Fair and Tender Ladies (33 page)

Then this morning I woke up early and started my letter to you.

I will write more later.

 

 

Silvaney, I have been caught up for so long in a great soft darkness, a blackness so deep and so soft that you can fall in there and get comfortable and never know you are falling in at all, and never land, just keep on falling. I wonder now if this is what happened to Momma.

You know I used to have so much spunk. Well, I have lost my spunk some way. It is like I was a girl for such a long time, years and years, and then all of a sudden I have got to be an old woman, with no inbetween. Maybe that has always been the problem with me, a lack of inbetween.

For all of a sudden when I saw those lights, I said to myself,
Ivy, this is your life, this is your real life, and you are living it. Your life is not going to start later. This is it, it is now.
It's funny how a person can be so busy living that they forget
this is it. This is my life.

But now I am so tired, Silvaney, just plain tired, tired unto death it seems. Maudy is the prettiest little baby I have ever had, but when she sucks it is like she is sucking my life right out of me. I am nothing but skin and bones now anyway, everybody says so. Oakley's mama Edith Fox keeps sending boiled custard up here for me and I eat and eat, but I can't gain. I can't seem to put on a pound. I am not old yet, Silvaney, 37—that don't sound so old! But I have fallen down and down and down into this darkness, I can see it all so clear now, and bits and pieces of me have rolled off and been lost along the way. They have rolled off down this mountain someplace until there is not much left but a dried-up husk, with me leeched out by hard work and babies. I feel like a locust—like a box turtle shell!

I hadn't ought to be so tired. I have worked all my life, you would think I'd be used to it by now. I was up cooking and washing dishes the third day after the twins were born. I milked the cow on the third day. I felt real fainty but there was not anybody else here to do it, I forget why. So you would think that with Maudy, I wouldn't of been so tired, but I was, even though Oakley's sister Dreama came up here and stayed a week to help me. After Maudy, I laid in the bed and slept like a rock, and did not dream. I never dream.

I never get out and go places any more, Silvaney. A woman just can't go off and leave so many children. So I don't hardly ever get out nor go anyplace. I dont go to church with Oakley except once in a blue moon—I've always got a baby to look after, anyway—and I don't get down to town but once every month or so. You know we have still got no near neighbors up here either, and I dont give a fig to go off real far visiting. I keep up with Ethel and Geneva, and lord knows, the Foxes come up here moren I like anyway. I can't seem to take any interest in reading, which I used to, nor voting, which Oakley does. Oakley is all the time politicking around with somebody, he is a real good Democrat. One time he voted for a dead man because he was a Democrat.

But it seems like I don't want to do a thing when I'm not working, except rest. And when I rest, I lean back and shut my eyes and fall straight as a plum down into that darkness that I have been talking about.

I have been down in that darkness now for years.

Although in a way it seems short, like one long day that has lasted for years and years. I feel like I've been frozen, locked in time.

Oh Silvaney, all of a sudden I am thinking about that game Statues we used to play, and how you loved it. Don't you remember? Victor was the one that would fling us around, and however we landed, we'd have to stay. Beulah always used to try to land some fancy way. Beulah used to cheat on how she landed. Well, the twins play it now, right here in the dirt in front of the house, where you and me played.

Now I feel like I've been playing Statues and got flung down into darkness, frozen there. I see myself frozen this way, frozen that way.

I look down in my mind and see my statues.

The first one is me with Granny right before she died, only on the day in question I didn't know she was dying. This was early spring, I believe it was two years ago.
You aint yourself,
Granny had said to me,
now hand that baby over to Dreama
—this was LuIda, newborn,—
and come along here with me.
It was March again, and a cold wind blew in little fits and starts, it pulled Granny's long skirts up around her skinny ankles in the old men's shoes. She had tied a bonnet under her chin and it was hard to see her face, you had to look straight at her, head-on. She had her willow basket over her arm and her sharp little knife in her hand.

I am too tired,
I think I said.

Hand that baby over and be quick about it,
Granny said, and so I did. Tenessee went in the house and sat down in the floor and started making newspaper hats for the children,
Get you a coat,
Granny said, and so I did, and so we left. Little LuIda was crying when we left.

We went looking for sallet greens.

You have got to purify your blood,
Granny said,
and get your strength back.
And she showed me how to find the little bunches of watercress growing in the rocky falls of Sugar Fork on up by Pilgrim Knob, and she showed me where to find the little green spears of poke, and how to cut them off right above the ground. They are real good if you cut them young, but if you let them get too big they are poison, and will kill you. We chopped dandelions no bigger than your little finger, and the fiddlehead ferns still curled up tight, and went along the sunny spots by the trace for lamb's quarter and dock. Before long Granny's basket was brimming plum over, and I had a stitch in my side from walking.

Lets us sit down a minute,
I begged her.
I am about to die.

So we sat in the sun above the creek and she told me what the greens are for, dock for the heart, dandelion greens for the liver. Granny says your blood gets dark and slow in the wintertime, and needs to be salivated. I got to looking around at the pretty day and thinking how we played party close to there, Beulah and you and me, with flowers in our hair.

Granny's hand was like a claw on my arm.
Look at me,
Granny said.
Here's how you boil your bitters,
and I looked straight into her bonnet, at her apple-doll face.
Remember,
she said, and I have. I saw the clouds already forming in her sharp blue eyes, and I have always remembered, and now in the spring of the year I go out and gather the greens the way she told me, and boil them like she said, and give everybody a good dose of bitters whether they want it or not, to thin out their blood for the summer. And we never eat sallet greens, which I fix like she said with bacon fat and vinegar, sugar and salt, but what I think of her. The sharp bitey taste of the greens takes me straight back to that sunny blowing day by Sugar Fork when we sat on the rock ledge and Granny said,
Ivy. Remember.

And I have remembered. I remember everything. But now that I am writing it all to you, Silvaney, it is coming over me real strong how bad I miss Granny since she died.

This happened the summer after that spring I was telling you about, nobody knows exactly how long she was dead up there in the cabin before Tenessee came down here to tell us, but it was some several days according to Oakley and his daddy who went up there later to do the necessary. I will never forget the night Tenessee arrived, in a thunderstorm, it is no telling how she found her way to us in the night or why she chose not to wait until morning. But here comes a pounding on the door, and the dog barks and the baby cries, and Oakley says
Hang on, Ivy, don't move
and gets his gun, for we don't have too much company up here in the middle of the night as you can immagine.

And lord, it was Tenessee! all by herself, sopping wet with her hair straggling down in her eyes, clutching that little bead purse in both hands. As soon as Oakley opened the door, she rushed in and hugged me and set to crying. Behind her, lightning flashed and lit up the whole of Bethel Mountain, lightning branching out like a sycamore up in the sky.

It is Garnett,
Tenessee finally said, and Oakley said
What? Who?
for I guess he had never heard Granny called by her given name in all these years.

Go get your daddy and go up there as soon as it gets light,
I told him, and finally I got Tenessee to lay down although I couldn't get her to take off her clothes or give up that filthy purse. But I covered her up with a quilt and laid down beside her to warm her up, and I could hear her mumbling, mumbling as I fell back to sleep.

When I woke up again it was light, full light, and she was gone. Oakley was gone too, and so I thought Tenessee had gone back up there with him and his daddy of course. Immagine my surprise when Oakley came home that night and said,
Why! Where is Tenessee?

I thought she was with you,
I said.

She was here asleep when I left,
said Oakley.
That beats all.

It does, too.

For Tenessee got up in the early morning and snuck off from here, Lord knows where she went, either. She had no money that I know of, no food, and no clothes but the clothes on her back. Now do you think she went out looking for a man, after all these years? Maybe she finally found one. Tenessee is seventy if she's a day. And she is gone, gone for sure, as surely as uncle Revel is gone, him that suffered such a love as to spin him loose for ever in the world. I reckon Tenessee has suffered from the lack of such a love. Anyway, nobody in Majestic has seen hide nor hair of Tenessee since the day she left. We have not seen her either, nor has she been back up there to her cabin, there is a Mister Burley living there now, Oakley and his daddy have leased it.

So. Tenessee is gone, gone, and the statue I have of her when I close my eyes is this—Tenessee standing still in the rainy door with the lightning branching out behind her head.

It's a funny thing, but I don't think she's dead. I think she's still wandering somewhere.

And Granny too, in a different way. For I did not go up to the burying ground with them when they buried Granny, so it don't seem to me that she has died really, but that she is off wandering too, with Tenessee. I have gone to Granny's grave since, on Decoration Day, and felt of the dirt with my hands, but it still don't seem to me that she is in there, it just dont.

Do you remember Decoration Day? It is the second Sunday in June, when you go and fix up the graves and put flowers in your mason jars and sink them down in the dirt to stay. The first time we went back up there, it was so much work to do. You have to tend a grave regular, Ray Fox Senior says. He knows all how to do it, too. Oakley's family is real good at keeping things up. Danny's grave is sunk in now and covered all over in violets, but won't nothing grow on Babe's, he was so mean. Babe's grave is hard red dirt. They laugh at me when I say this, but it is true.

Still, I can't get no feeling that Granny is dead, none atall, and sometimes when I am walking the trace, I think I will catch a glimpse of her long skirt swishing just around the bend ahead, or I think I smell her pipe-smoke in the air. And sometimes it is like I hear her talking in my ear. Just the other day for an instance, I heard her say to me just as plain,
A body can get used to anything except hanging.

But I think this is wrong, Silvaney.

I think a body can get used to hanging too.

A body can get used to
anything.

And even though she's gone, it's still like I can hear Granny talking in my ear. I can't get a feeling she is buried, nor the Cline sisters neither.

You remember them—the lady sisters, Virgie and Gaynelle Cline that used to come telling tales on Old Christmas Eve, and had told Daddy all the tales he ever knew, and he took us up there one time when they all lived on Hell Mountain and their house was so neat and they sat in those two little rush-bottom chairs on the porch. You wore a red skirt, Silvaney. I remember. It used to be Beulah's skirt. The sisters used to take turns talking.

Well, right before Joli went down to stay with Ethel, I got it in mind to go up there. I am not sure why either, except it had something to do with Joli leaving. I made her leave, I made her go on to school. But anyway, one pretty day last summer, Joli and me put some peaches in a poke and took off up Hell Mountain, leaving the younguns with Dreama and Martha. I was giggling like a schoolgirl that day. In my mind's eye I could see the lady sisters the night they left our cabin, flying over the snow. I told Joli about it, but she just laughed and said,
Oh Mama.
She didn't believe they flew. But that is Joli, she is more like Ethel some ways, and I am glad of it. I would not want her to be like me for anything.

So we climbed and climbed, and Joli kept saying
Mama, you know they are not going to be up here. You know they'd be a hundred years old by now. This is crazy.

Oh just come on,
I said. For I had got it in mind to go up there and take her. Before she left, before she went down off the mountain for good—for when Joli comes back she will be all different. I know. So I took her up on Hell Mountain while she was still mine.

But she was right.

I had a stitch in my side something awful by the time we got up there, and everything was gone. There was nothing left—nothing. And yet I was sure it was the right side of the mountain, the right cove. I remembered the chimney rocks on the way, and the two big pine trees behind the cabin. The pine trees were still there, blowing ever so gentle in the wind, with that sighing noise I remembered.

Oh Mama,
Joli said.

Come here,
I said. I dragged her over to where the cabin had stood and then we saw the heap of stones that was the chimney and the white roses running wild through the high green grass.