On Agate Hill (45 page)

Now everybody was looking at her and him.

Calvin had come out of the back of the store and grabbed up Mister Black’s money off the counter and stood there holding it.

As for your congratulations, Mister Black, I don’t need them, Molly spat out in a way that was not like her, that none of us had ever seen before. And as for my welfare, it is wonderful. In fact, I am going to have a baby.

Oh Lord! Nancy cried, hugging her, for none of us had knowed a thing about it. Everybody started talking at once.

Now who might this handsome gentleman be? Poor old Aunt Belle sailed out from the back with her hair standing out on one side of her head.

Molly! Calvin hollered, waving the money like a fan.

Mister Black inclined his head toward the Indian, then jerked it toward the door.

Molly! Calvin run out from behind the counter with the money in his hand. He is buying the mountain, Molly.

Molly looked down, and bit her lip, and then stepped forward like a soldier and reached for Mister Black’s hand. I believe I owe you an apology, she said. You have always been very kind to me. I seem to have lost my manners somewhere along the way up this mountain, but perhaps it is not too late for me to find them again.

We kept looking back and forth between them. It was clear to all concerned that some water had passed under that bridge before.

No apology is necessary, Mister Black said. I apologize to you, as far as that goes. I am an awkward man, and a solitary one, with unusual habits. Social discourse is hard for me. I find it difficult to say or do the right thing, or anything. You must understand that I do not have — nor have I ever had — any intention of bothering you, nor of troubling you in any way.
It is simply that I have always had . . . an interest . . . in you and your family. I wish you well.

Molly nodded, her arms across her stomach. I understand that, she said.

The minute Simon Black and the Indian was out the door, Calvin started whooping and waving that money around like a kid.

And the upshot of it was, we bought new shoes for the kids, and overcoats, and a new wagon, and a new toupee for Uncle Hat.

Swannie got her leg took off down in Knoxville. Molly went with her, and stayed in a boardinghouse the whole time, Jacky visiting when he could, and bringing us the news.

Swannie? She got plumb well, and learned to walk real good on one leg and some crutches, and got married to a boy down in Warrensville and moved off the mountain, and had a passel of kids of her own. Had herself a life. Ain’t that what we all want, I reckon? Some kind of a life of our own.

Mister Black? Well, he bought the mountain, of course, but he never done nothing with it. Fixed up the cabin some, and come up here from time to time, but very seldom, very irregular, and was always real cordial but never did mix with us none. Didn’t seem to expect it, he was serious when he said he was a solitary man. At first, Clara swore it spooked her, and told the kids to stay away from the cabin, but it didn’t spook me none, nor nothing like it. It seemed natural, that’s all, like the bobcat that is seen on the mountain from time to time. Nothing more nor less than that. Fact is, I liked it when Mister Black was over there, I felt like he was watching over us, or something.

And by then we kindly needed some watching over, leastways, Molly did. For now we are coming into what I call the slipping down years, the hard years, when things gone from good to bad to worst.

H
AVE
I
SAID HOW
much Jacky loved children? which he did, and they loved him back, for he done endless tricks with them, finding a penny in their ear, and throwing their voices into them little hand dolls he used to make, and putting on shows, and such as that.

Well, we are all partial to children up here. But you never saw a man take on so as Jacky did that first time when she said she was going to have one.
Lord! Nothing was too good for Molly then, and I couldn’t say I blamed him, I was near about as excited as them, watching her belly get big and her face get a little rounder, so that dimple appeared in her cheek. Jacky was a ball of fire, building the baby a cradle hisself and waiting on Molly hand and foot. He couldn’t keep his hands off her neither, up until she got real big, and then he had to. Clara told him, in no uncertain terms. I come in upon her telling him, and left accordingly.

But as luck would have it, I was the one that was there when the baby come. We were closing up the store. Jacky had gone off playing music some-wheres, trying to get them up some cash money to get ahead a little. I was putting up the mail, and Molly was straightening up the piece goods on that table in the middle, folding everything just so, the nice way she done, when all of a sudden she said BJ in a voice I had never heard before.

I looked over to see her clutching at the table with both hands while a pool of water spread out around her feet.

She is coming, BJ, Molly said.

I didn’t ask how she knowed it was going to be a girl, but somehow it didn’t surprise me none, her knowing. She was smart, smart, Molly — and then some.

What ought I to do? I asked her, running around the counter, but just then she moaned and sunk to her knees on the old oak floor, so I helped her over to this big old bag of rice we had there on the floor and stretched her out some. Help me, BJ, she said, and she pulled up her dress, and things commenced to happening real fast. I stayed right there so Molly could hold on to my arm, which she done so hard that her fingernails cut little bloody moons through my white shirt sleeves, now I was proud of that. See? I have still got these little scars to prove it.

Calvin run in at some time and said, Lord God, and run back out, and come back in with Clara and Nancy, and then I made to go, but Molly said, No, stay with me awhile, BJ, and so I did, and it were a miracle, sure enough, though it taken upward of five hours and we were all wore out when it happened, she came popping out all bloody and waxy into Clara’s hands.

Now let me have her, Molly cried, her hair wet with sweat and her face so
white in that lantern light, I wondered if all her blood had done seeped out between her legs. They had brung a ring of lanterns and put them all around us on the floor, and more of them up on the counter.

Clara cut the cord with those big old scissors we used to cut the wrapping paper, and handed her over to Molly, who held her to her breast, eyes jumping in the lantern light. Oh BJ, she said, isn’t she beautiful? And though she weren’t, naturally I said she was, and stuck to it until she was in fact, when her head had ceased being so pointy-like and her little eyes had turned blue.

Her birthing made a mess of my store, let me tell you! And that was a hundred-dollar sack of rice. Jacky had a fit when he came in a day later and heard all about it, and he called her his rice-baby ever after. They named her Christabel, after a poem, Molly said. She said she wanted her baby to have her own name, a name that nobody else had, which turned out to be true, at least up here. Jacky was crazy about Christabel and did not leave Molly’s side from the day he got back until a good two months afterward but stayed underfoot in the store all day long, so we couldn’t get a thing done.

It was the longest time I had ever seed Jacky stay put in his life time.

But everbody else carried on about Christabel too, now this was a baby that did not know a stranger. Molly kept the cradle over in the store where everybody could see her and marvel at how soon she was smiling back and cooing at them. Christabel was walking at a year, she used to follow me ever-place, I don’t know why, but she took to me, I have to say. And then she would take her nap on a pallet Molly had fixed up for her behind the counter. Pretty soon she was walking and saying Ma-ma and Da-da which tickled Jacky about to death.

She called me Bee.

Christabel was just over two when Calvin and Clara’s little Dolly, age five, come down with the diphtheria, and died of it, and when we all come back down the mountain from the burying ground, why there was Molly on the porch with Christabel in her arms just a-screaming.

BJ, BJ!
SHE HOLLERED
. Jacky was gone then too. Come here! Oh, everybody come! Christy has got it too. Which turned out to be true, sure
enough. She was struggling for breath with her face all red and her little eyes flat in her head.

We done everything we knowed to do. Clara swabbed her throat with turpentine, then blowed brimstone sulfur down it though Christabel cried so piteous that I had to go out and stand in the wagon yard. They lit pine tar torches all over the house. Christy’s mouth was full of old gray stuff like spiderwebs which Molly in her desperation tried to scrape out with a spoon until the blood started running down her little chin and Molly couldn’t stand it and had to quit. By the time Jacky got back, Christabel had yellow stuff coming out of her nose just as fast as you could wipe it off and was choking for air. Jacky snatched her up against his shoulder and walked her all night long singing “All the Pretty Little Horses” over and over. Molly sat on a chair and watched them. All over the store, you could hear Christabel trying to breathe.

Jacky carried her wrapped in her favorite little quilt that she dragged around everywhere, and rubbed the satin edging all the time with her fingers. She was the funniest, best little girl. She was dead by morning.

It took three of us to get the baby away from Jacky, so we could bury her. Oh, he carried on awful.

That is no way to act, Clara came right out and told him severely. Look to your wife, who sat still as could be, staring off at the mountains, at nothing.

Well, you know that sorrow will take over different people in different ways. And of course it is unnatural, the most unnatural thing that there is, for a child to die like that. They say there is no greater grief. When old Preacher Livesay come up here saying it was God’s will, and suffer the little children to come unto him, why Jacky jumped on him like a bobcat, then run him plumb off. Everybody was scandalized including Clara and them who go down to his church pretty regular. That is the Welcome Home Baptist Church in Sweet Holler which me and Jacky never did attend. I ain’t got no use for it, and Jacky didn’t have no time for it.

Two of the Rumples children died too, and that little Hawks boy from up on Groundhog. It was a sad, sad time.

But even so, the body will take over after a while, you know. The body wants to live, and it is bound to do so. So because they was young — and naturally sparky, both of them — Molly and Jacky come back to theirselves after a time, or seemed to, though she said privately to me that she never would get over it, nor want to. We were sitting out on the store porch in the old rocking chairs, watching it rain.

I want to think about Christabel every hour of every day, she told me. There is a hole inside me now that will not be filled up, ever, nor do I want it to be, no matter how many children I might have. It is a place for me and Christabel to be together, like we used to be on those nights when Jacky was gone and I’d get up to nurse her. I remember the rain drumming so loud on the roof, and the moon shining out on the snow. It was like we were the only people awake in the world, just her and me.

I turned to look at her. You reckon you will have some more then, sure enough?

I never once thought I would want a child, she said real slow, but now I want it the worst in the world. I want it for Jacky. It is all I want.

Well, I hope you get another one then, I said, and she said, Thank you, BJ, and so summer came along and all, and her and Jacky took to sweethearting up a storm and carrying on silly the way they had done before, and to look at them, you couldn’t have told that anything bad had ever come up in their life. Except that sometimes a look would come over Molly’s face when she sat down alone for a minute, or come back in from the garden by herself, a real private look, not sad exactly, and I knew then that she had been there, in that place with little Christabel.

Then at the tail end of January 1889, Molly’s second baby, named Spencer Jarvis, was pronounced dead at birth by Dr. Bowen who attended. I made the coffin myself. It was about the size of a toolbox. Jacky carried it. We all climbed up there in the snow except for Molly of course, some of the women stayed down at the house with her.

It was hard work digging in that frozen ground, but there was a lot of us
up there, and we didn’t have to go real deep, of course. We buried Spencer next to Christabel whose stone reads
CHRISTABEL JARVIS
,
OUR DEAREST HEART
,
B. MARCH
9, 1885,
D. MAY
12, 1887. Old Mister Crabtree carved it for them free, I swear it would just break your heart. Later he made Spencer one too, with just his name and the date on it, one date only, Jan. 29, 1889. We stood out on top of the mountain and took off our hats and said the Lord’s Prayer, and that was that. It was a low heavy sky covered in clouds, looked like the underside of a quilt, and sure enough it started snowing on us as we went back down the mountain.

Later that same night, Molly ran out barefoot and rolled in the snow, over and over, in her grief. She did not know what she was doing then or for days to come. Ever time she’d lose a baby, seemed like it took her longer to come out of it.

Yes sir. I am doing the best I can, sir. But now we have got up to the hard part, and it is not an easy thing to tell. I will try to tell it a quick as I can.

Another stillborn baby, Junius, was to come in 1890, and then a beautiful little girl she named Mary Agnes, that lived for three weeks in 1893, long enough to get everybody’s hopes up.

It was sometime in between the two of them that Jacky invented the rolling store. He bought a wagon, a mule, and a red bow tie for seventy-five dollars. I never did know where he got the idea, but I for one was glad to see him go. For Jacky did not have it in him to be sad for long, or sit still, or stay in one place, he had to get out and get moving. First we put sides and a good tin roof on the wagon, then we built shelves up against each side with a little space in between, just about big enough for one person to go in and see what was for sale, or for Jacky to get in there and find what somebody wanted. We put a regular house door on the back. Then he stocked it up with everthing he could cram in there, remedies in particular, such as castor oil, black draught sulfur, Epsom salts, mustard plasters, milk of magnesia, and Dr. LeGear’s Cow and Horse Prescription, now that has always been a real big seller for us.