In a Dark Season (39 page)

Acknowledgments

My editor Kate Miciak’s power to make me grow as a writer continues to amaze me. And now I’m thankful for her patience too. My wonderful agent, Ann Collette, is always a welcome source of advice, encouragement, and cheer. Someday soon I hope to introduce her to country life, up close and personal, bugs and tomatoes and all. Thanks to Deb Dwyer, my eagle-eyed copy editor, for her precision and for the nice comments. And once again, many thanks to Jamie S. Warren Youll for the great covers.

Cynthia Niles gave pharmaceutical advice and Marianna Daly, MD, and Polly Ross, MD, provided information on HIV/AIDS. I appreciate their help and hope I got it right.

The people of Hickory Nut Gap Farm and Sherrill’s Inn, one of the few stands still in existence in my area, were a great resource. Many thanks to Cindy Clarke for suggesting I visit and for showing me around, and to John and Annie Ager for allowing a stranger to wander through their house and imagine it as it had been.

The Vance birthplace in Weaverville, NC, a pioneer farmstead with a five-room log house reconstructed around original chimneys and furnished to evoke the period from 1795–1840, helped me to visualize the world of Lydy Goforth.

Thanks to old friend Dayton Wild, a link with the past. When Dayton told me how his father (older than his grandfather—you work it out) had told him stories about the Drovers’ Road, it gave me goose bumps and helped to make the past a little more real.

And I’m eternally grateful to all the fans who share stories with me or just tell me to keep going. Thanks to SFC Robert A. Myers (ret.) whose vivid reminiscence of a Melungeon couple he had known inspired Ish and Mariah Flores. And to Larry Suttles, who won the right in a library raffle to name a character. He asked that I use the name of his late father who had lived up on Max Patch and was a great plant propagator. “Maybe he could still be alive in your story,” Larry suggested, and that gave me an idea….

The following books were useful to me in working on this novel:
History of Buncombe County, NC,
F.A. Sondley, LL.D. (The Reprint Company Publishers, Spartanburg, SC, 1997—repro of 1930 ed.);
The French Broad,
Wilma Dykeman (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955);
Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia,
Anthony Cavender, (The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2003); and
The Kingdom of Madison: A Southern Mountain Fastness and Its People
by Manly Wade Wellman, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1973.

About the Author

Vicki Lane has lived with her family on a mountain farm in North Carolina since 1975. She is the author of
Signs in the Blood, Art’s Blood,
and
Old Wounds,
which was chosen as a Book Sense Notable Book. She is currently at work on an addition to her chronicles of Elizabeth Goodweather’s Marshall County,
The Day of Small Things.

“Vicki Lane writes of Appalachia as if she’d been driving up our hills and through our hollows her whole life…. In showing us how memory lingers like a smoky mist across the mountains, Lane reminds us again that the past never completely dies.”

—Margaret Maron, award-winning author of
Hard Row

If you enjoyed Vicki Lane’s

IN A DARK SEASON,

you won’t want to miss any of her haunting novels of suspense set in Appalachia. Look for them at your favorite bookseller.

Read on for an electrifying early look at her next novel.

THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS

by

Vicki Lane

Coming soon from Dell

The Day of Small Things

Coming soon from Dell

The Beginning

Dark Holler ~ 1922

On the evening of the third day, her screams filled the little cabin, escaping through the open door to tangle themselves in the dark brooding hemlocks that loomed above the house. The weary midwife, returning from a visit to the privy, glanced up at the mournful trees and shuddered.

“Seems them ol low-droopin boughs is just a-holdin in the sound. And all that pain and misery—hit’ll linger there till ever wind that stirs’ll be like to bring it back—all them cries a-flutterin round the house again like so many black crows.”

Pausing to adjust her long skirt, the midwife frowned at such an unaccustomed flight of fancy. “Law, whatever put such foolishness into my head? I’m flat wore out, and that’s the truth—how else would I come to think such quare things? But hit’s a lonesome, sorrowful place fer all that and a sorrowful time fer poor Fronie. Her man not yet cold in his grave and her boy tarryin at death’s door—ay, law, hit’s a cruel hard time to birth a child—iffen hit don’t kill her first.

For days the woman had labored. For almost forty hours she had clung to a fierce, tooth-clenched silence, broken only by an occasional low groan or an involuntary gasp as the pains came on anew. But at last her stern control had shattered, giving way to a frenzy of sobs and curses as the contractions grew in strength. And still the child would not be born.

Hurrying back into the small log house, the midwife pulled on the clean muslin apron that was the badge of her calling. The screams broke off and the expectant mother lay panting on the stained and stinking corn shuck tick, her breath coming in hoarse rasps. Long dark hair, carefully combed free of tangles in vain hope of easing the birth, fanned out in damp strands around her death-pale face. The anguish, the fear, the anger that had passed, like a succession of hideous masks, over the laboring woman’s gaunt countenance, was momentarily replaced by an otherworldly absence of all emotion.

Then a great ripple surged across the huge belly swelling beneath her thin shift and the woman’s face contorted once more. Her cracked lips opened to scream but nothing more than a strangled croak emerged. Gasping with pain and frustration, the woman twisted her misshapen torso from side to side as she clawed at her heaving belly.

The midwife caught at the woman’s hands and held them till the contraction passed. “Hit’ll be born afore sundown or they’ll be the two of ’em to bury,” she whispered to the frightened girl standing at the bedside.

“I ain’t never seen no one die, Miz Romarie. My daddy, he was already gone when they fetched him home from the loggin camp.” The girl’s wide eyes brimmed with tears. She turned her face, ashen in the fading light, to the midwife. “Miz Romarie, I’m so a-feared…”

The midwife patted the girl’s thin shoulder and then reached for the bottle of sweet oil that stood on a nearby stool. “We ain’t got time fer that now, Fairlight. You catch hold of yore mama’s hands whilst I see kin I turn the babe and bring hit on. Hold ’em tight now, honey.”

Black night had come and owls called out amid the sighing of the hemlocks as the exhausted woman looked without pleasure at her red, squalling infant. At last she spoke. “Hit’ll allus be the least un, fer there won’t be no more. Reckon that’ll do fer a name—call hit Least.”

The Burying Ground

Tuesday, May 1

T
oday me and Luther put an end to that girl. All that was left of her is under the talking oak at the yon side of the burying ground. Luther said that it must be so and he ast that I give my solum promiss never to speak that name no more nor to think on them other things. And he give me this new book to write in and said that I must burn the old ones. We got all our life ahead says he—a fine new begining and when you got a mess a young uns about the place youll fergit all this hateful bizniss.

As her finger traced the straggling words, Birdie Gentry’s lips moved silently. The pages of the composition book were yellowed and crisp with age but the words, penciled in childish printing by a determined hand, were clear. The old woman read on.

I’ll not be sorry to fergit that poor crazy girl and what she done—but
…Dark scribbling blacked out several lines before the printing continued.
There, I like to brok my solum promis alredy. So insted Ill write of the fine new house Luther is naming to build for us down near the road where the sun shines all day and ther aint all these old dark trees that moans in the night wind. Luther has already cut and hauled the timber—

The abrupt
brrr
of the telephone sounded from the living room. Birdie closed the journal and laid it gently atop a stack of similar books then, moving slowly, she pulled herself up and began to hobble toward the other room in response to the insistent ring, muttering as she went.

“I’m a-coming, you worrisome thing! Holler all you want to, this ol’ arthuritis won’t let me move no faster,”

“No, Dor’thy, I cain’t do it. I made a solemn promise and I’ve held to it, all these years. But I’ll help you any way I can, ’ceptin’ fer that. Tell me, have you heared atall from the young ‘un since she took him away?”

The voice on the telephone grew louder and more agitated and Birdie listened without further comment, only shaking her head in sympathy with her cousin’s lamentations. Finally she broke in.

“Dor’thy, you and me both know Prin ain’t a fit mother. But if the Social Services lady ain’t goin’ to…Now, don’t take on so…we’ll find us a way to git Calven back to you. I’ll think on hit and pray on hit too…. Yes, I name to go up to the cemetery this evenin’, soon’s I have my bite of lunch. I’m a-goin’ to pick up all them ol’ wore-out flower arrangements and such and make the place look nice afore Bernice’s boy comes to weed eat round the stones…. Naw, they ain’t no need fer you to come…”

At last the call drew to a close. Birdie replaced the receiver and sat motionless on the edge of her chair, her mouth pursed as she struggled to order her thoughts. Finally she roused herself and reached for the Bible lying on the crocheted doily by the telephone. Placing the book in her lap, she laid her outspread hands on the worn black leather and whispered, “I cain’t do it without You help me, Lord…. In Thy Holy Name, I ask it.”

Closing her eyes, she waited, head cocked as if listening to a distant voice. Then, eyes still shut, Miss Birdie cracked the Bible. One hand, index finger extended, hovered briefly in the air above the open book then fell like a stooping hawk to rest on the words below.

Birdie opened her eyes and peered at the verse her finger had singled out. Frowning, she adjusted her glasses.

“Zechariah 4:10, is it?
‘For who hath despised the day of small things?’
” The old woman leaned closer to the Book. “Lord, You ain’t speakin’ very clear today. But my finger was touchin’ on some of the ninth verse too…let me see…
‘and thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts hath sent me unto you’
…”

Birdie lifted her head to fix the ceiling of her living room with a bright blue gaze. “Well, who you goin’ to send me, Lord?”

The hickory staff dug neat pockmarks in the hard red earth as Birdie made her way along the path that wound up the wooded slope. Dangling from the crook of her elbow, a pair of black plastic garbage bags provided a rustling accompaniment to the brief huffs of her breath and the steady thump of her footfalls. The narrow, little-used trail ran beside a rusted barbed wire fence that marked the upper limits of an overgrown field thick with locust and poplar saplings amid brambles. A bright clump of coral-red fire pinks at the foot of a gray leaning post caught her attention and elicited a nod but Birdie kept on, following the trail into the woods.

In the dappled shade beneath the new-leafed trees, whole colonies of trillium, both white and pink, carpeted the rich mountain soil, while along the banks of the rocky stream, lavender phacelia and wild geraniums danced against the stern gray boulders. Beyond the tumbling froth of water the deeper purple of dwarf iris and wild larkspur dotted the steep wooded slope.

Birdie stopped, leaning on her staff and breathing in the rich woodland smell.
They’s some things don’t change, thank the Lord. That fine loamy smell of the dirt and the clean mint smell of the branch and the songs the water sings as it goes a-hurryin’ to the river and the birds calling out and the wind a-stirrin’ the trees. Hit’s all the good things of life itself. I pity the city folks ain’t never been in a mountain cove in May time.

She stood a few minutes longer in rapt appreciation then, mindful of her purpose, resumed the climb. Soon the path curved to the right and a few more minutes brought her into a small clearing. A log barn topped by a rust-red tin roof stood below a line of dark hemlocks that swayed in the freshening breeze. Nearby, a lone fieldstone chimney stood amid a thicket of well-grown locust trees stood. Two lichen-crusted apple trees lifted twisted branched beyond a row of ancient looming boxwoods and Birdie’s nose wrinkled as the shrub’s characteristic aroma reached her.
Whyever You come to make them bushes smell like an ol tom-cat’s been a-sprayin’ em, I do not understand, Lord. Was it me, I believe I’d a found a nicer smell. Reckon hit’s just another one of them mysterious ways of Yourn Preacher’s allus talkin’ about.

Birdie gave a quick glance at the chimney. For a few seconds her sharp eyes followed the faint trace of a path leading from near the old chimney into the hemlocks. She stood bemused, lost in her thoughts and memories. Then, recollecting herself, she turned away to follow the upward trail into the first of a series of old fields.
Let it go. Atter all these years, cain’t you let it go?
The words were a drum beat and her steps kept time.
Let-it-go. Let-it-go.

As she climbed the old woman could see dark clouds gathering above the scrub-filled abandoned fields. She could scent the coming rain but still she continued her slow, purposeful progress to the family burying ground atop the hogback ridge.
Let-it-go. Let-it-go.

At the summit Birdie paused briefly to catch her breath. Around her, gravestones and markers of all sorts and ages dotted the gentle crest of the ridge. Ignoring the more recent granite markers, deep-carved with names, dates, and bible verses, and their faded arrangements of artificial flowers, Birdie stumped doggedly on to the older section of the graveyard where modest sand concrete memorials and white painted slabs commemorated the dead of an earlier time. Here and there single plastic flowers were jabbed into the soil of these older graves but Birdie passed on without a glance, making her way to the far edge of the mown ground.

Only a narrow strip of tall grass and weeds divided the cleared hilltop from the forest of poplar, oak and beech, their leave lacquer-bright with the vibrant new greens of the season. The old woman’s eyes narrowed in concentration as she moved beneath the canopy of a great oak. Scanning the thick growth at her feet, she thrust her staff into the long grass, sweeping it aside to uncover a homemade lozenge of white-washed concrete, set flat and all but lost in the rising tide of late spring. On the rough surface the date 1939 showed, etched by an unskilled hand just beneath the single word—“LEAST.”

Miss Birdie Gentry leaned on her stick and studied the stone, lips moving soundlessly, tears dimming her bright blue eyes.
Many a year, law, yes, many a year. But hit weren’t right—

The babble of a familiar high-pitched voice broke into her reverie. Hurriedly, Birdie wiped her face on the sleeve of the man’s shirt she wore over her loose house dress. With one sneaker-shod foot, she quickly pushed the hank of grass back to cover the little marker. When it was hidden once again, she made her way back among the graves where she began to pick up the tattered floral arrangements and jam them into a garbage bag.

Well, so Dor’thy come along atter all. But reckon who it is she’s talkin’ to?
Her cousin’s chatter floated up the hill, every word clear now. A light rain began to fall and Birdie stretched out her hand to catch the drops.

“She
said
as she’d be up here, cleanin’ off the graves and gettin’ ready for Decoration Day. All them old wreaths and such to gather up and get shed of. I
told
her to let me do it—you know Miss Birdie’s gettin’ up in years—eighty-five this October—and not so spry as she once was—but will she listen? And now it’s come on to sprinkle. Well, I reckon it’ll pass off right quick. How long did you say it was since you seen your aunt?”

There was a soft murmur—an unknown woman’s voice. Birdie frowned and craned her head to catch the words but heard only Dorothy’s cheerful reply.

“I declare, won’t she be tickled you come at last!”

At that moment, Dorothy and her companion came into view. Dorothy, her familiar stout person clad in knit slacks and loose top, was a few steps in front of a slightly younger woman. Birdie studied the newcomer’s face carefully, looking for some clue to her identity.

Ay, law, now which one can that be? Many nieces as I got that I hain’t seed in a great time…this un here, what age would she be? Hard to tell the way they dye their hair and all. And of course, some folks just naturally hold their age real good. Blue eyes, wiry built…I wonder—

“Birdie Gentry, what in the world are you doin’, standin’ out in the rain like that? Why don’t we go set in my vehicle till it lets up? And why in the world didn’t you bring your truck and come by the road ’stead of walkin’ all that way through the fields. I declare—”

Ignoring Dorothy’s scolding, Birdie smiled and nodded at the other woman. “My mamaw allus said that hit was a fine thing to git wet in the first rain of May—that hit would keep a body healthy all the year.”

The unknown woman stepped forward, her face blossoming into a lop-sided smile that was oddly familiar.

“Aunt Birdie, you probably don’t remember me. I’m Myrna Louise—Lexter and Britty Mae’s youngest daughter. The last time I was here was 1959—I was only sixteen then so I don’t expect you to recognize me now.”

Lord, she sounds like a Yankee,
thought Birdie, looking for some hint of the teenager she dimly remembered.
But pore thing, she cain’t help it—livin’ up there in Dee-troit all this time with Yankees all about. Come to that, I believe she married one. But she does favor Lexter right much, now I come to look at her.

The little woman extended her arms. “Myrna Lou, honey, come here and let me hug yore neck. What took you so long to come home?”