To Make My Bread (6 page)

When supper was over Emma cleared away the dishes. Granpap and the stranger sat in chairs near the fire, the others on the floor. Emma, who had waited as usual, sat at the table having her own supper.

“Got something in the pack?” Granpap asked.

Small Hardy had been waiting for this. He pushed back his chair and pulled the pack along the floor. Emma, seeing what was going on, left her corn bread and lit the lamp. There was a little oil left in the bottom.

The hump-back drew his pack to the place where the dim light shone on the floor. He leaned over untying various strings and as he leaned his hump stood up from his back like a mountain peak from a ridge. Emma stooped over him. The others stayed back in the shadows. Only John edged closer along the floor, always keeping the pack between him and the man who had wanted to skin Georgy. Bonnie, the sleepy head, was dozing in a corner by the fire.

There was some red calico in the pack. It was a different pattern from that at Swain's. Small Hardy held a red silk waist with glass buttons against his chest to show its beauty. It looked queer against his small face, but in his enthusiasm for the goods he seemed to forget himself. From different pockets of the pack he took many things—a Bible, some cotton thread; gold-eyed needles, and pins with colored tops. With a great flourish he showed them a fine looking knitted thing, a fascinator, he called it.

“This is what you should wear,” he said to Emma.

It was bright red, with a border knitted from silver thread. The silver shimmered in the light as Small Hardy let the scarf trail over his hands. Suddenly he gathered it into a ball with his long fingers, and held it between his two palms.

“Oh,” Emma said. She thought he had ruined the pretty thing. But when he let go it sprang from his hands as if it was alive and fell over them again in soft folds.

“How pretty,” Emma said, and bent her neck over it.

“Fine ladies wear them like this,” Small Hardy told her. He reached up and put the fascinator over Emma's hair, crossed the end pieces under her chin and let them fall across her shoulders, down her back. He dug in one of his pockets, brought out a mirror, and held it up close to the lamp so Emma could see. She looked so fine with some of her brown curls coming out in front against her face. Kirk and Basil stared at her, and she felt their eyes were admiring. Her face became softer, and her lips curved up at the corners. Her eyes turned toward the money gourd on the shelf.

“It's sure pretty,” she said to Small Hardy. But she did not ask how much. She lifted the red, soft thing from her head and folded it up, letting it rest at each fold in her two hands.

“It's sure pretty,” she said again and gave it back to Hardy.

He laid it away carefully and brought from the same pocket two strings of beads, red, one longer than the other. Emma held them up to the light. They hung from her fingers. The light pierced into them and came away in little red rays.

“Are they jewels?” Emma asked, her voice soft with admiring them. She had heard Sally Swain talk about the jewels rich women on the outside wore.

“No,” Small Hardy said. “If they were real they'd be worth more than a hundred dollars.”

“I've heard,” Granpap spoke out of the dark, “they find real stones somewhere up in the hills. I remember there was gold down in Georgy, mixed right in the sand.”

“I did see some real stones in Leesville. They'd found them somewhere in the mountains. Sapphires large as the end of your finger. If you found one of them you would have something to live on.”

“It would be nice,” Emma said. “Just to go out, pick up a stone like you'd pick up a mouth rock and be rich.”

“Well,” Small Hardy sat back on his haunches. “They say poor folks are going to get rich now.”

He let them taste this news. Bonnie, trying to get to bed, stumbled over Plott, who gave a sleepy grunt. All the others were looking at Small Hardy. Even the eyes back in the shadows, Kirk's eyes and Basil's, were looking at him. Only Bonnie, done up with sleep, lay on the bed.

“Down in Leesville,” Hardy went on, “a Mr. Wentworth, a rich man, has a mill for making cloth like this.” He pointed to the calico. “And they say whoever goes down to work there is going to be rich like him—for he started out as poor as the next one. They say out there the rivers flow with milk and honey and money grows on trees.”

“Do,” Emma said. “And have you seen?”

“Well,” Small Hardy put his head on one side considering. His big head leaned against the hump and he moved his right shoulder that sloped so far down as if he was not quite comfortable. His bright black eyes looked up at Emma. “You see, I haven't been there much. But they said I was to spread the news. It's the poor folks' time if they'll pick up and go.”

“It's a long way,” Emma said.

“Forty miles from here as the crow flies,” Small Hardy told her.

“There's a store,” he went on. “Where they sell beads and other things cheap. And you get a house with windows and cook on a real stove,—no more bending over a chimney.”

“I'll lay the house ain't your own,” Granpap said. “Nor the land.”

Small Hardy had been talking to Emma. He shrank back when Granpap's voice came out of the shadows. “Maybe so,” he said when he recovered. “But the money's yours. Real money. Lots of it.”

“I like to have my own land,” Granpap answered. He got up to knock the ashes from his pipe. He stood there, and Hardy knew the evening was finished. He returned the goods to their pockets, folded the pack, and set it in the corner by the chimney. Emma held the light for them to cross the passageway, then blew it out. John, who would sleep with her that night, sat on the floor trying to keep his eyes open.

“They was pretty things,” Emma whispered. She sighed. “Come on, John. Get to sleep,” she said and leaned over the bed to shake Bonnie and turn down the covers.

T
HE
next morning, after all Emma's holding back, before Small Hardy left she bought a piece of red calico for Bonnie. As a result on Sunday, the first Sunday of the year when they had meeting, there was no change for collection. Emma could shake the money gourd all she wanted, pretending that she had expected to find something. The gourd was empty.

“The preacher'll have to do with our company,” she said half to herself, half to Bonnie and John who were waiting to start out.

John was very impatient. Granpap and the boys had gone long ago. They would be halfway to church. Emma still wanted to treat him as a baby and make him go with her. And the worst of it was the boys would not have him. He looked at Bonnie and saw her pulling at the narrow skirt of her new dress, trying to make it full and handsome.

“Look at Bonnie a-strutting,” he said.

“Let her strut,” Emma scolded. “She's a need to with her first new dress.”

“Some day,” she told John, “you'll have new jeans, not patched ones that come from the boys.”

She pulled her knitted black shawl over her head and followed the children up the trail. Bonnie ran on, stepping proudly along the path in her bare feet. The red calico dress with its long tight little waist and narrow gathered skirt looked nice and new.

They walked single file along the trail. Over one hill and down another side—over another higher one and along the ridge leading to Thunderhead. They could see Frank McClure's place down in the valley. Not a sound there. It was a good three miles away from that point but sound travels a long distance on a clear day. They knew the McClures had gone.

Close to Thunderhead they got into the shade of the early spring leaves. The trail sloped up to the divide over Thunderhead. On the other side of the mountain the narrow sledge road took them zigzag across the steep face of the mountain. All that side of Thunderhead was quilted zigzag by the trail and at the bottom the trail went down between the sides of other mountains like a loose thread a woman has left hanging off the side of a quilt.

All the way down the shut-in they walked by a stream that grew wider toward the bottom. Emma took off her shoes and waded over the stream when the trail crossed, but the children splashed through. Bonnie held her dress so high to protect it from the water, Emma had to call out and make her let it down, for there was nothing underneath. Just below the Martins' house they crossed the footway, across the branch, and after that it was only a little distance to the road.

The church, a small log building, was up a short trail at the left. Across the road, on a slope, was the burying ground. Emma's husband and the three children who had come between Kirk and Bonnie were laid away there. There were no flowers in the burying ground. The graves lay flat and plain on the slope. The dead were dead and there was enough to do caring for the living. There was not a woman around that country who did not have one child or more in the ground. When a woman was ripe she gave birth, and if the child died, it did not help much, after the first days of sorrow, to weep. What was done was done.

Sunday School did not last very long. When it was over the women stayed on the benches inside and talked. Bonnie hung around Minnie Hawkins and Sally McClure and some of the older girls. They were near the window and outside stood Kirk and Basil and Jesse McDonald. The boys pretended that they were interested in talk, but the girls knew well enough why they were there.

Bonnie moved up close to Minnie, who was talking to the others in a low voice so the women wouldn't hear. Ora was eying the girls. She was not sure she wanted her Sally talking so intimately with Minnie Hawkins, though she had nothing against Minnie, not anything she could show. Minnie had a beautiful white complexion. Her blue eyes and black hair made her the prettiest girl around the valley. She was plump where the others were rather skinny. Boys and men eyed her whenever she came into any gathering. And this perhaps was the reason the women did not trust her very much. Then they remembered her mother. But the very fact that the boys and men were interested in Minnie made her more interesting to the younger girls. Ora's Sally would have followed her anywhere.

Minnie felt Bonnie's face nosing at her shoulder. She lifted her hand, laid it on Bonnie's cheek, and not ungently pushed her away.

“This talk ain't for young ones,” she said. The other girls laughed. Even Sally, who was Bonnie's own kin, laughed. The little girl went back to Emma feeling left out and disgraced.

The men stood outside in the cleared place in front of the church. John had slipped away from Emma and hung behind Granpap away from the boys, though they probably would not have noticed him since they had plenty to hold their attention. There was a song they had sung after the preacher in church that said:

It was an easy song to remember and half under his breath but loud enough for the girls to hear, Kirk with his hat pushed on one side, perky and insolent, sang softly into the window, which had no panes, but was an opening for light to come in:

Halfway through, Jesse McDonald joined in, singing low like Kirk. Even Basil joined in on the last line. But he kept one eye on Jim Hawkins, who was standing around in front with the other men.

John was giving most of his attention to the boys and he hadn't heard the men talking. Just then Granpap, who was sitting on a log behind John, spoke out so loud even the boys hushed and listened.

“David danced before the Lord,” Granpap said.

The preacher hadn't yet come for midday meeting. Hal Swain, because he could read, carried on Sunday School.

“I'm not saying it's wrong—nor right,” Hal Swain shook his head. “But the preacher'll be telling us it's wrong before the day's out.”

“Like he told us last year and the year before that,” Granpap added.

“And next winter, if it's a good winter, we'll be at it same as ever.” Fraser McDonald spoke up from the steps where he was whittling a green Judas tree stick.

“If I thought it was wrong,” Jim Martin, who was twice as tall as his little wife, Jennie, boomed down from where he was standing by the church, “I'd quit. But I haven't ever seen the wrong. We danced in my cabin last week, and I'm not afraid to say so. My God is a just God and he won't punish me or my young ones for sashayin' around some to the music of Granpap's fiddle and Sam Wesley's banjo.”