A Land More Kind Than Home (22 page)

It was 1919 the year I left her, the year she made me go. Late spring, and hadn't nothing come up out of the ground fit to eat, and Lord knows we didn't have no cash money and nothing to trade with. There wasn't much to go around for none of us then.

“You need to get off this mountain and down to the city and get yourself set up to a job,” she said. “We ain't going to last the summer through on what we got, and besides, it's time you lit out on your own. Girls your age been give away by now and laid up with a baby or two and a piece of land all theirs.”

I was fourteen, and I didn't know any better; I just figured she wanted to get rid of me. I didn't know we'd have both probably died had I stayed the summer through.

Now, I had me a choice to make between Marshall, which is the county seat, Burnsville over there in Yancey County, and Asheville. Well, I'd been to Marshall once or twice before and back then there wasn't too much there but the courthouse and a couple of feed stores and the like, and I figured Burnsville wasn't much better than that, and knowing what I know now it would've been a long, tough trip there. I decided I'd go to Asheville, and I can tell you this, and this may surprise you when you hear it, but that's the farthest away from Madison County I've ever been. I ain't never had no reason to go no farther.

B
UT IF
I
DON
'
T REMEMBER COMING INTO THE CITY THAT
S
ATURDAY
evening in the spring with all those trees budding along the French Broad River, that man on the wagon that carried me in from Weaverville pointing to that brown water and saying “We had us a flood here three years ago,” and then I looked out on the banks and seen some of them market and warehouse buildings all tore up from the river rising like it did and carrying with it all them tree limbs and all that trash and whole heaps of other stuff from downstream.

We came in the city from the north, and if that wasn't the dangdest thing I'd ever seen, taking that cart through the farmer's market on Lexington Avenue and all that food looking like it had just been ripped off the vine and all them chippies there wearing their makeup and their powder and waiting on them farm boys to close up their stands and pack up their wagons and spend a little time with them before lighting back out for the country. We rode right through there, and my head almost fell off with all the looking around I done.

“Where you wanting me to stop?” that man asked me.

“It don't much matter,” I told him. He must've thought he had a real mountain yokel on his hands, and I can't say I much blame him. If I wasn't the greenest thing he'd ever seen, then I don't know what was.

“Well, what kind of work are you hoping to find?” he asked me.

“That don't much matter neither,” I said.

That must've frustrated him because that man stopped that wagon right smack in the center of town with all those cars and trolleys whizzing by and me sitting up there all bright-eyed and scared. He sat there with the reins in his hands and watched me get down and dust myself off and reach up for my little piece of luggage.

“What you figuring on doing now?” he asked me.

“I'm figuring on finding me some work,” I told him, and it wasn't hardly no time at all before I'd done just that.

That night I found me a bed in a little tenement shack for girls, and the next day I took a job as a laundress taking in wash from the summer folks who stayed in the boardinghouses around the square and uptown in the hotels. And Lord, if those folks from places like Charleston and Atlanta and Savannah didn't have just about the nicest, finest clothes I'd ever seen. But even all that fine fabric didn't make that job no easier; washing is some hard work on your hands. You keep them wet like that for long enough, and you can just about peel off your skin like an onion. It'll give you some soft hands, but Lord if they don't get to hurting you good after you done it awhile. I hated it, but that was about all the work I could find. It was early summer and a good three months before the apple season sprung out there in the south of town and there wasn't no tobacco coming in yet, so washing was about all the work I could get and about all the experience I had with the kinds of jobs folks did in town.

I washed clothes like the devil all summer long to keep my belly full and my back covered, and the first day them tobacco barns on the river opened up I was down there trying to hustle up a little work. They took one look at me, a skinny little girl from the hills, and they said, “What in the world do you know about tobacco?”

Of course I'd worked burley all my life, and I told them, “I know more about it on both ends than you do on this one. You let me work for you and pay me a fair take, and I'll show you just what I know.” And let me tell you, there was me at fourteen hustling that market like nobody's business.

“You there,” I might say to some or other seller, “what in the world did you do, drag that burley through the French Broad on your way here? Y'all going to have to dry that out good before it gets on this scale,” and “Yes, sir, you got yourself a right pretty crop, and we want to make you a right pretty deal to go with it.” I used to carry on like that just about all the time, trying to get those buyers a good price.

They'd say, “Where in the world did you learn to talk burley like that?” and I'd go into some or other long windy about being born with a burley knife already in my hand, and I'll be doggone if some of them fellers didn't want to believe it.

But if that wasn't a tough time for folks with all the boys gone off to fight and then bringing that sickness home. It wasn't bad enough the city was about slam full of lungers. You could see them sitting up on the screened porches of some of the sanitariums along the road from town and on the way to the tobacco barns. Folks would try and hide it, but you could tell them right off when you saw them. Just sickly looking and trying their best to hide those little handkerchiefs, those little red spots on the cotton. When the boys started coming home from the war in spells, it got a whole lot worse than it was before. The flu they brought home with them just spelled out disaster, and not only in town neither, and not just in this part of the country. Thousands died, thousands. We ain't never seen the like of it since, and I hope we don't in my day. Whole families just up and dying in only a week or two. Ain't never seen the like of it since.

I
CAME HOME TO
M
ADISON
C
OUNTY THAT FALL AFTER THE LEAVES
had turned and were just about off the trees, and on the road up the mountain I guess I had what you might call a premonition.

“Addie,” a voice said somewheres in my mind, “when you get up there things ain't going to be the same as they was when you left.” And for some reason, and I can't say why, I knew I wasn't going to find my great-aunt alive.

The place was just as still and quiet as it could be—no smoke coming up out of the chimney, nothing but weeds and a shriveled-up crop in the ground. I listened to the wind tumbling through the dead stalks in the field, and I remember that it put me in mind of hearing paper trash blow along the sidewalk in the town I'd just left from. If I'd have closed my eyes I might've thought I was right back in downtown Asheville carrying a heap of dirty laundry down a lamplit street instead of lugging my own little piece of luggage and a purse padded with a couple bills and some loose coins up the hill toward home.

Sure enough, I found her in the bed by the cold fireplace covered up to her neck with all the quilts she'd made. I can't say just how long she'd been dead, but I've seen pictures of those Egyptian kings after they find them in their tombs, and I think it's fair to say she was on her way to that. But she'd took the time to plait her hair, and it's because of that that I can fool myself into remembering that she looked just like a little girl laying there with those tight gray pigtails splayed out on the pillow beside her. If she'd still been alive and it had been somebody else laying there, even a stranger, I think I would've cried just for seeing a dead body. But it wasn't nobody else but her and there wasn't nobody else there but me, so I figured there wasn't much use in all that carrying on.

Then, at that time, I couldn't believe she'd been laid up dead for who knows how long and there hadn't been nobody coming up to check on the old woman and the little girl living on top of Parker Mountain. I found out later that folks had in their minds all kinds of no-count ideas about me and her living up there alone. They said she ran a still out there in the woods and had me out selling liquor to men on the other side of the mountain down near Greenville, Tennessee. The kids up there thought we were witches hiding out and eating the fingers and toes of little boys we caught on the land. With people holding truck in ideas like that, I reckon it makes pretty good sense that they'd stay as far away from us as they could.

I'd always known she wanted to be buried with her people up in the field above the cabin where they'd buried family for years. She'd take me up there on Decoration Day, and we'd sweep the stones clean and clear what grass and weeds there was growing up around them. She'd lead us a little service under a stand of oaks up there, sing songs, say a prayer or two. From that high up you could see the county rolling away from you to the east, and if you turned and looked around the other way you could see the range running clear to Tennessee. It was a right pretty place, and I figured that was where I'd lay her to rest.

Now, I didn't know the first thing about burying a body, and I for sure didn't know a thing about building no coffin. But I did know how to dig me a hole, though, and that's just what I did that next morning on top of the hill. I climbed up there just as the sun was breaking good on the ridge to the east, and I laid into that ground with a pickax and an old shovel. I didn't stop digging until that hole was as deep as I was tall, and even then I knew that it wasn't quite deep enough, but I was just too wore out to keep on.

After I finished I set off down the mountain and stopped at the first cabin where it looked like people were living. When I got close I seen a woman out in the field, and I called out to her.

“Ma'am,” I said, “I hate to bother you.” I looked on the other side of the field and seen an old man coming up out of the barn. He seemed like he was surprised to see a girl like me walking up the road to his place. That woman looked at him, and then she bent down to her work again. The old man made his way across the yard toward me so slow I thought he might not ever make it.

“What is it you're needing?” he asked me once he was close enough. He had on him an old pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, and through those glasses I could see how worn his eyes looked, like he'd spent his whole lifetime squinting up at the sun.

“I hate to bother you,” I said again. “I live up the road a piece with my aunt—”

“I know who you are,” he said. I shut my mouth quick, and he just stared down at me. Then he turned his head and spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the grass beside his boot.

“Well, I just came in from Asheville yesterday evening, and I found her passed away. I'm down here wondering if I could borrow—”

“What took her?” he asked.

“I don't know for sure,” I said. “I reckon it might have been this flu. But I can't figure out how. I'm sure you know folks up on this mountain here didn't have too much to do with her. I don't know how she could've caught it with nobody stopping by to see her, her not having no friends that I know of.” He looked at the ground for a minute, and then he spit another stream of juice into the grass and rubbed it in with the toe of his boot. “I need to borrow some tools from somebody so I can fix up something fit to bury her in,” I said.

He looked up from the ground out to where his wife stood in the field. She'd quit working and was looking over at us, like she'd been able to hear us talking to each other from all the way across the yard.

“I've got cash money,” I told him. “If that's what it'll take, then I'm ready to spend it.” He looked back at me.

“There ain't no need for that,” he said. “You go on and lay her out. We'll be up there with it in the morning.” He turned, and I watched him walk back toward the barn. The woman was staring at me from the field. I raised my hand to her.

“Thank y'all!” I hollered.

I
BEDDED DOWN IN THE BACK ROOM WITH HER STILL OUT THERE IN
the bed by the fireplace, and that night I had me a dream. I can tell you that I ain't never had such a dream before in my life, and not since have I remembered one so clearly.

It was dusk and I was walking up the hill from down there in the bottomland where the river snakes its way west to Tennessee. In the dream I wore some kind of baptismal robe that was so long that it drug along behind me in that dark, black mud, and I can remember just as plain as day looking down to see where it was still wet around the hem from me being in the river. It looked like I'd only stepped ankle-deep into the water and then changed my mind and walked right out, because in my dream the rest of me was dry and I didn't have no memory of being dunked under that cold water. No memory of any prayers being prayed over me and no ringing in my ears from the testament of faith I'd have likely been expected to share.