A Parchment of Leaves (19 page)

I just set there against him and held him for a long time, wanting to never move.

A
idia's excuse for going back to Aaron was that she couldn't bear staying with us during Saul's furlough.

“I know you all want to be alone,” she said. “You need to be.”

She gathered her clothes up in a paper sack and kissed Birdie on the forehead, then walked back up to Esme's.

“I wish Aidia would come live with us,” Birdie said. She pressed her face against the window glass as she watched Aidia climb the hill.

I felt bad for letting Aidia go back. I was glad to be shed of her, though. I hated to admit that, but it was true. Me and Saul did need some time alone. He would be going back the day after next, and I wanted to spend every minute doing something with him, making time stretch out as long as it would. We set right down on the porch floor and played with Birdie, hoed the garden together. Still, it seemed like we were only waiting and dreading his departure.

“I'll be home for good in no time,” Saul said. “They ain't many more trees there to be felled.”

I knowed that he would not be home for a while when we took
him back to the train station. I could feel it all through me, a certainty I could not explain to myself. The war showed no sign of slacking up, and they would need more turpentine. At the station I waited until he had left before I cried, my face turned away from the others.

Saul had had a long talk with Aaron before leaving and I hoped this would do some good, but I doubted it. Aaron seemed tired of Aidia. He would not let her touch him and barely grunted when Aidia asked him a question. That's just what I noticed. Aidia wouldn't speak of their marriage to me anymore. I believe she had decided to convince herself that everything was going to be all right once the baby arrived. She was like a child who makes herself believe that snakes don't live in the creek so she will be able to swim there in peace.

Nothing changed but the weather. Aaron was happy for a few days, then laid out for two or three nights gambling. He would come home stinking of liquor and filth in the same clothes he had left in. Aidia tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, and Esme busied herself with chores and church, the two things in her life that were most important, besides her family.

But there was a feeling of dread in the air. It crept over the holler like the rain clouds that rolled in every evening. When the summer thunderstorms raged, I stood on the porch and let the mist of the rain light on my face. I felt as if something was building up, growing and becoming more powerful. Sometimes I thought I might bust from a burden that I could not name, and felt as if I was mourning something that had not even happened yet.

I started writing long letters to my family and received many from them, but they told the same things over and over. They were settling in fine. My aunt Hazel was about to get remarried, and Jubal had already done so. He had married a young girl and received his draft papers on the same day. Mama had written, “He had to marry her. She got knocked up.” Daddy was doing well. I read these words many
times, trying to see what Mama was really saying in her tight, hunchbacked writing. I wondered if she was trying to spare me from suffering the truth, that he wasn't getting better, that he was worse. I often laid the letters on my chest and leaned back, closing my eyes and trying to picture him, to see what he was doing. I missed all my people, but being away from him was the hardest part, knowing that he was sick and not able to do for himself. It hurt me to the bone.

I saved all the letters. I got castaway shreds of fabric from Esme's quilting box and tied the letters in neat stacks. Sometimes, when I didn't think I could stand being away from my family any longer, I sat down and read all the letters again.

L
ATER THAT MONTH
, I stood near the door and watched as Serena delivered Aidia and Aaron's baby. It was the easiest birth I had ever seen, so I had gotten out of the way; it seemed Aidia bore down no more than an hour before the child come screaming forth.

Aidia laughed like a lunatic when Serena laid the baby in the crook of her arm. She laughed until tears streamed down her face. “She's mine,” she said over and over, as if in a daze.

Aaron hesitated about holding the baby. “I'm afraid I'll hurt it,” he told Serena.

Serena held the baby out to him, but still he wouldn't take her. She laid the baby back on her arm. “See here, as long as you keep her head up, you can't hurt her. Just keep her head steady.” Then she gently placed the baby into the crook of Aaron's arm. “There you go. There. See?”

Still, he held the baby like he was afraid of her. I didn't like the look of fear on his face. He held her with both arms and hunched over her, whispering so low that none of us could hear what he was saying. He appeared to be humbled, as all men seem to be right after a birth, but there was nothing peaceful about him.

That baby was three days old before Aidia ever considered naming her. Even though she had had that easy labor, she took a long
while to heal. On the third day, I was still having to change the towels between her legs. Aidia bled so much that I didn't see how she could lift her head, but Serena said it was a steady flow and not to worry.

“Raise your rump up so I can change these rags,” I told Aidia.

When I slid a new one under her, Aidia said, “Won't you name the baby, Vine? You're a good hand with names.”

“No, I couldn't do that,” I said.

“Please,” Aidia said. “You've been so good to me.”

Aaron stood in the door. “You ought to, Vine.”

I took the baby and held her up, her little rump in one hand and her head in the other. Her soft spot pumped a steady pulse, so quick that it moved the thin hairs on the top of her head. I held her close to my face and breathed in her clean scent. She was a quiet baby and only cried when hungry, but she rooted around, trying to suck her thumb all the time. Her brow was always in a furrow, so wrinkled that I thought I might be able to lay my finger within the creases. The baby was dark enough to be my own, with a ring of thick, black curls in a horseshoe shape around her head, like an old man who has lost all of his hair on top.

“You ought to crack the Bible for a name,” Esme called from the kitchen. “It'll have a happier life.”

None of us said a word to acknowledge Esme. I hadn't consulted the Scripture for Birdie's name and saw no reason for Aaron and Aidia to do so, either.

I looked at her for a long time, thinking a name would come to me. But it is near impossible to name a child that is not your own. When it is your own, you just know if a name is right or not. Once it comes to you, it just clicks. “I don't know, Aidia,” I said. “You name her.”

“No,” Aidia said. Her eyes were very big and she smiled as if teasing me.

“I always thought Matracia was pretty,” I said finally. My greataunt
Matracia had died long before I was born, but I had growed up hearing her name and had always liked it. “I wish I had tacked that on for Birdie's middle name.”

“Matracia,” Aidia said slowly, pronouncing each syllable in a breathless way. “I like it. I surely do.”

“Matracia Star,” Aaron said, taking a step into the room.

At this, Aidia spread her arms wide and he sunk down on his knees beside the bed. He buried his face in her hair and held her for so long that I wondered if he was crying.

Aidia had tears in her eyes but did not shed them. When she spoke, they quivered on her eyelashes. “The Star Theater is where me and him met,” she said, and I hurried from the room, afraid I might lash out at her for being such a fool.

A
T LAST
A
ARON
began to build a house for his family. He chose a shelf on the mountainside above Esme's house instead of the good, flat land down by the creek. He said he wanted to be able to look out on everything instead of only looking up at the mountains towering above him. The mountain was steep and draped in kudzu that Aaron chopped away, even though Esme told him that it would come back twice as thick.

There was a whole crew of men from the mill that come to help him, the Wooten brothers, and Duke Brown. Whistle-Dick's brother, Dalton, was there, and a crew of other boys, most of them friends of Saul's who come just because Aaron was his brother. None of us women set a foot up there, though. Aaron was short tempered, and no one wanted to be around him. Often while he was working on the house he would get aggravated and hurl a hammer across the yard. I heard tell that he almost fell while packing an armload of lumber, and when he had righted himself, he heaved the load over his head and throwed the planks into the frame of the house, knocking down a wall the men had just set up. One of the planks landed on Duke Brown's foot, causing him to draw his fist back on Aaron. There
were harsh words between them, and Duke stomped off down the mountain. Most of the men didn't come back after that, and I can't say I blame them. But the house was eventually raised. It was a shotgun house, small and—to my eye—off-kilter. It seemed to me a good rain might wash it right off the mountainside.

Despite all this, Aidia was tickled to have her own home. I knowed how she felt, for I remembered how miserable it was to live in Esme's house. At least Esme had liked me; Aidia had not even had that luxury. When I went into town, clerks leaned over the counter to tell me how Aidia had run up a debt by purchasing furniture and fabric. There was not room for much in the house, but what she did buy was the very best.

I have to admit that it was pretty up there on the mountainside. In the mornings you could set on the porch and watch the roofs below seem to rise up out of the mist that burned away by noon. Still, the kudzu would grow back thickly come spring, and they would be able to see nothing more than a drapery of bluish green. But Aidia said she wouldn't mind being hidden from the rest of the world. The birds gathered there and chattered all the time, but it was snaky, too. The ground was solid rock, too solid to be broken for a pump. Aidia had to walk all the way down to Esme's for water. She didn't seem to mind, though, and kept the house very clean, as if she expected important company.

When Aaron and Aidia had finally settled in, it was time for the slaughters. We all helped take care of the animals and then sold the meat in town. Esme offered to split the money three ways, but I told her that Saul sent me plenty to get by on. Besides, my garden had bore heavily in summer and I had all I needed to eat. I made Esme keep the third part for herself. I knowed that Esme gave this extra money to Aaron, but I didn't care. I hoped they would use it to pay off their debts. I guess I was hoping things would work out for them.

I had come to like Aidia. Her laughter was catching and she had that strange way of speaking politely all the time. There was something about her that was elegant. She was always touching me; sometimes
when we went for walks, she would hook her arm through mine and say, “We're sisters now.” It wasn't hard for me to see how Aidia and Aaron had been attracted to each other: they were both so full of dreams that it was a wonder they could think straight at all. Aidia spoke of seeing the ocean or going to Knoxville to buy a dress, trips that would have taken days, even by train. She curled her body around books she borrowed from Serena, sometimes closing her eyes as if picturing herself in some faraway tale. Aidia was a predictable person, and I liked that about her, too. She had only two moods: laughing or crying. Her good spells lasted the longest, but when a depression settled over her, it was heavy. She would go days without washing her hair and would set rocking the baby for hours, singing the same lullaby over and over. “Be-oh-by-oh, little baby. Hush-a-bye and good night-o.”

Aidia spoke of her family and her home in East Tennessee as if it was all a great kingdom she had been stolen away from by marrying Aaron, even though I knowed full and well that her own daddy had been mean to her and that they had been poor. But their little house seemed to lift Aidia's spirits.

I wish I could say the house had a good effect on Aaron. He started to roam even more than before and sometimes stayed gone for two or three nights in a row. He would come home dirty and ripe with the scent of whiskey and woodsmoke, his pockets empty. The day after he would return, I always went to check on Aidia. Sometimes I seen blue handprints on Aidia's arms, and once a cut lip, but Aidia said Aaron had not hurt her since that night Saul had been home.

“You'd tell me, wouldn't you?” I said.

“I would, but it wouldn't change nothing,” Aidia said, not wanting to look me in the eye.

A
ND THEN ONE NIGHT
, me and Serena were at Esme's house, working on a quilt. Birdie and Luke were underneath the quilting frame, laying back and pretending the quilt was the night sky
spread out above them. We could hear shouts coming down from the mountainside, but Esme talked that much louder, as if she didn't want any of us to listen to the fighting. She kept her eyes on the needle and did not so much as flinch. I looked at Serena, but I shook my head, willing her not to say anything. It wouldn't do for Serena to go into a rant about Aaron in front of his mother.

Then the blast of a shotgun cracked the night air, and all three of us jumped up at once. The children scrambled out from beneath the quilting frame and clutched at my legs.

“He's killed her this time,” Serena said, and stomped out of the house, pulling Luke along with her. Esme stood looking down at the quilt, as if in defeat. She let her shoulders slump and sat back down at the frame, but did not bend to reach for the thimble that had tumbled from her finger and rolled to the center of the quilt. I went after Serena.

We met Aaron on the path. He shoved his hands roughly into his pockets and raised his head only to stare into my eyes, daring me to say a word.

“What have you done, Aaron?” Serena hollered.