Gap Creek (7 page)

I held the hat and stood there beside the boxwood by the gate. Mama had swept the yard and sprinkled sand on it, but chickens had already tracked the sand and stained it. I would have to carry more sand from the branch for next Saturday. Shadows was getting longer across the yard, and I felt the coolness of evening in the air. A crow cawed in the pines on the hill. A dog barked down the mountain.

After a few minutes I started to wonder what Hank was doing in the outhouse. Was he sick? Had a spider bit him? It was embarrassing that he had gone there and was staying so long while I held his hat by the road. I looked at the soft felt hat. It must have been a seven and three-quarters size, for Hank had a large head. Mama come out on the porch and said, “Is he gone?”

I shook my head and pointed toward the outhouse. Rosie and Carolyn come out on the porch behind Mama and looked toward the arborvitae. I hoped Hank wouldn’t step out and see them all looking at him.

I held the hat and looked down the road, but didn’t see anybody. And then I looked up the road and saw the road that way was empty too. There was a dove call on the hill, and then another bobwhite call. I looked at the hat in my hand, and I looked toward the arborvitae. And then I smiled, because I knowed Hank had already slipped away into the trees and was far down the mountain. I was even more thrilled than I had been, to think he was safe, and that he had been so clever.

“Well, what happened to him?” Mama said.

“He’s done gone,” I said.

“He’ll have to come back for his hat,” Carolyn said. “A gentleman don’t go anywhere without his hat.”

Shadows was already reaching across the yard. There was crow calls from the trees on the hill. I tossed the hat up in the air and caught it. It was the happiest day of my life.

MARRIAGE WAS DIFFERENT from what I ever expected. Like all girls I imagined something wonderful, and it was wonderful, in most ways, but in different ways from what I had thought. Mama had always said that marriage is like everything else: it is work, hard work.

As I expected, Mama was angry when I told her I was engaged.

“You don’t hardly know that boy,” she said.

“How well am I supposed to know him?” I said.

“Well enough to know his mama’s name,” Mama said.

I didn’t say nothing. I never was good with talk when somebody was upset. Besides, there was nothing I could say to convince Mama.

“When are you getting married?” Lou said.

“Next month,” I said.

“Where are you going on your honeymoon?” Carolyn said. She was always reading stories in magazines about courtship and honeymoons.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “He has only just asked me.”

“I’ll say,” Mama said. “You only met him last week.”

“I’ll bake you a coconut cake,” Rosie said.

“Who is going to do the work around here?” Mama said.

“The crops is already in this year,” I said. “It’s not like Rosie and Lou and Carolyn is helpless.”

“This is a fine come off,” Mama said, “after your Papa died in the spring. And you not much more than a youngun.” But I don’t think Mama was as mad as she acted. Or if she was she got over it. Maybe she seen the advantage of getting one of her girls married off. Or maybe she seen there was nothing she could do to stop it. “I just hope he’s a good man,” Mama said, “though he’s really just a boy.”

“He’s eighteen years old,” I said.

“That’s what I mean,” Mama said. “You’re both just younguns.”

Four

Now the week before we was married Hank rented a house over the line in South Carolina. It was way down a little valley called Gap Creek, and it was the farthest I had ever been from home. Hank said he wanted to live there because it was a pretty place, and because it was cheap, and he had work where they was building a cotton mill at Eaton. He had worked before as a carpenter and mason’s helper and he already had a job lined up at the site in Eaton, helping to make brick. I thought later he moved to South Carolina to get away from his ma, because when I got to know her I could see why he would want to.

We got married on a Saturday, nearly a month after we first met, and we stayed that night at Mama’s house. I felt embarrassed to be spending my first night as a married woman in my own house, but Mama knowed what to do. Since there wasn’t no extra bedroom she told Hank to sleep on the couch in the living room, and I stayed in the bedroom with Lou and Rosie and Carolyn like I always had. I didn’t get hardly any sleep that night, and Lou giggled and teased me.

“Do you reckon Hank is lonesome out on the couch?” she said.

“Shhhhh,” I said and pretended to be sleepy.

The next day we walked down to Gap Creek.

Like any bride, I thought my husband was wise and on his way to riches. And when I seen the valley of Gap Creek I thought it was one of the prettiest places in the world. The house wasn’t so fancy, but the narrow valley with steep mountains on either side looked like a picture out of a magazine. The valley floor was flat, winding peaceful back into the steep mountains. It was still green in the slender cove, though it was already fall on the higher slopes.

The worst thing about the house was that Mr. Pendergast, who rented it to us, lived there hisself. He lived in the bedroom at the front of the house, and our rent was the meals I fixed for him and the washing I did for him. He was a crusty old widower and I seen I was going to have to humor him. I was just a young bride and Hank took me down there to start housekeeping in that little place, and to cook for old man Pendergast.

Mr. Pendergast was a short man with a huge head of gray hair and hair growing out of his ears. He always looked at you with a squint when he talked. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said the night we arrived, when I come in with all my clothes tied up in a pasteboard box and a pillowcase, after walking all the way from Mount Olivet, “I don’t eat hardly nothing, and I’m so quiet you’ll never know I’m around.”

He showed me where the kitchen was and where all the pots and pans was. His wife had died three or four years before, and he had let the house go the way most men would. Every inch of the floor needed to be scoured and scrubbed. You never seen such filth as was built up around and behind the cookstove. I seen it would take me a week to get the place cleaned up so it didn’t turn your stomach.

“What do you like for breakfast?” I said.

“Just fix me some biscuits and gravy,” Mr. Pendergast said, “and maybe a poached egg.”

I had heard of poached eggs, but I had never made a poached egg. I’d have to ask Hank what a poached egg was.

“We won’t have no bacon until we kill the hog,” Mr. Pendergast said. “But it’s almost time for hog killing.”

LATER WHEN WE went to bed that first night I was almost afraid to move in the attic bedroom, for the floorboards creaked and the bedsprings creaked. And I was afraid Mr. Pendergast was right below us listening to every sound we made. The floorboards groaned and the bedsprings moaned when we got in. “Shhhh,” I said to Hank.

“Pendergast is deaf as a fencepost,” Hank said, not even lowering his voice.

“Even a fencepost can hear this bed creak,” I said.

After Hank blowed out the lamp we laid in the bumpy bed in the room smelling of old wood and smoke. Hank turned over to face me and the springs banged on the slats of the bed. I giggled cause I was a little nervous. But I wasn’t scared or worried like so many brides are supposed to be. I had thought all my life about this first night in our own house, and now that it was here I was more worried about waking up Mr. Pendergast than anything else.

“Shhhh,” I said again.

When Hank put his lips to my ear it felt so odd and good it made me shiver. And when he put his finger on my nipple it felt like funny bones all over my body had been touched. When he run his hand over my shoulder and under my armpit and down to my belly, I thought little sparks must be jumping off my skin in the dark.

I felt something pulling my nightgown up over my knees and over my thighs and over my belly. I giggled and the bed creaked as Hank moved over me. And then I felt something hot and wet in my belly button, and I knowed it was Hank’s tongue going in and out and round and round the navel. He licked the little hairs around my
navel and stuck his tongue in the hole. I hoped there wasn’t any lint in there.

It was all so strange and different from what I had imagined. I didn’t hardly know what was happening. It was like the world had been tilted and turned in some way. And time had stopped, or slowed down. Time had been turned on its side and moved in a curve. When Hank got on top of me and rocked the bed, I felt numb with his weight, and I heard the headboard of the bed knock on the wall. I thought of Mr. Pendergast below listening. I wondered if this was it. Was this what everybody talked about and thought about so much?

Stop, I wanted to say. You stop that. But I couldn’t. You quit that, I thought of saying, but I didn’t. As Hank rocked faster the bedposts scooted on the floor a little. What he was doing hurt a little, but it felt good too. A sweet hurt, a hot sweetness.

“Oh,” I said. And I thought, You’ll have to stop this. We can’t go on like this, for I was getting short of breath. And Hank was getting short of breath. Stop that, I thought. Or maybe it was: Don’t stop. Don’t stop now. Don’t stop.

All the colors started running through my head in the dark. Purples and greens and yellows and blacks. They blended into each other and poured over each other. And the colors was like milk, so soft and warm and pouring over and into each other. And the colors was swelled, bigger than I had ever thought they could be. The colors was melodies, like shaped note singing.

Now quit this, I thought. We’ve got to stop or we’ll wake up old man Pendergast. We’ll wake up the chickens in the henhouse and we’ll wake up the horse and the hog in the pen. We’ll even wake up the stars over the mountains, and the birds roosting under the eaves of the barn. But the colors poured on behind my eyes, the purples and blues, the salty colors like orange and yellow. Yellow is salty as butter and popcorn. Yellow was swelled up and buttery. And there was a golden brown that was saltiest of all.

And I felt a sneeze coming down there. It was the best feeling, of a sneeze coming right out of my middle and swelling through me to get rid of what I was holding back. And I sneezed quick, and again. It was the sweetest cachoo, and cachoo, so deep and full it hurt too.

Hank was shoving too and pushing with his feet against the foot of the bed like he was running while laying down or dancing while laying down. And there was a wrench of boards and a squeal of nails pulling out. We fell and slammed onto the floor. It sounded like the house had fell down, but I knowed what had happened, even though it was dark and I couldn’t see. That old bed had pulled apart and the footboard had fell away. The springs and mattress had slid onto the floor.

I was laying on the floor, and I knowed Mr. Pendergast must have woke up beneath us. But I giggled a little and Hank put his head on my neck and giggled too. We was both tired out, and it felt good just to lay still. I listened to see if Mr. Pendergast was moving around below. But all I could hear was my own breathing, and Hank’s breathing. And then something crashed, and I could tell it was the headboard of the bed falling over on the floor.

“Lord a mercy,” I said in the dark. I thought I heard somebody laughing below, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been a screech owl off in the woods, or wind in the eaves.

MY FIRST TROUBLE with Mr. Pendergast come the next morning when I fixed his breakfast. Hank got up early to go to the mill at Eaton where he was helping to tend the brick kilns. I fixed him some biscuits and butter and jelly to take in his lunch pail. After he was gone I went ahead and boiled a saucepan of water to fix Mr. Pendergast’s poached egg. Hank had said a poached egg was just a slightly boiled egg. Rosie would know how to do it.

When the water was bubbling and rolling I put an egg in for what I figured was a minute. But I didn’t have an egg timer or clock with a sweep hand. So I just had to guess. And then when I took the egg out of the water and put it on the table beside Mr. Pendergast’s plate, he had still not come out of the bedroom. I kept waiting and finally eat my own breakfast of grits and gravy and drunk a cup of coffee. I finished and still Mr. Pendergast had not appeared. I got up and heated more water to wash the dishes, and after I had finished washing and drying the plates there was still no sign of him. I put the biscuits back in the oven and soon the grits was cold and getting a skin. Could Mr. Pendergast have died in the night? A chill went through me down to my tailbone. Had he heard the bed fall down in the night and was too embarrassed to come out? Had he got up early and left? Or could he be expecting me to serve him breakfast in bed?

I put the dry dishes on the shelf and got the broom and swept the kitchen floor. The fire was dying in the cookstove and I put a couple more sticks in. By then it was daylight and I could see the early sun turning the tops of the mountains copper. I heard a noise behind me and turned. There was Mr. Pendergast with his hair uncombed and his overalls with only one gallus buckled. He drug his feet as he walked to the table.

“I’ll pour you some coffee,” I said. I got the pot off the stove and hoped the coffee was still hot. The fire was blazing up again, but it might not have heated the pot yet.

Mr. Pendergast took a sip of the coffee and put it down. “This coffee is cold,” he said.

“I’ll heat it up again,” I said. I took the cup and poured the coffee back into the pot.

“A man can’t drink cold coffee,” Mr. Pendergast said.

I took the pot of grits off the stove and put it on the table beside his plate. He took the serving spoon and dug into the grits and seen
a skin had dried on them. “When did you make these, last night?” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made them for Hank at six.”

“I wouldn’t feed them to a hog,” Mr. Pendergast said.

“I can make you some more,” I said. I got more sticks of wood out of the box and put them in the stove.