Diary of a Wildflower (2 page)

February, 1918

Ice
came out of the sky and we can’t go to the school house.  Nell and Roxie
still have whooping cough, so they have to stay in the bed, but I’m over it, so
Luther tells me it's my job to go into the woods and find the baby lamb that is
lost there.

I
don’t have britches or boots like the big boys got.  I don’t have mittens
to go over my fingers.  But I do have a coat.  It usta be Nell’s.

The
woods are a fairy tale.  A lacey palace.  Ice here.  Ice
there.  With the cold white sun making shines on it.  The limbs are
nearabout laying on the ground.  The earth cracks when I step on it.

I
call to the lamb.  I have named it Curly.  My voice is tiny in the
big still woods.  Like a little bitty silver bell.  The wind takes
the sound away.  I hunker down against a tree trunk and cover my legs with
my coat and watch for Curly.  I look up there on the ridge where I see a
round white hump.  I think the wind has blinded me, for I can see only
white.  Then shapes start to come up from nothing.  Someone is laying
on the ice bank.  It’s the sleeping beauty!

Her
face is white.  Her dress is white.  Her hair is black as coal. 
She folds her hands at her heart like she is praying to be resacued by the
prince.  She is fast asleep in her ice palace.  Just sleeping and
waiting for the handsome prince to come and carry her off on his white
horse.  And they will live happily ever after.

Then
she turns her pretty face to me.  She opens her ice blue eyes and sees
me.  Her little mouth is a rosebud and she is fixing to tell me an
important thing, but somebody is here throwing something warm around me and
picking me up.  It’s Trula.  She has put her coat over me.  Her
breath comes out like puffs of smoke on my face.

I
tell her I saw the sleeping beauty and she says back to me that I was about to
be the sleeping beauty myself.  She says she should whip me good, such a
bad girl, going off in this temperature.  I tell her about Curly, but I
don’t say that Luther made me go find her.  I think that would make Trula
mad at Luther.

Trula
takes me to the house and up the stairsteps to the sleeping loft on the side
where the girls sleep.  Roxie and Nell cough cough cough, and I am put in
between them.  They go ooo..ooo..eee..eee when they feel my cold skin, but
they snuggle up to me to make me warm.  When all the world is frozen hard
with ice I think it is a cozy place to be between Nell and Roxie under the
quilts Mommie and Trula stitched together from the scrap bag.  Daylight
has snuck off the mountaintop when Trula comes to light the lantern beside our
bed.  We don’t have light bubs because we don’t have juice at our
house.  Uncle Green has the juice, but it’s too modern for Daddy.

With
her red raw hands Trula reaches me a jar full of sweet milk and a sidemeat
biscuit.  She's got one for us each.  It is so good.  We get the
crumbs under our butts.  We wipe greasy fingers on our petticoats. 
Last time Trula had a birthday she was fourteen, and I can see this cold white
day written on her tired face.  Here you see the sweeping and
mopping.  There you see the cooking and cleaning.  Yonder she is
tending to Jewel and Charles.  Or she's pouring the slop jars down the
toilet hole.  Milking the cow.  Churning the butter.  Stoking up
the fire.  Fetching water in a bucket from the half-frozen spring.  I
am sorry then to see my own little self in those Starr blue eyes.  With
all else she has to do, she hauls me out of the frozen forest where the
sleeping beauty sleeps for a hundred years.

September, 1918

I
am too old for counting fingers now.  I am close to seven.  I am in
the second grade and I can read awful good.  I know my numbers up a long
ways.  I know how to sew on a button.  I can put a patch on a tore
place.  I can mind Charles and Jewel for Trula.  I can help her carry
wood, and take ashes out of the cook stove.

           
We have a whole bunch of laying hens.  Me and Nell feed them cracked corn
of a morning and snatch their eggs.  Luther takes them to Deep Bottom to
sell to Mr. Call, who turns around and sells them to people who don’t have
chickens.  Our egg money is set aside for school stuff like paper and
pencils.

Mommie
and Trula cook three big meals most days.  Roxie helps some now.  In
our summer garden we grow lots of good vegetables.  We don't ever go
hungry, not even in the wintertime.  We are like the squirrels who store
things away for when the ground is too cold to make food.  We pack lots
and lots of good things to eat in jars with sealing lids.  We stash the
jars on shelves in the cellar out back of our log house.  It is under the
ground with the spiders.  It stays cool even in the summertime, and always
smells like damp earth.

When
the sun is orange on a Saturday evening, Samuel comes up from West
Virginia.  That’s four miles over the mountain.  He’s been there all
summer working in the hot sun, helping a man build a house.  It’s all the
work he can find.  He tried to join the army, but a doctor said he’s got
weak lungs.  Me and Mommie and Samuel sit on the porch.  I am next to
Samuel, and he smells like the last whiff of summer.  Mommie is shelling
butter beans.  She says her life is all up a hill.  It’s awful to be
borned a female and don’t you forgit it.  It’s a cross to bear.

Since
the drinking spring dried up, Mommie and Trula have to haul water a right good
piece from another spring.  And they are sick and tired of it. 
Mommie begs Daddy to buy our own well this year when the apples come in. 
She says it does not cost much to drill it.  Daddy tells her the apple
money is to spend for more important things.  Trula says she didn’t know
there was anything more important than water, and Daddy gives her a hard
look.  She is so mad, I reckon she forgets who she is talking to. 
She starts yelling that he’s not the one who has to fetch pails of water in the
snow and mud and rain.  And he should try it.  See how it hurts your
hands to carry it, and it’s so cold sometimes without mittens when it spills on
you.  But he’s got girls to do that for him, so what does he care?

Daddy’s
face turns red as fire, and that’s when I know Trula has said too much. 
Daddy will not put up with sass, especially from a girl.  He tells her to
go cut a switch and bring it to him.  Then Trula’s face is so pitiful, it
hurts me to look at her, but she does like she’s told.  Daddy makes the
rest of us watch while he switches Trula’s legs and back and behind.  She
does not let out a whimper.  But I cry, along with Roxie and Nell and
Jewel.  We beg him to stop.  I have to close my eyes.  I want so
bad to forget it now.  But it won’t leave me.

********************

Our
black and white dog is Dixie.  She is sweet as sugar.  She guards the
chicken house and keeps the critters away.  I hug Dixie in both my
arms.  Mommie sends us to look for persimmon trees.  We go down
Willy’s Road.  The woods here to the right are dark and overgrown, not
like the enchanted forest behind our house where the sleeping beauty
sleeps.  I stop and listen, for there is something in this patch of
woods.  It is older than the sun.  It is a grieved and lonely
thing.  I hear it crying tears but I can’t see it.  I don’t go in
these woods ever, ever.

October, 1918

Samuel
says to me that Grandpa Wallace has died.  Daddy comes in with some men
and they have a long box made of shined wood.  They set it in the big
room.  The box has a lid on it, and somebody opens it.  There is
Grandpa Wallace, his white face hair laying on his chest.  His eyes are
closed, and his old freckled hands lay still on his belly.  He's the
oldest person in the world, but they got him dressed up in young clothes – new
britches and a red flannel shirt.  I wish Samuel had him a shirt like
that.

Samuel
tells me Grandpa will be buried out there on the knob.  He is talking
about that place where some square rocks are standing in the wind.  Letters
are scratched on the rocks.  It’s all right to leave Grandpa’s body there
because he is not in it anymore.  It’s like a walnut shell with all the
kernels picked out of it.  Then you just get shed of it.

I
tell Samuel he should get that shirt off of Grandpa before it's buried under
the dirt.  Samuel makes a funny noise, and I can't tell if he's choked or
crying.

Daddy's
four brothers come in.  There is not a normal one in this bunch. 
First there's that good-lookin Uncle Ben.  He carries a gun on his hip
wherever he goes, and folks don’t mess with him.  He shot a man one
time.  And there's Uncle Green who has a wooden leg.  His reg’lar one
was cut off at the sawmill when he was a boy.  Uncle Artemis has a
deformed hand.  There's just two big fat fingers on it.  And Uncle
Tom is a Democrat.

They
stand around with the neighbors from over the mountain and down the
holler.  They look at Grandpa Wallace in the box and whisper.  When
everybody cries over Grandpa’s empty body, I sneak away to the loft.  That
old man was mean as a copperhead.  I did not love him, but now he is dead,
so I will keep it to myself.

November, 1918

With
the apple money Daddy buys a long barrel shooting gun from Mr. Call.  Him
and Luther practice with it out by the barn.  The noise makes me
jumpy.  When it’s time to butcher hogs I hide so I don’t have to
see.  Samuel finds me and whispers that a hog would be a worthless critter
if you couldn't kill it and eat it, now ain't that right?  He reminds me
how much I like bacon.  Mommie and Trula salt the meat and hang it in the
smoke house out by the barn.  We will eat on it till summertime. 
Tomorrow they will render the lard with lye and make soap for washing
clothes.  I reckon that’s what hogs are for.  Still it’s a lonesome
thing to hear them screaming in your dreams.

********************

Sweet
Dixie is so awful sick.  While I was at the school house Barney the mule
kicked her in the belly and it is swelled up big.  Daddy says that
something inside Dixie is busted, and she's liable to die.

It’s
dark and cold, but I must go and see my Dixie where she lays in the barn. 
After everybody's asleep I wrap a blanket around me and slip outside. 
When I open the barn door, I can't see a thing, but I can hear my sweet Dixie
breathing heavy breaths in the dark, and I feel my way to her.  When I put
my hands on her, she tries to get up and wag her tail, but she falls back
down.  I lay in the straw beside her and wrap my arms and my blanket
around her.  She whimpers against me and licks my face.  I whisper
sweet things to Dixie.  Her breaths come easier and she snuggles to me in
the cold barn.  She knows I have come to tell her goodbye, and she is glad
in her heart.

Before
the frost settles over the mountain in the wee hours I feel the warm spirit
slip out of my Dixie girl, and her body goes cold in my arms.  My tears
fall over the hairy face that usta grin up at me all the time, and the black
eyes that always followed me.  Now they are open, but do not see.

I
go out into the cold night.  There is not a moon.  When you stand
here beside the black sky you can see that Samuel is right – the world is round
as a tater.  I can barely make out Willy’s Road yonder going past the dark
and tangled woods.  Yeah, there is something out there.  Something
wild and broken-hearted.  I feel its awful longing.

I
squat and pee beside the barn.  I shiver, pull my blanket tight around me
and creep back into the house.  I tiptoe past Daddy and Mommie where they
sleep in the big room.  I go up the stairsteps and climb over the footboard
back into bed with Nell and Jewel.  I have the shakes and can’t
quit.  I can hear Roxie and Trula breathing in the other bed.  I wipe
the tears that have gone cold on my face.  I feel the embroidered yellow
ducks that Trula stitched on my pillow case.  There is a big hollow place
in my chest, and I wonder if it will always be this empty.

Tomorrow
Daddy will tell Luther to bury my Dixie girl way down deep in the cold cold
ground.  I can’t help wondering what it really means to die.  All I
know for sure is the thing that made Dixie move around and wag her tail, and
her eyes to look at me so full of love is gone from her, and I will wonder for
a long time where it went.

May 25
^th
, 1919

A
sweet wind moves across the mountaintop, and I can smell strawberries in
it.  They are ripe out there near the pasture.  Me and Roxie are
fixing to pick them before the birds steal them.  Mulberries will come
next, then raspberries and blackberries in the hot weather.  Me and Roxie
and Nell will help Mommie and Trula make jam and preserves and store the jars
in the stone wall cellar.

It’s
a Sunday morning, and I sit in the new grass, feeling apart from my body. 
This is a funny way to feel.  I know every moment what will come
next.  Just for a split second before it happens, I know what's
coming.  I am watching me from the outside of myself.  Now Lorelei is
going to put her hand there on the grass.  It all took place this same way
before.  There is a cardinal going to light on that branch yonder, and he
does it.  Here I see Roxie leaning out the window of our sleeping loft,
with her golden hair hanging down like Rapunzel’s.  She calls to me in her
pretty little voice to go in the kitchen and fetch a bucket.  Yes, it was
like this one time before.  But when?  Now the moment is gone, and I
don’t know what it was or what it meant.  I will ask Samuel.  He
knows about the stars and planets and most everything.

I
go in the kitchen for a bucket.  It’s hot in here.  Mommie is baking
bread.  It makes her sweat.  The windows are open, and the first
flies of the season are coming in.  By July the air indoors will be thick
with them.  Samuel wants to buy screen windows like Uncle Green’s, but
Daddy says screen windows are too modern.

Mommie
has on her dark face.  I try to curl up into myself, be as little as can
be.  I move like a shadow by the wall.  I start into the pantry to
get a bucket.  She turns of a sudden, and I am right there under her
feet.  In a jiffy I am flying across the room.  She has back-handed
me good.  I am in the corner seeing stars on the ceiling.

I
ask her why did she hit me?  What did I do?  And she growls that I am
in her way.  She says I am ALWAYS in her way.

As
I creep by her to get out, I see that her belly is poking out big.  How
come I did not see this before?  Does it mean another baby will come out
of her?  Lordy, why is she doing that again?

I
go out to the yard with a big knot coming up on my forehead.  Roxie wants
to know where is the bucket?  I say to her if she wants a bucket, she
should go get it herself, that Mommie knocked me across the room.

Roxie
says sissy, poor sissy, and a tear rolls down her rosy cheek.  She pets my
head, but she cannot touch the place where it hurts the worst.