Listen Here (33 page)

from Chapter 5

I have often wondered what would have happened if the prodigal son had been a daughter. Would the father have hurried out to meet her, put a ring on her finger and killed the fatted calf? I doubt it. I doubt if she would ever have come home at all, and if she had come the best he could have done would have been to say: “Go, and sin no more.”

But “go,” you understand. And all over the world you can see them, these frailer prodigals, hurrying away to the lost places.

In a rotting cabin, in an old field five miles from Redwine, lived one of them. Once a week she walked fourteen miles to the nearest large town to get plain sewing, and with this she supported herself and child. The field was her desert. For eight years no respectable woman had crossed it or spoken to her till the day William and I and the redheaded horse arrived at her door. She stood framed in it, a gaunt figure hardened and browned and roughened out of all resemblance to the softness of her sex; her clothes were rags, and her eyes like hot, dammed fires in her withered face. William sprang out of the buggy, raised his hat and extended his hand.

“My wife and I have come to take dinner with you,” he said.

“Not with me! Oh, not with sech as me!” she murmured vaguely. Then, seeing me descend also, she ran forward to meet me, softly crying.

We stayed to dinner, a poor meal of corn hoecake, fried bacon and sorghum, spread upon a pine table without a cloth. But of all the food I ever tasted that seemed to me the most nearly sanctified. It was with difficulty that we persuaded the lost Mary to sit down and partake of it with us. She was for standing behind our chairs and serving us. After that she sat, a tragic figure, through every service at Redwine, even creeping forward humbly to the communion. She was not received, however, in any of the homes of the people. She might “go in peace”—whatever peace her loneliness afforded—that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, and that was all. They would have none of her. This was not so bad as it seemed. She was free, indeed. Having no reputation to win or lose she could set herself to the simple business of being good, and she did. The time came when the field changed into a garden and the cabin whitened and reddened beneath a mass of blooms.

(January 6, 1911–December 20, 1966)

East Tennessean Mildred Eunice Haun was one of three children of Margaret Ellen Haun and James Enzor Haun. As the writer explained, “My mother was a Cocke County Haun and married a Hamblen County Haun.” Mildred grew up in the Hoot Owl District of Cocke County, Tennessee, and attended public schools there.

Deciding that her community needed a doctor, Haun went to live with an aunt and uncle to further her education. After graduating from Franklin High School in 1931, she was admitted to Vanderbilt University. She gradually abandoned her dream of medical school and took an advanced composition course with poet John Crowe Ransom, who encouraged her to write. After she graduated, she continued to write stories about her native Cocke County while she taught high school in Franklin and began graduate school. Donald Davidson directed her 440-page M.A. thesis “Cocke County Ballads and Songs,” a valuable collection of East Tennessee folklore. She also studied writing, supported by a fellowship, at the University of Iowa. When she completed her collection of stories,
The Hawk's Done Gone
, it was accepted for publication by Bobbs-Merrill in 1940.

Throughout her life, she supported her mother and herself with work as a writer and an editor. She was book review editor for the Nashville
Tennessean
(1942–1943), an editorial assistant to Allen Tate on the
Sewanee Review
(1944–1946), and an information specialist who lived in Memphis and then Washington D.C., and wrote and edited press releases, speeches, and technical information for military personnel and the Department of Agriculture.

Haun's stories show her keen ear for dialect and the oral tradition that surrounded her at home, as well as her willingness to explore the dark side of human nature. Regarding the subjects of her stories, critic Hershel Gower
asks, “How does one account for the intense absorption in somber, discomfiting themes—witchcraft, incest, miscegenation, infanticide…?”

In her story “The Hawk's Done Gone,” the family matriarch, Mary Dorthula White, is counting her losses, because her husband Ad and stepson Linus have been selling her valuables to antique dealers.

Short stories:
The Hawk's Done Gone
(1940),
The Hawk's Done Gone and Other Stories
(1968).

Hershel Gower, “Introduction,”
The Hawk's Done Gone and Other Stories
(1968), ix–xxv. Stephen Glenn McLeod, “Bottom of the Night: A Study of Mildred Haun,” M.A. Thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1973.
Mossy Creek Reader
[Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, TN] 3 (spring 1993) [entire issue devoted to Mildred Haun includes previously unpublished stories, photographs, and essays: Fred Chappell, “New Stories by Mildred Haun,” 35–37. Amy Tipton Gray, “The Perfect Hell of ‘The Hawk's Done Gone,'” 40–47. Robert Morgan, “This Page of Names: The Narrative Art of Mildred Haun,” 38–39. Karen Travis, “Adventure Begins at Home,” 49–56],

from The Hawk's Done Gone

I wonder why Ad and Linus never tried to sell me off to them hunters for old things. I would be a sight for somebody to look at. Big and motley and rough-looking. Old and still strong for my age. I miss the things they have sold. These new-fangled things are weak. They make me feel weak too. But I ought not to be setting here nursing this old Bible. I ought to get out and pick some sallet for supper.

The Bible is about the only old thing I have left, though. I thought I couldn't thole it when Ad and Linus first started selling off my stuff. I hate them folks that come around hunting for things to put in the Smoky Mountain museum. And I nigh hate Linus for letting them have my things. Linus is Ad's youngest boy by his first old woman and he has been spoiled rotten. Ad is the one that spoiled him too. Ad has turned everything over to him and let him run it to suit hisself—my own stuff too.

William Wayne was the only one of them antique hunters that was decent. Him and that painted-up woman he called Miss Robinson come together. I recollect that first day when they come. I was bent over the tub washing. Miss Robinson, she strutted up like she thought she was something on a stick, all dyked out in a purple silk dress and spike-heeled shoes. The first thing she did was to commence complaining about having to walk through the mud.

Miss Robinson's old hawk eyes seed everything I had. She got around Linus and got nigh everything I wanted to keep. She picked out the things she wanted. Looked at both of my corded bedsteads. One of them wasn't in very good shape, she said, and she didn't know whether she would take it or not. I felt like giving her a piece of my mind. And I did flare up a little. I looked at her straight and I said, “Who said anything about you taking either one of them? Them is the first bedsteads my pa ever made—made them for him and Ma to start housekeeping on. I was born in this one hyear and all my youngons were born in it.”

I recollect the way I said it to her. I recollect the way William Wayne looked—almost like the soldier boy looked at me that day—that first day. William Wayne had brown eyes—big brown eyes that smiled as much as his mouth did. He put me in mind of the soldier, smiling all the time and talking so gentle. But Charles would be old by now. Old enough to be dead. He
was older than me back then. I was just fifteen year old and he was a full-grown man. At least he was old enough to be out fighting the Yankees. At first I thought William Wayne might be Charles's boy maybe. But then I knowed Charles wouldn't ever have any other boy. William Wayne had pity for me and he hated to take my bedsteads away.

It didn't matter who had pity, though, for Linus and Miss Robinson made the bargain. The very next day Miss Robinson would send a wagon up here with two brought-on bedsteads, pretty ones, she said, to swop for my two wild-cherry ones.

And nigh all my quilts too. That huzzy said she would take all the pretty ones. Said some of them were mighty dirty but she could have them cleaned. My “Harp of Columbia.” Of course, Miss Robinson's hawk eyes got set on it the very first thing. The one I was piecing on when Charles come.

I was setting in here in the big house piecing on it when I heard the soldiers walk up into the yard—setting here in the old hickory rocking chair with Ma's red-and-tan checked homespun shawl around my shoulders. I kept it in my hand when I started to get the water for them. I held it all the time while Charles went to the spring. He looked at the quilt when he come back.

“What's that you are making there?” he asked. He took hold of it and fingered it like it was a piece of gold. “I never could handle them little squares and three-cornered pieces with my big fingers,” he said. And his hands were big. But I knowed right then I wasn't afeared of Charles.

I could tell from the way he kept looking at me he thought I was pretty too. He didn't tell me till all the other soldiers went over in the horse lot to catch up Old Kate. He didn't come right out plain and tell me then. “I'll bet your name is Edith—or Mary one.”

“Huh uh—Mary's just part of it.”

“Mine is Charles—Charles Williams. What is the rest of yours?”

“Hit's Dorthula—Mary Dorthula White.”

“It's pretty too.” In that deep voice. He kept feeling of the quilt. And looking at me. “Does that little red blanket on your shoulders keep you warm?”

That “Harp of Columbia” quilt was the one I always held in my lap and worked on when anybody come to see me during the while Joe was growing inside me. I told Joe about using it to hide him. Joe thought a heap of that quilt. I think it was the prettiest one I ever made. With Joe's stitches on it. My stitches—short and straight. And Joe's over there in the corner—long and crooked. Miss Robinson didn't take notice of them, I reckon. But somebody took Joe's stitches out, I know, before they hung it up for folks to look at. Nobody else would care. But I would rather had the hair pulled out of my head than had Joe's stitches pulled out of that quilt. The way he looked
up at me with them eyes he had—Charles's eyes—and begged me to let him quilt. I couldn't help but let him do it. “And you won't pull mine out, will you, Ma?” I promised him his stitches never would be pulled out.

That night, after Miss Robinson and William Wayne left, while Ad and Linus were both out of the room, I set there on the bed and run my fingers over Joe's stitches. I reckon they wouldn't be counted pretty stitches by anybody else. I felt like getting inside the feather tick and being took off too. I couldn't sleep that night. I laid awake and squeezed that quilt in my hand.

It was lucky for me the next day. Ruby Arwood was called to straw and I had to be over there with Ruby all day. When I come in that night it seemed more different from home than ever. Nearly all my things gone—spinning wheel, warping bars and everything. Even my big bone knitting needles, and my tatting shuttle that I made myself. I didn't give up then and I'm not going to give up now. Dona Fawver will be dying pretty soon and Dona couldn't stand for anybody to lay her out save me. I ought to go see her today.

I couldn't help but see the bedsteads the first thing when I come into the room that evening. There was that big old brass bed, all scarred up, setting over there in the corner, and that little old rickety bent up green one in front of the window. Both of them had the rods so scarred up they looked like they had been through the war. No telling who had used them. No telling what kind of old dirty folks had been sleeping in them. But Linus was setting in there bragging about them being so pretty. New stuff, he said, brought-on stuff. One of them was worth a dozen home-made things, he said.

I didn't look at them any more than I had to. I went on and got supper. When I turned the beds down I seed they had some big old dirty-looking gray blankets on them. I felt of them. They weren't even wool—just plain cotton. They were somebody else's old things too. I would rather sleep on the floor than to sleep on them old pads with cotton all wadded up in them. Ad and Linus said they were what all folks used that weren't old fogies. But I ought to be hunting the guineas' nestes. And I promised Mollie McGregor my receipt for corn relish.

It didn't seem right with them bedsteads in the room. And my little green and gold mug gone. It was my ma's mug. I used to think it so pretty. The time I had the measles Ma let me drink water out of it. I got thirsty every few minutes till Ma caught on and took to bringing it in the dipper….