Fair and Tender Ladies (31 page)

Dear Beulah,

 

I am writing again because you did not answer which makes me feel like we parted on a sour note, and I can't stand this since so many in our family are lost in light already, dead and gone. You know you have never wrote to me once not even after getting the letter where I told you that Oakley and me got married. Well, what do you think of that? You know we have ended up back here on Sugar Fork, and Oakley is farming which he has always wanted to do, so far it is hand to mouth but we are happy. I know how much you hate Sugar Fork, and I can see for why, but oh Beulah you would not if you could see it in the spring.

The apple trees behind the house were like a rolling sea of sweet pink clouds. The rosybush by the front porch steps is still in bloom, and the lilac by the back door never had so many flowers. It is beautiful up here. Try to think of me like this, in all these flowers, and don't be mad at me or disappointed because I failed to marry Franklin Ransom as you hoped, or make a schoolteacher either as Mrs. Brown and Miss Torrington wished. I guess I am too flighty to make a good schoolteacher anyhow—I still get all carried away! So I will just write my letters instead, for it means so much to me to keep in touch.

And as for Franklin Ransom, I am lucky I got out of that, believe you me! I am writing today to tell you what happened, in case you haven't heard. Well, it seems that Franklin Ransom had him a girlfriend in nigger holler all along, even when me and him were going out so much together, yes all that whole long time. Her name is Walterene Parrish. Franklin had daddied two little nigger babies on her, so they say. But after the mine disaster, when his parents left Diamond under a cloud, he went back over to Kentucky, and Walterene—now that's Tessie's sister's girl—took up with a big huge Northern nigger that had just come down here. But one day Franklin drove back over to Diamond and went knocking on Walterene's door again and she let him in same as always, and they were going at it for fair when this big new nigger got off of his shift and came home. And he up and pitched a fit! They say that Franklin said to him,
You must not know who I am, you must not know your place either,
and that nigger said,
I don't give a damn who you are, you had better get your white ass out of my house right now,
and then he shot Franklin in the rear end with grapeshot and made him run naked all the way down nigger holler to his car! I guess this Northern nigger had not yet learned how to act down here.

Anyway, folks did not take it laying down. You know how they are anyway, them that lives low down on Company Hill. They are so bad off theirselves that they have got to have somebody else to look down on, they have got to believe that there is somebody, someplace, lower than them. This is why they hate niggers so bad, in my opinion. This is why they done what they done, in my opinion, which was awful. Plus they are just naturally spoiling for a fight all the time. But what they done was awful.

A bunch of them got good and likkered up and went over there and lined both sides of that nigger holler just at dark, and let loose with a round of shooting you have never heard the likes of—and come morning, half of those niggers was gone. They had left out in the dead of night. They say that Walterene took off so fast, she left her beans in a pot on the cookstove, and her clothes flapping out on the line. Well, this is what folks say, anyway—so I am
glad
I failed to make a good thing out of Franklin, after all! I hope you will be glad too, and forgive me.

And times are still real bad over at Diamond, I reckon you have heard. I don't know
what
you have heard, though. The company side of it, I reckon. I swear, Beulah, I can't see it. I have to say I am all for the union myself, and Oakley says that not a day goes by but what he thinks of Ray, and blames the company for it. So I reckon you have heard what Violet is doing. We hear that the strike still goes on, and that the company has brought some thugs in there with Gatling guns to protect the scabs. So we don't know where it will all end, or when. But folks are leaving there in droves now, they can't hold out no longer. Violet is still right in the thick of things, her and her boy R.T. She is going to get run out on a rail soon, according to Oakley. She says that her and R.T. might go over to Harlan after this strike gets settled, and work for the union there. So Oakley and me are like to have her Martha for a good long time.

Speaking of children, how are John Arthur and Curtis Junior and Delores? Fine I hope. Give them all a big hug and a kiss for me, and do not let them forget me Beulah, especially John Arthur. Tell him how we used to go down the hill to see the train at Diamond. I think Oakley is real jealous of Curtis for having Curtis Junior. Oakley wants a boy the worst in the world, and says he heeds one to farm with! Or may be two.

I was thinking the other day about you and about Curtis's awful mother Mrs. Bostick, and how mean she was to you. Have you all ever made up yet? My new in-laws are anything
but
mean. In fact they will kill you with kindness if you let them, Edith Fox will cook you to death and Ray Senior would give you the shirt off his back. You know we stayed with them down there on Home Creek until the thaw. Oakley couldn't stand to be at Diamond another minute after Ray Junior got killed. The Foxes are so nice they are almost
too
nice, if you know what I mean. At their table you have to hold hands and bow your head and say grace before each meal. And every night of the world, Ray Senior reads the Bible out loud. But since he can not read as good as me, he got me to read it while we were staying there. Oakley was real proud of me. He just looked at me when I read, and I could tell he wasn't listening to a word of it. I could tell.

We went to church with them too. Now this is the regular Primitive Baptist Church at Deskins Branch, you turn left there at the fork of Home Creek instead of going like you would go on to Majestic. My word, Beulah—they don't meet but twice a month, and so it goes on for ever. They start with singing, and Delphi Rolette lines out the words which he has been doing for twenty years, and then there is preaching and then more singing and then more preaching, it will wear you out. I kept thinking about Garnie through it all. I guess we have lost him too at least for now. We have given him up to God! After the service, the moderator will
open the doors
which means he will ask,
Are all in love and fellowship?
which they never are, and then anybody that has got a complaint, comes forward. If there is somebody that has not been coming to church regular, for an instance, they will notice him to come in and give an account of himself. Or they will church you for walking drunk. We went to church two times with Oakley's family and both times I was scared to death that somebody would say,
There is one here that don't believe!
meaning me. And I thought it might be Oakley's sister Dreama that would say it, she's real religious. I know it hurts Oakley a lot that I have not been saved, but when Mr. Rolette lines out the invitational and Oakley squeezes my hand, I do not feel a thing except Oakley squeezing my hand. But I have thought to myself, may be I
will
walk up there and get saved after all, and be baptized in the river, then if it is true I will go to Heaven and if it is not true, it won't matter anyway. And Oakley would be so happy. But finally, Beulah, I find that I can not—they could see it on my face in a
minute
if I was to lie and put on like that. For you know me, I can not lie—I could not fool a cat.

So the Foxes failed to save me but they fattened me up some which was a good thing too as it has been such hard work since we come up here.

I can't tell you how I felt, the day we came—it was early March, wet ground, cold wind, cloudy. When we came up along Home Creek I was sorry and surprised to see the trash that folks have throwed in the water alongside the road—for there is a road now, Beulah—and the lowdown kinds of people living any old way along there. The woods look ragged too, they have timbered out all the big trees, and it's not much along there now but scrub pines. The big tulip poplars are all gone. So I was glad when we left the bottom, and started up Sugar Fork. The trace had gotten so overgrown that we had to keep stopping to move logs and branches that had fallen across it, and Oakley's daddy said, Me and Delphi will have to come back up here and do some grading, and they have done it since. Now you can ride nearabout the whole way up here in your truck, if the water is not too high that is, you know you have to ford the creek twice on the way. But the water is still as cold and as pure as it ever was, the best water in the world, it tastes as good as it did to Momma when she and Daddy stopped to drink, riding Lightning. I was thinking about Momma and Daddy while I waited for the men to clear the brush, how brave Momma was, not knowing where she was going or what in the world she would find. Now I felt that way myself, but I did not feel brave. I felt cold and scared. And on the final turn, when we parked in the clearing beneath the he-balsam and I stood looking down the bank holding Joli's hand while they started unloading, then I thought of Babe laying dead right there in the creek, and of Silvaney stepping across the steppingstones to find him.
Mama, Mama you are hurting me,
Joli said for I was squeezing her little hand too hard.
Come on honey,
Oakley said then and we came, me wondering—I am wondering still—how I
ever
rode Babe's horse all the way down to Home Creek that night for help. Lord, it seems like a million years ago. It seems like another person, but it was me.

We had to walk through briars and branches to the house, our feet slipping on the wet stones. And then for a minute I got real scared—the way I used to feel when I looked at Momma's face in the wind up on Pilgrim Knob or heard Daddy breathing horrible by the fire—but then when I stopped to try to breathe, I looked down and seen something I had not seen since we left there, those little yellow beauties and blue-eyed grass that come first every year on the mountains, don't you remember too? And then I said to Oakley,
Look here, spring is on the way for sure.
Then we were home.

But everything is
smaller
than I thought, or remembered, or immagined. This may be because I was a child then, and now I am grown, but I find that all has
shrunk
some way, and I do not like it. The sycamore tree, for an instance, stands half its size! It does not take long for a house to fall in either, and Nature to take its course. The breezeway between the cabin halves was all to pieces, with ivy growing up the broken wood. Oakley has shored it up and added on, it is like a new breezeway now. Up in the loft, that first day back, I found a twist of tobacco that must of been Granny Rowe's, as dry as a piece of rope, and some several old gourds full of seed that was never planted, that seed rattles around in the gourds like little stones. Now I cannot bring myself to throw them out, I don't know why.

And I had clean forgot about the chest up in the loft, Momma's old chest, you will not believe what I found inside! The beautiful crazy quilt stitched together with golden thread, that Momma used to call her burying quilt. And I thought to myself, now Momma is dead and buried in Rich Valley these many years, so she will not
need
her burying quilt, and I am alive and making a house here with Oakley Fox, and we need a pretty quilt the worst in the world, and so I just snatched it up and aired it out and put it on our bed, now it is the prettiest thing in the whole house! And I will use the old chest for Joli's hope box. I thought I would not mention to Oakley about it being a burying quilt unlessen of course he was to ask me flat out, Ivy, is this a burying quilt? But he will not. It will not cross his nor anybody else's mind, and if you come up here, don't you tell it!

Oh Beulah, I hope you will visit us sometime. I hope you are not still mad at me, or at Ethel either one. I may have mentioned to you that her and Stoney Branham came up here to help us clear, plus Victor, and Oakley's folks and some other people—anyway, it was like a party. We cut the brush and pulled it up and piled it in big piles and burned it, and the pale blue smoke from the burning rose straight up to the blue-blue sky. The purple judas-trees were already blooming, and pink and white dogwood, and red and white sarvis even though all the trees were bare except for the greening elmtops. Cardinals were back already, calling
Sugar sweet, sugar sweet.
Lord, we got so dirty, got so tired. Victor is a big heavy man now, Beulah, and Stoney Branham is getting real old. Didn't either one of them work too hard, they mostly told these Gooch boys what to do. Stoney and Ethel acts so funny together, it would make you laugh to see them. They are a sketch.
Mister Branham
is what Ethel calls him still, and draws up her mouth so severe which will make him act evermore the fool.
Now, now Mister Branham,
Ethel says, real disapproving. He likes it, she likes it. I guess they cut up like that in the store.

Victor and them are partners now and he does not drink a thing except about two times a year, when he goes on a big spree and does all kind of crazy things according to Ethel and Stoney. Like he asked an old maid woman from Matewan to marry him, and so here she came with all her things in a car and her father to give her away, and Victor met them at the door and said,
I am so sorry, miss, I cannot recall the incident in question.
When he's sober, he's real serious. In fact sometimes he is
too
serious, he will go on and on when you wish he would just shut up. But I am not mad at him now.

Anyway they came, we cleared the field, we burned the brush, and then we plowed with the mule that Oakley's daddy gave us when we came up here, that's Sal, and the old bull-tongue plow that Oakley found out by the orchard, rusting in the weeds. I reckon Momma just left it laying there, halfway between the field and the house, when she didn't have the strength to carry it no further. Her and you and me was not enough to run this place, I don't know why she entertained the idea for even a minute. A farm is a lot of work, believe me. You need a man.