On Agate Hill (38 page)

At school, ink froze in the inkwells overnight, attendance was very low, and once, two boys heading home with their pony and sled went down the steep bank, through the ice, and partly into the river — fortunately, a shallow spot very near their home. We had to close school several times. I enjoyed those long days of staying home, reading Dickens aloud to the Badger children while Chattie worked at her loom and the old granny spit tobacco juice
into a little tin cup, squinching her eyes shut tight as she listened. We roasted chestnuts, made snow cream and popcorn.

It was this same snowy February when Simon Black appeared, all unannounced, and I shall never forget it, though Molly refused to discuss it with me then, or ever.

Since the sun had come out at last, Chattie and the children had walked over the mountain carrying food to her father, old Memorable Jones. The children were “stir-crazy,” as Chattie put it, from days of being housebound. As soon as they left, Molly announced her own intention of “walking in the woods a little” and was off like a shot. She was still a child in many ways. I watched her run across the snow, wearing her old hooded blue cloak, with Chattie’s red scarf flying out behind her. The sunlight was dazzling. “Agnes! Agnes!” croaked old Granny Took. Reluctantly I went back inside, closing the door behind me. I put more wood on the fire.

About a half hour later I was reading — old Took having fallen asleep — when suddenly I felt the oddest sensation, compounded of both alarm and anticipation. There was no reason for it. We were alone in the house. Bright sunlight fell through the window to make a block of light on the heart pine floor. The fire crackled merrily. Yet the hair on my forearms rose, and my scalp prickled. My heart was in my throat as I put aside my book and rose. Quietly and swiftly I crossed to the door and opened it — but here I stopped, with the door cracked about six inches.

Down at the gate by the road stood Molly talking to Simon Black. His horse breathed plumes of smoke into the clear freezing air. Of course I would have known Simon Black anywhere. The long black coat, the boots, the spurs, that unmistakable mustache and beard, now dead white. Though he faced me, I could not really see his features beneath the wide black hat, its brim lowered as he spoke earnestly to Molly. Head cocked, she appeared to listen, then said something, then made an emphatic gesture with her hand. He spoke again. Their breaths, like the horse’s, made clouds in the air, eventually drifting together as one. They talked for some time. All the world was
brightest white or starkest black — snow, trees, figures — with only the red scarf for color. The great snowy mountains rose into the blue sky beyond. Finally Molly stamped her foot, then surprised me by turning suddenly to run back up the long hill toward the house.

In an instant, I had pulled the door to and resumed my seat by the fire, heart pounding. I don’t know why I didn’t step forward, out onto the porch, and speak to Simon Black myself. It was an instinct I had, as strong as the instinct which had pulled me over to the door in the first place. I simply felt that their conversation had nothing to do with me, this conviction producing a sense of devastating loss as well as relief. How to put it? I felt
saved
from something.

Everything else happened quickly. Molly ran in, getting snow on the floor, followed by Chattie and the children, who had just arrived, full of questions. “Who was that? What did he want?”

“It was a stranger,” Molly said evenly, unwinding the scarf from her neck. Her blue eyes stared directly into mine. “He had lost his way.”

At last came spring, and with it a box supper held at the school to raise money for a piano — for now that we had the globe, we had all grown very ambitious. The date was set. The children lettered signs which were posted at the Jefferson Academy as well as churches and stores throughout the community. As the date drew near, everybody began preparing. There was stiff competition, especially among the single girls, for the most beautiful box and the best food. A number of women felt that they had reputations to uphold. Steady beaux were expected to buy their girlfriends’ boxes even though other young men always “bid them up” out of devilment, so the fellow might have to pay a stiff price for his lady love’s box. Husbands had to buy their wives’ boxes too, with the same kind of friendly competition. The boxes themselves were works of art. Girls spent days trimming them with lace, feathers, scraps of cloth, ribbon, and even little pictures cut out of catalogs.

Molly decorated ours, much to the delight of the little Badger girls who were sent again and again to the woods for pine straw and robins’ eggs which we stuck with a pin and blew out carefully for little “nests” on top. I crocheted
a white froth of lace — this being my only domestic skill — to glue around the edges. Chattie put fried chicken, potato salad, pickled peaches, and fried apple pies in each. Biting her lip in concentration, Molly drew a freehand fairy for each box coloring them in with pastels from the school: pointed red caps, green suits, black boots, red hair. Caro cut the fairies out carefully while Molly folded layers of tissue paper for their wings. How in the world Molly ever came up with those fairies, I will never know. I always felt that she could have been an artist or a writer, either one — she could have done anything, really. Fresh violets from the creek provided a final touch on the boxes as we all sailed out the door.

Sure enough, our boxes were among the prettiest — and certainly the most unusual — with our fairies and birds’ nests. But I was getting nervous by the time they came up for bid, since it seemed to me that there were more boxes and women than men, though the schoolhouse was packed, with many people standing out in the schoolyard.

“Miss Agnes Rutherford!” the auctioneer, Harold Stump, called out, and Felix Boykin gallantly bid a dollar.

“One fifty,” another voice called out, then “Two dollars!” bid the newly widowed minister from Warrensville, Lester Ham. People turned to look; Molly elbowed me. I could feel myself blushing. “Sold!” cried Harold Stump, banging his gavel down. This being a decent price, I was not embarrassed at all, and was pleased to share Chattie’s good food and keep Lester Ham company out on the table rock. He was a serious and shy but determined man, much older than I, with an emphatic way of speaking.

After we had exhausted the topic of teaching school (Lester Ham did not believe in too much education for women), I cast about for another subject. “Now, does your church believe in infant baptism?” I asked.

“Believe in it!” he said, sitting back. “Why, I have did it many times myself.”

I got so tickled I almost choked, but Reverend Ham did not even smile, chewing steadily.
You will not do
, I thought.

Meanwhile Molly’s box had been hotly contested then sold to the young
lawyer Reuben Kirk, one of her admirers, for the maximum cash allowed. Harold Stump took the stage again. “Now wasn’t that some of the best food you ever ate?” he demanded. “Yessir! Let’s give all these ladies a round of applause. All right! Now it’s time for dessert, and this here cake is for the prettiest girl in the county, and if you win the bid, you get to name her, and take the cake and her too. Yessir! All right! Let’s go!”

“Rosalie Yates, one dollar!”

“Susan Trivette, one fifty!”

Men started calling out names, mine not among them, though Molly was bid for twice.

“Martha Fickling, five dollars!” someone called out, and everybody laughed. She had made the cake, as usual.

Then “Molly Petree!” an unfamiliar voice rang out from the schoolyard. “Ten dollars!” Heads swiveled and people leapt up to see who it was, bidding such a sum.

There stood a young man I had not seen before, a good-looking stranger wearing a three-piece tan suit and a green tie, all of which made him stand out like a sore thumb. His black hair was parted carefully, slicked back with brilliantine.

“What am I bid? What am I bid?” Harold Stump called. “Going, going,
gone!
” slamming down his gavel, on my desk.

Molly went forward through the crowd.

The young man said something in her ear.

Molly tossed her head, her color high. Then she cut the cake into little pieces, passing it out to everybody, apparently determined not to pay him too much attention, a thing he had not seen before, as this was a young man used to a great deal of attention.

Henderson Hanes was the black sheep in his family. But now he had come up from Salisbury to run the woolen factory for his father, its absentee owner, who was ill, and he was neither brilliant nor nice, and Molly did not even like him, but from the beginning, there was “chemistry.” Even I
observed it. “He is a slick customer,” Felix said, while Martha Fickling only smiled when I asked her opinion. Chattie was worried, saying, “He will never marry her,” though agreeing that Molly certainly had him “wrapped around her little finger.”

Molly was furious when I repeated this opinion to her. “Well, who says I want to
marry
him? Maybe I don’t want to marry anybody! What’s wrong with that?”

Though Molly made endless fun of his affectations — especially those three-piece suits, which he was devoted to — by summer she was riding with him every Saturday and Sunday in his wire-wheeled buggy, unchaperoned. Tongues wagged. The Misses Reedy came to talk to me about it. “It’s not right,” they said. “What kind of a model does she make for these young girls?” When I told Molly about their visit, she bit her lip and burst out laughing. “Well,
I
don’t care!” she said. That “contrary streak” which Mariah had complained about was emerging again. “What’s wrong with having some
fun
, for a change? Those old biddies are just being silly.”

Jealous is more like it
, I thought, but I held my tongue and looked the other way until that Sunday in early September when a circumstance arose which I discovered by accident but could not then ignore.

I was wading in the creek with the little Badger girls when Molly ran down the path to join us.

“Lord, it’s hot!” She peeled off her good ruffled blouse and tossed it onto the laurel, then gathered up her petticoat and waded in to join us, delighting Caro and Jane who were building a “dam” out of rocks.

“Look, Molly! Look, Molly,” they chanted. “We’ve got a gang of minnows.”

“Say ‘a school of minnows,’ “ I instructed them almost automatically, for just then I noticed that Molly was very pink — back and shoulders and arms and legs as well as her glowing face. “Oh, Molly.” I couldn’t help saying it. “Just look at you. What have you done?”

“Well, I went swimming, Agnes,” she announced defiantly, “over at Elk Creek Shoals with Henderson. So what? Don’t sound so tragic. You wouldn’t
want me to ruin my Sunday clothes now, would you?” She tossed her head, eyes flashing.

“Oh no.” I decided to make light of the situation in view of the little girls, who had stopped their play and were looking back and forth between us curiously, surprised by Molly’s tone.

I was surprised too and found myself filled with conflicting strong emotions as she continued to spend more and more time with young Mr. Hanes whose high-handed manners and imperious bearing endeared him to no one. He never even bothered to speak to me these days, for instance, since I was apparently so uninteresting and he clearly felt he no longer “needed to.” Was this, then, what I had rescued Molly for, at such great cost to both of us? Molly was moody and absentminded even in school, staring out the window, starting violently when a child asked her a question. Was this her idea of love, then, I wondered, to be miserable? And what had really happened — or had not happened — to her so long ago, back at Agate Hill? I was consumed by questions I dared not ask, for I had never once spoken to Molly about “country matters” — nor did I have any advice to give on the subject. Though I feared for her virtue, my more practical concern was that she would finally shock the community so much that she would get us both “turned out,” and then what would we do? Where would we go?

There came that October morning — a Sunday — which told the tale. It had been a glorious fall, the leaves more colorful than any I can ever remember, even now — the dark red dogwood, the flaming maples, the yellow hickorys and orange sassafras. The gusting wind was filled with leaves as I stood out on the Badgers’ porch in an old dressing gown drinking my coffee. The horseshoe bend of the New River shone below. The sky was a fierce bright blue. I sighed, wanting to stay right there, not wanting to go back inside to dress for church. But we were all running late. One of the Boykins’ daughters had married at the stone Methodist Church down in Jefferson the evening before, followed by a party at the Academy where even I had danced. I had
just turned back toward the door when Chattie emerged to whisper in my ear that Molly had not come home.

“What?” I dropped my cup on the porch.

“Hush,” Chattie said. “She’s not in the lean-to,” cutting her eyes at the little boys, who sat on the porch steps making Jacob’s ladders. Chattie went back inside.

I stood there gripping the rail and looking into the long blue distance, shading my eyes from the sun. The wind came up from the gorge with a moaning sound while hawks made big slow circles in the air. I had finally resolved to speak to Molly once and for all when she emerged suddenly from the forest like a forest sprite herself, on the old Indian trail from the Bobcat School. Henderson must have let her out there to save time. The air all about her was thick with whirling leaves; the wind whipped her hair around. She wore only her thin yellow dress from the evening before — no wrap, where was the blue cloak? — and carried only a handful of black-eyed Susans.

“Molly.” I stumbled, coming down the steps.

“Agnes,” she said simply, “these are for you,” handing me the flowers, then hugging me. “And I have something to tell you.” She pushed me back and held me out at arm’s length. “I am engaged to be married.”

Though I have been an English teacher all my life, I have never found the words to describe Molly’s expression as we stood out in the steep swept yard that morning. Her face was so odd — so dire, so intense, yet in a strange way wiped completely clean of all emotion at the same time. She appeared calm, even stricken, yet fully, terribly alive. A blowing red leaf stuck to her cheek momentarily; she laughed as it blew away.