The Truest Pleasure (21 page)

And then I saw what we had been going toward. Everything swung around like compass needles pointing in the same direction. It was in the eye of a pigeon setting high on a tree at the mountaintop. The eye was still as a puddle with no wind. It was still at the center of the whirl and clutter of things.

“This is what was meant,” I said.

Tom still didn't say anything.

“This is really the place,” I said. “Ain't it?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. It was all he said, but it was enough.

Sometimes in the evenings, after Tom counted his money, I read to him. As the nights got cooler we set by the fire and I read from the paper or a magazine. Sometimes I even read poems, or the Bible. Though he never would say much about what I read I thought he enjoyed it. Keeping up with the news is as much a habit as anything else, and the more you know about what's going on in the world the more you want to know. You start following out the threads of events and you want to know what happens next.

The Russians was fighting the Japanese off in the Pacific, and the Japanese had attacked one of their seaports. I couldn't say the name of the place, so I spelled it, V-l-a-d-i-v-o-s-t-o-k.

“What kind of name is that?” Tom said.

“Russian, I reckon.”

“And what happened?” Tom put the coins in the cigar box and took off his shoes. On cool evenings he liked to warm his feet in front of the fire.

“‘The Japanese warships bombarded the port city for most of a day,'” I read from the paper. “‘Before nightfall the Russians surrendered and the city was occupied by Japanese troops. All inhabitants, including American citizens, were taken prisoner.'”

Tom listened to every word I read. Jewel come and set in his lap. “What is a citizen?” she said.

When I read Longfellow to Tom I think he was a little embarrassed. I would read from “Hiawatha” for several minutes
and he listened close. I think he liked the song of the words, the rhythm and repetition. I read on and it looked as though he was listening, but then his head would begin to nod. I stopped.

“Don't stop,” he said, and straightened up.

“You want me to go on?” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

I read a few lines more and his head started to nod again. His chin touched his chest and his eyes closed. I stopped reading.

“No, go on,” he said, stirring hisself.

“No use to read if you're just going to sleep,” I said. “I can read something else.”

“No, that's fine,” he said.

I started reading again, and the next thing I knowed his eyes was closed and his head tilted over. I closed the book. “Tomorrow I'll read something else,” I said.

“No need to,” he said, pulling hisself up.

“I don't think you're interested in Indians,” I said.

“Them ain't Indians,” Tom said.

“How do you know?”

“Indians don't talk like that,” he said.

“How do you know how Indians talk?” I said.

“They don't talk like that,” Tom said. “I know that much.”

That winter I was expecting again. It was the fourth time, but I reckon I was scared by what happened to the last baby. I couldn't get it out my mind that I had done something wrong, though I didn't know what it was. It come to me I had worked too hard in the heat, or eat the wrong things, or bent
over the washpot the wrong way. They say drinking liquor before a baby is born will hurt the youngun, but I had just took a drink from time to time to calm myself. I done that more after Moody was born, but I never did it much. Pa kept a jug of whiskey in his cabinet, along with herbs and powders. Sometimes I bought a bottle myself and kept it in the linen closet. It was something I did to soothe myself when I got too worked up.

As winter went on and spring was near I was irritated by little things. I couldn't stand for the younguns to make noise or fight. If one started to cry it bothered me. If I looked at the mess in the house, or washing to be done, it made me mad. I lost my temper and snapped at Pa and Tom. I couldn't take the sight of the younguns getting dirty in the yard. As Moody got bigger I saw how much more trouble boys was than girls. He was always climbing, or pushing something over. He would fight with Jewel, and lash out in fits of temper. From the time he was two he liked to play shooting a gun. I thought how different he was from Tom. “Bang, bang,” Moody would yell, as though he had shot me.

When I couldn't stand it anymore I went to the outhouse under the big hemlocks down the hill. A woman that's expecting has to go more often anyhow, because she don't have much room inside her. But I found it was such a relief to be out of the house and away from the bother I stayed for several minutes. Nobody could pester me in the toilet. I would set there longer and longer, and put off going back to the kitchen.

Even the cold wood of the seat felt good on my bare skin. The wood had been polished by more than twenty years of wear, and it had the shine of a waxed floor. The cold wood made me shiver, but it felt soothing. Soon the wood I touched warmed up.

There was something about the dim light that made me feel sincere, prayerful. It was shadowy as a chapel or closet. The hemlocks brushed the sides and the roof when there was wind. Needles seeped through the cracks and gathered on the floor.

I thought how this was a place where earth was brought back to earth, an offering made for what we received from soil. It was a place of return and payment. I thought how important it was to have a place of quiet, of asylum. In our head we hide and look out from a secret place. But sometimes the eyes see too much and we hear too much. It was good to have a second shelter to go to.

It felt like I could almost get outside of time setting there. I could let the stream of seconds go past, while I stayed in that still pocket. The space was a gray crystal I climbed into. I could hear the younguns shouting and the cows bawling, and crows in the hill pines. I could even hear the river mutter after a big rain. But mostly I heard what I was thinking.

And I thought how that calm was the farthest thing from the rapture of a service, and yet it was almost the same too. To get off to the side of time and think and remember was a special privilege that had its own sacredness.

Sometimes I felt like a little girl again, and it seemed I didn't have any work that had to be done. I imagined I didn't have a husband to worry about, and I had all the time I needed to
read and go to meetings or do whatever I wanted. I could play in the woods if I felt like it, or go down to the river and wade in the shallows looking for crawfish or periwinkles.

Setting in the gloom I felt closer to Mama that died when I was a girl. I could remember how she taught us Bible verses. She hated the Holiness meetings as much as Tom did. I thought how the generations was linked and kept doing the same things even when they didn't know it. I saw how we was like our mamas and daddies in spite of ourselves, and how our younguns would be like us. And there wasn't much we could do about it, even if we wanted to.

Then I heard Moody bawling, screaming at the top of his lungs. It sounded like he was down the bank by the chickenhouse.

“Mama, Mama,” Jewel yelled. She run to the house thinking I was in the kitchen. Through a crack I saw her go up the steps.

By the time I got outside and up the bank Jewel had run back out on the porch. “Come quick,” she said. “Moody has fell over.”

“Fell over what?”

“He fell over the bank.”

I run by the house and looked over the edge of the yard, and sure enough, Moody was in the weeds at the bottom. He was upside down, like he had tried to do a somerset and stopped halfway. Sticks and leaves stuck to his jacket. I don't know if he had got the breath knocked out, or if he was too scared to get up. It was clear he had rolled down and stopped on his head.

When I picked him up his eyes bulged out. It looked like he was too scared to cry. Dirt and trash stuck all over his face.

“Are you hurt?” I said.

He started jerking like he was beginning to cry again. I felt him to see if any bones was broke. Then he started bellowing again and I knowed he was all right.

The baby born in June was a boy. Tom named him Muir Ray, after his boss at the Lewis place. He said since I had named Moody after my favorite preacher he would name this boy after somebody he liked. I didn't make any protest for I figured it was fair. But I never much liked the name. It sounded dark and hard. I knowed it was Scotch, and it sounded stingy and unfriendly.

After the wonderful nights of the summer and fall, and the hard work of the fields, you would have thought the new baby would have brought us closer together. You would have thought Tom's pleasure in a second son would have spilled over into his feelings toward me. But nothing works out the way you expect.

At first, after the birth of Muir, Tom just got quiet. He come around me less, and he didn't touch me as much when we was together. We had slept together until I was six or seven months along, and then Tom had fixed his pallet up in the loft again. He forced hisself to move, he said, for the sake of the baby. There is always the danger of injury, both to the mother and the baby, Dr. Johns had said. But we found again that when a man and woman ain't sleeping together they don't feel the same toward each other. No matter how careful they are not to quarrel it's not the same. I reckon the sex thing is a lot of the glue that holds people together. That's the way the Lord made them. But I wasn't sure I believed
the doctor. Sometimes I found myself looking at Tom, before he climbed into the loft. But he was a man awful strong and strict in his ways. Though I couldn't hardly see it when I was mad at him, I knowed he was a man with his own honor.

The Waters family had typhoid fever that summer of 1905 after Muir was born. I told Hilda to let the children that wasn't sick stay with us. I knowed people with typhoid needed absolute quiet. They had to lay in a still dark room until the fever broke. It was hard to nurse them with other children running around.

I said that to Hilda on a Saturday, not having mentioned it to Tom. She had helped birth all my babies, and it seemed like the least I could do. If folks don't help each other, then nothing good will ever happen. If women didn't help each other out I don't know how the world would ever get its children raised.

Since we didn't have any extra beds it meant having two of the Waters children sleep with Jewel, and two on the floor on a pallet. But I saw quick that Tom was angry when I brought the Waters younguns back with me. I reckon I should have asked him first, but it was too late. I got angry too. When you think you might be a little wrong it always makes you madder.

“I didn't know we was taking in boarders,” Tom said.

“I had to help Hilda,” I said.

“And now our younguns will catch typhoid,” he said.

“That's not the way you catch typhoid,” I said.

“And how do you know, Dr. Powell?” Tom said.

I had read that folks catch typhoid from water, from tainted water in wells and springs. But I didn't know for sure. It was a return of the old anger. That at least was contagious. Once one
of us got mad the other one caught it. It was a fever that come on us, and seemed as familiar as a cold.

“You don't need to get mad,” I said, trying to think of some way to stall our argument. “They will be here only a few days. The doctor said they had to be out of the way.”

“Then why does it have to be my house?” he said.

“It's not your house, yet,” I said. It come out before I thought. Once it was said it could not be took back. “I mean it's my house too, and Pa's,” I said.

Tom was too mad to answer. He walked out and didn't come back for supper. When he milked he set the buckets on the porch for me to strain and went back to the fields. When he did come in that night he went to the ladder and climbed to the loft to bed.

By the time Muir was two months we was no longer speaking. Tom kept his schedule in the fields and garden, but this year I was not helping. Every day he wagoned produce to the village, and made more money than ever. But he didn't count it on the hearth. He put the coins in the cigar box he kept in the attic.

Though I had never seen inside the cotton mill, it ordered our lives. Almost all Tom's farming was done for the village trade. He cut wood in winter to sell there, and made extra molasses and raised hogs to sell to mill hands. The mill had a whistle that blowed every morning at seven, and by then Tom was out at the barn or in the fields. It blowed again at dinnertime and I come to depend on the long note to tell me when it was noon. And it sounded again in the middle of the evening, like a hawk calling across the mountain, and the sound washed up the river valley. Soon it come to seem like something we had heard all our lives.

Because he was so busy in the fields, and because I was taking care of the baby, and since he had the extra money, Tom hired Florrie to come over the hill and help with washing and cleaning. Florrie had helped me in the past from time to time, and I reckon she would have again for nothing. It seemed strange to pay your own sister for work. But I guess Tom thought he couldn't ask her unless he paid her. After all, Florrie had her own house, and David was sick more than he was well.

But I resented that Tom was paying Florrie, and that he had asked her to work with me. I know I shouldn't have, but I did. “I have helped Florrie for nothing,” I said. It didn't seem fair, and I reckon I didn't show as much appreciation for Florrie's work as I might. I felt slighted, like I had been accused of laziness, and never recovered from my laying in.

The whole thing looked odd, because Florrie, everybody said, was a terrible housekeeper. “You could grow a garden on her kitchen floor,” women would say. She liked to gossip and read magazines, and she liked to drink. She kept a bottle in her kitchen cupboard, for making cakes and puddings, she would say. To be honest, she worked harder away from home. Helping me, she was quick and thorough, though I hated to admit it.