: buckwheat flour and timothy seed and
brandy and cinnamon and tonka bean: Spanish leather and the wet,
feral aroma of Buffalo robes and coon pelts that the old men had
bartered for bacon; the wandering, sharp ghost of Hartshorn Spirits:
acrid and somehow danger-smelling like the scent of horse brine and
the bitter-sweet of sarsaparilla and vanilla and wild cherry and
pipsissewa and sassafras and the jujube paste that old witches sucked
for winter croups.
How's your Aunt Sary, Tom?
Just fine, Mister Juniper!
By grannies, you've growed up overnight, Tom Christopher! You're
a half a hand taller than your grandpap already!
I flushed dark as sherry and kept my eyes where they had been
from the outset: among the doodads and gimcracks and cheapjack
trinkets on the worn, smooth counter wood: the pewter buttons with
Jackson's face like a Roman soldier, the brass whistles and the penny
candies and the frog-voiced jew's-harps. I waited with my big wrists
a-dangling and my shaved neck a-burning while he fetched the bag
of potash and I prayed no one would speak to me again.
How'd your Aunt Sary like the election, Tom?
She never said, I muttered, and blushed some more because none
of us had ever known there was an election down in the bottom-
lands.
Well, I don't reckon it's a woman's business to care one way or
t'other but I 'low if your Grandpappy Christopher had been around
durin' speech-makin' time this fall there wouldn't have been ary
single Lincoln vote cast in Marshall County! I mind back in 'Forty-
four when he went a-stumpin' up and down the river for Henry Clay
-speakin' at every landin' 'tween hyer and Louisville, he did! Lawk,
there was a spellbinder, Tom! A grand old soul—the Cap'm!
And he fumed and fussed among the wrack and tangle of stores
behind his counter and I threw him a short, sidelong glance and saw
his blue eyes, twinkling behind the little square lenses of his spec-
tacles and his cheek, sagging like a cow's udder with its burden of
135:


bitter kitesfoot: that quid that was always there and once when I had
come there with Coy for cornmeal I had seen Carly eat his lunch and
even then he had not removed the quid but merely shifted it back
while he ate his bread and cheese; and I think he must surely have
slept with it just as I am sure he went to bed wearing the stovepipe
beaver that he had worn atop his shaggy white head, summer and
winter alike, since the last battle of the Mexican War.
Hit's a bad time, Tom! There's talk of War! he cried, seeming to
read my thoughts.
And now the old men round the stove stirred and scratched their
boot soles restlessly on the harsh floor and muttered, waking from
their winter dreams, like paw-sucking bears disturbed.
Hit'll come afore the thaw! cried the steamboat captain on the
bench and shifted his elbows on his knees and blinked at the glowing
belly of iron. And there's good Virginians that'll welcome the show-
down!
Shore! cried an idle drayman on the bench beside him, and pursed
his lips angrily in the thicket of his red beard and winked one
wrinkled lid and glared at the captain with the other open eye.
Shore! I'll throw in with that! Hit's time Western Virginians had
the horse sense and bull guts to stand up to them damned tide-water,
pussy-footin' gentry with their fancy cotillions and their God-damned
taxes. My own Pap God rest his sperrit-used to tell how them
Randolphs and Washingtons used to send calvary clean over into the
mountains to gather the taxes at gun-point from pore river folk that
hardly had bacon fat to dip their cornbread in! I say fight 'em .
That hain't the issue! roared the butcher Noah Lindsay from his
vantage on the salt barrel. Hits them damned Abolitionists you'll be
settin' beside if you take that viewpoint and first thing you know the
niggers'll be risin' like Injuns
Shed up, boys! cried the steamboat captain, raising his hamlike
hand for silence. Let's don't start nothin' in Carly's store. The last
time we fit he made us go set out of doors for three days and it's too
blamed cold for that!
And so the butcher and the drayman subsided and brooded a while
longer and the drayman struck his palm with his fist and winked to
himself as if at some drastic and final inner remark and spat hard
against the stove and watched his juice break and fry like a sinner's
blood in hell.
Hyer's your potash, Tommy, cried Carly Juniper and heaved the
136


bag onto the counter amid the twinkling jars of French currants and
licorice. That'll be ten cents!
And I went to fetch it and paid him and caught it up, still not
meeting the gaze of any of those who might have chanced to stare at
me, and just as I had turned to move toward the door the silence of
the street outside was torn by a man's hoarse scream.
By God! cried the drayman, struggling to his feet and staring
toward the window. That sounds like French Marple and his brother's
at it again!
The men came pressing around the door and the windows and
shouldered and edged one another like farmers at a boat-show and I,
thinking in a sudden, choking panic that something might have
happened to Aunt Sarah's roan, pushed my way through them into
the bright cold day.
It's French all right! cried the pilot in my ear and clamped his big
fingers into my shoulder the better to see around it. And there's Jake
and, Lord God, French's whuppin' him down the street like a wagon-
mule!
My eyes had still not found the object of their talk and I looked
around to discover it. Far away at the wharf I saw the towering
white lace and the smokeless stacks of the steamboat ). D. Crowder:
stuck in the ice at the landing like a great white butterfly fixed in
hard cake icing. And then I spied the two: far up Lafayette Avenue,
beyond the church, beyond the blacksmith's and the creaking sign of
the Mammoth Boot above the Tanner's place: the man in the black
alpaca coat and the black silk hat, moving with what seemed an in-
finite and stately grace among the ruts of the frozen street, stepping
delicately among the icy puddles and steaming road apples, his arm
moving with an unangered and unimpassioned rhythm while in his
jeweled fist an eight-foot drover's whip cracked and flashed across
the shoulders of a man who scrambled, crablike, up the road before
him.
What did he do? I whispered in a sickened breath and felt my
own flesh cringe under those booming, skillful whip strokes and
watched, each time, as the fluffs of lint sprang into the air beneath
the whip's sharp tongue.
He voted for Black Abe! cried the drayman, and spat through his
red beard at the pale sun. That's what he done! And French is a
Douglas man!
Someone ought to stop him, I thought to myself, but it seemed
537


somehow the unmanly thing to have said, so I kept still and wit-
nessed it to the end: the man in the black alpaca moving in that un-
hurried pursuit of the other: his arm moving in that lazy, vicious
sweep while the thin and polished thong of the delicate whip would
seem to pause and gather itself in outrage the split second before
it wrapped in quickening coils around the other's arm or shoulder or
face until at last the quick tip licked in with finality and a moment
later the frozen air would shock to the pistol crack of it. The pursued
one seemed unable to get to his feet to run and so he scrambled
before his assailant on all fours, like a crippled dog, sideways, his
cries grating on the air like a hoarse, long gasp and most of his cheap
linsey jacket lashed from his shoulders now and his shirt itself be-
ginning to rip and explode into lint before the thong.
Give 'em hell, French! bawled the drayman and a slaver of brown
amber dripped in his red beard. Whup the son of a bitch a good
lick for me, French!
... But none of the others spoke and none moved to stop the drama
and it seemed that each of them stood transfixed in spellbound specu-
lation at this tiny parable of a headlong wrath: the clash of blood
kinsmen in the roads. And when the drama had drawn abreast of
the knot of men on the store porch the whipped man gave one last
choked scream and fainted face first amid clumped, steaming balls
of fresh horse dung and the other stopped and stared down a mo-
ment, bemused, and seeming to find final justice in this humilia-
tion itself, folded his whip and stared into us with dead, arrogant
eyes.
If he's not dead, Carly, I'd be obleeged if you'd fetch him in and
wash him up. I'll send my nigger Jason around to pay you for your
troubles and fetch him home in the rockaway at sundown.
And he turned and stalked away under the black lace of winter
trees, his fine boots ringing clean on the warped bricks while the
sheriff and his four deputies stood watching from the courthouse
verandah aghast and helpless as they had stood throughout.
Before the thaw! muttered the old pilot again, moving back into
the warmth of the store. He blew into his hammed fists and stamped
his boots and then spread his black jacket like a crow's wings before
the red halo of the stove.
Before the thaw! he muttered again and each of the others eyed
his neighbor dumbly, trying to ferret in that instant of naked emotion
the sentiments behind the eyes. But presently all stares fell again to
138


the stove and the heat soothed their blood and each huddled, dumb
and thick with his own speculations, glaring into the bulging belly
of the stove's false, momentary comfort and let the thrumming voice
of the flame say what each of them wished most to hear.
Supper was over and Aunt Sarah sat by the stove peeling apples
for a pie. She would let neither of the Negro women have any hand
in this: apple pies were her own special province and she claimed
stoutly that Toot peeled the fruit wastefully and Suse never sliced the
quarters thin enough and betwixt the two of them they always put
in too much cinnamon to suit her taste. Suse and Toot were busy
making candy for Christmas Day which was only two days off. Away
in the pantry they were buttering pans and fussing over the stove
where pots bubbled thickly and a witchery of spices laced the steamy
air.
Thomas, Christmas is nigh here, Aunt Sarah said in a soft absent
voice and watched the red and white rind uncoil like a cunning rib-
bon beneath the winking blade.
Yes'm.
The birthday of our Lord, she went on. The time of rejoicing and
Christian love!
Yes'm.
She sat a spell longer and I fidgeted to be out of the kitchen and
up to bed but I knew she would call me back at the first step.
I think it's a good time of the year for you and Catherine Ellen
to make friends again! Don't you, Tom?
I'd as soon not talk about that, Aunt Sarah.
Gracious, boy! What's wrong! You'd think poor Catherine Ellen
had the leprosy or something!
I reckon I'll be getting up to bed now, Aunt Sarah.
No, wait, Tom. Stay a spell and hear me out.
I sighed and kneaded my hands together restlessly and stared
miserably out the window at the thin moon, old and waning in the
apple-tree bole.
Don't crack your knuckles, Thomas. It's common.
Yes'm.
And the ticking of the clock in the faraway hall was like the meas-
ured rap of a cane I had used to hear wandering the house in that
hour of evening.
139


Bless my soul! she sniffed. I surely hope I'm not to blame for the
ill feelings between the two of you!
No, ma'am. It's nothing to do with you.
Then all you need to do is go to Catherine Ellen and say—I forgive
you. It's Christmastime and I forgive you.
Forgive her what? Lord, I can't rightly remember even that.
Well, I remember. I mind it clear as if it was yesterday. It was
because she blasphemed and carried on and sassed me to my face
that night of the storm. You wouldn't be much of a man if you
hadn't got mad at her for that. But still
Yes. I reckon it was that.
-but still that's past. Something that's gone. And Christmas is a
time for forgiveness, Thomas. I don't want to feel I'm to blame for
any hatred!
No. That's not it. There's more.
More to what?
More to my hating her.
Then what in Time is it, boy?
I can almost see the shape of it sometimes. Yes'm, I can fairly see
it when the lamps are out. When I'm lyin' in the bed at last.
Hate hasn't got a shape, Thomas! Such nonsense! I think you
better have Doctor Willie give you a good dose of calomel for your
liver. Pshaw. Such talk for a young boy!
It's what I see though!
What's it look like? she whispered sharply and I sensed something
cunning and craven in her voice and shot her a quick look but the
wink of lampshine on her spectacle lenses hid the truth.
It's something-something that swells! Something that swells in
the dark. And I'm afraid to look!
Aha! That's the Devil all right. Maybe you're speaking the truth,
boy!
Yes, I said, knowing something about my fear for the first time.
But it's kindly beautiful, too! Yet there's no word for it!
There's words—if a body listens to the biddings of Providence!
There's no words for some things.
Such as which?
Nothing.
Go on, Thomas. I can't abide it when you start to say something
and then don't finish. There's no words for what things?
140


Well, what I feel—the way I hate Cathie. That's one thing.
Thomas, I want no more talk of Hate in this house tonight.
Yes'm. I'm sorry. I wish I knew the word for it.
The air seemed suddenly full of soft whisperings like the brush of
wings and I closed my eyes and felt my sweating fingers dig into the
harsh cloth on my knees and heard the whisperings and each of them
a word and yet I could not hear what that word might be, nor even
know if it were the word of hating or of something as yet unknown:
a softness, worse somehow than Death.
Whatever grudge you hold against that girl, my Aunt said sud-
denly, I'd be obliged if you was to have it out with her.
I'd never strike her, I said.
Well, I should hope not.
I'd never strike her, I said again. Because I know it I struck her
once it wouldn't stop with that.
What do you mean by that?
That's what I dream about sometimes of a night. Me—and her!-
hitting each other! Or something worse! Lord. I can't name it. I
can't see it! It's part of the shape of hate I see in the dark!—the
swelling black shape of it.
That's the Devil. I thought you'd made up your mind what that
was!
Yes. Yes, I know! It's the Devil! But why won't he let me be! I
pray! Prayin' don't help it though!
God hears you.
Then why don't He help! Sometimes when the wind's blowin'
in from the river I pray out loud-thinkin' maybe He can't hear me
with that wind a-whinin' in the windows! So I pray louder than the
wind!
You know little about God's ways, boy! He hears the cry of the
sparrow above the storm. And all He's waitin for now is for you to
go to Catherine Ellen and take her hand-now, boy, in this time of
Christian love: Christmas! take her hand, I say, in Christian love !
Love!
Love! Yes, that's what I said-love! Not the shameful, whoring
lust of the Aesh! I mean the kind of love that mortals had before the
Shame in the Garden—before the snake!
Snakes! Lord yes! I think I can remember snakes in my dreams!
Sure you can! Sure! Because it's the Devil that gives you those
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dreams. And the only way you can get shed of those dreams is to fill
yourself with God's love! The kind of love-yes, the kind of pure
love I had for my father. That's what I mean, Thomas.
Now she put the pan of peeled, gleaming apple slices down with
a jarring out-thrust and sat upright again in the chair,her hands
outstretched a little with fingers spreading as delicate as the fingers
of a girl-her face tilted and rosy suddenly with a flush of some
sweetness I had never seen there before.
If you only knew how much I loved him! she whispered.
I watched her, mesmerized at this sudden trance of feeling that
obsessed her.
It was the pure love of God! she said. There's nothing I wouldn't
have done for that sainted man if he had bid me do it! Nothing!
And, Thomas! When he died and they laid him yonder in the parlor
with the candles lighting the poor, quiet clay of him I had no re-
grets! None! I grieved him as if it was a part of me they was to bury
in the forenoon of the day that followed. But I had no shame! No
regrets! I had given him every spark of love in me-don't you see?
And when they buried him they buried that, too! And I never tor-
tured myself when he was gone with doubts that I had given him
all of me that was worth giving. Do you understand that, boy? Your
Uncle Joe never did! Never tried to understand! Do you know that he
come home that very night sour and foul with demon drink and
walked right square into the room where your sainted Grandfather
lay a-cooling for the grave—with the breath hardly gone out of him,
I say! Joe went right in there and slapped that holy face of my
father! Did I ever tell you that? No, I reckon not! And there wasn't
man enough in him that he'd ever tell you. Just as there wasn't man
enough in him ever to stand up to my father when he was alive!
No, he waited till he was cold and stiff and cooling before he raised
his hand to him! I saw it with my own eyes. And do you know some-
thing, boy! I was glad! I was glad because it meant that in the end
of it all it was my father that had won-had beaten Joe clean to earth!
Now do you know why he took to dope?—why he went mad?—why
I sent him off to the Home? I reckon not. You condemned me for it
and censured me for a cruel, heartless wretch! Ay, and I will allow
that Dulcie and Willie Curtis and that wretched Cox woman whis-
pered and gossiped a-plenty over that! But you see they never knew!
Nobody knew. Nobody, I say! Ah, what a cross I have borne—what
a life I've wasted! Wasted, Thomas! Living with a man for all those
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years—the cream of my youth-wasted with a man who wasn't fit
to shine my sainted father's boots! That was why God punished your
Uncle Joe and took the blessed sight from his eyes! It was a judgment!
Her voice had risen and she leaned forward in the lamplight and
bit the word off at its ending.
A judgment! she cried again. And yet that very night when he done
that shameful, cowardly, rotten thing—slapped the cold clay of a
dead man's cheek—that same night, I say, he come to my bed
quivering and hot-breathed with lust—with whoring, Devil's lust!
And I rose up and drove him from my room with my parasol, I did!
Because the clean pure love of my father was still in me, boy! And
that's why I say if you pray to God to give you that kind of love he'll
save you from the other—the rotten, Devil's kind. That's why I say
now at Christmas is the time for you to square things with that girl.
I'll give you a silver dollar tomorrow and I'll expect you to ride to
Elizabethtown in the morning and buy Catherine Ellen a little gift
for the season!
A gift.
Something fitting and genteel—something proper for a young man
to give a young girl in fatherly love.
A gift! I cried. She would throw it in my face!
No, she would not. For I've talked to her this afternoon.
About me! You had no right! No right, Aunt Sarah!
Ah, but I did. I am the custodian of decency in this home. When
I am dead and gone you may do as you choose.
What did you say?
As much as I've said to you, she said. And a few things more.
There are things that I would say to her as a woman that would mean
nothing to you.
I got up on cold, wooden feet and went to the threshold of the
door while she rose and gathered up the pan of apples and went to
the long table to roll the pie-crust dough.
What-shall I buy? I whispered, not to her, not to the room even.
Something proper, she said. I think a book of verse would be
genteel. Mister Whittier's works seem decent enough. Carly Juniper
stocks a few books. Tell him it's for me.
For you?
Yes. He wouldn't understand if you was to tell him it was a gift
for her.
And I went up the pantry steps then and crept on cat's feet past
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the tiny room where Cathie lay a-dreaming with a thrawn, wild smile
on her lips. The summer tints Aluttered like peddler's calico in the
coal fire and I slipped like a shadow into the quilts and clenched my
lids tight against the nightmare's onset. But the encounter with Aunt
Sarah had benumbed me past dreams; so that I lay fisted in the clasp-
ing grip of dreamless sleep: in a blackness so profound that when I
waked at last in the cold, blinking light of winter morning I half
expected to find my body smeared and dappled with Night: like the
flesh of a soot-grimed chimney sweep.
Dusk of that Christmas Eve and I stood by the roan mare at the
hitching rail before Carly's store and stared at the silver dollar in
my palm. It is no eagle, I reflected, it is a dark bird of prey: a raven
or a chicken hawk. And I turned the coin and stared at the bland
crowned profile. It was no goddess' face pressed into that soft,
treacherous silver: it was the profile of my Aunt Sarah. Even the date
was a deception: 1845. A fool could tell by the feel of the coin that
it was older than that: why, it was old as deception itself. I stood a
spell more, staring at it and then looked up at Carly's window: the
lamp burning like a cold gold crescent on the chain from his rafter,
and the old river men huddled in their eternal winter around the
false summer of the stove and it was Christmas Eve in Elizabethtown
and decent folk drew close to one another in family kitchens and
eyes were warm with fireside and loving. I had ridden to town that
morning and hitched the mare at the railing and gone up the steps
and knocked the snow from my heels and clutched the coin in my
mittened palm till the milling cut my flesh and on the very threshold
of Carly's store such a wave of fear laid siege of me that I turned
and fairly ran down those steps again.
All that numb cold day I had wandered round the village, trying
to fetch back my courage, steeling myself for a deed that shamed me
when I thought of its innocence: all that was required of me was to
buy a book of verses for a girl. And yet I could no more do it then
I could snatch an eye from my face and lay it on Carly's counter; and
I think I would have sooner done that. The coin hung thick and
heavy in my cold mitten all that livelong day and once, blue-lipped
and bone-sick with chill, I went into the courthouse long enough to
warm myself at the roaring log of fat pine that bubbled and burned
in the great fireplace of the outer hall where the big back-country
144


cattlemen and sheep-raisers had come to stand and warm themselves
with up-turned coattails and stamp their mud-crusty boots on the
floor. I seemed to find among these men a safe anonymity that I
could never feel among the bird-bright, nibby eyes of the faces round
Carly's stove. These were back-country faces: flat and uncurious: men
who had long ago lost their tongues in the loneliness of country
winter and would not find it wakened again till the possum woke and
the raccoon and the black bear took his paw from his mouth and
itched and twitched awake in his cave beneath the dripping March
thaws. Because it was Christmas Eve they had come to town to glance
at one another and buy a ribbon for a woman and a candy for a child
and have a dipper of fire from Carly's black whisky hogshead and
then go stand and stare in the courthouse fire for a spell: finding in
these gestures what, to them, amounted to almost roistering festivity
after long nights up Hog Run and Granny Creek and the nights by
the fire when the woman had no words for anyone but the crying
child in the cradle of her shawled and weary arms. None of them
looked at me as I stood there among them—or, if they looked, they
said nothing, asked no questions, and if any among them guessed
my misery he respected it and saw some counterpart of his own
condition. And now and then I would feel the coin again and take it
out to finger it. A thousand times that cold afternoon, while I wan-
dered the town like a beggar, I envisioned that climactic scene.
Cathie?
She would not speak at first. She would be sitting on the split-
bottom chair in the kitchen watching Toot stuff the goose and pre-
tending I was not there at all.
Cathie?
What is it, Thomas?
I got you a present! a voice of me murmurs somewhere in the
thick stillness.
Let's see it.
And my tongue is dead and I stand there like the stone angel
above my mother's grave and hold the package out: a genteel book
of verses wrapped in the brown, stained storepaper from Carly's
counter and she takes it and opens it and stands looking at it a
moment in lip-curling disdain and then carries the thing yonder,
dangling it like a piece of offal between finger and thumb and drops
it in the coals of the oven and watches it burn and curl and gives it
a poke every now and then with the poker to see that each leaf
145


catches fire against the gold embers and when it's all gone she turns
to me again, her mouth lifted still in disdain and waits. And I won-
der what she waits for and yet I know how desperate that waiting is
and I know that now has come the moment of climax: the gathering-in
of that old and awful harvest: the fruit of the nightmare sowing.
And I move toward her and we collide in the black and choking
encounter: bare-toothed and claw-fingered: limbs striving and press-
ing for purchase on the floor boards. Now the encounter rages full-tilt
in my fancy: that same struggle that I have known in so many raging
dreams and the dark hair of the girl is roped in my fist and I draw
her head back and stare at her cheek and the bone beneath and the lip
drawn back from her white teeth and her eyes rolled back wild
beneath the lid drawn taut and quivering. What now? My blood beats
like a drum in my chest and I feel the sharp coin in my fist and I
stare up at the dull crescent of the lamp flame in Carly Juniper's store.
What now? Aunt Sarah has driven us together at last into the
encounter that she has foreseen from the outset: that same flesh-
pressing, back-arching struggle that I have known in dreams: sweat-
ing and striving beneath the quilts. What now? An act more soft
than murder: an act of darkness more profound than the deepest
sword's thrust. I stand with the winter wind from the ice-clutched
river twisting my ear like an aunt's pinching fingers and I see in
this vision of that encounter with Cathie the spectacle of black
rams struggling upon their bleating ewes on the hillside below
Dulcie's, below the fenced-in yard of the sleepers among the trees.
I see again a sight that has haunted my childhood: an encounter com-
mon to every spring, before winter is gone, before the wake-robins
nod in the hollows; the struggle of hugging forefeet: the hen be-
neath the treading barnyard cock and the bawling cow before the
bull's ruthless mounting onset. A book of verses for a girl. A cold
and treacherous coin in my mitten while I wander the streets of an
alien Christmas. For these things my Aunt Sarah would betray me
into an act of unspeakable darkness. I walk up the steps to Carly's
door and open it and walk inside. The old rivermen stir like cold
hens, ruffling and blinking upon the perch of speculation, and none
bother speaking: the general eyes fall back to the stove's scarlet-
cracked door.
Tom Christopher! Well, Merry Christmas, boy! Merry Christmas!
What'll you have?
What kind of—what kind of—?
146


What say, Tom?
I stared at him, calm now, and found my tongue at last.
Did you know my Uncle Joe?
Joe Alexander? Well I reckon I did! Knowed him like a brother!
What word do you get from him, boy? Does them folks at the Home
ever write?
What did he used to drink?
Eh?
What did he used to drink?
Joe Alexander? Why, applejack, when he was drinkin'! But that
was long years ago, boy! He'd been a teetotaler for many a year!
Hadn't he? Say! Don't tell me that was why she had him put away!
How much is applejack?
He squinted one eye at me and shifted the massive quid of tobacco
a little in his sagging, polished cheek.
Who's it for, Tom?
For Doctor Willie! I lied in a star-flash of inspiration.
So he went and fetched a stone jug and a cob-stopper and a funnel
and drew a half-gallon from the dripping spigot of the hogshead.
Now he pounded the cob home and shoved it cross the counter.
A dollar, he said, and I tore off my mitten and fairly threw the coin
across the time-worn hollow in the counter beneath his knuckles.
Merry Christmas, Thomas! he called to me as I moved to the door
with the jug ring hooked in my finger. And the same to Doctor Willie
when you see him!
But I forgot to tell him that. Even when he found me long hours
later: deep in the purple pocket of the star-strewn Christmas Eve:
found me when he came to me at last, curled fouled and sick and
laughing by the porch of the Tanners, under the cold creaking sign
of the Mammoth Boot: found me after a whole afternoon of search-
ing in the streets of Elizabethtown, missing me, I would suppose, by
a moment's mischance at every turn. And when he found me at last
with the jug half drunk and the rest spilled on the hard frosty
cobbles and my own tears and sickness frozen on my chin—when he
helped me to the buggy I forgot to wish him Merry Christmas as
Carly had said I should.
Here, Tom! Let me help you! Doctor Willie was crying out.
And I struggled at last into the buggy and turned my twice-seeing
eyes to focus on his face, shawl-bound beneath his tall gray beaver hat.
Steady, Tom! I'll get you home in a jiffy!
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Can't go back there! I cried to the fierce, forgiving star of Bethle-
hem, where it burned in the trees atop the river hills.
Pshaw now, Tom! Sure you can! And you'll be there directly! I
declare, boy! Set back now before you pitch headlong out of the
buggy and break your neck!
And even in the spinning yard, with the gold square windows of
the house whirling in the sick dark above me and the wrathful figure
of Aunt Sarah shifting and dissolving in the yellow kitchen doorway
and Coy and the Negro women thrusting hands under my arms to
help me along and Doctor Willie behind me with the hartshorn
bottle choking me at my nostrils: even in that final and desperate
instant my hands kept searching through my out-turned pockets for
it: certain somehow that it was really there: steadfast in my faith
that at the final dreaded showdown on the threshold I would close
my fingers on it at last: a slender volume of verses by Mister Long-
fellow: the genteel gift of Christmas for the dark, grave-eyed girl
whose white solemn mask seemed, amid all that swirling, sickening
ringing-round of enemies, the only face of loving I had ever
known.
Keep your eyes closed, I thought, and the day will not be. Keep
your lids shut and do not try to wet your leather-dry tongue and keep
your face tight against the pillow, and Christmas Day will go and
will not see you here. But there seemed such a commerce of footsteps
coming and going past my door and always there was that pause
before my threshold and the silence while eyes softly accused me-
that at last I opened my eyes and cringed under the affront of morn-
ing. Aunt Sarah stood in my doorway with the Bible in her right
hand and the bonnet on her head which told me that she had been
up the whole night, attending me.
Are you awake now?
I closed my parched mouth on my wooden congue and tried to
dampen it enough to answer. She watched, bemused and with that
withering patience in her eyes, and kept her finger in the pages of
the black Book of God.
Yes'm, I said at last.
Then get up and wash yourself and go downstairs. It's nearly eight
o'clock but Toot will fix you some breakfast.
I allowed that she would commence sermonizing with that, but to
148


my surprise, she did not and when I opened my eyes from a long
aching blink she was gone.
Toot snickered and glared at me by turns and kept my platter
heaped with buckwheat cakes and my stone china cup full of sputter-
ing-hot coffee. I felt my temper crouched in my throat like a watchful
dog; hoping that she would say one slight word of censuring, but
she kept busy at the stove. And Aunt Sarah came into the kitchen
while I was eating and I paused with a mouthful of buckwheat and
syrup and kept the mouthful unchewed while I felt her eyes on me
and waited for the sermonizing to begin.
Merry Christmas, Thomas, she said and stood a split second more,
watching me, and I felt the food in my mouth sour and grow heavy
and when she turned and swept into the hallway I opened my mouth
and spat it into my plate and sat staring at it a moment and then
washed my throat with all the hot coffee.
You best drink some more coffee, Mistuh Tom!
No. I've had enough.
I mind when Mas' Joe used to wake up with the solemncollies he
used to drink a whole pot full of coffee and half of de second!
Shut up. I don't want any more coffee.
I got up on quaking legs and walked to the door and stared out the
window at the blue shadows on the snow of that Christmas Day and
a cold bird nodding, half-frozen on the fence by the smoke house.
Where's Catherine Ellen? I whispered to the bird but it was Toot
that answered.
She tuk off dis mornin' to call on Miss Dulcie!
I felt my knotted stomach turn and I hiccupped in soft agony.
Miss Sary was fit to be tied, Toot whispered. I thought for a while
hit was de end.
The end of what? A body has a right to call on neighbors on
Christmas Day.
Not on Miss Dulcie dey don't! Yo Aunt claim Miss Dulcie hain't
fitten.
There's many she would claim wasn't fitten today, I said sourly,
and hated Cathie for being at Dulcie's for it was where I would be
myself. And I knew what a blue smoke of gossip would be rising
in the tiny low-ceilinged parlor as Cathie told them all of the night's
wild events.
I sho hope Miss Sary waits till de thaw 'fo she turns dat girl out
in de roads like she say!
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When did she say that?
You heard her! Many's the time! And today she said hit again!
She say de onlies' reason she hain't turn her out this mornin' is
'cause it's de day of Jesus' bornin'!
And what did Catherine Ellen say?
What you care? You's de one dat's done most of de hatin' round
here.
Shut up. I never asked you for impudence! Just answer what I
ask!
She humped, frozen with affront and, pouting, watched the goose
through the crack in the oven door and kept her hands rolled in her
apron.
What did they say this mornin'?
What did who say?
Aunt Sarah. Catherine Ellen.
Whatchu mean—what dey say? Dey say "Merry Christmas.” And
den Miss Sary tells me to put de goose in!
You know what I mean, Toot. What did they say about me?
Nothin'.
That's a falsehood. And you know there's a special corner of hell
for liars, don't you?
Ain't no lie.
No. I reckon not. I reckon they just sat there and thought about
me—thought how low and common I was. Just like my Uncle Joe.
Did she say that, Toot?
Say which?
Never mind.
I glared out the window at that string of congenial hearth smoke
curling up from Dulcie's chimney and I thought: She'll be fixing tea
for her now and giving her a slice of fruit cake and pumping her for
more of the scandalous news. But Doctor Willie will be sitting there
with his lips pressed together because he would not betray me and
because he is a drunkard and knows a few whys.
What did I do last night? I whispered to the string of smoke
upon the cold slate skies but it was Toot that answered.
You got drunker than Tommy Peacock, said Toot, mentioning the
name of the fabulous toper who roared and wailed on moonstruck
summer nights along the willows on the river shore above Powhatan.
I don't mean that. I know I got drunk. You think I need you to
tell me that. There was something else I did-after I got home.
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I sat the whole night by your bed, she said. I'd do that for a sick
dog. And I watched you toss and turn in your drunkenness and heard
you mutter such vileness—.
What? What did I say?
I would not soil my own mouth with it.
Tell me! What did I say?
Imagine any vileness that you can. That will be what you said. I
wouldn't repeat the vilenesses you spoke. I only know that now I see
how your childhood was spent and it makes me ashamed before God
that I raised you.
What did I say? Please, in God's name, tell me, Aunt Sarah!
And how could I have not seen it in your face when you'd come in
of an evenin' for supper—when you'd lift your mouth to be washed
clean of jam—when you'd pray at my knees? How could I not have
seen it there?
What! Seen what?
Seen the shadow of it! she whispered. That you'd been lyin' in
the orchard spyin' on the vileness of ram and ewe—of hen and cock
in the barnyard. That you'd hunkered there behind the smoke house
watching the service of the bull.
That's what I talked about then?
That and more! If a body could raise a window to Hell and crouch
listening for a night—they would hear what my ears heard by your
bed last night, Thomas Christopher.
You'd never tell me when I used to ask!
Tell you what?
What they were doing out there—the ram and the ewe! Lord, I
can still hear the poor thing cry!
Hush! You never asked me. If you'd ever dared ask me I'd have
washed your mouth with lye!
I did! I asked you many's the time.
Never. Never.
Well I still don't know. It's a darkness. It's a thing worse than
killing. That's all I know.
Yes. At least you know that. God has not abandoned your soul
entirely it would seem!
I only came to you today to tell you that I will not abide drunken-
ness in my father's house. I would not abide it with my own husband
I will not abide it with you. I took you in because you were my
beloved sister's child and when you were orphaned by the flood I
153


took you in because it was my Christian duty. But I will not abide
drunkenness. If I ever so much as smell elderberry wine on your
breath ever again I will send you out to make you own way. You're
a man now, Thomas, and I'm not obliged to keep you.
I know.
As for her—I plan for her to pack up and leave in the spring. I'll
not send her out in the winter.
Where will she go?
Where she belongs. To find work as a servant. Or worse.
Yes, I said. I'm glad.
You're glad of what?
Glad that you're sending her away. It was her fault that I done
what I done last night.
Blame no one but yourself for your own misdeeds. God knows
she's got enough blackness on her soul without you adding yours.
But it's true, I breathed, through squinting eyes. It was her sneak-
ingness that just ate on me until I couldn't stand it no more. I
wandered around Elizabethtown the whole livelong day with that
dollar you gave me
I'll expect you to work that off, she said. That was from my seed
money and spring planting's not far off.
-until I couldn't stand it. It was just like God kept saying to
me that something awful would happen if I spent that dollar on her.
I just kept looking at it and it seemed like it was money as filthy and
betrayed as the silver they paid Judas.
Perhaps so, she said. But do you reckon you made the money any
cleaner by spending it for rottenness and pollution?
No, I reckon not, I said. And I ask your forgiveness.
I give it to you, she said. Because it is Christmas Day. I think if it
were any other day I would drive you out.
I hate her, I whispered and saw something gleaming and shining
in the corner of my eye, in the north wall of the parlor and I would
not turn my head to see if it was a candleshine or not.
Which is why you must never drink again, she said.
What?
Which is why you must never touch that hellishness to your lips
again. Now—when you are sick and sober—you talk a good enough
Christian.
What do you mean?
You sang a different tune last night.
154


What do you mean?
You called her name the livelong night as if she were your own
mother! It was the drink talking in you!
I didn't!
Don't contradict me. I was the one who had to sit there in the
rum-stinking darkness and listen to it—that and all the other filthi-
ness you were babbling! I was the one that had to keep the quilt over
your mouth so's you wouldn't have her coming to answer you.
She beard me? I asked in a quaking, feeling the sweat spring in
cold beads across my brow.
Suse and Toot heard you-clean down in the slave house! I
reckon Catherine Ellen heard you—in the next room.
What did she say?
She never stirred. Had she dared to come answer you in the state
you were in I'd have driven her out into the snow in her nightdress.
But, no matter. Just try to imagine my feelings, Thomas Christopher
-I who have tried to raise you as a Christian mother might have
done—to hear you cry out the name of that young trollop in your
shameful, drunken madness.
She stood a spell more and still I sensed that dull gleam in the
corner of my eye and could endure the fantasy no more and turned
my head to see. But it was only the music box, caught in a random
ray of daylight, a-shining in the corner of the parlor. And when
Aunt Sarah left me suddenly I felt the silence quicken and put my
eye to the cold window again and searched with a child's panic for
the safe cold logic of a snowflake. But all my eye saw was a whiteness
that could have meant anything at all.
There was time enough to repent: a whole week of the old year
left; time enough for the wildest resolutions. And yet I do not recol-
lect having made any: cannot, for that matter, recall any thoughts at
all but a pained yearning for the old year to be done and forgotten.
But the black stain on that Christmas would not soon be laundered
out. Returning homeward, the caroling girls had halted their team
and sled on the river road and come whooping up the drifts to our
doorway Christmas night and gotten halfway through a chorus of
Adeste Fideles when Aunt Sarah came to the door and silenced them
there by the black-iron deer with the memorable news that "Christmas
is dead in this house! And not even your young voices can raise it up
155


again!" And they stopped and stared at each other's bonneted, apple-
cheeked faces and giggled with bewilderment and trudged somehow
shamefully back to the buffalo robes and warming pans in the sled
and whipped the mares back to Elizabethtown. Christmas dead. And
I its assassin. And she had turned and stared at me in the circle of
the lamp in the hallway and closed the door behind her.
Yes, Christmas is dead, she said again and stood a moment more
with a sock on the darning gourd in one hand and the threaded
needle twinkling like the tiny sword of God's wrathful Michael in
the other.
And it was me that killed it, I said, staring at the rug.
She sighed and shook herself and edged past me toward the stairs,
shaking her head as she went.
I think God is weary of us all, she murmured on the steps.
And she went up to her room to darn and shut the door and when
I passed it there was that slender thread of gold burning on her black
threshold and as I moved toward the small lamp in my room I heard
her voice again, to herself.
Dear dear dear! Lordy, Lordy! Save us all!
And her rocker quickened and paced the creaking boards with a
voice like a wild wooden bird. Time for repentance: seven days of
the old year to go: seven days before a dying of a time. And it seemed
to me then that whatever bell tolled the sick year's ending it would
ring to its grave the child in me and seal the stone against all resur-
rection. The year's last breath. And the soft sough of winter winds
against the shutters might have been, for all its gentleness, the quick-
ening trickle of those last sands in the glass. The time a-dying. And
I could not be sure if my joy at the old year's flight could comfort
me sufficient to stand against my fears for the year to come. War
before the thaw, the old pilot had said. And, at nights, I dreamed
about that, too—and somehow the struggling dream armies mingled
with the violence of that other encounter, with little enough to dis-
tinguish one from the other. And I wondered wildly what I had
really said that night in my drunkenness; what she had heard; what
secret she knew about me now. I think I would have given a decade
of my life to have that night's follies struck from being. It seemed
that for so many years I had kept my soul secret: like a small and
special room full of many things: dark things, proud things, things
of shaming and things of shining: things that festered like scraps of
food on old plates and things that shone like jeweled fireflies in a
156


black wood. Things that I had kept since childhood, since before that
even, locked against all inspection, especially hers. Most especially
hers. And then in a twinkling of a spinning cartwheel dollar on the
counter of a general store I had flung the door wide and held the
lamp high for them to see and led them in, skirts a-swirling, eyes
a-picking and a-spying, lips whispering and gossiping at the dark,
bright, wondrous, shameful and terrible things in my secret room.
I tell you honestly: in that week I despised them both. It seemed
that they had both bested me in the game: that my undoing had been
their common triumph. Often that week I saw in Aunt Sarah's face
a thin-lipped satisfaction at what I had done: as if something in her
bleak religion had found vindication in my undoing, and more than
once those last seven days I caught her studying me over her darning
gourd, a faint ghost of a smile playing in the tiny wrinkles of her
mouth's corners, unawares. And often I lay awake in my tiny room,
eyes lost in the fire-shadows on my ceiling, and stuffed the quilt end
in my mouth for fear I should cry out even more secrets to the mock-
ing girl in the room down the hallway. Lord, how I hated her for
that: for having heard, for knowing something about me that I
should never know. What was the vileness that I had cried out? Aunt
Sarah had said it was about the black ram and the ewe on the hillside
paths; the red bull working out his spring mutinies on the hips of the
sprawling, bald-eyed, braying cow. And I fell asleep in the fireshine
and dreamed of a springtime as long forgotten as Eden's last April:
a season in my childhood when Cathie and I went down the dusty
road to see Abijah's wondrous boat. And when we had wandered the
decks for an hour, like pilgrims in a white temple, Cathie said she
thought the river was not too cold for a swim in the shallows at the
mouth of the creek under the hair of the willows where the single
frog cried his croaking, busted-banjo tune. And in my dream we ran
there and she stood Alinging off her dress and as she tugged her coarse
black cotton stocking from her leg I stared and saw that her feet had
turned to hooves as shining black as a cow's horn. And I dared not
let my eyes look higher at her and kept my vision fixed in horror at
those two girl-hooves planted and stamping in the buttercups while
the pantaloons and petticoats tumbled round them. And I commenced
now to cry out her name and heard no sound but the neigh of a mad
ram where my voice had been and when I stamped my feet I heard
black hooves strike fire on the meadow stones and felt black wool
wrap me round and a wrath gathering in my sheep-loins and felt my-
157


self gone mad with the stamping of my own misshapen legs and the
black wool curled tight upon my cringing skin. I woke then, with
some voice of me echoing in the room, and knew that I had been cry-
ing in my sleep again and lay a-quaking. And then I began to wonder
what she had heard when I cried out. Was it the voice of the mad
ram? What was it? Was it the vileness Aunt Sarah had hinted? And
yet it seemed to me that the very stillnesses of the hushed winter night
seemed to echo my voice and I could heard them: those faint cries
under the muffiling of the cotton comforter: Cathie's name. And that
was somehow worse. I lay still as a stone and felt the cold pressed
upon my face heavier than the bed clothes that cocooned me in the
warmth of body heat.
Now there came a noise so faint that, startled as I was, I supposed
at first it was some last suspiration from the coals in the grate or the
numb tiny feet of a mouse wandering the walls of the house in win-
ter misery. A sound fainter than either of these sounds it was, and
then it came again and I turned my head swiftly on the bolster and
felt the cold pour down my exposed and perspiring neck as my eyes
strained through the blue dust of that starshine and saw a white
wraith in my doorway. The figure did not move, and stare as I might
my eyes could not give it the blessed shape of recognition: the mark
of mortality which would dispel, at least, my belief that one of the
many ghosts that wandered that house had come to avenge itself upon
me for some dream-spoken affront. I thrust my hands to my face
and dug my thumbs against my lids until red rockets puffed and burst
upon my vision. And when I looked again the shape was gone.
But the fact came peering plain across the rim of the quilt: the
truth of it thrust its hand around my throat. It had been Cathie. She
had heard me cry her name in the frosty silence of the house and had
risen and come to my door. Cathie. Cathie. It would not be Aunt Sarah.
She slept with her head stuffed in a nightcap of thick knitted wool
and her door was always latched against the rest of the house from
the time her candle was snuffed until dawn rose blue-staining on her
windows. Cathie. Cathie. She had heard me and come. But what had
she come for? I Aung back the bed clothes and felt the cold wash me
like a wave of water and my toes curled on the icy floor as I swung
my legs down and stood in my nightshirt staring round me in
the darkness. I dared not light a candle. I wished for a way to quench
the revealing star in my window. And I crepe slowly toward the door
to the hallway. But there was no one there and my cold feet felt for
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the worn nap of the flowered carpet and my fingers spidered down
the cold wall toward Cathie's door. I knew every board, every square
Wheeling nail of that house and I knew where to put my feet so that
no wood cried out. Standing at last on the threshold of her room I
stared through the velvet darkness.
The dust of that same star that lay frozen in my window had
painted a faint blue checkering on her bed and I could spy her shape
beneath the white quilt. Softly I stole toward her and at last was able
to bend, and see the shape of her face, nested in the black tumbling
of her hair. I listened. Her breath came slow and long and yet I
peered closer to be sure and presently I could make out the twin fringes
of her lashes on the lids cupped in sleep round her eyes and the curl
of her small dark nostrils and her mouth, and I saw that it was swept
up faintly at its corners in a sly and maddening smile. I stood there,
bent across her bed, and struggled with the almost insuperable
impulse to snatch back her bed clothes and wring her soft shoulders
in my fingers and shout to the whole sleeping house the question in
my mind. What did you hear? What was it? What did I cry out?
What is my secret? But I stole back to my own bed presently and
heard the clock chime three before my toes uncurled and my teeth
lay still against my tongue and I fell asleep with the firm resolve
that I would dress before cock's crow next morning and ride the roan
mare down the frozen road to Fish Creek and spend the morning on
the decks of Abijah's boat. For it seemed now, there among the
white pure solaces of the steamboat's carved lattice and her flashing
pilot-house panes, between the tall stacks: in a last and desperate
innocence, that I should find again the talisman to a time that was
fading: a time that would come no more.
The sky over the river hills was just staining with daylight as the
mare picked her cautious way down the frosty, snowbound road. Be-
fore that there had been only the diamond brilliance of the morning
Venus hanging between the pots of Dulcie's cold chimney. By the
time I had reached the place, morning had come up and the sky was
pearly with it and I could see the first ray of sun flash like a torch on
a pane in the pilot-house window. The boat was heaped and frosted
with snow like one of Toot's twenty-egg cakes and the morning wind
soughed a cold, lorn song in her fancywork. The air was cold and
thick with winter: like sluggish, icy water as I swung down from the
159


the air and struck the pilot wheel and clattered to the floor. I jumped
to my feet and stared toward the river and saw her then, standing on
the bluff above a crazy, snow-burdened clump of frozen laurels: her
scarf twisted round her angry face, its loose ends blowing like smoke
in the wind; her fists on her hips and her legs set apart, like a
pirate.
She looked like a wild creature of the woods come down to forage
among the county henhouses: her moon face stained with angry
flushes and her black eyes sparking outrage. I moved to the broken
pane and felt the wash of hateful, cold air pour in upon me. But I
said not a word. And neither did she. And yet the air burned with
our staring and I knew with a sudden, happy flood of feeling that I
had found here in Abijah's boat what I had come a-seeking. I was
not afraid of her here. And that did not even seem curious to me. It
was true. Standing here in this fantastic palace where we had played
as children I was no more afraid of the dark girl than I would have
been of a she-wren a-pecking and a-staring on the pantry windowsill.
Even if she had broken that long year's silence and called out to me
now the black curses that curled like smoke behind her eyes I would
not have feared her there. Even if she had come a-springing onto the
boat deck with her apron sagging with rocks I would not have feared
her. It was almost as if, away from that dark house of my Aunt, she
meant a different thing: as if here, in the pilot house of the King's
white boat, she were suddenly diminished to the measure of a foolish,
scolding child, while I became a man. She stared until her vision
seemed to shatter, and suddenly she whirled and went scrambling up
the drifts to the ruts of the road and stumbled stalwartly off alone up
the bottomlands for home. I stood a while more: proud and cruel as
as Emperor: stalking the little pilot house that had become to me
suddenly the longed-for and far-quested fortress of final safety.
Womankind could not touch me here. And if Abijah were King,
indeed, there might be another mortal head to fit that crown before
the tale be told. I stayed till the sun hung halfway in the sky, frozen
and halted in the wintry wind, hovering as if it lacked heart to complete
its day's journey. And when the mare neighed in the cold and pranced
in panic under the creep of frost up through her hooves I went down
and mounted her and made for home.
Aunt Sarah was in the kitchen supervising a bubbling kettle of
potato soup while Toot fretted and mumbled and said she knew how
to make potato soup long years before the Ark sailed.
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Where have you been, Thomas?
I was too cold to make a show of lying so I looked away from her
eyes and told the truth.
We need stove wood! she said. You might have better spent the
morning chopping stove wood than wandering the decks of that old
wreck.
I said nothing, still keeping my eyes from hers, lest she spy there
the fresh and nearly treasonable resolutions that the morning had
given me.
Did you have words with Catherine Ellen?
No'm.
Didn't you have a fight with her this morning? Answer me truth-
fully, Thomas!
No, ma'am.
You still do not speak?
No'm.
And I went off to the parlor then to sit till dark, till suppertime,
till that hour of family falseness when we must each gather and speak
a blemished psalm of thanksgiving for the bitter food and to stare at
one another in a kind of black covenance: an act of war even in
the breaking of bread. I sat a long spell, leafing through the ladies
in the old Godey's books and struggling to keep the good feelings of
the morning, of the moment on the boat, and yet feeling them ebb
slowly from me like a slow well of blood and gently as mildew the
old house began again to set its claim upon me. I heard a footfall in
the hallway, behind the high, closed door and turned at that sound,
wondering if perhaps Aunt Sarah had come to listen at the crack,
in hopes that I might be given to speaking to myself in the day-
time as she had heard me speak in sleep. And I rose and crept
shufiling across the carpet and stooped and put my eye to the
crack in the bottom panel of the door and saw a strip of calico so
hated and familiar to me that it was all I could do to restrain an
outcry. It was Cathie who had come a-stealing from her room, come
a-sneaking down the stairs and to the parlor door and stood now to
eavesdrop upon me even in my daylight solitude, as I knew well she
listened at the midnight walls to hear my nightmare outcries. I rose
and stretched my fingers toward the green brass latch to throw it up
and swing the door wide and at that instant I heard the dry scratch-
ing whisper of paper and saw the small folded sheet of it slide be-
162


neath the door under the toe of my boot. I snatched the paper up and
almost tore it in my eagerness as I opened it to a ray of fainting dusk
light and read what she had said.
You haven't got the right to go to the Nellie Queen any more. I
gave it to you and now I take it away. We are not friends and it is
my fathers boat and you haven't got any right there.
I could hear her slow, clenched breath beyond the thickness of the
door and I knew that she heard the intake of my own in outrage as I
turned and searched the parlor for a pencil to make my answer. I
dashed across the rug to Uncle Joe's old writing desk and tore a
drawer open and filled the air with scattered deeds and testaments and
wills till I found it and sat down at last, chewing my tongue, and
shaping out my reply in black, clumsy letters beneath her own.
Fish Crik is on Christopher land and I will go wher I pleas.
I rushed back to the door and put my eye anxiously to the crack
to be certain she had not gone away and then stuffed the white paper
through the crack and watched till it moved and the white triangle
of it was snatched from the other side. That had struck home, I knew,
and smiled at her gasp of rage and heard the dull, pecking pace of
the pencil a moment later as she shaped the letters of her rebuttal.
The white corner scratched as it poked through again and I grabbed it
and pulled it into the room and lifted it to read.
If Abijah was here he would kill you for trespassing on his boat.
I broke the pencil point in my next furious scrawl and had to pause
while I chewed away the wood until there was enough lead to finish.
But Bija is not heer and I wuld not be afraid of him if he wus.
Now I pressed my ear again to the cold, varnished panel and
listened to her slow, furious breath as she read and then the pecking
of the pencil again and presently the paper's edge came peeking
through the crack and I snatched it up and read again.
The first stone I threw is not the last. And I don't care if I break
every window in the boat. You have no right.
And I hunkered again and scrawled my retort in that failing light,
my shoulder against the wall like the prisoner of some dungeon
world, waging a furious paper war with the inmate of the cell beyond
my own.
My aunt sary will thro you out in the roads where you cum frum
to begin with.
Let her ponder that for a spell; let her think of this while winter
163


crouches like a gray cat above us in the sky and gnaws the house like
a cold, white bone. And I stuffed the paper through with such violence
that it wadded up and I had to bring it back and press the wrinkles
out before it would go through and now her quick breath as she read
was an audible sob and I shut my eyes and leaned my cheek to the
cold wood and smiled to think how final and ultimate this threat
would always be. But she was not defeated yet and I held the paper
up again to read where she had written: I am going anyways in the
morning.
And now victory began suddenly to capsize and sicken and I
searched for space on the paper to shape the black letters of a
"Where?"
The answer was short in coming back and I had to take it to the
window now to make out the lace of words in the last gray dust of
afternoon.
Anywheres. I cannot abide it to live here anymore where a person
is your vilest enemy by day and then calls for you of a night.
In that moment I was glad to be far from the door: thankful that
she could not hear my short, sore gasp of breath. She knew, she had
heard, and it was true that she had come and stood in my doorway that
night; wondering, perhaps, in justice, which me to believe: the black
daytime Tom who despised her or the white wandering spirit of me
in the night, a-crying her name. I scrawled the cramped black words
a final time and read them with silent, working lips to be sure of what
I had said.
That is a lie. You heared the wind that is all.
And yet when I fell to my knees by the door and pressed my eye
to the crack for that glimpse of calico and felt the cold, tiny draft
against my cheek I knew that she had won again. She had gone and
now I stood up and pressed my ear to the door again to be sure she
was not hiding there, beyond the wall, and at that instant Aunt Sarah
called supper and I heard Cathie's slippers go padding off toward the
kitchen. I opened the door and stood a moment in the hallway, balling
the paper in my damp palms and tearing it to pieces that I stuffed into
the pocket of my jacket. Then I slipped swiftly up the stairway to the
little room and saw through the space of the half-opened door the
dusty faded flowers of Rebecca's old carpetbag, packed and ready on
the floor beside the washstand. So she had not threatened idly: she
was going, in truth, and now I listened as Aunt Sarah called to me
from far away in the downstairs and yet louder than this I heard the
164


gathering drum of my blood and knew that before the light of that
morning stained the windows of the house a time of showdown would
have come and gone.
Once Aunt Sarah's voice had ended its brief grace we fell quickly
to the sullen meal and though I did not look at her I could feel her
quick eyes darting from my face to the lowered eyes of the girl and
back again, over and over, in a dumb, swift shuttle. There were times
when Aunt Sarah was like the black cock of a weathervane, turning
lightly on an oiled and cunning axis to catch the drift of the faintest
wind of feeling that stirred in the house. And tonight with such a
storm of emotion raging soundlessly between myself and the dark
girl she sensed it as surely as if we had sat there at our places and
screamed across the dishes. But she held her tongue till supper was
done.
Very will. Out with it! What's the trouble between you two?
I lifted my eyes first to Aunt Sarah's face and then moved them
sullenly to the pale lowered lids of Cathie. She had finished eating
and now her hands stole softly from the cloth and twined in her lap
and her lips thinned to a stubborn line and the very rise and fall of
the breasts beneath her shirtwaist seemed to cease.
Speak up! I've had enough of this pouting and mooning around!
I declare I never saw two young people take on so! What's the
trouble? You haven't so much as said good morning or good night
for the past twelve months!
She stopped and sat back; the twinkling gold and jet brooch at her
puckered collar seeming to bespeak her impatience.
Young lady, speak when you are addressed!
And in that instant when the gold tears sprang to her lashes and
her lips unclenched to make the shape of fear and grief Cathie sprang
to her feet and fled in a rush from the kitchen and was gone before
the milk from her upset tumbler had commenced its soft drip on
the floor.
Thomas? You will tell me. What is wrong in this house?
And I met her eyes without faltering and got up from the table
and pressed my napkin into the beef bone ring.
Good night, Aunt Sarah.
Sit down there at the table again, Thomas. I'm not done yet.
Aunt Sarah, I'm sleepy,
165


Not so sleepy that you can't hear me out. I mean to have an end
to this thing once and for all before the year is done.
So I stood a moment longer, though there was nothing more to be
said and no answer to her plagued questions. Not then, at least,
though tomorrow there might be. For something in the air of that
winter's night spoke to me and said that the time of a reckoning was
at hand and that more than our black pact of silence would be broken
before the sunrise came. Yes, even as I stood there my legs quivered
and yearned to be up the stairs and to my bed, while something in the
upper rooms seemed whispering with a blind, soft urging: Quick!
Come away! Come away! Answers are awaiting you here! A phantom
struggle to be ended and another begun, an act of darkness to be
fashioned upon the flesh of the night, a secret to be manifest at last.
Do you hear me, Thomas?
Yes'm.
I'll pray for you tonight as I do every night. I advise you to do
the same. Your soul is sore sick, boy.
I do pray!
And you should read your Scriptures more.
Now I stood up, all wildness unleashed and opened my eyes and
saw her there and hated her till my heart scorched before it.
Scriptures! I cried. Is that what you want? All right! Here's some
Scripture words!
And I caught up an empty china plate from the cloth and raised
it above my head and hurled it smashing against the copper skillet
hanging on its nail above the stove.
"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine
enemies.” There's your Scriptures for the day, Aunt Sarah!
And I dashed from the kitchen and into the hallway and she called
after me twice and then fell silent as I moved panting and exhausted
up the stairs and down the hallway past the latched door to Cathie's
tiny room where the gold thread of her fireshine quivered like a blade
in the blackness and I listened to the faint, smothered sobs of her,
face down in the faded quilts. And as I undressed before my fire
these sounds subsided and I crept among the covers and watched the
red shapes dance among the rafters and heard the river wind. Yes,
said the night, the hour of reckoning is nigh and the showdown
impends upon the waxing of the moon. And there was pulse to the
very darkness of night and it gathered and beat in my palms. And the
clock struck, blowing its hoarse, brassy breath nine times down the
166


black silences and I listened as Aunt Sarah labored up the stairs and
moved to my door and stood a moment by the threshold and I heard
the dry, faint whisper of her lips and knew she had begun that
praying she had promised me. And presently I heard her door fall
closed and the latch slip sharply into its slot and she seemed gone
from my life forever and the sands seemed running thinner and
thinner in the glass. I cannot ever believe that it was a mere mortal
hour until the clock chimed again. It seemed to me in that space of
ticking time that kingdoms had flowered and fallen in the meadows
of Carthage and Babylon and mighty trees had rotted and gone to
soil and rains had fallen in the river and been carried to the sea and
the droplets lost in the oceans beyond China and sucked up in the
clouds that bore down once more upon our river hill in endless,
ancient cycle.
Cathie! my voice and the last chime of ten awoke me and the echo
of both died a-mingling. And I saw her then in the doorway, the
white shape of her stained by fireshine and her eyes yellow with it
and the gold of the blowing coals sparking in her dark, tumbling
hair. And the night pressed roaring in my ears, wild with victory
and I struggled up and faced her across the room where she stood
now, framed in the window with the cursed, cold sickle of the moon
caught like a white dogwood blossom in the dark curl that framed
her livid cheek. She was there and this was waking and yet the dream
was reality and I felt the cold shock of my naked feet as they bore
me on the bare floor boards and it seemed that the clock had gone
mad in the hallway blackness and gone a-chiming in riotous amuck
so roaring were the crashing pulses in my ears. She was a bare yard
from me now, her face a-tilt and mad with something, and the
carved, dark wood of her curls thick round the puckered throat of
her gown and somewhere I heard my voice again cry out that damned
name of her and I felt the onrush gather and saw her face for one
final instant before the dark encounter, before the resolution of it:
her eyes staring like the glass eyes of a doll and her lips curled in a
grimace of passion and then I heard her name again and the night
burst into flame. And it was come at last: the fearing and the shaming
come at last: the act of darkness born of a dream and flaming now
like a haystack burning in a wind. The knowing of it faint and lost
in the drum of blood: dragging her back with me into the warm-
womb of the quilted, secret night and now the dark ewe bleated on
her spring.cursed hill and I heard the pain of my teeth striking hers
167


and the hen bent fluttering and gawking under the scarlet cock with
his proud and swollen comb and her arms went fighting round me
and the whole night boomed about us like a peddler's drum on the
roads. And now the dream more real and yet more terrible than in
sleep: desperate and fantastic beyond the telling and more violent
in its lustfulness: her flesh tearing delicately beneath the thrust of
it and her voice in my ear like a hot wind wailing: hoarse and wanton
with blood-heat and now the noiseless, secret, sacred hinges of elbow
and thigh rocking in their immemorial accord and the night was
light and the Grandfather God in the high room roared and railed,
helpless to rise, and stamped His cane impotently upon the resound-
ing floor. And after a while I floated up like a drowned sailor from
the salt seaweed caves of her deeps and lay fainting on the soft shores
of her oceaned flesh and opened my eyes and said her name again.
168


BOOK 2
BOOK
1860-1864





through the snow to the black, dead earth and digging, digging, like
a murderer to make a hole big enough, a hole to hell itself, a hole
to hide that thing that burned in my hands like the gown of someone
slain. The bedsheet. And when the hole was halfway dug: deeper
than any grave, it seemed, and yet not deep enough it would never
be that), I held the sheet up and stared in horror at it one last time
and saw in numb amazement how tiny were those flecks of her blood
and I wondered at so little stain from such a deed. Why were not
the walls of that room bespattered with it and the mirror above the
washstand scorched and blinded, its silver curled sere and black as
a winter leaf by the vision of that lightning encounter in my bed.
But those tiny darkling dapples of it were enough and I began to dig
again, sobbing with effort and feeling the flesh of my palms blister
and break with that wild digging and once I broke through into the
tunnel of a sleeping winter mole and the poor thing cried and scurried
off as I gathered the stained, shamed sheet together and thrust it down
into the steaming pit and tamped it with my foot and then com-
menced shoveling it over with a fury even wilder than the digging
had been.
All that spring the slow remembering of the morning came to
me: in the nights of the strange house where flight had brought
me at last and it seemed to me sometimes that the wind was telling
the tale, as if the wind itself had hovered, witnessing, in the cold,
winter branches of those apple trees above the burying place. The
dark place. The black, cursed place. It would be that against all time.
And I had filed it: gone wild-haired and stary-eyed back into the still
sleeping house and tiptoed desperately about gathering things to-
gether for my exodus. And I had stolen my Aunt Sarah's mare and I
remembered this: how morning had stained the sky pink behind me
as the horse thundered away up the frozen roads on Roberts Ridge
and it seemed that pink was the stain of my deed: the thigh-locked
violence among the quilts and her black curls in my mouth and her
white teeth needling into my shoulder. And a running and a running
and a time of coldness beyond the telling and the warmth and drowse
that comes beyond the blue, thumping pulse of frozen feet and the
horse's crackling breath in the air before me and the stark, cold road
a-winding to the east. The slow remembering of it: of days, of weeks
on the roads, and strange faces of kindly farmers and their women
and lanterns lighting thresholds where I came to stand and beg soup
and bread and a place by the hearthstones to slump like a dog and
172


sleep. And they gave it and asked no questions: needing none, be-
cause they read the shame in my eyes and let it be. And then the land
thickened and clumped and towered into mountains and the road
curled winding among its shelves and one morning when I stopped
by a thin trickle of spring to water the mare and take a drink myself
the giant named Isaac came by in his wagon. The wind was tall and
howling high in a ragged, high pine tree above the road and that was
all the sound there was while he sat a-staring, his finger hooked in
the long gun. I reckon I was sight enough to frighten even such as
he but it was not fright I read in his face but something nearer to
loneliness.
Whar ye from?
I shivered and dried my hands, numb and wet from cupping the
spring water.
Back west, I said.
Whar ye headed?
I had not thought of that until then and the question so appalled
me that I suddenly covered my face and broke into choking sobs. He
made no sound and when I had gotten my manhood back again I
kept my face covered a while more and listened to the blowing of his
horse and the snorting of my winded mare and the cold, slow singing
in the high pine.
Your mare's nigh heartbroken from ridin', he said at last and I
looked up at his face. Hitch her on behind the wagon and climb up.
For an instant I thought I would leap astride my mare and make a
break for the hillside but there was nothing in his face to fear and
even the long rifle seemed only a formality of that country. So I
did as he told me and sat beside him for the rest of the long ride up
that steep, rutted, winding road and it was a long while before he
spoke again.
Whar'd ye say ye was from?
Marshall County.
And he studied that for a spell and a long ways up the road he
seemed to have chewed that information over long enough and
wanted another bite.
Know whar ye are now?
No sir.
Hampshire County. And that's a marvelous long ways from Mar-
shall.
And I said nothing to that: knowing it for a truth better than he
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could ever know: knowing that long running land that lay behind
me; ten thousand miles or more. He was silent a long while more
and presently the road broke from the timber and I spied a smoking
cabin on a knoll of ground above us.
She'll be glad to set another place for lunch, he said.
And he had taken me up to the house and the woman had met us
at the door with the three children behind her skirts and neither the
woman nor the man had spoken while I ate; famished and ravenous
over the hot plate of mush and ham. And it had seemed as if, curi-
ously, they had been awaiting me a long time. There was little
enough talk about any of it: my coming and the fact that I would stay
and work and when the woman saw the Scripture in my saddlebag
she had grown soft-eyed and a gentle begging had come to her
mouth and that night after the candles were lighted she whispered
something to her husband and came to me by the fire where I was
reading from the Bible that had been my mother's and stood with
her hands folded in her apron, a-smiling and watching me as if she
had a question on her tongue that would not come out unaided.
Is that there the Book? she said softly.
Yes'm. It's the Scriptures.
He said it was, she whispered. He knows about such things.
And she blushed and turned her sweet face sideways and yearning,
her eyes watching the firelight gleam and shine softly on the black
leather of the old book's binding.
He never learnt to read, she said.
And that was all she had said that night and she had not come
and stood like that until a night weeks later and he was off in the
barn tending to some trouble in the horse's hoof and she stood that
way, regarding me with her eyes as dark as the blue hollows of the
mountains of that land in the mornings.
He won't never ask, she whispered, wide-eyed and breathless to
get it said quickly before the man Isaac returned. But he would surely
admire to know how to read. Do you reckon you could learn him?
Pleased and moved with the strange warmth of having something
to give, I nodded and looked quickly into the fire.
I'd be glad to teach him how, I said, and at that moment the man
Isaac came back and it had begun that night and the nights when he
had sat beside me on his stool by firelight, his giant shoulders hunched
close and his queer, big root of a finger following the words I named
and pointed for him and his mouth making the names of those
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barn. And I seen you wearin' the same shirt you was a-wearin' and
I knowed it was you when he brought you in the door.
He had not looked at me throughout her saying this and I did not
understand it until the following evening when she had taken me to
a place under a high spruce on the knob above the stable. She had
bade me follow her when the dishes were done and he had said
nothing, but sat staring into the fire, knowing I suppose that what she
was going to tell me had best be told and done with now. She led
me to a wooden slab in the earth at the head of a small mound that
she had shaped and preserved against the rub of seasons: the grave
of a child.
Hit was my first-born, she said softly. My least one.
And I could read the fading letters on that wind-thumbed slab of
cedar: Jacob Bone-1851-1852—and she stood a while more, her
eyes wandering in the valleys of the immense mountain reaches where
night seemed to rise like blue water in the long, far hollows. And
now she turned her face to me and her eyes glimmered in that
dusk.
He used to mock me when I'd say that someday my least one
would come home, she said and I could not tell if it was the steady
course of mountain wind or her words that made me shiver then.
He used to say that the dead was gone and best forgotten. But I al-
ways said that my least one was just off a-wanderin' in Glory some-
wheres and someday he would come home. And when I seen you in
that dream that mornin' I woke him and nudged him and told him
my least one was growed up to a man and he'd come a-ridin' home
that mornin' and he mocked me again for it. He's good though. He
don't show his feelings.
And she studied a while more and looked toward the house with
a shadow of a smile on her sad, young mouth and laid her fingers
alongside her cheek with a gentle, thoughtful gesture.
He wants me to tell you, she said, that he taken you in that mornin'
as if you was our least one returning. He said for me to tell you that
only the Lord knows your own true name and kin and he is not one
to pry. So I shall call you Tom Stranger.
I am mighty beholden to you both, I said.
Hit's a poorly place—this world, she said, shrugging a little and
facing me with a shy child's smile. What would hit be if there wasn't
folks to take a body in?
And with no word more she moved gently off down the slope
176


toward the house and left me alone to witness night's gathering
upon the humpbacked reaches of the wilderness.
Remembering back: the slow gathering of it in and all I could
remember was the breathless digging in my Grandfather's orchard
and the burying and the flight. The nature of my deed remained ob-
scure, though its color was red and it roared in my memory's deepest
reaches like the thunder of fire in a winter chimney. Like that self-
same roaring fire I sat before in the chill nights of that mountain
spring in the house of the giant and his woman Nancy who sat long
past the owl's first crying to sing small English songs to the three
children. And with the reading lesson done there was this little time
to myself before climbing to the loft's dreamless night and I would
sit for long whiles without moving a muscle, without blinking, specu-
lating upon the faces of summer in the flames. Aunt Sarah and Uncle
Joe and Suse and Toot. Yet Cathie's face would never come to me
and sometimes I caught myself yearning for the image of it as if by
so exorcising it there in the flames I might, somehow, perceive the
name and nature of the violence I had done her. But all memory
would grant me was some curious sense of a softness under my finger-
tips and a tingle in my lions.
For the months of April and May in that new year I knew the first
real peace of my whole life: the peace of hard work on the hillside
with Isaac and the peace of knowing that they would leave my life
to me and the peace of resting. Though I knew at last that the man
Isaac at least had voiced some speculation about my past. It was a
night in the last week of May and the peepers were shrilling like
golden fifes in the creeks below us and I had just shut my eyes when
I heard my name among the whispering of the children and I knew
it was the boy Job.
Air he asleep?
Yes, said Esther.
Pap says he slew a man and that's why he was runnin'.
With a gun? whispered Martha.
Pap never said. Pap said hit's wrote on him plain as the word on
Moses' tablet.
What's that?
Moses' tablet? I don't rightly know, Esther, but Pap says he will
find hit and read me the tale when he gits back.
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Whar's Pap goin', Job?
He don't say.
Then how you know he's goin' at all.
'Cause Ma says so is why! Ma says Pap don't say ary word when
he is fixing to go somewheres. But one of these mornin's him and the
stranger will go off together.
Whar to, Job?
To the War! Hain't ye heard? Black Lincum's comin' to fetch ever'
child in Virginny to Washingtown and skin him alive like a ground-
hog.
Martha and Esther put their thumbs in their mouths and heeded
the cold, slow sough of spring wind upon the clapboards and heard
in it, I reckon, the cold, dreaming moan of the approaching monster
who should come to fetch them away.
Pap says they's fixin' to march right up to Washingtown and hang
ol black Lincum to a crab apple tree!
Pap wouldn't let black Lincum skin me! whispered Esther.
Shoot no. Me neither! said Martha.
And they were still a while then and I thought they had fallen
asleep and then the boy Job began again.
Esther?
She's sleepin'! whispered Martha.
How come you ain't sleepin', too? said Job.
'Cause I'm skeered, said Martha frankly.
I ain't skeered a diddle-de-damn bit! said Job staunchly. 'Cept
sometimes when he looks at me.
Black Lincum?
No, said Job. The stranger.
Pap says he slew a man.
Shoot! said Martha. Pap shot Billy Joe MacAfee.
Shet your mouth, Martha! Pap said we wasn't never to talk about
that no more! Billy Joe shot at Pap first anyways.
And Martha kept still then and I could feel their child eyes wan-
dering the ghost-ridden dark of that midnight loft where the pale
shapes of mud-dauber's nests clustered like white bats around the
eaves.
Is he asleep?
Yes.
I like him, said Martha.
Not me, said Job.
178


Stranger, I don't reckon I believe that. I know you run off from home
for your own good reasons but it don't come to me that you done
nothing bad. Heed me, boy. Since I was a wee, small child in my
granny's kitchen it's been given to me to know the shape of things
unseen. I was born yonder forty miles beyond that ridge you see
there all blue and smoky on the sky. When hit's clear of an afternoon
and the mists are gone you can see the tree that grows there yit. Isaac
courted me there and taken me away with him and we settled here
and raised these three younglin's and the least one I laid in the
ground on the hill. And in all them years the Lord has favored me
with the gift of the seventh sense. And when I look at you, Tom
Stranger, I see it plain as God's word—that hit was someone done
you a bad hurt and not the other ways around.
My eyes brimmed with tears then and suddenly, strangely, I feared
the woman there: felt rushing into my breast those old and half-
forgotten dreads of that other place: that pantry and those haunted
passageways and the fire shadows dancing in a bedroom that I some-
times glimpsed in dreams.
No, I said. I done something bad.
A body can't always say, she said plainly. A body's memory plays
the meanest tricks.
I've got no memory, I said dully.
She studied me a while, the faintest of smiles a-twinkling at the
corners of her gentle mouth.
Hit was a gal I'll bet, she said.
Why do you say that? I breathed, wild-eyed and cornered.
Hit's plain to see, she murmured. Hit's marked on your face, Tom
Stranger, like the white feather of a scar.
No! I cried, banging my spoon on the rough table. That's not
true. You lie!
And I swung my eyes on her like pistols, ready for the flash of
answering anger I was certain would be there. But my outburst seemed
only to have softened her face the more and brought a tender brim-
ming of gold to her dusky, valley-blue eyes.
Hit was surely a cruelness was done you, Tom Stranger, she said.
To have hurt you so sore.
And I stared till my eyes started and then my face was in my
hands and banged down among the dishes and I was racked with
wild sobs and she stood throughout, witnessing and grieving for me
although there was no way she could offer a hand to soothe it. And
180


the time of peace was ended in that hour of noon and nights began
flickering again with tiny red fire fears and the loom of pale faces
came back to haunt me from the river past. And for the life of me I
could not think what she had said to make it so: what black necro-
mancy had transpired across those innocent lunchtime plates to make
her suddenly the familiar face of an enemy. Nights I would lie and
listen to the children whisper:
Ma says Pap's fixin' to go to the War right soon, said Job.
He don't say, said Esther. How come Ma knows.
She knows, said Martha, who was gentle with freckles of her
mother's wisdom. She knows, that's all.
Is the stranger goin', too?
Shore! Shore he's goin'! Ever' man in Virginny's goin' to catch
Black Lincum and string him up and
Susan Turley said Black Lincum cuts little boys' woodpeckers off
and feeds 'em to his turkeys!
She's a liar—that Susan Turley! scoffed Job. And a dirty old hop
toad to boot!
Just the same! whispered Esther. She declares hit's so!
Is he asleep? said Martha after a while.
Yes, said Job. He allus falls off right quick!
I don't reckon he really slew no one! said Martha softly.
He did too! said Job.
No, said Martha, surely. He never.
How come you know?
'Cause Ma, she said so.
How come Ma knows?
'Cause hit was given her to know, said Martha.
By whom? said Job, softly.
The wind told her, said Martha, and each of us then, man and
child alike, fell humbled and stilled, harking to the wind of that
star-blown wilderness night and the queer, sweet two-talk of a bob-
white below the hook of the April moon.
I cannot remember which troubled me the most: the man's silence
or the woman's kindness. Days of long hard labor in Isaac's corn or
helping him prune the young peach trees or hauling fence posts down
the meadow on the sledge behind the field horse—these were things
the man and I did together in a kind of wordless communion. And
181


yet I do not recall the day when he spoke more than five sentences
to me among those long labors; he seemed crawled within himself
like a lonesome bear: giant and gaunt and hard as a hickory rail and
nights in that little respite between sundown and starshine he seemed
brooding and diffident, staring out the pantry window to southward
and, curiously, harking and sniffing like a wild creature gathering the
spoor of moving enemies beyond its vision. I think he had always
been somewhat of that nature and now a new temper of that conten-
tious time had come to deepen even more the darkness of his intro-
spections. In May he took to riding down the mountain trail to
Romney, to the general store, and one night near the end of that
month he came back with a cut on his temple and a thin dribbled
clot of hardened blood in the fringe of his black beard and his
gnarled huge knuckles split and swollen. And after that night he lost
interest in the hearthside reading lessons I gave him and sat apart
from us, away from the fire, his beard sunk into his gray linsey shirt
and his long arms dangling like lank oars trailing from a boat and
his face a silent thunder of inner contests. The woman patched and
darned the little ones' ragged things and raised her eyes from time
to time to regard him with nothing to mark any emotion save the
slightest deepening of those dark irises and the barest slowing of the
measured rise and fall of her bosoms. Lord, the silence of those
evenings: more profound, it seemed, than the quiet of the river
nights that now I could scarcely remember, and I would sit reading
from my mother's Scriptures at the hearth's edge and brush the
popping sparks from my linsey knees and listen to the silence like
the vast unraveling of a rough, soft thread and sometimes I would
lift my eyes to the woman's face and find myself cringing again be-
neath the terrible gentleness that hovered in the red-leaf corners of
her mouth.
And then one night in the first week in June we were left alone
again. The children had gone up the ladder and subsided in their
tick and Isaac had gone to town in a blacker mood than usual and
there was no sound but the fire's whispering and the tread of the
woman's rocker and the gentle hiss of wind against the house.
Tom Stranger, I meant no meanness that day I spoke.
I know that, ma'am.
I studied the shape of summer in the flames and cracked my
knuckles and sighed miserably.
182


hand to hurl the golden ball of a summer tempest down the echoing
river valley.
What's the War about? she said to me then, like a child, and I was
flattered that she would think I would know.
I don't know, I admitted.
Nor I, she said. I heared them mention it in the store at Romney
when he taken me there last month to buy yard goods. Hit is about
Free Soil, I heared some say. And there was one feller said hit was
about Black Lincum.
Yes, I said. I heard talk back home last winter about him.
Hit's hard to think he is the monster some claim him to be, she
said. His Ma was a Hanks—born and bred not a morning's ride from
here-down in the holler behind The Saddle. My man's Ma knowed
her and said she was as kindly turned a soul as you'd want to see and
he says hit's a wonder before God how sich a fine woman could birth
that black-souled son of perdition—that abomination before Jehovah.
But, I declare, hit's hard to think he's bad as all that. Bad enough to
fight a war about.
She studied a while and rocked a little more to stir her thoughts.
Hit's a caution, she said. How they always find something.
Something for which?
Something to fight a war for, she said. Hit's a caution. I mind
when I was just a little bitty girl and my Pap got that look around
the eyes and Ma knowed he was going. Hit was just something you
could smell about a man-like when he's been drinkin' or been
with another woman that way they git before they go ridin' off to
a war. And my Pap went and we got nary word all that winter and
nary word that spring nor summer and in the fall of that year there
come a lame man up the holler on a wind-broke mule and he claimed
he'd come all the way from Texas just to bring us word.
About your Pa?
Dead on some strange-named river in Mexico. And the lame man
come all that way just to bring us the word—and my Pap's mouth
harp and his old turnip watch. Ma never cried a single solitary tear
neither and us kids didn't cry and that spring Ma married a black-
smith from Winchester and he was just as kindly as if we was all
his own. But, I declare I disremember what they was fighting over
then! And I don't reckon hit mattered so much. You never hear folks
talk about hit now.
She laughed a soft sound and her blue eyes dreamed in the flames.
184


Pap's mouth harp fell into the hands of a little boy named Jamey
Scott, whose uncle run the livery stable down at Romney and nights
when I'd hear him playin' that mouth harp down in the laurels I'd
swear hit was Pap come back all the way from Mexico—like hit
was his shade a-wanderin' home again. And the night my Ma died
I heared that mouth harp a-blowin' and a-singin' just as sweet as a
night bird up in the orchard and I knowed Ma would git over into
Glory after all. Because hit wasn't Jamey blowin'! Him and his folks
had burned down their cabin for the nails and sold their cow and
went off to Californi-ay the spring before. Lord, hit was Pap come
to fetch her over into Glory. I knowed that. Hit was just as plain
to me as if I had seen him come to stand there in the candleshine
and reach for her hand on the quilt. And hit was then that I knowed
I was favored with the knowledge of things to come, Tom Stranger.
I heard Isaac in the stable then and felt a curious comfort that he
had returned.
What about things that's past? I whispered.
Some things, she said, I can see.
What about me? I said softly. Can you tell what's past?
Hit's not all revealed to me, she said gently. Though some of it
is plain in your eyes, Tom Stranger.
I shivered and rose, flush-cheeked from the fire and bade her good-
night and lay outstretched beneath the coarse blanket in the loft when
the man Isaac came in and presently the crack of lantern shine be-
tween the floor boards fainted and I lay still in the tick of shucks,
listening to the slow breathing of the sleeping, suck-fingered chil.
dren.
Whar ye bin, Tom Stranger?
Up yonder in the orchard.
Mind ye don't wander into that poison sumac patch some evenin'.
I know right where it is, I said. I don't set near it.
A body likes to be alone sometimes, she said.
Yes.
A body needs to set and wonder all alone sometimes.
Yes'm.
I looked at her sitting with her feet close together in the cane-
bottom chair by the lantern. Her face was bent above the little ging-
ham dress she was making for the girl Esther.
185


Is she dark? she said suddenly in a soft voice and looked at me
across the room. Or is she fair, Tom Stranger?
Who? I breathed, feeling my throat tense and tighten on the word
as I spoke it.
The girl named Cathie, she said softly.
Now I was on my feet more swiftly than thought and backed up
against the wall so quickly that my chair went toppling on the
hearth.
How do you know that name?
Why, I've heared you say it often enough, she said softly. In your
dreams of nights.
You spy on me, eh?.
I sleep light, she said, her face rosy and blameless and wholly
unaware of my wild anger. I reckon hit's from listenin' for the kids
of nights. That's when I hear you speak her name. Hit seems like
hit's only when the moon is new. I never heared you dreamin' any
other time.
You lie there listening! I breathed hoarsely. I suppose he listens,
too!
You're mad at me, she said. Why are you mad at me, Tom Stran-
ger? Hit's no shame to love a girl.
I'm not ashamed! I love no one!
The names a body calls out in their sleep, she said, smiling, is the
names of them they love most always. And the way you cry her name,
Tom Stranger, is enough to break a body's heart—hit's a soft cry,
near to a sobbing and sometimes afterwards I can hear you cryin'
in your sleep.
Shut up!
I will, she said. I meant no meanness.
I glared at her a moment longer and her face was shadowed in
lampshine and her fingers plucked the needle in and out of the
gingham in a restless, steady rhythm and she seemed heedless of me
now as I fetched the cane chair upright and sat down again with my
eyes never leaving her and my chest still pounding with affront and
suspicion. For a long while there was no sound and I kept a-staring
and waiting for her to say something more but she kept her peace
and somehow I hated her the more for that.
What else do I say? I whispered presently.
Nothing, she said gently.
You lie. There's more.
186


I've got no cause to lie, she said. Hit's just her name—no more.
Cathie.
I scared a while more: hating her for her gentleness, longing sud-
denly with a violence that made me grate my teeth for some of the
answering temper that I had always come to expect from women.
I hate you, I said suddenly and nothing changed in her at that,
only the slightest hesitation in the bring wink of the needle in the
cloth and suddenly her enveloping gentleness triumphed and all my
stout brash anger faltered and went tumbling and suddenly I covered
my face in my hands as I had done that day at the table and spent my
foolish fury in tears upon my palms. And a moment later she had
come across the room to stand beside me and I felt her fingers
stroking my unkempt hair, and with a sudden new longing older
than memory it seemed, I flung my arms around her waist and
pressed my cheek into the bone of her hip, weeping wildly into the
lavender sweetness of her billowing skirts. And in all that time of
weeping she did not move, except to keep up that gentle stroking
in my hair, and said no word nor made any sound until, at last, I
was finished, spent, wept out and bared before her.
I'm sorry-sorry!
Hit don't matter, she breathed. A body says things they don't mean.
I'm sorry I cried! I choked. That's no way for a man to take on.
No, I reckon not. But there's many the man that would like to
cry if he knowed the knack.
Now she drew back from me and caught my cheeks in the shape
of her fingers and drew my gaze up to hers and there was grief in
her eyes now and it seemed a kind of mirroring of my own and in
her dark pupils I saw the firelit twin images of my own tortured face.
I done something terrible back there! I breathed, but her hands
did not relinquish their gentle cupping of my face.
Oh Lord, I thought. Oh Lord, maybe if I was to tell her it will
not wind my throat in such a grip of dread; maybe it will lift its
cold fog of fear from the hollow of my heart.
You can tell me if you please, she said.
It was a girl, I whispered wildly to her face and prayed that it
would keep its gentleness and not fail me as it listened and not go
twisting to a mask of horror and contempt as my tale unfolded.
Well I knowed that much, she said gently.
Yes. Yes. It was her I done it to.
Done what, Tom Stranger?
187


I don't know. I cannot name it, Nancy! For it was a deed without
name nor shape! I can't even remember it! All I know about it is
this: it was an act of darkness—worse even than killing, I think. And
in the morning—in the morning there was blood on the sheet.
Yes, she said softly. Oh, yes.
You know that? I whispered.
Yes.
And suddenly a sound in the night made me leap and clutch her
waist in my fingers.
Listen! I whispered. Don't you hear the sound of a rocking chair,
Nancy?
No. Hit was the wind. Hit's the bucket swinging on the rope at the
well.
Yes. Yes.
And I was still a spell, listening and trembling. But there was
only the wind and the crying rope.
Sometimes I think God has followed me all the way from the
river. Sometimes I think He come up the road behind me, Nancy, and
He's just waiting for the time to come to smite me down.
What for? she whispered.
For what I done that night to the girl. To Cathie.
He will strike you down—as He strikes us all, Tom Stranger. But
hit will not be for the deed you done that night, I reckon.
But there was blood!
There's blood from every kind of borning.
And I buried the sheer in the orchard that morning! And I stole
my aunt's mare and rode off!
And someday you'll be ridin' back, Tom Stranger.
Never!
Yes. You will.
No! I'm goin' away to the War with Isaac!
I know that. But you'll come back, Tom Stranger! she said and
looked over my head into the fire and I saw her eyes ringed with
grieving gold tears.
But I'll not go back to the river! Not ever!
She smiled at me then and put her fingers through my hair again
and I felt a choke of panic at all the wild things racing through my
heart.
Nancy! Nancy! What will happen?
Hit will be revealed to you, she said softly.
188


When?
When you ride back to her.
Maybe she's dead. Maybe I killed her, Nancy.
No.
But there was blood on the sheet, Nancy!
There'll be blood enough left in her to bring roses to her cheeks
when she hears your mare on the road.
Maybe I'll not live to go back! Maybe I'll get killed in the War.
No.
Can you see that? Has it been revealed to you, Nancy?
Yes, she breathed in a little blowing breath of a word that seemed
brushed by Doom's own wing.
When?
Jist now. In the flames. I seen it plain.
Seen what?
Seen you and him a-ridin' away into the gray of a mornin'! she
murmured, her eyes dark as violets in a snow. And I seen men
a-ridin' and a-cursin' and a-murderin' one t'other in a bloody
meadow! Ay, Tom Stranger. Plain as yonder flames, I seen it. And
then I seen you on the road to Romney-ridin' back to this very
dooryard on a black mare. And you're alone, Tom Stranger. Alone.
Why's that?
Because you left someone behind-dead in that bloody field! Cold
in that bloody meadow!
Who? Who is it, Nancy?
But before she could answer Isaac's mare came pacing up the
midnight road and we listened as he stabled her for the night and
we waited apace, staring into one another's grieving eyes as his boots
dragged lornly up the stone steps to the threshold.
Twice that night the wind woke me and I crept cross the rustling
pallet and put my eye to a break in the shingles and saw the black
pines contending in the wind: their feathered mountain boughs
thrashing on the white moon like the hair of struggling women. And
I dreamed. And in the dream I was standing apart from myself,
eye-witness to a deed which, even as it focused softly in the pearly
penumbra of dreaming, affrighted me again with all the old dark
dread. It was in no place I knew: a room without name or face, and
all I could see was myself and the girl struggling and the girl weep-
189


ing and myself acting out upon her protesting flesh that act of
darkness that had brought me here. Now she bent back beneath
this other hideous me and now her head strained and tossed like
the wind-wild boughs of the pines against the face of the lustful
moon and now her frail fingers fought and broke against me and
at last she relinquished everything and fell, weltering and sprawling
beneath me, and the me that witnessed it at last intervened and
fought hopelessly to drag the protagonists apart but it was too
late and the girl seemed suddenly dissolved and drowned in a
fanning, ribboning of her own bright blood. And I awoke. And I
choked: crucified upon the black loft and struggled to choke back
one last cry of protest and lay breathing hoarsely and letting the
drums in my ears subside to a faint pulse of reason. And the wind
had fallen now to a lorn lowing and all the silence of the night
seemed to hack to that part of my nightmare which still rode me in
the blackness and I scrambled from my pallet again and put my eye
to the cold chink and saw that the moon was gone and saw only the
shape of black pine-tree figures struggling vaguely like lovers on the
sky, with no moon to give them shape or name, and I knew then that
the sound I heard had not come from the mountain night, nor the
woods: it was no cry of owl or dreaming child but the cry of woman:
the soft, quilt-muffled cry of woman, and I scrambled back secretly
across the loft and peered wildly down the square hole into the room
of Isaac and Nancy. The fire still burned: a quarter of a pine log
still blew and hissed upon the stones of the hearth and clear as I
had seen them in the dream I saw them now: two figures locked and
limb-laced in the black act of darkness: the swift, sweet murder of
teeth against teeth and the contending of breast against rib and the
onslaught of hipbone to hipbone. For a moment I though I would
surely cry out, or spring down the ladder into the room and drag
the black giant away from her and yet I was gripped with a tight-
fisted demon of curiosity: a wild, strange sense of witnessing myself
as I had dreamed it before. And now her face sprang free from the
thicket of the giant's black beard and strained and wandered in the
pillow, eyes glassed and gilded by fireshine and wild with something
of Death and something of Life and still I witnessed, fist to my teeth
until the flesh of my knuckles parted and bittered on my tongue and
me thinking: Is it Death? Is it Life? It is neither. It is both. It is be-
yond. He is killing her. He is not killing her.
Ay, her eyes flicker and glaze in the flame of it and her lip rises
190


to bare her white teeth and she cries now, softly to the fireshine, to
the moon and the high, conspiring wind of spring and it is the cry
of a dying and a borning both. And I whirl and glare behind me as
if moon or god stands ready to snatch me away and now my eyes
return to the witnessing and I watch the wild deed quicken and the
thought cries in me: If it be Death he brings her, the moment of
Dying has come! And, to be sure, the woman arched and glared in
a glory and with that soft and yolky cry that uttered from her round
astonished mouth I fled back, quaking, into my pallet again and
stuffed my ears with quilt and heard, notwithstanding, the quaint,
frail voice of Cathie upon another pillow, beneath another wind,
speaking her scarlet psalm to yet another fireshine. And I lay, broken
with exhaustion, wide awake till nearly dawn; staring like a back-
broken hare into the black and soundless dark and knowing for a
certainty that when I went down the ladder to my breakfast mush I
would fine Isaac gone: the bedsheets buried in the rocky earth be-
neath the pine tree and himself gone helter-skelter fleeing down
mountain roads to whatever wars might now be left to him.
When daylight shone on the broken shingle like a white pigeon's
feather the children woke and rioted off down the ladder to the
breakfast whose sweetness already ghosted among the rafters in the
loft. And I lay listening and counted them one by one, the voices:
hers and those of the children, and yet I could not be certain if the
giant had really gone: he spoke so seldom ever, even when he was
there.
Where's Tom? cried Nancy.
He war sleepin'! cried Esther.
Land of Goshen! said Nancy. Such a lazy-mary! He's always up
and down washin' at the pump by now. Reckon he's sick? Martha,
run see!
Maybe he's dead! cried Job.
Martha's bare feet came thudding up the ladder rungs and I rose
in the pallet and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles when her face
popped up and fixed me with round-eyed and surly inspection.
Air you dead? she said. Ma wants to know.
No, I chuckled. I reckon I'm not dead. Nor sick neither. I'll be
down directly.
And I opened my mouth to ask if Isaac had gone but the question
191


fainted on my tongue at the clear round sound of his voice asking
Esther for the jug of black-strap for his johnny-cake.
Tell Tom I won't need him today. I'm going to town, woman, and
I'll not be back till nightfall.
Yes, she said, and I harked as he strode to the wall and heard the
steel chink lightly on the plaster in the logs as he fetched down the
piece.
Isaac, she said, and the sound of his name in her mouth had a
strange gentleness; I had never heard her address him at all in those
weeks I had been among them and he stopped and, by the sound, I
knew he had turned to stare down at her from the threshold and I
knew her eyes were on the long gun in his arms. And the saying of
his name and the staring would be all the question she would ever
dare ask about it.
No, he said. I'm not goin' yit. Not this mornin'. You'll know,
woman, when I go. I'll not leave without a word of parting. Hit's
just a little business at Romney that will keep me away the whole
day and the gun is to hold back trouble—not to start none. I want no
trouble. You know that much, I reckon, or you're a fool if you don't.
You fixin' to shoot somebody, Pap?
Hush! Hush your mouth, Job! she cried and I heard the quick, flat
sound of her palm on the boy's bottom and then they were all silent
while the giant went down to the stable, fetched out the mare and
rode down the mountain. And then it was still a great, long while.
Tom? Tom Stranger?
Yes'm.
Air ye sick?
No'm.
Well, don't bother to wash. Your breakfast is chillin' in the grease
now. Come set and eat, Tom Stranger.
And I sat, cross-legged in the pallet, and thought about that and
felt my eyeballs like hot stones in my head: grainy and dull with
sleeplessness. No, I would take no breakfast. It would be hard enough
to go down there at all, to face her, to manage to get past her. I
wanted nothing then but a day alone in the woods: a time to think
and wonder and wander and try to fit it all to a shape of meaning.
Tom?
Yes'm.
And I went backwards down the rungs, slow-footed and blushing
clean to my ears and stood for a moment with my back to her and
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let my eyes wander to the bed, without turning my head, to see if
the sheet were gone. Poor things, they had no sheets, they slept in
homespun and the bed was made and gay with checkers where the
quilt was stretched neatly across, shining and sweet in the morning
sun, and not a thread to mark the place to the night's black strange-
ness.
Tom?
Yes'm.
Turn 'round. Let me see you, Tom?
So I turned and stared at the naked feet of her on the smooth
scrubbed boards: her strong, long toes beneath the hem of her blue
dress.
I declare, Tom. If you ain't the strangest soul! What's wrong?
You look so queer!
I stared at her then, flat-eyed and angry and the shame in me swept
away by that.
Well I'm mighty sorry I look so queer to you, madam! I said and
fetched my leghorn hat from the nail by the door and went across
the threshold into the sweet of the morning.
Tom, you hain't had a bite of breakfast! Tom!
I want none and I thank you kindly just the same! I cried to the
breeze and walked off toward the orchard, toward the thicket and
the black pines beyond.
Tom!
I strode up the wet morning grass into the orchard, kicking through
the shimmering diamonds of the mist-showered cobwebs toward the
young trees. I stopped in the orchard for a while and heard the cries
of Martha and Esther and knew that she had sent them up the
meadow to fetch me back and I cursed aloud and sprang up and filed
through the orchard toward the thicket of laurels and down through
a path I knew and suddenly found myself in the cool, minted, high-
arched room of the forest and ran on down through nodding bells of
wake-robin to a place on the highest brow of the mountain where I
could stare down across a cloud-shadowed sweep of valley. Far away
on the toy road that wound toward the broiling white Potomac Isaac
and his tiny mare moved antlike through the mists. The air in the
mountains was cold and sweet as dippered spring water and I filled
my lungs and lost the sour taste of the sleepless night as I breathed it
out. I walked long into that morning and stopped when the sun stood
quarter-high and drank at a spring and saw a patch of sunlit leaves
193


suddenly leap and take the shape of a doe and her fawn and watched,
breathless, as they sprang away into the columns of tree-broken light.
There were small flowers trying themselves against the cold even that
early in the spring: white things and star-shaped blossoms like bits of
broken china scattered in the sward and the sunlit patches were dusted
with bluets like gusts of unseasonble snow. It was cold but there was
no wind and my shirt was warm and I sat a long spell on a rock by a
speaking pool and saw my face in the water, staring up like a
drowned, stark helmsman in a sunken boat of sky. The voices of
Nancy's children had long since blown away in the haunted vaults
of the forest and I knew that I had gone a good five mile down
the gap behind the mountain. And now I looked in the pool again
and saw the face of Nancy and espied again that warmth and
that rosy, drowsy-lipped languor of the well-rested and of some-
thing more. And the illusion moved and broke as a leaf fell on the
pool's mirror and I tried to think it through to a reckoning. What I
had seen in the fireshine of that night was surely the same as had
been mirrored in my room in the house of Aunt Sarah: myself and
the girl Cathie locked in that wild and yet curiously glorious act of
darkness. And yet. And yet. And I thought then that I would never
know the truth of it. And yet. And yet. Was Cathie dead or ruined
or crippled by that night's doing? Or had she risen like Lazarus in
the morning's light with her face touched with the same glory that
had angered and perplexed me when I had witnessed it on lip and
lid of the gold-haired woman in the kitchen of the cabin on the
outset of that very day.
What was it, Nancy? I whispered to the pool. What was it,
Cathie?
But there was no answer and my eyes widened and I saw nothing
in the water but my own foolish, morning face and was about to
rise and start back when I heard a far, faint crash of brush of horses
breaking through laurels and the single echoing of a man's voice.
My first impulse was to run pell-mell up the gap. I crouched on the
rock above the pool; my eyes trying to find the shape of man and
horse in that checkerboard of gold and green and I could still hear
the approach: the sound of horses on a narrow trail and the voices of
the men.
And I heard the crackle of brush-filth under the hooves and the
parting of branches and the green swinging back of them against
the men's shoulders and their soft, joking voices and one of them
194


was playing a jaw harp and the sweet, brassy twang came like a
frog's voice in the padded stillness.
Five men on horses stared up at me from a thin trail among the
wintergreen and scrub pines. Their faces were splashed with the sun
that fell from the high green forest roof and I saw that none of them
looked any older than I: coarse-faced country boys with peach-fuzz
yellow beards and homespun shirts and long rifles slung across their
saddlebags.
Howdy! called the leader of them and I said nothing and felt my
fingers close round a rock.
He looks like a Yank to me, said another, and five rifle barrels
swung up and hung like blue cold rings before their hands.
You a Yank? hollered the youngest, and I shook my head quickly.
Stand up, stranger, and walk slow towards us, said the leader, and
I stood up and began kicking my way down through the leaves and
the wake-robins and saw the five steady rings of the gun muzzles
fixed upon me like steel eyes and heard the irrelevant chatter of a
redbird in the rhododendron on the slopes below.
You live hereabouts?
Yes.
Whar?
Back up on the ridge, I said. Up the gap.
What's your name? cried the youngest and the ring of the gun
tossed in the air and the horse blew and rolled its wild white eye.
Christopher. Tom Christopher.
What side ye on?
I don't rightly know, I said. Which sides are they?
And they laughed at that and the guns fell and one of them swung
down and waded up through the leaves to the well and filled his hat
and took it back to his roan.
How fur is it to the Ferry?
Which Ferry? I said.
I think this son of a bitch is a blue belly, Jase, said the black-
haired one, and yet the other stilled him with a wave of his hand
and kept his cold eyes on me while the horses drank.
Harper's Ferry, he said. How fur is it?
I don't know, I said. But it's only a little ways to Romney and I
reckon they could tell you there.
Yep, said the black-haired one. He sure talks like a blue belly
to me, Jase.
195


Shut you mouth, Tarly! Come here, boy!
And though I felt a surge of anger at that from a gangly country
jake not a month older than me I went up to him and stared, my
thumbs hitched in my pants.
Maybe you hain't got the news up hyer yet, he said. But there's a
call for volunteers at the Ferry.
A black lock of hair fell across his brow and he swept it back with
a toss of his head and settled his wet buckskin hat over it and swung
back onto the horse.
I'm goin' when Isaac goes, I said.
Is Isaac a Virginian?
Yes.
And which side you and Isaac fixin' to join up with?
I haven't heard Isaac say.
And that was the wrong thing and the gun muzzle rings swung
up again until the five of them seemed fixed like the spokes of a
wheel round the hub of my head.
Hit's time he said, said the boy on the Indian pony softly.
Hold it, Tarly, you damned fool! cried the black-haired one, sweep-
ing the other guns away with the muzzle of his own. Hit may well
be that he hain't got the word yet. Boy, how many sides to a war?
Two, I reckon.
How many sides to this one?
Two,
Two, he said. And one of them is God's side and one of them is
the side of Hell and God is on the side of Virginia.
Jase! cried the blond-haired one and his eyes flashed with killing
glory at the sound of God's name. Jase, I say let's shoot the son of a
bitch and take no chances. He sure as hell don't talk like no Virgin-
ian to me!
Let's hang him! cried one of the others, and the black-haired Jase
swung his rifle on them all and the sunlight glinted on the twitching
of his cheek, beneath the eye. Then he turned his gaze to me again
and somehow in the black fire in his eyes I saw something more
brooding and dangerous than I had seen in the faces of the others.
Speak your piece, boy! he said to me.
I don't rightly know what to say, I said.
And you hain't never heard of the First Virginia Brigade? said
the black-haired boy.
No.
196


Against God's enemies?
Yes!
And will you swear to sign up with Colonel Jackson's First Vir-
ginia Brigade within the week?
When Isaac rides,
Will you swear! I hain't talkin' about this hyer Isaac! I mean you,
Christopher!
Yes! I'll swear to it!
S'pose he's lyin', Jase?
Shut up, Tarly! I'm a judge of men. He hain't lyin'. I can read
it in his eyes!
I swear it! I swear! I cried. I never knowed till now that it was
God's war and that's a fact, boys!
And I fetched my hand back from the cold, wrinkled leather of
the Book and they stared at me a hard moment more and then the
black-haired one reined up and the rest followed and they crashed
off into the brush without another word and I stood there for a great
while wanting to sing a hymn or shout or fall down and give thanks.
For now all the fears and terrors and lusts of those black loft nights
seemed blown away at last and I went back up through the rhodenden-
dron toward the orchard in the lambent gold of early afternoon,
thinking: If I can't understand it, at least I can atone; at least I can
make it clean in the service of the God I have wronged and perhaps
even, upon some strange field, upon some distant day, I will come
face to face with the father of her and he will give a name to it and
say a pardon and give me peace at last. And when Nancy saw my
face when I came to the dooryard a half hour later she read it all
written there, I reckon, the same thing she had seen gathering in the
firelit eyes of giant Isaac in those long wordless months and it was
the first time I had ever seen her lift her apron to her face and weep.
So, it seemed, this was what I had come all these long miles
to find: a meaning and a salvation and sometimes throughout
those singing April days that dwindled to the time of Isaac's de-
cision I would turn and cock my head to windward, certain that
I had heard the beckoning rattle of the war drum. Isaac sensed that,
too, and sometimes in those last evenings I would catch him study-
ing me, measuring me for the time and yet he said nothing at all
until that last cold morning came paling at the door. Nancy abided
198


and kept her eyes downcast to board and grass and hearthstone: not
looking either of us in the eyes as if she could not have endured to
read it through again: she who had seen riders go down the road
before and remembered the time when the cripple came back with
the dead man's mule. But I cared little for these timid, pantry specu-
lations and twitched and yearned toward the day of our riding and
I think the only thought I had in all those days that came close to
trepidation was a sudden midnight vision of the golden mask in
Doctor Willie's curio cabinet: the beaten gold face of the soldier
dead and dusted a thousand river years ago. But I dismissed the
vision and prayed. I cannot remember the words of my prayer now
but I know it had to do with Abijah and the Dominion of Virginia
and the damnation of her enemies. And the praying filled me with
God's good anger and I wondered what I had ever been afraid of
before.
Tom?
Yes'm.
Hit will be in the morning.
Did he say that, Nancy?
Hit will be in the morning, Tom, she said again and turned her
face back to the fire and blinked once, slowly, and stared again into
the flame-dreams there.
We had sat by that hearth, the two of us, until long past midnight
and Isaac had been off in the town all that day and when he had
gone that morning he had taken the old wooden clock and Nancy's
Aowered china pitcher and a little bag of silver spoons.
He taken them spoons and that pitcher of mine to sell, she said.
He will buy pistols with the money-one for the both of you.
She studied the flames and tilted her head and I saw the gold ring
of tears in her eyes again though I knew she would hold them back.
Them spoons was my great-granny's, she said. And that pitcher
was my Ma's. They was three more spoons but they got melded the
time the Shawnees burned down Grandpap's cabin. My Ma told how
the folks dug round in the ashes till they found them but they wasn't
nothin' then but little black hunks of silver. I teethed my least one
on one of them lumps but I don't know what ever become of the
rest of them. I mind how you could still read a word in that silver
but I never knowed what hit said.
She sighed and her lips thinned and her eyes widened and filled
with awe at something in the flame.
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Yes. He will sell them spoons and that old clock and that old
pitcher and buy pistols for the both of you. Yes.
It's tomorrow mornin' then, Nancy?
Hit will be in the mornin'. You'll see. He won't say much. He'll
just wake you and ask you if you want to come.
I felt the blood pulse in my throat and my eyes burned with
excitement.
Yes. Yes.
Yes, you'll go, she said. I knowed that long ago, Tom Stranger.
I knowed it even before that day when you went to the woods.
We'll be back, Nancy, I said, feeling huge and manly and com-
forting; but she did not look at me and her lids covered her eyes for
a moment and lay there quivering and then rose again and she looked
at me.
You'll be back, she said gravely. Not him.
Sure he will, I said. We'll whup them Yankees in a month.
And then she smiled and turned her eyes back to the flame and
began to hum softly and there was suddenly something awful in her
humming: a droning, golden sound that was full of death and a
dire knowing.
He won't be back, she said. For I can see it all as plain as I used
to see them little flowers on Ma's pitcher. Just as plain. Lord, just
as plain!
I won't let nothin' happen to Isaac, Nancy! I said, rocking on my
heels stalwartly and reaching out a big hand to pat her knee. But
she was heedless and haunted and hardly knew I was there: speak-
ing, it seemed, to the fire and to the shadows and to the night itself.
Hit's a great long meader, she said. And I can see it stretching
clean to the blue mountains on t'other side of the valley. Yonder
come blue men and here stand the gray. And I can hear the thunder
of their guns like a storm at noon. And he lies there a-wallerin' and
a-chokin! in his gore...
And I shivered despite myself and saw the wild grief fighting be-
hind her eyes. But it did not seem right to contest her terrible thought
and so I said nothing.
Him a-dyin' and you hurt, Tom Stranger! she cried softly, rocking
swiftly, and speaking through trembling lips. Hurt! Oh Lord, I can
see your hurt, boy, but hit will be healed! Yes, hit will be healed!
And you'll come a-ridin' back again.
And she looked at me then, her mouth twisted and wracked with
200


Time will reveal hit, she said softly. I sprang away and stared at
her, lit by fire, and saw her now with that same dread that I had seen
Cathie in the firelight. And yet her face stayed gentle and smiling
before my troubledness.
Poor Tom Stranger, she said softly.
You're like her! I whispered.
Her eyes fell to the floor, sorrowing that she had troubled me and
I glared at the figure of her with the golden hair tumbling in braids
on either side of the wide-rent calico.
Yes! I cried again. Like her. Lord God, sometimes I half think she
wanted it to happen to her!
She did! whispered the woman softly, her eyes closed.
No! No! Don't say that!
But hit is the truth before God! she whispered and stared smiling
above my head as if she saw Him there.
Not God! It was the Devil made me do it! Not God! I cried, and
heard the children stir and yawn in their sleep in the loft above me.
You will understand hit, she said. When you come back, Tom
Stranger! Hit will be revealed!
I understand it now! I see its face plain!
The face of Love, she whispered.
No! No!
And when she turned her face sadly away from me, toward the
fire again, I sprang around in front of her eyes and held up my fists
to her.
Aren't you afraid? I whispered wildly. Aren't you afraid I might
do to you what I done to her that night?
No, she sighed.
No? No, I reckon not. I reckon you wouldn't. For I seen him do
it to you in the heart of the night not seven days past and I would
almost have sworn-Yes, I think you wanted it!
Yes, she sighed.
Then she did, too!
Yes.
Then it was her that was to blame! Her that did the Devil's bidding
when she come to my room that night! It was her that should have run
away-not me! It was my home—not hers!
Tom, she said gently and came toward me with pacifying hands
outstretched and I struck them away and sprang up the ladder and
into the loft and lay with clenched lids and clenched fists and the heart
202


in my breast clenched, too, and prayed to God to let my heart find
again the salvation it had known for those brief days before this
night: the saving glory of drums and beckoning swords and the pis-
tols that Isaac would bring in the morning. I could hear her breathing
softly, standing at the foot of the ladder and presently she spoke.
Tom?
What do you want?
Tom, I won't say no more after this. He'll be home before sunup
and he will ride before the rooster crows.
I'm going! God! God! I would not stay here!
I know that, she said softly. And I want to say this one word more.
For I won't get the chance to talk to you again for many and many's
the day, Tom Stranger. Are you listenin'?
What do you want? What is it?
I just want to say that I hain't afraid of you. Hit is as if you was
part of my flesh, Tom Stranger, and even if he was to walk in that
door yonder right now and see me with my dress torn-he would
understand that, I reckon. And if he didn't understand-hit wouldn't
much matter.
While she spoke the wind soughed in the shingles and the children
stirred in their sleep and murmured her name to the darkness.
As for wanting you the way I taken him that night, she said softly.
Hit's not so. And time will show you the meaning of that, too. Time
and fire and the Lord will show you that, I reckon. And all I want is
you to come ridin' back whole in heart, Tom Stranger. Back whar you
belong. Back to the girl in the bottomlands.
She was still a while more and then she whispered a good-night
and I heard the chair scrape on the hearth while she began the rest
of the vigil of that last night. And I was chastened by what she had
said and lay till dawn paled in the broken roof and I heard Isaac
come up the road at last and listened to his voice and the voice of
Nancy in that last, brief, breathless exchange in the room below,
where the fire had failed and the ashes lay white and cold upon the
morning hearth and presently I heard his footsteps on the ladder and
I thought for a moment: He has come to avenge something.
When I saw his black-bearded, sunken-eyed mask staring at me
through the hole in the loft floor I shrank back a little and then he
thrust the shining pistol butt toward me and I gasped until I saw he
meant for me to take it.
You comin', Tom?
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Yes.
Here's your pistol.
Yes.
I rode the roan and he rode the black and Nancy never said a word
when she came with the young ones and stood by the pump under
the pear tree and watched us ride off down the pearly morning into
the mists and once I looked back after we had ridden a long ways in
silence and thought I glimpsed her still. But it was only a ghost of
red-bud like smoke among the laurels.
And soon the wake-robins browned in the woodlands and the
calico petals of the bird's-foot violet withered in the cool hollows
where mountain brooks leaped and spoke among the stones. Soon
spring, it seemed, had died a-borning like the laughter of a child
rebuked, and all that high Glory I had glimpsed in the faces of those
pilgrim recruits in the woods that day now seemed fallen to a poor
and sleazy measure, after all. The days came and went like the gutter-
ing light of a bivouac fire: days that wound stupidly among the angry,
drilling, dust-choked months of spring in the bleak gully of Harper's
Ferry and now it seemed to me that I had been snatched up by the
gray cloth of my jacket into the cogs of some enormous, cosmic ma-
chinery: something vaster even than the will of those good men who
strove, with a kind of impromptu desperation, to hammer and mold
us into the shape of soldiers.
Isaac, who was born to the saddle, was soon snatched away from
me and gone to ride with Stuart and in those campfire nights I often
lay a-dreaming of him dead upon that field that she had sooth-said by
the fire that night: wallowing and choking in his gore. And where
was War, that glory that had saved me from the meanness of fear
and exodus? It seemed to be no more than a shameful, footsore busi-
ness of drums and drill while the freckle-faced country gals watched
us gawk-mouthed from the terraced streets of the Ferry: that strange
village that seems always tumbling down its hillside. And one night
as I lay in the camp I wanted more than anything in the world to
go to the house of Dulcie on the hill and tell Doctor Willie a thing
I had learned and I fancied him there before me, holding the gold
mask of that other soldier, while I told him that I had discovered
that men go to war to find the lost Abijah. Perhaps they went for other
lesser things: anger, grief or the love of a tree and a house and a
204


stone fence along some plundered road. But it was the indistinguish-
able face beyond the smoke that lured them: Abijah, when all was
said and done. And there came a night, in July of that year, before
the holy Sunday in the meadow at Manassas that I thought surely I
had come upon him face to face when I had gone a-wandering in the
woods alone. It was a night of moonlight almost as vivid as the light
of a dusty noonday and there was a sweetness of honeysuckle and
swamp rose in the laurels and back down in the camp I heard the
green boys singing by the fires and a blowing lonely mouth harp in
the tents. I had gone to the woods to tend to my needs and he did
not see me and I heard his footfall first and fell back, a-crouching
behind a gum tree as he wandered into the clearing and I had my
pistol in my fist by then, thinking at first that Yankee patrols might
have come down upon us in the dark along the rocky South Branch.
And then I spied him: this strange, bleak tree of a man whose face
and eye and beard seemed shaped to the sharp true image of our
childhood image of him: hers and mine. It was the Colonel from the
western counties: who had lashed us the hardest, he who had ordered
the longest and dustiest drills, the one that seemed to have no laughter
in him at all and whose eyes sometimes cursed us and sometimes
grieved us and yet never blinked or broke their stony, steady regard
of us each: like an oak-hewn Prophet seeking the weak among his
sons. And for an instant I thought to myself with a wild catch of
breath: Lord, it is him! It is Abijah and I have seen him all these
weeks and never guessed the secret till now. Yes. It is the father of
her and my search is ended.
Suddenly a dried vine snapped under my foot and his eyes swung
slowly to me in unstartled regard and he saw me plain in the moon-
dappled shadow of the gum tree branches and I wondered at his calm
and thought how most soldiers would have slapped out a pistol and
gone a-blazing at a figure so surprised. Yet nothing about him seemed
moving, except the wild and curious intelligence behind his eyes; and
he studied me a moment longer, calm and unblinking, as if he knew
that he stood wrapped round in a hard and impervious shell of
Jehovah's guardian love, beyond the ambuscade of bullets or of
eyes.
Private, what is your regiment?
Fourth Virginia, Colonel Jackson.
Why are you not in your tent? Taps has long been sounded.
I come up here, sir—to the woods, sir. My kidneys, sir.
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He looked away from me then as if I had faintly affronted an al-
most feminine delicacy about him and then instantly his eyes were
back to me.
When you've tended to your kidneys, private, he said in his high,
country voice, you might give some consideration to your prayers.
And that was all. And never again did he speak to me. And never
again in all those wrathful days that we were to share did he ever
so much as glance at me and yet the memory of that midnight en-
counter survives as vividly as a daguerreotype in my mind: though no
less vivid than that vision of him etched in silver and black upon
the Sunday morning above Manassas Junction, before the Henry
House, in still another woodland, above Young's Branch, and now
my kidneys tended to themselves unbidden and without my leave as
our six field pieces began thundering behind the thicket and the green
boys licked their dry lips and checked their bayonets in the sweet of
that sunup, while round us in the trees birds sang heedless of all
that impended. And now something rent the innocent Sabbath sky
like a knife ripping downward through canvas and a moment later
I found myself with my face scratched and bleeding in a patch of
plantain at the foot of a wild plum tree and knew that I had been
unconscious for an instant and struggled up and felt for my Harper's
Ferry rifle in the grass longside. There is a crisis that lies beyond
fear where the mind moves into a place of deathly calm and the
convulsions of rebellious flesh subside and once I had gotten this small
purchase upon sanity again I heard my own voice cry aloud: I won't
shame him! I will be brave! I won't shame him. And I heard then
the curious high-pitched wail of something remotely human, though
it was more like the squeal of air escaping from a punctured bag and
I turned and saw the shattered stump of a sycamore, freshly splint-
ered, like bone, and beneath it in the buttercups a boy my own age
sat back against the smoking bark, holding his intestines in his hands
like a housewife lifting tripe from the butcher's block. And I sud-
denly was on my legs and they were running in odd independence of
my body and all the day went booming like a drum and great, round,
black comets came hurtling through the thickets round me and
perished in lightning and concussion amid the trees and the sun
seemed rushing pell-mell through the sky one moment and then it
seemed fixed and burning like a dying star on the smudged sky in
the next instant and I screamed hymns till my throat grew ragged
and I felt warm wet life spread hot down my boots and I thought
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that it was blood and did not care because he would be proud of me
for that.
And now on the distant slopes beyond the black ranks of tree
trunks we saw them: the blue multitudes of them gathering like a
thunderhead upon the brink of a rimming hill and one of their black
balls came bouncing through the laurels like something a child had
thrown and lay streaming white smoke amid a mass of men and I
recall their faces fixed and frozen and one hand outthrust like a
claw to ward off the gathering lightning there among the daisies and
then it seemed that I was caught in a shivering glass ball of sound
beyond hearing and I gathered myself up a moment later and thrust
a man's eyeball from off my sleeve and stared with my tongue thrust
out between my teeth in a passion of nausea as the eye fell amid the
grass and stared off to the left of me into the blue Shenandoahs as if
it now served witness to the earth itself and sent visions into the roots
of buttercups and to the mind of God. I cannot remember when it
began: the time of running and each of us struggling to outrun the
other and men's faces wrath-wrinkled and cursing beneath the slob-
ber-froth of maddened horses, struggling in their leather before the
broken, shattered tumbrels and now it is as if each of us had lost his
mind and joined it to the mind of the mob: now we were one flesh,
one organism and our common eye saw the wild and cunning Creole
Beauregard; his stained face gape-mouthed and roaring through his
beard and we had turned back and gone to face the east again and
saw the vast, indifferent torrent of blue and gold spill and break like
a millrace down the slope and then through the rags of smoke I saw
him again: we all saw him: Jackson, high and martyred on his mount.
And the smoke dragged and wrapped itself around him while the
bombs blasted like Armageddon in the broken woodland before the
Henry House and a boy who had played the banjo for us at the Ferry
in the firefly peace went racing down the hill with the blood fanning
out like a cock's feathers from his broken throat and died in the paw-
paws. And we moved, moved, moved toward the blue flood of them
and remembered his face as desperately as the face of a lover: the
soldier Jackson on the bald-eyed mare that minced lightly amid the
tatters of fire and black fumes with the high female precision of a
dancing-master: we clutched that image to our minds: the ragged,
angry head of him like the face of Moses or of God and we could see
him against that raining impact of Federal fire: like a face stamped in
the soft silver of our eyes: his lips cwisted back from his teeth as his
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high voice rasped out rallying words to urge us. On the plateau it was
a little hell. On the plateau we met them and I cannot see it even now
as a whole thing but only as pictures torn away from the whole: visions
with the vividness of life itself but like the shards of a broken
daguerreotype: the blue and scarlet Zouaves wallowing backward in
blood and convulsion down the slopes toward Bull Run like a horde
of dying clowns. And then the backlash of Union recovery and the
fiery fist of God smashing us back toward the pines again and so
there for three hours we lay, hunkering beneath the rim of that dish
of damnation with the sky beyond it burning and raging above us
and I saw the sun once, through the smear of it, and it caught me with
a choke of surprise to see it there, survived.
They taken the Stone Bridge! a voice roared, and I turned and
searched the blackened faces hugging the grass around me and by
my knees I spied a lantern-faced Kentuckian with his fingers digging
hard into the earth and the smile of a daffy child on his lips.
We're done, I reckon! Yep, we're plumb done! he simpered and
took one hand from the soil and dug the fingers hard into my ankle
and let the slaver trickle from his slack grinning mouth. I kicked and
felt my foot strike his face and heard him groan softly and roll away
and then we saw him again: the soldier Jackson, and we had lain
there beneath the rim of the plateau for three hours and it had seemed
like all the time of Man but at last he came riding, roaring, rallying,
and we rose up and went on. And it was past the Henry House and
down the slope and on to Matthews Hill and they were done for.
And yet that night when it seemed that he would be out among us in
the flush of that fantastic victory he was in his tent instead, praying.
Perhaps I will understand some day what chemistry changed my
heart and mind and soul that day, that Sunday above Manassas Junc-
tion, before the Henry House, above Young's Branch. For now I be-
gan to feel the first urge my heart had ever known to return to some-
thing, to belong somewhere, to set down roots and put fourth leaves
in some green place. In November Jackson left us and throughout
the winter of that cruel year and into the red-drenched May of the
year that followed, my thoughts wandered back to the memory of
Nancy in the hills above Romney. Isaac had not died on any field, as
she had soothsaid by that long-cold fire. I had bivouacked with men in
the June after victorious Winchester who had seen and talked with the
208


black-bearded giant two weeks before on the Cedar Creek Turnpike
and they remembered it because he, in turn, had asked for me. I wrote
Nancy letters nearly every Sabbath and she answered in a quaint,
feathery school script that I knew had been dictated to some store-
keeper's wife. I jibed her for the wildness of her prophecies and she
ignored that for all the winter and then one day in the spring 1862
she wrote me that she had seen it all again in a dream, myself
wounded and fallen in a field of struggling armies, and Isaac wallow-
ing in his death gore. And the field's name was Manassas, she would
have me believe and that was foolishness, I knew, for we had already
been there and survived and moved on: Manassas was a field forgotten
and chronicled in history now with the plains of Balaklava and Water-
loo; those Bull Run banks where the Zouaves had wallowed and
hemorrhaged in their circus-parade silks were grown over with green
grass now, rippling in quiet summer winds and the blue Shenandoah
slept behind the quiet, cold chimneys of the Henry House above
Young's Branch. And yet she swore that its name would be Manassas:
that field where I would fall and the black giant, too, and only I to
rise again.
I never wrote her after that. And we moved on into the months
and prayed our way through the weeks (he had taught us that: the
quiet god pacing through the flame at Manassas with his lifted, bleed-
ing palm) and there was never as much fear as there was dullness
and monotony and the waiting, waiting, waiting which is the gray,
dun, underfabric of war, however rich with fire and scarlet its petit-
point may be. How can I describe how the flame of those months had
annealed and tempered me?—how can you understand how faint and
unreal that terrible struggle in the midnight room had come to seem
after I had watched men die on the stone fences of Maryland turn.
pikes and green hill boys bubble out their lungs in the goldenrod
thickets of Malvern Hill? Those old fears: they seemed remote in-
deed. As for Aunt Sarah and Cathie: I knew not if they lived or
died and that in a time when I knew little enough if those around me,
nor I myself, were of the quick or the dead. It is strange and bene-
ficent:that manner memory has of healing itself over with a grass of
forgetfulness. Kernstown and M'Dowell and all their fiery baptism
are not so fresh in my memory as are certain incidents of quiet and
innocence, or happenings of a quality of spiritual terror beyond the
color of musket fire or the sound of bursting canister.
I mind a night in East Virginia in that summer of 1862 when seven
209


of us had gotten lost from the Brigade and gone up a side road to
billet down for the night in a deserted stone farmhouse. The door
was open and the ashes were cold on the wide stone Aags of the
hearth and the soup was mildewed in the kettle. Like as not the
family, Northern sympathizers, had filed at the first sound of Jack-
son's patrols along the echoing valley roads; gone with the buck-
board and the favorite mare and the family cow, with a treasured
rocker and the harmonium lashed to the wagon bed and the children
wild-eyed and pissing with excitement. It was for us a night of
Roman luxury: to sleep on a feather tick, to feel wood creak with
home sound beneath our feet; to drink spring water from a dipper.
I think Jackson would have had us shot if he had known and I think
it would have been nigh worth the cost: we were a sorry, footsore
gang. There was cornmeal and there was a single, solitary mildewed
ham in the smoke house and a Dominick rooster crowed miserable in
the brush-filth above the pasture and Jack Stoner went up and ferched
him and wrung his neck and we ate him, too. And when night fell
on the hollow we were mortal tired and no one had a mouth harp
and no one could remember a song and by the time the sun had
fallen in the blue pines above the branch the house was still and yet
there was no sound of snoring, for each of us lay awake a long while,
listening to that silent sound that home makes: the quiet that is more
profound than the lull between gunfire, more sweet than the silence
of the midnight bivouac: the silence that there is when a roof lies
above, and walls clasp the air around you. And down the hallway
somewhere came the steady wooden ticking of a little maplewood
Grandmother's Clock that the family had wound upon some night
before their exodus. Because it had been somebody's home and we
were borrowing that; using it for a while, and it was good even
though it was not ours: that feeling, that silence, that solace in the
walled peace. The ghosts of old meals and old laughter still laced the
hallways and the wallpaper cracked and its big flowered shapes
glowed faintly in the darkness like faces of children who had grown
up to die perhaps on the plateau above the Run or at Kernstown or
across the Chickahominy in the time to come. And then the clock
suddenly stopped ticking right there in the darkness; stopped cold
and made not so much as a whir: it had run down, the days had
dwindled since some woman's hand had wound it, like as not the very
moment before she ran to the wagon with the least child in her arms,
wailing and wet-britched and the man scolding her for her slowness
210


and she had taken the clock key with her, dropped it into her dress
between her breasts because it was the foolish kind of thing a woman
would do: a symbol of something she would take away and yet leave
behind her, as well. And we lay there, three of us in the big oak bed
in the master's room and the four Tennessee boys downstairs on the
carpet before the fireplace (we had thrown dice to see who got the
feather bed); we lay there listening to that awful void of nothing
that lay beyond the moment when the clock had stopped ticking and
each one ashamed to get up and go find the key and wind it again;
to admit that it mattered in those years whether clocks ticked or not.
And after a while no one could stand it any more: that sound of
Time that the silence made, and we could hear the Tennessee boys up
and stirring in the parlor below and rummaging in the closets for a
candle and directly one of them came up the stairs and stood in the
doorway with the little flameshine on his war-tired boy's old-man
face.
Us'n's been talkin', he said. I reckon we better hadn't stay here.
Us'n's decided we orter hunt up the rest of the boys 'fore Ol' Jack
misses us.
And nobody said a word and we all got up and got our broken
mud-heavy shoes back on and gathered in the hallway outside and
just before we went down the stairs Jack Stoner went over to the
little Grandmother's Clock and peered inside the case and shook it
and then looked at us as silly as a sheep-killing dog.
I reckon the key got lost, he said, and we went down the stairs of
that roaring silence where Time had died in the night and before we
left that kitchen the Tennessee boys washed the skillet at the pump
and scoured it with sand and hung it back on the hook and we filed
out into the light of the new moon.
Oľ Jack ain't sleepin' in no feather bed tonight, said Charley
Lovelace.
But nobody answered that and we stood a while wondering which
way to start walking again; it seemed like we had walked a long way
since God had driven us out into the war; a long while. There
was a broken willow-ware milk pitcher on the stones by the barn.
I will remember that: the way it shone blue there in the silvering
dust of moonshine: the woman had wanted to take that with her, too,
because it meant something like the clock key between her breasts
had meant and I reckon she wouldn't know why she had wanted to
take it either, because maybe there wouldn't be a table to set it down
2II


She's a woman full of strangeness, he said, not looking at me.
Visions and Speaking With Tongues and such.
Well, I said. I've heard her speak of strange dreams.
Yes, he said. Yes.
He drank a suck of water from his canteen and wrung his beard
dry with his palm and studied the fire a while more.
Whatever is to be, he said, is to be.
Yes, I said.
And Ol' Jack needs us ever' one, he said suddenly, his voice rising
a little.
I think I knew that night, by that fireshine, by that strange short
interview that Isaac would die in the weeks near at hand. By more
than anything in the presagement of the mountain girl I knew it by
some strange quiet in his face. We had come together for a moment
in the midst of that terrible War: like long-parted brothers united for
a moment on a island in the midst of a storm-wracked sea. And that
night, after taps had blown faintly through those woods where the
clank of myriad steel things subsided into sleep and men tossed in the
grip of fevered memory and fear and the tease of foregone passions,
I thought of what kindnesses he had meant to me, what a savior he
had been to check me in my wild exodus on that winter's morning,
on the mountain road, and take me to his children and woman and
his hearthfire. And yet, as he moved—as we both moved—toward
some far vaster peril, I was helpless to save him or myself either.
Time and her bright handmaidens: the stars, would deal with that.
And, meanwhile, we would be far too busy with the soldiering life
to have much time to think. For it was drill the livelong day through-
out those weeks of that summer: close up and guide right, halt,
forward, right oblique and left oblique (and this, in its way, was
the worst of war: the dull drumming commerce of it). And it was
halt, forward, guide center, eyes right, dress up promptly to the rear
(and there were some there, newcomers to the Brigade, whose wide,
wet country eyes yearned for the battles to come). Steady, double
quick, charge bayonets, fire at will. (And learn to shoot as hard and
fast as you can tear and ram cartridge, country boys, for your green
young life may hang on that.) And so the days went dwindling
through the glass and we marched and heard the mutter of rumor
like the brush of bird wings past a blind man's eyes: that Lincoln was
dead, that McClellan was dead, that Bragg's men had gone so sour
on him they had mutinied and hanged him by his own belt, and
213


sometimes there'd be heard the murmured breath: “That Fool Tom
Jackson" and there was more than one nose bloodied for that, because
we were men, for the most part, who would have died for him and
breathed our last all full of smiles.
Marching again now, through mile after mile of August sun
with no breath of wind to bless it, marching and aware now and
then of the shuffling tramp that marching makes: the strange, scuffing
heartbeat of war. And when the red sun burned low in the dust to
the West of our ranks we suddenly came upon him where he had
ridden to the fore to review us from the roadside: that figure of him
that some of us had known from the very beginnings, at the Ferry,
and later at First Manassas and Kernstown and M’Dowell: sitting on
his sorrel with his knees hitched up like the stirrups hung too short
and his old dusty hat pushed forward and the sun glinting on his
brown face. And he held his hand up to signal us not to shout lest
the Yanks should hear us but the outcry was already gathering in our
bellies and our chests and we could not have held it back if we had
wanted: the battle-yell that roared up like glory in our throats and
shook the trees and echoed up and down the August meadows and he
let the faintest of smiles move his lips and his eyes shone at that
sound. And that night we halted near Salem village and Zack Ramsey
and J. W. Magrill and Sam Chatham and I threw ourselves on our
blankets and slept in an old family graveyard by the road and it was
that night that I dreamed that I had wakened (perhaps my eyes did
really open enough to see that silhouette of the stones in the moonlight
of that place)—that I had found myself suddenly and unaccountably
among the square sandstones in the graveyard on the hill by Dulcie's
house. And I knew somehow that I was not one of the dead in that
place but had merely chanced to lie down there for a little sleep and
now I awoke and saw the wild moon above me in a rag of clouds
and silhouetted against the blue dust of the night above the river
hills I saw the stone angel beckoning from my mother's grave and I
jumped to my feet and stared wild-eyed round me, thick with grief.
For now the names on the stones were plain: etched deep and sharp
in the wind-smoothed slabs: the names of my Aunt Sarah and of
Uncle Joe and of old Suse and Toot and of Dulcie and Cynthie and
Doctor Will: all the names of those I knew to be living now: and
the names of Nancy Bone and Isaac, too, and the white stones stretched
214


out across the ridge as far as my eyes could scan: a forest of white
stones to the end of the night: to the rim of the cold, sweet moon's
illumination. And then I heard a breath among all that desolation of
death and turned and saw the stone angel on my mother's grave and
heard the granite rustle of her cold wings and saw the figure increase
till it was big as I: and its stone lips curved in the sweet breath of
beckoning and its hands outstretched to me and I saw then, moving
toward it irresistibly, that it was a figure not strange to my dreams:
that it was she: that it was Cathie. And I went into the breadth of
those sandstone arms and felt them suddenly come alive and warm
and saw her moon face close-up and with her sweet mouth curved to
the shape of a kiss and her fingers curling round my shoulders and I
suddenly grew cold with fear and yet it was not a fear of her that
sent me staggering back from that embrace: it was the sudden cer-
tainty that somewhere among that forest of stones was one that bore
a name of vast and terrible import and I stumbled off among the wild
flowers and felt my boots splinter the little sticks of flags that had been
set upon the graves of old and half-forgotten soldiers and while her
soft, stone voice trailed me, pleading and grieving on the wind, I
ran among those stones, searching for that name, choking with some-
thing deeper than shame, full of that terror that the name I sought
was the name of someone I had slain. And my blood seemed to know,
as I neared it, that the stone was close at hand and at last I came to a
towering sandstone slab, half lost in the lower branches of a wild
pear tree, and I fung myself upon it and traced the awful letters
with numb, trembling fingers while the moon came out from behind
her torn cloud and cast a cold light through the wild tangled branches
of the pear tree. ABIJAH. And I began to scream. ABIJAH. And
now I felt a hand shake me and someone cursed and I started up on
my elbows and opened my eyes while Zack Ramsey shook my shoul-
ders.
Wake up, Christopher!
I was dreaming.
I know, he said, falling back in his blanket.
I'm sorry, Zack.
Hit don't matter, he muttered. I git the horrors myself some
nights.
He lay a while more and I sat up and scratched my beard and felt
my chin wet with the slaver of sleep and saw the moon behind the
spire of the church beyond us.
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And then I began to itch with discomfort that I might have
said something in my dream that Zack or the others would think
strange.
Was I hollering in my sleep, Zack?
Eh?
Did I say anything in my sleep?
No.
Are you sure?
Hell yes, I'm sure. I been lyin' here awake for the past hour. Too
plumb tuckered to sleep. You just went to mumblin' and sputterin’
the way a feller does when he's dreamin'. And then you went to
moanin' and thrashin' round. And that's when I woke ye!
Thanks, Zack.
T'warnt nothin', he said. I git the horrors myself some nights.
He was still a while more and snored some and I thought he was
gone and then he stopped snoring and cleared his throat and I knew
he was awake again and as full of thoughts as I.
Where you reckon we're marchin', Tom?
I don't know, I said.
Me neither, he said. Some of the boys said they figured Old Jack's
gonna march us clean to Washington,
I reckon he might, I said. And then the war'd be over, Zack.
Yep, he said. And then the war'd be over.
And he studied that a while and then he chuckled.
You know somethin', Tom?
What?
I'd be lonesome, Tom! he chuckled. It's a queer thing to say but
it's gospel truth-I'd be lonesome.
What? Lonesome for the war?
Hell no, he said. Lonesome for Old Jack. It just wouldn't be
nothin' but a dirty, mean, bloody war if it warn't for Old Jack. By
damn, he makes a man feel like he's worth somethin'-—I don't mean
personal worth somethin', exactly— What I mean is he makes a
body feel like he was part of somethin' eternal!
Yes.
He was quiet a while and I heard him snap off a stem of sour
grass and chew it silently in that dust of moonlight.
I'd foller Stonewall Jackson right through the fiery old gates of
Hell, he said, and I didn't answer him because I knew he was saying
it to himself and in the next breath he was fast asleep, his jaw slack
216


against the dusty threadbare cloth of his worn butternut sleeve, and
the chewed grass stem fallen from his teeth.
And at last we had come again to that field, that meadow, where,
for so many of us, it had all begun and for nearly that number, it
would end. I do not think I fully realized where the War had brought
me until, crouching in the grass with my face close to that earth, my
eye espied a strangely streaked rock that I suddenly and vividly re-
membered having seen upon the morning of First Manassas. Yes, we
had come back: had been swept back like jetsam by the curious tide
of War and not a dozen yards to my left was the man named Isaac
who, I knew with a certainty beyond question was to die before the
day was out. The fight raged throughout that day and it seemed that
the whole of the Union Army had come pouring in upon us from
Centreville. Zack Ramsey died in a ditch near the Henry House at
noon and J. W. Magrill and Charley Lovelace fell at dusk on Stuart's
Hill and died a-screaming before the night came down. As for Isaac,
all that day he steadily kept tearing cartridge with his big yellow teeth
and ramming his wad home down the long musket barrel and firing
away from the shelter of his laurel thicket.
Where's Arkansaw? I heard him yell once at dusk and someone
behind him answered: Hit back yonder. Gone up the spout with the
rest. Him and Charley and Blakey. Up the spout!
And I never heard mortal speech from him again and all that night
I lay in the ditch with the remnants of us, knowing that it had hap-
pened and listening to someone up in the grass wheezing and choking
and trying to holler for a litter bearer or a little water and throughout
that red flickering hellfire night I prayed for the mortal soul of him
and felt the chill of sweating, grinding fear like malaria in my bones.
And in the morning I watched till dawn was pearly on the cedars
along Manassas Road and the big batteries opened up again and I
got up and went searching for him. Some of the boys were yelling
at me to get down and the rest were too busy fighting and I went
stumbling down that ditch below the laurel thicket and saw his
musket lying shattered at the stock and yet no sign of him and I
clambered up the rocky incline of the ditch to the laurel bush
where he had been and there in the thicket I glimpsed him in that
split second when the air filled with the organ-chord roar of a mighty
black swarm and I saw them rise into the hot morning sun, like
217


jeweled, blue-bottle smoke: ten thousand Aies that had come to
swarm in what was left of the giant when the cannon ball had come
bouncing through his laurel. I hung there in the rim of the ditch,
retching, and trying to recognize something of him in what was there
and I managed to pray a little and yet there was no tears in me and
I fetched his watch from the mess of his jacket and marveled that it
was whole and wiped it clean and swore to him that I'd take it back
to his woman and his children and then I crawled back to my post
with a curious, shameless, happy fire aglow in me: as if something in
Life had come to a logical end; as if, indeed, for the first time in all
my years I had seen a Pattern working out.
Whar was you, Christopher?
Up the ditch. I went to find Ike Bone.
Did you find him?
Yes.
Gone up the spout?
Yes, I said. Yes. Just like she said.
Like who said?
But suddenly I could not remember that name, her name, and
there was no time for remembering names and we went up the grass
into the blue wall of them and a minnie ball creased my leg and sent
me tumbling into the bloody buttercups and I lay there staring into
the sun until the smoke was too thick to see it any more.
I cannot remember grief at the death of Isaac. I cannot even re-
member any sense of shame at not feeling it. It seemed that his death
had been so set and fixed in the scheme of all the spinning moons of
almanac and soothsayer; of all events that had been before and all
that followed after, that it transcended sentiments of loss or mourn-
ing. Sometimes in the footsore nights of bivouac in the autumn of
that year I would remember him with a sense of fondness in retro-
spect and yet, for the life of me, I could never summon up the vision
of his face. And I would shut my eyes against the bivouac fire and
feel the throb of pain in my fresh thigh scar and try to remember that
day, that fateful return to the field by Manassas Road before the
Henry House and it all seemed as stiff and unreal as the pictures in
Harper's Weekly. As for Nancy, I determined that I would go back
when the war was won and Old Jack was done with us and give her
Isaac's watch. In my fancy I would plan to live there forever in that
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cabin above the blue valleys and help her raise the children and it
even occurred to me after a while Nancy and I might get to be a
comfort to one another and after a while she would stop grieving and
I even fancied that she would call me to her side some night by the
fire and hand me Isaac's watch and tell me it was mine to wear now,
that he would want it that way. In the months of that winter it seemed
to me that nothing could prevent these things from coming to pass
and I would think with a bitter kind of joy that I was done forever
with the dark girl by the river and with Aunt Sarah and all of the
shame of them and of the bleak terror that once I had so blindly
fled. And I kept all of these thoughts close within my mind and
spoke to no one of them. They say that wars make comrades of men
and that may be, although I had no close friend in those years. I
think there is only one mortal to whom I would ever have addressed
my feelings and sometimes, in my dreams, I would fancy going to
his tent and standing outside until he sternly noticed me and invited
me in, after a bit, to sit on his bunk and talk for a spell. And I never
spoke to ary mortal about those fancies either: for the very notion
of such intimacies would have had me laughed or drummed out of
the Army forever. And yet, I reckon, there was no man among all of
those in the Army of the Valley who had not had some such dream
come a-wandering through the stillness of his bivouac thoughts. There
was little time for dreams but it was a time when men needed dreams
and it was dreams that he gave us. It was a cold winter; a hard winter,
and yet there was a core of something gold and proud in each man
of us when Old Jack came riding up the frosty road and the winter
dawn thrummed and thrilled to the sound of the long roll by the
drummer boy's tent and men sprang proud to their muskets. A proud-
ness. And nights we huddled shivering in blankets scissored from the
flowered rugs of country parlors and kept that proudness like small
prayers against the dark. And when the spring of eighteen sixty-three
came there was something bred and flowering out of the blood and
stink of October's Fredericksburg. April and a washing wind and
the green ripple of the Wilderness grass beneath our feet and sun
like a peddler's calico among the leaves.
The winter had been, for the most part, a peaceful time, and word
had even run round among the men on Christmas Day that the
General had danced the polka up at Corbin's house and tossed chil-
dren high and kissed them in the candlelight and at the Christmas
feast, it was said, some clever valley housewife had shaped Old Jack's
219


favorite gamecock in his pat of butter. And on days when the world
had thawed enough the men fought snow battles on that bleak terrace
above the Rappahannock. As for myself, I kept apart from these
frivolities, filled with a strange solemnity: a sentiment that may have
sprung from the death of Isaac. Even on nights by the roaring, scarlet
campfires when the Fifth Virginia band rattled off her quick-steps and
"Old Dan Tucker” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” I could only stare off
into that frozen white world that seemed the very ghost of all who
had been lost on the bloody road from the Ferry. And the gentle
winter at Moss Neck ended and then, in the last week of April, the
whole Army began to clench itself again for movement and the
winter conceits had been shelved away and the Christmas candles
boxed up until another time. And the voices murmured by the
bivouac fires.
You reckon hit's as many of them up yonder as they say, Red?
Pshaw! Hit don't matter if they's a million of 'em. We whupped
twicet that many at Fredericksburg!
I know that, Red, but they was a nigger boy up at the sutler's
wagon this mornin' and he said they was a host of Yanks acrost the
Rap that could whip Pharaoh's legions to hell and back.
Pshaw! Old Pharaoh never had to tangle with Stonewall Jackson.
I reckon that would have made good Scripture readin'! You just wait.
Old Jack's got a trick up his sleeve. Him and Marse Bob'll show them
Yanks a trick or two they hain't seen yit!
And, rested from its winter's hibernation, surly as a suck-pawed
bear growling down his lair, the Army of the Valley itched and
strained for orders. And Isaac's death still seemed to me a curious
spiritual comfort: an ordering of events within the stars; the ordain-
ment of things to be that was almost a kind of safety to me. The face
of Nancy came to me on many's the night: an oval of gentle reassur-
ance floating through the snoring velvet of the tented darkness and the
smell of angry, restless men. She had ordained his death and my
wound. Nothing more, it seemed, could touch me now. And then
came a morning in that last week of April when five of us had stood
vedette in the cedars on Deep Run. The green, winding skirl of frogs
down in the bogs seemed to blanket the stillness and the fog lay so
thick that a man could scarcely see to count his fingers before his face.
It was nigh morning and the fog had begun to pale and my mind kept
thinking that when it cleared at last I would find myself on the river
again, in the bottomlands. C. D. Collins had gone down to the creek
220


a man does
we fell back fori blake, who had
to fill his canteen when the first snap of movement in the brush-filth
across the stream alerted us all.
Hark there! someone whispered from the laurel thickets behind me
and I stared hard with my musket leveled, barely able to make out the
gray shape of Collins down in the cattails with his canteen out-
stretched, frozen now with his long pistol in his fist.
Christ Jesus! screamed Blake on the slope behind me and I saw
the red flames lick in the gray and heard the roar of the Sharps rifles
in that instant when he screamed and I saw Collins go down and
heard him thrash in the shoals the way a man does when he's finished
but not yet still and Blake, who had screamed, wasn't even hit at all.
And we fell back firing and saw them, hordes of them in that aquatint
of fog, and when we had gotten back thirty yards we heard a flat
Vermont voice hollering to them to drag up the pontoons quick be.
fore we got word back. Blake went all to pieces and I will believe
to my last breath that it was the fog that did it and not the fear of
them: because there was no shape to see or fire at in the dawn blur
and nothing had changed except that the frogs were quiet now
and we could hear the Yanks in the creek: their boots splashing and
the brush breaking as they dragged the pontoons down and over the
stones. They were over now and I think their own vedettes had
guessed there were only five of us on the banks there because they
came through the brush now and the big Sharps rifles were booming
in the morning and the thumb-sized minnies were cutting and whin-
ing through the leaves and now Blake choked and went down and
sat coughing like a man that's caught a lung full of campfire smoke
and Cayce Jarvis was behind us tearing cartridge and ramming and
firing into them as fast as his big hands could move.
Git up, Blake! I cried and dragged his arm and he screamed and
fell back between a rotten stump and a young maple tree and some
breath of morning swept up from the brush and cleared the fog
between my eyes and him and I saw where the Sharps slug had gone
clean through his breastbone and out his back.
Tell Ma-! he screamed. Tell Ma that~! Tell Ma—!
And then he glared wildly up into the clearing mists and went up.
And then someone kicked me with all their might in the hip of my
bad leg and I turned and fell, cursing them as I went, thinking it was
Cayce Jarvis or the one they called Blue Beef that had kicked me and
I knew then that it was a minnie that had done it and not Cayce who
was dead by the rail fence, with his hat over his face like a dozing
221


I'm bleeding to death!
You've pissed your britches, too! he bellowed and whipped the
horse up the road, and then he roared with laughter. You've pissed
your britches, Tom Christopher! Be Goddamned if you hain't!
It was a quiet place, a home place and in the cool mornings they'd
take us out of the big rambling stone house with the honeysuckles
winding like girl-hair on the porches, and let us lie under the shade
of the pin oaks. And the two old sisters whose home it had been
would come out and read poetry to us whether we wanted it or not
and help the doctors and stand by with their wrists wrung tight in
their aprons and suck in their lips and shake their heads while the
doctors dressed our wounds.
Is that thunder?
Lie still, private!
Is that thunder, sir? It's only May. It don't thunder in May in these
parts, does it, sir!
And you would get no answer to that but the scalding touch of the
swab and you would shut your eyes against the sky, against the green-
ing season, and hear only your pulses.
How soon will I get up, sir?
There would be no answer to that either and you'd lie there listen-
ing to the scrape and thump of something beyond the rolling table-
lands, like the movement of enormous furniture and know that Old
Jack had moved again and needed you and you not there and sick
with the twist of both wanting and not-wanting to be there, too.
Springtime. Early May. And the honeysuckle like girl-hair round the
windows of the old stone house that they'd made into a hospital and
the two sisters who came and read Whittier to you and worked their
gray lips and puffed their gray cheeks and twisted their wrists in their
aprons while the doctor dressed your wound. Honeysuckle smell laced
through with the bite of Phenol and that other scent, sweet and dread-
ful which is the evanescent breath of Death itself. And on the third
day they let you sit up and the sisters came with mutton broth and
more poetry and the littler of the two of them sat by you a long while
before she let her hand creep out from beneath her apron and held
up the stiff, rattling daguerreotype of the child in the forage hat and
the Sharp's rifle bigger than him it seemed and asked you if you
might perhaps have seen him in the days back before Fredericksburg.
223


And you shook your head and she thrust the picture back, almost
shamefully, and sucked in her lips and you knew somehow that the
boy was dead (there was something even in a daguerreotype that told
you when they were dead).
And on the third day the sound of the big furniture beyond the
hills deepened and the wagons began rumbling down the road with
the wounded and broken ones and some that might well have been
spared that last jarring trip for they had gone up before the tailgate
was lowered.
What's up, Reb?
Old Jack's in Chancellorsville!
God! God! I've got to get up! Is it fierce, Reb?
Hit's poppin' some. Where'd you git it?
In the leg. Nothin'. Where'd you git yours?
Same.
Is your leg bad?
And now he laughs and his lips sweep clear of pink at the effort
and you can see his teeth fighting a little with one another.
You might send for it and see, he whispers and holds the blanket
back and you see the swab of foul bandages around the stump below
the knee and you smell the death smell again and turn away and lie
listening to the scrape and bump of the big furniture over the greening
brow of spring. And presently the sisters come and watch while the
doctors fetch the newcomer into the kitchen and you hear him give
one lusty, keening yell before he bites the bullet and faints and the
sisters stand under the honeysuckle on the stone porch and whisper
to God and Marse Robert and shake their heads.
Upon that day when I walked the yard on the little sister's arm and
bit my tongue to hide the soreness of my wound they brought in three
wagonloads of them. She left me by the smoke house and went to
help tend, puffing her cheeks beneath her prim bonnet and whispering
softly to herself.
That night when the candles were out and all the light in the
world was the thin bar of yellow beneath the kitchen door where the
doctors toiled and cut and cursed beneath the swinging coal-oil lamp
I heard them whispering and heard the great name of him and heard
the cold fear in their voices while the wisps of chloroform wandered
among our pallets like the ghost of his own travail.
Did you hear it, Reb?
Yes.
224


tors came to fetch us out into the sun. Caged and hemmed by them,
I thought of nothing but escape now and schemed night and day for
the best means to effect it: alert for that interval when no one would
see and I could wander casually out of the infirmary and borrow a
horse and be off to the west again. For now it seemed that only Nancy
could hold the answer to my salvation: only she could explain that
series of terrifying breaches in Providence that had, by now, nigh
driven me out of my mind. And through the days word slipped
through as to the state of Jackson. They had taken off his left arm
Another said it was a leg. A third rumor had it that he had been
captured, but I doubt if any who had fought with him gave much
credence to that.
He taken a turn for the worse, Reb!
Where'd ye hear?
I heared the sawbones whisperin' in the bandage room!
God! God! If we'd been there I'll vow, by God, hit wouldn't never
have happened.
Pshaw!
Lord, Johnny! What'll happen to us if Old Jack goes up!
But the other does not answer. He lies with his face to the wall and
his lips move silently and he is trying to remember the woman-words
of prayer that are burned and torn so sorely by those black years that
his mind can scarcely make them out-like the scrawl on an old letter
from Jesus. Word came the morning of the eleventh. We heard it:
the outcry of the old woman (the littler of the sisters) out under the
gum tree when the horse came up the yard.
Ah God! God! He's gone up!
; And for a while the great stone house, so rich with its own heritage
of death, seemed to suck in its breath and hold it in a faintness and
the men were struck dumb and then, as if in expiration of that breath,
a murmuring moan breathed like a wind against the silence.
We're done for! Done for! wailed the tow-headed boy from Ken-
tucky and swung his stump out from under the blanket and struggled
to be up.
. And the doctor came with a male nurse and fetched him back into
the bed and gave him morphine till he snored. And none of the others
broke. But none spoke either. And, as for myself, I could not be
certain whether it was grief or fear or something more terrible than
either that froze me stiff and staring in my sheets. And I lay so
for that whole day and watched the sunset in the window of that
great, grieving room and knew that if I were not on the road by
226


morning I would be out of my mind by then, and fetched away rav-
ing, like as not, to some army bedlam in Richmond to live out my
days strapped to a madman's cot. The towhead from Kentucky had
come around by then and lay for a long while asking for water and
when the little gray sister fetched him a dipper he lay a long while
humming an old gospel hymn to himself and then studied the ceiling
a while more.
Hit's like news that God was dead, he said to the quiet.
Then he hummed a while more and his voice was fighting with his
throat to keep from sobbing and then he stopped and studied it all
over a while more.
All we been through, he said. All that for nothin'.
Marse Robert'll win the War, Johnny, someone whispered, but
there was a quiver in that voice too.
When my Pap died, said the towhead, to himself and to the shad-
ows, and lef' all us twelve kids—hit war the same feelin'. I declare!
Lee's no fool! whispered the other.
I declare! said the towhead again, at this sudden enormous parallel.
Hit war jest the same.
When the grub came around nobody ate and when it was nearly
candlelight time they all began to talk again, with a false hearty cheer-
fulness now: tales of times they'd fought beside him, legends of field
and camp, legends, dreams that, already, had begun weaving them-
selves into the fabric of that history which lives by firesides and in
the pantry histories of nations: dreams that would be jawed over at
crossroads and by home hearths in the dull and lonely years ahead.
And nobody never knowed where he got them neither and that's
a fack, Johnny!
Got which?
Why, the lemons!
Lemons. What lemons!
I jus' got done tellin' ye! The ones he chawed on when the fightin'
was thick. You mean to say you never seen Stonewall Jackson settin'
up there on his little sorrel suckin' on a lemon?
I got one! laughed a voice down the line of cots and simpered
nervously for a minute. One of ol Jack's lemons.
We all turned our heads and saw him fumble around in his haver-
sack and fetch out a dried-up little lemon and hold it up just as the
little gray sister came and set her candle on the spindle chair by the
kitchen door.
Sure nuff? Is that one of 'em? How'd you git it?
227


He drapped it during the first wave at Fredericksburg. Hit rolled
out of his saddlebag and rolled right down the gulley and struck
against the foot of a big gum tree.
And you stopped shootin' to pick up a goddamned lemon!
Keep a civil tongue, Reb. Hit's no night to profane the name of
God.
Nor of Old Jack neither! muttered someone else, and the little
fellow put his lemon back and lay with his head cradled on his hands
and stared at the shadows waving on the ceiling of that old dining
room and we all stared a while and then talk about the lemons began
again and I could somehow fancy him there sucking that lemon, like
the lean acrid teat of his fierce Calvinist faith. And someone spoke
up: marveling where he managed to get them when the supply offi-
cers didn't even have potatoes or onions, let alone lemons.
I reckon he knowed some sutler, said one.
And they were still a while. And the moment of false camaraderie
was gone and the coldness stole among us again and Colonel Staple-
ton came in then with two of his aides and stood there in the candle-
shine a minute with his hat off and then he took off his sword and
laid it on a bloody Chippendale table.
Let us all pray, he said and knelt and the ones that wouldn't have
had anything to kneel on if they had been up, lay there with their
hands folded like children home sick from school and listened while
the bugler blew taps out by the stables and I rose softly and walked
out of that dark place: moved out into the pale blue mists of that
early Virginia dusk and no one saw me, no one cared, and I moved
past soldiers kneeling in the yard, among the bloody bandage pails
beside the honeysuckle roots by the stone porch and I went walking
off down the country road away from it; away from the house where
the broken and deserted children lay hands-at-prayer upon their beds,
away from the hills that muffled the great scrape and grind of the
big furniture. When it was nigh midnight I knew that my leg would
stand for no more walking and I woke a Scotch farmer from his spool
bed and traded him my pistol for an old windbroke mare. I rode away
down the shattered valley toward the distant blue mountains again,
down the long lane that I had come, it seemed, ten thousand years
before, and now I wept to myself in pain and grieving and nameless
want while the little sliver of new moon lay on the night clouds over
the Wilderness like the blade of Abijah's bright and broken sword.
228


AND so I filed again—went tumbling pell-mell, slack-jawed and
M eyes a-staring down the world's green running road. Nancy
Bone's prophecy had been a safety against Time and Death. Isaac's
death had been, by that token, a fulfillment. Fate had been my shield
and Destiny my good guardian. And then my second wound and the
death of Jackson-events unforeseen by Nancy Bone or by God Him-
self, I now supposed—these had held up, at last, before my affrighted
eyes the plain black fact of my Mortality. And now as I filed west-
ward on that road I came to know that fact whose knowing is the
end of youth: that no soothsaying by hearthshine, no blessing of star-
eyed Nancy, nor touchstone nor talisman could save me from the
worm at last. We are born to die and being born begin the dying
forthwith. Moon and sun and stars. Moon and sun and stars: the
twinkling iteration of day and night: whispering past like the pages
of a farmer's almanac leafed softly through above our heads. Plant-
ing and harvest and the fallow field at last—and our thin life winding
out like the poor thread of the town seamstress, weaving itself into
a fabric more perishable than the crystal morning gossamer of meadow
spiders. I, too, could die and would die, when that time came, and
lie beneath some wind-worn epitaph and even my stone angel would
herself come at last to eddying dust beneath a housewife's morning
broom. Yes, upon that road, beneath the tent of spring I met Death
riding: spied him pacing almost gaily toward me in the scorched
limelight of the child's kingdom of Confederacy that was, even now,
burning bright as Troy, behind the hills from which I fled—beyond
the fire-stained windows of the inn at Guinea Station where cold
Stonewall lay stiffening beneath his quilt. And now it seemed that I
229


must go to Nancy and tell her of these things: of that great revelation
and the awful knowledge that these weeks had brought to me. Now
I must show her that I could endure beyond the safety of her proph-
ecies. I had met King Death upon a road and watched him pass me
by and knew that he would come again in time and knowing that,
endured. And so it came to pass that this journey which had been, at
first, a flight, became, at last, a pilgrimage and quest. And a warm
new want possessed me and in the cold May mountain nights I would
pass by the honey-gold windows of farm cabins and turn a-yearning
on the barebacked mare and swear to my soul that I must soon find
my home or die.
The long ride broke open the fresh scar on my hip upon the first
day's evening. By the second day the wound was puckered proud
and throbbing. And on the third day I halted by a mountain creek
and eased off my trousers and worked loose the stiff-black bandage,
the calico print still faint beneath the stiffened black corruption (for
that bandage had late been the skirt of some gentle Richmond lady)
and now I saw my whole limb, to the ankle, streaked and shiny-
swelled with poison. A hollow beyond the road stretched up between
the horseshoe of twin hills and at its head I saw the smoking chimney
of a stone farmhouse. And so I stood a spell and studied my predica-
ment and waves of vertigo swept through me and small lightnings
quarreled and prickled in my leg. I turned my eyes away from the
smoke of that chimney. If they were Union folk there I should be
turned over to the Federals. If they were Southereners my fate would
be sorely worse: fetched away to Harper's Ferry, like as not, and
forthwith hanged like a horse thief. And so, seizing my last stick of
courage I hobbled to my waist in the icy water of the swift, crying
creek while a bluejay on a broken spruce above the far shore shrilled
and mocked my torture. But the chill of that water seemed only to
focus the agony more keenly. At last, biting my lip with anguish, I
struggled back onto the boulders on the shore. Now as I leaned,
whimpering and gasping, against a giant rock and began easing my
trouser leg cautiously back up the swollen limb, my poor mare stopped
tearing grass at the roadside and lifted her ears and whinnied and
stomped her foot. Five mintes later I shuffled stiffly to her side and
considered how I might mount her. I knew that it must be done
quickly, in a sudden vault and a quick thrust of my good leg, with
the bad limb swung over her back. And so I set my teeth and shut my
eyes and sprang. Even above the roar of my own pulse I could hear
230


stood up. Ah, I could manage that, at least. And now to take the
first step toward freedom, toward the little casement of the doorway
to the tiny stairs. And in five hard efforts that left me drenched with
sweat I closed my hand at last against the framework of the doorway
and stared down into the single large room that lay at the foot of
the stairway. There was plainly little chance of escape just then. The
room seemed filled with women although when, at last, I counted
them I found that there were only six. At the sound of my fainc
footfall on the threshold at the head of the stairs each seemed to
pause for the breath of a second in her task and turn her head toward
the noise and then swiftly resume. They were busy at looms and upon
the frames of these crude instruments shone the bright earth-dyed
tints of homespun cloth. Six women to face. Six women who com-
prised that gauntlet I must run and for all I knew six good Yank
husbands to come riding back to the house at nightfall. I stood a while
more, curious why they had not spied me by then, and tried to fit
my thoughts together into some pattern of sense. I had no notion how
I could have come to this place. I had no idea how long I had been
there. And if they were Abolitionists I could see no reason why they
had not turned me over to the Union authorities. The pain in my leg
was dull and obscure now and yet suddenly I was overwhelmed with
faintness and a fatigue so oppressive that I scarcely made it back to
the bed again before I slipped into a black and dreamless slumber. I
say "dreamless" because I believe now that the sensations which
drifted through to me in that sleep were the consciousness of living
things about me in that room.
The dark pit of sleep enclosed my soul and mind and yet that
sweetness of herbs that I had sensed on waking now seemed stronger
and closer: fresh and living as the breath of woodlands blowing out
at dusk. The midnight wool of sleep baled round my eyes and mind
and yet I knew as surely as if I had seen them that now gentle hands
carefully ministered my wound and now kind fingers drew the quilt
about my chin and then, beyond the midnight of that dreamless spell,
I heard the sound of woman singing softly and the creak of a rocking
chair. It was that sound that sprang like a spider on my mind and
woke me in a glare of dread, my head pounding. It was night. The
moon lay in the pine trees beyond the window and cast a dust of
blowing, living light through the small window. I saw the woman
by the sill, her face lifted to that light, to that lunar blessing, her eyes
blue and wandering in its smoky mists, while her throat pulsed and
232


trembled with her song. There were no lamps nor candles shining
and the house was hushed: the purr of the looms was stilled. And I
lay a great long while watching the woman in the window and won-
dering if her man were sleeping in the next room and why he had
not fetched the boys of the homeguard to hail me off to jail. Yet,
something in her face; something in the eyes brought back to me a
curious sense of safety from another day; from other eyes. I stared
at her through that penumbra of moonbeams, through the dusk of
midnight in which, flowerlike, her face seemed floating. And sud-
denly I knew that the woman was blind: her eyes pearled and vacant
like Uncle Joe's had been. And knowing that seemed to overwhelm
me with a sudden drowsiness born of a sense of perfect safety. And
immediately I fell asleep and heard all night in the vestibules of
memory the crying of the lost child Peggy.
Are you feeling better today?
I opened my eyes and blinked in the glare of mid-morning sunlight
and saw the young girl by my bedside with a blue china bowl of grits
and milk steaming in her cupped fingers.
Why yes. Yes, ma'am. I reckon so.
Your leg was better yesterday, she said. Miss Nicely dressed it last
night and said the fever was gone out of it.
Is she the blind woman? I said and sat up and reached for the
bowl, and began to watch the doorway suspiciously again for some
sign of soldier, blue or gray.
Yes, laughed the girl softly. Yes, she's blind-Miss Nicely is.
Well, she's mighty kind to have bothered with me, I said. Is she
your aunt?
No. Oh no, Miss Nicely's not my aunt! laughed the girl and
turned to the window and let her fingers stray in the brushing billows
of the breezing curtains.
Is your—is your Pap off to War?
She was still a while and turned to me then and fixed her eyes upon
the bedboard inches above my head.
There's no men about this house, she said softly, gravely.
The dark-haired girl was blind too. Downstairs in the great room
beneath the stairs the looms sang their country rhythm and the
pleasant voices of women murmured, intermittently, above their task.
I'm right sorry, I said humbly. I didn't notice it ,
233


You didn't know, she said. It don't matter a whit. We're not any
of us touchy.
Then there's just you women here, I said.
Yes. There are eight women in this house. And we are all of us
blind.
Eight!
Yes. There's me and Miss Nicely. And there's Miss Morley and
Miss Shackleford
Eight of you together-here-!I gasped, incredulous before this
strange menage of the sightless women.
Yes, she breathed, almost shyly, aware herself at the wonder of it.
And you are wondering how eight blind women came together under
one roof.
Yes, I wonder.
It was Miss Nicely's home, you see! Born blind, she was! And her
sister, too. That's Miss Abigail. Both of them blind from the morning
the midwife dried them on yonder washstand. Ay, blind, and helpless
and unwanted. There is few men in this world who will take a blind
girl for wife. Few!
And her lips paused in their speaking and parted in a little gasp
of wonder and I saw printed plain upon her face the joy of some-
thing; some knowledge that though there were indeed few men who
would want a blind girl, there was one. For an instant a light shone
in her sightless pupils and then she composed her mouth and smiled
for a moment and went on.
And so Miss Nicely's mother sent her to school to learn the
weaver's trade and she come home and taught Miss Abigail all her
fingers had learned. And brought a fine loom all the way from Phil-
adelphia. Oh, it's still one of our best! We have nine looms now, you
see.
I lay back with the half-eaten grits colding on the chair beside my
bed and moved my leg and found to my delight that I could move
it and that the most of the soreness was gone.
—and when Miss Nicely's father was killed at the Alamo it was
a lucky thing that her and Miss Abigail knew the weaver's trade. A
lucky thing I'll tell you. Because their mother died of cholera morbis
the following spring and here they were left-poor dears—with a
few picayunes of pension money and not a cent more! Two blind
darlings in the world alone. And so they set about to weave cloth
234


for the county! Oh, the stories they tell of those lean hard winters
at the first.
I listened to her tale with half my mind and with the other con-
sidered my situation in this new light. In this house of blind women
none knew the color of my jacket. Perhaps none even knew that I
was a soldier. With luck I could be up in another day and on the road
again.
Three other blind women came to live with Miss Nicely and Miss
Abigail in a year or two. And the word went round the counties and
each spring brought another blind girl riding up the road with a rela-
tive or slave to see that she made the journey safe. Until now there
are eight of us. And we are each of us eyes for the other.
How can you get about the house?
Sir, do you look in your pocket every time you reach for your
kerchief?
Why, no! I laughed. I know it well enough.
There! she said. You understand then!
I eased myself up to a sitting position and wriggled my toes again,
pleased at the new freedom of my blighted limb.
And now, I said. If you please, can you tell me a little bit of how
I came here-how long I've been here—?
Oh, Miss Nicely heard you moaning and wailing something awful
down in the rocks of the run below our well. She went down and
found you there—your face scalding with fever and your mind all
a-raving and your mouth full of grass where you'd chewed it in your
travail.
I-don't recall.
I reckon not! You've been laying in this bed in a delirium for nigh
a week now!
A week!
A week this very night! And you may thank Miss Nicely that
your're here at all, Private.
And I lay there chewing that one over for a spell: so they knew
that I was a soldier. And what would their knowing that mean to me?
I speculated, and listened as the blind girl babbled on.
Dear me! she cried. It was lucky Miss Nicely had a good store of
herbs in the cupboard, I'll tell you. It was herbs that drawed the fever
from your leg, Private! And from your poor wandering, fevered brain
as well!
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And when, I said softly, does Miss Nicely reckon I can be on my
way again?
Back to your Company, Private?
No, I said.
Home?
I stared hard at the spinning sun motes in the blue of the wandering
wind-swept curtains of that little window and the notched petals of
the white dogwood in the tree beyond the sill.
Home, I breathed, and knew not within the heart of me in what
uncharted province that place might be.
By Sunday, said the girl. But you must mind not to move about on
it too much for a day or so.
She paused a while and blinked her sightless eyes and a scowl
faintly furrowed her bland child's brow.
Was it a wound from—from battle? she murmured tactfully,
Yes.
Ah, this terrible war. This terrible, terrible war.
And her face suddenly blanched and the lids round her sightless
eyes widened in dark dread and she rose, nervously plucking at her
little apron, and curtsied like a child and was gone. And Miss Nicely
came at lunchtime with a plate full of ham and grits and a peach
cobbler for dessert and throughout the day the others came by my
door, smiling softly to themselves with their faces lifted to the open
doorway, almost as if some other sensate living eye of heart or soul
behind the benighted brow of them could see me and they giggled
and whispered in the hallways after they had passed, lonely women
in a black kingdom with neither light of sun nor touch of man and
I think I was, for that little time, something of both to them. In
three days I was up and around my room and on the morning of the
day following, Miss Nicely and her ancient sister Abigail came with
a fine gray homespun jacket and trousers and vest: a suit they
had made me with their cunning eyeless fingers and Miss Nicely
curtsied, blushing, and said it was in gratitude that they had
done it.
Gratitude, ma'am?
Oh, yes! cried Miss Abigail (her voice seemed like sound within a
tiny bubble that had not quite broken: a liquid faint bleat. childlike
and yet darkly wise). Your wound was for a great cause, young man.
A great cause! The blessed Union!
Oh.
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The blessed, blessed Union! cried Miss Nicely. And the great fight
against the black, black sin of Slavery!
I-I thank you kindly, I said and weltered in a sudden shame that
angered me at myself. I had deceived them. And yet I had not done
so with that intention. The children of that dark kingdom had sup-
posed with sweet naivete that none but a Union soldier would come
dying at their door-yard. I think their kindness to me had endeared
me to them: gilded me with a shine born of their own good hearts.
In the kingdom of the blind man is either thief or hero. And when
they left I fingered the good stout woof and warp of that cloth that
their hands had made through the long, thrumming loom-mornings
in their golden kitchen where the sun drifted and paled unseen and
unheeded in its orbit: shadow of cloud and leaf and bird upon the
dogwood branch unseen. Time to them was many things but it was
not light: they marked no hastening bony finger circling doomfully
upon the sundial's face. Time was kindness and trust and love and
they had fashioned this suit painfully and cautiously: plucking care-
fully at every seam and measure of my old Rebel butternut duds and
scissoring out the patterns like children sent to play in some dark
closet by a wrathful Grandfather God. Nothing, it seemed to me,
had ever moved me so much: no gift I had ever known. And I was
ashamed: not of the blood-spattered and sweat-rank gray uniform
that they had washed and laundered (feeling it to be blue with their
fingers and missing, miraculously, to read with their flesh the Con-
federate Infantry "I" embossed on my brass buttons). But ashamed
rather of the crippled thing within me: the fact of taking love and
not knowing how to give any shape or measure of it in return.
And days passed and I had been up and around now for con-
siderable stretches at a spell: the woodland-magic of Miss Nicely's
herb-wise fingers had worked a miracle in my wound: it was sound
and neat enough now to bear the strain of riding again. And the last
days among them I wandered round the strange, lampless house and
saw the thousand wise ways that they had made the world serve them
as eyes: the yarn knotted for them in different numbers for different
colors and the face of the wooden clock, glassless, so that their fingers
could brush it at morning, noon and dusk and know where the sun
stood above their house. There was neither dog nor cat about that
house but on my first venture into the yard I heard a raucous cry and
turned and spied a huge black bird perched in the bole of the little
dogwood tree: a crow venerable as Doom himself: cynical and with
237


wing of the house. Now he moved from the shadow of the tree and
I saw him plain, the blue of his jacket and the gold wink of brass
buttons and the long Navy pistol in the holster at his hip and even
as I gasped softly a white figure broke from the green cloud of azalea
bushes that framed the porch and ran down the yard to meet him.
Antonia: she who had brought me my breakfast on that first morning.
And I suddenly remembered her words and the misty smile of secret
triumph in her voice: "There is few men in this world who will take
a blind girl for wife. Few!” and I heard his whispered guidance as
she stood for a moment in the ghostly billowing folds of her long
nightdress and strained her moon-white face for some sign or sound
of where her lover stood.
Here! Here, my love!
And her throat uttered a soft sob and she turned and ran un-
erringly to where he stood and they moved into the shadow of the
chestnut tree and there was no sound for a spell and all I could see
of them was her white shape, bisected by the blue of his arm.
Que quieren? cried the crow again and fluttered to a point of
vantage on the stone fence. Que quieren?
Hush! whispered the girl through the shadows. Oh, hush, you evil
creature!
And now the mockingbird (in the azalea bush now) began his
wiry tirade against the black Mexican and then as suddenly as he
had begun, stopped, and broke from the bush and soared down into
the long meadow toward the road.
How long? I heard the girl say softly. Are you back for a day?
For a week?
No, he said. For no time. I had to see you. I taken time without
leave nor nothin'. I'll ride back tonight.
She whispered something then and there was a murmuring of close-
ness and he said something else that I could not hear and she mur-
mured her answer and they went down the fence to the small apple
orchard below the stable and the mockingbird began his tomfooling
far off now in the woods along the skirt of the rocky run. I knew
then that my escape depended upon how quickly and quietly I could
get out of the house and down the path to the road, without even
bothering after my mare. I hung breathless at the sill, thinking furi-
ously, desperately, and watching the black shadow of the crow, like
some hideous Mayan sentry pacing the dung-clotted path up to the
stable. The Yank's mare tore grass by the fence and whinnied and
they went dow could not heaturing of close
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Jack, you're hurting my arm!
Answer me!
Yes!
And you say he's not a Reb?
-
How do you know that? How would you know?
I could hear her gasp of shock and her wound at it: the way he
had told her that a woman with no eyes was only half a woman after
all was said and done.
He was hurt, she said. We would take in a thief that was hurt!
Worse than a thief! he whispered sharply, and turned then and
looked toward the house with the long Colt shining in his fist now.
His uniform, she said sickly, hangs yonder on the line where Miss
Abigail washed it and hung it out to dry this very mornin'. And even
if it is gray, Jack, you must-
He went and held up the jacket where it swung in the faint breeze
beneath that staring moon and saw the butternut and cursed and
turned to the girl with the pistol in his fist.
Where's he at? Upstairs?
Jack, listen to me!
Que quieren! cried the black sentry and walked the stone fence and
eyed the shadows of moon and leaf.
"Tonia, you've sheltered an enemy! Now stand away! I'm goin'
to the house to fetch him out!
Listen to me, Jack! whispered the girl swiftly. Let him go! He's
leavin' tomorrow-ridin' west, he said—to his home. He's got a
girl there!
And I hunkered there in shadow of moonshine, between the wall
and the vine and heard her words with new trembling.
Every man has a woman somewheres! said the man. I don't see
where that matters.
Jack, listen! Let him go! Think if it was you comin' home to me!
Think of it, Jack. This girl Cathie-think of her like me.
Cathie! I breathed the word despite myself and clapped my fingers
to my lips and hugged the moldering stone of the old wall and
smelled the breath of green night in the vines against my face.
—all the time he was ravin' with the fever! she raced on. Cryin'
her name in the nights—and sometimes by day. Listen to me, Jack!
There's been too much grief and killin' already in the land. Let him
go!
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scream of a dying horse that I had not heard since the last day of
Fredericksburg. He fired again and I heard the ball shatter into the
stable door and now I tore his rifle from the saddle holster and
scrambled down into the cover of a whitewashed stone wall that
abutted from the foundation of the stable. In the sour grass I lay
breathless, sighting now down the barrel of the heavy new Starr
carbine, seeing his moon-defined silhouette plain against the moon-
washed stone of the house. He had knocked Antonia to the ground
and she lay there, staring at the moon, her face silly as a child's with
shock and disbelief and now he fired from the hip again at some
chance flutter of moon and leaf and the ball struck the stone three feet
to my left and whined away into the moonlight like a mad yellow
jacket. And then he began pacing slowly and fearlessly down the
barnyard toward the place where the tree-shadows began and sud-
denly the mare thrashed her hooves violently as if in some final
desperate onset and then stiffened and was still, and still he came on,
his boots lifting lightly and cleanly, on and on into the very perimeter
of the moonlight's ending, where the shadow of Death began. And
I began to pray, not, strangely, for myself but for him: that he would
stop, that I would not have to kill him. I thought: Because it has to
end. The killing must end sometime—somewhere.
He stopped by the body of the cold mare and fetched out fresh
cartridges and broke his pistol, heedless of me, and reloaded and then
turned slowly, his eyes feeling out each shape of stone and leaf and
stain of moon on grass and clay and horse dung. I knew he had not
seen me when he fired suddenly: the heavy pistol leaping in his hand
and the bullet thudding off into the earth by the stable door.
Step out, Reb, he said suddenly. I've got the pistol and you got
the carbine. I'll not fire till the count of three. It's a fair fight.
I bit my lip and counted my breath: one, two, three, four.
You can shoot me down now if you want, Reb! he cried.
Antonia lay sobbing in the grass by the porch and by now the
blind women were stirring and wandered frightened in their black
house.
I don't want to kill you , I said softly, and he whirled and fired
a wide shot that knocked stone chips and whitewash down my collar.
He came toward my voice now, toward the stone fence, the pistol
shining long and blue in his big fist and when he saw me he grunted
and swung it down to fire and I killed him with a single shot between
the eyes. I lay for a spell, spent and sick and my ears ringing from
243


the pike and his tattered jacket so worn and faded by the brutal
alternations of sun-blaze and rainfall that it was neither Union blue
nor Rebel butternut any more: but merely the nondescript and hue-
less rag of his own defeated spirit.
Many times I came upon a group of these outcasts of War: silent,
stumping bands of men whose gray and dusty faces did not look at
one another, and whose sunken weary eyes barely lifted from the
dust long enough to watch me gallop past: men with faces ashamed
of some enormity behind them, eyes that seemed searching for some
treasure they had lost in the dust of that very road when they had
ridden that way in a gay spring long before, with a snapping banner
above them whose color they would be some months remembering.
Once one of them hailed me and, recklessly, I turned back and rode
up to him and he asked me for a chew and when he saw that I had
none his eyes resumed their inspection of the dust and he said dumbly:
"By God, I swore one day back there I'd give my good right arm for
a chaw of Virginny plug and I give my arm and I never got my
chaw!" His faded sleeve flapped as he moved on past me and the
two boys with him said nothing and nobody laughed. Sometimes at
dusk, when the perfume of the swamp rose drifted up from the hol-
lows, like the ghost of a girl, I would ride close by a mountain cabin
and turn my nose to windward and draw in my breath till some drift.
ing scent of supper: of biscuits or grits and gravy or frying meat came
wafting up the birdsong twilight and, often, I would drop all pre-
cautions and go up to the stone stoop and beg my supper and receive
it, more often than not, from the lean hands of some good woman,
widowed by War, and eat beneath the grave eyes of her five fatherless
lambs and, sometimes, I would be the first man the youngest of them
had ever seen. And there would be no questions and after a spell the
oldest girl would come shy and stiff-backed with courtesy and a candle
in her hand to light me to the hayloft of the stable and I would bed
down there and fall a-dreaming with my eyes in the cold moon: that
light which had been my lantern upon so many nights.
In the first week of July I came within sight of the chimney pots of
Romney and, skirting that bustling, martial hamlet, rode into the
mountains toward the cabin from which he and I had ridden on that
long-past, fatal morning of the spring two years before. When the
mare rounded the bend in the winding, dusty road and I saw the
cabin for the first time, my eyes sprang so full of helpless, happy
tears that the whole day ran a-swimming in my vision. Nothing had
245


changed. The great pine stood upon its bluff and shouldered the
steady tide of high ridge wind and on the slope below I spied, im-
mortal among its buttercups, the board that marked the least one's
tiny grave. No morning smoke curled from the chimney but that did
not dishearten me and I rode round the fence and up the high grass
toward the threshold with the sure knowledge in my heart that I had
come home at last and that the lorn road of hopeless search lay far
behind me.
Nancy?
I believe now, thinking back, that it was the echo of my voice that
first told me she was not there. Speak one word against the door of
a deserted house and hear its empty echo: know in an instant that
no one waits behind that door, that no ear turns and quickens at your
voice, that no hand reaches for the latchstring and no mouth shapes
for welcome nor for kiss. She was gone. The wind said it. The house
said it. And the bleak board of the least one's grave grieved mutely
in the cradle of the unremitting mountain wind: the tide of mourning
that flowed ceaseless from the distant seas: smell of fish and salt
mingled with the witchery of mint and mountain laurel to conjure
a smell of distance and of loneliness. And I struck the deaf door
with my fist. Once. Twice. And then a hammering with both fists
till the skin of my knuckles burst and bled.
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
I heard a voice then that was not the wind's and, turning, spied
an old woman on the road, with a yellow basket of ginseng on her
arm, bound for the market at Romney.
Hain't nobody there, stranger!
What?
Hain't nobody lives there no more! she hollered again. But the
cabin's anyone's that wants hit!
I choked and swallowed and fought my voice to keep it even.
Where'd they go?
She shook her bonnet and put her basket down among the butter-
cups and labored stiffly up the overgrown path, mumbling, and rub-
bing her snuff-stained gums with a long yellow finger.
That cabin, she said again, is anyone's that wants hit! But nary
soul will spend a night under that roof! Word's got round hit's
haunted!
Where'd they go?
How? she cried, cupping her hand to her ear. My hearin's poorly-
246


Where'd they go!
Who? the gal?
Yes! Her and the kids?
For answer the old woman waved her finger at the whitewashed
chimney: to letters fashioned with a stick dipped in red wagon paint:
“Gon to Texes.”
Who went to Texas? I gasped.
The widder Bone! cried the old woman with a prurient wink. Her
man Ike got killed over yonder in East Virginny in the War! Him
and the boy, too!
Boy! What boy?
Why, that one they taken in off the roads! The one they called
Tom Stranger!
Hah!
The both of them! she chanted, her eyes squinting with the drama
of her tale. Killed in Gen'l Lee's army! I heared the boys a-tellin' of
it down at Mister Tatum's store a week after the gal Nancy went
West! And I heared more, too!
Heard what! Tell me! I cried, wanting wildly to grab her old
shoulders and shake the tale loose at a single jolt. But she went
rambling on, with a loquacity rare in a mountain woman, and I held
my peace.
The cabin's haunted, so they say! And hit ain't Ike Bone's ghost
that haunts it neither!
Whose then?
Why, the boy Tom! she cried. And there won't nary soul spend
a night under them shingles! Though the gal come to town the night
before her and old Hackberry went West and said she'd left the door
swingin' wide for ary soul that wanted to move in. And within a
week's time-
Went West with who?
Why, with old Vergil Hackberry! The week after she got the word
from Richmond that Ike was killed-she got married again!
No! No!
Hit's the gospel! Why would I lie? Verge is a good old man! A
wheelwright by trade! Lived down on Frenchman's Run for forty
year! Hain't that what's wrote there on the chimney? I can't read
You're talkin' about another woman, I said. You don't mean
Nancy Bone that lived here-
The very one! Her man Ike was dead in the War! And the boy,
247


too! And her left with them kids! So when old Verge come a-courtin'
she said she'd take him!
No!
Yes, she did! And I don't see where a gal like her could have done
ary different! An ol' man he was—Verge Hackberry—too old for the
volunteers or the conscript army or the home guard! And a gov'ment
deed to a land grant out in Texas stickin' out of his pants pocket! By
dog, they was widders here 'bouts that 'lowed Nancy made a right
good catch !
Get away, old woman!
How?
Get away! I roared and bent and fetched up a stick of stovewood
in blind fury and the old one, unflinching, unsurprised at any new
madness of man after ninety years of witnessing it in every form,
blinked twice and turning, moved, unhurried and silent down the
path to the road, to her basket and ginseng and shuffled off to the
Romney market through the sweet mists of morning and was gone,
presently, down that same way that I had lately come. I leaned against
the door jamb for a long spell, the grain of the pine stick cutting into
the flesh of my clenched palm and then, fetching back my arm, hurled
it into the sun.
Whore of Sodom! I sobbed, watching the world and the gold
morning swim in the wash of blind and grieving tears.
Whore! Whore!
And now I turned and put my shoulder to the door and thrust with
all my might and when it flew open before me I staggered into the
familiar kitchen of that haunted place and stood staring round me,
strangling on my wracking sobs.
Whore! Whore! I wailed, putting my fist through the dusty win-
dowpane and stirring up the spinning ghosts of sunlit dust with
every stallion stamp of my boots. And so I raged intemperately round
that room; cursing it, cursing her, mad with outrage at the unspeak-
able betrayal of the dead giant at Manassas: he whose death she had
foretold, I now fancied, with heartless joy at the prospect of cuckold-
ing his scarce cold flesh. And presently I fell back, exhausted, and
with my cut fist dripping, in that same old rocker where, by light of
candles long guttered down and spent, she had used to sit through
the long winter's nights, her needle twinkling and pricking at the
child's sock upon her darning gourd. All else was gone, spirited
away: pots, pans, bed and washstand, footstools and Bible and every
248


there: the straw where I had lain thrawn and sweat-drenched in the
grip of dreams upon those winter midnights and swore that in that
patch of light where the moon streamed through the broken shingles
I saw the laughing faces of the suck-fingered brood; her younglings
smiling and trusting in their sleep, betrayed. And now the house
sighed softly behind me and I whirled on my hands and knees and
peered down the square hole into the room and saw them yet again
upon the bed: wrapped and twined and yearning, gape-mouthed with
lust and eyes filmed with the madness of it: quick-fleshed in their
deed of darkness: her and the giant. And I went down the ladder
again and staggered down the moonlight to the jug again and swung
it up and cradled it twixt ear and shoulder and drank it all: the last
of it, and felt wisdom strike me like a hammer and grew grave and
cunning and sat again in the rocker, belching faintly and conscious
of a slaver in my beard and had no strength nor wish to wipe it away.
WHO-O-O-ORE of Sodom! Ah, sweet Nancy Whore of Sodom!
And now it seemed the house became the whole world's advocate
and snickered at me and I stiffened with affront and glared about me
with bleary dignity.
Couldn't you have waited, Nancy? I whispered to the years.
Couldn't you have waited to be sure to be sure he wasn't ever coming
back?
And now a death watch commenced his slow ticking somewhere
in the timbers of that house: a sound that was the beginning, so seem-
ing, of a split in the good wooden axle of the turning earth.
Why? I whispered to Time, streaming blue through the dusty
windowpanes. Why didn't you wait a spell, Nancy?
And then I rocked a while and giggled some, speculating, and
muttered: "Gone to Texas! Gone to Texas!” and rocked a while more
and speculated and then suddenly fell off the rocker and laid with
my face in the cold ashes of the hearth and heard the moon go
clanking down the hill like a tin saucepan. “Gone to Texas! Sweet
Virginia whore!" I giggled again and slept for a spell and directly
I woke and heard a weeping somewhere north of the night and got
to my feet again and remembered the old woman on the road and
what she had said about haunts. And I wallowed out to the doorway
and got sick on the grass and sat a while on the threshold, holding
my head, and hearing that weeping still faint and pure in my ears.
And over and over in my mind I could hear the old woman's voice,
250


too; hear it plain, saying: "Hit ain't Ike Bone's ghost that haunts it
neither!"
"Whose then?” I said aloud.
"Why, the boy Tom!” her ghost-voice echoed, and I got up on my
two feet again and went back into that room to meet the griever in
the night, oh, child of moonlight, and stood, weaving and hiccupping
softly there in the whirling blue blur of rocking-chair shadows and
knew then that the weeping came from the loft, from the dream-
whispering straw beneath those eaves, and I went up the ladder yet
again and hung atop it, tettering, and caught myself and swung over
into the sweet timothy, face down, and opening one eye, spied the
boy Tom Christopher: the weeper, the griever in dreams, there under
the place where moonlight poured through the broken shingle-
hole.
Tom Christopher! I cried. Ah, God! Tom Christopher, poor boy!
Poor, lost boy!
But he made no reply: poor boy, poor, lost lad. Speechless he
hunched; pitiful, grieving shade: knees drawn up for elbow-rest and
his skimpy, scrawny boy-beard in the cup of his hand and his young
eyes wild and lorn.
Why, you did die out there didn't you, Tom Christopher? Eh?
You are a haunt of sorts—ain't you? And what's that make me, Tom
Christopher? What am I then? Why, I'm just a poor, lost, motherless
wanderer upon the world's green roads!— With my soul gone!— With
my youth dead and turned to shadows!
And the boy-ghost of me seemed so grief-struck at my speech that
he moaned aloud and seemed trying to fumble together his poor,
· wandering moonbeam wits and then suddenly scowling at me,
thumbed his nose in such a gesture of defiance and impudence that
I gasped in sudden outrage.
You're a fool! I said.
You're another! said he.
You ran away! I jeered.
So did you! sneered he.
You ran in fear! I cried. Of what you'd done to her.
You ran in fear! he said. That he'd find out that deed.
That who'd find out? I cried.
You know who! he laughed.
What's his name? I cried.
251


Abijah! he roared, and at that name I sprang forward, fist knotted,
and put my knuckles through the moonlight and scratched them on
the shingles for my trouble.
Tom Christopher! I cried. Come back, boy! Tom! Tom Christopher,
poor boy! Poor, lost lad!
And I settled back again, alone, and cried in my fingers for a spell
and directly I got back down the ladder and fumbled around the black
kitchen, cursing, till I'd found the other jug and had a little swig of
it and corked it back up and went out and sat on the threshold a
while, hearing thunder softly in the west and smelled rain riding the
dawn.
Tom? I called back feebly into the cabin once or twice but he was
gone, faded forever, perished and forgotten, and now the dark em-
pire of the night was ruled only by the rustling mice and the soft
sweet sough of wind. And so I went with my jug hooked safely on
my thumb and roused the mare and stood beside her a while, my head
clearing now as dawn drifted and streaked the hills behind me in the
East, the ridges humped in the night. And presently I was riding west
again to meet the rain from the river; riding with the dawn behind
me, with the light of morning falling shy as a girl's fingers on my
shoulders and the jug-ring tugging at my thumb.
The warm downpour struck me full-face like a lash of memory:
great skyborn seas of summer rain that came a-striding, full of taste
and sense of river, green with river smell and all a-glitter with river
light. Yes, the rain came on to meet me and to whisper plain amid
the thunder of flash-floods in the hollows in the hills below me that
the river was not far to westward: the river and the face of home.
And it struck me full-face like a curse: like a memory whose image I
had long struggled to strike away from the speculations of dream and
waking both. The great betrayal by Nancy had given me the taste
of what must surely await me in the bottomlands. And the rain that
lashed my face could not wash away the thin bitter smile of knowl-
edge: the certainty that man born of woman must live to be betrayed
of her. And I rode on, my mare snorting through the columns of the
riding rain, and thought of Cathie, the great Whore of the World,
wrapped and writhing in cuckolding lust beyond the very next hill,
for all I knew, beyond the rim of the road's rise, in the forests before
the last slope of land before the river. Whores. Whores. They haunted
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me throughout that drunken, wild day's riding. I drank through the
morning and into the storm and when the rain went thundering off
behind me in the east and the sun came out and illumined the far
green meadows round me and the azure empires of the sky lifted high
around my head, I raised the jug and drank till I choked and the
whiskey rose in burning needles through my nose and I sneezed and
swore and thought of all the world's great lusting whores and all
the men aggrieved, betrayed and shamed by them: men whisked away
by Fortune to all the world's far corners, men laboring, fighting, sail-
ing, questing, while behind them their women lay wrapped in the red
grip of lust. Whores. Whores. I drank some more and thought of
them: the red-mouthed country girls who had come a-lusting to the
camps and I remembered the whisperings outside the tents and the
chink of silver in a scented woman-hand and then the struggle and
the gasp in the laurel thickets. Harper's Ferry. Fredericksburg. The
Wilderness. The whores were always there. And I had never touched a
one; and I had sat a-sweating in my tent and leafed the pages of my
mother's Scripture and prayed to be saved from them, from the stain
of lust, from the same deed of darkness that had driven me, mad-eyed
and sweating, from the very bed of home. And yet, and yet, the more
I rode that day and the more I drank and the more the bleak red wafer
of the July sun burned down and cursed my face, the thicker grew the
wild, strange lust in my thighs. So I drank and drank till the jug was
empty and I grew so sore in my belly from the curse of this new
strange lust that it hurt me to ride and I got down from the mare and
fetched back the empty jug and sent it shattering against the stone
wall of a stable by the roadside.
Whores all! I roared, and stumbled in the road ruts. Ever' damn
one! Whores! Whores all! Nancy and Cathie and all the rest!
And now I whirled to face the setting red sun.
D'ye hear me, Abijah? I roared to the rising night wind and the
bright evening star lighted suddenly like the candle in a country
window. Listen to me, Great Abijah! You been betrayed! Betrayed,
d'ye hear me? Because your woman is a whore, Abijah! Daughter,
wife, mother it makes no never mind! A whore, do ye hear me? A
whore! A whore! A whore!
And the echoing of that red word came softly falling back upon
me from the dusky hollows and I shrank from that answering as if
it were Abijah's own bleak voice replying and then suddenly hounds
brayed and a latch flew up and a door creaked open and a gaunt old
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woman appeared from behind the stone stable and stared down at me,
her blackberry eyes snapping beneath her puckered bonnet brim.
Hush that hollerin'! Hush, I say! Hush!
And I gulped and felt ashamed and wiped the word off my mouth
with the back of my hand. But the old woman was not done with
me and came to the main gate by the road and glared at me some
more, with her beagles bugling around her skirts.
You soldiers is all alike! she cried in her clear, old voice. You come
a-ragin' home from the War and they hain't but one thing in your
head. It's a damned caution why decent folks has to hark to your
foulness. 'Deed if my old man warn't dog-tired and snorin' in the bed
I'd have him down here with his shotgun! If hit's a woman you want
you needn't come hollerin' around this gate! There hain't a woman in
this house under seventy years of age! If hit's a whore you want
there's a shanty-boat full of them over that hill yonder on the banks
of the Monongahela. Now git goin' 'gainst I turn the hounds on ye!
Gwan! Scat!
And at that I jumped astride my mare and fled up the hill road as
if she had been one of the dark harpies herself and rode till I had
cleared the hill-rim and could see down the road before me. Lord, I
was drunk and the moon was whirling like a silver dollar in the sky
and I heard music drifting up the warm night like the devil's own
fiddler and saw lanterns a-glimmer on the dark river's waters. Ho, I
thought. If there be whores yonder it's a-whoring I will go! And
maybe Nancy's there. And maybe Cathie's there!
And I rode galloping down the dark road toward the spinning
lanterns and rode down under the willows on the river shore and
fell off my mare and lay a-chuckling in the polkweeds and high grass
and heard girl-voices down on the river, heard the clear, damned
sound of them drifting sweet across the living water in the blue
moon's shine. I heard a donkey-engine somewhere up on yonder hill-
side and the thick night air was rich with the sour smell of fresh-cut
timber and I lay there a spell more listening to my mare tearing grass
by the water's edge.
Where's the whores at? I roared, staggering to my feet and strain-
ing my eyes through the moon-blue mists toward the lanterns behind
the willows on the shore. Ho, Nancy! Ho, Cathie!
And as I went wallowing down through the brush-filth along the
river bank and through the oak-sour breath of the lumber camp I
felt my nostrils quiver at the lacing scent of whisky and scented
254


camisoles. I staggered on apace, knee-deep in water now and squinted
my eyes and stared through the luminous river mists and spied it
then: the little stern-wheel steamboat with the fancy-house hitched
on behind: the little shantyboat that wandered among the mines and
camps along that little river in that black, war-cursed wilderness.
Where's the whores at? I bellowed again and stumbled then and
fell, half in the water and half out of it and lay, laughing and crying
both at once, with my mouth in the mud of the shore. After a spell
the night seemed to come alive with the silver, sweet laughter of
river things and hands were lifting me and fetching me off through
the leaves and presently a warm cloth wiped the mud from my eyes
and I sneezed and moved my shoulders and hips and felt solid boards
beneath them and saw the moon spin in the ribbon in a girl's dark
curls.
What you reckon hit is? mocked a silver voice.
Hit ain't human and that's for sure!
Hush! cried another. Oh, hush, hit's my Lonnie come back from
the War! Hit's my Lonnie! Sho 'tis!
Pshaw! Smell that liquor. He's as drunk as Old Noah!
Hush! Let me tend him! He's my Lonnie! Sho!
The hell he is! But he's not more than twenty and 'gainst he's
washed off he might be right purty!
Shoot! Throw him back in the river is what I say!
Hush your mouth! Mind the tale of the Good Samaritan!
And I lay there beneath a spinning boat's lantern and the pale of
the moon shone through the trees like the mocking face of a laughing
girl and I listened dimly to their tinkling speculations and chuckled
some and sobbed some and suddenly fell asleep. It was deep night
when I woke again and blinked my heavy eyes and saw the red moon
now in a dusty square of quartered window and far away on the
very brim of darkness someone strummed a Spanish guitar and sang
in a hovering, haunting breath of dusky sound.
Where ? Where—? I gasped, staring up, and felt a hand press
me lightly back into the straw tick.
Hush now, Lonnie! Lie still a spell longer! whispered a low voice
and I saw a dark, slender shape glide among the moon-shadows by
the window and blinked as a lucifer scratched and flared in the cup
of slender fingers and watched dumbly as she lighted the oil lamp
and sat in the rocker by the table, hands folded in her lap. She was
no more than eighteen, I judged, with the features of a cameo: flesh
255


pale as whey and hair as black as if eternal night had stained it freshly
and eyes as limpid and dark as the bird's-foot violet. She sat a-staring
shy-faced and yet with a cat's wildness in her dark eyes and now as
she rocked forward in the stain of yellow lampshine I saw the white
scar that from her left temple clean to the lobe of her right,
ear. It was a face of terrible beauty: a face painted there upon the
living darkness and then slashed asunder and shifted a hair's breadth
in curious mockery of itself.
Why was you so long a-comin', Lonnie love? she crooned, and
rocked swiftly in the silence like some dark and loving angel. They
tol me you was dead, love! Ay, love! They said your white bones lay
moldering by your musket on the stone fence of Sharpsburg pike!
But I knowed better! Sho, Lonnie! I knowed you'd come back!
Where's my mare? I whispered.
Hitched to a willow up the shore a piece! But never you fear,
Lonnie love! The Dutchman won't let no one steal her! He's Master
of this boat and he sets up yonder in the pilot house the livelong
night a-starin' down the barrel of his rifle! But never you mind about
that! You just lie there, Lonnie love, and take your ease! Lie there,
love, and let me stare at you! Ah, love, they said you wasn't never
comin' back to me! Love! Lonnie love!
Where am I?
And now the dusky, sundered face smiled a grieving smile and
the wide eyes fell to her open palms, ashamed.
I know what you're a-thinkin', Lonnie love! she whispered fiercely.
You're a-thinkin': What's my sweetheart doin' on a fancy-boat? Ain't
that the truth, Lonnie? Ah, love! Why was you so long a-comin'! If
only you'd come back sooner, Lonnie, —
And now her eyes widened and she bent forward with a hiss of
breath, listening, harking to the night sounds.
Ah! she whispered. Yonder comes Aunt Charity!
And I listened. But all I could hear was the dark water running
beyond the window: the warm river running to the sea. Yet presently
I heard what her sharp ears had early foretold: the whisper of slippers
in the corridor and presently the door opened and an enormous,
white-haired Negress entered with a candle in her hand. She was
hard-faced and proud, with the eyes of a Freed Woman, and in the
white folds of her billowing nightdress, at her breast, there hung a
black crucifix on a thick, silver chain. She stood a spell, puffing, then
fetched back a hank of hair from her eyes and stared first at me and
256


then at the girl and then, without a word, fetched up the clay pipe
that she had carried in her left hand all the while and, holding it to
the candle flame, sucked fire into the blackened bowl, till white smoke
streamed from her proud nostrils. Now she snuffed out the candle
and squatted on the footstool by the door, like a Queen of the
Islands, her black face gleaming in the lampshine, her baldy eyes
speculating, first upon the girl and then upon me again.
I'd not leave a dog lie yonder in the river shoals to drown or be
robbed, she said directly. Praise God!
I am beholden for that, I murmured.
Howsomever, she continued, glaring at the girl. There's to be no
more to it than that! There's to be no business between the sheets
with you and her! I just want that purely understood! We run a trade
here and 'gainst my gals start givin' it away it'd run the whole busi-
ness to a fare-ye-well!
She stared at me drily for a spell and puffed thrice on her bitter
clay pipe and then blinked and grunted, reading my thoughts.
And least you git your dander up at takin' orders from a Negro
I'll remind you that the Dutchman is Master of the Tygart Belle. I
am a Freed Woman and I am in his hire. These wenches is the
Dutchman's whores but I am a Freed Woman and I am in his hire!
Mind that now and Praise God!
And now she turned her whole, vast presence to the girl and I
knew she was done with me for a spell.
Piney, she said gently. Just git it clean out of your head that this
here is Lonnie come back! You hear me, Piney?
Yes'm. I .
Hush now till I'm done! Listen to me well, Piney! That man yon-
der ain't Lonnie!
Yes'm, 1-
Hush! Hush, I say! Leave me have my speech, Piney! You're a
whore. Mind that! A whore. And that man yonder on the pallet
hain't got nary shinplaster to his name for I've been through his
pockets twicet.
Sho now. I-
Hush! I'm not done yet! Can't you be still a spell? He's got no
money I say. And 'gainst I catch you in the quilts with him I'll fetch
you up yonder to the pilot house and leave the Dutchman thrash you
good with the cat! Mind now and Praise God!
And the dark girl's violet eyes flashed and widened and brimmed
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I say, when his britches is off and to hell with your goddamned wars!
Praise Almighty God! Before I come to work for the Dutchman I run
a sporting house up in the mountains at Romney. And that damned
town changed hands more times in a year than I've got fingers and
toes and one night there'd be blue Yank jackets hanging on my beds
and the next night there'd be butternut britches hanging from the
same brass knobs and it was all the same to me! To hell with your
wars! I run an honest trade. Praise God!
Now she staggered up from the stool and waddled to the rocker
that the girl Piney had lately left and fell back into it, her vast flesh
flowing into the shape of it, and set her pipe on the table to cool
and commenced an angry rocking in the lampshine.
That gal Piney! she scolded. Born in East Virginny. Fell in love
with that son of a bitch Lonnie and him with her. Well, he was
jealous as Satan and one night he taken a butcher knife to her (you
see her face!) and run off in a hot rage and joined the Rebel Cavalry!
Killed on the pike at Sharpsburg and he warn't a day past seventeen
when he fell and already meaner than most men of sixty! Piney's just
turned seventeen now! And ever' time the poor, simple thing sees
a pair of man's britches on the road she thinks it's her Lonnie ridin'
back! Pshaw! Hit's a blessing he's gone! Still and all it's a hard, hard
life! A hard, hard, world! Praise God! And if I don't keep a sharp
eye on her both night and day she'll be spreading her legs for ary
jack-o-the-roads that rides a horse and not never ask him for so much
as a plugged, pewter picayune for her troubles when he was done
with her! Pshaw! And how do you reckon I'd earn the Dutchman's
wages if I let his whores serve us thataway? There's rules to every
game, sir! Ain't that so now?
And with that she folded her thick fat fingers and pursed her lips
angrily, squinting and scowling into my face. And now her eyes filmed
faintly over with cozening, mercantile speculation.
What I told Piney was true, she said. You've got nary a red
copper cent?
I said nothing, scowling faintly at her through the yellow dust of
lampshine to know her meaning. When suddenly she dipped into the
billows of her white muslin bosom and fetched out Isaac's gold watch
and held it dangling on its horsehair chain, swinging and sparking
in the lampshine like a heathen jewel: Poor Isaac's stilled watch that
he would need no more, nor would anyone else; the seeking mists of
a hundred bivouac nights having rusted its works beyond the time-
259


telling of any but Judgment's Last Hour. And yet it was gold and in
the black woman's eyes I read the news that it was worth its weight
in lust, at least.
You want a woman? she whispered. You want Piney?
I gave her stare for stare, held in purest fascination at the notion.
And I thought of her whose hands I had fetched it home to hold:
whoring Nancy, gone to Texas in the old man's wagon.
I stared, and there rose in my loins the thunder of a fearful
revenge.
Eh, now? whispered the old woman, and the watch swung, evil
and yellow and shining on its chain of horsehair. Will you have
Piney? Or mebbe the half-breed Injun-Carlotta. Black eye-black
hair-and thighs like a tiger. Eh, now?
Whore Nancy, Whore Cathie: the world betrayed, Abijah molder-
ing in his several grave: the cuckoo moon riding the mountain forests
like a mocking girl. Now, Tom Christopher? Now shall you seek and
find again the black deed? Now that you have met Death riding on
his midnight road, seen the child's kingdom falter and fall, seen
violence penultimate, and men go weltering in the last red flood of
all, are you afraid of the men go weltering in her and fall, seen
And now the dark face clouded and furrowed faintly in a puzzled
scowl and the heavy underlip sagged in that momentary disappoint-
ment of a thwarted peddler.
Hit ain't worth much! she said. I needn't tell you that, sir! Hit
don't wind no more and the works is busted. What's a watch worth
but for the telling of time—except the gold! Answer that!
The gold, I thought, and watched the swinging yellow disc on its
horsehair chain and heard the thrum of the guitar and the voice of
the soft singer like a voice from the night's own deep womb.
And hit's low-value gold at that! she cried. No more than five
dollars' worth i'll allow! And that's the price of a fine wench like
Piney—for the night! Mind now-not just a quick tumble, sir, but
for all the night long! See how high the moon rides yonder? There's
five hours till the dawn! Think, sir! That golden, dusky gal— limbs
twinin' round you yonder in the tick and all the more lovin' for her
thinkin' that you're him! That you're her Lonnie come ridin' back!
Eh, now?
And while I pondered it, she sat staring the good, long while,
a-rocking.
Very well then she snapped and the watch suddenly gathered like
260


an anchor on its chain and disappeared into her fat palm and she
held it out to me. Take it then! I'm not a thief, at least! I offered
you—!
Yes, I whispered suddenly, and my voice was far apart from me:
Yes, I want Piney! Keep the watch and send her to me!
Hah! she cried. I knowed ye was a boldy boy!
And she rose with an aery and delicate gathering together of all
that vast volume of flesh beneath the billowing muslin and snatching
up her pipe and candle went shuffling and humming off down the
corridor. I lay still and the fumes of my drunkenness hung yet upon
the meadows of my mind like an early mist as I harked to the old
woman's voice off yonder in the hidden chambers of the houseboat
and the girl's voice like a silky whisper mingling through it. I
shivered and lay, trembling and remembering the fireshine of the
winter room where Cathie's white foot had come a-stepping and her
dark hair tumbling round me in the cold room's breath. Hah, who
was that? The girl already? No! Not so soon. Give me a breath of
time yet!
And I rose quickly and went to the lamp and cupped my hand to
the chimney and huffed my breath and felt the good dark fall round
me close and moon poured through the quartered, cobwebbed win-
dow like an elfin dust and spilled like a girl's gown on the rough-
grained floor. The moon? Hah, the moon is a whore herself. And I
knew then that Piney had been standing in the dark doorway for
a long spell now; had been there, for all I knew, when I had run
to the lamp to kill its flame. For as my eyes grew shaped for darkness
her vision came to me through weaving wisps of dust and moon: the
spider light, the witching light; across the checkered quilt of that
poor, shameful bed I watched her, arms a-dangling, the corner of
the moonlight checkered on the hem of her gaudy, gingham dress;
and her small feet white and naked on the boards and her toes, shy
and curling, waiting to be bidden.
Lonnie, I knowed it was you! she breathed, and now her gingham
ghost flitted through that spare oblong column of the moon and Aung
herself upon me and her poor mouth grieved and twisted on my ear
and her breath was like a storm.
Lonnie love! Ah, God, Lonnie, I knowed it was you! I knowed
ye'd not stay away! Ah, love, love! Hit's been so long a lonely whilel
And her lips fought through my beard to find my mouth and still
it with her own, and my fingers leaped as if galvanized at the hot,
261


And I sprang to the window and felt my nails dig into the dusty
wood and pressed my lip against the rough-grained sill.
Come here beside me! I whispered. Look yonder! On the other
shore! There! Yonder in the fog!
And she came on tiptoe to the quilts again, and stole on hands and
knees and peered beside me, across the sill.
There! He's yonder! Don't ye see him?
-
No, look! Hah! There! He moved!
Lonnie, you're so queer since you come back!
Yonder there! See? His horse just moved behind that gum tree!
See him?
But if she saw, she would not say; and if she did not see, then she
was blind; for he was plain and purely lit upon that river bank: proud
and living yet: Abijah! Yonder riding in the blue light of that sum-
mer moon! And down I flung myself into the hot, snarled quilts:
rich and musky-sour with the still-fresh sweat of lust, and pressed my
fingers to my face and shook with choking sobs, while Piney's
fingers stroked my neck in helpless comforting. And after a bit she
crawled down and lay against me as a hound will do to share warmth
in winter and we held each other for a spell, lost children damned
in our separate dreams, each seeing in the other someone who was
not there, and suddenly I slept, seeming borne up suddenly into that
pure darkness behind the moon. And when I opened my eyes again
the darkness was still there but the night was very old and I saw
Piney yonder in the rocking chair, her hands folded, prim as a school-
girl's, in her gingham lap, her naked feet twisted shyly together as
they thrust the rocker to and fro.
You hain't Lonnie, she said softly in a kind of singing voice that
held no reproach to me.
No.
Hit don't matter, she said then, gravely and with wonder at her.
self. I'm right glad I done it with you!
Why?
Because you're queer like me. Because you lost your true love, too.
Ain't that so?
I don't know, Piney.
Yes, she said, rocking a bit faster. Yes.
And she let her eyes wander out the window to the pine tree
263


where the moon lay dying for love of the night that was fleeing fast
away.
You chased me from the bed, she said presently, and her dark
pupils widened like flowers in shadow, moving.
And I sat up in the bed and dug my knuckles in my eyes till gold
stars burst finely in the blackness. And then in sharp remembrance of
some old warning of the night I whirled to the window again and
stared across the dark river into the innocent forests of the yonder
shore: deserted now by specter, mist and moonshine.
There hain't no one there, she said gently.
And I gave her a sharp glance for that and bent to fetch my clothes
from the floor.
I know that, I whispered, half-ashamed.
She watched me dress and the rhythm of her rocking did not
cease.
You're a-leavin', she said presently.
Yes.
Well, I shall fix ye a bite of breakfast 'fore ye go!
No. I'm not hungry. Thank you kindly.
And she said no more and led me down the silent corridor past
the doors that muffled the heavy breathing of the sleeping women and
out into the black morning. I spied my mare tethered to her tree up
shore and as I moved away Pine caught my fingers and pulled me
gently around.
Ride lightly, she whispered, and brushed my lips with a kiss. Ride
with God.
And as I rode westering again with the morning wind in my ears
I could not tell if its high moan was the voice of Piney crying her
dead lover's name in the willows far behind me, or the voice of the
black crow, circling above me once again, its shadow wheeling and
threatening on the silken vastness of the wind-rippling grass, now
pale with first light.
I spied a mower up in the field and hailed him from the road and
the long motion of the scythe in his hands stopped and he came down
the fallen grass to the stone fence, cupping his ear with his hand.
I say how far to the banks of the Ohio! I cried again.
He stared at me a moment and the morning light, fast gathering
now, lighted his face and I saw that he was older than time, with a
face like a withered apple and with bleak, black, stony eyes as evil
as a moccasin's.
264


Forty mile! he croaked, leering at me across his gnarled old hands
that lay folded now atop the long scythe handle. Maybe fifty!
I thank ye!
Wait! he squeaked again, and hobbled closer to the fence and mo-
tioned me closer with a crooked finger. And when I had ridden the
mare into the Queen Anne's lace along the burn he winked wisely
and snorted.
You just come from the Dutchman's boat. Ain't that so?
I stared at him hard and made no answer.
I know! I know! I'm up and wanderin' long afore the sun! I seen
ye kiss the gal Piney a fond and sweet fare-ye-well down by the river
shore!
Mind your tongue, old man!
Hah! Don't think I'm censurin' ye! Lord now, if I was a boy full
of sap like you I'd buy me a night with that meself! A fine piece! Oh,
a lovely piece—that Dutchman's black-haired daughter!
And the leather fairly froze in my fingers as my hands stiffened in
the very motion of reining my mare up onto the pike again.
No! Not his own daughter! You lie! He'd not whore out his own
daughter!
Hah! And I'll bet she thought you was her true-love Lonnie
comin' to take her away at last! Hain't that so now? They're all
Lonnie to her, poor, daffy soul! Even the loggers up yonder at Dog-
town! Hah! Tell me that now! Didn't she call ye Lonnie love?
Shut your mouth, old man! Shut your mouth!
How? Ho now! She did! She called you Lonnie, eh! Why sure, I
can see that plain! Well, don't pay that no never mind! It made her
so much the better-thinkin' you was him! Didn't it now?
And now his evil face was scarlet with the pleasure of his talk, his
black eyes blazing in his puckered face and his white, tufty eyebrows
twitching and rising in a wrathy ecstasy of gossip.
But he's dead! Ay, deader than Pharaoh's swine. Ay, that Lonnie
Steptoe is dead! And what tale did the Freed Woman tell ye about
that part of it? Eh? She told ye that Lonnie Steptoe was dead in the
War! Ain't that so?
And the old mower's voice fell to a whisper and he gave a glance
up the road and then a glance down, and crouched lower than his
scythe handle's tip and one eye blazed at me from the slit of its
wrinkled lid.
Now hark to this! he cried in a hoarse whisper. 'Twas the Dutch-
265


I had sat, I think, for nigh an hour, staring down into the very
face of home, before I knew that it was not a dream. I had clung
dumb and stunned with weariness astride the slobbering, windbroke
mare, fingers clenched in her poor sweaty mane to keep from pitching
off to either side, eyes half-blind from wind and sun, breath gone,
wits gone, staring downward from that high vantage on the ridge
road, across the moon-dusted slope to Dulcie's house and below that,
to the orchard, and thence to the black house of memory itself. And
if I had come back with my wits in a dream, the valley seemed gripped
in a dream of its own: pale and shifting in the astral perspectives of
summer moonlight; it might have all been no more than a picture.
And all that told me it was real was the river wind that blew from
out it, like the breath of Earth herself, and moving lights among the
orchard limbs, and the faint, leaden croak of a sheep's bell in the
woods. No candle, no lamp, shone in any window: no voice cried
welcome, nor surprise, nor damnation. Nothing had changed since
I had gone, said the land, said the moon, said the night wind: nothing
changed at all. And with the realization that it was real, that I was
not dreaming, a sudden new energy seized me: the vitality of curios-
ity, I suppose, and I left my mare and went on foot down the path
through the daisies toward the orchard, past Dulcie's house, past the
stone angels, moving cautiously, secretly, not through fear that any
of those ghosts should hear me but because I half feared that sudden
motion might dispel it all; that I might wake myself and find it un-
real once again. Nothing has changed upon that hillside; my feet
found their way to the sheep paths of my childhood wanderings, the
way to Dulcie's house, the way to the place where the stones stood
like sentries in the moonshine; and seeing strange lights in the orchard
I had the sudden, childish notion that they were all there: Aunt Sarah,
Cathie, Dulcie, Cynthie and Doctor Will: all of them there waiting
for me with tears and cries of welcome: old enmities long put away,
their hands reaching to bless the prodigal, lips and tears to warm his
face.
Nothing moved except the faintest wind. And as I stepped now
among the old trees of the orchard and smelled the rotting sweetness
of the ungathered windfall, I saw the lanterns hanging there between
the gnarled branches, and moving amid that quaint fairyland of lamps
among the golden fruit I felt more surely than before the fainting
notion of unreality to the place, to the time, and to my own return-
ing. Lanterns hanging in the trees and among the lanterns, like long,
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strange, moldering fruit of a different sort were hams from the smoke
house and yonder on a bench from Toot's own kitchen fresh loaves
of bread, snug in still-warm pans. Yes, I thought with a sudden heart-
swell of joy; yes, they knew I was coming and they have set this
bounty out as blessing and welcome to the son so long a-wandering.
Hams and fresh bread and a demijohn of cider in the cool grass: the
fatted calf of welcome, surely, and presently they would come crying
from their hiding places among the trees and wet me with tears and
kisses. And then, with the shock of sudden memory, I stole to the
place where I had buried my childhood (and hers, God knows!)
upon that long ago winter's day and stooped and cautiously touched
the earth as if I half thought to feel it burn my fingers or yawn wide-
open. But it was earth, and solid earth it was, and flowers grew there:
bluets among the night-wet grass. And I caught up a red apple from
the windfall and bit it and felt the juice spring in my teeth and
strode off, emboldened now, and thought what a fool Eve's Adam had
been. And there suddenly loomed the stable and the smoke house
and the house of my childhood itself: the house dark and somnolent
with a thousand whisperings and not a candle nor a lamp in any
window. And I thought in sudden panic that perhaps they had died
or moved away: Gone to Texas, too. And I fought back the rushing
urge to go to the back door and pound with my fists till Aunt Sarah's
bedside candle should come wavering down the dark: or Toot with a
lantern, her baldy-eyes like frightened moons. Not yet, I thought.
Not yet. And I felt suddenly the sweat and crust of the journey and
smelled the river and yearned for the benediction of its waters and I
turned then and went down the long meadow to the banks, un-
buttoning my foul shirt as I ran, and when I got to the willows on the
shore I tore off my boots and threw my trousers in the polkberry
bushes and sprang naked into the river. I splashed there a spell and
then drank some of it and floated for a while, admiring the stars and
the moon, and feeling some strength of the river flow into my own
being.
After a while I dressed again and went up on shore again and, upon
a sudden thought, ran to the meadow and strained my eyes to find
the white shape of the Nellie Queen and saw her, still there, still
proud against the green of the hills. Nothing changed. Nothing
altered. Had I really ever gone away at all? Had any of the wild,
wandering years, between that time and this, ever been at all, be-
yond the boundaries of this enchanted summer night? Perhaps as
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a child I had come down to the river shore and fallen asleep and
dreamed it all in a twinkling. I wandered back up to the barn pres-
ently and stared at the dark house a while more and went down to
the kitchen door and touched it, gently, and with a reverence that
thrilled my fingertips. It had not changed. The glass was cracked in
the same place: a tiny hole that wailed like a child's ghost on gusty
winter nights. And I wandered round to the front and saw the black
iron deer, his ears still pricked for the kelt of the hounds and the
winding horn on the wind, and lifted my eyes to the room where she
now slept, I supposed: the room with its small cold breath where
I had crept one time and laid my treasures on her sickbed quilt. And
after I had been round that house three times I knew that I could
not summon up the will to wake them: to have them coming blinking
through the lampshine, half out of dreams, and see this black-bearded
stranger on their threshold. No, I would go up to Dulcie's house and
call for Doctor Will and he would give me a homecoming dipper of
his best brandy and we would sit and watch the morning pale in the
window of Dulcie's kitchen and I would tell him that I had learned
the secret in the slotted eyes of the Indian's golden mask and I would
tell him of all the folly I had helped shaped from fire and steel and
lead and the things he had long ago said about War and the idiocy
of man: how I had gone to find the Truth in them and nearly died
for the pain of that finding. Yes, I wandered up the hill again and
crept to the little door of Dulcie's parlor and rapped three times and
shivered at the sound of my own knuckles there and rapped again
three times more and then went round and tapped with a pebble on
the window of the Doctor's bedroom. It had been a fine summer for
Dulcie's honeysuckle and the spirea blew its sweet breath like a
cupboard of spice-cake, and I stood breathing in that several sweet-
ness, and caught my breath at the first glimpse of life my eyes had
seen since I had come back: the flare of a lucifer in the dark little
cottage, and went round to the front door and waited, trembling like
a boy for one of them to come and wondering if they had given me
up for dead, and suddenly heard Dulcie's voice calling in the reas,
in the little doorway to her kitchen. I could not make out her words
and yet I could tell that they were pipey with fright: yes, and her
voice was older but then she had always been old, even when I was
small: had been born old, I believed. And I ran round the house and
saw her then, like the ghost of a baby, in her long white nightgown
and her old child's face pinched with the ribbon of her lace nightcap
269


a falling star and the pewter chattered on the stone stoop beneath her
quaking slipper-tips.
Dulcie! I said again. Dulcie, it's me!
And I caught her by the sleeve, whereupon she uttered a strangled
breath and fainted, slumping to the clean, scrubbed boards of her
pantry floor like an empty mitten. Cynthie, meanwhile, had not sur-
rendered so meekly and while I stumbled round the kitchen in search
of lucifers and a lamp I heard the tubercular voice of the harmonium
hesitate, gasp, utter one great heroic wheeze as if it had grasped the
gravity of the occasion and had rallied its time-choked lungs for
one final bid for mercy and began croaking out "Old Hundred.” In
a moment I had flooded the fragrant little room with the golden light
of the kitchen lamp and called to Cynthie to fetch the hartshorn to
bring poor Dulcie round. But she would have none of that and
pedaled the marvelous harmonium all the more furiously and now
began singing the old gospel hymn in a squeaking, quaking ghost of
a voice: a voice, I swear, such as one might fancy a wax doll to have:
"Praise God from who-om all bles-sings flo-o-ow!” And now it was
my turn to feel my wits stampede and my breath grow swift with
panic. None of them knew me. None would ever know me. I caught
up the lantern and stormed down the tiny hallway and brushed
through the beaded curtains into the candy-box parlor. Poor Cynthie,
whose short legs could scarcely reach the pedals of the instrument
upon which she was making her last fierce supplication, stopped her
playing now and turned her face slowly to stare at me: a face so small
within her vast scalloped nightcap that it seemed as if a mouse stared
out at me from the depths of a hollyhock.
Cynthie! Cynthie! I cried, angry now. Stop this nonsense this very
minute. It's me! Tom Christopher! I've come home!
A squeak; it was no more than that. And yet she peered closely and
her eyes twinkled black as berries and she gave a squeak more and
covered her mouth with one hand, and then plucked the hand away
and gave a gasping cry.
It's Tom Christopher!
And she ran across the rag rug and threw her arms around me and
cried a little and hugged me and cried some more and called for
Dulcie in the pantry, cold and breathless by the stove.
Tom! Tom! Now where have you been? Lawsy, where have you
been? Why, it's been days! What? Did I say, Days! Weeks is more
like it! Or months! Tom, how long have you been away? Lawk! Lawk!
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And for a spell each of them looked into the other's eyes and then
both looked at me and cast down their eyes to the floor.
What's happened? I cried, leaning forward in my chair. Why
won't you answer me? Where is she?
That's a sadder tale, said Dulcie at last. Than the tale of Poor Will,
in its way!
Tell me! I cried. She's not dead!
No, said Dulcie, and turned her eyes to the streaming window and
the flicker and wink of lightnings down the night. She's yonder!
Down at the house! I said. Down at Aunt Sarah's?
No, said Cynthie. Ah Lord, she wouldn't be under that roof! Not
her! Not that proud lady!
Hush, Cynthie! Let me tell it! cried Dulcie. The way you'll tell it
will make it seem that it's all poor Sarah's fault! And she's not all
to blame. Not all, I say! The girl's strange!
Where is she? I said. Will one of you please tell me that?
She left Sarah's house, said Dulcie. Packed her carpetbag with all
her worldly goods and walked out that front door and swore she'd
never come back! Cynthie was in the kitchen that morning and heard
her yelling at your Aunt!
- And Sarah was doing her share of yelling, too! said Cynthie.
Let that be said in fairness, Dulcie.
Hush, I will tell it! said Dulcie. Cynthie, go see if that east window
is closed in the parlor! It's pouring down the rain for fair!
And while Cynthie went to the parlor, grumbling and sniffling in
her nightcap Dulcie folded her hands in her lap and went on with
the telling.
It was the same morning, she said, that you run away.
Yes, I said. She told me she was leaving. She said she'd not stay
another night under Aunt Sarah's roof. Go on!
That same morning, Dulcie continued. Lawk, such a to-do there
was that day! Sarah was wild when she found you'd gone!
And her mare! I snorted. I reckon that riled her too!
I heard no mention of that, said Dulcie. At any rate, she could not
believe that you would run away like that. And she had Suse and
Toot searching the woods for you and calling your name while she
and old Coy took the buggy to Elizabethtown to search for you there.
And Will—he had not gone yet—Will was sent to search down the
river road. And when it was plain that you were gone and no doubts
about it—she come back to the house and there on the front porch,
uring donor, grumbo and w
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packed and bonneted and waiting to say her farewell was young
Catherine-
Did she say where?
She said no word that I could hear at all, said Dulcie. Though I
know there was plenty passed between the two of them. Sarah seemed
to be fairly mad with outrage and blamed the girl for your going.
And young Catherine was speaking quietly and—I think I could see
tears—I think she was crying. And directly she just picked up her
carpetbag and Sarah was right in the midst of shouting something to
her—the wind was blowing the other way and I could not catch it-
and presently she was marching off down the river road without
more ado!
Cathie was?
She was, said Dulcie. And that was the end of it.
And where did she go? I breathed, my heart fainting with name-
less, dreadful conjectures.
Why, where would she go? said Dulcie. What other place on earth
had she ever known as home! I swear, Thomas, I think sometimes
Sarah Christopher was too hard on her—on the both of you, for that
matter! Poor lambs! Fatherless and motherless lambs! Ah, Lordy,
Lordy!
Tell me, Dulcie! Tell me! Where did she go?
Dulcie rose from her stool and crept to the window and shaded her
brow against the flickering lightnings and peered through the stream-
ing glass to southward.
To Abijah's boat, she said. And she's lived there ever since.
Ah! The boat! Yes, she'd go there!
And suddenly Cynthie came back from the parlor and squatted
again on her stool beside Dulcie's, blowing into her cup of tea, and
blinking her eyes, still wet with tears.
Aunt Sarah drove her out! I whispered, my fists knotted in crackling
rage.
Hold on, Tom! cried Dulcie. That's not the whole of it! Many's
the time I've sat right here in this very pantry with your Aunt Sarah
settin' right where you are now and heard her say that she thought
she'd been too hard—that she wished the girl would come home.
Home! I said. It was never a home. Not for either of us!
Well, to the house, at least! said Dulcie. To a shelter. To her room
and bed and the good food that was set before her.
Lord save us all! cried Cynthie when the clock had chimed four
275


times from the dusky depths of the parlor. It's nigh morning,
Dulcie!
Yes, and a miserable, blowin' rainy morning it is for poor Tom's
homecoming! said Dulcie, and turned again to the screaming black
window and the flicker of lightning that fanned and fluttered like a
golden wing against the glass.
But you haven't told me all of it! I said, scowling at Cynthie's
irrelevancy. She's living down yonder in the Nellie Queen!
Winter and summer! cried Cynthie. Winter and summer and
autumn and spring, as well! Poor child! Poor little soul!
May God have mercy on Aunt Sarah for this!
Ah, but wait, Tom! cried Dulcie. There's more to it than shows!
Sarah would have her back, I think. She's proud. She never says!
She'd never ask her!
Proud! Yes, she's proud! I sneered.
And Catherine Ellen is just as proud! cried Dulcie. She will not
be beholden any longer! I think that was the whole gist of her leaving
to begin with!
Yes, but how does she eat? Where does she get clothes to cover
her?
It's been hard, whispered Dulcie. Ah God, the poor thing! It's been
hard!
How? How! Will you tell me that!
In the summer, whispered Dulcie, she peddles wild flowers on the
streets of Elizabethtown—wild flowers and little bundles of saxafrass
for tea—and other herbs!
Yes! added Cynthie. And she hires out in the homes for household
chores—scrubbing floors and such! And that's barely enough for the
clothes on her back—though she's neat! Neat as a pin—ain't that so,
Dulcie?
As for her meals, said Dulcie, hurrying on, heedless. And, Tom,
I'll not have you breathe a word of this—. Swear to that now!
Yes! Yes!
We feed her here, said Dulcie. She comes early in the morning for
her breakfast-before the sun's up.
And at suppertime, too! cried Cynthie. Lawk, the poor child! She
eats as if each meal were to be her last!
God! God!
Now, Tom! Tom! It could be worse! Keep hold of yourself!
But living on charity! I cried. Like a beggar on the roads!
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Charity nothing! cried Dulcie. She's far too proud for anything
by the name of Charity! Dear me no! Looky here, Tom!
And she went to the cupboard by the black stove and fetched
down a greasy little black ledger—the kind storekeepers have ruled
and measured—and opened it on the clean tablecloth before me.
Every meal, she said, tapping the open book. Every breakfast.
Every supper. It's all there.
You mean—you've kept a record of what she's eaten? I whis-
pered.
Not us, Tom! She's the one that keeps it! She would have it no
other way! cried Dulcie. Lawk, if it was up to me and Cynthie the
girl would be a-sleeping over yonder in my late brother's bed this
very night! The Lord knows he loved her and would want that!
He would! cried Cynthie and wept a little. He would, Dulcie!
As for keepin' track of the cost of her meals, cried Dulcie, waving
the little black ledger under my nose, I wanted no measure of it! It's
her pride! Her pride! Oh, she's so proud, Tom, it would shame a
queen!
That's so! snuffled Cynthie. I mind the mornin' she first come to
our door. Dulcie welcomed her in and we made over her like we
always done and presently she nigh fainted against the china closet
and it was Dulcie that saw how starved the poor creature was!
And fed her till she couldn't walk! cried Dulcie. I'll have no one
hungry in this house while there's a biscuit in the bread box!
That was two months after she'd left Sarah's house! said Cynthie.
And Lord knows what she had lived on throughout those awful
winter days! cried Dulcie. At any rate, she ate like a fieldhand and
when she was done she curtsied and thanked us as solemn as a
preacher and asked if she could come again.
And we said yes! cried Cynthie.
Hush, Cynthie! Of course we said yes. What else would Christians
say and be thankful for the tongue to say it with! And then at dusk
of that day when she come again she had yonder little book under her
cloak. And she gave it to Cynthie and explained that it was a blank
logbook from the Nellie Queen.
That's Bige's boat, added Cynthie.
Hush, Cynthie! Tom knows all that! At any rate, I asked her plain
out what was the purpose of the book and she sat yonder by the
window with her chin tilted high and proud tears in her eyes and
asked if Cynthie and I would feed her until her father come back.
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And the logbook was to be a record! said Cynthie, of every meal!
Ah, every portion! Just like a store ledger!
Yes! said Dulcie. Breakfast and supper! See, Tom? It's all there
in her own fine hand. Don't she write a pretty hand though?
I stared at the tiny black letters of that book—the fine black scrawl
of feathery words: Breakfast, June fifth, 1862 and Supper, the same,
and so on through the bleak and stunning pages of that tragic and
prideful volume.
God! God!
Hush, Tom! Don't take on so! We've both been proud to do it!
And Lord knows he would want it-poor Will. He loved that girl
just as he loved you, Tom! God rest his poor soul!
And who, I whispered, who is to pay—when the ledger is full and
the time of accounting has come?
And Dulcie smiled and turned eyes to the window again and her
eyes were bright with watching.
Him, whispered Dulcie. Him that she waits for night and day!
Him that she sits staring after in the window of that pilot house.
Abijah, I said.
None other, said Dulcie.
He's dead, I said, listening to the black summer rain puddling and
dripping mid the stones and flowers around the house.
Maybe so, said Dulcie. And maybe not. There's them that says he
rides with the raider Morgan!
Does she believe that?
As if it were a Word from the Almighty God Himself! said Dulcie.
I think she would have died long since if she had not believed that.
Ay, said Cynthie. That very day she come with the black logbook
and bade us keep the record of her meals she sat yonder at the table,
holding it in her hands, and she said: “Miss Dulcie, you understand
that I'm not asking you for charity! It's only a matter of time, you
see, until I'll be able to pay for every mouthful you give me!"
And, cried Dulcie, I said, "No one spoke the word Charity, my
dear, and no one ever will. Not at my table. Not in this home!" And
she looked plainly at me and her eyes were proud and rather bold,
I thought—though by no means impudent—and she said, “Miss
Dulcie, my father will come back. You may rely on that. And when
he does—he'll pay you for every mouthful of food. That's why I
want to keep the record here. In one of his own logbooks!"
And the Good Lord Himself only knows, murmured Dulcie, that
278


he may come as she says. 'Tis rumored that he rides with Morgan's
Raiders.
Yes, said Cynthie. And we will take not so much as a penny from
him when he comes, I can assure you of that, Miss Dulcie!
God would be ashamed of us! cried Dulcie and shuffled to the
window to watch His rains and wrathful lightnings in the night.
Gracious, Tom! cried Cynthie, with a shiver. You surely gave us
a turn tonight. We thought for certain you were Captain Morgan
coming to rob us in our beds!
Are Morgan's men in the bottoms? I whispered.
God Almighty knows that, whispered Dulcie, with her kerchief
to her mouth and her eyes a-wilding. He's riding somewhere in the
valley—that much is known! He's sworn to take the whole Ohio
before he's done and there's not a farm between here and Parkersburg
that hasn't laid out food for him and his men.
Hah! squealed Cynthie at the window. Ah, Lord, Dulcie, yonder
is a lantern! On the road! On the road!
It's him! cried Dulcie. Ah God, Tom, save us! Save us!
She ran to the window and crouched in the little curtains, peering
beneath poor Cynthie's bonnet brim. It was still night and yet already
the downpour in the blackness was growing gray with the first shine
of morning in the east behind us. To be sure a lantern swung, like
some strange and bleary firefly, on the bleak slope to the river road.
In the gray and watery perspective it was hard to guess at the gender
of the lamp-bearer at all. But it was no man that carried it. And only
when the figure rose, cape a-flutter and bonnet strings streaming in the
wind, and bore down across the ridge past the graveyard toward the
house of Dulcie, only then did I know it: only then did I glimpse in
one red ray of lampshine across the living flesh of cheek and brow:
the scarlet mouth, the haunted eyes that had stared upon me through-
out the nights of all those wandering years.
Cathie!
Why, so it is! cried Dulcie, with a quiver of relief in her voice.
Ah, Lord, what a night of surprises this has been! It's Cathie coming
for her breakfast. But, gracious, she's early this morning! she doesn't
usually come a-rapping till after sunup!
My my! murmured Cynthie, moving to the kitchen door. And
won't she be surprised to see Tom Christopher! Home at last!
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No! I breathed. No, not yet!
Eh? What say, Tom?
Not yet! I don't want her to see me yet, Miss Cynthie!
Why, forevermore, Tom, why not?
Because! Because! Let me hide! And don't tell her I'm back!
Tom, why?
Hush, Cynthie! Tom has his own reasons and that suffices! Yonder,
Tom! Down the hall with ye! To the little door by the stairs!
Dulcie, why won't Tom—?
Tut, Cynthie! And be still about it while she's here! Mind now!
Why, yes, Dulcie. Whatever you say.
And I had scarcely gone into the little room until the kitchen door
was opened and the rain and wind leaned in a-howling and the door
was slammed again and they were speaking.
Gracious sakes alive, Catherine Ellen! You're early! Such a morning
to be out! Come, dear, give me your cloak and your bonnet! You're
drenched to the skin!
I saw your lamps all lighted, said that voice that I had somehow
never been able to imagine, whatever else I might remember of her.
And I thought perhaps one of you was sick!
Sick! cried Dulcie: Pshaw now! Cynthie and me is never sick!
But your lamps all lit! she said. I saw them clean from the boat
and thought for sure someone was sick! It's not even sunup yet!
Well, said Dulcie. Sit yonder by the stove and dry out. I'll fix
you your breakfast, child!
I'm not hungry, she said. Thank you kindly, ma'am, but I'm really
not hungry. Not yet anyways. Are you sure everything is all
right?
Why, of course everything's all right! Why wouldn't it be! Cynthie
and me just got up an hour early that's all! These are restless times,
my dear, and a body's uneasy in the bed.
Are you sure that's all?
Pshaw, now! Stop that or I'll get cross, Catherine Ellen.
I'm sorry, she said. It just seemed so strange-seeing all your
lights a-shining! A lamp in every room! I thought to myself: It's
Miss Dulcie or Miss Cynthie! One of them's taken down sick! Or
maybe—maybe
Maybe what? Out with your "maybes”! cried Dulcie, and set the
ham a-sizzling in the skillet.
—maybe Morgan's Raiders had come, she whispered.
280


For Abijah! she said. When Morgan comes—he'll come too! You
believe that-don't you?
Why, yes, Catherine Ellen. I suppose I do.
And she snuffled some more and Dulcie stirred the ham and the
rain beat on the windows and I smelled the old smells of Doctor
Will: his whisky wandered there yet: pale ghost, and the faint spirit
of his pills had not left—and something more: the lost, wise bitter-
ness of his life.
I've come here so many times, said Cathie. Why, I practically grew
up in this kitchen. It always smells the same-good things cooking-
the smell of kindness, maybe. You and Miss Cynthie. A lovely smell.
The honeysuckle outside and cinnamon and tansy and ginger. And
then tonight—when I came in—I smelled something else.
Smelled what, dear?
A man, she whispered.
Pshaw! said Dulcie. There's not been a man here since the spice
peddler set his samples on yonder bench last Wednesday forenoon!
Here, child! Drink this good strong coffee!
Thank you. I'm sorry, Miss Dulcie.
And she sucked the hot coffee for a while and I could fancy her
now, her white fingers cradling the blue cup and her hair falling
down across the gentle flesh of cheek and jowl and her lashed lids
resting like the small fallen feathers of birds.
And after all, said Dulcie presently, suppose— just suppose, mind
you—that someone had been here.
Who?
Well, not Abijah, said Cynthie. Not your father.
Oh, but he'll come! He will!
There now! I never said he wouldn't, did I? But just suppose that
someone else should come back?
She was still a while and I heard Dulcie set the platter of breakfast
before her.
Who would come back? she said, between mouthfuls.
I'd not venture any guess, said Dulcie cryptically, and rattled the
coffeepot on the stove lid. I'd not say.
Then why guess? murmured the girl.
Well no, said Dulcie. What if Tom should come back? Tom
Christopher? Suppose one of these fine mornings he should come
riding back to the bottomlands? What say you to that, eh?
I heard the breathless pause while the girl seemed to hesitate in
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sensed Miss Dulcie in the room, easing off my boots, and presently
she laid a quilt across me and drew the blind and closed the door
softly and was gone. And I dreamed that Cathie and I were children
again: playing in the village of the sandstone slabs on the windy
ridge by Dulcie's house. And Cathie sat cross-legged in the stars-of-
Bethlehem with a dreadful black ledger on her knees. And between
sobbing and chewing on a poor stub of broken pencil she was keeping
strange sums in the black book's long, lined pages.
What are you doing?
Why, can't you see? she cried, wide-eyed and miserable. I'm keep-
ing the sums!
The sums? I cried, frowning and trying to see the shape of the
strange black numbers. Sums of what?
In this column, she said, I must keep the sum of every tear I shed!
While over here—in this column—I must keep the sum of all of
yours!
And with that she hiccupped with grief and stared at the latest
bright droplet twinkling on the tip of her finger and anxiously en-
tered a fresh number on the page.
There! she cried. That's the three hundred and fortieth today! Of
mine, mind you! Oh, there's thousands, Tom! Just thousands and
thousands! And I must keep the sum of every one!
But—why?
Hush! she whispered in a voice no louder than the thrum of gold
bees in the high honeysuckle on Dulcie's porch. Hush, Tom! You
mustn't ask!
But, why! Why!
Because she'll hear you! And punish us both!
Who?
And she leaned forward so that her quick breath was warm against
my ear and in the corner of my vision I saw her dark eyes wide with
fear.
Aunt Sarah! she murmured. That's who!
And I got to my feet in a quaking rage and as I stood up among
those gray stones and looked on the stone angel frozen in timeless
fight against her azure sky I felt my flesh suddenly grow to a man's
height. And when I looked down I saw that the girl-child in the
grass was a woman now. And still she grieved and kept her count
of tears and still her slender fingers wrote and wrote in the endless
column of her dreadful journal.
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And Cynthie came to the door then, smiling, and took Dulcie's
hand in her own.
And now what do you say to a good old bottomlands supper? she
cried. There's ham and fried chicken and sweet potatoes—.
And green beans cooked all day in fat meat in a black iron pot!
cried Dulcie.
And parched corn! said Cynthie. Creamed—the way you used to
like it! And—and a cobbler!
Peach! said Dulcie. Mind when you and young Catherine Ellen
used to come hollerin' in from the meadow like red Injuns and beg
for one of my peach cobblers?
And there's an old-fashioned, cross-barred green apple pie! con-
cluded Dulcie, gathering her hands proudly under her four-dusty
apron. With just loads and loads of cinnamon!
It's been a long time, I smiled, since I've heard a bill-of-fare like
that!
Well, hurry up then! cried Dulcie. There's a pail of water heating
on the stove so's you can wash up first! Come along, Cynthie, and let
Tom get out of the bed!
And when I fetched the pail from the stove and went out behind
the honeysuckle and casaba vines by the porch I could not help
glancing down into the dusk of the bottomlands where, it seemed,
even now the ruinous dust of my dream was rising. But the house
was there, unconjured, unvanished, and lamps shone now in the
pantry window.
And mind ye wash good behind the ears! cried Dulcie. You're still
a sassy-britches as far as I'm concerned, Tom Christopher!
And presently I came back into the kitchen, patting my wet hair
into some semblance of a part.
Have you been to tell Aunt Sarah? I said softly, without looking
at either woman. Does she know?
That you're back? said Dulcie. Why, no, Tom! I 'low that's your
job. Here now! Sit ye down and dig in! You'll be fit to face her
better with a good meal under your belt!
And I sat dumbly at my place and stared down at all the good
things heaped and fragrant before me and poked feebly at a drum-
stick with my forefinger.
I'm--not real hungry, Miss Dulcie!
Pshaw! cried Cynthie. Eat now, Tom!
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Hush, Cynthie! said Dulcie. Let him alone! Tom, look at me, boy!
Lift your eyes to mine! What's troubling you?
But I could neither answer nor lift my eyes to hers.
Because if it's worry about being welcome down there, she said
softly, and her fingers reached cross the butter dish and closed on
mine, have no fear, Tom! Tom, look up at me, boy! And hark to
what I'm saying! When Sarah sees you again—when she looks up
and spies you there on the threshold like the long wandering prodigal
in the Book—it will be all right again! She may not put on a big
show of it-like me and Cynthie done! That's not her way! But in-
side she is as full of love for you as if you was her own! I've seen the
sorrow and longing in her eyes through the years, Tom! Now sit
back down and eat that good supper me and Cynthie cooked you!
I can't eat, Miss Dulcie!
Tom! Ah, Tom, if you could look into the soul of Sarah Christo-
pher you'd see nothing but the light of loving kindness!
Loving kindness! I whispered fiercely, rising and striding to the
chain-closet, and flung wide its doors till the chin cups shivered in
their saucers and I snatched out the black logbook and shook it in
the lamplight.
And what about this? I cried. Is this the testament of Aunt Sarah's
loving kindness? This log of misery? Here, listen!
And I snatched it open, random, and struck an entry with a quak-
ing forefinger.
Breakfast! July tenth! Eighteen hundred and sixty-one!
And I leafed further on and struck another entry with my finger.
December twenty-fifth! Christmas dinner! Eighteen sixty-two! It
was Aunt Sarah drove her to this, Dulcie!
Tom, stop! Stop! That's not fair!
It is fair, Dulcie! We lived with her all those years! Cathie and
me! Children, Dulcie, children! And when we got big enough—we
ran away! A wild boy chasing down the roads of the land in search
of love! A wild girl driven to live like a 'gyptian in the river weeds
and wait for the King who never comes!
And I Aung the poor book back to the shelf by the window and
went out into the dusk, quaking and weeping, with the grief of those
sums still burning my fingers. And I went down the long ridge
through the goldenrod, past the stone angels and down the sheep-
paths of that meadow that my feet had learned by childhood's moon.
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And then, up wind, I heard a snort and saw my mare and whistled
sharp on my fingers and she came loping down the grass with rolling
eyes. And I led her down the river meadow toward the house, think-
ing through my rage and sorrow: "At least, I come back with as
much as I took. I am no horse thief at least. Here is a mare as good
as the other!"
I hitched her to a little tree at the edge of the orchard where the
lanterns burned and went toward that other lampshine in the pantry
windows of the black house, and saw printed plain as a storybook
picture in my furious mind the vision of Aunt Sarah, that ogress that
was higher than the moon. And when I came suddenly round the
open door and stepped upon the threshold I spied an old woman in a
straight-backed chair and heard the rattle of shelled peas in the sauce-
pan at her feet.
Suse? I whispered. Toot?
But it was neither. It was she. And I stood staring and thought:
Why, this can't be! She was someone giant and cruel and strong and
I could never see higher than her apron and it was higher than the
moon and the pin at her throat was higher than a star. This can't be
Aunt Sarah! This is someone old and small and scared, like a lonely
child playing in grownups' clothes upon a rainy shut-in day.
But it was she. And she looked at me across that lambent shine
of pantry lamp and her mouth shaped my name and her eyes brimmed
in love and mercy. And I crept to her knees and laid my face in her
lap, among the cold pods of her shelled peas, and felt the warm
splash of her tears upon my ears and heard Suse and Toot out in the
meadow hollering that the Raider Morgan had surely come for they'd
found his mare hitched to a tree.
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III
CUSE! Toot! Fetch Tom's clothes down from the great hair trunk
U in the upstairs hall! Oh, dear dear! Where's my poor mind gone
to! They'll not fit him now, for he's a man! A man, I say! Stand
there, Tom-right there and don't move a finger! Ah, such a picture!
Such a picture! Let me look! Suse! Did you slice green apples for a
pie? And kill that fat Dominick we were saving for Sunday! Ah,
Tom! Boy! Boy! If you could only know what the sight of you means
to me! It's like a tonic to my heart! What? Where's Coy? Hah, that
black rascal is never nigh when a body needs him! I swear these evil
times have worked more mischief among the slaves than we'll see
ended in our time! Now, Tom! Tom, do sit yonder on the stool
before me and tell me all of it! Every word! You were in the fight,
boy! I can see it shining in your eyes! Ah, Tom! Tom! I thought I'd
never see your face again in this world!
And she rocked hard and wrung my hand till I thought she'd wear
it off and cried and kissed me and then cried some more and had
poor Suse and Toot running the house the livelong night, lighting
lamps and fetching sheets and peeling apples and setting hams to
soak. God knows that house had not often, within the living memory
of its inhabitants, shone and rung to the light and voice of festivity.
And yet now, indeed, it seemed that all the spirits of the smothered
Christmas songs and the forbidden lanterns of Hallow’een and the
muted hymns of grim cold Thanksgiving days had risen and come
flocking through the doors and windows in a single throng of riotous
and unbridled renascence. I had never seen Aunt Sarah so beside her-
self with pleasure, with welcome, with all of the undisguised ex-
pressions of love.
Suse? Run yonder up to Dulcie's house and tell them the good
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news! Run now! Hurry! Don't waste a minute! And—and yes! Tell
her and Cynthia they're welcome to come down and witness the
prodigal with their own eyes! Hah! Toot? Did you put the coffee-
pot on?
As for myself, I found it hard, at first, to face. Mystified beyond
words, hangdog with vague shame at the dim recollection of my bitter
dream, dizzy with kisses and wet-faced with tears, I felt half-inclined
to turn tail and flee again from this unaccountable and unforeseen
affection. This was a new Aunt Sarah, a strange Aunt Sarah, and I
could not help watching her mouth and eyes, suspiciously, for some
evidence of the old Aunt Sarah which, I suspected, lurked surly and
time-biding behind the somehow pathetic face of her happiness.
And yet, at last, dissemblance or not, the hearty contagion of her
spirits swept my doubts away and within an hour I sat like Ulysses
returned, ringed round by the glad faces of Aunt Sarah and Dulcie
and Cynthie and Suse and Toot and old Coy. Aunt Sarah would shout
a question and pound her parasol for silence while I shaped my mouth
to answer and before the first word was out she would holler to Suse
to fetch some pound cake or set poor Coy on his way up the black
river road to Elizabethtown to rouse Carly Juniper out of bed for a
pound of Rio coffee. Cynthie and Dulcie held their tongues and said
nothing of my first night's stay beneath their roof and sometimes
when my eyes crossed Dulcie's I would see there a faint reproach
that I had ever doubted the goodness of Aunt Sarah's heart. And
presently they listened, nodding and pursing their lips and clucking
affirmation and shock or outrage and throwing up their hands, while
I told them of my days in the Stonewall Brigade and came at last to
the death of him, and Aunt Sarah bugled her nose softly in her
kerchief, and quietly bade Suse run fetch the framed oleo: General
Jackson, stiff and preposterous as a toy grenadier, amid the rags of
cotton-puff gunsmoke and piebald horses that looked like sheeep, upon
that peddler's gaudy broadside.
A Christian gentleman! exclaimed Aunt Sarah. Ay, every inch of
him that! It shows here in the picture, doesn't it, ladies?
Yes! Oh, yes! they cried. And he was a Presbyterian too.
Of course! cried Aunt Sarah. And now he is in the arms of his
Saviour.
And I told them about First Manassas and the rest of them and
got so caught up in the stiff, stock dramatics of the telling that it
never once occurred to me how much of it I would not tell and could
290


ing fearfully like fairy-tale monsters, and some scratching like obse-
quious cats.
Your old bed's waiting for you, Tom! she said. It's always been
waiting! Do you know I've kept clean sheets upon that bed through
all this time? And a pinch of lavender to keep the mildew out? Hah,
Tom! I always knew you'd be coming home again!
Aunt Sarah.
Oh, I grieved when you went away! Many's the year that's been
cut from my Time on Earth for grief of that, Tom Christopher! But
I do not count that cost! I knew why you went-to fight for a good
cause! And I knew you would come home again! And now, good-
night!
Good-night, Aunt Sarah!
She led the way up those memory-haunted stairs, and I, in her
wake, saw momentarily in the swirl and swing of her dark skirts the
waist-high perspective of my childhood, and quaked in the candle
shadows that dragged behind us both; and old familiar nail and
wooden outcries from board and joist stirred the dust of recollection
as our feet carried us down the hallway, past the tiny cold-mouthed
room where Rebecca had died and where Cathie had once found
shelter against the world. And now she set the pewter candlestick
upon the footstool by the door and motioned to my old bed, quilt
and sheet turned down from the bolster, as they had likely been
through every night that I had been away. She kissed me again and
stood for a spell with her old face lifted, smiling, almost washed free
of all those enmities that seemed always ready there to spring behind
her eyes.
Good-night, Tom, she whispered again. And welcome home.
And she was gone. And I sat on the bed for a long while, staring
into the gold tongue of candle-flame and presently, reaching out
thumb and finger, pinched it out and the darkness flowed round me
like a sea of memories. And I tugged off one boot and put it down
softly and listened and listened and tugged off the other boot and
heard nothing—and yet, was there not the faintest respiration in
the world in that small room down the hall? And I listened and
listened and stole, at last, across the rag rug and crept along the
hallway, certain now of that sound so faint that it was not the sound
of breath at all but rather the whisper of the rise and fall of a sleep-
ing bosom and when my fingers found the door jamb I stared into
that small and memorable chamber which, even now in the close
293


clouds of summer fireflies drifted in jeweled galaxies. And yet, as I
stared among these lights, I saw that one of them did not move or
waver; one remained fixed and small and valiant among the golden,
blowing dust of all those errant others: the bright unfailing lantern
in the pilot-house window of the Nellie Queen.
When the clock in the hallway chimed four I waked suddenly in
the dark and listened to the last dying fall of that smothered, breath-
less tolling, like an angelus beneath the sea, and heard the echo of
something more: the sound of weeping. And I knew that the bell
was the Judgment of Time and I knew that the weeping had been
my own, and sat up and touched my face with my fingers, finding it
dry-eyed, after that curious, tearless grief of dreams, and suddenly
felt all that wild emotion return that had gripped me on the road
in my flight from Piney and the Dutchman's boat. In the stilling air
of the room it seemed now as if I drowned in a liquid of loneliness
and despair and only one soul on earth held power in her hands to
save me. I got up and dressed—all but for my boots which I car-
ried—and went over the sill and down the slates of the porch roof,
slick now with early mists that rose like smoking wraiths from the
river and lay like a ragged, drifting blanket along the bottoms of the
meadow. The house behind me was silent, sleeping: I could almost
fancy that tired lids had fallen across the dark eyes of its quartered
windows; it was that hour of nocturne when it seems as if God Him-
self must surely nod and snooze upon His breast and only frogs and
fireflies and the merry stars keep a rioting conclave before the dawn.
Outside that silent house the night was noisy with its own industries:
green things croaked and racketed among the fog-bound willows and
the river flowed with its own dark, perceptible music; a mockingbird
cried his alarms in the orchard and furred things stirred in the wood-
lands above the meadow. I think I have never seen the land more
beautiful. There was no moon and yet the starshine seemed im-
prisoned and magnified in the luminous mists that lay waist-deep
across the meadows. I sat on a stump below the house and tugged
my boots on and then went off down the river road and heard the
startled thump of a rabbit in the dust before me and listened to the
feathered, faint drum of my own footfalls as I went that familiar
way that my feet had not gone since the long-gone springtimes when
she and I had wandered there together. It loomed faint and white in
295


hull-shrunken and long-moldering in the mud betwixt creek bottom
and dry shore gravel—would scarcely have held her to her waterline
for more than a trip across the Ohio and back again.
I rose, at last, determined against the sharpest apprehensions, to
steal aboard the Nellie Queen and go silently up her forecastle ladder
to the texas deck and peer, at last, through the window for a glimpse
of Cathie. As I moved a step I set a small avalanche of dried mud
and stones spilling and clattering down the slope. I think it was not
that sound that wakened her but the aftermath of shocked silence
among the choiring frogs. They hushed suddenly and simultaneously
and only those far off on the shores of the great river, beyond the
creek mouth, persisted in their shrill, erotic litany. And now a
tousled-haired girl rose suddenly in the lighted pilot house and, catch-
ing up a spare lantern from the floor, came presently down the deck
ladder, the lampshine ruddy on her slender arms. I did not see her
face until she arrived on the lowest deck of the boat and came to
the side, standing there and holding the lantern high enough for her
whole self to be, in that moment, totally and faithfully illumined
by it.
Who's yonder! she whispered.
Even had I possessed the spunk to reply, I could not have moved
my tongue to shape the words: so enthralled and stunned was I by
that vision of her there: face still flushed and damp with sleep and
one dark curl spiraling in a gentle, dark tendril across her cheek.
She wore only the patched and wash-faded gingham gown that was,
I judged, her sole garment, and her bare toes curled on the boards
of the boiler deck like those of a child. I think, remembering her
then, that I have never seen anyone or anything so beautiful: a beauty
that I had only ever fancied in some dream in the blood: a fancy
rooted in times older than the beginnings of memory itself. She had
grown taller since childhood and yet more rounded and nubile: the
boyish fury of her nonage having now seemed to have fled into her
flesh and subsided there; unvanquished, but tensed and ready within
the marvelous quickness of thigh and lip and slender foot: a liveness
of wilderness blood beneath her slow, round breasts.
Someone's yonder! she shouted again, and I could not remember
this rich huskiness in her voice when I had heard her speak at Dulcie's
house the night before.
Abijah! she said, her voice subsided to a whisper now. Father? Is
that you?
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comprehend that he held the other's flesh-and-blood in his arms.
But our touching was like children's: in innocence and desperate con-
firmation. And for a spell we clung and swayed there, gasping and
weeping and laughing by turns, softly, into one another's necks, and
presently, wordlessly, she gathered my fingers into her cold hand and
led me back to the boat.
And there in the pilot house of the Nellie Queen we sat holding
one another among his dusty, rain-splattered logs and charts. And
nothing had changed since that time when we had come there as
children: nothing, that is, but ourselves, and we stared marveling
at that.
I thought you were dead! she whispered, and caught her breath
in a sob of excitement.
I was close to it. More times than I can say.
I think I have been, she said. At times we die for a while. Don't
you think that's so? And stay dead until someone wakes us again?
I reckon that's so. Yes, I know that's so.
Why did you run away? she whispered after a long stillness.
And I looked at her and frowned a little before I answered.
I can't remember now. I think I was looking for something. Some-
one.
She stared at her fingers, outstretched on my shoulder and her
eyes widened in teror at remembrance of something.
I thought I'd die that morning, she said. When you weren't there.
I thought I'd just die, Tom! It was just me in that house then—alone
with her.
With Aunt Sarah.
Yes, with her. And I knew how she hated me.
She never really hated you, I said. There are certain things in her
that make her seem to hate people.
Maybe, she said. But it seemed that way to me. And you weren't
there any more. Tom! Tom! We were all each of us had through so
many years! Remember?
I remember, I said. I forgot it for a while.
Oh, I did too! she said. Sometimes all I could ever think about or
dream about was him—Abijah—coming back like he said he would!
Sometimes I'd spend weeks and weeks and think about nothing but
him! And those were times when I never thought about you at all,
Tom-never missed you or anything!
And she turned her face to me, eyes wide and shining with tears.
299


Yes! I can feel it in my bones. He's not coming! Something's hap-
pened! Hah, he was a fool to try so much! The whole Ohio Valley
in a sweep! More spunk than sense, I'd say!
I sat for a while, watching her as she stood glaring off toward the
river road.
They say that Abijah Hornbrook is riding with him, I said quietly.
Pshaw! Fiddlesticks! she cried. Who says! She says! Catherine
Ellen's the only one that ever said such a fool thing! Why, a gentle-
man like General Morgan wouldn't have an old tramp like Bige
Hornbrook for his mess cook! That was some more of her fancy-talk
I used to have to put up with.
It still might be, I said. That Abijah is with Morgan! It takes all
kinds to make an army, Aunt Sarah!
She came back to the table now and sat down softly and spread her
hands on the cloth regarding me as she tapped her fingers lightly.
That girl is in your mind yet, she said. She was on your mind
last night.
Aunt Sarah, I want no argument this morning!
Nor I, she said. Good gracious, Thomas, is a civil discussion what
you call "argument"? But just the same I'll not take her part. It it's
that tune you want to hear-go talk to Cynthie and Dulcie! You
know, of course, that she begs her meals from their door!
Begs is not the word! I cried.
Hah! How do you know so much about it? Have you been to see
her?
No.
Then Dulcie told you herself! she cried. You went to her house
before you came here!
What difference does it make! If she begs then it is because she
has no one to turn to! I cried.
She could have stayed here! said Aunt Sarah, thin-lipped and eyes
narrowed. If she had at least made an effort to become the Christian
young lady I tried to raise her to be! She could come live here yet if
she begged my pardon for her black ingratitude! My heart is never
closed-
It was never open!
God forgive you for that!
Not to her it wasn't! Why? Why, Aunt Sarah? Why did you take
her in at the beginning?
Because it was the duty of a Christian to do so!
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its green brass tube that scanned the up-river stretches by the north
bend.
What did they say? I cried, and she did not even seem aware of
me and kept the eyepiece to her cheek and when I went up the aft
ladder I could see how her whole face had gone to the color of
tallow.
What did they say? I cried again, and finally seized her by the
shoulders and swung her round, with her pale face a-staring and
stunned and the telescope clenched in her white knuckles.
Gunboats! she whispered.
What? Is that what the Yanks said? What do you mean?
The gunboats! she screamed now. They laughed! One of them
laughed and rode his horse up yonder on the rise in the meadow
and hollered at me, laughing!
What did he say? Cathie! Get hold of yourself!
He said if I was waiting to wave my apron to General Morgan
I'd best tear it up for bandages because the gunboats were coming!
Gunboats! What gunboats? Yankee gunboats?
Yes! Yes! Oh God! Gunboats to take him! Gunboats coming to
blast him off the earth! Oh God. Abijah! Abijah!
And she collapsed against the railing and fell with her cheek
against the palings, sobbing and livid and stiff with fear. I took the
telescope from her then and twisted the green-crusted tubes until
the prospect of the north bend sprang into focus in the lens. The
river there, below Elizabethtown, was empty: the sky mirrored in the
unruffled stream and not a sign of so much as a fisherman's skiff
upon it.
When? When? I cried. When are they coming?
And she was beginning to choke now with hysteria and could not
answer and I caught her by the hair and swung her face up and
she gave a great sobbing gasp as I stuffed the telescope in my jeans
pocket and fetched her a sharp, flat slap across the cheek.
When are they coming? I shouted.
Now! she cried. They're not three miles upstream-above Eliza-
bethtown—and they're moving full steam! Ah, God! It's the end of
him, Tom! The end! The end!
And now the fury of her hysteria seemed to subside, like a storm,
into the steady rain of long and hopeless tears. And I left her against
the railing and fetched out the glass and stared up river and even
then I could spy the smear of black smoke that always foretold the
306


appearance of rivercraft. I went back and knelt beside her and
cradled her face against my shirt.
There's nothing to be done, I said. God knows if either of us
could do anything—we would.
Abijah! she grieved softly into my arm and I could feel the wet-
ness of her desperation spread through the cloth of my shirt. Ah
God, Abijah!
Morgan is a fox! I said. He may outwit them! He's done it before.
Cathie. Cathie. Get hold of yourself!
And she stiffened suddenly in my arms and I thought for a
moment my words had helped her, when she flung herself abruptly
out of my embrace and leaped to her feet.
We can do something she cried.
And all I could do was stand, helpless, and stare and wonder what
mad notion had seized her mind.
We can do something! she cried again and ran away down the
texas deck toward the ladder.
Cathie! Where are you going? Wait!
And she went clambering down the ladder like a boy and raced,
barefoot, down the boiler deck to the bow and it was there that I
caught her by the shoulders and swung her round so sharp that her
teeth snapped.
Cathie! Stop this!
Let me go! Let me go!
I'll not let you go! Get hold of yourself, Cathie! There's nothing
can stop those gunboats! Nothing in our power, at least!
There is! she cried. Oh, there is! There's the Nellie Queen!
What? I gasped, letting go of her and staggering back. The Nellie
Queen! This little towboat!
And despite myself I lay back against the guard and roared with
laughter and with that she drew back her brown arm and laid a
slap across my jaw that brought the tears to my eyes.
Stop that! she screamed. Stop it, I say!
Cathie, listen to me!
I'll not listen to you!
This little boat could never stop a gunboat!
We'll sink her in the channel! she cried. And let them rip their
bottoms out on her!
Cathie, that's suicide!
You're afraid! God, you're a coward!
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I'm not! But I like an even fight!
Is it an even fight for Morgan's Raiders down yonder with cavalry
on the river banks and gunboats on the water! What kind of an even
fight is that!
But, Cathie, the Nellie Queen hasn't been afloat in ten years! Her
timbers wouldn't hold her halfway across the river!
Then it's plain! she whispered in a white-lipped, black-eyed spasm
of fury. It's plain you want to see him taken!
Who? Morgan? Cathie, that's not fair.
Abijah! she whispered. It's Abijah you want to see taken! You
want to see him dead! It's plain to see that, Thomas Christopher!
And it's even plainer to see the reason why. It's because you hate him!
Cathie, that's not so!
You hate him! You hate him! You're jealous of him!
Jealous!
Yes, jealous!
Hush your mouth, Cathie! I'm jealous of no one on earth!
You are! You are! You're jealous of him because you know I
could never love you like I love him!
I struck her again then, hating my hand for the cruelty of that
touch that I could not govern, feeling the wet of her mouth against
my knuckles and seeing the bright tear of blood in the corner of
her lips.
Then to hell with you! she screamed and sprang past me to the
gravel of the shore and put her shoulder against the boat and swung,
struggling and gasping, her naked feet slipping and tearing, hope-
less, in the clamshells, pebbles and rack. And I sprang after her and
found a stout timber in the brush-filth along the rim of the meadow
and came down and levered it under the hull of the boat, in the
mud, among the rocks and bore up on it until my temples seemed
ready to burst. And the Nellie Queen rocked gently in a coquettish
gesture of anticipation, of almost gay decrepitude, and I heard the
vines tear along her paddle wheels.
Oh God! screamed Cathie and pointed north and just below the
bend now, in motionless foreshortening, we saw the blue sun glint
on the flat shapes of them; the gunboats like iron rattraps approach-
ing no more than a mile up river: their black funnels like squids
staining the hot, blue oceans of the flat sky.
And I set my shoulder to it again and strained and the little boat
rocked and creaked and the water sucked and lapped beneath her and
308


And now we could see the faces of her crew and the spark of sun
on their brass and the great stacks seemed towering interminably
above us: pouring out their tumbling black torrents of smoke and the
whistle gave another hoarse shriek like the trump of Doom and
Cathie, in a livid fury, sprang out on the texas deck with her arms
clutching logbooks and the brass telescope and a cracked ironware
pitcher and began hurling them as if the whistle itself had provoked
her beyond endurance. I left the wheel then and ran to her side to
meet the impact of them and threw my arms around her while the
living air of the whole world seemed filled with a gigantic chord
of impending whistle-sound and vast blue plates of riveted iron rose
up to fill the whole prospect and the choking stacks spun cinders
down into our hair. And it seemed in that final moment as if the
flagship had gone clean under us. Everything, in an instant, seemed
frozen to the stiffness of a tintype event: the great belching stacks,
the impassive crews on the rusty decks, the beetling cannons; and
after the first vast shudder and outcry of chattering timber far beneath
us the whole world seemed to upthrust and explode and Cathie was
gone from my grasp: snatched into the face of the sun; while her
voice still shrieked defiance in the very face of Behemoth. In the
water I saw her again: through the haze of black smoke that lay like
a veil in the black giant's wake: her face awash and hair adrift
across it; cheeks the color of chalk, eyes stunned, and mouth still
shaped to the utterance of outrage. She was no more than a dozen
feet away, drifting on the rise and fall of waves in the churning
paddle-wake and the second of the gunboats seemed almost upon us
and when I got to her side and seized her under the arms the blue
decks went hissing past us and I remember a bearded boy with a
musket in his hands leaning over us for a split-second: his whole
face aghast at the vision of a girl in the river, while his mouth
shaped a shout to his comrades to come and see.
The giant paddles of that second boat nigh pulled us under and
when we had cleared ourselves of its foaming wake we both com-
menced swimming for shore. I think if we had been two men they
would have shot us in the water. And yet surely the legend of it had
already gone whispering among the crews of the iron fleet: the fable
of a wild-haired chit of a girl on the hurricane deck of that prepos-
terous little packet: hurling logbooks and chinaware down the gun
muzzles of the juggernauts. The water to every side of us was lit-
tered with the bobbing wrack and ruin of the Nellie Queen. She was
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be certain who that prayer was for. A faint breeze blew cool against
my wet clothes and none of the women moved nor spoke. Yet even
now Aunt Sarah's eyes widened: brimming with tears: a hot struggle
was ending between them; and suddenly with a soft, wordless cry
she came forward and, gathering Cathie's flushed face into her hands,
kissed her forehead and pulled her damp curls against her cheek.
Dulcie began weeping then, audibly, and I knew then how hard
she had prayed for that to happen and she shook Cynthie's elbow
and presently they moved off together toward the meadow, toward
the hill, toward home again, and suddenly Aunt Sarah whirled on
poor Toot as if she had touched her with a hot poker.
Well! Great day in the morning, Toot! Don't stand there like a
stick! Can't you see this poor child is more dead than alive! Go make
up the bed in the little room! And, Suse, run put the kettle on for
tea! Come along, Tom! Bring the girl!
And she chased them up the yard in furious outcry: scolding and
slashing the dandelions with the ferrule of her eternal parasol.
Cathie was shivering now in a chill of shock: her dark eyes lay wide
and unseeing against my damp shoulders, her fingers dug hard into
the flesh of my arm as if she imagined herself still on the verge of
that instant of hurtling impact. She began to sob now: not with the
steady rhythm of despair but in little shuddering gasps and when I
carried her through that doorway that had been so long closed against
her, she shut her eyes and moaned as if some shamefulness of this
return had touched her spirit. I bore her up the stairway in Aunt
Sarah's fussing wake and carried her to the doorway of the little
room. The cushion was not on the bed. Aunt Sarah had gotten there
ahead of us in time to whisk it off somewhere: perhaps to reconsider
in that instant its embroidered sentiment. And I laid Cathie there
and she stopped quivering almost at once and fell asleep.
Now go long, Tom! cried Aunt Sarah. I'll tend to her now! Scat!
And I went out into the hallway while Aunt Sarah peeled Cathie's
wet clothes off and tucked her in naked under a summer quilt and
all the while she fussed and prayed under her breath and cried a
little and fussed and prayed some more. Presently she opened the
window and let out the fusty, long-enclosed breath of the room and
came out into the hallway.
Come Thomas! Let her sleep! she whispered. That's the best healer
of all! Come away, I say!
And I went away from the doorway and stared at Aunt Sarah a
while before I put my arms around her.
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You are good, I whispered. You are truly good, Aunt Sarah.
She thrust me back; almost angrily, and turned her strained face
to the open doorway of my Grandfather's room.
You don't know me, she whispered. You don't know me. No one
ever knew me, I reckon, but him—the one who died in yonder, in
that room. You all think I'm hard and cruel as a Turk. And then
when I do anything that's Christian and decent—why, then you
think it's just astonishing! Gracious! you say to yourselves. Sarah
Christopher is human after all! Well, no matter! No matter!
And now she turned her face to me and I saw again how old she
had grown and she stared at me with the wide, fearing eyes of a
child.
Why, she has no place else on earth now! she whispered. That
boat! That was all she had!—that fool, rattletrap boat that he left
her and poor Rebecca! That boat was all! Do you suppose I'd see
her with no roof over her head, Thomas? However much I might
censure her, do you suppose I'd see her with—with nowhere? Oh,
that fool, reprobate father! That shiftless Bige Hornbrook! Men!
Men! Oh, Lordy, she's a woman ain't she? And don't I know what
women have put up with from fool men since Adam?
She looked toward the doorway of the place where Cathie slept;
that doorway with its tiny, ancient breath, now held as if in suspense.
She sat down suddenly on the straight-backed chair by the door
to Grandfather Christopher's room and rested her chin on the silver
knob of her parasol and sighed.
That day so long ago, she whispered. When her and poor Rebecca
came to the house! Remember, Thomas! Lawk, it was cold! And I
took them in! Why, I would not go to my Maker with the knowledge
of it on my conscience that I had turned them away! And today is
no different! There was no place for her to go! Ah, Lordy, Lordy!
No place in all God's world!
And Cathie slept. And I kept a snail's dumb stillness lest she wake.
Because it seemed to me as certain as star-rise that when she woke
and found herself in that room of phantoms and old wandering
griefs; when she found herself tricked back into that hated house
so long latched against her, then she would flee it like a wild thing.
As for Aunt Sarah, she acted as if Cathie had never been away at
all and went fussing about her trunks and cupboards after gowns
and shifts and shirtwaists of her own that could be cut down to
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Cathie's spare shape and she fetched the girl's only, poor gown down
to Suse's washtub and bade her launder out the cursed river water
and dry it in the hot wind and iron it fresh by sundown. I stayed
in the parlor most of that afternoon: it was cool there and, as always,
it was solace and solitude. And I listened as Aunt Sarah scraped and
thumped about the lower rooms, snapping at the Negroes one
minute and humming hymns the next: she seemed in high, good
spirits and full of generous deeds. But Cathie will never stay, I
reflected. No, I know her too well for that. And I could almost
fancy her waking now in the little bed, beneath that alien quilt,
and with her mind still wispy with the horror of the river disaster,
finding herself in the midst of a horror still more fresh: that house
that had hated her so long. And now Aunt Sarah called me: her
voice ringing among the walls, now close and now afar: in pantry,
hall and stairwell: and that voice vibrant now with something the
years had taken away that was now restored by the beneficence of that
day.
And I came in her boisterous wake and washed, out under the tree,
while she chattered and clatterd in the kitchen and set Suse and Toot
to laying out a grand and festive table.
Lawk! she cried to me from the kitchen doorway. This day has
made me twenty years younger, Tom Christopher! Why, it's like
you was both my lambs again! And the both of you safe under a
good sound roof again! Toot, have you done ironing Catherine
Ellen's gown? Ah, good! Then take it to her and fetch her down
for supper!
And Toot went with the still-steaming frock, grumbling and puff-
ing up the back stairs to the little room; where, I clearly fancied,
Cathie would be clutching the quilt to her chin, waiting only for
clothes enough to make her swift flight from door or window.
Aunt Sarah met me on the threshold and took the towel from my
hands and clasped my cheeks in her palms, smiling and radiant
with happiness.
Ah, Tom! Tom! she whispered. It will be like the old times-
won't it? There's been bitterness! Some of it my own fault. Yes
an honest confession is good for the soul! I've been to blame-many
and many's the time! Quick to anger! Quick to judge! Yes, too
quick, I'll allow! Life's not easy! Ah, Lord, the years have taught
me that, at least! But now it's all washed clean—all blown away
like a bad fog, eh? It'll be the way it used to be—the way it should
314


walked, shining, like someone filled with light: like a human lamp
that held back every darkness in that mansion of the many rooms.
And gone were the glum days when she had sat brooding, eyes set to
southward: forlorn and distant, awaiting the lost King. She never
spoke his name and I would swear that she never thought it either.
And I know that this rich change was no pretension. Sometimes I
would catch her alone, smiling to herself, or hear her singing in the
orchard when she went to fetch fruit for a supper pie; or see her at
dusk coming up the meadow with a posy of wild flowers for Aunt
Sarah: a slender girl walking up that sea of twilight grass and bear-
ing a sly and lovely secret in her face: a new meaning and an inner
calm and goodness. As for Aunt Sarah, she seemed, strangely, to par-
take of that new peace that had come among us.
My children, she would say to us across the supper. My gracious!
Why couldn't we have all lived this happily in the old times! Good-
ness' sakes alive! When I think the way you two used to be at each
other all the time! And now—now it's as I always hoped and prayed
it would be! Thomas, you can never know what peace it brings to my
heart—to see you be a second father to young Catherine Ellen as I
always hoped you would!
And even at the word "father" Cathie would not flinch with re-
membrance of her loss. It pleased her to hear me praised, I suppose,
by her who had been, for all those years, the harshest judge of both
of us. And Aunt Sarah never heard those soft, eager footfalls past her
doorway in the moon-dappled nights of that August: never heard the
sweet gasps and whispers. And Cathie would lie in my arms till
nearly dawn and make me tell her tales of the War and the long
wandering years and I would oblige, outrageously, for a man has the
right to tell his woman lying, wild legends about his wars; if only
for the very reason that he can never tell her how bad they really
were. Sometimes she would fall asleep in the cradle of my forearm:
the slow pulse of her breath against the flesh of my shoulder; and I
would stare at her in wonder and hushed delight: pouting sweetly in
her sleep and whimpering betimes in some little scaring dream: her
soft, white limbs bathed in bleak, pure moonshine and the dark,
whorled feather of her sex like the rich-lashed lid of the eye of Love
itself, closed against the silent night. Long before the pale before
sunup; long before I heard Suse pumping water for breakfast coffee,
I would wake her and send her back to her room before Aunt Sarah
rose. Although, curiously, it never seemed to us that she would have
325


glad enough for the mere joy of loving her at all. And that grieving
act of passion upon the hill seemed to have fired her to even greater
yearning when she came to me again to give herself. And she seemed
to forget her old terrors in the mirroring joy of my joy in her.
Why do you stare at me so, Tom? she whispered, delightedly, by
moonlight, in my room one crisp fall night when the first fire was
laid: guttering and blowing on the little grate.
Because you are so beautiful, I said. And because I love you so!
Yes, she teased, blushing to her shoulders with happiness. But you
know what I look like every inch of me! You've stared at me a
thousand times! What more of me is there to see?
I want to memorize you, I said. Like someone learns a verse by
rote.
Ah, that's a silly thing to say! A silly sweet thing to say! she
laughed. Ah, Tom. Ah, my love Tom! And what is the name of this
verse?
Cathie, I whispered. Cathie is its name!
And so our lovely dalliance would run. And I would bid her lift
her soft and gentle arm so that I might rejoice in the soft, dark
whorls of maiden's hair that curled faintly in the hollow of her arm:
moist and fragrant. And I would set to memory the poetry of her
lashes and the cunning, secret lid: fragile and agate-veined, that
veiled her dark eye. Or the tiny hollow of her navel; like the print
left in rich cream by the tip of a silver spoon. Of the curve of small
breast with its rosebud nipple: each contending with the other for
my favor. And the mouth of Love itself: scalloped and wise and
fragile-fashioned as a rosy seashell in its nest of ocean moss. And
when she had gone padding back to her little room in the black hour
before daybreak I would shut my eyes; desperately trying to sum-
mon up the vision of her there: to comfort me till morning; and I
would lie, racked with fevered yearning till the sun came warm against
my eyes.
In the mornings, at breakfast, sometimes I fancied Aunt Sarah
would surely guess from sight or sound or scent of us what we had
been about that night. But she would not. And one fine autumn day
we went again to that cool, quiet chamber in the forest where we had
gone before and in the chill, sweet silence of the forenoon we rol-
licked and shouted through the ocean of fallen leaves and smelled the
burning season and searched for yellow pawpaws among the tricking,
golden shadows. And when we had found a fine fall of the paw-
330


stunned for a moment: as much with shock as with the impact of my
nose in river sand there in the shoals. And when I sat up, choking
and spitting water, I spied her standing among the leaves, livid with
laughter, with the vine clutched in her hand.
You tripped me! I roared, shamed and furious, feeling the same
outrage I had known when we were small and she would outdo me
at some game.
You look like a catfish! She gasped. With the water dripping from
your whiskers!
And I got up and waded shoreward, clenching my teeth and swear-
ing I would not show her any more of the indignance that seemed to
please her so.
There now! she scolded. Don't sulk! It was only a joke! As long
as you're wet— let's go for a swim!
It's too cold! I muttered, holding my chilled teeth together.
It may be for a boy! she mocked, hurtling her dress up over her
elbows. But it's not for me!
And she peeled out of petticoat and pantaloons and all and swam
out into the cold autumn river and dove under and came up with her
hair streaming like a mermaid and her nipples hard with cold and
spouted water at me, mocking. I gritted my teeth and got my clothes
off and swam out after her and she dove, teasing, and stayed under
as she had used to do until I grew mad with fear that she had drowned
and then came up behind me, sputtering and gasping and ducked me
with both hands. When I could see her again she was ten feet away,
treading water and staring now at the scuding autumn clouds re-
flected in the mirror of the river.
Hello, God! she cried again, her voice live and singing on the wa-
ter. Thank you, God!
And I thought with a sudden twist of little fear how utterly we
both were in His mercy there: if He should choose to end us both.
And my eyes followed hers, to the sky shining there in the green, great
mirror of the river and saw how lovely it was and knew that her
thanks had been a solemn thing and not a mocking. It was a swift
and violent vision: that other sky beneath the water, with six white
clouds a-hasting and a tiny, circling hawk upon the starless face of
day: two heavens: one above and one on earth, and seeing it so, for
that immortal instant, I closed my eyes and breathed His name in
praise, thinking: Why can't we always know that these two heavens be?
We dressed gravely on the shore and went up the faint path
332


if He had come and told me Himself! I knew it was a curse upon
me!
And you blamed me, I murmured, glumly.
Tom! Tom! Not really, I didn't! Not in my heart! It was just so
scaring a thing! And she had told me that I wasn't really one of you!
Not a Christopher, she said. A servant in the house, she said. Remem-
ber, Tom?
Yes.
And so I hated you, I guess. Oh, I don't know. It was so scaring a
thing! The blood! Twelve red splatters upon the calendar of every
year! Such a cursed and shameful thing! Oh, God! I wanted to burn
my body! I wanted to be clean of something! I think if Abijah had
ever come back while I was in one of those cursed times I would have
run down and drowned myself in the river. Awful! Awful! And she
told me that it was the curse of God upon woman. But I never knew
exactly if she meant on all women or just on me.
And she breathed and took her eyes down from the little place of
sky and looked at me and took my hands.
And now He has forgiven me, she whispered. He has taken His
curse away.
My love! I said. My love!
Not last month, she whispered, her face like a shining child's. Not
this month, either. Tom, He has made me clean!
In the days of the first snowfall of that winter Cathie seemed hap-
pier than I had ever seen her—and more loving. And it seemed mani-
fest beyond doubt that God had indeed blessed her: her eyes gleamed
like dark jewels and her flesh grew pink and luminous under the gray
winter light and her whole body seemed to shape itself happily into
some rich, new province of young womanhood. Her flesh seemed in-
tent upon something of which her mind knew nothing; and her soul
bent upon some ich fashioning that transcended conscious reason.
As for myself, I felt an old restless and uneasy twitch of familiar, yet
long-exiled dangers. Sometimes in the winter nights when I would lie
alone and listen to the singing rain upon the panes I would fancy that
the night's outer turmoils veiled over yet another sound: the drum
of hooves upon the river road. And to my thoughts would come
a-whispering and a-whispering that name that I never dared speak
to her: that haunting specter of him, from whose menace I could
334


never hope to find asylum in her arms: Abijah. Abijah riding the
midnight roads again. Abijah haunting that house and its dreamers
until the trump of Doom should wake us all to morning innocence.
Abijah. Abijah tapping light with his pistol upon the pantry panes.
Abijah come to avenge upon my flesh that sin that I had never known
by name or number. And while I started and stared at every shadow
upon the frosted glass of winter and shivered at each scratch of leaf-
less bough upon the slates, Cathie dreamed radiant within the syna-
gogues of her flesh: rejoicing and luminous in every pore and eyelash
and tendril of soft hair upon her temples. It was plain enough that
miracles were afoot. Sometimes we would feel it upon us and fall
suddenly dumb and frightened in its presence. And though Cathie
seemed, day by day, to grow more beautiful within this spell, she was
increasingly shy of my stares and of my loving inventories and kept
her old spinisterish nightdress tight about her knees until the very
moment of love was at hand and, even then, she would never let me
stare upon her when the hearthfire blew bright and filled the room
with summer dusks or when the winter moon was blue and full upon
the frosty window. And then the dream ended: almost as suddenly
as it had begun. It was a bitter night in November and the river was
frozen and silent and foxes barked along the hills.
Cathie, you'll freeze standing there! Come here—under my quilts!
She had come barefoot into my room and stood before the fire,
staring silently into the grate, her teeth set in her lower lip and her
child's hands wandering fitfully upon the faint roundness beneath her
nightdress.
Cathie?
But she would not answer, would not even turn her face to me:
her pupils wide and strange and wandering in the fire as if in search
of visions there: of flame-ghosts of summers gone beyond recall.
Cathie, what's wrong?
I don't know, Tom.
I threw back the quilts and ran to her side and she turned her face
to me and it was feverish with the shadows of the fire, and something
more.
Something—moved, she whispered, and her fingers crawled and
froze upon the roundness of her belly. Something moved inside me,
Tom! Something-leaped. Ah, God! There! It came again! Something
—something's alive in me!
And she threw herself against me and clung hard with her nails
335


Just hold me, Tom!
Cathie, listen! We'll run away together!
Yes!
We'll pack and leave in the morning! We'll catch the morning
packet at Elizabethtown!
Tonight, Tom! Tonight! I can't abide hearing another clock-strike
in this house!
And she seized my face in her fingers and kissed me wildly and
then drew back and stared into my eyes again.
Tom! Tom, say you love me!
I love you.
Then take me away, Tom! Take me away, Tom! Now! Tonight!
This very minute! Before he comes back! Now, Tom!
Cathie! Listen to the weather out there! It's all wind and rain! To-
morrow will be time!
And suddenly the joy was gone from her face and her pupils
widened and I knew that she was listening, listening again.
He won't ever come back—will he, Tom?
1-
Will be, Tom?
Cathie! God help me! I don't know!
Tom! Oh God, Tom! Say he won't ever come back, Tom!
He won't ever come back, Cathie.
Why, no, she breathed, her mouth and eyes criss-crossed with cob-
webs of thrawn, sweet joy. Why, no! He's dead! Abijah's dead, Tom!
Dead with Morgan and the others! Dead, Tom! He won't ever be
back! There's no use to listen any more, Tom! It's only the wind and
the rain!
And we did not go away together that morning; nor on the morn-
ing of the day that followed: nor any morning ever after. For there
was no place to go, even if we had had the will to go. And perhaps
the specter of Abijah would have followed us, wherever we had gone.
And Aunt Sarah never so much as gave a sign that she had heard
Cathie's wild outcry at her door that night; perhaps she had slept
throughout it: snug within her nightcap and the dreamless waste-
lands of her aging spirit. As for Cathie, after that night she seemed
again withdrawn into herself: into those grave speculations of her
flesh. The winter ice had rotted and gone off in thundering, tumbling
344


She seemed wholly unaware now of the child within her; with all
of her consciousness focused instead upon that being in the womb of
night itself. And I harked as she had bidden me for that cry which she
alone could hear.
Listen, Tom! Listen! Don't you hear it? It's him-out yonder there
in the mist—it's him, at last!
And I quaked and sweated and shut my eyes against her candle-
flame and pressed my palms into my ears until they thundered and
drummed with seashell tempests.
No, I whispered. No.
Yes! Yes! Listen, Tom! It's Abijah!
It's not! I shouted. He's dead!
And I heard her quick intake of breath before I said that other
thing that shaped itself in cold dread upon my tongue at the very
saying.
Tom, no. No, Tom.
He's dead! He's dead!
No, Tom.
Yes! Yes! Back yonder! In the war! In the mountains! Over in East
Virginny! Somewhere! Come away from the window, Cathie! He's not
there to spy your candle! He'll never see it, Cathie! He'll never come
now! He's dead!
No, Tom! Ah, God! No! No! No!
And she was on her feet now, falling back from me in horror, her
head thrown back and her hair a-tumble across her wild grieving
mouth and her hands upon the roundness of her belly like the ma-
donna in the old picture. And suddenly she dropped the candle and
swept past me toward the stairway like a white wraith in the faint
traces of moonshine that blew and drifted through the moving
curtains.
Cathie! Cathie, wait! Let me tell you !
But she was gone and I listened, aghast, as she stumbled on the
bottom step and fell forward with a crash against the little table under
the mirror and got up again, groaning and gasping, and fled on down
the hallway to the front door and flung up the latch and was gone
into the mists in a twinkling.
Cathie! Cathie! Wait!
And when I got there the great door hung wide open upon its
hinges, as it had been upon that faint-remembered night when I had
driven her into the shows; and now it seemed as if those selfsame
349


winter drifts had returned: the ghost of them, for the land to the
river's edge lay phantomed and white with the fog that had come up
in the wake of that climactic rainfall.
Cathie! Cathie, in God's name wait! I cried and rushed out into
the fog to bring her back.
The mist was like a sea and we like men upon its floor. Our lan-
terns glimmered and drifted in its pale depths like frail luminous
anemones moving in a fathomless Atlantic as we wandered through
the pastures and meadows crying her name like drowned sailors
hailing the lost Lorelei.
Miss Catherine! Miss Catherine!
Far up on the river road the lantern on the buckboard glowed
dimmest of all: a faint stain of yellow on the veil of mist. Down
among the willows on the river shore Coy's lantern swung and then
halted and then drifted on, casting a spidery gossamer of radiance
around it like a halo.
Cathie! Cathie!
And the name rang ilat: un-echoing: a dead question posed against
implacable elements.
Miss Catherine! Miss Catherine!
And when the old Negro's lantern disappeared suddenly behind
the willows I was seized suddenly with a choking and despairing
panic and almost dropped my own.
Coy! Are you there!
And I heard his tired, frightened old bleat of answer and saw the
dusty shine of the flame again: bobbing and drifting far down in
the heart of that white darkness. And so we moved throughout the
whole of that terrible night, seeking her, searching by lampshine and
the instincts of memory along every inch of meadow and shore,
crying her name until we were hoarse and hearing no sound but our
own voices and the lap of water along the invisible shores and the
faint cloaked bugling of hounds in the river farms across the stream.
In the hour before daylight a breeze came up from the river and
roiled the mists like troubled phantoms and we waited for a spell,
knowing that they would be gone when the sun shone at last along
the eastern ridges.
Coy? Any sign?
No, Marse Tom! God have mercy on that po' chile!
350


He was fifty yards away, I judged, by the creek bank where the
boat had lain throughout that decade of her long dreaming wait and
I had somehow thought that it was here that she would have come.
And I stood listening as the old man crashed and stumbled among
the brush-filth, his voice whispering and whimpering and imploring,
saying her name and praying by turns, and once I heard him singing
a scrap of an old hymn to keep his own affrighted spirits up. Listen-
ing, listening. And moving on. And living through that night in a
circle of world no bigger than the spread of that lampshine round
my boots. And when I first heard that new and alien sound I thought
for a choking instant that it was the voice of that ghost that she
herself had called up from the mists of the past: Abijah, born from
the white womb of the fog.
Coy? Is that you?
But he, in turn, was listening, too, and stood far off from me,
transfixed and motionless at what he heard: haunted by his own
notions of what it might be. For a moment then I thought, in-
credulously, that the old man was laughing; it was a high, chuckling
sound: remote, hidden, unearthly: ghostly and muffled, like the
voice of some river spirit. And suddenly I heard Coy's outcry and
saw the shape of his lantern swing suddenly forward with new
alacrity through the fog and I shouted something and began to
stumble toward him.
Marse Tom! Marse Tom! God Almighty, come quick!
And I ran then, sobbing a prayer, and fell face down in a gully
and lost the lantern and got up and ran on down the meadow toward
the light and the voice. It was louder now and yet, as it grew more
distinct, it seemed a sound so small and piteous that it was a
marvel that anyone but the frogs and sleeping birds should have
heard it.
Down yonder! cried the old Negro. Quick! Praise God, down
yonder in the pawpaws! Down yonder on the bank!
He moved ahead of me: his shape, caught suddenly in the halo
of his own lampshine, printed giant and towering upon the tissue
of mists.
Jesus have mercy on us! he breathed and held the lamp down and
I leaned across his arm and stared into the green hollow of the bank
where she had fallen at last: under the branches of the green-budding
pawpaw thicket. She was unconscious—or dead: I could not know
which at that first terrible vision of her there: her white thighs bared
351


the treasures? All the silver and the golden things! The golden,
golden, lovely things!
And she would call each of them to witness her great hour: each
name in all the province of her memory but my own. And not once
did she call me to witness her new, fancied glory.
A princess! she would cry. See, Miss Christopher? And you once
said that Aunt Rebecca and me. But that's no matter. Oh, I'm so
happy! So happy! It's all come true! See, Miss Dulcie? Here! Let me
give you one of my golden, lovely things!
And I stood there in the hallway, crucified against the cold plaster,
and heard her out and at the choking dusty chime of ten another
sound fluttered faintly in the breathless air and I turned and saw the
faint yellow shape of the parasol and the poor huddled shape of
Aunt Sarah in the depths of her father's room.
Tom?
I moved toward the door, my legs numb and thick as logs, and
fetched a candle from the table and held it up in the doorway and
stared down at her, in mercy and heartbreak, while she stared up at
me from beneath her shabby nodding bonnet-brim, like a naughty
child, hiding in a closet of grownups' clothes. Her eyes burned like
wild pagan jewels in her sallow grieving face and it seemed as if
only in that single instant had she grasped any of what had happened
in the day that had just ended.
The best I knew how! she whispered in a breath and lowered her
eyes and I took the candle away and went to stand against the cold
wallpaper again, like some fatal sentry, listening while Cathie's
feverish and doomed prattle rose and diminished, raving and riot-
ing innocently through the hushed house.
I fell asleep that night, on my feet, against the wall, and Aunt
Sarah came out and found me there and led me, like a somnambulist,
to my bed and covered me with the quilt and went away, dragging
a wake of candlelight shadows behind her down the corridor. Below,
in the kitchen, Dulcie and Cynthie and the Negro sisters kept their
loyal teacup vigilance before that immemorial suffering that each of
them, in her female loins, so richly comprehended. And I dreamed
a strange dream that I went up the hill to the place by Dulcie's where
the river wind seemed always to blow, to the grasses where the
stones stood against the sky with their bitten names and the num-
bers of their time on earth yielding slowly to the erasure of rain
354


I had fallen, choking, speechless, to the floor beside the little bed,
clinging to it with the strange, strangling desperation in which men
cling to boats in smothering midnight seas. Her hand! Her hand!
My God, I must find her hand and fetch it up out of the nothingness
of that flat quilt beneath which her whole body seemed to have
diminished and dissolved.
Don't you want to see them? My treasures?
Her fingers: to seize them, to kiss each separately, to absorb her,
somehow to hold her back from the bidding of that Darkness which,
even now, yearned and fidgeted upon the thresholds of her flesh. It
was as implicit as a scent in the room: the shadows of lampshine
held the fumes of it in the air between us. And the circling night
bird cried its name down her corridors of Queen-Anne's-lace and
moonlight on the firefly meadow.
My treasures, she said again, and I looked up and her eyes were
wide and brimming with hurt. You don't even care. You won't even
look at them.
Yes! I sobbed.
See! They're all spread out here on the quilt!
And her face denied death in that quick spasm of happiness: her
eyes restrained the shadows. And I peered through that fateful, dap-
pling lampshine to see what she wanted me to see: those ghosts of
gold arrayed upon the coverler that shaped the faint, frail outlines of
her filesh. The golden things: the treasures that Abijah had brought
back in prodigal glory: a dream of Kings come riding back upon the
river roads at last.
Can't you see them? All my treasures? she whispered, with a
ghosting smile. The pebble that holds the color of the moon—the
hawk's feather. Remember how you gave them all to me that day,
Tom? The bird points that the Injuns made? The jackknife? The
pretty, pretty pearl button. The piece of blue bottle the color of the
air before storms. My treasures. All my lovely things. All-
And the night bird hushed and the frogs stilled in the river
willows and something went out of the little room like a breath.
And I lay on the floor beside her bed, holding her fingers until my
hands would warm them no more. And in the hour before dawn I
would have sworn that I heard the myriad, golden laughter of chil-
dren running in the river meadows. But I was mistaken. It was only
the voice of the waking child in another room.
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